EDITOR’S NOTE: The Amazing Colossal Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 5, 1964 at 11:15 p.m. and December 10, 1966 and the sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, was on Saturday, October 17, 1964 at 1 a.m. and also was on December 4, 1965 and September 2, 1967. The Cyclops was on the October 10, 1964 episode.

The Amazing Colossal Man: Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) has been given orders to keep his men safe from a nuclear blast, but when a civilian glider crashes close to the area, he races out to save the day. He ends up getting blown up real good — one would argue exactly like Dr. Bruce Banner five years later — and has third-degree burns all over his body. Then, the bad news. The plutonium blast has caused his old cells to stop dying while the new ones multiply at an accelerated rate. That means that he’s growing ten feet a day and there’s no sign of it stopping.

Before long, his heart and brain can no longer support him and he’s running wild, decimating the olf Vegas strip and throwing giant syringes at scientists before taking a tumble off the Hoover Dam directly into next year’s War of the Colossal Beast.

Jim Nicholson of American International Pictures made this movie because The Incredible Shrinking Man was a success and he had the rights to Homer Eon Flint’s The Nth Man, which is about a man ten miles tall. Charles B. Griffith was hired for the script ad Roger Corman was brought on board to direct but soon dropped out. You know, if you’re going to make a movie with way too big or way too small people, get the man whose very name says BIG: Bert I. Gordon.

You can watch this on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZoAZ8Qshuk

War of the Colossal Beast: A spiritual sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man — with a different cast — this movie starts with Joyce Manning believing that her gigantic brother Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning survived his fall from Hoover Dam in the last movie.

He does live, except that his face is disfigured and he’s lost his mind as it tries to deal with the traumatic fall that he took. This facial damage was because there was a new star — and also a stagehand on the film — Dean Parkin and this would disguise the fact that they changed up who would play the lead. Stranger still, the dream sequence in the movie shows original actor Glenn Lanagan.

War of the Colossal Beast was produced, directed and written by Bert I. Gordon — the king of these kinds of movies — and co-produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff. The last scene of the movie was shot in color and then made into black and white to match the rest of the film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Cyclops: Bert I. Gordon made three movies in two years that had a giant bald man, played by Dean Parkin, menacing tiny people. Paul Frees is the voice of this horrible titular beast. It also has the same makeup artist as War of the Colossal Beast, Jack H. Young.

Bruce Barton is missing and his girlfriend Susan Winter (Gloria Talbott, who was also in this movie’s double feature, The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll) goes to find him. Lee Brand (Tom Drake) will fly the plane, scientist Russ Bradford (James Craig) will study the area and mining expert Martin “Marty” Melville (Lon Chaney Jr.) will get drunk and mean.

They also find all of the effects you expect from a Burt I. Gordon movie, like a giant iguana, a mouse, an eagle, a huge snake, a spider and yes, the Cyclops, who is really Bruce after being around all the radiation in the area.

Made in five days and before the money from RKO was taken away, this was a rough movie to work on, helped by the very real drinking of Chaney. But hey, Bert had a great poster that said “World’s Mightiest Horror! More Monstrous Than Anything Human Eyes Have Seen! The Giant Man-Thing growing 50 Ft. high in a horrendous land where nature has gone mad!”

In Tom Weaver’s Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, it turns out that Chaney wasn’t the only one getting loaded. During one scene in the plane, Talbott said, “Both Lon and Tom were absolutely smashed. James Craig was nipping a little, too, but nothing like what was going on in the front! And in this -h-o-t, tiny mock-up I was getting blasted from the fumes! It was such close quarters and so hot that I was ingesting alcohol through my skin. I was getting absolutely stoned, and by the time we got out of there I was weaving. If you watch that scene, you’ll see that every once in a while I look a little sick – well, I was!”

EDITOR’S NOTE: I Was a Teenage Werewolf was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 21, 1964 at 1:00 a.m. 

Herman Cohen started his climb up the show business ladder from the lowest rung, working as a gofer and usher at Detroit’s Dexter Theater at the tender age of 12. By 18, he’d be the manager. His career would take him from being the sales manager for Columbia’s Detroit region to their Hollywood publicity department and finally making his own films.

His greatest success came in the 1950’s with this film — which he wrote and produced for American International — which earned $2 million dollars on a $100,000 budget (approximately $18 million on a $900,000 budget when adjusted for today’s inflation). He was also behind the films Craze, Trog and Berserk!

Back in 1957, when this film was made, the idea of a teenager becoming a monster was shocking to audiences. Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff claimed that he received plenty of guff for exploiting this idea. In fact, this is the first of many I Was a Teenage movies, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

It’s also the first role for Michael Landon, who would go on to enjoy a long and fruitful Hollywood career with three landmark series on his resume: Bonanza, Little House on the Prarie and Highway to Heaven. When I was a kid, I was often afraid of the photo of the werewolf in this movie and my mother would say, “It’s just Michael Landon. You shouldn’t be afraid.” Also, as a youngster, if I ever went to another kid’s home and they were fans of Little House on the Prarie’s adventures of the Ingalls family, I’d instantly judge them as boring and want to go home.

Here he plays Tony Rivers, a troubled teenager to say the least. Unlike most 1950’s fare that portrays its protagonist as noble, we’re shown that Tony is a rough character right from the beginning. He doesn’t just rail against authority, he hates everyone. And he’s not all that forthright about it. In a fistfight with another classmate, he goes so far as to throw dirt in the man’s face and try to kill him with a shovel instead of just using his fists. His love of violence and hatred for his fellow man stands in dramatic contrast to his pretty boy looks.

Barney Phillips, who was also Sergeant Ed Jacobs on Dragnet, plays Detective Donovan, a cop who feels bad for Tony and tries to intervene on his behalf several times. After all, Tony grew up without a mom and his dad’s probably a drunk.

Yvonne Lime, who would move on from acting to becoming a noted philanthropist with her husband, plays his girlfriend Arlene. While her parents don’t seem to enjoy the cut of Tony’d jib, she’s in pure love with him, believing in him no matter what.

That said, the real horror starts at a haunted house party. After an extended dance sequence where Vic and his girl sing along to a record — amazingly, this is announced as a big deal and I can’t imagine attending a party where the highlight is some guy playing bongos and lipsynching to a 45 — Tony flips out and nearly kills the man for surprising him from behind. I mean, everyone was pranking one another to an inordinate degree and only Tony tried to outright murder Vic. Look — I hated Vic after a minute, so I get it, Tony. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have to spend time with him on an extended basis.

Don’t believe me? Just watch these antics and tell me you don’t wish you could go full lycanthrope and strike them all down.

However, Tony’s rage ends up knocking down his girlfriend, so he volunteers to meet with hypnotist Dr. Alfred Brandon. He’s played by Whit Bissell, who would play a psychologist in not only this film, but in its follow-up, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. He also had the same occupation in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

This being the 50’s, the doctor has to be a quack. He’s really only interested in experimenting on Tony, regressing him to his most primal state.

After another party at the haunted house — this is made a major point yet we never see a single ghost — Tony drives Arlene home and Frank, one of their friends, is mauled and killed. As the cops debate the autopsy, Pepi the janitor (Vladimir Sokoloff, a Russian actor playing a Carpathian, so this isn’t whitewashing as much as its Hollywood not really even knowing at this point what ethnicity is. In fact, Sokoloff would play 35 different nationalities in his career, including people from Greece, China, Spain, Mexico and so many more) tells them all the truth: these are the marks of a werewolf!

Tony feels like there’s something wrong with himself, but the principal is so happy with his progress that she’s recommending him to State College. One would assume that the marks on his permanent record have been removed.

As he leaves her office, he notices Theresa practicing her gymnastics. This drives his teenage hormones into overdrive and he responds by going full werewolf and killing her, which is about the best translation for toxic masculinity that 1957 can muster. Just seeing the comely form of Dawn Richard (Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1957) as she stretches out is all it takes. That said — her sexuality had to be somewhat shocking for the puritanical Baby Boom era. Therefore, she had to be destroyed.

Tony’s recognized by his jacket and goes on the run. He calls Arlene for help and she can only listen, unable to reply. And a visit to Dr. Brandon only leads to the man using our protagonist and filming his transformation, at which point Tony kills everyone. The cops are forced to gun him down — silver bullets are unnecessary when you have good old fashioned American steel — and that’s all she wrote.

One of those cops — they opine that man shouldn’t mess in the affairs of God — is Guy Williams, who would soon be swashbuckling in Zorro and sailing through the galaxy in Lost In Space.

Less than four months after the release of this film, AIP would release two movies that are pretty much the same story: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula, which is even more of a remake, just with a female lead and doctor. It’s such a paint by numbers recreation that there’s even another dance number thrown in, references to Carpathia, dialogue lifted nearly line by line and an observer who knows that it’s a vampire when no one else will believe them.

I watched this movie on the very same day I rewatched An American Werewolf In London and it’s stunning to see the different ways that they interpret not only being a werewolf, but the transformation itself. Instead of the pain that 1981’s Rick Baker effects depict, all we see here is a slow dissolve of Tony getting a furry face. But it works — for so often, this was how American audiences saw werewolves.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 22, 1963 at 3:00 p.m. It also aired on July 11, 1964 and February 20, 1965.

Janet Smith (Gloria Talbott) and her fiancee George Hastings (John Agar) arrive at the English manor house that she will inherit the next day. They’re met by her guardian Dr. Lomas (Arthur Shields), housekeeper Mrs. Merchant (Martha Wentworth), groundskeeper Jacob (John Dierkes) and Maggie (Molly McCard), who is Janet’s personal maid. They’re worried that she’s getting married so quickly, as she’s inheriting a sizeable sum of money, as well as another inheritance: she’s the daughter of Dr. Jekyll who was a werewolf, which is something new on me.

That night, Lomas hypnotizes Janet. Before bed, Maggie warns her that this is the night that her father rises from the tomb. When she sleeps, she dreams that she’s killed a woman. She wakes up to blood all over herself and a werewolf in her mirror. Ah, but is she just seeing things because of Lomas? Or has she really become a lycanthrope?

Shot in a house on 6th Street in Los Angeles, near Hancock Park, you can occasionally see late 50s cars through the windows, despite this being set in the past. After playing double features with The Cyclops, this was sold to TV by Allied Artists as part of their 22-film Sci-Fi for the 60s package which includes Terror In the Haunted House, House On Haunted Hill, Not of This Earth, The Hypnotic Eye, The Brain from Planet Arous, The Atomic Submarine, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Bat, Caltiki the Immortal Monster, The Cyclops, The Cosmic Man, The Disembodied, Frankenstein 1970, World Without End, War of the Satellites, From Hell It Came, The Giant Behemoth, The Indestructable Man, Spy In the Sky and Queen of Outer Space. Obviously, Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater purchased this package of films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kronos was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, September 29, 1963 at 11:10 p.m. It also aired on April 18 and August 16, 1964; December 30, 1972; September 28, 1974 and November 1, 1975.

A glowing bit of energy is launched from a UAP from deep space. The energy lands on our planet and takes over the brain of a man somewhere in the Southwest and sends him to a research facility where scientists have been tracking the object.

It soon takes over Dr. Hubbell Eliot as astrophysicist Dr. Leslie Gaskell and Dr. Arnold Culver track the UAP. They fire three nuclear missiles at it, because that’s what humans do, and it survives the attack. They leave for Mexico, along with Gaskell’s girlfriend Vera Hunter to see Kronos, an energy accumulator that is going to take everything we have and bring it back to its planet. That’s why when the U.S. military drops an atomic bomb on it, Kronos gets even bigger.

Dr. Eliot breaks out of alien control and kills himself to keep them from learning more from him. At the last minute, Gaskell reverses the polarity and drops nuclear ions on the robot and saves the day.

Director Kurt Neumann also was the man who made She Devil, the movie that this played double features with. Kronos was written by Lawrence L. Goldman and Irving Block. Block was an effects man who also wrote the story for Forbidden Planet.

It’s also the first movie for Richard Harrison. The same man who Godfrey Ho would use in movie after movie, often the same footage, until it seems like he was in twenty or more ninja films.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Undead was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 10, 1964 at 1 a.m. It also aired on February 3, 1968; October 14, 1973; March 30, 1974; May 10, 1975; May 28, 1977 and October 23, 1982.

In the mid-1950s, reincarnation was in and The Search for Bridey Murphy was being made, so Roger Corman asked Charles Griffith to write a script, which was originally called The Trance of Diana Love, which is a great title, and was to be in all iambic pentameter.

Griffith said, “I separated all the different things with sequences with the devil, which were really elaborate, and the dialogue in the past was all in iambic pentameter. Roger got very excited by that. He handed the script around for everybody to read, but nobody understood the dialogue, so he told me to translate it into English. The script was ruined.”

I can’t even add up how many wasted hours that was.

Mel Welles, who played Smolkin, told Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Actors, Moguls and Makeup, “It was a wonderful script and it probably would have been the cult film rather than Little Shop of Horrors had it been shot that way. But either Roger or someone at American-International Pictures didn’t think it was commercially viable to do it that way and at the last minute a decision was made to rewrite the script without that.”

Quintus Ratcliff (Val DuFour) is a psychic researcher who has spent years in Tibet to learn how to mentally regress someone back into their past life. He wants to prove to an old professor that he can do this, so he hires Diana Love (Pamela Duncan) for $500 to place her into a trance for two days.

She’s soon back in the Middle Ages, trapped in the mind of her ancestor Helene, accused of witchcraft. Diana is able to inform her past self of how to escape, so she heads into the night and meets up with the real witch Livia (Allison Hayes) and even Satan himself (Richard Devon).

Using the link between Diana and Helene, Quintus comes back in time, hoping to convince Helene to avoid her death and change history.

With Billy Barty as an imp and Dick Miller as a leper, this Corman film may have been a cheap one — and one that caused him stress with the bad smelling fog and budget issues — but it’s a fun idea well told. You can’t even tell that it was shot inside a supermarket.

This movie is where The Misfits got the artwork for their album Evilive. You can learn more about the horror film influences of The Misfits here.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Unearthly was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, December 29, 1963. It was also on the show on April 30, 1966; February 24, 1973; January 26, 1974; April 17, 1976; February 18 and October 21, 1978 and August 9, 1980 when the show aired at 1 a.m.

Dr. Charles Conway (John Carradine) is experimenting with artificial glands to make people live longer, working with Lobo (Tor Johnson) and his assistant Dr. Sharon Gilchrist (Marilyn Buferd, a former Miss California). Those that get these glands think they’re getting one surgery and get shuffled off for something else.

One of those patients is Grace Thomas (Allison Hayes, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman; she died as a result of nutritional supplements, specifically a calcium supplement that had abnormal levels of lead), who is suffering from depression which means that she’s due for some surgery that will help John Carradine live eternally.

Originally called The House of Monsters, this was filmed over approximately five days and is the third movie in which Johnson played Lobo (Bride of the Monster and Night of the Ghoul would be the others).

Director Boris Petroff, using the name Brooke Peters, also directed Anatomy of a Psycho. I’ve heard that the writer of this movie, Jane Mann, was Petroff’s wife. I’ve also heard that it’s a pen name for Ed Wood.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Beginning of the End was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, December 8, 1963. It also was on the show on March 19, 1966; February 24, 1973; May 4, 1974; February 28, 1976; October 8, 1977 and January 6, 1979 when the show moved to 1 a.m.

American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres, or Am-Par, decided to create their own film studio to make low-budget movies that they could place into their theaters, signing a deal with Republic Pictures to make them. And after the success of Them!, who else but Burt I. Gordon to make more giant bug movies?

Gordon did the effects by himself in his garage, bringing the magic effect he used for King Dinosaur: grab some animals and shoot them in front of a still photo. So he grabbed 200 non-hopping, non-flying live grasshoppers in Waco, Texas and brought them to California. At that point, the agriculture department got involved and somehow, only 12 grasshoppers live after they all turned into cannibals. One would assume the dozen that are in this movie are the toughest ones of all time.

That said, the film’s title was prophetic. For some reason, the studio stopped making films. Luckily for Gordon, he landed at American-International Picture where he kept making giant movies. The Amazing Colossal Man was next.

There’s a decent cast in this, with Peter Graves* as the scientist who uses radiation to better grow crops until some crazy locusts eat it all and — you guessed it — get big as well. Peggie Castle, Miss Cheesecake of 1949, was born for films like this and Invasion U.S.A. It also seems like character actor Morris Ankrum was a lock for nearly any science fiction film of this time, as he made Rocketship X-M, Flight to Mars, Red Planet Mars, Invaders from Mars, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, From the Earth to the Moon and this movie in the ’50s.

*Whose brother James Arness was in Them!

EDITOR’S NOTE: From Hell It Came was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, October 20, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on April 11, 1964; January 16 and June 26, 1965 and July 9, 1966.

Sure, Paul Blaisdell created the effects for The She-Creature, Invasion of the Saucer Men, Not of This Earth and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but this is the only movie in which he made a tree person.

Yes, this film is about the prince of a South Seas island wrongly executed by a witch doctor who hated the fact that the prince became friends with Americans. Well, those foreigners pay him back by irradiating the island and reanimating the royal victim, who has been buried inside a tree. Now he is known as Tabonga, an angry tree stump that demands bloody retribution.

This movie is one of the many reasons why quicksand concerned me as a child, as the tree man throws his unfaithful widow into the sinking muck and then tosses the witch doctor down a hill. He can only be stopped by white men and their guns, which hasn’t really changed for so many since this was made sixty some years ago.

Written by Richard Bernstein (Terrified!) and Jack Milner, this was directed by Jack’s brother Dan, who worked as an editor on the Bozo the Clown TV show (he also made The Fighting Coward and The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues).

Look, it’s not great, but the tree man reveal is better than most entire movies. It has that going for it at least.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the Crab Monsters was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 21,  1963 at 3 p.m. It also was played on August 21, 1965 and August 31, 1968.

Directed by Roger Corman, this played double features with his film Not of This Earth.

A group of scientists and sailors land on a remote Pacific Ocean island as a search party for a previous expedition that disappeared without a trace. Just like the New X-Men and Krakoa, huh? While they’re there, the scientists plan on studying the impact of nuclear tests from the Bikini Atoll on the island’s ecosystem.

Charles B. Griffith, who wrote this, said he was kind of conned into it: “Roger came to me and said, “I want to make a picture called Attack of the Giant Crabs” and I asked, “Does it have to be atomic radiation?” He responded, “Yes.” He said it was an experiment. “I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.” His trick was saying it was an experiment, which it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to bother cutting out the other scenes, which he would do.”

Corman, ever the one to make it seem nice, said “I talked to Chuck Griffith about this. Chuck and I worked out a general storyline before he went to work on the script. I told him, “I don’t want any scene in this picture that doesn’t either end with a shock or the suspicion that a shocking event is about to take place.” And that’s how the finished script read.”

Will Dr. Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), geologist James Carson,(Richard H. Cutting) and biologists Jules Deveroux (Mel Welles), Martha Hunter (Pamela Duncan) and Dale Drewer (Richard Garland) survive? I know who doesn’t. A sailor named Tate, played by Griffith, who also directed some of the action moments.

Not only does this have giant crabs, they’re also telepathic giant crabs. Guy N. Smith must have seen this movie before he wrote Night of the Crabs, Killer Crabs, The Origin of the Crabs, Crabs on the Rampage, Crabs’ Moon, Crabs: The Human Sacrifice, Crabs’ Fury, Crabs’ Armada, Crabs: Unleashed, Killer Crabs: The Return, Crabs Omnibus and The Charnel Caves: A Crabs Novel.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Brain from Planet Arous was the first movie to ever be on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 14, 1963 at 3 PM. It also aired on the first Chilly Billy Halloween show on October 31, 1964 and on September 24, 1966.

Directed Nathan Juran was the brother of Joseph M. Juran, a man who introduced Japanese and American companies to improve their work and also created the Juran trilogy, an approach to cross-functional management that is made up of three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement. His theory, in short, is that without change, there will be constant waste; during change there will be increased costs, but after the improvement, margins will be higher and the increased costs will make up for the losses.

Nathan had a pretty great career of directing films, including The Black Castle, The Deadly Mantis, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, First Men In the Moon, Jack the Giant Killer and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf.

He was unhappy with this movie, so instead of his real name, it’s credited to Nathan Hertz.

Stephen King even credited it with some of his initial success, telling Playboy, “Carrie, for example, derived to a considerable extent from a terrible grade-B movie called The Brain from Planet Arous.”

Gor (spoken for by Dale Tate) is an alien criminal shaped like a human brain who has come from a planet named Arous. He possesses scientist Steve March (John Agar) and begins to take over the world. Luckily, Vol (also the voice of Tate) has come to Earth to save us from Gor and is inside a dog that belongs to March’s fiancee Sally Fallon (Joyce Meadows).

If the story of a space cop chasing a criminal to Earth who can jump bodies sounds familiar, well, they took it from the book Needle by Hal Clement. You know who else did? The filmmakers who brought you The Hidden.

The giant brain in this often gets made fun of, but you know, it works for the time that it was born in. It played double features with Teenage Monster and, obviously, as a TV favorite. After all, it’s the first movie that Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater would ever air. When the show came back on the air in September of 2023, it also was the first film shown.