Litan on Horror and Sons

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I am happy to report that the latest Halloween Horrors month on Horror and Sons has an article by me on the weird and wonderous Litan. Check it out!

There are so many great writers this month and I’m excited that I can share this little known movie with the readers of this great site.

In the review, I said: “Seeing as how this is running in the month of Halloween, I have to confess that this movie won’t be spooky for everyone. Yet, I’ve been obsessed by age as of late, by life change, by legacy. I don’t know if it even matters sometimes. What matters? I’m not sure. I just know that movies make me feel things, deep and meaningful things, and this movie brought me a flood of joy and as there’s a dearth of that in this current timeline, I wanted to share it with you.”

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: The Blood Rose (1970)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blood Rose was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 25, 1976 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on October 1, 1977.

Directed and co-written by Claude Mulot (who sadly died at the age of 44), this is the story of Frederick Lansac (Philippe Lemaire). He’s a botanist, portrait artist and the owner of a beauty salon. After meeting Anne (Anny Duperey) at a dress ball and they are soon married. Somehow, some way, Anne gets her face shoved into a bonfire by the jealous Moira (Elizabeth Teissier) at one of Lansac’s painting shows, which is the wildest way to make a ripoff of Eyes Without a Face that doesn’t have Peter Cushing’s girlfriend have a studio light hit her in the face.

Lansac learns that one of his employees Dr. Rohmer (Howard Vernon), is a doctor who can only practice on criminals after an incident. Before you can say The Awful Dr. Orloff, they’re killing women to graft parts of their bodies to Anne’s face, who has gone into madness and also is having fantasies of her nurse Agnès (Michèle Perello) in scenes cut from the American version of this movie.

When a movie is sold as “The First Sex-Horror Film Ever Made!” it’s astounding that it aired on regular TV like Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater. This isn’t afraid to get way weird, like Igor (Roberto) and Olaf (Johnny Cacao), two dwarf servants who dress in animal skins, randomly show up.

SPEND HALLOWEEN WITH THE DIA DOUBLE FEATURE!

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We’re back for a Halloween party. Join Bill and me on Saturday at 8 PM East Coast time for two blasts of strangeness, ads, drinks and the kind of deep thought and dirty minds — and the best chat room! — that you expect from our show.

Up first is Massage Parlor Murders which you can watch on Tubi.

Here’s the drink for the first movie!

Legspreader

  • 1.5 oz. Midori
  • 1.5 oz. Malibu rum
  • 5 oz. pineapple juice
  • 1 oz. lemonade
  • 1 oz. lemon-lime soda
  1. Pour all ingredients into a glass with ice.
  2. Stir, shake and leave the money on the nightstand.

Our second movie is Madman which you can watch on Tubi.

Here’s the second cocktail.

Jacuzzi Sex

  • 2 oz. Chambord
  • 2 oz. vodka
  • 1 oz. cranberry juice
  • 1 oz. pineapple juice
  • 1 oz. orange juice
  • 2 oz. lemon-lime soda
  • 1 oz. orange soda
  1. Pour all the ingredients in a glass with ice.
  2. Add a splash of orange soda on top of the whole thing and sing the Madman song.

Saturday is going to be great!

SCREAMFEST LA: Howdy, Neighbor! (2023)

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Screamfest Horror Film Festival stands as a cornerstone of the horror genre, boasting the largest and longest-running festival of its kind in the United States. You can learn more about this year’s festival by checking out the official site. Howdy, Neighbor! played on Wednesday, October 11. 

When he was just a child, Benjamin Caldwell (Matthew Scott Montgomery, who also wrote this movie) was Bucky on the TV show Howdy, Neighbor! He’s been trying to hide his past but he’s asked to be in a web-based reunion before the show starts streaming again. Before that, his neighbor Chase (Grant Jordan) starts stalking him when he recognizes him from the show.

Ben shares this with neighbor Harley Walker (Debby Ryan) who suggests he contact the police. Benjamin wants to solve it all on his own which is the worst of all plans.

This entire movie is shot on screens, so if you spend all day in Teams calls like I do, it kind of feels like you’re back at work. For anyone else, this is an interesting way of seeing this story as the neighbor gets stranger and Benjamin keeps making some of the worst decisions.

SCREAMFEST LA: Eight Eyes (2023)

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Screamfest Horror Film Festival stands as a cornerstone of the horror genre, boasting the largest and longest-running festival of its kind in the United States. You can learn more about this year’s festival by checking out the official site. Eight Eyes played on Monday, October 16. 

Cass (Emily Sweet) begins to hear voices while backpacking through Yugoslavia with her husband Gav (Bradford Thomas). She thinks it’s just stress or maybe her marriage not working out. But then a local named Saint Peter (Bruno Veljanovski) offers to show them the real parts of his country and Gav goes missing.

Eight Eyes was shot using a variety of 16mm and Super8 cameras, such as the Aaton XTR Prod Super 16mm, Bolex H16 Super 16, Krasnogorsk 3 Super 16, Leica Leicina Special and Classic Pro Max 8 16×9. 16mm and 8mm film was used to get a vintage look, including animated shots and sequences that were all captured in-camera using a reflected-glass process.

This is also the first production by Vinegar Syndrome, who worked with Not the Funeral Home and Night Loops, the crew that creates Joe Bob’s The Last Drive-In. Director Austin Jennings also directs that show.

Ever since Cass meant Saint Peter, she’s been having hallucinations and hearing voices. And then this gets weird, as we see Gav’s 8mm footage and meet Saint Peter’s strange family and then we descend into folk horror and that kind of 70s occult weirdness that I love filtered through the torture-filled slashers of the mid 2000s.

This is yet another movie that tells me that I should never go to Serbia, the same as how I will never go to so many places that have terrified me so much through cinema.

SCREAMFEST LA: Teques Chainsaw Massacre (2023)

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Screamfest Horror Film Festival stands as a cornerstone of the horror genre, boasting the largest and longest-running festival of its kind in the United States. You can learn more about this year’s festival by checking out the official site. Teques Chainsaw Massacre played on Friday, October 13. 

Director Rodrigo Hernández-Cruz, wrote this movie with Carlos Marín and Alfredo Mendoza, has created this horror comedy about film students who head to Teques, Mexico with soap opera actress Ana Cecilia Burgos (Jessica Ortiz) to make a horror movie. Reynaldo (Juan Ugarte) is the director who thinks he knows more than he thinks he does. Virginia (Tatiana del Real), Tania (Florencia Rios) and Pau (Danae Reymund) are the crew stuck with making his movie look good.

They soon learn that the movie that they are making is based on a real killer. And that killer? He’s hunting all of them one by one. This movie goes from comedy to straight up slasher and doesn’t look back. If you’re looking for gore, well, this has tons of the sangre y tripas.

Don’t get too attached to anyone in this.

SCREAMFEST LA: Cannibal Mukbang (2023)

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Screamfest Horror Film Festival stands as a cornerstone of the horror genre, boasting the largest and longest-running festival of its kind in the United States. You can learn more about this year’s festival by checking out the official site. Cannibal Mukbang played on Monday, October 16. 

This film was described as “An exploration of one’s relationships with food, sexuality, and revenge.”

Director and writer Aimee Kuge wrote this movie while experiencing a period of disordered eating and the end of toxic relationships. That led to a movie about an introverted nerd — Mark — who finds himself dangerously deep inside the crazy world of mukbanging after he falls head over heels for a mysterious woman named Ash. She’s super into mukbanging so he finds himself getting into it.

Also: Murder.

What is mukbanging?

The term is from South Korean and means “eating broadcast.” There, professional mukbangers make up to $10,000 a month not including sponsorships from food and drink brands. Basically, they eat huge amounts of food while interacting with their viewers.

Cannibal Mukbang is one strange movie and it looks really gorgeous. I’m excited to see what Kuge does next.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy (1958)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 17, 1966 at 1 a.m. It was also on the show on August 19, 1967.

You may worry that you haven’t seen the first two Aztec Mummy films, but trust me, there are so many recaps here that you’ll get caught up really soon.

Somehow, Dr. Krupp has come back from a snakepit to become The Bat and lead a whole new gang. To get what he wants — that gold breastplate that has led him to battle Popoca, Dr. Eduardo Almada, Flor and Pinacate across this film series — he’s made a robot with a human brain that can deliver electronic shocks through its clawed hands.

If you learn anything from this film, maybe you shouldn’t. Aztecs never practiced mummification and used hieroglyphic writing, instead using cremation or simple burial, as well as pictographs. Maybe the filmmakers meant the Incans and the Mayans? Well, they buried Popoca as if he were an Egyptian style mummy, but one thinks that they based that knowledge on Universal horror movies and not any textbook.

You can watch this on YouTube and Tubi.

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE DAY 23: The Power Within (1979)

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October 23: A Horror Film That Features Someone That Has Lightning Powers

Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey and written by William Clark and Edward J. Lakso, The Power Within is about Chris Darrow (Art Hindle), a pilot who is struck by lightning and gains the ability to shoot it out of his fingers. In order to get a handle on his powers, he turns to his father, General Tom Darrow (Edward Binns) and learns that he has to recharge those powers when he uses them or he’ll die.

This was a pilot for a series that never happened. Back then, comic book movies just took ideas from comics and made them their own. This is very Green Lantern mixed with the opening of The Hulk TV origin. I’m sure if I had seen this as a kid, I’d still be drawing scenes from this movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

2023 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 23: The Night (2020)

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23. VACANCY: Road weary are we? Pull over for one that’s set at a hotel or a motel. Goodnight?

A few years ago, I worked at the kind of ad agency that was too cheap to pay for creative directors to go on shoots. Well, when I got the chance to get a script developed by a food social media site for one of my clients, I couldn’t wait to get to be part of the production. And someone had to be there with the client, right? Well, I had to pay for everything out of pocket. Flight and hotel. So I stayed at the Hotel Normandie, which somehow had rooms for less than a hundred a night and was in the middle of Los Angeles’ Koreatown, the kind of place that has all night buffet dinners, so when I wanted dakgangjeong at 4:17 a.m., well…I was covered. It was also blocks from The Prince, the bar where Jake Gittes meets Evelyn in Chinatown, where Gene Wilder and Golda Radner went on a date in The Woman In Red and the bar where magicians hang out in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Other movies that filmed there include Midnight Run, Crank, Body and Soul and shows like New Girl and Mad Men also were lensed there.

So yeah, the agency was cheap but I had a great time.

I was surprised to see the Hotel Normandie show up as the setting for this movie, but when I think about how every room had the look of a hard boiled detective’s office from the 1930s, it all kind of makes sense.

Babak Naderi (Shahab Hosseini) and his wife Neda (Niousha Noor), along with their daughter Shabnam (Leah Oganyan), get lost in Los Angeles and decide to stay for the night. There is only one room left and they’re told that they will be locked in for the night. Soon, both are seeing strange people who aren’t always there and are confronted by the odder front desk clerk (George Maguire). It turns out that the relationship between our protagonists is not strong at all and their secrets are what is keeping them trapped within the hotel.

Director Kourosh Ahari has a good eye for this kind of movie and it’s an interesting watch.

My stay was much better than this one. Originally built in 1925, the Hotel Normandie was selected as the official hotel for Stanford University alumni, as well as the University of Southern California and the University of California Los Angeles. It’s been fully restored and it looks gorgeous inside. I’d definitely recommend staying there if you’re ever in town.