EDITOR’S NOTE: Hatchet for the Honeymoon was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 30, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on March 8, 1980 and August 8, 1981.

Do you need to love, trust and care about the hero of the movie? Mario Bava is here with Hatchet for the Honeymoon in an attempt to craft a story where the hero is the absolute worst person in the entire film.

Meet John Harrington. He’s 30, runs a bridal dress factory, lives in a gorgeous villa near Paris and kills young women to overcome his impotence and Oedipus complex. His wife, Mildred, refuses to divorce him. And he’s instantly smitten with Helen (Dagmar Lassander, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The House by the Cemetery), a young model who has come to replace a missing girl.

Why is she missing? She was one of the models at the salon who John took a liking to, giving her one of his dresses for her wedding. The moment she tried it on, he hacked her up with a meat cleaver, burned her corpse and used it to fertilize the plants in his greenhouse.

Inspector Russell knows that something isn’t quite right. After all, how can six models disappear from the same dress company? If only there was some evidence…

John, however, is falling in love with Helen. And he finally decides to do something about his wife. That something entails him putting on a wedding dress and killing her. But there’s one problem. Here’s where Bava twists the film from giallo into supernatural territory: she won’t stay dead.

While John can’t see or hear his wife, everyone else can. Even after burning her remains and placing them in a handbag, she keeps coming back. He takes the handbag with him to a club, where an attempt to bring another woman home fails when she sees his wife. Beaten by a bouncer and ejected, he cannot even use his charms to win over women. He throws his wife’s ashes into the night, but she remains with him

If John can’t be happy, at least he can murder Helen. He convinces her to wear a wedding dress and tells her that he never wanted to hurt her. She avoids the final blow of his cleaver, which unlocks a flashback where we learned the truth: John loved his mother and that love grew as he became the man of the house after his father’s death. But when she remarried — and started having sex again — he couldn’t take it and murdered her and her new husband. His mind erased the evidence until now.

Helen was an undercover cop all along, leading Inspector Russell and his men back to arrest John. While being transported to prison, he’s happy knowing that his many trials are over. Then, to his horror, he sees the handbag and notices his wife sitting next to him. Now, he’s the only person who can see her. She promised to be with him forever, even in Hell. He goes insane before accepting his fate.

Hatchet for the Honeymoon predates the slasher, yet many of its conventions can be found here and in other early Bava works. This film is a masterwork of both style and substance, with gorgeous fashion, sets and camerawork creating a gorgeous tableau. I love the scene where John uses Bava’s Black Sunday, playing on the TV, as an excuse for the screams that come from his apartment. And as his wife’s blood drips down onto the ground floor, it’s almost as if Bava dares you to empathize with a hero who is completely contemptible. What a predicament to be in!

This is part of the Nightmare Theater TV package, which also included Damiano Damiani’s The Witch, José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Marta, John Farris’ Dear Dead Delilah, Raúl Artigot’s The Witches Mountain, José María Zabalza’s The Fury of the Wolfman, Peter Sadsy’s Doomwatch, Francisco Lara Polop’s Murder Mansion, Carlos Aured’s Horror Rises from the Tomb and The Mummy’s Revenge, Joe D’Amato’s Death Smiles on a Murderer, Claudio Guerí’s The Bell from Hell and Amando de Ossorio’s The Night of the Sorcerers. Chiller Theater showed every single one of them.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Horror of the Blood Monsters was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 16, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It had the TV title Vampire Men of the Lost Planet. 

Al Adamson was remixing movies back in 1970. Invasion of the Blood Monsters has footage from Robot Monster, Unknown Island, One Million B.C., the Filipino movie Tagani and The Wizard of Mars. By the time it was ready for drive-ins and theaters, that black and white footage looked old. Adamson used a process called Spectrum X that made everything a single color. It’s really strange when mixed with full color footage yet I kind of enjoy it.

Exploitation heroes like Gary Graver and Adamson play vampires in the beginning as we listen to Brother Theodore tell us what has happened to our home world and why a rocket must go into space and John Carradine will lead humans in their quest to save Earth.

Jennifer Bishop is the beautiful girl who will help them fight snake men, lobster people and more vampires — hey, Bud Cardos — and oh yeah, bat people! Sam Sherman produced this and it was originally started in 1966 with reshoots in 1970. It was getting renamed all the way up until it was a Star Wars clone — well, in title only — under the AKA Space Mission of the Lost Planet.

I just read a bad review of this movie and it made me dislike the person who dare say anything mean about this film. From the moment the Independent International logo shows up, I was happy. Like, deliriously joyous. How can you not love a movie like this? What’s next, people don’t like Brain of Blood?

While Nazis deport the Danish Jews to extermination camps, the Danish people decide to fight them. One of the people in danger, Lillian Stein (Jane Seymour), wants to leave but her father (Ebbe Rode) wants to remain. Yet there comes a time when they must leave and it will take selling everything important to them and people giving their lives to get them away from this horror.

Directed by Bent Christensen and written by John Gould, this was Seymour’s first film and wasn’t available in the U.S. It’s a great lesson in the past and one that we should keep in mind for now, because I always believed that these things couldn’t happen any longer and today, I think that they could happen at any time. We need to study the past so that we avoid the future that is coming.

You can get The Only Way from MVD.

Roch Siffredi (Alain Delon) — and yes, this is where the porn star got his name — is out of the big house and looking for his lover Lola (Catherine Rouvel). She’s now with François Capella (Jean-Paul Belmondo), another criminal, and while they fight at first they soon become partners.

Rinaldi, a lawyer who works for Marello (Arnoldo Foà) and Poli (André Bollet), helps them take over the fish market, which is fine by the rules of organized crime, but when they take over the meat market, it’s revenge time, They kill Poli, but Rinaldi is murdered by a killing machine called The Dancer. Before it’s all over, Siffredi and Capella are the new kings, but when Capella tries to leave it all behind, he’s killed. Finally, Siffredi decides that his friend had the right plan and gets out of town.

This movie happened because Delon wanted to make a movie with Jean-Paul Belmondo. By the time he was promoting the movie, he wasn’t so high on working with the actor, saying “We are still what you in America call pals or buddies. But we are not friends. There is a difference. He was my guest in the film but still he complained. I like him as an actor but as a person, he’s a bit different. I think his reaction was a stupid reaction… almost like a female reaction. But I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”

That’s because they had a deal to have their names as equals, yet Delon’s production credit came up first. There was even an agreement to split the number of close-ups.

As for the movie, Delon’s inspiration was the crime team of French gangsters Carbone and Spirito. There was an idea to have it be about them, but they were worried about using real gangsters.

The title comes from the company who made the fedoras that gangsters wore, Borsalino. Of course, when the movie was released, there was a revival of these hats.

The Arrow blu ray release of this movie has new audio commentary by film scholar Josh Nelson, features on the music, the costumes and Belmondo, a trailer, an image gallery, an illustrated book, a double-sided poster, and six art cards. You can get it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Scars of Dracula was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 28, 1974 at 11:30 p.m. It also played on February 21, 1976 and December 16, 1978.

Directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by Anthony Hinds, this Hammer film starts with Dracula’s dead body on a stone plinth in a chamber in his castle, defeated after Taste the Blood of Dracula. A bat flies in, gives him blood and Dracula is back and he even survives his castle being burned down. Weirdly, that’s the same footage from that movie played backwards because, you know, the budget.

He soon hs a new servant named Klove (Patrick Troughton) and a mistress named Tania (Anouska Hempel). Well, he did, because she tries to get with his new captive Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews), so Dracula stabs her and tosses her into acid because, you know, he’s Dracula.

Paul’s brother Simon (Dennis Waterman) and his fiancee Sarah Framsen (Jenny Hanley) come to save him but you know how smart Dracula is about these things, even if Klove chooses Sarah over him, which gets him punished.

This one has perhaps the dumbest death for Dracula ever, as he holds a metal spike and gets struck by lightning. He catches on fire and just keeps burning, but come on. That doesn’t kill a vampire. That ending is forgotten about by Dracula A.D. 1972.

Warner Brothers and other American major studios didn’t want to deal with Hammer’s Sir James Carreras, so the budgets were cut to $200,000. Many think that the decline in Hammer movies starts here.

Christopher Lee said, “I was a pantomime villain. Everything was over the top, especially the giant bat whose electrically motored wings flapped with slow deliberation as if it were doing morning exercises.” Sure, he was sick of playing Dracula. You would be too if you played him four times in the same year in Count Dracula, One More Time and Taste the Blood of Dracula. He almost didn’t do this and would have seen John Forbes-Robertson take the role earlier. He eventually played the count in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.

If you look close, Peter Cushing is one of the milkmaid in the opening village scenes. There was a delay on Scream and Scream Again and Lee dared him to sneak into the movie.

“I’m trisexual — I’ll try anything for pleasure!”

Any movie that has this line, no matter what happens in it, has something good in it.

Norman (Gerald Jaccuzo) is The Duke Of Norwich. When his half-brother is killed, he gets closer to the throne, which makes him filled with a need for power. He sets his other half-brother Albert (Hal Borske) up with a commoner named Heather MacGregor (Susan Cassidy) with plans to take control of their child and therefore, the throne. But there’s also the dead half-brother’s pregnant wife Lady Jane (Patricia Dillon), a hunchback named Ivan (Richard Mason) — who even gets into a threesome — and a woman with one eye.

I can’t even imagine what people unaware of Andy Milligan think when they saw this. It could still be happening now thanks to streaming, as someone sees the poster art and the title and thinks. “I’ll try this” before they’re confronted by Staten Island being a foreign country and costumes that look like they came from a Christmas play. Will any of them make it to the end? Or will they just be upset by what they have seen?

You can watch this on Tubi.

One of five movies that Andy Milligan was to shoot for British distributor Leslie Elliot — before the falling out with Elliot’s father, who was his business partner — Nightbirds was written on the plane to England.

It’s not the normal — well, was anything he did normal? — horror movie that Milligan was getting known for. Dink (Berwick Kaler) and Dee (Julie Shaw) meet, hook up and he moves into her attic apartment. Then they grow so obsessed with each other that the outside world no longer matters. Their worship game is one of trying to outdo the other, trying to make the other the victim when it should be about lovemaking. It’s not, but you already knew that going in.

Like Vapors, this is an intimate film and not one of blood and horror. Well, you could say that there is horror but not the supernatural kind. I read someone once who said they wondered what Milligan’s career would have been like if Warhol had paid him instead of Paul Morrissey and I bet he’d have ruined the opportunity sooner than later, but just dream of what could have been.

Making his way to England instead of Staten Island, Andy Milligan created a vampire movie in which Rev. Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) has an entire family of vampires — a wife who doesn’t speak, three green-skinned vampire women and a hunchback named Spool — living in Carfax Abbey.

Inbreeding is destroying this vampiric brood, so he calls out to America for more family members to add to the DNA and increase their chances of survival.

To get this on film, Milligan handmade costumes and smeared vaseline all over the lens. As always, he also had everyone scream at the top of their lungs.

Spool is abused throughout the movie, even when he’s trying to do the right thing and save the victims.

A lot of people seem to hate this movie and you know, maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome because I watched so many Andy Milligan movies all in the same week, but I am not seeing the same movie that they have. I kind of fall into a drone dream when I watch these, letting them wash over me and take away the world that I don’t want to be in. I feel sad for others who can’t use these movies in the same way.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Released as a double feature with Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers finds Andy Milligan making another one of the classics. Sweeney Todd to be exact.

Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) and Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) come together to kill off their customers, steal their money and valuables, and give the bodies to Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) to disposal. After a few kills, they start getting way into murder, so they decide to start using the bodies to make meat pies, including one that has a woman’s entire breast in it.

Shot in London, this actually feels like it could be in its time period, unlike the New York City Milligan movies where you can see modern buildings and hear the traffic. Milligan made five movies in 1970 alone — Torture Dungeon, Nightbirds, Guru the Mad Monk and The Body Beneath are the other films — and it’s pretty wild that he was doing so much so often. Then again, to the casual viewer, these movies are overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod, but to those who love these movies, well, they’re also overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod. Perspective is important.

TV Guide said that Bloodthirsty Butchers was a “gory and typically cheap retelling of the Sweeney Todd legend.” One star.

I may have ranked it much higher.

You can watch this on Tubi.