EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bad Seed was on the CBS Late Movie on March 29, May 10 and November 29, 1973.

John Waters, in his book Role Models, claimed that he wanted to be Rhoda Penmark, the titular antagonist of The Bad Seed. “I wanted to be Rhoda. I pretended I was her. Why? I wanted to strike fear in the hearts of my playmates.”

There’s really no other movie quite like this one. Sure, we’ve covered plenty of other kids in trouble and kids causing trouble movies over the last two weeks, but this is the ultimate.

Based upon the 1954 play of the same name by Maxwell Anderson — which is based upon William March’s 1954 novel — the entire movie revolves around one person: Rhoda (Patty McCormack). She’s doted on by her parents, but the truth is, she’s quite literally menace incarnate. Who else would be so upset about losing a penmanship contest that she’d be moved to murder?

How did she get that way? Is it because her mother (Nancy Kelly, who won a  Tony on Broadway for the play and was nominated for an Oscar) is the daughter of a serial killer who was adopted by a kindly cop? Is it because her father (William Hopper, who was later Paul Drake on Perry Mason and is the son of Hedda Hopper) isn’t around? Is society to blame? Or are some people just plain evil?

In the novel and play, the mother dies and the bad seed survives. The Motion Picture Production Code could never allow crime to pay, so Christine’s life is saved and Rhoda is struck down by the only thing that can really stop her: the hand of God, tossing a bolt of lightning her way. To further keep the censors away, Warner Brothers added an “adults only” warning to the film’s advertising.

This film is packed with great performances. There’s Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup, the caretaker who snarls every line at Rhoda, sure that she’s committed some crime as he sleeps in a bed of excelsior. Or Eileen Heckart as Hortense Daigle, a woman whose grief has reduced to a spirit of sheer nothingness. Or Evelyn Varden as Monica Breedlove, an older woman who wants to desperately see the good in Rhoda (she’s equally amazing in The Night of the Hunter). Hey — there’s even Frank Cady here, who would go on to play Sam Drucker in several seventies hicksploitation sitcoms.

I also love the end of this movie, where the entire cast comes out as if they’re still on Broadway and doing their curtain call.  After her credit is shown, Nancy Kelly puts Patty McCormack over her knee and gives her a spanking as they both laugh, trying to break the tension because Rhoda is so violently real, more villainous than any cartoon villain you’ll see in every single movie thereafter.

The Bad Seed has led to plenty of remakes and reimaginings. It was remade in 1985 as a TV movie that starred Carrie Welles, Blair Brown, Lynn Redgrave, David Carradine, Richard Kiley and Chad Allen. This version uses the original ending, but isn’t fondly remembered. There was another remake in 2018 that aired on Lifetime. It was directed by Rob Lowe and Patty McCormack even shows up in a cameo.

In 1995, McCormack would star in the first of two Mommy films that are kind of, sort of unofficial sequels. The Lifetime film House of Deadly Secrets, also starring McCormack, is another film that’s a spiritual second to this one. There’s also an off-Broadway musical adaption called Ruthless! and just about every bad kid movie that’s come after 1956 owes this one a debt.

How do you follow Plan 9 from Outer Space?

You bring back Tor Johnson as Lobo and Paul Marco as Kelton the cop from Bride of the Monster, you get Criswell to do another framing story and get the character of Captain Robbins to return as well, even if Johnny Carpenter takes over the role from Harvey B. Dunn, who does play a frightened driver in this.

Originally called Revenge of the Dead, this sat on the shelf for years after its premiere. Wood had intended to make changes but couldn’t afford the post-production work. The film laboratory opted to keep the negative footage and for years, people thought that this wasn’t a real movie or a lost one. Film archivist Wade Williams managed to locate the film with the help of Wood’s widow Kathy.

It’s also a lot like The Unearthly. The writer of that movie is supposedly the director’s wife, but I’ve also heard it was Ed Wood. The plot is the same — there’s an isolated setting, a supernatural carny and undercover cops. Tor Johnson also plays Lobo in both movies, which were both shot in 1957. It also has a lot of stuff taken from the movie Sucker Money.

Criswell starts us off by pronouncing “How many of you know the horror, the terror I will now reveal to you?” Oh Criswell. We’re ready. Maybe not for you to talk about juvenile delinquents and drunk driving, but whatever you want to discuss.

Then we watch as a couple fight when the man gets too aggressive. They are soon killed by a Black Ghost. That’s when Kelton comes on board to investigate, saying “Monsters! Space people! Mad doctors! They didn’t teach me about such things in the police academy! And yet that’s all I’ve been assigned to since I became on active duty! Why do I always get picked for these screwy details all the time? I resign.”

Are we in the Ed Wood Cinematic Universe? Yes.

There’s also a White Ghost who is really an actress named Sheila (Valda Hansen), a Dr. Acula (played by “The Meanest Man In the Movies” Kenne Duncan; as for the name Dr. Acula, does anyone still fall for that?), a seance at a table filled with skeletons, the Black Ghost (Jeannie Stevens) being revealed as a real undead creature and Criswell bidding us farewell from inside a coffin, telling us we’ll all be dead someday. Thanks Criswell.

Sometimes, Jeannie Stevens wasn’t there for her scenes. So when you see that, you’re seeing Ed Wood as her. I wonder if he wore his angora sweater under the costume.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Mike Wilson (Russ Tamblyn) goes undercover as Tony Baker to get inside a high school narcotics operation. His cover is that he lives with Gwen Dulaine (Mamie Van Doren) who acts as his aunt but really wants to seduce him. He keeps his cover, which means he’s some kind of robot, because living with Mamie Van Doren who wants to sleep with you at every opportunity seems like the kind of life some men dream of their entire existence, you know?

Mike also has some romantic moments with a student — Joan Staples (Diane Jergens) — and a teacher — Arlene Williams (Jan Sterling) — but he’s more interested in getting the guy pushing all the marijuana in school who is known as Mr. A (Jackie Coogan).

The thing about this movie is that the cops are all squares and all of the really cool people are on drugs. So yes, the makers of this movie — director Jack Arnold and producer Albert Zugsmith, the man who director Dondi — erred on the side of making an entertaining movie, even if Zugsmith wanted nudity. Indeed, the European version of this movie has Jan Sterling topless when Tamblyn calls her on the telephone and a girl in the throes of heroin withdrawal showing her breasts.

If you listened to any White Zombie, you’ll recognize the beat poetry read by the character played by Phillipa Fallon, who was also in Zugsmiths’s The Girl In the Kremlin and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, which goes like this:

“My old man was a bread stasher all his life. He never got fat. He wound up with a used car, a 17-inch screen and arthritis. Tomorrow is a drag, man, tomorrow is a king-sized bust. // They cried, “Put down pot. Don’t think a lot.” For what? Time how much and what to do with it. Sleep, man, and you might wake up diggin’ the whole human race, givin’ itself three days to get out. Tomorrow is a drag, pops, the future is a flake. // I had a canary who couldn’t sing. I had a cat that let me share my pad with her. I bought a dog that killed the cat that ate the canary. What is truth? // I had an uncle with an ivy-league car. He had life with a belt in the back. He had a button-down brain. Wind up a belt in the mouth and a button-down lip. // He coughed blood on this earth. Now there’s a race for space. We can cough blood on the moon soon. Tomorrow is dragsville, cats. Tomorrow is a king-sized drag. // Hula fast shorts, swing with a gassy chick, turn on to a thousand joys, smile on what happened, then check what’s gonna happen, you’ll miss what’s happening. Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum. Tomorrow, drag.”

That sample appears on La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1, as does the Columbus speech at the start of the movie and the lines “Do you want to start a rumble?” and “Drop it, buster!”

Not only does this movie have Jerry Lee Lewis do the theme song, he shows up to sing it.

I love this movie. I love it so much I nearly missed Michael Landon showing up in it, but I was concentrating on all the kids just openly smoking joints and, well, thinking about Mamie Van Doren.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Ben Saul (Scott Marlowe) is a reform school graduate who is starts classes at a public high school and wins over the students by buying beer for them and getting them into weed. He’s actually working for the syndicate and things start getting out of hand when a kid tries to hold up a gas station and gets killed. Of course, Ben starts getting high on his own supply and of course, he dies because that’s the moral of this movie.

This was produced by Elmer Rhoden Jr of the Kansas City-based Commonwealth Theaters, a prominent chain of motion picture theaters that needed low-budget teen exploitation films. The first movie he made, The Delinquents, was directed by Robert Altman. This would be the second film he made, which was directed by William Witney and written by Richard C. Sarafian.

It was picked up by American International Pictures and ended up being one of their bigger juvenile delinquent movies. It was so realistic that Richard Bakalyan and Dickie Jones were arrested by Kansas City police for vagrancy in between filming.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt) runs away, become thieves and live “a sin-steeped story of the rise of the Beat Generation.” Directed by Paul Henreid (the Cardinal from Exorcist II: The Heretic) from a script by Allen Rivkin and Ib Melchior, they find themselves working with Rick (Mike Connors) and Artie (Troy Donahue) and go from slipping guys a mickey when they take them back to their motel rooms to knocking over a post office to get six figures worth of jewels.

Meanwhile, Jill’s sister Kim (Mary Murphy) gets sick of their drunken father and decides to find where her sister is, getting mixed up in all this crime. She’s just lucky that she meets a truck driver named Jerry (Sheridan Comerate) who treats her well and helps her forget that her dad’s drunken friend once tried to touch her.

These girls are supposed to be teens but are instead in their late 20s. Such is the juvenile delinquent film. It played with Girls On the Loose and you can often see pictures of Eberhardt being worn by Slash from Guns ‘n Roses.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Terence Fisher and written by Jimmy Sangster, this sequel to The Curse of Frankenstein played double features with Curse of the Demon, which seems like the most perfect night of all time.

Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) escapes the guillotine by having a priest beheaded and buried in his place with the aid of a hunchback named Karl (Oscar Quitak). He changes his name to Doctor Stein and heals the rich while still tending to the poor in the city of Carlsbrück. He’s discovered by Dr. Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews), who doesn’t want anything other than to work with Frankenstein on his experiments. They place Karl’s brain into a new body (Michael Gwynn), which he hops will help him steal the heart of Margaret (Eunice Gayson). The experiment doesn’t work, as the body becomes contorted and turns back into a hunchback, which kills Karl.

As the important doctors discover Frankenstein is still alive, his poor patients attack him, killing him. Hans shows them the body, but he also puts the doctor’s brain in a new body and the two escape. The experiments will continue.

Hammer pre-sold this movie in the U.S. James Carreras told Jimmy Sangster they needed a script. Sangster said, “”I killed Frankenstein in the first film.” He was told “You’ll figure something out.” This was shot three days after shooting finished on Dracula.

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!”