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.

Once, this movie was called No Sleep, then Don’t Sleep, then it became an Amityville movie because that’s what you do sometimes if you want your movie to get out there, I guess. Hey — director and co-writer Calvin Morie McCarthy is out there doing it, I guess.

So anyways, as you can guess, this has nothing to do with Amityville, yet when has that stopped us in the past?

Jim is a poor college student who gets a House of the Devil job housesitting for a strange woman named Eunice, even after he’s been warned that the house itself is evil. Right away, he can’t sleep what with all the nightmares and the supernatural stuff that happens when he’s awake may be even worse.

Of course, most of this movie takes place in a room with people just talking to one another. It gets boring and yet never gets into murderdrone territory where it feels like the kind of mind numbing drugs that my brain demands, instead being merely like drinking an O’Doul’s and wondering why you’re not drunk.

I realize that they’re going to keep making Amityville movies and I’m going to keep watching them. Here are a few of my free titles to improve the streaming schlock that hopefully has at least something small to do with 112 Ocean Avenue:

• Amityville Alien
• 50 Shades of Amityville
• Once Upon a Time…In Amityville
• Amityville Giallo
• Amityville Christmas
• Amityville Ouija Party
• Amityville Police Academy
• Don’t Go in the Basement of the Amityville Death House
• House of 1000 Amityville Horrors
• Amityville Avengers

I literally have thousands of these and I await any streaming production company that wants more.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Footprints On the Moon was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 15, 1977 at 11:30 p.m.

Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) watched a strange film in her childhood called “Footprints on the Moon,” where astronauts were stranded on the moon’s surface. Now, as an adult, the only sleep she gets is from tranquilizers and she starts missing days of her life. Get ready for a giallo that skips the fashion and outlandish murders while going straight for pure weirdness.

After losing her job as a translator, Alice find a torn postcard for a resort area called Garma. That’s where she meets a little girl named Paula (Nicoletta Elmi, Demons, A Bay of Blood) who claims that Alice looks exactly like another woman she met named Nicole, who is also at the resort. Slowly but surely, our heroine starts to believe that a huge conspiracy is against her.

This is the last theatrical film of Luigi Bazzoni (he has directed some documentaries and wrote a few films since), who also directed The Fifth Cord. There are only two murders, but don’t let that hold you back. There are also abrupt shifts in color and a slow doomy mood to the entire proceedings. It’s unlike any other giallo I’ve seen and I mean that as a compliment.

Klaus Kinski also shows up as Blackman, the doctor who was behind the experiment that Alice saw as a child. He’s only in the film for a minute or so, but he makes the most of his time, chewing up the scenery as only he can. And cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, beyond working on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, also was the DP on films like Apocalypse Now, Reds, Last Tango in Paris and Dick Tracy.

This isn’t like any of the films that came in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and it’s a shame that its director didn’t make more films in the genre.

Here’s are two drinks to enjoy with Footprints.

To the Moon

• .25 oz. Kaluha
• .25 oz. Bailey’s Irish Cream
• .25 oz. amaretto
• .25 oz. high proof rum

1. Stir with ice and strain into a chilled shot glass.

Footprints On the Amber Moon

• 3 oz. whiskey
• Raw egg
• Dash of Tobasco

1. Pour whiskey into a glass, then crack a raw egg and drop into the glass. Don’t break the yoke or the ghost of Klaus Kinski will haunt you.
2. Add some Tobasco, do a count down and ignite the engines.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Fury of the Wolfman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 18, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, June 19, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

La Furia del Hombre Lobo is a 1970 Spanish horror film that is the fourth in the saga of werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky, played as always by Paul Naschy. It was not theatrically released in Europe until 1975, yet an edited U.S. version played on television as early as 1974 as part of the Avco-Embassy’s “Nightmare Theater” package, along with Naschy’s Horror from the Tomb and The Mummy’s Revenge.

For those that care about these things — like me — the other films were Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Night of the Sorcerers, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, Maniac Mansion and The Witch.

This time, Daninsky is a professor who travels to Tibet, only to be bitten by a yeti which seems like not the werewolf origin that you’d expect. He then catches his wife cheating on him, so in a fit of passion, he murders them both before being killed himself. But this being a Spanish horror movie, that’s just the start of the trials that El Hombre Lobo must struggle through.

Daninsky is revived by Dr. Ilona Ellmann (Perla Cristal, The Corruption of Chris Miller), who wants to use him for mind control experiments. Soon, however, our hero learns that she has a basement filled with the corpses of her failed experiments. To make matters even worse, she brings back his ex-wife from the dead and turns her into a werewolf too!

There’s a great alternate title to this movie: Wolfman Never Sleeps. How evocative! That’s the Swedish version that has all of the sex that Franco’s Spain would never allow.

Naschy claimed that director José María Zabalza was a drunk, which may explain how this movie wound up padded with repeat footage from Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror and some stunt double continuity antics that nearly derail this furry film.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 11, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.

Instead of having that who is your favorite Bond discussion, we should all talk about who our favorite remix remake ripoff Bond is or which movie is best. Man, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is a pretty good one, even if it has some of the most laddish louts I’ve seen in one of these.

Based on Kommisar X, a popular series of crime novels from Germany, Kommissar X is a private detective and FBI Special Agent named Joe Walker, who is played by Tony Kendall. He’s paired with New York City police captain Tom Rowland is played by Brad Harris).

This is just the first of seven movies in this series of films. In 1966 alone, this movie, Kommissar X – Drei gelbe Katzen (Three Yellow Cats AKA Death is Nimble, Death is Quick) and Kommissar X – In den Klauen des goldenen Drachen (So Darling, So Deadly) all were released, followed by Kommissar X – Drei grüne Hunde (Death Trip AKA Kill Me Gently) in 1967, Kommissar X – Drei blaue Panther (Three Blue Panthers AKA Kill Panther Kill) a year later, Kommissar X – Drei goldene Schlangen (Three Golden Serpents AKA Island of Lost Girls) in 1969 and finally, 1971’s Kommissar X jagt die roten Tiger (FBI: Operation Pakistan AKA Tiger Gang).

The two men meet and come together to figure out why a scientist named Bob Carroll was killed. It. turns out that a rich villain named Oberon (Nikola Popović) who was stealing gold from his partners by irradiating it and having Carroll fix that at the cost of his own life when he became sick.

With a theme song called “I Love You Joe Walker,” you know that he’s going to be one of those spies that swing.

I kind of wonder how every Eurospy villain has an army made up of women with go go boots. And somehow, Joe Walker can turn any of them to his side with just a kiss. One can only imagine if he can do that vertically, what he does when things get horizontal.

Director Gianfranco Parolini went from peplum to westerns to Eurospy with ease, making three of the movies in this series, as well as The Three Fantastic Supermen, If You Meet Sartana…Pray for Your Death, the three Sabata movies, God’s Gun and the fantastic Yeti Giant of the 20th Century. He wrote the script along with Giovanni Simonelli (Jungle Raiders, The Crimes of the Black Cat, The Face With Two Left Feet, A Cat In the Brain), based on the books by Paul Alfred Müller AKA Bert F. Island.

This movie is a total blast, made in the time when ironic and cynical films did not seem to exist.

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.

“The Belle Witches have to revisit their magical talents to deter the evil Dominique Marcom from trying to raise the demon Botis into the world.”

You may read the sell line from this and wonder — a movie with an alternate title of Witches of Amityville Academy — “Is this an Amityville movie?” And i”m wondering, “Are all movies Amityville movies?” Because at this point, I feel like I’m in a non-Faustian bargain. I feel compelled to watch all of these movies and really get no reward.

After receiving an acceptance letter from Dominique’s (Amanda Jade-Tyler, who is in Amityville Scarecrow 2) prestigious Amityville Academy for witches, Jessica (Sarah T. Cohen, who was in Hellkat and Medusa) soon learns that only the Belle Witches can save her from a demon. A demon named Bortis who is also known as Otis — I am not making that up — and is discussed in the Lesser Key of Solomon as a President and an Earl who initially appears as a viper before changing into a sword-toting, fanged and horned human who likes to talk about the past, present and future. He also rules 60 legions of demons.

The good witches of this movie all definitely shop at Ann Taylor Loft and Pottery Barn because they look late 40s attractive upper class — I’d say South Hills but yinz aren’t all from Pittsburgh — and they just like to chill and sip on tea and gossip. Sam (Kira Reed Lorsch, Chained Heat 2001: Slave Lovers and on Playboy’s Sexcetera before being an early internet adult adopter and creating Married Couple Live with her husband in the early 2000s), Ellena (Brittan Taylor, Space Girls in Beverly Hills) and Lucy (Donna Spangler, who was The Coal Miner’s Daughter in the wrestling group POWW and also played Hugs Higgins in the Andy Sidaris movie Guns, Mee-Shell in Dinosaur Valley Girls and Katanna in Space Girls in Beverly Hills) are those Belle Witches and they’re fabulous.

Director Rebecca Matthews (The Candy Witch, Pet Graveyard) and writer Tom Jolliffe (Jurassic Island) have done the impossible: they’ve made a non-Amityville Amityville movie that didn’t make me question why I do this. I’m all for a web series of the Belle Witches where they bemoan the closing of Chicco’s in their mall or battle a series of zombie Karens or just sit around and drink tea and talk about their husbands.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Blue Sunshine was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 12, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

You know why I’ve never done acid? This movie right here. After all, it has an “inspired by true events” square up in the end credits.

After a series of seemingly unconnected murders in Los Angeles, only one link keeps coming up — every single person took the same strain of LSD called Blue Sunshine.

Yep — the sins of the past decade are ready to come back and destroy the “Me” decade.

Zalman King — yes, the same man who got your mom all tingly after you went to bed with Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries — plays Jerry Zipkin, a man accused of the murders who — in true giallo-style — must clear his name. That’s because he was at a party where the murders may have started, complete with a screaming Brion James and Billy Crystal’s brother singing Frank Sinatra songs before he starts throwing women into the fireplace.

If turns out that if you took Blue Sunshine, chances are that you’re about to lose all your hair, go crazy and start killing everyone in your path. Of course, no one knew this ten years ago when they were all dosing on it back in college. Chromosomal damage can be a real b, you know?

How can you not love a movie whose title is spoken by a parrot? One that has a climactic disco shootout? Or is so 1970’s that it ends up speaking for pretty much the entire decade?

Between the self-medicating Dr. David Blume, the hard-drinking and hair losing John O’Malley and Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard, Major Don West from Lost In Space) are all caught up in the grip of the bad trip. The effects pretty much sum up Flemming’s political campaign: “In the 1960s, Ed Flemming and his generation shook up the system. Now he’s working within it.” He has become the system. It’s as if the children in Manson’s famous quote — “These children that come at you with knives–they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.” — are even more dangerous when fully grown.

Goddard isn’t the only TV star that shows up, as Alice Ghostly (Esmerelda from Bewitched) makes an appearance.

Writer and director Jeff Lieberman would lend his strange style to other films like Squirm, Remote Control, Just Before Dawn and the odd true crime TV show Love You to Death that starred John Waters as a Grim Reaper attending weddings of partners that would soon kill one another.

The director claims that two major TV networks expressed interest in purchasing the film as a “movie of the week.” The opportunity to get double the budget was appealing, but after seeing the edits that the movie would need to be able to play on network TV, Lieberman decided to produce this for theaters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 6, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 15, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.

Five months after American-International Picture’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Herbert L. Strock (The Crawling Hand) directed this follow-up, which has British professor Professor Frankenstein (Whit Bissell, who was also the mad scientist in AIP’s first teenager as a monster movie) coming to America to assemble his monster from the bodies of teenagers who didn’t make it through Dead Man’s Curve.

He’s the kind of scientist who has no problem feeding former Lois Lane Phyllis Coates to alligators (AIP’s Herman Cohen kayfabe stated that the alligator had been used to dispose of the bodies of the victims of serial killer Joe Ball from a small town outside San Antonio, which I love) or cutting off the face of a boy on Lover’s Lane (Gary Conway, The Farmer) for his undead monster.

Herman Cohen and Herbert L. Strock were able to write and shoot this film and Blood of Dracula in 4 weeks. That’s because a Texas chain of drive-ins asked for two new movies from AIP if they could deliver by Thanksgiving.

How did AIP not follow this up with I Was a Teenage Dracula? Then again, both the teenage werewolf and teenage Frankenstein show up in How to Make a Monster.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Godzilla King of the Monsters was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 9, 1965 at 11:15 p.m., Saturday, October 31, 1965 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 9, 1967 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, February 15, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, April 4, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, September 4, 1971 at 1:00 a.m.

“We weren’t interested in politics, believe me. We only wanted to make a movie we could sell. At that time, the American public wouldn’t have gone for a movie with an all-Japanese cast. That’s why we did what we did. We didn’t really change the story. We just gave it an American point of view.” – Richard Kay

Godzilla came to America as a result of several business deals. The first was between Edmund Goldman and Toho. For $25,000, Goldman bought the rights to create a movie “narrated, dubbed in English and completed in accordance with the revisions, additions, and deletions,” with final approval by Toho.

He would sell his interest in the movie to Harold Ross and Richard Kay of Jewell Enterprises — who had the idea to dub the movie and hire Raymond Burr — and then Joseph E. Levine, the man who would bring Hercules and Sophia Loren to America — came on board to make the movie a blockbuster.

Director Terry Morse was paid $10,000 for re-writing and directing any scenes that would be made for the remixed version of Godzilla, the same fee that Burr would get for a day’s work (and lending his box office clout to the film).

This was a movie made under duress, mostly due to the budget. The new footage was filmed in just three days, with Burr working a 24-hour straight day — living up to his day of work, I guess — to shoot all of his scenes.

The rough edges — references to atomic bombs, nuclear tests and radioactive contamination — were cut. This was a movie about a giant monster now, not a nation using said big monster to deal with grief, fear and loss national identity.

Speaking of beating up actors, James Hong — Lo Pan! — and Sammee Tong (Bachelor Father) were locked in a room for five hours and recorded every single Japanese voice in this movie. They never saw the footage, only sitting with Morse at a table with a microphone.

For what it’s worth, original director Ishirō Honda found the changes pretty funny, saying  that he was “trying to imitate American monster movies” in the first place.

Burr plays Steve Martin, an American reporter injured in the wake of Godzilla’s attacks on Japan. For all the bad things you can say about editing this movie, his narration makes some scenes even stronger: “This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of Man’s imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world. There were once many people here who could’ve told of what they saw… now there are only a few. My name is Steve Martin. I’m a foreign correspondent for United World News. I was headed for an assignment in Cairo, when I stopped off in Tokyo for a social call, but it turned out to be a visit to the living hell of another world.”

It’s pretty astounding that this movie basically samples the entire original movie and inserts Burr into so many scenes, using newly lensed scenes with Asian-American actors and editing tricks to make it seem as if he was always there.

Until 2004, this was the version of the movie that was seen worldwide. In Italy, however, Luigi Cozzi made a remix of the remix called Cozilla. Needing more footage to pad its running time, he added in real footage of chaotic death from newsreals to put the dark edge back into the film or give it an “up-to-date and more violent look” in his own words. Whatever the intention, the original art was cut up and made to be something more palatable to American audiences at one point and now was made to fit the need for Italian audiences to always see something shocking.