This entry was written by Bill Van Ryn, who is the creative force behind the website Groovy Doom and the zine Drive-In Asylum. Somehow, he’s tackled nearly every yeti related film on this box set. Thanks, Bill!

Filmed in 1972, Track of the Moon Beast never received any significant theatrical distribution. It sat shelved for years after completion, and IMDB claims it premiered June 1, 1976, but I’ll be damned if I can find an ad for any theatrical engagements in any newspaper archive.  The first appearances I can document are when it came to TV in 1978, and after that it was a frequent item on local stations desperate to fill their late night slots. Even though the film takes place in the early 1970s (a fact that the fashion and decor will never let you forget), the plot for this is straight out of classic 1950s science fiction.

A young man named Paul (Chase Cordell) is struck by a tiny shard from a falling meteorite from the moon. The shard has embedded itself in his head, and for some reason this causes him to transform into a rampaging lizard monster whenever the moon rises.  He happens to be friends with a local professor who connects this bizarre turn of events with an ancient Native American legend, although nobody can stop Paul’s deadly transformations.

Track of the Moon Beast boasts an interesting creature design by Rick Baker and Joe Blasco, about on the level with Baker’s monster suit work for 1971’s Octaman. It’s a throwback ‘man in a suit’ monster movie, and the majority of the film is just total camp. Even its most ridiculous moments are played with a serious tone, and the experience of watching the limited actors devour the absurd script makes it an easy target for riff trackers, both professional and amateur.

There is one scene in the film that I found extremely effective: after Paul transforms for the first time, we see an older man and his wife who are in the middle of a fight. The wife is angry and has locked the drunken man outside, threatening to go to bed and leave him out there all night. They are ridiculous caricatures, and we know he’s going to be attacked by the Moon Beast, but the film presents it in an unexpected way, focusing on the wife’s stunned look of horror as she hears the sounds of it attacking and killing her husband just outside their front door.  The camera pans from her frozen face to a large pool of blood that has started to seep under the door, and for a few moments the film actually seems capable of something.

Although it never lives up to that moment again, Track of the Moon Beast probably would have ended up with a better reputation if it had just been a little more lighthearted. The nihilistic aspects of the story are a real bummer, made even worse by the fact that there is actually some real chemistry between Chase Cordell and Leigh Drake, who plays Paul’s girlfriend Kathy.  It’s almost by accident, but they do seem very natural together, and Kathy of course is about to find out the cruel truth that every girl who ever dated a werewolf could have told her: there’s no future when you fall in love with a man who transforms under the moon. There’s a scene where Paul and Kathy overhear a doctor in an adjacent room casually discussing the fact that Paul’s condition is hopeless and he is doomed to die. Although the film veers off into a ludicrous climax at this point, it’s hard to shake the fact that a man is given a medical death sentence on screen and runs off into the desert with intentions of suicide. The fact that he turns into a man-lizard and disappears in a supposed shower of cosmic rays might make you smile, but you’ll either be asleep or seriously bummed out when it’s all over. I couldn’t blame you either way.

Don’t have the Chilling Classics box set? You can watch this for free with an Amazon Prime subscription.

Hey guys! Paul Andolina is in charge for this review. I met Paul at a wrestling show and we discovered a mutual love of film. Check out his writing at Wrestling with Film.

I love holiday themed horror movies. I probably spend too much time scouring the internet and books to look for more films with a holiday bent to add to my watchlist. Just this October I participated in a friendly movie watching competition. Its theme was holiday-centric horror. When I picked up Chilling Classics I had completely glanced over the fact it contained the film Silent Night, Bloody Night. I already owned it separately on DVD. I finally got around to watching it for this review and I was not expecting what I got. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised.

Silent Night, Bloody Night is a horror thriller released in 1972. It was directed and partly written by Theodore Gershuny. You may be familiar with his work unknowingly as he worked on both anthology television series, Tales from the Darkside and Monsters as both director and writer. Silent, Night Deadly Night is about the Butler house, a one-time asylum with an interesting past. Wilfred Butler the man who restored the house to its current state dies when he set himself on fire on Christmas of 1950. His only surviving relative, his grandson, Jeffrey Butler, is selling the house. He’s in town to settle affairs but his lawyer and other people go missing. What is it about this house? Why does Jeffrey want to sell it and why do the townsfolk seem so eager to acquire it all costs?

The film stars James Patterson, a Derry, Pennsylvania native, as Jeffrey Butler. He died during post-production of the film and his lines were apparently dubbed by someone else. It also stars the director’s then-wife Mary Woronov as Diane Adams, the mayor’s daughter. It largely centers around these two characters. Someone is calling the townsfolk and in whispered tones is asking them to come to the Butler house. The calls sort of reminded me of those placed by Billy in 1974’s Black Christmas. However, the caller is able to convey a creepiness without the crassness of the calls in Black Christmas. There is something deeply unsettling about the hush toned calls from the mystery caller, who says she is Marianne. The movie is deliberately paced and has substantial payoffs both in terms of plot and the kills depicted. Even though there are only two or three kills depicted outright, there is one that will catch you off guard and change the tone of the film drastically. 

The movie takes place around Christmas but it isn’t played up much, apart from some Christmas tunes on the radio, some decorations, and sparse snow. It still has the dreariness one would want in a holiday horror flick and would go well with some spiked eggnog or whiskey laden hot chocolate on a snowy day. There is a particularly interesting use of the church hymn In the Garden as well. It is a recurring theme throughout the movie’s soundtrack and adds an extra dose of oddness to the proceedings. If you enjoy low budget films or holiday centered horror or just enjoy proto-slasher films you’ll find much to enjoy in Silent Night, Bloody Night. I should also point out that not only is this Cannon’s first released film it is also co-produced by Lloyd Kaufman of Troma. I hope you consider watching this film during the upcoming holiday season but must warn that most cuts of the film released on DVD are not the best looking prints.

Known in Spain as El Monte de las Brujas, this 1972 effort comes to us from director Raúl Artigot, who was the cinematographer on The Ghost Galleon (released in the U.S. as Horror of the Zombies) and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein.

The opening of this movie is Cathy’s Curse level insanity: Carla walks around her house and finds a knife stuck in a wig, a voodoo doll and finally, a bloody cat in her bed. That’s when a little girl appears and tells her that she took care of the stupid cat before running away to look for another animal. Carla follows her to the garage, throws gasoline all over the place and sets everything — including the little girl — on fire.

That’s just the start of this movie. The next scene has nothing to do with any of that, as photojournalist Mario (Cihangir Gaffari, Jess Franco’s The Demons) breaks up with Carla and decides to not go on vacation with her, instead calling his office and begging for an assignment. Soon, he’s on his way to the Pyrenees Mountains in northern Spain. Soon, he meets freelance writer Delia (Patty Shepard, who not only appeared in numerous Paul Naschy movies like La Noche de Walpurgis (The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman) and Los Monstruos del Terror (Assignment: Terror) as well as Hannah, Queen of the Vampires and Slugs), who joins him on his trip.

They decide to stop at an ancient hotel that’s staffed by a man who sounds like every bad Igor impression. And then they learn of a mountain that’s haunted by a coven of witches, so they decide to go check it out.

Keep in mind that the beginning of this movie has nothing to do with things until the end, that Mario is a horrible hero and that you will hear chanting ala The Exorcist and The Omen for the entire running time of this movie. Do you want a shock ending, too? Of course, we can get that for you!

Avco Embassy included this movie as part of their Nightmare Theater package that was syndicated for television in 1975. The others are Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, A Bell from Hell, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymooon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch.

This entry was written by Bill Van Ryn, who creates both Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum. You should order every issue, because Bill puts together a zine that makes you fall in love with movies more and more with every page.

There was something great about growing up in the 70s as a monster kid. With VHS still a distant promise waiting over the horizon, TV was the only way you could access movies once they passed through your local theaters–and if you were a kid, seeing them theatrically usually meant pleading your case with an adult who was totally disinterested. TV was the last stand. Fortunately, local stations desperate for programming often filled their lineup with syndicated packages of older films. Horror movies often turned up as time-fillers on local TV, usually in late night slots meant for insomniacs and people who worked graveyard shift.  What this meant for us monster kids was, we scoured the TV Guide looking for movies noted “THRILLER”, and then you had to make a decision about whether or not it was worth staying up until 3am to watch.

1972’s Horror Express was one of those flicks that I *never* missed, no matter what. Not only does it star Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, Telly Savalas shows up about halfway through the film as a Russian cossack (!), and it’s got a series of simple but gruesome attack scenes that were some of the goriest things I’d seen up until that point. The story is set in the early 1900s, and Lee plays an anthropologist who discovers a hairy ape-like fossil in the Himalayas. Believing it to be the missing link, he crates it and hurriedly books passage on the Trans-Siberian Express in order to return to England with it as quickly as possible. Cushing is a colleague of his who is also on board, and immediately senses that Lee is up to something noteworthy. Unbeknownst to anyone, the creature is actually the last vessel of an extraterrestrial intelligence that has the ability to lock eyes with its victims and drain their brains of all information contained therein. It gets out of the crate and starts absorbing people. Its victims die gruesomely in the process, bleeding profusely from the eyes, which turn white like a boiled fish. This alien presence can also transfer itself to another host in this way, allowing it to jump from body to body if necessary.

Horror Express is a British/Spanish coproduction directed by Eugenio Martin, who had just made the movie Pancho Villa starring Telly Savalas. Martin used the same train set from that previous film, and each different “car” of the train was actually the same set redressed for each new part of the train. That meant that the entire film had to be shot out of order, with every scene taking place in the corresponding car being completed before the set was taken down and redressed. The movie was shot silent, with the entire soundtrack dubbed in later, although Lee, Cushing, and Savalas all did their own dubbing, so their familiar voices are all present.

Most importantly, the story is engaging and clever, with the mystery of the creature being slowly unraveled by the protagonists using clues left behind. One of the more outlandish moments has Cushing obtaining the eyeball of the now dead fossil and extracting fluid from it — fluid that somehow contains actual images that the host observed, now visible under a microscope! This is how they determine that it was from outer space and had been on Earth since prehistoric times. Hey, it’s as good an explanation as anything, right?

Although not a Hammer production, this movie definitely feels like one, especially since we have Lee and Cushing together in the same film. It was perfect for late night television, and it was hard for me to forget those bleeding white eyeballs after I saw this movie. You’ve probably already noticed the similarities to the story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, the basis for “The Thing”, and I always loved the way this movie sets up the hairy fossil as if it’s the villain. Eventually you realize that whatever the fossil was, it was just a shell, another victim of the real monster. Although we’re talking about the Chilling Classics public domain version of Horror Express, there exists a fabulous blu ray transfer from Severin Films, definitely worthy of your hard earned dollars.

I love Mill Creek multipacks. Sure, the quality is abysmal at times. Often, you get the same films on multiple sets. And you get bad dubs. But let’s face it — often you can find these sets used for $5 or less and you get up to 50 amazing films. That inspired me to spend the month of November gathering some of my favorite writers and fans of the site to tackle the Chilling Classics box set.

Originally released as La Mansion de la Niebla (The Mansion in the Fog) and also known as Murder Mansion, this Spanish/Italian film fuses old school haunted house horror with the then new school form of the giallo.

The plot concerns a variety of people drawn to a house in the fog, so the original title was pretty much correct. There are plenty of European stars to enjoy, like Ida Galli, who also uses the name Evelyn Stewart and appeared in Fulci’s The Psychic as well as The Sweet Body of Deborah. And hey, there’s Analía Gadé from The Fox with the Velvet Tail. Hello, George Rigaud, from All the Colors of the Dark and The Case of the Bloody Iris! They’re all here in a movie that seems to make little or no sense and then gets even more bonkers as time goes on.

This was one of the 13 titles included in Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated in 1975 (the others were Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch). How did these movies play on regular TV?

There’s a history of vampires in the house, the previous owner was a witch and hey — this is starting to feel like an adult version of Scooby Doo with better-looking ladies. That’s not a bad thing. But if you’ve never watched a badly dubbed giallo-esque film before, don’t expect any of this to make a lick of sense.

Don’t want to buy the whole box set? This is playing for free on Amazon Prime.