EDITOR’S NOTE: A Black Ribbon for Deborah was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 3, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. It also aired on October 4, 1980 and October 2, 1982.

Marcello Andrei directed this movie  wrote the script with Alvaro Fabrizio, Giuseppe Pulieri and Piero Regnoli — who wrote the original idea of a woman passing her child to someone else before they “all the usual bullshit: the witches, the sorcerer, the special effects.” It was released as The Torment in the UK.

Deborah (Marina Malfatti) wants a child of her own more than anything anyone could ever want. She’s told that only a miracle will make her pregnant. This fact has destroyed her marriage to Michel (Bradford Dillman). Deborah is also a powerful psychic, even if she doesn’t know it, and when she and her husband find a car crash with a dying pregnant woman named Mira (Delia Boccardo),  those skills are used to solve the mystery in this movie.

Marina Malfatti is rocking the short Mia Farrow hair here and is finally getting the chance to be the lead in a giallo after supporting Barbara Bouchet in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and Edwige Fenech in All the Colors of the Dark. She’s also up front in The Red-Stained Lawn.

Sure, this is more supernatural than straight up giallo, but it aspires to f-giallo, as Deborah tries to be a mother in any way that she can, whether that’s doting on her dog Igor or giving toys to every kid she meets.

This also has some more American star power with Gig Young (in a role that Jose Ferrer was supposed to play) as a parapsychologist named Ofenbauer who is friends with Michel and debates him the difference between science and religion. There’s also a dinner party where he demonstrates his skills as a psychic but the feedback between Deborah and him is nearly a tragedy for everyone.

Soon, Deborah begins to feel that she is pregnant and starts to have a psychic proxy pregnancy, if you will and if that’s a thing, while also occasionally being hysterical and destroying all of her artwork. And as you can imagine, this is all heading toward a shock ending.

I love that Un Fioggo Nero per Deborah played on Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater. What a strange lineup that show played over its decades of being on the air, going from American 1950s science fiction to Japanese monsters, Hammer horror and odd Italian psycho affairs like this. I can only imagine what the talk at the mill or school was the next day about this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 22, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on July 3, 1982.

Edgar Allan Poe’s (Robert Walker Jr., Evil Town, Hex) love Lenore (Mary Grover) was nearly buried alive after a coma made it appear as if she were dead and now, she’s insane. Poe’s friend Dr. Forrest (Tom Drake) advises him that Dr. Grimaldi (Cesar Romero) will take proper care of her, but then Poe starts to worry. That place should be strange but it seems truly odd.

There’s someone who thinks that they are a werewold, an axe murderer and a watery tomb filled with snakes that you just know that Poe will get stuck in. Plus, you also get Dennis Fimple and Carol Ohmart.

It all looks as cheap as possible and that’s why I love it, as Mohy Quandour was the director, writer and producer and tried to do all he could with the limited cash he had on hand. He also made the movie Yanco, which is one of the 95 films on the Church of Satan film list.

I hope that lots of schoolkids who watched this movie tried to use it for their book reports.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Night of the Sorcerers was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 9, 1980 at 1 a.m.

Back in 1910, native sorcerers stole a woman and attempted to sacrifice a woman under the full moon, but not before whipping her because this is Eurohorror, but soldiers stop them before they can chop her head off. However, a demon has possessed the woman, so the bad guys — are they the bad guys, this is colonialism against indigenous people? — win.

Many years later, Professor Jonathan Grant (Jack Taylor, who else) leads a safari investigating where all the elephants in West Africa have gone, bringing along two white blonde women (of course) named Elisabeth (Maria Kosti, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse) and Carol (Loli Tovar, The Legend of Blood Castle), as well as Tunika (Kali Hansa, Demon Witch Child) and the studly Rod Carter (Simón Andreu). They soon find where the natives we saw earlier conducted their occult rites and Carol decides that this would be a good place to take photos and then they all make the worse decision to camp there.

That woman that was nearly killed and possessed before, you know, Bárbara Rey from The Ghost Galleon? She’s been waiting for something just like this and can bring back the old sorcerers and they all chop off Carol’s head. I mean, they whip her first, but you knew that, right?

Now she goes from headless rich girl photographer to leopard skin-wearing vampire and soon, she and the original vampire woman are killing everyone, including Liz, who was dumb enough to take sleeping pills in the middle of all this insanity. Day for night slow motion leopard print insanity, mind you.

Sacrificial rites turn normal women into leopard vampires. There aren’t enough kind words to say about this, one of the many wonderful movies in the Nightmare Theater package.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

There are tons of Bigfoot films to watch. Trust us, we know. We have an entire Letterboxd list packed with the ones we’ve made it through. And we know that Scarecrow has an even larger section in the store that’s all Yeti, skunkape and Sasquatch-based.

We decided to go back to the classics and rewatch this 1974 Michael Findlay film, in which Professor Ernst Prell takes four of his graduate students — Keith Henshaw, Karen Hunter, Tom Nash and Lynn Kelly — into the woods to discover if the Yeti really does exist.

Despite a mysterious dinner the night before — their dish of gin sung is broken up by a drunken former student and his wife who loudly proclaim that the last trip to see a Bigfoot got everyone killed — everyone decides that going into the brush to find the beast is a dandy idea.

As if that isn’t enough, that lout keeps drinking and decides to cut his wife’s throat with an electric turkey knife before she responds in kind by dumping a toaster into the bloody bathwater as he tries to clean himself up.

When the students get to Boot Island, they have more gin sung, meet a mute Native American named Laughing Crow and listen to Tom strum a little tune he wrote about the Yeti, who liked that song so much that he rips Tom apart, leaving only his leg as evidence.

The professor isn’t someone I’d like to have as a teacher, as he’s willing to use that leg and the body of another of the students, Lynn, as bait to catch his white whale. Or white Yeti, you get the allusion.

That said, the reveal of this all — spoiler warning for a 46-year-old movie — is that there’s no Bigfoot at all, but a big society of cannibals looking for either victims to be fresh meat or those willing to help them consume the flesh of their fellow man.

If you’re a big film geek like me — seeing as how you’re reading about a Sasquatch film from the last century when you could be doing something much more productive, I get the feeling that you are — you’ll wonder, did the print Sam saw have Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” in the soundtrack? Yes. It did. It sure did.

In 1982, if you were lucky enough to still have a drive-in around ou, chances are you could have seen this movie as part of an event named 5 Deranged Features. Don’t be fooled by some of these titles, as you may have seen them all before! They’re Coming to Get You is not All the Colors of the Dark, but instead Al Adamson’s Frankenstein vs. Dracula. House of Torture is The Wizard of Gore. Night of the Howling Beast is The Corpse Grinders. And Creature from Black Lake wasn’t so lucky as to get a name change.

Here’s a drink that I’ll be bringing to the drive-in.

Yeti

• 1 1/2 oz. gin
• 1/2 oz. blue Curaçao
• 3 oz. lemonade (you can make it yourself or just go off the shelf)
• Club soda
• Lemon wedges

1. Combine gin and the lemonade in a glass with ice.
2. Add blue Curaçao and top with club soda. Stir using a mixing spoon and garnish with lemon wedges.

Can’t make it to the drive-in? Watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

When a movie has the working title Want A Ride, Little Girl? you know it’s going to be scummy. What may surprise you is that William Shatner — who director William Gréfe met at an airport — is in the lead role.

Don’t be fooled by the supernatural looking poster. No, this is a slasher with Shatner’s Matt Stone as the bad guy picking up young women, freaking out Shat-style and getting rid of their bodies. He’s being trailed by a detective named Karate Pete (Harold “Oddjob” Sakata), which is, pardon the pun, pretty odd. He’s on the trail because Stone keeps bilking and killing old women for their money.

Jennifer Bishop (who is also in Gréfe’s Mako the Jaws of Death) plays the daughter of one of these older women who suspects that the leisure suit-wearing Stone is a shyster. And oh yeah — Ruth Roman is in this!

Sakata almost died making this, as the rig that was used for his hanging death failed and he was nearly hung for real. Shatner saved his life — breaking a finger in the process — and the entire accident can be seen on the He Came from the Swamps documentary.

This movie belongs to Shatner. As a child, his character kills William Kerwin with a sword in a kind of pre-Pieces opening, then murders a puppy and gets so worked up in one scene that he supposedly farts on camera. His assortment of 70’s fashions are pretty astounding and every single frame of this feels as sweaty and gross as a night in the Everglades.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Swinging Cheerleaders aired on USA Up All Night on November 10 and 11, 1989; May 4 and October 27, 1990 and April 11, 1991.

The fact that a movie called The Swinging Cheerleaders (AKA Locker Room Girls and H.O.T.S. II) is so good rests on the fortune that this was co-written and directed by Jack Hill. It’s a movie that promises cheerleaders and sex. Sure, it delivers that. It also gives you a crime story, a tale of journalism and a wife so enraged by her husband’s infidelity that the one scene she shows up for is volcanic, ending with her screaming that she plans on carving her name into a girl’s anatomy.

Kate (Jo Johnston in her one-and-done role) is writing an article for the college newspaper about how cheerleading demeans women, so she joins the squad. Yet she soon finds herself bonding with the girls.

There’s Mary Ann (Colleen Camp), who wants her boyfriend Buck to stop sleeping around and marry her. Lisa (Rosanne Katon) is the one having an affair with a married professor. And Andrea (Rainbeaux Smith!) just can’t go all the way.

But there are bigger problems. All of the adults are betting on the football games, including the dean, the coach and Mary Ann’s dad, a local businessman. They’re willing to do anything it takes to keep their scam going, too.

Strangely enough, when this movie and The Student Body played a Dallas drive-in, Randall Adams and David Harris were in attendance and used the film as an alibi when they were investigated in the murder of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. When Adams said that he had to leave as he didn’t feel comfortable with the content, it led to his conviction. You can learn more in the documentary The Thin Blue Line.

I saw someone on Letterboxd say that “If Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was about college cheerleading, this would be that movie.” What a great way to explain this.

It’s totally not the teen sex romp you think it is, yet it has a scene where multiple people in a row all punch a security guard in the face, which should be a moment in every film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Barely released in 1974, Mania was once a lost giallo until a 35mm print surfaced in 2007 at the Cineteca Nazionale film archive in Rome, which keeps every movie submitted to censors. It’s somehow all at once a giallo, gothic horror and science fiction and refuses to make sense.

We start by meeting Lisa (Eva Spadaro) and her fiancée Lailo (Isarco Ravaiolo) as they speed along the highway with her remembering how she cheated on her husband Professor Brecht (Brad Euston, who also starred in the director’s Oscenità, a movie that is supposedly an allegory of female oppression yet contains corncob masturbation, bestiality and a lengthy lesbian orgy) with his twin brother Germano (also Euston), who is now in a wheelchair because his brother was caught in a mad scientist lab fire and his brother  —  not Lisa — could save him.  Now she’s lost her mind and is with her twin brother-in-law but also another man but oh yeah, there’s also a ghost car chasing them and Lisa is always taking her insanity up to 11.

That very same ghost attacks the housekeeper Erina (Mirella Rossi) with a plastic bag that is filled with blood by the end, but it doesn’t kill her, just scar her and take away her voice. For some reason, this makes Germano hate her and abuse her further with his wheelchair. Someone has also dropped off a model of a coffin — the same one her husband was buried in! — and her doctor tells her that the best mental health thing to do is go back to the now haunted house and face her fears.

Oh yeah. Lisa also has another maid, Katia (Ivana Giordan), who is her secret lover and when they hook up, the camera spies Erina pleasuring herself with a bottle while she secretly watches. Just in case you needed more sleaze, I guess. This somehow turns into a catfight and ends up Erina running in terror and right into Germano, who tortures her some more before using his burned-up hands to feel her up.

If it needs to get stranger, well, Lisa is attacked by a net full of snakes in the attic, saved by Erina and then those two go at it while Katia goes out into the garden and makes love to Germano atop his wheelchair.

This involves her reading mash notes from her deceased hubby who soon arrives as a zombie because why not? This is followed by her going into his crypt and this briefly being a Hammer movie until Germano decides to torture both Lisa and the housekeeper inside a futuristic BDSM machine because, look, I don’t know, this movie is awesome.

And by awesome, I mean weird as fuck.

I hesitate to give away any more. Trust me, there’s so much more. According to Eurofever, the fumetti of this movie shows page after page of graphic sex scenes that were taken from the final print. Like, you know how Erich von Stroheim supposedly shot crazy stuff that the Hayes Commission would never allow in his films? This goes there. And then it goes so much further. I mean, this is a movie that ends with a character leaping to her death and landing in a tree that — you won’t believe it — tears all of her clothes off.

The blame — or the thanks — for this goes to Renato Polselli, who also made The Vampire and the Ballerina, The Vampire of the Opera and two movies nearly as wild as this, Delirium and Black Magic Rites AKA The Reincarnation of Isabel. He pushes everyone in this cast to just go wild, so wild that Alucarda might appear and ask them to tone down all the screaming.

Claudio Fragasso was the assistant director. Do you need more to get you to watch it? How about Euston wrote it and, according to Roberto Curti’s Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970–1979, “provided most of the money for the film himself on the condition that he was cast as the protagonist.”

This is absolute trash with a wild acid rock soundtrack that was made by a maniac, has actors overacting to a degree that they nearly destroyed reality and gorgeous women in fishnets making love just because they can. They need to invent a new galaxy for how many stars I give this movie.

You can get this from the Internet Archive.

After finishing his latest movie, Jose Mojica Marins gives an interview. He’s asked, “Does Coffin Joe exist?” Surely the answer is no. But then a camera light explodes and we wonder, Well, perhaps…”

Mains stays with a friend to write his next movie, The Demon Exorcist.

Everything seems normal at Alvaro’s house. His father Mr. Julio is a nice old man planting flowers, Alvaro’s wife Lucia seems kind and his daughters Betinha, Luciana, and Vilma all seem quite normal. But at night, Mr. Julio tears off his shirt and screams that he has come to collect a debt. The Christmas tree is filled with snakes and spiders. And a mysterious woman keeps intruding into everyone’s thoughts. She just stands there, holding a cat, posed in front of a photo of Coffin Joe.

That’s when the secrets all come out. Lucia shares that Vilma is the daughter of a witch and has been promised to her other child Eugenio, whose father is Satan. Vilma wants to marry Carlo and this enrages the witch, who gave her the child to cover up Alvaro’s lack of being able to impregnate her.

Roosters get their heads bitten clean off, the fiancee nearly dies in car crashes and a naked Vilma knocks out Marins, who awakens to a Black Mass presided over by Coffin Joe, who exhorts “May the blood of those who don’t deserve to live burst out of their bodies! May lightning burn the scum!” Then Coffin Joe walks up a living staircase of naked women who jubilantly dance after he steps across their backs, joining Vilma and Eugenio in unholy matrimony as scenes of cannibalism, torture and dismemberment fill the screen. Up next, young Betinha is to be killed, but Marins finds a crucifix and screams, “I believe in God!”

The witch and her son die as Coffin Joe is exorcised from Marins. All is well, as everyone gathers for the Christmas feast. All except for Betinha. The camera zooms into her eye and there is Coffin Joe, laughing and as always, superior.

A Christmas movie, an Exorcist rip-off, a Coffin Joe sequel all in one movie. How magical is that?

Kartal Yuvasi means Eagle’s Nest but a quick look at this movie will clue you in that director Natuk Baytan and writer Tarik Dursun Kakinç are really making their own version of Straw Dogs.

Yet this movie is very much its own movie.

That’s because it’s filtered through the lens of creators coming from a country quite unlike our own. At the time of filming, the setting of Cyprus was in the middle of a battle between Greece and Turkey with the Turkish Muslims being forced out of their homeland. That’s quite a different setting than Wakely. And there is no David Sumner character in this, instead two women, one young and another old.

The closest thing this movie has to Dustin Hoffman’s character is Murat, a doctor who is returning home along with his new English fiancee Mary. When he’s called away for an emergency, Mary must stay with Murat’s mother Makbule, a Muslim woman who the town already distrusts and outright hates. Even worse for them, the very idea that mary would convert from Catholicism for her husband is enough to rile them up into outright sexual assault, a much different reason for the crime than Peckinpah’s film.

During the climactic attack on the house, the mother even reveals a Turkish flag under her clothes and plays matching band covers of their national anthem while getting thrown off the steps by men much larger than her. Then the movie juxtaposes this battle with actual footage of Turkish soldiers retaking the town from the Greek army. That’s the second weirdest crosscutting in this, as Mary’s rape is played against the birth of a baby.

I’ve debated in my head if Straw Dogs is art or exploitation. This film definitely leans toward the latter, yet is also a political message, which is pretty fascinating.

You can watch this on one of the best channels on YouTube, White Slaves of Chinatown.