Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak) owns a store in Greenwich Village but she’s really a witch and even with all her magic she’s still bored with life and wonders what it would be like with new neighbor Shep Henderson (James Stewart). On Christmas Eve, Shep finds Gillian’s aunt Queenie (Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein) in his house and before he kicks her out, she hexes his phone, which forces him to visit Gillian’s apartment to use her phone. Their evening ends up at the Zodiac Club, where Shep brings his fiancee Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule) and Queenie shows up with Gillian and her brother Nicky Holroyd (Jack Lemmon), a bongo playing warlock. It turns out that Gillian and Merle have hated one another since college, so what better payback than to work with her cat familiar Pyewacket to cast a love spell on Shep.
Meanwhile, Nicky wants to get rich exposing the world of witchcraft to Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), the publisher of Magic In Mexico. Gillian and Nicky fight over this as well as her wanting to renounce magic when she falls in love with Shep. Yet because she is a witch and she initially got with him to spite her old enemy, she decides to tell the truth even if her chance at love will be gone. Or will it?
Directed by Richard Quine and written by Daniel Taradash from the play by John Van Druten, this was released as a blockbuster and was such a big movie that it was lifted by Bewitched creator Sol Saks, who took some of this and a little bit of I Married a Witch to make his show. It almost became a series in 1976 with Yvette Mimieux as Gillian, Michael Murphy as Shep, Doris Roberts as Aunt Enid and John Pleshette as Nicky.
The title is a reference to exorcism, which is way before anyone would know what that was.
Known in Italy as La morte viene dallo spazio and in the UK as Death Comes From Outer Space, this was directed by Paolo Heusch (Werewolf In a Girl’s Dormitory) at least in screen credit, but according to many, this was actually the first movie directed by Mario Bava, who also worked as the cameraman, did the special effects and manipulated newsreel footage and backyard rockets into making crude special effects. It’s the first true Italian science fiction movie.
Carlo Rustichelli, who did the score and would also work with Bava on The Whip and the Body and Blood and Black Lace, created the soundtrack with a ton of non-traditional music and non-music instruments, saying that he “went into the recording studio with a fire extinguisher, a blender and a vacuum cleaner, to do those special sound effects.”
The Vampire’s Coffin is the sequel to El Vampiro, a movie that tool Universal monsters to Mexico and created a new way to see vampires.
A graverobber named Manson (Yerye Beirute) has been hired by Dr. Marion to take the coffin of Conde Karol de Lavud (German Robles) back to the hospital, the very place where Marta (Carlos Ancira), the heroine of the first movie, is being nursed back to health by her boyfriend Dr. Enrique (Abel Salazar). As she recovers, he follows her to the theater where she’s working on her dance career, all with the aim of possessing her forever.
How many movies will you see where a vampire makes a wax museum his lair? This one. Beyond having a basement with functional torture implements, Conde Karol de Lavud also has time to act as this movie’s Phantom of the Opera.
Beyond acting in this, Salazar wrote the script with Ramon Obon and Raul Zenteno. Director Fernando Méndez made both of this and the original film.
When this played in the U.S., there was a smiling skull-and-crossbones logo on the posters and lobby cards stating that The Vampire’s Coffin was “Recommended by Young America Horror Club.” This club did not exist and was invented by K. Gordon Murray in a strange shot at selling tickets.
I love the moment that someone puts a mirror up to the vampire’s face, he looks into it and just sees a skull. That’s cinema.
Everyone is in love with Beatriz (Evangelina Elizondo). Like the goofy El Clavillazo (Antonio Espino, Conquistador de la Luna) and the sinister Dr. Sputnik. The latter uses hypnosis to convince her that she’s really Galatea and his lover, while the former has to make his way into the mad scientist’s castle and do battle with the Frankenstein’s Monster-like butler, a werewolf, a gillman, a strange caveman kept behind bars and a vampire played by German Robles, who was usually a very serious vampire in movies like El Vampiro and the Nostradamus series.
The monsters in this movie are all dispatched in some interesting ways and mostly by accident. The gillman gets turned into a fish, the caveman chokes out the wolfman, the hunchback shoots the mad scientist who stabs him before he expires, the modern Prometheus electrocutes himself which doesn’t seem possible but maybe I’m basing that on Japanese Frankenstein being able to absorb electricity, the mummy gets eaten up by alligators and the vampire forgets that the sun rises.
Universal-International wanted to adapt Whit Masterson’s novel Badge of Evil and hired Charlton Heston as the star, Albert Zugsmith as the producer and Paul Monash as the writer.
Heston asked that Orson Welles direct the movie. He joined the project and rewrote the script, appears in the movie and directed the film. He also asked that the actors be part of the process, with Janet Leigh saying, “We rewrote most of the dialogue, all of us, which was also unusual, and Mr. Welles always wanted our input. It was a collective effort, and there was such a surge of participation, of creativity, of energy. You could feel the pulse growing as we rehearsed. You felt you were inventing something as you went along. Mr. Welles wanted to seize every moment. He didn’t want one bland moment. He made you feel you were involved in a wonderful event that was happening before your eyes.”
Leigh’s agent initially rejected the low salary offered without even consulting the actress. Welles sent her a personal letter about how much he looked forward to working together. Leigh told her agent that being part of a movie directed by Welles was more important than any money.
Welles also added the racism in the storyline — Americans racist toward Mexicans, which as you can assume wasn’t popular — and shift in the narrative point of view. He also was very involved in the editing of the movie, working with Edward Curtiss until creative differences caused the editor to be replaced by Virgil Vogel. The film was finished by Aaron Stell with Universal locking Welles out, at which point he left to make Don Quixote. Welles was so shocked by the new cut that he wrote a memo explaining how he would edit the film.
Universal cut fifteen more minutes and ordered reshoots that would be directed by Harry Keller. Heston and Leigh were contractually obligated to be in these new scenes, including one that had a stand-in play Welles’ character. Heston said, “I have done worse work in the movies than this day’s retakes, but I don’t remember feeling worse.”
After eeing a second cut of his film, with scenes he never shot, Welles tried one more time to save the movie with a 58-page note where he outlined how he saw the film working. The studio demanded that Welles attend a dialogue re-record. He refused.
The film that was released was not the film Welles wanted. It really wasn’t the movie anyone wanted. In 1976, UCLA film studies professor Robert Epstein discovered the preview cut in the Universal archives. This 108-minute edit of the film was as close to Welles vision as had ever been seen by the public. The film was re-edited in 1998 using Welles’ 58-page memo.
What emerged with the re-edits was a movie that was way better than past contemporary reviews would suggest. That said, even the original version won the top two awards at the 1958 Brussels World Film Festival, an event Universal didn’t even want to screen the film at. The judges at that event were Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who made Breathless and The 400 Blows shortly after.
The movie begins with a time bomb killing Rudy Linnekar and his girlfriend Zita (Joi Lansing), a crime investigated by Mexican special prosecutor Miguel Vargas (Heston), who is on a honeymoon with his American wife Susie (Leigh). He’s soon joined by Captain Hank Quinlan (Welles) and Sergeant Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia), who interrogate — and plant evidence — on a man named Sanchez. Vargas suspects that the older policemen have done this before and starts looking into their past.
This puts the two lawmen against one another, with the stress of the battle finding Quinlan starting to drink after more than a decade sober and using the very criminal he’s been investigating, Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), to not only assault Susie but to make it look like she’s using drugs and killed the crime lord.
Welles pushed each actor to doing things beyond what they did before, such as having Dennis Weaver be the opposite of his Gunsmoke character, as well as bringing in friends for small parts, including Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Cotton and Mercedes McCambridge, who has the movie’s most terrifying line, as the gang surrounds the helpless Susie: “I wanna watch.”
Touch of Evil may have taken years to be recognized — Welles originally hated the film’s title but eventually liked it — but now it’s a known classic.
Kino Lorber’s blu ray release of Touch of Evil has brand new 4K restorations of the theatrical (with one commentary track by Tim Lucas and another by F.X. Feeney), reconstruction (with one commentary track by Imogen Sara Smith and another with Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and reconstruction Producer Rick Schmidlin) and preview cuts (with commentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore) of the movie. There are also two featurettes, Evil Lost and Found and Bringing Evil to Life, plus the trailer. You can purchase it from Kino Lorber.
The UHD version has all of the same features as the blu ray as well as Dolby Vision HDR versions of the three cuts of the movie. You can also purchase it from Kino Lorber.
Something Weird has made out lives so much richer, saving the strange, the smutty, the scary and everything in between. Working with the American Genre Film Archives, they created this mixtape of sheer lunacy which adds up the scare films of the past. You’ll never do drugs again until the next time to do drugs.
This blu ray has the following movies, all uncut and in 2K:
Beyond LSD (1967): This movie astounded me because instead of telling parents that their kids are maniacs, it tells them to listen to them because they’re going through some things. How is this even real?
Director Paul Burnford mainly made shorts and documentary films, like 1944’s Nostradamus IV and the 1943 blood transfusion ten-minute epic Brothers in Blood. He also directed the first movie in the Rusty series and an entry in the A Crime Does Not Pay series, Dark Shadows, which is about a psychiatrist matching wits with a killer.
In short — it’s less about drugs and more about how to treat your kids. It’s still relevant today.
The Bottle and the Throttle (1961, 1968): Narrated by Timothy Farrell, who was one of the two narrators and the psychiatrist in Glen or Glenda, as well Girl Gang,Pin-Down Girl, Dance Hall Racket, Test Tube Babies, The Violent Years, Jail Bait and many more. He was also a bailiff for the Los Angeles Marshal’s Department when he was acting in movies like Paris AfterMidnight, which was raided by the Los Angeles Vice Squad during filming.
A bunch of kids a drinking beach beers — Budweiser, Schlitz and Hamm’s — and Bill has had one too many. He ends up driving home and killing a child and breaking the back of her mother. Was it worth it?
Do you remember that wheel of how many drinks you had and how long until you sober up back in driver’s ed or health class? Man, I used to think of that all the time and here I am, now trying to gauge edibles which are magical and unpredictable lunacy when compared to whiskey.
The major difference between the 1961 and 1968 films is that the former is made with the help of the Culver City Police Department and the Culver City Unified School District while the latter is made with the West Covina Police Department. I’d like to think these organizations were scammed and paid twice for one movie.
“The little girl died on the way to the hospital and the mother will probably never walk again. No matter how your trial comes out, you’ll always have to live with those facts, won’t you Bill. A child dead. A mother crippled. Not a pleasant future to face at the age of 18.”
Pure nihilism.
Sidney Davis Productions also made The Dropout, Boys Beware (an anti-homosexual scare movie), the Ib Melchior-directed — yes, the guy who wrote Death Race 2000 and directed The Angry Red Planet — Keep Off the Grass, Skateboard Sense and LSD: Trip or Trap!
Curious Alice (1971): Dave Dixon, the Culture Czar, was the lead DJ of the legendary “Air Aces” on Detroit’s rock station WABX and the first person to play Sabbath, The Doors, Led Zeppelin and The Doors in the Motor City. Beyond co-writing Peter, Paul and Mary’s “I Dig Rock & Roll Music,” he co-wrote this animated film that explains drugs through Alice In Wonderland which is totally right on with the kids and four years after Jefferson Airplane did the same thing in “White Rabbit.”
The art in this movie is mind-boggling, however, and you’ll be entranced as Alice learns about LSD from the Mad Hatter, speed from the March Hare, heroin from the King of Hearts and barbituates from the Dormouse.
Made by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1971 and meant for use with ten-year-old students, if I had seen this before my teen years I would have done all the drugs in high school. The National Coordinating Council on Drug Education agreed, writing that viewers “may be intrigued by the fantasy world of drugs” after watching it.
The Distant Drummer (1970): A short-lived series of four 22-minute American documentary films that warned the kids about drugs, these were all directed by William Templeton (The Fallen Idol) and written by Don Peterson.
The first two movies in this series, A Movable Scene and A Movable Feast, were narrated by Robert Mitchum, who served 43 days at a California prison farm for possession of marijuana in 1948, a conviction that was overturned in 1951.
Here’s just a sample of Mitchum’s speech: “Thousands of snapshots on police station walls remain the only link between many of America’s most affluent families and the children who embodied their great expectations. Nearly everyone in the hippie community smokes marijuana — whether they call it pot, grass, hemp, gage, joint or mary jane — the marijuana is the basic background for the shared drug experience. The experience is shared to such an extent that roach pipes are always in demand — a roach is a marijuana butt and it requires some form of holder for those last few drags. The new generation, whether they are runaways or rebels-in-residence, use marijuana as a symbol of discontent with the basic values of the establishment. For some, there exists a social imperative beyond flaunting society’s rules — for these adventurers the mind-expanding drugs open a window on a whole new frontier…”
The other two parts, Bridge from No Place and Flowers ofDarkness, were narrated by Rod Steiger and Paul Newman.
Drugs, Drinking and Driving (1971): Herbert Moskowitz is now here to explain why you should never mix the three things in the title. I love that this movie has no issues with using the Mission: Impossible theme over and over and over, flaunting copyright law with each successive refrain.
This also seems pre-Jackass with a stunt where two drivers are each given drugs, one amphetamine and one barbituates, and then told to drive for 36 hours straight until they either pass out or wreck their cars.
LSD: Insight or Insanity (1967): “Now, everybody who takes it admits that there’s always the risk of a bad trip, a bummer, a freak-out, even a flip-out. But, why be lame, baby? Give yourself a real kick. Yes, a kick in the head!”
That’s Sal Mineo talking in this Max Miller-directed (the same dude who made the Sonny Bono anti-drug movie Marijuana) film which explains what LSD is, how it’s made and when people take it they jump in front of cars and take leaps off cliffs like Diane Linkletter out of the windows of the Shoreham Towers, blamed on LSD even if the last person who saw her alive — Edward Dunston — may have also was the last person to see actress Carol Wayne alive. Then again, both Dunstons could be different people and for some other reason, people seem to confuse them with David E. Durston, the man who taught us that Satan was an acidhead in I Drink Your Blood.
See, I may make some detours, but I always get you back on the road.
This ends with a Russian Roulette freakout and Mineo singing over the closing credits, which inform us that everyone in this movie was not an actor. You won’t be surprised.
LSD 25 (1967): Directed by David Parker and written by Hank Harrison — the father of Courtney Love — this movie is narrated by an LSD tab which proves that the creators of this may very well be getting high on their own supply.
“Today, you’re high. Tomorrow, you’re dead.”
Yes, LSD starts all happy explaining all the good things it does and by the end, your fingerprints can’t get out of any police database.
So go ahead and take that sugar cube. You’ll learn all the secrets of the infinite and then, you know, you won’t be able to tell anyone.
Because you’ll be dead.
Narcotics the Decision: Goofballs and Tea (1958): Written by Pittsburgh native Roger Emerson Garris, who was the story editor for the Sherlock Holmes TV series, this police training film is all about barbituates and marijuana. Yes, people once called drugs these words.
Narrated by Art Gilmore, who was on Dragnet and voiced the radio announcer on The Waltons, this movie lets kids know that it starts with sneaking their parent’s booze and ends up with you in jail, dead or worse. Avoid weed, avoid malt shops, avoid everything.
None for the Road (1957): Margaret Travis wrote 83 shorts that we know of, movies like The Other Fellow’s Feelings, Health: Your Clothing and Rowan and Martin on the Driveway One Fine Day, an industrial film for Phillips 66 Petroleum where the future Laugh-In stars run a gas station. This movie, too.
But the director? That’s Herk Harvey, who made around four hundred or more industrial films like Shake Hands with Danger. And one very important movie, Carnival of Souls.
Three men all use alcohol in different ways: not at all, a little and too much. They’re like the lab rats that we later see injected with alcohol, which sounds like a good way to spend a weekend. But wow, we’ve been warning people about drunk driving for 65 years and not everyone listens.
The Trip Back (1970): It’s no accident that an episode of Strangers With Candy was titled “The Trip Back.” Jerri Blank on that show is literally the star of this movie, Florrie Fisher, played for comic effect.
Fisher was married four times by the time she filmed this speech, first an arranged marriage, then to a pimp, then another drug addict and finally to a man she met via the mail. She credited her recovery to Synanon, which was originally established as a drug rehabilitation program and became one of the most dangerous and violent cults America had ever seen.
Wait, what?
Founded by Charles E. “Chuck” Dederich Sr., Synanon — a mix of togetherness (“syn”) with the unknown (“anon”) — was an alternative community centered on group truth-telling sessions called the “Synanon Game”, a form of attack therapy during which participants humiliated one another and exposed each other’s innermost weaknesses. There are theories that Dedereich was given LSD by Dr. Keith S. Dittman and Dr. Sidney Cohen, as well as encouraged to start Synanon as part of the CIA MK Ultra program.
Headquarted in a former beachfront hotel in Santa Monica called the Club Casa del Mar, women who joined Synanon had to shave their heads. Men were given forced vasectomies. Pregnant women were forced to abort their babies. Married couples were broken up and had to take new partners as the group became the Church of Synanon.
After Synanon’s transition into an alternate society in 1968, the game became a 72-hour ordeal for most members. The program of rehabilitation went from two years to a lifetime rehabilitation program, as they now preached that addicts would never truly be well enough to return to society.
Throughout this period, San Francisco area media covered the adult and child abuse caused by the church, but were often sued for libel by Synanon’s lawyers. If all of this sounds like Scientology, well…there was a group within the group called the Imperial Marines authorized to beat members into oblivion.
When NBC started reporting on the church in the late 70s, executives received hundreds of threats and Paul Morantz, a lawyer who had helped members escape, had a de-rattled rattlesnake placed in his mailbox. It bit him and put him in the hospital. A police search found a tape of Dederich speaking about Morantz, saying: “We’re not going to mess with the old-time, turn-the-other-cheek religious postures. Our religious posture is: Don’t mess with us. You can get killed dead, literally dead/ These are real threats. They are draining life’s blood from us, and expecting us to play by their silly rules. We will make the rules. I see nothing frightening about it. I am quite willing to break some lawyer’s legs, and next break his wife’s legs, and threaten to cut their child’s arm off. That is the end of that lawyer. That is a very satisfactory, humane way of transmitting information. I really do want an ear in a glass of alcohol on my desk.”
The teachings of Synanon influenced groups like CEDU, Daytop Village (the very place Nancy Reagan visited and became aware of the drug problem, which led to Just Say No), Phoenix House and those boot camps that always show up on daytime talk shows.
Back to Florrie Fisher.
An interview with David Susskind led to her appearing on The Mike Douglas Show, speaking at schools and an autobiography, The Lonely Trip Back. This film captures her speaking at a New York City high school, barraging the audience with a rambling dissertation on turning tricks, six of her marijuana friends all dying in the chair, jailhouse sapphic antics and shouting things like “I now know that I can’t smoke one stick of pot! I can’t take one snort of horse! I can’t take one needle of cocaine because I am an addictive personality! And that’s all I need is one of anything. Ya know I need one dress. If I happen to like this dress in tan, I buy the same dress in green and black and pink. This is the type of personality I am!”
Despite how horrible Synanon was for some, it worked for Florrie. Sadly, she died during the lecture tour she’s on in this movie due to liver cancer and kidney failure.
This movie is totally worth the price of this entire blu ray.
Users Are Losers (1971): Think drugs are for teens? This kid is saving up his milk money to pay for his habit, doing odd jobs and being incredibly thrifty just to get some marijuana. It made me think, parents are always on kids for throwing their money away, but this kid knows what he wants, works hard for it and then is selfless and shares what he gets with his friends.
Some kids also find one of their friends dead on a mattress and some young narc says, “If you blow pot, you’re blowing your future.” Get off my TV, kid.
Plus, you also get DRUG STORIES! NARCOTIC NIGHTMARES AND HALLUCINOGENIC HELLRIDES, a full-length mixtape from the AGFA team.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go blow some pot. Get toasty toast. Go clambaking. Fly Mexican Airlines. Run within an endless field. Walk the green ducks. Roll into the Backwoods. Be a ninja. Do some chiefing at the Rooney statue.
At the Explorers’ Club in London — yes, it’s all rich white dudes — Dr. Moran (George Coulouris) tells everyone that he’s going to the Amazon to get “a miracle-working JuJu that can bring the dead back to life.” While there, he watches Marpessa Dawn, a year removed from being in Black Orpheus — get eaten by a tree. Then he gets jungle fever and it takes five years for him to recover.
Dr. Moran has brought the tree and the drummer who controls it, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan), to keep on working on bringing life to death, which starts with feeding Susan Curtis to the tree. I’m amused that Sara Leighton, who played the role, became a famous lady of British society known for her portrait painting.
Meanwhile, Sally Norton (Vera Day) is working at a sideshow dancing the hula-hula, because Hawaii was all mondo to British people in the late 50s. A local favorite named Jack Venner (Peter Wayn) ends up getting her fired and then hired by Moran, who must love Tanya Donelly because he can’t stop feeding that tree. And he starts falling for Sally, even strangling the woman who has loved him nearly forever, Margaret Santor (Joyce Gregg), all so she can start working in his lab.
The end of this movie gets all nihilist, as the drummer refuses to teach the secret of how to keep the brain alive after death and Moran realizes he loved Margaret and tries to bring her back to life, only to have her as a brainless zombie. Tanga tries to feed Sally to the tree, Moran sets it on fire and then gets killed by the drummer’s knife before Tanga kneels before the tree and lets it set him on fire.
What!?!
Director Charles Saunders and writer Brandon Fleming stopped making movies after 1963. That’s a shame because this movie is just…something.
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.
Known as The Trollenberg Terror in England, where it was made, The Crawling Eye has exactly what you want to see: a giant eyeball. If we didn’t have this, we wouldn’t have The Fog, as this movie directly inspired John Carpenter. See, great things can come out of a movie whose special effects consist of cotton balls stapled to mountain photography.
Originally a six-episode TV miniseries, this was remade with American Forest Tucker placed into the lead so that audiences in the states would have someone to root for. Or maybe they’d be like me, excited to see gigantic eyeballs come rolling along at the camera.
He plays UN troubleshooter Alan Brooks, who has traveled to the Swiss mountain of Trollenberg to learn why the heads of climbers are being torn off their body and why a mysterious cloud is seen in the wake of the bloody destruction.
Do you know how you defeat a giant eyeball? A Molotov cocktail. Horror movies make you smart, right?
Five years before this movie was released, wrestler and actor Fernando Osés asked Santo to be in a movie with him. Santo had already turned down Rene Cardona’s El Enmascarado de Plata as he wanted to strictly be a wrestler and thought that the films would fail. Somehow, Oses was able to get the Mexican wrestling star to play his sidekick — Osés plays a masked cop named El Icognito — in this film and Santo contra Los Hombres Infernales. Of course, that wasn’t the title of either film as Santo was meant to just be the second banana. But after Santo contra Los Zombis became a success in 1962, both of these movies were rushed back out with Santo’s name in the title.
Strangely enough, both were filmed in Cuba with production ending literally the exact day before Fidel Castro entered Havana and declared that the revolution was a success. This seems like William Castle kayfabe BS, but who are we to deny Santo (or El Dandy, for that matter).
In the first fight of his film career, Santo loses to a trio of crooks who beat him down to the point that an evil doctor named Doctor Campos brainwashes the man in the silver mask and gets him to commit crimes. Luckily, El Icognito saves Santo, who is called El Enmascarado throughout the movie. By the end, Santo gets his revenge and El Icognito gets a bullet, even if he comes back for Santo contra Los Hombres Infernales.
This film does not fit into the crazed form of the later Santo films, but trust me, things will get much more interesting.
Also: Do not be confused with 1961’s Santo vs. the Diabolical Brain.
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