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.

You can download this movie from the Internet Archive or buy the Kino Lober blu ray.

The Day the Earth Froze is a Russian-Finish film that goes by Sampo. It was bought by American-International Pictures, cut by 24 minutes, the crew was renamed (Aleksandr Ptushko is Gregg Sebelious,  Eve Kivi is Nina Anderson and Andris Oshin has the name Jon Powers) and it was a double feature with Conquered City. There’s also the idea that this was shot in Vistascope, whatever that could be.

It’s all about how Lemminkäinen tries to win the heart of Annikki and battles the evil witch Louhi, who wants to make a magic machine called a Sampo that can make salt, grain and gold. When our hero fails to get it for her, she steals the sun and the world freezes, just as you’d expect from the name of the movie.

Directed by the same man who made The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and The Sword and the Dragon, each scene was shot four times: once in Russian, once in Finnish and then in both standard and anamorphic widescreen

If you have only seen the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, well, you can get the original film in a restored version from Deaf Crocodile. You can also watch this on Tubi.

At once an exploration of the Beats and one of the last original film noir movies, The Beat Generation is about the police looking for Stan Hess (Ray Danton), a serial rapist known as the Aspirin Kid because he goes to married women’s homes, acts like he has a headache and then attacks them while their husband isn’t home. He meets a cop named Culloran (Steve Cochran) who doesn’t realize he has the man everyone is looking for in his car. The cop and his partner Baron (Jackie Coogan) think that the real rapist is beatnik Art Jester (James Mitchum). How wrong he is, learning that when Hess assaults his wife and makes her pregnant, nearly ending his marriage while Jester falls for a gangster’s wife, Georgia Altera (Mamie Van Doren).

Directed by Charles F. Haas, who also made the Van Doren movie Girls Town, The Beat Generation has plenty of beatnik moments, like Maila Nurmi — Vampira — has a white rat walking all over her ghostly skin while freestyling a poem. Louis Armstrong is also on hand and recorded the theme song.

Irish McCalla was going to be the lead, but was told there was a rape scene and she’d have to do more for the European version, but the assault would be in good taste. She decided to take a smaller part.

This was written by Richard Matheson, who based it on a true story, saying it was “about a guy who would meet salesmen and talk to them on the road, learn all about their houses, where they were during the day, what they did; then he would go and attack the wives while the salesmen were still on the road. I wrote it as a police procedure film.”

There’s also a wrestling beatnik. That’s Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, who used to slap people in boxing matches. Despite all the silliness, this is a much darker movie than you’d think.

Frank Tashlin made the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons and you know, that’s pretty much what this movie is. It’s a cartoon come beautiful and wonderfully to life. He’d work with Jerry Lewis on six of his solo films (Rock-A-Bye Baby, The Geisha Boy, Cinderfella, It’s Only Money, Who’s Minding the Store? and The Disorderly Orderly) and then work with Jayne Mansfield again on the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He also wrote the Don Knotts film The Shakiest Gun in the West.

I knew I would love this movie in the first few seconds, when Tom Ewell introduces the film by showing how CinemaScope and the colors by DeLuxe work. It’s an astounding moment that breaks the fourth wall before it has even been built.

A mobster who runs the slots, Marty “Fats” Murdock (Edmond O’Brien), has one dream. He wants his girl, Jerri Jordan (Mansfield), to be a singer. She has no talent, but he knows that press agent Tom Miller (Ewell, who is best known for The Seven Year Itch and whose last movie was Rodney Dangerfield’s Easy Money) can get the job done. Even better, he never hits on his clients.

Murdock is obsessed with a song he wrote, “Rock Around the Rock Pile,” and Miller has to go to enemy territory and sell the song to another mobster, Wheeler (John Emery, Kronos), who rules the jukeboxes.

There’s all manner of romantic confusion and a gang war over jukeboxes, which was actually a thing once. All ends well, with Jerri confessing that she really can sing and Murdock letting her know that he doesn’t want to marry her, so she can go off and be with Tom, the man she loves. The wedding dress that Mansfield wears here was loaned to her for her wedding to Mickey Hargitay.

Oh yeah — and Juanita Moore, from Imitation of Life, is in this. That’s what normal folks know her from. Me, I recognized her as Momma from Abby right away.

The real reason to watch this — beyond the rainbow of colors ready to bathe your eyes in perfect beauty and majesty — are the performances by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, The Platters, Gene Vincent, Eddie Fontaine and more.

In The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney discusses how John Lennon learned how to play guitar from watching Cochran in this movie. It meant so much to them that they cut the recording of “Birthday” at Abbey Road Studios short to watch its 1968 British TV debut. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck also claimed that this movie was a big influence.

Speaking of influence, some feel that Elvis was directly inspired by the dancing for “Rock Around the Rockpile,” which was somewhat of an imitation of him anyway, and may have used the look of this scene when he made Jailhouse Rock. The makers of The Girl Can’t Help It wanted Elvis for this film, but dealing with Colonel Tom Parker proved to be too much to deal with, as his asking price for one Elvis song was too expensive.

Want to love this movie even more? Listen to John Waters discuss it on the British DVD release. He would also tell the Directors Guild of America Quarterly, “This wasn’t a movie that my boy classmates wanted to see or cared about. They weren’t interested in discussing Jayne Mansfield’s complete lack of roots. I really had no one that I could be enthusiastic with about it. So it was a private secret of mine, this movie.”

Waters based so much of the character of Divine — she would even come on stage to the song “The Girl Can’t Help It” — from Mansfield. He also points out that Little Richard’s mustache in this movie had such an impact on him that he’s had it for his entire life.

This film is pure greatness on a level that very few movies ever hope to reach. You can watch it on YouTube.

Directed and written by Gene McPherson, The Last Prom is a remake of the 1962 film and it updates it in a way that it kept shocking students for decades. I mean, I know that I saw it in 1988 in my high school.

Sandy Clark (Sheelagh Bevan) may have broken up with her boyfriend, but her friend Judy Grant (Mary LeClair) and her boyfriend Jim Miller (Ron Bohmer) fix her up with Bill Donovan (Jamie Bozian). Soon, they’re at the big event and the boys are getting trashed on vodka while no one is watching and they’re all joy riding and you see where this is going. Nearly everyone is about to die, as this is a slasher movie as much as anything that came out in the golden era of the genre.

Even though Bill caused the crash and killed everyone, he still goes to Sandy’s funeral. I have no idea why this happens.

This film also led to the mock accident that schools put on outside in the parking lot every year. When they did mine, the effects looked so bad and I had begged to be allowed to do them and was refused, as I was told that the levels of gore that I had planned would upset people. Isn’t that the point? Wouldn’t people at prom maybe behave a little better if they had seen a cheerleader’s intestines all over the Lincoln High School teacher’s lot?

I kind of love the ghost images and foreshadowing with the scenes of the bloody van and Sandy’s face heading toward a windshield. It’s shot like a documentary otherwise but man, it sure comes off as the most doom student scare movie I have ever sat through numerous times. If only everything they forced us to do in school was this good.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Man, the Woolner Brothers put out some wild movies.

Directed by Hugo Grimaldi — and writer Arthur C. Pierce — this has the Intergalactic Council send Dr. Kolos (Richard Kiel) on a mission for their galaxy domination program to replace humans with androids just like him. If his mission happens, the world will be taken over. If not, he dies.

He quickly enslaves Prof. Vaughan Dornheimer (George Macready) and starts making the androids and takes over the top scientists of the world — like Dr. Munson (Walter Abel) — and uses them to steal the things they need to keep making more copies of humans.

The professor’s daughter Lisa (Dolores Faith) and Glenn Martin (George Nader) are on the case, but soon, Glenn is duplicated. His girlfriend Gale Wilson (Barbara Nichols) figures it out and the cops open fire on the fake Glenn, who rips his arm off to escape. As for the real Glenn, he’s found the professor just as the android professor takes over, ties up Dr. Kolos and uses several copies of the evil Thor (John Indrisano) to steal Lisa and start making a duplicate of her.

She’s saved at the last minute by Dr. Kolos, who has a change of heart, knowing that he is an android and will soon die. However, he was able to see the human race and the beauty of mankind.

Filmed at the same time as the movie it played double features with — Mutiny In Space — this was re-released on VHS as Jaws of the Alien after Kiel became a star for playing the James Bond henchman.

Amongst consumers of the seamier world of exploitation film — alright, let’s be fair and call ourselves scumbags — Emilio Vieyra is best-known for his 1969 film The Curious Dr. Humpp, an astounding retitling of his film La Vengenza del Sexo (The Revenge of Sex). Blame Jerald Intrator, director of Striporama and dubbing supervisor for Night of the Bloody Apes) for that, as he also bought Vierya’s Placer Sangriento (Bloody Pleasure) and released it with the equally awesome title The Deadly Organ. Oh yeah — he was also smart enough to insert twenty minutes of nudity into La Vengenza del Sexo, a movie already rife with naked bodies.

This is Vierya’s vampire film. Actually, he also made La Bestia Desnuda (The Naked Beast) too.

Ofelia’s (Susana Beltrán, who appears in several of the director’s films, including saying “Use my body to keep you alive!” to Dr. Humpp and another I need to see called Stay Tuned for Terror) is about to be married to Eduardo but is truly in love with Gustavo. On her wedding night, her true love breaks into the honeymoon suite, kills her husband and turns her into a vampire just like him.

We fast-forward to the 60’s where Ofelia’s curse continues as she seduces and drains numerous teens one by one after their van breaks down. While she’s using up men, Gustavo is planning on doing the same with all the ladies.

The Argentinian government cracked down hard on this mix of gore and sex, keeping it hidden away for four years before allowing it to be released in all its bloody go-go dancing glory.

Mondo Macabro released this back in 2004, so here’s hoping that someday soon it gets another reissue. It’s so worthy of your time, a movie with seagulls instead of bats.

Also known as Hidden Face, this Ed Wood movie is about Don Gregor (Clancy Malone, director Ed Wood’s grocery delivery person), the rich son of plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson). Instead of following his father into medicine, he’s a henchman of gangster Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) and constantly getting into trouble with the law. A job gone wrong ends with them killing an old woman and Don telling his father that he wants to turn himself in to the police. Vic doesn’t allow that to happen, killing him and forcing Dr. Gregor to perform plastic surgery so that he can stay ahead of the police.

I’ve made this sound like a normal movie but no, it’s always night no matter what and the soundtrack from Mesa of Lost Women plays constantly over everything, never stopping. You may think that Rawlinson’s part should be played by Bela Lugosi. In a similar tragedy to that actor, Rawlinson died the day after filming was done. You may notice he isn’t breathing well. He had terminal lung cancer.

The nightclub scene is unique in every print. Wood had intended it to be a striptease scene, but the producers replaced it with a performance by minstrel act Cotton Watts, one of the last performers in the genre. This is taken from another movie, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones.

This is also the first movie for Steve Reeves and other than Athena, the only film in which his real voice is heard.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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.

The VCI blu ray of Horrors of the Black Museum has archival commentary by Cohen, a 2023 commentary by  Robert Kelly — who also created the new artwork for the cover, a tribute to Cohen and the original U.S. HypnoVista opening featuring psychologist, Emile Franchel. You can get this from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

Newspaper photographer Jeff Rhodes (Thom Meyers) has found that the people of a small Texas town are all drained of all of their blood. He’s on a deadline — Uncle Joe (Robert Bradeen) and Aunt Kate (Billie Keller) demand that he quit his job and come back to the family farm — while his brother Ralph (played by director and writer Roger Coburn) is a successful scientist at Research City. He also knows that alien life forms have come to Earth to bring dead bodies back to life and seek blood. If Jeff can stop the bedroom rodeo with Julie (Laura Ellis) he just might save the world if General Sanders (Dennis Letts) doesn’t nuke everyone first.

Bloodsuckers from Outer Space is aware that it’s a bad movie and leans into it, yet in the scenes where the aliens describe being dead and how Jeff will soon join them, the dialogue is actually pretty incredible. If only it went that way and became a Texas-based Messiah of Evil.

After running for President every year between 1968 and 1996, Pat Paulsen gets to be the leader of the United States in this movie and like almost everyone else, he’s busier having sex than doing something.

This had its first showing at Joe Bob Briggs’ 3rd Annual World Drive-In Movie Festival and Custom Car Rally in 1984 — Paulsen was chaffed by how bad it looked — and even came out on VHS by a major company, Karl-Lorimar Home Video.

Coburn was also one of the directors of Tabloid.