The poster for The Acid Eaters is, of course, a billion times better than the movie it’s selling, but how many films have a bunch of people climbing a fifty-foot tower of LSD cubes? One that I can think of.

Under the name B. Ron Elliott, this film’s director, Byron Mabe, made a nudie cutie with perhaps the best title ever, A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine. He also directed She Freak, The Lustful Turk, Nude Django, Mystic Mountain Massacre and Space Thing amongst others. In between making these berserk movies, he was an actor in Hollywood.

Writer Carl Monson would direct a few movies too, like A Scream in the Streets, Please Don’t Eat My Mother!, Will to Die (AKA Legacy of Blood), The Takers and the x-rated Tarz and Jane and Cheeta, which had Devil In Ms. Jones star Georgina Spelvin, Talia Cochrane (Wham! Bam! Thank You Spaceman!, Devil’s Ecstasy) and Patrick Wright (The Seven Minutes, Track of the Moon Beast) in it.

Pat Harrington, who was in plenty of Harry Novak movies and Mantis In Lace, is in this, billed as Camille Grant and dancing to bongo drums. So are former pro wrestler Buck Kartalian, who you may know as The Khan from Gymkata, and Sharon Carr, who was in the aforementioned A Smell of Honey is on hand.

There’s a drone soundtrack, David F. Friedman serving as the cinematographer and the devil poking people in the butt while they’re all trying to kiss in the nude. Look, I’ve never done LSD, but I would hope that it is not as boring as this movie and totally as sensational as the poster for this one.

Olga (Audrey Campbell) is the meanest and the best at her job, which is turning out women like Frenchie (Gigi Darlene), plying them with marijuana and if that doesn’t work, just beating them into submission, all so that they turn tricks for her and the syndicate. The syndicate! You will hear their names so many times.

A film made with all voiceovers, White Slaves of Chinatown was directed and written by Joseph P. Mawra, who directed Fireball Jungle and may or may not have directed Shanty Tramp and Savages from Hell. Probably not.

There’s opium everywhere and this feels like those black and white detective magazines you used to see on the newstand that seem way more perverted than any porn magazine, always with women being threatened on the cover and in every story.

Olga would return for four more movies: Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls with Campbell and Mme. Olga’s Massage Parlor with no Olga showing up and Olga’s Dance Hall Girls with Lucy Eldredge as Olga.

In 1964, this movie was probably as offensive as can be. Today, it’s still pretty scuzzy but you can’t help but find it adorable.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Curt Siodmak wrote The Wolf Man and for that, we should always thank him. He also directed and wrote this film, which was shot in Eastmancolor on location on the Amazon River. There was 10,000 feet of color film left over that Siodmark couldn’t export. so the same cast and crew made Love Slaves of the Amazons.

Rock Dean (John Bromfield, whose wife Larri Thomas plays the nightclub dancer) wonders why the workers on his plantation have left. Dr. Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland) wants to find the drug that witch doctors use to shrink heads. That’s how they got on the Amazon. Their guide, Tupanico (Tom Payne) is really trying to lead his people back to the old ways and using the monster Curucu — or at least the legend — to drive them from the plantations.

At least there’s a scene where a piranha eats an arm. and wow, the ending, the gift of a shrunken head is always something.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

Man, Alan Ormsby has done so much. In addition to working with Bob Clark on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Death Dream, he wrote My Bodyguard and the remake of Cat People. Plus, he was the original director of Popcorn and the man behind Kenner’s Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces action figure. 

He’s the man behind Deranged, along with Jeff Gillen, who played Jeff in Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and who you can see every Christmas Eve as Santa Claus in A Christmas Story. 

Deranged is filmed as if it were a true story, with reporter Tom Simms (Leslie Carlson, Black Christmas) appearing within the events and narrating them. The whole thing was based on Ed Gein, the infamous real life Butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho are both based on.

It was produced by producer Tom Karr, a concert promoter for bands like Led Zeppelin and Three Dog Night who had been fascinated with Ed Gein and dreamed of making a film about his story.

Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom, Old Man Marley in Home Alone, how’s that for a scary tie-in role?) is our Ed Gein stand-in, running a midwest farm with his mother Amanda (Cosette Lee, who played Raxl, Daughter of the Priestess of the Serpent on Strange Paradise, a Canadian occult soap opera created in the wake of Dark Shadows). Since he was a boy, she’s taught him to hate women.

Once she dies, it takes a year for him to come out of his shell. When he finally snaps to it, he does what any loving and grieving son would do: he digs his mom up and puts her body together with fish skin and wax.

Ezra gets involved with an eccentric older woman who claims she’s psychic named Maureen Shelby (Marian Waldman, Mrs. MacHenry from Black Christmas, and if you don’t know who that is, please stop reading and start watching). They have a fumbling sexual encounter that ends with Ezra killing her and we’re off to the races.

Ezra’s next target is Mary Ransum (Mickie Moore, who is also in The Vindicator and is one of the Believers in, yes, The Believers), a waitress who he lures home, knocks out and dresses in just her underwear for dinner. Their nice meal is ruined by her trying to run, so he smashes her head with a femur bone. And then he takes out young Sally, which leads the police to his home, where they find him in the kitchen, enjoying a bowl of blood after skinning her.

Deranged is not an easy watch, as its subtitle, Confessions of a Necrophile, will tell you. It’s also the second movie — after Deathdream — that Tom Savini ever worked his special effects magic on.

You can get the blu ray of this film from Kino Lorber.

Tor Johnson is one of those actors who was a special effect without any help. Just by showing up on screen, he’s thrilling. In this one, he’s Joseph Jaworsky, a Russian scientist who runs from the Iron Curtain and finds his way to Yucca Flats, where radiation turns him into a mute beast. All he wanted to do was give the Americans the secrets to the Russian moon landing!

American actor, writer, producer and director Coleman Francis made this, casting his sons and himself in the movie. His oeuvre, as it were, is made up of films like The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba. People don’t just smoke in his movies. The smoking becomes central to the entire film. Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 said that the themes of his movies are “death, hatefulness, death, pain, and death.”

The police, for no real reason or trial, shoot the irradiated Tor Johnson over and over, but he lives just enough to hug a jackalope* before he dies. The police officers in Francis’ films, which often end his stories by brutally blowing away the bad guys, may be the most realistic ones in the history of movies.

Everything in this movie is dubbed. Nobody speaks on camera. Even guns are fired off-camera and then b-roll of guns being shot is cut in. The editing is such that some characters appear to have been shot to death and then arise and come back in later scenes. There’s also a murder scene in the beginning with a naked woman in the shower being choked. That scene is only in this because Francis likes shooting nude scenes.

What’s funny is that this movie predates The Incredible Hulk and seems very much like the same origin story. Maybe that’s a coincidence. As for Tor Johnson, he would only make one more movie, appearing without credit in Head. Here’s a quote about the making of the movie that I love: *The jackalope wandered on set and Tor Johnson improvised caressing it. Man, life is awesome, isn’t it?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Nicholas Merriweather, who wrote this, is Arch Hall Sr. He wanted to make his son, Arch Hall Jr., into a star. Before that, he was a legitimate cowboy and even had a Native American name: Waa-toe-gala Oak-Shilla, which means Wild Boy. In fact, when he died, he was buried in a full Sioux ceremony led by Lakota Sioux spiritual leader Frank Fools Crow. Before that, he was a pilot and stuntman who finally started his own studio, Fairway Productions, making movies like Eegah, The Corpse Grinders and The Sadist.

Arch Hall Jr. was a pilot after his short Hollywood life. He also used the name Nicolas Merriweather as a writer.

Wild Guitar was directed by Ray Dennis Steckler, who also made The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies and who rivals Joe D’Amato for alternate names, such as Sven Christian, Michel J. Rogers, Henri-Pierre Duval, Pierre Duvall, Sven Hellstrom, Ricardo Malatoté, Harry Nixon, Michael J. Rogers, Wolfgang Schmidt, Cindy Lou Steckler, R.D. Steckler, Ray Steckler, Cindy Lou Sutters and, of course, Cash Flagg. He also plays one of the bad guys, Steak.

The world of Wild Guitar seems on the surface like our own but no, it is not. It is a world that Bud Eagle (Hall Jr.) is seen as the next big star and is manipulated by big Hollywood boss Mike McCauley (William Watters, but that’s Hall Sr. being the heel to his boy) on the surface, but you’re seeing a universe that has been created by lunatics who think that their creation is normal when no, it is not. It is a mirror world that we stare into and worry that we will never properly leave. And yet we love this movie for that, as it is never boring. Bud misses his brother, who he writes letters to, and loves Vickie (Nancy Czar), a former figure skater that he’s met like once. I want this world to be the one I live in, a place where the giant headed Arch Hall Jr. can be the hottest star in the galaxy.

This does feel like part of a cinematic universe, as posters and props from Eegah are everywhere and the song “Vickie” was also in that movie. There are also posters for The Choppers and Wild Ones On Wheels.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) wants a Pulitzer so bad that he’s willing to go into a mental hospital to learn who killed someone. He’s talked Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) into working with him to appear insane and his cover is that he’s incestually obsessed with his sister, who will be played by his exotic dancer girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers). She doesn’t want to be part of this, realizing how dangerous it is. He doesn’t care — he wants fame.

Once inside, Johnny is overwhelmed by the patients he meets. Literally, as an entire wing of female nymphomaniacs assault him. He gets closer to the truth through three patients: Stuart (James Best!), a man who was taken by the Koreans and indoctrinated into Communism before being reformed, then outed as a traitor by his own government. He now believes that he is Southern General J.E.B. Stewart. The second is Trent (Hari Rhodes), a black man who was so abused in college that he believes that he is a member of the Klu Klux Klan. The last is Boden (Gene Evans), a nuclear scientist who helped invent the atomic bomb who has reverted the mentality of a child so that he no longer has to create weapons.

While Johnny learns who the killer is, it takes his sanity, which is destroyed after shock therapy. He thinks that Cathy is his sister and sure, he writes the story, but he’s now trapped in the same place he worked so hard to get into.

Directed and written by Samuel Fuller, this was shot in ten days with no exteriors. Fuller was upset that the movie was sold as an exploitation movie. It played double features with The Naked Kiss. As I always say, the only difference between the arthouse and the grindhouse is where the movie is playing.

You can watch this on YouTube.

We need more people like William Castle.

As he starts the movie explaining how the gimmick works — Illusion-O — we learn that we will have the chance to see ghosts. Or not.

Most scenes of the movie is in black and white, but scenes involving ghosts let you watch them with special viewing glasses. If you want to see the ghost, you look through the red filter. If you don’t want to see them, watch through the blue filter.

Occultist Dr. Plato Zorba has given his house to his poor nephew Cyrus (Donald Woods), who moves in his wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp) and children Medea (Jo Morrow) and Buck (Charles Herbert). They find out from their lawyer Ben Rush (Martin Milner) that they share the house with 12 ghosts and they must stay there and not sell it or the state gets everything.

There’s also a seance-happy housekeeper called Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton!) and somewhere, if they can find it, a fortune.

How could you live with twelve ghosts? There’s a floating head, a screaming woman, a set of hands, a skeleton on fire, a chef who keeps killing his wife and her lover, a lynched woman, an executioner with a head that he’s chopped off, a lion (Zamba, who played Kitty Cat on The Addams Family) with a headless lion tamer and Dr. Zorba, who has left behind goggles to help them see the ghosts and an Ouija board that soon warns that death is coming.

Who killed Dr. Zorba? Where is the money? Will the family stay alive living here? Who will become the thirteenth ghost that frees all the other spirits? And how cool is it that the exterior shots are the Winchester House, an actual haunted place?

As much as I dislike remakes, I really dig the newer version of this, Thir13en Ghosts. Dark Castle, who produced that film, has been talking about doing a series about each of the ghosts. I’d love to see that.

You can watch the movie on Tubi or download it from the Internet Archive.

Inspired by the true story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the notorious “lonely hearts killers” of the 1940s, The Honeymoon Killers tells the tale with Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler, in her film debut, as the leads.

Ray starts the film by seducing Martha and stealing money from her, but it turns out that she may be every but his equal, using her wits to help him con and even kill numerous women from lonely hearts ads.

From relationship to relationship, Ray promises to never cheat on Martha, but there’s no way that he can keep up the con. Along the way, every one that crosses their path dies, often horribly.

Originally to be directed by Martin Scorsese, who was fired from the film, it was taken over by writer Leonard Kastle, who only created this one film. Named by François Truffaut as his “favorite American film,” it looks more like a grim documentary than an exploitation film.

American-International Pictures was going to distribute this, even making ad materials, but dropped it due to the film’s “extremely gruesome and misanthropic” tone. Their loss — it’s a work of art.

I’m enthused by the fact that an ad appeared in Variety at some point in the late 70’s announcing a sequel. Although never made, the story would have involved an imagined death row conjugal visit between Ray and Martha , resulting in the prison birth of brother/sister twins who were separated at birth. Years later, the pair meets and becomes adult murderers/lovers, never suspecting that they are siblings. This movie needs to be made.

Directed by Bill Rebane and an uncredited Herschell Gordon Lewis, Monster A Go-Go has astronaut  Frank Douglas (Henry Hite) — or maybe an alien impersonating him — coming back to Earth and going wild, often being restrained by scientists, not that anyone sees it. Most of the movie seemingly must be inferred from dialogue or read by the narrator. Rebane gave up on this movie in 1961 and Lewis came back to finish it, as he needed something to show along with Moonshine Mountain. Characters disappear, never to return. There is nothing resembling normalcy.

The movie ends with this narration: “As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some 8,000 miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?”

Most horror movies end with the monster chased down and killed. This one ends with Lewis reading those words, probably because that was cheaper. You have to admire that.

You can watch this on YouTube.