June 14: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is kung fu.

Shot on Super 8 in Chicago and never released on any format, Ninja Zombie made its way to our world via Bleeding Skull! and AGFA.

Karate expert Jack has been stabbed through the heart by a martial arts master with a spider on his face named Spithrachne. He becomes a ninja zombie with the help of Brother Banjo, a voodoo master and tennis lover who wants to help our hero get his revenge.

Writer/director Mark Bessenger is making a movie right now called Satan’s Not Dead which is all about a kid who escapes a church’s mass suicide ritual in order to kill the Devil. I mean, the guy knows how to put together something I want to see.

Ninja Zombie is a great example of that. A spider cult of martial artists versus an undead ninja with a mullet but shot on Super 8? That’s exactly the kind of movie that I demand goes directly into my eyes.

Sure, it’s not the kind of movie that would play in theaters, but when has that ever stopped you from liking something? If it has, wow, you’re on the wrong site.

June 13: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is ’80s comedy!

Dan Greenburg has written plenty of books, including the Zack Films and Secrets of Dripping Fang children’s books. He’s also had several of his books made into movies, including the Elvis Presley film Live a Little, Love a Little, which was based off his work Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips, Foreplay, Private School, The Guardian and the movie we’re about to discuss, which was based on his book Philly.

It’s directed by Alan Myerson, who was O.K. Corrales in Billy Jack and directed Police Academy 5, as well as episodes of Ally McBeal, Friends, The Larry Sanders Show and more. In case you’re wondering, “Does Alan Myerson know comedy?” the answer is yes, as he’s one of the people who helped found The Committee, which counted folks like Howard Hesseman, David Ogden Stiers, Carl Gottlieb, Rob Reiner and Del Close.

That said, Private Lessons made me question my younger self. To wit: when you’re fifteen years old, the opportunity to lose one’s virginity to Sylvia Kristel seems like a dream come true. But when you’re getting close to fifty, you start to cringe at scenes where she tries to lure this film’s protagonist into a bathtub or makes out with him in the back of a limo. It doesn’t seem like a fantasy any longer. It feels wrong.

Philip “Philly” Fillmore (Eric Brown, Waxwork) is a 15-year-old high school student whose father has left him alone for the summer with the only supervision coming from Lester the chauffeur (Howard Hesseman) and Nicole Mallow (Kristel), the family’s new French maid. Sure, Kristel is really Dutch, but we’re not here to quibble about her nationality.

All of her seduction games with our newly pubescent protagonist are all a ruse. She’s an illegal alien who Lester is using in a scheme against Philly and his father. Once they have sex, she’s going to fake her death and Lester will help Philly bury her body. Then, the kid will have to steal ten grand to keep the mysterious demise of Nicole a secret.

The weird thing is, even when Philly busts Lester, he ends up letting the guy keep his job. Once you also see this movie through the eyes of someone from 2021, you realize that Philly is a rich white kid who is going to grow up to be a creep, empowered by the knowledge that he was able to subjugate those in castes below him and still get to repeatedly struggle snuggle with the woman who was once Emmanuelle, despite the fact that she states numerous times in the movie that she feels guilt for having taken his innocence. He has no innocence to speak of, as the last scene in the film shows, where he boldly inquires for a date with a teacher who already informed him that she found his intentions upsetting. I guess money can solve so much, but I wouldn’t really know.

Now for the fun parts.

This movie was Jack Barry & Dan Enright Productions, who usually stuck to producing game shows. They even used one of their announcers, Jay Stewart, to do the trailer’s voice-over. Barry received a lot of hate mail for this film from loyal viewers of his shows who were disgusted by the content of Private Lessons. As a result, he never made another film again.

Yet even more intriguing was the fact that this was the first picture for Jensen Farley Pictures, a subsidiary of Sunn Classic Pictures. Yes, after years of making movies just for America’s families, Jensen Farley would release stuff like The Boogens and another movie where an older woman — Joan Collins! — would deflower a younger man, Homework.

I can’t even imagine the music budget on this movie, because it has everything from Air Supply’s  “Lost In Love” to Eric Clapton, Earth, Wind and Fire, John Cougar and “Hot Legs” “Tonight’s The Night,” and “You’re in My Heart” from Rod Stewart.

It’s also the American debut of Jan de Bont, who was the cinematographer here and would go on to make Speed and Twister.

I should mention that I despise Eric Brown even more now, because not only did he get to do multiple love scenes with Sylvia Kristel, but he did the very same thing in They’re Playing With Fire, except that that time, the kid got to appear with Sybil Danning.

Another last revelation: I now realize that many of the women I’ve dated are just me trying to find my own Sylvia Kristel. Sadly, the real thing had a very rough life that was dominated by addiction and a quest to find a man who could replace her father.

Man, I should never write about comedies, huh?

You can watch this on Tubi.

PS: I totally forgot that Pamela Bryant from Don’t Answer the Phone! is in this.

June 12: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is sci fi!

I have no idea why people aren’t losing their minds and talking about this movie all the time.

High school football star Billy Hamilton and his cheerleader girlfriend Allison are kidnapped in the middle of a date and taken to an underground base that houses a fight club somewhere beneath Las Vegas because that’s the world of this movie and I love it.

They’re now part of the Legion of Iron, a place where men become gladiators and women become playthings and man, 1990 wasn’t that long ago for a movie like this to be made. It’s like someone read all the Gor books and said, “The movies weren’t disquieting enough and I’m going to be the maniac that changes that,” and made this.

As our heroes watch the first gladiator fight, things get unsetting in a hurry, as the leader of all this, Diana (Erika Nann, who was in Animal Instincts and Night Rhythms before appearing in the video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots proving that Hideo Kojima loves direct to video 80s and 90s movies as much as all of us) forces them to watch a battle to the death between Mad Dog and Rex (Stefanos Miltsakakis, Frankenstein’s Monster in Waxwork II, in addition to being a frequent JCVD fight partner). As Rex is the winner, he’s allowed to forcibly take Allison while Diana makes her man watch.

In the first fifteen minutes of the film, we’ve already had a kidnapping, the revelation of a secret shadow world of white slavery and gladiatorial combat under the Western United States, said gladiatorial combat and an assault. This movie isn’t worried about offending anyone and everyone.

Billy is in similar danger, because the guards think this is the Roman empire and keep trying to take him themselves when Diana isn’t tying him up and forcibly engaging him in martial congress. So our hero now has a reason to kill Rex and needs a mentor, who he finds in ex-pro football player Lyle Wagner. Enter a series of montages, in which our boy learns how to become a man or least fight in American Gladiator-like challenges to the death. Lyle is also pretty much Yoda, as he utters things like, “Haven’t you heard? Superman’s black, freakface!” and “The worst thing that can happen is death.”

At some point, Billy and Allison try to escape, which ends with everyone in the cast beating Billy down with sticks and when that isn’t good enough, Diana repeatedly makes Allison brutalize her boyfriend before allowing all of the gladiators to have their way with her. This makes Billy even more determined to kill Rex, which he does, showing up in a silver sparkly glitter costume that has amazing shoulder pads. His contest with the big bad is pretty much our hero repeatedly striking the much larger man in the testicle again and again. I mean, when you’re working a body part, work the body part, even if it is the ball bag.

The entire time this battle was happening, Lyle was making machine guns in the orgy bed chamber. This allows our heroes to have a massive uprising while battling the Chinese version of the Legion of Iron, which posits that there are small gladiator sex cults all over the world. After an insane battle that involves people getting machine-gunned in the nuts, throwing stars and nearly everyone dying, Billy and Allison get away, but not before being attacked by Diana flying the kind of plane John Denver died in.

Seriously, Diana is the heroine of this movie for me. She escaped a life as a showgirl and dancing in Vegas to lead an army of maniacs under the earth and continues said empire by kidnapping high school football stars. In the scene where she ties up Billy and tries to explain the fact that people are all commodities, he spits in her face and instead of being a shrinking violet, she says, “Go ahead and spit on me, if it turns you on.” Then she explains the difference between love and hate when giving him an old fashioned. She should have been the main character of like ten more movies.

This was the first movie that Yakov Bentsvi ever directed and he waited fourteen years to make another. Writer Steven Schoenberg was the editor of Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses? and Hamburger: The Motion Picture, so who knew he had such pent-up insanity?

If you ever watched the aforementioned American Gladiators and said, “Is there any BDSM-obsessed fan fiction of this show?,” Legion of Iron is the film for you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 11: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is vigilantes.

You know, I’ve wanted to watch this movie because the dude on the cover has a facemask on and is carrying a crossbow. That never really happens in the movie, but at least it’s entertaining.

At the end of the Vietnam War, the soldiers known as The Annihilators — Sgt. Bill Ecker (Christopher Stone, The Howling), Garrett Floyd (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), Ray Track (Gerrit Graham!), Woody (Andy Wood) and Joe (Dennis Redfield) — undertake their final mission, during which Joe is critically injured saving his friends.

Years later, Joe works at his father’s Atlanta convenience store, which is under attack by a street gang led by Roy Boy Jagger (Paul Koslo) and his gang The Rollers, which ends up costing him his life. His father then begs Bill to teach the neighborhood how to fight back, which pretty much consists of the guys ineffectually shooting at the gang members and neither side being really able to hit one another, all while trying to stay away from the cops.

Known as Action Force in Europe, this movie would have been much better if I just watched the poster and got high. Well, I learned my lesson, The Annihilators.

Charles E. Sellier Jr. directed this. Yes — the producer of so many of my favorite Sunn Classics films! It was his last time directing after a career that included Encounter with Disaster; Silent Night, Deadly Night and Snowballing. He also created The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.

This movie was made at the same time as Invasion U.S.A. and shared the same stunt team, who worked on this movie during the day and with Chuck Norris at night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 10: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is a Scott Adkins movie.

Scott Adkins film career started when he was offered a role in the Hong Kong martial arts film called Dei Seung Chui Keung. After that he worked for some of teh best action experts in the world, like Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen, Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan. But it was his role as Russian MMA villain Yuri Boyka in Undisputed II: Last Man Standing that made him known to action film fans. He fought Van Damme in The Shepherd: Border Patrol, battled Donnie Yen in Ip Man 4: The Finale, took on Jason Statham in The Expendables 2 and was Ryan Reynolds’ double in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

For this movie, Adkins did more than star as Mike Fallon, an assassin who specializes in creating deadly accidents. He also produced and wrote this adaption of Pat Mills and Tony Skinner’s comic book.

After losing his girlfriend to another woman, Mike takes jobs and hangs out at The Oasis, a bar that’s owned by his mentor Big Ray (Ray Stevenson, the Punisher in Punisher: War Zone and Volstagg in the Thor movies). It’s a drinking establishment frequented exclusively by killers like Poison Pete, commandos Mic (Michael Jai White) and Mac (Ray Park), weapons creator Finnicky Fred, axeman Carnage Cliff and Jane the Ripper. Honestly, the quick worldbuilding scene in the beginning of the film is the best part, as all of these characters could be in several films.

Unfortunately for Mike, he’s been set up by Milton (David Paymer), the person who sets up their kills, by an amateur killer who he easily dispatches. That was just to distract him as Mic and Mac were hired to kill his ex-girl, who got too close to exposing the seamy side of the oil industry.

Now, Mike wants revenge. And he has plenty of targets, because everyone at the Oasis has been hired to kill him.

I’ve never seen any of director Jesse V. Johnson’s films before, but now I’m going to track them down. This was an absolute thrill of a movie and I enjoyed every second. That means that I have to start checking out Adkins work as well. Thanks Junesploitation for introducing me to a whole new bunch of movies!

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 9: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is Italian horror.

Marcello Avallone made three movies in Italy — the mondo The Queer…The Erotic, Un gioco per Eveline and Cugine mie before moving to the United States. Nearly ten years later, Avallone began this film through the help of producer Maurizio Tedesco, the brother of actress Paola Tedesco.

He wrote the script along with Andrea Purgatori, a newspaper reporter turned movie scribe, and Tedesco. While Dardano Sacchetti’s name is in the credits, it’s because the film’s financial people were not confident in the script and hired him to doctor it up. He discussed the film with the writers but otherwise didn’t add much, by his own admission.

During excavations for the Rome Metro, a collapsed wall reveals a necropolis known as the Tomb of Domitian, a place that Professor Lasky (Donald Pleasence) claims was built for Roman Emperor Domitian, the third and last emperor of the Flavian dynasty. In real life, he was not sacrificed by a death cult, but was assassinated and given the worst sentence possible, as his memory was condemned to oblivion by the Roman Senate and his name was erased from anywhere that it appeared on official documents and buildings.

Lasky’s three students, Barbara, Marcus (John Pepper, who was an assistant director on Ghostbusters and cast for his ability to speak English) and Andrea (Trine Michielsen, Delirium), must explore the tomb and attempt to escape with their lives.

There’s a scene where the students all watch a movie-within-a-movie version of Creature from the Black Lagoon and a bed kill that completely is taken from A Nightmare on Elm Street. This also feels like the Italian version of Quatermass and the Pit with Dr. Loomis screaming dialogue at Italian youngsters. Actually, that’s totally what this movie is, but that sentence makes Specters sound like a much more interesting movie.

Avallone would go on to make Maya, which by all accounts is a much better — if somewhat similar — film to this.

June 8: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is blacksploitation.

Released by American International Pictures as a double feature with Foxy Brown, this movie features Isaac Hayes as former pro football player turned bounty hunter Mack “Truck” Turner. After another successful job with his friend Jerry, he gets another bounty from Fogarty (Dick Miller), but not before seeing his girlfriend Annie (Annazette Chase, The Toy). She wants him to give up this crazy and violent life.

That next job is all about catching a pimp named Gator (Paul Harris, Across 110th Street), who runs and ends up getting killed. His main lady Dorinda (Nichelle Nichols!) gets all of his prostitutes under control and makes a deal with all of the other pimps in Los Angeles. Whoever kills Truck Turner gets to be the main pimp. Only Blue (Yaphet Kotto) takes the challenge, but no matter what he tries or who he hires — a veritable rogue’s gallery of villainy — Truck keeps making it through.

Director Jonathan Kaplan, who went from movies like this and The Student Nurses to bigger things like Heart Like a Wheel and The Accussed, told Monthly Film Bulletin that Truck Turner was written for Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum or Ernest Borgnine, but Larry Gordon at AIP said, “Well, we can’t get any of them so now it’s a black picture.”

June 6: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is free!

I’m always chasing the dragon, so to speak, when it comes to weird movies and no high has eluded me more often than 1975’s borderline insane vanity project The Astrologer.

Trying to find it led me to discover the other 1975 movie with the same title, which is also known as Suicide Cult. That film, in which a government agent tries to use biorhythms to find the Antichrist, may be the strangest movie I’ve ever seen.

And then I watched this.

The Astrologer is the very definition of a lost film, one that went away forty years ago and only was discovered again when a 35mm print was amongst a thousand pornographic movies that were donated to the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA). I can’t even imagine what it was like to be in the first few screenings of this movie, which starts somewhat normally and then suddenly lurches into heights of psychotronic madness the likes of which I have never seen before.

Trust me. I’ve been caught in hype for movies before, but this time, the time and energy and sheer waiting that this movie engendered all paid off. If anything, The Astrologer is even better than I thought it would be. Imagine if Miami Connection was not about how martial arts can save the world, make better friendships and repair families, but instead that auteur madness drove one man to make a movie about a carnival con man who learns that he really does have psychic powers when he isn’t becoming the President’s fortuneteller, a diamond smuggler, a movie star, a producer and a murderer.

According to Matchbook Cine Club, the man behind all of this, Craig Denney grew up rich in Canada — maybe — and was such a devotee to numerology that he refused to ever reveal his birthdate*. He was kicked out of every school he attended and fired from every radio station he worked at as a top 40 DJ, then went into the “astrological charts business” with his company Moonhouse. Working for individuals and corporations, Denney would use computers to create detailed astrological charts that portended to their future. By 1975, he’d made $31 million and became one of the youngest studio heads in Hollywood history.

The Astrologer seems to have gotten its start as an eight-episode TV miniseries — in a time before that became a normal thing — while Denney would also appear in a reality show called Craig Denney’s World of Astrology. Shooting started on the former in places as diverse as Tahiti, Africa and France.

Somehow, this film also sought to transform Republic Arts Pictures, which used a bald eagle as its mascot, into a phoenix. From 1935 through 1959, the studio released mostly westerns, serials and b-movies like The Quiet Man and Johnny Guitar. After they ceased making movies, Republic was bought by Victor M. Carter, a turnaround specialist, who transformed Republic into a business that encompassed plastics and appliances in addition to its film library and studio rental business. Within eight years, he’d increased the value of the company by 400%, then sold his interest to CBS**.

Meanwhile, Republic sold its library of films to National Telefilm Associates (NTA), which did so well with these films at the dawn of cable that it changed its name to Republic Pictures Corporation. From the 90s to the next century, Republic was part of the ever-growing world of multimedia mergers, becoming part of Spelling Entertainment, which was controlled by Blockbuster, which then became part of Viacom and then Paramount. Meanwhile, Lionsgate continued to license the Republic name. Today, the company is part of Melange Pictures, LLC, established by Viacom as a holding company for the Republic library, which the films sold to various media by Olive Films and Kino Lorber; the name remains licensed from Viacom/CBS.

But I digress.

In June of 1976, The Astrologer was reported as being the first of ten films from the newly revitalized Republic Arts Pictures. Funds were to come from Moonhouse and three French banks, as well as oil tycoon Ernest J. Helm Jr., who was the main money man for the movie that we should really be discussing instead of the intricacies of multi-media mergers.

Supposedly, the making of this movie was even more intricate, based on the aforementioned numerology, with even the numbers on cabs, how many people appear in scenes and even the length of cuts all based on important numerological concepts. Also, there was no script, other than the story that was credited to Dorothy June Pidgeon, but instead, horoscopes that were scried each day would determine what was filmed.

So what’s it all about?

Well, Denney plays Craig Marcus Alexander, who we first meet as a helicopter flies above a carnival, where we learn that he’s gone from picking purses to fleecing people via fake psychic shows to getting married to Darrien (Darrien Earle, who was Denney’s cousin and a restaurant owner who was married at one point to Lee Iaccoca****) to being told about stealing diamonds to being in jail for the second time for jewel theft. If it seems like we’ve missed big moments in time and that things have escalated quickly, just hold on. This rollercoaster is only going to get faster. And stranger***.

While in Kenya, Alexander takes the gems that will bankroll his empire, defeating corrupt cops, quicksand and cobras to sail to America — always sailing, a movie more obsessed with sailing than Christoper Cross in 1980 — to start his new career becoming the world’s most famous astrologer. He does this by allowing a woman to drown in said quicksand and selling another for a boat, which we watch sail endlessly as ripped calendar pages fly at us while listening to the Moody Blues “Tuesday Afternoon.” Keep in mind the music in this movie, as we’ll get to it in a bit.

At this point, you may think that you have watched five movies worth of material. Well, hold on.

When he isn’t conducting secret missions for the Navy, Alexander has become a multi-media mogul, making the movie of his life within, well, the movie of the life of the real Denney. To make sure that his money is safe, our psychic protagonist hires his friend Arthyr***** to be in charge of his cash, which is weird because the man has a tenth-grade education, but Alexander remarks that there’s no difference between ten bucks and ten million dollars, which is the most false statement that nearly anyone has ever uttered ever.

Meanwhile, being a star leads our hero to rescue Darrien, who is now a prostitute, her room filled with rats, graffiti and, oddly, Milk of Magnesia. He decides to make her the star of all his movies, learning nothing from William Randolph Hearst nor his fictional analogs.

At some point, Florence Marly — the Queen of Blood herself — shows up.

Of course, all good things must end. Alexander gets overextended and the love of his life ends up hating him, summed up in an astounding montage of dinners that goes from romantic to face splashing horror. You really need to witness it for yourself. It’s set to Procol Harum’s “Grand Hotel” and literally is a music video — made in 1975 — that follows the exact words of the lyrics.

The moment that blows my mind the most in this movie is when our hero is meeting with his financial analyst in the middle of his gigantic new home and shows off his galactic mirror. Yes, he has a window into the galaxy itself that shows the stars as if you are standing next to him and this revelation is brushed off within seconds, while extended sleeping in a bed and eating sequences seem to last for hours.

Soon after, with his business manager screaming at him, “You’re not an astrologer, you’re an asshole!” after he murders his wife’s lover, Alexander can only stare into the sun — hey, it’s a star too — as he contemplates his life as a quote from King Lear fills the screen.

This movie cost $4 million dollars, which is about $19.5 million in today’s money, and nothing in this film looks cheap. It has crane shots, helicopter shots, underwater photography and so much more. And as for the music, well, the movie has the aforementioned Moody Blues and Procol Harum on the soundtrack, as well as Tommy Edwards, Conway Twitty and Gustav Holst’s “The Planets Suite” performed by The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Beyond the fact that none of these artists were paid for their music, Denney went the extra mile of trying to get paid for using their songs.

Showings of The Astrologer were sparse, but it did play theaters. There was also a rumored airing on the CBS Late Night Movie that has to be an urban legend. So what happened to Denney after this movie pretty much disappeared?

According to that amazing Matchbox Cine Club article, Denney continually referred to himself as 31 years old and continued making money under the Republic banner. Four of the films that are known that were to be made include Attack at Shark’s Reef, Death Rays from the Sky, Death Star and The Lucifer Project, which became Barracuda, which also had Denney and Ernest J. Helm Jr.’s names attached to its original promotional materials.

Denney also got married around this time to Donna Sue Whisman, who joined his company as a nutritionist and became the president of the motion picture division, not unlike the character of Darrien (who was played by his cousin who is also a restaurant manager, which is what Whisman went to school for; maybe Denney really was psychic as this turn of events also mirrors the way his character in the movie gives his wife a job she is not able to do).

The follow-up to The Astrologer was a movie called  Oceanic Opera, A Sea Odyssey. It would have starred no actors or actresses, but an all-nature cast and would have a traveling orchestra play during screenings of the film. It was supposedly nearly done when it all fell apart. According to an article in Variety, Denney and his wife had shot “sunken Japanese ships, undersea Greek temples, submerged Wells Fargo stagecoaches, hard hat divers and all forms of marine life from Alaska to Australia.”

The real end of that movie was when Denney and Republic Pictures Industries filed a $50 million suit against DeLuxe General Inc for “alleged unauthorized release of his film negatives from its vaults.” This is because Denney said that cinematographer Chuck Keen was given the film he shot. Around this time, Denney supposedly died in Ohio.

Guess what. Even that is disputed.

According to Young Hollywood, Denney told Chadbourne that he “was very interested in escaping the FBI and IRS by faking his own death.” Later, when he stopped to visit his old friend, he was told that he was dead and his sister said, “We’re all very upset,” in a way that indicated that no one was really that devastated.

Can there be any more?

Sure there can.

Beyond the fact that Denney convinced people to pay him to be in this movie, that mob money was used to potentially film it and that an IMDB poster hinted that Denney was his neighbor and “was really cool in many ways that I cannot divulge since I was a minor but a lot of fun to be around******,” this film has been impossible to see, something of an anomaly in today’s always-connected, everything is always available way of life.

When this movie leaked to YouTube******* this year — it was down in a few weeks. Going back to that multi-media merger we hinted at before, there’s now a black screen that says, “This video contains content from Paramount Pictures, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.”

There aren’t many movies left that need to be hunted down. This is one that is so worth it. I watched it at least three times in the last 24 hours, often rewinding things back and pausing them so I could discuss what I just watched with my wife. All of the time that I spend obsessing, waiting and thinking about The Astrologer paid off. I can only imagine that Denney is still alive, hilariously happy that the movie that he created decades ago that went nowhere somehow has become such a quest for so many.

Immortality is something we all seek as human beings. Who knew that Denney’s quest for fame would end with a movie that so few could see, even today, but that nearly everyone who discovers it can’t wait to watch?

*One would assume that he was involved in some shady circles like in the movie Pi and needed to make sure that the other occult mathematicians would have magick power over him if they knew what day he was born.

**The former Republic studio lot is now CBS Studio Center.

***My theory is that the entire ten-episode TV series was actually filmed and what we are seeing is the edited down version, like how canceled TV shows would air in Europe as theatrical movies or, inversely, how Yor Hunter from the Future went from four eighty-minute episodes to one nearly incomprehensibly awesome 98-minute film.

****Honestly, when you learn that Le Iacocca’s Cordon Bleu-educated ex-wife and relative of the film’s auteur is in this movie and it’s the least surprising thing, you’re truly watching a movie packed with weirdness.

*****Arthyr Chadbourne, a real-life astrologer who still has a website where he discusses the fact that he “was astrological director as well as the star in the motion picture, The Astrologer. He has also worked as an executive producer for the independent television series Meet The Astrologer.” Notably, he does not mention Denney, but does say that he worked in early Star Trek productions and designed watch faces for Paramount’s Dark Shadows, whatever that means.

****** That IMDB commentator was tracked down by Paste and interviewed and…yeah, the story is just as wild as you’d imagine.

*******It’s on the Internet Archive now, but who knows for how long?

June 5: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is revenge.

Sure, Paul Blaisdell created the effects for The She-Creature, Invasion of the Saucer Men, Not of This Earth and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but this is the only movie in which he made a tree person.

Yes, this film is about the prince of a South Seas island wrongly executed by a witch doctor who hated the fact that the prince became friends with Americans. Well, those foreigners pay him back by irradiating the island and reanimating the royal victim, who has been buried inside a tree. Now he is known as Tabonga, an angry tree stump that demands bloody retribution.

This movie is one of the many reasons why quicksand concerned me as a child, as the tree man throws his unfaithful widow into the sinking muck and then tosses the witch doctor down a hill. He can only be stopped by white men and their guns, which hasn’t really changed for so many since this was made sixty some years ago.

Written by Richard Bernstein (Terrified!) and Jack Milner, this was directed by Jack’s brother Dan, who worked as an editor on the Bozo the Clown TV show (he also made The Fighting Coward and The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues).

Look, it’s not great, but the tree man reveal is better than most entire movies. It has that going for it at least.

You can watch this on Tubi.