EDITOR’S NOTE: Invaders from Mars was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 12, 1966 at 11:20 p.m.; Saturday, August 5, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.; Saturday, January 4, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday, April 5, 1969 at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday, October 20, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 23, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

Directed by William Cameron Menzies and written by Richard Blake, Invaders from Mars was made in a hurry to beat George Pal’s War of the Worlds to theaters. It worked; Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Martin Scorsese, and John Landis have all said it was an influence. 

David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) wakes up to a thunderstorm and sees a UFO. His father, George (Leif Erickson), goes to investigate, and when he comes back, he’s not the same person. He tells David and his mother (Hillary Brooke) that there was no flying saucer. The cops arrive and tell David the same thing. As for the other kids, one of them, Kathy (Janine Perreau), disappears after the spaceship lands, then comes home and burns her house down. 

Only Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter) believes him. Working with Dr. Stuart Kelston (Arthur Franz) and Col. Fielding (Morris Ankrum), she realizes that the aliens are in town to take our nukes. Anyone controlled by the aliens has devices in their heads that cause their heads to blow up real good, but despite Martian rays and technology, good old-fashioned U.S. war mania wipes them out. Or so we believe, but it all turns out to be a dream, with David waking up to the UFO landing all over again.

The Martian leader is played by Luce Potter. She was also one of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and said that she received letters from adults telling her how much she had scared them when they were kids.

I enjoy this one and love the Tobe Hooper remake even more.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It Came from Outer Space was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 10, 1973 at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday December 14, 1974 at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday, July 3, 1976 at 11:30 p.m.; Saturday, August 20, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. and was the last movie ever shown on Chiller Theater on December 31, 1983.

Based on Ray Bradbury’s original film treatment “The Meteor,” this was directed by science fiction expert Jack Arnold and written by Harry Essex. The two also worked together on The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Astronomer John Putnam (Richard Carlson, who directed Riders to the Stars) and schoolteacher Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush) watch a meteorite crash land in Sand Rock, Arizona. No one believes John when he claims that a UFO was in the crater. Even Ellen isn’t sure, but when locals start to disappear, Sheriff Warren (Charles Drake) wants action. John wants a peaceful solution.

The aliens appear to John, who demands to see their proper form, like a doubting Thomas wanting to put his finger in the nail marks on Jesus’ hands. The aliens decide that they will destroy themselves instead of dealing with humans — I get it, my dudes — but Putnam gets them back home safely. 

I love this speech from the sheriff: “Did you know, Putnam, more murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. At lower temperatures, people are more easygoing. Over ninety-two, it’s too hot to move. But just ninety-two, people get irritable.” 

The sheriff’s office is near Courthouse Square from Back to the Future, and the alley where they chase the reborn people is where Atticus faced off with the lynch mob in To Kill a Mockingbird. This film is all about recycling, as the meteorite footage is also in Cat-Women of the Moon and The Astounding She-Monster. 

Of all the 3D films, this is probably the classiest.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Magnetic Monster was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, March 29 at 11:10 p.m. and Saturday, July 18, 1964 at 4:00 p.m., Saturday, February 13, 1965 at 11:15 p.m. and Saturday, June 29, 1968 at 11:30 p.m.

This is the start of Ivan Tors’ Office of Scientific Investigation trilogy, which was followed by Riders to the Stars and Gog. OSI agents Dr. Jeffrey Stewart (Richard Carlson) and Dr. Dan Forbes (King Donovan) are sent to an appliance store to learn why everything is magnetized and the clocks have all stopped working. Could it be the lab above and the dead body? Yes, and Dr. Howard Denker (Leonard Mudie), who has been irradiating an artificial radioactive isotope by the name of serranium, is the real reason behind all of this.

Only the Canadian invention, the Deltatron, can help us. The lead scientist won’t let Stewart use it, so he does what Americans do best. He uses a show of force and makes them comply! We’re saving the world, Mr. Scientist, and don’t have time for your objections!

Directed by Curt Siodmak and an uncredited Herbert L. Strock, who was hired by Tors because he was an editor familiar with using stock footage, the film includes plenty of it, including nearly ten minutes of an underground magneto-dynamo from the German movie Gold.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Robot Monster was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 28, 1967 at 11:20 p.m. 

Phil Tucker invented a rotary engine known as the CT Surge Turbine, which he successfully patented but unsuccessfully attempted to sell to the automobile industry as a more efficient alternative to the internal combustion engine. Years after directing movies like this and The Cape Canaveral Monsters, he did actually contribute to some movies as an editor, including Orca and King Kong.

Yet we’re all going to remember him for this movie, and to be honest, whenever life gets me down, I remember that at some point, people got together and decided to make a movie about the end of the world, and they threw a monkey suit with a TV set for a head in it. I think about the startling ridiculousness of that, and you know, it’s all better.

That monster is known as Ro-Man Extension XJ-2. He’s played by George Barrows, who made his own gorilla suit to get roles in movies. He’s already used his Calcinator death ray to kill everyone on Earth except for the eight people we meet in this movie.

I mean, that’s pretty through. There were 2.6 billion people alive in 1953, so to wipe out that many people, much less be able to find the eight you missed, is pretty good work, if I can commend the outright annihilation of a planet.

This movie outright rips off the ending of Invaders from Mars and recycles footage from One Million B.C., Lost Continent, Rocketship X-M, and Captive Women. Still, it’s in 3D, shot all over Bronson Canyon and was made in four days for $16,000. That is also worth celebrating.

It also features a score by Elmer Bernstein, who was currently being held back from major movies due to his liberal views. He also composed a score for Cat Women of the Moon that year, but would soon become one of the biggest names in movie music.

Look, this is a movie that has a Billion Bubble Machine with an antenna being used for Ro-Man to communicate with the Great Guidance, the supreme leader of his face, who finally gets fed up and blasts not only that gorilla robot but the child hero before he causes dinosaurs to come back and then uses psychotronic vibrations to smash Earth out of the universe. If you can’t find something to love there, you are beyond hope.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater and the original version of this movie on Tubi.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

I despise the notion that Ed Wood was a horrible filmmaker. Sure, his movies aren’t technically proficient and are often pretty maudlin in moments, but he’s an actual auteur. For this movie, he didn’t just direct and write, he also starred as Daniel Davies. Who else could? After all, Wood convinced producer George Weiss that he was the perfect director for this movie as he was a real-life transvestite.

In this movie, Wood takes pains to emphasize that a male transvestite is not automatically a homosexual. He swore that he had never had a single homosexual relationship in his life and was considered a womanizer. He also was given to directing his adult work in full drag and claimed that his greatest fantasy was to come back as a gorgeous blonde. Yet he still would say that he was comforted by the feel of angora.

So while the Golden Turkey Awards may give Wood the title of Worst Director of All Time and Leonard Maltin may say that this is “possibly the worst movie ever made,” it has heart. An inept heart, but heart.

A transvestite who has been to prison four times for cross-dressing has killed themselves, saying “Let my body rest in death forever, in the things I cannot wear in life.”

This leads Dr. Alton (Wood player Timothy Farrell) to seek out Glen, another man who loves to dress as the other sex, often stealing the clothing of his fiancee Barbara (Dolores Fuller, Wood’s girlfriend at the time). Glen is struggling between being honest with Barbara before their wedding or telling her afterward. Through extended dream sequences, he finally comes to terms with who he is and his other side, revealing it to her. As she hands him an angora sweater, she accepts every side of him.

The doctor then learns of another person, Alan/Anne. Anne was born a boy, but her mother wanted a girl and raised her that way, which left her abused throughout school. Despite hiding her true self during the war, she has since had an operation to become “a lovely young lady.”

Let me tell you, this kind of movie is incendiary in 2022. This was made in 1953.

A movie with these words, which we should live by: “Give this man satin undies, a dress, a sweater and a skirt, or even the lounging outfit he has on, and he’s the happiest individual in the world. He can work better, think better, he can play better, and he can be more of a credit to his community and his government because he is happy.”

So yes, Ed Wood isn’t someone with a cinematic eye. But he put himself — all of himself — on the screen. That’s worthy of celebration.

The inclusion of Bela Lugosi is as well. That’s what takes this movie from message movie to true oddity, as Bela plays The Scientist, a character unconnected to any narrative that begins the film and is not even the narrator, much like how Encounter with the Unknown decides to have a second uncredited voice take the role because just having Rod Serling is not enough.

“Beware. Beware. Beware of the big, green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys, puppy dog tails and big, fat snails. Beware. Take care. Beware.

Wood would bring back Glen/Glenda again in two of his novels. Killer in Drag has Glen/Glenda becoming a serial killer while Death of a Transvestite has Glen/Glenda being executed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story, directed by Eugène Lourié and with animation by Ray Harryhausen, this is a very Godzilla-style movie — actually, it’;s the other way around as Godzilla came out a year later — as a giant dinosaur known as the Rhedosaurus in unfrozen by an atomic bomb test. What really inspired this was the successful 1952 re-release of King Kong.

As Operation Experiment — these dumb scientists — blows up a big part of the Arctic, physicist Thomas Nesbitt (Paul Christian) states, “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell.” Time doesn’t take all that long, as there’s soon as the dinosaur shows up. In the story, it was a brontosaurus, but not it’s a four-legged tyrannosaurus, which never existed except as a stop motion monster. Everyone thinks Nesbitt has lost his marbles when he says he saw the dinosaur, but soon its making its way through America, destroying everything.

Soon, there are 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, damage estimates $300 million as the Rhedosaurus makes its way to Coney Island, before Colonel Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey) shoots it in the throat with a bazooka. The blood from it causes a virus that causes even more people to die and the beast goes into the water, only to reemerge in the amusement park, where Lee Van Cleef of all people shows up and has a radiation gun that he uses to shoot the dinosaur in its neck wound. As all military operations usually end, the entire Coney Island park burns to the ground.

There are some famous people in here, if just their voices. Beyond James Best as a radar man, the tones of Bill Woodson (who did The Odd Couple credits) and Merv Griffith are in this. As for the skeleton that is used, that wasn’t made for this. It was from RKO’s prop department and first showed up in Bringing Up Baby. As for the Rhedosaurus, he’s the dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

One of the most successful movies of 1953, this would lead the way for every kaiju that would come in its wake. It was released in Japan by Daiei, who would soon have their own giant monster with Gamera.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Maze was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 30, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 10, 1973 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, January 24, 1976 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, April 29, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

William Cameron Menzies invented the term production designer.

Let that sink in.

He directed Chandu the Magician, Things to Come and Invaders from Mars, but he may be better known for his art direction on movies like Gone With the Wind, Our Town, For Whom the Bell Tolls and so many more movies. He was also a pioneer of adding color to film.

In The Maze, written by Daniel Ullman and based on the book by Maurice Sandoz (illustrated by Salvador Dali!), Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson) breaks off his engagement to Kitty (Veronica Hurst) after his uncle dies. He moves back to Scotland where he inherits a huge house and servants. Yet Kitty won’t accept that he broke off their upcoming marriage and travels there with Aunt Edith  (Katherine Emery).

Yet the Richard she finds is much older and acts differently. What has happened?

This movie has one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a hedge maze that has a frog god inside it, who is really the actual master of the castle, Sir Roger MacTeam, and who gets so upset that it climbs up into the castle and hops out a window to its death. In 3D!

Leonard Maltin called it “ludicrous (and unsatisfying)!” What does he know? Who did he ever fistfight and defeat?

EDITOR’S NOTE: House of Wax was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 2, 1976 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 11, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. and September 30, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

A remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum, this was the first major studio 3D movie and really may be the best 3D film ever made. It was re-released in 1971 and in the early 80s, each time that 3D was revived.

Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price) is the best wax sculptor in the world, but his business partner Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts) wants him to make a grislier museum to draw in the crowds. He gets sick of waiting to make money, so he tries to burn the whole thing down, trapping Jarrod in the blaze.

Months later, Burke is rich from the insurance money and out on the town with his girlfriend Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones, years before was Morticia Addams) when he runs into a cloaked man who hangs him, then comes back a few nights later to kill Cathy. He runs into her friend Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) and escapes.

Jarrod returns, now trapped in a wheelchair with his hands destroyed. He starts his wax museum again with the sculpting by his assistants Leon Averill (Nedrick Young) and Igor (Charles Buchinsky, not yet Charles Bronson).

As movie coincidences happen — Sue’s boyfriend Scott Andrews (Paul Picerni) is also a sculptor and starts to work in the museum, Sue gets a job modeling even though she thinks the Marie Antoinette statue is her friend Cathy and police officer Sergeant Jim Shane (Dabs Greer) recognizes Averill as a criminal — this is also the movie that inspired so many other wax museum movies, as all of the sculptures are the bodies of dead people.

Director Andre de Toth was blind in one eye, having lost his eye when he was young. This meant that he couldn’t see in 3D, which may be why this is one of the better 3D films, as it’s more about the story and less about the things coming at you. There is one amazing effect, when a shadow seems to run into the screen and another where a paddle ball comes at you, but at this movie’s heart, it’s not a gimmick-filled film.

This had a big premiere, with Eddie Cantor, Rock Hudson, Judy Garland, Shelley Winters, Broderick Crawford, Gracie Allen,  and Ginger Rogers in attendance, as well as Bela Lugosi with an ape on a leash, played by Steve Calvert, who appeared with him in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.

One of the biggest movies of 1953, this took Vincent Price from being a supporting actor into a lead villain, changing his career. He’s incredible in this, making every moment count. He attended several showings of this movie and said the best time was in New York City, sitting behind two teenagers. As the lights came up, he took of his glasses and said, “Did you like it?” He said, “They went right into orbit!” His makeup was so grisly that it got him banned from eating lunch at the studio commissary, but it was all worth it.

In the 1960s, when horror was a big deal on TV, Warner Brothers wanted to make a House of Wax series.  tried to create a “House of Wax” television series. Cesare Danova, Wilfred Hyde White and Jose Rene Ruiz played the employees of the wax museum who would solve mysteries, using the sets from the movie. It was too intense for hoe viewers so it was released as Chamber of Horrors along with gimmicks like the horror horn and fear flasher.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Of all the weird releases of 21st Century, how and why did they re-release Aida?

Renata Tebaldi and Gina Lollobrigida were originally cast to play Aida. Some say that Gina turned this down because she didn’t want to be dubbed by Renata Tebaldi, who sings all of the opera in this. Loren took the part, her first starring role, because “I couldn’t afford to be so proud.”

Directed and written by Clemente Fracassi, this is the opera Aida by Giuseppe Verdi. This takes some of the action and scope of peplum and the class of opera, which were being filmed in Italy at this time.

Aida was once an Ethiopian princes but is now a slave. Despite the war against her country, she has fallen for one of the enemy Radames (Luciano Della Marra with the singing voice of Giuseppe Campora), who is also in love with Princess Amneris (Lois Maxwell — Moneypenny? — with the voice of Ebe Stegnani).

The odd thing today is that Loren is in blackface. It looks quite odd not just because of how much the world has changed but for how badly it is applied.

21st Century re-released this in 1982.

You can watch this on YouTube.