EDITOR’S NOTE: She Demons was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 10, 1970 at 1:00 a.m.

Jerrie Turner (Irish McCalla, a model for Vargas and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin), Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung, Charlie Chan’s number one son) and Kris Kamana (Charles Opunui) are the only survivors of a shipwreck and wash up on a beach paradise that they soon learn is not just filled with demonic native women with spears, but also Col. Osler (Rudolph Anders), a survivor of the Third Reich who is using this little bit of heaven on Earth to experiment with lava and pain. The women have all become She Demons because Osler’s wife Mona (Leni Tana) had her face burned off by that hot volcanic magma and he hopes that he can fix it. So, you know, Eyes Without a Face, except that was made a year before that film!

Richard Cunha made Giant from the Unknown and Astor Pictures demanded that they would only release that movie if he made a second for a double feature. This is what he created and wow, I am so happy that it was filmed. A Nazi war criminal lives in a mansion tended to by island slaves, protected by an army, all surrounded by lava while he is vainly trying to fix the face of wife.

I don’t know if a better plot exists.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It! The Terror from Beyond Space was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 23, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, September 19 at 11:15 p.m.

In 1973, Earth is on its second manned mission to Mars. Only Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) survived and it’s thought that he killed the other nine members of his crew. He tells anyone that will listen that a monster was behind it all. Commander Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding) orders Carruthers to be watched at all times, but it’s not him they should be worried about.

The monster that Carruthers warned everyone about is on the ship and bullets won’t stop it. Nor will grenades, electricity or radiation. It is played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan in his last role and he was a handful for special effects artist Paul Blaisdell, refusing to get fitting for the costume and drunkenly tearing it apart almost every day. By the end of filming, Blaisdell had just about had it with how he was treated by Corrigan and Shirley Patterson, who hated that she was stuck in a science fiction movie. The problems for Blaisdell were compounded when United Artists kept the costume and used it again in Invisible Invaders.

Directed by Edward L. Cahn and written by Jerome Bixby, this recycles the music from Kronos and used parts of the costumes from the Buck Rogers serials and Destination Moon. Yet for such a low budget film, it went on to be the obvious inspiration for Alien.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Hideous Sun Demon was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 18, 1965 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, June 6, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, October 21, 1972 at 1:00 a.m.

Written, directed and produced by Robert Clarke — the only movie he’d write and direct, sadly, after a career of acting in movies like The Astounding She-Monster — this movie was inspired by the success of that film. After all, Clarke got five percent of She-Monster’s profits in addition to his salary. Although Clarke later admitted that the film was awful, it was a financial success for him and enabled this movie to happen.

With a crew that was made up of University of Southern California film students and a cast of friends and unknowns, this movie was made over twelve weekends with three cinematographers.

An unauthorized sequel, Don Glut’s Wrath of the Sun Demon (which features the real Sun Demon mask from Bob Burns’ collection) was produced in 1965. Two redubbed versions of the original film havealso  been released: Hideous Sun Demon: Special Edition and What’s Up, Hideous Sun Demon (AKA Revenge of the Sun Demon), the latter of which had Clarke’s blessing. Both Susan Tyrel and Jay Leno were involved with that movie.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is the claim that its amongst the first movies to use practical locations, which is common practice today.

Dr. Gilbert “Gil” McKenna (Clarke) falls unconscious after accidentally being exposed to radiation yet he has no burns nor damage to his body. However, when he’s in the sun, he transforms into a prehistoric reptile man, destroying all notions of both scientific evolution and religious Creationism.

Once he realizes that he can never go into the sun again, he does what you or I would do. He drinks himself blind drunk and gets involved with a girl at a bar and battles some toughs over her.

In the scene where the radio announcer is warning the public that the Sun Demon is loose, he then says, “I return to music by the King Sister.” Clarke was married to Alyce King of the singing King Sisters and Marilyn King wrote and performed “Strange Pursuit”, the song in the bar scene.

A $50,000 budget, helped by weekend camera rentals which were more affordable, and a $500 rubber suit has never gone so far as it does in this film.

You can watch this on Tubi. You can also enjoy Rifftrax commentary over the film on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Teenage Caveman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 26, 1964 at 1:00 a.m.

Robert Vaughn thought that this was the worst movie ever made. Roger Corman wanted it to be called Prehistoric World. In England, they called it Out of the Darkness. Yes, Teenage Caveman is something.

The early humans live amongst the rocks and suffer, despite there being a lush grassland on the other side of the river. There’s also a terrifying monster of a god over there, so they keep happy in the dirt.

It turns out that the god is an old white haired-man who was all burned up. One of the young cavemen (Vaughn) makes him a peace offering while another attacks the man, killing him. The tagline of this movie gives it away — “Nuclear holocaust has destroyed the world as we know it – and now the future of humanity is in the hands of TEENAGE CAVEMAN!” — because this movie does Planet of the Apes without the apes or the budget. Just the end of all things and cavemen coming back after nuclear destruction.

Robert Vaughn, despite playing a teenage caveman, was 26 when this was made.

Beach Dickerson tops that by dying three times — he’s the boy who drowns in quicksand (and the guy playing drums at his funeral) as well as a bear and the caveman who gets speared by the old man.

And that monster costume? It also shows up in Night of the Blood Beast.

When this title was used for a series of made for cable movies on Cinemax, Larry Clark directed it. Yes, the director of Kids.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 19, 1963 at 3:00 p.m., Saturday, December 31, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, June 1, 1968 at 1:00 a.m.

Nathan Juran came to America from Romania. His brother became quality control master Joseph M. Juran. As for Nathan, he went from art directing The Razor’s Edge to directing movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, Jack the Giant Killer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and this movie, which was written by Mark Hanna.

Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) has some problems. Her husband Harry (William Hudson) is sleeping with every woman in town but her. She has mental health issues that have been going on for some time. And she likes to throw drinking and driving on top of that cocktail. One night, driving drunk from an angry evening at a bar, she runs into a flying saucer whose pilot gets out and grabs her.

Somehow, she gets away and no one believes her. After all, she just got out of a mental institution and in 1958 — well, 2024 as well — no one believes women. As for her husband, he’s just with her because she’s worth $50 million and is more interested in Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers, Playboy Playmate of the Month July 1959; her centerfold was shot by Russ Meyer). Nancy begs him to search for the UFO with her and as they drive through the desert — she has agreed to be hospitalized again — they find the alien. Harry runs and Nancy wakes up irradiated in her pool house.

Honey convinces Harry to shoot up his wife and kill her off. He walks into her room and only finds a giant hand as his wife starts to grow in size and anger. Dr. Isaac Cushing (Roy Gordon) and Dr. Heinrich Von Loeb (Otto Waldis) try to keep her sedated and the butler (Ken Terrell) finds the UFO, which is being powered by Nancy’s diamond necklace, which has the largest diamond in the world on it. Yes, the richest woman in the world who has the largest piece of jewelry is trapped in a loveless desert marriage that is fought out in dive bars.

Nancy heads back to the bar and tears the roof off, killing Honey before grabbing her husband. As she walks through bullets, one lawman fires at the power lines and kills her, but at least her husband dies too.

They almost made a sequel to this and Dimension Pictures was going to have Paul Morrissey remake it, then Jim Wynorski said he would with Sybil Danning. Christopher Guest then remade it with Daryl Hannah as an HBO movie. Now, Tim Burton and Gillian Flynn have said that they are making a new one, so we’ll see.

Roger Corman designed the poster for this movie. Nothing in the art happens in the movie, but who cares? It’s the most perfect idea of what we want to see.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Haunted Strangler was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 27, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Sunday, September 13, 1964 at 11:15 p.m.

Jan Read wrote the story “Stranglehold” just for Boris Karloff, who made this movie at the same time as Fiend Without a Face, the movie that it played double features with.

Edward Styles (Michael Atkinson) is executed for being the Haymarket Strangler, a killer who choked women with one arm while stabbing them. As his coffin is closed, someone slips a knife in and for twenty years, no one thinks of these crimes.

James Rankin (Boris Karloff) believes that Styles was innocent and begins to look into the crime. As he killed his last victim, Martha Stuart, at the Judas Hole bar — The Judas Hole is an alternate title, as is The Grip of the Strangler — as others watched, including singer Cora Seth (Joan Kent). A man named Tenant did the autopsies of the victims and grew ill before the end of the case. This makes Rankin think that he could be the killer but without the murder weapon, it’s hard to put the evidence together. No one can find Tenant, who went insane just after the murders.

Ready for the spoiler?

As Rankin looks at the bones of Styles, he finds the knife and begins to transform, his face changing and his arm being paralyzed like the strangler. Somehow, thanks to the love of his nurse — and wife — Barbara (Elizabeth Allan) he has been able to keep the Strangler inside himself. Now, as he investigates the case, he alternates between the two different personas and begins to kill again, including his wife. This drives him further into psychosis and he begins screaming that he is the killer yet no one believes him. As he attempts to kill his daughter Lily (Diane Aubrey), he finally realize he must be stopped. As he tries to bury the knife in the grave, he is shot and killed by the police.

Director John Croydon was also shooting First Man Into Space at the same time, so British drive-in films were in great demand. He kept directing the whole way until 1991 with the TV movie Fire: Trapped on the 37th Floor. He also made She, Corridors of Blood and The Green Man.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: My World Dies Screaming was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 9, 1964 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 16, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 2, 1969 at 1:00 a.m. under the title Terror In the Haunted House. That was its TV title, which was used as part of the 22 film Allied Artists Sci-Fi for the 60s package.

Sheila Wayne (Cathy O’Donnell) has just married Phillip Justin (Gerald Mohr). She’s spent the last 17 years in Switzerland, a place where she had nightmares of a Florida mansion where the mad Tierney family once lived. It’s been abandoned for — you knew it — 17 years. At least that’s what the caretaker, Jonah Snell (John Qualen), says when Phillip drives Sheila to the door, telling her it will be their new home. She freaks out, but just as you’d figure, the car breaks down before they can leave.

Sheila has been dreaming of this place for years and remembers that a tree says SW+PT. When she looks at the actual tree, that is carved into it. When Mark Snell (William Ching) visits, he calls her Ms. Tierney and that’s when she starts to put it all together. Phillip is PT, Phillip Tierney. He tells her that the two years she spent in a hospital as a child were to forget what happened in this house, but if she goes into the attic, she will be cured. She refuses.

Jonah tells her that Matthew Tierney – Philip’s grandfather – killed his sons Lawrence and Samuel in the attic with an axe. This makes Phillip, Samuel’s son, the last of the Tierneys. Or maybe not, as Mark accuses them of gaslighting her. That’s when she finally goes to the attic and remembers that Jonah is Mark’s father and that he killed everyone out of jealousy, then paid for Sheila and her family to go to Switzerland for treatment. Mark ends up killing him before he can tell her, but after he battles Phillip, he gets stabbed on his own axe.

This was originally filmed with the Precon Process — called Psychorama — which used subliminal messages and exaggerated supraliminal symbols. Only one other movie, A Date With Death, uses Psychorama. However, most of the subliminals are edited out of the versions that are available today. In Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 1953–1968, the messages are described as “…single frame, hidden images such as skulls, knives, and spelled words like death designed to trigger the audience’s emotional responses. These subliminal imprints remain below the level of consciousness of the viewer, supposedly causing a palpable but unexplainable dread and horror.” He also claims that other messages include “a devil face, a bug-eyed face, a skull (in red), a cobra head and the message “scream bloody murder.””

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: War of the Satellites was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, May 3, 1964 at 11:10 p.m., Saturday, September 7, 1968 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 5, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.

My mom was nine when Sputnik went up into space and she said that people were so afraid of what it was and yet it was the size of a basketball. Roger Corman took those fears and made this movie in which a space barrier from the Spiral Nebula Ghana is destroying the satellites of the United National space program. They plan on quarantining humanity to Earth and not letting us into space, which seriously is a good idea because we tend to destroy everything we touch.

Dr. Pol Van Ponder (Richard Devon) plans on leading a mission into space but a ball of light destroys his car. The crew still goes, including Dave (Dick Miller) and Sybil (Susan Cabot). Yes, Dick Miller is the hero.

Well, Van Ponder comes back to life but he’s really an alien and he can make multiple versions of himself. He even tries to shut down the rocket going into space but Dave gives a speech that gets the world back into going into the unknown, even if the aliens are making natural disasters happen everywhere.

As you can imagine, the only way that we can realize our manifest destiny in space is to murder aliens. Good news. Human beings are awesome at killing. Dick Miller rises to the challenge and beats one of the Van Ponders into oblivion, then we go to space and leave litter all over Saturn.

The spaceship in this is two lounge chairs and a background. The future does not look all that forward. The always happy Miller told Fangoria, “We had two of the best lounge chairs money could buy to take off for the moon in. The type where you hit the sides and the chair slides down into a lying-down position.”

This played double features with Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Vampire’s Coffin was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 3, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, July 12, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.

The Vampire’s Coffin is the sequel to El Vampiro, a movie that brought Universal monsters to Mexico and created a new species of 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.

You can watch this on Tubi.