EDITOR’S NOTE: The Spider was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 3, 1964 at 1:00 a.m.

Chatrand the Great (Edmund Loew) asks his fans on a radio show — how do you do magic on a radio show? — that he is looking for the true identity of his assistant Alexander (Howard Phillips), who lost his memory two years ago after an accident. Beverly Lane (Lois Moran) believes that he’s her brother and answers this question. But then there’s a murder — of Alexander’s abusive uncle John Carrington (Earl Foxe) — during their act and Chatrand has to get him out of trouble.

The sets and the magic are pretty great, as they were created by William Cameron Menzies, who co-directed with Kenneth MacKenna. This has mesmerism, mind reading and a seance and hey — it’s only 59 minutes. If it all feels like it’s happening in real time, this was based on a stage play.

It was remade in 1945 as a very different movie yet still based on the same play.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cyborg 2087 was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 1, 1975 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, October 18, 1975 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, January 14, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

2087: Free thought is illegal. The population is docile. Only a secret group of free thinkers exist and they are able to send Garth A7 (Michael Rennie) back in time to either stop Professor Sigmund Marx (Eduard Franz) from showing his new invention to the government or, if that fails, to murder him. Yes, what Marx makes today will create the mind control of the future. As Garth A7 escapes back in time, he is followed by two other cyborgs called Tracers (Dale Van Sickel and Troy Melton).

To succeed in his mission, he takes over the mind of Marx’s assistant Dr. Sharon Mason (Karen Steele), using her to find Dr. Zeller (Warren Stevens), who removes the tracking device that allows the Tracers to find him.

A member of the Marines in World War II, director Franklin Aderon got into Hollywood as a technical advisor on the serial The Fighting Marines. He wrote screenplays and produced at Republic Pictures before directing his own movies, including Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders and Dimension 5. He also directed several Western TV shows.

This was written by Arthur C. Pierce, who went from being in the Navy during the war to shooting industrial films and creating special effects. He eventually became a writer, making Beyond the Time Barrier and The Cosmic Man. He also directed The Astral Factor, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Las Vegas Hillbillies, Mutiny In Outer Space and The Human Duplicators.

For as similar as some of Pierce’s stories are to other films — Beyond the Time Barrier cashed in on The Time Machine and The Cosmic Man is like The Day the Earth Stood Still — this film predates Terminator 2 with the idea of a machine coming back in time to murder the inventor that led to its creation.

Speaking of The Day the Earth Stood Still, this film has its star, Michael Rennie, who is playing a very similar role to Klaatu. He would do the same in a three episode story in the TV series The Invaders, in which he played one of the alien leaders, Alquist.

The strangest part of this is that Dr. Mason falls in love with Garth A7, even when he tells her that he had to get her to do things against her will. It doesn’t matter, as she has found something much like love with him. She asks him to bring her back to his future and he tells her that when he goes back, if he was successful, he will no longer exist. He is willing to cease being to make tomorrow free; she forgets him as he walks back into time and by the end, is making a date with another man instead of looking at this cyborg with a blinking metal chest as a project to fix, a blank slate to project her love upon.

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.

Amityville Ripper starts with a news segment of people hating Amityville movies, the original house being burned down, an auction of items that were in the house, multiple UFO abductions, the Spider podcast, a commercial for Alien Mingle and another for Steve Martin’s (not that one) Video Store. At some point, I was wondering if this was using Pond 5 footage like every other Amityville movie and just trying to pad a runtime with all of this footage, but then as the movie went on, surprise, this actually gets why I watch these movies.

Not just because a demon cursed me to watch all of them and would ruin our web traffic if I stopped.

This takes place in 2000 — the Y2K bug is a thing — and Marianne (Kelsey Ann Baker) and her brother — or step-brother — Nichols (Hunter Redfern) wake up to their parents going away on vacation for New Year’s Eve. Marianne — known as M — had something big planned with her best friend Annie (Angel Nichole Bradford). And no, not lesbian stuff, as her brother and his wheelchair bound friend Chapman (Ryan Martel). Instead, she has had the knife of Jack the Ripper sent to her from that auction. And her friend Tony, who is now in Hollywood, said it’s real because “he lived that Ripper lifestyle.”

What is a Ripper lifestyle?

Also, Marianne has dreams of slow jams playing over stock footage of a jet ski, which makes her even more endearing to me and not just because she’s a goth girl with shaved sides of her hair and looks a lot like Rainbow Harvest. She also mentions that she really wanted the clock from the house, but an architect — Jacob Sterling, right? — got it first.

While everyone — including way too nice cheerleader Liz (Anna Clary) — is partying and playing Sugar Ray, Marianne and Annie go up to her room and have a seance with a Ouija board, some tarot cards, Jack the Ripper’s knife and plenty of candles. Also: If M is so goth, why is she wearing an N’Sync shirt when the rest of her room is full of Universal Monsters pillows, a black metal poster and a Killer Klowns poster? At least her closest is all full of black shirts.

Director and writer Bobby Canipe Jr. has obliterated the fourth wall in this movie, as the characters even find the script, not that it keeps all of them alive. Just look at the dialogue:

Annie: Everything that happened in the Amityville house was true. And can you just imagine if this knife of Jack the Ripper’s became imbued with the power of the Amityville house? It’d be like we had some sort of Amityville ripper on our hands.

Marianne: True, but I think that’s kind of the point. I’m pretty sure that the name of this movie is Amityville Ripper.

Then The Ripper (Josh Allman) comes to life, wearing a Dracula costume, and also aliens.

There’s a line that sums up this entire movie, as well as all Amityville sequels.

“Brother, it’s an Amityville sequel. Shit’s different here.”

Not all the humor hits perfectly, but who cares? This is way better than nearly any other Amityville sequel, which isn’t saying much, but it does try. Which is, again, way more than almost every other sequel not made in Canada or by an Italian director.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blood Spattered Bride was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 10, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, November 15, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, September 17, 1983 at 3:00 a.m.

La novia ensangrentada is based on Carmilla, that tale of forbidden Sapphic vampire love. Released as a double feature in the U.S. with I Dismember Mama, it even had a special trailer that had an audience member losing their marbles.

Susan (Maribel Martín) is so newlywed that she shows up on her honeymoon still wearing her gown. She’s being followed by Mircala Karstein (Alexandra Bastedo) and has waking terrors, imagining a man has come into her room to assault her. When she visits her the house where her husband (Simón Andreu) was raised, she finds paintings of all the men, but no women save Karstein, who murdered her husband on their wedding night after he forced her to commit unspeakable acts.

As her dreams are taken over by Karstein, her husband finds a woman buried on the beach. She’s still alive — well, she’s undead — and she’s Karstein in human form, seducing Susan in dreams of deadly daggers and in waking caresses. By the end, he must destroy them while they sleep intertwined in a coffin and then fulfill the wish of her thrall to shoot her in the head.

Sure, it’s a lot like The Vampire Lovers and Daughters of Darkness, but those movies don’t have their protagonist’s sexual awakening come complete with remembering that her husband uses her for sex whenever he wants it without pleasure for her, so she blows another man’s balls clean off with a shotgun.

“The good ones are those who are content to dream what the wicked actually practice.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gorilla at Large was on Chiller Theater on Friday, July 6, 1982 at 8:00 p.m. and Saturday, August 28, 1982 at 2:00 a.m. in 3D.

Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr, Lee Marvin and Warren Stevens. What a cast! Throw in George Barrows as Goliath, the titular gorilla and man, we have a movie. Wait — it’s in 3D? How much do you want to give us, Panoramic Productions?

The carnival has come to town and its big selling point is watching the giant gorilla Goliath get cock teased by Laverne, a trapeze artist (Bancroft). Yet the owner, Cyrus Miller (Burr) thinks the act is growing old. So carnival barker Joey (Cameron Mitchell) puts on a gorilla costume and they change it up, with a new ending where the beast really does get the girl. This upsets Goliath’s trainer Kovacs (Peter Whitney) and Joey’s fiance Audrey (Charlotte Austin), who doesn’t want him near another woman.

Of course, murders ensue, a hall of mirrors and a rollercoaster make for amazing set pieces and the ending is a genuine surprise. When this aired on TV in the 80s, the giveaway glasses smelled like bananas, which is what I want all movies to have the whiff of.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Black Room was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 5, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, September 24, 1966 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, November 4, 1967 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, March 28, 1970 at 1:00 a.m.

Directed by Roy William Neill  — who gets mystery, after all, he directed eleven of the fourteen Basil Rathbone-starring Sherlock Holmes films as well as early noir like Black Angel — and written by Arthur Strawn and Henry Myers, The Black Room has a prophecy at its center: at some point, the younger brother of the de Berghmann family is cursed to kill his elder in the Black Room of the castle. Hmm — seems like something that would show up nearly forty years later in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.

Boris Karloff seems to be having the time of his life in this movie, playing the dual role of the kindly Anton de Berghmann and his depraved brother Baron Gregor de Berghmann, who is about as blasphemous as the Hayes Code would allow. After all, he’s known for randomly killing the wives of the simple folk that make up his people.

When servant girl Mashka (Katherine DeMille) disappears, the people have had enough and take their pitchforks and torches to the castle. The Baron claims that he will be leaving forever, giving the kingdom to his more genial and popular brother. As they sign the papers in secret, the Baron leads Anton to his Black Room. By that, I mean he drops him like thirty feet into it and before Anton dies, he sees the dead body of Mashka and plenty more women.

Now, the Baron acts as Anton — even pretending only one of his arms works — and manipulates Thea (Marian Marsh), the daughter of family advisor Colonel Hassell (who also gets killed), into marrying him instead of her true love Lt. Albert Lussan (Robert Allen), who is jailed. Just when there’s no hope, Anton’s dog interrupts the wedding and basically shoves the man who killed his master into the pit that is the Black Room as the Baron is impaled on a knife held in his dead brother’s hand, fulfilling the prophecy.

This was shown often on TV as it was part of the Son of Shock package, along with Before I Hang, Behind the Mask, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Face Behind the Mask, Island of Doomed Men, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man Who Lived Twice, The Man With Nine Lives, Night of Terror, The Devil Commands, Black Friday, The Bride of Frankenstein, Captive Wild Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, The Jungle Captive, The Mummy’s Curse and The Soul of a Monster.

It’s a really fun — and fast moving — movie with a huge cast of extras, making it seem like a way bigger movie than it really is.