Imagine a movie that starts with a fourteen year-old girl being killed by a faceless maniac wearing a black leather glove with razor-tipped fingers. If you’re ready for that before the first credits roll, then you’re ready for The Demon.

That very same killer then kills a trucker, steals all his money and gets a place in a sleazy hotel in Johannesburg. Emily’s parents are frustrated by the police and turn to Bill Carson (Cameron Mitchell, the whole reason why I picked this movie), a psychic detective who was once a U.S. Marine. Of course.

Emily’s mother just wants to know if her daughter is alive or dead. Her father, though, wants revenge. Carson replies that its best for the Parkers if they don’t find the killer, telling them that he’s pure evil. I mean, you should believe a dude who can tear up a bed like this.

The killer has moved on to an American schoolteacher named Mary (Jennifer Holmes, who was on TV’s Newhart before being replaced by Julia Duffy). She first sees him outside her classroom window, as he can seemingly appear and disappear at will. And when she’s not seeing killers, she’s hanging out with her South African cousin who is dating Dean Turner, a rich American playboy that Mary hates.

Jo is out having fun and poor Mary is stuck at home, getting phone calls with heavy breathing and menacing knocks on her front door. Is it the killer? Or is he happy to be at home grunting, groaning, doing push-ups and shredding porno mags?

The Demon also likes to go out and try and pick up ladies. And where does he go? Boobs Disco! Yes, this was a real place. And yes, it was really called that.

We even get to hear some of Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown” in this scene, as the killer is stopped from raping a girl by two motorists, one of whom is slashed and the other gets his motorcycle blown up real good.

Meanwhile, Cameron Mitchell is getting the most out of his ten minutes of screen time. I guess that’s all the producers could afford. He creates a faceless sketch of the killer and tells the Parkers where the man lives. He warns Mr. Parker one more time, but the guy just can’t listen and gets his neck snapped pretty much immediately, then thrown off a balcony.

Children are playing in the woods when they find Emily’s remains, which brings Carson back to Mrs. Parker, telling her that he’s sorry, but the time of The Demon is drawing close. She accuses him of being behind all of this to keep his career going as a psychic and shoots him in the face. Well, that had really nothing to do with the other half of this film, which is becoming a riff on Halloween.

Mary and Jo go out on dates that night while The Demon gets ready for them. Mary tells Bobby, her man, that she’s been getting stalked late at night. And she’s right — The Demon has, for reasons known only to him, broken in to kill Jo and rich guy Dean, then hide in the house.

You know, if I had a cool razor glove, I wouldn’t suffocate people with a plastic bag like The Demon. But hey — I’m just a writer on a web site.

It’s time for this movie to go full Halloween, with The Demon chasing Mary all over the house — up and down the stairs, through a closet, into the attic and finally through a hole in the roof. She finally makes it to the bathroom, where she builds a trap with scissors, the shower and shampoo. That’s right — The Demon is the first masked killer I’ve seen that is basically killed by slipping in the shower.

If you’re watching this movie based on the description Mill Creek gives, you’re going to be disappointed. Cameron Mitchell never gets to be the Australian Dr. Loomis, instead being felled by a housewife with a handgun. And I know that I give generous berth to the transfers on these, but even I was amazed by how long scratches would appear on the footage.

If you enjoy scenes that having nothing to do with the overall film being given the same importance as major facts, then let me recommend The Demon. Come for Cameron Mitchell, stay for Boobs Disco.

This Universal movie serial — told in twelve parts — shares some similarities with the earlier serial The Vanishing Shadow, including the inventions of an invisibility belt and a remote-control robot.

That makes sense — at the time, Universal was all about recycling. This movie contains stock footage from The Invisible Ray and The Vanishing Shadow, as well as music from the Flash Gordon serials and Frankenstein movies, plus car chase footage that had been used in several other serials and newsreel footage taken from the Hindenburg disaster.

Eight years after his star turn in Dracula, Bela Lugosi’s career was in decline. He had been typecast as a horror star and was not seen as talented as his co-star — and possible rival — Boris Karloff.

This career downturn had many factors behind it. Universal changed management in 1936, and due to a British ban on horror films, they dropped the once-popular films from their production schedule. Lugosi found himself consigned to Universal’s non-horror B-film unit, the same team that made serials like this. And while the actor was busy with stage work, he had to borrow money from the Actors Fund to pay the hospital bills for the birth of his son, Bela George Lugosi, in 1938.

However, that year brought Bela back. California theater owner Emil Umann revived Dracula and Frankenstein as a special double feature, a bill so successful that it played to sellout crowds and Lugosi himself came to host the movies. The actor would say, “I was dead, and he brought me back to life.” Universal took notice of the tremendous business and launched its own national re-release, as well as hiring Lugosi to star in new films.

The Phantom Creeps — yes, we’ll get back to this movie in a minute — was the last of the five serials that the actor would make, shot right after he returned from making Dead Eyes of London. It was released a week before his comeback vehicle, Son of Frankenstein.

Sadly, by 1948, the parts dwindled again and severe sciatica from Lugosi’s military service was treated with opiates, causing a downward spiral that the actor would never really emerge from. He appeared in movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster. After making that movie, he checked himself into rehab, one of the first celebrities to publicly do so. According to Kitty Kelley’s His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, “Old Blue Eyes” helped with expenses, despite never meeting Lugosi before and visited him at the hospital.

The actor died of a heart attack in 1956, having just married his fifth wife. And yes, he was buried in his Dracula cape.

In this film, he plays Dr. Zorka, a man who loves to make weapons and refuses to sell them to anyone or any country. This upsets all manner of people, like Dr. Fred Mallory, his former partner, and government man Captain Bob West.

Dorothy Arnold, who plays love interest Jean Drew, was the first wife of baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Look for Edward Van Sloan, who always played the doctor battling the supernatural in Universal films. He’s Van Helsing in Dracula, Dr. Muller in The Mummy and Dr. Waldman in Frankenstein. In fact, that movie begins by him warning the audience that they can leave now if they’re too frightened. And Ed Wolff, the seven-foot-four-inch actor who played the robot, was also in Invaders from Mars and The Return of the Fly.

Speaking of the robot, you may have seen him in Rob Zombie’s work. The song “Meet the Creeper” is based on the movie and the robot often appears in the singer’s music videos and stage shows.

You can download this from The Internet Archive.

Based on the 1924 play by Noël Coward, this Alfred Hitchcock-directed movie opens with Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) testifying at her divorce trial as she leaves her husband, Aubrey (Franklin Dyall). The scandal of it all is that Claude Robson (Eric Bransby Williams), an artist, is in love with Larita and a mistaken moment leads to him being shot. She leaves town, goes to Europe and instantly marries John Whittaker (Robin Irvine) after he hits her in the eye with a tennis ball.

Of course, his mother (Violet Farebrother) hates her, as she wanted him to marry Sarah (Enid Stamp Taylor). She does everything she can to turn the entire family — and her son — against Larita, who finally just gives in and allows her husband to divorce her.

At the end, as photographer take her picture outside of court, she says, “Shoot! There’s nothing left to kill.” Hitchcock said it was the worst thing he ever wrote. Sadly, this was a financial failure.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Adele Karnstein (Halina Zalewska, An Angel for Satan) is accused of witchcraft and burned, but really it’s because she wouldn’t sleep with Count Humboldt (Giuliano Raffaelli). When her daughter Helen (Barbara Steele) confronts him, she even offers her body to him to save her mother. The Count still watches as her mother is burned alive and tosses Helen off a cliff. To add even more pain to the Karnestein family, her sister Lisabeth (also Halina Zalewska) is taken in by Humboldt and eventually marries his nephew, Kurt (George Ardisson).

As a plague destroys the country, a storm blows in on the night of the Count’s death, bringing Mary (also Barbara Steele) who inspires Kurt to kill his wife and be with her. Bad idea Kurt. This is an Italian Gothic and all men are morons who must be destroyed by the female ghosts of past tragedy and the curses of mothers whose daughters could not save them.

I mean, Barbara Steele is a ghost whose skeleton is reanimated by lightning. Can movies get any more magical? Do you know how much it makes me fall into a dream of movie drugs to have Steele walking through a cobwebbed castle in a white nightgown holding blazing candles?

While written by Ernesto Gastaldi and Tonino Valerii, neither had enough experience to direct — or so said producer Felice Testa Gay — which brought in Antonio Margheriti to make the film. For as much as Margheriti is known for his miniature-rich war movies, he had a talent for making movies like this. Just check out Castle of Blood, The Virgin of Nuremberg, The Unnaturals and Web of the Spider.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I know that Lon Chaney Jr.’s career highlight was being in the Universal monster movies. I realize that the end of his life seems sad — he suffered from throat cancer and heart disease after decades of hard drinking and smoking. In fact, Robert Stack claimed in his autobiography that Chaney and Broderick Crawford were known around the Universal lot as “the monsters” due to how much they drank and raised hell.

Despite living in his father’s shadow, Chaney could be one hell of an actor. After all, he played Lennie Small in the original Of Mice and Men. You get reminded of that when you watch late period Chaney and he has to use his voice and body instead of makeup in films like Spider Baby.

That brings us to The Devil’s Messenger, a 1961 anthology that takes three episodes of the Swedish TV series 13 Demon Street. From the tale of a 50,000-year-old woman trapped in ice bewitching scientists to a man who learns of his death in a dream to a photographer who attacks a woman in teh snow and can’t escape her, these are some pretty decent stories. And oh yeah — there’s a framing device starring Chaney, Karen Kadler and John Crawford that was directed by Herbert L. Strock (I Was a Teenage Frankenstein).

Guess what? Those three Swedish episodes — The Photograph,” “The Girl in the Glacier,” and “Condemned in Crystal” — were directed by Curt Siodmak. Who is that? Oh, only the guy who wrote the original The Wolf Man, I Walked with a Zombie, Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein as well as directing Curucu, Beast of the Amazon and The Magnetic Monster.

Look, any movie where Lon Chaney Jr. makes good on Satan’s plot to nuke the world is one I’m going to love.

Starting with Todd Slaughter at the BBC, talking about his first two movies (Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), this has him playing Stephen Hawke, a money lender who loves his daughter Julia (Marjorie Taylor). He’s also the Spine-Breaker, a serial killer who is the opposite of his friendly self.

He ends up murdering Joshua Trimble (D J Williams), the father of his daughter’s fiancee Matthew (Eric Portman). Miles Archer (Gerald Barry), another suitor, finds out and tries to blackmail Julia into marrying him instead, so Hawke kills him, but falls off a roof to his death.

It’s a stage play, like Slaughter’s other films, but he’s so strong in this that he can snap a man with his bare hands. Director George King and Slaughter teamed for several of these films, which were encouraged by the British government so that not every movie was made in Hollywood that screened in the UK.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, this was directed by George King and written by Edward Dryhurst, Frederick Hayward and H. F. Maltby. It stars Tod Slaughter as a man taking the place of Sir Percival Glyde, trying to take his estate, Blackwater Park. It starts with him hammering a tent stake into the man’s ear and continues to have him murder many people who think that he’s an imposter. Who knew that slashers started in 1940?

Maybe the estate is bankrupt, so despite all the killing that the fake Sir Percival has already done, he has to romance and marry heiress Laurie Fairlie (Sylvia Marriott), then he plans to murder her and replace her with a mental patient who looks just like her.

Slaughter was known as the villain in Victorian stage plays, which were all about him being over the top. He does that here, strangling people, shouting about “beastly germs” when someone sneezes and being haunted by the woman in white. He’s the best.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.