There are two movies named Frightmare. Both are enjoyable on their own merits, despite the fact that Prism re-released the 1974 film as a sequel to the 1983 one, which makes no sense. Whether you choose an older British cannibal or a movie star who seems to defy death, both films are quite entertaining. Consider the following the “tale of the tape” to determine which one best matches your filmgoing fancy!

This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum issue 11. Grab your copy here.

Hours before a nuclear attack, couples that have been matched by computer are taken to an underground shelter so they can eventually repopulate the Earth. A great plan, if it wasn’t for the vampire bats!

Starring Jackie Cooper (Superman), Richard Jaeckel (Grizzly), Bradford Dillman (The Swarm), Star Trek: TNG’s Diana Muldaur, Lincoln Kilpatrick (who has an amazing scene where he tries to find a way out by climbing up and out) and more, this post-apocalyptic film is very 70s. There’s a lot of talking, not much action and plenty of in-fighting.

Can what’s left of humanity get along long enough to make some post-bomb babies? Will the bats bite their butts? Will you be offended when a rape scene turns into a seduction because this is the 70’s? These questions and more will all be answered.

Sure, Bob Clark did A Christmas Story. And he did Porky’s. But man, did he make some dark films along the way, like Black Christmas and this one, which totally grabbed me by the throat and kept me thrilled from start to finish.

Andy Brooks has been killed by a sniper in Vietnam. Yet as he dies, he hears his mother’s voice say, “Andy, you’ll come back. You’ve got to. You promised.”

While Andy’s father Charles (John Marley, who woke up to a horse’s head in his bed in The Godfather and starred alongside his wife in this film, Lynn Carlin, in John Cassavetes’ Faces) and sister Cathy go through the five stages of grief, his mother is stuck in denial.

Yet her unwillingness to accept the truth is rewarded when Andy comes back to their home unharmed.

Andy isn’t Andy any longer though. He’s withdrawn and rarely speaks, spending his days sitting motionless inside the house. Stranger still, the police are looking for a hitchhiking soldier who killed a trucker and drained his blood.

Andy’s death and rebirth rip open long-festering wounds between husband and wife — Charles never gave his son love, only authority. Christine made him too sensitive. And what of Andy? Oh, he’s just attacking a neighborhood kid and killing a dog during the day, then becoming more alive at night, when he goes to the cemetery.

Meanwhile, Dr. Phillip, a family friend, tells Charles that he’s suspicious of the similarities between Andy’s return and the murder of the truck driver. Andy visits the doctor late and night and demands a checkup before killing the doctor and injecting his blood into his body.

Christine sets Andy up on a double date with Joanne, his high school girlfriend. In a harrowing scene, she explains how she wrote to Andy but felt like he was gone before he even died, that Vietnam had taken him. As she speaks to him, he starts to decay before her eyes before killing the girl and her friend, then running over someone else as he escapes from the drive-in.

Returning home, Christine protects her son from his father’s wrath. The man gives up and kills himself as his mother helps him escape the police. Finally, as the police corner them in the graveyard that Andy spends his evenings haunting, they discover his decayed corpse in a shallow grave, his tombstone carved by his undead hand as his mother throws dirt to cover her son.

The film takes many of its beats from the W.W. Jacobs story The Monkey’s Paw, yet shows the struggles of PTSD at a time that few were able to articulate how the Vietnam War would impact not only soldiers but their families. And thanks to the acting chops of Marley and Carlin, as well as Richard Backus, who played Andy, the film feels incredibly real, despite the unreality of its premise. And it also includes the very first FX work by Tom Savini, a Vietnam vet himself.

Blue Underground just released the most complete version of this film possible recently, which you should grab ASAP! You can also watch it on Shudder.

Here’s a drink to go with this movie.

Joanne’s Letters

• 1 oz. high proof rum
• 1/2 oz. tequila
• 1/2 oz. Midori
• 1/2 oz. Chambord
• 1/2 oz. passion fruit syrup
• 1 1/2 oz. orange juice
• 1 1/2 oz. pineapple juice
• Dash, grenadine

1. Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice except rum.
2. Shake, then pour into a glass. Top with rum and enjoy.

Directors are notoriously horrible to the actors in their films. Witness the way Friedkin treated the cast of The Exorcist or how Hitchcock told Tippi Hedren that mechanical birds would be used in a scene in The Birds, only for real ones to be used in an incident that she described as “brutal and ugly and relentless.”

The House of Seven Corpses is all about Eric Hartman (John Ireland, I Saw What You Did), a director who is making a film in an actual haunted house. A zombie is awakened because the actors find The Book of the Dead and use the words in it for authenticity.

Disclaimer: The Tibetian Book of the Dead isn’t a book of evil spells but actually describes the period of time between death and rebirth.

Soon, people start dying left and right, starting with caretaker Edgar Price (John Carradine!) and leading to a grave featuring David, the director’s assistant’s name. One by one, the cast succumbs to the zombie, who finally takes his girlfriend back to his grave.

Director Paul Harrison was a writer on the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf. One wonders how much that experience colors this film. The director is completely out of his mind, screaming and yelling and damaging anyone that comes near to him. Perhaps he’s the real monster.

This is an enjoyable trifle, but nothing to lose your brains over. You can check it out for yourself at Shudder.

The TV commercial for It’s Alive terrified me. The music, the slowly turning bassinet, the fact that a demon baby was inside — it was too much for my child brain to handle. I would cover my ears and yell every single time I saw it. The power and memory and latent fear for this thirty seconds created stayed with me for decades, ensuring that I would never watch this film. Until now.

Frank and Lenore Davis are excitedly expecting the birth of their second child. They’ve been waiting for years and properly planned the child’s birth, with Lenore using birth control pills until the time was right. However, their infant is a monster, a deformed creature with fangs and claws that is so horrifying, one of the doctors instantly tries to suffocate it. The baby kills the team who delivered it before escaping, leaving a crying Lenore and frightened Frank.

The baby goes on a murderous rampage while Frank denies that the child is his, as a parallel is made to Frankenstein and how Dr. Frankenstein abandoned his creation. It turns out that the birth control drugs Lenore was on may have caused the mutation. To protect their bottom line, they want the child destroyed.

The baby finds its way home, where Lenore embraces her child. Their first son, Chris, becomes homesick (he’d been staying with Charley, a family friend) and returns home, where he meets his sibling and promises to protect him. Frank discovers that the child is being hidden and shoots at it, but the baby escapes and kills Charley.

The police and Frank track the child to the sewer, where the father realizes that the beast is his flesh and blood. Hiding the baby in his coat, Frank tries to escape, but he’s caught by the police. Then, his child leaps from his arms to kill the pharmaceutical company representative who is with the cops. The police open fire, killing the child and the man who he is attacking.

As the police take the Davis family home, we learn that another deformed child has been born in Seattle.

When Larry Cohen completed the film, he learned that the executives who had produced the film were all gone. It’s Alive got a paltry one week run in Chicago and a limited release. Three years later, after that team of executives were replaced, Cohen convinced Warner Brothers to re-release the film with the ad campaign featured above, leading to a successful run.

It’s Alive preys on our worst fears — that our children will grow to become monsters. However, Cohen takes it a step further. These children instantly are monstrous killers.

Two sequels — It Lives Again and It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive — followed, as well as a remake. The original — shot at the same time as Hell Up in Harlem by a crew that was doing day and night shoots 7 days a week — is an impressive film. Like all Cohen’s work, the idea is stronger than the budget and the final product looks so much better than the dollars it cost to create would suggest.

What movie would Sean Connery choose to follow up his run as James Bond with? Well, it’s The Offence, but this was his second movie after. And it’s definitely the first film John Boorman did after Deliverance. What they created was a film that absolutely cannot be easily explained. I’ve watched it in the double digits and there are whole sequences that I can’t unpack.

In the year 2293, Earth has lived beyond the end of the world. There are two populations, the immortal Eternals and the mortal Brutals. The Eternals live in the Vortex, a country estate that affords them comfort at the expense of excitement. The Brutals live in a wasteland growing food for the immortals, yet face constant danger.

The Brutal Exterminators are the ones that keep the machinery running, as they are ordered by a giant flying stone head named Zardoz to kill other Brutals and exchange food for more weapons.

One of the Brutals, Zed (Connery) goes for a ride on Zardoz, even temporarily killing its pilot, Arthur Frayn. Zed goes to the Vortex, where he meets Consuella (Charlotte Rampling, The Damned, Asylum) and May (Sara Kestelman, Liztomania). They defeat him with psychic powers and use him for menial labor. Consuella wants hm destroyed, while May and Frayn want to keep him alive.

Zed learns that the Eternals are watched over by an artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle. Because they live forever, they have become bored and no longer have sex. Some of them have fallen into comas and are known as Apathetics. And despite their vast resources of knowledge, all they care about is making special bread, meditating and enforcing their social rules by artificially aging anyone who violates their byzantine rules.

The Eternals misjudge Zed — he is far more intelligent than he lets on. He learns that he is part of Arthur Frayn’s eugenics experiment and that Frayn is also Zardoz. He’s also learned to read, and once he discovers that Zardoz isn’t a god but a play on the Wizard of Oz, he becomes enraged.

Zed lives up to Arthur’s goal for him — to deliver death and freedom (one and the same) to the Eternals. He absorbs all of their knowledge as he leads the Brutals on a killing spree against the Eternals.

The film ends with still images of Consuella and Zed falling in love to the tune of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — an ode to soldiers — and giving birth to a son before they age into skeletons. It’s complex and simple and moving and silly all at the same time. Kind of like the rest of Zardoz.

I didn’t even mention the animated scene of how erections work or Connery in a wedding dress or the weird outfit Zed and the Brutal Exterminators wear — knee-high boots and a giant red thong.

The film was inspired by Boorman almost making The Lord of the Rings. Although the project ended, he wanted to see if he could create his own fantasy world. A fantasy world that makes little or no sense, as evidenced by the spoken word intro that 20th Century Fox executives asked Boorman to create. The goal was to help the audience understand the film. But just look at this dialogue:

“I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years, and I long to die. But death is no longer possible. I am immortal. I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue — rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred, but they may. Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation — and a magician, by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented, too, for your entertainment — and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?”

There’s no way to really prepare you for this movie. Trust me when I say that there has never been a movie like it before or since.

We take a second look at Zardoz with our “Drive-In Friday: A-List Apocalyspe Night.“

No matter what title you watch this movie under —  from the original Spanish title, No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos (Don’t Disturb the Sleep of the Dead) or alternates like Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, The Living Dead, Breakfast at Manchester Morgue and Don’t Open the Window — it’s an intriguing slice of early 70’s shock. At once a portrait of the young, hip and now generation and a zombie film, Jorge Grau’s film features scenes that still freak people out over forty years later.

I first learned of this film from the Electric Wizard song “Wizard in Black,” as a sample of the Inspector arguing with George starts the song.

George (Ray Lovelock, Murder Rock) runs an antique shop in Manchester and decides to go work on a house with some friends. At a gas station, Edna (Cristina Galbó, What Have You Done to Solange?) hits his motorcycle with her car, so she agrees to give him a ride. On the way to see Edna’s sister, they hit a dead end. George finds a short cut that takes them past an experimental insect killing machine in the fields. It uses ultrasonic radiation and is supposed to be safer than DDT. Meanwhile, a mysterious man attacks Edna.

That night, Edna’s sister Katie and her husband Martin (Jóse Lifante, Dr. Death from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) argue. Martin goes to take photographs while the same man who attacked Edna menaces Katie. Martin tries to save her, but is killed just as Edna and George arrive.

They go to the police to report the death, but the police sergeant thinks Katie was the killer. They all decide to stay at the Old Owl Hotel, as George gets the photos developed that Martin was taking to see what was really happening.

Meanwhile, Katie has gone insane and is hospitalized. For some reason, newborn babies are biting people with murderous intent — something which is not followed up on in this movie.

The developed photos show a homeless man, who later returns to trap our heroes in a crypt and bring back to life numerous bodies simply by touching their eyes with his bloody fingers. George and Edna cut their way out of the ground itself to escape, but only Edna makes it out, as the zombies won’t let go of George. A police officer named Craig, who has been following them, saves them but the zombies give chase. He soon discovers his gun has no effect as they overwhelm him and rip him apart, eating his vital organs.

As the zombies trap George and Edna all over again, they throw an oil lamp at the horde, which saves them. They decide to split up. Edna will inform the police and George will destroy the machine. Unbeknownst to them, the police — and more specifically, the inspector (Arthur Kennedy, The Antichrist) — think that they are Manson-like Satanic killers and have issued an order to shoot to kill.

Edna is nearly killed by her brother-in-law in zombie form, but is saved again by George, who drops her off at a gas station. He’s then caught by the police, who take him and Martin’s body to the hospital and switch the machine on again. The zombies — now including Katie — come to life, killing everyone in their path and menacing a sedated Edna.

Sadly, George is too late. Edna is a zombie and pushes him into a room where the police inspector shoots him four times, killing him. He even claims that he wishes that George would come to life again just so he could kill him one more time.

He gets his wish, as an undead form of George comes for him, but now, bullets cannot stop him. And in the field, the machine keeps working.

I’m in pure love with this movie. From the way it depicts the blight of early 70’s England to the way the cops treat our heroes to the downbeat ending, it’s everything that is perfect about horror movies. And the close in the hospital is packed with shocking gore that will truly stay with you. No matter what title you see this as, make sure to see it.

You can watch it on Amazon Prime.

Anne (Lina Romay, muse of this film’s director, Jess Franco) is a performance artist who specializes in recreating Satanic rituals and spicing them up for old rich folks to savor. She also writes for a magazine, Garter and Dagger, that appeals to people who like this kind of dreck.

Turns out that Mathis, one of the writers at the magazine (yep, Franco himself), was a priest kicked out of the church for following Old Testament beliefs instead of Vatican 2. After overhearing Anne and her assistant planning a Black Mass (not an actual one, more like a sex party, which come to think of it, why is a man of the cloth working for a porn magazine? And wouldn’t an orgy be just as bad as a Black Mass?), Mathis kills each and every person involved.

There’s another cut of the film, Demoniac, which is just death and gore with none of the sex. It’s 69 minutes long. And there’s another version called Sexorcismes that remakes this film with added hardcore footage, including Franco himself showing up for the party. And Franco remade it again as El Sádico de Notre-Dame.

Under any title, this movie is the absolute shits. It fails at horror. It fails at being sexy. It fails at being interesting. It even fails at being an Exorcist clone because it has nothing to do with exorcism!

Look — when I tell you a movie is bad, trust me. It’s bad. Real bad.

Seriously — I found a movie about Satanic sex crimes boring. If that’s not a recommendation to avoid, I don’t know what is!

Don’t watch this. Even if it’s free on Amazon Prime.