EDITOR’S NOTE: Bowery at Midnight was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 10, 1971 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 7, 1973 at 11:30 p.m.

Criminology professor Brenner (Bela Lugosi) is also Karl Wagner and in addition to teaching, he also runs the Bowery Friendly Mission, where he feeds the unhoused but is also getting new members of his criminal army, which includes Doc Brooks (Lew Kelly), an alcoholic drug addict who knows how to make zombies.

Sure, alright.

Somehow, Bela’s character is able to do all of that and be a happily married man and he’s not exhausted by all of that. I mean, I’m tired just typing that out.

Meanwhile, Richard Dennison (John Archer) gets involved as his girlfriend Judy (Wanda McKay) works in the soup kitchen. He also gets killed, brought back as a zombie and somehow ends this film feeling perfectly fine. You know, he got better. He’s also a student of Brenner, so coincidences are everywhere in this.

Zombies in the basement are effective at eliminating corpses. That’s the lesson from this movie. Monogram is pretty great because their movies exist in the universe of their films, as East End Kids and The Corpse Vanishes posters are visible.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Giant Claw was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 9, 1965 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, April 22, 1967 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, January 25, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.

Directed by Fred J. Sears (Don’t Knock the Rock, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Teen-Age Crime Wave), The Giant Claw is somehow inspired by matter and anti-matter, as well as la Carcagne, the mythical bird-like banshee from French-Canadian folklore. Yes, some heady material, but then this movie has one of the goofiest — and most awesome — monsters ever.

Producer Sam Katzman originally planned to utilize stop motion effects by Ray Harryhausen. This movie didn’t have the money for that, so he hired a Mexico City effects studio who sent him a marionette that, well, looks like a monstrous turkey. Seeing as how he spent fifty dollars on the monster, I think he got so much more than what he paid for.

No one in the movie knew what that creature looked like until they saw the movie. This really embarrassed lead actor Jeff Morrow, who was there to see the movie live in his hometown and every time the monster showed up, people laughed louder, until the actor ran home and started drinking. I mean, Morrow must have felt the same way when he was in Octaman.

Obviously, the poster artists never saw the special effects either. That said, the film is also quite aware of the UFO sightings of the day, which is what they think the monster is until scientists discover that it’s an evil bird from an antimatter universe.

This is a pretty nihilistic film for the time, as the evil bird kills people without a thought when it isn’t destroying every building it can.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Evil Eye was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, August 14, 1971 at 11:30 p.m. It’s also known by its Italian title, The Girl Who Knew Too Much. 

Mario Bava is a genius. This is the root of all giallo before The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and it stars John Saxon as Dr. Marcello Bassi and Leticia Roman as Nora Davis, a young girl who travels to Rome only to witness murder after murder. No one believes her because there’s no corpse. And it only gets worse for her.

Nora was in Rome to help her sickly aunt, who dies the first night that she’s in the city. After walking to a hospital to alert Bazzi, Nora is mugged. When she awakens, she watches a man pull a knife from a woman’s back. The police think she’s an alcoholic and send her to a sanitarium, where she’s rescued by Bazzi.

One of her aunt’s friends, Laura (Valentina Cortese), goes on vacation, allowing Laura to stay in her home. But our detective fiction obsessed heroine can’t resist snooping, finding a series of articles about a serial killer that the press are calling the Alphabet Killer, as he or she kills in alphabetic order. The last murdered person was Laura’s sister, but that was ten years ago. That’s when the phone rings and a voice tells her that “D is for death” and how she will be the next victim.

Nora begins to fall from the doctor and after they tour the city, she gets a phone call that leads them to an empty room with a recorded message telling her to leave the city if she wants to live.

The giallo conventions that we know and love originate here: a foreigner who can’t remember every detail of a murder, now in danger from the killer and unable to be helped by the police, causing them to turn to their own detective skills. Red herrings abound. And the killer seems to be one person, only for their identity to come out just before the end of the film. What is missing are the more psychosexual and high fashion parts of the genre, but don’t worry. They’ll soon show up in force.

The film was the least commercially successful picture of Bava’s career, as giallo films didn’t find favor until Argento’s 1970’s efforts. It was released in the United States by American International Pictures as Evil Eye, part of a double bill with Black Sabbath. This version features a different score and more of an emphasis on comedy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: King Dinosaur was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 18, 1965 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, October 26, 1968 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, September 14, 1974 at 1:00 a.m.

This shot-in-one-week effort was Bert I. Gordon’s first solo movie as a writer-director (he co-directed the previous year’s Serpent Island, which he wrote), made with borrowed equipment and the cast of four all working on deferred salaries. The rest of the footage is all stock, including a mammoth taken from One Million B.C. And it takes 10 minutes — of educational space exploration stock footage and narration — before the first actor steps foot on the newly discovered planet.

It takes place five years in the future, which would be sixty years in our past.

Zoologist Dr. Richard Gordon, geologist Dr. Nora Pierce, medical specialist Dr. Ralph Martin, and chemist Dr. Patrica Bennett (while the men wear baggy flight suits and military-issue boots, the gals wear sensible gauchos and knee-high boots) are on a space voyage to the planet Nova in the hopes of starting a new Earth colony. It’s filled with animals (bears, elk) that are way bigger than they should be — remember that Burt I. Gordon directed this one — including King Dinosaur, which is really an iguana. So the scientists do what any good researcher should: they nuke the processed-shot and floating-matte planet, and leave.

Is there a deeper message about Manifest Destiny and American Imperialism in the frames? Is this a plight of the American Indian allegory? Nope. Burt just likes big creatures on film and blowing up stuff: for this is a world where, regardless of the intelligence of smartly-dressed women (clad in ballet flats and wedged mules with their tailored flight wears) conquering space — just like in The Angry Red Planet and Gog — they’re still screaming and imploring the men to “do something” and to shoot everything they survey.

The funny thing about this movie is that Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury wanted to provide the dinosaur effects, so they brought in some footage. Gordon watched it, didn’t acknowledge them and just walked out. Harryhausen and Bradbury were obviously upset, but a few years later, at the premiere, Bradbury allegedly approached Gordon and said, “Remember me? Ray Bradbury. It won’t make a dime!”

If you wonder, “Have I heard this music before?” then you’ve probably seen Ed Wood’s The Violent Years. Actually, you should just watch that movie. It’s way better than this. Even at its short running time at a measly 63 minutes — 43 if you cut out the opening stock-narration salvo. And if you recognized the narrator, that’s Marvin Miller, who was the voice of Robby The Robot in Forbidden Planet and was Mr. Proteus on Commander Buzz Corey and the Space Patrol. And if you recognize the rocketing landing from King Dinosaur, that’s because it ended up in Fire Maidens from Outer Space.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this movie on Amazon Prime and Tubi. It’s also available without the commentary on Daily Motion.

Gary Dauberman is one of the creatives that came out of the Conjuring series of films, writing Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, The Nun, The Nun II and directing and writing Annabelle Comes Home. He also wrote the remakes of It, It and It Chapter Two. This led to him directing and writing this film, another Stephen King remake.

Before COVID-19, this was to be released on September 9, 2022. Then, April 21, 2023 came and went, the next release window, and this was replaced by Evil Dead Rise. By October of that year, most people thought this would be another tax write-off for Warner Brothers. Even Stephen King wrote, “Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows.” It went to HBO Max — well, are we supposed to just call it Max? — instead of playing theaters.

I was excited about it but also worried. After all, Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot is one of the best horror films not just of the 80s, but all time. It’s near-perfect, a film that doesn’t even seem as long as it is and one that we watch in this house at least twice a year.

It feels unfair to compare this movie to that.

But then again, don’t you have to?

Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) is an author who has come home to Jerusalem’s Lot, where he grew up, to write a book about his childhood. He quickly meets Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) as she works in the real estate office of Larry Crockett — thereby forgetting the entire subplot of Larry sleeping with Bonnie Sawyer or her husband Cully catching them in the act — and takes him to the town’s gathering place, the drive-in.

That drive-in is lame because it’s double feature is The Drowning Pool and Night Moves. I know this is set in 1975. but come on. It could have been showing I Don’t Want to Be Born and House of Exorcism or The Devil’s Rain and The Hatchet Murders.

Yes, this has many of the characters that you remember, like horror fan Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) and teacher Matthew Burke (Bill Camp). Except that the schoolteacher was never Ben’s mentor and there’s no relationship other than the one that the movie shoves upon us. There’s none of the people in the boarding house or any of the numerous smaller characters that make up the town, which is difficult with a shorter running time, yet this movie feels like it crawls at times and is only interested in vampire violence.

Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk) has bought the Marsten House for his boss Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward), but it’s difficult — again — to not miss James Mason. It seems like we never even get to know Straker, as the movie quickly gets to killing off Ralph (Cade Woodward) and Danny Glick (Nicholas Crovetti), as well as gravedigger Mike Ryerson (Spencer Treat Clark).

This feels like its more about assembling a team to battle the undead, with Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) and Sheriff Gillespie (William Sadler) discovering the truth about vampires early. Dr. Cody even stops being turned by giving herself a rabies shot. If you’re wondering, did this come from the book? Nope. It’s new and a way of explaining away vampirism through science. And Mark finds out how to defeat vampires from an issue of House of Secrets like he’s the third Frog brother.

It’s also a movie more concerned with the action sequences than the fear of the unknown and the destruction of your small hometown, as well as the memories that are brought back by trying to come home again. Dauberman has said that he wanted to make vampires frightening and not sexy, but Barlow never had a probably being terrifying.

In King’s lifetime, he’s seen two mini-series (Mikael Salomon directed the 2004 TNT mini-series) and an attempt at a spin-off, 1987’s Larry Cohen-directed A Return to Salem’s Lot. I get it, diminishing returns, even if I have a soft spot for Cohen’s film. And maybe I shouldn’t expect all that much from this.

At no point is anything the least bit frightening in this. It doesn’t have enough time. There are so many characters that there’s barely time for anyone to be anything other than a cardboard cutout of an archetype: smart doctor, smart teacher, frightened cop, frightened priest, girlfriend and a smart writer. Straker barely even has any reason to be memorable.

Mark has a poster of Trog on his wall and after that, I kept thinking how much I’d rather be watching that movie.

Maybe this spoiled when it sat on the shelf so long. Or maybe it has nothing new to say other than glowing crucifixes. In truth, this barely even feels like Salem’s Lot and could have changed the character names and give Ben have a different job and it would be no better or worse. It just sits there. It just is.

And for something with this much potential, that’s a shame.

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, if all director and writer Nathan Rumler (Fangboner, Gay for Pray: The Erotic Adventures of Jesus Christ) had done was write this movie’s tagline, “For God’s sake, get off!” and never even made the movie, we’d be fine.

However, I made a deal with a lesser demon to get Arrow blu rays for free, which means that now I must review every Amityvlille movie or pay for their latest releases with something worth way more than my paycheck.

Cathy (Corella Waring, CarousHELL) has done the unthinkable. She’s bought a marital aid at a yard sale, which may be the most wrong of the many wrong things in this movie. The more she and her girlfriend Roxi (Mallory Maneater) use the titular evil wand upon one another, the more chance that the demons that possessed the residents of 112 Ocean Avenue will find their way into their loins. And their souls, I guess.

Also, the vibrator can talk.

Also, there’s Spanky, a possessed ventriloquist dummy that rips off a man’s face and then has sex with a woman.

Also, there’s a murder scene juxtaposed with a sex scene.

Also, a character asks “Perform an exorcism on my (slang for part of anatomy).”

Also, two characters take mushrooms in the woods for real and in real time we watch them wander all over the place.

Meanwhile, Chad (Rumler) — the ex-boyfriend of Cathy — and his partner Mallory (Emily Hilborn) are kind of cosplaying Friday the 13th the Series except they are hunting down all of the cursed objects from the DeFeo house and only have one object left. Yes, the magical vibrator.

That said, in no way is this movie for anyone easily offended by, well, anything. It’s exactly what it promises to be and much, much worse. It’s a grimy, gross and upsetting movie that’s definitely going to have an audience. And well, I guess I’m in it because I have to see every Amityville movie and write them up if I want that UHD of They Call Her One Eye without suffering in Hell for all eternity.

Mitigating factor: a male cover version of the spraying amputation in Tenebre, copious amounts of well-done gore and people who are all obviously having fun making this. Honestly, this movie gave me the same feelings I had watching Cannibal Holocaust and that says to me that despite watching every Bruno Mattei and Joe D’Amato movie this year, I am still human after all.