EDITOR’S NOTE: Dimension 5 was first on Chiller Theater on July 21, 1973 at 1 a.m. It also was on the show on August 3, 1974; April 5, 1975; January 3, 1976 and May 13, 1978.

Directed by Franklin Adreon (who also directed the similar Cyborg 2087) and written by Arthur C. Pierce, Dimension 5 is about time-traveling secret agents Justin Power (Jeffrey Hunter) from Espionage, Inc and Ki Ti Tsu (France Nuyen). It was going to be a TV movie but ended up being released to theaters.

Together, the two agents battle an Asian crime ring, Dragon, led by crime lord Big Buddha (Harold Sakata), who will destroy Los Angeles if the U.S. doesn’t leave Vietnam. However, Power is able to preview time, which allows him to keep people safe from Dragon’s killers.

Kitty has her own reasons for wanting to battle Big Buddha, as he was the executioner during the Nanking Massacre who killed her parents. The bad guy plans on building a nuclear bomb in the U.S. by placing it inside owl-shaped incense burners and Christmas decorations.

Nuyen is great in this, but man, Jeffrey Hunter was sleeping or so it seemed. Maybe he could use that time travel to get a few extra hours of nap before coming back and being the superspy in this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: One Million Years BC was on USA Up All Night on December 6, 1996 and September 27, 1997. 

Don Chaffey also directed Pete’s Dragon and Jason and the Argonauts, as well as Persecution AKA The Graveyard. Shot in Lanzarote and Tenerife in the Canary Islands as well as Elstree Studios, the real star of this movie is the image of Racquel Welch wearing a bikini that predates so much of our world’s history.

A remake of the 1940 movie One Million B.C., this movie is only sixty million years or so off from humans and dinosaurs living together. Then again, Ray Harryhausen, who did the stop motion effects, said that he wasn’t making this movie for professors who probably don’t go to see these kinds of movies anyway.

It starts with these words: “This is a story of long, long ago, when the world was just beginning… A young world, a world early in the morning of time. A hard, unfriendly world. Creatures who sit and wait. Creatures who must kill to live. And man, superior to the creatures only in his cunning. There are not many men yet. Just a few tribes scattered across the wilderness. Never venturing far, unaware that other tribes exist even. Too busy with their own lives to be curious. Too frightened of the unknown to wander. Their laws are simple: the strong take everything.”

We first meet the Rock tribe and Chief Akhoba (Robert Brown), who has two sons at one another’s throats, Tumak (John Richardson) and Sakana (Percy Herbert). Actually, everyone fights everyone as Tumak even goes after his dad over the fair share of the meat of a warthog. He gets banished into the wild lands filled with prehistoric beasts and nearly dies before being saved — and saving — Loana (Welch) of the Shell tribe.

However, Tumak is always trouble and when he fights for his spear, he is kicked out of the Shell tribe. Loana follows him home, where his brother has replaced his father who is a broken man. This is a movie filled with battles between dinosaurs — a Triceratops versus a Ceratosaurus made me go crazy as a kid and those same miniatures are in The Valley of Gwangi — but adult me is more interested in Welch and Martine Beswick going hand to hand.

Then a volcano made of wallpaper paste, oatmeal, dry ice and red dye kills nearly the entire task and forces the Rock and Shell people to stop fighting and become one tribe.

I dig what Harryhausen was going for here, using real animals in some scenes, including a vulture, a python, a green iguana, the warthog mentioned above, a Loaghtan (a type of sheep) and a tarantula. He thought that if people saw some real animals, they may think that everything was an actual animal.

Crazy World…Crazy People was directed by Renato Polselli, who co-wrote the film with Giuseppe Pellegrini, who wrote and did second unit work on several of Polselli’s early movies.

A group of young musicians work with Maurizio, an older vaudeville actor (Posani), to organize a show that only gets on the stage thanks to girlfriends and Elvezia Allori, the actor’s wife (France Polesello). One of those musicians is Claudio Natili, who twenty years later would score Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.

Thea Fleming also appears and is even on some of the posters. She showed up in several Eurospy movies like SuperSeven Calling Cairo, From the Orient With Fury and Operation Counterspy. Franco Latini is in the cast as well and he was the voice for Stan Laurel, as well as several muppets and the Italian dub voice of Skeletor and Donald Duck.

The film itself is a fake mondo about the concert and the issues of it getting to the public. It has none of the other outright insanity that you can find in Polselli’s other movies.

Altin Çocuk means Golden Boy, who is the name of the superspy played by Goksel Arsoy. His mission? Stop Demetrius (Altan Gunbay), a supervillain who plans to destroy Turkey by firing missiles into Istanbul’s biggest nuclear reactor. Golden Boy was also Arsoy’s nickname, so this is his show. He also produced it.

This even gets the James Bond formula down so well that it starts with credits over a gorgeous woman and has an action scene before the main story, as an evil spy named The Wolf rises from the waves and tries to kill our hero with a speargun. But wait — it turns out that The Wolf was actually wearing a Golden Boy disguise and the killer is our hero. Hit the strip club sounding music and we’re off to the Eurospy — err, Turkspy? — action.

They even shot some of the opening in London to give this a more continental air. We get to see Golden Boy drive a sportscar and win over some British ladies before we get down to the actual spy intrigue. But once he gets back to Turkey, he learns that his fellow agent S-99 has been killed and starts to investigate. He also meets a capable female (Sevda Nur) who fights by his side for the rest of the movie.

Directed by Memduh Un, this even has an ending where Golden Boy and his female friend SCUBA into Demetrius’ underwater lair just like Thunderball.

Golden Boy would return in Altin Çocuk Beyrut’ta (Golden Boy in Beirut).

EDITOR’S NOTE: Chamber of Horrors was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11, 1972.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the motion picture you are about to see contains scenes so terrifying the public must be given grave warning. Therefore, the management has instituted visual and audible warnings at the beginning of each of the four supreme Fright Points. The Fear Flasher is the visual warning. The Horror Horn is the audible warning. Turn away when you hear the Fear Flasher! Close your eyes when you hear the Horror Horn!”

Chamber of Horrors was initially intended to be a made-for-TV movie and a pilot for a series known as House of Wax. It was way too intense for that, so it came to theaters. It was pretty short — it’s only 99 minutes with padding — so they added two gimmicks: the Fear Flasher turns the screen red when something scary happens, and the Horror Horn makes plenty of noise when something gory is about to befall a character.

This was directed by Hy Averback, who directed and produced plenty of TV as well as directing the movies Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and The Story of Life, a 62-minute sex educational film with animation by several former Disney cartoonists. He was also the voice of the loudspeaker on M*A*S*H*. It was written by Stephen Kandel, who, in addition to writing tons of TV scripts, also wrote Winchester 73. Seriously, his TV credits hit every major show of the 70s.

Anthony Draco (Cesare Danova) and Harold Blount (Wilfrid Hyde-White) own a wax museum in Baltimore and have a side hustle as detectives. They join the police — including Wayne Rogers as Sgt. Albertson — in the hunt for Jason Cravette (Patrick O’Neal), a man who kills women and then marries her, which doesn’t seem like the usual way these things go. After being caught and sent via train to prison, he escapes by cutting off his own hand and running off to New Orleans, now with a hook where he once had fingers.

He finds a sex worker named Marie Champlain (Laura Devon) and transforms her into a lady — ironic, as Hyde-White played Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady — and takes her back to Baltimore to seduce and murder the man who convicted him, Judge Walter Randolph (Vinton Hayworth). He chops off the dead man’s hands and head so the police can’t figure out who did the crime. He follows that by killing Dr. Romulus Cobb (Richard O’Brien) and sending that man’s hands to the police to taunt them.

Draco and Blount believe that the mysterious murderer is Cravette and that he’s sending an entire corpse to the police piece-by-piece, with the arms and head still missing. After he kills a police officer for the hands, Draco realizes that the head the killer wants will be his.

There’s a tease for the next episode: a body in the Iron Maiden in the museum turns out to be real. The detectives call the police, and, well, that’s the end of their adventures.

This was supposed to be a House of Wax series, so the sets from the original film are used in this movie. Tony Curtis also appears in a cameo, and William Conrad narrates the story.

Sources

Cool Ass Cinema: Chamber of Horrors (1966) review. http://www.coolasscinema.com/2010/11/chamber-of-horrors-1966-review.html?showComment=1290117394811

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Glass Bottom Boat was one of the first movies on the CBS Late Movie, airing on February 17, 1972. It also aired on July 31, 1972; February 19 and November 5, 1973 and March 12, 1976.

Also known as The Spy in Lace Panties, a title change that was likely made to emphasize the spy plot, this movie teams up animator-turned-director Frank Tashlin (who made one of my favorite movies of all time, The Girl Can’t Help It) and star Doris Day, who gets to sing, of course, but also gets pulled into a spy plot. It was written by Everett Freeman, the writer of The Maltese Bippy.

Day plays Jennifer Nelson, a widow helping her father (Arthur Godfrey) in his tourism business by dressing as a mermaid and swimming under his glass bottom boats. One day, she’s accidentally caught by Bruce Templeton (Rod Taylor) while he’s fishing; the embarrassment of her being nearly nude in front of him is compounded when she realizes that he works at her new position of employment, an aerospace research company.

Bruce’s new project is GISMO, a gravity system, and he hires Jennifer to write his biography. But really, in truth, he just wants to get with her. Jennifer also meets Julius Pritter (Dom DeLuise), a spy struggling to install a stereo in Bruce’s futuristic apartment while gathering information on him, and Edgar Hill (Eric Fleming), a CIA agent protecting Bruce and GISMO.

Love blooms, as it does in romantic comedies, but the issue is that Hill, security guard Homer Cripps (Paul Lynde!) and PR executive Zack Molloy (Dick Martin!) believe that Jennifer is a spy. Why would she call the same phone number multiple times a day and simply hang up after saying, “That’s enough, Vlamdir?”

As it turns out, ‘Vlamdir’ is not a Russian boss, but Jennifer’s dog. The poor pup’s only exercise during her work hours is running around the apartment, irritated by the ringing phone. In a classic rom-com twist, Bruce makes a blunder by underestimating Jennifer’s intelligence. She decides to play along and pretends to be a spy. This leads to a series of light-hearted hijinks at a party, but all’s well that ends well.

For TV aficionados, Norman and Mabel Fenimore (George Tobias and Alice Pearce) are the same characters Tobias and Pearce played on Bewitched. The film also features a memorable cameo by Robert Vaughn, and the theme from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is heard on the soundtrack. Speaking of the show, Templeton’s ultra-technological apartment was repurposed as the evil spy base on a two-part episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., titled ‘The Concrete Overcoat Affair.‘

After this, Day only made four more movies — including the pure spy movie Caprice with Tashlin  before starting what many would know her best for: The Doris Day Show. In that show, she sang the theme song, “Que Sera Sera,” which became synonymous with Day’s career and was also featured in her earlier films, like The Man Who Knew Too Much and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Trygon Factor was on the CBS Late Movie on January 23, 1973 and January 2, 1974.

Das Geheimnis der weißen Nonne (Mystery of the White Nun) is known in the U.S. as The Trygon Factor and is based on Edgar Wallace’s book Kate Plus Ten.

Inspector Cooper-Smith (Stewart Granger) is on the hunt for a group of thieves who have been stealing various unconnected goods. His investigation leads him to the country manor of the Emberdays, a respectable English family. The mistress of the house, Livia (Cathleen Nesbitt), and Sister General (Brigitte Horney) and the nuns living in her home, are all suspects. Could they be behind the thefts to save the family fortune? The plot thickens when Inspector Thompson (Allan Cuthbertson) is murdered at Emberday Abbey. The Emberday children, Trudy (Susan Hampshire) and Luke (James Culliford), also come under suspicion.

The Trygon Factor leans more towards the Eurospy genre than the nascent Giallo, a style of Italian thriller, as the Krimi cycle of films began to slow down. The Eurospy genre is characterized by its focus on espionage and action, which is evident in the film’s plot and action sequences. Director Cyril Frankel, known for his work on UFO, The Avengers and Return of the Saint, brings his expertise to the film. The script was written by Derry Quinn (Young, Willing and Eager) and Stanley Munro.

One of the most intriguing scenes in the film features a gang member in a striking yellow suit of armor, wielding a gigantic gatling gun to burst through a bank wall. This unique sequence is only topped by the unexpected moment when Stewart Granger’s character punches a nun right in the face.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Psychopath was on the CBS Late Movie on July 23, 1973; January 30 and December 17, 1974. 

Between Die! Die! My Darling! and the poster for this film featuring the killer, Glenn Danzig clearly found plenty of inspiration in British horror movies.

Directed by Freddie Francis for Amicus, this film revolves around a series of murders in which each victim is found with a doll that looks exactly like them attached to their body.

It embodies the early elements of Giallo cinema, highlighted by a striking scene of a room filled with dolls. If it had some stylish fashion, a jazzy soundtrack, a few bottles of J&B, and a touch of nudity, it could easily fit into that genre. I would also consider it a slasher, and I’d support your choice in that classification.

Patrick Wymark, known for Blood on Satan’s Claw, plays Inspector Holloway. Margaret Johnson, from Night of the Eagle, portrays the mysterious, wheelchair-bound doll maker Mrs. Von Sturm. John Standing, known for his role in The Elephant Man, plays her obsessive son Mark.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “A movie where a man with mommy issues turns into a murderer sounds a lot like Psycho, you’d be right—this was written by the same author, Robert Bloch.