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.

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Stanley was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 6, 1976 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on April 28, 1979; December 30, 1980 and January 16, 1982.

Tim Ochopee (Chris Robinson, who would write, direct and star in 1975’s The Intruder) is a war damaged Seminole just back from Vietnam who wants to live out the rest of his life in the Everglades with his snake Stanley. He didn’t count on Richard Thomkins (Alex Rocco), a maker of leather goods with mob ties, killing his father. Now, all the snakes that Tim has lived with will be the death of everyone who has done him wrong.

Only Grefe could take a ripoff of Willard and somehow make it more disturbing than you’d expect. Yes, this is a movie packed with snakes doing all manner of damage to people and people doing just as horrible things to them, including an exotic dancer playing a geek and biting the head off one on stage as she dances seductively with blood all over her bare chest.

Of course, Tim has to kill everyone in the way and kidnap Thomkin’s daughter Susie (Susan Caroll), but any hope of true love kind of goes the way that you’d expect in a Florida regional horror film that doesn’t stop with just stealing from one film and moves into being a reptile-obsessed Billy Jack.

That said — for a movie so much about protecting snakes, the actual snakes in this movie were defanged and some had their mouths sewn shut. There’s enough human on snake violence in this that you’d expect that it was made in Italy. Grefe still owns the wallet that they made out of the skin of the main snake that played Stanley, which is pretty weird when you dwell on it as much as I have.

Gary Crutcher wanted to do a sequel called Stanley in Miami, but it didn’t happen. He wrote this on two days under the influence of amphetamines, which is the most Florida thing you can say about a movie that is the most Sunshine State movie I’ve seen.

The original Spanish title of this movie is  La noche del terror ciego (The Night of the Blind Terror) but it is better known as Tombs of the Blind Dead). Director and writer Amando de Ossorio was inspired by El monte de las ánimas by Spanish romantic writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Night of the Living Dead to make this. Instead of zombies, these knights from the Easts would come to be known as the Templars, based on the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order who were  the most skilled fighting units during the Crusades. The Knights Templar innovated banking and had a form of basic credit which King Philip IV of France took advantage of. Once he was deeply in debt, he began to spread rumors that the Templars spat on the cross, denied Jesus, worshipped either Baphomet or the head of John the Baptist and engaged in homosexual relationships. There was no evidence of this yet the Templars were still tortured, gave enforced confessions and were burnt at the stake.

Their Grand Master Jacques de Molay recanted his confession and when he was burned at the stake, he asked to be turned so he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer. As he perished, he said, “Dieu sait qui a tort et a péché. Il va bientôt arriver malheur à ceux qui nous ont condamnés à mort.” which means “God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death.” His accusers King Philip and Pope Clement would be dead within the year.

In the abandoned medieval town of Berzano, at the border between Spain and Portugal, the Templars were hung and birds pecked their eyes out. Now, they emerge from their graves seeking blood to remain alive now and forever.

Why would you come to such a place, Betty Turner (Lone Fleming)? Why would you bring your new lover Roger Whelan (César Burner), a fact that upsets your college girlfriend Virginia (María Elena Arpón) so much that she leaps from a train and ends up dead at the dusty hands of the Templars? What will it take you to realize that nothing stops the slow moving Templars and that they will destroy everyone that you love and leave you ruined by what you have witnessed?

As much as I adore this movie, I love even more that it was released in the U.S. as Revenge from Planet Ape, removing the Templar flashback and changing the movie to be about a post-apocalyptic future in which the undead are deceased intelligent apes.

The Synapse blu ray release has the original uncut version of the movie in Spanish and hybrid English and Spanish, as well as the U.S. The Blind Dead version. It also has multiple audio commentaries with one by Troy Howarth, one by star Lone Fleming and another by Rod Barnett and Troy Guinn of NaschyCast, a documentary about Spanish zombie movies, the Revenge from Planet Ape opening, a music video, a featurette on Spanish horror, a trailer and an image gallery. You can get it from MVD.