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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Curse of the Stone Hand was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 4, 1968 at 11:20 p.m. 

Alright, I know this isn’t a Mexican movie, it’s American, but it was a remix and reedit by Jerry Warren, who brought so many South of the Border movies to America. He shot new footage with John Carradine — who else? — and Katherine Victor to freshen up two twenty-year-old Chilean films, La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) and La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death).

Seeing as how it’s two films, Warren decided to turn this into an anthology, if two stories can really be an anthology. The same house is supposed to be the setting for both stories, one in which a gambler finds a set of stone hands in the cursed house and uses them to play curses before joining a suicide club. This is La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death), as that movie was an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. The second story has another owner’s son finding the hands — this is La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) — and using them to hypnotize his brother’s fiancee.

This is the closest that Warren would stay to his source material and therefore lacks the utter drug-induced insanity of his Mexican remake remixes. The dubbing is horrible, yet we can directly trace Godfrey Ho and the wildness that he dropped on us several decades later to the way that Warren could take any movie and chop it to pieces.

Warren once said, ” “I’d shoot one day on this stuff and throw it together. I was in the business to make money. I never ever tried in any way to compete or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I’d get a few dollars. It’s not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude. You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture.”

Know what you’re getting into before you watch this!

Warren’s American Distributors Productions, Inc. teamed this up with another of his mixtape wonders, Face of the Screaming Werewolf, which is Mexican and is also two movies in one — La Casa del Terror and La Momia Azteca.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The 10th Victim was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 11, 1969 at 11:30 p.m. 

How do you avoid warfare in the future? The Big Hunt is the answer. It’s the most popular form of entertainment there is, bringing in all types of people who want to be rich and famous. Every competitor has to complete ten rounds of the game — five as a hunter, five as a victim. If you survive, you retire with more wealth than you can ever dream of. And if you don’t make it…

Caroline (Ursula Andress, Dr. No, The Mountain of the Cannibal God) is one of those competitors, using a powerful shotgun to hunt her final target. If she gets a perfect kill, right in front of the cameras, she’ll make even more money, thanks to her sponsorship from the Ming Tea Company. And that target? Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni,  La Dolce Vita, 8½), a man whom she finds herself in love with. The big problem is neither is sure if they have the right target and if you accidentally kill the wrong person, you lose the game.

From the jazzy score by Piero Piccioni to a scene where Andress kills a victim with a bra that has gun barrels inside it, this film is pure 60’s pop spy retro-future perfection. Director Elio Petri (A Quiet Place in the Country) turned Robert Sheckley’s short story into a comic book-looking film with incredibly gorgeous lead actors. Anne Margaret and Sue Lyon (Lolita herself!) were both considered for the role, but no one but Andress would have been right in my opinion.

If you’re watching this and thinking, this movie looks like Austin Powers, that’s no accident. The character of Austin Powers started in a Mike Myers music side project known as…Ming Tea. Yes, the very same Ming Ting from this movie. Featuring The Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs as Gillian Shagwell, Matthew Sweet as Sid Belvedere, Stuart Johnson as Manny Stixman and Christopher Ward as Trevor Aigburth, the band recorded several songs, including two that appeared in Austin Powers films.

The look of those films comes directly from this movie and other 60’s pop art films, such as Barbarella, Danger: Diabolik! and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (it’s not an accident that two of Bava’s films are on this list, he had this look down pat). It’s worth mentioning that the film’s costumes were designed by Andre Courreges, one of the most iconic clothing designers of the twentieth century, who is credited with innovating so much of the mod look and is credited with redefining the go-go boot and inventing the mini-skirt (along with Mary Quant).

If you’re looking for this yourself, Shameless Films put out one that works on UK region players that has a lenticular animated cover. For those of us in the US (and elsewhere), Blue Underground has also released this on DVD.

You can also watch this on Tubi and Vudu.