EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wizard of Mars was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 10, 1976 at 1:00 a.m.

David L. Hewitt was an illusionist in the Dr. Jeckyll’s Strange Show who wanted to be in the movies. He wrote to Forrest Ackerman and gave him his script Journey into the Unknown, which became The Time Travelers. After that, he directed the 3D short Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, which played with spook shows, as well as Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Mighty Gorga, The Girls from Thunder Strip and The Tormentors. He’s also Gorga in that giant monkey movie.

When this movie was released by Regal Video in the 80s, it was retitled Alien Massacre and it could have either been this movie or Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors in the tape you got. That movie has no aliens. Neither has a massacre. But the box art and tagline, “Blood flows like water,” got plenty of people to watch whatever it was.

Let’s head to the future of 1975, where Steve (Roger Gentry), Doc (Vic McGee), Charlie (Jerry Rannow) and Dorothy (Eve Bernhardt) have barely made it to Mars alive. After crash landing, they battle monsters in the canals of the red planet, avoid a volcano and get caught in a dust storm, all of which makes Charlie lose it and start shooting his rifle at everything.

They find a stone road that leads them to a city that is empty other than a dead Martian and a silver globe which mentally directs them to fixing what has been broken and reveals the face of John Carradine, who tells them how Mars once ruled the universe before coming back to their home to ponder the next stage of evolution. Then, the city goes back into the planet.

Obviously, this is The Wizard of Oz in space, just like Zardoz would kind of be a decade later. That movie wasn’t made for $33,000 with a Don Post mask and it was not also edited for spook show audiences. It also rips off plenty of sound design from Forbidden Planet.

John Carradine gets to read a long speech, intoning ““Space is vast, time is long. It was then that we impaled time on an axis. Eternal stillness, transgression upon time. Time tugs us to our yesterdays almost as strong as all the unborn tomorrows that stretch through all eternity.” That’s really all it took to make me love this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Woman Eater was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 28, 1966 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 19, 1967.

At the Explorers’ Club in London — yes, it’s all rich white dudes — Dr. Moran (George Coulouris) tells everyone that he’s going to the Amazon to get “a miracle-working JuJu that can bring the dead back to life.” While there, he watches Marpessa Dawn, a year removed from being in Black Orpheus — get eaten by a tree. Then he gets jungle fever and it takes five years for him to recover.

Dr. Moran has brought the tree and the drummer who controls it, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan), to keep on working on bringing life to death, which starts with feeding Susan Curtis to the tree. I’m amused that Sara Leighton, who played the role, became a famous lady of British society known for her portrait painting.

Meanwhile, Sally Norton (Vera Day) is working at a sideshow dancing the hula-hula, because Hawaii was all mondo to British people in the late 50s. A local favorite named Jack Venner (Peter Wayn) ends up getting her fired and then hired by Moran, who must love Tanya Donelly because he can’t stop feeding that tree. And he starts falling for Sally, even strangling the woman who has loved him nearly forever, Margaret Santor (Joyce Gregg), all so she can start working in his lab.

The end of this movie gets all nihilist, as the drummer refuses to teach the secret of how to keep the brain alive after death and Moran realizes he loved Margaret and tries to bring her back to life, only to have her as a brainless zombie. Tanga tries to feed Sally to the tree, Moran sets it on fire and then gets killed by the drummer’s knife before Tanga kneels before the tree and lets it set him on fire.

What!?!

Director Charles Saunders and writer Brandon Fleming stopped making movies after 1963. That’s a shame because this movie is just…something.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Back from the Dead was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, May 17, 1964 at 11:10 p.m.

Charles Marquis Warren directed this and the film it played double features with, The Unknown Terror, before creating Rawhide and adapting Gunsmoke to television. It was written by Catherine Turney and was based on her book The Other One.

Dick (Arthur Franz) and Mandy Anthony (Peggie Castle) are on vacation with her sister Kate Hazelton (Marsha Hunt) when Mandy passes out and loses the child in her womb. She also refers to Dick as Dickens and will only answer to Felicia, the name of the dead wife that Dick never told his second wife about losing.

She demands to be taken to her parents, Mr. Bradley (James Bell) and Mrs. Bradley (Helen Wallace). Dick tells Kate that the Bradley women were all evil. So evil that when Mr. Bradley says, “God will punish you for this,” Mrs. Bradley answers “You believe in your God. I’ll believe in mine.”

Felicia then tries to murder Kate, who only wakes up when she hears the voice of her sister, and then kills Copper the dog, who hated her and adored the new wife. Kate decides that she needs to know more and follows Nancy Cordell (Marianne Stewart) to the coven run by Maître Victor Renall (Otto Reichow), who was in love with Felicia and is angry that her mother did magic without him.

Dick’s friend John Mitchell (Don Haggerty) is able to save Kate through his love for her when she’s attacked by a spell created by Mrs. Bradley. He feels like he causes Felicia’s death, as she said that she would kill herself if he didn’t make love to her. She backed up and fell off a cliff, but now she’s in Mandy’s body and runs to Renall after her mother kills her father and Renall’s spell kills Mrs. Bradley.

You know who finally stops the devil cult leader? Nancy. She was in love with him and even in death, he loved Felicia. She shoots him and Mandy comes back to her body. Her sister tells Dick that her sister should never learn the truth, which is kind of not women staying together.

The sales guide for this movie had this advice: “Have a woman dressed as a zombi wander about the streets near the theatre bearing a sign with the picture’s title, such as: I am Back from the Dead. Come and see me at (name of theatre).”

I loved this, as you can imagine, because it’s so rich in its occult wackiness. In 1957 there were devil cults in the suburbs and people’s moms were in them. It’s also terrifying because I do not want my ex wife showing up in my wife’s body.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Directed and written by Adam Thorn, this is an anthology where a man who needs to use an outhouse on a nature trail is blocked by an old hermit who tells him three stories. On the way, we get to hear “Crucified Woman” by Riz Ortolani, which is from Cannibal Holocaust.

In “The PandaManiac of the Pandemic,” you get exactly what is promised. A panda masked killing machine wiping out some teens, one of whom is Justin Decloux from Gold Ninja Video/The Important Cinema Club. He’s one of many twenty or thirty something teens in this who all dance like Jimmy Mortimer. Every time the panda attacks, he’s greeted with some metal, which is the exact thing I wanted. A panda that rips ears off soundtracked with barked vocals and double bass! He even grabs a guitar and murders someone, all before the pizza gets there.

In “Ranger,” we learn that the Amityville Outhouse used to be in Amityville but is now in the woods somehow and it keeps reappearing, which makes a park ranger go crazy. He chops it to pieces, he sets it on fire and then he gave up and decided to use the outhouse. The voices of the spirits got in his head and he burned the outhouse down with himself inside it, killing only the ranger.

The next installment is “Holy Shite,” a priest tries to exorcise a woman. As he finishes, he must take a number two, giving birth to a Satanic shit, so to speak, a demonic dookie, an infernal hot snake. It ends up becoming a poopet and asks the clergyman to teach it how to sing and what humor is, but it still ends up killing him when he tries to go to the bathroom again.

Finally, “The Gabba Ghoul AKA The Meat Man” is supposed to get to the bottom Amityville and the Jersey mob. This tracks, as the DeFeo family had organized crime connects through Louise DeFeo’s father, Michael Brigante, Sr., an associate of Gambino boss Carlo Gambino. As an Italian-American, this is where I remind you that the mafia and organized crime does not exist. Cole slaw creatures are also not real.

Amityville Outhouse is yet another example, along with The Amityville Curse, why Amityville movies should be made in Canada. It’s way better than any of the other sequels and I didn’t have to look at Shawn C. Phillips.

I can go to the bathroom almost anywhere but even I have issues with bathrooms in parks. It just seems like you could get killed and this movie has made that real.

Also: The song “Fat Kid On a Toilet” is wonderful.

I downloaded this for $2 Canadian here and you can also get it from Gold Ninja Video along with Rock ‘n’ Roll Asylum.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ape was on Chiller Theater on February 1, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Saturday, December 17, 1966 at 1:00 a.m.

William Nigh had already made this movie before as The House of Mystery, but now he had Boris Karloff as the lead. As Dr. Bernard Adrian, he’s trying to cure polio through that mad scientist body magic known as spinal fluid. He’s so devoted to curing Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon) so that she can marry Danny Foster (Gene O’Donnell) that when a wild ape attacks his lab and destroys all of his samples, he skins the ape and dresses as it to get more spinal fluid.

Karloff had worked for Monogram on the Mr. Wong movies. Monogram often used actors on loan from bigger students, like Wrixton, who said that working there was like “…living in a poor apartment. It was like living in a foxhole.” Unlike the budgets they were used to, actors made movies in a week with none of the fancy things they may have become used to.

Karloff had to be in plenty of ridiculously plotted movies in his career but never before was he a kindly doctor who wore monkey skins to rip out the spines of innocent people so a kindly young girl could walk the aisle. Even at the end, when he’s shot, he finally gets to see her steady and he dies happy. I would assume the people who gave their lives and back juice do not feel the same.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Maze was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 30, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 10, 1973 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, January 24, 1976 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 29, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

William Cameron Menzies invented the term production designer.

Let that sink in.

He directed Chandu the Magician, Things to Come and Invaders from Mars, but he may be better known for his art direction on movies like Gone With the Wind, Our Town, For Whom the Bell Tolls and so many more movies. He was also a pioneer of adding color to film.

In The Maze, written by Daniel Ullman and based on the book by Maurice Sandoz (illustrated by Salvador Dali!), Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson) breaks off his engagement to Kitty (Veronica Hurst) after his uncle dies. He moves back to Scotland where he inherits a huge house and servants. Yet Kitty won’t accept that he broke off their upcoming marriage and travels there with Aunt Edith  (Katherine Emery).

Yet the Richard she finds is much older and acts differently. What has happened?

This movie has one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a hedge maze that has a frog god inside it, who is really the actual master of the castle, Sir Roger MacTeam, and who gets so upset that it climbs up into the castle and hops out a window to its death. In 3D!

Leonard Maltin called it “ludicrous (and unsatisfying)!” What does he know? Who did he ever fistfight and defeat?