Baron Sardonicus (Guy Rolfe) was once Marek Toleslawski, a farmer like his father. He lived a quiet existence with his wife Elenka (Erika Peters), working is father’s land. Before his father died, he had purchased a ticket for a national lottery. He won, but was buried with the ticket. Elena says that if Marek loves her, he will open the grave and get the ticket. When the coffin opens, he is so upset by the rotted and grinning face of his dead dad that his face is stuck in the same manner, leaving him unable to speak or eat food for some time. His wife is so upset that she kills herself. Despite his wealth giving him a title, he is stuck with his face. After hiring experts, he is able to eat and speak, but needs Sir Robert (Ronald Lewis) to give him his face back.

Despite being married to Maude (Audrey Dalton), Sardonicus has been kidnapping and torturing young women with his wealth protecting him. He also has an assistant Krull (Oskar Homolka) who has lost an eye for making Sardonicus angry. If Sir Robert can figure out how to fix this, he will be saved — his face is now threatened — and numerous people will be protected. Can he do it?

This is a William Castle movie, so it needed a gimmick. At the conclusion, audiences took part in a “Punishment Poll” where they held up a glow-in-the-dark card with a thumbs up or down to determine if Sardonicus would die. Castle hosts the poll within the movie.

In his book Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America, Castle said that the two different endings came from the Columbia Pictures hating the dark ending. He said,  “I would have two endings, Columbia’s and mine, and let the audience decide for themselves the fate of Mr. Sardonicus. Invariably, the audience’s verdict was thumbs down… Contrary to some opinions (just in case the audience voted for mercy) we had the other ending. But it was rarely, if ever, used.”

I’m going to disagree with Castle and say that that ending was never filmed. There was also said to be a drive-in ending with headlights flashing the votes.

Mr. Sardonicus was based on a book (it was originally published in three parts in Playboy) and stage play by Ray Russell, who also wrote The Incubus, Zotz!, The Premature Burial, Chamber of Horrors, The Horror of It All and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Tor Johnson is one of those actors who was a special effect without any help. Just by showing up on screen, he’s thrilling. In this one, he’s Joseph Jaworsky, a Russian scientist who runs from the Iron Curtain and finds his way to Yucca Flats, where radiation turns him into a mute beast. All he wanted to do was give the Americans the secrets to the Russian moon landing!

American actor, writer, producer and director Coleman Francis made this, casting his sons and himself in the movie. His oeuvre, as it were, is made up of films like The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba. People don’t just smoke in his movies. The smoking becomes central to the entire film. Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 said that the themes of his movies are “death, hatefulness, death, pain, and death.”

The police, for no real reason or trial, shoot the irradiated Tor Johnson over and over, but he lives just enough to hug a jackalope* before he dies. The police officers in Francis’ films, which often end his stories by brutally blowing away the bad guys, may be the most realistic ones in the history of movies.

Everything in this movie is dubbed. Nobody speaks on camera. Even guns are fired off-camera and then b-roll of guns being shot is cut in. The editing is such that some characters appear to have been shot to death and then arise and come back in later scenes. There’s also a murder scene in the beginning with a naked woman in the shower being choked. That scene is only in this because Francis likes shooting nude scenes.

What’s funny is that this movie predates The Incredible Hulk and seems very much like the same origin story. Maybe that’s a coincidence. As for Tor Johnson, he would only make one more movie, appearing without credit in Head. Here’s a quote about the making of the movie that I love: *The jackalope wandered on set and Tor Johnson improvised caressing it. Man, life is awesome, isn’t it?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Joseph Losey and written by Evan Jones, These Are the Damned is taken from the novel The Children of Light by H.L. Lawrence. It has Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) arriving in England, fresh off a failed marriage, and meeting Joan (Shirley Anne Field), who lures him into a mugging by her brother King (Oliver Reed). Not the way to start a romance, but still, it’s a start.

Simon gives Joan another chance and they stay a step ahead of King and his motorcycle gang but running into some caves. They finally make love in an abandoned house and are chased again, finding a military base where nine 11-year-old children live, all cold to the touch and highly intelligent. Held by a man named Bernard (Alexander Knox), they are observed at all times as they have survived a nuclear blast that killed their parents. They are all born on the same day and perhaps the next step in evolution.

While Simon, Joan and King try to help the children escape, they are all overwhelmed by the radiation that lives inside them and Bernard wipes out the evidence, even killing his girlfriend Freya (Viveca Lindfors) when she refuses to be part of his plot to raise the children to survive the war that he knows is coming.

Losey was an anti-war director blacklisted by Hollywood, working for Hammer in England. They made him tone down the incest between King and Joan, as well as changing the end where a helicopter would kill Freya and not Bernard. Cut to 77 minutes when it played in the U.S., it’s an incredible film that was inside the guise of a simple horror film.

You can watch it on YouTube.

Written and directed by Curtis Harrington — one of the leaders of New Queer Cinema and also the director of Queen of Blood, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, Ruby and so many more — this film was always one I wanted to see as it features Marjorie Cameron in a small role.

Harrington had also shot a documentary about her — The Wormwood Star — and I’ll forgive you if you have no idea who she is. Cameron was many things — an artist, poet, actress, and probably most essentially, an occultist. A follower of Crowley’s Thelema, she was married to rocket pioneer and nexus point of all things 20th century occult, Jack Parsons. In fact, Parsons believed that he had conjured Cameron to be the Whore of Babylon/Thelemite goddess Babalon as part of his Babalon Working rite, which he conducted alongside L. Rod Hubbard. No, really. It may have also opened our world to the aliens that have obsessed us since Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO in 1947.

After a suicide attempt and being institutionalized, Cameron gathered a group of magic practitioners around herself that she called The Children, whose sex magic rituals were to create a moonchild. She was now pregnant with what she referred to as the Wormwood Star, but that ended in miscarriage. Many of The Children soon left, as her proclamations of the future had grown increasingly apocalyptic.

Cameron’s orbit — much like her husband’s — unites both the worlds of art and the occult, straddling appearing in the films of Kenneth Anger, working with UFO expert and contactee George Van Tassel and appearing in Wallace Berman’s art journal Semina.

Why did I tell you all this? Because it fascinates me that she’s in Night Tide.

Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper!) is a young sailor on shore leave who meets Mora (Linda Lawson, who is also in William Castle’s Let’s Kill Uncle), a woman who makes her living appearing in a sideshow. They fall in love before he learns that her past boyfriends have drowned under mysterious circumstances. That may — or may not — be because Mora is a siren, a legendary creature who exists to lure men to their deaths. Adding to her suspicions is the mystery woman (Cameron) who calls to her and demands that she follow her destiny.

One evening, under a full moon, she invites him deep sea swimming, but cuts his hose, forcing him to surface so that she isn’t tempted to kill him. She then swims into the depths of the ocean, fulfilling the call of the mystery woman. And when he returns to the boardwalk, her dead body is still in the mermaid sideshow, now there for visitors to gawk at her dead eyes.

Despite a police confession as to who the killer is, the strange woman in black and her call to the sea is never explained.

Anton LaVey discussed this film in Blanche Barton’s The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. “There’s a whole genre of films that are just little evocative low-budget gems that I certainly wouldn’t call schlock but that are also being revived as a consequence of more attention in those directions. Director Curtis Hanington’s first movie, Night Tide filmed around the Santa Monica Pier and Venice. California in the late ’50’s, is a psychologically intricate story about a young sailor (Dennis Hopper) who falls in love with a mermaid It’s just wonderful to see these precious works of art being finally given the attention they merit.” This also appears on the Church of Satan film list.

According to Spencer Kansa’s Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Anger introduced Cameron and LaVey, who was delighted to meet the actress, having been a fan of the film.

You can download this movie from the Internet Archive or buy the Kino Lober blu ray.

Thanks to Severin Films for including a quote from this site in the sales copy: 

“A SIGNIFICANT MOVIE… One of the first zombie films made in color, it mostly played Southern drive-ins and Mexican cinemas before disappearing for over 40 years.” B&S About Movies

Extras on this release include an audio interview with distributor Samuel M. Sherman, an interview with author/filmmaker C. Courtney Joyner on Barry Mahon and a trailer.

You can get the blu ray from Severin.

The Dead One is a significant movie because it’s one of the first two zombie films made in color — the other is Dr. Blood’s Coffin — and it was made outside of the Hollywood system in New Orleans. It mostly played in Southern drive-ins, in Mexico and the UK before it disappeared for 41 years.

Shot in Eastmancolor and Ultrascope, a form of Cinemascope from Germany, The Dead One has a cool looking zombie and otherwise would be an unremarkable film other than the fact that it’s a Barry Mahon film and stands out from the rest of his output, which is either falls into the disparate genres of nudist films, roughies, propaganda movies or childen’s films.

Actually, the poster for this would like you to know just how remarkable this movie is, saying that The Dead One is “The Greatest VOODOO Film Ever Made – Filmed on Location in New Orleans Where VOODOO was introduced to the New World.”

A zombie is haunting the plantation of Kenilwort and commanded by Monica Carlton (Monica Davis, who is also in Mahon’s 1,000 Shapes of a Female, Rocket Attack U.S.A. and She Should Have Stayed In Bed), the mistress of the decaying plantation.

This is probably the most restrained Mahon film I’ve seen. It played double bills for a long time, a filler for drive-ins that would run late into the night while what happened in the steamed up cars looked a lot like the other movies Barry was known for making.

Ever since I read about Blast of Silence in RE/Search: Incredibly Strange Films, back in the time before you could just get a movie in moments, I’ve wanted to see this movie. I often hold back watching movies until I feel like I’m ready for them and this movie lived up to everything I thought that it would be.

Frankie Bono is a hitman working with Cleveland-based organized crime — this is where I remind you that there’s no such thing as the Mafia and Italian-Americans are a diverse group not strictly employed by organized crime — comes home over the holidays to New York City. He’s there to kill  Troiano (Peter H. Clune), which won’t be an easy kill. He’s told that if he’s seen before the kill, he won’t be paid his full paycheck.

He buys a gun and silencer from Big Ralph (Larry Tucker, who wrote Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and developed The Monkees with Paul Mazursky), a strange man who keeps sewer rats. Between his disgust for that individual and his growing memories of discontent with where he came from — growing up alone in an orphanage — and a disastrous holiday meal with old acquaintance Petey (Danny Meehan) and an even worse get-together with Petey’s sister Lorrie (Molly McCarthy) that ends with him assaulting her before regretting his actions, Frankie is falling apart before he even gets to his work.

Following Troiano and his girlfriend (Milda Memenas) to a Greenwich Village jazz club where beat artists bellow about lost love, Frankie finds Big Ralph ready to blackmail him. He follows the man home and strangles him before calling his bosses to say he can’t do the hit. He’s told he has no choice. As he starts falling to pieces, he tries to convince Lorrie to leave town with him, only to discover she already has a man (Dan Saroyan).

All alone, as he claimed he always wanted to be, he kills his mark and escapes, nearly caught multiple times, before calling for the rest of his money. The meeting place is an isolated spot by the water and Frankie is ambushed by multiple killers, shot numerous times and finally dies in the freezing December water.

He was already dead anyway. That’s because Blast of Silence may seem like a film noir from what you’ve read but it also has a completely deranged way of telling its story. That’s because Allen Baron, the director, writer and star of the movie wasn’t like most filmmakers. He got the cameras and lights for this movie from a movie he’d been on the crew for, Cuban Rebel Girls, which had been left in the country when that movie — Errol Flynn’s last — was abandoned when the production had to run in the face of the Cuban revolution. The producers of that movie — which was directed by Barry Mahon — told him that if he could get the equipment smuggled out, he could use it. As it was, Baron was already a wanted man in that country, as he was sleeping with a woman who was the girlfriend of a gangster. A confrontation ended with him shooting that man.

Shot mostly in New York City locations with no permits, the end of the film was shot at the Old Mill on a Jamaica Bay estuary on Long Island during Hurricane Donna, a location that Baron knew was a dumping ground for the dead bodies of mob hits. That moment where he hits the water and dies? That’s no stuntman. The snow and waves and rain in that scene isn’t fake either. It was filmed during Hurricane Donna.

What makes it even weirder is that the film flirts between grindhouse and arthouse, a movie that should be about bad people and murder that opens up the emotional damage that its lead is suffering from. That’s told through narration that was written by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, Coming Home) and read by also blacklisted actor Lionel Stander, which is embued with dread. Just check out how the film closes: “God moves in mysterious ways,” they said. Maybe he is on your side, the way it all worked out. Remembering other Christmases, wishing for something, something important, something special. And this is it, baby boy Frankie Bono. You’re alone now. All alone. The scream is dead. There’s no pain. You’re home again, back in the cold, black silence.”

It’s also filled with dark imagery that seems more thought-out than the normal B picture that it — on the surface — it is emulating.

Oddly, for as much about crime and murder as it seems like Baron knew, the idea that a silencer would work on a revolver is impossible.

Allen Baron was born to immigrant parents at the start of the Great Depression. In his memoir, Blast of Silence, he discusses how his father died when he was eleven, how he dropped out of school in the tenth grade, worked on the atomic bomb at sixteen years old and worked in comic books all before his mother sent him to Los Angeles to find an ex-boyfriend of hers. Once there, he ended up at Paramount Studios, inspiring him when he got back to New York City and became a cab driver. With just $20,000 he would make this movie, which was supposed to star Peter Falk. Instead, he did the role and created a movie that is still discussed sixty years later. Its creator would go on to work mostly in TV, although he did direct Terror In the City, Outside In and Foxfire Light. I find it as dark and sad as this movie that its creator went on to make episodes of The Love Boat, The Brady Bunch and The Dukes of Hazzard.

Lycanthropus was directed by Paolo Heusch (The Day the Sky Exploded) and written by Ernesto Gastaldi. Heusch used the name Richard Benson, as all Italian directors of that time had to have an American names.

If the title Werewolf In a Girls’ Dormitory isn’t good enough — and it is, it’s one of the best exploitation titles ever — it was also released as I Married a Werewolf, Ghoul in a Girl’s Dormitory, Monster Among the Girls and The Ghoul In School, which is the name of the song that Marilyn Stewart and Frank Owens wrote and that was sung by Adam Keefe. In case you wonder why a voice that sounds like Peter Lorre says, “Come with me to the corridors of blood,” that’s because this movie was on a double feature with Corridors of Blood. 

Director Swift (Curt Lowens) is trying to run a reform school that’s funded by Sir Alfred Whiteman (Maurice Marsac). Swift brings on a new teacher named Julian Olcott (Carl Schell, the brother of Maximilian) even though he’s aware of the fact that when Olcott was a doctor, some patients died.

One of the girls, Mary Smith (Mary McNeeran), is sleeping with Whiteman and also blackmailing him. She’s the first to die — shocking that the bad girl of all these reform girls is the first to die and that she’s also sleeping with the rich man paying for all of the school — and the police decide that she was killed by wolves. Priscilla (Barbara Lass, Roman Polanski’s first wife) believes that someone else did it, as she finds a note that was threatening Mary. Like a giallo main character, she ends up investigating the case herself with the help of the school’s handyman Walter (Luciano Pigozzi) and Whiteman. She soon learns that his wife Sheena (Annie Steinert) knows who killed the girl ruining her marriage but she won’t reveal the truth.

As you can tell by the title, there is a werewolf. It gets there and yes, it’s amazing when it happens. This movie looks so much better than you’d expect with its title. It’s also the only werewolf movie I’ve ever seen where the girls attacked by the monster have orgasms while in the jaws of the furry creature.

Want to see what Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum thinks? Check out what he has to say here.

You can get this from Severin.