A lost movie from Al Adamson and Sam Sherman, this softcore Western was filmed on Spahn Ranch, the same place where Charles Manson and his Family were living as they attempted to commit Helter Skelter.

The cast has Gary Kent, the stuntman who Danger God was made about, as a prospector; Bambi Allen (who also appeared in adult films as Holly Woodstar; she’s also in Satan’s Sadists and The Bang Bang Gang under the name Chata Cruz) and Rene Bond (one of the first adult stars; mainstream appearances include one of the evil women in Invasion of the Bee Girls, Please Don’t Eat My Mother! and the TV movie Betrayal) as two kidnapped girls; and for the evil men stealing all these ladies, there’s John “Bud” Cardos, George “Buck” Flower and Eric Stern.

It did play theaters but it just can’t be found. If it were, it would have showed up on Severin’s all-encompassing box set.

Shot in the summer of 1969 at Spahn Ranch, which was the home of the Manson Family at the time, The Female Bunch also has moments filmed at Hanksville and Capitol Reef in Utah as well as Las Vegas, Nevada. Adamson loved shooting outside. He must have loved every second of this movie.

All the bad men she’s dealt with leaves Sandy (Nesa Renet) wanting to end it all. Her friend Libby (Regina Carrol) takes her into the desert to meet Grace (Jennifer Bishop), who leads a gang of women that run drugs and use men.

This is the last movie of Lon Chaney Jr., filmed after Dracula vs. Frankenstein. His voice sounds painful, the result of throat cancer radiation treatments.  He plays Monti, an old Hollywood cowboy who is loyal to Grace. Kim Newman, who writes some great film reviews, wrote a short story about this movie, “Another Fish Story.” In this tale, Charles Manson is trying to using one of the Ancient Ones to destroy the world while Lon Chaney Jr. is given a mission in the desert that will keep The Family from bothering Adamson and crew.

To join this gang of women, you have to be buried alive in a coffin. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but if I got to hang out with Chaney and Russ Tamblyn, I may let you throw some dirt on my grave.

Dracula vs. Frankenstein feels like the most Independent-International movie there is. I have no other way to explain why this movie seems like it came from another reality. It has Dr. Durea (J. Carrol Naish, in his last movie), the last descendent of Dr. Frankenstein, killing women with his assistant Groton (Lon Chaney Jr. in his next to last movie) to try to come up with an elixir that will fix his legs and his henchman’s simple brain. They’re visited by Dracula (Zandor Vorkov, really Raphael Peter Engel, given that name by Forrest J. Ackerman and someone who once ran record stores; according to this interview in Fangoria, he’s wearing a rental cape that was once used by Bela Lugosi) who wants them to finish their cocktail so that it can allow him to walk in the daytime which he feels will make him finally able to take over the world.

The doctor and his assistant decide to set up their lab — using the Kenneth Strickfaden equipment from the Universal films — in a haunted house known as the Creature Emporium. They keep killing women while Dracula is sent after the man who put the doctor in a wheelchair, Beaumont (Forrest J. Ackerman). A biker named Rico (Russ Tamblyn) gets involved and Dracula gets his blood hot over a showgirl by the name of Judith Fontaine (Regina Carroll).

I nearly forgot! Dracula also has the corpse of the Frankenstein Monster, which he took from Oakmoor Cemetery. he’s played by both John Bloom and Shelley Weiss. The goal is to also bring that creature back to life. Graydon Clark is in here as The Strange, a hippie leader, and of course the kids all drop acid.

Judith also learns that the doctor has kept her sister Joanie (Maria Lease) and her friend Samantha (Anne Morrell) nude and trapped between life and death. He’s using a special enzyme in their plasma that comes from the fear before death to create his magical elixir so that he can heal his leg, fix his quiet friend and help Dracula. His hypothesis is that if Judith watches Mike (Anthony Eisley), a hippie that has fallen for her and she for him, die that the enzyme in her blood will be strong enough to complete his work. He sends Grazbo the dwarf (Angelo Rossitto) and Groton after them, but the little guy falls through a trapdoor and onto an axe, Groton gets shot by the cops and he himself falls onto a guillotine which cuts his head off.

But oh Mike, you aren’t safe. Dracula attempts to take Judith and when our hero tries to save her, the vampire blasts him with his ring and turns him into ashes. Now, the fanged Frank Zappa lookalike tries to drink her blood in a desecrated church but the Frankenstein Monster falls in love too and fights Dracula. This sounds like the kind of story an elementary student would make up in class when they should be studying and that’s why I love it. Dracula rips off the creature’s arms and head but gets burned by the sunlight.

Lon Chaney Jr. was in bad shape during this, lying down between takes and not speaking as he barely could be heard. He would speak to Adamson’s father and say things like, “You and I are the only two left. They’re all gone. I want to die now. There’s nothing left for me; I just want to die.”

What makes me love this even more is the theory that this was a sequel to Satan’s Sadists with Russ Tamblyn and the other bikers from that film coming back. Sam Sherman decided to turn it into a horror film and much of the biker footage was cut as a result. Not all of the biker footage could be cut, which is why Tamblyn and his biker gang wander in and out of the movie.

This movie has one of my favorite lines of all time, as Dracula has hypnotized Forrest and is taking him to his doom. He gives him directions as he speaks and I wonder, why doesn’t he just have him drive as he’s already taken over his will? He says, “I am known as the Count of Darkness, the Lord of the Manor of Carpathia. Turn here.”

In 1971, drive-ins across America and the maniacs inside the cars wanted more of the Blood Island movies. But hey — the guys behind them were busy, so Hemisphere said, “What if Al Adamson made a Blood Island ripoff outside of the Philippines?”

Brain of Blood is the result. The gory, ridiculous and totally awesome result.

Amir (Reed Hadley, one of the actors who played Red Ryder and also someone who narrated Department of Defense films during World War II) is the ruler of Kalid and is dying, but a scientist named Dr. Trenton (Kent Taylor, who shows up in all the Blood Island series) has different plans, thanks to the requisite dwarves and chained up women. Can Amir’s pal Bob (Grant Williams, who starred in The Incredible Shrinking Man, in his last role) and his wife Tracey (Al Adamson’s wife Regina Carrol) save the day?

Angelo Rossitto plays the evil Dorro. This small-sized actor also shows up in Scared to Death, From A Whisper to a Scream, The Trip, Freaks, Galaxina and nearly seventy other films, including a turn as Master in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. He’s also on the cover of Tom Waits’ album “Swordfishtrombones.”

John Bloom also shows up, who you may remember as Reaper in The Hills Have Eyes II, as well as playing Frankenstein’s Monster in Adamson’s borderline insane Dracula vs. Frankenstein, the recipient of The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant, Big Foot in Angels’ Wild Women, The Dark in, well, The Dark and appearances in Bachelor Party, The Great Outdoors and Up Your Alley.

You can get the blu ray from Severin. There was also a Cinematic Titanic riffed version of this under the title The Oozing Skull. The title was changed as Sam Sherman was concerned that multiple versions of the film could create marketplace confusion.

It just makes sense that the Third Reich would regroup in Las Vegas, I guess. FBI agent Mark Adams (John Gabriel) poses as a member of a Sin City organized crime gang to get into the world of war criminal Count von Delberg (Kent Taylor) and stop him from his plan to counterfeit U.S. dollars. He’s helped by Israeli agent Carol Bechtal (Vicki Volante) whose parents were killed by von Delberg during the war. But the Count hasn’t slowed down or not gotten with the times. He’s working with the Bloody Devils, a motorcycle gang, to make his plans work.

This started as a spy movie called Operation M before it was The Fakers and then a few years later, bikers — real bikers, the kind that get busted for weapons charges during filming — joined the cast.

You know who else is in there? Colonel Sanders. He’s in one of his KFC restaurants. The Colonel had sold the restaurants in 1964 but retained ownership of the Canadian stores and was a brand ambassador, even if he started to despise the way the new owners made his chicken cheaper and not to his taste. In 1975, he said, “My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I’ve seen my mother make it. There’s no nutrition in it and they ought not to be allowed to sell it. Their fried chicken recipe is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.” KFC has paid for product placement in this movie, which may seem strange, but the Colonel also shows up — as does his chicken — in some Herschell Gordon Lewis movies. The Godfather of Gore used to serve up the original recipe as his craft service. The Colonel is also in Blast-Off Girls, The Big Mouth and The Phynx.

John Carradine plays a pet shop owner. That’s enough to make me watch.

Al Adamson was remixing movies back in 1970. Invasion of the Blood Monsters has footage from Robot Monster, Unknown Island, One Million B.C., the Filipino movie Tagani and The Wizard of Mars. By the time it was ready for drive-ins and theaters, that black and white footage looked old. Adamson used a process called Spectrum X that made everything a single color. It’s really strange when mixed with full color footage yet I kind of enjoy it.

Exploitation heroes like Gary Graver and Adamson play vampires in the beginning as we listen to Brother Theodore tell us what has happened to our home world and why a rocket must go into space and John Carradine will lead humans in their quest to save Earth.

Jennifer Bishop is the beautiful girl who will help them fight snake men, lobster people and more vampires — hey, Bud Cardos — and oh yeah, bat people! Sam Sherman produced this and it was originally started in 1966 with reshoots in 1970. It was getting renamed all the way up until it was a Star Wars clone — well, in title only — under the AKA Space Mission of the Lost Planet.

I just read a bad review of this movie and it made me dislike the person who dare say anything mean about this film. From the moment the Independent International logo shows up, I was happy. Like, deliriously joyous. How can you not love a movie like this? What’s next, people don’t like Brain of Blood?

Directed by Al Adamson and written by Robert Dix, who plays Ben Thompson, Five Bloody Graves is about Ben battling Satago (John “Bud” Cardos), the man who scalped his ex-girlfriend Nora (Vicki Volante) and her husband (Ken Osborne). Cardos is also Joe Lightfoot, Satago’s brother, who is half-white and half-Native American.

Ben was a former lawman and now, he wanders the Wild West — including an amazingly named town Goblin Valley, Utah, which is a real place — before he helps holy man Boone Hawkins (John Carradine) and a stagecoach full of showgirls like Kansas Kelly (Paula Raymond) and Althea Richards (Darlene Lucht) through Native American territory while death itself (Gene Raymond) narrating explaining how Ben and Satago are his messangers on Earth. It’s all very metal.

This also looks pretty great thanks to cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who went on to win an Oscar for Best Cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as well as filming McCabe & Mrs. Millers, The Deer Hunter, Deliverance, The Black Dahlia and many more.

The tagline “Lust-Mad Men and Lawless Women in a Vicious and Sensuous Orgy of Slaughter!” is enough to get me in the drive-in for this.

Al Adamson made his breakthrough with this movie, going on to direct Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Cinderella 2000, Nurse Sherri and one of the most legitimately unhinged movies I’ve ever survived, Carnival Magic. Even stranger, he was murdered and buried beneath his hot tub in 1995, killed by his live-in contractor Fred Fulford in a plot that could have been one of his films.

However, today we’re talking about his contribution to biker films.

The Satans are a motorcycle club who roam the American Southwest, led by Anchor (Russ Tamblyn, TV’s Twin Peaks) and including Firewater (John “Bud” Cardos, Breaking Point), Acid (Greydon Clark, who directed Satan’s Cheerleaders), Romeo (Bobby Clark, TV’s Casey Jones), Muscle, Willie and Gina (Regina Carrol, Adamson’s wife who appears in nearly all of his films). We’re introduced to the gang as they beat up a man, rape his girlfriend and then push them and their car off a cliff.

They have the bad luck to get in the way of hitchhiker Johnny Martin, a Vietnam vet who is just trying to figure it all out. He gets picked up by Chuck Baldwin (Scott Brady, the sheriff from Gremlins) and his wife Nora. The old man’s a cop and wants to help the young Marine as he travels the highways. They all go to a diner, where we meet Lew (Kent Taylor, half of the inspiration for Superman’s alter ego), the owner, and Tracy, a waitress.

The Satans show up and ruin the budding romance between Johnny and Tracy, as they earn the ire of Chuck and his wife, who tosses a drink in one of their faces. Chuck tries to pull his gun, but the old man’s authority means nothing to the hardened toughs who beat the fuck out of him and rape his woman. Then, they kill all three — but not until Anchor screams out a totally inspired rant:

“You’re right, cop. You’re right, I am a rotten bastard. I admit it. But I tell ya something. Even though I got a lot of hate inside, I got some friends who ain’t got hate inside. They’re filled with nothing but love. Their only crime is growing their hair long, smoking a little grass and getting high, looking at the stars at night, writing poetry in the sand. And what do you do? You bust down their doors, man. Dumb-ass cop. You bust down their doors and you bust down their heads. You put ’em behind bars. And you know something funny? They forgive you. I don’t.”

The Satans don’t leave witnesses. Well, except for our hero and the waitress, who just escaped from Muscle and Romeo. Meanwhile, the gang meets three young girls and start partying with them. Gina can’t take seeing Anchor with other women, so she jumps off a cliff.

Willie tries to kill our heroes, but a rattlesnake saves them (!). Meanwhile, Firewater finds his body and comes to tell Anchor, who has gone insane and murdered all three girls. They fight and Firewater leaves the leader for dead. As he finally finds Johnny and Tracy, he is killed by a landslide (again, nature itself is against the bikers).

Finally, Anchor catches up to them and goes nuts, giving another soliloquy about being Satan. He raises Chuck’s gun to kill everyone, but Johnny simply throws a switchblade at him. “In Vietnam, at least I got paid when I killed people,” he says and at that, he and Tracy ride off on the villain’s cycle.

Satan’s Sadists was filmed at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, CA, at the same time the Manson Family lived there. Some movies would hide this fact. This poster will prove that this one wears it on its bloody sleeve.

Truly, this is a movie that does not give a fuck. Just about no one gets out alive or unscarred. Any moments of pleasure are stolen or taken by force. The poster promises human garbage and this film delivers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1967) is truly a boring film, even for Al Adamson, who is not known for making great films. The most exciting bit of action in this movie was the scene-stealing walrus in the opening scene shot at the old Marineland in Palos Verdes, California. That walrus puts in a more energetic better performance than any of the human actors.

The story concerns Mrs. and Mrs. Count Dracula, who have essentially retired as “The Townsends” to a castle in the California desert (Falcon Rock Castle Antelope Valley, California.)

Now free from a life of killing villagers in Europe their new life is one of leisure. There’s no more hunting for these two elites! Their new bougie diet consists mostly of bloody cocktails prepared for them by their butler George played by John Carradine, a priest in a cult who worships Luna the Moon God along with the Townsends.

The blood comes from the various girls kept chained in the basement, most of whom are collected from the nearby highway and brought home by their deformed Igor-like caretaker Mango played by Ray Young. A tall stunt actor better known as the boulder-throwing half of The Kroft Supershow staple Bigfoot and Wildboy (1976.)

The Townsends and also have a strange relationship with a local serial killer named Johnny (Robert Dix). Although how he came to be close with the Townsend’s is never explored, they seem to have a reciprocal relationship. One in which he brings them victims for promised initiation into vampirehood. In the alternate television version (yes, there are two versions of this snorefest – both available online) Johnny is a werewolf.

After escaping from a mental institution, Johnny kills a few people just for the hell of it on the way home to the castle. Here, the added werewolf scenes actually make sense. Somewhat. In the original version Johnny mentions repeatedly how he can’t control his murderous urges when there’s a full moon. The problem with the new inserts lies in the fact that they were clearly shot years later. The hairstyle and wardrobe of the victim places it squarely in the ‘70s and the electronic music bears no resemblance to the music in the rest of the film.

One would think that a police pursuit of a serial killer/werewolf would be exciting. It isn’t. That’s the problem with this movie. Even when things happen it doesn’t feel like it. There’s an utter lethargy to the acting, camera placement and editing. During the chase, the screen direction is completely off and there is very little foley to bring the soundtrack to life.

Once reunited, the Townsends, Johnny, George and Mango now have a new problem to contend with. They must find a new place to live. Sadly, after a nice, calm, sixty-year tenancy, their 108-year-old landlord has died, leaving the castle to his nephew. The new landlord – a photographer named Glenn Cannon and his perpetually complaining model fiancé Liz decide they’re going to live there.

When they show up to inspect the place, instead of chaos, we are treated to a series of long civil discussions between the characters. Most disappointing of all is that the vampires never do anything. They’re far too spoiled and sophisticated. Count Townsend (played by Horrors of Spider Island star Alex D’arcy) is so nonchalant that at one point he tells a potential victim, “Oh, no. We won’t kill you. We need your blood,” with the calm tone of a man making small talk. They don’t even fight when Glenn ties them up in the finale. They’re far too used to being looked after by their staff to do anything as vulgar as defend themselves. If the Howell’s on Gilligan’s Island were vampires, this is exactly how they’d behave. The effect is equally as comical. However, they don’t go as gently into the ether as one might think. After sacrificing a girl on the beach to Luna, aging and turning to dust when the morning sun shines through the window, two bats emerge from the vampires’ fancy party clothes and fly off. Perhaps to rent another castle somewhere else and start over. George and Johnny are dispatched by our heroes.  Glenn saves Liz. Mango gets shot, axed and thrown off a cliff. It should be exciting. It isn’t.

Link to the theatrical Crown International cut:

Link to the Television Paragon “Werewolf” cut:

Dr. Howard Vanard (John Carradine) implants a strange electronic machine into the brain of ‘Nam survivor Joe Corey (Roy Morton) who becomes a psychotic killer.

This is the same story that we saw in The Fiend With the Electronic Brain.

Joe Corey steals some diamonds and the jewels are thrown into the back of a pickup truck. They end up in a doll, which is taken by Linda and her daughter Nancy to a cabin. A cop saves them by shooting Joe and the villain falls off a cliff to his demise.

This is the same story that we saw in Psycho-A-Go-Go.

Seven years later, Dr. Vanard’s daughter Susan (Regina Carrol) begins to get psychic prank calls from Elton Corey (Kent Taylor) and his zombie Akro. Elton is the father of Joe and wants revenge on everyone connected with the death of his son. Sgt. Cross (Tommy Kirk) gets his partner’s head in the mail and tracks down the witch doctor mad scientist just in time to watch Akro kill Corey and die himself. Also, for some reason, they age Susan and turn her into a zombie but she gets better.

This is not the same story.

The Man With the Synthetic Brain, however, is pretty much the same story without all the nightclub moments. That was Sam Sherman’s version for TV.

I have a weird way of thinking about movies. If a major studio did this, I would be angry. But when it’s Independent-International, I am so pleased with their ingenuity.