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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Freese has been a staff writer for Videoscope Magazine since 1998. He also contributes to Drive-in Asylum. 

Beautiful, young Justine (Shirley Corrigan) travels with her much older new husband to visit the final resting place of his parents. There, a trio of trouble making brothers attack and kill her husband before Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) shows up, busts some heads, kills two of the thugs and saves Justine, who passes out.

She awakens in Daninsky’s castle to an old housekeeper watching over her, who assures her she is safe (The village people refer to the residents of the “Black Castle” as, “a witch and the Devil himself.”).

Whenever the full moon peeks out from behind the dark clouds, Daninsky turns into a werewolf and noshes on whoever is unlucky enough to be out. When Justine learns of Daninsky’s touch of lycanthropy, she convinces him to return to modern London with her to meet a friend who might be able to help him out, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Jack Taylor).

Running late for his first appointment to see the doc, a power outage traps Daninsky in a clinic elevator with a pretty, young nurse (It’s “El Hombre Lobo of London” time after Daninsky transforms into the werewolf inside the elevator, feasts on the nurse and escapes the clinic after the elevator doors are finally pried open.).

Dr. Jekyll’s master plan is to shoot Daninsky up with his grandfather’s famous elixir and allow the Mr. Hyde part of Danindky’s psyche to overpower and overthrow the werewolf part. Once the Hyde persona is fully in control, Jekyll will inject an antidote into him and presto-chango, Daninisky is cured from being a werewolf. 

Everything works until Jekyll’s jealous assistant Sandra (Mirta Miller) double crosses him and re-injects Daninsky with the Hyde juice. Seems she loves the doctor, but he only has eyes for Justine, who now loves Daninsky, so Sandra figures she will use Mr. Hyde to torture Justine, which he does, with a big grin on his face while he does it. What Sandra doesn’t figure on is Mr. Hyde being a bigger psychopath than she is, and soon we got Mr. Hyde practically skipping through Soho looking for prostitutes to decimate and destroy.

Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf (aka Doctor Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo) is a perfect example of the kind of movie they no longer make. Naschy, writing the screenplay under his real name, Jacinto Molina, fills his plot with so much story, pathos, soap opera drama and gratuitous monster attacks, no true monster fan will be able to resist its charms (Among the best moments is a scene where Mr. Hyde wanders into a hip Soho disco, only to change back into Daninsky, then change into El Hombre Lobo and clean the place out!).

Jack Taylor is pretty great as the sketchy Doc Jekyll and Mirta Miller seems to be having a good time playing the true villain of the piece. When Naschy portrays Mr. Hyde he does so with a sinister grin and a hairpiece that recalls not so much Fredric March or Spencer Tracy, but more Bugs Bunny from the 1955 short “Hyde and Hare.”

The earnestness Naschy puts into all his monster portrayals is truly the work of a master craftsman and he always seems to be having the time of his life in his creature features (Naschy should certainly be considered one of the true icons of horror, alongside other greats as Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., Vincent Price, Barbra Steele, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.).

Naschy fans are split on the order of his El Hombre Lobo/Daninsky series, as the second film, 1968’s The Nights of the Wolf Man is a lost film (Naschy himself never recalled seeing it, but did remember going to Paris for a week to shoot his scenes.). Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf is the fifth film to see actual release in the series, but the sixth film in the series, including the lost second chapter.

I watched the version available from Code Red (on a double feature disc with Vampires Night Orgy). While most sources peg the running time at 96 minutes, the Code Red version runs 88 minutes, as opposed to the edited, 72 minute version included on the Pure Terror collection (It’s safe to say this truncated version is missing buckets of brutal sadism, gratuitous nudity and abundant monster violence.).

Regardless of what version you watch, Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf is a treat, made by a man who truly loved his monsters for fans who share that love.