VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the May 9, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

The greatest birthday of my life was when I turned seven in 1979. Sure, I had a roller skating party, but getting a Rodan Shogun Warriors figure that had a wingspan longer than my height was literally my greatest dream come true.

Ken Kuronuma, who wrote the original story for this film, based it on Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a pilot for the Kentucky Air National Guard, who died in a crash while allegedly pursuing a UFO.

This was the most popular of Toho’s movies in the United States for some time. It had a major ad campaign and boasted actors like Keye Luke, George Takei and Paul Frees. Maybe American audiences liked giant birds better than lizards. Or maybe it was because it was shot in color.

Giant bugs known as meganuron have been killing miners in a small town while unidentified flying objects continually attack. It turns out that there are two pteranodons that have been awakened by nuclear bomb tests. The flaps of their wings unleash sonic waves that take out entire cities, but they can’t survive being burned in a volcano.

Once I see this movie as an adult, the end, where they try to escape that fiery doom, makes me tear up. I hate that humanity causes these creatures to be reborn and then spends the entire movie trying to destroy them.

Rodan would, of course, be back. As for seven-year-old me, Rodan destroyed many a city and fought many a robot. I was the kind of kid that would delight in telling you that Rodan’s original Japanese name Radon is derived from Puteranodon, the Japanese word for Pteranodon. There was a soap with that name in the U.S., so the name was changed.

Director Ishiro Honda should be recognized in the same class as so many great filmmakers, but he may never be, as he mainly worked in genre cinema. He worked on nearly every Godzilla movie, as well as The Mysterians, Matango, Frankenstein vs. Baragon, The War of the Gargantuas, King Kong Escapes and shot second unit on Ran.

Child me was not incorrect. Rodan is the kind of movie that you can watch again and again.

A Latin teacher named Valentín Mosquera (José María Seoane) wanders through the night, stalking the  streets of Madrid and trying to come to terms with the fact that his son Mario will be executed at dawn.  This is an indictment of the death penalty as well as the debut of director Amando de Ossorio, this was filmed in secret and never released to theaters. This was seven years before Luis García Berlanga’s El Verdugo caused a major controversy at the Venice Mostra Film Festival.

Based on a play by Horacio Ruiz de la Fuente, this first played at the Belgian Experimental Film Festival and Ossorio said of it, “It was banned, they didn’t give us permission to shoot it. But we stubbornly did it.” It was made because he convinced law student Francisco Javier Pérez de Rada y Díaz Rubín, son of the Marquises of Zabalegui, to finance the filming.

It’s unlike anything else in his filmography, as after this he soon moved from human terror to the supernatural.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The artwork in this film was destroyed in a ritual.

This is the only record that they were ever here.

Harrington said this of the film’s subject, Marjorie Cameron: “Before I made the film I’d heard from Renate that Cameron had spent some time in the desert trying, through magical means, to conceive a child by the spirit of Jack Parsons without success.  Cameron never spoke of Jack directly, but I do remember feeling sometimes when I talked to her, of her going off into a realm that I didn’t understand at all. It was sort of an apocalyptic thing and it’s there in her poetry.”

So who was Cameron?

An artist. A poet. A muse. A cartographer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. A member of the propaganda machine. An occultist. An actress. Perhaps the Whore of Babylon.

And the love of Jack Parson’s life.

Parsons, the man who helped invent the rockets that got us to the moon, the man whose lodge housed numerous icons of science fiction, a devotee of Thelma and Crowley and the man who had just finished a series of Enochian rites with L. Ron Hubbard to invoke his elemental lover after Hubbard stole his wife.

When Cameron showed up at his home, red hair burning and blue eyes blazing, they ended up having sex for two weeks straight.

After Parson’s death, she started rituals to create a moonchild, which often involved slashing her wrists. As her mental state worsened — or improved, look I have no idea and my belief system is pretty wild myself — she came to understand his purpose in carrying out the Babalon Working that invoked her. On a diet of marijuana, peyote, and magic mushrooms, she proclaimed all the many ways that she saw the world would be destroyed.

Somehow, in a life beset by mental demons and intense drama, Cameron produced art. A woman making art in the male-dominated world of the 50s. She dated outside her race, which was illegal at the time, but she also ran a sex cult, so I don’t think the law mattered, outside of love is the law, love under will.

I’ve been fascinated by her for years and will be for the rest of my life. The Wormwood Star is one of the few ways to see her work and her up close. She’s absolutely terrifying in this film and I can’t even imagine what she was like in person. Similarly, she’s a force of absolute magic in Harrington’s Night Tide.

Life is filled with magic. Find it. Live it. Let it drive you wild, let is make you insane.

As another source of obsession, James Shelby Downard wrote, “Never allow anyone the luxury of assuming that because the dead and deadening scenery of the American city-of-dreadful-night is so utterly devoid of mystery, so thoroughly flat-footed, sterile and infantile, so burdened with the illusory gloss of “baseball-hot dogs-apple-pie-and-Chevrolet” that it is somehow outside the psycho-sexual domain. The eternal pagan psychodrama is escalated under these “modern” conditions precisely because sorcery is not what 20th century man can accept as real.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as The Flesh Merchant,Sex Club andDial 5683 for Love, this W. Merle Connell-directed (Untamed Women, Test Tube Babies) frolic tells the sordid tale of Nancy Sheridan, a twenty-something fresh off the bus looking for her sister in Hollywood. Unlike something like The Seventh Victim, where one finds Satan, instead here one finds sin.

Sure, she finds her sister Paula and falls for the high end opulence she has in her Hollywood apartment, what with all the fancy furniture and fur coats. Older sister tells her to scram, but how do you send a girl back to the farm when she’s seen La-La Land?

Paula’s in-road starts at the art institute, where she poses nude, and let me tell you, I went to an Art Institute and none of our models looked like Joy Reynolds does in this movie.

Let me ask you — inspired by the review that the much more intelligent than me G.G. Graham wrote — what’s the worse prison? Selling your body willingly and making the money that your gifts have earned you from a variety of gentlemen or giving it all away for the slavery that lies behind a white picket fence? Is Nancy right to fall in love with the night? Does Paula wish she hadn’t made the same mistakes? Are we to pull morals out of a movie that has a normal cut and one with smoker inserts?

In IMDB user Schwenkstar’s Hollywood Giallo (+ Its Others) list, they state that this film pulls “the same trick Argento uses frequently in his films: a character sees/hears something but misinterprets it, misleading the character as well as the audience.”

Based on Philip MacDonald’s book Warrant for X, this film also takes cues from Rear Window, placing a differently abled person against criminals who come after them in the dark. This time, the hero is Philip Hannon (Van Johnson), a blind playwright who believes that the partial conversation he’s heard is related to a possible kidnapping that hasn’t even happened yet.

With the police disbelieving him, he is thrust into the role of the giallo hero: a stranger in a strange land and one even stranger because he only knows the steps from building to building and will never see this new skyline, a place that he’s escaped to in avoidance of his depression over his loss of sight. Those simmering feelings of a bleak future have led him to leave Jean (Vera Miles, who would soon appear in another essential Giallo inspiring film, Psycho) behind in America, but she’s come to Englan,d which puts him even more off his hermetic path.

Director Henry Hathaway is probably best known for True Grit and The Sons of Katie Elder, but he put together a fun mystery here, a film that exists before the krimi and giallo yet has many of the things we’d later see in much more lurid tales.