Confusion at the start of this.

This was first released in 1936 as The Great Manta and shown in Great Britain as The Sea Fiend. Also, a Spanish-language version, El diablo del mar, directed by Juan Duval using some of the same actors and footage, was released in the United States.

Ten years later, it was re-released with a little something for daddy: stock footage inserts of topless native girls. But what about the Hays Code, you may ask? Well, they tolerated partial nudity in native scenes, so this was all good for them.

This is filled with stock footage of nature, fishing and even more nature. Somewhere in here, a giant manta ray is attacking villagers. They tell us it’s big, but we never see it at the same time as humans, so who are we to say?

Barry Norton, the hero of the Spanish version of Dracula, is the lead. And the Spanish-language version has Movita in the cast. She was married to boxer Jack Doyle and to Marlon Brando, who left her for another actress in Mutiny on the Bounty with both of them, Tarita Teriipaia.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: She-Wolf of London was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 19, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 31, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 17, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, January 20, 1973 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 26, 1975 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, June 24, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, October 15, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

As a kid, I’d see a title like She-Wolf of London and prepare myself for lupine madness, only to be angered by the fact that there is not a single werewolf in this movie. Imagine how angry I am as an adult when I watch films like The Wolf of Wall Street!

Years before Lassie and Lost In Space, June Lockhart would play the title character. There’s been a series of murders at a local park and her relatives inform her that because the blood of a werewolf runs in the family and that she is responsible for the deaths. Not Maureen Robinson!

As our heroine begins to worry that she is the next to suffer the Curse of the Allenbys, her aunt both tries to help and worry her at the same time. I smell gaslighting! Can you smell gaslighting? Because I totally can.

Sara Haden, who plays Aunt Martha Winthrop, is perhaps best known for playing another movie aunt, Aunt Milly Forrest in thirteen Andy Hardy films.

This was directed by Jean Yarbrough, who also brought us Hillbillys in a Haunted House and Jack and the Beanstalk, one of only two movies that Abbott and Costello made in color (the other is Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd).

Directed by William Nigh and written by Charles S. Belden, this time The Cisco Kid (Gilbert Roland) learns that Commandante Arturo (Martin Garralaga) and Bennet, a tax collector (Harry Woods), are stealing land from the poor. Can he play them against one another and return the land to the people who really deserve to live there?

Auturo’s sister Carmelita (Iris Flores) is going to marry one of those locals (Carlos Mandreno), but her brother really wants to marry her off to Bennet. Cisco decides that he’ll help these young kids in love, as he’s a sucker for romance.

Garralaga played Pancho in some of the movies with Duncan Renaldo such as Cisco Kid Returns, Cisco Kid In Old New Mexico and South of the Rio Grande, so it’s interesting to see him as a villain.

The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.

The Cisco Kid (Gilbert Roland) attacks a stagecoach carrying a wealthy young French person named Du Bois who ends up being Jeanne Du Bois (Ramsay Ames). The gang escapes with the money which Cisco says is money stolen for years from the poor of California. Of course, she soon falls in love with Cisco — and he with her, come on, he’s Cisco and she’s Ramsay Ames — and he gives her the money back. She has to decide what to do with it.

Directed by William Nigh and written by Charles S. Belden, this was another quick movie made for Monogram Pictures yet the Cisco Kid’s legend has lived all the way to today, as I’ve been watching movies with the character in them all week.

The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.

The Cisco Kid (Gilbert Roland) has no Pancho to help him. That said, he can still keep a young girl named Pepita (Ramsay Ames, who played Princess Ananka in The Mummy’s Ghost; despite her exotic appearance, she was born on Long Island) from marrying a rich man to save her family home. There’s also a gang of stagecoach robbers. It makes it all simple when the man aiming to steal Pepita ends up being the same man who leads the criminals.

According to director William Witney, there were several Republic Pictures’ stuntmen who got hurt running on rooftops to get a better look at Ames walking across the backlot. In fact, more of them got hurt that way than in the actual stunts.

This was directed by William Nigh, who directed many of the East Side Kids and Mr. Wong movies, and written by Charles S. Belden.

The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Spider Woman Strikes Back was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 24, 1976 at 1:00 a.m. It also appeared on November 19, 1983.

There was a second Universal horror cycle after the Karloff and Lugosi monsters, even if they never get discussed any longer. And so much of it was based around one man, Rondo Hatton.

Well, Sherlock Holmes too. We’ll get to that.

Hatton was once a sportswriter for The Tampa Tribune and a World War I veteran, but then acromegaly distorted the shape of his head, face and extremities, giving him a unique look that made him a livings special effect. In fact, the studio system tried to play his looks up as an even worse deformity, stating that he’d received elephantiasis after exposure to German mustard gas attack during the war.

After playing the Hoxton Creeper in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film The Pearl of Death, a series of Creeper films was planned. Sadly, House of Horrors and The Brute Man were released after his death, the result of his acromegalic condition.

Back to the master detective.

The second character spun off from a Holmes film was The Spider Woman, who originally appeared in Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman. Again, like Hatton, Gale Sondergaard didn’t need much makeup to achieve her fame as a dangerous and evil woman.

In fact, after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, MGM considered having the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz played as a glamorous villainess, much like Snow White’s evil stepmother. They did two screen tests with Sondergaard in the traditional witch look and the more out there sexy style. After the decision was made to go with the ugly wicked witch, Sondergaard was reluctant to wear the disfiguring makeup, so she stepped away from the role which went to Margaret Hamilton.

Sondergaard also played the evil humanized cat Tylette in The Blue Bird — 20th Century Fox’s answer to Oz — as well as the sinister wife in The Letter.

So yes, back once again to Holmes. After playing the villain in one of the long series of Sherlock movies, Sondergaard would play the sinister Spider Woman again in an unrelated sequel. In the first movie, she was known as Adrea Spedding but now she’s the wealthy, blind and mysterious Zenobia Dollard.

Jean (Brenda Joyce, who played Jane in several Tarzan films) is hired as Zenobia’s caretaker, a job with a definite shelf life as all of the previous caretakers have vanished. Perhaps that’s because at night, Zeonbia’servantnt (yep, Rondo Hatton) harvests her blood while she sleeps a drugged sleep, mixing her plasma with that of her ancestors and a little bit of spider venom — sounds like one of my cocktails — to make a death serum. Oh yeah — he has blood drinking plants to help him with his experiment!

At just 59 minutes and with direction by non-horror fan Arthur Lubin, this film couldn’t catch on the same way Universal’s past horror successes did. Yet it’s still astounding that they attempted to start a new series, much less one with a female antagonist. That said, this did run quite often on TV, as it was part of the original Universal Shock Theater package.

Kino Lorber’s new blu ray of The Spider Woman Strikes Back with a great looking 2K remaster of the film, commentary by film historians Tom Weaver and David Schecter, trailers and Misteress of Menace and Murder: Making The Spider Woman Strikes Back, a new documentary featuring interviews with C. Courtney Joyner, Rick Baker and Fred Olen Ray. Much like all of their latest releases, Kino really knows how to find that exact movie that you suddenly discover that your collection is missing.

You can get it directly from Kino Lorber