The first film produced by Roger Corman, directed by Wyott Ordung and written by Bill Danch, making it a notable entry in cult cinema history. It was like remade as Sharktopus. Corman is all about being green.

Julie Blair (Anne Kimbell), an American artist on vacation in Mexico, meets marine biologist Steve Dunning (Stuart Wade), who dismisses the sea monster until she provides a tissue sample from an oceanic amoeba, prompting him to attack it in his submarine. 

In fact, that sub was a real one and used for free. That’s why the credit Submarine built by Aerojet General shows up.

There’s a moment in this where the scientists talk about pterodactylus, and Steve says he found an actual egg at one point. This is glossed over, and you may react as I did: Why are we here looking for an amoeba when there are actual dinosaurs alive and in the world?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Target Earth was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 29 and Saturday, August 8, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Saturday, September 14, 1968 at 11:20 p.m.

An army of alien soldiers has landed on Earth, and a small group of humans, including Nora King (Kathleen Crowley), who just attempted suicide, is all that’s left in a city. She trips over a dead body and meets Frank Brooks (Richard Denning), a man who has just survived a robbery. They join up with two partiers, Jim Wilson (Richard Reeves) and Vicki Harris (Virginia Grey), as well as Charles Otis (Mort Marshall), who tells them that all power has been stopped, and even cars won’t stop. Charles freaks out after learning of the aliens and runs into the street, getting blasted by some kind of death ray.

Just when it seems like all hope is lost, a twist in the plot unfolds. The human race, it turns out, is its own worst enemy. A killer named Davis, played by Robert Roark, whose dentist father was a producer on this, ends up murdering Vicky before Jim takes him down. As the aliens launch their final attack, a Shaun of the Dead-style moment occurs. The army arrives at the last minute with a sonic weapon. American firepower to the rescue.

A one-week wonder shot with no permits on the streets of Los Angeles in the early morning, this was based on “Deadly City” by Paul W. Fairman. We hear about a robot army but only see one, which was played by bartender Steve Calvert, the gorilla from Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Bride of the Gorilla. 

Director Sherman A. Rose was mainly an editor. The film was written by William Raynor (whose career stretches back to the 1950s, from Snow Dog to Dukes of Hazzard), and by American-International Pictures’ James H. Nicholson and Wyott Ordung, who also wrote Robot Monster. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gorilla at Large was on Chiller Theater on Friday, July 6, 1982 at 8:00 p.m. and Saturday, August 28, 1982 at 2:00 a.m. in 3D.

Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr, Lee Marvin and Warren Stevens. What a cast! Throw in George Barrows as Goliath, the titular gorilla and man, we have a movie. Wait — it’s in 3D? How much do you want to give us, Panoramic Productions?

The carnival has come to town and its big selling point is watching the giant gorilla Goliath get cock teased by Laverne, a trapeze artist (Bancroft). Yet the owner, Cyrus Miller (Burr) thinks the act is growing old. So carnival barker Joey (Cameron Mitchell) puts on a gorilla costume and they change it up, with a new ending where the beast really does get the girl. This upsets Goliath’s trainer Kovacs (Peter Whitney) and Joey’s fiance Audrey (Charlotte Austin), who doesn’t want him near another woman.

Of course, murders ensue, a hall of mirrors and a rollercoaster make for amazing set pieces and the ending is a genuine surprise. When this aired on TV in the 80s, the giveaway glasses smelled like bananas, which is what I want all movies to have the whiff of.

Made at the Lake Como Family Nudist Resort in Lutz, Florida, this is all about J. Randolph Latimore (R. G. Armstrong), his daughter-in-law Susan (Jamie O’Hara) and his granddaughter (Karen Sue Trent) coming to terms with the death of his son and her falling in love with Johnny Patterson (Mickey Knox) as well as the elder man coming to grips with the growing need for people to be nude in public.

While this film seems silly today, it was part of a court case, Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents. The New York State Court of Appeals ruled that onscreen nudity was not obscene and this movie is why others can depict nakedness on screen. Everyone in this is a nudist by the end. In movies like this, if you had a nude woman appear at a nudist camp, it was legal. Anywhere else she was naked, it wasn’t. That’s why there were so many of these films.

Director and co-writer Max Nosseck always seemed to make exploitation in the U.S. like Dillinger — starring Lawrence Tierney and written by William Castle and Philip Yordan — as well as Girls Under 21. Then again, he also made The Return of Rin Tin Tin.

Nudist camp movies may seem goofy and perhaps even boring today. When this debuted in Tampa, a 20 year old woman wasn’t allowed in to see it, as she was too young. She was in the movie, so she was old enough to be nude at a camp.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive.

Also known as Hidden Face, this Ed Wood movie is about Don Gregor (Clancy Malone, director Ed Wood’s grocery delivery person), the rich son of plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson). Instead of following his father into medicine, he’s a henchman of gangster Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) and constantly getting into trouble with the law. A job gone wrong ends with them killing an old woman and Don telling his father that he wants to turn himself in to the police. Vic doesn’t allow that to happen, killing him and forcing Dr. Gregor to perform plastic surgery so that he can stay ahead of the police.

I’ve made this sound like a normal movie but no, it’s always night no matter what and the soundtrack from Mesa of Lost Women plays constantly over everything, never stopping. You may think that Rawlinson’s part should be played by Bela Lugosi. In a similar tragedy to that actor, Rawlinson died the day after filming was done. You may notice he isn’t breathing well. He had terminal lung cancer.

The nightclub scene is unique in every print. Wood had intended it to be a striptease scene, but the producers replaced it with a performance by minstrel act Cotton Watts, one of the last performers in the genre. This is taken from another movie, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones.

This is also the first movie for Steve Reeves and other than Athena, the only film in which his real voice is heard.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Killers from Space was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, December 15, 1963 at 11:10 p.m. It aired six more times on June 5, 1965; November 27, 1965; February 11, 1967; April 12, 1969; May 2, 1970 and July 3, 1971.

W. Lee Wilder and Planet Teleplays were just cranking out science fiction movies in the 50s and we’re all the better for it today.

Dr. Douglas Martin (Peter Graves) is a scientist studying nuclear blasts at Soledad Flats. As he flies over the area, his plane crashes and he wakes up healed yet with a large scar on his chest. He starts acting so weird that the FBI gets called in. Once he’s given truth serum, he lets it be known that he’s being controlled by aliens from Astron Delta under the command of The Tala.

These aliens have some wild plans that involve mutant lizards and bugs that will wipe out the people of Earth. Using a slide rule, Martin figures out that if he can shut down Soledad Flats for ten seconds, he’ll overload the alien base and kill all of them. You know how good U.S. military men are at that and yes, he blows them up real good.

UFO skeptic Dr. Aaron Sakulich thinks that many alien abduction stories contain the same elements, such as medical testing, strange scars, memory being erased, aliens with giant eyes and the feeling of being kind controlled. He feels that the initial articles about UFOs and abductions were influenced by this movie and that they entered the collective unconsciousness. Fiction influencing reality or the subconscious.

As for those big eyes, they’re egg cartons.

In 2002, this movie was redubbed by director Doug Miles and writer Tex Hauser as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The plot of that movie is about alien invaders that have a machine that can turn people gay and Operation Manhole, a government project that will lure gay people to one location and drop a bomb on them. The tagline: “They came from outer space… and they’re fabulous!”

You can watch the original movie on Tubi.