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.

Bonus points: A theremin-heavy soundtrack.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Filmed and released within four months of the late-1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots, this American-International Pictures film was directed by Arthur Dreifuss and written by Orville H. Hampton. It even has its own song, “Riot on Sunset Strip”, written by Tony Valentino and John Fleck of the Standells.

It has some of the same cast from another AIP movie, Hot Rods to Hell. In that film, Mimsy Farmer was the bad girl and Laurie Mock was the virgin. Here, they switch roles, as Farmer is Andrea Dollier, a young girl seduced by LSD and evil hippies. Aldo Ray plays Sgt. Walt Lorimer, a cop who has been trying to get along with the kids on Sunset but when he finds his daughter sexually assaulted, he goes wild on a bunch of flower children. If only she hadn’t taken that drink laced by Herbie (Schuyler Hayden), she wouldn’t have been attacked by five boys that same night.

Beyond the music of The Standells, The Enemies and The Chocolate Watchband, we also get a long sequence of Farmer tripping out. Perhaps in my cinematic universe, her character Andrea goes on to become Estelle from More, which was made just two years later and is much franker about drug use. Maybe if her parents stayed together, maybe if her mother Margie (Hortense Petra) wasn’t a drunk, maybe if her dad wasn’t so driven to clean up the streets all of this would have never have happened.

I realize I love Mimsy Farmer on film because she’s always in trouble. Or causing it, freaking out about slashing her father, a man who always wanted a boy and got her instead or dealing with a conspiracy that wants to eat her or sunspots and autopsies. Her movie life is a nightmare and she’s a dream, what can I say?

This movie is ridiculous, made by out of touch people for kids probably far away from Los Angeles who want a piece of the action. Therefore, I love every minute.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Amongst consumers of the seamier world of exploitation film — alright, let’s be fair and call ourselves scumbags — Emilio Vieyra is best-known for his 1969 film The Curious Dr. Humpp, an astounding retitling of his film La Vengenza del Sexo (The Revenge of Sex). Blame Jerald Intrator, director of Striporama and dubbing supervisor for Night of the Bloody Apes) for that, as he also bought Vierya’s Placer Sangriento (Bloody Pleasure) and released it with the equally awesome title The Deadly Organ. Oh yeah — he was also smart enough to insert twenty minutes of nudity into La Vengenza del Sexo, a movie already rife with naked bodies.

This is Vierya’s vampire film. Actually, he also made La Bestia Desnuda (The Naked Beast) too.

Ofelia’s (Susana Beltrán, who appears in several of the director’s films, including saying “Use my body to keep you alive!” to Dr. Humpp and another I need to see called Stay Tuned for Terror) is about to be married to Eduardo but is truly in love with Gustavo. On her wedding night, her true love breaks into the honeymoon suite, kills her husband and turns her into a vampire just like him.

We fast-forward to the 60’s where Ofelia’s curse continues as she seduces and drains numerous teens one by one after their van breaks down. While she’s using up men, Gustavo is planning on doing the same with all the ladies.

The Argentinian government cracked down hard on this mix of gore and sex, keeping it hidden away for four years before allowing it to be released in all its bloody go-go dancing glory.

Mondo Macabro released this back in 2004, so here’s hoping that someday soon it gets another reissue. It’s so worthy of your time, a movie with seagulls instead of bats.

Yet another Kommissar X film — there were seven of them and this one was originally titled Kommissar X – Drei grüne Hunde — this entry features the team of Tony Kendall and Brad Harris. They were the Terence Hill and Bud Spencer of their day. Here. Tony is Joe Louis Walker, aka Kommissar X and Brad is New York Police Department Captain Rowland.

Rowland has traveled to travels to Istanbul to bring a shipment of LSD for the U.S. armed forces — MK Ultra anyone? — but the Green Hounds steal the shipment.

Olga Schoberova (The Vengeance of She), Christa Linder (Dracula in the Provinces) and Samson Burke (The Three Stooges Meet Hercules) are all in this.

Also known as Death Trip, this Eurospy film was directed by writer Rudolf Zehetgruber and Gianfranco Parolini (God’s Gun, Three Fantastic Supermen).

Four years later, Coffin Joe has returned from the end of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and has recovered from shock, blindness and being accused of a series of murders. Now it’s time to get back to finding his perfect woman and continue his blood.

Together with a hunchbacked assistant named Brono, he kidnaps six gorgeous women and puts them all through a horrific series of tasks to determine who will bear his child. Only Marcia doesn’t scream in the face of the madness Coffin Joe puts them through, so only she can be the one. Yet even though he takes her to his bed — and kills the other five with snakes — she refuses him. He releases her, claiming he knows that she will never tell anyone what she has seen.

That’s when he meets the Colonel’s daughter, Laura, who actually returns his affection. The military man and his son try to break off their union, but Coffin Joe acts as only as he can to such an offense: he has Bruno kill Laura’s brother and blames the colonel’s henchman Truncador.

Yet now comes the dark night for the man who has no soul, as he goes to Hell after learning that one of his six brides was pregnant when he killed her. Dooming her child, he wanders the technicolor nightmare that is the abyss and comes upon Satan himself, who is also Coffin Joe. Our world’s version renounces his ways in light of this revelation.

Coffin Joe resists all the killers the colonel and his men send after him and finally impregnates Laura, just as Marcia kills herself by drinking arsenic. Yet before she dies, she tells the townsfolk of Coffin Joe’s crimes and they form a lynch mob just as he must decide who will survive, his bride or the baby, as the pregnancy has complications. Together they agree that the child must live, but fate is cruel and both Laura and Joe’s scion die. Destroyed by this, he is no match for the lynch mob that arrives, shooting him in the cemetery where he drowns in the same pond where he drowned so many of his victims.

At the point of death, a priest offers to hear Joe’s confession. He accepts God as his Savior and drowns as the skeletons of his victims claim him.

Brazilian censors forced filmmaker — and the human avatar of Coffin Joe — Jose Mojica Marins to recut and redub the end of this movie. That’s why the strange ending of salvation is in here. It enraged Jose Mojica Marins and put a curse on his career, or so he felt, to the point that he could never finish his planned trilogy of three Coffin Joe movies. It took until 2005 and filmmakers who grew up as his fans before Embodiment of Evil closed out the story and showed how Coffin Joe survived.

In The Wizard of Oz, a better world is in color instead of black and white. In This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, Hell itself is the only place to get the full color gel Mario Bava treatment and that says something about the nihilistic worldview of its creator and his creation. I grew up in a small town too, Coffin Joe, but I wasn’t brave enough to grow out my fingernail to absurd lengths, go on and on about my superiority and make out with a woman while throwing snakes at others. I can only watch you and see how it could have been.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is everything. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse has commentary with Marins, Paulo Duarte and Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles. There’s also a new interview with Stephen Thrower on Marins’ influences and a new video essay by Miranda Corcoran about Coffin Joe as a horror host. You can get this set from MVD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1967) is truly a boring film, even for Al Adamson, who is not known for making great films. The most exciting bit of action in this movie was the scene-stealing walrus in the opening scene shot at the old Marineland in Palos Verdes, California. That walrus puts in a more energetic better performance than any of the human actors.

The story concerns Mrs. and Mrs. Count Dracula, who have essentially retired as “The Townsends” to a castle in the California desert (Falcon Rock Castle Antelope Valley, California.)

Now free from a life of killing villagers in Europe their new life is one of leisure. There’s no more hunting for these two elites! Their new bougie diet consists mostly of bloody cocktails prepared for them by their butler George played by John Carradine, a priest in a cult who worships Luna the Moon God along with the Townsends.

The blood comes from the various girls kept chained in the basement, most of whom are collected from the nearby highway and brought home by their deformed Igor-like caretaker Mango played by Ray Young. A tall stunt actor better known as the boulder-throwing half of The Kroft Supershow staple Bigfoot and Wildboy (1976.)

The Townsends and also have a strange relationship with a local serial killer named Johnny (Robert Dix). Although how he came to be close with the Townsend’s is never explored, they seem to have a reciprocal relationship. One in which he brings them victims for promised initiation into vampirehood. In the alternate television version (yes, there are two versions of this snorefest – both available online) Johnny is a werewolf.

After escaping from a mental institution, Johnny kills a few people just for the hell of it on the way home to the castle. Here, the added werewolf scenes actually make sense. Somewhat. In the original version Johnny mentions repeatedly how he can’t control his murderous urges when there’s a full moon. The problem with the new inserts lies in the fact that they were clearly shot years later. The hairstyle and wardrobe of the victim places it squarely in the ‘70s and the electronic music bears no resemblance to the music in the rest of the film.

One would think that a police pursuit of a serial killer/werewolf would be exciting. It isn’t. That’s the problem with this movie. Even when things happen it doesn’t feel like it. There’s an utter lethargy to the acting, camera placement and editing. During the chase, the screen direction is completely off and there is very little foley to bring the soundtrack to life.

Once reunited, the Townsends, Johnny, George and Mango now have a new problem to contend with. They must find a new place to live. Sadly, after a nice, calm, sixty-year tenancy, their 108-year-old landlord has died, leaving the castle to his nephew. The new landlord – a photographer named Glenn Cannon and his perpetually complaining model fiancé Liz decide they’re going to live there.

When they show up to inspect the place, instead of chaos, we are treated to a series of long civil discussions between the characters. Most disappointing of all is that the vampires never do anything. They’re far too spoiled and sophisticated. Count Townsend (played by Horrors of Spider Island star Alex D’arcy) is so nonchalant that at one point he tells a potential victim, “Oh, no. We won’t kill you. We need your blood,” with the calm tone of a man making small talk. They don’t even fight when Glenn ties them up in the finale. They’re far too used to being looked after by their staff to do anything as vulgar as defend themselves. If the Howell’s on Gilligan’s Island were vampires, this is exactly how they’d behave. The effect is equally as comical. However, they don’t go as gently into the ether as one might think. After sacrificing a girl on the beach to Luna, aging and turning to dust when the morning sun shines through the window, two bats emerge from the vampires’ fancy party clothes and fly off. Perhaps to rent another castle somewhere else and start over. George and Johnny are dispatched by our heroes.  Glenn saves Liz. Mango gets shot, axed and thrown off a cliff. It should be exciting. It isn’t.

Link to the theatrical Crown International cut:

Link to the Television Paragon “Werewolf” cut:

The Fiend with the Electronic Brain is — sort of — Al Adamson’s 1965 movie Psycho-A-Go-Go which is also — sort of — Blood of Ghastly Horror.

Psycho A-Go-Go is all about Joe Corey taking part in a diamond heist with the stolen contraband hidden inside a little girl’s doll when it isn’t about Tacey Robbins singing.

This remix has Joe Corey’s madness explained as he is an injured Vietnam vet who is experimented on by Dr. Vanard (John Carradine). Everything that happened in the first version also happens here but Joe is off the hook, I guess, because of the surgery on his mind.

Venard wanted to heal the soldier’s shrapnel injuries with electric shock therapy, but he turned Joe into a woman-killing monster who is now hunting him down. He straps Dr. Vanard to his own lab equipment and electrocutes him before we somehow find ourselves back in that jewel robbery, the diamonds in the doll and the forest haunting of the woman and her daughter, all before Joe gets shot and falls off a cliff.

Beyond also being Bloof of Ghastly Horror and also The Man with the Synthetic Brain, a Sam Sherman retitling for TV. You could see this movie four times and be taken every time as you’re seeing the same story with little tweaks along the way with footage being Xeroxed over and over and over.

I get upset when Spielberg or Lucas comes back and meddles with their movies but I am in no way upset that Al Adamson just kept trying to make this movie better. Arguably, he didn’t. He tried and you have to give it to him for that.