EDITOR’S NOTE: The Snow Creature was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 22, 1963 at 11:10 p.m. It also aired on June 12, 1965; February 11, 1967 and April 19, 1969.

Dr. Frank Parrish (Paul Langton) is collecting botanical samples in the Himalayas when the wife of his guide Subra (Teru Shimada) is kidnapped. The guide takes over and forces the entire group to find his wife who he claims has been taken by a Yeti. Parrish and photographer Peter Wells (Leslie Denison) plan on working together to stop Subra but they soon learn that the creature is real.

By the end of the story, Parrish and Wells have succeeded in bringing the Yeti back to what we call civilization, only for it to escape into the sewers and get killed by one of the men hunting it. Way to go, humans.

The Yeti is played by Lock Martin, who also played a Martian in the original Invaders from Mars and Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Director W. Lee Wilder is the brother of Billy and also made The Omegans, Phantom from Space and Killers from Space. His son Myles wrote the story.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The world of strange film is, well, strange.

Just as Mexican director Benito Alazraki remade Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein for his own country as Frankenstein el Vampiro y Compañía, Isa Karamah made it for Egyptian audiences as Haram alek, which was also released as Pitié! (Pity!) in France, Ismail Yassin Meets Frankenstein in the UK, Ismail and Abdel Meet Frankenstein and Have Mercy in the U.S. and Shame on You in the rest of the world.

It’s the same kind of cross-cultural remixing that happened when you look at El Planeta De Las Mujeres Invasoras from Mexico, the Turkish Uçan Daireler Istanbul and another film by the comedy duo, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.

Were Bud and Lou so influential? Were they just playing with easily remade archetypes like comedic men meeting the once frightening Universal monsters and aliens? Is it the collective unconsciousness at work?

The difference is that both Ismail Yassin and Abdel Fattah El Kasri can’t play a straight man — in the comedic sense — to save both their lives. So they both end up playing Lou Costello when this remake needs a Bud Abbott.

Yet the monsters are all translated to be Egyptian in nature, with Professor Assem stepping in for Dracula as some kind of never dying ancient Egyptian who can turn into a bat and wants the secret in a box, which is Frankenstein’s Monster by way of a mummy. But they’re not really twins for who they should be, making this anything but a true ripoff.

As for Dr. Morad, the werewolf, he has his curse because he planned on telling the truth about the professor, so he’s just as heroic — more so, to be truthful — than our bumbling antique store employee leads.

The end, instead of Vincent Price as the Invisible Man, has an Angel of Death show up to frighten our heroes.

It’s not an essential watch, but it’s certainly an interesting one.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We covered Pin-Down Girl under its other title, Racket Girls, earlier this year. Thanks to this Kino Lorber re-release of Something Weird’s The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture imprint, we’re watching it again.

Girl Gang is really about Joe (Timothy Farrell), who leads the titular group of young ladies. He hooks them on drugs, then gets willing participants in the crimes of robbery and prostitution. Farrell would play pretty much the same role, under the same name, in 1957’s Gun Girls. His main girl June is played by Joanne Arnold, who was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1954.

This is the kind of movie I find myself loving when I’m not watching Italian splatter or Mexican lucha movies: too old to be teenagers getting in trouble and dragging down everyone else with them.

Pin-Down Girl also has Farrell, this time as Umberto Scalli, a women’s wrestling manager who uses the world of pro wrestling to hide all of the racketeering, bookmaking and prostitution he has his dirty little fingers wrapped up in. Oh yeah — he also owes the mob enough money for them to want him dead.

Peaches Page, Clara Mortensen and Rita Martinez were all real wrestlers in a movie that threatened to show the real side of the business.

Farrell had already played Scalli in The Devil’s Sleep and despite getting killed by organized crime at the close of this film, he would come back for Dance Hall Racket, which has Lenny Bruce and his wife Honey Harlow. Now that I think of it, Scalli dies in every movie he shows up in. Is he an eternal man forced to be killed again and again for the sins of vice and wrestling women?

The man playing these roles was no saint either. At the same time that he was making these movies, the actor worked as a bailiff for the Los Angeles Marshal’s Department. He was embarrassed at work when he — and the entire cast — of Paris After Midnight was arrested by the Los Angeles Vice Squad as they made the movie. Things went pretty well after that with Farrell being appointed the County Marshal in 1971. But in 1975, he was fired after his conviction on felony charges for illegal use of deputy marshals in political activities. He would have gone to jail for six months, but just got probation because he was in bad health. He spent the rest of his life managing properties and a lumber mill when he wasn’t saving animals with his wife, so perhaps he learned his lesson.

Both of these movies came to be because of producer George Weiss, who is perhaps best known for getting Glen or Glenda? out there, as well as padding the film with nonsensical sequences of BDSM and dancing women. He’s also the man responsible for producing Olga’s House of Shame, White Slaves of Chinatown, Olga’s Girls, Mme. Olga’s Massage Parlor and Olga’s Dance Hall Girls, a series of roughie films that scandalized the screens of their era, as well as providing insidious influence for the Findlays and John Waters.

I truly appreciate that these films are being released on blu ray and preserved for generations of weirdos like me who may come in the future.

The Kino Lorber blu ray re-release of these films has Girl Gang and Pin-Down girl remastered in 2K from the original and re-release 35mm negative. The former has commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas while the latter has a commentary track by Eric Schaefer, author of Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959.

In 1952, José G. Cruz created a comic book that turned Santo into a Mexican hero. This series ran for 35 years and was the basis for the Santo films, yet before that, director Rene Cardona wanted to make this film. Santo decided to not be in this, as he thought it would fail.

Who can say if he was wrong or right? All we do know is that within a few years, Santo would be a movie star, so maybe he just knew how to pick the right scripts.

This film is filled with villains. There’s Lobo Negro and his street gang, there’s a Silver Mask that gives the orders and another villain in a hood named El Tigre that gives even more orders, but he’s the one to listen to because he’s figured out how to throw lightning and change the weather. You know, if you could do this, wouldn’t you want to do it all the time? Well, El Tigre is more into being a traditional gangster, so perhaps he feels like having all these mereological powers are kinda like cheating.

Our hero is El Médico Asesino and his sidekick Freckles. One wonders how is a man named Killer Doctor the good guy, but these questions are best left unasked.

This isn’t the first lucha movie. That would be Huracán Ramírez, a movie in which actor David Silva played the masked wrestler. Eduardo Bonada wrestled as Huracán Ramírez until he was replaced by Daniel García, who kept the character until he retired; he’s in the movies El misterio de Huracán Ramírez, El Hijo de Huracán Ramírez, La Venganza de Huracán Ramírez*. If you ever hear of a wrestler doing a move called a huracánrana, it came from García as Huracán Ramírez. He also played Santo in La Leyenda. Huracán Ramírez regularly teamed with Santo in the ring — but not in the movies — often forming a trio with Rayo de Jalisco.

During a match between this tecnico team and El Signo, El Texano and Negro Navarro — who still wrestles to this day as a maestro-style luchador** — Santo had a heart attack and was saved by Huracán Ramírez. Lifelong friends, he would be a pallbearer for Santo when he was buried in his silver mask. As for El Signo, El Texano and Negro Navarro, the infamy they received from this match led to them becoming known as Los Misioneros de la Muerte (The Missionaries of Death) and their trios-style would make trios matches the most common match form in Mexico.

As for Médico, he would go on to appear in El Luchador Fenómeno and La Bestia Magnifica before becoming one of the most famous Mexican wrestlers of his era. He was the first luchador to have a female second — La Enfermera del Médico Asesino — and teamed with Santo and Enfermero as Ola Blanca (White Wave). He also feuded in Texas with Pepper Gomez, Duke Keomuka and Johnny Valentine as a babyface using the name El Medico. He even had four NWA title matches against Lou Thesz at this time, a major deal in that era.

Sadly, Médico would be dead from advanced cancer just a few years later. There’s an urban legend that his family kept the cancer a secret from him, but for a guy who weighed 275 pounds in his prime to die at around 110 pounds, he had to know something was wrong. Luckily, he had insurance and saved his money, so his family didn’t suffer monetarily. Ironically, his wife worked as a nurse after his death.

His death was enough to reduce his opponents — and partners, El Enfermero famously broke down during a match and just sat on the floor of Arena Coliseo — to tears. He may not be known in the U.S. like Santo or Mil Mascaras, but he was an incredibly important figure in lucha libre history.

Anyways — this film is a footnote in Mexican wrestling movie history, but an important one.

*He is not playing the character in the boxing movies Huracán Ramírez y la Monjita Negra and De Sangre Chicana.

**This ground wrestling escape style is closer to the British World of Sport style than modern lucha, as it has near dance-like motions. It’s the best thing ever. Another example of a star that does this style is El Solar. You can also catch Navarro’s son’s as Los Traumas.

Note: Sources used include Luchawiki and the November 16, 2020 issue of the Wrestling Observer, in which Médico Asesino was inducted into the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame.

It’s difficult to remember, but the cuddly Godzilla that emerged in the 70’s as monster kids watched the films repeatedly on TV was anything but when he first emerged from the waves and brought the same destruction to Japan that it had endured just one decade before.

Director Ishirō Honda completely shot Tokyo rampage with the same terror that came from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying “If Godzilla had been a dinosaur or some other animal, he would have been killed by just one cannonball. But if he were equal to an atomic bomb, we wouldn’t know what to do. So, I took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla.”

It’s also a cultural metaphor for how Godzilla is the victim of the United States — Japan as a whole felt the same way — with the bomb tests that woke him sending the giant dinosaur searching for something and finding only the need to destroy everything. It is filled with bleak and brutal images from a country that was the only one in the world that had to deal with having nuclear hell unleashed upon it.

Unlike every movie that ripped off this film and gave birth to the kaiju film, this is not just men in suits ripping up model buildings. This is a film that uses a gigantic beast as a metaphor for trying to start again, for being bombed into oblivion, for dealing with fear and so much more. It’s an astounding piece of art that couldn’t play that way in our country, leading to Godzilla, King of the Monsters! 

Director Ishirō Honda — who worked shirtless in blazing heat to make several scenes in this movie come to life, leading to permanent scars on his back from sunburns — felt that no one would respect a science fiction movie, so this needed to be presented as a documentary and the titular creature would only be seen in shadow and never in full frame until late in the film.

Dr. Kyohei Yamane wants to save Godzilla, as he’s waited his entire life to see a real dinosaur or ancient sea creature or whatever this creature, awakened by nuclear bomb testing, really is. Yet all anyone can do is send more bombs, more bullets and more electronic fences after the creature who shrugs it all off. The hospitals are overflowing with the dead and dying, reminding one of the radiation-scarred cities at the end of World War II.

Only Dr. Daisuke Serizawa and his horrifying Oxygen Destroyer — which disintegrates oxygen atoms and causes living things to rot — can really stop Godzilla, but Serizawa realizes that if he uses this weapon, it won’t be the last time that it is unleashed. So he reacts exactly like a man who embraces Japanese honor would, even in the face of death. He burns his notes and commits to dying as he faces the monster one-on-one, knowing that all of his work will never fall into the wrong hands.

Many thought that this film would flop and it opened to mixed reviews. Critics believed that the movie exploited the nuclear terror Japan had survived as well as the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident, in which a Japanese fishing boat had been caught in a U.S. nuclear test. It wasn’t until American reviews pointed the art in using monsters to deal with real-life horror that the film was considered a success.

As for that American movie, Honda wasn’t even aware that it had been re-edited until it played Japan as Monster King Godzilla in 1957. We’ll get to that on our site soon enough, but it’s odd that the kind American reviews that prompted critical reevaluations in Japan were watching a movie that had been sanitized of much of the real-world elements, making it more of a monster movie than a parable.

Godzilla is an important film, not just because thirty films plus and a cultural force emerged from it. It demands to be watched and considered, particularly in a world where it seems like we’ve learned none of its lessons.

Edward J. and Harry Lee Danziger may have come from America, but their films were all over UK screens through the 50’s and 60’s. Devil Girl from Mars is a great example of the kind of movies they made money with.

Patricia Laffan was Empress Poppaea in Quo Vadis — with costumes by Herschel McCoy, hairstyles by Sydney Guilaroff and jewelry by Joseff of Hollywood — before this movie and an international fashion impresario after this. She owns every single moment of screen time as Nyah, the title character.

Accompanied by one of the goofier robots ever — Chani is its name — she also has a raygun that she uses to kill anyone that gets in her way, seeking men to come back to help repopulate her planet, which has been dying off ever since a devastating battle between the sexes that one would assume that the women have won.

She can’t find a single man willing to go back to Mars with her. This is why this movie is science fiction, because Nyah — and Laffan herself — is absolutely stunning.

Maybe it’s because she’s landed right in the middle of a soap opera, because she’s outside a bar where a fashion model (Hazel Court, Dr. Blood’s Coffin) is running away from the runways of New York City and a relationship with a married man. And at the very same place, a convict who accidentally killed his wife has come to reunite with the barmaid (Adrienne Corri, Mrs. Alexander from A Clockwork Orange) who he really loves.

What’s even more interesting is that while The Day the Earth Stood Still presents Klaatu as Jesus, this movie pretty much presents Nyah as an evil Virgin Mary. Or seeing as how Laffan had dark reddish eyes and green eyes, perhaps we can see her as the Scarlet Woman, come to Earth to lead us to the End Times.

One final irony: Laffan was a lesbian and the last girlfriend of divorce lawyer Frances Blacket Gill, the first female lawyer in the UK. So how strange is it that she’s here on Earth ready to kill men to get them to copulate with her?