In the U.S., this movie played TV. But in the UK, it was in theaters, where people could be as freaked out as I was when I was four and had to watch bees cover a VW Bug and sting people of all ages, shapes and sizes.

It was the movie that Guerdon Trueblood made after The Candy Snatchers, so obviously he’s all about punching the audience in the head, heart and gut. He also wrote Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo and Ants, so once he realized little creepy crawlers freaked people out, he kept at it. He also was the writer for SST Death Flight and Jaws 3D. And oh yeah — the sequel to this movie, Terror Out of the Sky.

Norman Gary is the real hero here. He was an entomologist and acted as the production consultant and bee wrangler/handler for this film. All of the swarming shots were handled by him and he also plays a victim. Hundreds of thousands of bees were used for this movie, but there were few injuries.

Sheriff Donald McKew (Ben Johnson) finds his dog dead just as an abandoned freighter pulls into New Orleans, kind of like Zombi, except with bees instead of zombies. Assistant Medical Director Jeff DuRand (Michael Parks) and entomologist Jeannie Devereaux (Gretchen Corbett) learn that the bees in the dog’s stomach are violent ones that could only come from South Africa. This is all happening during Mardi Gras and yes, the parade should be canceled, but the tourists! It’s all psychological. You yell spider and everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell killer bee, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July. Or Mardi Gras.

But the scene where Devereaux has to drive that Volkswagen into the Super Dome hoping that it will get cold enough to kill the bees? Still horrifying. Kids covered in bees? The UK poster? It’s all bee trauma.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Elvis was on the CBS Late Movie on January 6, 1984.

As Elvis Presley (Kurt Russell) prepared for his first live performance in eight years at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, he remembers his life in this made-for-TV movie firected by John Carpenter and written by Anthony Lawrence.

Unlike so many of Carpenter’s work at this point, this wasn’t in the horror or fantasy genres. He told Film Comment, “I wanted to work with actors. I wanted to do a dramatic film. I wanted to do something different. And Elvis was the first thing that came along that I had any feeling for, personally-because I did have a feeling for Elvis, I liked him very much, cared about him. So it seemed like a pretty good package when it arrived. After it was over I was disappointed in some of my work, and I was disappointed that I didn’t have more participation in the editing.”

Elvis’ father is played by Russell’s own dad, Bing Russell, while his mother Gladys is Shelley Winters. The actress who played Priscilla, Season Hubley, would be married to Russell from 1979 to 1983. She’s the girl in the Chock Full O’Nuts that he encounters as Snake Pliskin in Escape from New York.

Russell visited the real Vernon at Graceland during filming. A supporter of the movie, Elvis’ father gave Kurt one of Elvis’s real jumpsuits, the Adonis. The actor had actually worked with Elvis, as his first movie was It Happened at the World’s Fair, a film during which he kicked Presley in the shins. He’s also the 12th cousin to Elvis.

He did not sing, though. That’s Ronnie McDowell. That said, Russell was so good at Elvis’ voice that he performed it in Forrest Gump.

When this was made, the drugs that fueled Elvis were only gossip. That part is missing, but the iconic stature of the King is what this movie is all about.

Also: another member of John Carpenter’s group of actors is in this. Charles Cyphers is also in his movies Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog, Halloween, Halloween II, Escape from New York and Someone’s Watching Me!

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Beasts Are On the Streets was on the CBS Late Movie on February 22, 1984 and March 8, 1985.

Peter R. Hunt is best known for his work on the James Bond movies, editing many of the early movies and directing one of my favorites, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

He also directed this Hanna-Barbera Production, written by Laurence Heath and Frederick Louis Fox, in which a tanker truck smashes into the fence of a Texas wildlife preserve, unleashing all of nature’s fury into the city, including bears, bison, zebras, rhinos, tigers, camels, antelopes, ostriches, elephants, lions and bears. Only Dr. Claire McCauley (Carol Lynley, Elevator) can save the day.

The strangeness of this movie comes from the fact that it uses the Hanna-Barbera audio library, so every sound effect for real happenings has the audio of a cartoon and what we know of cartoons, you know? It’s disconcerting.

A pre-Miami Vice Philip Michael Thomas is here, as is Bill Thurman, who is in several Larry Buchanan movies. He’s the pill-loving trucker who gets the movie in this mess.

Don’t expect Roar or Wild Beasts, but still, maybe you can ethically enjoy this film more, even if it doesn’t have some of the lunatic thrill of those other two animals gone wild films.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Terror of Frankenstein was on the CBS Late Movie on December 26, 1988 and May 12, 1989.

Directed and written by Calvin Floyd (In Search of Dracula), Terror of Frankenstein attempts to film an authentic version of the original source material. And then it misspells Mary Shelley’s name in the opening credits, but hey, you can’t have it all.

Shot in Ireland, this is the story of Victor Frankenstein (Leon Vitali) and his fiancee Elizabeth (Stacy Dorning). After leaving her behind for medical school, he becomes obsessed with reanimating dead tissue, which leads him to sew together corpses and create the being that so many simply refer to as Frankenstein, but the book refers to as Adam, played here by Per Oscarsson.

Frankenstein is frightened by what he has made, so he comes back home and his child follows, making life horrible for anyone connected with his creator.

Known as Victor Frankenstein in other countries, this was purchased by Sam Sherman — thanks DVD Drive-In — and given a new title before being released on video and syndicated. Of course it ended up on the CBS Late Movie, as that’s the perfect place for insomnia-aided eyes to find this lower budget, literary minded take on the traditional horror story.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Evil Stalks This House was on the CBS Late Movie on January 8, April 29 and August 4, 1987.

This was a pilot for a horror anthology that would be called Tales of the Haunted. According to IMDB, this series was broadcast in syndication as 30-minute episodes shown over five consecutive nights. That means that each story would be a five-parter and then edited down to a 96-minute film.

Sadly, the initial syndicated run of this episode didn’t get great ratings.

Who knows if whatever would have emerged if this had become a series and if it would have been as deliriously weird as this movie, but one could hope, because wow — this one really goes for it.

Hosted by Christopher Lee — that part doesn’t appear on many of the roughly taped YouTube videos that are all the evidence that remains of this show — this tells the story of Stokes (Jack Palance), who drifts into two with two kids in tow who may or may not be his. After their car breaks down in a downpour, they make their way to the home of Maggie and Dody (Helen Hughes and Frances Hyland), who seem to be two easily conned older ladies taking care of a mentally handicapped man.

Stokes learns that there are valuables all over the house, so despite promising to leave, he never does, even stealing the ladies’ heart medicine to keep them enslaved to him. They’re not so helpless, however, and the house is filled with horrifying traps like a quicksand pit in the basement, a deadly spider and a witch coven in the attic that bedevils Stokes and another grifter who also comes to take advantage.

The end of this movie totally steals the shock ending from The Baby and I could not love it any stronger.

Nearly a stage play that’s been shot on video, this was directed by Gordon Hessler (Cry of the Banshee, Pray for Death, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die) and written by Louis D. Heyward (Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, Planet of the Vampires, The Crimson Cult), I’ve seen this written up quite dismissively in reviews. But why? This is such a lost moment of strangeness with Palance absolutely snarling and hissing out every line with so many nightmare moments for impressionable kids who stayed up way to late to watch it on the CBS Late Movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Poppy Is Also a Flower was on the CBS Late Movie on November 10, 1972; May 23 and December 6, 1973 and June 9, 1975.

You know how I’ve discussed how Eurospy films often feel like the United Nations, what with so many countries working together to make these movies? This American/French/Austrian made-for-television spy and anti-drug film — also known as Danger Grows Wild — was made with the United Nations themselves as part of a series of television specials designed to promote the organization’s work. It was produced by Xerox.

So how does it tie-in to Bond? Well, 007 director Terence Young is at the helm — he passed up Thunderball to direct this — and it’s based on a story by Ian Fleming.

In an attempt to stop the heroin traffic at the Afghanistan–Iran border, some United Nations operatives inject a trackable radioactive compound into a seized shipment of opium and let it go go back into the wild to try and find Europe’s top heroin distributor.

German-born Sente Berger — who is also in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. film The Spy with My Face and The Ambushers — is here, as is Stephen Boyd (Ben-Hur), Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, Georges Geret, Hugh Griffith (another Ben-Hur alumnus), Jack Hawkins (who took as many roles as he could late in his career before his three-pack-a-day habit stole his voice), Rita Hayworth (!), E.G. Marshell, “If I Had a Hammer” singer Trini Lopez as himself, Marcello Mastroianni, Amedeo Nazzari (a huge Italian star from before World War II and well afterward), Omar Sharif, Barry Sullivan, Nadja Tiller (Death Knocks Twice), Eli Wallach (who won an Emmy for his role), Grace Kelly (this is the only movie she made after retiring from acting in 1957) and Harold “Oddjob” Sakata. Truly, this is the very definition of a star-studded affair.

All of them were paid $1 each to be in this film, with Young working for free.

One of the producers, Edgar Rosenberg, was of course the husband of Joan Rivers. This is the movie where Joan would meet Hayworth and write that she was demanding and incoherent, yet still glamorous. That said, it’s possible that Hayworth was already beginning to suffer from the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hotline was on the CBS Late Movie on October 30, 1986 and March 10, 1987.

Originally airing on CBS on October 16, 1982, this made-for-TV movie was directed by Jerry Jameson, who also was the in the director’s chair for movies like The Bat People, Airport ’77 and the Gunsmoke and Bonanza reunion movies. Lynda Carter (TV’s Wonder Woman as well as Miss World USA 1972) plays Brianne O’Neill, an art student who is getting stalked by The Barber, a man who claims to be behind several killings in the paper.

Who is The Barber? Is it Justin Price (Granville Van Dusen, who was the voice of Race Bannon on The New Adventures of Jonny Quest)? Deranged killer Charlie Jackson (James Booth, Airport ’77)? Former actor Tom Hunter (Steve Forrest, Mommie Dearest), who has been in love with Brianne for a long time? Her boss Kyle Durham (Monte Markham, Jake Speed, We Are Still Here)? Or her co-worker Barnie (Frank Stallone!, Ground Rules)?

Look for Harry Waters, Jr. in this movie. He played Marvin Berry in Back to the Future, the guy that Marty McFly used to steal rock ‘n roll from black people. There’s a death by harpoon gun, so this movie has that going for it. Consider it an early 80’s American low budget made for TV giallo and you’ll be fine.