EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare In Wax was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 8, 1976 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, May 21, 1977 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, May 12, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 25, 1981 at 1:00 a.m.

From voicing Jesus in The Robe to the 1951 version of Death of a Salesman, Cameron Mitchell had plenty of big roles in even bigger films. But we’re not here to talk about those. We’d rather talk about his appearances in movies like Night Train to Terror (his segment also appears as another stand-alone movie, The Nightmare Never Ends), The Demon and Blood and Black Lace.

This time out, Cameron is Vince Rinaud, an FX artist who is disfigured by Paragon Pictures studio boss Max Block, who was also a rival for the attention of actress Marie Morgan. Yes, all it takes to ruin a man is to throw wine in his face and then a cigar. Who knew?

Leaving movies behind, Vince gains an eyepatch and a wax museum, while Paragon quickly loses four of their stars. Is it a coincidence that they soon appear as wax statues in Max’s museum?

This movie is pretty much a direct ripoff of House of Wax, except instead of dead bodies being under the wax, Vince uses a serum to turn people into zombies that just stand there under his control. There are also two cops who are the worst detectives this side of a giallo on the case — one of them is Bud Cardos, who appeared in Satan’s Sadists and directed The Dark!

But hey — Cameron Mitchell wearing a cape and an eyepatch. If that makes you happy, we’re happy you’re reading our site.

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, I’ve seen enough Amityville movies now that it takes a lot to surprise me. But the fact that this was directed and co-written by Tim Vigil knocked me out.

Tim Vigil may not be a huge name to you, but those that loved black and white outlaw comics know and revere his name. Starting with the comic book Grips — imagine Wolverine being allowed to murder people — and getting to beyond out there books like EO and Faust — which became the Brian Yuzna film in the 2000 movie Faust: Love of the Damned — Vigil’s incredible art made him the kind of creator worth following from book to book.

The cleanest Faust image I could find

Even some of my fellow comic book mutants had no idea this movie was coming. I had to hunt down the truth — was this the Tim Vigil? And yep, right in the middle of his Instagram, which repeatedly gets shut down because Tim loves posting images that upset pretty much anyone decent, there was the art for this movie.

Much like Danzig’s Verotika, this is the movie that you’d expect Tim Vigil to make.

If you love his stuff, you’ll be excited. If you hate it, well, stay far away.

The first nice thing you can say about this film is that the Amityville House actually shows up in the movie as a cleaning crew comes to do their work at 112 Ocean Avenue. Sure, this footage is a different aspect ratio than the rest of the film and the cleaning crew scenes were directed by someone else and they try to explain why the evil gets in the woods. It’s pretty much like how Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror is a werewolf movie but has a Frankenstein title because Sam Sherman already had 400 theaters lined up for the Al Adamson film Dracula vs. Frankenstein and had promised those grindhouses and drive-ins a Frank-centric double feature.

This leads to two people in the woods making out, but when his girlfriend won’t put out, Kurt sends her to the doom of being attacked by the titular vampire, who is played by the astoundingly named Jin N. Tonic, who was also in not only Dracula in a Women’s Prison but Frankenstein in a Women’s Prison. Somewhere, probably in Hell, Bruno Mattei is pleased.

Meanwhile, radio DJ and former rock star Johnny (Anthony Dearce) and Fran (Miranda Melhado) are on the way to those very same woods. He keeps telling her stories of how it’s haunted, making this kind of an anthology, which works better than it should. Except that the place they’re going is Red Moon Lake and not Amityville, but come on, we knew that was coming.

So there’s a story about Lilith — the vampire from the opening — inviting a woman to Thanksgiving and another where a man begs Lilith to do what God can’t and save his dying wife. Why he would tell her these stories happened in the place they’re going to is beyond me, but don’t look for life lessons in Amityville ripoff movies.

Meanwhile, Kurt now has a bunch of friends that are looking for women to assault. Yes, this is a movie filled with women showing up only to show off their breasts, long conversations that go nowhere, women being punched in the face and then laughing about it, a sexual assault filmed like the Austin Powers joke gag that really is reprehensible, a seeming encouragement of suicide, horrible looking blood, a decent looking vampire, a breast signing in a parking lot that doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the movie, some of the most over the top line reads and reaction shots you’ve ever seen in a movie and all the quality you expect from a direct to streaming poorly lit, filmed and soundtracked effort by a first-time director.

In short, it’s exactly the kind of movie I look for. What a glorious mess and man, I hope Tim Vigil makes tons of movies. It’s not good, but it’s not good in the violently bad way that says to me that his films are only going to get weirder, wilder and less concerned with petty concerns like continuity, color balancing, story and realistic effects and more worried with creating the kind of boundary-pushing magic that the Satanic mass orgy scenes in Faust delivered.

I mean, Tim Vigil tried to sell a 15-year-old me an art print of it and when I told him, “Well, I still live at home with my parents because I’m in high school,” he called me a pussy and I thanked him for it.

Dear Tim Vigil,

I now have my own home.

Make more movies.

I will buy them all.

Thanks,

Sam (former pussy)

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Quartermass Experiment was on Chiller Theater as The Creeping Terror on Saturday, June 29, 1977 at 11: 30 p.m., Saturday, July 28, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, February 16, 1980 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, June 20, 1981 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, March 13, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

This film is based upon The Quatermass Experiment, a British science fiction serial broadcast by BBC Television during the summer of 1953 that was written by Nigel Kneale. Hammer Films producer Anthony Hinds, who had a history of making movie versions of radio shows. Kneale, a BBC employee, was paid nothing for his work making the company so much more cash.

Directed by Val Guest, this starts with the crash landing of a British-American Rocket Group spaceship that was designed by Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy). Of the three astronauts, only Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) survives, while the space suits of Reichenheim and Green are empty.

Caroon begins to mutate as its discovered that not even his fingerprints are human by Scotland Yard Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner). His wife Judith (Margia Dean) hires a private detective named Christie (Harold Lang) to break him out of the hospital, but now the man she loves starts to absorb organic material and kills the man sent to get him. By the end of this movie, he’s grown into a gigantic mass of animals and plants, filling Westminster Abbey, which is filled with electricity and used to destroy the alien before it can infect the Earth.

The start of not just Hammer horror, body horror and the Quatermass series of films all start here. It’s got a monster covered in cow guts and tripe that probably smelled like absolute death, as well as a young Jane Asher as the little girl menaced by the alien.

This played with The Black Sleep as a double feature. In Chicago, the parents of Stewart Cohen sued United Artists and the theater playing this movie after their nine-year-old son died of a ruptured artery, dying of fright. Not to make light of that, but William Castle had to be happy it wasn’t one of his movies, as he’d have to pay off the family with one of his life insurance policies.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Unknown Terror was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 16, 1963 at 3:00 p.m., Saturday, July 25, 1964 at 4:00 p.m., Saturday, January 12, 1974 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, April 3, 1976 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, August 5, 1978 at 1:00 a.m.

I wonder what’s wrong with the people in these movies. If you told me there was a Cave of the Dead teeming with parasitic fungi, I’d say, “No thank you.” As it is, I barely want to leave the house.

Jim Wheatley (Charles Gray) is one of those people who didn’t listen and went to the Caribbean to find this cave. Now, his sister Gina (Mala Powers) and her husband Dan (John Howard) have come to find him, only to also find Pete Morgan (Paul Richards), a man who saved her husband’s life once, giving him a permanent limp and oh yeah, they were all in a romantic triangle once. Along with Raoul Koom (Richard Gilden), all four search for the cave, inspired by the lyrics they heard in a song by calypso performer Sir Lancelot.

Again, if I hear someone sing a song with lyrics like, “He’s got to suffer to be born again,” I’m out.

In Raoul’s village, Dr. Ramsey (Gerald Milton) — an ugly American — has married local Concha (May Wynn), who he regularly beats into oblivion. He’s been gathering slimy and fuzzy fruit from the area to do research on slime mold — as you do — and Dan decides to spread around some American money — $200 worth — to anyone who knows where the cave is.

Concha knows a place where you can hear dead men screaming and shows the men. At the same time, a moss man chases Gina. Soon, everyone is trapped in the cave and it’s been flooded, all the work of one of Raoul’s henchmen, Lino (Duane Grey). The cave is filled with fungus that grows all over everywhere, which is some experiment that Ramsey is doing for some reason. Seriously, what are the motivations of anyone in this other than some aberrant manifest destiny to do things because they haven’t been done yet?

Dan breaks his back and ends up dying, which frees up Pete to save Gina and they swim away as the fungus destroys everyone else. At least Concha gets to blow her husband up real good.

Released as a double feature with Back from the Dead, this was sold into syndication in 1960, at which point it ran non-stop on American television.

Director Charles Marquis Warren was mainly known for his Westerns and he developed Rawhide and Gunsmoke for TV. The godson of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he also wrote for pulp magazines, won the Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and five battle stars for his World War II service and directed and wrote the Elvis Western Charro! Many credit him as the creator of the television Western. Writer Kenneth Higgins also worked in TV and wrote the script for Ghosts On the Loose.

This was one of several B-features made by Regal Pictures, which was a company that 20th Century Fox used to shoot films in Cinemascope. That way, theater owners that paid for screens and projectors that used that format would have enough films to show their customers.

The monsters look good, the fungus looks like soap suds because it is, the natives see the cave as purgatory and white rich people intrude into their ancient ways and pay for it with their lives. This is what I call a nice rainy Saturday afternoon movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It Conquered the World! was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 27, 1965 at 11:15 p.m.

It Conquered the World was released by American-International Pictures as a double feature with The She-Creature and has perhaps the goofiest monster ever, The Venusian. It was originally written by Lou Rusoff, who had to leave for Canada when he learned that his brother was dying. Charles Griffith did a rewrite two days before filming started and told Fangoria that the script “was incomprehensible which was strange because he was quite meticulous. Lou’s brother was dying at the time which most likely had something to do with it.” He also admitted that the final movie was terrible.

Paul Blaisdell created The Venusian and figured that is Venus was a big planet, it had heavy gravity so it needed to be bottom heavy and low to the ground. Beverly Garland, who plays Claire Anderson in the film, said that when she first saw it, she said knocked it over, telling Fangoria, “I could bop that monster over the head with my handbag! This thing was no monster, it was a table ornament!”

Her husband in the movie, Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef!) has brought the creature to Earth to help  humanity deal with its problems, except that it does what aliens in Roger Corman movies do and that’s enslave humanity. Anderson deals with that by using a blowtorch to the face of the monster, which temporarily earned it an X rating in the UK as they deemed it cruelty to animals until AIP producer Samuel Z. Arkoff explained that, well, it’s not an animal. It was an alien.

This was an early heroic role for Peter Graves and I’d like to think this comes from the same cinematic universe where his brother James Arness was The Thing from Another World.

Alexis Walker (Linnea Swanson) lost her mother and brother to a home invasion that was led by Dante (Ken Brewer). At the same time that the South Bay Slasher (Lawrence Waller) is killing victims, she’s saved women on the streets by, well, shooting dudes a whole bunch of times. Now, detectives Shane Douglas (Doug Waugh) and Maddie Schoefield (Traci Burr) are on the case, as are O’Brien (Tom Grindle) and Ramirez (Al Zuniga) and so many people are going to die along the way.

Directed by Brewer, who co-wrote the script with Meri Gyetvay, this is the kind of movie that is packed with gunfire with CGI results and acting that is challenged at best. And then it surprises you, because Bridget “The Midget” Powers is a force of terrifying nature as she plays Stella, the small yet deadly member of the gang and really the greatest part of this movie. Swanson is also quite good as the title character, a woman who has given up on life and demands the deaths of everyone who ruined her existence.

That said, if you like microbudget movies, if you want to see 45 people die, if you want to hear the word fuck more times in five minutes than ten movies combined, well, this movie has the goods. Actually, I really enjoyed how its multiple plots converged, how it goes from slasher to revenge movie, and how it makes no excuses for the fact that it’s filled with horrible people being scumbags and paying the price at the end of a gun. Here’s hoping for Death Bitch 2 and even more punishment.

You can get this from Livid Media.