Tag Archives: 1972

THAN-KAIJU-GIVING: Django And Trinity Against Godzilla (1972)

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When a good witch sends Django one hundred years into the future, he has to protect humanity from Godzilla. Yet even his abilities are not enough, so the sorceress sends him assistance in the form of Trinity. Can these two Italian Western heroes stand a chance against the Japanese King of the Monsters?

Edited by Steven Sloss, this fan trailer was edited together from seven different films, with music and sound effects from many others. It also has some original voice acting.

I know this isn’t real but I was so happy after watching this that I decided to share it with all of you.

Spagvemberfest 2023: Two Brothers in Trinity (1972)

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Jesse & Lester – Due fratelli in un posto chiamato Trinità (Jesse & Lester – Two Brothers In a Place Called Trinity) starts Richard Harrison as woman-loving, gun shooting Jesse Smith and Donald O’Brien as Lester O’Hara, a God-fearing Mormon. They’re also half brothers who have inherited land from their uncle and must kick gold prospectors off the land. Not just other people who want the gold but rustlers using slaves to get the gold. They also get involved in gambling on boxing, which means that Jesse has to fight in the ring to get their gold back.

Jesse is running from a series of fathers angry that he’s impregnated the daughters and has the dream of opening his own bordello while Lester wants to open a church. These are not mutual goals, but they must work together. Anne Zimmerman also plays Elena Von Schaffer, the love interest of Jesse. She’s also in The Sister of Ursula, Camorra and The Bloodstained Butterfly.

Director Renzo Genta worked with Harrison to write and direct this movie. He’s better known as the writer of movies such as Concorde Affaire ’79, Last Cannibal World and Day of Anger.

This is episodic and, as you can imagine, trying to be a Trinity movie. Harrison and O’Brien are good, but they don’t reach their inspirations.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: Fair Play (1972)

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Teddy (Phillip Alford) is in Fairplay looking for his uncle F.O. McGill (Paul Ford) who told him he owned a spa. He really owns a saloon and is in the middle of a battle to keep it.

Directed by James A. Sullivan, who edited Manos: The Hands of Fate and directed Night Fright, and written by Garry Carr and Wallace Clyce, who also wrote another young guy in over his head movie, this time with gangsters, called The Pickle Goes In the Middle, this movie is a comedy in the West that takes place in one room and doesn’t have one laugh. It’s painful but we must watch movies that we don’t like to understand the films that we love. There are no peaks without valleys, no joy without pain.

Barbara Hancock, who plays Pearlie Purvis, is in The Night God Screamed and went into craft service after this movie. Richard Webb, who is the preacher, was once Captain Midnight. And Bill McGhee, who plays Jefferson Washington, was Sam in Don’t Look In the Basement. I feel badly for every single one of them for being in this movie. I will not remember you for this. I will remember you for the other movies you were in.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Spagvemberfest 2023: Pancho Villa (1972)

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An Italian Spanish co-production, this was directed by Eugenio Martín and produced by Phillip Yordan as part of three movies they’d make together, which also include Bad Man’s River and Horror Express.

After being double-crossed in an arms deal by a gun merchant McDermott (Luis Dávila) from New Mexico, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Telly Savalas) and his American lieutenant Scotty (Clint Walker) attack a U.S. Army weapons depot and seize McDermott.

Colonel Wilcox (Chuck Conners) is stationed on the American side of the border and is assigned to rescue the shady McDermott, who is as bad or worse than the Mexican revolutionaries.

In his book Hollywood exile, or, How I learned to love the blacklist: A memoir, producer Bernard Gordon goes into how little Telly Savalas and Clint Walker liked one another. Savalas made attempts to upstage Walker while — unlike their characters in the movie — Anne Francis and Walker got along quite well. Walker was also not far from a near-death experience. The actor Walker skied out of control and had his heart stabbed with a ski poke. He was pronounced dead until a doctor heard a faint sign of life and performed life-saving surgery.

Walker is pretty much Rick Dalton. He was the lead on Cheyenne before getting into Western and war movies. He eventually moved into TV movies, several of which are pretty good, including Killdozer! and Snowbeast.

Pancho Villa even has a song, We All End Up the Same”, which was written by John Cacavas and Don Black and sung by Savalas. This feels very Vietnam-era, in that Connors has a scene where the entire army can’t kill one fly. It ends as all movies should with a train on train head to head crash.

You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK SCI-FI CLASSICS: Moon of the Wolf (1972)

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Daniel Petrie made some pretty much films — Fort Apache the Bronx, A Raisin in the Sun and The Betsy — as well as some memorable made-for-TV movies like Sybil (which ruled mid-70s bookshelves and viewings) and The Dollmaker.

Here, he’s in Louisiana along with a stellar cast making a movie that honestly could have played drive-ins. That’s how great these made-for-TV films were.

In the Lousiana bayou country of Marsh Island, two farmers (Royal Dano! and John Davis Chandler) find the ripped apart remains of a local woman. Sheriff Aaron Whitaker (David Janssen!) and the victim’s brother Lawrence Burrifors (Geoffrey Lewis!) both show up at the scene, but it’s soon determined that somehow, some way, the girl died from a blow to the head. Lawrence blames her most recent lover. The sheriff thinks it was wild dogs. And the Burrifors patriarch claims that it was someone named Loug Garog.

That mysterious lover could have been rich boy Andrew Rodanthe (Bradford Dillman!), who along with his sister Louise (Barbara Rush, It Came from Outer Space) lives in an old mansion, the last of a long line.

Based on Les Whitten’s novel, this originally aired as an ABC Movie of the Week on September 26, 1972, then reran as part of ABC’s Wide World of Mystery on May 20, 1974.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK SCI-FI CLASSICS: The Brain Machine (1972)

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James Best, before he taught Tarantino and chased the Dukes. Gerald McRaney, before he was a Simon and was with Delta Burke. An ESP experiment gone wrong and well, a lot of talking. That said, it’s very 1972 and looks every bit as dated as you’d imagine, so I saw that as a very relaxing place to spend time in.

Director Joy N. Houck Jr. also made Night of Bloody Horror and Creature from Black Lake. He wrote this with Thomas Hal Phillips, who plays the General, and Christian Garrison.

I think this was a government experiment so that anyone who wanted to know about MK Ultra in 1972 would watch this movie and be bored into thinking that it’s not worth caring about. It’s like The Alpha Incident but somehow more boring, so imagine. Please just imagine. Actually, just do that. Maybe you don’t need to watch it.

Hey — Cannon released it on home video in Germany.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch it on Tubi.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: Vampire Circus (1972)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Hammer time

Directed by Robert Young, with a screenplay by Judson Kinberg and a story by George Baxt and Wilbur  Stark, Vampire Circus is pretty great. Young hadn’t made a movie with the studio so he was surprised that when he tried to get an extra week of filming, they just took the movie to be edited.

What they got it one of the most adult and interesting films the studio would ever make.,

Somewhere in Serbia, schoolmaster Albert Müller (Laurence Payne) watches his wife Anna (Domini Blythe) take a little girl into the castle of Count Mitterhaus (Robert Tayman). She’s become his mistress, helping him to get children and drain them of their blood.

That night, Müller, the girl’s father (John Bown) and a lot of the men of the town attack the castle with nearly all of them dying. Müller puts a stake through the vampire’s heart but not before he curses the village, claiming that all of their children will die to bring him back to life. Anna runs through the village and takes the Count to his crypt just as the castle is blown up. She seeks Emil (Anthony Higgins) and his Circus of the Night.

Years later, the entire town has been quarantined due to a plague. They believe that they are living under the curse of Count Mitterhaus. The Circus of Night shows up, somehow able to get past the blockade of soldiers outside the town. The gypsy woman that leads the group (Adrienne Corri) and Michael the dwarf (Skip Martin) get the tents up and the townspeople excited while Emil and twin acrobats Heinrich (Robin Sachs) and Helga (Lala Ward) find the Count’s body and state his curse.

Dr. Kersh (Richard Owens) goes for help while his son Anton (John Moulder-Brown) distracts the soldiers. The circus also begins, taking in the daughter of one of the villagers who stopped the Count — Rosa (Christina Paul) — while Emil turns into a black panther and kills several others. Anton’s sister Dora (Lynne Frederick) finds several bodies but by now, it’s too late to stop the death from destroying their little town.

The gypsy woman? Well, that’s the mother of Anton and Dora and she wants to use the blood of her children to bring the Count back. Can they save anyone?

Vampire Circus is so great. It’s filled with so many wild sights, it has a full circus with a pre-Darth Vader David Prowse as the strongman, fully painted female dancers and sets that were also used on Twins of Evil.

The end teases that there could there could have been a sequel and man, I wish there had been. The later Hammer movies fascinate me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: The Night of the Devils (1972)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Folk horror

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s novel The Family of the Vourdalak inspired part of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath and this film follows the same story.

Directed by Giorgio Ferroni (Mill of the Stone Women) and written by Eduardo Manzanos, Romano Migliorini and Gianbattista Mussetto, this starts with Nikola (Gianni Garko) being found frozen and near-death. When the gorgeous Sdenka (Agostina Belli) visits him, he screams until he’s forced into a straight jacket.

We then learn how he came to be in this place. He was driving through the snow and narrowly hit a girl with his car. Then, he watches as Gorca Ciuvelak (William Vanders) and his son Jovan (Roberto Maldera) bury a family member. They invite him to stay the night as his car is damaged as he had driven off the road. There, he meets the dead brother’s widow Elena (Teresa Gimpera), her children (one is Cinzia De Carolis) and the other family members, all of whom fear leaving the house after sunset. Then, Gorca decides to get revenge and kill a witch. The family decides if he doesn’t return by morning or has any change in him, they will kill him.

What follows is a workout for effects master Carlo Rambaldi, because while Bava did his movie with color and camerawork, this goes berserk with torn out hearts, exploding heads and maggots. Oh yeah — also full frontal female nudity, showing how far Italian genre morals had descended — no complaints — in the past decade.

Despite Ferroni needing a hearing aid, he wasn’t some doddering old man. There’s an influence of Night of the Living Dead in this as well as a ferocious energy here. The ending is brutal and goes for it. Maybe there is room for two wildly different takes on this story.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Dear Dead Delilah (1972)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Dear Dead Delilah was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 12, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on March 1, 1980; February 14, 1981 and July 24, 1982.

Director and writer John Farris had three of his books made into movies: Because They’re Young, When Michael Calls and The Fury. 

In 1943, a pregnant Luddy Dublin (Patricia Carmichael) murdered her mother with an axe. When she gets out of jail years later, she’s walking through a college when she’s knocked over by Richard (Robert Gentry) as he plays football. His wife Ellen (Elizabeth Eis) is a nurse and invites her to heal at their plantation home where they live with her elderly aunt Delilah (Agnes Moorehead).

As you can imagine, rich people have wild problems. Ellen finds out that Luddy killed her mother and holds it over her head while everyone wants to get at Delilah’s money. Richard is also cheating on her with Grace Charles (Anne Meachum), Delilah’s brother Doctor Alonzo Charles (Dennis Patrick) is a heroin addict and oh yeah, people start getting killed, starting with family attorney Roy (Will Greer) as Luddy finds an axe in her bed and wanders outside where she finds his body, which makes it seem like she killed him. Morgan (Michael Ansara) and his girlfriend Buffy (Ruth Baker) are next and Delilah soon goes missing.

Grace decides to roll around in Delilah’s wheelchair and gets her head cut off with Richard revealing himself as the killer. Working with Ellen, they’ve found the rumored money buried on the property and are taking care of everyone else in the family, starting by overdosing Alonzo. They make love to celebrate and Richard killss her. He plans on making it seem like Luddy did it. But not everyone is as dead as they appear.

Shot in Nashville, Tennessee — which is the home of producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement, the writer of “Ballad of a Teenager Queen” and “Guess Things Happen That Way.” He also discovered and recorded Jerry Lee Lewis. This was the only movie that he produced and its a weird piece of psychobiddy exploitation.

It’s also a gory soap opera mixed with regional horror. There’s not much else like it, a dialogue heavy trip through the strange world of a wealthy family. Everyone is going for it with their performances and I ended up loving every minute of it.

This is one of the Nightmare Theater movies. That collection of movies also has Damiano Damiani’s The Witch, José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Marta, Raúl Artigot’s The Witches Mountain, José María Zabalza’s The Fury of the Wolfman, Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon, 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. They all aired on Chiller Theater. I’m obsessed by each of them.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Doomwatch (1972)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Doomwatch was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 5, 1980 at 1 a.m. It also aired on May 29, 1982.

Doomwatch was originally a TV series that was on between 1970 and 1972. It was so big that it became this movie, which was released in the U.S. as Island of the Ghouls.

Dr. Spencer Quist (John Paul) and the Doomwatch (Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work) team — Doctor Del Shaw (Ian Bannen), Dr. John Ridge (Simon Oates), Dr. Fay Chantry (Jean Trend) — visit a village on the island of Balfe that is cut off from the rest of civilization. That’s because pollution has led to many of their people becoming mutated and violent.

Del Shaw was a new character who became the lead in this, which hurt the popularity of this movie with the fans of the show. Judy Geeson also gets more time than any of the show’s cast.

Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, who created that show, have writing credits, but Clive Exton (The House In Nightmare Park, The Awakening) did most of the story. It’s kind of folk horror mixed with ecology, which is a weird mix.

That said, I love director Peter Sasdy. His movies are all over the place. He made everything from Taste the Blood of Dracula, Countess Dracula and Hands of the Ripper to The Stone Tape, Nothing But the Night, I Don’t Want to Be Born, Welcome to Blood City and The Lonely Lady.