EDITOR’S NOTE: War of the Satellites was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, May 3, 1964 at 11:10 p.m., Saturday, September 7, 1968 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 5, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.

My mom was nine when Sputnik went up into space and she said that people were so afraid of what it was and yet it was the size of a basketball. Roger Corman took those fears and made this movie in which a space barrier from the Spiral Nebula Ghana is destroying the satellites of the United National space program. They plan on quarantining humanity to Earth and not letting us into space, which seriously is a good idea because we tend to destroy everything we touch.

Dr. Pol Van Ponder (Richard Devon) plans on leading a mission into space but a ball of light destroys his car. The crew still goes, including Dave (Dick Miller) and Sybil (Susan Cabot). Yes, Dick Miller is the hero.

Well, Van Ponder comes back to life but he’s really an alien and he can make multiple versions of himself. He even tries to shut down the rocket going into space but Dave gives a speech that gets the world back into going into the unknown, even if the aliens are making natural disasters happen everywhere.

As you can imagine, the only way that we can realize our manifest destiny in space is to murder aliens. Good news. Human beings are awesome at killing. Dick Miller rises to the challenge and beats one of the Van Ponders into oblivion, then we go to space and leave litter all over Saturn.

The spaceship in this is two lounge chairs and a background. The future does not look all that forward. The always happy Miller told Fangoria, “We had two of the best lounge chairs money could buy to take off for the moon in. The type where you hit the sides and the chair slides down into a lying-down position.”

This played double features with Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lipstick was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 5, 1983 at 2:00 a.m. I can’t believe it.

Never trust Chris Sarandon.

I learned this at a young age with Fright Night, but this was before that and you still should never trust him. Don’t trust him in The Sentinel, don’t trust him in The Princess Bride, don’t even trust him as the voice of Jack Skellington.

Christine McCormick — played by Margaux Hemingway, herself a supermodel who appeared on the covers of Cosmopolitan, Elle and Vogue as well as serving as the spokesperson for Fabergé’s Babe perfume — is the face of a new brand of lipstick. She also is the guardian of her 13-year-old sister Kathy (Margaux’s sister Muriel, who was also in Star 80 and Personal Best), who has a young girl crush on her teacher, Gordon Stewart (Sarandon). For some reason, he thinks that Christine has the connections to get his music out to the world.

He comes to her beach photo shoot, but there’s no time to chat, and she forgets that they were to meet at her apartment. As he plays his atonal music — more on that in a second — she leaves the room to take a phone call from her lover Steve (Perry King, who really was in some awesome junk and I say that in the best of ways).

Hurt by her seeming rejection, his assault is brutal in its quickness. Saying, “So you fuck priests, too” he shoves a photo of her brother Martin (John Bennett Perry, Matt Perry’s dad) in her face, breaks it and then smears lipstick all over her face, telling her he wants it all over him. He ties her to the bed and takes her — the scene is too male gaze, too beautiful in a way because it’s a disgusting act — and even when they’re caught by Kathy, he suggests that the little girl joins them.

Once free, Christine gets a lawyer, Carla Bondi (Anne Bancroft), who tells her that it won’t be easy to convict him. And it isn’t. Christine’s sexual image as a model, even the fact that she has fantasies and a sex life, is used against her. So when Gordon goes free, it’s no great surprise.

Christine decides that she’s done with California and modeling after one last job. Except that the last job is in the same exact abandoned building where Gordon is rehearsing a synth ballet. He ends up finding Kathy, using her heartbeat as an instrument and then raping her as well. When she gets back to the photo shoot, Christine finds the rifle she had packed — literally, they packed to leave and are doing the photoshoot and then getting out of town — and shoots at Gordon as he tries to get away. As he gets out of the car, she pumps round after round into him. And in the end, no jury will convict her.

But maybe not. Because I believe that everything that happened after the not guilty verdict is in her head. There’s no way that she’d leave modeling literally from her last shoot. The coincidence that Gordon would be in the same building, in a California filled with places to rehearse, is infinite. The idea that she can successfully shoot him so many times in broad daylight and still not go to jail is the kind of fantasy that only appears in exploitation movies. Like Lipstick.

Director Lamont Johnson started as an actor and was mainly known for TV movies like Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232, Crisis at Central High and That Certain Summer, as well as Spacehunter: Adventures In the Forbidden Zone. It was written by David Rayfiel, who was the scriptwriter for The Firm, Havana and the 1995 remake of Sabrina.

Michael Winner turned down producer Dino De Laurentiis’ offer to direct this film and that shocks me. In his autobiography, Winner said that “Chris Sarandon was not a very good actor unless he was playing nut cases.” Then again, he used him in The Sentinel.

Even stranger, in 1998’s Little Men, Muriel Hemingway and Sarandor played husband and wife Jo and Fritz Bhaer.

That’s really fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo shooting the lipstick ads, while the clothes for this movie were designed by Jodie Lynn Tillen, who was the costumer for Messiah of Evil and Lemora! While uncredited, Donfeld also worked on the clothes. He was most famous, perhaps, for creating the TV costume for Wonder Woman.

French singer and music composer Michel Polnareff did the music for this, which is beyond wild. It’s completely unsettling — he also did a disco soundtrack for the film — and when it plays while Gordon assaults Christine, it’s horrifying, setting up his assault of her body, brain and ears as his atonal noise blasts, filling the room with painful beats and shrill screams. Later, when it’s played in court and the jury must hear it, you nearly feel bad for the bad guy but no, he’s absolutely the worst.

Despite critics hating this movie and it failing with audiences, it was remade as Insaf Ka Tarazu, College Girl and Edi Dharmam Edi Nyayam in India and Arzu in Turkey.

The real victim? Margaux. This movie was supposed to launch her career in Hollywood, but Muriel got most of the notice. She would make a few movies over the next seven years — Killer Fish, They Call Me Bruce and Over the Brooklyn Bridge, the first movie for Sam Firstenberg — before working in foreign genre movies like Goma-2 and straight to video films like Fred Olen Ray’s Inner Sanctum and Inner Sanctum II, Joe D’Amato’s A Woman’s Secret and Donald Farmer’s Vicious Kisses. Sadly, she became heavily involved in drugs and died at 41 from suicide. Her sister Mariel has always claimed that her death was not self-induced, but instead drugs.

Harlan Ellison, that cantankerous madman of my heart, once said of this movie, “Lipstick panders to the basest, vilest, lowest possible common denominators of urban fear and lynch logic. It is the sort of film that, if you see it in a ghetto theater filled with blacks, will scare the bejeezus out of you. The animal fury this film unleashes in an audience is terrifying to behold. It gives exploitation a bad name; and it has less to do with rape, which is the commercial hook on which they’ve hung the salability of this bit of putrescence, than it does with the cynicism of Joseph E. Levine, a man who probably has no trouble sleeping with a troubled conscience.”

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.

To the tune of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” by Bruce Springsteen:

Man walking through the Walmart store

Has so many DVDs, needs so many more

Looking at covers to see what catches the eye

What number Amityville is this, seventy-five?

Is that a werewolf I spy on the case?

What’s next Amityville in Space?

My wife sleeps as I watch all this mess

No taste, no standards, no limits, no rest

(Chorus)

Well, the internet highway is alive tonight

But nobody’s kidding this movie’s any good

I’m sitting down here in front of my TV

Watching the multiple ghosts of Ron DeFeo

Now Sam said, “Wherever there’s a cop comes from Amityville

Wherever a hungry Amityville shark appears

Where there’s a monkey that’s possessed and a 1/2 star review in the air

Look for me, I’ll be there

Wherever a family fights a possessed clock

Or an evil lamp or is in 3D

Wherever a demon is trying to get free

Look in their eyes and you’ll see me

You’ll see me!

So this movie — surprise! — has nothing to do with Amityville. It does have something to do with a halfway house and a werewolf and how did Lions Gate, a somewhat major studio, sully their hands with this?

Thomas J. Churchill also made The Amityville Harvest, which I’m sure I’ll be watching soon enough, and just finished Amityville Uprising, in which “a chemical blast at a military base sets off a supernatural disaster in this tense action-horror thriller.” Oh no. Oh no…

This also has Cody Renee Cameron in it, whose IMDB describes her as “a cool cocktail comprised of raw acting talent & badass stunt work, sprinkled with sexy, then shaken and poured into a chilled glass.” She should have written this movie, or maybe her publicist because that’s better than anything I just sat through.

Tuesday Knight from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is also on hand and she just made a movie called Amityville Bigfoot and seriously, they’re just making movies for me now to make me have crossover between my many Letterboxd lists. “The newest entry to the Amityville franchise follows a new story with Bigfoot and a new terror in the very special house” says IMDB. And who directed it? Shawn C. Phillips, who is also making Amityville Karen and Amityville Shark House because we needed two shark movies set in Amityville.

There’s also an Amityville Thanksgiving coming.

You know it’s bad when Common Sense Media — in their review of is this movie proper for your family or not — includes this discussion question: “Families can talk about sequels that aren’t really sequels, like The Amityville Moon. Why do you think Hollywood makes so-called “sequels” that have little, if anything, to do with the previous movies in the series?”

I wish my parents had talked to me about Amityville sequels but it’s too late. It’s just too late. I’m up at 4 in the morning watching movies like this when I should be sleeping. But you need me, don’t you, dear reader? If anything, I’m protecting you from 112 Ocean Avenue.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Haunted Strangler was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 19, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, May 20, 1967 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, November 16, 1968 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, January 2, 1971 at 11:30 p.m.

Released as a double feature with AIP’s Assignment Outer Space, The Phantom Planet finds the U.S. Air Force having bases on the moon and getting ready to fly to Mars. It’s 1980.

Captain Frank Chapman (Dean Fredericks) and Lt. Ray Makonnen (Richard Weber) are investigating why astronauts bound for Mars keep disappearing. Is it a phantom planet taking them? Well, Makonnen dies in a few seconds, so don’t get used to him, as meteor storm destroys their ship and Chapman ends up on an asteroid where he’s suddenly all of six inches tall.

Welcome to Rheton, Chapman, a planet that has a tractor beam and is ruled by Sesom (1910s and 20s matinee idol Francis X. Bushman), who has a mean blonde daughter Liara (Coleen Gray, Nightmare Alley). She’s interested in this human who is allowed to stay on the planet, as is the mute Zetha (Dolores Faith, who is in House of the Black Death, V.D. and The Human Duplicators; she left acting to marry Maxwell House heir James Robert Neal). Once he’s used to his new home, he’ll get to marry whoever he wants. Liara declares her love for him and he turns her down; Heron (Anthony Dexter) who has been in love with her tries to set up Chapman and they duel to the death. At the last moment, the Earthling saves Heron and finally falls for Zetha.

The reasons why this planet flies through space the way it does is to stay away from the evil Solarites but now that Chapman and Heron are friends, they rid the planet of them and then our hero is able to leave this planet behind, including the women who love him. The Solarite who captures Zetha, who gets her voice back before she is rescued, is played by Richard Kiel in his first film.

The costumes, sets and special effects in this all come from the TV series Men Into Space. Some people believe that parts of this movie’s sets were recycled for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Director William Marshall also acted in the movie State Fair. Writer Fred Gebhard also wrote 12 to the Moon while co-writer Fred De Gorter mostly worked in TV.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, April 5, 1964 at 11:10 p.m.

“Many times in the history of our civilization the introduction of a new thought has brought skepticism, even ridicule. Despite this, there always has remained the duty and inalienable right to tell the people the truth. The Motion Picture you are about to see is true. It is not fiction. Much of the information in it has never been told. You will see it here for the first time.”

Man, with a title like that, you’d expect Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers to be exciting. During this, my wife said, “Is this the business side of flying saucers?”

Producer Clarence Greene (the writer of D.O.A. and Pillow Talk, as well as the producer of The Oscar) saw a U.F.O. and contacted the Air Force. He met public information officer Albert M. Chop, who answered all of the public’s questions on this matter. Chop told him that there was filmed footage of these ships, so he bought them and started making this movie.

This starts with the 1947 events that kicked off the last century’s UFO phenomena, like the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting, the Mantell incident, the Gorman Dogfight and the formation of the government’s Project Sign, which was created to monitor UAPs. Tom Towers plays Chop and he was a former captain in Army Air Force intelligence during World War II that knew Chop and was working as an aviation reporter.

Chop doesn’t believe in flying saucers and doesn’t even allow his wife (Marie Kenna) to say those words in his house. Then he meets a former Third Reich scientist (William Solomon) who tells him that they had UFOs back in Germany and are we just going to ignore the Project Paperclip stuff in this? Yes we are. Or the filmmakers are.

Want to see some real or fake UFOs? Then get ready for the Mariana UFO Incident of 1950. Yes, Nick Mariana, the general manager of the Great Falls Electrics minor league baseball team and his nineteen-year-old secretary Virginia Raunig were in Legion Stadium baseball field before a game and saw a flash. He ran to the car, got his camera and filmed two silver discs. Project Grudge wrote it off as reflections of jets but even today, this footage hasn’t been debunked fully. he film also shows U.S. Navy footage of a UFO over the Great Salt Lake.

Albert Chop has a son named Chip in this. His son’s name is Chip Chop. This is the man we trusted with our country’s UFO defense.

That said, this movie is this may be the dryest movie I have ever watched. When Harry Morgan’s voice comes in, it makes it exciting. That’s how slow it is. No one was a trained actor and I believe this was a government sponsored film that would make flying saucers so boring that no one would care about them.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare In Wax was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 8, 1976 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, May 21, 1977 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, May 12, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 25, 1981 at 1:00 a.m.

From voicing Jesus in The Robe to the 1951 version of Death of a Salesman, Cameron Mitchell had plenty of big roles in even bigger films. But we’re not here to talk about those. We’d rather talk about his appearances in movies like Night Train to Terror (his segment also appears as another stand-alone movie, The Nightmare Never Ends), The Demon and Blood and Black Lace.

This time out, Cameron is Vince Rinaud, an FX artist who is disfigured by Paragon Pictures studio boss Max Block, who was also a rival for the attention of actress Marie Morgan. Yes, all it takes to ruin a man is to throw wine in his face and then a cigar. Who knew?

Leaving movies behind, Vince gains an eyepatch and a wax museum, while Paragon quickly loses four of their stars. Is it a coincidence that they soon appear as wax statues in Max’s museum?

This movie is pretty much a direct ripoff of House of Wax, except instead of dead bodies being under the wax, Vince uses a serum to turn people into zombies that just stand there under his control. There are also two cops who are the worst detectives this side of a giallo on the case — one of them is Bud Cardos, who appeared in Satan’s Sadists and directed The Dark!

But hey — Cameron Mitchell wearing a cape and an eyepatch. If that makes you happy, we’re happy you’re reading our site.