EDITOR’S NOTE: Terror from the Year 5000 was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 21, 1964 at 11:15 p.m. It also aired on April 9, 1966 and September 30, 1967.

Originally titled The Girl from 5000 A.D., this movie had a great tagline: “From Time Unborn … A Hideous She-Thing!”

Playing on American-International Pictures double features with The Screaming Skull or The Brain Eaters, Terror from the Year 5000 was shot in Dade County, Florida and presents a world where scientists attempt to communicate with the future by sending their fraternity keys through time and getting statues and coins in return. One of the scientists, Victor, grows insane attempting to communicate with the future and pays for it with his life. There’s also a mutant cat cadaver, in case you’re into that kind of thing.

The poster for this movie is, quite frankly, way more interesting than the movie it’s selling. Which, come to think of it, is how posters should work, right?

Dede Allen, who would one day edit The Hustler, Wonder Boys, Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon and Reds, started her editing career on this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne was on Chiller Theater on June 14, 1980 at 1 a.m. and September 3, 1983.

Vynález zkázy (Invention for Destruction) was brought to the United States in 1961 by Joseph E. Levine. He had it dubbed into English and changed the title to The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, releasing it with Warner Bros. Pictures as a double feature with Bimbo the Great. There’s also a new introduction with narration by Hugh Downs.

Based on several works by Verne, including Facing the Flag, this movie combines the original illustrations from his books with live action. For all that people compare about effects heavy movies that were made on green screen, this film — made in 1958 — has a major effect in almost every shot.

Director Karel Zeman had already made one movie, Journey to the Beginning of Time, based on Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and made two more movies afterward in this series, The Stolen Airship (based on Two Years’ Vacation) and On the Comet (which is taken from Hector Servadac). This movie also has references to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Robur the Conqueror and The Mysterious Island.

There are also parts of the work of Georges Méliès, Metropolis, Battleship Potemkin and the 1916 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in this.

The artwork comes to life in a variety of styles of animation, including traditional, stop-motion and cut-outs, as well as miniature effects and matte paintings. Actors appear directly within this line art and this movie looks like nothing I’ve ever seen.

The story is about a gang of pirates working for the evil Count Artigas who want to get a scientist to give them his most futuristic weapon. As simple as that is, the film looks incredibly complicated and filled with incredible visuals. Known as Mysti-Mation, this movie looks like woodcut illustrations that can move and house human beings.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 17, 1966 at 1 a.m. It was also on the show on August 19, 1967.

You may worry that you haven’t seen the first two Aztec Mummy films, but trust me, there are so many recaps here that you’ll get caught up really soon.

Somehow, Dr. Krupp has come back from a snakepit to become The Bat and lead a whole new gang. To get what he wants — that gold breastplate that has led him to battle Popoca, Dr. Eduardo Almada, Flor and Pinacate across this film series — he’s made a robot with a human brain that can deliver electronic shocks through its clawed hands.

If you learn anything from this film, maybe you shouldn’t. Aztecs never practiced mummification and used hieroglyphic writing, instead using cremation or simple burial, as well as pictographs. Maybe the filmmakers meant the Incans and the Mayans? Well, they buried Popoca as if he were an Egyptian style mummy, but one thinks that they based that knowledge on Universal horror movies and not any textbook.

You can watch this on YouTube and Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Monster On the Campus was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 23, 1972 at 1:00 a.m. It also aired on Saturday, December 29, 1973; August 23, 1975 and March 12, 1977.

Released as a double feature with Blood of the Vampire, Monster On the Campus is about Dr. Donald Blake (Arthur Franz), a science professor who gets a coelacanth, which he refers to as “a living fossil, immune to the forces of evolution.” As he examines it, he’s cut by its teeth and passes out as Molly Riordan (Helen Westcott) drives him home.

That night, someone kills Molly, leaving her in a tree outside Blake’s home. Blake is found inside, passed out, by his fiancee Madeline Howard (Joanna Moore). Lt. Mike Stevens (Judson Pratt) and Detective Sgt. Eddie Daniels (Ross Elliot) take him to the station for questioning but he can’t remember anything.

All sorts of weirdness starts happening, like dragonflies growing big in size and the doctor accidentally smoking his own blood in his pipe. That’s when he figures out that the gamma rays in the ancient animal have preserved its blood and it can turn anyone into a devolved version. He thinks that he’s turning into a troglodyte, so he goes to his cabin and sets it up to take a photo if he walks across a wire. He does. He’s a caveman.

A caveman with an axe.

Director Jack Arnold made a lot of these science films, like Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space! and This Island Earth. He also made High School Confidential!, Boss N***** and finished his career directing episodes of The Love Boat, The Fall Guy and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. He also made 28 episodes of Gilligan’s Island. This was written by David Duncan, who scripted The Time Machine, Fantastic Voyage, the American script for Rodan, The Monster that Challenged the World and The Black Scorpion.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Astounding She-Monster was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 7, 1964 at 1 a.m. and December 3, 1966.

Released as part of a double feature with Roger Corman’s The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, American-International Pictures’ The Astonishing She-Monster is all about what happens when a gang kidnaps a rich heiress and just happens to run into an alien woman who emerges from a meteorite. You know, everyday stuff.

Nat Burdell (Kenne Duncan, the “Meanest Man In the Movies”), Esther Malone (Jeanne Tatum, The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow) and Brad Conley (Ewing Miles Brown, who produced Blood From Dracula’s Castle) kidnap wealthy society girl Margaret Chaffee (Marilyn Harvey, who appears as Dr. Sapirstein’s receptionist in Rosemary’s Baby) and hide out to wait for the ransom to come rolling in.

Meanwhile, a geologist named Dick Cutler (Robert Clarke, The Hideous Sun Demon) watches a meteor land in the forest. He misses the fact that a glowing blonde in a skintight leotard — that ripped during filming — which is why she backs out of every room instead of turning around — has emerged and that she can kill with just a touch.

So, in an amazing coincidence, the gangsters end up in Cutler’s cabin. One of them chases after the alien woman, who quickly dispatches him with radiation before taking out the other gangsters one by one.

Only Cutler and Chafee remain, but he’s one of those 1950s scientists that can come up with a solution no matter what. He someone deduces that the alien’s body is made up of radium and platinum, which he uses to come up with the perfect acid solution that instantly disintegrates her.

The jokes on him, as she was holding an invitation from the Master of the Council of Planets of the Galaxy for Earth to join the Council. Only now do they realize that she only killed in self-defense and their actions may have doomed our world.

Ronnie Ashcroft directed this, but he had help. Yes, he brought along Edward D. Wood, Jr. who wanted to title this movie Naked Invader. While it was originally planned as a $50,000 production with a seven-day shooting schedule, the final product only cost $18,000 to make and was sold to AIP for $60,000. Most of the actors were paid $500 a week and several actually made decent residuals as it played for at least four years in theaters and drive-ins. So it’s not a great movie, but it is a happy story, right?

This movie promises you an alien femme fatale, but really only delivers a mute alien in high heels and a skintight outfit killing men. Actually, I’m all for that, when you put it that way.

Thanks to Andrew Chamen for catching that I had the title wrong.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Frankenstein 1970 was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 5, 1963 at 3:00 p.m. It also aired on Sunday, July 12, 1964 and Saturday, May 4, 1968.

Howard W. Koch produced the Academy Awards show on eight occasions. He also made this movie, Jungle Heat and The Girl in Black Stockings with Mamie Van Doren. And along with Telly Savalas, he owned a horse named Telly’s Pop that won some big races.

Things have come full circle, I guess, for Boris Karloff as now instead of playing Frankenstein’s Monster, he’s Baron Victor von Frankenstein. After being abused by the Nazis for not aiding them during World War II. Now he’s back to being a scientist but in need of money, he allows a crew to make a horror movie at his family’s castle.

I have no idea how much money he’s getting paid, because it’s enough to buy an atomic reactor and make a clone of himself that starts killing members of the film, his butler and then absorbs himself.

Mike Lane, who plays the monster, would also play the role in The Monkees and on the TV series Monster Squad.

With a set borrowed from Too Much, Too Soon — the autobiography of Diana Barrymore that has Vampira in it — you can spot the Maltese Falcon as a decoration.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cosmic Monsters was on Chiller Theater on Sunday, October 5, 1963 at 11:10 p.m. It also was on the show on December 26, 1964.

Also known as The Strange World of Planet X, this film has scientists Dr. Laird (Alec Mango) and Gilbert Graham (Forrest Tucker) goofing around with magnetic fields and working with Brigadier Cartwright (Wyndham Goldie) and Michele Dupont (Gaby Andre) to solve their issues of needing massive amounts of energy to do their work.

While the military is interested in how they can use this research, the magnetic field gets so messed up that it causes brain wave disruptions and makes men into killers and bugs into giant monsters. Humanity must be saved by Mr. Smith (Martin Benson), an alien being with his own flying saucer, as Dr. Laird has lost it, sending giant spiders after Dupont and endlessly making magnetic mayhem.

At least it has a good tagline: “Shock by incredible shock this ravaging death overruns the earth…menacing mankind with overwhelming chaos!” The poster is pretty fun with the giant spider being the main thing and who doesn’t enjoy monstrous bugs? I once dated a scientist who would do experiments like seeing how long bugs could live without their heads and I referred to movies of this genre to warn her of the dangers. She refused to hear me.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the Puppet People was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 26, 1964 at 11:15 p.m. It also aired on July 31, 1965 and February 18, 1967.

With the totally awesome working titles The Fantastic Puppet People and I Was a Teenage Doll, as well as the provocative UK title Six Inches Tall, this Bert I. Gordon auteur project — he wrote, directed and produced — was rushed into theaters by AIP to capitalize on the success of the previous year’s The Incredible Shrinking Man. It was paired with War of the Colossal Beast, which is ironic, as this film features that movie’s first installment, The Amazing Colossal Man.

Mr. Franz (John Hoyt, who was in everything from Cleopatra to Flesh Gordon) owns a doll factory and seems quite nice, but the lifelike dolls stored in glass canisters — his special collection — seem quite odd. That’s because they’re all real people transformed into dolls!

June Kennedy (Teenage Doll, Sorority Girl and the incredibly named The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent) plays Sally Reynolds, who takes a job with Mr. Franz. Before long, she’s gotten all into salesman Bob Westley(John Agar, who has a vast career from John Wayne films to tons of B movies and science fiction films all the way to Miracle Mile; he was also the first husband of Shirley Temple), which seems to upset her boss. Before long, the guy is gone — just when they were about to get engaged and move away!

Soon, the twosome finds themselves part of Franz’s doll collection, forced to act out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Keep an eye out for Laurie Mitchell (who played Queen Yllana, the ruler of Venus, in Queen of Outer Space) and Susan Gordon, the daughter of the director. She’s also in his films Tormented and Picture Mommy Dead.

This movie is part of American history, believe it or not. On the evening of June 17, 1972, Alfred C. Baldwin III (in a nearby hotel as a lookout for the Watergate burglars) became so interested in the film that he didn’t notice the two plainclothes detectives who made the historic arrests that led to the event known as Watergate.

You can watch this with Rifftrax commentary on Tubi. You can also get the Shout! Factory blu ray release with a 2K scan if you’d like.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fiend Without a Face was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 6, 1964 at 4 p.m. It also was on the show on January 2, 1965.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=FxXLcI_DQqE

Based upon Amelia Reynolds Long’s 1930 short story “The Thought Monster”, originally published in the March 1930 issue of Weird Tales magazine, this independent British film played in the US on a double bill with The Haunted Strangler.

U. S. Air Force Interceptor Command Experimental Station No. 6 is a long-range radar installation located in the fictional town of Winthrop, Manitoba, Canada, which is a farming village that’s been plagued by unexplained deaths. It turns out that people are being killed with their brains and spinal columns being taken. The townies are up in arms, as they feel that the radiation experiments are to blame.

That leads Air Force Major Jeff Cummings starts to investigate the murders and quickly fingers Professor R. E. Walgate as a person of interest. Turns out that the Professor has been experimenting with telekinesis and thought projection for some time. That said — the radiation from the base has turned his thought projections into an entirely new life form that is attacking the locals and using them for host bodies. Of course, those bodies are mostly invisible, but also show up from time to time as moving brains with spinal columns with eyes at the end of extended eye stalks. They’re creepy as hell and led to a public uproar after its British premiere, with the public and critics angry over the films horrifying levels of gore (for the time, at least).

When this movie debuted at the Rialto Theatre in New York City, it came complete with a sidewalk exhibit of a “living and breathing Fiend” that moved and made sounds. The crowds that gathered to watch the caged Fiend created large crowds that the NYPD had to disperse.

It’s a pretty effective picture. Maybe that’s not even due to the film’s director, Arthur Crabtree. He believed that science fiction was beneath him and walked off the set at one point, with star Marshall Thompson finishing the direction of the movie.

If you like 1950’s atomic science fiction, scenes of people boarded in a room trying to hide out from pulsating brains and stop-motion blood and guys, well, this is the movie for you.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I Bury the Living was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, April 26, 1964 at 11:10 p.m. It also aired on April 3, 1965 and May 11, 1968.

John S Berry wrote this wrote the site awhile ago. I really like this review as it gets into the working class nature of this movie. You can read more of his words on his Twitter. 

A few years ago I saw a movie called The Canal. In the opening scene, a man gets an auditorium of noisy kids to pipe down asking them if they want to see ghosts. The “ghosts” he is referring to are the people in the film and how none of them are alive today.

I often think of these “ghosts” when I watch older movies. How odd (and wonderful)it must be to get to see relatives long gone. Not just the visuals but also their mannerisms and hearing their voices. I Bury the Living has that feeling for me. I am seeing ghosts pleading, going mad and caring that have been gone for some time.

I Bury the Living was released in 1958 and I am not sure how well it was received. Most of the reviews and articles I read about it compared it to a longer episode of the Twilight Zone. It runs an efficient 77 minutes and was made by Albert Band, who is the father of Charles. Looking up his career I found the sweet support of a father who served as a producer for many of his son’s projects including one of my favorites Castle Freak. I wondered what he thought of his son’s films then I realized he was the director of Dracula’s Dog and Ghoulies II. Thanksgiving in the Band house must have been a lot of fun.

Stephen King is a huge fan of this film but hates the ending. That is a fact steeped in irony since I often find the endings of his books to be lacking (throw rotten tomatoes at me here). I am not going to spoil the ending, but I have watched this several times and am still undecided. I don’t hate it but after some viewings, I think they could have done more with it. But I am not sure how or what (no not a giant spider).

I Bury the Living is very atmospheric and you can feel the coldness of the main set of an office at a cemetery. Richard Boone is kind of a grumpy 50s businessman that has to take his turn in being the chairman for the cemetery. When he is sworn in they tell him it is not a tough job but slowly it possesses him and he goes from a confident and well-groomed man to a confused, flustered and downright scared man.

Andy is the caretaker who does the real day-to-day running of the cemetery. There is something charming and sweet about him and he is a man who truly loves his job. It was a sign of the times and a sad reminder of how people used to have pride in their work no matter how lowly or menial the job was. Andy didn’t have nice suits and slick hair like Mr. Kraft but he appreciated the scenic views at the cemetery and the comfort and peace.

Mr. Kraft imposes his values on Andy and thinks he is doing him a favor when he tells him it is time for him to retire and to find his replacement. Kraft being the typical businessman pats himself on the back not realizing work and this place provides Andy with most of his purpose. And a man can be truly lost when he has lost his purpose.

The giant map has a great look to it. In it are white pins for unoccupied spots that have been sold and black ones are for the ones that have bodies in them. Kraft makes a mistake and puts the wrong color of pin into the map and starts a chain reaction of doom. Or does he?

Kraft’s lady Ann comes to visit and she seems a bit younger than Kraft. I like the fact that the leads are older. It seems like films these days never cast older people (they consider mid 30s old now) and I think it adds to how Kraft actually wears down after all the bad things that start happening around him. He even questions his sanity and wonders if he is truly to blame which is what we often do as we age. Much more meaningful then Archie trying to spend time with his best gal no matter what is going on around him.

No one seems to believe Kraft and he in a sense is doing the math. They seem to think he is buckling from all the pressure of being a modern businessman. A few costly experiments are done and Kraft really starts to go off the rails. The music used is top notch and eery and Band does some very interesting visuals for Kraft’s descent into possible madness.

It is hard to write without spoiling the film. But it is definitely worth a watch. Sure it could be a supernatural force at work or a whodunnit. I feel it is a film about the upper class not truly understanding how the working class feel about life and their jobs and that is all you are going to get out of me. I am still not sure how I feel about the ending, but really I love the room to speculate and wonder about the ending of a film.