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: Pick a Lance. I know Lance loves baseball, so I feel like this is the right pick.
There aren’t many baseball horror movies. Here’s the ones I know:
The Tobe Hooper directed segment “Eyes” in Body Bags
Years ago, back when they were on a little league team, Bobby (Marshall Caswell) and his friends Alison (Erin Hammond), Kyle (Nick Sommer) and Danny (Max Williamson) beat their teammate Billy up something fierce when he struck out in the biggest game of their young lives. They followed this by tying him up, putting him in a dunk tank and trying to drown him. The only thing that saved the poor kid was the umpire, who told him to stand up for himself.
Billy then killed two of his teammates and his coach before being put away for several years.
Directed and written by Drew Rosas and Nick Sommer, this has the teammates get back together and an umpire showing up with a bat murder weapon that he or she uses to kill them off, one by one, before constructing a baseball field in a swamp.
This follows the slasher story of a uniting bad event coming back to haunt people, has a cool looking slasher and a decent final girl. Also: the flashback scene has nudity, which seems correct. The gore is decent and it seems like the directors were trying for cool shots several times, even if they come at the expense of storytelling. This feels a little too long but that’s fine when a movie has numerous moments of baseball bat violence and an ending that is set in a batting cage.
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.
Look, if all director and writer Nathan Rumler (Fangboner, Gay for Pray: The Erotic Adventures of Jesus Christ) had done was write this movie’s tagline, “For God’s sake, get off!” and never even made the movie, we’d be fine.
However, I made a deal with a lesser demon to get Arrow blu rays for free, which means that now I must review every Amityvlille movie or pay for their latest releases with something worth way more than my paycheck.
Cathy (Corella Waring, CarousHELL) has done the unthinkable. She’s bought a marital aid at a yard sale, which may be the most wrong of the many wrong things in this movie. The more she and her girlfriend Roxi (Mallory Maneater) use the titular evil wand upon one another, the more chance that the demons that possessed the residents of 112 Ocean Avenue will find their way into their loins. And their souls, I guess.
Also, the vibrator can talk.
Also, there’s Spanky, a possessed ventriloquist dummy that rips off a man’s face and then has sex with a woman.
Also, there’s a murder scene juxtaposed with a sex scene.
Also, a character asks “Perform an exorcism on my (slang for part of anatomy).”
Also, two characters take mushrooms in the woods for real and in real time we watch them wander all over the place.
Meanwhile, Chad (Rumler) — the ex-boyfriend of Cathy — and his partner Mallory (Emily Hilborn) are kind of cosplaying Friday the 13th the Series except they are hunting down all of the cursed objects from the DeFeo house and only have one object left. Yes, the magical vibrator.
That said, in no way is this movie for anyone easily offended by, well, anything. It’s exactly what it promises to be and much, much worse. It’s a grimy, gross and upsetting movie that’s definitely going to have an audience. And well, I guess I’m in it because I have to see every Amityville movie and write them up if I want that UHD of They Call Her One Eye without suffering in Hell for all eternity.
Mitigating factor: a male cover version of the spraying amputation in Tenebre, copious amounts of well-done gore and people who are all obviously having fun making this. Honestly, this movie gave me the same feelings I had watching Cannibal Holocaust and that says to me that despite watching every Bruno Mattei and Joe D’Amato movie this year, I am still human after all.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Goliath and the Vampires was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 5, 1968 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, August 29, 1970 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, June 23, 1973 at 11:30 p.m. It played as The Vampires.
Released in its native Italy as Maciste control il vampiro, American-International Pictures thought no one in the U.S. knew who Maciste was. He’s also been called Hercules, Samson, Atlas, Ulysses and Colossus with several of his films being part of the Sons of Hercules TV package.
The character first appeared in the 1914 silent film Cabiria, has been in more than fifty movies and has been played by Mark Forrest, Reg Park, Gordon Mitchell, Reg Lewis, Kirk Morris, Samson Burke, Alan Steel, Richard Lloyd, Renato Rossini and Frank Gordon. This time, the man carved from rock is played by Gordon Scott.
Directed by Giacomo Gentilomo (Hercules Against the Moon Men, Slave Girls of Sheba) and Sergio Corbucci (Django, The Great Silence and, yes, Super Fuzz) and a script by Corbucci and Duccio Tessari (one of the fathers of the Italian Western), this movie is totally incredible. Seriously, it slowly built into something that exploded my brain.
Nearly all of the men in Goliath’s village are killed and the women and children taken. He swears to kill everyone until learning that they are all under the spell of the vampiric monster Korbrak (Guido Celano). Yes, pirates who are controlled by a vampire demon who set villages on fire and killing the mother of a demigod as well as kidnapping his girlfriend!
Korbrak is turning all the people he has killed into faceless monsters that serve as his foot soldiers and when Goliath finally meets him face to face, he learns that they are twins. Well, not for long, as Korbrak’s face gets ripped off revealing a horrible visage. There’s also a scene where Goliath is trapped inside a giant bell, as well as everything in the realm of the vampires being colored with gels.
There are also good guys with blue skin and a rubber spider that is one of the best giant spiders you’ll see. This would be the best peplum ever made if it wasn’t for Hercules in the Haunted World but you know, Bava and Christopher Lee together is a tough customer.
Goliath is pretty much a blank slate as a hero but everything else in this movie is just plain weird and by weird, read that as perfect. Monstrous bone and body eating bad guys, even the heroes threatening to send a beautiful woman into a pit filled with monsters while she begs for her life, a sultan who has become the ruler because he sold his soul, people falling on spikes, children being menaced by flaming trees and so much blood. Like, this has all the gore — in 1961, mind you — that every other peplum film not named Conquest wishes that it had.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Teenage Caveman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 26, 1964 at 1:00 a.m.
Robert Vaughn thought that this was the worst movie ever made. Roger Corman wanted it to be called Prehistoric World. In England, they called it Out of the Darkness. Yes, Teenage Caveman is something.
The early humans live amongst the rocks and suffer, despite there being a lush grassland on the other side of the river. There’s also a terrifying monster of a god over there, so they keep happy in the dirt.
It turns out that the god is an old white haired-man who was all burned up. One of the young cavemen (Vaughn) makes him a peace offering while another attacks the man, killing him. The tagline of this movie gives it away — “Nuclear holocaust has destroyed the world as we know it – and now the future of humanity is in the hands of TEENAGE CAVEMAN!” — because this movie does Planet of the Apes without the apes or the budget. Just the end of all things and cavemen coming back after nuclear destruction.
Robert Vaughn, despite playing a teenage caveman, was 26 when this was made.
Beach Dickerson tops that by dying three times — he’s the boy who drowns in quicksand (and the guy playing drums at his funeral) as well as a bear and the caveman who gets speared by the old man.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Night Tide was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 4, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, February 20, 1971 at 11:30 p.m.
Written and directed by Curtis Harrington — one of the leaders of New Queer Cinema and also the director of Queen of Blood, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, Ruby and so many more — this film was always one I wanted to see as it features Marjorie Cameron in a small role.
Harrington had also shot a documentary about her — The Wormwood Star— and I’ll forgive you if you have no idea who she is. Cameron was many things — an artist, poet, actress, and probably most essentially, an occultist. A follower of Crowley’s Thelema, she was married to rocket pioneer and nexus point of all things 20th century occult, Jack Parsons. In fact, Parsons believed that he had conjured Cameron to be the Whore of Babylon/Thelemite goddess Babalon as part of his Babalon Working rite, which he conducted alongside L. Rod Hubbard. No, really. It may have also opened our world to the aliens that have obsessed us since Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO in 1947.
After a suicide attempt and being institutionalized, Cameron gathered a group of magic practitioners around herself that she called The Children, whose sex magic rituals were to create a moonchild. She was now pregnant with what she referred to as the Wormwood Star, but that ended in miscarriage. Many of The Children soon left, as her proclamations of the future had grown increasingly apocalyptic.
Cameron’s orbit — much like her husband’s — unites both the worlds of art and the occult, straddling appearing in the films of Kenneth Anger, working with UFO expert and contactee George Van Tassel and appearing in Wallace Berman’s art journal Semina.
Why did I tell you all this? Because it fascinates me that she’s in Night Tide.
Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper!) is a young sailor on shore leave who meets Mora (Linda Lawson, who is also in William Castle’s Let’s Kill Uncle), a woman who makes her living appearing in a sideshow. They fall in love before he learns that her past boyfriends have drowned under mysterious circumstances. That may — or may not — be because Mora is a siren, a legendary creature who exists to lure men to their deaths. Adding to her suspicions is the mystery woman (Cameron) who calls to her and demands that she follow her destiny.
One evening, under a full moon, she invites him deep sea swimming, but cuts his hose, forcing him to surface so that she isn’t tempted to kill him. She then swims into the depths of the ocean, fulfilling the call of the mystery woman. And when he returns to the boardwalk, her dead body is still in the mermaid sideshow, now there for visitors to gawk at her dead eyes.
Despite a police confession as to who the killer is, the strange woman in black and her call to the sea is never explained.
Anton LaVey discussed this film in Blanche Barton’s The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. “There’s a whole genre of films that are just little evocative low-budget gems that I certainly wouldn’t call schlock but that are also being revived as a consequence of more attention in those directions. Director Curtis Hanington’s first movie, Night Tide filmed around the Santa Monica Pier and Venice. California in the late ’50’s, is a psychologically intricate story about a young sailor (Dennis Hopper) who falls in love with a mermaid It’s just wonderful to see these precious works of art being finally given the attention they merit.” This also appears on the Church of Satan film list.
According to Spencer Kansa’s Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Anger introduced Cameron and LaVey, who was delighted to meet the actress, having been a fan of the film.
16. INCREMENTAL BREAKDOWN: Stop-motion films are hard to make. Appreciate that mania today.
Directed, written by and starring the voice of Mike Mort, this is the story of tough guy cop Chuck Steel, a man who lost his wife to the Yakuza. He drives Captain Jack Schitt (Mort) crazy with his ability to always blow things up and cause chaos. In fact, his new partner Barney (Paul Whitehouse) is so upset by the first day of riding with Steel that he shoots himself. Now, he gets to choose between a Swedish woman, a monkey or a cheese plant. He goes Swedish and ends up with a woman bigger than he is.
When they go to the hospital to check in on the victim of a violent crime, he meets Professor Van Rental (also Mort), a vampire hunter who informs him that bloodsuckers are basically unhoused people now, driven by a need for blood in the same way that winos need rotgut. Oh yeah — Steel also has to meet with the police psychiatrist Dr. Alex Cular (Jennifer Saunders) who is making all the rest of the policemen ineffective.
Chuck is bitten in a vampire attack, his new partner dies and he ends up working with the Professor in the hopes of stopping the curse before midnight. He also gets Giggles the monkey as his next partner.
As you can tell by this description so far, this stop-motion movie is ridiculous, combining 80s action hero silliness with vampires, good dumb humor and clay gore. It was made with 425 puppets and I’d never even heard of it, which is a shame, because it’s way better than I thought it was going to be, featuring dramatic romantic scenes with clowns, Chuck becoming the chosen one of the homeless and an Illuminati lizard.
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: Series episode
For six Sunday evenings in 1978, Radiotelevisione Italiana (Rai) TV in Italy aired a series which was a marked break from a channel that until now had only shown conservative Christian Democrat programming. By establishing a secular channel, Rai 2, the network was hoping to encourage experimentation and “a marked exploration of new languages of communication.” These were the national channels of Italy and somehow, Stryx made it on the air, if only for a very short — and thematically perfectly numbered — length of time.
Named for a combination of the legendary vampire owl of legend and the Italian term for witch, strega, this was created by Enzo Trapani, Alberto Testa and Carla Vistarini. In interviews, Trapani said that he was inspired by a meal of salami and figs, saying “Begone milquetoast rhythms and family-friendly songstresses with round cheeks and heart-shaped mouths,” as he sought to change TV.
Or, as he also claimed, he got a phone call from the devil.
With the words, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Devil,” an entire salon of demons, goblins, singers, dancers, human sacrifice victims and people willing to get naked and weird emerged into the psychedelic and smoke-filled cave in which this show is set. By the end of the first episode, the switchboards had lit up. Even if Italians are used to nudity and some level of violence, they weren’t ready for the dependable Rai to send outright Satanic imagery into their homes.
I can’t even begin to imagine what people thought — Italy is a country that has Vatican City, the heart of the Roman Catholic empire, directly inside it and a population that is 75% Catholic — when “Lucifer, Emperor” and “Beelzebub, Prince” were introduced and walked out on screen, presiding over the inquisition, women dressed as cats, live animals including a lion, cats, hawks, dogs and a chimpanzee as well as more women, some half-naked, many fully nude and quite a few being tortured and even mock burned alive.
That said, Stryx still has the trappings of the variety show. There are continuing characters, such as a witch named Ludmilla (Ombretta Colli, a singer, future senator and actress in the Fulci film Getting Away with It the Italian Way and Antonio Margheriti’s War Between The Planets), who keeps trying to transform a toad named Franz into a prince and always having him become into boring accountants played by Walter Valdi; a mime played by Hal Yamanouchi (Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072) and Gianni Cajafa, playing a magician named Furcas who teaches the audience how to read their fortunes and banish the malocchio or evil eye.
Do you love strobing? How do you feel about dry ice and fog? How about liberal use of chromakey? This has all of that and so much more. Money was spent — lots of lira — to make it feel like this show exists inside its own world. I mean, let’s be honest, this is the Hell of the dreams of metal kids who smoke skunk weed in the high school parking lot and say, “Man, it’s going to be a party.”
Well, it was a party.
The first episode aired on October 15, 1978. Just take a look at the music guests:
Gal Costa “Sea Rain:” Gal Costa was a Brazilian pop superstar who had a fifty-year career in which she released more than five hundred songs. She’s the only singer from Brazil to be in the Carnegie Hall Hall of Fame.
Angelo Branduardi “Dance in F sharp minor:” Known as The Minstrel, Branduardi created a new musical genre that combines medieval and Renaissance music with Celtic, Germanic, British and French folk music. He plays the devil’s instrument — the violin — as Death itself dances with villagers.
Amanda Lear “Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmm To Me!):” Amanda Lear is a source of fascination to me. At once the muse of Bowie and Dali, now a disco queen who famously played with the question of whether she was even a she. This song features the lyrics “Are you devil or angel? Are you question or answer?” Lear also appears in the movie Crazy Nights for Joe D’Amato and is on the cover of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. In the 2024 reality where people are still regularly losing their minds over sexual gender, Lear was breaking ground nearly fifty years ago and looking incredible every step of the way. This short article can’t contain her majesty.
Patty Pravo “Handsome:” This sentence alone should explain to you why she was on this program: “Her peculiar low and sensual timbre, her provocations and excesses have made her an icon of transgression.” Along with Mina, Ornella Vanoni , Iva Zanicchi and Milva, Pravo is considered one of the five major protagonists of Italian song. She’s also the first mainstream artists in the country to embrace funk and new wave with her 1976 album Biafra. At this stage of her career, she embraced the androgynous look of Bowie. Future performances would see her carried by goblins as a human sacrifice and another where she was given shock treatment while performing.
Grace Jones “Hunger:” Do I even have to write of how incredible Grace Jones is? How vital? Or how perfect Jones was for this show, a feral force of nature stalking the stage and somehow being the most supernatural thing in a world teaming with demons and devils?
Rockets “On the Road Again:” A French Space Rock band, Rockets used to land on stages filled with smoke and lasers, emerging with metallic faces and spacesuits, looking like Destro meets KISS. They were super dangerous, too, as they used to shoot a “fireworks bazooka” into the audience, more than once hitting audience members and setting their clothing ablaze.
The other episodes — not many of which survive — also feature Mia Martini, Asha Puthli, Area and Anna Oxa.
As the calls continued from angry viewers, the show only averaged nine million viewers, not enough to continue airing. Trapani followed up with another controversial show, C’era Due Volte (Twice Upon a Time), during which adult film star and future senator Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller retold fairy tales in ribald ways. It was delayed by a year and remained too controversial to live.
Sadly, in 1989, frustrated by the idea of aging and unable to get his visions on TV, Trapani would shoot himself in the mouth, languishing in the hospital for over a week.
There’s is supposedly a seventh episode, which never aired. I dream of seeing it.
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.
In the woods of Amityville, scientists whose lab once occupied the very space that the house on 112 Ocean Avenue sat have somehow captured Bigfoot, conducting a series of experiments on him. He escapes and runs wild in the woods, all while a film crew is shooting their own Bigfoot movie, local birdwatchers seek an elusive species and protestors who want an end to Amityville movies all gather in one place to become victims.
This movie has almost everything that an Amityville movie should, which is a great name and a better poster, even if that looks like Kong exploding from the familiar windows of the De Feo home. It does not, however, have any taglines.
Directed by Shawn C. Phillips, who co-wrote it with Julie Anne Prescott and is on his ninth trip to Amityville, (he directed Amityville Shark House and Amityville Karen and acted in Amityville Webcam, Amityville Job Interview, Amityville Frankenstein, Amityville Thanksgiving, Amityville In the Hood and Amityville Hex) has put together yet another movie that has no ties to the original other than you’ve seen both movies.
He also plays Ian, the leader of the scientists who lose Bigfoot, leading one of them named Annie (Lauren Francesca, who was the Amityville Karen) to be assaulted by the creature, who she claims “Has the biggest dick I’ve ever had.” The Amityville Bigfoot which acts a lot more like the sasquatch in Night of the Demonthan a friendly skunk ape. Is there such a thing as an amiable abominable snowman?
As for that movie in the woods, its director Claude (Brandon Krum) is having issues with his producer father Harv (Phillip Krum) and his main actress, Francesca (Ashleeann Cittell). And somehow, in the middle of all of this — Bigfoot sexual, fecal and urine assaults abound — Eric Roberts and Tuesday Knight appear. There’s also a scene where Bigfoot pushes a baby carriage with a dog inside it down a hill and this is played for comedy.
This wouldn’t be an Amityville movie without ten minutes at the end of videos sent in by people who paid to be in the movie, as well as news footage that pads out the running time. There’s also lots of ad libbed dialogue, people talking on and on when they never would in real life and so much screaming. Yet it looks a lot better than most Amityville or Bigfoot movies, so I guess that’s some faint praise.
EDITOR’S NOTE: First Man Into Space was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 13, 1964 at 4:00 p.m.
U. S. Navy Commander Charles “Chuck” Prescott (Marshall Thompson) is worried if his brother Lt. Dan Milton Prescott (Bill Edwards) is the right man to be first into space. He doesn’t follow orders — he went to see his girlfriend instead of doing his post-flight report — and had some issues on his last flight. Now, as he flies an advanced jet into the upper reaches of Earth, he decides to go for it instead of landing.
As the crews examine the wreckage, they find it covered with stone that keeps it from being scanned by all forms of light. Soon, a creature is draining a nurse and cattle of their blood. That used to be Dan. Now, it’s a hulking monster that crashes through doors and stalks women. His brain needs blood because of how it was destroyed by a lack of oxygen and it’s only because of a high altitude chamber that he’s able to say, “I just had to be the first man into space,” before he dies.
Directed at the same time as The Haunted Strangler by Robert Day, this started as a potential AIP movie. When they rejected it, AIP’s Alex Gordon sent it to his brother Richard, who worked with writer Charles F. Vetter and John Croydon, taking parts of another script, Satellite of Blood by Wyott Ordung. This played double features with The Mysterians.
In the stock footage, when you see that jet taking off? That’s Chuck Yeager.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Indestructible Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, August 1, 1964 at 4:00 p.m., Saturday, July 30, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 12, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.
Charles “Butcher” Benton (Lon Chaney Jr.) is dead. He lived a life of crime and now, after being blasted by the electric chair, he’s ready for the ground. That’s when his body is sold to Dr. Bradshaw (Robert Shayne), who thinks that he can cure cancer by injecting chemicals and shocking dead bodies. It works, as Benton gets up and starts walking. It works too well, as now the felon can shrug off scalpels, bullets and even larger weapons.
His henchman and lawyer (Ross Elliot) got him killed so they could get his money and his dancer girl (Peggy Maley) is now dating the cop, Lt. Richard Chasen (Max Showalter), who caught her man. Benton uses the sewers to escape and keep killing, but the cops decide to shoot him with both a bazooka and a flamethrower, but it doesn’t stop him. What does is nearly the entire power grid of Los Angeles being applied directly to his body.
Directed by Jack Pollexfen (The Man from Planet X, Captive Women) and written by Vy Russell and Sue Dwiggins, the rare for the time female team of writers who also scripted Monstrosity. Lon Chaney Jr. plays most of his role with no dialogue, instead all through acting. Then again, he asked for no changes in the dialogue or script after lunch, because that’s when he started to drink.
This movie is also a travelogue of old Los Angeles with so many incredible locations. As for the sewer scenes, many of them come from He Walked By Night.
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