EDITOR’S NOTE: Demons of the Mind was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 20, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, May 14, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

Between Venom, To the Devil a Daughter and this movie, Peter Sykes is an unappreciated creator of early 70s scummy horror. Written by Christopher Wicking (Cry of the Banshee, Scream and Scream Again), this movie combines insanity, mesmerism, religious fervor, incest, Satanic possession and just plain British weirdness to make the kind of movie that we watch on a rainy Sunday.

Baron Friedrich Zorn (Robert Hardy) keeps his children Emil (Shane Briant) and Elizabeth (Gillian Hills) locked up and away from one another, lest they make sweet sweet brother and sister love in the name of the devil. After all, his own wife had a madness like theirs that led to her suicide in front of both of them — or maybe he just wouldn’t sleep with her any longer and she got so upset at the loss of getting some of little Friedrich that she offed herself — so they both must be constantly treated to the bloodletting that takes out the evil flowing through their bodies.

Meanwhile — if that’s not enough –women s are being murdered in the woods and covered with rose petals. The townspeople think demons are to blame and by the end of the movie, they go absolutely beyond wild and try to wipe out the cause. There’s also Doctor Falkenberg (Patrick Magee) who has a carny method of curing the evil out of the Zorn progeny; he intends to get a village woman named Inge (Virginia Wetherell) to portray their dead mother in a strange roleplaying exercise while another young local named Carl (Paul Jones, who once sang for Manfred Mann) falls for Elizabeth. And oh yeah — maybe the Baron is more to blame than anyone.

Gillian Hills was a last minute replacement for Marianne Faithful, but the early 70s were not a good time for her, as she lost her son and was dealing with heroin addiction, anorexia and living on the streets. She wasn’t able to be insured for this movie.

I’m a lover of late period Hammer, as they move away from the classics and start to make their own weird little movies. Of course, they’re often filled with lots of nudity, madness and Satanic forces, so…look, I’m weak and I love what I love.

12. THE LIVING IMPAIRED: Insert zombie joke here.

Woody Invincible (Jordan Chan) and Crazy Bee (Sam Lee) are mallrats, stealing from stores, gambling and selling bootleg VCDs probably of movies just like this. Actually, the movie starts with them bootlegging the film that you’re about to watch. They flirt with Rolls (Angela Tong), who works at the beauty spa, fight with cellphone store owner Mr. Kui (Wayne Lai) and do small jobs for their gangster boss, like getting his car. Well, on the way back to the mall, they hit a zombie infected government agent and Woody drinks his soda, which has a bioweapon inside it that turns humans into the walking dead. And oh yeah, they try and hide the body of the dead man, who isn’t dead and is soon turning the mall into Hong Kong Monroeville.

Also called Hong Kong Zombie, this has some fun video game moments and the kind of nihilistic ending that Romero would have loved. Directed by Wilson Yip, who co-wrote the story with Matt Chow and Man Sing So, this may not have much new when it comes to zombies, but once it gets the mall filled with them, it picks up steam and goes for it.

This movie worships Dead Alive and shouldn’t every movie nerd? Amazingly, this got a blu ray release before its inspiration.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

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.

One year after Amityville Scarecrow, Tina (Amanda Jade-Tyler) and Mary (Kate Sandison) are about to reopen the camp from the first movie, but there could be some evil still lurking about. In England. Not in New York. Yes, Amityville gets like that.

Directed by Craig McLearie (The Killing Tree) and written by Adam Cowie, the beginning of this movie is well shot and made me think that I was actually going to get a quality Amityville movie. Then, the talking begins and never seems to end and the Amityville Scarecrow never really does anything.

This movie is about trailer parks and the legal dealings of trailer parks and you know, I kind of want my Amityville movies to not be about human affairs but whatever. It’s better than the first one, but that’s like being constipated for a few days and then having non-stop diarrhea. They’re both bad and you don’t want go through them, but at least it’s some level of change.

I mean, I’m not going to stop pooping. And I’m not going to stop watching Amityville movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Spiritism was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 1, 1967 at 1:00 a.m.

Benito also directed Munecos Infernales, Santo vs. the Zombies and the astoundingly titled Frankenstein el Vampiro y Compania. This time, he’s sending his movie up north where Espiritismo will become Spiritism thanks to K. Gordon Murray.

This goes the Monkey’s Paw one better by having Satan himself grant the wishes. I mean, when the Lord of Lies is giving things away, that’s when you start questioning things. Louis and Mary Howard (Nora Veryan and Louis Fernandez) decide to attend a seance with a medium by the name of Elvira (Diana Ochoa). She warns them that April 8 will be the start of tragedy and seeing as how that’s their 20th anniversary, they suddenly get concerned and soon are dealing with death, spirits and the decimation of their family.

This movie features a character so clueless that she goes to a seance for herself, which sounds like a joke I should be saving for the next time someone wants to play The Dozens against me. Actually, the scene where she discovers that she is dead and can’t believe it is incredibly sad.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Haunted Strangler was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 27, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Sunday, September 13, 1964 at 11:15 p.m.

Jan Read wrote the story “Stranglehold” just for Boris Karloff, who made this movie at the same time as Fiend Without a Face, the movie that it played double features with.

Edward Styles (Michael Atkinson) is executed for being the Haymarket Strangler, a killer who choked women with one arm while stabbing them. As his coffin is closed, someone slips a knife in and for twenty years, no one thinks of these crimes.

James Rankin (Boris Karloff) believes that Styles was innocent and begins to look into the crime. As he killed his last victim, Martha Stuart, at the Judas Hole bar — The Judas Hole is an alternate title, as is The Grip of the Strangler — as others watched, including singer Cora Seth (Joan Kent). A man named Tenant did the autopsies of the victims and grew ill before the end of the case. This makes Rankin think that he could be the killer but without the murder weapon, it’s hard to put the evidence together. No one can find Tenant, who went insane just after the murders.

Ready for the spoiler?

As Rankin looks at the bones of Styles, he finds the knife and begins to transform, his face changing and his arm being paralyzed like the strangler. Somehow, thanks to the love of his nurse — and wife — Barbara (Elizabeth Allan) he has been able to keep the Strangler inside himself. Now, as he investigates the case, he alternates between the two different personas and begins to kill again, including his wife. This drives him further into psychosis and he begins screaming that he is the killer yet no one believes him. As he attempts to kill his daughter Lily (Diane Aubrey), he finally realize he must be stopped. As he tries to bury the knife in the grave, he is shot and killed by the police.

Director John Croydon was also shooting First Man Into Space at the same time, so British drive-in films were in great demand. He kept directing the whole way until 1991 with the TV movie Fire: Trapped on the 37th Floor. He also made She, Corridors of Blood and The Green Man.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wolf Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 18, 1965 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 13, 1967 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, April 13, 1968 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 29, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, November 6, 1971 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 17, 1973 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, January 19, 1974 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, September 10, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. and on the final Chiller Theater on December 31, 1983 at 1:00 a.m. with It Came from Beyond Space.

As you watch this movie, understand the pains that Lon Chaney Jr. had to go through for your entertainment. While the stories got exaggerated over the years, even a portion of their truth is a testament to the actor’s herculean patience. Although the effects improved with each movie, this makeup — which was originally developed for Werewolf of London — took five to six hours to apply and a full hour to remove. There were even “finishing nails” carefully hammered into the skin on the sides of the actor’s hands so that they would remain motionless during the transformation scenes, which took ten hours of Chaney getting makeup, going to set to hold still against a pane of glass, then back for more makeup on a day that stretched to twenty-one hours of work over two days of filing.

Larry Talbot has returned to Wales to make peace with his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) and falls for a local girl (Evelyn Ankers, Universal’s “Queen of the B’s”).

During their initial meeting, he buys a silver-headed walking stick decorated with a wolf just to get to talk to her while she works. She tells him that it depicts a werewolf, a fact of life that he learns all about when he defends her friend from an attack and gets bitten on the chest as a result.

Soon, he learns from the fortune teller Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) that it was her son Bela (Bela Lugosi!) who bit him. Now, he will live up to the poem that is recited several times during this film: “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night; May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

The funny thing is that poem is not an ancient tale; it was written for the movie by screenwriter Curt Siodmak. He based the chasing of Talbot and his life being thrown upside down on his experiences in post-WW II Germany.

Director George Waggner would go on to direct plenty of TV, including episodes of Batman and Cheyenne.

While this film was a success and Larry Talbott (with Chaney playing him) would return for four more films, the character never appeared in its own direct sequel. Joe Johnston would direct a 2010 remake with Benicio del Toro in the lead role. There was also talk that the character would be played by Dwayne Johnson in the planned Dark Universe and Ryan Gosling in a Blumhouse version of the film.

Most of the legends of werewolves come not from folklore but directly from this film, including a person becoming a werewolf through a bite, the weakness to silver bullets, and werewolves’ and their victims’ hands being marked with pentagrams.

Fun fact: A five-year-old Sam asked every child in his kindergarten class to show their palms, as he had told his teacher that he was doing a magic trick for the class. In truth, he was checking to see if any of them were werewolves.

Mutilator may not have the fanbase of other slashers — you won’t find much merchandise or an aisle devoted to it in your Spirit Halloween store — but it does have a great tagline in “By sword, by pick, by axe, bye bye” and the legend that the original was almost unreleased because the gore earned it an X rating.

Now, four decades after this late in the game slasher came out, original director Buddy Cooper returns with much of the cast of the first movie, all to make a meta sequel as a sequel is being made at the original filming location, as well as a wrap party and fan convention to celebrate the end of a rough shoot. Ruth Martinez, Pam from the 1985 film, plays herself, as does Bill Hitchcock (Ralph).

After Jon (Mark Francis), the director of the new Mutilator is killed, a detective named Columbo (Damian Maffei) starts to investigate and the bodies pile up. I mean it, the last part of this movie wipes out nearly every new character one after the other. Somehow, Jon’s producer brother Julian (Dan Grogan) is able to convince the police to not investigate until the wrap party.

Terry Kiser — who played the dead Bernie twice — is actor Jack Chatham, the man who played Big Ed in the first movie (who has a cameo) and he’s obsessed with getting his hands on his old weapons.

Speaking of those weapons, all of them and more will be used to decimate this movie’s cast, including fishing tackle taking out an eyeball in a method that Fulci would savor and a speargun up the rear and out the mouth kill that blew my mind, as well as a lynching that was so disgusting that I forgot I was on mute during a work conference call and yelled out loud in excitement. A fish even gets pulled off the wall and used.

Despite having eleven writers — Cooper, John Douglass, Edmund Ferrell, Keith Ferrell, Semone Fournillier, Ann Hale, Marshall New, David Edward Roop, the Soska sisters and Keith Patrick Stoddard — once it comes time to end this movie, it does so Porky Pig-style as the credits start to run.

It’s a shame that this ends in such a ramshackle fashion, just as things are picking up. Then again, this would be a fun movie to see with an audience and it revels in its gore, which is both amusing and shocking. If you love Mutilator, you’ll be overjoyed that other people love it just as much as you. But if you adore it that much, you’ll be upset that the “Fall Break” song doesn’t play in this.

This was one of the movies I was most looking forward to in several fests this year, so I’m excited that I finally got to see it. Here’s hoping it gets another pass before it plays wide, as with some tweaking, I think this could get in front of even more viewers than its inspiration.