EDITOR’S NOTE: It! was on the CBS Late Movie on April 11 and August 8, 1975.
This movie is one crazy mix-up of a bunch of other movies that you may love, all in one easy to gulp down cocktail. Take some Hammer mood, squeeze in some modern gothic, a pinch of Psycho, rip off the motorcycle scene from The Great Escape, throw in some nukes and boom — you have It!
After a London museum warehouse burns down leaving behind the Golem of Judah Loew and the dead body of the museum’s curator. His assistant, Arthur Pimm (Roddy McDowall), takes a big interest in the golem, figuring out that it’s the key to getting what he wants out of life.
That Arthur — what a character. He keeps his mom’s dead body in his apartment and steals jewels from the museum for her to wear. And he learns how to use the golem for murder, when all it wants to do is defend its Jewish community.
After the catastrophic destruction of Hammersmith Bridge, which Pimm has already told his love interest, Ellen Grove, that he could do, he tries to destroy the golem. Guess he didn’t read any of the fine print inscribed into the clay monster that says that it can’t be destroyed by fire, water, force or anything man has created.
Ellen eventually falls for another man, Jim Perkins of the New York Museum, who also wants to take the golem away. He turns in Pimm to the police, who then commit him to a sanitarium. He breaks out with the help of the golem and kidnaps Ellen. Luckily, the hero saves the day just before a nuclear explosion wipes Pimm out of existence (let’s be fair, everybody within a few thousand miles is going to get radiation poisoning, but this was the 1960’s and horror movie science). The golem? He’s fine. He just walks into the sea to go away from awhile, Godzilla style.
Man, I love the way the golem looks in this movie. Pre-CGI monsters are always awesome. Just look at this guy! He looks scary as heck!
Even though it was shot in color, the U.S. version is in black and white! Say what? It’s also the screen debut of Ian McCulloch, who always pleases the couch audience in our house in films like Zombie and Contamination.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Vengeance of Fu Manchu was on the CBS Late Movie on November 30, 1972 and August 6, 1974.
Directed by Jeremy Summers (The House of 1,000 Dolls) and written by Peter Welbeck — hey, that’s Harry Alan Towers — this is the third of five movies that would feature Christopher Lee as Sax Rohmer’s supervillain Fu Manchu.
Playing double features with The Million Eyes of Sumuru, this time Fu Manchu replaces his arch enemy Nayland Smith (Douglas Wilmer) with a clone. If you’re wondering, “Will this be whitewashing and somewhat offensive?”, perhaps the scene where an Asian man gets facial and eye surgery to look like a Western man will answer you.
This does start off strong with Fu Manchu executing nearly every one of his crime lords for failing him. There’s also Ingrid (Maria Rohm, Venus In Furs), an Interpol agent who becomes a nightclub singer in her disguise, which one assumes will help her as Fu Manchu replaces world leaders with his plastic surgery made army.
Also: Maria Rohm was Tower’s wife. In all the wildness of his career, I’d consider that one of his biggest accomplishments.
While the last movie for Douglas Wilmer as Nayland Smith, three of the actors in this would appear in every one of the films: Lee, Tsai Chin as Fu Manchu’s daughter Lin Tang and Howard Marion-Crawford as Dr. Petrie. Jess Franco would direct the next two films in this series, The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blood Beast Terror was on the CBS Late Movie on March 8, 1974.
When you mention 1960’s British horror films, most people are going to think of Hammer. Or Amicus. But there’s also Tigon, the very small studio who could, and by could, I mean make some astoundingly strange movies.
Vernon Sewell directed this thriller about young and good looking men having their throats torn open and drained by a killer so frightening that whomever it is has driven the last eyewitness mad, claiming that a horrible winged creature with huge eyes is the killer.
Detective Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) responds by thinking that a giant eagle — no, not the Pittsburgh-based grocery store — has to be the murderer.
If this development has you happy, then good news. This is the kind of stiff upper lip British low budget fun you’re looking for. Yes, I struggled to include this in either the werewolf or vampire weeks we’re planning because it features a weremoth who lives on human blood. A weremoth! What will they think of next!?!
Cushing considered this the worst of his many films. Scanning his vast resume should tell you just how low this must be, but he was acting in as many films as he could to pay for the care of his wife Helene, who was suffering from emphysema. She would die four years later and by all accounts, he never recovered.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Ghosts, Italian Style was on the CBS Late Movie on June 28, 1977.
Pasquale Lojacono (Vittorio Gassman) and his wife Maria (Sophia Loren) have no money, nowhere to live and no future until they are allowed to live rent-free in a cursed apartment haunted by an old Spanish nobleman’s ghost.
Questi Fantasmi played U.S. theaters under this title so that people would remember Loren in Marriage Italian Style. In fact, her co-star from that movie, Marcello Mastroianni, shows up in as a headless ghost at the end. This film was produced by Sophia’s husband, Carlo Ponti. You know, the man who brought us both Dr. Zhivago and Torso.
Maria’s past love, Alfredo (Mario Adorf) shows up to try and win her back from her recently fired opera singer husband, who thinks that he’s not a living person, but the ghost.
Directed by the writer of Marriage, Italian Style, Renato Castellani, this has a huge list of writers who worked on the script, including Castellani, Adriano Baracco, Piero De Bernardi and Tonino Guerra, based on a play by Italian writer Eduardo De Filippo.
This is a goofy farce that didn’t do well at the box office in Italy or America. But hey, here it is on the CBS Late Movie!
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
Boojie Baker (Dan Conway) has been screwing bands — like Charlie — and ruining their dreams. He discovers the band The Faded Blue and renames them The Big Blast. To get them the best studio in music, he and his assistant Gordy (Ray Sager) send women to make out with the engineers and blackmail them. This group of musicians is smarter than the others and they confront Boojie about where their money is. He then sets them up with a drug bust, but they figure out a way to get back at him.
A non-nudie or gore movie from Herschell Gordon Lewis, this movie is probably most famous for featuring Colonel Sanders, who Lewis often used for catering on his movies. His scene was filmed in a Cleveland Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant with Sanders requesting multiple takes, his own billing in the credits and even wanting to direct his moment in the movie!
Here’s the dialogue:
Gordie: Hey, man. Do you serve fried chicken?
Harland Sanders: Do we serve fried chicken? Whoo-wee! We DO serve fried chicken!
Gordie: I got five hungry musicians in the parking lot wanting five buckets of fried chicken.
Harland Sanders: Musicians you say? Hey, I love music! If you let them play some music outside, I’ll let you have lunch for free.
Gordie: You got yourself a deal, buddy!
With a name like Blast-Off Girls, you might be hoping for some of the nudie cutie movies that Lewis did just a few years before. Instead, you get garage bands and fried chicken.
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
You know, if Herschell Gordon Lewis only made his nudie movies or just the gore, he’d be celebrated still, but for my money, the real good Lewis movies are the ones that almost frighten you by their incoherence or ability to fully create a world that is unlike any we will ever live in, like how She-Devils on Wheels gives us a reality — in 1968 — where female bikers are the alpha predator of all creation. Or the nihilistic mind blast that’s Just for the Hell of It which ends with a character saying, “Who cares man” when everyone he knows is dead.
Then there’s Something Weird.
Everything starts when Cronin Mitchell tries to help a man who has fallen from an electrical pole and gets rewarded with a face full of electricity which burns his face off. He wants to die — and why wouldn’t he — but he’s also gained ESP thanks to all that pure energy blasting him right in the brain.
At this point, most people would step back, see that their work is good and then finish the movie. But Lewis is a trickster god who felt the need for more, more, more.
Mitchell has become a bandaged hermit who gives psychic readings when the Bible of the Witches ends up in his hands, followed by a literal witch who promises that he can have his face back if he agrees to be her lover. Now he’s handsome again, but a slave to the sorceress.
She becomes his assistant Ellen and now Mitchell is hunting serial killers along with a karate chopping government agent who is in love with Ellen because he has no idea that she really looks like the cartoonist witch but hey, maybe love is blind. To find this elusive killer, it’s going to take some LSD.
But before that, Mitchell levitates for an audience and then finds a ghost inside a church. These side stories just pad the 80 minutes of running time but honestly, I’d pay whatever money is needed for more adventures of Mitchell being weird.
Anyways, Jordan can’t deal with the fact that he can’t have Ellen, so he goes nutzoid and attacks her. She escapes and demands that her psychic slave murder the government agent, so Mitchell psychically attacks him with several blue blankets which somehow the misogynistic loverboy escapes and what is this movie?
Then this whole thing goes proto-giallo as Mitchell takes the LSD and discovers that the cop that’s been leading them through the case is the killer, but the trip he’s on leads directly into a bullet between the eyes and our hero is dead.
The movie keeps going.
So now Jordan can be with Ellen and sees her, but at that moment he sees the witch and runs into traffic and burns his face off, which she heals but…
Time is a flat circle.
This is a movie that obsesses me. Like I can’t stop thinking about it. Who was it for? Why was it made? Yeah, Lewis was in it to make money, but who would pay to see this (me)?
All these Film Twitter kids writing about how movies stick in their head for life and how things are fever dreams and they’ve never had the moment where you randomly put on this movie and are not ready for its power. About as perfect a movie that’s filled with imperfections can be.
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
A Miami businessman, John Stone (Bill Rogers) gets a package from England with two dusty and cobwebbed bottles of plum brandy from a recently dead ancestor. He drinks them both and, as these things happen, he becomes a vampire. He puts his wife Helene (Elizabeth Wilkinson) in a trance and heads off to England.
There, he fights Howard Helsing (Otto Schlessinger), the last survivor of the Van Helsing family. Well, as much England as Miami.
This was Herschell Gordon Lewis’ attempt to go mainstream, filled with better acting, less gore and, well, way too much running time. At least the makeup on the vampire version of Stone is cool, there is some nice lighting and unique camera angles. It was good enough for Roger Corman to offer Lewis a job, which he politely turned down.
In case you’re wondering where the music is from, it’s from the Dr. Who episode “The Tenth Planet.”
While not a bad movie, I come to a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie to be upset, shocked and nauseated. This did none of those things, but at least he stretched a bit.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Valley of the Dolls was on the CBS Late Movie on October 25, 1974 and May 9 and September 1, 1975.
I love this movie. I can’t deny it. I won’t say that it’s a guilty pleasure. I have no beliefs that this is a great movie or that it’s a classic. I just love it. I quote from it all the time. I wish that I could live in the world of the film.
Jacqueline Susann. It’s thanks to you that I know just how bad dolls are.
Three young women are out to make it in the big bad world.
Neely O’Hara (Patty Duke) has talent, if she can just stay off the pills. She’s in the big bad world of Broadway, where she runs up against arrogant legend Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward).
Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) is gorgeous but doesn’t have the talent. She’s stuck in the chorus.
Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins) is an ingenue who has arrived in New York City to work in the theatrical agency that represents them.
Of course, the dolls — which are the barbiturates Seconal and Nembutal and various stimulants — are all too much for everyone. Neely becomes a diva and cheats on her husband with fashion designer Ted Casablanca, but when she puts her career before him, he leaves her. Eventually, her career goes into the skids because of all the drugs she’s on and she gets committed to a sanitarium.
Jennifer also heads to Hollywood, where she falls for nightclub singer Tony Polar, who has Huntington’s Chorea and ends up in the same asylum as Neely. She also has an abortion and to pay for her man’s care ends up doing French art films, which really means nudie cuties.
Anne falls for a guy named Lyon and she starts a new career as a model, but he gets stolen from her by Neely, fresh out of the sanitarium and ready to get on the make. Of course, she falls right back into the loving embrace of all them dolls. She also gets into a catfight with Helen Lawson and flushes her wig down the toilet, which is a moment that I always pause and get on my hands and knees and thank God that this movie was made.
She then hits rock bottom, has sex with a stranger and watches him rob her. That’s nothing — Jennifer’s mother can’t deal with her softcore films and won’t support her when cancer strikes. She commits suicide with all them dolls.
Anne gets on them too, but she decides to kick the habit and move back to New England. Lyon comes to try and win her back, but she walks away, out of his life for good.
No one leaves Valley of the Dolls unchanged.
Judy Garland was originally cast as Helen Lawson, but was fired when she reportedly came to work all messed up. She would have brought some real know-how of this world to that role. After all, Neely was based on her, as well as a little bit of Betty Hutton and Frances Farmer. She still got paid and loved the sequined pantsuit she was to wear in the movie so much she didn’t just keep it; she had costume designer Travilla make her duplicates.
Patty Duke brought plenty of know-how when it came to drugs, too. She had become addicted to drugs because her guardians gave them to her to make her a better actress.
Of course, this all led to probably my favorite movie of all time, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which was filmed while the studio was being sued by Jacqueline Susann. Obviously, this Roger Ebert written and Russ Meyer directed film is a completely different and much crazier movie, if that’s possible. Her estate won $2 million in damages years after her death. That’s good, because she believed that even this movie was “a piece of shit.”
A lot of the more risque parts of her book never made it into the film, like Jennifer’s attempting to become a lesbian, Ted Casablanca’s homosexuality and Tony’s love of anal sex. Of course, there are plenty of mentions of the hard g “f word” throughout the film.
There were also two TV series made from this movie. 1981’s Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, had James Coburn, Catherine Hicks, Lisa Hartman, Gary Collins, Bert Convy, one-time wife of Robert Evans Camilla Sparv, Tricia O’Neill from Are You In the House Alone? and Britt Ekland. There was also another 1994 version called Valley of the Dolls which had Carol Lawrence as Bernice Stein (she was also Miriam on the 1981 series), Sally Kirkland, Melissa De Sousa and Sharon Case.
Director Mark Robson, who also was behind the movies Peyton Place and Earthquake — as well as an assistant editor on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and an editor on Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie — was rough as hell on the actresses in this movie. Sharon Tate was the one he directed most of his rage at, but even years after his death, Patty Duke would refer to him as “a mean son of a bitch.”
Famous science fiction writer, noted crank and one of my heroes, Harlan Ellison was the original screenwriter of this film. He was upset at the softened ending of the film and demanded that his name be taken off of it. Hollywood never really treated Harlan all that fairly, between stealing two of his Outer Limits episodes for Terminatorand him getting fired from Disney within a few hours thanks to an impression of Mickey, Minnie and Donald having barnyard coitus.
Zontar, the Thing from Venus is one of the many remakes of Roger Corman movies — this one is It Conquered the World — directed by Larry Buchanan.
This starts at a dinner party. That’s where NASA scientist Dr. Keith Ritchie (Anthony Huston) reveals to Dr. Curt Taylor (John Agar) that he’s been secretly meeting with an alien from Venus named Zontar who is coming to solve all of Earth’s issues. A dinner party would not seem to be the time to do this.
Zontar ends up being a three-eyed, bat-winged, skeletal black creature and I don’t want to be one of those people that judges people by their outside appearances, but I don’t think Zontar has any intention of making the world a better place.
Not even when Zontar starts possessing people with lobster injecto-pods does Ritchie think this friend is a horrific alien monster. No, it takes his wife Martha (Patricia De Laney) dying before he does something about it. Scientists are really smart and also so dumb.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
Director and writer Erick Santamaria only made one movie (or did he? Letterboxd also lists three Spanish-language movies, La masacre de Ponce, La Tormenta and Los hijos del vicio) and this is it. He wrote the script along with his star, William Kerwin, and Kerwin’s brother Harry. Of course, by this point people may have known the actor from being in Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!But now, he wasn’t the hero. Now, he was the villain named Bill, an artist who loses his mind when his models move.
The Kerwins left the environs of Florida behind to come to Canada for this and oddly, this is the only acting role for Neil Sedaka. Why the singer of “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” would choose a scummy drive-in movie to be in is a mystery. Yet here he is as Bob, who is dating Betty (Linda Christopher) and ends up being seduced by her sister Arlene (Christopher’s real-life sister Jean) after a concert by JB & The Playboys. Maybe it was because Neil got up on stage and sang “Waterbug” with them.
One may also wonder why the movie has shifted from a murderous amateur artist killing women — with a speargun! — and suddenly has become a soap opera. I have learned that when it comes to movies of this ill repute to not ask these types of queries.
After this sisterly affair, Bob and Betty go back to their college and Arlene ends up hiring Bill. She wants him, after all, despite the fact that he instantly looks like a killer from a Canuxploitation horror movie set in Quebec because that’s exactly who he is. She keeps trying to get in his slacks and he keeps blowing her off. Finally, he consents to sketch her. She keeps moving and he tries to playfully strangle her. After she fights him off, he apologizes and explains why he’s how he is: he once helplessly watched as three girls drowned. Now, he has nightmares about watching them all over again as a fourth woman shoots a man with a bow and arrow. His psychologist told him to paint what was in that dream but he’s never been able to get it right because these women keep moving around. She’s dumb enough to allow him to stay in the house and even worse, to skinny dip around him. He loses it all over again, strangles her and leaves her in the very convenient walk-in cooler that her house has. Now, he can sketch and paint her dead body and achieve his need to paint that dream.
Now, Bill gets his plans really going. He places an ad for someone to care for his sister and Pat (Mary Lou Collier) applies and instantly is added to the meat locker. So is lounge singer Nikki (Andrée Champagne, who sings the song “Montage” and went on to be the casting director of Quest for Fire), who is also posed for Bill’s etchings. Finally, a friend of Arlene’s comes to check on her and ends up becoming the final woman in the painting, but then the power goes out and Bill’s plans melt, so to speak. It all comes together quite well.
Unreleased in the U.S. until 1970 — as Decoy For Terror — Playgirl Killer promises nudity and mayhem and delivers jazzy music and saturated semi-violence. But who cares? You already paid for your ticket and you just get the chance to let it all play out. I’m a sucker for movies where artists go wild and destroy people in the pursuit of their aesthetic pursuits.
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