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.

The true Amityville curse is that I must watch all of these films. Just look at this ever-expanding article and Letterboxd list.

Has everything been done in the world of 112 Ocean Avenue?

Director Shawn C. Phillips and writer Julie Anne Prescott say no and also want to speak to your manager.

Just look at this line: “Every neighborhood has a Karen and Amityville is no exception.”

Karen (Lauren Francesca) is so cold and mean to people that she insults them in her sleep. Her latest target is a local winery (run by James Duval!). After getting service that isn’t to her liking, she takes a bottle of wine. A bottle of cursed wine. I mean, this is Amityville after all.

That said, this movie may not need to be an hour and forty-five minutes. It could get tighter, but that said, it does have a death by corkscrew, which is always something that I enjoy in a film.

Somehow, the movie slides into an underground occult circle within the town — it’s Amityville, come on, be open — as well as female demons which means that yes, this movie may not have foreign investors demanding nudity but it has nudity all the same.

This is Phillips’ first solo film and he was wise to get Francesca as his lead. She’s really great in the role and is understated when you expect this to be out of control the whole time. The film nearly gets her to be a sympathetic figure if she wasn’t abusing everyone around her nearly all the time.

If you watch a lot of direct to streaming and disk horror, you’ll recognize a lot of the cast, including Jennifer Nangle, Caleb Thomas, Ashleeann Cittell, Derek K. Long, Marc Pearce, Mike Ferguson and Dawna Lee Heising.

I think what this movie needs are some fun taglines for the poster, however. So I will attempt to write a few in the hopes that they get used for the sequel:

For God’s sake, she wants to speak to your manager.

She’s so haunted that it’s unacceptable.

Do not lose her business.

All lives no longer matter.

Bleached. Bobbed. Possessed.

She demands death. And an apology.

I wait to see where Amityville movies go from here and raise you Amityvid-19, Make Amityville Great Again and Critical Amityville Theory.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Look, this movie references The Entity so if that’s all it did, I would have liked it.

Go figure, Hollywood is haunted. Well, you know how many lives were ruined there, so you can only imagine that there has to be some paranormal activity or at least crazy people willing to tell you that there is.

There are no bigger BS artists than paranormal investigators, much less ones that show up for a Tubi Original. Can you believe the girl who got a sore throat from walking around Sharon Tate’s murder house? How about the house where they filmed American Horror Story that probably wasn’t haunted until they did the show there? And hey, the Comedy Store used to be a mob hangout called Ciro’s so there have to be ghosts there and here’s a podcast clip to prove it!

Even the Hollywood sign is haunted by Peg Entwistle, an actress who jumped off the sign. You can smell her perfume and hear her screams. And you may have been wondering, will we get to the Cecil Hotel? Of course we will. Will we talk about Lisa Lamb in the elevator and dying in the water tank and hotel guests drinking her body for weeks? We must.

This is filled with stock footage and I love it for that.

Also: A girl takes her doll Lola to a haunting.

There are professional paranormal investigators in this that say things like dark energy and heavy feeling and temperature drop. How do they get hired? How much do they make? These are the questions I want answered.

You can watch this on Tubi.

These movies are based on the book Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists by John L. Potash. Within the pages of that tome, you’ll learn how a group of opium-trafficking families came to form an American oligarchy and eventually achieved global dominance.

Sure, they may have helped fund the Nazi regime and then saved thousands of the Third Reich during Operation Paperclip to start the CIA and push LSD through MK-Ultra, but in the midst of their war on drugs which was funding by drugs, they got into targeting the left leaning groups that sought to usurp their power.

And then, they went after rock ‘n roll.

Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists (2018): After going after so many of the younger politically radicalized types that made up organizations like the Black Panthers, the ruling class — according to this film, directed and written by Potash — went after the artists who inspired them.

How did LSD get into the public consciousness? Did MK-Ultra agents party at acid tests? Why did George Harrison and John Lennon’s dentist dose them? Why would the FBI give the Rolling Stones drugs and then turn around and bust them? Who killed Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin? Did this strange method of connecting with the youth culture also claim the lives of Tupac and Kurt Cobain?

As we hear from narrator Douglas Barron, the film contends that everyone from Yoko Ono and Timothy Leary to Ken Kesey and Courtney Love were government agents used to hook stars on different drugs and then kill them when they tried to get clean.

It all seems a little too simple, but this documentary reminds me of the times when conspiracy theories were ramshackle narratives that collapsed when you pricked the balloon of them too much. Sure, we’d love to believe that John Lennon wasn’t an egomaniac drug abuser and wife beater. We hope that Tupac is still alive. Maybe through conspiracy, we are able to get back to the parasocial relationships that we have with rock stars.

Or maybe not.

This also willy nilly rips off so many web sites, Nick Broomfield’s documentaries, Benjamin Statler’s Soaked In Bleach, YouTube videos and anything it can get its hands on to build its narrative which skips around so much and frankly skips so many things that you wonder if this is also a compromised conspiracy. Or, you know, if you’re like me, deny everything until finally you can’t deny the idea of reality itself.

I kind of do love the idea that the government created Courtney Love to be a James Shelby Downard-style wires out the butt honey pot exotic dancing in Japan before she could legally drive and getting Cobain hooked on heroin so that his stomach would stop hurting which is the exact opposite of how heroin usually treats its addicts before he heals his stomach and she pays El Duce to shoot him.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CIA Drugs R Us! A Drugs as Weapons… Sequel (2024): Listed as a “comic sequel” to the first movie, this covers much of the same ground with more focus on Lennon, Cobain and Tupac, as well as how MK-Ultra was connected with the Manson Family (never mentions that sex films including Sharon Tate and the Hollywood elites), the government infiltrating the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and finally, gloms on to The Keepers by exploring the Maryland’s Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and how it may be connected to MK-Ultra.

This has the same YouTube of the 2000s quality along with music by a band called ElectroCult Circus which I figure has director and writer Potash as a member. That may also because none of the many bands in this would be OK with their music being taken for it. Then again, there’s a Chris Rock joke taken directly from one of his specials.

This also goes deep into Amanda Claire Marian Charteris, Countess of Wemyss and March, who founded the Foundation to Further Consciousness (now the Beckley Foundation). This group uses psychoactive drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and addiction while enhancing well-being and creativity. She also trepanned herself in 1970 with a dental drill. That means she drilled directly into her brain to expand her consciousness. In the world of this film, this woman is behind so many things and that LSD can have no positive benefits no matter what because it was used by Nazis to kill your favorite rock star.

I’m paraphrasing.

Despite having a three-hour length, I watched and enjoyed all of it. Your mileage — like that of my wife — may vary, as she said that she felt that this lasted for a week and only cared when The Keepers was mentioned. The connection this movie makes, like all of the best conspiracy theories, is tenuous.

I yearn for the days when politics hadn’t yet invaded my safe space of fake moon landings and UPC codes being the Mark of the Beast. Yes, this is beyond left-leaning, but it made me wistful for Art Bell and wildcat lines.

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

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Last Woman On Earth was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 5, 1964 at 11:10 p.m. and Saturday, October 24, 1964 at 1:00 a.m.

Harold Gern (Antony Carbone) is a rich man constantly getting in trouble with the government. He’s in Puerto Rico with his new, younger and very attractive wife Evelyn (Betsy Jones-Moreland) and his lawyer Martin Joyce (Edward Wain), as they prep for his latest trial.

As the three go diving, they learn that everyone on the surface is dead and that they have to keep on oxygen tanks until they get into the jungle. Most of the animals are still alive and Harold takes control, as he thinks they are the only three left in the world.

You know what happens next, right? Evelyn and Martin have sex, her husband thinks that she had to have been raped and she tries to run away with the man who is her age. Then, spoiler warning, Harold beats Martin to death and asks for his wife’s hand. She takes it and man, did anyone learn anything in this? Everyone in this movie is a horrible person.

Directed by Roger Corman, this was written by Robert Towne, who was also Edward Wain. That shocked me. The reason he got the part was that the script wasn’t done, so Corman needed a writer and an actor, so he saved money by hiring just one person.

Shot at the same time as Creature from the Haunted Sea, this played double features with Little Shop of Horrors.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Godzilla vs. Megalon was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 10, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, October 11, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 14, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

This film came out in the U.S. when I was four years old and for a kid that watched Godzilla films every time they aired, I was so excited to see something new. Yes, Jet Jaguar was accidentally called Robotman and Gigan was Borodan but I didn’t yet super anal retentive about kaiju movies and need to see the originals in Japanese.

On March 15, 1977, this was the first Godzilla movie that aired on American network TV in prime time. It was cut down — nearly in half, come on! — but it was hosted by John Belushi in a Godzilla suit. However, no one saved any of this footage. For decades, I thought I had just had a dream about it.

197X: Humans keep nuclear testing, which ends up causing earthquakes on Monster Island, nearly killing Godzilla and taking out Anguirus. The undersea city of Seatopia has had enough of humanity and unleash their greatest monster, Megalon, cleaning their hands of surface people forever.

Inventor Goro Ibuki (Katsuhiko Sasaki), his brother Rokuro (Hiroyuki Kawase) and Hiroshi Jinkawa (Yutaka Hayashi) have created a robot named Jet Jaguar. Seatopia does not wanted to die off like Atlantis, Mu (justified and ancient) and Lemuria. They steal the robot to guide their monster.

Once the inventor and his friends save Jet Jaguar, they team with Godzilla just in time for the Seatopia army to contact the Space Hunter Nebula M and send Gigan back to our planet. What follows is the monster fight of all monster fights, which ends as all must, with Godzilla shaking hands with his new robot friend. If you think this is goofy, we can never be movie friends.

Jet Jaguar was the result of a contest Toho had for children. Red Arone was a robot sent in by a child who was upset when his drawing became a monster. Toho redesigned him as Jet Jaguar and made him a hero.

This once had the title Insect Monster Megalon vs. Godzilla: Undersea Kingdom’s Annihilation Strategy. Japan forever.

If this is starting to all feel the same, this movie uses footage from Mothra vs. Godzilla, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, The War of the Gargantuas, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Destroy All Monsters, Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Godzilla vs. Gigan.

The last fight in this is total pro wrestling. Godzilla even hits a dropkick.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Horrors of the Black Museum was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 3, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.

Producer Herman Cohen was inspired by reading a series of newspaper articles about Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. He got to visit the museum and wrote this with Aben Kandel. Many of the weapons in this — including the binoculars — were based on actual weapons of murder.

Cohen wanted Vincent Price or Orson Welles, but Anglo-Amalgamated pushed for a British actor, so Michael Gough is the main bad guy, Edmond Bancroft. Working with his assistant Rick (Graham Curnow), he’s creating a black museum of his own filled with things that have killed people. He also writes about them in the paper and in books. He’s so known for this that a shop owner (Beatrice Varley) keeps weapons that she gets just for him.

There’s also a serial killer who is murdering people with other strange weapons and every time it happens, Bancroft goes mad and his blood pressure goes to 200/100, which let me tell you as someone who is oCD about testing and retesting my blood pressure would kill you.

Bancroft fights with his lover Joan (June Cunningham), who laughs at him and calls him a cripple. She goes out by herself, gets soused and hits on every man she sees before coming home to have a strange looking man place a guillotine on her bed and chop her head off.

As all that is happening, Rick falls for Angela (Shirley Anne Field) and starts planning to get married. However, he is tied to the crime writer by a dark secret.

Making this even better is the opening, which has hypnotist Emile Franchele and HypnoVista. This was added in the U.S. by American-International Pictures. I don’t know if I could be more excited to watch a movie after the opening.

Directed by Arthur Crabtree, this is a movie that was called “lurid,” “nasty” and “sensationalism without subtlety of characterization, situation or dialog.” Those people were right, right and very wrong.