Corrado Farina was once a copywriter in advertising before he began to direct his own commercials. He moved on to direct documentaries as well as two feature films — Baba Yaga and this strange campire film. After this, he mainly worked on documentaries and wrote novels. That’s a shame, because both movies are pretty good.

Farina referred to this as a conceptual movie. It concerns a man who is given a promotion at the car company that he works for. However, that promotion comes from a place and a person that he didn’t expect.

This film was influenced by German philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his critique of capitalism and communism One-Dimensional Man. In story, consumerism is a form of social control, just like vampirism. Nosferantu is still out there, sucking blood, but now he’s being much more polite about it — he’s Adolfo Celi playing Giovanni Nosferatu and not Max Schreck.

In the modern world, the vampires use advertising — a subject that Farina obviously knew plenty about — and business to control their victims. There’s even Harkers and Van Helsings on the Nosferantu payroll now. And instead of draining blood from their necks, Giovanni derives pleasure from shooting targets that moan with each shot.

Co-writer Giulio Berruti would go on to direct Killer Nun if you’re interested in playing seven degrees of giallo and Italian genre filmmaking with me. Let’s keep the game moving — Geraldine Hooper, who plays Nosferantu’s androgynous secretary, was also in Deep Red and Emmanuelle in Soho.

You have to love a movie where business meetings take on the sinister trappings of the occult ritual. The symbols may have become logos and the mantras may have become concept statements, but the intent is so much the same.

There is no better companion film for The Thing with Two Heads than this, a movie that’s pretty much the same idea: Dr. Roger Girard (Bruce Dern!) is a scientist experimenting with head transplantation who finally gets the chance to do the experiment that everyone says shouldn’t happen. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

Girard had a caretaker who was killed. That man’s son Danny (John Bloom, The Dark, The Hills Have Eyes Part II, Brain of Blood) is a giant with great strength and the mild of a child. Manuel Cass is an escaped mental patient who is critically injured after killing Danny’s dad. So you know — why not transplant their heads on the same body? What can go wrong?

Larry Vincent, one of the first film riffers as horror host Seymour on Los Angeles’ Fright Night on KHJ-TV and Seymour’s Monster Rally on KTLA, shows up, as does Pat Priest (the second Marilyn Munster, of course), Casey Kasem (I really need to do a Letterboxd list on the films of Casey because, well, I’m a maniac) and stuntman Gary Kent (who the film Danger God was about).

Once, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Dern revealed he was not paid for acting in this movie. He was given a check for $1,700 that bounced and when he returned to the set for the next day of filming, it had already been shut down.

It certainly made money, as American International Pictures paired this with the Amicus movie Scream and Scream Again.

You can watch this for free on Tubi with and without commentary by Rifftrax.

This is Filippo Walter Ratti’s last movie, but man, just from the opening, where a couple hides and strange faces show up amongst flames while a woman screams a James Bond-like song? This makes me want to stay up even later than 3:14 AM, which I figure is probably the best time to watch Satan-themed Italian horror movies.

When this was released in France as Les Nuits Sexuelles, it had plenty more sex and skin. Just a warning, if you find that version.

Jean (Pierre Brice, who played Winnetou in a series of spaghetti westerns) and Danielle Duprey (Patrizia Viotti, Amuck) love solving mysteries. Well, they get one right away, as Jean get a letter from Guillaume de Saint Lambert that arrives in the form of a riddle that references the book Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire. This leads them to the prince’s castle, where Jean’s old friend is dying from a disease that impacts everyone in his family over the age of thirty-five. It’s lasted for three generations and the doctors can’t help him.

Then there’s a painting of a man dying at the stake and Danielle starts dreaming about it. And oh yeah — it turns out that the prince’s wife is a witch that his family had burned at the stake. It’s not worth falling in love in an Italian gothic horror romance.

I was wondering — how can a movie called Night Of The Sexual Demons be this slow? Then I saw a review that said to try and hang on past the first thirty minutes. And then I thought, well, this does have a pretty great poster, so I held on for a little more. Luckily, I was rewarded with exactly the kind of movie I was hoping for, complete with a killer that has razor-sharp claws that he or she uses to eviscerate nude victims, as well as an attempted sacrifice. Thank, well, whomever in the nine circles who made that finally happen.

Shot between 1968 and 1970 in the Santa Ynez, California area, Touch of Satan was a regionally released drive-in and grindhouse film that wasn’t well-known until it appeared on a 1998 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There was a rumor that this movie was directed by Tom Laughlin, who made the Billy Jack filmns and used the pseudonym Don Henderson as the producer of The Born Losers and the editor of Like Father, Like Son. The director of this movie really as Don Henderson, who only made two other films: The Babysitter and Weekend with the Babysitter. While not actually connected, the second film is a spiritual sequel to the first. George E. Carey wrote, produced, and starred in both films — but played different characters. Yet they both share the idea of an older man having a fling with the babysitter of his children, named Candy Wilson in both movies, but played by two different actresses, Patricia Wymer and Susan Romen.

This movie begins with a farmer being repeatedly pitchforked by an elderly woman who has a burned up face. She goes scorched earth and sets his barn on fire too, while she’s at it. As she literally falls through the screen door when she gets back home, an older couple and a young woman begin arguing about how to handle things, adding that she’s done things like this in the past. Please note: this family lives on a walnut ranch.

Meanwhile, Jodie Thompson comes to town, as part of his vision quest as he decides whether or not he wants to be a lawyer like his father. He falls for Melissa, the girl we’ve just met with the insane grandmother, who is really her sister because our girl Melissa is a witch.

Cue the Mercyful Fate!
“Melissa, you were mine
Melissa, you were the light
She was a witch
Why did they take you away?”

Believe it or not, this movie takes plenty of dialogue from the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Horror at Red Hook.”

While this was originally going to be called Pitchfork, it has an amazing Italian title: L’Ossessa: i raccapriccianti delitti di Monroe Park, which translates as The Obsession: The Horrific Crimes of Monroe Park. That said — there’s no location named Monroe Park in the film. There is, however, that one amazing bit of dialogue when Melissa says, “This is where the fish lives.”

You can watch this on Amazon Prime with and without commentary from Mystery Science Theater 3000. The riffed version is also on Tubi.

In his BBC documentary series A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss referred to this film, along with Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, as the prime example of a short-lived subgenre he called folk horror.

It’s directed by Piers Haggard, who also was behind The Quatermass Conclusion, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu and Venom. He’s also the great-great-nephew of H. Rider Haggard, the creator of Allan Quartermain.

Robert Wynne-Simmons was hired to write the story, which was inspired by the modern-day Manson Family and Mary Bell child murders.

In the early 18th century, Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews, Dracula Has Risen from His Grave) uncovers a one-eyed skill covered with fur while plowing his fields. He asks the judge (Patrick Wymark, Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow) to look at it, but it’s gone missing, and his fears are ridiculous.

Peter Edmonton brings his fiancee, Rosalind Barton (Tamara Ustinov, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb), to meet his aunt, Mistress Banham. Banham disapproves of the coupling and demands that Rosalind sleep in an attic room. After screaming throughout the night, she soon gets ill, and the judge commits her. As she’s led away, Peter discovers she has a claw instead of a hand.

Claws show up all over this — hidden in fields to be found by children and attacking Peter inside the cursed room, causing him to sever his hand. The judge leaves behind the town for London but promises to return. He places Squire Middleton (James Hayter, The 39 Steps) in charge.

One of the children who found the claw, Mark, is lured out by his classmates and killed in a ritual game by the leader of a new cult, Angel Blake (Linda Hayden, Madhouse, Queen Kong). She even tries to seduce Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley, the Master from Dr. Who) and tells him that Mark had the devil inside him, which needed to be cut out. Her group also has a Black Mass inside a ruined church where they attack Mark’s sister Cathy (Wendy Padbury, companion Zoe on Dr. Who). They ritualistically assault and murder her before tearing the fur from her skin.

Of course, it’s not long before all hell quite literally breaks loose, with insane children raising Satan himself from the Great Beyond and Ralph growing fur on his leg, marking him for death. This movie is…well, there’s nothing else quite like it. I can see why it had a limited audience for years; it’s so dark and unforgiving.

“It never made much money,” said Haggard. “It wasn’t a hit. From the very beginning, it had a minority appeal. A few people absolutely loved it, but the audiences didn’t turn out for it.”

While Satan’s Skin was the original title, you must give it to American International Pictures’ Samuel Z. Arkoff, who created the film’s title.

Eddie Romero directing and John Ashley starring? That was all I really needed to know. Man, anything remotely connected with these two — like the Blood Island films — and I’m ready to go.

This was also the first release for Roger Corman’s distribution company New World Pictures. After successfully distributing Beast of Blood in 1970, Kane W. Lynn’s Hemisphere Pictures tried to get the distribution rights to this, but got cut out of the deal.

Ashley’s new company, Four Associates Ltd. went on to produce The Twilight People, The Woman Hunt and Ebony, Ivory & Jade. As for Lynn, he worked with Sam Sherman to make Brain of Blood. Me? I’m happy all around at whatever these maniacs decided to make.

While Ashley would say that this was the most cerebral of the Philippines-based horror movies he made — and its success led to Corman making more movies there like The Big Doll House — Eddie Romero would say, “We really tried for quality. I don’t think it did very well. They prefer out and out gore.”

As World War II ends, Satan himself — Vic Diaz from Night of the Cobra Woman — spares Joseph Landgon’s (Ashley) life if he becomes his disciple. So over the next 25 years, Langdon possessed people and forces them to do the bidding of his dark master.

However, he wants to free himself from the Lord of the Flies, but instead becomes a hairy monster who could pretty much be a werewolf. He’s in the body of Phillip Rogers now and that man’s wife tries to save him. An old blind bandit named Sabasas finally saves him, asking him to pray for his soul just as an inspector catches up to him and shoots our — well, I guess he isn’t the hero — turning him into an ancient corpse.

Mary Charlotte Wilcox, who plays the wife, is also in the absolutely bonkers film, Love Me Deadly, which I love me dearly. She also shows up in Psychic Killer, Black Oak Conspiracy, Strange Brew and was a cast member of SCTV and Maniac Mansion.

Once he moved back to America, Ashley produced The A-Team. In one episode, he plays a movie producer trying to get a movie made. That movie? Beast of the Yellow Night.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or with Rifftrax making fun of it on Tubi.

The man named Matt Cavanaugh who wrote this doesn’t exist. It’s really Willie Gilbert, the author and playwright. Once he left Cleveland for New York City, he discovered that his physician Jack Weinstock shared his dream of being a writer. They wrote for nightclub performers, Broadway reviews, on early TV shows like Howdy Doody and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and shared two Tony Awards for 1962’s How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.

The team also wrote the plays Hot Spot, Catch Me If You Can and were working on The Candy Store when Weinstock died. Gilbert went on to work for Hanna-Barbera, where he worked on The New Scooby-Doo Movies, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Super Friends, The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone and Yogi’s First Christmas. He died in 1980.

Somewhere along there — let’s say 1971 — he wrote this movie, which is about the kids of today. You know, in 1971.

Also known as The Idiotic Couple, Frenetic Party and The Love-Thrill Murders, this movie has some awesome poster copy: “Six states wanted them jailed. Eight torture victims wanted them dead. All the blood freaks wanted was one more night… of the most brutal orgy in history!”

Director Robert L. Roberts doesn’t have many credits, other than Michele and the Device, The Big Man and Patty, a movie in which doctors and experts sit around and discuss the Patty Hearst case. That movie was released in hard-X, soft-X and R-rated versions and starred Jamie Gillis. If you don’t think I’m on the hunt for this movie right now, you don’t know me.

Sandra Barlow (Renay Granville, who is also in the aforementioned Patty) is looking for kicks. Sex and drugs, baby. Balling! Yes, this is another movie that uses balling, a  word that I am desperately trying to bring back into vogue; please help me!

She hires Moon (Troy Donahue, a 50’s and 60’s matinee icon who was in Man of a Thousand Faces, the TV series Surfside 6, Imitation of Life and then dropped out, appearing in movies like this and Seizure. Perhaps you’ve also seen him in Dr. Alien, Shock ‘Em Dead or Cry-Baby, where he played Mona “Hatchet-Face” Malnorowski’s dad), a Manson-like drug leader who has more on his mind than sex and drugs for the big party.

Donahue said some amazing things in the press about this movie. “I play Moon, a religious creep who murders a lot of people, a real heavy trip. But I don’t want anyone to think I’m playing it in some phony exploitation flick that takes advantage of the Manson case to make a fast buck. I don’t like many things, man, but I dig this picture… We’re trying to show both sides of the problem. The Hollywood glamor society is as guilty as the depraved hippy cults. They pick up people on the Sunset Boulevard and tease them. When they made fun of Manson they picked on the wrong guy. I was up at the Tate house. It was a freaky scene. Sure I met Manson at the beach playing volleyball.”

He also predicted that this movie would be as bigger as Love Story.

Tallie Cochrane, who plays Ruth in this movie, shows up in all manner of 1970’s sexploitation, like Girls for Rent, The Centerfold Girls, The Candy Tangerine Man, If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!, Track of the Moonbeast (which she also did make-up on), Hollywood High and Frightmare. She also did voiceover work and ran a casting agency for the New York City adult film industry in the early 1970’s.

There’s also a scene where Fritzi gets ready to have sex with a male member of Moon’s gang, exclaiming, “Haven’t you ever heard of science? I’m a woman and I loved cock so much I just had to have one for myself. I went to Sweden and got this off a sailor who is now a woman. Get with the times.”

This is the kind of movie where a famous actress has an apartment that looks like it’s somewhere out in the suburbs and has a swinging party that looks like the kind of potlucks that my parent’s church social club used to throw and I’d hide in the basement so I didn’t have to hang out with any other kids, when all I wanted was to sit in my house and watch Hammer movies on a Saturday afternoon.

I love this movie. It’s pure scum and invites the thought that the people that the Manson Family killed were just as invested in the sex and drugs scene as the Creepy Crawlers who started the Year of the Fork. Quentin Tarantino screened this at the New Beverly before Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood came out and it makes a scuzzy companion piece to that film.

Unfortunately, this movie has never been released on DVD. I blame Troma, who has the rights, but then at least I didn’t have to watch a Lloyd Kaufman introduction to this movie.

1971 I love you. You are at the end of the hippies, hiding inside your home, freaked out by the acid you once took, releasing movies like The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, Daughters of Darkness, Simon King of the Witches, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil, Vampyros Lesbos, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin and so many more astounding films.

Troy Donahue giving speeches about God not being dead to suburbanites fried on acid who are due to be killed at his hand? This movie was made just for me.

Paul Wendkos may have directed most of the Gidget movies, but he has quite the horror pedigree. There’s the TV movie Good Against Evil, Haunts of the Very Rich, the 1985 remake of The Bad Seed and the legendary 1975 TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden.

Because this is a Quinn Martin Production and CBS aired it extensively on TV, many people believe that it was a made-for-TV movie. However, it was actually released in theaters—the only movie that Twentieth Century Fox released for the entire calendar year of 1970, due to several of 1969’s movies failing at the box office.

Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda) once wanted to be a pianist but is now a music journalist. He gets to interview the world’s greatest piano player, Duncan Ely (Curd Jurgens, The Vault of Horror). It doesn’t start well, but then Ely discovers that Myles has hands perfect for the piano.

At that point, Duncan and his daughter Roxanne (Barbara Perkins) become friends with Myles and his wife Paula (Jacqueline Bisset), who doesn’t trust either of them. She was right to suspect them, as they’re Satanists who have transferred Duncan’s mind to Myles’ body. However, as Myles becomes a major star, she starts to like the man she’s married to more and more. She becomes seduced by the power, even if Duncan comes to her in dreams and tells her that their daughter must die.

After that dream, the daughter dies, which pushes Paula to investigate the Ely family. She then finds herself falling into the arms of Roxanne’s ex-husband, Bill (Bradford Dillman).

This is the 1970s, so of course, incest figures in. It turns out that Duncan and Roxanne have bartered with Satan to enable them to pursue their incestuous relationship by placing Duncan’s consciousness into Myles’ body. When Bill is killed with the same blue forehead murder style as Paula’s daughter, she starts to worry for her life. But simultaneously, she decides that no matter who is in her husband’s body, that’s the man she wants to be with.

So she does what any of us would do. She turns to Satan and kills herself, moving her mind into Paula’s body. Then, she returns to her husband, Paula’s father, in her husband’s body. Whatever issues there were with the marriage have been solved, thanks to the left-hand path and outright murder.

“Apes exist, Sequel required.”

With those words, sent in a telegram from producer Arthur P. Jacobs to writer Paul Dehn, a sequel was set in motion to Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

But hey — didn’t everyone die in a nuclear bomb blast at the end of that movie?

They sure did.

Doesn’t matter.

Dehn decided that Cornelius and Zira — along with an inventor ape named Milo — would go back in time with Taylor’s ship. He also consulted Pierre Boulle, writer of the original Planet of the Apes novel, to add more satire to the story. Originally titled Secret of the Planet of the Apes, the results are rather genius, as only three ape actors allowed for a smaller budget while selling director Don Taylor (Damien: The Omen II and The Final Countdown) on the idea of making the film more humorous.

Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira (Kim Hunter) and Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo!) have escaped the ruin of future Earth and landed back in 1973, where they are taken to the Los Angeles Zoo, where Dr. Stephanie Branton (Natalie Trundy, the wife of producer Jacobs and the only actor to portray every single race in the Apes universe) and Dr. Lewis Dixon (Bradford Dillman!) are set to examine them.

In private, the apes elect to not to let the humans know that they can speak. They also can’t tell them that, you know, they once dissected humans and that everyone else died in the Ape War. But man, those humans act so condescending to Zira and she flips out and shows them just how smart she is. And then she starts talking. And then, well, a mishap allows a zoo gorilla to kill Dr. Milo. Luckily — and in spite of this — Lewis ends up friends with the chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a Presidential Commission has been formed to investigate the return of Taylor’s spaceship and determine what these apes are all about. Cornelius and Zira become celebrities over night and everyone loves them.

That’s not sitting well with President’s Science Advisor Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden, Titanic, Colossus: The Forbin Project), who discovers that Zira is with child and therefore fears for the future of humanity. He gets her drunk — dude, she’s pregnant! — and she reveals all, which means that now it’s time for the government to really interrogate them. After some truth syrum, Zira reveals that yes, she has dissected humans before and yes, she knew Taylor before he died.

Hasslein takes his findings to the President (William Windom), who must agree with the council that Zira’s pregnancy is to be aborted — guess he’s not a Right to Lifer — and that they must both be sterilized. After his child is called a little monkey by an orderly, Cornelius goes wild and accidentally kills the man before they escape.

Branton and Dixon help the apes to escape, where they hid out in the circus run by Senor Armando (Ricardo Montalban!), where an ape named Heloise has just given birth. Zira also gives birth to a son, whom she names Milo in honor of their deceased friend.

Hasslein is more animal than the apes, tracking them to a shipyard. The couple do not want to be taken alive, which suits him just fine. He fires numerous shots into Zira and her baby to the horror of all watching. Cornelius kills him in retaliation before being shot by a sniper. The couple crawl toward each other, touching one another one more time before dying.

Meanwhile, at Armando’s circus, we learn that Zira switched children with Heloise and Milo has survived. As the ringmaster walks away, we hear his first words as he cries for his mother.

Somehow, each Apes film tops the previous one for total downer endings.

It could have been worse — Cornelius and Zira were originally going to be ripped apart by a pack of Doberman Pinschers!

James Bacon shows up here — the only actor to be in all five of the Apes films. He also would go on to write numerous books about Hollywood, including the Jackie Gleason biography How Sweet It Is: The Jackie Gleason Story. This is the only movie in the series where he plays a human being.

Detroit TV announcer — he was mostly on WXYZ-TV  — Bill Bonds plays a TV newsman. John Randolph plays a councilman, a role he’d also play in the next film, and he’s in another monkey movie, the 1976 remake of King Kong. M. Emmet Walsh also makes an appearance. And Albert Salmi, who is in Superstition, is here as well.

Sal Mineo found the makeup process very uncomfortable and tiring. Kim Hunter would later say that she and Roddy McDowall had to hug Mineo a lot to console him. He had hoped that this movie would restart his career, as it did McDowall’s, but due to how much he hated the make-up, he was killed off earlier than originally planned. Escape from the Planet of the Apes would be Mineo’s final theatrical film before he was murdered on February 12, 1976 at the age of 37.