Tag Archives: 1975

2025 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 27: Death Is Not the End (1975)

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27. TRANCING AND HYPNOTISM: Gold watches ain’t just for retirement.

I’ve been obsessed with this movie for years.

My Drive-In Asylum co-host Bill Van Ryn shared an ad for a movie that I’d never heard of on his Groovy Doom Facebook page, and it immediately piqued my curiosity. What could Death Is Not the End be?

Kinorium says, “The mystery of life eternal is discussed by a number of purported experts in various fields of metaphysical research, as well as individuals who assert that they’ve lived before.”

The AFI Catalog goes a bit deeper, telling us “Reporter Wanda Sue Parrott and an African American laborer named Jarrett X are put into deep hypnotic trances as part of a psychic experiment in past-lives therapy.”

It played at least a few times, if ads are to be believed. The Phoenix, AZ, premiere was on December 8, 1975 — the ad featured in this article — and it also played a year later in Los Angeles on April 11, 1976.

The July 25, 1974 Hollywood Reporter claimed that the film, then known as 75 IT, would premiere at the Atlanta International Film Festival in Georgia on August 16, 1976. Dona Productions took over distribution in 1976, and the film’s title was changed to ‘Death Is Not the End’, a title that hints at the film’s themes of reincarnation and life after death.

Anyways, these are a lot of facts, but there was no chance I was ever going to see this movie.

Or was I?

Imagine my surprise to open my email and see this:

Hi Sam,

We were given a big binder of family stories for Christmas, and in it was a DVD of 75 IT. We already had one, but it got me and my husband googling the movie and we found your blog.

I watched it years ago but am not sure I ever got to the end as it was pretty bad.  I did enjoy the brief shots of my husband as a child at the very beginning.

I’m not sure who has the rights to it now.  Wanda used to stay in touch with Ron Libert but I think they fell out over the publishing of her novel.

Are you still looking to watch it?

It took about six months to arrive. And you know how I work. When I get something I’ve been waiting to see, I tend to sit on it. Like gift cards, I like the idea of having something to look forward to. In this case, the anticipation of finally watching this rare and obscure film was too exciting to rush.

But today would be the day that I would watch this.

75 IT or Death Is Not the End was the work of Elroy Schwartz. The brother of Sherwood Schwartz, he and Austin Kalish wrote the original pilot for Gilligan’s Island, which went unaired until TBS showed it in 1992. He would continue to be a writer on the show along with his brother, Al.

In 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported that Schwartz and Kalish were suing Sherwood, saying, “They charge that the older sibling has been cheating them out of Gilligan’s Island credits and royalties for decades. The dispute apparently began in 1963, when Elroy and Kalish say they wrote most of the pilot show. Sherwood was the producer and, as a favor, they honored his request and listed his name as a co-writer on the script, the suit says. Ever since, they charge, Sherwood has tricked them out of their share of royalties and has controlled the rights to the show, which has made him as rich as, say, Thurston Howell III.”

They’re not exaggerating. In Kalish’s obituary in The Hollywood Reporter, it’s reported that “Years after the show ended, Kalish said documents were uncovered that indicated he should have been entitled to one-quarter ownership of the series, worth about $10 million, but he received nothing.”

In addition to being a writer, Schwartz was a licensed hypnotherapist specializing in past-life regressions. He described this movie as such: “There wasn’t any established script. The movie is a ‘happening’ — a spontaneous filming of a hypnotic regression into reincarnation, and ‘procarnation’ — a look into the subject’s next life.”

According to the article (The Tampa Times from April 4, 1977) posted above, “Elroy Schwartz, stocky, cordial, gregarious, doesn’t look like a Svengali, but, he says, he’s “a hell of a hypnotist.” Schwartz is in town from Los Angeles, where he’s a full-time writer and producer (he’s written for such TV shows as I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island and Movie of the Week and a sometime hypnotist who’s delved into uncharted areas of the mind. From these explorations have come both a book, The Silent Sin, and a movie, Death Is Not The End, scheduled for showing Monday night at the Tampa Theatre. His book, written six years ago, deals with a hypnosis subject whom he “regressed,” or took backward in time, over a period of several months, eliciting from her unconscious several past lives she felt she had lived in various reincarnations. In one reincarnation, the subject went through a reenactment of labor pains. For Schwartz, “It triggered something in my mind.” He thought, “If we can go backward in time, why can’t we go forward?” He tucked the thought away for a while, but some time later met Wanda Sue Parrot, a newswoman with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and “got good vibes from her.” They started work on regressing, and when he felt she was really in touch with her subconscious, Schwartz asked her to go forward in time to her next life.

He was in for a shock. Wanda was “reborn” as a mutant inhabitant of a world recovering from the near-annihilation of an accidental atomic detonation from China. What had been the United States was now “America’s Islands,” fragmented, with whole sections gone from the map. She lived in “Utah County” in the year 75 I.T., which, the hypnotist found, meant International Time, a time system set up by the “World Tribunal,” which governed what was left of Earth.

From the concept of this horror story emerged the movie, which was filmed live as Schwartz repeatedly put his subject into a trance state under the supervision of a medical doctor.

“It’s not edited except for time,” Schwartz said. “Producers have told me it’s not technically a movie, but it has a tremendous impact. Wherever it’s shown, people thank me. They want to see it again.” For himself, Schwartz “knows what we have is real. Maybe this is a warning; maybe we can stop history if we stop and think what we’re doing.” For now, he’s trying to find practical and creative ways to utilize his gift.”

So let’s get to the movie.

It’s wild: this is relatively low quality, but when you have what may be one of the few copies of a movie in the entire world, you don’t complain.

This film is relatively simple. Schwartz sits in a chair, a shirt unbuttoned to reveal a bare chest, speaking with Wanda Sue Parrot, who wrote for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and Chicago Tribune. As Schwartz hypnotizes her, she quickly remembers several of her past lives, including being a woman named Akina in an early civilization. Often, she is unable to communicate with Schwartz because there is no translation for her words or for how she sees things.

She starts as a single-cell organism, then gets brothers and sisters as a cavewoman, as Schwartz tries to get her to speak the language she used. The language can’t be identified as a modern language; it’s very rudimentary. It sounds Native American, which makes sense, as Parrot has Chickasaw and Cherokee ancestry in her family tree. She also wrote under the Native American byline Prairie Flower.

Schwartz then hands her the paper and a marker so she can write. Even though she’s a writer by trade, she struggles with the marker, biting down on a pencil as she creates a triangle. Synth music bubbles as she continues her drawing. In her language, she tells him what the drawing is. Then she says it’s a drawing of creation and how it came to our world. She says there are two sides of God, symbolized by two fish. She refuses to take the pencil out of her mouth so that Schwartz can understand her. He then puts her to sleep so he can get the pencil back, and asks her to wake up; he will be her god Ika. He will talk to her and she will understand him.

“You have been a good person, Akina. You may speak to your god.” Schwartz says. She laughs and says that Ika is invisible. He replies by walking out and coming back, saying that he’s Iko. She holds his hands and smiles, studying his watch, which she smells and tries to bite. She’s also interested in his many rings. “Ahh e tu ah,” she replied. Then says, “Snake.”

He puts her back to sleep.

Akina dies when she goes to see the blue people — is this Yor Hunter from the Future? — and she is crushed. She dies far below her people. Schwartz then counts to three and tells her to feel the pain of Akina as she dies on a bed of stones. Wanda begins to move around in pain, just as she’s told to go to sleep.

What about the blue people? Akina describes the geography of the world she lived in. The blue people raised cattle, sheep, and a bird. Their skin is as dark as ashes, but not black like ashes. A deep color blue like the sky. They were being extincted, and their women were unable to reproduce, having only one child each. Any children they had moved into new territories across the ocean, but their color changed to dark, but not blue, except in cases of…she doesn’t know the word. They had blue black skin, brown black skin. Then she discusses other people, like the Unix, who were the work animals.

Schwartz then tries to learn how the electron that she once was became the identity of a new person and how the soul moves through different bodies through time. We hear her be born and make very realistic noises as if she were a crying infant. He then takes her to the 1600s, where she is a French man. Wanda only speaks English and Spanish, not French, so when she starts to say things in French, it’s surprising.

The film cuts to a couch, where Schwartz meets Jarrett X, a black man wearing a dress shirt covered in dots and white flowers. He quickly is able to get Jarrett to go into a hypnotic state and remember being named Jacob Elliot Nash. After the Civil War, he worked on a farm for Master Hearst, a white man he disliked, who often beat him with whatever he could find. Schwartz tries to take on the voice of Jarrett’s master, yelling at him before learning that the young slave stayed behind on the plantation, bound by the fact that his mother would not leave.

This gets pretty harrowing, as Jarrett is asked to sing at one point and says that he refuses to sing as he no longer believes in God, as what God would allow so much suffering? Schwartz counts to three, snaps his fingers and reminds Jacob of when he was a child and did sing. He then relates a few bars of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

Then, the worst memory comes when Jarrett remembers the owner’s son stabbing him with a pitchfork, ending his life. This gets even harder to watch, as we learn that in the past, Jarrett was accused of fooling around with a white woman, which earned him his death. As Schwartz snaps his finger and wakes him up, he quickly seems like a totally different person.

Schwartz relates to Dr. Kent Dallt, Professor of Psychology at UCLA, how he wrote his book on hypnotherapy and reincarnation. As they sit in a field, they discuss how no one seems to believe in previous or future lives. Schwartz relates that even if he had proof that someone was actually alive —a newspaper article or a tombstone —no one would believe it. Skeptics never open their minds to these things.

Dallt brings up From India to the Planet Mars by Theodore Flournoy and Sonu Shamdasani. The book explores Catherine Müller, also known as the medium Hélène Smith, “who claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, of a Hindu princess from fifteenth-century India, and of a regular visitor to Mars, whose landscapes she painted and whose language she appeared to speak fluently.”

Death Is Not the End moves on to the procarnation exercises, which move Wanda to her next life as a blind mutant newly born in Cold Springs, Utah. Seventy-five years after a nuclear accident, which gives this film the name 75 IT, the United States has been divided into the American and Barbara Islands, which are ruled by the World Tribunal of Africa. As America has been decimated by this nuclear event, its people aren’t allowed to celebrate any religion, experiment with any science or even marry one another.

This is all supposed to be happening in the year 2100 or so, Schwartz thinks. All Wanda can say is that it’s the year 75 IT when Wanda’s mutant future form is twenty. She claims that her father was from Philadelphia. Elroy pushes her for more information on the accident, to which she can only reply, “Horrible. Horrible.” He keeps asking, and she tells them that people burned, their skin came off their bodies, their eyeballs fell out, and they still didn’t die.

No one knows why or how the accident happened, which doesn’t help us much. It wasn’t a war, she knows that much, and that it happened in China. Schwartz goes through several cities and asks if they are still around. Miami and Florida have sunken beneath the waves, but Omaha and St. Louis are safe. Most of the towns he throws out, she can’t remember, although she has heard of Birmingham. England is underwater with piranhas, she says, at one point.

The world is governed by the World Tribunal, which has representatives of every nation on Earth. Elroy then asks if she will always be in Cold Springs, but she will go to the University of Heidelberg when she’s 25. Oh yeah — Phoenix is a port now, too.

Throughout the interview, Wanda seems almost upset and struggles to explain herself. Schwartz even chuckles a few times. This makes me drift and see the room he has set up, which is very 1970s, with green shag carpeting, tons of plants, and comfy couches with afghans. It isn’t a place you’d discuss the end of the world.

She claims Kennedy would win the 1980 election, and Elroy quickly moves on. She then took up a lover, Joseph Martin, her lover from Belgium. He taught her how to see, which landed him in jail for treason. While she was blind, she was taught to see with the center of her brain or her third eye. Joseph showed her how to use transmission to see and how to use telepathy to see through his eyes.

There’s a wild moment here where the mutant wakes up in Wanda’s body and can see. She looks like she’s freaking out and then seems elated that she can see. It’s hard to tell if she’s sending messages back in time or speaking through this body. This moves her to tears.

The mutant dies in the year 106 IT. She goes home to Cold Springs to have her baby, the child of a criminal. She goes up the mountain and doesn’t come back. The baby is born. Schwartz wakes her up with a smile.

The end credits claim that the year IT is 2012. It also says that “Two months after the final edit of this film, Dr. Dallet, finding the film personally distubring, shared the Procarnation description of “the accident” with colleagues at the University’s Astronomy and Science departments. Their “concensus of opinion” theory was that “the accident” was probably a Pole Shift — cause by a weight imbalance at the poles due to a melting of the polar ice caps.”

There’s a producer’s note — which makes me wonder if this was planned to be released in 2005, before the 2012 event and in a time when polar shift theory was at its height — that says “In the thirty years since this documentary was filmed, much of the polar ice has melted — and continues to melt at an increasing rate. Thirty years ago, Earth scientists considered the melting of the polar ice as improbable and without precedent.

Death Is Not the End doesn’t feel fake. It feels like people are being captured in moments of hypnosis. Whether they’re guided to feel this way or they’re really sharing moments of their past and future is up to you, the viewer. It feels way too raw to be either improv or scripted.

I can’t even tell you how overjoyed I am to get this movie, and I am beyond thankful that it was sent to me. I wish it had a bigger potential audience than just movie nerds like me, as I can’t even see this being something a boutique label would release. But in a world where we can find everything within seconds online, the fact that some films remain hard to find — and therefore occult — is something that keeps me alive.

As bas as the world seems like it can be, we also live somewhere that the real creator of Gilligan’s Island can make an unseen movie about past and future lives, as well as an end of the world that never came.

Notes on the people who made this:

Richard Michaels directed the film and began his career as a summer assistant to legendary New York sportscaster Marty Glickman before becoming a script supervisor. He also directed episodes of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and The Odd Couple, and produced Bewitched, a show he would direct for 55 episodes.

That show would change his life, as he and star Elizabeth Montgomery fell in love during the show’s eighth year, breaking up her marriage to William Asher and his to Kristina Hansen. They were together for two and a half years.

The rest of his career was spent in TV, mostly directing TV movies such as The Plutonium Incident and Scared Straight! Another Story, Heart of a Champion: The Ray Mancini Story, Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean and many more.

The music comes from Mort Garson, who wrote the song “Our Day Will Come,” which is on the soundtrack of Grease 2, More American Graffiti, Under the Boardwalk, Shag, Buster, She’s Out of Control, Love Field, The Story of Marie and Julien, You Should Have Left and Role Play. He was part of The Zodiac’s Cosmic Sounds, a 1967 concept album released by Elektra Records that had early use of the Moog synthesizer by Paul Beaver (“a Scientologist, a right-wing Republican, unmarried and a bisexual proponent of sexual liberation” who helped build Keith Emerson’s custom polyphonic Moog modular synthesizer, did the sound effects for The Magnetic Monster and composed the score for The Final Programme) with music written by Garson, words by Jacques Wilson and narration by folk musician and Fireside Theater producer Cyrus Faryar, all with instruments played by members of the Wrecking Crew studio collective, such as Emil Richards, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, Bud Shank and Mike Melvoin.

Garson was an early adopter of Moog, which makes me like him even if he wrote the theme song for Dondi. He also wrote the song “Beware! The Blob!” for the Larry Hagman-directed sequel and scored René Cardona Jr.’s Treasure of the Amazon, Paul Leder’s Vultures and Juan López Moctezuma’s To Kill a Stranger.

Plus, his song as The Zodiac, “Taurus – The Voluptuary,” also shows up in several gay adult films of the early 70s, including the Satanic-themed Born to Raise Hell, which also uses his songs “Black Mass,” “The Ride of Aida (Voodoo),” “Incubus” and “Solomon’s Rising.”

Garson was also Lucifer, the electronic artist who released Black Mass — also called Black Mass Lucifer — that AllMusic reviewer Paul Simpson says is “a soundtrack-like set of haunting Moog-based pieces which interpret various supernatural and demonic themes.”

Cinematographer Alan Stensvold also shot Bigfoot and Wildboy for The Astral Factor, Dimension 5, Cyborg 2087, Thunder Road, and the TV show Dusty’s Trail, where he had to have met Elroy Schwartz, who created the show with his brother Sherwood.

This movie was edited by Joan and Larry Heath. While Joan has no other credits, Larry has an extensive portfolio of work on TV, including 106 episodes of Rhoda, 46 of Simon & Simon, the film Billy Jack and episodes of Gilligan’s Island and Dusty’s Trail, where he also met Schwartz.

Notes on the production and distribution companies:

Schwartz’s Writer’s First only lists this movie and episodes of the show Dusty’s Trail as released productions.

Dona Productions seems made just to distribute this film,

Libert Films International was seemingly was a tax shelter used to distribute films like Rum Runners, Angela, Encounter with the Unknown, The Great Masquerade, My Brother Has Bad Dreams, Mario Bava’s Roy Colt & Winchester Jack, The Devil With Seven Faces, Never Too Young to Rock, Willy & Scratch, Charlie Rich: The Silver Fox in Concert, Beyond Belief and Stevie, Samson and Delilah. Ron Libert was the CEO of this company and Apollo Productions and was part of American Pictures Corporation, along with Robert J. Emery, who directed the Claudia Jennings-starring Willy & Scratch.

Cougar Pictures, which picked this up in 1977. also distributed The Flesh of the Orchid, Starbird and Sweet William, Scream, Evelyn, Scream! and another Libert pick-up, Beyond Belief.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2025: Lord Shango (1975)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Birth Year (1975)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

Jenny (Marlene Clark from Ganja and Hess) wants to have a baby with boyfriend Memphis (Wally Taylor), so she does what any reasonable woman does when she has reached a point of desperation—she goes to get baptized, turning to God to hopefully fulfill her wish. And just to be extra sure, she takes her grown daughter Billie (Avis McCarther) down to the river to get dunked as well. But Billie’s boyfriend Femi (Bill Overton) follows a different deity, Shango. When Femi prevents Billie’s baptism, the deacons take matters into their own hands, drowning Femi while the congregation watches in horror.

From here, things get even stranger as Billie mourns Femi so hard that she thinks Memphis is Femi back from the dead, and getting pregnant by Memphis, which of course infuriates Jenny (this melodramatic soap opera histrionics is what I love to see in my horror movie). Billie runs away and Jenny turns to the cult of Shango for assistance (you know, since the Christianity experiment did not turn out so well). The battle for Billie’s soul becomes a spiritual conflict that would rival any wizard battle found in a Shaw Brothers film.

Lord Shango might be lacking in traditional horror elements, but supernatural forces are definitely at play here. And there is an interesting look into religion. It might be easy to believe that Jenny turns her back on God after the incident at the baptism, but the truth is Jenny had never actually accepted Christ into her heart. It was all a show in an attempt to manipulate God into giving her what she wanted. It did not work, because Christianity does not work that way. It is not a genie in a bottle. But by embracing a Yoruba, perhaps even a voodoo, religion, you might see some quicker results, albeit not necessarily the results you hoped for or expected. Jenny might get more than she bargained for, but she does not seem to mind.

I’ve seen Lord Shango described as Blaxsploitation. Here is yet another example of a film with an all black cast categorized as such. I love Blaxsploitation films, but Lord Shango does not belong next to Truck Turner. There are really no exploitation themes found here. Just simply a supernatural horror/drama that deserves to be seen by more people. I just would not want viewers to be disappointed if they were expecting something else. It really is closer to Ganja and Hess. A great, if not emotionally draining, potential double feature.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Kiss of the Tarantula (1975)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Kiss of the Tarantula was on Chiller Theater on Saturday. November 22, 1980 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, August 6, 1983 at 1:00 a.m.

Also known as Death Kisses and Shudder, this gender and species swapped cover version of Willard is all about Susan Bradley, a little girl who can control spiders, which she does to kill her mother — well, she was gonna kill daddy — before taking out anyone else who displeases her. Susan really loves her spiders — to the point that one scene almost suggests that she loves them biblically. Oh 1975, what a magical time you were to be alive.

The big issue is Walter, Susan’s creepy uncle and a dirty cop. He has evidence that his niece has killed at least two people, but he covers it up and even kills to protect her, all so he can get the chance to aardvark with this little arachnophile. Guess what? She’s not a habit of it. Oh yeah — Walter was also sleeping with her mom and helping her plan to murder his own brother. Whew!

You kind of have to love a movie where a little girl kills an entire VW worth of teenagers at the drive-in. This movie checks almost all the boxes for our site: murderous children and animals gone wild. If only there was an acid sequence, a Satanic ritual and George Eastman dressed as a big hairy tarantula.

Writer and producer Daniel Cady would go on from this to write and produce several adult films, such as Soft Places, Reflections and Tomboy under the name William Dancer. He also produced the regional shocker Dream No Evil.m ader Chris Munger would also direct Black Starlet and The Year of the Communes, a documentary narrated by Rod Steiger.

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE DAY 9: Cross of the Devil (1975)

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October 9. A Horror Film Directed by John Gilling

John Gilling’s first film since leaving Hammer Films in 1967, La Cruz del Diablo was written by Paul Naschy and based on three short stories by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. He gave the project to writer Juan Jose Porto, who cut him out, as did Gilling, who didn’t like his acting. He won a lawsuit and his name is on the movie, but he felt that what he wanted to make had been ruined.

Alfred Dawson (Ramiro Oliveros) has been dreaming of the Knights Templar attacking a woman. Is it all the drugs he smokes or is this a vision of his sister Justine being in danger? Well, by the time he arrives in Spain, she’s dead, and now he has to go to the ruins of the Templar castle, which does not seem like a good idea. There, he meets the woman from his dreams, Beatriz (Emma Cohen) and a magic sword.

This doesn’t have the lunacy of a Blind Dead movie, but it does have some drone doom going for it. I wanted to love it, but just liked it. That said, I don’t hate the time I spent watching it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Deliver Us From Evil (1975)

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The trailer for this movie claims that it’s “a movie that tells it like it is about blacks. The beautiful blacks. The evil blacks.”

It’s also a movie that’s preaching to its audience about ending the drugs and violence in black communities to the point that it moves from blacksploitation to Godsploitation. It starts with Chris Townes (Renny Roker and yes, he is related to Al) going shithouse in a room full of glass vases and getting sent to a psychiatric ward where he screams at people. When he gets out, he has to deal with the worst white people ever at work and back home with his landlord. Maybe he can get with Mindy (Marie O’Henry), a social worker who he has a crush on. Well, when he drives her home, his maniacal skills behind the wheel show her that yes, Chris is a dangerous human being to be avoided.

Chris needs to get with Mindy, so he decides to start being nice to the wheelchair-bound Little Joe (Danny Martin) to prove how nice a guy he is. But then it is revealed that Mindy is married, and Chris uses Little Joe to meet her friend Kim (Kandi Keath) because this movie flies through character, and at the same time, black on black crime is out of control to the point that it appears in this movie and is moralized over more than a day of Fox News.

But you know, I kind of love this as it ends with Chris looking directly at us, the audience, and demanding that a million black men march on Washington 18 years before that happened. And then this title comes up:

The tagline for this movie was “Our streets… nightmares! Our neighborhoods… execution chambers! Look what we’re doing to ourselves!” 

Director and writer Horace Jackson had some talent. Sure, this movie is all over the place, but there’s a scene where criminals beat up Mindy that is really artistic. And sadly, it could still be made today and be completely relevant. You could watch this and laugh at how silly and earnest it is, or you could look at it as a filmmaker using all of the tools that he had to get out a message that he believed in.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Demon Witch Child (1975)

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Like nearly every other genre director in the Old Country, Amando De Ossorio had a possession movie in him and if their films feel purer than their American counterparts, it may be because they’re all true believers, raised in countries that had way more religion in their blood than the freer — and yet often more repressed — New World.

Our titular demon witch child is possessed by a witch named Mother Gautère (Kali Hansa) who starts this movie off by destroying a church, stealing a chalice and killing herself in the name of Satan by jumping out of a police station window rather than revealing where the baby she’s kidnapped is, telling the forces of law and order that the child would be dead by the time they found it. Meanwhile, young Susan (Marián Salgado), the daughter of head inspector Barnes (Angel del Pozo) is given a pendant that instantly begins her possession. Avoid all gifts from hippies as you would tanis root from old Hollywood actors.

Perhaps she can be saved by Father Juan (Julian Mateos), the priest who left behind love and condemned a good woman to a broken heart and a life on the streets? Or maybe the maid Anne (Lone Fleming) can get through to her. Well, no on either account and young Susan neatly slices off the penis of Anne’s lover and presents it to her in a napkin, along with crawling the walls like a prepubescent Dracula.

What strange coincidence that when The Exorcist came to Spain, Salgado was the voice of Linda Blair.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Delinquent Schoolgirls (1975)

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Homosexual fashion designer Bruce Wilson (Stephen Strucker, Johnny the air traffic controller from Airplane!), sexed up Dick Peters (Bob Minor) and Carl C. Clooney (Michael Pataki) escape the insane asylum and work their way into a girls’ school. Still, instead of this being a revengeomatic, it’s a comedy.

The Delinquent School Girls cut of this film missed the first half hour and all of George “Buck” Flower’s scenes that were in the Carnal Madness version. It was also released in the UK as Scrubbers 2 to cash in on the girl school movie Scrubbers and as Sizzlers as part of a double feature with Intimate Games.

Directed by Greg Corarito (who directed The Sadistic Hypnotist and Hard On the Trail, the adult film that sent Lash LaRue on a journey of redemption), who wrote the movie with John Lamb (Mondo Keyhole, Zodiac Killer), Maurie Smith (who wrote Recruits and Julie Darling), it starts with the men visiting the farm of Earl (George “Buck” Flower) and his wife Ellie (Julie Gant), who ends up in bed with Dick, a former baseball play r. Then, it’s off to the school where the girls end up kicking their asses more often than not, and Pataki gets to show his skill at impressions.

As for the girls, there’s Colleen Brennan (AKA Sharon Kelly, Olga Vault; she’s also in Supervixens and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS), magazine starlet Roberta Pedon and several attractive actresses who made this their only movie.  Brennan said of this movie, “I always wondered how anybody managed to pull a movie out of that reeking pile of short ends.”

You can watch this on Midnight Pulp.

September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama 2025: The Devil’s Rain! (1975)

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September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre, September 19 and 20, 2025. Two big nights with four feature films each night include:

  • Friday, September 19: Mark of the Devil, The Sentinel, The Devil’s Rain and Devil Times Five
  • September 20: The Omega Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Grindhouse Releasing 4K restoration drive-in premiere of S.F. Brownrigg’s Scum of the Earth and Eaten Alive

Admission is $15 per person each night (children 12 and under – accompanied by an adult guardian – are admitted free). Overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $20 a person per night. Advance online tickets (highly recommended) for both movies and camping here: https://www.riversidedrivein.com/shop/

 

The Devil’s Rain! is a movie that could only have been made in 1975. It united old Hollywood royalty, television stars, the visionary director of The Abominable Dr. Phibes and the Church of Satan in the Mexican desert.

It is not a perfect movie. You can’t even say that it has plot holes, as that would require something of a coherent plot—a fact director Robert Fuest was all too aware of. On the sparkling commentary track that accompanies the new Blu-ray release from Severin (picked up from the Dark Sky DVD release), he speaks about discussions with the writers (Gabe Essoe, James Ashton and Gerald Hopman, whose only credit is co-producing Evilspeak, so one assumes that he is Satan) where they assured him that the script made perfect sense. While Fuest claims that he did what he could to clear up his issues with the film, a movie that effectively decimated his promising directorial career emerged.

But you know what? I embrace plot holes the way some critics hold dearly onto their Criterion collection films and back issues of Premiere. There’s no way I can be objective about The Devil’s Rain! The only box it doesn’t check for me is a disclaimer stating that it’s based on a true story.

The film begins with close-ups of Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, along with the wails of the damned as they gnash their teeth in Hell. Then, we’re dropped into the lives of the Preston family, who have suffered under a curse for hundreds of years.

Turns out that at some point in the 18th century, the family screwed over Jonathan Corbis (Ernest Borgnine, Escape from New York), a Satanist who was eventually burned at the stake. He had a book containing the souls of all he had damned, which was stolen by Martin Fyfe (William Shatner, who I don’t need to tell you anything else about). Before he dies, Corbis vows revenge on the Fyfe family, which changes its name to Preston. He’s been stealing them one by one, selling their souls to Satan and trapping them in the devil’s rain. They then become living wax figures with melting eyes and black robes.

That’s how we meet Steve Preston, the leader of the family, who has escaped Corbis to warn his wife  (Ida Lupino, an actress and director known for noir classics like The Bigamist and On Dangerous Ground. She often referred to herself as the poor man’s Bette Davis, as she was usually offered the parts that Davis had turned down. She refused those parts so many times that Warner Bros. suspended her, so she used that time to learn the craft of directing on set. As roles for her slowed, she became the second female director admitted to the Director’s Guild, following Dorothy Arzner, the sole woman director of Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”) and son, Mark (also Shatner). As the old man tells them to return the Book of Souls, he melts in the rain.

So what does Mark do? He takes the book directly to Corbis, challenging him to a battle of faith in the desert. That battle quickly turns into Mark trying to escape, but Corbis’ disciples are too much for him. He shows a cross to the priest, who transforms it into a snake before using a ritual to erase Mark’s memory in preparation for a major ceremony.

Oh, the 1970s — when your main character gets wiped out minutes into a movie because he has to leave town for a three-day Star Trek convention in New York. That really happened, and I have no idea if that was why Shatner went from hero to geek in such record time.

Mark’s older brother Tom (Tom Skerritt, Alien) and his wife, Julie, must save the day. Oh yeah — they also have Dr. Sam Richards (Eddie Albert from TV’s Green Acres) along for the ride, as he’s a psychic researcher.

Finding Corbis’ church, Mark watches the ceremony that converts his brother into a wax follower. Anton LaVey shows up under a hood, and Corbis turns into a goat, which is an event that sent me scrambling through our living room in a paroxysm of glee. The Severin release also contains interviews with the Church of Satan’s High Priest Peter H. Gilmore, High Priestess Peggy Nadramia and LaVey’s wife and biographer Blanche Barton, all of whom share anecdotes of the Black Pope’s time on the set (indeed, it seems to be a madcap time by studying the photos they show, with LaVey in a jaunty leather cap smiling like a child on Walpurgisnacht) and input on the film. He’s nearly caught, but also discovers that the source of Corbis’ power is the devil’s rain, a glass bottle containing the souls that the priest has captured.

But wait — if he has the devil’s rain, why did he need the book? If he came back to life, why does he need revenge? Look — perhaps these questions will derail your enjoyment of The Devil’s Rain! But not me.

During the final battle — the film moves incredibly fast, making ninety minutes feel like half an hour — the devil’s rain is destroyed by Mark, who finds his lost humanity. Then, it starts to rain.

I love how the advertising for this film states that this is “absolutely the most incredible ending of any motion picture ever!” They aren’t lying. Corbis and his followers melt for nearly ten minutes of special effects, turning into piles of goop. It’s over the top and ridiculous and extraneous and totally awesome. I use this kind of scene to determine if I can be friends with someone. If you dismiss it, you’ll never share a beer with me.

Producer Sandy Howard (who was also responsible for Meteor, Blue Monkey and the A Man Called Horse series) based his whole ad campaign around the end of the film, so he took over the final cut to ensure that this sequence would last and last.

Tom and his wife — whose ESP is the sole reason we can see the flashbacks to know why Corbis is doing what he does — make it out alive, but as he embraces his wife, we know that he’s really hugging Ernest Borgnine! Where’s his wife? Trapped in the devil’s rain, in a scene that comes back at the end of the credits that is harrowing as she looks out into the darkness with no hope.

Is The Devil’s Rain! a good movie? Well, that depends on your perspective. Despite the flimsy plot, Fuest succeeds at delivering plenty of pure weirdness and gorgeous visuals. And there’s so much talent on the screen — I didn’t even mention that this is one of John Travolta’s first films and that Keenan Wynn (Piranha, Laserblast) shows up as the sheriff.

Plus, like all 70s occult movies, plenty of legends are behind the film. Like Ernest Borgnine claiming that there were so many accidents on set that he’d never work on a Satanic movie again. Or he was saying that the Mafia produced the film and that he was never paid. Cinefantastique magazine even wrote that Fuest had suffered a nervous breakdown during the making of the movie, a fact he disputes on the commentary track. And LaVey claimed that he did a special success ritual for Travolta.

PS – Here’s the link to a June 1975 Argosy interview with LaVey during the filming of The Devil’s Rain! where he discusses buying the panties of “MGM’s most famous stars- from Greer Garson to Liz Taylor – with the labels still on them,” being minimized on movie sets and Ernest Borgnine accepting an honorary priesthood.

Here’s a drink:

Fell Out of Heaven

1 oz. amaretto
1 oz. Malibu rum
1 oz. Midori
6 oz. pineapple juice

Pour all ingredients over ice. Stir and say these words: “O Mighty light and burning flame of comfort, enter this body and cleanse it of its unworthy soul.” Drink.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: If You Don’t Stop It…You’ll Go Blind!!! (1975)

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Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”

Vincent Canby said it was, “a collection of witless blackout sketches dealing with infidelity, wedding nights, impotence and masturbation, played by a small cast of not very talented actors.”

Gene Siskel called it a “sleazy, unfunny sec comedy” that was so bad that a no refunds sign was posted.

It was a dog of the week five years after it was released because it had staying power.

Yes, it’s If You Don’t Stop It…You’ll Go Blind!!!, which was followed by Can I Do It…’Til I Need Glasses? Directed by Keefe Brasselle, the star of The Eddie Cantor Story, who plays himself in this, and I. Robert Levy, the idea is that there’s the World Society of Sexual Arts and Science, and each year, they give away the World Sex Awards. You know, the Dildies.

Tallie Cochrane was out of town, and when she returned, her husband allowed producer Michael Callie to film in their home. The production crew saw her and asked who she was. She said, “I live here.” When the actress no-showed her nude scene, Tallie ended up being the woman stuck on the toilet seat. She was also in Wam Bam Thank YoU Spaceman.

67 punchlines in 79 minutes, and a few of them hit. This does have Pat McCormick as the master of ceremonies for the awards. Patrick Wright is in this, too. He’s Mr. Peterbuilt in Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens and in Track of the Moon Beast. There’s also George Spencer from Massage Parlor Murders! and Garth Pillsbury from Malibu High and Vixen.

A lot of reviews of this movie say that most of the cast were one-and-done actresses just in it for nudity, but they didn’t look into the depths as deep as I did. Maybe I wasted my time. You tell me.

First off, Uschi Digard is in it as “various big-breasted characters.” She’s in the king of these movies, The Kentucky Fried Movie, as one of the Catholic high school girls in trouble. She’s also one of the most recognizable softcore (and later hardcore) actresses of all time.

There’s also Jane Kellem, who was in The Thing With Two Heads; Herb Graham, one of the white gangsters from The Human Tornado; Alan Sinclair from The Goddaughter and Deep Love; Lew Horn, who was an MC in plenty of things and is a game show host in this one; Russ Marin from The Sword and the Sorcerer; Barry Cooper, who was in Fear No Evil and The Witch Who Came from the Sea; Leon Charles, Boss in The Candy Snatchers; Ina Gold, who had various old lady roles in everything from The Day of the Locust to The Silent Scream; Thelma Pelish, who was also in The Silent Scream; adult actress Maria Arnold, who was in Fantasm, Country Hooker and Meatcleaver Massacre; William Hartman, a dialogue coach on Can’t Stop the Music who is also in Steel and St. Helens; Sandy Dempsey, in a ton of adult as Terry Rich, Darlene Saunders, Tiffany Stewart, and Cora Cuze and Jim Drigger, the hanging priest in The Beastmaster.

Then again, this does feature Becky Sharpe, who played adult roles as Joan Brooks, Mona Leasah, Holly Bridges, Dora Douche, and Mona Poll, as well as appeared in Curse of the Headless Horseman as Rebecca Pearlman. Mary Miller, one of the dancers, was in Raw Force and Tiger Commando. And Cathy Hall, one of the girls who sings the song about being a prostitute, was on the season 7, episode 13 Unsolved Mysteries, attending a seance with James Van Praagh.

Who else? Michael Flood, who was in Criminally Insane and .357 Magnum; Nancy Frechtling, who did makeup for both Supervan and The Van; Doug Frey, who was in Five Loose Women and Drop Out Wife; Brenda Fogerty from Fantasm and Trip With the Teacher; Charla Hall, who was in Vice Squad Women and Lemora; Kathy Hilton, who was in Invasion of the Bee Girls and was also Joanne Stevens, Lacy Stewart and Judy Pilot (she was shot by her boyfriend in what was claimed to be a suicide pact which she denied; it caused lifelong seizures that ended her career, but she does show up as Show-Me, the same character name she used in Heads or Tails in the 1986 adult film Honey Buns); Bebe Kelly, the schoolteacher who loves snakes in Fangs; Gary Leibman, a sound guy on The Last House On the Left; Hal Miller, the second actor to play Mr. Gordon on Sesame Street; Gene Stowell from Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? and Rod Hasne, who was The Flash on the Legends of the Super Heroes TV special.

The jokes are rough — sex is a pain in the ass for a gay man -some will absolutely leave you angry if you are too young to remember dirty joke paperbacks. Otherwise, you can watch it as a time capsule of a dirtier yet more innocent time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Bug (1975 )

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Bug was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find any info on the date. Do you know?

Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by William Castle and Thomas Page, based on Page’s novel The Hephaestus Plague, this is the last film Castle would make.

Bradford Dillman spent so much of the 70s at war with nature. Now he’s Professor James Parmiter, whose wife (Joanna Miles) dies spectacularly when one of these fire farting cockroaches gets into her hair and then her ear. He keeps one of the bugs alive and experiments on it. But before you know it, he can talk to the insects and breeds them with other bugs to make them more intelligent than humans. Why would you do this?

Miles was afraid of cockroaches and told Szwarc that she couldn’t do the scene. Castle told them they were harmless and put one on his arm. It then bit him.

Castle wanted a gimmick. First, he thought of putting brushes — like windshield wipers — near the seats that would rub against the audience’s legs to make them feel like bugs were crawling on them. Theater owners turned him down, so he insured the giant cockroach for $1 million.

This sets more than a woman’s head on fire. It also cooks a cat and starts a fire inside the Brady Bunch house.

Unlike every disaster movie, this starts with an earthquake and gets worse from there. Ken Middleham was the man to go to for directing insects, as he also directed Phase IV — this is like that movie, but almost relentlessly stupid, and I say that with pure love — and The Hellstrom Chronicle.

This starts with trucks and people going up in an inferno and ends with Bradford Dillman, a diving helmet and bugs who spell things. It’s so goofy yet so earnest, a movie unaware of how dumb it gets, and those are the best kinds of movies because they’re not dull – and that’s what I look for.