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.

Jackie (Natalie Peri, who is also in Amityville Conjuring) and Danny (Paul Faggione, who played John Gotti in a series of documentaries and is also in a movie called Bad Ravioli, so you can expect exactly what he does, speaking in an exaggerated Italian accent) are having Thanksgiving at an intensive therapy session with Amityville’s best — and not only, believe it or not — marriage counselor Frank Domonico (Mark C. Fullhardt, who is also in Amityville Conjuring, so…it looks like I’ll have to watch that as well). The doctor has some strange ways of bringing couples together, although it seems like he wants to have sex with Jackie more than fix her marriage.

Yes, this is both a Thanksgiving and an Amityville movie and man, that means that I was duly bound to watch it. I mean — just look at this Amityville list of films I’ve already made it through.

Directed and written by Will Collazo Jr. (Bloody Nun, Night of the Zomghouls, Ouija Encounters of the Third Kind, Mothman: Mount Misery Road and yes, the upcoming Amityville Conjuring) has kind of, sort of assembled this movie from disparate scenes and several solo actors just filmed on their phones. Seriously, the film ends way before it actually ends and people just talk about events that happened within or after the story and there’s no reason at all for them being there.

Yet you know, to make an Amityville movie about Thanksgiving and not have it really about either and instead an excuse for old men with thick New York accents about having rough sex with other men’s wives is pretty much a genius concept. It also has Shawn Phillips and David Perry as a male couple that has the same marriage issues as everyone else.

I was going to say I have no idea who this is for, but I know that the answer is me. I’m the same kind of jerk that will write thousands of words saying how creatively bereft a movie like Smile is and then watch every single Amityville movie and if sixteen year old me knew that, he would be so happy with how things turned out.

Also: marriage counselor who puts the seed of a demon into women he’s steered into leaving their husbands and then eating them — as well as killing their marriage counselor competition — is the kind of career path no one tells you about. Cannibal Marriage Counselor is also not as good a title as Amityville Thanksgiving.

The SRS Cinema DVD of Amityville Thanksgiving has a commentary by director and writer Will Collazo Jr., an interview with the lead actor, a trailer and trailers for other SRS Cinema movies. You can get this from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: House of Wax was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 2, 1976 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 11, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. and September 30, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

A remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum, this was the first major studio 3D movie and really may be the best 3D film ever made. It was re-released in 1971 and in the early 80s, each time that 3D was revived.

Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price) is the best wax sculptor in the world, but his business partner Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts) wants him to make a grislier museum to draw in the crowds. He gets sick of waiting to make money, so he tries to burn the whole thing down, trapping Jarrod in the blaze.

Months later, Burke is rich from the insurance money and out on the town with his girlfriend Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones, years before was Morticia Addams) when he runs into a cloaked man who hangs him, then comes back a few nights later to kill Cathy. He runs into her friend Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) and escapes.

Jarrod returns, now trapped in a wheelchair with his hands destroyed. He starts his wax museum again with the sculpting by his assistants Leon Averill (Nedrick Young) and Igor (Charles Buchinsky, not yet Charles Bronson).

As movie coincidences happen — Sue’s boyfriend Scott Andrews (Paul Picerni) is also a sculptor and starts to work in the museum, Sue gets a job modeling even though she thinks the Marie Antoinette statue is her friend Cathy and police officer Sergeant Jim Shane (Dabs Greer) recognizes Averill as a criminal — this is also the movie that inspired so many other wax museum movies, as all of the sculptures are the bodies of dead people.

Director Andre de Toth was blind in one eye, having lost his eye when he was young. This meant that he couldn’t see in 3D, which may be why this is one of the better 3D films, as it’s more about the story and less about the things coming at you. There is one amazing effect, when a shadow seems to run into the screen and another where a paddle ball comes at you, but at this movie’s heart, it’s not a gimmick-filled film.

This had a big premiere, with Eddie Cantor, Rock Hudson, Judy Garland, Shelley Winters, Broderick Crawford, Gracie Allen,  and Ginger Rogers in attendance, as well as Bela Lugosi with an ape on a leash, played by Steve Calvert, who appeared with him in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.

One of the biggest movies of 1953, this took Vincent Price from being a supporting actor into a lead villain, changing his career. He’s incredible in this, making every moment count. He attended several showings of this movie and said the best time was in New York City, sitting behind two teenagers. As the lights came up, he took of his glasses and said, “Did you like it?” He said, “They went right into orbit!” His makeup was so grisly that it got him banned from eating lunch at the studio commissary, but it was all worth it.

In the 1960s, when horror was a big deal on TV, Warner Brothers wanted to make a House of Wax series.  tried to create a “House of Wax” television series. Cesare Danova, Wilfred Hyde White and Jose Rene Ruiz played the employees of the wax museum who would solve mysteries, using the sets from the movie. It was too intense for hoe viewers so it was released as Chamber of Horrors along with gimmicks like the horror horn and fear flasher.

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.