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?”

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

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.

Luther Boots (Mike Hartsfield) goes to a yard sale, finds a backpack — that has killed a child with a stock video explosion and that means I had to send a message to Erica from Unsung Horrors and pass the curse of this on to her — and it starts to kill everyone that is close to him.

Evan Jacobs also made Amityville Death Toilet, so I guess I have to watch this.

Every SRS-released Amityville movie has characters that just talk about everything. They narrate every moment of their lives. No one I have ever met talks like this, but yet this happens in all of their movies. I realize that we need to explain what is happening, but when the talking takes up most of the movie and people are given to saying things like, “Backpack, I think you’re going to help me a lot.” I lose my mind by the time a film like this one is over.

What didn’t help is that I usually watch Amityville movies all alone, but for some reason my wife came in and started watching this one and realized that she had made a mistake marrying me. She had so many questions about why I would spend so much time watching this and I was afraid to show her my Letterboxd list because I’m too old to start over again.

Anyways, what it does have going for it is shots inside the backpack, as well as the fact that the backpack looks just like the house on 112 Ocean Avenue. It also has the threat of a cat death — spoiler warning, it survives — and a lot of people killed by, yes, a backpack. Who knew that my old JanSport could have been so evil?

There were moments of this that were so uncolor balanced and the sun was bleeding into the image that I was shocked that it wasn’t filmed by someone who had never seen a camera or a movie before. Then there would be a great shot or a cool slow motion push in to someone. I wonder, can you tell when one of these movies is a parody any more?

Now, to the tune of Stroke 9’s “Little Black Backpack:”

Don’t want to watch this,

You say why not?

Don’t want to think about

Movies about this haunted town

There’s totally no good reason

For my wife to care about

This little Amityville Backpack

You can watch this on Tubi or order it from Ronin Flix.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Murder Clinic was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 26, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 16, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

The Murder Clinic predates the Argento era of giallo, coming around the same time as the Bava instigation with The Girl Who Knew Too Much and the krimi films. Known in its native Italy as La lama nel corpo (The Knife in the Body), it was written by Luciano Martino (brother of Sergio and writer of Delirium and The Whip and the Body) and Ernesto Gastaldi (The Sweet Body of Deborah, All the Colors of the Dark, The Case of the Bloody Iris and so many more) with direction coming from Elio Scardamaglia (this is the only film he’d direct as he usually produced movies) and Lionello De Felice. It’s based on the book The Knife In The Body by Robert Williams, a former Tuskegee Airman who became an actor. He also wrote Turkey Shoot, which really means that his work was produced all over the world.

The story takes place in 1870s England, so this movie can also be considered a gothic horror film. Dr. Vance, the director of a mental hospital (Wiliam Berger) is restoring his sister’s face using patients as raw material, all while a masked killer uses the giallo weapon of choice, a strait razor, to kill other people within the hospital.

This story would replay itself across many films—Slaughter Hotel, Faceless, Mansion of the Doomed (well, that owes a debt to Eyes Without a Face)—while the first scene, with a young woman being chased by a killer in the woods at night, and a scene where the killer stalks his prey in a room full of hanging sheets, feel like they inspired Suspiria.

The Murder Clinic itself feels indebted to Bava, really taking to heart the color strategies of Blood and Black Lace.

This is a movie with a fascinating release history. After Berger spent some time in an Italian prison—he had been wrongly accused of possessing hashish and cocaine—it was re-released with a line on the poster that said, “William Berger, guilty or innocent?”

In the U.S., Revenge of the Living Dead was renamed to cash in on Romero’s zombie film. It played triple features with Curse of the Living Dead (Kill, Baby, Kill!) and Fangs of the Living Dead (Malenka) in the 70s as the Orgy of the Living Dead.

With a great location—the Villa Parisi, home of Blood for Dracula and Patrick Still Lives—and appearances by Françoise Prévost (The Return of the Exorcist), Mary Young (who only appeared in this movie and Secret Agent 777), and Barbara Wilson (her only film, and she really should have done more), The Murder Clinic is an early giallo worthy of being enshrined in your collection.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Circus of Horror was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 1, 1965 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, July 2, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, March 4, 1967 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 30, 1967 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, April 12, 1969 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, June 16, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, September 13, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 24, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

Released in the U.S. by American-International Pictures as a double feature with The Angry Red Planet and A Bucket of Blood, Circus of Horror was inspired by the success of another Anglo-Amalgamated film, Horrors of the Black Museum

Dr. Bernard Schüler (Anton Diffring) is really Dr. Rossiter, a man who ran from England with his two assistants, Martin (Kenneth Griffith) and Angela (Jane Hylton) and makes his way to France, where he starts to practice. He meets a girl scarred in the war, Nicole Vanet (Carla Challoner when she is young, Yvonne Monlaur when she’s an adult), and fixes her wounds, making a deal with her father (Donald Pleasence) that he will buy into his circus and use it to further hide from his past.

As he celebrates the sale, the circus owner begins to dance with a bear — yes, this really happens — and this leads to him mauling him. He yells for Schüler to save him, but the doctor watches him die and takes over the circus, working with his assistants to take criminals, heal their scars and add them to his circus.

One of those performers is Elissa Caro (Erika Remberg), a gorgeous sex worker whose face is marred with a scar through her eye. He promises to fix her if she joins his circus, which becomes a success over the next ten years. When anyone tries to escape, they die accidentally, like star Magda von Meck (Vanda Hudson), who dies in a knife throwing act, allowing Elissa to be the main act again.

However, things start to fall apart when Melina (Yvonne Romain) shows up, her face destroyed by a lover who threw acid at her. The doctor and circus owner fixes her face and falls in love with her.

Elissa decides to stay ahead of her competition and learns who the doctor really is, thanks to overhearing the adult Nicole explain her surgery to Inspector Arthur Ames (Conrad Phillips). Schüler tries to warn her off with a snake, but she keeps blackmailing him, so he makes sure that she dies during her act.

A gorilla goes wild and scars the doctor, who must go through his own surgery, appearing bandaged as the circus is visited by Evelyn Morley Finsbury (Colette Wilde), the very woman who Schüler scarred for life and was nearly ruined by. That night, a lion kills Melina — man, this circus! — as the doctor’s assistants try to run. He stabs Angela as Martin escapes, joining Evelyn in telling everything to the police. Schüler tries to run, but Evelyn returns to run him over with her car.

Director Sidney Hayers also made Burn, Witch, Burn with this movie’s screenwriter George Baxt. The circus was owned by Billy Smart and was also used for the Joan Crawford movie Berserk.

I love the idea of this movie where a plastic surgeon ends up running a circus of criminals and animals that can’t stop attacking human beings.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Curse of Dracula was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 7, 1963 at 3:00 p.m., Saturday, January 9, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. and  Saturday, August 21, 1965 at 1:00 a.m.

Dracula (Francis Lederer) escapes a band of vampire hunters led by John Meierman (John Wengraf) and gets on a train, where he kills artist Bellac Gordal and makes his way to California, where he moves in with Gordal’s cousin Cora (Greta Granstedt) and her children Mickey (Jimmy Baird) and Rachel (Norma Eberhardt, who was in Live Fast Die Young the same year).

Rachel has been reading the letters that Bellac sent to Cora and is struck by his struggle as an artist. Yet when Dracula moves in, he won’t leave his room and, as you can imagine, does things like sleep all day and scream when he’s near mirrors. He also drinks the blood of Mickey’s cat and throws it down the mineshaft where he’s really sleeping.

While Rachel wants to be a clothes designer, she knows that she’ll probably be a nurse and never get out of Yorba Linda, the home of Richard Nixon. She also takes care of sick people at a parish house, including Jennie Blake (Virginia Vincent), a blind girl who tells her that she knows death is coming for her. After Rachel reads to her, Dracula appears and promises to help her see again. He bites her, which ends her life, but she comes back the next evening, now fully alive. But not before she dies in front of Rachel and her boyfriend Tim (Ray Stricklyn).

A detective comes to town, hunting for Dracula, but is soon killed by a white wolf. That night, as Rachel puts on the crucifix that Jennie left behind. In her dreams, Dracula promises her eternal life if she takes it off, basically telling her to turn her back on God, a wild idea for a 1958 black and white horror movie. He tells her that they will survive this dying world together, yet the vampire hunters arrive and stake Jennie through the heart — there’s a three second burst of blood here, the only color in the film — which breaks the spell that the monster has on Rachel. Tim holds the crucifix, which sends Dracula down the mineshaft and where a piece of wood goes right through him, leaving behind a skeleton.

Gerald Fried did the score for this film and used “Dies Irae,” which he more famously used in The Shining.

Director Paul Landres mostly worked in TV, but he also directed The Vampire. This was written by Pat Fielder, who also scripted the TV miniseries Goliath Awaits, tons of TV and the movie that this played double features with, The Flame Barrier.

In theaters, this was titled The Return of Dracula and it was also titled The Fantastic Disappearing Man in the UK.

As for Francis Lederer, he would play Dracula again in the Night Gallery episode “The Devil Is Not Mocked.”

I loved this movie. It has a shocking air of dark energy, as well as an antireligious air about its villain. It’s also quite interesting that he’s never called Dracula.

You can watch this on Tubi.