EDITOR’S NOTE: Back from the Dead was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, May 17, 1964 at 11:10 p.m.

Charles Marquis Warren directed this and the film it played double features with, The Unknown Terror, before creating Rawhide and adapting Gunsmoke to television. It was written by Catherine Turney and was based on her book The Other One.

Dick (Arthur Franz) and Mandy Anthony (Peggie Castle) are on vacation with her sister Kate Hazelton (Marsha Hunt) when Mandy passes out and loses the child in her womb. She also refers to Dick as Dickens and will only answer to Felicia, the name of the dead wife that Dick never told his second wife about losing.

She demands to be taken to her parents, Mr. Bradley (James Bell) and Mrs. Bradley (Helen Wallace). Dick tells Kate that the Bradley women were all evil. So evil that when Mr. Bradley says, “God will punish you for this,” Mrs. Bradley answers “You believe in your God. I’ll believe in mine.”

Felicia then tries to murder Kate, who only wakes up when she hears the voice of her sister, and then kills Copper the dog, who hated her and adored the new wife. Kate decides that she needs to know more and follows Nancy Cordell (Marianne Stewart) to the coven run by Maître Victor Renall (Otto Reichow), who was in love with Felicia and is angry that her mother did magic without him.

Dick’s friend John Mitchell (Don Haggerty) is able to save Kate through his love for her when she’s attacked by a spell created by Mrs. Bradley. He feels like he causes Felicia’s death, as she said that she would kill herself if he didn’t make love to her. She backed up and fell off a cliff, but now she’s in Mandy’s body and runs to Renall after her mother kills her father and Renall’s spell kills Mrs. Bradley.

You know who finally stops the devil cult leader? Nancy. She was in love with him and even in death, he loved Felicia. She shoots him and Mandy comes back to her body. Her sister tells Dick that her sister should never learn the truth, which is kind of not women staying together.

The sales guide for this movie had this advice: “Have a woman dressed as a zombi wander about the streets near the theatre bearing a sign with the picture’s title, such as: I am Back from the Dead. Come and see me at (name of theatre).”

I loved this, as you can imagine, because it’s so rich in its occult wackiness. In 1957 there were devil cults in the suburbs and people’s moms were in them. It’s also terrifying because I do not want my ex wife showing up in my wife’s body.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Directed and written by Adam Thorn, this is an anthology where a man who needs to use an outhouse on a nature trail is blocked by an old hermit who tells him three stories. On the way, we get to hear “Crucified Woman” by Riz Ortolani, which is from Cannibal Holocaust.

In “The PandaManiac of the Pandemic,” you get exactly what is promised. A panda masked killing machine wiping out some teens, one of whom is Justin Decloux from Gold Ninja Video/The Important Cinema Club. He’s one of many twenty or thirty something teens in this who all dance like Jimmy Mortimer. Every time the panda attacks, he’s greeted with some metal, which is the exact thing I wanted. A panda that rips ears off soundtracked with barked vocals and double bass! He even grabs a guitar and murders someone, all before the pizza gets there.

In “Ranger,” we learn that the Amityville Outhouse used to be in Amityville but is now in the woods somehow and it keeps reappearing, which makes a park ranger go crazy. He chops it to pieces, he sets it on fire and then he gave up and decided to use the outhouse. The voices of the spirits got in his head and he burned the outhouse down with himself inside it, killing only the ranger.

The next installment is “Holy Shite,” a priest tries to exorcise a woman. As he finishes, he must take a number two, giving birth to a Satanic shit, so to speak, a demonic dookie, an infernal hot snake. It ends up becoming a poopet and asks the clergyman to teach it how to sing and what humor is, but it still ends up killing him when he tries to go to the bathroom again.

Finally, “The Gabba Ghoul AKA The Meat Man” is supposed to get to the bottom Amityville and the Jersey mob. This tracks, as the DeFeo family had organized crime connects through Louise DeFeo’s father, Michael Brigante, Sr., an associate of Gambino boss Carlo Gambino. As an Italian-American, this is where I remind you that the mafia and organized crime does not exist. Cole slaw creatures are also not real.

Amityville Outhouse is yet another example, along with The Amityville Curse, why Amityville movies should be made in Canada. It’s way better than any of the other sequels and I didn’t have to look at Shawn C. Phillips.

I can go to the bathroom almost anywhere but even I have issues with bathrooms in parks. It just seems like you could get killed and this movie has made that real.

Also: The song “Fat Kid On a Toilet” is wonderful.

I downloaded this for $2 Canadian here and you can also get it from Gold Ninja Video along with Rock ‘n’ Roll Asylum.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ape was on Chiller Theater on February 1, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Saturday, December 17, 1966 at 1:00 a.m.

William Nigh had already made this movie before as The House of Mystery, but now he had Boris Karloff as the lead. As Dr. Bernard Adrian, he’s trying to cure polio through that mad scientist body magic known as spinal fluid. He’s so devoted to curing Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon) so that she can marry Danny Foster (Gene O’Donnell) that when a wild ape attacks his lab and destroys all of his samples, he skins the ape and dresses as it to get more spinal fluid.

Karloff had worked for Monogram on the Mr. Wong movies. Monogram often used actors on loan from bigger students, like Wrixton, who said that working there was like “…living in a poor apartment. It was like living in a foxhole.” Unlike the budgets they were used to, actors made movies in a week with none of the fancy things they may have become used to.

Karloff had to be in plenty of ridiculously plotted movies in his career but never before was he a kindly doctor who wore monkey skins to rip out the spines of innocent people so a kindly young girl could walk the aisle. Even at the end, when he’s shot, he finally gets to see her steady and he dies happy. I would assume the people who gave their lives and back juice do not feel the same.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Maze was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 30, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 10, 1973 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, January 24, 1976 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 29, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

William Cameron Menzies invented the term production designer.

Let that sink in.

He directed Chandu the Magician, Things to Come and Invaders from Mars, but he may be better known for his art direction on movies like Gone With the Wind, Our Town, For Whom the Bell Tolls and so many more movies. He was also a pioneer of adding color to film.

In The Maze, written by Daniel Ullman and based on the book by Maurice Sandoz (illustrated by Salvador Dali!), Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson) breaks off his engagement to Kitty (Veronica Hurst) after his uncle dies. He moves back to Scotland where he inherits a huge house and servants. Yet Kitty won’t accept that he broke off their upcoming marriage and travels there with Aunt Edith  (Katherine Emery).

Yet the Richard she finds is much older and acts differently. What has happened?

This movie has one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a hedge maze that has a frog god inside it, who is really the actual master of the castle, Sir Roger MacTeam, and who gets so upset that it climbs up into the castle and hops out a window to its death. In 3D!

Leonard Maltin called it “ludicrous (and unsatisfying)!” What does he know? Who did he ever fistfight and defeat?

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

You know you’re in for it when the description on IMDB says, “Some kinda horror-anthology nonsense hijacking the Amityville brand.”

This claims to be found footage found in an Amityville home. What you watch for an hour is just quick cuts into short stories, you know, an anthology as we used to call them. A lot of people swear and yell, as often happens in microbudget horror.

The ride share starts the film, as a man picks up a woman, takes her home, then chokes her out with a plastic bag. Then the clowns, TV news people and urban legends show up. Again, this often happens in microbudget horror.

It all ends with yet another clown, this time Buttons the Clown, who has gathered other facepainted killers to stalk a slumber party. Also: Henry from the Paranoia Tapes series of films shows up and those movies are pitched for ten minutes at the end of the movie. Yes, ten minutes of trailers.

Directed by Jack Hunter II, who wrote it with Dann Eudy, this has two of the meanest IMDB reviews I’ve seen destroying it, with quotes like “I fought in the Gulf War, and this movie makes me wish I was back in the Desert dodging IED’s” and “s someone who has a sick compulsion to watch every film with the Amityville title, Rideshare vies for one of the bottom of the list, it’s only saving grace is at least it’s short, unlike Amityville Hex which still holds distinction as the worst.”

The sound quality is beyond horrible in parts, you can barely see what’s going on and really the only part that worked for me was the abduction scene, as that at least felt weird. Would you like to watch people unleash profanity on one another while the camera is locked off and occasionally there’s some bad video effects? Good news. This one will scratch your stupid itch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Disembodied was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 26, 1964 at 111:10 p.m., Saturday, March 27, 1965 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 16, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 30, 1967 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 16, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.

Tom Maxwell (Paul Burke) is a man in search of excitement, which brings him to a tropical island where he meets Dr. Carl Mertz (John Wengraf) and his native wife Tonda (Allison Hayes). Tom’s friend Joe (Robert Christopher) is mauled by a lion and it’s hoped that the doctor can save him, but voodoo is what does it, taking the soul of servant Suba (Dean Fredericks) and putting him into the white man’s body. Only his wife Mara (Eugenia Paul) knows the truth and Tom’s too busy lusting after Tonda to know the difference.

She gets tired of trying to get Tom to kill the doctor and goes full voodoo on him, hanging dolls and stabbing them, dancing around the fire at night. She can get any man she wants and she knows it. Well, Allison Hayes is definitely the right actress to play her, after roles in The Undead, The Unearthly and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Director Walter Grauman mostly worked in TV, directing hundreds of episodes of episodic dramas, as well as TV movies like Daughter of the Mind, Crowhaven Farm and The Old Man Who Cried Wolf. This was written by Jack Townley and played double features with From Hell It Came.

It’s a little past an hour long, most of the people who should be black are white and it’s shot on a soundstage instead of in the jungle. That said, I have a weakness for movies like this.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Murder In the Blue Room was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 23, 1976 at 1:00 a.m.

A remake of the 1933 movie of the same title, which was also a remake of a German film made in 1932 and which was also remade in 1938 as The Missing Guest, this film was directed by Leslie Goodwins and written by I. A. L. Diamond and Stanley Davis.

The original plan was for the Ritz Brothers to be the stars, but instead, The Three Jazzybelles (Grace McDonald, Betty Kean, June Preisser) were the leads.

Nan (Anne Gwynne) and her mother have opened their home to boarders, despite her father killing himself in the Blue Room twenty years ago. The Three Jazzybelles perform for the lodgers and one, Larry (Bill Williams), demands to stay in the Blue Room, only for the room to be empty and locked from the inside in the morning.

It’s pretty much the same story as the original, only with all singing and all dancing. So, if you want that with your mystery, you have that here.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Man With Nine Lives was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 23, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, June 31, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.

Torn from the headlines! Both this movie and The Man They Could Not Hang on Dr. Robert Cornish, a University of California professor who brought a dog. named Lazarus back to life. After that became a big story, the university kicked out Cornish, who played himself  in the 1935 film Life Returns. Following a preview screening of the film, Universal pulled the film from general release and said that it was a “freak picture, not suitable for the regular Universal program.” In 1937, director Eugene Frenke won a lawsuit and got his film back, re-releasing it through Scienart Pictures a year later.

Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) is trying to convince his bosses that he can use cold therapy to heal patients, but they disbar him. He and his nurse Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) travel to the abandoned home of the man who inspired him, Dr. Leon Kravaal (Boris Karloff), a genius who has been missing for more than a decade. That’s becaue he and five other men — one already dead — have been frozen all that time. Kravaal awakens and must figure out how to recreate the method he used to freeze everyone, even if that means experimenting on and killing everyone else.

Like all of Karloff’s mad doctor movies of this era, this was directed by Nick Grinde from a script by Karl Brown and Harold Shumate. With a tag like “He kills in the name of science…Tombs of ice for the living…Chambers of horror for the dead!,” I can see why audiences kept coming to these films. It’s also one of the few Hays Code movies to allow the word cancer.