EDITOR’S NOTE: Till Death was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January, 1981 at 1 a.m. It also aired on December 25, 1982 at 1 a.m.

Directed by Walter Stocker — the only movie he directed, he was usually an actor — and written by his son Gregory Dana, Till Death starts with Paul Ryan (Keith Atkinson) dreaming that he’s picked up a woman on a foggy road, then is trapped in a crypt — with his name on it — with her dead body. He wakes just in time to get married to Anne (Belinda Balaski!) and after some making out in the fog, there’s a car crash and she dies on the way to the honeymoon.

Yes, this one is dark.

Once healed, Paul goes to Eden Glen Cemetery and the Eternity mausoleum where his wife is buried. The shock is too much and he passes out, waking inside her tomb. And as you can imagine, he’s not alone.

Filmed in 1972 and having a 1974 copyright, this was not released until 1978 but as other reviewers have pointed out, it didn’t really show up until some UHF horror hosts played it in the early 80s. Like Chiller Theater in Pittsburgh, which even chose it for a Christmas night airing.

This is a love story with horror slightly getting involved. It’s nearly elevated horror — well, if early 70s can be — but knows to stay in the mood and deliver an actual ending. It predates The Iron Rose, but I doubt Jean Rollin ever saw this. So many lovers can get locked in the cemetery, don’t you know.

Charlie (Kathleen Kenny) is a remote helpline volunteer who comes into the grip of The Gentleman, a sinister being that uses the sound of a crying baby to lure people into his destructive embrace. One night, while home alone, she realizes that she is anything but when she hears an infant outside her home.

Directed by Colton Tran and written by Luke Genton — who also worked on the horror film Snow Falls together — Sorry, Charlie was based on a true story of a man who used recordings of children to get women to leave their houses.

Nearly nine months ago, Charlie was raped by someone — on Halloween — who left her pregnant. Now, she tries to help others from her home, a place she rarely leaves if only to go to the doctor and to tend to her garden. As for the house, it was her grandmother’s and her pregnancy doesn’t leave her much energy to fix it up any further than she got before the attack. But for now, she’s surviving. Then the calls start, calls that sound so much like the man who assaulted her. And then, The Gentleman shows up.

Sorry, Charlie may seem to be made in the cloak of the slasher, but it’s more about grief, adjusting after a horrific event and trying to move past it. We don’t all get to so violently deal with our trauma, but Charlie sure does.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Caltiki – The Immortal Monster was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, February 23, 1964 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on August 22, 1964.

After the success of Hercules, Galatea Film began production on films made for the international market. They hired Riccardo Freda to make this movie, but he left before it was done, supposed to allow Mario Bava — the cinematographer and special effects artist on this — the opportunity to direct and earn more money. This same situation — Freda leaving and Bava finishing the movie — also happened during I Vampiri (The Devil’s Commandment). 

There are different stories over who did what. Freda told Luigi Cozzi that he “left it when there were just two days of shooting left. I did shoot it yes, but it’s Bava’s type of film. I don’t enclose it in my body of work. The only thing I remember with pleasure about it are the statues that decorated the sets: I sculpted them myself,” while Bava referred to this as his first film and claimed that Freda left the movie” because everything was falling to pieces. I managed to carry it out, patching it up here and there.”

Cozzi would come back to this interview thirty years later, setting the record straight by stating that “the director of Calitiki il mostro immortale is Riccardo Freda, full stop. Mario Bava did take care of the cinematography, the special effects and directed the scenes with the miniatures (that is, mostly the tanks….) and in addition to that he filmed some shots of soldiers with flame throwers. That’s all, and of course it cannot be enough to say that Bava directed that movie.” That said, in the last two or three weeks of filming, Bava directed and shot over 100 special effects shots.

Honestly, the answer depends on who you ask and when you ask them.

A group of archaeologists discovers a large statue of Caltiki, a supposed Mayan goddess who demanded human sacrifices. When one of them descends into a pool, he finds skeletons covered in gold and jewels. He keeps going back for more before he’s melted into a skeleton himself.

Now, Caltiki is a made-up deity. But man, who cares, because soon a blob-like creature emerges and tries to devour everyone. The monster was created from cloth and tripe, which is the stomach of a cow. It made a horrific smell, so no one wanted to be around it.

Anyhow, the blob-like organism attaches itself to one man’s arm and, of course, replicates and feeds on radiation. It’s about to have a buffet, because a radioactive comet that last appeared in our orbit during the time of the Mayans is about to come back and every little blob will become gigantic unless the smart brains in this can figure something out. How do you destroy a blob in the world of this movie? Flamethrowers. It’s that simple.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Unearthly was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, December 29, 1963. It was also on the show on April 30, 1966; February 24, 1973; January 26, 1974; April 17, 1976; February 18 and October 21, 1978 and August 9, 1980 when the show aired at 1 a.m.

Dr. Charles Conway (John Carradine) is experimenting with artificial glands to make people live longer, working with Lobo (Tor Johnson) and his assistant Dr. Sharon Gilchrist (Marilyn Buferd, a former Miss California). Those that get these glands think they’re getting one surgery and get shuffled off for something else.

One of those patients is Grace Thomas (Allison Hayes, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman; she died as a result of nutritional supplements, specifically a calcium supplement that had abnormal levels of lead), who is suffering from depression which means that she’s due for some surgery that will help John Carradine live eternally.

Originally called The House of Monsters, this was filmed over approximately five days and is the third movie in which Johnson played Lobo (Bride of the Monster and Night of the Ghoul would be the others).

Director Boris Petroff, using the name Brooke Peters, also directed Anatomy of a Psycho. I’ve heard that the writer of this movie, Jane Mann, was Petroff’s wife. I’ve also heard that it’s a pen name for Ed Wood.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Black Sleep was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 14, 1963. It was also on the show on July 5, 1964 and January 23, 1965.

Reginald Le Borg was a banker in Austria and a director in America, making low budget horror at Universal like The Mummy’s Ghost and Weird Woman. Released along with The Creeping Unknown, it was ahead of the Shock Theater package that would ignite a new interest in Universal’s horror movies. It’s also Bela Lugosi’s last movie, although footage of him appears in  Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Dr. Gordon Ramsay (Herbert Rudley) claims that he is innocent yet remains in jail, guilty of murder, when surgeon Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone) offers him a chance at redemption. All he has to do is assist him with some experiments, starting with taking a potion called The Black Sleep, which will put him into a deathlike slumber.

After the “dead” body of Ramsay is discovered in his cell, Cadman takes the body for burial and revives Ramsay back in his lab. There, he’s attempting to learn the mysteries of the brain so that he can bring his wife Angelina (Louanna Gardner) back to life. One of his servants, Mungo (Lon Chaney Jr.) was once Doctor Monroe, one of Ramsay’s former teachers. Now he’s a monstrous beast barely under control. And then there’s the mute — and frightening — Casimir (Bela Lugosi).

So why do Laurie (Patricia Blake), Odo (Akim Tamiroff, who replaced Peter Lorre, who wanted more than this production could pay for) and Daphnae (Phyllis Stanley) work for him? It turns out that Laurie is Mungo’s daughter and wants her father to be normal again. That said, there’s an entire basement filled with experiments that haven’t worked, broken human beings — like Tor Johnson — led by a maniacal preacher named Borg (John Carradine). They’re so close to breaking through the doors to the lab…

The Black Sleep has a great cast but doesn’t do much with them. But it’s a fast movie and if you don’t think too much — or want to hear Bela speak — you may enjoy it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Beginning of the End was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, December 8, 1963. It also was on the show on March 19, 1966; February 24, 1973; May 4, 1974; February 28, 1976; October 8, 1977 and January 6, 1979 when the show moved to 1 a.m.

American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres, or Am-Par, decided to create their own film studio to make low-budget movies that they could place into their theaters, signing a deal with Republic Pictures to make them. And after the success of Them!, who else but Burt I. Gordon to make more giant bug movies?

Gordon did the effects by himself in his garage, bringing the magic effect he used for King Dinosaur: grab some animals and shoot them in front of a still photo. So he grabbed 200 non-hopping, non-flying live grasshoppers in Waco, Texas and brought them to California. At that point, the agriculture department got involved and somehow, only 12 grasshoppers live after they all turned into cannibals. One would assume the dozen that are in this movie are the toughest ones of all time.

That said, the film’s title was prophetic. For some reason, the studio stopped making films. Luckily for Gordon, he landed at American-International Picture where he kept making giant movies. The Amazing Colossal Man was next.

There’s a decent cast in this, with Peter Graves* as the scientist who uses radiation to better grow crops until some crazy locusts eat it all and — you guessed it — get big as well. Peggie Castle, Miss Cheesecake of 1949, was born for films like this and Invasion U.S.A. It also seems like character actor Morris Ankrum was a lock for nearly any science fiction film of this time, as he made Rocketship X-M, Flight to Mars, Red Planet Mars, Invaders from Mars, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, From the Earth to the Moon and this movie in the ’50s.

*Whose brother James Arness was in Them!