EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mummy’s Hand was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 12, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 1, 1975 at 3:00 a.m., Saturday, July 24, 1976 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 29, 1978 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 22, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

Universal brought back Frankenstein’s Monster with 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, a movie that boasts a deranged Lionel Atwill as a police officer obsessed with his fake arm. It did so well that they reintroduced the Invisible Man a year later in The Invisible Man Returns. Success in Hollywood means more of what works, so the Mummy would come back in this movie, which is a sequel in that it’s very similar without being an actual sequel, and yet, it would have a sequel, The Mummy’s Tomb, and a third in this series, The Mummy’s Curse.

Unlike the days of major league money thrown at these movies, like when the first movie was made in 1932, Universal did this on a budget, reusing sets from James Whale’s Green Hell, using stock footage from The Mummy and stealing the entire score of Son of Frankenstein. The crew worked from 6 a.m. to 4 a.m. some days, grinding down contracted talent and crew.

Andoheb (George Zucco) has come to the Hill of the Seven Jackals to speak with the dying High Priest of Karnak (Eduardo Ciannelli). There, he learns the story of Kharis, a man who loved the bride of the pharaoh, Princess Ananka, and stole the tana leaves that can bring the dead back to life to save her when she was killed. When he was caught, his tongue was torn out and he was mummified alive, used to guard the tomb of the princess for the rest of eternity.

This start of the film got me all fired up for Kharis to rise and destroy, but no, like all Mummy movies, I had to suffer through the humans in this, Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford), who are supposed to be heroic and comedic, respectively, but just made me want to see them get choked out by the curse of the pharaohs. Along with  the head of the Cairo museum, Dr. Petrie (Charles Trowbridge), The Great Solvani (Cecil Kellaway), a stage magician, and his daughter Marta (Peggy Moran), they decide to enter the tomb.

Andoheb makes it seem like he’s an educated man of Egyptology, but he’s also here to protect the treasure, so he raises Kharis (played here by Tom Tyler, who play Captain Marvel the following year) and finally, after what seems like years of comic relief, I get what I want: tannis leaves, bandages and sweet death. That said, Andoheb makes the mistake of falling for Marta, and he tries to take the leaves for himself, making the two of them immortal. The white bread hero ends up shooting him and setting Kharis on fire, making it back to America with all of the riches of the pyramids and the mummified remains of Princess Ananka. This is a happy ending to some. Not to me.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Curse of the Crying Woman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 10, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.

An older Mexican horror film that actually played in the U.S. — American-International Pictures offered it for syndication in 1965 — The Curse of the Crying Woman is another film that attempts to translate the legend of La Llorona, the crying woman, and does the best job of any I’ve seen.

The film begins with a full realization of the weirdness and wildness within, as a carriage ride is interrupted and all three passengers are hunted down by a mysterious woman in a long black dress, accompanied by her three monstrous dogs and an even more frightening henchman. In case you wondered, “Did Black Sunday play in Mexico?” this scene will definitely answer affirmatively.

That’s when the film introduces us to Amelia, our heroine, who has come to stay with her Aunt Selma, a place shrouded in cobwebs, where the cries of a woman can be heard at night. The bodies of generations of relatives decompose in the basement. One particular relative was a powerful witch who would return to power and take Selma to an afterlife filled with black masses and blood drinking, a fact that she excitedly related to a shocked Amelia.

From there, the film descends into wild scenes of Selma transforming into the Crying Woman, an eyeless creature surrounded by thousands of eyes, as well as a black mass filmed in negative and dead bodies coming back to life. It’s a movie that transcends its inspiration and delivers its own artful—and scary—take on a legendary story.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mummy’s Curse was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 25, 1965 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, February 10, 1968 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, September 30, 1972 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, January 25, 1972 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, September 20, 1975 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 23, 1977 at 1:00 a.m.

The fifth entry in Universal’s original Mummy franchise, this is a direct sequel to The Mummy’s Ghost. Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) and his beloved Princess Ananka (Virginia Christine ) remain in the swamp, even if the swamp has moved from Massachusetts to Louisiana—even if the accents don’t always sound right.

The Southern Engineering Company — one of those TVA or New Deal kind of public works projects — wants to drain the swamp, but the locals are afraid of even going there. Sure, they’re poor, but would you want to deal with a mummy, much less two?

Scripps Museum sends Dr. James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr. Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe) to investigate, just as a worker is killed with all the handmarks — literally of Kharis. But never trust science, as Zandaab is really a priest of the pharaohs and is working with Ragheb (Martin Kosleck) to fully return the Egyptian royalty to life within the mucky confines of this deep southern bog.

Thus follows brewing the tea leaves and killing a monk as Kharis rises, filled with power anew. Ananka also rises, being found by a bulldozer and washing herself clean. She’s found by beloved local Cajun Joe (Kurt Katch) and, of course, taken to the local bar before Kharis busts in and starts killing people. She’s found by Halsey and Betty Walsh (Kay Harding) and is shocked by how much she knows about Ancient Egypt. I was shocked finding out how much English she could speak.

Of course, it ends as it always does, with evil scientists pushing their luck and the Mummy being dead all over again.

Directed by Leslie Goodwins, this had a huge list of writers attached, including Bernard Schubert, Leon Abrams, Dwight V. Babcock, Ted Richmond and Oliver Drake, who would go on to make another mummy movie, many years later and somehow with an even lower budget, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals which, outside of the Las Vegas setting, feels like it could be the lost sequel for this film.

Universal had one left — Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy — but Joe Dante in Famous Monsters Vol. 4 No. 3 wrote that this was one of the most disappointing horror films the studio would release, packed with footage from The Mummy and The Mummy’s Hand instead of new scenes. Between the stock footage and stunt men stand-ins for the occasionally drunk Chaney Jr., The Mummy is played by at least three people, including Boris Karloff and Tom Tyler.

I kind of love this, as the swamp is a fun place. If we follow the timeline of these movies, with The Mummy’s Tomb set in 1970, The Mummy’s Ghost two years later and this twenty-five years after all that, it should be 1997. It does not feel like 1997 at all.

After The Thing and Prince of Darkness, this is the third and final part of John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy. It’s a film that explores the very notion of reality, how fictional characters perceive themselves within a narrative, and issues of creation itself. It’s a natural next step after Prince of Darkness, playing with many of the same themes.

The film begins with a narrative device familiar to readers of H.P. Lovecraft, as Dr. Wrenn (David Warner, The Omen, From Beyond the Grave) visits a patient in a psychiatric hospital who has written all over the walls and himself, covering them with crosses.

John Trent (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park) is an insurance investigator who can smell out a co like no one else. We’re shown an example in the beginning, as he breaks down a scam being perpetrated by a business owner (Carpenter, regular Peter Jason). Later, he meets with the owner of an insurance company (Bernie Casey, Gargoyles) who gives him a new case: investigating a claim made by Arcane Publishing that their biggest-selling author, Sutter Cane, has disappeared.

Just then, a man attacks them with an axe. He stops to ask Trent, “Do you read Sutter Cane?” The police shoot him, and later, we learn that this man was Cane’s agent, who was so influenced by reading his latest manuscript that he killed his entire family.

Trent meets Arcand Publishing owner Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston!), who asks him to look into the disappearance with the help of Cane’s editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen, Fright Night Part 2). As he begins to read Cane’s books, Trent learns that his readers have been known to suffer from disorientation, memory loss and paranoia firsthand.

He’s also convinced that this disappearance is a publicity stunt. Yet he spends plenty of time tearing apart Cane’s book covers, which depict the state of New Hampshire and mark Hobbs End, the location for many of Cane’s stories—a setting quite similar to Castle Rock in Stephen King’s tales.

As they travel to the fictional town, Linda begins to see things, and they both lose track of day and night. Once in the city, the people and landmarks are precisely as they appeared in the written word. Trent believes this is still a publicity stunt. Linda comes clean and says that the disappearance started as a stunt, but no one can find Cane. Everything that happened from now on is real, she claims.

For example, inside their hotel room, Trent claims there should be a black church out the window. The only problem is that he didn’t read the books closely enough. While the first window he opens reveals nothing, the evil cathedral is shown when he opens the window that faces east.

As they travel to the church, an army of black dogs emerges to defend Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow, Dune, The Keep), who sits inside. Linda confronts him, but simply being exposed to his final novel, In the Mouth of Madness, drives her insane.

The fabric of reality has begun to tear asunder. A man (former pro wrestler Wilhelm von Homburg, who played Viggo in Ghostbusters 2, who led an insane and demented actual life) tells Trent that Cane has his son, and he can no longer save him. His own daughter attacked him, and he could do nothing to stop her. He wishes that he could tell him more, but this is how Cane wrote him. With that sentence hanging in the ether, the man blows his brains out with a shotgun.

The townspeople have become monsters, and the story beats of each of Cane’s tales have started to come true. Trent tries to drive away but keeps coming back to the center of town. He takes Linda with him, but she transforms into a monster. Finally, he crashes his car and wakes up inside the church. Cane explains to him that his stories ended up being true, an almost Bible for a new and more horrible world. As more of his readers began to believe in his stories, they raised a race of Ancient Ones from the before times. Again, this is well-trod ground for anyone who has read Lovecraft, but it is not something that often makes it to the screen.

Cane explains that Trent is just one of his characters, and his role is to help end humanity by delivering his final story to Arcane. He then tears his face open, sending Trent to the dimension of the monsters from beyond time and space. As he runs down a long tunnel to return to the real world, he begs Linda to come with him. She says that since she has read the whole book, she can’t.

Once Trent returns, he destroys the story. But once he visits Arcane, he learns that Linda never existed, and the final book has already been published. In fact, they are almost done making a movie. Trent is then arrested after attacking readers of the book with an axe.<

We come back to the asylum, where Dr. Wrenn laughs off the story and walks away to leave, only to have the attendant, Saperstein (John Glover, Gremlins 2), ask him, “Do you read Sutter Cane?”

Trent barely sleeps at night, convinced that people are fighting and dying outside the walls of his cell. He awakens to find the hospital and most of the city abandoned, with only the pages of Sutter Cane books left behind. A radio announces that mass murder and suicides are happening in every major city, with some people mutating into monsters.

Finally, he wanders into a theater where In the Mouth of Madness is playing. As he watches the entire movie replay, he begins to laugh hysterically before breaking down and crying. He is just another character in another story, never real in the first place.

Between characters named Pickman and the closeness of Cane’s titles to Lovecraft’s (Sutter Cane’s novels have similar titles to H.P. Lovecraft stories: The Whisperer of the Dark is The Whisperer in Darkness, The Thing in the Basement is The Thing on the Doorstep and The Haunter Out of Time is almost The Haunter of the Dark or The Shadow Out of Time), this is probably the closest we’ll get to a significant budget Lovecraft film that isn’t Re-Animator. All of the words read from Cane’s books are also from Lovecraft, including parts of The Rats in the Walls and The Haunter of the Dark.

Beyond that, even the town’s name — Hobb’s End — is a reference to a work that is close to the heart of Carpenter. It’s the train station where the spaceship is found in Quatermass and the Pit. The inscription on the church, “Let these doors be sealed by our Lord God and let any who dare enter this unholy site be damned forever,” is similar to the words “Terribilis est locus iste” found at France’s Rennes Le Château. In English, that should read “This place is terrible.”

Even more interesting, if you pause and read the movie poster for the movie within the movie, you’ll learn that, aside from the three main characters, all the actual people who worked on the film are listed. So is the movie real? Was Cane ever real? Was Trent just a made-up character? Are we real? Is reality just an illusion?

The Arrow 4K UHD of In the Mouth of Madness has a new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative by Arrow Films; commentary with director John Carpenter and producer Sandy King Carpenter; another with Carpenter and director of photography Gary B. Kibbe; another with filmmakers Rebekah McKendry & Elric Kane, co-hosts of Colors of the Dark podcast; interviews with Sandy King Carpenter, Jürgen Prochnow, Julie Carmen and Greg Nicotero; featurettes and appreciations of the movie; behind-the-scenes footage; theatrical trailer and TV commercials; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla; a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla and a perfect bound collector’s book featuring new writing on the film by Guy Adams, Josh Hurtado, Richard Kadrey, George Daniel Lea, Willow Catelyn Maclay and Alexandra West. You can get it from MVD.

There was a time when comic books were not celebrated. When only the disenfranchised cared or knew about them instead of the mainstream. And in those ancient times — let’s call them 1992 — no news was bigger than when Marvel’s biggest creators left en masse to form Image Comics. At the time, these artists were derided as style over substance. Many of them weren’t known for hitting their deadlines. Or even how to draw feet properly. But one of them — Todd McFarlane —  took the opportunities that his new home presented and made the most of them, creating his signature character: Spawn.

Spawn is everything that McFarlane loved to draw: a muscular hero covered in spandex, chains and a cape that seems to be way longer than it should be. It was an instant hit, giving birth to a toyline, an HBO animated series (which still holds up) and finally, this movie.

Al Simmons (Michael Jai White, playing one of the first African-American superhero to be a movie lead, as this movie and Shaw’s Steel came out at the same time) is a black ops soldier assigned to a mission to investigate a North Korean biochemical weapons site. But he’s been set up by his boss, Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen) and is killed by Jessica Priest, Wynn’s new top assassin. After being set on fire, he winds up in Hell, where Malebolgia offers him a deal. If Simmons will lead his armies to Heaven’s gate, he can see his true love, Wanda, one more time.

You know how those deals with demons work. They’re rarely fair. When he returns to Earth, Simmons learns that Wanda is now married to his best friend Terry(D.B. Sweeney, Fire in the Sky, The Cutting Edge), who is raising his daughter, Cyan.

Malebolgia sends one of his demons, Violator (John Leguizamo), to mentor Simmons. But there’s also Cogliostro (Nicol Williamson, The Exorcist III), who also sold his soul to become a Hellspawn but who has found his way to Heaven.

Meanwhile, Simmons becomes Spawn and attacks Wynn, now a powerful arms dealer. He easily defeats his killer, Jessica, and escapes an attack by an army of mercenaries thanks to his new powers.

Violator — who either appears as a clown or an Alien-esque demon — gets Wynn to add a device to his heart that will release Heat 16, a biochemical superweapon, if he dies. Malebolgia wants Simmons to kill Wynn and start the end of the world. But Violator has his own agenda and nearly kills our hero before Cagliostro saves him. As he learns how to use his powers just as he also learns that Wynn plans on killing everyone he loves.

What follows is a battle on our earth and in Hell, where Spawn denies his contract with the Devil, bests Violator and returns to our reality, ready for the sequel which never came.

Spawn is very of its time, a film packed with early CGI (nearly half of its effects were unfinished until two weeks before it was released) and a soundtrack that mixes techno with hard rock and metal (the Atari Teenage Riot/Slayer mashup “No Remorse” is a highlight). It’s a decent enough film but is a sanitized version of the chaos inside every panel of the Spawn comic. It just feels like something is missing. There’s no real heart in the film, nor any real threat to our hero.

After years of talk of a sequel, McFarlane announced a new Spawn adaptation in 2015, with the goal of the creator writing the script and directing. In July of 2024, it was confirmed that this was true, with the film being produced by Blumhouse. Here’s hoping for something great.