Miguel Madrid — credited here as — only has directed three films: The Butcher of Binbrook, Bacanal en Directo and this completely insane entry. He also wrote The Feast of Satan and Del Amor y de la Muerte. He’s credited as Michael Skaife on this movie, the same name he used on The Butcher of Binbrook, which was released in the U.S. as Graveyard of Horror.

All hail Spanish horror! Your movies make my head hurt and yet I love them so!

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x587aug

David Rocha plays Paul, who was thrown out of medical school because he can’t stand the sight of blood. Now, he’s back home, living on the estate of Countess Olivia (Helga Line, Horror Express, Horror Rises from the Tomb), where his father is a gardener.

To say Paul is mixed up is an understatement. The film attempts to explain it by stating that Pail was raised as a girl after his sister died and has taken on part of her personality. He also likes to perform surgery on his dolls and remove their hearts. And oh yeah — there’s a female-voiced masked killer on the loose wearing a black wig and a white doll mask.

There aren’t many Spanish giallo films — I can point to Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (AKA House of Psychotic Women), The House That Screamed, Clockwork Terror, Maniac Mansion, The Corruption of Chris Miller, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, The Killer Is One of Thirteen and Glass Ceiling are some that I can think of. Of course, there’s also Pieces and Bloody Moon, but I feel that those are more slasher than giallo.

The thing about Paul — and this movie — is that instead of comely females writhing around half nude as in most giallo, our protagonist showers all of the time, except for when he’s not killing and dreaming that people in his life are mannequins. Seriously, the dude loves taking showers. He’s also given to going completely bonkers, running in slow motion past seagulls after smashing flowerpots with an axe while screaming “Leave me alone!”

Ah man, I totally loved this movie. It gives up who the killer is way early, unlike most giallo, but it’s so charmingly daffy and out of control. This is a movie that I’d never even heard about before it was sent my way. And man, that little Robert kid who pals around with Paul? That kid seems like a real handful. Why he hangs out with a murderous twenty-something man who identifies as a woman and everyone is cool with it is beyond me, but maybe 1974 was just that crazy.

If you didn’t get the hint, go get this movie now. Like…right now.

You can get this movie from Mondo Macabro, who as always put out some amazing cinema from around the world. Released for the first time ever in the U.S. and the first time on blu ray, it features a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative with Spanish audio and newly created optional English subtitles. Plus, there are new interviews with actor David Rocha and Dr. Antonio Lazaro-Reboll (author of the book The Spanish Horror Film), as well as new commentary tracks, one by Kat Ellinger and the other by Robert Monell and Rodney Barnett. You can grab your copy right here.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by Mondo Macabro.

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is probably my favorite religious movie ever made. Unlike today’s religious films that sneakily preach at you and make you feel inferior, that movie straight up lets you know that Communists are going to kill everyone you love and that you’re definitely going to burn in Hell forever.

If you think three years dulled the edge of Estus Pirkle, you’ve never been more incorrect. Get ready to pay, sinner!

At once a combination of regional exploitation and good old fashioned revival sermon, this movie is going to punch you in the face as many times as it can. This is the kind of film where two hippies show up wanting to learn more about God, get rebuffed, one of them dies by getting beheaded and the other runs right back to church.

You get to see people actually in Hell and learn exactly how long it lasts. This is the kind of movie that is going to either confirm your mania or let you know that everyone is insane. Seriously, they don’t make them like this any longer. That’s right — no movie made now spends as much time explaining how worms are going to eat you forever and ever and ever.

Let me quote to you from this movie. “Statistics have proven…every hour 3,000 people go to Hell; every minute 60 people go to Hell; right this very moment, someone is headed for a burning Hell.”

Ron Ormond, who directed this, survived two near-death plane crashes before finally deciding to turn to the Lord. Before that, he made movies like the 1950 Lash LaRue-starring King of the Bullwhip (he actually directed many films starring that whip-wielding cowboy) and the minstrel show review Yes Sir, Mr. Bones before going into full-on exploitation madness with flicks like Please Don’t Touch Me, Girl From Tobacco Row and The Exotic Ones. He shows here that he lost none of his touch for shocking the living shit out of you in just about every frame. Bravo, Mr. Ormond. Bravo.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive or on the YouTube link posted below.

While Amicus is mainly known for their anthology films, they also presented singular stories. Director Jim Clark may have also made the films Every Home Should Have One and Rentadick, but he’s better known as an editor. You’ll definitely recognize the films he edited — Midnight Cowboy, The Killing Fields, The World Is Not Enough and Marathon Man to name but a sliver of his list of efforts.

It’s also the sad end of the AIP cycle of films, as Samuel Z. Arkoff felt that due to its lower box office, it marked the end of the horror cycle. That makes sense — it seems a film at odds with the direction horror would take, present a character not unlike Dr. Phibes who must now deal with the new horror, styles like giallo and American independent films that would reinvent the rules.

Paul Toombes (Vincent Price) has been a horror star for decades and is set to make his fifth appearance as Dr. Death, a skull-faced killer. During the premiere, he announces his engagement to Ellen Mason, a co-star, who gives him an engraved watch. However, within no time at all, adult film producer Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry, who was despised so much by Price in real life that it comes through in the film) reveals that Ellen had once been in his films.

Toombes explodes in anger and when Ellen returns to her room, before the sight of any credits, she’s attacked by a point of view killer. When our protagonist attempts to apologize, her head falls from her neck and into his hands, a shocking scene for the usually staid AIP world.

The world falls apart — Toombes is instituitionalized, unsure if he killed his love or not. He’s acquitted and the rest of the world moves on in his absence.

Years pass and Toombes is released. He visits London to meet his friend, screenwriter Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing), who is created a Dr. Death TV series with Quayle.

On the cruise ship that will bring him to the U.K., Toombes must deal with Elizabeth (Linda Hayden, The Blood On Satan’s Claw), an ingenue actress who wants publicity. She continues to follow him, as do her parents once she’s killed with a pitchfork.

Flay’s situation is no better than his former lead actor’s. In the basement, his wife Faye (Adrienne Corri, best known as the abused wife Mrs. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange), who was once the lead in a Dr. Death film, has gone mad, the result of her constant affairs leading to a car accident that has left to her being hideously burned.

Every time Toombes becomes enraged, someone dies, and they expire in a manner directly releated to his films. He finally goes mad and sets the set — and himself — ablaze.

That night, under the assumption that Toombes is dead, Flay signs a contract to take his place as Dr. Death. He celebrates by watching Toombes’ apparent death on film. That’s when the real Toombes walks toward him, burned but alive, and learns how his friend was behind it all. Flay’s wife reappears and stabs him, feeding him to her spiders, before she and Toombes sit down for dinner. Now, the actor has completed the makeup that will allow him to look like the traitor that tried to destroy his life.

Madhouse is an interesting film. At once, it’s a best of retrospective of AIP films, featuring moments from Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Haunted Palace, The Pit and the Pendulum, Scream and Scream Again, and House of Usher. It even points out that it was made thanks to special participation by Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, who had died in 1967 and 1969, as they make appearances from the past of AIP.

Then, it feels like a meditation on the past ending and a struggle to keep pace with the new world. Within a half-decade, horror would be filled with slashers and the Price films would feel charming and quaint, not movies that terrified the world. And at the very same time, Italian giallo was doling out movies filled with equal measure of brutality and shifting identities.

Finally, it’s also a movie in love with the idea of horror films themselves, willing to show both Quarry and Cushing dressed as their vampiric alter egos at a cast party.

The whole thing just made me sort of sad — as I know that no one today really thinks of films such as this and can see the magic inside them. It’s as if Price is playing Toombes as himself, going out one last time to try and wring out whatever he can from a dying genre of film.

Man, Alan Ormsby has done so much. In addition to working with Bob Clark on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Death Dream, he wrote My Bodyguard and the remake of Cat People. Plus, he was the original director of Popcorn and the man behind Kenner’s Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces action figure. 

He’s the man behind Deranged, along with Jeff Gillen, who played Jeff in Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and who you can see every Christmas Eve as Santa Claus in A Christmas Story. 

Deranged is filmed as if it were a true story, with reporter Tom Simms (Leslie Carlson, Black Christmas) appearing within the events and narrating them. The whole thing was based on Ed Gein, the infamous real life Butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho are both based on.

It was produced by producer Tom Karr, a concert promoter for bands like Led Zeppelin and Three Dog Night who had been fascinated with Ed Gein and dreamed of making a film about his story.

Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom, Old Man Marley in Home Alone, how’s that for a scary tie-in role?) is our Ed Gein stand-in, running a midwest farm with his mother Amanda (Cosette Lee, who played Raxl, Daughter of the Priestess of the Serpent on Strange Paradise, a Canadian occult soap opera created in the wake of Dark Shadows). Since he was a boy, she’s taught him to hate women.

Once she dies, it takes a year for him to come out of his shell. When he finally snaps to it, he does what any loving and grieving son would do: he digs his mom up and puts her body together with fish skin and wax.

Ezra gets involved with an eccentric older woman who claims she’s psychic named Maureen Shelby (Marian Waldman, Mrs. MacHenry from Black Christmas, and if you don’t know who that is, please stop reading and start watching). They have a fumbling sexual encounter that ends with Ezra killing her and we’re off to the races.

Ezra’s next target is Mary Ransum (Mickie Moore, who is also in The Vindicator and is one of the Believers in, yes, The Believers), a waitress who he lures home, knocks out and dresses in just her underwear for dinner. Their nice meal is ruined by her trying to run, so he smashes her head with a femur bone. And then he takes out young Sally, which leads the police to his home, where they find him in the kitchen, enjoying a bowl of blood after skinning her.

Deranged is not an easy watch, as its subtitle, Confessions of a Necrophile, will tell you. It’s also the second movie — after Deathdream — that Tom Savini ever worked his special effects magic on.

You can get the blu ray of this film from Kino Lorber.

Call it El Gran Amor del Conde Dracula. Call it Cemetery Girls. Or Dracula’s Great Love — the title I saw the film under — or Dracula’s Virgin Lovers or The Great Love of Count Dracula. Whatever title you prefer, you’re about to savor a nonsensical odyssey through Spanish vampire madness, a world where someone can fall down the steps for what seems like hours, all women dress like Disney princesses and a girl can step on a beartrap and only get a small scratch.

We start in an old sanitorium, deep in the Carpathian Mountains as two delivery men arrive with a large, heavy man-shaped crate. Of course, you know that that crate has Doctor Wendell Marlow (Naschy) inside it. But right now, this scene is all about these movers casing the joint and trying to steal something, only for one to get hit with an axe and the other to get his throat ripped out and sent tumbling over and over and well, over.

Then, a stagecoach with four women — Karen, Marlene, Senta and Elke — breaks down and forces the girls to stay at Marlowe’s mansion.sanitorium. One by one, the girls are bitten and become part of Dracula’s army of the undead, all with the goal of the head vamp resurrecting his daughter Radna and convincing a virgin — hi Karen — to love him forever before he sacrifices her.

By the end, Dracula has tired of this lifestyle and decides to kill all of his brides with sunlight. Then, he realizes that he loves Karen and can’t use her to further his monstrous aims, so he kills himself with a stake.

If you’re a fan of female vampires being female vampires — which mostly means them licking blood off of one another and whipping — then Naschy has exactly what you’re craving here. There was a Spanish version of the film that has the actresses remaining modest, while international cuts of the film feature abundant full monty shots of the brides. And there’s also fifteen minutes of footage that no one can locate that supposedly goes even further!

Amazingly, Naschy made this movie, Hunchback of the Morgue, Curse of the Devil, Horror Rises from the Tomb and Vengeance of the Zombies all in the same year.

If you want to see the best possible version of this film, Vinegar Syndrome has a blu ray that features the European unclothed cut of the film, as well as a never-released audio commentary track with Naschy and director Javier Aguirre.

Martin Davidson made his directorial debut with this film. You may know him better from Eddie and the Cruisers. You may not know him from the John Ritter vehicle Hero at Large. It was written and co-directed by Stephen Verona, who years later would direct the astounding exercise video Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves.

This movie is one of the first that introduced both Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler to a wide audience, as well as the debut film role for Armand Assante.

The four Lords — Chico Tyrell (Perry King), Stanley Rosiello (Stallone), Butchey Weinstein (Winkler) and Wimpy Murgalo (Paul Mace, Rat from Paradise Alley) — chase girls, shoot pool, loiter at the malt shop and steal cars together.

This film is an episodic look at their lives. Chico just wants to win the heart of Jane (Susan Blakely, Capone, The Concorde … Airport ’79, Over the Top and Dream A Little Dream), who seemingly wants nothing to do with him. Stanley gets pressured into marrying his girlfiend Frannie (Maria Smith, Concepcion from The Incredible Shrinking Woman) despite the fact that she may have lied about being pregnant. And Butchey may be smart enough to escape Flatbush, but he hides his intelligence behind his leather jacket.

Funny enough, both Winkler and King were Yale graduates playing Brooklyn tough guys. For his part, King decided to follow Method acting: “Stephen Verona would never have cast a Yale graduate to play Chico, so I stayed in character, and halfway through the film I told him (in thick Brooklyn drawl): “Hey Steven, you realize you cast two Yale graduates as your hoods?” He thought I was kidding!”

He wasn’t the first choice for the role. Richard Gere was supposed to play the character, but he and Stallone didn’t get along. That’s an understatement, as Stallone would tell Ain’t It Cool News: “We never hit it off. He would strut around in his oversized motorcycle jacket like he was the baddest knight at the round table. One day, during an improv, he grabbed me (we were simulating a fight scene) and got a little carried away. I told him in a gentle fashion to lighten up, but he was completely in character and impossible to deal with. Then we were rehearsing at Coney Island and it was lunchtime, so we decided to take a break, and the only place that was warm was in the backseat of a Toyota. I was eating a hotdog and he climbs in with a half a chicken covered in mustard with grease nearly dripping out of the aluminum wrapper. I said, “That thing is going to drip all over the place.” He said, “Don’t worry about it.” I said, ‘”f it gets on my pants you’re gonna know about it.” He proceeds to bite into the chicken and a small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh. I elbowed him in the side of the head and basically pushed him out of the car. The director had to make a choice: one of us had to go, one of us had to stay. Richard was given his walking papers and to this day seriously dislikes me. He even thinks I’m the individual responsible for the gerbil rumor. Not true… but that’s the rumor.”

For what it’s worth, Winkler claims that he based The Fonz — the role that for some time made him quite possibly the most famous man in America — on Stallone’s acting in this film.