EDITOR’S NOTE: Necromancy was on the CBS Late Movie on January 6 and June 23, 1977.

If you go to a town named Lilith to live, you should not be surprised that the town is run by devil worshippers. If Orson Welles comes to you in a robe and his name is Mr. Cato, you should not be shocked to learn that he wants to use you to raise his son from the grave. What is surprising is that for a movie promising rituals and raising the dead, Necromancy isn’t all that exciting.

Directed by Bert I. Gordon (War of the Colossal Beast, Picture Mommy Dead), the master of rear projection, this film is all about Lori Brandon (Pamela Franklin, The Legend of Hell House, And Soon the Darkness), a woman who has recently lost a child. She moves with her husband, Richard (Michael Ontkean, Sheriff Harry S. Truman from Twin Peaks) to the aforementioned town of Lilith to start over again.

On the way there, they get in an accident and kill a woman, but it’s totally glossed over because this is 1972. Life was cheap. At least Lori gets a baby doll out of this accident.

There used to be a sign in my hometown that said, “What Ellwood City makes, makes Ellwood City.” The town of Lilith makes one thing: the world’s finest occult paraphernalia. There’s one great scene here with Lori sees her image inside a tarot card, a really evocative scene thrown away in a film that is otherwise less than memorable.

If you’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby, you know exactly how this is all gonna turn out. If you are the star of a 1970’s horror movie — especially if you are Donald Sutherland — expect to die. Horribly.

Much like the devil, Necromancy goes by many names, such as The Witching, A Life for a Life, Horror-Attack, Rosemary’s Disciples and The Toy Factory. When Paragon Video re-released it on VHS in 1982, they chopped out tons of story and dialogue to insert scenes of nude witches like Brinke Stevens and even more Satanic rituals.

As much as I love Orson Welles — we’ll have a whole month of his films at some point, I’m certain — this is not his finest hour. He has some fine speeches, but the material is Mrs. Paul’s level. Beneath him.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kansas City Bomber was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11, 1975; December 6, 1976 and February 10, 1978.

Barry Sandler wrote Making Love, the first mainstream American film to deal with homosexuality and Crimes of Passion. His film script — written as his Master’s Degree thesis at UCLA — was for this movie. He always had Raquel Welch in the lead and said, “”Raquel was a huge star at the time — kind of like the pop culture goddess. I just thought it would be great to see her as a roller derby queen; it seemed like a perfect meshing of pop culture with that role.”

Sandler personally delivered the script to her house and her husband Patrick Curtis bought the script for their production company, Curtwel Productions.

The original idea changed somewhat, as Sandler told Stone Cold Jeff, “It was a dark, gritty, character piece, more in the vein of Requiem for a Heavyweight. It’s about this young woman from Kansas City who goes out to Hollywood dreaming of fame and fortune, making it in the movies, and she’s really not good enough to do so, but she’s desperate to make her name and to get attention. She struggles and struggles, and never makes it, and then one day, she meets this kind of beat up, bruised up, burnt-out ex roller derby queen who kind of takes her under her wing and coaches her, and tries to get her involved in the roller derby. It sort of shows her becoming a roller derby star, and the irony is that she makes it in the roller derby, but as a black-trophy … as a bad girl who gets hissed at, beat up, and spit on every week. The irony is that she is able to find the stardom she desperately yearned for, but not as a movie star–as a star on the roller derby track getting booed at and spit at every week. And so it’s kind of dark, and much grittier and different, kind of almost along the lines of Midnight Cowboy.”

It was originally to be made at Warner Brothers and he believed that they would have stayed true to what he wrote: “Warner Brothers was a much more adventurous studio at the time. They were making The Devils and A Clockwork Orange, Performance. They stuck with those kinds of movies. MGM wanted to sell Raquel Welch in a tight roller derby jersey, running around the track. Listen, they weren’t stupid, they were smart to do that. It certainly made them a lot of money, and it would have been a much riskier project to go the other way. They weren’t sure whether Raquel could pull it off. I think she could have, but they wanted to play it much safer and go with a much more straight-on roller derby story.”

Roller derby used to be a totally different sport than it is today. Imagine if pro wrestling won over women and they decided to do it for real. That’s exactly what happened with roller derby.

The sport has its origins in the banked-track roller-skating marathons of the 1930s. It became a competitive sport thanks to Leo Seltzer and Damon Runyon. Yes. The short story writer.

In 1940, more than 5 million spectators watched in about 50 American cities. Eight years later, Roller Derby debuted on New York television and by the 1960s, it aired on several national networks. Of the competitors to Seltzer — who owned the name roller derby — Roller Games was started by Herb Roberts and bought by Bill Griffiths Sr. and Jerry Hill.

By the mid 1960s, Roller Games had teams in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Florida and Hawaii, with leagues in Canada, Mexico, Australia and Japan. The biggest team — and where the TV was taped — was in Los Angeles with the L.A. Thunderbirds. It was such a big deal that in 1972, an interleague match between the Thunderbirds of Roller Games and the Midwest Pioneers set a roller derby attendance record of 50,118 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park.

Yet by 1975, Roller Games disbanded and many of the skaters started local circuits, kind of like how pro wrestling has survived the ups and downs of popularity. In the late 80’s, RollerJam and RollerGames both aired on television, but the revival didn’t take except with people that remembered watching the original games on UHF TV.

Welch understood what the sport was all about, telling the New York Times, “The game is almost show business, it’s a carnival atmosphere, but I can understand its popularity. Most of the spectators are basic people and there’s something cathartic about watching people get dumped. The yelling creates a certain kind of intensity. The type of violence draws you in, makes you involved. The skaters are tough but I think all women are tough. The skaters aren’t any tougher than most of the women in the world, underneath. Skating is a batchy, sweaty, funky life. I don’t want to do another film about it. I’ve done my number. But I enjoyed it.”

Welch played K.C. Carr, who has just left her team in Kansas City to start life all over again in Portland to skate for the Loggers. It’s all because their owner, Burt Henry (Kevin McCarthy), wants her. She dates him without knowing how he manipulates the team, like sending her best friend and roommate Lovey (Mary Kay Pass, Nurse Sherri) to another team and gets the crowd to drive “Horrible” Hank Hopkins (Norman Alden) crazy after he realizes that the older player has a crush on K.C. He has a plan to get out of Portland and go to Chicago, bringing her along. He sets up a match between her and Jackie Burdette (Helena Kallianiotes), which will lead to her leaving, just as she lost a match at the start of the movie with “Big Bertha” Bogliani (Philadelphia Warriors skater Patti “Moo Moo” Cavin) but by this point, she knows he’s a liar and instead of throwing the fight, she wins. The actual fight got out of hand between Welch and Kallianiotes, with the sex symbol getting punched in the face. She also suffered bruised knees, a spasm in her trapezius, hematomas on her head, several headaches and a broken wrist that delayed filming for two months.

The most harrowing scenes are when K.C. stops in Fresno to visit her two children who live with her bitter mother (Martine Bartlett). Her son Walt (Stephen Manley) refuses to speak with her, as he worries about her getting hurt. Her daughter Rita is a young Jodie Foster. And when Hank confides that he hates riling up the crowd and confesses how beat up he is, it made me think of the many aging heels I’ve met through wrestling.

The battles between K.C. and Jackie make up most of the film, including one battle where they tumble down a hill and are nearly hit by a train before being saved by team coach Vivien (Jeanne Cooper, Katherine Chancellor from The Young and the Restless). Kallianiotes earned her Golden Globe nomination for this movie.

Real roller derby venues in Kansas City, Fresno, and Portland were also used for key scenes and stars Judy Arnold (the captain of the Philadelphia Warriors and the skating double for Welch), Ralph Valladares (the holder of every important scoring, speed and endurance record in the history; “The Living Legend” was a member of the T-Birds as a player, coach and manager for 38 years), Danny “Carrot Top” Reilly, T-Bird Ronnie “Psycho” Rains, T-Bird and later New York Bomber Captain Judy Sowinski, one of the best jammers in the game “King” Richard Brown, “The Body Beautiful” Tonette Kadrmas, announcer Dick Lane and John Hall, a former skater who became the in-field manager for the Detroit Devils.

Director Jerrold Freedman mainly worked in television, directing TV movies like A Cold Night’s Death, Unholy Matrimony, The Boy Who Drank Too Much, The Comeback and The O.J. Simpson Story (as Alan Smithee). He also helmed episodes of The X-Files and Night Gallery. Oh yeah — he also wrote and directed the Charles Bronson movie Borderline. The script was written by Thomas Rickman (Coal Miner’s Daughter) and Calvin Clements Sr. (who wrote 66 episodes of Gunsmoke) from Sandler’s story.

Perhaps most odd, Phil Ochs was originally approached to write a theme song for this movie. His song was rejected but A&M Records released it. He hoped to publicly debut the song at the Olympic Auditorium during a Roller Games television taping at Los Angeles’ Olympic Auditorium. Thunderbirds owner Bill Griffiths Sr. said no thanks.

Welch claimed that this was the first of her movies that she liked. She isn’t always the heroine in this and despite her looks, she comes off as tough. I wish she’d made more films like this.

Roger Corman found out this was getting made and created his own roller derby film, Unholy Rollers. It’s very similar to this movie but has the benefit of Claudia Jennings as its star. She’s even wilder than Welch and ends the film attacking the entire audience and flipping off the cops. It’s great.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dracula A.D. 1972 was on the CBS Late Movie on March 18, 1981. You can download the full episode with commercials at the Internet Archive.

Warner Brothers and Hammer saw how well Count Yorga, Vampire did with young moviegoers and decided that it was time to make a modern Dracula.

While today, many associate Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing with their roles as Dracula and Van Helsing, this was the first time that Cushing played the role since Brides of Dracula. And while this was the sixth time Lee played the Count, the two had not battled since the original Hammer Dracula. It would be the next to last time they faced off in the roles and the next Hammer Dracula, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, would be the last for them to both play these characters.

It opens with Count Dracula and his nemesis Lawrence Van Helsing battling atop a carriage that crashes, impaling Dracula. With his mortal wounds about to end his life, Van Helsing finally destroys his archenemy. This is a thrilling opening — kind of like a Bond movie — but to Hammer continuity lovers, this invalidates the last few movies and starts a new timeline.

In 1972, Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham, And Now the Screaming Starts!) and her hippie friends are convinced to come and watch Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame, The Love Factor) perform a Black Mass — set to White Noise’s “Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell” — at the deconsecrated St Bartolph’s, the same church where her descendent Van Helsing and Dracula were both buried.

He soon draws the blood of Laura Bellows (Caroline Munro!) and brings Dracula back from the dead, as the Count quickly drains the lifeblood of the young girl. Then, they start to turn all of Jessica’s friends like Bob (Philip Miller) and Gaynor Keating (Marsha Hart) into vampires, all to draw her back to the Lord of the Vampires so that he can keep getting revenge on Van Helsing, who has a descendent, Lorrimer (also Cushing), the grandfather of Jessica.

This movie features controversial Page Three girl Flanagan — who was the Kray Twin’s mother’s hairdresser and campaigned for their release — and Concord, CA ten-piece band Stoneground. Three members of that group — Cory Lerios, Steve Price and David Jenkins — would later form Pablo Cruise. They were in the movie to replace The Faces, which would have been wild.

In the U.S., a brief clip was played before this movie in which Barry Atwater (Janos Skorzeny from The Night Stalker) rises from a coffin and swears the entire audience in as members of the Count Dracula Society as part of a HorroRitual.

This played as part of some great double features with Trog, Twins of Evil and Crescendo.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Frogs was on the CBS Late Movie on October 26, 1973; September 20, 1974 and June 11, 1976.

The Crockett family, led by Jason (Ray Milland), may have great power and influence, but nature in no way cares about those things. Snakes, birds, geckos, alligators, turtles, butterflies and, yes, frogs, are prepared to end their lives for daring to abuse the ecosystem with pesticides.

Wildlife shutterbug Pickett Smith (Sam Elliot) picked the wrong holiday weekend to be in their Florida mansion.

Directed by George McCowan, whose career often found himself working in episodic television, and written by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees (Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, Dr. Phibes Rises Again).

I am sad that I will never live the life of drive-in aficionados of 1972 who got to see this with Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster.

I have no idea if the animals are turning on all of humanity — I mean, Jason’s dog remains loyal — or if it’s just this family, but I love the swampy world that this movie makes, one that makes nearly every creature in the world outside the Crockett home into a killer ready to work together and wipe out rich folks.

This also has tons of stock footage of animals which is how you make a low budget movie about a whole bunch of animals. As it was, the hotel everyone was staying in was adamant that no animals were allowed to stay in the actor’s rooms, as if that would be a thing.

John Talbot (Barry Newman, Vanishing Point) shows up in a small Louisiana town and nearly immediately starts a fight with some cops, goes to jail and it’s soon discovered that he is wanted for killing a policeman and robbing a bank. He then escapes, abducting Sarah Ruthven (Suzy Kendall), who just so happens to be the daughter of a millionaire. But nothing in this movie is as it seems.

Directed by Michael Tuchner with stunt sequences coordinated by Carey Loftin (Bullit, The French Connection), Fear Is the Key is really about Talbot faking his way into becoming a criminal in order to find out who killed his wife and son, going the whole way to the depths of the ocean to get the answers and retribution that he craves.

It’s also Ben Kingsley’s first movie, although he would only work on the stage on on TV for a decade until he was in his next movie, Ghandi.

As exciting as the book that this was based on, written by Alistair MacLean, there’s nothing like getting a twenty-minute car chase that features Newman driving a 1972 Ford Gran Torino. Loftin was the king of scenes like this, as well as being the driver of famous car scenes in Duel and Christine. That chase happens at the beginning of the movie, which may seem like a strange way to structure a movie, but sometimes, you give it your best shot right from the starting flag.

The Arrow release of Fear Is the Key has tons of extras, including new audio commentary by filmmaker and critic Howard S. Berger, a visual essay by film critic and author Scout Tafoya, an appreciation of the movie’s composer Roy Budd by film and music historian Neil Brand, a making of, an interview with associate producer Gavrik Losey and a trailer. It’s all inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Nathanael Marsh, along with a double-sided foldout poster and a booklet with new writing by filmmaker and critic Sean Hogan.

You can get it from MVD.

Paul Bartel is a bonafide hero here at B & S About Movies. From his cameos in movies like Gremlins 2: The New Batch and Chopping Mall to the films he directed like Death Race 2000 and Eating Raoul, every time he turns out on the screen it makes us happy.

Cheryl and her roommate get in a fight, so instead of going back home, she decides to move into her aunt’s run down hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Suffice to say that shenanigans ensue.

Aunt Martha is a strange lady, played by Lucille Benson, who was on TV’s Bosom Buddies and played Mrs. Elrod in Halloween 2, as well as time on Broadway. She’s obsessed with funerals and given to moralizing. Her hotel is packed with maniacs and there are also a series of murders going on, with Cheryl as the best chance to be the next victim.

Get this — the role of Aunt Martha was originally written for Mary Astor (The Maltese Falcon, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte)!

Cheryl wants to be a woman and experience her sexuality, which leads her into George’s orbit. He’s a photographer who longs for love, but also sleeps with a water inflated doll that he often injects with human blood and covers with a photo of Cheryl’s face. He’s somehow not the strangest person in the hotel. And oh yeah, to add to the whiff of perversion in the air, he’s her cousin.

Stanley Livingston, Chip Douglas from TV’s My Three Sons, also is in this movie, playing Jeff, another tenant. He would be a better mate for Cheryl, but she’s already too deep. And it’s pretty crazy to see Laurie Main, who hosted and narrated Disney’s Welcome to Pooh Corner, as a gay priest. That said, he also shows up in some other strange places, like Larry Cohen’s Wicked Stepmother and as the narrator of Cheech & Chong’s The Corsican Brothers.

There was also a model named Alice that once lived in Cheryl’s room that nobody wants to talk about. And a whole bunch of keys that open other rooms so that our voyeuristic heroine can spy on all of them.

Private Parts began with the working title Blood Relations, but its new title was rough on the film, as some newspapers wouldn’t promote it with that name, some even calling it Private Arts. Some ads even said that the title was too shocking to print and asked people to call the theater to learn the name of the film!

It really was shot in a skid row hotel, the King Edwards Hotel in downtown L.A and all of the people in it were based on people that writers Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein met in LA in the 1960s. It’s still around, having been purchased in 2018 with plans to convert it into low-cost single-occupancy transitional housing.

This is a movie that fits in well with other blasts of 70’s odd like The Baby. Like that movie, Private Parts may not explicitly have sex and violence, but it just feels off and as if it came from another universe that might appear to be ours, but has scum and strangeness in every corner.

Leonard Maltin said this about Private Parts: “If Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls had co-directed by Alfred Hitchcock and John Waters, it would come close to this directorial debut by Paul Bartel.” That sums this up quite well.

As late as 1997, when it was re-rated NC-17 “for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail,” Pink Flamingos keeps on offending people in the best of ways.

A movie that has the dedication “For Sadie, Katie, and Les- February 1972” — Manson Family members Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten discovered in February 1972 that the death penalty was abolished in California, reducing their sentences — director and writer John Waters and star Divine announced themselves to the world here, despite already making the movies Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, Eat Your Makeup, Dorothy, the Kansas City Pot Head, Mondo Trasho, The Diane Linkletter Story and Multiple Maniacs, films that didn’t escape Baltimore and small screenings.

The filthiest person alive Babs Johnson (Divine) lives with her mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills) and traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) in a trailer with pink flamingos in the front yard. Her title is challenged by Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond Marble (David Lochary) who come to regret ever invoking her wrath, costing them their baby stealing empire and eventually their lives.

Banned in Switzerland and Australia, as well as in some provinces in Canada and Norway as well as Hicksville in Long Island, this movie is less about the plot and more about the urge to shock you. It’s Waters using filth in the same way that his hero William Castle used gimmicks to bring you into the theater. If Joan Crawford was the ultimate gimmick for Castle, Divine served the same role for Waters. She even ate dog feces for the movie (followed by her calling a hospital emergency hotline pretending to be a mother whose son ate the same thing to make sure she would survive). And yet somehow, it’s all rather heartwarming, even if it’s a movie punctuated by Divine’s rants that include incendiary words like “Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!”

Pink Flamingos is as old as me but retains its wild edge when everything else feels dulled down. I often think of it when I am down and am amazed that it exists, a movie that is endlessly watchable and quotable. I’ve resisted writing about it for so long because what else can I add to it? But I feel that I must celebrate it and why it keeps on meaning so much, a movie that I watched people walk out on 25 years after it was made, angry that the movie was just so wrong.