EDITOR’S NOTE: A Bell From Hell was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 14, 1979 and August 29, 1981.

What happens when a young man is released from an insane asylum and returns home? Well, he goes for revenge on his aunt and her three daughters, the ones who stole his insurance when they claimed he had gone crazy.

This is another part of the Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated for television in 1975. The others are Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch).

Bell from Hell isn’t an easy watch. It’s dreamy at times, brutally realistic at others, particularly the slaughterhouse scene. Juan wants revenge against Marta (Viveca Lindfors, Creepshow) and her three daughters (as well as anyone connected with them), but there are times when he could easily kill them and he lets them escape. A good chunk of this movie feels thrown together. But there’s a reason.

Director Claudio Guerín fell — or jumped — from the tower housing the title bell on the last day of shooting and was killed. The film was completed by Juan Antonio Bardem. One assumes that Bardem did the best job he could to combine all the many parts that Guerín into some whole. Throw in the fact that this movie is translated from Spanish to English and you get a swirling dervish of confusion.

EDITOR’S NOTE: How amazing is it that the Mexican Nostradamus vampire movies were on Chiller Theater? The Monster Demolisher was on the show on December 9, 1967 and August 23, 1969. Genie of Darkness was on the show on August 5, 1967. Blood of Nostradamus was on July 15, 1967 at 11:20 p.m. and December 11, 1971. Oddly, Chiller Theater never showed the first movie, The Curse of Nostradamus.

Nostradamus is not the fortune-telling mystic that scared you so badly in 1981’s The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. No, he’s an aristocratic vampire played by German Robles, who also played Count Karol de Lavud in the two El Vampiro films.

This was originally a 12 part serial that has been broken down into 4 films by American producer K. Gordon Murray: this one, known as Curse Of Nostradamus in English, plus The Monsters Demolisher, The Genie Of Darkness and Blood Of Nostradamus.

In the first movie, a professor has been re-elected to lead a society dedicated to the destruction of superstition, all so he can prove that werewolves and vampires aren’t real. However, he’s soon visited by a 400-year-old vampire, the son of Nostradamus the Alchemist. That leads us into the first film that was shown on Chiller Theater.

The Monsters Demolisher: After the first film, the professor finds that he must admit that the undead walk the Earth. He joins with a vampire hunter to stop Nostradamus, who is the son of one of the most powerful bloodsuckers of all time.

Nostradamus takes his evil even further by basically explaining to both of them how if they don’t stop him, he’ll make the world an even worse place. To prove his heart is in the wrong place, he also kidnaps several children and repeatedly places them in danger.

The vampire hunter Igor is played by Jack Taylor, whose career may have started in American television, but would take him all over the world. Of course, most of his roles have been in the kind of movies that only I would care about, like Mexican vampire movies, Jess Franco sleaze (Eugenie, Succubus, Count Dracula), Spanish horror (Dr. Jekyll vs. The Werewolf, The Killer Is One of 13, The Ghost Galleon, The Vampires Night Orgy) and appearances as a priest in Conan the Barbarian, as Professor Arthur Brown in Pieces and as book collector Victor Fargas in The Ninth Gate.

Perhaps most famously in the United States, this movie ran out of sequence as an April Fool’s Selection on the USA Network’s Commander USA’s Groovie Movies. Seeing as how that episode aired on April 4th, I find it even more amusing.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Genie of Darkness: The real trouble with the villagers and professor who are supposed to be the heroes of the Nostradamus film series is that they’re boring as all get out. The only interesting one, Igor the vampire hunter, is unceremoniously dispatched early in this film. The rest just sit around and yammer away at what they should do instead of doing anything.

Meanwhile, the nattily dressed Nostradamus and his hunchback pal Leo are living it up. Well, maybe not so much Leo, whose witch mother Rebeca dares to question the villainous vampiro and gets set on fire for her troubles.

Director Federico Curiel would go on to work with Santo several times, as well as write one of the most out there of all early Mexican horror films — and trust me, that’s saying something — El Baron del Terror.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Blood of Nostradamus: After three films — The Curse of Nostradamus, The Monsters Demolisher and The Genie of Darkness — we have arrived at the end of our tale, where the society to eliminate superstition must rise up against what we’re to assume is the son of the seer Nostradamus (although this is disputed in this series, depending on where you come in).

The good guys are about as intelligent and effective as a bunch of cops in a giallo film, as they think that by removing the ashes of Nostradamus’ ancestors from his coffin that he will die at sunrise. He just laughs and tells them that are the ashes of someone else he killed. Yes, he sleeps surrounded by the sooty remains of those he has killed before. You go, Nostradamus. You go.

Somehow, the good morons manage to kill off the hunchback and get their hands on a sonic weapon, which does some damage to the vampire before the sword cane of Igor — remember that dude who died and it was kind of a shock? — poetically is used to stake Nostradamus while in bat form.

I don’t know if you should watch all four of these movies in one day, but then again, I’ve also watched around fifty Mexican horror movies in the last few weeks, so I may be muy macho when it comes to watching peliculas de terror.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dracula Has Risen from His Grave was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 29, 1977 at 9 p.m. on a prime time special. It was also on the show on July 21, 1979 and November 14, 1981.

This was the fourth Hammer Dracula movie and the third to star Christopher Lee (he doesn’t appear in The Brides of Dracula). It was directed by Freddie Francis, who stepped in to replace Terence Fisher, who injured his leg in a car accident. It has an extraordinary and wonderful effect when Dracula appears in the film, as the edges of the frame take on the colors of crimson, amber and yellow.

There’s a fantastic beginning where a young altar boy (Norman Bacon) finds a dead woman hidden inside a church bell, just one more of Dracula’s victims. But a year after — and the events of Dracula: Prince of Darkness — finds the greatest of all the undead quite dead.

Monsignor Ernst Mueller (Rupert Davies) visits the village from the opening and learns that the altar boy can no longer speak and the town’s holy man (Ewan Hooper) has lost his faith. Because Dracula’s castle has a shadow that extends over their church, they refuse to even come near it. The Monsignor decides to exorcise the castle, which leads to the kind of strange occurrences that always bring Dracula back: lightning strikes, the older priest slips, he hits his head on a rock, and the drips of his blood through the cracks in the ground make their way to the deceased vampire.

As Mueller returns home, Dracula quite literally rises from his grave and takes on the frightened priest as his familiar. Now unable to enter his castle, he flips out and demands revenge, heading off to Keinenberg, where he plans on making Mueller’s niece Maria (Veronica Carlson, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Horror of Frankenstein) into one of his lovers.

Luckily, her boyfriend Paul (Barry Andrews) is ready to protect her, even if he has to defeat the advances of a barmaid Zena (Barbara Ewing, who has since become a well-reviewed author) who has been hypnotized by Dracula. There’s a wild moment when Dracula orders the priest to kill Zena, so he burns her body in a bakery oven while Dracula leaps across the rooftops to find and bite Maria.

This has some fascinating ideas as Paul has to go it alone after the Monsignor dies. As an atheist, he and the lost faith priest are unable to properly stake and destroy Dracula. As always, Dracula is stopped, and faith is restored. This is the most challenging time for achieving that end goal.

As a kid, the Hammer movies were quite literally the end-all, be-all of my existence. I thought about them all day and would discuss them with anyone who wanted to hear about them—often, many who didn’t.

As an old man, I’m struck by how often the film in the movie is sped up, which doesn’t work, while the color effects and rooftop scenes have lost none of their infernal power. Plus, this has one of the best posters I’ve seen, just the throat of a bosom woman with band-aids where Dracula’s teeth have penetrated her.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Run,. Psycho, Run was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 28, 1970 at 11:30 p.m. It also appeared on June 26, 1971.

Director Brunello Rondi directed Il Demonio, a movie that didn’t do well. He was interviewed by Dario Argento and said that this movie was made with “no intention of making a mystery, or a horror film, or even a suspense yarn, Hitchcock-style. What really interests me is to grasp with a film set in 1912 the origins of today’s disease within the bourgeoisie, and to portray its degeneration with extreme violence. I read very few crime novels in my life. And I must say that I do not even like them very much. In my film there is indeed a crime, and an investigation. But it’s only a pretext, in a story full of hatred set in the last years of the “Belle Époque,” when some kind of false euphoria was decomposing, while one could glimpse the first signs of the impending war, the signs of hatred and the strengthening of class struggle.”

Rondi wrote La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, so he was an intellectual. Then again, he directed Riot In a Woman’s Prison and Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle. Therefore, I respect him.

It was called Più tardi, Claire… più tardi (Later, Claire…Later) in Italy but when AIP bought it to show on American TV, it was called Run, Psycho, Run. It’s never been released on home video.

Judge George Dennison (Gary Merrill),  his wife Claire (Elga Andersen) and their son Robert arrive at a Villa in Mount Argentario for the summer. Shortly after a party, Claire and Robert are both murdered.

A year later, Judge Dennison returns to the villa with his new fiancée Ann (also Andersen) and her son. Because Ann looks like Claire, Dennison hopes to use her to solve the mystery of who killed his wife and son.

It’s not a giallo but, as the director told Argento more of a class struggle on film. There’s a lot of talking instead of showing and Dennison doesn’t even show up until half an hour into the film. What a strange movie and yet another film that somehow played Chiller Theater.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Murder Mansion was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 2, 1980 at 1 a.m. It also aired on July 31, 1982.

Originally released as La Mansion de la Niebla (The Mansion in the Fog) and also known as Murder Mansion, this Spanish/Italian film fuses old school haunted house horror with the then new school form of the giallo.

The plot concerns a variety of people drawn to a house in the fog, so the original title was pretty much correct. There are plenty of European stars to enjoy, like Ida Galli, who also uses the name Evelyn Stewart and appeared in Fulci’s The Psychic as well as The Sweet Body of Deborah. And hey, there’s Analía Gadé from The Fox with the Velvet Tail. Hello, George Rigaud, from All the Colors of the Dark and The Case of the Bloody Iris! They’re all here in a movie that seems to make little or no sense and then gets even more bonkers as time goes on.

This was one of the 13 titles included in Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated in 1975 (the others were Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch). How did these movies play on regular TV?

There’s a history of vampires in the house, the previous owner was a witch and hey — this is starting to feel like an adult version of Scooby Doo with better-looking ladies. That’s not a bad thing. But if you’ve never watched a badly dubbed giallo-esque film before, don’t expect any of this to make a lick of sense.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 30, 1963 at 3:00 p.m. It also aired on August 2, 1964 and August 7, 1965.

Directed by Edward L. Cahn and written by Orville H. Hampton, this is the tale of the Drake family. Because of a massacre in Ecuador led by Capt. Wilfred Drake, the men of their family have all been cursed to die at the age of sixty, beheaded and their severed heads shrank down. A killer named Zutai (Paul Wexler) kills one of the Drake men, Kenneth, before Jonathan (Eduard Franz) can warn him.

Of course, the family physician seems to think that the real curse of the Drake men is heart disease. That may be true, but then where are their heads? After all, we’ve seen the Zutai and his bamboo weapon stabbing people and he nearly poisons Jonathan, who keeps having visions of floating skulls.

There’s also The Cult of Headless Men who have had their lips sewn shut and fingertips branded with small skulls to achieve endless life. Perhaps the real culprit behind all of this could be Dr. Emil Zurich (Henry Daniell). After all, he has a white person’s head on a black person’s body, which is pretty wild for 1959. Either way, the curse demands four skulls and right now, it only has three.

This was kind of movie that was “Written, Produced and Directed To Scare The Daylights Out Of You!” Whether or not it did may depend on just how creeped out you are by voodoo and skulls.

As part of United Artists’ Science Fiction-Horror-Monster Features, which was sold to TV stations in 1963, this aired all over the U.S. well into the 70s. It also played theaters with another movie by the same director, Invisible Invaders. These movies have two different production companies listed — Premium Pictures for Invaders and Vogue Pictures for Four Skulls — but they are the exact same company.

EDITOR’S NOTE: House of Dracula was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 14, 1966 at 1:00 a.m. It was on so many times: Saturday, October 28, 1967; December 16, 1972; November 3, 1973; October 12, 1974; October 30, 1976 in a triple feature with House of Frankenstein and Curse of Bigfoot; November 19, 1977 and January 1, 1983.

A sequel to House of Frankenstein, this would be the seventh film to feature Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange*) and the fourth for both Count Dracula (John Carradine) and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney, Jr.). Although it was a success, it would be the last of the serious Universal Monster films, with the comedic Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein coming out in 1948.

Director Erle C. Kenton made 131 movies between 1916 and 1957, including several horror movies for Universal like The Cat Creeps and The Ghost of Frankenstein. He started as an actor with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops and finished his career on TV, directing shows like The Texan and Telephone Time.

Baron Latos — come on, everyone knows that you’re Dracula — ha come to Visaria to discover a cure for vampirism from Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens, Them!) and his assistants Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll, Ghost Catchers) and Nina (Jane Adams, who was given her first name by American servicemen and played Vicki Vale in the second Batman and Robin movie serial). Of note is that Nina is a hunchback, which is certainly a gender switch way ahead of its time.

Edelmann has been working on the clavaria formosa plant, which has the ability to reshape bone. How this is possible is the kind of horror movie science that requires you to just accept it and move on.

Soon, Larry Talbot also shows up and he wants the cure for his lycanthropy. What, did Edelmann put out an ad in a trade magazine for monsters? They don’t believe him, so he begs Inspector Holtz (Lionel Atwill, who memorablely was quoted in Hollywood Babylon as saying, “All women love the men they fear. All women kiss the hand that rules them… I do not treat women in such soft fashion. Women are cat creatures. Their preference is for a soft fireside cushion, for delicate bowls of cream, for perfumed leisure and for a master – which is where and how they belong.”) to lock him up. He transforms and then the doctor theorizes that pressure on the brain is why he turns furry, not the moon. He responds by flinging himself into the ocean, where he survives and washes up inside the castle, where an unresponsive Frankenstein’s Monster still holds the skeleton of Dr. Niemann from House of Frankenstein.

If you’re thinking — I bet Dracula tries to sleep with that comely blonde assistant, because after all Martha O’Driscoll played Daisy Mae in the original Li’l Abner, you’d be right. The quick-thinking Edelmann drags his coffin into the sun and sets him ablaze, but before long, a blood transfusion gone wrong leads to Dracula’s blood making him evil.

By the end, the good doctor is breaking necks, villagers descend on the castle and Talbot ends up being the one to save the day, wiping out every single other monster. This would be Chaney’s last Universal contract film, although they’d bring him back for the aforementioned Abbott and Costello movie.

Throughout the production, his drinking was out of hand. For example, Glenn Strange was stuck in the cumbersome Frankenstein’s Monster makeup and also had to spend the day in quicksand. He could barely feel his feet, so Chaney helped the only way he knew how. He got the actor smashed thanks to a bottle of scotch.

Speaking of sad stories, Atwill died a few months after this movie from lung cancer. The last few years of his life were a mess. He had married socialite Louise Cromwell Brooks, the ex-wife of General Patton, but after their 1939 separation, he went a little wild. So wild that a 1940 Christmas party, where at the least stag loops were shown and at the worst underage girls were assaulted, ended up getting him in front of a grand jury on morals charges. Sure, he was judged guilty of felony perjury and sentenced to five years probation. But thanks to the Hays Office — who also took the fangs )pun intended) out of the original version of this script — his career went from Universal to movie serials and lower than B movies. He died while making one of those serials, Lost City of the Jungle.

This movie was a big part of monster kid’s lives, as it was part of the Son of Shock package that was sold to TV stations in 1958. The other movies are Before I Hang, Behind the Mask, The Black Room, The Boogie Man Will Get You, The Face Behind the Mask, Island of Doomed Men, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man Who Lived Twice, The Man With Nine Lives, Night of Terror, The Devil Commands, Black Friday, The Bride of Frankenstein, Captive Wild Women, The Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, Jungle Captive, The Mummy’s Curse and The Soul of a Monster.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Amazing Colossal Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 5, 1964 at 11:15 p.m. and December 10, 1966 and the sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, was on Saturday, October 17, 1964 at 1 a.m. and also was on December 4, 1965 and September 2, 1967. The Cyclops was on the October 10, 1964 episode.

The Amazing Colossal Man: Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) has been given orders to keep his men safe from a nuclear blast, but when a civilian glider crashes close to the area, he races out to save the day. He ends up getting blown up real good — one would argue exactly like Dr. Bruce Banner five years later — and has third-degree burns all over his body. Then, the bad news. The plutonium blast has caused his old cells to stop dying while the new ones multiply at an accelerated rate. That means that he’s growing ten feet a day and there’s no sign of it stopping.

Before long, his heart and brain can no longer support him and he’s running wild, decimating the olf Vegas strip and throwing giant syringes at scientists before taking a tumble off the Hoover Dam directly into next year’s War of the Colossal Beast.

Jim Nicholson of American International Pictures made this movie because The Incredible Shrinking Man was a success and he had the rights to Homer Eon Flint’s The Nth Man, which is about a man ten miles tall. Charles B. Griffith was hired for the script ad Roger Corman was brought on board to direct but soon dropped out. You know, if you’re going to make a movie with way too big or way too small people, get the man whose very name says BIG: Bert I. Gordon.

You can watch this on YouTube.

War of the Colossal Beast: A spiritual sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man — with a different cast — this movie starts with Joyce Manning believing that her gigantic brother Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning survived his fall from Hoover Dam in the last movie.

He does live, except that his face is disfigured and he’s lost his mind as it tries to deal with the traumatic fall that he took. This facial damage was because there was a new star — and also a stagehand on the film — Dean Parkin and this would disguise the fact that they changed up who would play the lead. Stranger still, the dream sequence in the movie shows original actor Glenn Lanagan.

War of the Colossal Beast was produced, directed and written by Bert I. Gordon — the king of these kinds of movies — and co-produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff. The last scene of the movie was shot in color and then made into black and white to match the rest of the film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Cyclops: Bert I. Gordon made three movies in two years that had a giant bald man, played by Dean Parkin, menacing tiny people. Paul Frees is the voice of this horrible titular beast. It also has the same makeup artist as War of the Colossal Beast, Jack H. Young.

Bruce Barton is missing and his girlfriend Susan Winter (Gloria Talbott, who was also in this movie’s double feature, The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll) goes to find him. Lee Brand (Tom Drake) will fly the plane, scientist Russ Bradford (James Craig) will study the area and mining expert Martin “Marty” Melville (Lon Chaney Jr.) will get drunk and mean.

They also find all of the effects you expect from a Burt I. Gordon movie, like a giant iguana, a mouse, an eagle, a huge snake, a spider and yes, the Cyclops, who is really Bruce after being around all the radiation in the area.

Made in five days and before the money from RKO was taken away, this was a rough movie to work on, helped by the very real drinking of Chaney. But hey, Bert had a great poster that said “World’s Mightiest Horror! More Monstrous Than Anything Human Eyes Have Seen! The Giant Man-Thing growing 50 Ft. high in a horrendous land where nature has gone mad!”

In Tom Weaver’s Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, it turns out that Chaney wasn’t the only one getting loaded. During one scene in the plane, Talbott said, “Both Lon and Tom were absolutely smashed. James Craig was nipping a little, too, but nothing like what was going on in the front! And in this -h-o-t, tiny mock-up I was getting blasted from the fumes! It was such close quarters and so hot that I was ingesting alcohol through my skin. I was getting absolutely stoned, and by the time we got out of there I was weaving. If you watch that scene, you’ll see that every once in a while I look a little sick – well, I was!”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Eye Creatures was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 5, 1971 at 1:00 a.m. and April 22, 1972.

Directed by Larry Buchanon and written by Paul W. Fairman, Robert J. Gurney Jr. and Al Martin, The Eye Creatures is based on Fairman’s “The Cosmic Frame” and is a remake of American-International Pictures’ Invasion of the Saucer Men. It was made in Dallas for $25,000 as a series of remakes that would fill in AIP’s TV packages. They had Jonn Ashley, who took up most of the budget, but his wife left him just before they made the movie.

Buchanan told Fangoria, “We got John Ashley on the weekend that his wife Deborah Walley said goodbye to him. And here I am with him on the set the next morning; he was in bad shape. Deborah had gone over to Arkansas on an AIP publicity junket for one of those “Beach Party” things, and John asked me if he could fly up and see her. I said, “John, we just started!” I sat down with him and worked it out, I shot around him for two days while he tried to reconcile with her. It didn’t work. But it did work for me in that when he came back, he worked his tail off. I told him he had to make a break— he had a little money— and go as far away from Deborah as he could get. And we talked long into the night, about shooting, casting and making movies. I don’t think we ever stopped on that picture. We would work all day and talk all night. And then he went off to Manila and began making those Bamboo-girl pictures and made a fortune.”

Buchanan also made In the Year 2889 (a remake of Day the World Ended), Zontar, the Thing from Venus (a remake of It Conquered the World); Curse of the Swamp Creature (a remake of Voodoo Woman); Creature of Destruction (a remake of The She-Creature); It’s Alive!,  Mars Needs Women and Hell Raiders (a remake of Suicide Battalion) for AIP. All of these movies went straight to late night horror shows on UHF channels.

AIP told him, “We want cheap color pictures, we want half-assed names in them, we want them eighty minutes long and we want them now.”

Project Visitor should be used to search for UAPs, but the horny soldiers use it to watch teenagers like Stan Kenyon (Ashley, who was a 33-year-old teenager in this movie) and his girlfriend Susan Rogers (Cynthia Hull) make out. When she tells him that she thinks someone is watching them, he tells her that everyone in every car is watching each other. Maybe later, they’ll watch some other couples. 1967 is wild.

As they pull out of lover’s lane, they hit and kill an alien with their car. The alien body ends up getting used in a get rich plan and the government looks for it. It. turns out that the aliens plan on attacking the town but the teens soon learn that bright light destroys them, so everyone stops dry humping and shines their headlights on the eye creatures, destroying them.

If you watch The Ghost In the Invisible Bikini, the eye creature shows up. There’s a lot more recycling in this movie, as the UFO scene is from Invaders from Mars and music is taken from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Beach Party and The Hypnotic Eye.

You can watch this on Tubi.