EDITOR’S NOTE: Apologies. I know this was just part of Chiller Theater month but it’s also on the Mill Creek box set I’m writing about.

W. Lee Wilder and Planet Teleplays were just cranking out science fiction movies in the 50s and we’re all the better for it today.

Dr. Douglas Martin (Peter Graves) is a scientist studying nuclear blasts at Soledad Flats. As he flies over the area, his plane crashes and he wakes up healed yet with a large scar on his chest. He starts acting so weird that the FBI gets called in. Once he’s given truth serum, he lets it be known that he’s being controlled by aliens from Astron Delta under the command of The Tala.

These aliens have some wild plans that involve mutant lizards and bugs that will wipe out the people of Earth. Using a slide rule, Martin figures out that if he can shut down Soledad Flats for ten seconds, he’ll overload the alien base and kill all of them. You know how good U.S. military men are at that and yes, he blows them up real good.

UFO skeptic Dr. Aaron Sakulich thinks that many alien abduction stories contain the same elements, such as medical testing, strange scars, memory being erased, aliens with giant eyes and the feeling of being kind controlled. He feels that the initial articles about UFOs and abductions were influenced by this movie and that they entered the collective unconsciousness. Fiction influencing reality or the subconscious.

As for those big eyes, they’re egg cartons.

In 2002, this movie was redubbed by director Doug Miles and writer Tex Hauser as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The plot of that movie is about alien invaders that have a machine that can turn people gay and Operation Manhole, a government project that will lure gay people to one location and drop a bomb on them. The tagline: “They came from outer space… and they’re fabulous!”

You can watch the original movie on Tubi.

Jerry Warren sat on this movie for two years before playing it with Teenage Zombies. Shot in Colossal Cave in Tucson, Arizona, the monster costume looked so bad that Warren didn’t use it. Let’s think on that for a minute. An effect so bad that Jerry Warren wouldn’t use it.

Professor Millard Wyman (John Carradine) has sent Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor), Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan) and Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coates) to the bottom of the ocean but their vehicle becomes lost. They swim — in scuba suits at crushing depths — into a cave where only Matheny (George Skaff), an old sailor, is still alive.

Professor Wyman’s brother Jim (Joe Maierhauser) has luckily built another vehicle, because Matheny is looking at the ladies like a man who is been in a cave for more than a decade and suddenly has a gypsy girl from Beast from the Haunted Cave and Lois Lane right within staring distance. Before he can say, “You know, I killed a man,” a volcano goes live, he dies under some rocks and all the white scientists celebrate their good fortune above the surface and no one gets the bends.

Warren sold this with “A Nightmare of Terror in the Center of the Earth with Forgotten Men, Monsters, Earthquakes and Boiling Volcanos!” I mean, yes, it has those things, but it’s…maybe not as exciting as the ads make it sound. The petrified world is the movie itself.

Also known as Ein Toter Hing im Netz or A Corpse Hung in the Web, this West German horror film is all about Gary, a nightclub manager who invites several pretty ladies to strip dance in Singapore. They crash land on the way, make it to an island and find a giant spider web. Soon, Gary is bitten by the spider and becomes a mutant.

First released here as an adults’ only nudie cutie called It’s Hot in Paradise, it was re-released without nudity as Horrors of Spider Island. Your enjoyment of this film depends on how much you like watching women wrestle one another and pull hair. I mean, who amongst us can say no to that?

Maybe just look at the awesome German poster, hmm?

When I first saw this, I was way too dismissive of it. It has the same cinematographer as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Georg Krause, shooting a movie with nearly nude women menaced by spiders. Was I in a bad mood the first time I wrote about this? What was wrong with me?

You can get a great version of this from Severin.

In Italy, this movie is known as Ercole e la Regina di Lidia (Hercules and the Queen of Lydia) and it’s loosely based upon various Greek myths and the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as envisioned by co-writers Ennio De Concini and Pietro Francisci, who also directed. It’s also the second — and last — Hercules movie with Steve Reeves in the lead.

Hercules has been brought in to settle the battle over who should rule Thebes between brothers Eteocles and Polynices. However, a magic spring looks so refreshing and Hercules is hypnotized by a harem girl and becomes the kept man of Queen Omphale of Lydia (Sylvia Lopez, who sadly died the same year this movie was made), who plans on sleeping with our hero until she gets bored and turns him into a statue.

Luckily, Ulysses is on hand to help him get his memory back, just in time to decimate three wild tigers in order to rescue his wife beloved Iole (Sylvia Koscina). Then, our hero realizes that he should just let the two brothers kill one another.

Wrestling fans will be happy to see Primo Carnera (he was also a boxer and known as the Ambling Alp) show up as Antaeus.

Mario Bava served as special effects supervisor on this film (he was the cinematographer for Hercules and Hercules Conquers Atlantis; he would then direct the incredible Hercules In the Haunted World), which you can definitely see in the foggy dream sequences.

While Reeves would leave the series to Reg Park, the two Hercules files he was in would be successful all over the world.

You can watch this on Tubi with Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing or check out the original on YouTube.

Asparia (Anna-Maria Polani) is the Queen of the Hellenes, and has been captured by the Babylonians. Somehow, she has hidden her royalty and is living as a common slave in Babylon. Hercules (Rock Stevens, who is really Peter Lupus, who played Flex Martian in Muscle Beach Party, Goliath in Goliath at the Conquest of Damascus and Superman in a series of Air Force commercials, a job he lost when he posed fully nude in Playgirl) is on his way to save her.

King Phaleg of Assyria (Mario Petri) comes to Babylon hoping to marry Asparia and unite their kingdoms. That’s stopped by the rulers of the country, Taneal (Helga Line), Salmanassar (Livio Lorenzon) and Azzur (Tullio Altamura). Hercules saves him and continues to Babylon.

When he gets there, the brothers are fighting over who gets to marry Asparia while Taneal destroys her own nation to get its riches. Brother kills brother, King Phaleg shows his true colors and Hercules does what he does best.

This was directed by Domenico Paolella, who directed his first movie,  Gli ultimi della strada, in 1940 and wrote his last, Power and Lovers, in 1994. He also wrote the story with Luciano Martino.

The problem I have with this is that Helga Line, as a murderous maniac, is so much more attractive than Polani. If I had the power of Hercules, I know that my decisions would not be as godly.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

Ercole l’invincibile came to American audiences as Son of Hercules in the Land of Darkness. Of these thirteen movies in the Embassy Pictures package offered to TV channels, two had Hercules, none had his children Alexiares, Anicetus, Telephus, Hyllus and Tlepolemus, and four were Maciste movies.

Ercole, or Hercules, is played by Dan Vadis, a former U.S. Navy sailor and bodybuilder who was a member of the Mae West “Muscleman Revue.” He had already played Hercules in The Triumphs of Hercules and after these movies, moved into Westerns, the films of Clint Eastwood and finished his career in Seven Magnificent Gladiators.

After saving Telca (Spela Rozin, Strange Girls) from a lion, her father Kabol (Ken Clark) offers her hand in marriage if he gets a dragon’s tooth for him. That tooth is impossible to pull out unless the dragon is dead, but a witch (Olga Solbelli) claims she can help make a spear. But that tooth has magic that only works once and the witch also wants the tooth. There is also a tribe of cannibals who eat hearts called the Demulus, led by Ella (Carla Calo).

Director Alvaro Mancori was also the cinematographer of the peplum horror crossover Goliath and the Vampires. He used the name Al World here and in the only other movie he made, the anthology The Double Bed, he was Al Wood.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

Known elsewhere as Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis, this is the film debut of Reg Park as Hercules, or Ercole as he’s referred to in the Italian title (Ercole alla Conquista di Atlantide).

Directed by Vittorio Cottafavi, this had a complete retitle, re-edit and rescore* — as well as a title design by Filmation — before playing in America.

Strange things are happening in Greece, but Hercules — now married to Deianira with a son named Hylas — is content and comfortable with his family life. However, his son feels the call to adventure that his father once did.

That means that Androcles must take matters into his own hands, drug Hercules and take him on his ship as Hylas stows away. After refusing to take part in heroics, Hercules finally consents and battles a god named Proteus and rescues a princess of Atlantis.

But man, Atlantis is messed up. They plan on murdering the princess to keep the fog that hides them from the rest of the world. They also have this weird ritual where children are taken from their parents and forced to touch a stone made from the blood of Uranus that either transforms them into blonde-haired superhumans or makes them mutants that are cast into the pit. With an army of these Aryan-looking demigods, Queen Antinea (Fay Spain, who somehow has shown up in both this movie and William Gréfe’s The Naked Zoo) plans on conquering the universe.

The only way to stop all of this? Hercules has to tear the top of a cave off and blow up Atlantis real good. Of course, none of this has anything to do with the real myth of Hercules, but such is Italian cinema.

I read that Hercules exemplifies the characteristics of sprezzatura, or studied carelessness, or even the ability to do something extremely well without showing that it took any effort. That’s an intriguing way to look at him, especially as until midway through this, he really wants nothing to do with anything, but by the end, he’s willing to die for the men he has journeyed with and his son, who has found his way to the pit filled with the castoffs of Atlantis’ Faustian bargain with the gods.

You can download this from the Internet Archive or watch it on YouTube. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 version is also available on Tubi.

*There is a noticeable steal from Creature of the Black Lagoon in the American music.

I love when a film series sticks around long enough to battle aliens. Hercules is no different, as now he must battle the evil Queen Samara (Jany Clair, Planets Against Us)  and her army of Moon Men, who demand that children be sacrificed to bring back their dead leader.

Hercules is played by Sergio Ciani, who used the stage name Alan Steel. He got his start doubling for Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained and The Giant of Marathon. His run of seven Hercules films is filled with crazy situations to keep the peblu genre alive, such as Hercules and the Masked Rider, which had a Zorro theme, and Hercules and the Treasure of the Incas, which started as a sword and sandal movie and became a western after A Fistful of Dollars became a major hit during filming.

If you’re expecting this movie to be true to its mythological origins, you should know that it borrows from Roman, Greek, Ancient Egyptian and Cretan stories, as well as even soem Edgar Rice Burroughs. In Italy, Steel really playing Maciste, who was a star of silent Italian cinema, but American distributors changed him to Hercules.

Look, it’s Hercules against moon men with giant heads. You should be so lucky.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi to download this from the Internet Archive.

A handpicked group of soldiers — by Julius Caesar, no less! — must break into the druid stronghold to locate and destroy the secret weapon that could help them win the Battle of Alesia. They are centurion Claudius Marcellus (Richard Harrison, not yet in the world of Godfrey Ho), Germanicus (Ralph Hudson, who was only in one other movie, Ape Man of the Jungle), knife thrower Varus (Goffredo Unger) and Castor (Ettore Manni, who hits all the various genre of Italian exploitation cinema from this peplum to westerns like For a Few Extra Dollars, poliziotteschi like Calling All Police Cars, giallo such as A.A.A. Massaggiatrice bella presenza offresi… and even is in Fellini’s City of Women and Bava’s Rabid Dogs). They are joined by the young Valerius (Alberto Dell’Acqua, who is in a ton of westerns as well as Zombi), who wants to be a soldier like all of them.

They are captured and placed in a cell next to noblewoman Livilla (Wandisa Guida, Miss Cinema of 1954, who is also in I Vampiri) and her bodyguard Drusus (Philippe Hersent, So Sweet, So Dead) whose spirit has been destroyed by the tortures of the terrifying druid Vercingetorix (Renato Baldini, Who Killed the Prosecutor and Why?). He tries to do the same thing to Claudius Mercellus, threatening him with heated metal, and the centurion just picks it up and burns his own chest with it. Man, these guys are tough. Anything to find that catapult, right? Even if the kid has to die.

This movie was directed by Anthony Dawson, whose name I love to say because he’s really Antonio Margheriti. This was written by the always busy Ernesto Gastaldi along with Arlette Combret and producer Luciano Martino.

As the genres go in fashion in Italy from sword and sandal to westerns, the final films of the glory days of peplum begin to give way to other films and be inspired by them. This could be a war movie other than the costumes.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Roger Corman and written by Robert Hill (Confessions of an Opium Eater) and Victor Stoloff, this finds brothers Jim (Don Durant) and Chris (Bill Cord) running from a murder charge to the Sulu Sea, where they’re shipwrecked on — you know it — a shark-infested reef. They’re rescued by an all-female society of pearl divers. The younger women enjoy them being there but Queen Pua (Jeanne Gearson) wats them gone.

Chris falls in love with Mahia (Lisa Montell) while Jim steals the pearls. His brother has to decide if he can save his new lover or his brother and, well, the shark eats well.

American-International Pictures added the She Gods part of the title, which is a good move on their part. It was made with one shark and plenty of stock footage. This played double features with Night of the Blood Beast.

This was filmed at the Coco Palms Resort where Elvis shot Blue Hawaii. The hotel used to sell weddings based on the end of that movie where Elvis finally settles down. Miss Sadie Thompson was made there as well with the Chapel in the Palm built just for that movie. Grace Buscher, the manager of the hotel, would use this chapel to invent the Hawaiian destination wedding.

Don’t have the box set? Watch this on Tubi.