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.

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.

You know, some people do great things. They invent things that help their fellow man. They write words of sheer beauty that move people to tears or songs that people have in their weddings or teach people things that change the world.

I watch Amityville movies and write about them.

Such is my albatross.

Stanley DeFeo has come back to Amityville and there’s this whole story of his parents coming there to run a bank and his mom fell for a dude named Asmodeus because you know, it was the sixties. But now there’s a cult in town and our hero is doomed.

Except it’s in Amityville, Texas.

Let’s have that sink in.

Amityville.

Texas.

Birthright: An Amityville Horror was the original title and this cost less than a used car and has a scene where a lawyer agrees to a meeting within minutes, not months, so it’s also science fiction. This is also known as Amityville Secret.

So yeah. Our hero comes home — don’t do that — reads his mother’s diary — don’t do that — tracks down his father — don’t do that — and tries to set things right — don’t do that — and then a bunch of hooded robed people end up on his porch, which is pretty awesome and I wish they would come over here and party with me because I’m kind of lonely tonight.

At one point, a character talks about getting to dance with the devil and I thought about that and kind of wished that this movie was about a woman finding her groove in the late sixties and escaping her boring husband through Satan, but that would be probably something only I’d want to see and not something that would fool you by being a new Amityville movie on the shelves at Walmart and the digital racks of Amazon Prime and Tubi.

I almost wrote, “You could have put a legit turd into my DVD case and I would have enjoyed it more,” but that just seems mean.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Hotel was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 24, 1979 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, August 16, 1980 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, September 26, 1981 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 20, 1983 at 3:00 a.m.

Nightmare Hotel is the TV title for A Candle for the Devil which is also known as It Happened at Nightmare Inn. Directed by Eugenio Martín, it begins with sisters Marta (Aurora Bautista) and Verónica (Esperanza Roy) confronting May (Loreta Tovar), one of the guests at their small inn. She’s sunbathing nude outside and in the middle of an argument, she’s shoved down the stairs and dies when she goes through a stained glass window. Just as the sisters start to get rid of the body, the dead girl’s sister Laura (Judy Geeson) shows up, wondering where her sister is. She decides to stay there until she can find her sister.

Things are steamy all over town. One of the guests, Helen Miller (Lone Fleming), is on the make and bringing men back to her room at all hours of the evening. Verónica is sleeping with the much younger Luis (Carlos Piñe) and stealing money to give to him. And every man in the village seems to be swimming nude, which excited and enrages Marta, who soon kills Helen.

An American mother named Norma (Blanca Estrada) comes to stay just as Laura leaves, worried for her safety after Helen disappears. She asks Norma to let her know when she leaves to ensure that she isn’t killed. Soon, the sisters covet the baby and start to believe that Norma is a sex worker and has no idea who the father is. Verónica grabs her baby as Marta stabs the woman. It turns out that she was in the middle of a divorce and this gives Verónica more reasons to doubt her sister; she gives Luis all of her money and says she no longer wants to see him, begging him to leave town.

Laura returns, after not hearing from Norma. She brings a man from town,  Eduardo (Víctor Barrera), who finds a container in the basement with mystery meat floating in red wine. As he finds Norma’s severed head, he’s murdered by Marta. At the same time, a guest gets sick from eating food made from people and her husband goes to the police.

Laura returns to her room and finds Eduardo’s body as the sisters attack her, dragging her to the room with the rotting meat. As she screams against a window, the police save her, but as her face and tears go through the credits, it seems like she will never be the same again.

When this played U.S. theaters as Dread Stop at Nightmare Inn, it got a PG rating. How?!?

I loved every moment, from the Blaise Pascal quote at the start — “There are only two types of men: The righteous who think they are sinners, and the sinners who think they are righteous” — to the final moments.

In 1985, this was remade in Turkey as Vahset Kasirgasi (Brutal Storm). And thanks to my friend Bill Van Ryn, I know that this played double features with Things From The Grave, which is a retitled Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 19, 1963 at 3:00 p.m., Saturday, December 31, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, June 1, 1968 at 1:00 a.m.

Nathan Juran came to America from Romania. His brother became quality control master Joseph M. Juran. As for Nathan, he went from art directing The Razor’s Edge to directing movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, Jack the Giant Killer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and this movie, which was written by Mark Hanna.

Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) has some problems. Her husband Harry (William Hudson) is sleeping with every woman in town but her. She has mental health issues that have been going on for some time. And she likes to throw drinking and driving on top of that cocktail. One night, driving drunk from an angry evening at a bar, she runs into a flying saucer whose pilot gets out and grabs her.

Somehow, she gets away and no one believes her. After all, she just got out of a mental institution and in 1958 — well, 2024 as well — no one believes women. As for her husband, he’s just with her because she’s worth $50 million and is more interested in Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers, Playboy Playmate of the Month July 1959; her centerfold was shot by Russ Meyer). Nancy begs him to search for the UFO with her and as they drive through the desert — she has agreed to be hospitalized again — they find the alien. Harry runs and Nancy wakes up irradiated in her pool house.

Honey convinces Harry to shoot up his wife and kill her off. He walks into her room and only finds a giant hand as his wife starts to grow in size and anger. Dr. Isaac Cushing (Roy Gordon) and Dr. Heinrich Von Loeb (Otto Waldis) try to keep her sedated and the butler (Ken Terrell) finds the UFO, which is being powered by Nancy’s diamond necklace, which has the largest diamond in the world on it. Yes, the richest woman in the world who has the largest piece of jewelry is trapped in a loveless desert marriage that is fought out in dive bars.

Nancy heads back to the bar and tears the roof off, killing Honey before grabbing her husband. As she walks through bullets, one lawman fires at the power lines and kills her, but at least her husband dies too.

They almost made a sequel to this and Dimension Pictures was going to have Paul Morrissey remake it, then Jim Wynorski said he would with Sybil Danning. Christopher Guest then remade it with Daryl Hannah as an HBO movie. Now, Tim Burton and Gillian Flynn have said that they are making a new one, so we’ll see.

Roger Corman designed the poster for this movie. Nothing in the art happens in the movie, but who cares? It’s the most perfect idea of what we want to see.