Peter Bogdonovich may have debuted by fixing up a movie for Roger Corman called Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, but Targets was his first film. He directed, co-written and co-produced a movie that does not feel like the work of an inexperienced filmmaker.

Maybe it was because he had been studying. As the film programmer for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, he saw up to 400 movies a year.

Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) sees no reason to be in horror films any longer. The news on TV every night is way more frightening than any film he can conjure. However, as a favor to a young director named Sammy Michaels (Bogdanovich), he will make one more appearance at a drive-in before leaving for his native England.

Bobby Thompson is an insurance agent and Vietnam War veteran who snaps. One morning, he decides to start killing, taking out his wife, mother and a delivery boy before climbing an oil tower to kill people in passing cars before heading to the very same drive-in that Orlok will appear at.

As Orlok’s final film is shown, Thompson begins murdering more people. However, as the elderly actor appears on screen and in-person, Orlak smacks him down with his walking cane, giving the police the opening they need to arrest him.

I love the concept of this film: it exists in the middle of two eras, with Karloff as the last remaining Universal Monster, coming up against the cynical and all too real evil that the New Hollywood would use as monsters.

While Thompson is based on Charles Whitman, Orlok isn’t anything like Karloff. Instead of being tired after years of acting and angry that he was only known for horror, Karloff was proud of his legacy.

The actor was in ill health. He had emphysema along with rheumatoid arthritis, with only one half of a lung still functioning. Years of abuse to his body wearing the heavy Frankenstein’s Monster makeup led to braces on both his legs, as well as the need to use a cane.

While this would be his last major film, he’d keep working, making films like Curse of the Crimson Altar, Fear Chamber, House of Evil, Cauldron of Blood, Alien Terror and Isle of the Snake People.

Bogdanovich only got to make this because Boris Karloff owed Roger Corman two days’ work. Corman told the young director that he could make any film he liked provided he used Karloff and stayed under budget. What really speaks to the actor is that even though he was only supposed to do two days work, he was so impressed with the script that he refused pay for the three additional days of work he did to complete the film.

Writing about the film for the New Beverly Cinema, Quentin Tarantino said, that Targets was “the most political movie Corman ever made since The Intruder. And forty years later it’s still one of the strongest cries for gun control in American cinema. The film isn’t a thriller with a social commentary buried inside of it (the normal Corman model), it’s a social commentary with a thriller buried inside of it… It was one of the most powerful films of 1968 and one of the greatest directorial debuts of all time. And I believe the best film ever produced by Roger Corman.”

Roger Corman knows how to get the most out of a movie. He turned the Russian Planeta Bur into both Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and this movie. The former* has new scenes with Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue, but the latter has one major reason to watch: Mamie Van Doren.

The pedigree of this movie is pretty wild, because it was adapted by Peter Bogdanovich, who chose not to have his name credited on the final film. And let’s not forget that this all ties back — since Corman loved to recycle what he recycled — into the early Francis Ford Coppola cheapy and Mill Creek box set favorite, Battle Beyond the Sun.

Five male astronauts and their robot John land on Venus and are attacked by a pterodactyl and then an entire culture of women, including Van Doren. Amongst their number are Verba (Mary Marr, who would go on to edit Rolfe Kanefsky’s softcore movies), Twyla (Paige Lee), Meriama (Irene Orton), Wearie (Pam Helton) and Mayaway (Margot Hartman, who in addition to being in this movie, would go on to be the chairman of the board of the First Stamford Corporation, one of the largest privately held commercial real estate companies in the State of Connecticut; she also wrote and starred in Violent Midnight, Descendant and The Curse of the Living Corpse).

Bogdonovich was asked by Corman to work on the film, as American-International Pictures wanted some girls in it, so he hired Mamie Van Doren and an entire cast of blondes, then went and filmed them for five days and did the narration.

Despite the fact that this had to be remixed together, you have to love the ending, where the robot left behind becomes the new god of Venus. Spoiler warning for a 52 year old film…

*Curtis Harrington adapted that movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This movie looked like absolute junk, a tale of white colonialism that would be dated even a few years after it was made.

But then I realized that the jungle girl was played by Edwige Fenech and here we go.

Director Guido Malatesta made Colossus and the Headhunters and Maciste il vendicatore dei Maya, so I’m going to stop being mean and just say that he made simple films that were probably crown pleasers in their time.

Roger Browne, who would one day be the Senator in Emanuelle in America, is looking for a diamond mine and finds Samoa (Fenech), he has to decide between being a criminal and leaving with her tribes holy stones or settling down in the jungle with the queen of all giallo. Dude, how is this even a choice?

Come for the comically long bar fight, stay for Ms. Fenech and enjoy the appearance by Femi Benussi, who was in The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance; So Sweet, So Dead and The Killer Must Kill Again.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The independently wealthy Albert Zugsmith made millions selling ads. So he did what you or I would probably want to do if we had that much money. He started producing his own movies, starting with his American Pictures Corporation, which made Captive Women, Sword of Venus and Port Sinister all for under $100,000 each.

His first big success was Invasion U.S.A., which he followed with Paris Model and Top Banana before making a deal with Universal. There, he produced Female on the Beach with Joan Crawford, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Written on the Wing and Touch of Evil before moving to MGM, where he got High School Confidential!, which was part of a series of films he worked on with Mamie Van Doren, including The Beat Generation, The Big Operator, Girls Town and the first movie he directed, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve.

The movies that he directed definitely start moving in an exploitation direction from here on out, like the Vincent Price movie Confessions of an Opium Eater, Sex Kittens Go to College, the notorious bomb Dondi, Psychedelic Sexualis, Sappho Darling and Movie Star American Style or LSD I Hate You. He also produced Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill.

That brings us to this burst of insanity.

Nick Vidal (Carlos Rivas) owns the bank his father stole from the Cervantes family, with Juan Cervantes (Ivan J. Rado, The Wild Bunch) still working there. For some reason, Juan has no worries at all, while Nick can barely sleep and is obsessed with the shady deal. He’s also sleeping with his secretary, Sidonia (Regina Torné, La Senora Muerte).

Meanwhile, Consuelo the maid (Gloria Leticia Ortiz, Santo in the Hotel of Death) tries to hang herself and is stopped by her father Pedro (Germán Robles, who played Nostradamus the vampire in that series of films). It turns out that she too had an affair with Nick and can’t live without him. And while all that’s happening, Dr. Saluby (Guillermo Murray, El Mundo de Los Vampiros) has come to check on the injured maid and ends up sleeping with Nick’s wife Muriel (Elizabeth Campbell, Golden Rubi from the Wrestling Women movies).

To make this even more convoluted, Nick has been getting threats on bank stationary. He’s sure it’s Juan, so when he goes to the man’s house, instead of a fight, he’s warmly greeted and taken to the Chinese room that gives this movie its title. There, he sees a woman in a mask who is in a drug haze, which helps her get over the pain she feels from her deformed foot.

Nick’s nightmares kick into high gear, filled with gory dismemberments, dancing skeletons and him being bound to a giant clock.

Then, somehow, this becomes a murder mystery, as the maid is found hung again, but the real cause of death is choking by human hands. And anyone — everyone — has a reason for why she had to die, because it turns out that she’s pregnant with Nick’s child.

I have no idea how this film ended up made in Mexico with a mostly Mexican cast. That said, it’s really something. How many mushroom taking murder mysteries with dream sequences have you seen?

This is a movie that raises so many questions.

Here’s the first: Why did I list it as being made in 1968 and 1984?

That’s because it was originally Cautivo del Mas Allá (Captives of the Beyond) when it came out in the late 60’s.

In that movie, Rafael Portillo (who made the Aztec Mummy films, as well as the mummy parts of Face of the Screaming Werewolf) told the story of Vicki, who wants to be gorgeous, so a witch gets her to strip for Satan, who gives her the power of being a vedette dancer.

For some reason, Portillo decided to grab all the footage from that movie — which is more a romantic story with supernatural elements — to make a gore movie about Satan. You know, movies like this are exactly why we have a web site.

So let me see if I can make sense of this one.

Vicki (Ana Luisa Peluffo, who was one of the first Mexican actresses to appear nude, she’s also in El Violador Infernal, one of the most mental movies I’ve ever seen) is in love with Ricardo (Gonzalo Aiza, who also produced this movie, and strangely it is the only movie or movies that he ever appeared in*), who only has eyes for Barbara (Barbara Wells, who didn’t do much more than appear in John Candy’s Summer Rental and an episode of Lassie).

That’s when Vicki does what any of us would do. She sells her soul to the devil, who makes her man soft with any woman not named Vicki, which seems like a pretty dark bargain. They aardvark, but then a private dick shows up to say that she’s on the left hand path, which ends up with her stabbing poor Ricardo in the throat.

This is when all the new footage shows up, as there’s a funeral and Ricardo’s brother Carlos tells his brother’s ghost that he will avenge his death, so brother and possesses brother and sleeps with his Satanic sister-in-law, which seems like something people search for in late October on Pornhub. Then, Carlos kills her and has to go to court to argue the occult reasons why this all went down.

For some reason, Ricardo also shows up as a zombie that rips out people’s innards after a firing squad shoots his brother dead — after that court case — and has the sound effect of Vincent Price’s laughter.

This came out as Terror, Sexo y Brujería (Terror, Sex and Witchcraft), which is one of the best titles of all time, in theaters and Narco Satanico on VHS, which is also a great name.

Some of this movie will bore you into submission with long courtroom scenes, but stay with it. There will be moments of Satan in a Ben Cooper mask wandering a cemetery with fog all around him, as well as glowing graves, extreme gore and a mariachi band that has been dubbed to play synth.

Adding to the confusion of this film is that there are times — within minutes — where two different actors play the same character and time moves back and forth until you are confused beyond belief. The editing also has ADD, so there are times when you’ll just get flashes of things that have nothing to do with what is happening on screen or eyes getting superimposed over the footage, as if they forgot a layer or to delete something, but Photoshop and non-linear editing didn’t really exist in 1968 or 1984.

You know how some people get their doctorates by writing their thesis about ways that they plan on bettering the world? Mine is going to concern this film, explaining how two movies, made sixteen years apart, can use the same footage and tell two similar yet wildly different stories that bridge the gap between Mexico’s ripoff cinema of the late 60’s, which was still influenced by Universal movies from three decades before, and the VHS films of the 80’s, which saw Mexican filmmakers create Fulci-esque films with no filter whatsoever.

*This is a complete mystery to me, as well as the awesome The Bloody Pit of Horror site, which discusses whether this role is played by Gonzalo Aiza — as listed sometimes in the credits — or Carluis Saval, the name used on the 1984 version for Carlos, who looks exactly the same as Ricardo. Plus, is the producer Dr. Gonzalo Aiza Avalos the same person? What’s the story with Film-Mex Productions, who bought all this footage and hired the original director to make a remix? Was it all a front for Avalos to make himself or his son or whoever a star? And why is David Reynoso, who plays an attorney in this movie, holding a machine gun on the VHS cover art?

Known as Fear Chamber — as well as Chamber of Fear, The Torture Chamber and Torture Zone — this is another of the four movies that Boris Karloff made for Juan Ibáñez, with Jack Hill directing his segments.

In this strange little film, scientists discover a living rock beneath a volcano that feeds off the fear of young women. So instead of leaving well enough alone and saying, “This seems like a bad idea,” they create a fear chamber — yes, it’s right there in the title — to create the energy the rock needs from girls frightened out of their minds.

Karloff is obviously in bad health, even appearing lying in bed in some scenes. No matter — his role as Dr. Mantell is a bonkers one, as he even puts his own daughter into danger, facing off with the rock god who has obsessed him. I mean, of course he’d create a haunted house filled with strange people and vaguely Satanic ceremonies in order to keep studying his rock formation find, right?

Julissa, who plays Karloff’s daughter, also appears in two more of Hill/Ibáñez films, House of Evil and Isle of the Snake People, which is somehow even weirder than this one. This also has Isela Vega in it, who was in El Macho Bionico and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, plus Yerye Beirute from The Body Snatcher and Santanón, a small size actor who is in plenty of memorable big roles in films like Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters and El Gato con Botas.

I’ve read so many people saying that Targets should have been Karloff’s last film. They might not understand that he was a working actor and the fact that he was able to keep working and in demand for roles right up until the end is the real testiment to his career.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The translation of the German title to this film — Under the Spell of the Uncanny — is way cooler than The Zombie Walks and The Hand of Power**, the other titles for this Edgar Wallace adaption. No matter — this movie looks cool as hell, a Blood and Black Lace influenced pre-giallo with a delightful skull-faced killer named The Laughing Corpse* who even has his very own poison filled scorpion ring.

There’s one bonkers scene that would never be in a movie made in 2020, where the hero repeatedly tries to look up the skirt of a gorgeous librarian, who is played by Ewa Strömberg. She of course would catch the eye of noted pervert Jess Franco, who would cast her in Vampyros Lesbos and She Killed In Ecstasy.

As for the movie itself, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Higgins takes on a case that starts with a man laughing from the inside of his own coffin and gets even stranger with the deaths of nearly everyone who know that man, all from the scorpion ring of that dashing masked killer.

The credits for this really shout mod while the heroes shout old school, but you know, I pretty much loved all of it. I haven’t really explored the Wallace adaptions, but the last two I’ve watched her been more than entertaining.

This is one of the few giallo I’ve seen where the killer uses a machine gun. Also, there’s a guy with green skin and no one makes a single mention of it, so 1968 Germany was way woke early.

*The voice of The Laughing Skull came directly from director Alfred Vohrer.

**That’s the title of the book that this was based on.

You can watch this on YouTube.

A Hyena In the Bank Vault might have the best looking fashions I’ve ever seen in a giallo. Oh man, glitter eyeshadow, furs, striped suits, insane patterns — I’m in love.

Four thieves — Klaus from Germany, Albert (Sandro Pizzochero, So Sweet, So Dead), from France, Juan from Spain and Carina from Tangiers — have met up in what they think is an isolated castle to split up some diamonds. That said, their dead boss’s wife Anna is throwing a party. Complicating matters further, all five keys must be used at the same time to open the vault, so everyone has to keep getting along, even when Albert’s new girlfriend Jeanine annoys everyone. And when people start getting killed, how will anyone get their reward?

Cesare Canevari is probably better known for his scummy side, with movies like A Man for Emmanuelle, Killing of the Flesh and The Gestapo’s Last Orgy on his resume.

I kind of love these kinds of pre-Argento giallo that haven’t started aping his style and instead are all over the place in influence. This is the kind of movie that I wished had showed up in Vinegar Syndrome’s last Forgotten Gialli set, because I want more people to see it. It’s got the brightest colors, the furriest upholstery, the most theatrical makeup and a soundtrack that swings. It is, well, everything.

1968 saw the release of Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters, but just seven months later, director Kuroda Yoshiyuki (Daimajin, several Zatoichi films) made this sequel, which takes the main ideas of presenting Japan’s native monsters, perhaps finds some inspiration from the manga GeGeGe no Kitaro and the story of Momotaro, take a strong shot of national Japanese pride and remembers that no one cares about the humans in the story. We’re here to see monsters. And oh man, are we gonna get them!

In the Babylonian city of Ur, the body of the great monster Daimon lies amongst the ruins. That is, until some treasure hunters rouse him from his dark sleep, which leads to him flying to Japan, vampirically taking over the body of samurai Lord Hyogo Isobe.

As Isobe, Daimon goes wild, burning all the religious altars, killing the family dog and even rousing a kappa — a “river child” turtle creature who loves to wrestle — from his slumber in the river. Hurt in combat with the much stronger Daimon, the kappa begins his quest to unite the yokai and stop the foul beast.

Soon, the kappa meets Kasa-obake (a one-legged umbrella with eyes), Futakuchi-onna (a two-mouthed cursed woman), Rokurokubi (a long-necked woman who often appears in the more adult kaiden stories), Nuppeppo (a clay creature who resembles a blob of meat) and Abura-sumashi (a wise ghost of a human who once stole oil). They tell him that according to coloring books and field guides, no such yokai exists.

Meanwhile, Daimon has stopped his attempted exorcism and responded by killing the parents of several children. As his men hunt for the surviving kids, they hide in the yokai shrine. Soon, the monsters realize the kappa was telling the truth and join him in battle, which ends up involving nearly every single monster from across Japan.

Takashi Miike remade this movie in 2005 as The Great Yokai War, which also features Kitaro creator Mizuki in a cameo.

Seriously, this movie took a bad day and made anything seem possible. This is pure joy on film.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Daiei could produce a masterpiece like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon while still putting out movies that featured Gamera, Zatoichi, Daimajin and the Yokai Monsters, who are based on the monsters of Japanese folklore. They may be evil creatures who cause great misfortune and harm or — quite the opposite — could  also be beings that bring good fortune to those who meet them.

Much like the aforementioned films like Gamera and Daimajin, this is a tokusatsu film that uses practical effects, including actors in costumes, puppets and animation to tell the story.

That story is really about a rich landowner, who wants to tear down a local shrine to build a brothel. He cheaps out and after telling the stories of the yokai, neglects to pay for the ceremony to keep them out. They soon go wild in the town, partying down as they arrive with sake.

Known in Japan as Yokai Hyaku Monogatari, this was directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda, who made six of the Zatoichi movies. It suffers the sin of some Godzilla movies, in that we don’t really care about the humans. We just want the monsters. And we’ve been promised a hundred of them!

The following film, Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, came out the same year and realizes this issue and instead fills nearly every moment of the movie with monster after monster. This is good. That movie is great.

You can watch this on YouTube.