Visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, The Tree of Life, The Towering Inferno) finally got the chance to direct with this movie and sadly, he didn’t get to capitalize on it

Made for one million dollars, one-tenth the budget of Kubrick’s classic, this movie was helped by all the special effects know-how of Trumbull, who was not originally going to direct it. Lead actor Bruce Dern stated that Trumbull’s creative vision was equal to Alfred Hitchcock, who he had also worked with. And that made the director hot for the briefest of times, as it flopped at the box office.

Trumbull joked “It was just a great experience for me as a filmmaker, but I didn’t know that I was part of an experiment by Universal Studios…to see if it was possible to have a movie survive on word of mouth alone without an advertising campaign.*”

At some point in the future, all that is left of Earth’s ecosystem is floating in space. The crew is ordered to destroy the greenery by the faceless bureaucrats that run what is left of the world and they comply, all save Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern, The ‘Burbs, Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte, Coming Home), who has taken three service robots and gone into “silent running” around the rings of Saturn, keeping himself as sane as he can and what is left of Earth’s once lush forests blooming.

Written by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino (the two would go on to write The Deer Hunter and Cimino would spectacularly self-destruct with Heaven’s Gate) and Steven Bochco (who would go on to create L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues and more), this is a quiet tale of a man whose only companions are the industrial droids he renames Huey, Dewey and Louie**.

The effects in this movie are obviously the draw. The ship Valley Forge was reused on the show Battlestar Galactica years later and still held up as a great looking spaceship, even post-Star Wars. And the haunting soundtrack was by Peter Schickele, better known for doing classical music parodies under the name of P.D.Q. Bach.

Without this movie, we’d have no Mystery Science Theater 3000, as the idea of a man lost in space with only robots to talk to resonated with creator Joel Hodgson. And speaking of inspiration, Trumbull was asked by George Lucas to work on this movie, but passed. Lucas asked if he could use a droid in his film inspired by the robots in Silent Running and Trumbull agreed. Six years later, when 20th Century-Fox sued Universal, claiming that Battlestar Galactica was a ripoff of Star Wars, Universal countersued with the theory that Star Wars ripped off Silent Running.

This was a film I searched for most my childhood, as we couldn’t just grab a DVD or stream films back then. I always saw photos of it in Starlog and wondered what the robots would look like when they moved.

The Arrow Video release of this film has everything you ever wanted on this film and more. There’s a new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, approved by Trumbull that was created exclusively for this release. Plus, you get a new commentary track by critics Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw and one from Trumbull and Dern. There are also features with film music historian Jeff Bond on the film’s score, Jon Spira exploring the screenplay and Dern on his work in the movie. Plus, the artwork is by Aric Roper, who did the art for Sleep’s “Dopesmoker” album and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and Peter Tonguette. You can get it from MVD.

*Actually, this really was part of a Universal Studios experiment to try and recreate Easy Rider by giving a million dollars or less to young filmmakers and letting them have final cut. The other films are Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, Hopper’s The Last Movie, Forman’s Taking Off and Lucas’ American Graffiti.

**The three drones were played by four bilateral amputees (Mark Person as Dewey, Cheryl Sparks and Steven Brown (he’s also in the biker mover J.C.) as Huey and Larry Whisenhunt as Louie). That means they are either missing both arms or both legs. This was inspired by sideshow performer Johnny Eck. Also, in Italy, the drones are named after Paperino, Paperone and Paperina (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and Daisy Duck) because the names for Huey, Dewey and Louie in Italy are Quim, Quo and Qua. Therefore, calling them would have sounding like this; “Vieni qui, Qui,” which would be pretty weird, right?

Unfortunately, Trumbull’s directing efforts didn’t fare much better with 1983’s Brainstorm.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on December 18, 2017 and again on March 2, 2022 to discuss how it was re-released by Cannon as Deathhouse. 

Christmas Eve, 1950: Wilfred Butler runs from his home, on fire, and supposedly dies in the snow.

Christmas Eve, 1970: John Carter (Patrick O’Neal, The Stepford Wives, The Stuff) and his assistant Ingrid arrive in a small Massachusetts town. He meets with the town’s mayor, sheriff and major citizens like Tess Howard and Charlie Towman (John Carradine!), who may have lost his voice to a tracheotomy but not his need to smoke, about selling the Butler mansion as soon as possible. While staying overnight with Ingrid, who is also his mistress, they are both killed by an axe. The killer calls the police and says that they are Marianne.

Tess, the town’s telephone operator, hears the call and drives to the mansion, where she is greeted by Marianne Butler before she is hit in the head with a candle holder. Meanwhile, Sheriff Mason finds that Wilfred’s grave is empty. He is killed and thrown into the empty hole.

Mayor Adams is asked to go to the Butler mansion but leaves his daughter, Diane (Mary Woronov, Death Race 2000, Chelsea Girls) at home. She meets up with a man who claims to be Jeffrey Butler, who has taken the sheriff’s abandoned car. Together, they search for the lawman but can’t find him.

After taking Towman to the mansion, Jeffrey goes back to get Diane. On their way to the mansion, Towman stumbles blindly in front of them and is hit and killed. His eyes had been stabbed out and Diane grows worried about Jeffrey.

Well, fuck me, this movie is also about incest! A diary found at the house reveals that Jeffrey is the son of Wilfred and his daughter, Marianne. Afterward, Wilfred turned the house into an asylum and admitted his own daughter. However, on Christmas Eve 1935, he turned all of the inmates loose. They killed every doctor as well as his daughter. Of note here is that many of the inmates in the flashback are played by former stars of Warhol’s factory, like Ondine, Tally Brown, Kristen Steen and Lewis Love, as well as Flaming Creatures auteur Jack Smith, artist George Trakas and his wife at the time, Susan Rothenberg. Warhol superstar Candy Darling also shows up in the film as a party guest.

Well, it turns out that some of the inmates of the insane asylum ended up being important parts of the town — that’s right, all of the important people John met with in the beginning!

Mayor Adams arrives at the mansion and he and Jeffrey face off, guns drawn, each believing the other is the killer. They kill one another as Marianne shows up, but she is really Wilfred, who is alive. He went after the inmates for their role in the death of his daughter and used his grandson/son/secret shame Jeffrey as a patsy. Diane gets the gun and kills the old man. One year later, the mansion is demolished as she watches.

Director Theodore Gershuny worked on plenty of episodes of Monsters and Tales from the Darkside after this film. He was also married to Woronov. The original title for the film was Night Of The Dark Full Moon and it was also nearly called Zora, which makes little to no sense.

There are some really interesting techniques here, especially in the flashback sequences, which feel like tinted photographs come to life with the saddest version of “Silent Night” ever playing behind the action. I love how experimental and dark these sequences look — they remind me a little of the film Begotten.

This is a dark film for your holiday viewing, so if you want to chase away the family for a while, this is the one to do it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on August 14, 2018. It’s back — with edits and new writing — because VCI has released the fiftieth anniversary 4K UHD release of this movie. You can get it on UHD, blu ray or DVD from MVD by clicking the line for each format.

Each edition has the following extras: a new introduction and Q&A with Alan Ormsby; a ninety-minute documentary Dreaming of Death: Bob Clark’s Horror Films; a commentary track with Alan Ormsby, Jane Daly and Anya Cronin; a Q&A filmed at. the Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival; an interview with Ken Goch; photo and poster gallery; two music videos by The Deadthings “Dead Girls Don’t Say No” and “Cemetery Mary;” liner notes by Patrick McCabe; the original trailer; radio spots and a slipcover for the initial release. 

The same Bob Clark that did Porky’s did A Christmas Story and also made Black Christmas and Deathdream. He even produced the film Moonrunners, which inspired TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard. He also made Turk 182! (if you had HBO back in the day, you saw it), Rhinestone and the Baby Geniuses series. Yep. Bob Clark pretty much did it all. And here’s one more completely great thing he created.

Alan (Alan Ormsby, who would go on to write Deathdream, Deranged, My Bodyguard and direct Popcorn) leads a group of actors who have all gone to an island together for a night of shenanigans. Sure, the island is a cemetery for criminals. And of course, he’s going to do a seance to raise the dead. And while the whole thing is a joke, Alan is genuinely upset that the dead aren’t walking the swamp.

They do find a corpse — Orville — and Alan uses it to continually harass his actors. And the ritual really did work, as the dead begin killing everyone off one by one.

The shift from comedy to drama to horror in this film is startling. The cast is amateur, but the terror feels real. The dread and doom at the end, as the zombies board a boat as the lights of Miami are in the background and atonal music plays are as perfect as film can be.

Clark shot this movie at the same time as Deathdream, using some of the same cast. A surprising moment in the film is that while there are two gay men — and they stereotypically lisp — they play an integral role in the film. That’s pretty incredible for 1972.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because the expectations are so low. All you need to do is show up, eat food and fall asleep watching football, which is way less pressure than Christmas. While you lounge, here are some movies to watch and upset your entire family and start the holidays off right.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

In 2004, I stumbled across a copy of Blood Freak released as a special edition on the Something Weird Video label. I knew nothing about the film before I watched it. 90 minutes later, as the credits rolled, I held up the packaging to the heavens and proclaimed, “Every film I ever watch from this moment forward will be compared to Blood Freak.” Is it good? That depends on your point of view. Do I love it? Absolutely. It is, in this writer’s humble opinion, the best “worst” movie ever made. Not because it’s slow or boring. But because it’s a film that defies all logic. Made equal parts enthusiasm and technical ineptitude in Florida by nudist director Brad F. Grinter on a $25,000 budget, and star Steve Hawkes, it’s positively dripping with WTF moments. Blood Freak exists in a genre all its own somewhere in the center of a “Cult Movie” Venn Diagram featuring Sting of Death, Blood Feast, Reefer Madness, and the collective Christian works of Kirk Cameron.

The plot involves a biker named Herschell (in a nod to fellow Florida filmmaker H.G. Lewis) played by the box-bodied, pompadoured Hawkes himself. Herschell has just finished his service in Vietnam and needs to figure out the rest of his life. After assisting a girl on the Florida turnpike named Angel with her car trouble, she invites him home. There, we find Angel’s polar-opposite younger sister Ann toking up and sniffing poppers with her friends. Ann likes Herschell, who rejects her for an evening at Bible study with Angel and her elderly friend who just happens to need “a husky guy” to help out on his poultry farm. To mellow him out, Ann gives Herschell a laced joint by the pool, causing him to become addicted after one dose. The two quickly fall in stoner love.

Herschell gets a job at the old man’s turkey farm (where the sounds of real turkeys are augmented by human voices gobbling and whistling on the soundtrack) and agrees to eat some experimental samples injected with chemicals. The combination of the spiked weed and the spiked turkey causes him to pass out. He awakens a while later to discover he has transformed into a giant turkey monster. Well, more like a guy with a papier-mâché turkey head and feather scarf, but you get the idea. He’s a mutant game bird dependent on the blood of drug addicts. When he’s not out killing junkies and drinking their blood with his toothy beak, he goes home to Ann and gobbles softly to her about his plight. In response she ponders, “Gosh, Herschell, you sure are ugly. I love you. But if we stay together, what will the children look like?” Then they make sweet, sweet turkey love.

If it sounds insane, it is. It is the only film I’ve ever seen where the director periodically interrupts the proceedings to explain what the hell is going on. It doesn’t help but it sure is entertaining to watch Grinter glance down at his script every few seconds.

Fortunately, Herschell wakes up to discover the entire episode was all a hallucination. It turns out our hero was already addicted to pain killers from injuries sustained in Vietnam. Angel, Ann and the poultry farmer get him the help he needs and he and Ann walk off happily ever after.

Just prior to the conclusion, director Brad Grinter pays his audience one last visit to warn us of the dangers of chemicals in our food. All while chain-smoking and coughing. The message couldn’t be clearer. Grinter knows he’s a hypocrite. It’s an apt description given that he taught filmmaking at the same time he made a literal turkey of a movie comprising underlit, out-of-focus shots. Me? I love turkey. I searched for many years to find a gem worthy of the “Best of the Worst” title. Blood Freak is the reigning Gobbler.

Trivia: Blood Freak is filled with a lot of big cat imagery. Actor Steve Hawkes was rescued by a lion from a fire while shooting a Tarzan film in Europe. He spent the rest of his life rescuing big cats. Steve was the original Tiger King. 

To find out more about his life, which is worthy of a film on its own, click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sipek

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on February 21, 2020.

Cauldron Films has released it on blu ray along with several featurettes, such as Remembering Sergio Pastore – Interview with Sara Pastore and Sergio Pastore – Un Ammirevole Indipendente. There are two commentary tracks — one by Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson and the other by the Fragments of Fear podcast — as well as a trailer and image gallery. You can get it from MVD.

Italy and Denmark unite for a film made in the wake of Dario Argento’s landmark The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Just look — there are crimes right in the title and some vaguely associated animal name! Actually, a black cat does kill some people in this, so the name makes sense.

Originally titled Sette Scialli di Seta Gialla (Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk), this movie was written and directed by Sergio Pastore.

Several fashion models are killed by a murderer — think Blood and Black Lace — by a black cat that has been alerted to them by gifted shawls laced with chemicals. Such a strange way to kill someone, but hey — we’re in the psychosexual world of the giallo, so why worry?

Paola, the first victim, had been dating Peter Oliver (Anthony Steffen, who was Django in Django the Bastard and also shows up in Play Motel and The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), a blind composer who believes that he’s heard the killer. He and his butler (Umberto Raho, Enter the Devil) are on the case, tracking the cat down to its owner, who is killed before she can reveal who has been taking care of her cat.

Much like the aforementioned — and superior — Bava film, Francoise (Sylva Koscina, Steve Reeves’ love interest in Hercules and Hercules Unchained; she’s also in So Sweet, So Dead and Bava’s Lisa and the Devil) was killing the models to cover up another killing. That’s because Paola was sleeping with her husband and certainly had to pay.

So yeah. The movie is a Bava remix with a lead character taken from another giallo, Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails. And the killer’s method comes from Bela Lugosi and The Devil Bat. Don’t let all that copy and pasting get in the way of your enjoyment of this movie. It’s still fun — the fashions are inordinately loud, the zooms are wild and the music is out of control. There’s a vicious shower kill than leaves nothing to the imagination. And it’s still better than anything out there today.

The poster to this movie is all it took to get me, but then I discovered that hardly anyone has watched this, that it was shot in Jacksonville, Florida for nearly no money and it goes all out occult weirdness in the midst of sunlight sleaze. All of this and more, please.

A psychic tells a young blonde named Yvonne (Dolores Heiser) that she needs a new life and should move to Florida, which brings her into the world of the DeLorca family. They have a curse upon them as once there was a ritual to conjure evil spirits that got interrupted, so now each male son becomes a vampire, which kills the mother upon the second birth.

The family has a plan: Madame von Kirst explains to them if they lure four girls — remember the young lady I discussed above? — to their house and do a new ritual, they can escape the pox upon their clan. There are also three other girls — Laura (Jan Sherman), Vickie (Rita Ballard) and Dana (Delores Starling) — as well as a hunchback and a wild sunlit home, which seems like not the place for vampires to live, but hey, I’m not a cursed vampiric madman, so what do I really know?

The occult influence on this film comes directly from all of Anton LaVey’s appearances in men’s magazines, focusing on his use of nude women as altars. Obviously, I am scandalized by all of this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Joseph Valachi was an informant in the early 1960s who was the first to acknowledge that organized crime existed. Based on The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas — Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach stopped Maas from publishing his edition of Valachi’s original memoirs, but did allow him to publish a third-person account based upon interviews he had conducted with Valachi — this has Charles Bronson as the protagonist, a man who suddenly finds himself fingered as a snitch when he was keeping omerta. He finally decides that if he’s going to get killed for being a rat, he better just be one and hope to get out of this alive.

A prisoner in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he’s given the kiss of death by his boss Vito Genovese (Lino Ventura) and becomes paranoid, killing anyone who comes near him after he’s nearly murdered in the shower. Then the film shows the life of crime that Valachi has lived, including his marriage — Jill Ireland plays his wife, of course — and all the people killed along the way.

Dino de Laurentiis had to convince Charles Bronson to take the role, as Bronson turned it down at least twice. He took it when he found out the character got to age from his late teens to early 60s. This movie was pushed up after The Godfather was such a big hit, a movie that Bronson referred to as “The Godfather? that was the shittiest movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

Director Terrence Young may be best known for his Bond movies, but he also did this and Wait Until Dark, two films far removed from the spy genre. He keeps things moving and sometimes the violence is stylized as black and white photos that are discussed or tightly wound moments where blood and gunfire can erupt at any time.

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of. The Valachi Papers has commentary by Bronson expert Paul Talbot, trailers from Germany and the U.S., a TV ad and a radio commercial. You can get this from Kino Lorber.