EDITOR’S NOTE: The Spider Woman Strikes Back was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 24, 1976 at 1:00 a.m. It also appeared on November 19, 1983.

There was a second Universal horror cycle after the Karloff and Lugosi monsters, even if they never get discussed any longer. And so much of it was based around one man, Rondo Hatton.

Well, Sherlock Holmes too. We’ll get to that.

Hatton was once a sportswriter for The Tampa Tribune and a World War I veteran, but then acromegaly distorted the shape of his head, face and extremities, giving him a unique look that made him a livings special effect. In fact, the studio system tried to play his looks up as an even worse deformity, stating that he’d received elephantiasis after exposure to German mustard gas attack during the war.

After playing the Hoxton Creeper in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film The Pearl of Death, a series of Creeper films was planned. Sadly, House of Horrors and The Brute Man were released after his death, the result of his acromegalic condition.

Back to the master detective.

The second character spun off from a Holmes film was The Spider Woman, who originally appeared in Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman. Again, like Hatton, Gale Sondergaard didn’t need much makeup to achieve her fame as a dangerous and evil woman.

In fact, after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, MGM considered having the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz played as a glamorous villainess, much like Snow White’s evil stepmother. They did two screen tests with Sondergaard in the traditional witch look and the more out there sexy style. After the decision was made to go with the ugly wicked witch, Sondergaard was reluctant to wear the disfiguring makeup, so she stepped away from the role which went to Margaret Hamilton.

Sondergaard also played the evil humanized cat Tylette in The Blue Bird — 20th Century Fox’s answer to Oz — as well as the sinister wife in The Letter.

So yes, back once again to Holmes. After playing the villain in one of the long series of Sherlock movies, Sondergaard would play the sinister Spider Woman again in an unrelated sequel. In the first movie, she was known as Adrea Spedding but now she’s the wealthy, blind and mysterious Zenobia Dollard.

Jean (Brenda Joyce, who played Jane in several Tarzan films) is hired as Zenobia’s caretaker, a job with a definite shelf life as all of the previous caretakers have vanished. Perhaps that’s because at night, Zeonbia’servantnt (yep, Rondo Hatton) harvests her blood while she sleeps a drugged sleep, mixing her plasma with that of her ancestors and a little bit of spider venom — sounds like one of my cocktails — to make a death serum. Oh yeah — he has blood drinking plants to help him with his experiment!

At just 59 minutes and with direction by non-horror fan Arthur Lubin, this film couldn’t catch on the same way Universal’s past horror successes did. Yet it’s still astounding that they attempted to start a new series, much less one with a female antagonist. That said, this did run quite often on TV, as it was part of the original Universal Shock Theater package.

Kino Lorber’s new blu ray of The Spider Woman Strikes Back with a great looking 2K remaster of the film, commentary by film historians Tom Weaver and David Schecter, trailers and Misteress of Menace and Murder: Making The Spider Woman Strikes Back, a new documentary featuring interviews with C. Courtney Joyner, Rick Baker and Fred Olen Ray. Much like all of their latest releases, Kino really knows how to find that exact movie that you suddenly discover that your collection is missing.

You can get it directly from Kino Lorber

EDITOR’S NOTE: Black Sabbath was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 28, 1967 at 11:20 p.m. It was also on the show on June 13, 1970; March 27, 1971 and June 10, 1972.

Known in Italy as I tre volti della paura (The Three Faces of Fear), Mario Bava’s seminal film plays differently in other countries of the world. Here in the United States, American-International Pictures suggested changes to Bava during filming so that the film would play better in America, where it underperformed. Those changes include replacing the original dialogue, changing Roberto Nicolosi’s score to music by Les Baxter and censoring much of the film’s violence. The first story, “The Telephone,” was changed the most, as it was given a supernatural element missing from the Italian version and all references to prostitution and lesbianism were exorcised.

Bava wanted to create a story about how terror can strike in different time periods and looked to books for inspiration. The first tale, “The Telephone,” is based on F.G. Snyder’s story and has Bava trying to match the lurid covers of giallo detective books. The whole name giallo had no been codified yet, so this is a take between The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace.

In that story, a French call girl named Rosy (Michèle Mercier) returns home to receive a series of strange phone calls from her pimp Frank, who has just escaped from prison. A prison that she sent him to, no less.

Rosy calls her ex-girlfriend Mary (Lydia Alfonsi) as she is sure that she is the only person who can help her. She gives her a large knife and while Rosy sleeps, Mary writes to confess that she was the one who made the calls, hoping that she could bring their relationship back. As she finishes, Frank (Milo Quesada)really does break in and kills her. Realizing he murdered the wrong woman, he moves to Rosy’s bed, but the knife does end up saving her.

In “The Wurdulak,” Vladimir Durfe (Mark Damon) is a young nobleman who finds a headless corpse with a knife in its heart. Taking the blade, he leaves for a small cottage where a man tells him that the knife belongs to his missing father Gorca (Boris Karloff, who also hosts the movie), who has gone to fight the wurdulak.

Now, however, the old man has become what he was fighting and even transforms their son into another undead creature that demands to feed on humans, predating Salem’s Lot. One by one, the family becomes these creatures, leaving only Vladimir and his love, Sdenka (Susy Andersen).

That story was loosely based on The Family of the Vourdalak by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, along with the story “The Wurdulak” from the anthology I vampiri tra noi, Guy de Maupassant’s “Fear” and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Finally, “The Drop of Water” was based on a Chekov story and “Dalle tre alle tre e mezzo” (“Between Three and Three-thirty”) from an anthology book called Storie di fantasmi (Ghost Stories). Nurse Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux) is called by the maid (Milly Monti) of an elderly medium to prepare her body for burial. She can’t help but steal a ring from the dead woman, which leads to bussing flies, drips of water and even the dead woman coming back for her.

Even the color of this film is different between the American and Italian versions. It may seem crazy to us today, but AIP recut, re-edited and recolored a Mario Bava movie. This would be seen as ridiculous today, but in 1963, horror films were hardly seen as art.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Black Pit of Dr. M was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 4, 1967 at 1:00 a.m. It was also on the show on August 10, 1968 and May 20, 1972.

Misterios de ultratumba was released as The Black Pit of Dr. M in the U.S. and it’s a movie that explores man’s fascination with what comes after this world.

Dr. Mazali (Rafael Bertrand) and Dr. Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) make a bet with one another: whoever dies first will return to tell the other what happens after death. Aldama goes first and appears to Mazali during a seance, telling him that within three months, he will know everything about the afterlife.

Aldama’s ghost leads Patricia (Mapita Cortés) — also his daughter, but that’s a spoiler — to the insane asylum Mazali leads. The older doctor falls for her, but she and an intern named Eduardo (Gastón Santos) are in love. He also lets another inmate out of her cell and she instantly burns an orderly with acid right to the face. She’s murdered, Mazali takes the fall and heads to the gallows, proving that he will indeed soon know the afterlife.

While most early Mexican horror repeats the Universal horror movies and most Americans only know lucha movies to be the rest of the genre output from south of the border, the truth is that there are moments of sheer gothic dread for those willing to look. I’d definitely recommend this movie — the opening with the mental patients filling the frame is harrowing and a man rises from his grave in an incredibly unsettling fashion — as well as Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jesse James Meets Frankenstein;’s Daughter was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 23, 1968 at 1:00 a.m. It also appeared on December 20, 1969 and November 4, 1972.

I’ll admit it. I cheated. Instead of watching this movie in its original form, I found a version that had Joe Bob Briggs do commentary. Unlike modern commentary tracks where bloggers and magazine writers try in vain to impress you with how cool and smart they are, Joe Bob just hangs back and blows your mind with his limitless info. It made this movie way better than it deserves.

Paired with director William Beaudine’s other cowboys against the supernatural film Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, this film supposes what would happen if Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter Maria would come to the American wild west along with her brother Rudolph to use prairie lightning to turn immigrant children into slaves that will help continue their father’s experiments.

Meanwhile, Mañuel and Nina Lopez are leaving town before their daughter Juanita (Estelita Rodriguez, Rio Bravo) is killed. And here comes Jesse James (John Lupton, Airport 1975), Hank Tracy and Butch Curry, the leader of the Wild Bunch (no, not the Peckinpah film), who are here to steal $100,000 from a stagecoach. Yep, Jesse James did not die on April 3, 1882.

The crime gets foiled when Butch’s brother Lonny tips off Marshall MacPhee (Jim Davis, Jock Ewing the patriarch of the Ewings of TV’s Dallas) in exchange for becoming his deputy and getting reward money for Jesse James. Everyone but Jesse is shot, with Hank barely surviving. They hide in the Lopez family’s camp and Juanita takes them to the Frankensteins in the hope that Hank’s mortal wound can be healed.

Maria, of course, is in love with Jesse instantly, even faking suicide to get in his heart. She’s goth before goth was goth, basically. Jesse manages to escape another trap and kills Lonny, who has tried to bring him back in. Maria Frankenstein has transformed Hank into Igor, her new servant, and killed off her brother. She then orders him to kill Juanita, but he turns on his mistress. In a final scuffle with Jesse, Juanita kills the monster with Jesse’s revolver. She begs the famous outlaw to stay with her, but he goes off into the sunset, arrested by the sheriff.

I fear that I’ve made this movie sound way more interesting than it really is. The one good thing I can say is that the lab equipment was provided by Ken Strickfaden, who loaned out his gadgets for all of the Universal films, as well as Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Blackenstein.

That said, William Beaudine started his career as an assistant to D.W. Griffith on The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. His directing career stretched from 1922 to 1966, with this being his final film. Harry Medved’s book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, gave Beaudine the nickname “One-Shot” because everything ended up being in his films, like actors screwing up their lines or special effects not working properly.

The truth is that he actually had some talent and worked with plenty of talented films, including Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett and W.C. Fields. However, bad judgment and worse luck ruined his career.

Beaudine was brought to England in the 1930’s to work with their top stars. He directed there and expected to come back to the United States with his A-list status intact. Sadly, studios no longer wanted to pay his salary. And even worse, he lost his personal fortune when a bank he bought an interest failed. It got worse. Most of his UK income was then seized by the British government in taxes.

Then, publicist-turned-producer Jed Buell and Dixie National Pictures offered Beaudine $500 to direct a one week job: an all black picture. The director realized that if he took this job, he’d never return to the limelight. But at that point, he was near destitute and needed the work.

William Beaudine reinvented himself as the master of low budget films, forgoing art for survival. He recouped his finances through the amount of work he turned in, working in all genres and with stars like Bela Lugosi in the absolutely bonkers film Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, the East Side Kids and nearly half of Monogram Pictures’ series of Bowery Boys comedies. In fact, he became the master of sequel series films, also working on films with characters like Torchy Blane, Jiggs and Maggie, The Shadow and Charlie Chan.

He also directed Mom and Dad, the film that pretty much set up the exploitation movie pipeline until the death of grindhouses. Produced by Kroger Babb, this film was distributed by a loose knit organization that called themselves the Forty Thieves. You had guys like S.S. “Steamship” Millard, who produced Is Your Daughter Safe?, Samuel Cummins whose Public Welfare Pictures and Jewel Productions brought the public 10 Days in a Nudist Camp, J.D. Kendis who produced Gambling with Souls, Dwain Esper who brought one of the original serial killer movies Maniac to the public (as well as buying Freaks from MGM for just $50,000 and re-distributing films like Reefer Madness), Willis Kent who had The Wages of Sin, Louis Sonney who owned the West Coast with films like Hell-a-Vision and Howard “Pappy” Golden, who was known for stealing prints from the other thieves. They weren’t a studio as much as an informal trade association, kind of like the old National Wrestling Association, that used something they called the “states rights” system. Truly, Mon and Dad is an exploitation landmark and we wouldn’t have so many of the films we love without it.

Beaudine became so well known for his efficient directing that Walt Disney himself used him for several films (he directed the special Disneyland After Dark, whose title was appropriated by the Danish rock band D-A-D). TV was tailor-made for the director, as he worked on shows like Lassie. He was even the director of Plan 9 from Outer Space alum Criswell’s TV series, Criswell Predicts!

This Western horror mix would be his last film, although after Bruce Lee became famous, several episodes of The Green Hornet that he directed would be packaged as feature films — 1974’s The Green Hornet and 1976’s Fury of the Dragon.

Look, this isn’t a great movie. But it’s fun. And it’ll lead you to learning a lot about exploitation films and Old Hollywood, if you want to learn more.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 12, 1968 at 1:00 a.m. 

I hate when people make lists of the worst movies ever made, because stuff like this always ends up on it.

Whether you see it as this title or as Duel of the Space Monsters, Frankenstein Meets the Space Men, Mars Attacks Puerto Rico, Mars Invades Puerto Rico or Operation San Juan, you’re going to see something that is absolutely ridiculous. But why else do you watch movies?

Also: there is no Frankenstein in this movie.

Martian Princess Marcuzan (Marilyn Hanold, the June 1959 Playboy Playmate of the Month who is also in In Like Flint and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) is in this, the last female survivor of an atomic war who has brought Dr. Nadir (an amazing Lou Cutell, who was Amazing Larry in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) with her to screw with Earth.

Oh yeah and abduct women in bikinis. And drive around a lot. And deal with an android astronaut named Colonel Frank Saunders whose face gets all burned up and he ends up fighting a mutant named Mull to the death.

Look, 65% of this movie is stock footage and I wouldn’t have it any other way. So much of this just hits me in the right places. Sure, if it got made today, it would be on digital video, the stock footage would be watermarked and I would hate every single minute of it. But I love what this is.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is another movie that I can’t believe was on Chiller Theater. It was on the show on July 7, 1979 at 1 a.m. and December 26, 1981.

Once you watch this film, you’ll wonder — just how did this play on TV? It was part of the 13 titles included in Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated in 1975 (the others were Marta, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch) and several of these films aired intact on regular television! I can’t imagine — nor will you once you read this — what people thought! I even found a mention that the scene where Klaus Kinski inserts a pin into a girl’s eye aired uncut on Pittsburgh’s beloved Chiller Theater (indeed, it played on  July 7, 1979 and December 26, 1981, thanks to the amazing listing on the Chiller Theater fan site).

1906. Austria. Greta von Holstein (Ewa Aulin, Candy from Candy as well as Death Laid an Egg) has been used and abused by all of the men in her life, including Dr. von Ravensbrück, a rich cad who knocks her up and leaves her to die in childbirth.

Three years later. Her hunchback brother Franz, besotten with incestual love, brings her back to life with a magic medallion inscribed with the secret of life over death. He tries to get back into her pants, so she throws a black cat at his face. It eats his eyeballs, because, well, this is a Joe D’Amato movie. She then escapes into the world where she seeks revenge on the von Ravensbrück’s family.

Walter, the son of the doctor who done her wrong, and Eve, his wife, take her in after an accident outside their home. They both fall in love with her, which gives D’Amato license to shoot long lovemaking scenes. You may know him on one hand for his horror films, like Beyond the Darkness, Frankenstein 2000, Absurd and Antropophagus. But you may also know him for his adult films like Porno Holocaust and the Rocco Siffredi vehicle Tarzan X – Shame of Jane. Here, he combines his love of the female form with his eye for murder and insanity.

Eva is becoming jealous of Greta. But what he doesn’t know is that her new lover is wiping out people left and right, just for fun. The butler in the gallery with a razor. The maid in the woods with a shotgun. A lab assistant in the lab with a metal club. Even the family doctor (Klaus Kinski, do I need to say more or tell you he was in Schizoid, Crawlspace, Marquis de Sade: Justine and more? Or that he was also maniac who was drafted to the German army, spent time as a POW and drank his own urine to get sick and get home earlier? This is not the craziest Kinski story, by the way…) is strangled right after he learned how to use her amulet to bring back the dead that he had been experimenting on (as you do).

Eva’s jealousy wins out, so she walls her up alive in the rooms beneath the castle, killing her. But Greta isn’t done yet. She shows up as a ghost at a party and lures Eva toward falling off the roof. That night, Greta’s ghost gives Walter a fatal heart attack in bed. And all of this was just to lure her old lover, Dr. von Ravensbrück, to the funeral, where she leads him to a vault and suffocates him.

A police inspector wonders if he’ll ever add up the case, as he finds the corpse of Greta’s brother near her empty grave. She’s gone and he wonders whatever happened to her. The person he has been telling the story to? Greta.

I was really struck by Berto Pisano’s music in this. He also contributed the strange soundtrack to Burial Ground. Here, his music is jazzy and then atonal, with sharp stings to call out the action.

I feel like I need to take a long shower after watching this movie. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. It’s an effective mix of giallo and gothic romance, with plenty of sleaze and gore for those seeking those thrills.

In the book Spaghetti Nightmares, Massaccesi said that he used his real name on this film because he was “encouraged by the budget…and by the presence of two important actors like Ewa Aulin and Kalus Kinski, who were appearing at the time in several Italian films, and whose presence was opposed on me by production and distribution. Kinski, in spite of everything, is an excellent professional actor.”

When asked how he felt about the movie, he wasn’t kind to himself: “Not many fond memories there. I’m afraid it’s a very imperfect film, pandering and mechanical, but this is due to the fact that I wrote the script on my own. When you don’t work with someone else who challenges your ideas, stimulates them and corrects you where necessary, helping you to make what you write credible, it’s much harder to come up with a good product.”

You can watch this on Tubi.