From the CUFF guide: “From the depths of space, Dracula has devised his most dastardly plan yet: turning the residents of Marlow into his personal army of vampire zombies. Terror grips the town as a full-blown zombie outbreak erupts, leaving chaos in its wake. A motley crew consisting of a grizzled detective, a sceptical rookie cop, a chain-smoking greaser, and a determined young woman band together to save the world from — (see title). Packed with gruesome special effects, b-movie miniatures, and gut-busting laughs, Vampire Zombies…From Space! is a bloody comedy that has its foundation in horror films of the 1950s.”
Directed by Mike Stasko, who wrote the script with Jakob Skrzypa and Alex Forman, this has appearances by Night of the Living Dead‘s Judith O’Dea, Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, Tim & Eric’s David Liebe Hart and Saw VI’s Simon Reynolds.
Dracula (Craig Gloster) is from space — he has a son, Dylan (Robert Kemeny), too! — and they’ve come back to Earth to kill everyone — all in black and white. He had once attacked the family of Roy MacDowell (Erik Helle) and killed most of them, making the entire town think that Roy is a killer. When Roy’s daughter Susan (Charlotte Bondy) is killed, everyone blames him, but his daughter Mary (Jessica Antovski) is ready to convince Police Chief Ed Clarke (Andrew Bee) that there really are aliens. She joins with Officer James Wallace (Rashaun Baldeo) and local tough guy Wayne (Oliver Georgiou) to save her town.
With an evil council of vampire aliens that includes Coppola’s Dracula (Martin Ouellette), Vampira (O’Dea) and Nosferatu (David Liebe Hart), a store called Ed’s Wood & Hardware, a public jerk off bandit played by Kaufman, tons of gore and a heart that beats right because it’s making fun with, not at, old movies, this is one to find and love.
Vampire Zombies…From Space! screens as part of the 2025 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 17–27. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.
April 26: Oh Giorgio! — Pick a movie with a Giorgio Moroder score. Here’s a list to get you started.
Also known as Cyber Eden, this movie is wild.
Gloria Ruckhauser (Carroll Baker) has enabled scientists to reverse the aging process. However, they have done their job too well, as all the old people are becoming children. And also — all of the scientists are little kids.
The budget for this movie had to be insane or maybe I just think Christopher Lee should cost more money.
Giorgio Moroder doing the music, Luciano Tovoli shooting, Pietro Scalia editing and a whole vault of cash and this movie, which gets into AI and virtual reality years before that was a thing…it’s just weird.
It’s also the last acting role outside of a TV mini-series for Adriano Celentano. IMDB says that he was “one of the most important singers of Italian pop music, but he’s also been a creator of a comic genre in movies, with his characteristic way of walking and his facial expressions. For the most part, his films were commercially successful, in fact in the 70s and part of the 80s, he was king of the Italian box office in low budget movies.”
This TCM write-up tries to explain the movie: “Special effects comedy about seven brilliant children, hidden away in a secluded laboratory where they are perfecting an anti-aging drug. To help them relax, a lovable “idiot” is engaged to teach them about “lunacy”, but the results are too much for one of the young geniuses who creates a fantasy city.”
April 26: Oh Giorgio! — Pick a movie with a Giorgio Moroder score. Here’s a list to get you started.
Also known as Mamba, this has video game designer Gene (Gregg Henry) get upset when Eva (Trudie Styler, soon to marry Sting) leaves him, so he injects hormones into a mamba to kill her.
Directed (and co-written with Lidia Ravera) by Mario Orfini, who also directed another Moroder-scored movie, Jackpot, this film also features Bill Moseley in the role of the man who sells the snake.
Then, in real time, we watch Eva get stalked by that mamba. Watch as she gets dressed and it slithers by. She takes a bath and there’s the snake. And then…it gets closer while she narrates everything in her brain. It’s no Venom.
It’s shot by Dante Spinotti, so it looks good. However, it doesn’t really go as hard as you want it to. That said, the Moroder score may make this worth watching.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn
There’s been so much written about this early giallo that I almost didn’t want to take this one on. But after seeing a digital screening at London’s Prince Charles Cinema in March of 2025, I felt I needed to share the experience of watching the brutal murders of European models in a 1960’s Roman fashion house with a much younger audience. Would they be as enraptured by the mystery as I was when I first saw this movie in the early ‘90s on video?
Many of the patrons that night had never seen the film and yet it was sold out. Initially, this filled my Bava-loving heart with joy. “A whole new generation will be introduced to Mario Bava’s creamy purple, green, and blue gels!”, I thought. My joy was quickly doused sounds of the young audience’s laughter. Most of the little pricks found the film hilarious and outdated.
Yes, the film is old. Yes, it’s filled with meme-able moments where the camera zooms in to a close-up on a possible suspect’s gaze, accompanied by a classic Carlo Rusticelli music sting. Little did they know, it’s precisely because of films like this one that we know this to be a cliché in 2025. Yes, Cameron Mitchell is delightfully smarmy, and yes, the use of cocaine is over-dramatized. The moment that got the biggest laugh? The close-up of German text written in Isabella’s diary.
This last point was apparently so confounding to one couple, they were still trying to figure it out in the lobby after the screening. That this was their focus was disappointing. The whole point of the diary isn’t what language it’s written in. The diary is the object that drives the murderer and makes every main character look guilty. Everyone wants to know whether Isabella wrote something about them in her diary as they each have skeletons in their closets next to their mink coats. Or perhaps even, wearing the coat. It gets chilly when you’re a skeleton.
Here’s the Italian version:
I walked out into the cool, early March night air hoping that this couple would look up the film and read a bit more about the film’s international co-production between companies in France, West Germany and Italy following Bava’s departure from Galatea Films. “Maybe…” I thought, “they liked it enough to seek out Bava’s other works, too.”
I’m still trying to move past my disdain for that night’s group of morons and hold onto my gratefulness to the Prince Charles for screening the film in the first place. I’m happy they made money that night. Whether or not the brain-dead among that night’s audience liked it is not my nor their concern.
This film is gorgeous on the big screen. Every murder is staged to perfection, with each shadow and highlight revealing only the details Bava wants us to see. Every trumpet note on the theme song is perfectly placed, accentuated with cues used in Bava’s 1963 supernatural thriller The Whip and The Body, creating a sultry soundscape for the beautiful actors and actresses to sway in and out of the lush backgrounds.
In terms of story, I’ll not bother going over it again. If you’re here, you likely already know it. It’s the prototype for the Italian giallo, mixing elements of the German Krimis with the Agatha Christie novels, peppered with black-gloved killers, gorgeous, flawed, horny protagonists who literally and figuratively stab each other in the back the first chance they get until the final twist leads us to a downer ending.
To those who laughed during the screening, I can only say, “Fuck You.”
Blood and BlackLace is the base of the giallo pyramid, on which stands everything that came after it. Perhaps someday, someone will write a giallo about a group of shallow, disrespectful audience members who get murdered one by one after a screening of one of the greatest giallos ever made.
In the meantime, you can watch the entire film here:
Wow! This episode is directed by Freddie Francis, who knows something about horror! He also directed Trog, The Psychopath, Legend of the Werewolfand most importantly, the original Tales from the Crypt. This episode was written by Scott Nimerfro.
“Greetings infesters! I’ll be with you in a moment. I was just putting these gross profits away for safekeeping. You see, boils and ghouls, at Crypt Keeper Financial, we can help you get morgue for your money. Whether it’s mutual fiends you want or cold, horrid cash, we can guarantee you’ll coroner the market. Hmm. I bet you’d be the type who’s interested in boo chips, like tonight’s tale. It’s about three girls who are chopping around for a tax fright-off of their own in a nasty shock option I call “Last Respects.”:
Yvonne, Dolores, and Marlys Finger (Emma Samms, Kerry Fox and Julie Cox) are three sisters who work at the House of Curios and hate one another, although only Marlys is the owner. Then they find a monkey’s paw — the actual one the story was based on — and it does what the paw always does. People die and no one can outsmart the thing. Only one of the sisters can get the shop and all the money that somehow it suddenly starts making.
The original owners of the paw, Mr. and Mrs. Wilder, are played by Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray in their last roles. Married for nearly sixty years, they always appeared together. Dulcie was also a short story writer with several of her stories showing up in the Pan Book of Horror Stories.
This story was based on “Last Respects!” from Tales from the Crypt #23. It was written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Graham Ingels. That story is very different, as a man gets locked inside a mausoleum and survives nearly a month by catching leaking rain water and eating a dead body, but dies because of formaldehyde poisoning.
April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.
Known in Italy as Gli invasori (The Invaders), this is the story of two Vikings, Erik (George Ardisson) and Eron (Cameron Mitchell), who are separated when Sir Rutford (Andrea Checchi) of England makes a surprise attack on their father, King Harald (Folco Lulli). In the battle, Eron is rescued, and when King Lotar (Franco Ressel) becomes angry that Rutford has gone against his orders, he is also killed. His wife, Queen Alice (Françoise Christophe), rescues Erik and raises him.
Twenty years later, King Olaf (Jean-Jacques Delbo) has made Eron his warrior of choice, ready to take the fight back to England. Meanwhile, Erik is made Duke of Helford and leader of the English Navy, but Rutford sabotages his ship and sets it on fire. In the battle to come, brother fights brother, brother discovers sister, and Eron dies, naming Erik to his title.
Together, the Viking, English, and Scottish armies defeat Rutford. At the same time, Erik becomes King of the Vikings with vestal virgin Rama (Alice Kessler) while her twin sister Daya (Ellen Kessler) sails alone with the body of her lover, Eron.
Shot in Rome’s Titanus Studios, this is director Mario Bava making use of all his camera tricks while also having good acting and amazing sets to work with. This is only the second movie he’d directed, and already you could see his power. There’s an incredible spider death trap and a mesmerizing beauty in the story of two brothers, long kept apart, first enemies and the twin sisters who love them. Yes, it was inspired by The Vikings, but the best Italian movies start with another movie and then do something all their own.
From the CUFF Guide: “In the chaos of Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, a teenage usher named Vince Lawrence witnessed the fiery backlash against disco—a sound that defined freedom and pride. Undeterred by the hostility, Vince used his earnings to buy a synthesizer, setting in motion a journey that would change music forever. Venturing into the underground sanctuary of The Warehouse, where Frankie Knuckles spun revolutionary sounds, Vince teamed up with Jesse Saunders to form Z Factor, a scrappy collective of visionaries who captured the pulse of Chicago’s underground on wax. Their track, “On and On,” became the first recorded house music anthem, sparking a movement that transformed a local DIY culture into a global phenomenon. From those gritty Chicago streets to festival stages worldwide, Vince’s story is an electrifying testament to how a dream, born in the ashes of rejection, ignited a genre that continues to unite and liberate people across the globe.”
Directed by Elegance Bratton, this has Vince Lawrence tell the story of house and how it grew out of disco, which people believe died but come on. We know that isn’t true. This breaks down how rock bands felt threatened by disco and how Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979 was a way of fighting back. But what was a way for Steve Dahl to push back against disco replacing rock turned into racism, as this movie tells us. Some saw it as a targeted attack on black music.
Vince Lawrence was there that night working as an usher, saving for a synthesizer. He said when people were saying “Disco sucks,” it started to feel like they were saying it to him. And then he had to go home through Bridgeport, worried he would be made fun of, attacked or much worse. Steve Dahl got in trouble for a publicity stunt but it was out of control and an event that destroyed black art as some of the records were Motown, not disco.
In “The Flip Sides of ’79” in Rolling Stone, writer Dave Marsh said, “The antidisco movement, which has been publicized by such FM personalities as notorious Chicago DJ Steve Dahl, is simply another programming device. White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.” He also told Today, ““I was appalled,” remembers Marsh. “It was your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead. It was everything you had feared come to life. Dahl didn’t come from Top 40 radio, he came from album rock radio, which was fighting to heighten its profile.”
In that same article, Gloria Gaynor said, “Disco never got credit for being the first and only music ever to transcend all nationalities, race, creed, color, and age groups. It was common ground for everyone.”
That’s where the movie gets into how disco gave birth to “a couple babies:” house and hip-hop. The difference, according to several in this, is that hip-hop led to violence and disrespect. House brought people together and house became a safe party with no gangsters, because, “everyone was gay.”
I really liked how the movie breaks down the song “Fantasy,” who thinks they wrote it and how the black artists felt disrespected by the white singer, Rachael Cain (who is also part of the Michael Alig NYC club scene and ended up owning Trax Records). I also liked how so much of early house was one drum machine and one synth. Nothing else. Just noise and beat; the DJ became the focal point; not a band. Not a real drummer.
Also an interesting point that this film brings up is how black culture is always stolen from. Today, the most famous house musicians are white. House was stolen by white culture. Techno was taken from Detroit. EDM stole from black music. The creators of house never saw the money that other musicians did after them.
This is recommended, as it shines a light into a form of music I’d always wanted to know more about. Now, I want to go deeper and learn more about the personalities and songs that this has introduced me to.
Move Ya Body: The Birth of House screens as part of the 2025 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 17–27. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
Eight years after Basket Case, Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and his brother Belial are still alive, despite falling out of a window. They’re kidnapped by Granny Ruth (Annie Ross) and are nursed back to health by her and her granddaughter, Susan (Heather Rattray).
Granny Ruth’s home is filled with what others would call freaks, like Eve, a female version of Belial, with whom he soon falls in love. But Duane still hates his brother and doesn’t want to be surrounded by these people and their deformities. The brothers are separated, but then reporters Marcie (Kathryn Meisle) and Artie (Matt Mitler) find them, wanting to bring them to justice. Belial scars Marcie for life, making her a freak just like him.
On the night Eve and Belial finally make love, Duane tries to run away with Susan, only to learn that she has been pregnant for six years with a creature. He shoves her out the window and sews Belial back onto his body as the film ends. Well, there’s more, but you need to see Basket Case 3: The Progeny.
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