EDITOR’S NOTE: Creature from Black Lake was on Chiller Theater on Saturday. August 7, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

If I’ve learned anything from my week of watching Bigfoot movies, it’s that Yankees aren’t wanted in the places where Bigfoot resides. You can also rewrite that sentence to cover that city folks aren’t wanted when Bigfoot decides to walk on through Western Pennsylvania or Southeastern Ohio.

This one is all about two dudes: Rives (John David Carson, Empire of the Ants) and Pahoo (Dennis Fimple, House of 1000 Corpses). That’s right, Pahoo. Dennis Fimple was 36 when he played this young twenty-something just back from ‘Nam and looking for something, anything, maybe even Bigfoot. Rives is more concerned with hamburgers, fries and Cokes. And oh yeah, redhead goddesses. Well, everyone gets what they want in Black Lake.

You get a lot of character actors in here, like Western star Dub Taylor as Grandpa Bridges, Bill Thurman whose career stretches from The Last Picture Show to Mountaintop Motel Massac, re, and Jack Elam, who is the best part of this film as the tracker Joe Canton.

Elam lost an eye to a sharpened pencil at a Boy Scout meeting as a child (he also literally grew up picking cotton) before serving in WW II, becoming a studio accountant and even managing the Bel Air Hotel in LosWorld Warngeles. A character actor in numerous gangster and Western films, as well as TV, Elam came up with a quote that many have stolen over the years in relation to how Hollywood sees people. He said that casting directors about him:

• Stage 1: “Who is Jack Elam?”
• Stage 2: “Get me Jack Elam.”
• Stage 3: “I want a Jack Elam type.”
• Stage 4: “I want a younger Jack Elam.”
• Stage 5: “Who is Jack Elam?”

He shows up in some crazy roles, such as Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing in the Cannonball Run films and in The Norseman, Charles B. Pierce’s bonkers ode to Vikings that stars Lee Majors. The film was re-released theatrically in 1982 as part of a multi-film package called “5 Deranged Features.” Also on the bill were Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) (under the title They’re Coming to Get You so perhaps people went thinking they were about to see the American cut of All the Colors of the Dark), The Wizard of Gore under the name House of Torture, Shriek of the Mutilated and The Corpse Grinders under the title Night of the Howling Beast.

If you’re up for seeing college students try to get laid while eating burgers and hunting Bigfoot, then this is probably the exact movie you’re looking for.

What this movie really has going for it is cinematography by Dean Cundey (Halloween, The Fog, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Rock ‘n Roll High School and many, many more great movies). There are some interesting shots, and it’s not your typical dark, swampy seventies affair.

Hakujitsumu is based on a 1926 short story by Junichirō Tanizaki, which explores the nature of reality.

An artist and a young woman are in a dentist’s waiting room, and the man is too shy to even connect with her. In the same examining room, they’re both given an anesthetic as he imagines that she is being abused and tortured and even chased by a vampire. The uncut Dutch version even has a sexually explicit scene during which the woman is digitally attacked by the dentist.

A significant budget example of a pinky violence movie, this film even dared to show female pubic hair, a major cultural crime in Japan. Most instances — even in the most hardcore of films — are digitally fogged or have a mosaic over them.

Director and writer Tetsuji Takechi was nearly 70 when this was made. He’d already filmed Day Dream once before in 1964, after starting his career in kabuki theater and having his own TV show, The Tetsuji Takechi Hour, during which he reinterpreted Japanese stage classics. His next film, 1965’s Black Snow, saw him arrested on indecency charges and embroiled in a public battle over censorship between Japan’s intellectuals and the country’s government. Takechi won the lawsuit, which paved the way for the pinky films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Black Snow may be more controversial for its themes than its sex: its protagonist is a young Japanese man whose mother serves the U.S. military at Yokota Air Base as a prostitute. He’s impotent unless making love with a loaded gun in his hand, and before long, he’s killed a black soldier before being cut down by several Americans. The film is also fiercely nationalist with Americans — most pointedly the black man who is killed — shown to be nothing but sex-wild animals.

In the journal Eiga Geinjutsu, Takechi said, “The censors are getting tough about Black Snow. I admit there are many nude scenes in the film, but they are psychological nude scenes symbolizing the defencelessness of the Japanese people in the face of the American invasion. Prompted by the CIA and the U.S. Army, they say my film is immoral. This is, of course, an old story that has been going on for centuries. When they suppressed Kabuki plays during the Edo period, forbidding women to act, because of prostitution, and young actors, because of homosexuality, they said it was to preserve public morals. In fact, it was a matter of rank political suppression.”

The remake of Day Dream came a full decade after newspapers would not advertise his movies, and the director was only writing. That film is literally Japan’s first hardcore pornographic movie, and it was a big-budget movie played on big screens.

Yet while Westerners see his influence, in Japan, Takechi was an outsider in the mainstream and pinky world, so he’s forgotten. His right-wing politics clash with the protest ethos within other pinky films, so all in all, he’s lost in many ways.

Female star Kyoko Aizome, who plays Chieko, would gain notoriety from this film and become a star in the worlds of feature dancing (being arrested for indecency due to her on-stage behavior) and hard and soft AV (adult video) movies. According to an article on The Bloody Pit of Horror, she had her hymen surgically repaired so she could lose her virginity again on camera and also had her own King Kong vs. Godzilla moment when she starred in Traci Takes Tokyo opposite an underage Traci Lords.

As for the vampires, the dentist’s assistants (Saeda Kawaguchi and Yuri Yaio) have fangs, and the dentist himself is Kwaidan actor Kei Sato, a mainstream talent appearing in a movie that is anything but. Even after Chieko runs over the dentist and decapitates him, he comes back as a traditional film vampire.

After the original movie was made, South Korean director Yu Hyun-mok remade it as Chunmong (Empty Dream) and was arrested because there was a rumored nude scene. There were also rumors that actress Park Su-jeong had been humiliated by appearing naked on the set. The truth was that she wore a body stocking. Supposedly, the Korean film, which was kept off screens until 2004, is a superior piece of surrealist art.

I recall attending a convention and seeing my first Severin booth, and thinking, “If I start buying these movies, I’m never going to stop.”

I can’t always predict the future all that well, but after my first purchase — Dr. Butcher M.D., in case you wondered — I keep buying something from this label almost every single month.

The films of Frederick R. Friedel set, which also includes Axe and Blood Brothers, are just one of many examples of why I love Severin. Not only have they taken a Video Nasty and a drive-in obscurity and made them look better than they ever have before, they’ve also found almost everyone that worked on these films, gotten their side of the story and explained what actually happened before, during and after they were filmed.

Jack Canon, who the credits erroneously refer to as the kidnapped co-ed, plays Eddie Matlock, who is really the kidnapper. He was also in Axe, Maximum Overdrive and Trucker’s Woman. As the film begins, he’s already taking Sandra Morely (Leslie Rivers) captive. Her father puts an enormous ransom out for her return, so other criminals are now after them both to try and get paid.

Also known as Date With a Kidnapper, this is 75 minutes of a movie where things just happen for no reason, with no set-up or explanation. Axe is a movie where nothing happens for long stretches of time, whereas this is the opposite: a movie where all kinds of things happen, and the Stockholm syndrome is in full effect — although the kidnapper isn’t truly the villain he seems to be at the beginning.

This film looks gorgeous, getting every cent of its budget on the screen, and was shot by Austin McKinney, who worked on all sorts of genre films, from shooting Boris Karloff’s four Mexican films (The Snake People, House of Evil, Isle of the Snake People and Alien Terror), Hot Summer in Barefoot County, Getting It On and Jaws 3-D to being part of the sound crew on Hellraiser III and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child to working on the special effects team on movies like Beastmaster 2, Escape from New York, Battle Beyond the Stars, Sorceress and The Terminator. He was even the uncredited editor for The Beast of Yucca Flats and the production manager for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

You can get this from Severin.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Keeper was on the CBS Late Movie on December 19, 1985.

Christopher Lee is The Keeper, the crippled administrator of a secluded and exclusive mental hospital known as Underwood Asylum. It’s where the richest and most well-known families in British Columbia send their mentally disturbed relatives for care. Yet these families are killed off en masse, with their insane relatives suddenly becoming relatively well-off. Dick Driver (Tell Schreiber) is the detective — Triple D, as it were — who is out to find out what’s happening.

In a 1976 interview shared on Reeling Back, Lee had praise for this low-budget movie shot in Vancouver, saying, “I’ve never come across a story quite like this one. The character is extremely well-written. It has so many different sides to it that I said to my wife when I read it, “Here, this is good.” I gave it to her to read, and she said, “Yes, it’s perfect.” I said, “I’m going to do this. I’d like to do this very much.” The story itself appealed to me as a story. One of the major reasons, if not the major reason, I accept a role is because of what the story is and what the story is about.”

Three years later, he was asked of the film in this article: “It was a little movie. Drake directed it on a $135,000 budget, 60 percent of which came from the federal government’s Canadian Film Development Corporation. After Lee had returned to London, “I received a letter from British Equity, passing along a letter from Canadian Equity, advising me not to do the picture. ‘They were concerned because it was a completely non-union project.” The film, one that had appealed to Lee, “because it was an original idea, totally original,” has never been released. “An actor never goes into a picture with the knowledge that it’s going to be a disaster,” he said. “I always hope for the best, and work to do my best for the producers””

The Keeper sat unwatched for nearly a decade before being sold to TV, and in 1985, nine years after its release, it aired on the CBS Late Movie. It was released on VHS.

Directed and written by Canadian singer-songwriter, film director, and screenwriter T.Y. Drake (who would go on to write Terror Train), this film features the detective sending his assistant, Mae B. Jones (Sally Drake) is undercover at the sanitarium, where Lee is putting his patients through their worst fears because, well, he loves to watch that. Then, Dick commits himself to learning more. If you could explain to me what The Keeper’s plan is and how he’s supposed to make it all happen, I’d be so happy.

You can find this movie, but it’s as close to a lost one as there is these days. However, it’s by no means a discovery. It’s…something. I mean, I had fun with it, but as this site should prove to you, I have a distinct lack of taste.