EDITOR’S NOTE: Terrified! was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 19, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on August 11, 1979; July 26, 1980 and October 10, 1981.

I’m echoing what nearly every article about this movie says, if only because it’s true. The first two minutes of this movie are better than anything that will follow.

We start in a ghost town, where a laughing hooded figure buries a young boy alive. When the kid asks, “Who are you?” the reply is chilling: “You know me, Joey!” and then laughter, as the boy’s shocked face is shown and we see gigantic eyes fill the screen.

Seriously, if that’s all Terrified! was, people would still be talking about it and not just maniacs like me.

The titles are so classy — just check out the whole opening at Art of the Title — that even the Crown International Pictures title card comes up as part of the animation and not just thrown out at the start of the movie.

Lew Landers’ last movie — he made The Raven at Universal before a long career that went from film to television — Terrified! is all about a college psychology student studying just how much terror a man can take. Once a killer starts hunting him, he gets first-hand knowledge.

Denver Pyle — years before he was Uncle Jessie — is in this as a lawman. Speaking of lawmen, Ben Frank, who was Inspector Lt. Mankiewicz in Death Wish 2, is in this. So is Barbara Luddy, who was one of the Disney players from 1955 to 1973, with her voice showing up as Lady in Lady and the Tramp, Merryweather in Sleeping Beauty and Rover in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. And oh wow — Robert Towers is here too, someday to be in Masters of the Universe as the strange-looking Skeletor minion Karg!

It’s not horrible, but man, that opening makes you hope for so much more.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

I’m proud to say that Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in the same town as me, Pittsburgh, PA. He was lured from a career as an educator into being a radio station manager and then, well, advertising got him. I can relate. I’ve spent the better part of 25 years doing the same. But then Lewis got smart. He learned how to make money.

He began making movies with David F. Friedman, starting with Living Venus. Their nudie cuties would be innocent today, but showed way more skin than mainstream films. These weren’t high art. They were made to turn a profit and they sure did, from movies like Boin-n-g! and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre to the world’s first — and probably only — nudist camp musical, Goldilocks and the Three Bares.

Once nudie movies got boring, Lewis needed another tactic. He found it. Oh wow, did he find it. Gore. Blood everywhere, guts all over the screen and no limits to the depravity that he’d fester on drive-in screens nationwide. It all started with Blood Feast.

This is a pretty simple film: Faud Ramses wants to make sacrifices to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar to resurrect her, so he kills beautiful young socialites when he’s not catering their coming out parties. He’s also wiping out anyone who requests a copy of his book, Ancient Weird Religious Rites.

Shot in Miami, Florida — where life is cheap! — in just four days for just $24,000, Blood Feast used all local ingredients for the gore, except for a sheep’s tongue that came from Tampa Bay. Friedman was a genius at publicity, helping the film succeed, giving out vomit bags at screenings and even applying to get an injunction against his own movie in Sarasota so that it couldn’t be shown.

Lewis and Friedman didn’t stray too far from their sexy roots, bringing in June 1963 Playmate of the Month Connie Mason to star in the film. She would come back for Lewis’ even more astounding Two Thousand Maniacs!

As for Lewis, he left filmmaking in the 1970’s, served some jail time for fraud and then began copywriting his way to even greater success, a second — maybe even third or fourth career — later in life. He wrote and published over twenty books, including The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion, Direct Mail Copy That Sells! and The Advertising Age Handbook of Advertising. His books were all over the place at my first agency job and I was shocked to discover that the author of these books — one of the godfathers of direct mail and eblasts — was also the American godfather of gore. Sometimes. life makes sense.

In 2016, Arrow Video released a huge box set of his films and the man whose work was often in grimy drive-ins and Something Weird video cassettes finally began to be appreciated as an auteur. Funny, as he was the man who said, “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form.”

You know those movies that they warn you about and tell you that they’ll warp your mind and make you a maniac, how you’ll never be the same again? This is that movie. You should probably watch it right now.

Can’t make it this weekend? Blood Feast is available on Tubi or on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

In the great Jay Slater biography and interview I found on Renato Polselli, he says, “In 1961, Polselli found critical success with Ultimatum alla vita and Avventura al motel. Ultimatum alla vita is a war drama in which women prisoners of the Germans begin to fight for the partisan cause. The film won a number of awards and was particularly well-received in France. Polselli freely admits that World War II affected him during the German occupation of Italy. “Minor Italian films such as All the Girls Are Going to Stop Me and From Matter to Life made me stop and think. These films were not only important to me personally, but for all the people of Italy. They conveyed social concerns regarding the war and Italy’s situation after the Allies left. In the 50s, Italian cinema found it difficult to raise these questions and answer our doubts.” Polselli switches his mood to one of deep thought and utter seriousness. “I knew that in the 50s, Italian cinema was restrained in what it could say. So, I decided to make films that could ask questions and try to raise more dangerous topics. One such film I saw at the cinema, now lost, was critical of the American invasion of Italy. The politicians were afraid of movies like this, and tried to ban them.” While on the subject of Ultimatum alla vita, Polselli changes direction and starts talking about mistreating his actors! “I have never really had a problem with actors in my films. The only actor who gave me trouble was Fabrizio Capucci, who plays the role of ‘Hans’ in Ultimatum alla vita. Capucci was always so stupid and full of himself. Eventually, after putting up with his behavior, I beat him up! After that, Capucci was fine on set and did what I asked of him.”

I kind of love that Italian directors have no issues with telling you that they physically fought their actors.

He goes on: “Avventura al motel was a sexual farce, very much like the teenage American comedies of the early 80s in which the characters were obsessed with losing their virginity. The film is a simple story in which couples attempt to screw in a motel, but are always disturbed before they can get down to the dirty deed. Avventura al motel was very successful at the Italian box office.”

Unfortunately, I can’t find a copy of Ultimatum alla vita, but I have seen Avventura al motel.

It’s pretty wild when you realize the excesses that Polselli would later unleash, but this is a light and frothy sex comedy in which a starlet and a pilot, two bit Casanovas, an industry manager and his secretary, and several others all have sexual hijinks in a fancy hotel. It was written by Polselli with Giovanni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci and stars Italian Western icon Anthony Steffen, comedy team Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, Margaret Lee (Asylum Erotica AKA Slaughter Hotel) and Eva Bartok (Blood and Black Lace).

You can watch this on YouTube.

The circus that Kapoor (Bir Sakhuja) and Jagdish (Madan Puri) own is a money-losing proposition but if they can just capture the giant ape Otango from the jungles of Malay, all their problems will be solved. Along with Professor Sharma, Rita (Ragini), a hunter named Ajit (Ajit) and Chandu the circus clown (Randhir), they go in search of the beast but find only destruction and the laboratory of Dr. Cyclops (K. N. Singh), a maniac who has started transforming humans into gorillas.

Dr. Cyclops has a daughter, Shobha (Helen), who wants to help the outsiders survive while all the mad scientist wants to do is marry Rita, even bringing Jagdish over to his side. It seems like nearly everyone is going to have to die and most of the jungle is going to have to burn before this is all over.

Amazingly, India has more than one kaiju movie, as this was followed by Balwant B. Dave’s Gogola, which is Godzilla. As for Shikari, it somehow combines Mighty Joe Young, King Kong and Dr. Cyclops — which was produced by Kong‘s Merian C. Cooper and, like all three movies, directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack– into one movie.

Dr. Cyclops is pretty awesome. He can shrink people, create a giant gorilla and has a snake pit that he loves throwing people into. He also has a mutant chained to a wall that never really gets referred to. If I had a captive mutant, you best believe I’d be bragging about it.

Amazingly, this Kong also has songs. Five of them!

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read another take on this film here.

Based on the Charles Exbrayat novel Vous souvenez vous de Paco, this is all about everyone in the orbit of a corrupt politician named Maurice Leprince (Jean Servais), those who want to protect him and those who seek to stop him. This is Franco’s homage to noir, with an aquarium scene that references The Lady from Shanghai as well as tips of the cap to other noir classics.

Juan (Serafin Garcia Vazquez) has learned that Leprince runs the crime in the city and is killed. His handler Mora (Fernando Fernan Gomez) goes after the criminal but is dumped in the river. He quits the force so that he can use whatever force he needs to get revenge. I mean, you throw someone through a good cop’s window and this is what happens.

There’s also a female killer — a Franco Cinematic Universe favorite — who is killing all of Leprince’s men to get revenge for Juan and wants him in her sights before it’s all over.

Franco as always struggles with action scenes but when it comes to capturing a city in the shadows and the smoke-filled jazz cabarets within, he proves to be a genius.

A year after making this, Franco would be Welles’ assistant on Chimes at Midnight.

You can buy this from Severin or watch this on Tubi.

The Jaguar comes early in the career of Jess Franco and, as with much of Italian and Spanish directors, he was working on a western.

Venezuela, 1863. Colonel Saltierra (Georges Rollin) brazenly attacks the home of Colonel Mendoza (Felix Dafauce), murdering everyone except for the man’s son Jose (Jose Suarez) and a servant named Juano (Roberto Camardiel). Within a few years, no one is left to challenge Saltierra except for revolutionaries — which includes Spanish pop stars Los Machucambos — led by a Robin Hood named The Jaguar, who is, as you can already figure out, Jose.

The trouble is that Jose is in love with Saltierra’s daughter Ines (Marta Reves) who is already promised to one of her father’s men, Lieutenant Alberto Kalman (Todd Martens). Sylvia Sorrente, who plays the dancing informant Lolita also shows up in Castle of Blood and The Poppy Is Also a Flower, as well as an uncredited role as a Roman citizen in Bruno Mattei’s Caligula et Messaline.

Franco actually has a budget here and this is not full of his usual zooms and leering at the female characters, although you can tell he’s having a blast capturing the lusty dancing and energy of Sorrente. This was written by his first wife, Nicole Guettard, using the name Nicole David. She also wrote The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll as David Coll, the story that Al Otro Lado del Espejo is based on and used the name Nicole Franco for the credits on the movies Celestine, Maid at Your Service; Lorna the Exorcist, Le Jourisseur, But Who Raped Linda and Les chatouilleuses. She’s also the script supervisor for The Diabolical Dr. Z, Vampyros Lesbos, X312 – Flight to Hell, Eugenie de Sade, Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein, La Maldicion de Frankenstein, Sinner: The Diary of a Nymphomaniac, Quartier de femmes and Game of Murder. She shows up in a few of his films, including Robinson und seine wilden Sklavinnen as a script girl, as a doctor in A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Gloria in Al Otro Lado del Espejo, as well as Midnight Party and Shining Sex, where she plays a cabaret owner.