ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to A.C. for sending this. It would fit Junesploitation on June 12, which was New World day. This was also covered in “Exploring: 10 Tangerine Dream soundtracks.”

These days, we live lives of great convenience. Just about any movie we want to watch is only a few clicks of the remote control or keyboard away. Yet, even with this luxury, I yearn for the days of old when I used to scour the catalogs of mail-order businesses like Video Search of Miami and Sinister Cinema or the dealers’ tables at cons in search of elusive films. Those treasure hunts were thrilling when you unearthed a gem that had never been released on home media in the United States, such as Death Line a/k/a Raw Meat (my blurry VHS dupe bore the title Tren de la Mort and had Spanish subtitles) or Jess Franco’s The Bloody Judge a/k/a Night of the Blood Beast (my copy was
entitled The Throne of Fire and was in French with no English subtitles).

But I realized those fun times were over when even Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, a film never released theatrically in the United States, got a special edition DVD. For years, I’d stared at the same three stills from that film in books on horror films. But now, it was mine to own. Today, everything, no matter how obscure, gets an official home-media release. Well, almost everything. Wavelength, a science-fiction film from 1983, still has never been released to DVD or streaming in this country.

Robert Carradine is a down-on-his-luck musician. One day, when things are looking bleak, he meets an attractive young woman in a bar. She’s played by the estimable Cherie Currie of the groundbreaking rock band The Runaways. They quickly hit it off, hook up, and become a couple. He soon learns that his new girlfriend is psychic. She starts hearing strange voices, leading them to an underground bunker in the desert where the evil government is experimenting on three captured aliens. With the help of a drunken old coot played by Keenan Wynn (of course), they work to free the child-like aliens so that they can return to their mothership and go home. In other words, it’s the same plot as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with bigger ambitions, but on a fraction of the budget. The beautiful special effects shot in the finale delayed the film’s release until after E.T. had become a box-office behemoth. Perhaps in an alternate universe, Wavelength came first. One can only imagine.

Sincerely written and directed by Mike Gray, a former documentary filmmaker who wrote The China Syndrome and Chuck Norris’s Code of Silence, charmingly acted by Carradine and Currie, with a typically great score by Tangerine Dream, Wavelength was once a staple of HBO. Now it’s fallen into the black hole of forgotten films. (A soft-looking rip from an old VHS tape is available on YouTube.) It’s not a world-beater, but it’s a well-done B-movie, which was released theatrically by New World Pictures with little fanfare and even less box-office success. (I saw it in an empty theater during its original run.) Here’s to Wavelength’s rediscovery. Like an artifact from a film grail quest in the good old days, it’s a tiny gem.

June 23: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Oliver Drake may have started as an actor, but he’s probably best-known as a prolific screenwriter (151 movies!) and director (41 films, including two adult movies — Angelica: The Young Vixen and Ride A Wild Stud as Revilo Ekard and he was not fooling anyone with that Alucard scam) of low-budget Western films.

A former cattle rancher, he brought his own trained horse with him to Hollywood. 1917, appearing with his trained horse. After acting in silent films, he directed, wrote and produced films for Gene Autry, Tex Ritter and others for RKO, Monogram and Republic. He was so invested in the Western film genre that he used his Pearblossom, California ranch for location shooting.

But by 1969, he was pretty much done in Hollywood. He’d moved to Las Vegas and decided to make a horror movie. Many claim that he didn’t ever work in horror before, but he wrote the 1968 proto slasher No Tears for the Damned AKA Las Vegas Strangler as well as The Mummy’s Curse, Riders of the Whistling Skull, the giallo-esque Sinister Hands and Weird Woman.

In Tom Weaver’s Interviews With B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, this movie’s star Anthony Eisley (Dracula vs. Frankenstein) said, “The director was quite senile at the time — the absolute epitome of total confusion.”

That claim is denied by the director’s daughter, who said on IMDB, “Oliver Drake would have agreed with these reviews. I should know because he was my father. He was his harshest critic & did not enjoy watching this after it resurfaced on VHS. It is also incorrect that this was the only monster movie he ever made, The Mummy’s Curse comes to mind. But I completely disagree with comments by Anthony Eisley that my father was senile during the making of this film! Its true that this film was never finished and sat on the shelf for years. My father went on to write two books, both of which were very well received by critics. He attended many Western Film Festivals as the guest of honor and gave very informative and entertaining speeches about the early days of film-making.”

The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals was written and co-produced by William C. Edwards. He only has three movies on his IMDB page with one being the aforementioned Ride A Wild Stud (“When men were men — and women didn’t forget it!”) and Dracula (The Dirty Old Man), another movie that has a jackal-man, as Dracula — using the Alucard name, see it never gets old — enslaves Dr. Irving Jekyll, making him a werejackal and forcing him to bring women to his cabin. It’s the kind of movie where you can see the stick that’s holding up a vampire bat.

Man, Edwards loved the Alucard trick. After all, this has a mummy named Sirakh instead of Kharis and the Ananka character — yes, he also adored Universal horror movies — is Akanna. Well, guess what? This movie is kind of, sort of a sequel to that movie, as it brings back the werejackal under the name Irving Jackalman.

So how did this get made? Well, Drake ended up in Vegas and Edwards was working with Vega International Pictures. According to an article in The Las Vegas Sun, this was just the first of many films the studio had in the works: “The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackal is designed as a breakaway from the high camp and pseudo-intellectual spook picture. Said one Vega executive, “There’s no social comment and no hidden meaning. The horror characters were designed to scare the hell out of the audience and that’s that.””

Supposedly, the production ran out of financing before it was completed and all of the footage was confiscated by an unpaid contractor, which is how it ended up on VHS when Academy released a decimated looking copy in 1985, complete with sitar music — I guess that’s Egyptian, said someone — and surf rock instrumentals instead of whatever music the filmmakers intended. Or maybe Drake himself was looking to sell it at one point. There are also vague reports of it playing in 1969 at an L.A. theater for investors and on a horror UHF show. Somehow, Drake sold They Ran for Their Lives to the CBS Late Movie, so anything is possible.

Maybe I should tell you the story of this movie now.

The sarcophagus of Princess Akana (Marliza Pons, who was a famous belly dancer in Las Vegas and supposedly had an uncredited part in Cleopatra and is also in Did Baby Shoot Her Sugardaddy? along with Rene Bond) is being displayed by controversial archeologist Dave Barrie (Anthony Eisley), along with another mummy. She’s remarkably well-preserved and he falls in love with her, falling for the curse of the jackal, which transforms him into a jackal by the light of the full moon. And by jackal, I mean he looks a lot like my chihuahua.

Let me tell you, the place that he stores these mummies is in no way hermetically sealed or scientific minded. It’s a shack probably in Hendersonville and it looks like a total mess.

The princess wakes up and Dave falls in love with her, taking her on dates and teaching her how to put on a bra, which is a modern invention that she doesn’t understand. I have to tell you, I’ve seen a lot in movies but nothing prepared me for a movie where a werejackal by night explains to an undead Egyptian how a Maidenform works. They also go see a Vegas show, at which point the other mummy awakens and attacks an exotic dancer before blasting his way through a wall.

I was wondering, how could this get better? And then John Carradine shows up for all of a minute to say scientific things like, “I can tell from the mold accumulation that this casket is 4,000 years old.”

Is this heaven? Yes, if heaven has a werejackal and a mummy battling on Fremont Street back when Vegas was seedier and cooler and filled with tourists who just look and keep gambling, because yeah, sure, you see monsters fighting every day but you only get the chance to do Vegas once every few years.

Can it get better? Well, the mummy is played by a man named Saul Goldsmith, which is the least frightening mummy name ever.

This is eighty minutes of film with two sentences of plot, which is just how I like it. You come here wanting to see monsters and man, you get monsters. It also completely rips off the Universal version of The Mummy but adds in a Herschell Gordon Lewis-style tongue ripping out effect. It also has a scene where Dave takes Akana — who also has a magic ring that can hypnotize people — on a double date where he claims that “She’s not from here. She comes from … back east.”

The cinematographer of this was William G. Troiano, who also worked on the Vegas productions Ride a Wild Stud, They Ran for Their Lives and No Tears for the Damned. He’d follow this by going to work on Horror of the Blood Monsters. He also shot She Freak, The Devil’s Messenger and The Wild World of Batwoman. What a career!

The makeup effects — such as they are — are by Byrd Holland, whose credits stretch across the gamut of my cinematic obsessions, working on everything from Rabid and The Baby to Lemora, The Undertaker and His Pals and Terror Circus. Supposedly, he spent days doing a transformation scene that was cut from the film. He was assisted by Jack Shafton (the creature developer for The Intruder Within and effects on Jennifer) and Tony Tierney (effects for Dracula vs. Frankenstein and The Astro-Zombies). Its effects come from Harry Woolman, who was also on Evilspeak, Hangar 18, In Search of Historic Jesus, The Incredible Melting Man, Rattlers, Supervan, Love Camp 7, Dolemite, Don’t Go Near the Park and so many more movies. Again, what a career!

This movie really is a nexus point for my fascinations.

It has no fewer than four assistant directors. Wyott Ordung shot second unit for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters and wrote Robot Monster. Willard Kirkham was on second unit for The Dark and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Russell Hayden only worked on this film, but Robert Farfan was an assistant director on Rebel Without a Cause, which is classy, and more movies I’d be proud to say I worked on, like Bride of the Monster and Moonfire.

This is a movie filled with werejackal murders of winos and cops. I’ve oversold it beyond belief so when you watch it, you may wonder why I love it so. I love the idea of it, I adore the fact that it exists and this to me is why movies are made in the first place. It has Carradine solemnly intone, “We can’t just stand by and let a 4,000-year-old mummy and  a jackal man take over the city!” It was made by people who had astounding careers both before and after. And here we are, in a world where we can say, “I know I could watch a movie that critics worldwide agree is true cinema that makes the blind see and the lame walk, but I’m going to watch The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals and disappoint everyone.”

Severin is releasing this as a totally cleaned up version that I can’t wait to watch. They found a print at Ewing “Lucky: Brown’s Los Angeles estate sale and added two hours of special features, including another Vega International Pictures film, the once lost movie Angelica, The Young Vixen.

Until then, you can watch the battered original VHS version on YouTube and Tubi.

A lot of the info for this post came from the amazing Monster Kid Classic Horror Forum.