“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn’t only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let’s examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!”

You know how I always say, “They could have stopped making movies after this?” This is the movie at the center of my argument. I really don’t know how any movie gets any better than this, unless Russ Meyer is directing it.

The three worst women you’ve ever met — and also the finest — finish their dance routines at a club and then head out to the California desert where they race their car and verbally abuse one another. They are Billie (Laurie Williams), Rosie (Haji) and Varla (Tura Satana, perhaps the finest thing Satan ever made for the Lord). They follow that up by sizing up the guy mansplaining things to his girl and snap his neck before drugging his woman, Linda (Susan Bernard).

Stopping to fill up, they learn that a wheelchair-bound man and his feebleminded son are literally sitting on a treasure. So they do what you or I would do — manipulate, manhandled and murder everyone in their way.

Originally known as The Leather Girls and then The Mankillers, this isn’t a movie as much as a religion to me. No less a cultural giant as John Waters said, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”

Tura Satana is the kind of woman that if she wasn’t born, we would have created her and made her into a goddess. There have been many pretenders to her throne, but none will ever ascend it.

Seriously, I wore the t-shirt of this movie for most of the 90s before it fell apart. If you dislike this movie, we can never, ever be friends.

The art for this comes from this site.

Man, the Woolner Brothers put out some wild movies.

Directed by Hugo Grimaldi — and writer Arthur C. Pierce — this has the Intergalactic Council send Dr. Kolos (Richard Kiel) on a mission for their galaxy domination program to replace humans with androids just like him. If his mission happens, the world will be taken over. If not, he dies.

He quickly enslaves Prof. Vaughan Dornheimer (George Macready) and starts making the androids and takes over the top scientists of the world — like Dr. Munson (Walter Abel) — and uses them to steal the things they need to keep making more copies of humans.

The professor’s daughter Lisa (Dolores Faith) and Glenn Martin (George Nader) are on the case, but soon, Glenn is duplicated. His girlfriend Gale Wilson (Barbara Nichols) figures it out and the cops open fire on the fake Glenn, who rips his arm off to escape. As for the real Glenn, he’s found the professor just as the android professor takes over, ties up Dr. Kolos and uses several copies of the evil Thor (John Indrisano) to steal Lisa and start making a duplicate of her.

She’s saved at the last minute by Dr. Kolos, who has a change of heart, knowing that he is an android and will soon die. However, he was able to see the human race and the beauty of mankind.

Filmed at the same time as the movie it played double features with — Mutiny In Space — this was re-released on VHS as Jaws of the Alien after Kiel became a star for playing the James Bond henchman.

Assassination in Rome AKA El secreto de Bill North (The Secret of Bill North) was directed and co-written by Silvio Amadio, who also made Amuck! and Smile Before Death. It was co-written by Giovanni Simonelli, who also wrote Jungle Raiders, Seven Deaths In the Cat’s Eye and Django Shoots First.

Dick Sherman (Hugh O’Brien) is an American reporter who has settled in Rome, covering scandalous celebrity stories. A dead body is found at the Trevi Fountain — already famous from La Dolce Vita and Three Coins in the Fountain to movie watchers — which sets this whole mystery off. There’s also American Shelley North (Cyd Charisse), on vacation in Italy with new husband Bill (Alberto Dalbés) when he goes missing. Decades ago, she and Dick had an affair and she calls to him for help, which doesn’t work all that well with Dick’s current love interest Erika (Eleonora Rossi Drago, Camille 2000).

There’s also a MacGuffin that everyone needs to find that keeps getting stolen, lots of gorgeous parties and even a trip to Cinecittà studios where a peplum is being filmed. Known in Italy as Il segreto del vestito rosso, which is more of an Edgar Wallace-style title, this is an early giallo before the genre had been fully formed, arriving just a few years after The Girl Who Knew Too Much. It has some style and huge society parties, plus Dick’s office bar is bigger than the one in my house and everyone smokes inside, making me love everything about this movie, even if by the end Dick doesn’t seem all that moved by all the death that surrounds him.

Also: The poster and U.S. title for this looks like a Eurospy film. If it had come out a few years later, it would have had an animal name and had a poster with Cyd Charisse’s $5 million dollar legs in full view.

The only movie directed by Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo, who used the name Finney Cliff, The Seventh Grave is one wild movie.

Written by Caracciolo, Antonio Casale (who plays Jenkins in this movie as the Americanized name John Anderson; he was also assistant director using the name Paul Sciamann) and Alessandro Santini (using the name Edmond W. Carloff; he also directed and wrote La pelle sotto gli artigli and Questa libertà di avere… le ali bagnate, which was co-written by Renato Polselli). this all takes place in Scotland after Sir Reginald Thorne dies from leprosy. As happens in these movies, the family comes to his estate for the last will and testament to be read.

Attorney Bill Elliot (Nando Angelini) and his assistant, a waitress named Betty (Germana Dominici), prepare to tell who gets what to the assembled friends and family, who include Jenkins (Antonio Casale) and his mistress Mary (Bruna Baini); his brother Fred (Gianni Dei, Patrick Still Lives); Sir Reginald’s assistant Patrick (Calogero Reale); Reverend Crabbe (Ferruccio Viotti) and Colonel Percival (Umberto Borsato) and his psychic daughter Katy (Stefania Nelli).

According to Sir Reginald’s request, everyone must stay together for 48 hours and explore the mansion, as the treasure of Sir Francis Drake is hidden there. Huh? Well, soon Patrick is dead, the coffin with Sir Reginald’s body is empty and Inspector Wright (Armando Guarnieri) is on the case.

This feels like The Cat and the Canary meets an Italian Gothic with a seance and a masked killer and oh, maybe we should add some psychic powers. I mean, that’s exactly what it is. And I loved it. It’s such a baffling movie, made with so many people who didn’t do much else and I’m kind of obsessed with learning more about it.

You can get this as part of Severin’s Danza Macabra Vol. 1 box set or watch it on Tubi.

Al Adamson was the son of silent film stars Denver Dixon and Dolores Booth. After working on some of his father’s later films, he started his own production company with Sam Sherman called Independent-International Pictures.

From tinting a Filipino horror movie neon hues and releasing it as a movie shot in Spectrum X — Horror of the Blood Monsters — to filming two movies at Spahn Ranch and making two softcore stewardess movies in one year (1975’s The Naughty Stewardesses and Blazing Stewardesses, which actually had parts written by the elderly Three Stooges who were unable to appear), Adamson’s movies are all over the map. His films Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Carnival Magic are both shockingly inept and amazingly transcendent, sometimes at the very same time. Yeah, I get the incongruity of this statement.

This movie was to be a straight action picture, back when it had the title Echo of Terror. But soon, it turned into a vehicle for Adamson to promote Tacey Robbins’ singing amidst a plot where a murderous jewel thief stalks a woman and her child after jewels are hidden inside the girl’s Christie Minstrel doll. Yes, a singing black baby doll that sings old slave songs, 1965 grindhouse fare ain’t the place to find woke storylines. I’d imagine that this plot point was cribbed from The Night of the Hunter.

Amazingly, Adamson would resurrect this movie numerous times over the next several years, turning it into a veritable zombie of a film. In 1969, it was completely re-edited, with John Carradine as a mad scientist added after the fact, and re-released as The Fiend with the Electronic Brain.

Two years after that, Adamson added even more footage to the film, including scenes with his wife Regina Carrol, and created an entirely new version called Blood of Ghastly Horror. The fact that three different movies are vying for one coherent narrative probably didn’t matter to Adamson. All of this was released one more time as a fourth version of the film, The Man With the Synthetic Brain. I can only imagine the confusion of some viewers who had to be sure they’d seen this movie before, as the main villain’s motivations go from being simply villainous to being experimented on by an evil doctor to dying early in the third and fourth versions of the film before his father brings a zombie to gain revenge on the family of the evil doctor. Imagine a movie being a sequel to itself but never telling you! Talk about confusing!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 12, 1968 at 1:00 a.m. 

I hate when people make lists of the worst movies ever made, because stuff like this always ends up on it.

Whether you see it as this title or as Duel of the Space Monsters, Frankenstein Meets the Space Men, Mars Attacks Puerto Rico, Mars Invades Puerto Rico or Operation San Juan, you’re going to see something that is absolutely ridiculous. But why else do you watch movies?

Also: there is no Frankenstein in this movie.

Martian Princess Marcuzan (Marilyn Hanold, the June 1959 Playboy Playmate of the Month who is also in In Like Flint and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) is in this, the last female survivor of an atomic war who has brought Dr. Nadir (an amazing Lou Cutell, who was Amazing Larry in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) with her to screw with Earth.

Oh yeah and abduct women in bikinis. And drive around a lot. And deal with an android astronaut named Colonel Frank Saunders whose face gets all burned up and he ends up fighting a mutant named Mull to the death.

Look, 65% of this movie is stock footage and I wouldn’t have it any other way. So much of this just hits me in the right places. Sure, if it got made today, it would be on digital video, the stock footage would be watermarked and I would hate every single minute of it. But I love what this is.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Castle was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 24, 1976 at 11:30 p.m.

A couple of months ago, I was doing my usual weekend of looking at used DVD stores when I noticed an older man staring at the stacks of used movies. He stopped and asked, “Do you mind if I ask you what movies I should get?” It turns out that his wife had recently died and he missed watching horror movies with her and wanted to bring back some memories. He had no idea how streaming worked and had just gotten a DVD player, so as we continued talking, it turned out that he really liked Barbara Steele in movies and was surprised that he could own this film. It made me feel really great that I could help someone out like this as well as realize that Ms. Steele has been bewitching men of all ages all around the world for decades.

Mario Caiano has made movies across nearly every genre that an Italian director can work in, from peplum like Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules to westerns such as A Coffin for the Sheriff, giallo like Eye in the Labyrinth and berserk freakouts like Love Camp 7, The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe and the kinda giallo Ombre Roventi.

This is the kind of gothic madness that I love so much, starting with Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller, Malenka) discovering his wife Muriel (Steele) having the gardener plant some seeds inside her. He shoves a hot poker in the man’s face, burns her with acid and then electrocutes both of them before removing their hearts and giving their blood to de-age his servant Solange (Helga Liné!). And then he finds out that he isn’t the heir to the castle — it turns out that Muriel has an identical sister named Jenny (also Steele) who is mentally deranged but will become his new bride.

I’m in. All in.

Stephen and Solange begin to gaslight Jenny but she has the ghosts of the dead lovers on her side, as well as Dr. Derek Joyce (Marino Masé, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times). This movie looks beyond beautiful and really allows Steele to showcase her acting skills (and her piercing eyes).

“If you’re gonna scream, scream with me,” sang Glenn Danzig in the Misfits’ “Hybrid Moments,” which was inspired by this movie. Nightmare Castle is everything great about black and white gothic melodrama and I just want to live within every frame of this film. It’s also the first horror score that Ennio Morricone would write.

You have so many choices to see this. For the easy way, just stream it on Tubi. Or you can do what I did and buy the Severin blu ray, which has commentary by Steele, an interview with Caiano and Castle of Blood and Terror Creatures from the Grave included.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gamera was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 4, 1968 at 11:20 p.m. 

I’ll come clean. As a kid, I liked Gamera more than Godzilla. Sure, Daiei Film Studios was just following the success of Toho’s kaiju superstar, but I always felt a kinship to a monster who could just withdraw into his shell. Gamera was, after all, a friend to all children. And man, I wanted to be his best pal.

Originally released on November 27, 1965 in Japan, a re-edited version with new footage was released the following year in the U.S. as Gammera the Invincible. It was the only movie in the series to get a theatrical release in this country.

Over the Arctic, a nuke blows up and awakens a prehistoric giant turtle that just so happens to have big tusks. That’s Gamera, but he’s no friend to anyone at this point.  He can also breathe fire, which he does to blow up an American jet real good.

These scientists that he battles are pretty much morons. They’re smart enough to come up with freeze bombs, but they think that if they get him on his back, he’ll die of starvation. So Gamera just pulls all his arms and legs inside his shell and starts spinning around like a UFO.

This movie will also teach you that turtles are not even. They’re just turtles.

Back to those scientists. A whole bunch of Russian, Japanese and American ones invent this thing called Z Plan. You know what it is? They put Gamera in the nose cone of a missile and send him to Mars, all excited about how their scientific ways have triumphed over idealogy.

It’s a crock of turtle shit.

You know what’s really awesome? This movie was originally going to be called Dai Gunju Nezura (The Great Rat Swarm), but all of the real rats that were going to run over the miniature city got fleas.

This is the only Gamera movie where he doesn’t fight another monster and also the singular black and white film in the series. He’s also a good guy in every movie after this.

You can watch this at the Internet Archive and imagine a young Sam losing his mind screaming, jumping all over the TV room, so happy to see a turtle fly.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night Caller from Outer Space was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 20, 1973 at 1:00 a.m. It also aired on May 18, 1974; February 1, 1975 and October 11, 1975.

This is also known as Blood Beast from Outer Space but isn’t the thought that an alien was crank calling in the days before Caller ID frightening?

Dr. Morley (Maurice Denham) and Dr. Jack Costain (John Saxon) have found a small ball that crash landed on our planet from Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. One night in their lab, their secretary Ann Barlow (Patricia Haines) sees a creature that soon kills Morley. Now Constain must find what exactly is on our planet.

This alien has the wildest plan. When girls try out for Bikini Girl magazine, it takes them with the goal of heading back to its planet with new breeding stock.

Directed by John Gilling (The Plague of the Zombies), this has some wild music in it, like Alan Haven’s jazzy cover of “Image” and the American version of the movie has a lounge song called “The Night Caller” by Albert Hague that is sung by Mark Richardson.