EDITOR’S NOTE: Zontar, the Thing from Venus was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 7, 1968 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, April 18, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, November 27, 1971 at 1:00 a.m.
Zontar, the Thing from Venus is one of the many remakes of Roger Corman movies — this one is It Conquered the World — directed by Larry Buchanan.
This starts at a dinner party. That’s where NASA scientist Dr. Keith Ritchie (Anthony Huston) reveals to Dr. Curt Taylor (John Agar) that he’s been secretly meeting with an alien from Venus named Zontar who is coming to solve all of Earth’s issues. A dinner party would not seem to be the time to do this.
Zontar ends up being a three-eyed, bat-winged, skeletal black creature and I don’t want to be one of those people that judges people by their outside appearances, but I don’t think Zontar has any intention of making the world a better place.
Not even when Zontar starts possessing people with lobster injecto-pods does Ritchie think this friend is a horrific alien monster. No, it takes his wife Martha (Patricia De Laney) dying before he does something about it. Scientists are really smart and also so dumb.
27. MAN & MACHINE: When one interacts with the other, both are forever changed.
Originally airing on NBC on April 7, 1986, Annihilator was an unsold pilot for a TV series that would never be made.
Robert Armour (Mark Lindsay Chapman, Arcane from Swamp Thing the TV series) is dating Angela (Catherine Mary Stewart), another reporter. But when she returns from a girls only Hawaiian vacation with her friend Cindy (Lisa Blount), she’s not the same. That’s because their flight was taken by aliens and they’ve been replaced by killer androids who will destroy the human race.
Director Michael Chapman directed The Clan of the Cave Bear the same year this was released and shot The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Hardcore, Raging Bull, The Lost Boys, Ghostbusters II and so many more films. So this looks way better than it should. It was written by the father and son team of Roderick and Bruce Taylor, who also created the series Otherworld and Super Force. Roderick wrote Gator and Bruce, well, he wrote Elves so he’s good in my mind. More than good.
Oh yeah: These aliens — known as Dynamatars — are also super Satanic.
So anyways, Robert ends up killing Angela after she murders their dog and then comes after him. He rams her with a Jeep and then goes on the run from both the alien androids and the police, setting this up like The Fugitive versus Terminator with a bit of The Invaders.
We also get Nicole Eggert as a teenage robot killer, Geoffrey Lewis as her plot explaining professor father, an appearance by Earl Boen to really hammer that TerminatorHome Edition point home, Brion James as a biker and the hints of an alien leader in the shadows who carries around some kind of spell book.
Somehow, this had the budget to have “Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie play repeatedly, no complaints.
With a cast full of scream queens I had crushes on, a weird Miami Vice-like music video way of shooting the show and a conspiracy plot, I wish this had become a series. It would have lasted 11 of 12 episodes with the last one only airing in Europe as a TV movie edited together from several of the stories.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: The Sweetest Taboo
In the book The Sweetest Taboo An Unapologetic Guide to Child Kills In Film, author Erica Shultz says that this movie doesn’t just have dead children, but “100 of them being smashed in a hydraulic press so their blood can be used to awaken a demon.”
So if you’re charged with writing about a movie with kid kills, this would be the one to go for.
Lam Ngai Kai also made Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, so you know that he has no problem with blowing your mind and making you kind of excited with all the non-stop gore.
Based on Ni Kuang’s series of novels Dr. Yuen — Ni Kuang also narrates this and make an appearance — this has Dr. Yuen Chen-hsieh (Chin Siu-ho) rescuing a girl named Bachu (Chui Sau-lai) from being sacrificed by the Worm Tribe. However, he has Seven Curses which she heals him from for one year, but they cause his legs to bleed and when all seven curses happen, he will die. So he goes back to Thailand to battle the cult of worms and their leader Sorcerer Aquala (Elvis Tsui) one more time.
He’s joined by reporter Tsui Hung (Maggie Cheung), Black Dragon (Dick Wei) and his friend Wisely (Chow-Yun Fat) on this adventure. In the books this comes from, Wisely is the hero and Dr. Yuen the sidekick, but there’s so much happening in this movie that you don’t have to concern yourself with that.
Imagine a movie that starts with Dr. Yuen in the middle of a SWAT assault then turns into an Indiana Jones movie, but if Indiana Jones had karate, tons of nudity, skeleton fights, way over the top gore and even a flying monster baby. Also a giant stone god, an Alien end boss, a coven of devil worshippers, lighting out of Bava and Chow Yun-Fat blowing a demon up real good twice with a rocket launcher.
I don’t know that there’s another movie that’s quite as strange or as good as this. Writing about it makes me want to watch it all over again.
The Piper is about Mel (Charlotte Hope), a composer who steals a concerto from the home of her dead mentor Katharine (Louise Gold) — which is told is her only option by conductor Gustafson (Julian Sands) — all in the hopes that it will allow her to make it in the competitive world of writing classical music and take care of her deaf daughter Zoe (Aoibhe O’Flanagan).
That song is supposedly cursed, but Mel needs money. When played, the song brings The Piper (Boyan Anev) to life. Yes, a glowing eyed beast who wouldn’t even allow the music to be burned in the first place. By the end of the film, The Piper crawls out of the body of the flute player who starts the song off when it is played live and Mel and her daughter have to grab instruments of their own and battle the final boss, causing a rat to literally crawl out its mouth.
Director and writer Erlingur Thoroddsen based this on the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who played his flute to lure the rats away from the city. When he wasn’t paid, he did the same to the children and depending on the story, he drowned them or took them to a cave. The film looks good, has CGI that isn’t all horrible and has some gory moments.
The plot reminded me of Paganini Horror but one assumes that more people will have seen this than that. Sands is good in this and the film is dedicated to him, as he died not long after making it.
InSurprise, David Gamble (Will Coleman) thought that his wife Jenna (Nunu Thurman) was having an affair with his business partner and best friend Greg (Lemastor Spratling), so he took things so far that he ended up paying for his best friend to be killed and then seemingly having a heart attack.
In Surprise 2, David woke up in the hospital, still alive, with Greg clinging to life as the killer that our protagonist hired is waiting to murder him. The killer went to jail and ended up being killed by his cell mate.
Surprise 3 starts with David digging a grave.
Directed by the same team of Rockey Black and Jhayla Mosley, Greg is finally clear to get out and back to his old ways, asking out the nurse taking care of him, Kelly (Marietta Elliott). David is losing his mind and Jeanna still has no clue what’s going on as she’s on vacation. David is still dealing with Lisa’s (Amerrah Garrison) murder as his wife asks him to watch her home.
Meanwhile, Detectives Rogers (Grover McCants) and Johnson (DeJuan Ford) are on their way to the hospital as they build their case just in time for Greg losing his phone and the evidence of what has happened to him. The cops want him to wear a wire while Jeanna comes home wondering where Lisa is. In fact, everyone wants to know where Lisa is.
By dealing with Lisa’s murder, I mean that David soon starts waking up to her angry ghost crying in his bedroom and telling him that he will pay. If it can get worse, it can, because the evidence disappeared thanks to the hitman hookup from the first movie, who is angry that the blood of one of his best men is in — not on — David’s hands. David threatens him, which is not a good idea.
David and Jeanna are staying at Lisa’s house when Greg visits. He gets there before David and tells his wife to not trust him. Just after, Jeanna is visited by Lisa’s mother, who wants to know where her daughter is. We get a flashback of Lisa telling her mother that she thinks that David is her boss but also someone she doesn’t trust.
Greg screws everything up by knocking out David, just in time for Lisa’s mother to go to the police and get a search warrant, sending them looking through the house. After a night at the bar, someone shoots at David and a mysterious envelope is left for him at his house that says “I know what you did.” David’s company is being audited and they find where Lisa’s body is buried. Things are not looking good for him, but I’ve been through two of these movies so far.
Spoilers below…
Except that this time, David doesn’t get out of things. He’s finally gets caught and goes to jail, sent there when the police find the dead body of Lisa. In prison, he gets killed by the same person who killed the other killer, under the employ of the man David hired, paid for by Greg, who is now making love to Jeanna.
Great ending, right? Well…
It was all a dream.
That’s right, three movies, all a dream.
There’s even a graphic that says: SURPRISE. IT WAS ALL A DREAM.
Readers were angry about the end of the last two movies. I can’t wait until I start getting letters and comments complaining about this one.
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.
Nick Box has also made Amityville Frankenstein, Amityville Elevator and Amityville Job Interview. I have seen all of these movies and feel like I escaped with my sanity, so when I found out there was another film in his Amityville cycle of movies. This was originally on his YouTube site and now, all that remains is a trailer.
The claim is that this is about an European art house film I Drink Tea and Watch You Die Slowly that is broadcast on Amityville TV and people die as a result. But this has no watches on Letterboxd and no one has reviewed it on IMDB. So I’ll bite the bullet and say, Nick Box, if you want to send this to me, I’ll wade out into it and report back. Let’s do this.
Just a few months after the TMZ special The Downfall of Diddy, there’s a follow-up that has the TMZ crew get into the indictment against the former Bad Boy.
Sean “Puffy” Combs has been with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. The charges claim that he abused, threatened and coerced women and others, and led a racketeering conspiracy that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.
These are not small crimes.
According to the legal records, his “sexual abuse of women included causing them to engage in frequent, days-long sexual activity with male commercial sex workers, some of whom were transported over state lines. These events, which Combs referred to as “Freak Offs,” were elaborate sex performances that Combs arranged, directed and often electronically recorded. To ensure participation in Freak Offs, Combs used violence and intimidation, and leveraged his power over victims — power he obtained through obtaining and distributing narcotics to them, exploiting his financial support to them and threatening to cut off the same and controlling their careers. Combs also threatened his victims, including by threatening to expose the embarrassing and sensitive recordings he made of Freak Offs if the women did not comply with his demands.”
According to Texas attorney Tony Buzbee, he is representing more than 120 men and women whose allegations against Combs include violent sexual assault or rape, facilitated sex with a controlled substance, dissemination of video recordings and sexual abuse of minors. There are nearly more cases by the day.
Just this past week, Combs’ lawyers have asked for a gag order on all New York media, as they claim that the government has an illicit partnership with the press that will ruin Combs’ ability to get a fair trial. This is in regards to the video of him abusing partner Casandra “Cassie” Ventura that he claims was leaked to CNN.
This doc even has an interview with Combs’ legal team, claiming that this is all about an attack on a successful black man. I’ve never felt right about Combs since the early incident where he oversold a concert leading to deaths, but I must remember that you are innocent until proven guilty. I wonder if Combs will ever get to trial.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Track of the Moon Beast was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 10, 1981 and Saturday, November 20, 1981 at 1:00 a.m.
Bill Finger wrote Death Comes to Planet Aytin, The Green Slime and this film, as well as two episodes of the Batman TV show, which would be the first time he was credited for writing Batman, a character that he co-created with Bob Kane, who ended up taking most of the credit for years. Finger co-wrote this with Charles Sinclair in two days, calling their story The Lunar Analog. Sinclair totally forgot working on it and was shocked when his son called him and said he saw his name on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Directed by Richard Ashe (the only movie he ever directed, although he was second unit on A Place for Today, Diary of a Mad Housewife and Girls Are for Loving) and shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this is the story of mineralogist Paul Carlson (Chase Cordell) and how he gets smacked on the head with meteor, which makes him turn into a lizard at night.
His girlfriend Kathy Nolan (Donna Leigh Drake) and former anthropology professor and noted stew maker Johnny “Longbow” Salinas (Gregorio Sala) try to help as much as they can until NASA figures out that the meteor has become part of him and that he will soon blow up real good. So Paul goes into the desert to die alone. You’d think his friends and the government would help him, but no, Johnny uses a meteorite arrow to shoot him and make him explode. One presumes he ends up curling up with Kathy that night and they have a piping hot mug of his chicken, corn, green peppers, chili and, sign, onion stew.
Frank Larrabee and his band are the real stars of this, as they perform the song “California Lady.” They were the house band at the Ramada Inn in Albuquerque where the filmmakers were staying and also where the footage was shot.
Originally, Kathy was going to have been played by Cheri Caffaro from the Ginger movies. If that isn’t exciting enough, this never really played theaters and went straight to TV, meaning that there is a gore cut of Track of the Moon Beast that has never been seen.
EDITOR’S NOTE:The Ape Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 3, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 27, 1967 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 5, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.
Based on “They Creep in the Dark” by Karl Brown, this William Beaudine-directed, Barney Sarecky-written film stars Bela Lugosi as Dr. James Brewster, a scientist whose experiments have turned him into an ape man. He needs human spinal fluid to transform back to a man again, which as you can imagine, leads to him killing all manner of people when he becomes the ape (Emil Van Horn) version of himself.
By the end, his assistant Dr. Randall (Henry Hall) has been forced to keep injecting the quickly going mad doctor, ending with him breaking what’s left of it in their lab. The ape Randall flips out and strangles him then goes wild killing everyone he can to get that spine juice.
The next year, Monogram released Return of the Ape Man as a sequel to this, even if it has nothing to do with it.
This has the weirdest ending, as the protagonists escape and a man shows up in their car. They ask who he is and he says, “Me? I’m the author of the story! Screwy idea, wasn’t it?”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Lost Continent was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 5, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, January 11, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, August 7, 1971 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, July 22, 1972 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, January 20, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 30, 1981 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, May 1, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.
Maj. Joe Nolan (Cesar Romero, the only Joker never to shave), Lt. Danny Wilson (Chick Chandler) and Sgt. William Tatlow (Sid Melton, Alf Monroe from Green Acres) and three scientists — Stanley Briggs (Whit Bissell, the undertaker in The Magnificent Seven), Robert Phillips (Hugh Beaumont from Leave It to Beaver) and Russian Michael Rostov (John Hoyt, Flesh Gordon) — are headed out to find an atomic rocket that has crashed in the South Pacific.
Spoiler: they find dinosaurs.
Yes, if you want to see a movie where dinosaurs wipe out a team of smart men and military guys, by all means, Lost Continent is the movie for you.
You’ve got Ward Cleaver being brutalized by a brontosaurus and a triceratops goring one of the team members, who eventually get back at the dinos by shooting a pterosaur for food. If this was an Italian movie, that would have been a real pterodactyl and we would have watched one of the natives hack at it with a dull machete.
Also, if you like rock climbing and tinting a black and white film green so that it doesn’t seem dated or uncool, then you’re also going to love this.
Director Sam Newfield has 277 directorial credits on his IMDB page, among them Radar Secret Service and I Accuse My Parents. In fact, he made so many movies that he also used the names Peter Stewart and Sherman Scott to hide the sheer amount of films that he directed. He’s considered to be the most prolific film director in the history of American film and some believe that his final number of movies could be well over three hundred projects thanks to his industrial promotional one-reelers, training films, comedy shorts, TV series episodes, full-length features and the very same TV series episodes that were padded into full-length features.
Sadly, all of this work came from the fact that Sam suffered from a serious gambling addiction, making him poor for most of his life and even breaking up his marriage. After thirty years of directing, he was so broke that his brother Sigmund, the head of PRC Pictures, paid off all his debts and gave him a place to live for the last six years of his life. After all, he’d only paid him $500 a movie for years, so it was the least that he could do.
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