Monica (Ulrike Butz) and Helga (Marie Forså) are the guests at a huge castle where a will is about to be read. The girls will need to stay there for a year to claim the estate of Baroness Varga, who was burned at the stake for being a vampire hundreds of years ago. They’re joined by folklore scholar Dr. Julia Malenkow (Anke Syring) and her brother Peter (Nico Wolf) crash in the woods nearby. They are descendants of the women who killed Varga, which probably won’t go all that great with the castle’s maid, Wanda (Nadia Henkowa), who conducts nightly lesbian rituals devoted to the fallen blood countess.
Also known as Vampire Ecstasy, this feels like it fits right in with Jess Franco and Jean Rollin’s vampire women. I say that as a compliment. Unlike many of his New York City-shot movies, director and writer Joe Sarno shot this in an actual castle owned by the relatives of producer Christian Nebe.
Other titles include The Curse of the Black Sisters, Plaything of the Devil and Veil of Blood.
As much as I hate to admit it, this is the last chapter of Night Gallery.
If you thought it’d be an incredibly poignant story from Rod Serling, you’d be remiss.
No, the last thing of the show is…a Jack Laird directed and written black out comedy tale.
“Room for One Less” takes place in a crowded elevator that stops to let in several more people in. A monster (Lee Jay Lambert) points to a sign that says “Occupancy by more than 10 passengers prohibited by law” to the elevator operator (James Metropole), which used to be a thing up until at least the 90s, as my art school had them. The monster has a sophisticated accent when he says, “Quite.” He then blows up the elevator operator.
The end.
Ah, it’s been a journey watching all of the Night Gallery episodes and writing about them for you. Did you have a favorite episode? Did any of these bring back memories for you? This gave me a sense of joy as there is so much good here, as well as some sadness, as by the middle of the second season you can start to see that Serling wasn’t getting to tell the stories that he wanted to. Commerce always conscripts creativity but my memories before now were so rose-lensed that I forgot that even a show that I consider great has moments of not being all so good. That said, the great is enough to forget all of the one minute silly sketches that Jack Laird threw in which prove that sometimes, something extra can ruin the recipe.
Once abandoned to the wilds of public domain DVD sets, Messiah of Evil was for a time the gold amongst the dross, a film of incredible power. Hidden amongst old television shows, near-unwatchable transfers of Spanish horror and video store-era throwaways, it held a haunting power. Did I see that? Is this movie real? Can I explain it to anyone who hasn’t seen it?
Today, Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once-lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones slumber until time untold to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.
You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her lost artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.
It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead yet uninfluenced by it, where an entire town slowly becomes something like the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, they begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.
Or maybe it’s about something else. Is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price isRight model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style and sophistication. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.
Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality.
I don’t want that.
This is what I want. A transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.
Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with Jaws and Star Wars. Yet at this point, as this film’s commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower reminds us, even the creators of the blockbusters that changed entertainment forever, all the way back then, all wanted to be artists. And in a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Grafitti andIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.
This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.
I love that this movie once appeared in DVD bundles easily available in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume or Arietty spreading the infection into other towns, it found the right people. It always discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost for so long.
How wonderful it is to have what was once occult brought into the light and yet it loses nothing of its infernal power. In fact, it retains its power now, all the furtive watches and evangelists that loved this movie and spread that message. It’s just easier to access it thanks to the Radiance Films blu ray.
Featuring a 2023 restoration from a 4K scan of the best-surviving elements of the film from the Academy Film Archive, their blu ray release is something I never thought would happen. It creates new moments and feelings in me; I always believed that Arietty felt trapped in a comic strip world in her father’s house, but thanks to this new restoration, it appears that his paintings are real, that the mirrors and colors and brushstrokes are his way of showing how the outside city has become sick and wrong. They are as trapped in this reality as any other. The colors on her face as she drives through the night, the hum of the marquee in the center of town, the faces that appear in Ralph’s supermarket hungry for something, anything — all more vital. All more fresh. All more dead.
This release also includes an archival interview with co-writer-director Willard Huyck by Mike White from the Projection Booth Podcast; a documentary titled What the Blood Moon Brings: Messiah of Evil, A New American Nightmare that is co-directed by Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger and has appearances by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Maitland McDonagh, Guy Adams, Mikel Koven and David Huckvale; and a visual essay by Ellinger on American Gothic and female hysteria.
There’s also a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, as well as a book with contributions by Bill Ackerman, Joseph Dwyer, Amanda Reyes, Andy Marshall-Roberts and Larissa Glasser.
The extras have added even more to my love of this film, even if Newman and Thrower can’t tell the difference between Joy Bang and Anitra Ford. Not just once. Multiple times. I don’t expect two British film experts to know what Ralph’s supermarket is, but my love for both Bang and Ford — and of course Hill — is beyond human measurement. I yelled at my television!
If you love movies, you should have already bought this.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Roommates aired on USA Up All Night on June 18 and December 11, 1993 and February 24, 1995.
Carla (Marki Bey, Sugar Hill herself!), Heather (Pat Woodell, The Big Doll House) Beth (Roberta Collins, Eaten Alive, Unholy Rollers), Brea (Laurie Rose AKA Misty Dawn, the wife of John Holmes) and Paula (Christina Hart, The Stewardesses) take a summer vacation together on Lake Arrowhead. This would seem to be a very Corman nurse movie from the surface, but the tagline — “Which will die in the class of ’73?” — points to a very frightening story.
Is it too soon to talk about 1972?
Of course, all the men in this movie are horrible, like Martin (Ken Scott), the owner of the motel who sleeps with Heather and was the man who took her virginity when she should have been doing her driver’s test. And then there’s the death of Alice (Connie Strickland), stabbed a hundred times and left in the woods so close to where the girls sleep.
Whodunnit? Socks the biker (John Durren, who wrote the movie)? His girlfriend (Paula Shaw, The Centerfold Girls, Pamela Vorhees in Freddy vs. Jason)? Creepy Harold (Greg Mabrey)? Don the handyman (Kipp Whitman)? Just about any guy in this movie? And why would Heather throw a big party when, you know, there’s been a murder?
I’m making this sound more like it has an actual story and less than a vehicle for female nudity, as each of the leads gets their clothes off as do the guest stars, which include Connie Strickland, Uschi Digard, Lindsay Bloom (H.O.T.S.), and Juanita Brown. When your movie starts with a medical school orgy, you know how it will go.
Arthur Marks also directed Detroit 9000, Bonnie’s Kids, Linda Lovelace for President, the way better than any of those movies J.D.’s Revenge, Friday Foster and uncredited work on Solar Crisis. Durren also came up with the idea for the Mickey Rooney movie The Manipulator and wrote Devil Times Five.
I like the ramshackle narrative of this movie, but this one really shows you just how good Corman’s crew was at making their girls movies.
Directed by Timothy Galfas (Black Fist) and written by Jack Laird from a story by Mary Linn Roby, “Die Now, Pay Later” never aired during the original run of Night Gallery. Instead, this and next week’s episode, “Room for One Less” were unaired stories from season 2 added to the syndication package along with episodes of The Sixth Sense. Rod Serling came back to record new introductions for these stories as well as those unconnected stories of the Gary Collins series.
Sheriff Ned Harlow (Slim Pickens) thinks that the death rate in Taunton, Massachusetts is increasing because of the January clearance sale of funeral director Walt Peckinpah (Will Geer). According to Harlow’s wife, Peckinpah has relatives in Salem and may be a relative of a warlock who was burned after the witch trials. But after getting all excited, Harlow’s wife calls the funeral home and yells at him.
The sale continues with the sheriff perhaps being a customer.
This is, as you can guess by Laird being involved, an episode of low quality. Why it’s a half hour is beyond me. Ah well — we should probably just enjoy the good stories and not be so sad about the rough ones.
Just seeing the name of the second story of this episode says to me Jack Laird and I already get a bit upset with it. Maybe I should give it a chance. I mean, there’s only a few episodes left. Actually, this was the last episode that ever aired on May 27, 1973. There are two more episodes that only played in syndication.
“Hatred Onto Death” was directed by Gerald Perry Finnerman (who mostly worked as a cinematographer and directed this tale and two other TV episodes, one of Moonlighting which he shot 58 episodes of and another of Salvage 1) and written by Halsted Welles (3:10 to Yuma) from a story by Milton Geiger.
Grant (Steve Forrest, Greg Savitt!) and Ruth Wilson (Dina Merrill) come upon a captured gorilla in Africa. Grant and the animal instantly hate each other and just the opposite, Ruth and the gorilla sense something in one another. He brings it back to America to study, despite his wife begging him to set it free.
As he studies the animal at his museum, a colleague named Dr. Ramirez (Fernando Lamas) tells him that he believes that at one point, Grant and the gorilla were enemies. Maybe in another life, they battled before. Ruth tells the gorilla a story of two of his kind battling over a woman. It goes wild and she releases it. This allows Grant to fight his enemy once more.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so down on the Jack Laird story because this story is really bad. Maybe he can save this episode.
This is how Night Gallery ended its network TV life. With a Jack Laird two-minute blackout sketch called “How to Cure the Common Vampire.”
Directed and written by Laird, it stars Richard Deacon as the Man with the Mallet and Johnny Brown as the Man with the Stake. It has no good joke and is as pointless as you thought it would be.
Look, I love Night Gallery. But perhaps with all the issues of season three, it was best that it died when it did. That’s so hard to admit.
But hey — two more episodes coming! Maybe those will be good.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Invasion of the Bee Girls aired on USA Up All Night on June 8 and September 1, 1990 and March 8 and September 21, 1991.
This was the first movie that Nicholas Meyer ever wrote. Yes, the same guy who wrote The Day After, Time After Time and the two good Star Trek films (two and four, if you’re playing at home) started right here. One day when he left to visit his parents, the script was altered and young Mr. Meyer wanted to take his name off of the project, but was convinced by his manager that he needed a credit.
Neil Agar (William Smith, Grave of the Vampire) is a special agent for the State Department sent to investigate the numerous deaths at government-sponsored Brandt Research.
It turns out that the scientists there are more obsessed with sex than their research to the point that some of them are literally getting balled to death. By the way, I’m on a quest to get the word balling and ball used in the vernacular again. Please help me.
The truth is the women of the research lab have all become Bee Girls through self-induced mutation. Now they have eyes that allow them to see like insects and the instincts of using and destroying men, several of whom totally welcome the end.
The main reason to watch this is Anitra Ford as Dr. Susan Harris. You may remember her from The Big Bird Cage and being a model on The Price Is Right. She’s in one of my favorite movies, 1972’s Messiah of Evil. If you haven’t seen that, you should probably just stop reading this right now and get on that.
Victoria Vetri plays the heroine, Julie Zorn. Using the name Angela Dorian, she was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and 1968’s Playmate of the Year. When Apollo 12 went to the moon, a photo of her and Playmates Leslie Bianchini, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers was there, inserted into the activity astronaut cuff checklists.
She also appears in Rosemary’s Baby and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 2010, nearly a quarter-century into her marriage to Bruce Rathgeb, Vetri was charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting her husband at close range after an argument. She received nine years in prison on a charge that was finally reduced to attempted voluntary manslaughter. Her husband claimed that she had been saying, “No more Charlie, no more Charlie,” as she’d been convinced that Charles Manson wanted her dead ever since her friend Sharon Tate was killed. In fact, the gun that she used was given to her by Roman Polanski, who her husband claimed that she often slept with along with Tate. Vetri is in a halfway house now and working on making her way back to society.
This movie is also known as Graveyard Tramps, which has nothing to do with what it’s really about. You should watch it anyway.
Here’s a drink recipe.
Invasion of the Bee’s Knees
2 oz. gin
.75 oz. lemon juice
.75 oz. honey syrup
1 oz. egg white
Dash of honey
Place all ingredients in a shaker, then shake vigorously.
Directed by Night Gallery regular Jeannot Szwarc and written by David Rayfiel from a story by Martin Waddell, “Whisper” has Sally Field and Dean Stockwell as Irene and Charlie Evans. He used to work as an architect, but his wife hasn’t been herself. Literally.
Irene and Charlie have moved to rural Mississippi because she channels the personalities of deceased people, a fact that he has just come to understand and deal with. After all, she always comes back and is herself again after being possessed. She’ll always come back to being Irene, he figures, he just loans her out. Right?
One of the spirits in her head is Rachel, a woman who keeps coming back and begins to obsess Irene. She starts referring to Charlie as Johnny and makes him dig up something — a dead child? — buried under some rocks. He goes back to his wife when he’s done but she tells him. “Oh, Charlie, I can’t get back. I can’t get back!”
Is Irene gone forever? Or is she just a victim of mental illness? There are no answers from this Night Gallery.
Three years later, Sally Field would gain more critical praise for another TV program about multiple personalities, Sybil. As for this episode, Szwarc proves why he’s the best director on the program and even has moments of Stockwell narrating directly to camera, as if this is all a dream or a memory.
The third season is rough but as always, when it works — like in “Whisper” — it gets it right.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Matthew Hale on Letterboxd, I’ve learned that there are alternate versions of this Mill Creek box set. For the sake of completeness and my obsessive compulsive disorder, here’s this missing movie.
Also known as La Tumba de la Isla Maldita (The Tomb of the Cursed Island); Young Hanna, Queen Of The Vampires; Crypt of the Living Dead and Vampire Woman, this Spanish film was originally directed by Julio Salvador with new footage added by Ray Denton (Deathmaster, Psycho Killer). TV western-bred scribe Lou Shaw, who wrote The Bat People, tweaked the Spanish dialog for the less-gory U.S.-version.
Andrew Prine (Simon King of the Witches) stars as Chris Bolton, a man who has traveled with his sister Mary (Patty Shepherd, The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman) to attempt to remove his father’s body from where he died. It turns out that there was a heavy sarcophagus that he found inside a hidden tomb but now his body lies smashed under it. The townspeople refused to help, as inside that coffin lies Hannah (Teresa Gimpera, Lucky the Intrepid) and they don’t want her ever coming back.
The 70’s were filled with female vampires of all shapes and sizes, from the Hammer lesbian-tinged vampires of The Vampire Lovers, the Satanic Twins of Evil, Jean Rollins’ sexually starved bloodsuckers, Daughters of Darkness, the fairy tale world of Lemora, Lina Romay as Jess Franco’s Female Vampire and the future vampires of Thirst. Every one of these films makes me happy despite the darkness and gloom of these days.
Ron (Robert Pratt) and Jake (Lou Antonio) sell fish on the pier during the day and at night, Ron visits Hyacinth (Lesly Anne Warren), a woman who refuses to see him when the sun is up. She also fears crossing running water, but as the barge she lives on is in a slowly draining canal, she promises to visit soon. Ron already has a girlfriend, Phyllis (Brooke Bundy), who goes into the barge and watches her competition go to sleep in a coffin. She barely escapes with her life. Jake, however, soon falls for her and both men are willing to give their lives to this gorgeous supernatural being.
“Death On a Barge” was directed by Leonard Nimoy and was one of his first directing jobs, as he had a one-year contract with Universal to act and direct whatever he could find. Working in the low budget of Night Gallery, he had to shoot a story that’s set at night — literally on the show Night Gallery — day-for-night. He also had to deal with the Universal tour constantly driving by and the drivers yelling while he was trying to film.
This episode was written by Halsted Welles and is based on the short story “The Cana;” by Everil Worrell. Worrell spent most of her life working for the U.S. Department of Treasury and wrote for pulps like Weird Tales.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.