EDITOR’S NOTE: Forbidden Planet was first on Chiller Theater on October 12, 1963 at 3 p.m. It also aired on June 14, 1964 and February 27, 1965.

From the awesome Egor’s Chamber https://egorschamber.com/pittsburghhorrorhosts/grafix/terminalstare1.jpg

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Phantom from Space was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 28, 1963 at 3 p.m. It was also on June 19, 1965; January 1, 1966; March 8, 1969 and February 6, 1971.

Director W. Lee Wilder formed a film production company in the early 1950s called Planet Filmplays to quickly make low-budget science fiction films with screenplays co-written with his son Miles. Directing was in the Wilder blood, as his brother was the much better considered Billy.

Other Wilder science fiction movies of this era include Killers from Space and The Snow Creature.

Do you know who gets there first when a UFO crashes? The Federal Communications Commission. Yes, they’re there when The Phantom (Dick Sands), an invisible radioactive alien, is on the loose before it gets trapped inside Griffith Observatory. He tries to communicate through tapping but it’s too late. He can’t breathe our air and ends up falling off the top of the planetarium to his death, despite Barbara Randall (Noreen Nash) trying to save him.

I kind of love the way that the alien looks but then again, I like how Robot Monster looks.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Crawling Eye was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, November 24, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on February 15 and June 28, 1964; January 21, 1967; April 19, 1969; June 13, 1970 and June 5, 1971.

Known as The Trollenberg Terror in England, where it was made, The Crawling Eye has exactly what you want to see: a giant eyeball. If we didn’t have this, we wouldn’t have The Fog, as this movie directly inspired John Carpenter. See, great things can come out of a movie whose special effects consist of cotton balls stapled to mountain photography.

Originally a six-episode TV miniseries, this was remade with American Forest Tucker placed into the lead so that audiences in the states would have someone to root for. Or maybe they’d be like me, excited to see gigantic eyeballs come rolling along at the camera.

He plays UN troubleshooter Alan Brooks, who has traveled to the Swiss mountain of Trollenberg to learn why the heads of climbers are being torn off their body and why a mysterious cloud is seen in the wake of the bloody destruction.

Do you know how you defeat a giant eyeball? A Molotov cocktail. Horror movies make you smart, right?

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bat was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, November 17, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on February 8, 1964 and December 25, 1965.

The 1959 version of The Bat is the fourth version* of the story, all based on the 1908 novel The Circular Staircase. This played a double bill with the Hammer version of The Mummy.

Agnes Moorehead plays Cornelia Van Gorder, a mystery author who gets involved with a bank president and his physical (Vincent Price) who are trying to scam $1 million dollars ($8.9 million adjusted for inflation) when a forest fire breaks out.

Meanwhile, a giallo-esque masked villain named The Bat is tearing out the tender throats of young women with his steel claws. He learns of the scam and terrorizes an entire house full of women, among them Darla Hood. Yes, the very same Darla from Our Gang in her last role.

Crane Wilbur, who directed this, started his career as an actor. He was also a screenwriter and wrote House of Wax.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi or download it from the Internet Archive.

*The other versions are the 1926 silent film The Bat, as well as the 1930 movie The Bat Returns and a 1920 stage play.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Queen of Outer Space was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, November 10, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on June 20, 1964; January 23, 1965 and September 28, 1968.

It’s amazing just how much Amazon Women on the Moon got the parody of this movie right, all the way down to the uniforms.

What’s even more astounding is that this movie was written by Charles Beaumont, who wrote “Number Twelve Looks a Lot Like You” for the Twilight Zone, as well as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder and one of my favorite movies of all time, The Masque of the Red Death.

Oh man, this movie.

Edward Bernds is mostly known for Three Stooges and Bowery Boys shorts, but he also made Return of the Fly, High School Hellcats and Reform School Girl, which are three movies that I absolutely love. He was hired by producer Walter Wanger, who had just got out of prison for shooting agent Jennings Lang when he caught him making time with his wife Joan Bennett.

Exiled to Allied Artists, he bought this movie, which wasn’t made for a decade and by which time others at the studio were looking for properties that had already been paid for. Throw in some recycling of Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, Cat-Women of the Moon and Fire Maidens from Outer Space, as well as actual recycling — Queen of Outer Space uses sets and ships from World Without End, footage from Flight to Mars, another ship from the Bowery Boys movie Paris Playboy and costumes from Forbidden Planet — and you have a movie.

The far-flung future world of 1985 is when Captain Patterson (Eric Fleming, Rawhide) and his crew of Lt. Mike Cruze (Dave Willock, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz, The Silencers) and Professor Konrad (Paul Birch, Day the World Ended) are attacked by a laser beam that crashes their ship on Venus, where they run afoul of Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell, who is also in the very similar Missile to the Moon). This masked matriarch presides over a society of all women, having killed all men after her face was scarred ten years ago. Well, not all the men — some of the scientists have been kept on a prison colony on one of the planet’s moons*.

Luckily, the all-white crew of JR “Bob” Dobbs lookalikes is helped by Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor, perfectly cast as the only Hungarian beauty queen in space) and her female comrades Motiya (Lisa Davis, the voice of Anita, the female owner of the 101 Dalmatians), Kaeel (The Monster That Challenged The World) and Odeena (Marilyn Buferd, the only actress I can think of who was in Les Belles de nuit, won Miss America and was also in The Unearthly).

For all my attempts at assembling a week of movies about matriarchies, Talleah and her friends long for the love of men, which means that this women-run planet cannot survive. It all falls apart when the queen decides to destroy Earth and the disintegrator backfires, killing her and putting Talleah in power.

Even though their ship is fixed, Earth’s leaders demand that they remain on Venus for a year, which is exactly what they wanted anyway. Everyone begins to embrace and hug one another and…well, let’s leave it up to your imagination.

You know who wasn’t happy? One of the crew left behind his girlfriend, who was played by Joi Lansing (Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Bigfoot).

The strangest thing about this movie, however, is that it predates Star Trek by eight years and the uniforms that the queen’s guard wear are in the same red, blue and gold colors.

*Strange, because Venus has no moon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: From Hell It Came was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, October 20, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on April 11, 1964; January 16 and June 26, 1965 and July 9, 1966.

Sure, Paul Blaisdell created the effects for The She-Creature, Invasion of the Saucer Men, Not of This Earth and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but this is the only movie in which he made a tree person.

Yes, this film is about the prince of a South Seas island wrongly executed by a witch doctor who hated the fact that the prince became friends with Americans. Well, those foreigners pay him back by irradiating the island and reanimating the royal victim, who has been buried inside a tree. Now he is known as Tabonga, an angry tree stump that demands bloody retribution.

This movie is one of the many reasons why quicksand concerned me as a child, as the tree man throws his unfaithful widow into the sinking muck and then tosses the witch doctor down a hill. He can only be stopped by white men and their guns, which hasn’t really changed for so many since this was made sixty some years ago.

Written by Richard Bernstein (Terrified!) and Jack Milner, this was directed by Jack’s brother Dan, who worked as an editor on the Bozo the Clown TV show (he also made The Fighting Coward and The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues).

Look, it’s not great, but the tree man reveal is better than most entire movies. It has that going for it at least.

You can watch this on Tubi.