Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

After the success of his gore epics, Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, Herschell Gordon Lewis made this, the first of several country fried films. But just because this is supposed to be a sexy comedy romp doesn’t mean that Lewis won’t hit us with plenty of strangeness and lots of the red stuff.

Charles Glore, working here as Chuck Scott, is a country western star who heads back to the hills of the Carolines where within days, he’s in the middle of a feud between the government and the moonshiners. Glore also was the musical director for Two Thousand Maniacs! and wrote this movie.

The title card says “directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, who ought to know better, but don’t.” Lewis just can’t help himself, as in the midst of the country fun, a psycho named Asa Potter is refused sex from the singer’s girlfriend and then kills her. Keep in mind that he’s also the town’s sheriff and also assaults multiple women in the film, including one mentally challenged girl that eventually fells him with an axe, which is how it works in the universe of Lewis.

This leads to the sheriff shooting people off a watertower, Charles Starkweather-style. Keep in mind this movie was made only six years after that shocking event.

Lewis also wrote and sings the main theme, “White Lightning.” As much as he would live up to the quote “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form,” you can tell when the man is having a good time. Moonshine Mountain isn’t a good film, but it sure is interesting in parts and it’s pretty short. More films should aspire to both points.

There was also a novelization of the film, which blows my mind. It’s a collector’s item today. I miss the time when every movie had a book that would go with it. Somehow, having this movie written into a novel legitimizes it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

The first roughie and the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer David F. Friedman, Scum of the Earth! tells the story of Kim Sherwood (Vickie Miles, AKA Allison Louise Downe, who was also in several other Lewis movies like She-Devils on Wheels), a college girl She-Devilshe wrong way and ends up trying to pay her tuition with glamour photos. But you know how the road to hell goes. It ends up going deeper and deeper, with Kim getting blackmailed into doing more and more explicit photos and dealing with sexualized violence, which is pretty insane for 1963.

Shot in six days and filmed in the same Miami locations that Blood Feast stained, it was made in black and white so that it would look filthy, like some kind of smoker film that would start turning on some old cigar smoking men before turning on them and shocking them with its willingness to make its sex violent. There’s also the matter of Sandy, another older girl, and her willingness to put the young Kim through all this so that she herself can escape.

Lewis — and Friedman — were the kings of talking you into the theater. They blessed this movie with some of the best taglines ever, like “Hell is their only address and they offer you a cheap substitute for fulfillment … in exchange for your soul!” and “Depraved. Demented. Loathsome. Nameless. Shameless. These are the Scum of the Earth!”

Lewis also knew how to write some dialogue, with stuff like “All you kids make me sick! You act like little Miss Muffet and down inside you’re dirty, do you hear me? Dirty! You’re greedy and self-centered and think you can get away with anything. You’re no better than the girl who sells herself to a man, you’re worse because you’re a hypocrite. And now little Miss Muffet is in trouble and she’s all outraged virtue. Well you listen and you listen well, you’re damaged merchandise and this is a fire sale.” 

This was beyond hot stuff in the early 60s. Now you can stream it into your home. Times have changed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

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:

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

This was a parody of everything that had come before in the gory and sleazy Herschell Gordon Lewis and if anything, goes even further than all that had been done in the past.

Reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) has offered detective Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress) $50,000 if he can solve the murder of Suzie Cream Puff (Jackie Kroeger), as long as she gets the exclusive. Following him on his investigation, other food-themed dancers like Candy Cane and Pickles get killed with evidence that points to a man named Grout (Ray Sager), a Vietnam vet that misses smashing the heads of dead people during war and finds vegetables a poor substitute. Or maybe its the feminists who are protesting all the male gaze in the go go club. Oh yeah — Henny Youngman also shows up as Mr. Marzdone Mobilie, a man who owns plenty of jack shacks and strip clubs.

Gentry keeps Weston drunk most of the time or gets her onstage to dance in an amateur contest but he’s just really trying to lure the killer into his clutches. He’s a horrible person and in fact, nearly everyone in this movie is completely despicable, some kind of alternate world where everyone is absolute scum. I say this with beaming happiness.

The only movie that Lewis ever sent to the MPAA — it got an X, so no surprises there — this is the kind of movie where a woman’s breasts are cut over with scissors to drink chocolate milk out of them, but it can still have themes of PTSD from Vietnam in 1972, years before any other filmmakers were articulating this issue.

But at heart (and guts and brains), this is a movie where a woman’s butt is beaten with a tenderizing hammer and then seasoned with salt and pepper. Or a bubble gum chewing dancer dying as her bubble is filled with blood? Then somehow there’s a level-headed appearance by the feminist group in the movie that pretty much has them saying everything that Lewis probably knew he was guilty of. Literally exploitation and education at once, but lost on everyone who just loved a director who often had characters just play with entrails for long stretches while he zoomed in. And then he invented direct mail.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Part of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ so-called Blood Trilogy with Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, this one concerns Adam Sorg, an artist who is seeking the perfect color red for his latest masterpiece. While conventional science would tell you that blood would turn brown when it dries, in this movie, it remains the same garish tone that an Italian giallo would feature.

Color Me Blood Red and A Bucket of Blood are essentially the same basic film, except that where Roger Corman keeps much of the violence off-screen, you’re here for a Lewis film to see blood and organs splash all over the screen. You’re not here for subtlety.

Gordon Oas-Heim is positively unhinged here as the lead. It’s kind of amazing that years later, he’d play Manford the butler on The New Monkees. He also shows up in Lewis’ Moonshine Mountain as the sheriff (he used the stage name Adam Sorg here!) and also is in Andy Warhol’s Bad.

This would be the last film from the duo of Lewis and David F. Friedman. There were plans to make a fourth in the series — Suburban Roulette* — but Friedman thought they’d done all they could when it came to gore. He’d move on to make roughies and nudie cuties like A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine; 7 Into Snowy and The Acid Eaters, as well as Love Camp 7 and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS using the name Herman Traeger.

You can watch this on Tubi or get the Arrow Video blu ray from Diabolik DVD. That has audio commentary by Lewis and Friedman, as well as Something Weird as a second bonus film. If you don’t have the gigantic Lewis box set, this is a great purchase.

*Lewis would end up making a movie with this title in 1968.

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. 

Runaway teen Bobby Douglas (Stephen White, Gas-s-s-s) is given shelter by a cult of Satanists, but both his presence and questionable sexuality leads to conflicts within the group.

To be fair before we begin — The Church of Satan statement on homosexuality is that they “fully accept all forms of human sexual expression between consenting adults. The Church of Satan has always accepted gay, lesbian, bisexual and asexual members since its beginning in 1966. This is addressed in the chapter “Satanic Sex” in The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey.”

Made by filmmakers from the gutters of Tampa on short ends as AGFA tells it — Joe Wiezycki also made the movie Willy’s Gone — Satan’s Children was made with students from the University of South Florida drama department.

Bobby escapes his father’s insults and his stepsister’s sexual suggestions — you thought incest only happened like this via Pornhub — to unknowingly end up at a gay bar. All the horror stories from Cruising are true — he’s soon having a train run on him in the grimy backseat of a car against his will. Yep, they drive all around while yelling things as they roger him, then leave him face down and ass up in a field.

So what would you do? Well, if you’re Bobby, you’d join a Satanic coven and get your revenge. After all, Florida may be the home of Disney resorts, but it’s also the birthplace of bands like Nasty Savage, Marilyn Manson, the Genitorturers, Deicide and, well, Creed.

Everybody in this movie is too sweaty, too pale and too frightening to behold. This is all you need to know of Florida to beware of its darkness. The gay bars even look like a diner and not any place that I’d imagine them to appear like. Every scenario here is concrete block and wood-paneled, covered in years of filth, dust and scum.

The first time I saw legit non-Playboy VHS porn was a movie that later research would tell me was 1984’s I Like to Watch with Lisa De Leeuw, Mike Horner, Herschel Savage and Bridgette Monet. It was upsetting. The people looked too strange, too slovenly, too unsexy — exactly the opposite that I thought porn would be.

This movie brought back that queasy feeling, which kind of made me nostalgically happy for films that can still upset me. It’s wonderful to know that that can still happen.

You can watch this for on Tubi.

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. 

Sadly, we will never see this movie in the way it was intended.

Monsters Crash the Pajama Party is a short film designed to have a break where monsters — well, people in costumes — would emerge from the movie and run through the audience before grabbed a planted victim and dragging them back into the movie. Often, it was screened as part of a traveling midnight ghost show that was hosted by illusionist and promoter Joe Karston. It would be followed by a feature presentation.

Karston was also behind spook shows such as Dr. Macabre’s Frightmare of Movie Monsters, Dr. Satan’s Shrieks in the Night and Dr. Jekyl and His Weird Show. There sure were a lot of evil doctors performing for horror audiences in the 50s through 70s.

If the gimmick of having monsters run out of the screen sounds like Ray Dennis Steckler, Karston re-released his films and added those elements. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies was retitled The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary had zombies that ran through the audience. The Thrill Killers was now The Maniacs Are Loose and had a live actor dressed as a character from the movie. And The Lemon Grove Kids had a mummy pop out of the silver screen.

David L. Hewitt had formerly been one of the Dr. Jekyl hosts who had started making movies such as The Time Travelers, Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Mighty Gorga, The Girls from Thunder Strip and The Tormentors.

Karston produced this film, which has Professor Williams (Vic McGee) and Police Lieutenant Hudson (James Reason) investigating a haunted house where a mad scientist — with monsters for assistants — takes teenagers and turns them into more monsters.

That night, the kids from a local college sneak in as part of their initiation for a fraternity. They soon meet the Mad Doctor (also McGee), as well as his gorilla assistant, as well as Igor (Charles Hegen) and Draculina (Pauline Hillkurt).  Soon, women are being turned into apes, a werewolf appears, a laser gets shot through the screen and the monsters get loose in the theater.

What an amazing time the past was. I figure that today, people would just laugh at teens in Ben Cooper masks running through the audience. As for me, I can only dream about the experience.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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. 

This Spanish film has no ravens — its title translates as The Swamp of the Ravens — but instead black vultures. It’s about Dr. Frosta, who believes that life can continue after death and will do anything to take that hypothesis and transform it into a theory. There’s also a guy singing to mannequins and the doctor trying to use blood to keep his girlfriend alive but he continues to take her to 6th base, as they say.

Thanks to Mandrakegrey on Letterboxd, I can share those lyrics:

“Never, never will you fly from me
Lifeless heart that doesn’t beat after all
I have such feelings for a dead robot

Wherever you may find yourself
I wish you were dead
My own robot, my own, my lady”

It seems like every time the scientist kills people and brings them back from the dead and gets rid of the results, they come back from the dead again. There’s some strange imagery here and the story never really adds up, but you know, I was kind of really entertained by all of this. So I guess it’s a zombie film, but it could also be an attempt at art.

Director Manuel Caño also made Voodoo Black Exorcist, which sounds just as odd as this movie, so I have to track that one down now as well. Writer Santiago Moncada was the pen behind such oddball efforts as The Corruption of Chris Miller, Cutthroats 9, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, The Fourth Victim, All the Colors of the Dark, Ricco, A Bell from Hell, Curse of the Black Cat, Rest In Pieces and many more. Knowing that made me realize why I felt like I liked this movie more than the other reviewers I’ve seen online have.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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. 

El Charro de las Calaveras (The Rider of the Skulls, played by Dagoberto Rodríguez) is a Western superhero, like Santo on a horse. Also like the man in the silver mask, he battles monsters.

The first movie directed by Alfredo Salazar, who wrote Herencia Diabólica, Una Rata en la Oscuridad, Frankestein el Vampiro y Compañía, Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dr. Frankenstein, Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man, Santo en el Tesoro de Drácula, The Panther Women, The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy and so many more films, this combines two of my favorite genres, the Mexican lucha-style horror film and Western horror.

It’s made in three episodes, starting with El Charro fighting a werewolf, as well as a zombie doing the narration and a witch showing up. The second has a rubber bat, a vampire and El Charro allowing the woman he’s to protect to get bit. Then again, he also screwed up and the werewolf killed a woman in the first movie, so maybe he’s not as good at his job as Santo. The last story — now in the present — has El Charro battling a headless horseman whose head keeps showing up in a box owned by a rich woman. Once he gets the head back, he and our hero have a sword fight.

At least El Charro adopts the son of the first woman — Perico (Alfonso Ortiz) — and somehow also adopts a full grown man named Cléofas (Pascual García Peña). Now he has sidekicks. His costume is really cool, so he has that going for himself. It’s like a dress outfit with skulls on the pockets and a nice black mask. He’s a great fighter, too, but that’s because he’s Fernando Osés in the stunt scenes. Osés was one of many luchadors that played Huracan Ramirez.

The three parts of this — they were shot as shorts originally — are El Lobo Humano, El Vampiro Siniestro and El Jinete Sin Cabeza. The masked vampire in this might be my favorite monster in all of Mexican cinema. I wish there were fifty of these movies, just like my favorite luchadors.

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. 

Made in Charlotte, North Carolina by one and done director/writer/producer/editor/stunt coordinator/casting director Dave A. Adams, this movie isn’t even about David Berkowitz — or whoever was really the Son of Sam — much less a new version of this occult killer. No, instead, it’s about Harvey.

Who is Harvey, you may ask. Well, he’s a killer escaped from a mental hospital in a movie that has moments that seem to be Halloween a year before that even hit theaters. Don’t think that this has any Carpenter directorial highlights or moments of Dean Cundy-esque camera brilliance. The movie tends to pause for several seconds while dialogue just keeps running and the camera seems to be a window into the mind of someone tripping balls while the coolest synths ever play.

Speaking of music, the real star of this show is a lounge singer named Johnny Charro who still plays shows to this day. Oh yeah, there’s also SWAT officers in action, a stuffed dog who seemingly wants to take a shower with his owner and an abortion, because, well, I honestly have no idea why.

Harvey has been killing people because his mom assaulted him as a child. Why did the cops bring her out to try and talk him out of a hostage situation? Seriously, that’s some giallo-level police buffoonery.

You can get this movie on the AGFA blu ray for The Zodiac Killer or watch it on Tubi.