Based on an original story by writer and critic Walter C. Mycroft, this was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who co-wrote it with Eliot Stannard. This is the second comedy that Hitchcock made after The Farmer’s Wife; he later voiced his unhappiness with the film in François Truffaut’s Hitchcock/Truffaut, saying that the movie had no story. During a press conference for Family Plot, he again said that it was his least favorite movie.

Betty (Betty Balfour) uses a plane to fly to see her boyfriend (Jean Bradin) in France, which upsets her wealthy father (Gordon Harker). She meets a mysterious stranger (Ferdinand von Alten) and breaks up with her boyfriend just as her family loses all their money. But it’s all a lie; the father has hired the man and has tipped off the boyfriend.

Not my favorite Hitchcock, but he would be OK with me saying that.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Have you ever seen Night Train to Terror and wondered — what would one of that film’s portmanteau sequences be like if they were expanded to an entire movie? Good news! Well, maybe. Your wishes have come true.

The final story of Night Train, “The Case of Claire Hansen”, was really a film called The Nightmare Never Ends (alternatively known as Cataclysm and Satan’s Supper). It boasts three directors. Amazingly, it was written by Philip Yordan, who not only won the Academy Award for Broken Lance in 1954, but also provided a front for blacklisted Hollywood writers (he was Bernard Gordon’s front for The Day of the Triffids)!

This is my favorite kind of movies — a film I discover at 5 a.m. when the rest of the world is asleep, and I wonder if it can really be true and if I am not still asleep. To say that this is a batshit insane film is to do a disservice to the phrase batshit insane. I feel ill-prepared to share its wonder with you, but I’m sure going to try.

Two stories are going on here:

Nobel Prize-winning author James Hansen (Richard Moll of TV’s Night Court and House) and his devoutly Catholic wife Claire (who is a surgeon, which totally comes into play later) decide to go to Vegas to both celebrate James’ new book and to get away from Claire’s nightmares. Wondering what James won the Nobel Prize for? He wrote a book that proved that God is dead. Now, he’s planning a TV special to tell the whole story to the entire world (he’s preaching the bad news!). Well, alright. And that Claire — seems that she’s been dreaming about volcanoes. They decide to go see a magician, who puts Claire into a trance in seconds.

That’s when we learn the real secret of what has been bothering Claire — Nazis! She dreams of a handsome young officer who kills a room of other officers and an all-female string orchestra. After the show, Claire invites him to dinner after he tells her that a demon is after her. He never makes it — he is killed and a 666 tattoo is left on his scalp.

Remember when I said there was a second story?

Mr. Weiss is super old and out of it, but totally recognizes a Nazi when he sees one. Pretty and rich Olivier is being interviewed during the intermission of the New York Ballet, and he looks exactly like the Nazi officer who killed Weiss’ parents at Auschwitz (and he’s also the Nazi from Claire’s dream). Weiss is a Nazi hunter, believe it or not, and he calls in his neighbor, Lieutenant Stern (Cameron Mitchell, who has been in more movies than there have been movies, but let’s call out Blood and Black Lace as one of the best of his films). They go to the ballet and follow Olivier to his extravagant mansion, all the while Stern tries to convince the old man that this cannot be the man who tormented his childhood. Weiss grabs his Luger and goes to kill Olivier, but an unseen demon kills him and leaves a 666 on his body.

Oh yeah, there’s also a homeless priest named Papini who tries to protect James and Claire, even telling her how to kill Olivier.

Numerous characters show up and just die, like Stern’s partner and Claire’s nephew. Even better, there are multiple disco scenes, which feature some wonderfully horrid songs and Olivier seducing Claire’s nephew’s fiancée (so many degrees of separation) until he takes off his shoe to reveal a furry hoof!

As to not skip any exploitation genre — we’ve already had Nazis, tough cops, disco and the occult — Claire goes to visit a black spiritualist who unexpectedly goes off on a rampage, pushing the film toward blaxploitation!  “I am a black man–a (N WORD) in your country. You are a rich woman; I’m sure you have many powerful friends… but they couldn’t help you! You had to seek the help of a (N WORD)!” It’s so insane and doesn’t fit into the movie at all.

Neither does the scene where Papini is killed by Ishtar, Olivier’s assistant (who is only in this one scene). It’s the chance to add some skin to the film and even more blasphemy.

Seriously — this film has blasphemy in spades. If you’re in a metal band that needs samples about religion and the devil, you should totally give this a watch. You’re going to find tons of samples.

Every single actor in this film either reads their lines in monotone or screams them as loudly as possible — sometimes within the same sentence. The lone exceptions are Richard Moll, who is the best actor here and Mitchell, who is the gruffest cop of all time.

Nearly everyone in this movie (and the related Night Train to Terror) was also involved in another film that destroyed my brain cells, Cry Wilderness, which was featured on the latest season of Mystery Science Theater. A Bigfoot meets E.T. epic of pure maniacal weirdness, it was also written by Yordan and was directed by Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, who created the wraparound story for Night Train to Terror. Seems that Visto International Inc., a small theatrical motion picture production and distribution company, produced these films in the early 80s, a magical era of cheaply made independent films. Plus, both films (or all three, if we can cross over between Night Train, Nightmare and Wilderness) feature the acting skills, if you will, of Tony Giorgio, Maurice Grandmaison and Faith Clift.

Let me see if I can summarize the ending of this — after Oliver kills everyone else, Claire hits him with her car. She throws the body in the trunk and takes him to surgery, where she and her nephew’s girlfriend give him open heart surgery, complete with blood spraying and puking. Oh yeah, there’s also stabbing and slapping and screaming. And the bad guy wins!

Holy fuck — this is certainly a slice of cinematic goofball awesome that I won’t soon forget. Make no mistake — it’s a horrible film. But at the same time, it’s also a great one!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Criminology professor Brenner (Bela Lugosi) is also Karl Wagner and in addition to teaching, he also runs the Bowery Friendly Mission, where he feeds the unhoused but is also getting new members of his criminal army, which includes Doc Brooks (Lew Kelly), an alcoholic drug addict who knows how to make zombies.

Sure, alright.

Somehow, Bela’s character is able to do all of that and be a happily married man and he’s not exhausted by all of that. I mean, I’m tired just typing that out.

Meanwhile, Richard Dennison (John Archer) gets involved as his girlfriend Judy (Wanda McKay) works in the soup kitchen. He also gets killed, brought back as a zombie and somehow ends this film feeling perfectly fine. You know, he got better. He’s also a student of Brenner, so coincidences are everywhere in this.

Zombies in the basement are effective at eliminating corpses. That’s the lesson from this movie. Monogram is pretty great because their movies exist in the universe of their films, as East End Kids and The Corpse Vanishes posters are visible.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Detective Dan Turner (William Marshall) has been hired by movie exec  Ziggy Cranston (Ricardo Cortez) to stop a blackmail plot against him by Carla (Stephanie Bachelor), who has photos of him but is soon murdered. He’s also being set up by some mobsters. 

Based on Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, a pulp story that ran in Spicy Detective and Hollywood Detective. This story came from “Stock Shot” by Robert Leslie Bellem, which was in the June 1944 issue of the latter magazine. The character was also played by Marc Singer in The Raven Red Kiss-Off, which was also released as Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. 

This is just 67 minutes, which is perfect for a quick film noir. This has a lead that says, “Don’t move, sweetheart, this thing doesn’t shoot marshmallows.” It was directed by Lesley Selander, who did more than fifty episodes of Lassie and ended his career working in Westerns. Writers included Royal K. Cole (who did the Captain America, Blackhawk, Superman and Tex Granger movie serials, as well as Valley of the Zombies, The Tiger Woman and The Monster and the Ape) and Albert DeMond (who wrote The Crimson Ghost and D-Day On Mars). 

Based on “They Creep in the Dark” by Karl Brown, this William Beaudine-directed, Barney Sarecky-written film stars Bela Lugosi as Dr. James Brewster, a scientist whose experiments have turned him into an ape man. He needs human spinal fluid to transform back to a man again, which as you can imagine, leads to him killing all manner of people when he becomes the ape (Emil Van Horn) version of himself.

By the end, his assistant Dr. Randall (Henry Hall) has been forced to keep injecting the quickly going mad doctor, ending with him breaking what’s left of it in their lab. The ape Randall flips out and strangles him then goes wild killing everyone he can to get that spine juice.

The next year, Monogram released Return of the Ape Man as a sequel to this, even if it has nothing to do with it.

This has the weirdest ending, as the protagonists escape and a man shows up in their car. They ask who he is and he says, “Me? I’m the author of the story! Screwy idea, wasn’t it?”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, this is the story of Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a normal man who somehow gets caught up in the evil deeds of spies who call themselves The 39 Steps. They’re stealing British military secrets, and when he tries to stop them, he’s accused of killing an agent. Richard has to run to Scotland, where he meets Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), falls in love and works to prove his innocence.

Like many Hitchcock movies, this is about an innocent man on the run, trying to prove that he didn’t commit a crime. It also has one of the first of many Hitchcock blondes, of which Roger Ebert said, “The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were blonde. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerized the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.”

That said, while Pamela doesn’t believe Richard and thinks he must be a criminal, she comes to his side by the end of the movie. 

Back to the writer of the original story, John Buchan. The character of Hannay would appear in five more books, which made Ian Fleming a fan, who claimed, “Without him, there is no Bond.” Another fan is Holden Caulfield and his sister Phoebe. In The Catcher In the Rye, he remembers “Her favorite is The 39 Steps, though, with Robert Donat. She knows the whole goddam movie by heart, because I’ve taken her to see it about ten times. When old Donat comes up to this Scotch farmhouse, for instance, when he’s running away from the cops and all, Phoebe’ll say right out loud in the movie, right when the Scotch guy in the picture says it, “Can you eat the herring?” She knows all the talk by heart.”