ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

For a fun bit of science fiction horror with a 1980s aesthetic and an offbeat humorous vibe, you need look no further than director Sam Fox’s short-film blast of oddness The Blue Diamond (U.S., 2024). You know you’re in for a good time when Barbara Crampton is part of the cast, and that’s just for starters.

Crampton portrays Jacqueline, the recently deceased leader of a self-help cult based around, of all things, skiing. Her adult daughter Alison (Desiree Staples) travels to the group’s ski lodge for her mother’s funeral, and is understandably uneasy around the cheerful cult members, who behave in, shall we say, unusual manners and who dress in colorful 1980s ski outfits. The mother and daughter had a contentious relationship, and the more Alison learns the secrets behind Jacqueline’s freaky following, the worse things get for her.

Fox invests her unique short with interesting family drama, an engaging air of mystery, and plenty of highly entertaining bizarreness — wait until you get a load of the dance number. Crampton and Staples play off of each other marvelously. The short’s color palette and music scream “Soooo eighties!” and Fox directs with panache. 

The Blue Diamond is currently on the film festival circuit and screened as part of Beyond Fest, which ran September 25–October 9, 2024 in Los Angeles. For more information, visit https://beyondfest.com/

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.

Gregg G. Allin (Isaac Golub, who played Father Dingleberry in five Death Toilet movies, including Death Toilet 4: Brown Snakes on A Plane) — get it, G.G. Allin? — is a paranormal podcaster brought to Amityville by Mayor Dump (Roy Englebrecht, who was the boxing consultant for Celebrity Boxing), who wants him to “kill this toilet,” and by this toilet, I mean the Death Toilet that has been killing people in the same town where Ronald DeFeo Jr. was possessed all those years ago.

After the toilet kills the caretaker, the same man who has been randomly showing up to shoot hot snakes into the bowl, Gregg must battle the bowl, so to speak, to save the anuses of Amityville.

I always wonder about people who get to be in movies, want to brag to their family, and then see the name of their role, like Mike Hartsfield, who in this movie plays Misc. Men Making Mud Mounds.

Evan Jacobs has directed fifty movies, and this is one of them. Yes, all of the Death Toilets were directed by him and written by him. He also made the DV series about a serial killer who keeps filming himself. I would say that when he finally gets to the close of this movie, where animated birds, sharks, and flies all attack, it’s pretty funny. That took 55 minutes to get to, nearly an hour of people repeating themselves as they talk directly into the camera and act as if they’re streaming and being as dull as most streamers when they had every opportunity to retake these scenes and make something better.

However, the film does take a turn for the better, and the unexpected moment of a toilet uttering, ‘Leave!’ managed to elicit a genuine laugh from me. This is a level of humor that most Amityville movies fail to achieve, leaving you pleasantly surprised.

But if you haven’t made it through 47 other Amityville movies to get here, first of all, don’t. Please don’t make the same mistakes I have. Because you’re going to watch five minutes of this and hate yourself, hate cinema and perhaps even give up on life. Then again, if you’ve insulated yourself against things like plot, good sense and movies made with stock fire explosions that you can buy for less than the price of this DVD, dig in. It’s certainly at least as good as Amityville Karen and much better than Amityville Thanksgiving, a movie so caused that I feel like I never stopped watching it. Any second now, I will wake up, and it will start all over again. I’ll be trapped watching it forever and ever, amen.

You can buy this DVD from MVD or watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Horror of Frankenstein was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 30, 1974 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, July 10, 1976 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, December 9, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

Directed by Jimmy Sangster, written by Jeremy Burnham and Sangster and starring Ralph Bates as Baron Victor Frankenstein, this started as a remake of Curse of Frankenstein before Hammer allowed Sangster to write it as a parody. This was an attempt to make Bates into the new Hammer star.

Shot on the sets of Taste the Blood of Dracula and The Vampire Lovers and playing double features with Scars of Dracula, this also has David Prowse as the monster. He’s the only actor to play the role twice for Hammer, as he’s also in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (and wore Universal Frankenstein’s Monster makeup in Casino Royale).

Victor Frankenstein isn’t sympathetic at all in this. He kills his father to get the title of Baron von Frankenstein, goes to medical school in Vienna until he’s caught knocking out the dean’s daughter and then he comes home to assemble the dead into his creation.

Dennis Price and Joan Rice are good as the graverobbers, but despite the idea of starting a new series with a younger Dr. Frankenstein, this feels less special than the past of Hammer. Even the ending, where the monster gets covered by acid, is a let down. But still, it’s a Hammer movie and even a bad one has some reasons to watch.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It! The Terror from Beyond Space was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 23, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, September 19 at 11:15 p.m.

In 1973, Earth is on its second manned mission to Mars. Only Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) survived and it’s thought that he killed the other nine members of his crew. He tells anyone that will listen that a monster was behind it all. Commander Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding) orders Carruthers to be watched at all times, but it’s not him they should be worried about.

The monster that Carruthers warned everyone about is on the ship and bullets won’t stop it. Nor will grenades, electricity or radiation. It is played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan in his last role and he was a handful for special effects artist Paul Blaisdell, refusing to get fitting for the costume and drunkenly tearing it apart almost every day. By the end of filming, Blaisdell had just about had it with how he was treated by Corrigan and Shirley Patterson, who hated that she was stuck in a science fiction movie. The problems for Blaisdell were compounded when United Artists kept the costume and used it again in Invisible Invaders.

Directed by Edward L. Cahn and written by Jerome Bixby, this recycles the music from Kronos and used parts of the costumes from the Buck Rogers serials and Destination Moon. Yet for such a low budget film, it went on to be the obvious inspiration for Alien.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Man They Could Not Hang was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 22, 1966 at 1:00 a.m.

Directed by Nick Grinde (The Man with Nine Lives, Before I Hang) and written by Kurt Brown (A McKeesport native who was the assistant to D.W. Griffith’s cameraman G.W. Bitzer before becoming a cinematographer; he was the son of comedian and character actor William H. Brown and his mother was Lucille was an actress), The Man They Could Not Hang stars Boris Karloff as Dr. Henryk Savaard, a somewhat mad scientist who has invented a procedure for bringing the dead back to life.

The film begins with him being arrested and about to be executed for murdering a young medical student who volunteered to be killed as part of the testing phase of this procedure. On death row, his assistant Lang (Byron Foulger) signs papers to take possession of the doctor’s body and then he is lynched.

That’s just the start of the movie.

Lang surgically repairs Savaard’s neck and then, like a 1930s version of Dr. Phibes*, he ensures that six of the jurors that convicted him all die by hangings that appear to be suicidal. Only Scoop Foley (Rbert Wilcox) believes that the doctor is still alive and killing everyone who did him wrong. By the point that jurors are being killed every quarter hour, people start to take him seriously.

Virginia Pound — billed here as Lorna Gray — is Savaard’s daughter. She played plenty of comic roles — opposite Buster Keaton in Pest from the West and the Three Stooges in You Nazty Spy!; Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise; Three Sappy People and Rockin’ thru the Rockies — as well as receiving co-billing in several Republic movies and serials. I love how at the end she holds off all of these important doctors and basically sacrifices herself twice.

After this film, The Man with Nine Lives, Before I Hang and The Devil Commands, Karloff had played basically the same role four times. So when he did a fifth takeoff on the same idea, The Boogie Man Will Get You, it was treated as a parody of this storyline.

Also: Open heart surgery is science fiction in this film.

*One of the victims is killed by picking a phone up and a needle going in their ear to kill them. That’s a total Phibes kill.