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. 

J.G. Patterson Jr. — full name Jr Junius Gustavious Patterson — was only on our planet for 45 years, but in that time, the North Carolina native worked on She-Devils On Wheels, The Gruesome Twosome and Axe, as well as providing effects for Three On a Meathook and The Electric Chair. He was also an actor in movies such as Preacherman, Moonshine Mountain and Whiskey Mountain.

Yet it’s his vanity production — in the best sense of the word — The Body Shop that we’ll be talking about today. In addition to directing, writing and producing this movie, Patterson was also its lead, playing Dr. Brandon. He’s lost his wife in a car crash — shades of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die — so after setting her head ablaze, he decides to just remake her in a perfect body by killing women — again, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die — along with his hunchbacked assistant Greg (Roy Mehaffey).

Patterson got the most important part of being a horror star right. Just like Paul Naschy, he gets to make out with every pretty girl in this movie before killing them and getting to show off his skills at making over the top gore. He also repeatedly cuts to a country star — I use this word in the lowest wattage and I am also not about to refer to the stand up comedian — Bill Hicks, who keeps coming back to tell us that “A Heart Dies Every Minute.”

Hicks may be William T. Hicks, who was also in the Earl Ownsby-produced North Carolina-filmed classics A Day of Judgement, Death Screams and Order of the Black Eagle.

Now that the doctor has Anitra (Jenny Driggers), he wants to keep her away from every other man. He can also control her mind. But you know that women are always smarter than men, even if they are sewn together from the corpses of a model, a secretary and a few other pretty girls.

When this came out on VHS, it had Herschell Gordon Lewis introduce it and the name changed to Dr. Gore. In the credits, it also says that Patterson was America’s #1 magician, which seems like the kind of claim that can be verified. Also known as Shrieks in the Night, this movie is also evidence as to why Patterson died of metastatic malignant melanoma — his death certificate is linked on his IMDB page — because he’s lighting up in every scene, even when he’s in his lab. He also picks his nails with a scalpel, so there’s that.

A few of the ladies in the cast — Jenny Driggers and Jeannine Aber — are also in another North Carolina regional film, The Night of the Cat.

This was also called Anitra while it was being shot. I can tell you that because the clapboard is on screen for a good five seconds. But I loved this. It has 15 gallons of blood in it, which is enough for ten people.

Let me ask you: Does Poor Things have a soundtrack by William Girdler? Does it have the line, “Greg! Put on this lab coat, so they don’t know you’re a hunchback!” Does a cop give up the investigation because the doctor says, “I’m a doctor?” No, it doesn’t. This movie cost a fraction that can’t even be calculated of that Film Twitter darling’s budget and it doesn’t have Bill Hicks and The Reignbeaux singing in a steak house.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

We first encountered The Child at a Halloween party thrown at the palatial Mexican War Streets home of Mr. Groovy Doom himself, Bill Van Ryn. While some folks drank in the kitchen or enjoyed the mix of Goblin and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult blasting in the sitting room, I was entranced by a film that was playing on the TV. The sound wasn’t turned up, the images all felt like transmissions from beyond and nothing really added up in the movie. “What the hell is this,” I asked. “Oh, The Child!” exclaimed Bill, hurriedly running in to try and explain why he was growing more and more obsessed with multiple rewatches of the film.

Sometime in the 1930’s — which you’d only know from the old cars, as this film feels like an anachronism lost in no particular time — Alicianne has been hired to be the caretaker for Rosalie Nordon, the titular child, who has just lost her mother. Along with her father and brother Len, she lives in a house on the edge of the woods.

Even the trip to the house is strange, with Alicianne’s car breaking down after she drives it into a ditch. A journey through the woods brings her to Mrs. Whitfield, who warns her about the Nordon family. She probably should have listened, as everyone in this family — hell, everyone in this movie — is touched, as they say.

When Alicianne first meets Rosalie, he jack in the box suddenly moves by itself. It’s a very subtle scene that hints that things might not be right here. After all, people have seen Rosalie wandering the cemetery late at night, a place where she brings kittens so that her friends there will do anything she asks. And even dinner is strange, as her father relates a story of Boy Scouts eating a soup stirred with oleander that caused them all to die. Father and daughter have a good laugh at that while Len just seems embarrassed by his family.

Then there are the drawings — Rosalie has been sketching everyone who was at her mother’s funeral, marking them for death. And if she does have psychic abilities, is she using them to reanimate the dead or control them? Or do they just do whatever she wants? The Child wasn’t made to give you those answers. It just screams in your face and demands that you keep watching despite your ever-growing confusion.

Mrs. Whitfield’s dog is taken first, then that old busy body pays the price, with her face getting ripped off as the zombies mutilate her. That gardener has some of mommy’s jewelry, so he has to pay, too. And Alicianne, who was supposedly here just for Rosalie, has started to spend too much time with Len. She’s next on the list.

There are some really haunting scenes as we get closer to Halloween, like a scarecrow come to life and a jack-o-lantern that keeps relighting itself and following our heroine around the room.

Finally, Mr. Nordon starts to discipline his daughter, which leads to Rosalie unleashing all of her powers. She decimates her father, crashes Alicianne’s car and sends zombies to chase her governess and brother all the way to an old mill. Len tries to fight them while Alicianna just screams and screams, but he can’t stop them from dragging him under the building and tearing his face to bloody pieces. As the attack of the zombies stops, Rosalie walks through the door just as our heroine hits her with an axe. She walks outside into the dawn’s light and everything is still. The threat is over.

Written by Ralph Lucas as Kill and Go Hide, The Child isn’t a great movie, but it’s an interesting one. If you ask me, that’s way more important. Some people will get tied up in things like narrative cohesion, good acting and a soundtrack that makes sense. None of those people should watch The Child with you, as they’ll just ruin what can be an awesome experience. This is the kind of movie that takes over, kind of like one of those dreams you have and try to write down the moment you wake up, but it gets lost in the ether of reality. For most of the film, the zombies are barely glimpsed, just seen in the shadows, so they really could just be tramps that live in the cemetery. Or something much worse.

Producer Harry Novak acquired this film and made his money on it, even if director Robert Voskanian and producer Robert Dadashia saw no profit. It’s a story we’ve seen hundreds of times — an interesting movie taken, used and abused by conmen who have no interest in art.

Yet I wear a Harry Novak shirt all the time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This 1970 documentary about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan that was directed and produced by Ray Laurent, whose only other credits involve editing some films, including one of the Lemon Grove Kids films that Ray Dennis Steckler directed. Within this movie, there’s plenty of ritual footage, as well as interviews with LaVey, his family, church members and then his somewhat annoying neighbors and some priests and Mormon missionaries.

It’s really interesting to see how the people living next to LaVey saw things, less concerned about the people coming in and out than the upkeep and shingles of the Black House. This is a rare opportunity to see actual rituals of the early Church and hear from its members.

Also, the Church is very ahead of the cultural mores of the time — and even today — commenting on how they don’t tolerate homosexuality in the Church of Satan. Instead, they go further: “To tolerate is to infer they are different or less than, we just accept them as normal people because that’s exactly what they are.” Keep in mind this was made in 1970.

“Well, I had a man come to me the other day and he said that it was just terrible, when he joined the Satanic Church, he was masturbating just about every day, and now he’s masturbating two, and sometimes three, times a day, and he’s very happy, much happier than he’s ever been before.” – Anton Lavey

Director Ray Laurent also edited  The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters and Body Fever and was the editorial consultant on Sappho Darling.

This had an X rating, probably for the nudity in the Black Mass scene.

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 Huntington, West Virginia, Teen-Age Stranger was directed by Ben Parker (Thunder Mountain, Invisible Avenger) and written by Clark Davis, who also wrote the songs “Yipe Stripes” and “Willows Wept” that are in this.

Huntington may be the second largest city in the state and the home of 1950s TV icon Dagmar, game show host Peter Marshall and Brad Dourif, but it does not seem large enough to have a giallo-style killer wandering the streets, tying women up with their stockings and leaving lipstick X marks all over their young dead bodies.

Jimmy Walton (Bill Bloom) is a dirtbike racing rebel new in town. Everyone thinks he could be the strangler, even if his brother Mikey (John Humphries) and his secret love Betty (Jo Canterbury) know it can’t be him or any of his gang, the Fastbacks even if the killer is wearing one of their jackets.

This is the kind of movie where a hamburger restaurant can have a band called the Huntington Astronauts just jump up and start playing and yet there’s a sexually motivated killing machine bringing death to this Leave It to Beaver black and white world.

The real hero is Mikey, who might be the biggest goofball in the history of movies. Between his brother taking the blame for things he’s done, being so annoying that his brother kicks him in the face and being unable to ride a bicycle without an accident, he cries in nearly every scene. If this really were a giallo, he would have to be the killer.

John Humphries later revealed that he thought that Jo Canterbury was a professional actress. She was really an airline hostess. When she got wilder with her performance, he thought she was a pro, so he did the same thing.

This played theaters and drive-ins as late as 1985 due to its great title. It became better known after Mystery Science Theater 3000 played it on their show. It does a lot in 61 minutes. Those West Virginia kids are unshakeable. Betty nearly gets killed by the villain — who is not a teenager, but Janitor Choker is a worse title and a spoiler, sorry — and then has a cop shoot a bullet right at her that hits the killer and he dies inches from her, she goes right back to the malt shop. Montani Semper Liberi!

You can watch this on Tubi with or without riffing.

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. 

Rogelio A. Gonzalez made more than 70 movies, but I wonder if he ever made anything near as good as this movie, which is perhaps one of the strangest films I’ve ever had the delight to witness.

I was wondering how to even describe this movie. Basically, Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe, Miss Mexico 1953 and a third-runner up for Miss Universe) and Beta (Lorena Velazquez, Miss Mexico 1960 and also Zorina queen of the vampires in Santo vs. Las Mujeres Vampiro) have come from Venus to find men to repopulate their planet. Of course, they can’t resist biting people or falling in love with Lauriano (Eulalio “Piporro” Gonzalez, one of the kings of golden age of Mexico comedy and the literal embodiment of Northern Mexican culture), a singing cowboy.

Sure, that would set up a great movie, but this is Mexico. Which means that the ship has a robot named Tor who is collecting a whole bunch of monsters — why, the title translates as Ship of Monsters, surprise! — and those monsters are about to go crazy. There’s Uk the cyclops, the many armed Carasus, Prince of Mars Tagual, Utirr the spider and the dinosaur skeleton named Zok. Also, Tor falls for a jukebox. And some of the special effects were ripped off from the Russian movie Road to the Stars.

Imagine if Ed Wood lived in Mexico, had a better budget, lucked out and had magnificent actresses willing to wear swimsuits and high heels, as well as a singing cowboy. Then we’d cut open slice open a peyote cactus and make him sit in a cave until he made this and it still might not this charming and odd.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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. 

In 1965, director Massey Cramer and writer Bob Corley made The Legend of Blood Mountain. It’s a comedy about reporter Bestoink Dooley (George Ellis), who comes to Blood Mountain to learn about the legend — see what I did there? — of the creature who is said to rise when a drop of blood is spilled. Everyone else thinks there’s a serial killer, even if we didn’t know what that word meant, as Robert Ressler first used it in a presentation in 1974.

In 1975. Donn Davison — the manager of the Dragon Art Theatre in Gainesville, FL, as well as the director of the “Asylum of the Insane” inserts in She-Freak, Honey Britches and Moonshiner’s Woman, plus the producer of Secrets of the Gods and The Force Beyond; even more, he was a hype man for Film Ventures International and played a folklore expert in Crypt of Dark Secrets and the antiquities expert in Mardi Gras Massacre — must have seen how much money that The Legend of Boggy Creek was making. So he took that aforementioned movie — now ten years old — and added on some “real people” and himself up front as an expert. Then, he shared it with the world.

When he refers to himself as a “World Traveler, Lecturer and Psychic Investigator” who are we to say he isn’t?

If you’re wondering who Bestoink Dooley is, he was the host of the Big Movie Shocker, which aired on Fridays at 11:30 p.m. on Altanta’s WAGA-TV Channel 5. Played by George Ellis, he was also in the movies Swamp Country, Honey Britches (which was renamed and re-released as both Shantytown Honeymoon and later Demented Death Farm Massacre) and Moonrunners, as the villain Jake Rainey. That movie kind of disappeared, but would return when its director Gy Waldron took the concept and narrator Waylon Jennings and went to Hollywood to sell it as The Dukes of Hazzard. Ellis never got to play Boss Hogg.

According to this amazing article in Oxford American, “The Bestoink Dooley Fan Club,” Ellis also bought a theater known as the Festival Cinema. Atlanta magazine described it as a venue where “patrons would often come as much as 30 minutes before the show started to sit in the plush lobby in white sculptured chairs and leaf through copies of Sight and Sound or talk in muted voices and sip the complimentary Viennese coffee.” Despite introducing the city to the French New Wave and New German Cinema, Ellis was broke. So he started showing porn and got arrested for obscenity. Years later, he’d open other theaters — the Film Forum at Ansley Mall, the Film Forum on Peachtree and the Bijou Cinema — all places where “You can trace the roots of Atlanta’s film culture through these theaters.”

As if this movie doesn’t have enough nexus points, the bikini-clad daughter of a town doctor who falls for Dooley by the name of Phyllis Stinson is played by Erin Fleming. She’s also in Hercules in New York, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) and Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York but is best-known as the secretary and manager of Groucho Marx. While many of the actor’s friends admitted that she did much to revive his popularity and getting him an honorary Academy Award Marx, many also believed that she psychologically and physically abused him. After his death, she was ordered to repay $472,000 which she had taken from his estate. She’s gorgeous in this movie, yet sher life went so wrong over the last few decades she was in this plane of reality. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, arrested for carrying a concealed and loaded gun and lived out the rest of those dark years homeless and delusional before shooting herself at the age of 61.

Nearly everyone in this is either overacting, reading off cue cards — Davison is wearing sunglasses so you can’t tell that he is doing exactly that — or repeating lines because they think that someone is going to edit this movie.

Well, there is editing ten years later, as the strange original monster has been replaced with fog and a sasquatch.

“BIG FOOT” is more than a legend… They swear to God it’s true!” That’s the kind of words that get people in theaters and drive-ins. You know what else helps? Having your own theme song.

“The Ballad of McCullough Mountain” by Tim York is the kind of theme kind of demanded after Boggy Creek. As for three year old me, this movie may have terrified me as much as the frozen Bigfoot that came to the parking lot of my K-Mart. My aunt went to see it and brought back pictures. I remember yelling at her, because now Bigfoot knew that I knew he was here.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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. 

Directed, written and produced by William Edwards, this movie starts with this line: “I saw a panorama of beautiful hills. However, as beautiful as it may seem, death lurked behind those beautiful hills and beautiful women. I don’t know which came first.”

Count Alucard (Vince Kelly) has brought a reporter named Mike (Billy Whitton) to his cave and turned him into Irving Jackalman, a werewolf henchman who brings him women to both feed on and make love to. The jackal or werewolf mask is from another movie that Edwards wrote, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals, which has five minutes of John Carradine in it.

The problem is that Mike’s girlfriend Ann (Ann Hollis, who was also in The Ravager) is so attractive that the vampire must have her even after a whole movie of him tying up women, making out with them and then drinking their hemoglobin.

Producer Whit Boyd also was behind 60s sleaze like Spiked Heels and Black Nylons, Hot Blooded Woman, The Sex Shuffle, Scarlet Negligee, The Office Party, Party Girls and Eat, Drink and Make Merrie. In April 1970, sheriff’s deputies in Pensacola, FL seized prints of this movie and I Am Curious (Yellow) from the Ritz Theatre and charged the manager with two counts of unlawful showing of an obscene film and maintaining a public nuisance.

Where this gets even better is that the original sound shot with the movie was so bad and didn’t match the footage that the entire thing was dubbed in the studio. As well as additional footage shot in Dallas, using local talent, there are only two voices in this movie and both sound like old vaudeville comedians talking over some jazz instead of any dialogue for most of the film.

It makes this roughie feel almost cute, I almost said, then I looked up and a werewolf was strangling a naked women, who was covered with blood, and still raw dogging — I guess, right? — her.

One of the few actresses in this to do anything else is Sue Allen. She plays Carol in this and is also in the X-rated 1970 movie Cindy and Donna. She would go on to sing in several cartoons, including Yogi’s First Christmas.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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. 

You better like the song “Beware of the 4-D Witch!” when you watch this. Written by Joe Bisko with vocals by Johnny by the Way and music by Attila Galamb, it’s one of two songs that plays through nearly all of this movie, which wasn’t recorded with synched sound and instead has voiceovers. You will hear this song so many times that you may lose your mind.

The other songs are Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” Ravel’s “Bolero,” Mussorgsky’s “Night On Bald Mountain,” Holst’s “Mars, Bringer of War (from The Planets suite)” and strangely enough, “A Saucerful of Secrets” by Pink Floyd.

I have no idea who Victor Luminera was or is. This is all that he created and left us with and you know, it’s enough. How does one describe this movie?

Let me try.

The end of the 70s occult fascination mixed with props made by Ben Cooper overlayed with nudie cutie style filmmaking that never becomes sexy all with overlaid images like you’re tripping acid at the Fillmore while Kenneth Anger possesses Victor to make something like his films but with no budget and the lowest quality camera ever made.

Cindy (Margo, her only name) promised her daddy she’d be a virgin but she loves the occult and is as horny as me after walking through the saloon doors to the adult section of Heads Together. Abigail the 4D Witch (Esoterica) promises her a rich fantasy sex life if she follows her. Together, they have Super Orgasms and travel on the astral plane like the wet dreams of Chris Claremont.

One of their missions has them making gay neighbor Mr. Jones (Kelly Guthrie, The Sexorcist) straight — problematic! — and then they get Cindy’s friend Jan Kleinmetz (Tracy Handfuss, who unlike many folks in this was in more than one movie; she’s also in A Clock Work Blue, Did Baby Shoot Her Sugardaddy? and in the starring role — Toni Carrione — in The Goddaughter) all goofed up on spider venom and human blood, which leads her to play with a snake that slithers its way out of her asshole. Yes, this happens and it feels like a Tim Vigil comic book come to life.

The problems happen when the fantasy sex — as Abigail says, “Let’s fantasy fuck now!” — gets out of hand and Jan gets hurt. It turns out that the 4D Witch is angry that Cindy — in a past life — stole her lover and this is all about revenge, but like a square up reel, Cindy learns that prayer can stop the occult. This leads to Jan waking up from death and saying, “Salem, witch bitch!”

Somehow, the movie continues and Cindy’s brother Mark (Tom Yerian) becomes the King of the Sex Vampires, I shit you not. If you’re shocked that a copy of Look with Anton LaVey on the cover appears, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Fourth Dimension is beyond good and evil, so who are we to judge the 4D Witch? It remains untouched by science. Somewhere in all this, Jan also has a sapphic moment with her Aunt Fanny (Annette Michael, who appeared as Annette Anderson in Flesh Gordon). Jan has more problems with liking women than with incest, so…yeah. The only thing that can stop this 4D Witch and her curse is an actual orgasm from a doctor, which makes me wonder about said therapist’s ethics and the idea that reality can be more powerful than fantasy.

This is the kind of movie that promises and delivers necrophilia and yet censors out every use of the word fuck after the first time it is uttered.

Amazingly — thanks to Bill Van Ryn of Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum — this played Hawaiian drive-ins with The Devil’s Rain! An Anton LaVey double feature!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Roadshow Rarities (June 30 – July 6) In the old days of theatrical releases some of the more lavish movies would be promoted by holding limited screenings in large cities. These roadshow releases would generate hype before the nationwide release and allow producers to tweak the film to the audience’s reaction. This model also worked for low budget productions that may have had no intention of a wide release. These explo roadshows traveled an informal circuit of theaters, churches, revival tents, high school auditoriums and anywhere else they could run a projector. They frequently promised more than they delivered and left town before the angry audience could catch up to them. Through the restoration efforts of SWV many of these movies have survived to piss audiences off to this very day!

After White Zombie, this would be the second zombie movie ever made. It may also be the first movie to be absolute horror movie BS. That’s because as the story goes, the producers wanted to hire dancers and drummers from Haiti. However, papaloi voodoo priests objecting and the director was threatened with a wanga — a voodoo curse — on his car. To make things even worse, the prop master then stole sacred objects including stuffed snakeskins and skulls. When production moved to Jamaica, a cyclone killed two crew members, then supposedly another was murdered by a barracuda and another passed away from yellow fever.

Klili Gordon (Fredi Washington) is a half-white and half-black plantation owner in love with fellow plantation owner Adam Maynard (Philip Brandon). He likes her, but because of racism, he chooses Eve Langley (Marie Paxton) instead. Klili decides to use voodoo to kill off her rival, raising thirteen black men to do her commands. Adam turns to LeStrange (Sheldon Leonard), his plantation overseer, to stop this. He hangs a dead body dressed as her, but it fails, so he ends up just strangling her.

This movie has so many issues. Leonard was cast as a black man despite being a Jewish white man. And in her last movie, The Emperor Jones, Ferdi Washington kissing a black man looked too close to a white woman kissing a black man, so she had to wear makeup to appear darker. That’s before we even get into the idea that all black people know voodoo.

Director and writer George Terwilliger revised this movie and it was remade as a movie for African-American audiences called The Devil’s Daughter.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Roadshow Rarities (June 30 – July 6) In the old days of theatrical releases some of the more lavish movies would be promoted by holding limited screenings in large cities. These roadshow releases would generate hype before the nationwide release and allow producers to tweak the film to the audience’s reaction. This model also worked for low budget productions that may have had no intention of a wide release. These explo roadshows traveled an informal circuit of theaters, churches, revival tents, high school auditoriums and anywhere else they could run a projector. They frequently promised more than they delivered and left town before the angry audience could catch up to them. Through the restoration efforts of SWV many of these movies have survived to piss audiences off to this very day!

Sam Newfield directed around 250 movies. He didn’t specialize in a genre. He made about twenty movies a year. He made so many movies that he also used the names Sherman Scott and Peter Stewart so that it wouldn’t seem like he had made so many.

In fact, Fred Olen Ray even used the name Sherman Scott to make Tomb of the Werewolf, Haunting Desires, Super Ninja Doll, Girl with the Sex-Ray Eyes, Bikini-A-Go-Go, The Bikini Escort Company, Bikini Cavegirl, Bad Girls from Mars and The Prophet. He used Peter Stewart for 13 Erotic Ghosts, Dear Santa and Mom’s Outta Sight.

Newfield heard someone say, “If this economic dive keeps going, we’ll be using midgets as actors.” That’s why he made a Western with little people.

It starts with a man (Stephen Chase) introducing the movie and stars Buck Larson and Bat Haines getting ready to fight before the story has even played. In that story, Haines and his gang are stealing the Shetland ponies of Buck’s father and selling them to another farmer, Tex Preston. Buck also falls in love with that man’s niece, Nancy (Yvonne Moray).

Buck was played by Billy Curtis, who started his career in the vaudeville and pro wrestling. In his fifty year career, he was in everything from The Wizard of Oz (as the Munchkin city father) to the AIP small person gang film Little Cigars and High Plains Drifter. He also played Mayor McCheese, Bark Bent and Superpup in the wild pilot The Adventures of Superpup, a Martian in The Angry Red Planet, a child ape in Planet of the Apes and appears in Eating Raoul.

The bad guy is played by “Little Billy” Rhodes, who was the Barrister in The Wizard of Oz, which also had Charlie Becker (the cook in this movie) play the mayor, John T. Bambury (Buck’s dad) was a soldier, Joseph Herbst (the sheriff) was a soldier, Nita Krebs (a vampire in this movie!) was one of the Lullaby League, George Ministeri (the blacksmith) was a villager, Fern Formica (Diamond Dolly) was a sleepyhead, William H. O’Docharty (The Old Soak) was a villager and Jerry Maren was a townsperson in both movies. He was also the last surviving cast member of The Wizard of Oz with an identifiable speaking or singing role before dying in 2018.

Many of the actors were former members of the performing troupe The Singer Midgets — I apologize for having to keep using that racially horrible term — which was founded by Leopold Singer. He even created Liliputstadt, a special town at the Venice in Vienna amusement park, where they could perform. Singer provided 124 actors and stand-ins to play Munchkins. While his employees called him Papa, some say he kept half their money. This movie’s star, Billy Singer, said that he “had a reputation for cheating his midgets.”

This is another movie that Harry Medved and Randy Lowell listed in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way). It also won he P.T. Barnum Award for Worst Cinematic Exploitation of a Physical Deformity in the Medveds’ The Golden Turkey Awards.

As always, they are wrong.

This was written by Clarence Marks and Fred Myton, who wrote over 170 movies, including Nabonga.

You can watch this on Tubi.