EDITOR’S NOTE: Atom Age Vampire was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 26, 1970 at 11:30 p.m. 

Seddok, l’erede di Satana was renamed Atom Age Vampire in America. It was directed by Anton Giulio Majano and written by Majano with Gino De Santis and Alberto Bevilacqua.

An exotic dancer (Susanne Loret) has her face ruined in a car accident. She goes insane when she sees her face but is offered a chance by Monique Riviere (Franca Parisi Strahl), the assistant of Dr. Levin (Alberto Lupo). The idea of saving the beauty that she has lost appeals to Levin, so he starts injecting her with a special serum called Derma 28, which he based on research done on burn victims in Hiroshima. Before you can say, “Corruption is not a woman’s picture” or “Eyes Without a Face,” he’s fallen in love with her and he’s killing women to keep her ravishing, even if it lasts less and less with each murder, because the supply is running out. In order to forget things like morals, he injects himself with Derma 25, which makes him into a monster who no longer cares how many women he has to kill. The police bring in Dr. Levin to consult and he blames Japanese immigrants for the crimes. Of course, it’s been him all along.

There are two amazing remakes of this movie.

Animator Scott Bateman used the English dubbing to create a soundtrack for his animated version of the movie.

Adam Roberts also made Remake, a scene-for-scene reshoot that also has the dubbed English soundtrack, but moves the camera so we never see anyone. It also looks like a bad VHS dub, which is an intriguing choice.

There’s no vampire in this, but once Dr. Levin starts losing control of his beast side, you won’t miss any of those blood drinkers.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Monster On the Campus was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 23, 1972 at 1:00 a.m. It also aired on Saturday, December 29, 1973; August 23, 1975 and March 12, 1977.

Released as a double feature with Blood of the Vampire, Monster On the Campus is about Dr. Donald Blake (Arthur Franz), a science professor who gets a coelacanth, which he refers to as “a living fossil, immune to the forces of evolution.” As he examines it, he’s cut by its teeth and passes out as Molly Riordan (Helen Westcott) drives him home.

That night, someone kills Molly, leaving her in a tree outside Blake’s home. Blake is found inside, passed out, by his fiancee Madeline Howard (Joanna Moore). Lt. Mike Stevens (Judson Pratt) and Detective Sgt. Eddie Daniels (Ross Elliot) take him to the station for questioning but he can’t remember anything.

All sorts of weirdness starts happening, like dragonflies growing big in size and the doctor accidentally smoking his own blood in his pipe. That’s when he figures out that the gamma rays in the ancient animal have preserved its blood and it can turn anyone into a devolved version. He thinks that he’s turning into a troglodyte, so he goes to his cabin and sets it up to take a photo if he walks across a wire. He does. He’s a caveman.

A caveman with an axe.

Director Jack Arnold made a lot of these science films, like Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space! and This Island Earth. He also made High School Confidential!, Boss N***** and finished his career directing episodes of The Love Boat, The Fall Guy and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. He also made 28 episodes of Gilligan’s Island. This was written by David Duncan, who scripted The Time Machine, Fantastic Voyage, the American script for Rodan, The Monster that Challenged the World and The Black Scorpion.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Curse of the Stone Hand was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 4, 1968 at 11:20 p.m. 

Alright, I know this isn’t a Mexican movie, it’s American, but it was a remix and reedit by Jerry Warren, who brought so many South of the Border movies to America. He shot new footage with John Carradine — who else? — and Katherine Victor to freshen up two twenty-year-old Chilean films, La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) and La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death).

Seeing as how it’s two films, Warren decided to turn this into an anthology, if two stories can really be an anthology. The same house is supposed to be the setting for both stories, one in which a gambler finds a set of stone hands in the cursed house and uses them to play curses before joining a suicide club. This is La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death), as that movie was an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. The second story has another owner’s son finding the hands — this is La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) — and using them to hypnotize his brother’s fiancee.

This is the closest that Warren would stay to his source material and therefore lacks the utter drug-induced insanity of his Mexican remake remixes. The dubbing is horrible, yet we can directly trace Godfrey Ho and the wildness that he dropped on us several decades later to the way that Warren could take any movie and chop it to pieces.

Warren once said, ” “I’d shoot one day on this stuff and throw it together. I was in the business to make money. I never ever tried in any way to compete or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I’d get a few dollars. It’s not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude. You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture.”

Know what you’re getting into before you watch this!

Warren’s American Distributors Productions, Inc. teamed this up with another of his mixtape wonders, Face of the Screaming Werewolf, which is Mexican and is also two movies in one — La Casa del Terror and La Momia Azteca.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the Robots was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 15, 1968 at 1 a.m. It was also on the show on December 18, 1971 and August 19, 1972.

You know, there are times when you get the Jess Franco who is obsessed with sex and times when you get the jazz-loving, Old Hollywood fan Jess Franco and this would be the latter.

This Eurospy affair stars Eddie Constantine as Al Pereira*, who is hunting down a series of bronze-skinned and horned-rim glasses-wearing killer robots commanded by Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney (Françoise Brion, probably the only person to be in movies like Le Divorce and Otto Preminger’s Rosebud, as well as a Franco film) who is using computers to destroy Europe.

So yeah, Jess shows up playing jazz piano, but don’t worry. Plenty of BDSM and mind control lurk right around the corner, instead of appearing full frontal and center. Perhaps the strangest thing about this movie is that it was shot in color and released in black and white. And that it’s nothing like the Franco movies that people dislike his movies harp on.

*Franco would return to the character in the films Les Ebranlées, Downtown; Botas Negras,Látigo de Cuero; Camino Solitario; Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies and Revenge of the Alligator Ladies.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Man from Planet X was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 2, 1963 at 3:00 p.m. It also aired on Saturday, November 7, 1964.

After landing in the foggy Scottish moors, an alien follows Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond) and American reporter John Lawrence (Robert Clarke). They can’t communicate and wonder what he wants. Dr. Mears (William Schallert) tries to use music and when that doesn’t work, he attempts to murder the space brother by shutting off his breathing machine.

It turns out that the alien was actually leading Planet X here to take over our planet, so maybe the bad guy had the right idea. How odd.

This was directed by poverty row icon Edgar G. Ulmer, who also directed The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, The Amazing Transparent Man and Girls In Chains. In Peter Bogdonvich’s book Who the Devil Made It, he said, “I really am looking for absolution for all the things I had to do for money’s sake.”

Speaking of cash, this was shot on the sets of Joan of Arc and pumped in fog so you didn’t notice.

You can watch this on Tubi.