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.

First, there was Amityville Toybox, in which a cursed toy monkey from the house on 112 Ocean Avenue caused chaos. That was followed by Amityville Clownhouse, which amped up the Satanic possession with, well, an evil clown. Now, the circle is complete as Amityville in the Hood goes to the inner city and shows just how deep the roots of the evil of Amityville go.

This is Dustin Ferguson’s third trip to Amityville and this time, he directed, wrote, stars and edited this movie. Heck, he even performs two songs as MC Dirty D, “The Amityville Rap” and “Slide Into My DM.”

You know how much I love continuity, so Peter Sommars (John Walker) is on hand again, a reporter who has been in everything from Amityville Clownhouse, Ouijageist, Tales from the Grave and Meathook Massacre 4  to Angry Asian Murder Hornets, Arcachnado, Zombi VIII: Urban Decay, Amityville Hex, Ebola Rex, Archnado 2: Flaming Spiders and the upcoming Axemas 3: Santa Insane, Axemas 4: The Axemas Legacy and Ghoul.

An Eastside gang is using the Amityville property to grow marijuana — yes, I know, this is the best idea ever — called Amityville Possession. I mean, when in doubt, name your strain after the best of the many movies, right? Well, those drugs get stolen and taken to the Westside streets of Compton as Amityville is in Los Angeles in this universe and whomever smokes that sticky icky pays for it with their soul.

Jennifer Nangle, who plays Malvolia the Queen of Screams, is in this briefly — too briefly — as a sex worker named Cheyenne who is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I mean, do I have to sell it any more to you? I guess all that blood flowing out of the walls and ghosts and shotguns and cursed monkeys — look for a quick sprint through the last two films — all add up to the perfect planting soil. Or maybe they grew it hydroponically inside the red room?

Seeing as how this movie was not blessed with a tag line, let me give some:

• For God’s sake, smoke up!
• This time, Amityville gets smoked.
• If these walls could talk, they’d be stoned.

Look, it’s basically an hour of your life. This week has been horrible and this is the first time that I laughed in some time, if only when thacymbal-playingng monkey started slapping his percussion together and the ghost of Mario Bava showed up in the lighting. This is my 38th trip to Amityville, not my last and not my worst.

Also: I completely believe that this movie is way better on drugs. I’m not telling you to be on drugs but…I’m kinda telling you to be on drugs.

Want to know way too much about Amityville? We got you covered with a deep dive into every single movie in the series. Check it out here. We also have a Letterboxd list because, well, of course we do.

Thanks to the incredible folks at Wild Eye, who knew we’d need to see it immediately as it was released.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Castle of the Living Dead was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 5, 1972 at 1:00 a.m.

Castle of the Living Dead is a movie of mystery.

Who directed it?

Warren Kiefer, who couldn’t be directly credited for the film as the film required an Italian director?

Herbert Wise — Luciano Ricci, the film’s first assistant director — whose name was used to fulfill that needed native director credit?

Riccardo Freda, who left I Vampiri for Mario Bava to finish and also made Double Face and Tragic Ceremony?

Michael Reeves, the tragically lost too song director who made Witchfinder General? Depending on who is asked, Reeves either did minor second unit work, a polish on the script’s dwarf character, a complete takeover of the movie or nothing at all.

And did Mario Bava do effects?

So many mysteries!

This gothic horror movie stars Christopher Lee as Count Drago, a man who embalms humans and animals, making them part of his eternal theater thanks to a chemical formula that instantly kills and embalms anything that lives, arresting them at the very moment of death.

Beyond Lee, the cast includes Gaia Germani (Hercules In the Haunted World), Philippe Leroy (The Laughing Woman), Luciano Pigozzi (the Italian Peter Lorre), Luigi Bonos (Frankenstein 80) and Donald Sutherland in his first movie playing a witch, an old man and Sergeant Paul.

Co-writer Paul Maslansky would go on to produce tons of movies like Death Line, She Beast, Race with the Devil, Damnation Alley and Ski Patrol amongst so many others, as well as creating the original concept — and producing — all of the Police Academy movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Black Cat was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 4, 1975 at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday, August 28, 1976 at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday, July 23 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, June 11, 1983 at 1:00 a.m.

Cat lady Henrietta Winslow (Cecilia Loftus) lives in what looks like a haunted house. But that’s where he family must go to hear the reading of her will. She plans on leaving half of her money to her niece Myrna (Gladys Cooper),  the other half to her granddaughter Margaret (Claire Dodd) and the estate to her granddaughter Elaine (Anne Gwynne).  Meanwhile, Myrna’s husband Montague (Basil Rathbone) has invited realtor Gil Smith (Broderick Crawford) and antiques dealer Mr. Penny (Hugh Herbert) to help him creak up the estate.

Smith saves Henrietta’s life by keeping her from poisoned milk — this has already been added to my poisoned milk Letterboxd list — but she’s later killed when she is cremated one of her murdered cats. Her money is not to be given to anyone until her faithful maid Abigail dies (Gale Sondergaard) and she tries to throw everyone out, but they won’t leave.

Meanwhile, Montague’s son Richard (Alan Ladd) catches his father with Margaret and threatens to tell Myrna, just in time for Abigail to be murdered. The killer is using secret tunnels in the house to pull off their scheme, but one of the surviving black cats solves the case by setting them on fire.

An attempt to cash in on the success of The Cat and the Canary, this was directed by Albert S. Rogell. The original script by Eric Taylor and Robert Neville was rewritten by Robert Lees and Frederic I. Rinaldo.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cat Girl was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 28, 1964 at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday, July 3, 1965 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 6, 1966 at 1:00 a.m.

An unofficial remake of Cat People, this Alfred Shaughnessy-directed (he wrote Upstairs Downstairs) film is all about Leonora Johnson (Barbara Shelley, perhaps Hammer’s best-known female actress with roles in Dracula, Prince of Darkness; The Gorgon; Rasputin, The Mad Monk and Quatermass and the Pit), who may have inherited a family curse — when angered, she transforms into a murderous cat — along with an ancestral estate and lots of money.

Somehow, Dr. Brian Marlowe is still Leonora’s psychologist, despite them dating years before. I have no idea how he’s able to serve in this role, which feels like a violation of ethics, nor stay married to his wife Dorothy when Leonora continually is either trying to sleep with him or transform into a wolf and kill her. Dorothy is either a saint or a moron, as she keeps forgiving and helping.

If you were at the drive-in in 1957, you probably could have caught this on a double bill with another American-International Pictures release, The Amazing Colossal Man. Shelly would also star in another cat-themed horror movie, The Shadow of the Cat.

You can watch this 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.

Did this poster just put one of those horrifying wind-up monkeys in the windows of the house at 112 Ocean Avenue? Well, that’s just not fair. If this movie came out when I was seven, I would have defecated in my pants to such a level that you would be about to smell it, even nearly four decades into a thankfully feces-smell free future.

Yes, a cursed monkey is purchased from the DeFeo garage sale and makes its way across the country to Nebraska, where it wreaks havoc. If this sounds like the plot of the mid-90’s Amityville films like It’s About Time, A New Generation and Amityville Dollhouse, the filmmakers are very aware of those films and specifically pay tribute to them.

According to the film’s official Facebook page, this movie has been acquired by Wild Eye Releasing and will soon have a new Amityville-related title, as well as a sequel called Amityville: Evil Never Dies. Is Mumm-Ra in that one? I’m not sure, but do you know who is? Mark Patton, who played Jesse in the criminally underrated second A Nightmare on Elm Street film.

This was directed by Dustin Ferguson, who also made Nemesis 5: The New Model, Silent Night, Bloody Night 2: Revival, a remake of Die, Sister, Die! and is now working on a remake of Umberto Lenzi’s Ghosthouse. The sheer chutzpah of that last move either makes me love this guy or despise him. Don’t screw that one up.

Somehow — well, Ferguson has worked on their music videos — this movie has “Spooky Tricks” by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult on its soundtrack. That’s more than I can say for most Amityville movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Burn, Witch, Burn! was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 5, 1966 at 11:20 p.m.; Saturday, June 28, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday, October 31, 1970 at 1 a.m.; Saturday, July 17, 1971 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, May 13, 1972 at 1.m.

Based upon the 1943 Fritz Leiber novel Conjure Wife, this movie was called Day of the Eagle in the UK before getting a title that sounded more like a horror movie for American audiences. The book had already been adapted once before as Weird Woman in 1944 and then one more time afterward in 1979 as Witches’ Brew.

The American version also has an opening in complete blackness where the voice of Paul Frees reads a spell intended to protect the audience from the evil within the film. Filmgoers also were given a special pack of salt and the words to an ancient incantation. Man, going to the movies used to be awesome. American-International Pictures knew how to sell an occult movie!

Written by a combination of Charles Beaumont (The Masque of the Red Death, several great Twilight Zone episodes), Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, Duel) and George Baxt (Shadow of the Cat, The City of the Dead), this is the story of Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde, Klytus from Flash Gordon), a man who discovers that all of his career success is due to the magic skills of his wife. As soon as he demands that she burns all of her magical ephemera, everything in his life goes wrong

By the end of the movie, his rational view of the world must confront the fact that magic truly exists. It also posits that women are the magic workers of the world and that men just stumble through, a view I can completely agree with.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Little Shop of Horrors was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 23, 1964 at 11:10 p.m.; Saturday, August 14,1965 at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday, March 9, 1968 at 11:10 p.m. and Saturday, January 17, 1970 at 1:00 a.m.

Drected by Roger Corman, written by Charles B. Griffith and made under the name The Passionate People Eater, this movie was made in two days for $28,000 on the same sets as A Bucket of Blood. Playing double features with Black Sunday and Last Woman On Earth, it became a cult film and that continued once it aired repeatedly on TV.

Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles) and his two employees, Audrey Fulquard (Jackie Joseph) and Seymour Krelboined (Jonathan Haze), run a flower shop that seen better days. When Seymour screws up an order for dentist Dr. Phoebus Farb (John Shaner), he’s fired until he shows his new plant, which he claims he grew from a seed that he was given by a Japanese gardener over on Central Avenue. He names it Audrey 2 and before you know it, it lives on human blood and then people. Yet it brings people into the store and becomes famous. Gravis calls Seymour son now.

Of course, Gravis eventually sees Seymour feeding a dead homeless man — it was an accident, but still — to Audrey 2 and then Dr. Farb, who he killed in self defense. But the crimes are getting worst and the police — named Fink and Stoolie — and the Society of Silent Flower Observers of Southern California wants to give Seymour an award. All he wants is the original Audrey, but the plant hypnotizes him and makes him continue bringing him food.

The movie was actually written at a coffee house. Corman said, “We ended up at a place where Sally Kellerman (before she became a star) was working as a waitress, and as Chuck and I vied with each other, trying to top each other’s sardonic or subversive ideas, appealing to Sally as a referee, she sat down at the table with us, and the three of us worked out the rest of the story together.”

This is also an early Jack Nicholson movie — the actor said that “I went in to the shoot knowing I had to be very quirky because Roger originally hadn’t wanted me. In other words, I couldn’t play it straight. So I just did a lot of weird shit that I thought would make it funny.” — and as you know, went on to become even bigger when it was made into a musical and remade in 1986. There was even a cartoon, Little Shop, that was on Fox Kids and had Corman as a consultant. As for this one, Corman was so sure it wouldn’t do well that he never got a copyright and let it go into public domain.

Dick Miller really did eat that flower.

You can watch this on Tubi.