Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
Rogelio A. Gonzalez made more than 70 movies, but I wonder if he ever made anything near as good as this movie, which is perhaps one of the strangest films I’ve ever had the delight to witness.
I was wondering how to even describe this movie. Basically, Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe, Miss Mexico 1953 and a third-runner up for Miss Universe) and Beta (Lorena Velazquez, Miss Mexico 1960 and also Zorina queen of the vampires in Santo vs. Las Mujeres Vampiro) have come from Venus to find men to repopulate their planet. Of course, they can’t resist biting people or falling in love with Lauriano (Eulalio “Piporro” Gonzalez, one of the kings of golden age of Mexico comedy and the literal embodiment of Northern Mexican culture), a singing cowboy.
Sure, that would set up a great movie, but this is Mexico. Which means that the ship has a robot named Tor who is collecting a whole bunch of monsters — why, the title translates as Ship of Monsters, surprise! — and those monsters are about to go crazy. There’s Uk the cyclops, the many armed Carasus, Prince of Mars Tagual, Utirr the spider and the dinosaur skeleton named Zok. Also, Tor falls for a jukebox. And some of the special effects were ripped off from the Russian movie Road to the Stars.
Imagine if Ed Wood lived in Mexico, had a better budget, lucked out and had magnificent actresses willing to wear swimsuits and high heels, as well as a singing cowboy. Then we’d cut open slice open a peyote cactus and make him sit in a cave until he made this and it still might not this charming and odd.
Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
In 1965, director Massey Cramer and writer Bob Corley made The Legend of Blood Mountain. It’s a comedy about reporter Bestoink Dooley (George Ellis), who comes to Blood Mountain to learn about the legend — see what I did there? — of the creature who is said to rise when a drop of blood is spilled. Everyone else thinks there’s a serial killer, even if we didn’t know what that word meant, as Robert Ressler first used it in a presentation in 1974.
In 1975. Donn Davison — the manager of the Dragon Art Theatre in Gainesville, FL, as well as the director of the “Asylum of the Insane” inserts in She-Freak, Honey Britches and Moonshiner’s Woman, plus the producer of Secrets of the Gods and The Force Beyond; even more, he was a hype man for Film Ventures International and played a folklore expert in Crypt of Dark Secrets and the antiquities expert in Mardi Gras Massacre — must have seen how much money that The Legend of Boggy Creek was making. So he took that aforementioned movie — now ten years old — and added on some “real people” and himself up front as an expert. Then, he shared it with the world.
When he refers to himself as a “World Traveler, Lecturer and Psychic Investigator” who are we to say he isn’t?
If you’re wondering who Bestoink Dooley is, he was the host of the Big Movie Shocker, which aired on Fridays at 11:30 p.m. on Altanta’s WAGA-TV Channel 5. Played by George Ellis, he was also in the movies Swamp Country, Honey Britches (which was renamed and re-released as both Shantytown Honeymoon and later Demented Death Farm Massacre) and Moonrunners, as the villain Jake Rainey. That movie kind of disappeared, but would return when its director Gy Waldron took the concept and narrator Waylon Jennings and went to Hollywood to sell it as The Dukes of Hazzard. Ellis never got to play Boss Hogg.
According to this amazing article in Oxford American, “The Bestoink Dooley Fan Club,” Ellis also bought a theater known as the Festival Cinema. Atlanta magazine described it as a venue where “patrons would often come as much as 30 minutes before the show started to sit in the plush lobby in white sculptured chairs and leaf through copies of Sight and Sound or talk in muted voices and sip the complimentary Viennese coffee.” Despite introducing the city to the French New Wave and New German Cinema, Ellis was broke. So he started showing porn and got arrested for obscenity. Years later, he’d open other theaters — the Film Forum at Ansley Mall, the Film Forum on Peachtree and the Bijou Cinema — all places where “You can trace the roots of Atlanta’s film culture through these theaters.”
As if this movie doesn’t have enough nexus points, the bikini-clad daughter of a town doctor who falls for Dooley by the name of Phyllis Stinson is played by Erin Fleming. She’s also in Hercules in New York, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) and Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York but is best-known as the secretary and manager of Groucho Marx. While many of the actor’s friends admitted that she did much to revive his popularity and getting him an honorary Academy Award Marx, many also believed that she psychologically and physically abused him. After his death, she was ordered to repay $472,000 which she had taken from his estate. She’s gorgeous in this movie, yet sher life went so wrong over the last few decades she was in this plane of reality. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, arrested for carrying a concealed and loaded gun and lived out the rest of those dark years homeless and delusional before shooting herself at the age of 61.
Nearly everyone in this is either overacting, reading off cue cards — Davison is wearing sunglasses so you can’t tell that he is doing exactly that — or repeating lines because they think that someone is going to edit this movie.
Well, there is editing ten years later, as the strange original monster has been replaced with fog and a sasquatch.
“BIG FOOT” is more than a legend… They swear to God it’s true!” That’s the kind of words that get people in theaters and drive-ins. You know what else helps? Having your own theme song.
“The Ballad of McCullough Mountain” by Tim York is the kind of theme kind of demanded after Boggy Creek. As for three year old me, this movie may have terrified me as much as the frozen Bigfoot that came to the parking lot of my K-Mart. My aunt went to see it and brought back pictures. I remember yelling at her, because now Bigfoot knew that I knew he was here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Maneater was on the CBS Late Movie on September 26, 1975 and May 9, 1977.
Directed by Vince Edwards — Ben Casey himself — and written by Edwards, Marcus Demian and Jimmy Sangster, Maneater is another retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, this time with two couples — Nick and Gloria Baron (Ben Gazzara and Sheree North) and Shep and Polly (Kip Niven and Laurette Spang) — who are on an RV vacation.
Look, if you go on an RV trip in a 70s movie, you’re dead.
As their camper breaks down, they’re helped by Carl Brenner (Richard Basehart), who is the owner of two tigers. As money is low, he’s been feeding them by causing accidents and having the tigers get a buffet of tourists. But first, he has his wife Paula (Claire Brennen) serve them a rattlesnake dinner. Then he shows them his private camp area and offers it to them, which they should have said no to, because after dinner he was going on about conversation starters like “Men kill for pleasure. Animals kill to survive.”
What follows is cats chasing humans and Ben Gazzara proving that while he’s a city boy, he knows how to survive.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Avalanche was on the CBS Late Movie on June 28 and September 4, 1985.
Corey Alan directed a ton of TV, 1971’s The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio and this Rock Hudson-starring disasterpiece in which the much beloved actor plays ski resort owner David Shelby, a man who owns a ski lodge so we can all totoally identify with him. He also invites his ex-wife Caroline Brace (Mia Farrow!) to visit in the hopes that he can convince her that he’s a changed man.
His opposite is Nick Thorne (Robert Forster), an environmental photographer who knows that that David has built his resort where he shouldn’t. One look at the title of the movie should tell you what’s coming next. When Caroline battles Nick over being a control obsessed freak all over again, well, she ends up in Nick’s arms just in time for David’s business partner’s plane to crash into the mountain and send the snow into everyone’s lives.
The end of this movie — after so much destruction and loss of life — is really all about Mia Farrow choosing between Rock Hudson and Robert Forster. I mean, what else should this be about?
Originally budgeted at $6.5 million, producer Roger Corman cut that amount –will the shocks ever end? — before shooting began in Colorado. There’s plenty of styrofoam for snow, which is kind of obvious. It was still the most expensive movie that New World ever made.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Mind Over Murder was on the CBS Late Movie on July 30, 1982.
Suzy (Deborah Raffi, Death Wish 3) is a dancer who suddenly has psychic visions where time slows down and she can witness a strange bald man (Andrew Prine, as creepy as it gets) assaulting and murdering women. Her boyfriend Jason (Bruce Davison) refuses to believe her but she gets some help from government agent Ben Kushing (David Ackroyd) and his partner Ted Beasly (Robert Englund). She can see the bald man killing everyone on an airplane and they hope that she can use her Eyes of Laura Mars powers and stop him.
Also known as Psychomania, Are You Alone Tonight? and Deadly Vision, this was directed by Ivan Nagy and written by Robert Carrington (Venom, Wait Until Dark).
This is the best IMDB review ever: “Deborah Raffin punched in the stomach? If this is the same movie I’m thinking about, what I recall the most is the lead girl (very pretty) Debra Raffin (I think) was punched real hard in the stomach by a bald guy. The punches weren’t seen but they were heard and then she was seen on her knees, doubled up on the floor – suffering for a long period of time, holding her stomach and bent over. I was rather young when I first saw this movie and I remember that scene of the girl on her knees, bent over double holding her stomach and in so much pain. I remember think How could someone do such a thing to such pretty girl? Her acting in the part was superb. She acted as though she had really been punched in the stomach.” 10 out of 10 stars.
Speaking of creepy, Prine is incredible in this, yelling dialogue like, “What do you want to do first? Make love or die?” She also gets to see him shirtless and glistening with oil while wearing pants that feel painted on as he stalks and kills several women.
And creepier still, let’s talk Ivan Nagy. A former bookmaker for the mob and boyfriend of Heidi Fleiss; he also directed episodes of CHIPs and HBO’s The Hitchhiker, as well as the movies Captain America II: Death Too Soonand Pushing Up Daisies. He made Deadly Hero, a film where an unbalanced cop becomes a hero after killing the stalker of a woman, then becoming obsessed with her, as well as the Gary Coleman as an arsonist TV movie Playing With Fire and Intimate Encounters, a TV film where Donna Mills get all sexed up. But it’s his movie Skinner that this reminds me of, a giallo-style thriller that has a killer pursuing Ricki Lake and being pursued himself by a scarred Traci Lords, one of the many sex workers that he’s cut off their skin but the only one who has survived. It’s beyond scummy in the way that only someone who knows the world they’re writing about can create.
After that movie, Nagy went into adult films, directing Izzy Sleeze’s Casting Couch Cuties, Trailer Trash Teri and Wild Desire.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Loneliest Runner was on the CBS Late Movie on August 12 and December 15, 1987.
This was written, produced and directed by Michael Landon, who really was the loneliest runner. That’s because he wet his bed until he was 14 and his mother hung his sheets out to dry so that all the neighborhood kids could see that he couldn’t sleep a night without pissing himself.
During his childhood, Landon had to deal with his mother threatening suicide. On a family beach vacation, she tried to drown herself, but he rescued her. Later, his mother acted as if nothing happened, and the stress of this led to him bedwetting even more.
Before he tore his shoulder, Landon wanted to be a javelin thrower. Instead, he became a teenage werewolf, a cowboy, a settler and an angel on the road.
John Curtis (Lance Kerwin) can’t sleep a night without getting the bed soaked and not from wet dreams. No, he urinates the sack nightly and runs to a local laundromat and washes the sheets when his parents are asleep. He also stays up all night during sleepovers. You would too if you had parents like Arnold (Brian Keith) and Alice (DeAnn Mears). She yells at both of them for being less than men and in response, Arnold slaps his son around. This makes him leak the sheets even more.
A young girl, Nancy Rizzi (Melissa Sue Anderson) shows interest, but all John can think about is running home to get those stained sheets down every day. However, his mother’s horrible parenting skills and his father’s inability to reveal that he also was a bedwetter means that he learns how to run fast. Really fast. He makes it to the Olympics, his father tells his mother to shut up and he gets the girl.
This movie inspired “Peanut Butter, Eggs, and Dice,” an episode of Mr. Show in which “The Bob Lamonta Story” is told.
Despite the earnestness of this film, it’s heart is in the right place. It was a staple of made for TV movies and it made me worry every night when I went to bed, sure that I’d be peeing everywhere. When I woke up and the bed was dry, I thanked Michael Landon.
Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
Directed, written and produced by William Edwards, this movie starts with this line: “I saw a panorama of beautiful hills. However, as beautiful as it may seem, death lurked behind those beautiful hills and beautiful women. I don’t know which came first.”
Count Alucard (Vince Kelly) has brought a reporter named Mike (Billy Whitton) to his cave and turned him into Irving Jackalman, a werewolf henchman who brings him women to both feed on and make love to. The jackal or werewolf mask is from another movie that Edwards wrote, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals, which has five minutes of John Carradine in it.
The problem is that Mike’s girlfriend Ann (Ann Hollis, who was also in The Ravager) is so attractive that the vampire must have her even after a whole movie of him tying up women, making out with them and then drinking their hemoglobin.
Producer Whit Boyd also was behind 60s sleaze like Spiked Heels and Black Nylons, Hot Blooded Woman, The Sex Shuffle, Scarlet Negligee, The Office Party, Party Girls and Eat, Drink and Make Merrie. In April 1970, sheriff’s deputies in Pensacola, FL seized prints of this movie and I Am Curious (Yellow) from the Ritz Theatre and charged the manager with two counts of unlawful showing of an obscene film and maintaining a public nuisance.
Where this gets even better is that the original sound shot with the movie was so bad and didn’t match the footage that the entire thing was dubbed in the studio. As well as additional footage shot in Dallas, using local talent, there are only two voices in this movie and both sound like old vaudeville comedians talking over some jazz instead of any dialogue for most of the film.
It makes this roughie feel almost cute, I almost said, then I looked up and a werewolf was strangling a naked women, who was covered with blood, and still raw dogging — I guess, right? — her.
One of the few actresses in this to do anything else is Sue Allen. She plays Carol in this and is also in the X-rated 1970 movie Cindy and Donna. She would go on to sing in several cartoons, including Yogi’s First Christmas.
Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
You better like the song “Beware of the 4-D Witch!” when you watch this. Written by Joe Bisko with vocals by Johnny by the Way and music by Attila Galamb, it’s one of two songs that plays through nearly all of this movie, which wasn’t recorded with synched sound and instead has voiceovers. You will hear this song so many times that you may lose your mind.
The other songs are Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” Ravel’s “Bolero,” Mussorgsky’s “Night On Bald Mountain,” Holst’s “Mars, Bringer of War (from The Planets suite)” and strangely enough, “A Saucerful of Secrets” by Pink Floyd.
I have no idea who Victor Luminera was or is. This is all that he created and left us with and you know, it’s enough. How does one describe this movie?
Let me try.
The end of the 70s occult fascination mixed with props made by Ben Cooper overlayed with nudie cutie style filmmaking that never becomes sexy all with overlaid images like you’re tripping acid at the Fillmore while Kenneth Anger possesses Victor to make something like his films but with no budget and the lowest quality camera ever made.
Cindy (Margo, her only name) promised her daddy she’d be a virgin but she loves the occult and is as horny as me after walking through the saloon doors to the adult section of Heads Together. Abigail the 4D Witch (Esoterica) promises her a rich fantasy sex life if she follows her. Together, they have Super Orgasms and travel on the astral plane like the wet dreams of Chris Claremont.
One of their missions has them making gay neighbor Mr. Jones (Kelly Guthrie, The Sexorcist) straight — problematic! — and then they get Cindy’s friend Jan Kleinmetz (Tracy Handfuss, who unlike many folks in this was in more than one movie; she’s also in A Clock Work Blue, Did Baby Shoot Her Sugardaddy? and in the starring role — Toni Carrione — in The Goddaughter) all goofed up on spider venom and human blood, which leads her to play with a snake that slithers its way out of her asshole. Yes, this happens and it feels like a Tim Vigil comic book come to life.
The problems happen when the fantasy sex — as Abigail says, “Let’s fantasy fuck now!” — gets out of hand and Jan gets hurt. It turns out that the 4D Witch is angry that Cindy — in a past life — stole her lover and this is all about revenge, but like a square up reel, Cindy learns that prayer can stop the occult. This leads to Jan waking up from death and saying, “Salem, witch bitch!”
Somehow, the movie continues and Cindy’s brother Mark (Tom Yerian) becomes the King of the Sex Vampires, I shit you not. If you’re shocked that a copy of Look with Anton LaVey on the cover appears, you haven’t been paying attention.
The Fourth Dimension is beyond good and evil, so who are we to judge the 4D Witch? It remains untouched by science. Somewhere in all this, Jan also has a sapphic moment with her Aunt Fanny (Annette Michael, who appeared as Annette Anderson in Flesh Gordon). Jan has more problems with liking women than with incest, so…yeah. The only thing that can stop this 4D Witch and her curse is an actual orgasm from a doctor, which makes me wonder about said therapist’s ethics and the idea that reality can be more powerful than fantasy.
This is the kind of movie that promises and delivers necrophilia and yet censors out every use of the word fuck after the first time it is uttered.
Amazingly — thanks to Bill Van Ryn of Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum — this played Hawaiian drive-ins with The Devil’s Rain!An Anton LaVey double feature!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Kill and Kill Again was on the CBS Late Movie on November 4, 1983 and February 15, 1985.
Kill and Kill Again is a sequel to the film Kill or Be Killed and tells another adventure of Steve Chase (James Ryan), a secret agent martial artist who has been hired by Kandy Kane (Anneline Kriel, whose life should be a movie, between having singer Richard Loring writing the song “Sweet Anneline” about her, followed by nude photos she took for his friend Roy Hilligenn being leaked — in 1977 — as well as being present when boyfriend Henke Pistorius — father of Oscar Pistorius, the legless South African athlete who would shoot and kill his girlfriend — shot himself while cleaning his pistol, as well as a singer and Playboy South Africa cover girl, as well as Miss South Africa 1974 and was later crowned Miss World 1974) to find her father Dr. Horatio Kane (John Ramsbottom), a scientist who has learned how to control minds while trying to turn potatoes into an energy source.
Yes, if you thought Kill and Kill Again would be normal, oh no. Oh no.
The government gives Steve $5 million dollars to pick his own team of super agents, which includes former martial arts champion Gypsy Billy (Norman Robinson), the mystic mystery man who only answers to The Fly (Stan Schmidt, a South African master of Shotokan karate), the goofball Hot Dog (Bill Flynn) who when we first meet him is challenging men to stand in a room while he shoots bullets at them and the former pro wrestler and now construction worker gorilla (Ken Gampu, King Solomon’s Mines).
They’re sent to stop Wellington Forsyth III, a billionaire who has now become Marduk (Michael Mayer), who has taken over the town of Ironville and is looking to create an army of warriors to take over the world. He has wanted Steve to come to challenge his champion, The Optimus (Eddie Dori), an unstoppable fighter.
Yes, in the world of South African martial arts, white men are the greatest fighters in the world.
In the commentary track for this movie, James Ryan said that the third film would have been called Most Dangerous Man and had him appear opposite Sharon Stone. However, FVI went out of business and he headed back to South Africa.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Curse of the Black Widow was on the CBS Late Movie on April 13 and October 19, 1983 and June 6, 1984. Bill Van Ryn also covered this movie for the site.
For the last few years, men have been found dead in Los Angeles with small bites all over them. It hits home for Mark Higbie (Tony Franciosa, Tenebrae) when a woman picks up one of his friends and soon leaves him killed in the same way. As a detective, Mark knows some cops, like Lieutenant Gully Conti (Vic Morrow), who lets him in on the secret: the men are filled with spider venom and the same woman, Valerie Steffan (Patty Duke) is always near the scene of the murders.
One of the suspects, Leigh Lockwood (Donna Mills) — her sister Laura (also Duke) is the other the police are following — hires Mark, as she once dated every single one of the men who were killed. Also: the girls’ father was killed in a plane crash that they survived, after which one of them was bitten by spiders. When he meets the Native American who saved them, he’s told that some women are affected by an ancient curse passed through the female line. During the full moon, these women turn into giant spiders in times of stress — werespiders! — murder men, encase them in webbing and feed on them. These women have a red hourglass-shaped birthmark on their abdomens, like a black widow. The only thing that can kill them is fire. Also, a bartender says that he saw a giant spider kill one of the victims.
Spoiler: Valeria and Laura are the same person, driven by a hate of the sister and how successful she is with men. Only their mother (June Lockhart) — now in a coma after seeing her turn into her spider shape — and their nanny Olga (June Allyson) know the truth. Meanwhile, Mark is falling for Leigh when he should maybe pay attention to his assistant Flaps (Roz Kelly). But what do I know? I’ve never investigated a giant werespider murder mystery before.
I love this movie. It’s packed with character actors — Max Gail, Jeff Corey and Hard Boiled Haggerty are also in this — plus Sid Caesar makes an unexpected appearance. Directed by Dan Curtis and written by Robert Blees (Savage Harvest, Frogs), this movie will teach you so many things but foremost that giant spiders sound like Rodan.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.