We need more people like William Castle.

As he starts the movie explaining how the gimmick works — Illusion-O — we learn that we will have the chance to see ghosts. Or not.

Most scenes of the movie is in black and white, but scenes involving ghosts let you watch them with special viewing glasses. If you want to see the ghost, you look through the red filter. If you don’t want to see them, watch through the blue filter.

Occultist Dr. Plato Zorba has given his house to his poor nephew Cyrus (Donald Woods), who moves in his wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp) and children Medea (Jo Morrow) and Buck (Charles Herbert). They find out from their lawyer Ben Rush (Martin Milner) that they share the house with 12 ghosts and they must stay there and not sell it or the state gets everything.

There’s also a seance-happy housekeeper called Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton!) and somewhere, if they can find it, a fortune.

How could you live with twelve ghosts? There’s a floating head, a screaming woman, a set of hands, a skeleton on fire, a chef who keeps killing his wife and her lover, a lynched woman, an executioner with a head that he’s chopped off, a lion (Zamba, who played Kitty Cat on The Addams Family) with a headless lion tamer and Dr. Zorba, who has left behind goggles to help them see the ghosts and an Ouija board that soon warns that death is coming.

Who killed Dr. Zorba? Where is the money? Will the family stay alive living here? Who will become the thirteenth ghost that frees all the other spirits? And how cool is it that the exterior shots are the Winchester House, an actual haunted place?

As much as I dislike remakes, I really dig the newer version of this, Thir13en Ghosts. Dark Castle, who produced that film, has been talking about doing a series about each of the ghosts. I’d love to see that.

You can watch the movie on Tubi or download it from the Internet Archive.

Inspired by the true story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the notorious “lonely hearts killers” of the 1940s, The Honeymoon Killers tells the tale with Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler, in her film debut, as the leads.

Ray starts the film by seducing Martha and stealing money from her, but it turns out that she may be every but his equal, using her wits to help him con and even kill numerous women from lonely hearts ads.

From relationship to relationship, Ray promises to never cheat on Martha, but there’s no way that he can keep up the con. Along the way, every one that crosses their path dies, often horribly.

Originally to be directed by Martin Scorsese, who was fired from the film, it was taken over by writer Leonard Kastle, who only created this one film. Named by François Truffaut as his “favorite American film,” it looks more like a grim documentary than an exploitation film.

American-International Pictures was going to distribute this, even making ad materials, but dropped it due to the film’s “extremely gruesome and misanthropic” tone. Their loss — it’s a work of art.

I’m enthused by the fact that an ad appeared in Variety at some point in the late 70’s announcing a sequel. Although never made, the story would have involved an imagined death row conjugal visit between Ray and Martha , resulting in the prison birth of brother/sister twins who were separated at birth. Years later, the pair meets and becomes adult murderers/lovers, never suspecting that they are siblings. This movie needs to be made.

Directed by Bill Rebane and an uncredited Herschell Gordon Lewis, Monster A Go-Go has astronaut  Frank Douglas (Henry Hite) — or maybe an alien impersonating him — coming back to Earth and going wild, often being restrained by scientists, not that anyone sees it. Most of the movie seemingly must be inferred from dialogue or read by the narrator. Rebane gave up on this movie in 1961 and Lewis came back to finish it, as he needed something to show along with Moonshine Mountain. Characters disappear, never to return. There is nothing resembling normalcy.

The movie ends with this narration: “As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some 8,000 miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?”

Most horror movies end with the monster chased down and killed. This one ends with Lewis reading those words, probably because that was cheaper. You have to admire that.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Joseph Losey and written by Evan Jones, These Are the Damned is taken from the novel The Children of Light by H.L. Lawrence. It has Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) arriving in England, fresh off a failed marriage, and meeting Joan (Shirley Anne Field), who lures him into a mugging by her brother King (Oliver Reed). Not the way to start a romance, but still, it’s a start.

Simon gives Joan another chance and they stay a step ahead of King and his motorcycle gang but running into some caves. They finally make love in an abandoned house and are chased again, finding a military base where nine 11-year-old children live, all cold to the touch and highly intelligent. Held by a man named Bernard (Alexander Knox), they are observed at all times as they have survived a nuclear blast that killed their parents. They are all born on the same day and perhaps the next step in evolution.

While Simon, Joan and King try to help the children escape, they are all overwhelmed by the radiation that lives inside them and Bernard wipes out the evidence, even killing his girlfriend Freya (Viveca Lindfors) when she refuses to be part of his plot to raise the children to survive the war that he knows is coming.

Losey was an anti-war director blacklisted by Hollywood, working for Hammer in England. They made him tone down the incest between King and Joan, as well as changing the end where a helicopter would kill Freya and not Bernard. Cut to 77 minutes when it played in the U.S., it’s an incredible film that was inside the guise of a simple horror film.

You can watch it on YouTube.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn’t only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let’s examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!”

You know how I always say, “They could have stopped making movies after this?” This is the movie at the center of my argument. I really don’t know how any movie gets any better than this, unless Russ Meyer is directing it.

The three worst women you’ve ever met — and also the finest — finish their dance routines at a club and then head out to the California desert where they race their car and verbally abuse one another. They are Billie (Laurie Williams), Rosie (Haji) and Varla (Tura Satana, perhaps the finest thing Satan ever made for the Lord). They follow that up by sizing up the guy mansplaining things to his girl and snap his neck before drugging his woman, Linda (Susan Bernard).

Stopping to fill up, they learn that a wheelchair-bound man and his feebleminded son are literally sitting on a treasure. So they do what you or I would do — manipulate, manhandled and murder everyone in their way.

Originally known as The Leather Girls and then The Mankillers, this isn’t a movie as much as a religion to me. No less a cultural giant as John Waters said, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”

Tura Satana is the kind of woman that if she wasn’t born, we would have created her and made her into a goddess. There have been many pretenders to her throne, but none will ever ascend it.

Seriously, I wore the t-shirt of this movie for most of the 90s before it fell apart. If you dislike this movie, we can never, ever be friends.

The art for this comes from this site.

As late as 1997, when it was re-rated NC-17 “for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail,” Pink Flamingos keeps on offending people in the best of ways.

A movie that has the dedication “For Sadie, Katie, and Les- February 1972” — Manson Family members Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten discovered in February 1972 that the death penalty was abolished in California, reducing their sentences — director and writer John Waters and star Divine announced themselves to the world here, despite already making the movies Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, Eat Your Makeup, Dorothy, the Kansas City Pot Head, Mondo Trasho, The Diane Linkletter Story and Multiple Maniacs, films that didn’t escape Baltimore and small screenings.

The filthiest person alive Babs Johnson (Divine) lives with her mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills) and traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) in a trailer with pink flamingos in the front yard. Her title is challenged by Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond Marble (David Lochary) who come to regret ever invoking her wrath, costing them their baby stealing empire and eventually their lives.

Banned in Switzerland and Australia, as well as in some provinces in Canada and Norway as well as Hicksville in Long Island, this movie is less about the plot and more about the urge to shock you. It’s Waters using filth in the same way that his hero William Castle used gimmicks to bring you into the theater. If Joan Crawford was the ultimate gimmick for Castle, Divine served the same role for Waters. She even ate dog feces for the movie (followed by her calling a hospital emergency hotline pretending to be a mother whose son ate the same thing to make sure she would survive). And yet somehow, it’s all rather heartwarming, even if it’s a movie punctuated by Divine’s rants that include incendiary words like “Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!”

Pink Flamingos is as old as me but retains its wild edge when everything else feels dulled down. I often think of it when I am down and am amazed that it exists, a movie that is endlessly watchable and quotable. I’ve resisted writing about it for so long because what else can I add to it? But I feel that I must celebrate it and why it keeps on meaning so much, a movie that I watched people walk out on 25 years after it was made, angry that the movie was just so wrong.

Vernon, Florida has about 732 people living in it and was once known as Nub City because of how many limb loss insurance claims were made in the area. More than two-thirds of all insurance claims for people who lost their arms or legs in the fifties and sixties lived there, so director Errol Morris decided to make this movie. He was threatened by the people who lived there so he made this instead.

You’ll watch 55 minutes of the people of the small town, like turkey hunter Henry Shipes, who speaks with such excitement about the hunt, saying “Listen to that sound? Hear that sound? Getting in an out of trees? That flop-flop sound? Mm, that sound will sure mistake you for turkeys. Listen. Hear that flop-flop. Limbs breaking. Hear that good flop, then? Listening to that gives me the turkey fever. Mm, I wish there were as many turkeys as there are buzzards.”

You also get a worm farmer, a preacher and a cop who is happy that nothing ever happens. Then again, who shot the cop’s windshield?

Nearly nothing happens and I had so much fun watching that nothing. What a fun movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Is a biker movie not enough action for you? What if I told you that a biker gang named The Devil’s Advocates happen upon some warlocks and then one of them is bitten by a female werewolf and transforms under the full moon? How’s that sound?

I literally just told you the entire plot of this movie. Soon after the cult members cast a curse on the biker leader’s (Stephen Oliver, who was married to Lana Wood, sister of Natalie Wood and also the star of Motorpsycho and Angels from Hell) girlfriend that makes her turn into a werewolf, she turns him as well. Soon, the bikers are being killed one by one until they see their leader and his girl transform.

The bikers head back to the church for revenge, but suddenly stop when they see themselves in the cult lineup.

This movie has been sampled by Rob Zombie repeatedly, including the line “We all know how we’re going to die, baby. We’re gonna crash and burn.” It’s also better than anything he’s done since The Devil’s Rejects. Actually, it’s probably better than that, too.

Real bikers were used for all the stunts in this movie, so it has a real authenticity to it. And the weirdness of the cult’s rituals breaks into that so nicely, giving this movie a real air of pure strange. The cult leader, One, is played by Severn Darden, who played Governor Kolp in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He’s so great in this movie!

The soundtrack is also so good. It’s very blues country rock with a bit of doom. It’s perfect for the action on the screen. This movie gets a very high recommendation!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt) runs away, become thieves and live “a sin-steeped story of the rise of the Beat Generation.” Directed by Paul Henreid (the Cardinal from Exorcist II: The Heretic) from a script by Allen Rivkin and Ib Melchior, they find themselves working with Rick (Mike Connors) and Artie (Troy Donahue) and go from slipping guys a mickey when they take them back to their motel rooms to knocking over a post office to get six figures worth of jewels.

Meanwhile, Jill’s sister Kim (Mary Murphy) gets sick of their drunken father and decides to find where her sister is, getting mixed up in all this crime. She’s just lucky that she meets a truck driver named Jerry (Sheridan Comerate) who treats her well and helps her forget that her dad’s drunken friend once tried to touch her.

These girls are supposed to be teens but are instead in their late 20s. Such is the juvenile delinquent film. It played with Girls On the Loose and you can often see pictures of Eberhardt being worn by Slash from Guns ‘n Roses.

You can watch this on YouTube.