EDITOR’S NOTE: Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood was on the CBS Late Movie on September 4, 1981.

We live in a magical reality, the kind of place where Michael Winner, the same man who made some of the roughest films ever — Death Wish, Death Wish 2, Death Wish 3, The Mechanic, The Sentinel — made this movie that’s a kind of, sort of biography of Hollywood star dog Rin Tin Tin.

It was originally called Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Warner Bros. before Paramount bought the film and, well, the movie had to change its name, right?

Estie Del Ruth (Madeline Kahn) has made her way to Hollywood, followed by a dog named Won Ton Ton. While she has dreams of being a star — and a director who continually and unsuccessfully pitches movies that will be made many years later named Grayson Potchuck (Bruce Dern) tries to help — the truth is that the dog has all the talent.

This is less a film than a collection of vignettes about the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as Ron Leibman’s effeminate take on Rudolph Valentino and Art Carney, Phil Silvers and Teri Garr as players in the tale of Estie and Won Ton Ton.

The draw for me — beyond how strange it is that Winner directed this comedy misfire — is the huge cast of Hollywood legends, many of whom made this movie their final role. Here are as many as I could remember:

Dorothy Lamour: One-time star of the Hope and Crosby Road movies, she shows up here as a visiting film star.

Joan Blondell: Often cast as a gold digger, Blondell’s career stretched back to vaudeville. She’d appear in two more movies after this: The Champ and Grease.

Virginia Mayo: Warner Brothers’ biggest box-office money-maker in the late 1940s, Mayo continued acting until 1997. She was one of the first actresses to be awarded a star on the Walk of Fame.

Henny Youngman: The rapid-fire standup who would always say, “Take my wife…please.”

Rory Calhoun: Readers of this site will definitely know Calhoun, as he reinvented himself in the 80’s, appearing in genre films like Motel Hell, Hell Comes to Frogtown and the first two Angel films.

Aldo Ray: Much like Calhoun, Ray appeared in just about every genre film he could in the later part of his career. Shock ‘Em Dead, Human Experiments, The Glove, Don’t Go Near the Park, Haunts…I can and will go on.

Nancy Walker: This star of Rhoda would go on to direct an even bigger bomb than this: Can’t Stop the Music, the unreal story of the Village People.

Ethel Merman: Playing Hedda Parsons here, Merman was considered the First Lady of musical comedy.

Rhonda Fleming: Her name in this movie is Rhoda Flaming, which is…par for the course of this film. She was known as the Queen of Technicolor for how well she filmed.

Dean Stockwell: If you only know him from Quantum Leap, I’d recommend you check out his roles in To Live and Die in L.A. and Married to the Mob.

Tab Hunter: Known for his clean-cut, boy next door looks, his later years are marked by interesting turns, such as playing Mary Hartman’s dad on the spin-off Forever Fernwood and appearing with Divine in Polyester (1981) and Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust.

Dick Haymes: This big band vocalist sang in the session where Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters recorded both “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better).”

Robert Alda: Yes, he’s Alan’s dad. But you knew that. And you also knew that he played Father Michael in Mario Bava’s House of Exorcism.

Victor Mature: This would be the actor’s last major role; he also shows up in a cameo at the end of Winner’s film Firepower.

Edgar Bergen: As Professor Quicksand, this is one of his few roles not holding one of his trademark partners like Charlie McCarthy or Mortimer Snerd. He’s also in The Phynx, which still blows my mind.

Henry Wilcoxon: You may not know that he was very involved with the films of Cecil B. DeMille, but you do know him as the priest caught in a rainstorm in Caddyshack.

Yvonne DeCarlo: In 1950, the Camera Club of America voted her “Sexnicolor Queen of the Screen.” You know those guys — the pre-Internet creeps that’d hire women to pose for them as they stood around en masse. DeCarlo is better known as Lily Munster, she also appears in the kind of movies that this creep enjoys, namely Satan’s Cheerleaders, Silent Scream, Play Dead, Guyana: Cult of the Damned, American Gothic and Mirror, Mirror.

There are literally dozens and dozens of stars here, so get ready…

Edward Le Veque (the last surviving member of The Keystone Kops); William Benedict (Whitey of The Bowery Boys); Huntz Hall of The Dead End Kids; silent stars Carmel Myers, Dorothy Gulliver, Maytag repairman Jesse White; comedians Jack Carter and Shecky Greene; Marilyn Monroe rival Barbara Nichols; Variety columnist Army Archerd; Fernando Lamas; Zsa Zsa Gabor; Cyd Charisse, whose legs were once insured for $5 million dollars; Doodles Weaver (who also shows up in plenty of insane movies like The Zodiac Killer); cowboy actor Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez; Dick Van Dyke Show co-star Morey Amsterdam; Monroe/JFK scandal magnet Peter Lawford; Eddie Foy Jr.; Patricia Morison; The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok star Guy Madison; John Carradine as a drunk (yes, I realize that this is an easy target; I also realize that I watch at least one movie with Carradine in it a day); Regis Toomey, who is also in another dog of a film C.H.O.M.P.S.; Ann Rutherford (Gone with the Wind); Milton Berle (once perhaps the most famous person in entertainment); Keye Luke (a founding member of the Screen Actors’ Guild as well as the original Brak on Space Ghost and Mr. Wing from Gremlins); Walter Pidgeon (he’d be in one more movie, the Mae West vehicle Sextette); character actors Phil Leeds and Cliff Norton as dogcatchers; Winnie the Pooh’s original voice Sterling Holloway; two of the Ritz brothers who were also in Blazing Stewardesses; Edward Ashley (Professor Sutherland from Waxwork); Fritz Feld (who is also in The Phynx); George Jessel; Ken Murray; Stepin Fetchit (considered to be the first African-American to have a successful acting career, now seen as an example of how Hollywood treated minorities); Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller; Louis Nye; Dennis Morgan; William Demarest (Uncle Charley from My Three Sons); Billy Barty who plays an assistant director; Ricardo Montalban; Jackie Coogan; Roy Rogers’ sidekick Andy Devine; Broderick Crawford (of his many movies, I’ll let on that Harlequin is one of my favorites); Richard Arlan; Jack La Rue; former pro wrestler “Iron” Mike Mazurki; as well as singers Dennis Day, Janet Blair, Jane Connell, Ann Miller, Rudy Vallee and Gloria DeHaven.

When Augustus von Schumacher attended the premiere — he was the dog who played the lead role — he walked in with Mae West. Now that’s how you become a star.

As for the movie — unless you’re someone like me that gets excited about cameos, you’re going to hate it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Count Yorga was on the CBS Late Movie on August 16, 1974 and August 14, 1975.

Directed and written by Bob Kelljan, Count Yorga, Vampire was originally going to be soft core porn movie, The Loves of Count Iorga. In fact, some prints have that title. Robert Quarry, the man who would be Yorga, told producer Michael Macready that he would play the vampire if they turned the story into a non-sexual horror movie.

Donna (Donna Anders) is trying to contact her recently deceased mother via séance by Count Yorga, a mystic who has recently moved to America. Donna becomes hysterical and needs to be calmed by Yorga; afterward she reveals to her friends that Yorga was her mother’s last over and when she died, he demanded that she be buried and not cremated.

Yorga then conducts a campaign of terror, biting Erica (Judy Lang), who goes from party girl to vampire eating her own kitten — don’t worry, it’s just a kitten covered in lasagna — in a matter of hours. Oh yeah — Donna’s mom (Marsha Jordan) is now one of Yorga’s brides and it’s the swinging seventies, so he commands her to make love to one of his other undead women on a cold cemetery slab.

By the end of the film, Yorga and his brides have wiped out just about every one of Donna’s friends and strengthened his hold over her, which extends potentially beyond the grave. Again, it’s the seventies and life is cruel and cheap and happy endings aren’t often found after the New Hollywood. The count is also self aware and watches Countess Dracula.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Comedy of Terrors was on the CBS Late Movie on September 1, 1972 and April 30, 1973.

American-International Pictures follow up to The Raven, this movie reunites Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. Adding to the trio is Basil Rathbone, giving this film an astounding cast. They’re all working from a script by Richard Matheson and direction by Jacques Tourneur, who for my money made some of the greatest horror movies ever like Night of the Demon, The Leopard Man and Cat People.

Price is Waldo Trumbull, a funeral home owner, a business that he stole from his partner Amos Hinchley (Karloff) after marrying his daughter Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson). They only have one coffin, which saves them money, as Felix Gillie (Lorre) dumps the bodies when he isn’t setting up the death of wealthy clients.

Rathbone plays John F. Black, Esq., the landlord that tries to evict Trumbull but keeps dying and coming back to life, giving soliloquies and dying again. The cat, who keeps waking him up due to allergies, is played by Orangey the cat, who also menaced The Incredible Shrinking Man.

While a fun movie, this one could have really used Corman’s touch. That said I’m a big fan of Tourneur. It wasn’t a big success, but it’s still worth a watch. You might even spot the hearse coach that now is part of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

The Family of the Vourdalak by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, written on Tolstoy a trip to France from Frankfurt where the author was attached to the Russian Embassy, has been filmed before. The most obvious adaption is “I Wurdulak” in Mario Bava’s anthology Black Sabbath. Starring Boris Karloff as the father and Mark Damon as the young nobleman, it’s a classic horror film. Less known, but still incredible, is Giorgio Ferroni’s more modern take, The Night of the Devils, the 2020 Argentina film Sangre Vurdalak and the animated Vrdlk: Family Of Vurdulak.

I’m so happy to report that director Adrien Beau has found another take on the film that makes it fresh and exciting.

Arriving on a stormy night, Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), a noble emissary of the King of France, finds himself the last survivor of a royal group that has been attacked by a mysterious group. He has somehow found his way to a home in the woods. Belonging to Gorcha (that’s also Belew’s voice and he co-wrote this movie with Hadrien Bouvier), he is fed and kept safe by the man’s sons Jegor (Grégoire Colin), Vlad (Gabriel Pavie) and Piotr (Vassili Schneider), along with Jegor’s wife Anja (Claire Duburcq) and Gorcha’s daughter Sdenka (Ariane Labed). As for the father, he disappeared some days ago looking for revenge on a man named Alibek.

If you know the story, you know what’s next. If Gorcha never comes back, he will be killed. But if he does survive, it could be much worse. In six days, he will become a vampiric vourdalak and have no problem killing and dining on all of those that he loves.

The Marquis instantly falls for the mysterious Sdenka, a young woman who gave her heart to another traveler and now cannot be married. She refuses to discuss her family, the supernatural curse that her father may suffer, and even resists being seduced by nearly launching the powdered wigged man off a cliff, the same place she was to meet her lover and escape her doomed family. But now, that man is dead and her hopes are as well.

And then Gorcha is found, a dead thing barely able to move, demanding a feast and that their dog be shot and killed. He has become something unearthly — the puppet used for this film is astounding, feeling like something out of the art of Mike Mignola come to life — and like all vourdalaks, the blood that they want most is the blood they have created.

He does exactly that, working his way through the family, as well as pitting them against one another. he forces the Marquis and Sdenka to dance for him while revealing that he was the one who killed her lover. Then, his son Piotr, appears covered in makeup and flowers, ready to destroy his begetter before he’s shot, his blood spraying all over his sister’s face. Jegor attacks the nobleman and says that in the morning, he will be given a horse and if he ever comes back, he will be murdered.

Chained in the dungeons overnight, the nobleman must watch helplessly as the now undead Vlad kills his mother, Anja, just before Sdenka tells him that she plans to finally leap to her demise. As he rides away, he plans to return, looking for the woman he loves. He finds her back at her home and she finally seduces him, wrapping her thighs around in as she begins to drink his blood, revealing that the Marquis is between the thighs of Gorcha. He leaps to his feet, stakes the vampire, and leaves the house in flames.

He rides to find Sdenka and tells her that while his time is short, she can live. He gives his horse and a map to get to Europe, then takes her place, jumping to his death. She rides away, chewing on a shroud, just as her father once did, leaving us wondering if she will pass her curse to the noblewoman who has written that she has taken her in.

Shot in Super 16 and filled with colors unseen in movies in decades and a family that destroys each other through supernatural means, but they may have been destroyed in spirit long before. As Piotr tells the Marquis, “Love itself is a curse in these parts.” Gorcha uses that love against them, whether placing himself as their protector by hanging the head of Alibek above their door or alternating between cruelty and kindness, just like every abuser. Is the Marquis any better, a man not above bringing up his station while fretting about the malaise of the upper class?

This is above all else beautiful and eerie, with a lead vampire more alive than most human actors, a bloodsucker who even sounds terrifying, sucking at his burial cloth, hungry for those he once supposedly loved. I felt just as hungry as him, devouring every frame of this masterwork.

EDITOR’S NOTE: RPM was on the CBS Late Movie on October 25, 1973 and April 20 and August 31, 1976.

Stanley Kramer called his movies heavy dramas but they’re what are often called message films. A liberal, he brought issues to the public eye through his movies like the dangers of nuclear war (On the Beach), fascism (Judgement at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools), creationism against evolutionism (Inherit the Wind), greed (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) and racism (The Defiant Ones, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner).

While Pauline Kael saw his movies as “melodramas,” and “irritatingly self-righteous,” she also had to realize that they had “redeeming social importance.”

But in 1970, maybe he was past his expiration date.

Did he feel like Professor F.W.J. “Paco” Perez (Anthony Quinn) does in this movie? For years, Paco has been the radical, the one that stood outside the mainstream. He says at one point that he fought Franco and McCarthy and has learned so much, but the young people don’t want to learn anything. Did Kramer feel that way, an old man in the New Hollywood that was so much more in touch with the youth?

Is Paco just a fifty-year-old fanny chaser, as out of touch with the time as the administration he’s been asked to be a part of?

Radical student activists — Paco is impressed that the blacks and whites have worked together — occupy the administration building with a list of 12 demands. President Tyler (John Zaremba, who spent the 70s and 80s wandering the Earth searching for the best beans for Hills Brothers Cofee) resigns and the Board of Trustees looks at the list that the students have written up of the presidents they would be happy with.

Top on the list? Paco.

It’s after midnight and he’s asleep with his grad student girlfriend Rhoda (Ann-Margret). Yet he’s urged to rush out and fix things. The next day, he starts his new job, showing up on a motorcycle.

Paco reads their demands and many of them, like inner-city scholarships, a college reinvestment program, no military research on campus and adding an African American to the all-white Board of Trustees make sense. But the idea that students can hire and fire faculty doesn’t work for him. He’s already reached the first time where his theory and reality begin to not work together.

With Rossiter (Gary Lockwood) and Steve Dempsey (Paul Dempsey) leading the students, Paco tries to be the person between them and the Board of Trustees. But when Rossiter says that he will destroy all of the campus’ computers, Paco has to make the tough decision to call in the police. They come charging in with tear gas, turning their hero professor into just one of the old people never to be trusted. When the cops round up the students, Rhoda is one of them.

What they don’t know is that Paco has signed off on their bail. Yet he still walks past the crowd and is screamed and booed at. He has learned the hard way that the lessons of books and classrooms often mean little in the real world.

I really liked the songs by Melaine, “We Don’t Know Where We’re Goin’” and “Stop! I Don’t Wanna Hear It Any More,” that were in this. It’s quite preachy, but it also feels like this movie was Kramer attempting to determine where he fit in any longer. Then again, Kramer would say that this was his least favorite film that made the lowest amount of money. The dialogue may get silly sometimes, but that’s because it’s written by Erich Segal, who also did Love Story.

After this movie, however, I understand why my dad and other older male relatives would say Ann-Margaret’s name with the reverence they otherwise reserved for the saints.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bad Seed was on the CBS Late Movie on March 29, May 10 and November 29, 1973.

John Waters, in his book Role Models, claimed that he wanted to be Rhoda Penmark, the titular antagonist of The Bad Seed. “I wanted to be Rhoda. I pretended I was her. Why? I wanted to strike fear in the hearts of my playmates.”

There’s really no other movie quite like this one. Sure, we’ve covered plenty of other kids in trouble and kids causing trouble movies over the last two weeks, but this is the ultimate.

Based upon the 1954 play of the same name by Maxwell Anderson — which is based upon William March’s 1954 novel — the entire movie revolves around one person: Rhoda (Patty McCormack). She’s doted on by her parents, but the truth is, she’s quite literally menace incarnate. Who else would be so upset about losing a penmanship contest that she’d be moved to murder?

How did she get that way? Is it because her mother (Nancy Kelly, who won a  Tony on Broadway for the play and was nominated for an Oscar) is the daughter of a serial killer who was adopted by a kindly cop? Is it because her father (William Hopper, who was later Paul Drake on Perry Mason and is the son of Hedda Hopper) isn’t around? Is society to blame? Or are some people just plain evil?

In the novel and play, the mother dies and the bad seed survives. The Motion Picture Production Code could never allow crime to pay, so Christine’s life is saved and Rhoda is struck down by the only thing that can really stop her: the hand of God, tossing a bolt of lightning her way. To further keep the censors away, Warner Brothers added an “adults only” warning to the film’s advertising.

This film is packed with great performances. There’s Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup, the caretaker who snarls every line at Rhoda, sure that she’s committed some crime as he sleeps in a bed of excelsior. Or Eileen Heckart as Hortense Daigle, a woman whose grief has reduced to a spirit of sheer nothingness. Or Evelyn Varden as Monica Breedlove, an older woman who wants to desperately see the good in Rhoda (she’s equally amazing in The Night of the Hunter). Hey — there’s even Frank Cady here, who would go on to play Sam Drucker in several seventies hicksploitation sitcoms.

I also love the end of this movie, where the entire cast comes out as if they’re still on Broadway and doing their curtain call.  After her credit is shown, Nancy Kelly puts Patty McCormack over her knee and gives her a spanking as they both laugh, trying to break the tension because Rhoda is so violently real, more villainous than any cartoon villain you’ll see in every single movie thereafter.

The Bad Seed has led to plenty of remakes and reimaginings. It was remade in 1985 as a TV movie that starred Carrie Welles, Blair Brown, Lynn Redgrave, David Carradine, Richard Kiley and Chad Allen. This version uses the original ending, but isn’t fondly remembered. There was another remake in 2018 that aired on Lifetime. It was directed by Rob Lowe and Patty McCormack even shows up in a cameo.

In 1995, McCormack would star in the first of two Mommy films that are kind of, sort of unofficial sequels. The Lifetime film House of Deadly Secrets, also starring McCormack, is another film that’s a spiritual second to this one. There’s also an off-Broadway musical adaption called Ruthless! and just about every bad kid movie that’s come after 1956 owes this one a debt.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Black Scorpion was on the CBS Late Movie on March 21, 1973 and March 7 and August 1, 1975.

This movie has a good FX pedigree: Willis O’Brien, creator of the stop-motion animation effects for the original King Kong, was the special effects supervisor. There’s an urban legend that the spider pit creatures that were cut from that film show up here. While Ray Harryhausen’s An Animated Life would claim that many of O’Brien’s models were still in storage at RKO when this was made, many of them were pretty decayed by that point.

An earthquake happens in Mexico and a new volcano rises, along with someone who believes that a demon bull has come out of hell. If only it could be so simple. Instead, the beasts are gigantic prehistoric scorpions.

How do you kill a monstrous scorpion? You fill an arena with meat and then shoot it with a spear that’s attached to an electric cable, then spark that thing up. You have to admire that level of ingenuity.

October 1958 Playboy Playmate Mara Corday was probably used to this kind of thing by this point, having already dealt with Tarantula and The Giant Claw. I can see dealing with one giant monster, but three? Yeah. That’s being a magnet for kaiju.

An even bigger coincidence is that six of the actors in this movie — Carlos Rivas, Mario Navarro, Pascual García Peña, José Chávez, Roberto Contreras and Margarito Luna — all appear in another Willis O’Brien-animated giant monster movie, The Beast of Hollow Mountain.