EDITOR’S NOTE: Godzilla vs. Megalon was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 10, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, October 11, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 14, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

This film came out in the U.S. when I was four years old and for a kid that watched Godzilla films every time they aired, I was so excited to see something new. Yes, Jet Jaguar was accidentally called Robotman and Gigan was Borodan but I didn’t yet super anal retentive about kaiju movies and need to see the originals in Japanese.

On March 15, 1977, this was the first Godzilla movie that aired on American network TV in prime time. It was cut down — nearly in half, come on! — but it was hosted by John Belushi in a Godzilla suit. However, no one saved any of this footage. For decades, I thought I had just had a dream about it.

197X: Humans keep nuclear testing, which ends up causing earthquakes on Monster Island, nearly killing Godzilla and taking out Anguirus. The undersea city of Seatopia has had enough of humanity and unleash their greatest monster, Megalon, cleaning their hands of surface people forever.

Inventor Goro Ibuki (Katsuhiko Sasaki), his brother Rokuro (Hiroyuki Kawase) and Hiroshi Jinkawa (Yutaka Hayashi) have created a robot named Jet Jaguar. Seatopia does not wanted to die off like Atlantis, Mu (justified and ancient) and Lemuria. They steal the robot to guide their monster.

Once the inventor and his friends save Jet Jaguar, they team with Godzilla just in time for the Seatopia army to contact the Space Hunter Nebula M and send Gigan back to our planet. What follows is the monster fight of all monster fights, which ends as all must, with Godzilla shaking hands with his new robot friend. If you think this is goofy, we can never be movie friends.

Jet Jaguar was the result of a contest Toho had for children. Red Arone was a robot sent in by a child who was upset when his drawing became a monster. Toho redesigned him as Jet Jaguar and made him a hero.

This once had the title Insect Monster Megalon vs. Godzilla: Undersea Kingdom’s Annihilation Strategy. Japan forever.

If this is starting to all feel the same, this movie uses footage from Mothra vs. Godzilla, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, The War of the Gargantuas, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Destroy All Monsters, Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Godzilla vs. Gigan.

The last fight in this is total pro wrestling. Godzilla even hits a dropkick.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Horrors of the Black Museum was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 3, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.

Producer Herman Cohen was inspired by reading a series of newspaper articles about Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. He got to visit the museum and wrote this with Aben Kandel. Many of the weapons in this — including the binoculars — were based on actual weapons of murder.

Cohen wanted Vincent Price or Orson Welles, but Anglo-Amalgamated pushed for a British actor, so Michael Gough is the main bad guy, Edmond Bancroft. Working with his assistant Rick (Graham Curnow), he’s creating a black museum of his own filled with things that have killed people. He also writes about them in the paper and in books. He’s so known for this that a shop owner (Beatrice Varley) keeps weapons that she gets just for him.

There’s also a serial killer who is murdering people with other strange weapons and every time it happens, Bancroft goes mad and his blood pressure goes to 200/100, which let me tell you as someone who is oCD about testing and retesting my blood pressure would kill you.

Bancroft fights with his lover Joan (June Cunningham), who laughs at him and calls him a cripple. She goes out by herself, gets soused and hits on every man she sees before coming home to have a strange looking man place a guillotine on her bed and chop her head off.

As all that is happening, Rick falls for Angela (Shirley Anne Field) and starts planning to get married. However, he is tied to the crime writer by a dark secret.

Making this even better is the opening, which has hypnotist Emile Franchele and HypnoVista. This was added in the U.S. by American-International Pictures. I don’t know if I could be more excited to watch a movie after the opening.

Directed by Arthur Crabtree, this is a movie that was called “lurid,” “nasty” and “sensationalism without subtlety of characterization, situation or dialog.” Those people were right, right and very wrong.

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, some people do great things. They invent things that help their fellow man. They write words of sheer beauty that move people to tears or songs that people have in their weddings or teach people things that change the world.

I watch Amityville movies and write about them.

Such is my albatross.

Stanley DeFeo has come back to Amityville and there’s this whole story of his parents coming there to run a bank and his mom fell for a dude named Asmodeus because you know, it was the sixties. But now there’s a cult in town and our hero is doomed.

Except it’s in Amityville, Texas.

Let’s have that sink in.

Amityville.

Texas.

Birthright: An Amityville Horror was the original title and this cost less than a used car and has a scene where a lawyer agrees to a meeting within minutes, not months, so it’s also science fiction. This is also known as Amityville Secret.

So yeah. Our hero comes home — don’t do that — reads his mother’s diary — don’t do that — tracks down his father — don’t do that — and tries to set things right — don’t do that — and then a bunch of hooded robed people end up on his porch, which is pretty awesome and I wish they would come over here and party with me because I’m kind of lonely tonight.

At one point, a character talks about getting to dance with the devil and I thought about that and kind of wished that this movie was about a woman finding her groove in the late sixties and escaping her boring husband through Satan, but that would be probably something only I’d want to see and not something that would fool you by being a new Amityville movie on the shelves at Walmart and the digital racks of Amazon Prime and Tubi.

I almost wrote, “You could have put a legit turd into my DVD case and I would have enjoyed it more,” but that just seems mean.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Hotel was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 24, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, August 16, 1980 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, September 26, 1981 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 20, 1983 at 3:00 a.m.

Nightmare Hotel is the TV title for A Candle for the Devil which is also known as It Happened at Nightmare Inn. Directed by Eugenio Martín, it begins with sisters Marta (Aurora Bautista) and Verónica (Esperanza Roy) confronting May (Loreta Tovar), one of the guests at their small inn. She’s sunbathing nude outside and in the middle of an argument, she’s shoved down the stairs and dies when she goes through a stained glass window. Just as the sisters start to get rid of the body, the dead girl’s sister Laura (Judy Geeson) shows up, wondering where her sister is. She decides to stay there until she can find her sister.

Things are steamy all over town. One of the guests, Helen Miller (Lone Fleming), is on the make and bringing men back to her room at all hours of the evening. Verónica is sleeping with the much younger Luis (Carlos Piñe) and stealing money to give to him. And every man in the village seems to be swimming nude, which excited and enrages Marta, who soon kills Helen.

An American mother named Norma (Blanca Estrada) comes to stay just as Laura leaves, worried for her safety after Helen disappears. She asks Norma to let her know when she leaves to ensure that she isn’t killed. Soon, the sisters covet the baby and start to believe that Norma is a sex worker and has no idea who the father is. Verónica grabs her baby as Marta stabs the woman. It turns out that she was in the middle of a divorce and this gives Verónica more reasons to doubt her sister; she gives Luis all of her money and says she no longer wants to see him, begging him to leave town.

Laura returns, after not hearing from Norma. She brings a man from town,  Eduardo (Víctor Barrera), who finds a container in the basement with mystery meat floating in red wine. As he finds Norma’s severed head, he’s murdered by Marta. At the same time, a guest gets sick from eating food made from people and her husband goes to the police.

Laura returns to her room and finds Eduardo’s body as the sisters attack her, dragging her to the room with the rotting meat. As she screams against a window, the police save her, but as her face and tears go through the credits, it seems like she will never be the same again.

When this played U.S. theaters as Dread Stop at Nightmare Inn, it got a PG rating. How?!?

I loved every moment, from the Blaise Pascal quote at the start — “There are only two types of men: The righteous who think they are sinners, and the sinners who think they are righteous” — to the final moments.

In 1985, this was remade in Turkey as Vahset Kasirgasi (Brutal Storm). And thanks to my friend Bill Van Ryn, I know that this played double features with Things From The Grave, which is a retitled Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 19, 1963 at 3:00 p.m., Saturday, December 31, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, June 1, 1968 at 1:00 a.m.

Nathan Juran came to America from Romania. His brother became quality control master Joseph M. Juran. As for Nathan, he went from art directing The Razor’s Edge to directing movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, Jack the Giant Killer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and this movie, which was written by Mark Hanna.

Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) has some problems. Her husband Harry (William Hudson) is sleeping with every woman in town but her. She has mental health issues that have been going on for some time. And she likes to throw drinking and driving on top of that cocktail. One night, driving drunk from an angry evening at a bar, she runs into a flying saucer whose pilot gets out and grabs her.

Somehow, she gets away and no one believes her. After all, she just got out of a mental institution and in 1958 — well, 2024 as well — no one believes women. As for her husband, he’s just with her because she’s worth $50 million and is more interested in Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers, Playboy Playmate of the Month July 1959; her centerfold was shot by Russ Meyer). Nancy begs him to search for the UFO with her and as they drive through the desert — she has agreed to be hospitalized again — they find the alien. Harry runs and Nancy wakes up irradiated in her pool house.

Honey convinces Harry to shoot up his wife and kill her off. He walks into her room and only finds a giant hand as his wife starts to grow in size and anger. Dr. Isaac Cushing (Roy Gordon) and Dr. Heinrich Von Loeb (Otto Waldis) try to keep her sedated and the butler (Ken Terrell) finds the UFO, which is being powered by Nancy’s diamond necklace, which has the largest diamond in the world on it. Yes, the richest woman in the world who has the largest piece of jewelry is trapped in a loveless desert marriage that is fought out in dive bars.

Nancy heads back to the bar and tears the roof off, killing Honey before grabbing her husband. As she walks through bullets, one lawman fires at the power lines and kills her, but at least her husband dies too.

They almost made a sequel to this and Dimension Pictures was going to have Paul Morrissey remake it, then Jim Wynorski said he would with Sybil Danning. Christopher Guest then remade it with Daryl Hannah as an HBO movie. Now, Tim Burton and Gillian Flynn have said that they are making a new one, so we’ll see.

Roger Corman designed the poster for this movie. Nothing in the art happens in the movie, but who cares? It’s the most perfect idea of what we want to see.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Demons of the Mind was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 20, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, May 14, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

Between Venom, To the Devil a Daughter and this movie, Peter Sykes is an unappreciated creator of early 70s scummy horror. Written by Christopher Wicking (Cry of the Banshee, Scream and Scream Again), this movie combines insanity, mesmerism, religious fervor, incest, Satanic possession and just plain British weirdness to make the kind of movie that we watch on a rainy Sunday.

Baron Friedrich Zorn (Robert Hardy) keeps his children Emil (Shane Briant) and Elizabeth (Gillian Hills) locked up and away from one another, lest they make sweet sweet brother and sister love in the name of the devil. After all, his own wife had a madness like theirs that led to her suicide in front of both of them — or maybe he just wouldn’t sleep with her any longer and she got so upset at the loss of getting some of little Friedrich that she offed herself — so they both must be constantly treated to the bloodletting that takes out the evil flowing through their bodies.

Meanwhile — if that’s not enough –women s are being murdered in the woods and covered with rose petals. The townspeople think demons are to blame and by the end of the movie, they go absolutely beyond wild and try to wipe out the cause. There’s also Doctor Falkenberg (Patrick Magee) who has a carny method of curing the evil out of the Zorn progeny; he intends to get a village woman named Inge (Virginia Wetherell) to portray their dead mother in a strange roleplaying exercise while another young local named Carl (Paul Jones, who once sang for Manfred Mann) falls for Elizabeth. And oh yeah — maybe the Baron is more to blame than anyone.

Gillian Hills was a last minute replacement for Marianne Faithful, but the early 70s were not a good time for her, as she lost her son and was dealing with heroin addiction, anorexia and living on the streets. She wasn’t able to be insured for this movie.

I’m a lover of late period Hammer, as they move away from the classics and start to make their own weird little movies. Of course, they’re often filled with lots of nudity, madness and Satanic forces, so…look, I’m weak and I love what I love.

12. THE LIVING IMPAIRED: Insert zombie joke here.

Woody Invincible (Jordan Chan) and Crazy Bee (Sam Lee) are mallrats, stealing from stores, gambling and selling bootleg VCDs probably of movies just like this. Actually, the movie starts with them bootlegging the film that you’re about to watch. They flirt with Rolls (Angela Tong), who works at the beauty spa, fight with cellphone store owner Mr. Kui (Wayne Lai) and do small jobs for their gangster boss, like getting his car. Well, on the way back to the mall, they hit a zombie infected government agent and Woody drinks his soda, which has a bioweapon inside it that turns humans into the walking dead. And oh yeah, they try and hide the body of the dead man, who isn’t dead and is soon turning the mall into Hong Kong Monroeville.

Also called Hong Kong Zombie, this has some fun video game moments and the kind of nihilistic ending that Romero would have loved. Directed by Wilson Yip, who co-wrote the story with Matt Chow and Man Sing So, this may not have much new when it comes to zombies, but once it gets the mall filled with them, it picks up steam and goes for it.

This movie worships Dead Alive and shouldn’t every movie nerd? Amazingly, this got a blu ray release before its inspiration.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

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.

One year after Amityville Scarecrow, Tina (Amanda Jade-Tyler) and Mary (Kate Sandison) are about to reopen the camp from the first movie, but there could be some evil still lurking about. In England. Not in New York. Yes, Amityville gets like that.

Directed by Craig McLearie (The Killing Tree) and written by Adam Cowie, the beginning of this movie is well shot and made me think that I was actually going to get a quality Amityville movie. Then, the talking begins and never seems to end and the Amityville Scarecrow never really does anything.

This movie is about trailer parks and the legal dealings of trailer parks and you know, I kind of want my Amityville movies to not be about human affairs but whatever. It’s better than the first one, but that’s like being constipated for a few days and then having non-stop diarrhea. They’re both bad and you don’t want go through them, but at least it’s some level of change.

I mean, I’m not going to stop pooping. And I’m not going to stop watching Amityville movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.