EDITOR’S NOTE: Count Dracula was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 1, 1974 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, March 8, 1975 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, November 1, 1975 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, January 7, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, August 26, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. I am beyond happy that yinzers would turn on Chilly Billy and be attacked by a Jess Franco movie.

After years of being in Hammer Dracula movies, Christopher Lee starred in this Harry Alan Towers produced, Jess Franco directed version of Bram Stoker’s novel.

There’s a great cast and by that, I mean the kind of cast that I look for in movies. Klaus Kinski, (before he played Dracula in Nosferatu the Vampyre and Nosferatu In Venice) is Renfield, Herbert Lom is Van Helsing, Frederick Williams (A Bridge Too Far) is Jonathan Harker, Maria Rohn (Venus In Furs) is Maria, Paul Muller is Jack Seward, Jack Taylor is Quincey Morris (he had vampire hunting experience after being in the Mexican Nostradamus films) and Soledad Miranda — and who else, really? — is Lucy.

This could have had an even wilder cast, as both Vincent Price — sadly under his American-International Picture exclusive contract — and Dennis Price were both selected to play Val Helsing.

At the same time that this was being made, so was Cuadecuc, vampire, which was shot on the same sets with the same actors by the experimental director — and a senator elected in Spain’s first democratic elections who participated in the writing of the Spanish Constitution — Pere Portabella.

As for Franco’s film, it’s one of the first attempts at being faithful to the novel, with Dracula starting as an old man and gradually gaining in vitality as the movie goes on. Lee* was supposedly tired of playing Dracula and was only convinced to join the cast only after being promised that this movie would be faithful to Stoker. It still plays fast and loose; oddly enough Towers has claimed he tricked Kinski into being in this with a fake script. Franco has said that that wasn’t true, but what was is that Kinski ate real flies.

I wouldn’t expect the Franco madness that most associate with him, but this is the first extended time he’d work with Miranda before the films they’d be known for making together (she was an uncredited dancer at just eight years old in Franco’s Queen of the Tabarin Club). But there’s a great Bruno Nicolai score, Lee is super into everything he’s doing, the sparse sets work and Bruno Mattei was one of the editors.

There’s always been a contingent of people who claim this movie is boring, but look, any movie with Soledad Miranda in it is worthwhile.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*To be fair, Lee played the role three other times in 1970: in One More Time, Taste the Blood of Dracula and Scars of Dracula.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Hideous Sun Demon was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 18, 1965 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, June 6, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, October 21, 1972 at 1:00 a.m.

Written, directed and produced by Robert Clarke — the only movie he’d write and direct, sadly, after a career of acting in movies like The Astounding She-Monster — this movie was inspired by the success of that film. After all, Clarke got five percent of She-Monster’s profits in addition to his salary. Although Clarke later admitted that the film was awful, it was a financial success for him and enabled this movie to happen.

With a crew that was made up of University of Southern California film students and a cast of friends and unknowns, this movie was made over twelve weekends with three cinematographers.

An unauthorized sequel, Don Glut’s Wrath of the Sun Demon (which features the real Sun Demon mask from Bob Burns’ collection) was produced in 1965. Two redubbed versions of the original film havealso  been released: Hideous Sun Demon: Special Edition and What’s Up, Hideous Sun Demon (AKA Revenge of the Sun Demon), the latter of which had Clarke’s blessing. Both Susan Tyrel and Jay Leno were involved with that movie.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is the claim that its amongst the first movies to use practical locations, which is common practice today.

Dr. Gilbert “Gil” McKenna (Clarke) falls unconscious after accidentally being exposed to radiation yet he has no burns nor damage to his body. However, when he’s in the sun, he transforms into a prehistoric reptile man, destroying all notions of both scientific evolution and religious Creationism.

Once he realizes that he can never go into the sun again, he does what you or I would do. He drinks himself blind drunk and gets involved with a girl at a bar and battles some toughs over her.

In the scene where the radio announcer is warning the public that the Sun Demon is loose, he then says, “I return to music by the King Sister.” Clarke was married to Alyce King of the singing King Sisters and Marilyn King wrote and performed “Strange Pursuit”, the song in the bar scene.

A $50,000 budget, helped by weekend camera rentals which were more affordable, and a $500 rubber suit has never gone so far as it does in this film.

You can watch this on Tubi. You can also enjoy Rifftrax commentary over the film on Tubi.

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.

Look, you had me at directed and written by Mark Polonia, never mind the fact that this is a Western set in Amityville when it was still being settled. This gets the first part of the Amityville equation right: It has a great title. It’s missing the second, which is having a tagline that gets you to watch it. “For God’s sake, get out! from the first movie?” Perfect. The third one has “Inside these walls, nothing is impossible … except survival.” And what does this give us? Nada.

That said, if all it had was the ending, where a puppet bat hovers in front of an explosion, as well as a scene where a severed head speaks with the voice of a demon and the time that a giant pentagram appears, it would automatically be better than 100% of the other Amityville movies I watch. The town looks like it belongs in the West, the costumes are good and the demonic noises sound like Sammi Curr being played backward.

The idea that this gets to Amityville before the house was even built is a decent one as well. Sure, there are too many scenes of people just talking, but at no point did I hate myself for watching this, which is so much more than I can say for most movies that start with Amityville and to me, that’s a win.

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 by Mark Polonia, who has been to Amityville before with Amityville Island, Amityville Exorcism and Amityville Death House, and co-written by Polonia and Aaron Drake, this brings back Father Benna (Jeff Kirkendall) from Amityville Exorcism and begins with a final battle against the darkness within the house on 112 Ocean Avenue. The demon inside cuts off the priest’s hand and in pain, the holy man begs for God to help him. His prayers are answered as the house is blasted into not only space, but the far future.

I mean, I’m here for all of this. You know how I am about Amityville, not to mention horror sequels set in space.

The moment that I knew I would love this movie is when the space ship that finds the Amityville house floating within a black hole, we see the crew contains a robot named Vox. Said robot’s costume looks like a silver foil welding suit version of Wildfire from the Legion of Super-Heroes. That’s topped by this film’s version of the demon, which looks like a Spirit store version of a final boss from a Mortal Kombat ripoff game from 1993.

Additionally, this movie is amazing because it’s just as much sub-budget Event Horizon as it is an Amityville film and once I realized that, my heart grew 666 times.

If you can’t get into a movie being made in a small town in Pennsylvania with foil covering the windows to simulate a starship, as well as a giant priest battling an enormous demon outside of a black hole with a glowing pentagram between them, why are you even watching movies?

Also: I did some science research. This movie has its vessel doing Dark Star work sending nukes into black holes. I found the answer, of course, on Reddit. One answer said that “All that happens as a consequence of the bomb exploding is in the future light cone of the detonation event, which is all inside the black hole.”

Someone asked the same question on Quora and the answer there by Shane Kennedy was “Nothing. Even if it did explode, the energy released in a “nuke” explosion is irrelevant compared to the energy in a black hole. The chances are that it would just be torn apart without exploding.”

This answer by Hardik Prajapati gets super scientific: “Blackholes are spheres with very very high gravitational force. Even light can not escape that force. So even if the bomb explodes, we won’t be able to observe it. Blackholes are made from high density neutron star. You can’t expect a black hole to be destroyed just by an explosion of nuclear weapon.

Bomb explosion would release a huge amount of energy (assuming it reaches the “surface” of a blackhole and explodes). Blackhole treats energy and mass equally. So it will absorb all the energy released by the bomb.

Lets assume we throw the bomb at event horizon. Time is slow there, much much slower then in our normal world. So before the bomb reaches the center, we might have passed 100s or 1000s of earth years. So if you are the person to drop the bomb, you probably wouldn’t be the person to observe it when it explodes. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

Finally, this answer by Christopher Barnes says it best: “Not much. Black holes absorb nuclear explosions already – they’re called “stars.” You’d add a bit more nuclear fire and a bit more radiation to an environment that’s already fairly rich in both, to a net result of precisely dick.”

I’m not watching Mark Polonia movies for science. I’m watching them to be entertained. If a Satanic house can fly through space and take over an advanced civilization a thousand years after Earth is no more, who am I to discuss matters of physics when all I really know are shot on video and Italian ripoffs?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dark Eyes of London was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 10, 1973 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 8, 1975 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, October 4, 1975 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, August 26, 1978 at 1:00 a.m. It played as The Human Monster. 

Dr. Orloff (Bela Lugosi) has quite the scam going. He loans money to people so that they can get life insurance, then drowns them in the Thames and has their money go to the Dearborn Home for the Blind. Of course, Professor Dearborn is also Orloff, as secretary Diane (Greta Gynt) soon learns.

Based on the Edgar Wallace book, which also was made as Dead Eyes of London and The Awful Dr. Orloff in the 1960s, this was the first movie in the UK to get the H rating for horrific. As you may know, Wallace was the father of the krimi, the giallo and King Kong. He was a busy man, who apocryphally would write with both hands while dictating another story to his secretary.

Lugosi’s voice is dubbed by O. B. Clarence as the Professor, so the reveal is pretty good. Also, he was placed into a seven foot deep tank filled with a mix that looked like river mud. He had weights on his ankles so he would stay still and also had a chain to hold on to. You have to admit that this was a pretty horrific stunt for a major star to do. He also had to sail to England to make this, which took some time one assumes.

This was released in the U.S. by Monogram Pictures. I wonder if anyone in the past ever wondered why Dr. Orloff showed up in so many movies?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bubble was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 6, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. It played as Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth. 

Tony (Johnny Desmond) flies Mark (Michael Cole) and his pregnant wife Catherine (Deborah Walley) through a storm which causes them to land. She gives birth as the men wander the city, finding it filled with all sorts of odd buildings and technology, as well as drugged out people. It’s all covered by a dome that keeps people from leaving, other than the shadow that keeps appearing over the town that pulls people into the sky.

As Tony is taken away, Mark starts to dig under the dome before he’s caught. He gives a speech about being free, just in time for it to rain and the aliens to go away.

The Bubble came out in 3D in 1966, years after the first of the fad, and had twenty minutes of pure popping out at the camera moments that got cut from the 2D version of this. This was made in Space-Vision 3-D, the same process that was used for Andy Warhol’s Dracula. It was directed and written by Arch Oboler, who also directed and wrote the 3D movie Bwana Devil and The Twonky.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Invasion of the Body Snatchers was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 13, 1965 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, October 22, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, March 22, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 30, 1972 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, April 27, 1974 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, January 18, 1975 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, January 21, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

The extraterrestrial invasion of Santa Mira is more than just the event that this film chronicles. No, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has transcended its simple science fiction roots to become a cultural touchstone. We often refer to people acting differently as pod people; those who may have never seen this film or its many sequels intimately know its plot and what it means.

Thanks to this new Olive Films Signature reissue, I’ve had the opportunity to watch this film again and my goal was to evaluate it as if I were watching it when it was first released.

The conceit is simple: Alien plant spores have shown up in a small California town and reproduce exact copies of human beings, taking on the exact physical characteristics, personalities and even memories of those that sleep near them. Within a month, they’ve completely taken over the town and created an untroubled world, a place of no emotion or worry, a place where everyone is one of us.

Near the end of the film, one of the pod people tells our hero, Dr. Miles J. Bennel (Kevin McCarthy) that their way is so much better. “Love, desire, ambition, faith – without them, life’s so simple, believe me.” When he exclaims that he wants no part of this new world, he’s told that he has no choice.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is bold in its depiction of love in 1956. Both Miles and his former flame Becky (Dana Wynter, Airport) are suffering through divorces and unlike many films of the era, they are not represented as bad people for their actions. Instead, their romance is championed. It may mean nothing to us watching the film 62 years after its release, but the fact that they stay in the same room and have a romance at all was groundbreaking.

Miles and Becky manage to escape the entire town being taken over until a dog is nearly run over. Becky’s emotional outburst alerts the pod people, who blast sirens as our heroic couple races against an army chasing them, up steps, through city streets, across mountains, even with Miles carrying her (there’s a charming moment in the bonus footage on this disk where Wynter says that McCarthy never complained or even got out of breath because he’s a gentleman) in a fruitless attempt to escape. They separate and when they finally find one another, Miles can’t wait to kiss his lover. In horror, he learns that she is now one of them too.

That’s when the most arresting images of this movie appear. Miles runs into the night, a non-stop chase that brings him onto a crowded highway filled with transport trucks loaded with pods bound for the major cities. He screams in vain at passing cars as they narrowly avoid hitting them, his panicked face streaked with sweat and rain and car lights in the deep dark night, bellowing, “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!”

This was to be the original ending of the movie, but focus groups — yes they had them back then, too — wanted a happy ending. The promise at the end, where the FBI is alerted and the pods will obviously be stopped, rings hollow. That final image of Miles on the highway in abject panic as the camera pans up and away is just too powerful.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is filled with talent, with everyone giving their best performance, from the future Morticia Addams, Carolyn Jones, to character actor par excellence King Donovan and even future Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah, who has a minor role as a gas meter reader.

Some see a story within a story in this film, a meta-commentary on the dangers facing America such as McCarthyism while others see it as an allegory for the loss of personal rights in the wake of Communism. Several connected with the film state that it had no such aim, but you can graft any story onto any movie if you want.

This was remade in 1978, which is a really great version that goes even deeper (and gorier) into the storyline of this film, as well as Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers and the 2007 film The Invasion. And Santa Mira is, of course, the setting for Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. Obviously, the film is a big influence on John Carpenter, as you can see hints of it in his film They Live.

McCarthy would later reprise his role of Dr. Miles in the 1978 remake, as well as Looney Tunes: Back in Action. He’s also Fred Francis, named for that noted director, in Joe Dante’s The Howling. The interview segments with him on this disk make him seem like quite the likable fellow. Actually, all of the extras are heartwarming, making one feel that they’re sitting around with some movie-loving friends and discussing this together.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a film that speaks to audiences with the same confident power that it did in the mid 1950’s. It has lessons within it that should never be lost and I feel that it should be required viewing for all film lovers, even if you dislike science fiction (that said, it’s closer to a horror movie than pure SF).