EDITOR’S NOTE: Scars of Dracula was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 28, 1974 at 11:30 p.m. It also played on February 21, 1976 and December 16, 1978.
Directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by Anthony Hinds, this Hammer film starts with Dracula’s dead body on a stone plinth in a chamber in his castle, defeated after Taste the Blood of Dracula. A bat flies in, gives him blood and Dracula is back and he even survives his castle being burned down. Weirdly, that’s the same footage from that movie played backwards because, you know, the budget.
He soon hs a new servant named Klove (Patrick Troughton) and a mistress named Tania (Anouska Hempel). Well, he did, because she tries to get with his new captive Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews), so Dracula stabs her and tosses her into acid because, you know, he’s Dracula.
Paul’s brother Simon (Dennis Waterman) and his fiancee Sarah Framsen (Jenny Hanley) come to save him but you know how smart Dracula is about these things, even if Klove chooses Sarah over him, which gets him punished.
This one has perhaps the dumbest death for Dracula ever, as he holds a metal spike and gets struck by lightning. He catches on fire and just keeps burning, but come on. That doesn’t kill a vampire. That ending is forgotten about by Dracula A.D. 1972.
Warner Brothers and other American major studios didn’t want to deal with Hammer’s Sir James Carreras, so the budgets were cut to $200,000. Many think that the decline in Hammer movies starts here.
Christopher Lee said, “I was a pantomime villain. Everything was over the top, especially the giant bat whose electrically motored wings flapped with slow deliberation as if it were doing morning exercises.” Sure, he was sick of playing Dracula. You would be too if you played him four times in the same year in Count Dracula, One More Time and Taste the Blood of Dracula. He almost didn’t do this and would have seen John Forbes-Robertson take the role earlier. He eventually played the count in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.
If you look close, Peter Cushing is one of the milkmaid in the opening village scenes. There was a delay on Scream and Scream Again and Lee dared him to sneak into the movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dimension 5 was first on Chiller Theater on July 21, 1973 at 1 a.m. It also was on the show on August 3, 1974; April 5, 1975; January 3, 1976 and May 13, 1978.
Directed by Franklin Adreon (who also directed the similar Cyborg 2087) and written by Arthur C. Pierce, Dimension 5 is about time-traveling secret agents Justin Power (Jeffrey Hunter) from Espionage, Inc and Ki Ti Tsu (France Nuyen). It was going to be a TV movie but ended up being released to theaters.
Together, the two agents battle an Asian crime ring, Dragon, led by crime lord Big Buddha (Harold Sakata), who will destroy Los Angeles if the U.S. doesn’t leave Vietnam. However, Power is able to preview time, which allows him to keep people safe from Dragon’s killers.
Kitty has her own reasons for wanting to battle Big Buddha, as he was the executioner during the Nanking Massacre who killed her parents. The bad guy plans on building a nuclear bomb in the U.S. by placing it inside owl-shaped incense burners and Christmas decorations.
Nuyen is great in this, but man, Jeffrey Hunter was sleeping or so it seemed. Maybe he could use that time travel to get a few extra hours of nap before coming back and being the superspy in this movie.
Directed by Michele Lupo (The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid) and written by Sergio Donati (thank you Orca), Walter Patriarca (thank you the costumes in Zombi) and Gianfranco Clerici (thank you for Cannibal Holocaust, The Last Match and so many more), Seven Times Seven is the Ocean’s Eleven of Italian late 60s genre cinema.
Look at the cast. When else would you have Gordon Mitchell, Raimondo Vianello, Terry-Thomas, Ray Lovelock and Lionel Stander, Gastone Moschin and Adolfo Celi all in the same movie and actually be the stars instead of the bad guys or the supporting cast? And when you see Erica Blanc is in it, you may — if you are me — audibly sigh in happiness.
Anyways, this gang of crooks plans and plans a heist to rob the Royal Mint, then all sneak back into prison. I wish I could make awesome heists like this in real life, but I can’t even shoplift without getting nervous.
This may as well be another in the series that started with Seven Golden Men. Even better, it has some incredible poster art.
I had the opportunity to watch some of the SLASH Filmfestival 2023 shorts and here’s what I think:
From the FANTASTIC SHORTS COMPETITION – CHAPTER I
Hole (2023): Directed and written by Hwang Hyein, JeongMi (Lim ChaeYoung) is a child services worker in South Korea who comes to check on Jun-seo (Kwak SooHyeon) and Jun-hui (Son JiYu). They’ve been missing from school and no one can find their parents. The secret soon comes out, as a manhole opening has appeared inside their bedroom.
A dark and strange movie from the very first moment. This feels like a movie that should be a full feature and I hope that happens.
Magdalena (2022): Czechoslovakia, 1971. A Slovakian woman (Susan Angelo) is trapped by her past as it seeks to destroy the new life that she has worked so hard to build for her family.
Director Michael Lazovsky, who wrote the story with Max Hersh, based this story on his Jewish grandmother’s experiences growing up in communist Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Storyboarded on an iPhone, shot in Los Angeles but yet looking like the sterile world of a Communist country and made by someone whose family lived these lives, Magdalena is a very rough watch yet a film that looks completely gorgeous. What a perfect short!
Demon Box (2023): After festival rejections pile up, director Sean Wainsteim revises his intensely personal short film about trauma, suicide and the Holocaust. After ten years of painful work, it has become a dissection of the movie he wanted to make and may end up being more of a film than he intended.
This film is almost too honest and I mean that as a compliment. It made me feel uncomfortable, reminding myself of how I feel about the stories I heard growing up and how I joke about the continual negative darkness that came out of them, how it feels like everyone always has cancer and everyone is always dying.
If you feel like putting yourself through that journey, as well as Wainsteim’s, watch this.
The Old Young Crow (2023): Liam LoPinto has created this movie — which has some animation and some live action — about an Iranian boy befriending an old Japanese woman at a graveyard in Tokyo.
We hear the story told by Mehrdad (Naoto Shibata as a young one, Hassan Shahbazi in his older age) who remembers the Japanese woman and how he learned about grief and loss. It’s an incredible mix of media that creates this film, a joy to watch and experience. As I always say, I cannot and will not live these lives, so the chance to do so through film is so important.
From the FANTASTIC FUTURES:
Remove Hind Legs Before Consumption (2023): Even in a hopeless insect food farm — where millions of crickets are being bred, frozen, packaged and fried — one cricket survives and escapes.
Leslie Herzig, Finn Meisner and Lukas Wind have come together to create a violent and yet heartwarming film that teaches us that yes, even a cricket can do something important.
Also not that I was planning on eating tons of friend crickets but this movie has convinced me not to do so because they have souls. I feel bad for all of the one that I have chewed on before I watched this.
Chef Gustav (2023): This movie is simple but a lesson worth learning: never ever mess with a cat in the kitchen. You will be murdered.
This looks like near stop motion but I’m certain it has to be computers. However it was made, I love that orange cat and believe that it is innocent of all of this bloodshed, even if I saw it with my own eyes.
The Law Of The Jungle Gym (2023):Somehow, lunch and tag on the school yard gets transformed into the end of the world. This is some of the finest animation I’ve seen in some time and I was struck by both how realistic and unreal it is. I have no idea where this ideas came from, but Yoon Hei Cho, who seemingly did all of this themselves, is beyond a talent. Mindblowing.
On the 8th Day (2023): A gorgeous blast of color and fabric, an apocalyptic 3D short that drew me in with its cuteness before destroying every moment of it, then sending its purple people lilting upward into space. I can’t describe it more but it made me emotional.
Perfect City: The Bravest Kid (2023): In the second part of the Perfect City series, a paper boy has a horrific dream in which a gigantic iron knife hand and a series of other sharp objects are chasing him all the way to his bed. The even worse realization? His parents are not paper, but also knives. I can’t even imagine seeing this when I was a kid, as I would have been awake all night.
Director Shengwei Zhou also made Perfect City: The Mother which is just as strange as this, which is a compliment. This is the type of stop motion animation that I haven’t seen since the days of Liquid TV, which is much missed.
The Third Ear (2023): Sammy (Devin Burnam) has an issue. In his job as an art model, he often likes to look at the work that artists create from his body. But what if they draw him incorrectly? Does he really have an ear in the back of his head?
Director and writer Nathan Ginter has created something really intriguing here, a quick and fun tale of a man’s fight for his own self-image.
The Hand That Feeds (2023): Irina (Anca Cipariu) is a single mother who moves in with her former mother-in-law Trudi (Inge Maux), who constantly cooks meals and gives her gifts. Yet something feels wrong.
Directed and written by Helen Hideko, this makes you feel the unease that Irina feels as she attempts to create her own life within the one that Trudi has. This leads to visions of absolute terror that begin to tear at her and she feels a rage that she can’t explain.
I get the feeling that if I were a mother, this movie would totally trigger me.
The Taster (2023): Sometime in the future, in Romania, Ozana (Silvana Mihai) is chosen to work as the new taster girl for the occupying forces. On her first day, she breaks the most important rule. And that’s to never look the leader in the eye. Soon she finds herself alone and face to face with the man destroying her country.
Director and writer Sophia Bierend has created a future movie that is based in reality, such as the idea that the world’s ecology is destroying and the Danube is one of the few places that can produce food for the powerful.
Into this horrible world, Ozana is cast, made to taste each of the meals for the leader. If she dies, he will know that someone is trying to kill him. She must not make any friends. Just sit and eat. She hasn’t even had a solid morsel for two years, as she lives on a nutrient formula. So this position allows her to be part of the world of the elite, even if all she’s doing is possibly dying for their dining enjoyment.
SHORTS BEFORE FEATURES:
La Vedova Nera (2023):While cycling through the streets of Marseille, Alfredo (Siro Pedrozzi) crashes his bike. He goes into a porn cinema for help and finds an old giallo playing that creates the scene for a predator who either wants him for his body or murder or, well, both.
Directed and written by Fiume and Julian McKinnon, this film looks absolutely astounding. The title means The Black Widow, which easily feels like a callback to the animal-themed post-Argento giallo of the early 70s. Beyond just being a homage, this feels like a creative team that intimately understands the genre and uses it to tell their own movie. There are hints of the past intricately woven with today.
I can’t say enough about this short. More work from these filmmakers now!
Chomp It! (2023): In a society founded on social hierarchy and privilege, two crocodile men ople are trying to cool down at a swimming pool. One of them is seemingly of a different and special kind; the other is unable to control his desire.
Shot on 16mm and directed by Mark Chua and Li Shuen Lam, I think that this would mean so much more to me if I understood the weirdness of life in Singapore. As it is, the colors and look of the film — I mean, a child’s riding machine powered by a heart? — are incredible.
Every House Is Haunted (2023): The realtor told them the house was haunted but as the title tells you, every house is haunted in its own way. Maya (Kate Cobb) and Danny (Kevin Bigley) move in anyhow, because to find a house like this, in this market, well…
And she’s used to not even knowing what she wants any longer.
Director and writer Bryce McGuire shows us that not every ghost is evil and not every living person is alive, if that makes sense. I really enjoyed the effects in this, as well as the way that Maya found a way to bond with the spirits that live in her home.
Content: The Lo-Fi Man(2023):Brian Lonano, who co-directed this short with Blake Myers and wrote it, just wants to tell you about Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Yet he’s been replaced by the new and improved Brian Lonano (Clarke Williams) who is now a streaming content aggregator and influencer, asking you to smash that like button and ring the bell so you get the updates. Breaking free from the mouse-eared androids that have him locked up, he battles the Content Seeker by, well, kind of becoming Tetsuo and joining up with film revolutionaries Kino, B-Roll and Wild Track.
We live in a strange place now, a reality where you can get almost every movie you want but may not have the time to watch it. Or maybe you do and when you want to break it down and discuss it, you get lost in the machine of likes and shares. I try to keep my mind open to both sides, as sure, it’s nice to have the most perfect quality home media ever, as well as streaming materials and everyone deserves the opportunity to find and appreciate pop culture in their own way. But man, if I see another listicle or YouTube video that posits theories like “maybe all the shot in the Eastern Bloc SyFy sequels in the 90s were high art” or ten slashers you never saw before and #3 is The Burning, well…
4. WORKING REMOTELY: One that takes place out in the cut somewhere.
Directed by Kevin and Michael Goetz and written by Kyle Killen, Scenic Route — AKA Wrecked — is about Michael (Josh Duhamel) and Carter (Dan Fogler) broken down in the California desert, an event created by Carter so that he can finally hash it all out with Michael.
For most of this movie’s running time, these two lifelong friends either fall to pieces or come back together, often just moments between those diametrical events, while trying to figure out how to get the truck running again.
Shot in twelve days all in the same location with both leads occupying all of the screen time other than flashbacks and the ending, this was a real test for both actors, including Duhamel appearing with his hair cut into a mohawk. It’s really unlike any role I’d seen either in before.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Series episode
“Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. But he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. Now, his niece Micki, and her cousin Ryan have inherited the store… and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back, or the real terror begins.”
Friday the 13th: The Series was created by Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams and was going to be called The 13th Hour. Mancuso Jr. never intended for there to be an outright link to the Friday the 13th film series, but instead referenced “the idea of Friday the 13th, which is that it symbolizes bad luck and curses”.
That said, the creators did try to tie-in Jason Vorhees’s hockey mask but the idea was discarded so that the show could exist on its own. Mancuso Jr. was afraid that mentioning any events from the films would take the audience away from “the new world that we were trying to create.”
That said, the title was what was needed to sell the show. It did so well in late nights that some stations moved it to prime time. In all, it lasted 72 episodes over 3 seasons.
An antique dealer named Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) got wealth and power from Satan for selling his soul, along with being the conduit for people to purchase cursed objects from his store Vendredi’s Antiques. When he tries to get out of the deal, the devil has him killed and gets his soul anyway.
The store is inherited by his niece Micki Foster (Robey!) and her cousin Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay). They sell off many of the cursed antiques before being stopped by Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), who once collected antiques for Lewis before learning that he was evil.
Airing on October 26, 1987, “Hallowe’en” was directed by Timothy Bond (The Lost World, Return to the Lost World) and written by Bill Taub. The cursed object in this episode is the Amulet of Zohar and it can transfer a spirit into a deceased body.
Jack thinks that Micki and Ryan should have a Halloween party at the antique shop to try and fit into the neighborhood. The basement — where all the evil things exist — is off limits, but you know that they’ll soon be used and for the first time in the series, Uncle Lewis will appear. Well, the ghost of Uncle Lewis, who tries to come off as a hero and say that just wants to save the soul of his wife Grace, whose corpse is in a secret room in the store that they have never been to.
Now that he has the Amulet, Lewis has three hours to find a new body and escape back into the real world. He leaves behind Greta (Victoria Deslaurier), a demon who will do anything he asks, to battle Micky, Ryan and Jack.
I was let down that this show wasn’t part of the Vorhees saga when I was young but now I love it. At all times, I have had a major crush on Robey. Come on. Who didn’t?
One of the most infamous movies branded with Hong Kong’s Category III adults only rating, Taxi Hunter is the story of Ah Kin (Anthony Wong), a man who was quiet and kind until he loses his pregnant wife to an unprofessional taxi driver.
If you’ve seen Herman Yau’s Ebola Syndrome, you know the levels of craziness that he can bring to the screen. Now, he puts the Taxi Hunter on the hunt, testing drivers to see if they meet his level of professionalism. If they don’t meet his grade, they die.
The problem? Well, other than all the death and destruction, his brother-in-law Yu Kai Chung (Yu Rong Guang) is a cop who may be forced to kill Ah Kin to stop his path of yellow cab serial killing.
If you’re ready for taxi chases, gunplay and, well, pregnant women being dragged by taxi cabs to their bloody doom, well…you still aren’t ready for this movie.
The 88 Films release of Taxi Hunter has commentary by Hong Kong film expert Frank Djeng, interviews with writer Tony Leung Hung-Wah, action director James Ha and Anthony Wong, a trailer, an image gallery and a reversible cover with new artwork by Sean Longmore and the original poster. You can get it from MVD.
Directed and written by Pakphum Wongjinda and Chalit Krileadmongkon, this Thai horror film had moments that almost made me nauseated, which I feel is the best feeling I can get from a scary movie.
Inspired by the story of Battambang from the reign of King Rama V, Creepy Crawly — originally The 100 —
A travel influencer is kept quarantined in a hotel that has seen better days. Beyond just dealing with COVID shutdowns, she also has a rare blood disorder that she’s kept a secret from everyone. Along with her brother Fiew and a martial arts master named Leo — as well as his sister and their deaf father — all of them must come together when the centipedes that live in the hotel get smart and decide that the time to destroy humans is now.
Not only are these centipedes out to kill just about everything — a rat attack earlier is stomach decimating — they also are all led by a monstrous one-legged killing machine that can possess people.
I’m usually one of those people that prefers real effects to CGI, but I really liked the effects in this. I mean, centipedes that overtake people and become part of them? Incredible.
I had so much fun with this movie. Even thinking about it now as I write this, I kind of want to watch it again.
You can get more data on this movie from the official Well Go USA site.
In this South Korean movie, directed by Soo Sung Lee, the people of Seoul’s wealthy Gangnam district are under attack by a quickly expanding zombie population. In order to protect these citizens, a former taekwondo expert by the name of Hyeon-seok (Ji Il-joo) battles past his injuries and takes on the undead.
What can you say about a movie that starts with a cat attack being the origin of a zombie assault, as the first undead emerges from the water in Gangham and starts devouring raw meat?
Hyeon-seok goes from working an office job at a streaming company and an unrequited love for Min-jeong (Park Ji-yeon) to being the hero that saves her from the undead. Blame their boss Tae-soo, who keeps his staff there and thinks that by filming the zombie attack, he can finally make some money.
This is a high energy blast of walking dead insanity, all set inside a mall — shouldn’t most zombies be filmed there? — and even having some ideas I’ve never seen before, such as zombies with dentures being unable to transfer the disease.
You can get the Well Go USA blu ray and learn more information on this movie on the official site.
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox from a script by Cyril Hume that was based on an original film story by Allen Adler and Irving Block, Forbidden Planet is a movie that is forever in the zeitgeist of what 1950s American science fiction looked like. It’s also the first movie to show hyperspeed travel, to have a robot with a personality — Robby the Robot — as well as the first to use an electronic soundtrack. It’s also kind of, sort of The Tempest, which is a big idea to get your head around.
After a year in space, United Planets starship C-57D wants to land on the distant planet Altair IV and see what happened to an expedition that landed there twenty years ago. One of the survivors, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) tells them that it’s too dangerous for them but Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Neilsen) lands anyway.
Joined by Jerry Farman (Jack Kelly) and “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), Adams discovers that everyone but Morbius is dead. His wife may have died of natural causes but he claims an unseen force killed everyone else one-be-one. Other than his servant Robby, the only other living thing is his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).
Proving that men will always be men even in the future, Adams finds Farman kissing Altaira and yells at both of them — him for his behavior and her for how she dresses. She looks too attractive! His men have been on a ship all alone for a year! And you know, when he sees her swimming, he kisses her too! And then a tiger attacks him and she has to shoot it with a blaster.
Morbius has been using materials that he found from the previous occupants of this planet, the Krell, making his brain twenty times smarter. There are also 9,200 nuclear reactions below the planet making it filled with energy, power that Adams wants to bring to Earth. Morbius gets angry and says that they don’t deserve it.
At the same time, that alien force kills Engineer Quinn (Richard Anderson, years before The Six Million Dollar Man) and Farman. It turns out that the same technology that increases Morbius’ brain power has also unlocked his id, unleashing a monster that kills at his subconscious command. This becomes even more obvious when Altaira tells Morbius she is leaving with Adams. Robby detects the creature approaching and his master commands Robby to kill it, but the robot knows it is Morbius and shuts down. After accepting the truth, the creature disappears and Morbius dies, just in time for his daughter to leave the planet which blows up real good.
To make up for the huge cost of this movie, its props were used again and again. The spaceship appears in the Twilight Zone episodes “To Serve Man” and “On Thursday We Leave for Home;” Robby is in The Invisible Boy and plenty of TV shows before he became a star on Lost In Space, including “One for the Angels,” “Uncle Simon” and “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” on The Twilight Zone, his head dome appearing on “The Bridge of Lions Affair” episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and even all the way to the 70s, Robby was Chuck on Mork & Mindy, as well as appearances on the shows Project UFO and Space Academy as well as the movie Phantom Empire.
This movie is so well-known that it’s the film within the Mystery Science Theater movie.
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