“To Serve Man” is a 1962 episode of the television series The Twilight Zone. The episode is one of the best remembered from the series.

The story is based on the 1950 short story “To Serve Man”, written by Damon Knight and was adapted for the small screen by Rod Serling, the series’ creator, himself, as was often the case. The title is a play on the verb serve, which has a dual meaning of “to assist” and “to provide as a meal.” The episode is one of the few instances in the series wherein an actor breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewing audience at the episode’s end.

Rod Serling’s traditional to-camera introduction sets the scene:

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal – a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we’re going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone”.

It is the present day and Earth has been visited by the Kanamits, an alien race seemingly only created for one purpose – to help others, in this case, Mankind. With their advanced technology, they reveal they have previously visited other worlds to solve their problems and are now here to do the same: specifically, they have a quick solution to world famine, cheap and clean energy sources and the ability to create force fields between territories, essentially ending all wars. Continuing to address the assembled United Nations, they apparently ask for nothing in return, sending alarm bells ringing for some, offering hope for many.

The visitors mistakenly leave behind an item after the address, a book written in an unknown language. After some time, the title is cracked: ‘To Serve Man’. This is enough for huge numbers of people, including decoder Michael Chambers (Lloyd Bochner, also in The Dunwich Horror, Amazing Mr No Legs) to book their flights on Kanamit ships to journey to their home world and, presumably, Utopia. Meanwhile, Chambers’ assistant, Patty (Susan Cummings, Swamp Women) continues to try to translate the rest of the text and, alas just as the space craft is blasting-off, discovers there was a rather elementary misunderstanding in the book’s title. Chambers, addressing the television audience, bemoans his fate – Rod Serling concludes in typical manner:

“The recollections of one Michael Chambers with appropriate flashbacks and soliloquy. Or more simply stated, the evolution of man. The cycle of going from dust to dessert. The metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone’s soup. It’s tonight’s bill of fare from The Twilight Zone”.

The episode is best remembered for the distinctive appearance of the Kanamits, their spokesman played by Richard Kiel (Eegah; James Bond baddie Jaws, The Humanoid) in a very early screen role and the shocking reveal at the end of the episode, which has been much mimicked since. The original story was by Damon Knight, best known for his science fiction work and was written in 1950 – it can be found in the collection “The Best of Damon Knight”. The aliens in the story differ completely from those created by Serling resembling pigs in the original text. Serling created a slightly docile-appearing creature, partly due to their communication being by thought than actual speech, and partly due to their heavy eye-lids and huge domed craniums. Decked in flowing robes and on the frame of the 7’2″ Kiel, the effect was the perfect balance of veiled benevolent/malevolent, with no further clues given to the audience.

There is a slight prat-fall with Serling’s version, the decoding of the alien runes being surely impossible; Knight allows for a modest Kanamit/human dictionary to allow conversation to allow for the eventual translation. Whether to double meaning of ‘to serve’ would survive is another matter entirely.

The full-size lower portion of the Kanamits’ transport spaceship is the adapted version, with retractable stairway, of the saucer-shaped United Planets Cruiser C-57D, seen in the MGM film Forbidden Planet (1956). The ship used for the episode is also seen on the episode “Third from the Sun”, and shots of the ship or stairway also appear in the episodes “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby”, “The Invaders”, and “Death Ship”.

Stock footage from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was also used in the episode for the shots of the Kanamit spaceship arriving in New York City (although landmarks of Washington, DC, are seen).

The Kanamit ship seen taking off near the end of the episode is the distinctive Ray Harryhausen-animated ship from the film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956).

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia.

‘The name written in blood!’

Eegah is a 1962 American sci-fi fantasy horror film written by Bob Wehling. It stars Arch Hall, Jr. (The Sadist), Arch Hall, Sr. (who directed as Nicholas Merriwether, co-produced The Thrill Killers; and wrote The Corpse Grinders), Marilyn Manning and Richard Kiel in the titular role, the same year he was in the classic Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’. 7 foot two inch tall Kiel would go on to appear in House of the Damned (1963) twice play Jaws, a James Bond villain, star in Italian sci-fi film The Humanoid (1979) and play ghost Captain Howdy in horror spoof Hysterical (1982).

Assistant cameraman Ray Dennis Steckler appears in the picture as Mr. Fischer, the man at the hotel who is thrown at the pool near the end. Steckler made his directing debut the next year in the Arch Hall Jr. vehicle, Wild Guitar. Steckler’s first independent feature, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies was later distributed by Fairway-International, owned by Arch Hall, Sr.

Eegah is often cited as being one of the worst films of all time but there are many worse.

Plot teaser:

One night after shopping, Roxy Miller (Marilyn Manning) is driving to a party through the California desert when she nearly runs her car into Eegah (Richard Kiel), a giant cave man. She tells her boyfriend Tom Nelson (Arch Hall, Jr.), and her father Robert Miller (Arch Hall, Sr.) about the giant. Her father, a writer of adventure books, decides to go into the desert to look for the creature and possibly take a photograph of it.

When his helicopter ride fails to show up at his designated pickup time, Tom and Roxy go looking for him but the latter is soon kidnapped by Eegah and taken back to his cave…

Reviews:

“Eegah! is considered by many to be the worst movie ever made. We think we’ve seen worse, but there’s no denying that Arch Hall Sr’s caveman epic is among the most poorly made motion pictures of all time. Hall cast himself, his son, and his secretary in the lead roles, and all three of them are low on talent. The only person involved with this film that has any scrap of talent whatsoever is Richard Kiel…” Shameface.com

” … bad movie fans have a special place in their hearts for the efforts of the Halls, and for Eegah especially, perhaps because of the deeply emotional reverberations it leaves in the minds of all who see it. Or maybe because it’s a good laugh.” The Spinning Image

“Terrible in all the right ways, Eegah is about as bottom of the barrel as they come but no less enjoyable for it if you’re in the right frame of mind. It’s not often a movie combines dune buggies, rock n roll, cavemen and helicopters in on ninety minute mainline hit of celluloid weirdness, but here it is. Hall’s typically clunky direction is on display and the film’s miniscule budget shows throughout (Eegah lives in a cave that appears to be made out of a dirty drop cloth!). Kiel is actually well cast as the grunting caveman and not entirely unsympathetic in his part, while Arch Jr. is as dopey and as goofy as they come, singing his way through the movie with nary a care in the world.” Ian Jane, DVD Talk

Cast:

• Arch Hall Jr. as Tom Nelson
• Marilyn Manning as Roxy Miller
• Richard Kiel as Eegah
• Arch Hall Sr. as Robert Miller
• Clay Stearns as Band Member
• Bob Davis as George
• Deke Richards as Band Member
• Ron Shane as Detective
• Addalyn Pollitt as George’s Wife
• Lloyd Williams as Kruger
• Ray Dennis Steckler as Mr. Fishman
• Bill Rice as Chef
• Carolyn Brandt as Fishman’s Girl

Wikipedia | IMDb | Internet Archive

Taste of Fear (US title: Scream of Fear) is a 1961 British horror thriller film directed by Seth Holt (Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb), shot in black-and-white by Douglas Slocombe, for Hammer Films. The film stars Susan Strasberg (The Manitou), Ronald Lewis, Ann Todd, and Christopher Lee, the latter, one of Hammer’s most bankable stars, in a supporting role.

Christopher Lee has been quoted as saying: “Taste of Fear was the best film that I was in that Hammer ever made… It had the best director, the best cast and the best story.” To “drag it back to reality” (his words in the film), Lee’s French accent doesn’t work.

Plot teaser:

A young paralysed woman (Susan Strasberg) returns to her family home after the mysterious disappearance of her father. She has a cool relationship with her stepmother, while the chauffeur helps her to investigate the father’s disappearance.

During the investigations, she finds the father’s corpse in various locations around the house, but it always quickly vanishes again before anyone else sees it.

Reviews:

” … plainly inspired by Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) but offering several neat twists and turns of its own. A superior Hammer movie – from its well-crafted script to its inventive direction and fabulous monochrome cinematography from the great Douglas Slocombe, it features a stand out performance from young star Susan Strasberg as well as great support from Ann Todd and Hammer Studios stalwart Christopher Lee.” Tipping My Fedora

“Scream of Fear doesn’t demonstrate quite the same mastery of its subgenre as earlier Hammer productions demonstrated of gothic or sci-fi-inflected horror in the 1950’s, but it is competitive, on the whole, with any but the best of the similar movies that William Castle would make during the post-Psycho era. Susan Strasberg is one of 60’s psycho-horror’s better damsels in distress, Christopher Lee is wonderfully smarmy (who the hell knew that Lee could do smarm?) as the vaguely but palpably suspect doctor, and Ronald Lewis damn near walks off with the whole movie as a character who repeatedly shows us that we don’t know him nearly as well as we think we do.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

“I usually don’t care for this type of plotting (it requires way too much planning on the part of our heroes, not to mention that any slight deviation on the part of the villains would cause their entire plan to unravel. These people must be chess masters), but at least I was somewhat surprised by the final five minutes. It was still fairly dull, but it’s something.” Horror Movie a Day

“What I find so exceptional about S.O.F. is the fact that even though it is a grounded in reality thriller, it huffs and puffs like a supernatural yarn and is just altogether haunting. The incredible black and white photography is partially to blame but the story itself leaves giant spaces for you to come to your own conclusions at times and you won’t be blamed for suspecting something otherworldly is going down. One scene in particular that involves Dad’s corpse being spied in a swimming pool is just a blaring punch of full-on horror.” Kindertrauma

Writer/producer Jimmy Sangster jokes with actress Susan Strasberg

Cast:

• Susan Strasberg as Penny Appleby
• Ronald Lewis as Bob
• Ann Todd as Jane Appleby
• Christopher Lee as Doctor Gerrard
• John Serret as Inspector Legrand
• Leonard Sachs (The Giant Behemoth; Konga; Doctor Who) as Spratt
• Anne Blake as Marie
• Fred Johnson as Father

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Tops in total horror!’

Cauldron of Blood, also known as Blind Man’s Bluff and El coleccionista de cadáveres, is a 1967 (released 19700 Spanish/American horror film directed by Santos Alcocer (The Orgies of Dr. Orloff) from a screenplay by José Luis Bayonas (The Death Train) and Edward Mann (Island of Terror; The Mutations). It stars Jean-Pierre Aumont (House of the Damned), Boris Karloff, Viveca Lindfors (The Damned; The Hand; Creepshow), Rosenda Monteros, Milo Quesada (Tragic Ceremony), Dyanik Zurakowska (Sexy Cat; The Hanging Woman; The Vampires’ Night Orgy), Rubén Rojo, Manuel de Blas (Assignment Terror) and Jacqui Speed.

Karloff’s role was originally intended for Claude Rains (The Invisible Man; Phantom of the Opera), however the veteran actor died during pre-production. In an interview in Fleapits and Picture Palaces, producer Robert D. Weinbach (The Mutations; Shiver) has also said he considered Basil Rathbone, Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney for the role! In the US, the film was released on a double-bill with Crucible of Horror by Cannon.

Plot teaser:

Claude (Jean-Pierre Aumont), a photo-reporter for ‘Holiday’ magazine travels to Torremolinos in Spain to interview Franz Badulescu, a “doomed” blind sculptor who is working on his magnum opus unaware that the skeletons he has been using for armatures are apparently the remains of the victims of his evil wife Tania (Viveca Lindfors) and that he is the next target…

Buy Cauldron of Blood on Olive Films Blu-ray from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“At the time of its initial release, Cauldron of Blood was generally dismissed by horror fans; Karloff’s role wasn’t prominent enough, his expressive eyes were covered throughout (either by heavy black goggles or a grotesque makeup showing his eyes welded closed), and the modernist style of the film was jarring, its jazzy score (credited to Ray Ellis, though it sounds very much like a Spanish film score of its era) and its garish lighting not in keeping with the traditional qualities found in Karloff’s best pictures. Revisited today, with more familiarity with Spanish horror cinema and its own traditions under our belt, it’s easier to appreciate for what it is — not a good film by any means, but more interesting than previously thought.” Tim Lucas, Video Watchblog

Viveca Lindfors cracks a whip!

“Spliced into this rehash of the wax museum plots are swinging party vignettes, unconvincing red herrings, and pop culture references galore. It’s much more subdued, and consequently duller, than it sounds. However, an out-of-synch diversion comes in the way of a surreal nightmare vignette with Lindfors haunted by psychedelic images of her hubby transformed into a shrunken head (replete with equally psychedelic scoring). Tania undergoes a transformation herself, as a whip-cracking femme Nazi leering after and stalking female victims. Among Tania’s obsessions is Claude’s gal pal Elga (Euro sex kitten Dyanik Zurakowska), and her stalking concludes with a near fatal encounter with a vat of acid (Lindfors and Zurakowska standing in for Lionel Atwill/Fay Wray).” Alfred Eaker, 366 Weird Movies

“… the disconnectedness of the scenes, and the addition of several stylized sequences (including the opening title, and a dream one third through), make everything vaguely surreal. Its enjoyable in spite of itself. Karloff is mostly at the mercy of his fiery wife (Viveca Lindfors, who played a sculptor herself in These Are the Damned). His attractive seaside mansion has dungeons underneath!” David Elroy Goldweber, Claws & Saucers

Buy Claws & Saucers book from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

IMDb | Image credits: Classic Horror Campaign | Wrong Side of the Art!

The Monster Album is a 1964 release on Don Costa’s DCP label. The twelve songs are mostly written by Dickie Goodman and Bill Ramal, though there are also takes on hits of the day, including Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s perennial “Monster Mash. The performers are mostly session musicians, though there are known contributions from prolific songwriter and producer Gary Usher (best known for his work with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys) and Chuck Girard, the singer of both The Castells and The Hondells.

The late 50’s and early 60’s were flooded with ‘novelty’ horror and Halloween-themed albums, in some respects a post-war rejection of fantasy horror as something genuinely frightening and a sign that horror had entered mass public consciousness to the extent that parodies would be widely understood.

Dickie Goodman was an American music and record producer born in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for inventing and using the technique of the “break-in”, an early precursor to sampling that used brief clips of popular records and songs to “answer” comedic questions posed by voice actors on his novelty records. Perhaps the most notorious example of this is “Mr Jaws”, a 1975 parody of Spielberg’s summer blockbuster which inexplicably went to number 4 on the Billboard Top 100.

If anything, The Monster Album is more subtle, though it would be alarming if anything were to compete. The track-listing is as follows:

1. The Ghoul From Ipanema

2. Frankenstein Meets the Beetles

3. Werewolf Waltz

4. Haunted House

5. Monster Mash

6. My Baby Loves Monster Movies

7. Dracula Drag

8. Blood and Butter

9. A Hard Day’s Night

10. Monster Talk

11. Purple People Eater

12. Mambo Mummy

The songs are mostly in a rock ‘n’ roll style but with elements of surf music and hotrod imagery. The ‘adaptations’ are easy to spot – a fleetingly amusing take on “The Girl From Ipanema” and yet another version of Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater”, a song only aped more by “Monster Mash”, which is also here. Beatlesmania certainly influenced the album, the original “Frankenstein Meets The Beetles” (not sure why they changed the spelling)  which sees our favourite animated corpse taking the place of Paul alongside George, John and Ringo on the grounds that they all have the same haircut. The creators were pleased enough with it that they released it as a 7″ single, backed with “Dracula Drag”, probably the best song on the album which sounds eerily like The Ramones’ “Rock n’ Roll High School”. The single was credited to Jekyll and Hyde. The charts remained untroubled.

Elsewhere on the album, “A Hard Day’s Night” is a disgracefully lazy straight read-through of The Beatles’ hit but ‘sung’ by a Boris Karloff sound-a-like (actually, a-sound-a-bit-a-like) and “Blood and Butter” parodied the already ludicrous, “Bread and Butter” by The Newbeats.

The album was housed in one of the most poorly executed sleeves of all-time, a pitiful rendering of classic movie monsters plonked on a crudely-drawn graveyard backdrop. The album has never been issued on CD and partly due to the Gary Usher connection, now commands, incredibly, three-figure sums on internet auction sites.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

‘Behind the tents and tinsel of a monster midway something barbaric occurs on the alley of nightmares’

She Freak is an American-made 1967 film, directed by Byron Mabe and written by David F. Friedman. The film is broadly based on the classic (and still at the time, banned) 1932 Tod Browning film, Freaks. Though the film features far fewer of the real-life sideshow performers seen in the earlier film, it is still notable for its footage of actual sideshows and as an example of 1960’s exploitation film-making.

We are introduced to Jade Cochran (Claire Brennan), a dissatisfied waitress in a run-down greasy roadside cafe who is determined to make a better life for herself. Somewhat remarkably, she considers that waiting the tables at the local carnival, which has just hit town, is a step up the social ladder. It seems she has a point – the people are friendlier and more money is coming in – this is the good life after all, although she’s none too keen on the strange faces and figures of some of the more exotic parts of the carnival. She befriends a stripper called Moon (Lynn Courtney) and in turn Steve St.John (Bill McKinney, The Deliverance, Cleopatra Jones, in his first screen role), the carnival owner, whom she immediately sees as marriage material, for his money if nothing else.

Sadly, once married, the money isn’t enough for Jade and she moves her attentions to more lustful desires, in particular the Ferris Wheel operator, Blackie Fleming (Lee Raymond), who is more than happy to indulge in the affair. The carny code leads to one of the performers, Shorty (Felix Silla, Cousin Itt from The Addams Family, The Brood) informing Steve of their duplicity and Steve stabs Blackie to death when they confront each other. With Steve sent to prison, Jade is left to ponder what to do with all his money whilst entertaining herself by being horrible to the carnival residents but once again, the carny code leaves the sideshow folk with one last performance to give in honour of their jailed boss.

Once you have completely cleared your mind of the existence of 1932’s Freaks, you can begin to appreciate She Freak for the enjoyable schlock it is. David F. Friedman’s somewhat unique style and approach did not sit well with the director, Mabe and he was replaced before filming was completed, inevitably by Friedman himself, indeed you wonder why he felt it necessary to employ someone other than himself in the first place (he also appears as the Carnival Barker, an ideal piece of casting!). It’s a badly-shot and badly-paced film, the lingering shots of of Sacramento’s State Fair are fascinating (even the children seem to be smoking) but belong in a documentary, not dragging the pace of the film down to a crawl.

The pleasingly filthy sixties go-go music, which often appears when you least expect it, is the work of Friedman’s go-to tunesmith, William Castleman, also notable for his scores to The Big Bird Cage (1972) and The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), also directing the entertaining, Johnny Firecloud.  It’s difficult to warm to Jade as a lead character, her innocent intentions flipping to devious throughout the film, it’s impossible to fully sympathise or hate her. Those expecting a parade of deformed individuals will be disappointed; an appearance by the 3’11” Silla is always a treat (interestingly, he went on to start a 9-year affair with Brennan, which both hid from the world’s eyes, despite them having a child) and some actual 60’s burlesque work is pleasing to see. The film taunts you with an ending you’re already expecting and then still fails to deliver, an impossible and ridiculous spectacle your only reward. Daft dialogue, garish colours, ropey but enjoyable performances, and a glimpse at yesteryear, the enjoyable aspects of the film are largely accidental – such are the joys of exploitation films.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

The Gruesome Twosome is a 1967 American splatter horror film, produced and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and written and co-directed by his then wife, Allison Louise ‘Bunny’ Downe. The film stars Elizabeth Davis (How To Make a Doll), Gretchen Wells and Chris Martell (Flesh Feast, Scream Baby Scream).

In downtown Florida, dear old Mrs Pringle (Davis) runs The Little Wig shop, a small boutique which is doing a roaring trade amongst the local college students who are indulging in the latest craze for fake hair-dos. Handily, Mrs Pringle lives in the house adjoining the shop, along with her retarded son, Rodney (Martell) and her stuffed wildcat, Napoleon. Ever benevolent, Mrs Pringle rents out a room in her home to homeless students, welcoming the prospective tenants with a friendly chat and usually a helpful saying to live your life by (“I always say…don’t I, Napoleon?”).

Alas, when the guided tour of the dwelling commences, the unlucky girl (it’s always a girl) is shoved into a side-room in the wig shop, whereby they are quickly dispatched by the lurking Rodney who is a dab hand at scalping – the resulting mop of hair becoming part of the steady supply of incredibly realistic hair-pieces Mrs Pringle is selling.

Despite three girls going missing in quick succession, there is surprisingly little fuss on campus where the girls spend seemingly all their time listening to ropey jazz on the radio. In between jives, wig shop recommendations and boyfriend squabbles, one girl, amateur sleuth, Kathy (Wells), is sufficiently concerned about yet another missing friend that she sets off to investigate the wig shop for herself. After being treated to a tea and Napoleon welcome, Kathy too gets to meet Rodney but even dotty Mrs Pringle realises that she has attracted rather too much attention. Will Kathy’s boyfriend and the police get there in time?

Buy The Gruesome Twosome on Something Weird DVD from Amazon.com

The real challenge to enjoying The Gruesome Twosome is to get beyond the first five minutes – rather like a bad skit on an album, there is a truly awful intro involving two talking be-wigged heads, neither funny nor contributing anything to the story. It’s also interesting to consider other horror films made in 1967 – Quatermass and the Pit, Corruption and The Fearless Vampire Killers to name but three – H.G. Lewis seems utterly oblivious to the rest of the world, even with a raft of horror films already under his belt, he has effectively ploughed a completely unique furrow and has picked up no influences on the way. Rather like the work of Andy Milligan, this is either a blessing or a curse, depending on your tolerance of trash cinema.

The acting is of a uniformly outrageous standard, Davis having rather an Edith Massey quality, something so far beyond acting that it becomes a unique art-form. The best performer, apart from the static Napoleon, is Martell, a gurning mute who survives several silent sequences of him playing with wool or his new toy, an electric carving knife, with a surprisingly satisfying degree of accomplishment. Martell is the only ‘breakout'; star from the film, with several more acting roles, a spot of assistant directing (Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things) and also a couple of stints as a production manager (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things) under his belt.

Buy the Herschell Gordon Lewis Collection on DVD from Amazon.com

There appears to be some confusion by the filmmakers over when the film is set – it seems peculiar that during the Summer of Love, the college girls would sit in their rooms listening to beige jazz, then frolic to surf guitar on the beach, all the time competing with a slightly flatulent orchestral score. Of course, a parade of luxuriously-coiffeured youths being desperate to put even more hair on their heads requires a little bit of forgiveness from the audience too. The fact that not even the basics make any sense is part of the charm, you need to approach H.G. Lewis fare with an utterly empty brain.

On the subject of brains, not a drop of red is spared in the film, the scalping, disembowelings and stabbings being of the lingering kind, just long enough for the unlucky actress to blink whilst playing dead. The effects are a real treat, though naysayers are keen to point out the lack of realism that presumably they detect in the rest of the film – that’s not to say that they’ve had any more money spent on them since Blood Feast, four years earlier. The 74 minute film is not without genuine problems – it stutters from the wig-chat beginning, through unnecessary girl gossip to an odd caper involving the school caretaker being mistaken for the killer because he buries bones for his pet dog to find.

Buy The Blood Trilogy on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

The Gruesome Twosome is not in the Two Thousand Maniacs! league, the narrative, though fun, ultimately has nowhere to go and the padding only highlights this. Rodney features far too infrequently, being both fun and engagingly menacing, his mum grabbing most of the limelight. The film was made towards the end of Lewis’ series of splatter films, the previous being Color Me Blood Red, indeed only The Wizard of Gore followed which could truly be classed in the same category, before his return to the genre, thirty-some years later.

As an example of trash cinema, this is a required watch, rated as one of H.G.’s own films, it deserves a far better reputation and is perhaps the most overlooked of his horror films.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Herschell Gordon Lewis on Horrorpedia: Blood Feast | The Gore Gore Girls | The Gruesome Twosome | Monster A- Go Go | Two Thousand Maniacs! | The Wizard of Gore

Buy A Taste of Blood: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis book from Amazon.co.uk

Cast:

• Elizabeth Davis as Mrs. Pringle
• Gretchen Wells as Kathy Baker
• Chris Martell as Rodney Pringle
• Rodney Bedell as Dave Hall
• Ronnie Cass as Nancy Harris
• Karl Stoeber as Mr. Spinsen
• Dianne Wilhite as Janet
• Andrea Barr as Susan
• Dianne Raymond as Dawn Farrell
• Sherry Robinson as Lisa
• Barrie Walton as Neighbor Lady
• Marcelle Bichette as Jane
• Tom Brent as Neighbor Man
• Mike Todd as Mike

 Buy The Godfather of Gore documentary on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Buy The Eye-Popping Sounds of Herschell Gordon Lewis CD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Buy The Godfather of Gore Speaks book from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror!’

Blood Feast is a 1963 American horror film directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. It concerns a psychopathic food caterer named Fuad Ramses who kills people so that he can include their body parts in his meals and perform sacrifices to his “Egyptian goddess” Ishtar.

Filming took place over a period of 4 days with a budget of $24,000 and was filmed in Miami, Florida. Director Lewis wanted something realistic for the scene where a woman gets her tongue ripped out, in order to accommodate this a sheep’s tongue was imported from Tampa Bay and used in the scene.

Blood Feast is generally considered the first splatter movie, and is notable for its groundbreaking depictions of on-screen gore. It was followed by a belated sequel, Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat, in 2002.

Fuad Ramses was described by author Christopher Wayne Curry in his book A Taste of Blood: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis as “the original machete-wielding madman” and the forerunner to similar characters in Friday the 13th and Halloween. Lewis said of the film, “I’ve often referred to Blood Feast as a Walt Whitman poem. It’s no good, but it was the first of its type.”

Buy The Blood Trilogy on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Blood Feast is the first part of what the director’s fans have dubbed “The Blood Trilogy”. Rounding out the trilogy are the films Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965). After the third film, producer David F. Friedman said, “I think that for now we’re going to abandon making any more ‘super blood and gore’ movies, since so many of our contemporaries are launching similar productions, causing a risk that the market will quickly reach a saturation point.”

Plot teaser:

In a suburban Miami house, a young woman arrives home and turns on her portable radio which broadcasts news of the latest of several recent murders. The woman turns off the radio and begins to take a bath. Suddenly a gray-haired, wild-eyed man appears in the bathroom and brutally stabs the woman in her left eye, killing her. The maniac hacks off her left leg with a machete and leaves with it.

Next day at the police station, detective Pete Thornton reviews the latest murder, noting that a homicidal maniac has killed four women without leaving any clues. The police chief orders Thornton to continue to pursue the case.

At Fuad Ramses Catering store, wealthy socialite Dorothy Freemont arrives, where she arranges for Fuad to cater a party for her daughter Suzette. Fuad agrees and tells Mrs. Freemont that what he’s preparing hasn’t been prepared for over 5,000 years. Mrs. Freemont wants the catering done in two weeks, and Fuad assures her that he will have enough time to procure the last of his needed ingredients. After Mrs. Freemont leaves, Fuad ventures to the back storage room where he has displayed a large gold statue of the “mother of veiled darkness,” the goddess Ishtar. Fuad is preparing a “blood feast” – a huge vat containing the dead women’s body parts – that will ensure the goddess’s resurrection…

Buy A Taste of Blood: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis book from Amazon.co.uk

Buy the Herschell Gordon Lewis Collection on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“Impossible to take seriously on any level, Blood Feast compels the viewer simply by topping itself in the gore department. Unlike the Friday the 13th films which mostly tease the viewers with quick and timid flashes of grisly mayhem, Lewis and company trot out the whole dog and pony show under a spotlight. Legs are hacked off, skulls pulled open, tongues yanked out, and so on. Meanwhile the laughs build up faster than any slasher spoof (“Leg Cut Off!” yells one newspaper headline), while Arnold delivers a hand-wringing villainous performance that actually makes Tod Slaughter look subtle”. Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital

“… Lewis’ listless direction shows all of the style and finesse of an early stag film (another genre with which he was fondly familiar). Blood Feast tastefully implies nothing, and instead plasters the screen in one lurid image after another, using as few camera set-ups and shots as possible for the minimal amount of coverage provided. Lewis and Friedman would tap Playboyplaymate Connie Mason to star as the beautiful young bride-to-be, who would also return for their follow-up 2000 Maniacs the next year. Mason, along with her fellow cast members, produce truly horrible performances, but the roles are so poorly acted and outrageously over-the-top that they give way to the highest level of camp.” I Like Horror Movies

“As Lewis had intended, Blood Feast was a mindless, virtually plotless, but high-spirited orgy of gore for gore’s sake, which, upon its initial release to drive-ins in the South, managed to shock both the popcorn eaters and the neckers alike into wide-eyed, open-mouther attention. Its like had never been seen before in a commercial feature film”. John McCarty, Splatter Movies (FantaCo Enterprises, 1981)

Herschell Gordon Lewis on Horrorpedia: Blood Feast | The Gore Gore Girls | The Gruesome Twosome | Monster A- Go Go | Two Thousand Maniacs! | The Wizard of Gore

Cast:

• William Kerwin as Detective Pete Thornton
• Mal Arnold as Fuad Ramses
• Connie Mason as Suzette Fremont
• Scott H. Hall as Frank, Police Captain
• Lyn Bolton as Mrs. Dorothy Fremont
• Toni Calvert as Trudy Sanders
• Ashlyn Martin as Marcy, girl on beach
• Sandra Sinclair as Pat Tracey
• Astrid Olson as Motel victim

Buy The Godfather of Gore Speaks book from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Buy The Godfather of Gore documentary on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

 Buy The Eye-Popping Sounds of Herschell Gordon Lewis CD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

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‘Terrifying suspense… it will shock you out of your seat!’

Hysteria is a 1964 British psychological thriller directed by Freddie Francis (Nightmare; The Skull; The Creeping Flesh) from a screenplay by producer Jimmy Sangster, for Hammer Films and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the US in April 1965. It was released in the UK 27 June 1965.

The film stars Robert Webber, Jennifer Jayne (The Trollenberg Terror; Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors; The Doctor and the Devils), Maurice Denham (Paranoiac; The Night Caller; Countess Dracula), Lelia Goldoni (Theatre of Death; Invasion of the Body Snatchers; The Devil Inside) and Anthony Newlands (Circus of Fear; Scream and Scream Again). The bombastic jazzy score was provided by Don Banks (Monster of Terror; The Reptile; Torture Garden).

Plot teaser:

An American wakes up in an English hospital unable to remember anything of his life before a recent car accident. With only a photograph torn from a newspaper to guide him, and an unknown benefactor, he attempts to unravel what looks increasingly like a bizarre murder…

Reviews:

“By all accounts this was not a very happy production with Francis subsequently saying that his heart just wasn’t really in it, though it is all shot with his customary ingenuity and elegance. Indeed, despite some lacklustre sets by Edward Carrick (Hammer regular Bernard Robinson was on another assignment), Francis and his faithful cinematographer John Wilcox once again make good use of the filters the director used on The Innocents (1961) as well as his previous Sangster thrillers Paranoiac and Nightmare.” Tipping My Fedora

“Hammer fans generally regard Hysteria (1965) as the weakest of Sangster’s thrillers: “the last – and least – of Hammer’s series of Psycho clones,” wrote Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio in their recommended Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography. But Maniac (1963) and Crescendo (1970) are much worse overall, and Val Guest’s The Full Treatment (released in the U.S. as Stop Me Before I Kill!, 1961), which Hysteria all but remakes, is downright terrible by comparison. No, Hysteria is perfectly respectable with many fine ideas. It’s interesting and genuinely suspenseful and unsettling at times, and though it doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, is highly satisfying.” Stuart Galbraith IV, DVD Talk

Buy Hysteria on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“If Chris Smith’s journey took him on a journey through London’s seamy underbelly, we might have a late-noir classic here, but Sangster does, eventually, move back to the more familiar, comfortable territory of red herrings and absurdly elaborate conspiracies that were his trademark contributions to Hammer’s suspense thrillers. Still, sharp dialogue is maintained to the very end, with appealing performances from the supporting cast, particularly Denham’s private detective, who proves to be tougher than he looks. Don Banks provides a jazzy score, and Freddie Francis directs, with his gift for drawing out every ounce of the eerie with eye-popping black-and-white photography.” Jeff Kuykendall, Midnight Only

Choice dialogue:

“How long can a man live in a void without going nuts?”

Buy Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography book from Amazon.co.uk

Cast:

• Robert Webber as Chris Smith
• Anthony Newlands as Doctor Keller
• Jennifer Jayne as Gina McConnell
• Maurice Denham as Hemmings, a private investigator
• Lelia Goldoni as Denise James
• Peter Woodthorpe as Marcus Allan
• Sandra Boize as English Girl
• Sue Lloyd as French Girl
• John Arnatt as Mr. James
• Marianne Stone as Marcus Allan’s Secretary – Miss Grogan
• Irene Richmond as Mrs. Keller
• Kiwi Kingston as French Girl’s Husband

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image credits: Tipping My Fedora

‘White hot-terror! Cold, clammy fear!’

Maniac – aka The Maniac – is a 1962 (released 1963) British psychological thriller directed by Michael Carreras for Hammer Film Productions from a screenplay by producer Jimmy Sangster. It stars Kerwin Mathews, Nadia Gray and Donald Houston.

It was filmed in black and white in the Camargue district of southern France and the MGM British Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.

Plot teaser:

Vacationing American artist Jeff Farrell becomes romantically involved with an older woman, Eve Beynat, in southern France, while harbouring some attraction for her teenage stepdaughter Annette. Eve’s husband/Annette’s father Georges is in an asylum for, four years ago, using a blowtorch to kill a man who had raped Annette. Believing it will help make Eve his for life, Jeff agrees to assist her in springing Georges from the asylum. Of course, Eve has a completely different agenda in mind…

Reviews:

‘Maniac has one thing and has it in spades – a plot of extraordinary cunning… (It) takes on a twitching suspense that simmers, sizzles and explodes in a neat backflip … Michael Carreras’ direction is uneven and the characters are a generally flabby lot… Maniac remains a striking blueprint, with satanic tentacles, for a much better picture’. Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

‘Sangster”s script includes some thoroughly unexpected twists in its final stages. In this regard the film cheats outrageously during the early part of the film but it would be unfair to spoil this for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet and ultimately this knowledge just adds to the enjoyment, showing the efforts the filmmakers did go to fake the viewers out.’ Tipping My Fedora

‘Maniac toes the line between its noir tendencies and its straight-up horror elements. It’s both a grisly and slick little crime story that keeps you on your toes until the very end; it’s well-written pulp, the type of story that employs cheap tricks and cheaper thrills, but it works.’ Brett Gallman. Oh, the Horror!

‘Maniac’s Psycho-like midpoint twist, meanwhile, is actually the crux of a double fake-out; its shower scene moment only seems to eliminate its Janet Leigh. That gives Maniac a unity of tone and purpose that Sangster’s other early-60’s thrillers lack, but that isn’t always a point in this movie’s favor. A few more disorienting revelations or whiplash-inducing subgenre shifts might have disguised the glaring unlikelihood of the twists and turns that it does take.’ 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

Cast:

• Kerwin Mathews as Jeff Farrell
• Nadia Gray as Eve Beynat
• Donald Houston as Henri
• Liliane Brousse as Annette Beynat
• George Pastell as Inspector Etienne
• Arnold Diamond as Janiello
• Norman Bird as Salon
• Justine Lord as Grace
• Jerold Wells as Giles
• Leon Peers as Blanchard
• André Maranne as Salon

Wikipedia | IMDb

French poster

The Nude Vampire – French title: La vampire nue – is a 1969 film (released May 1970) directed by Jean Rollin. It stars Christine François,Olivier Rollin, Maurice Lemaitre, Bernard Musson, Jean Aron, Ursule Pauly, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel and Michel Delahaye.

Plot teaser:

Wealthy and decadent industrialist Georges Radamante rules over a strange secret suicide cult and wants to achieve immortality by figuring out a way to share the biochemistry of a young mute orphaned vampire woman. Complications ensue when Radamante’s son Pierre finds out what’s going on and falls for the comely lass…

The Nude Vampire was Jean Rollin’s first collaboration with cinematographer Jean-Jacques Renon and his first film in colour.

Buy The Nude Vampire on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“The film comes across with the emotionally intense illogic of a dream, intellectually nonsensical but meaningful on an instinctive plane. No means a total triumph, dialogue is stilted, and the story lags in several places. Still, there is enough suggestive menace and outrageous imagery to make up for this shortcoming, and the touches of science fiction and kink point dramatically to the dreams of surrender and destruction that Rollins had up his sleeves.” Sex Gore Mutants

“Though the pacing of The Nude Vampire is still recognizably Rollin-esque, this film may prove easier for newcomers to swallow as its story veers from one oddball element to the next. Leopardskin fabrics, party masks, and lots of teasing partial skin shots set this one firmly in 1970, and as a mod French art film gone berserk, it’s plenty of fun.” Mondo Digital

“There are a lot of signs of what is yet to come from director Jean Rollin and yet this early effort is also appealing because it is not as filled with the usual Jean Rollin clichés. Ultimately The Nude Vampire is a solid early effort from director Jean Rollin with its many memorable images and fascinating take on immortality.” 10,000 Bullets

“Jio Berk designed the fabulous costumes and the visual style was drawn from pulp comics and old paperback covers. La vampire nue is one of Rollin’s most enjoyable films and a great leap forward, technically, from Le viol du vampire. It also remains remarkably true to its original conception of a film around the idea of mystery, of enigma. Even the ending, when an explanation is given for all the mysterious events, is successfully undercut.” Cathal Tohill, Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: Sex & Horror Cinema in Europe 1956 – 1984

Buy Psychedelic Sex Vampires: Jean Rollin Cinema book from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“The film’s visual highlights include shots of night-lit streets which evoke the paintings of Paul Delvaux, or tableaux ala Max Ernst (a strong influence on Rollin) often using spotlights to achieve vivid contrasts and shadowy outlines, as well as back lighting to make women’s transluscent. The picture is most fascinating if seen as an intensely fetishistic but luscious play of textures punctuated by beautifully stylised, extravagantly romantic comic-strip compositions chronicling the obsessions of a guiltily Catholic voyeur, wallowing in a sense of perversion and sin.” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

Jean Rollin on Horrorpedia: Fascination | The Grapes of Death | Lips of Blood | The Living Dead Girl | Night of the Hunted | The Nude Vampire | The Rape of the Vampire | The Shiver of the Vampires | Virgin Among the Living Dead | Zombies Lake

Wikipedia | IMDb

It’s hardly surprising that the most notorious, indefensible, loathsome and reprehensible movies ever made are those that exploring nasty Nazi sex and violence fantasies. Even the most liberal of critics seem reluctant to defend these goose-stepping abominations, and they sit at the top of that sorry list known as the Video Nasties.

In fact, the pulp fiction and cinema industry had been exploiting the Nazi nightmare since the war ended. Cheesy B-movies like Hitler’s Madman, They Saved Hitler’s Brain; She Demons and The Flesh Eaters exploited the idea that mad Nazi scientists were up to mischief in remote South American jungles and on desert islands, attempting to revive the fortunes of the Third Reich by somehow resurrecting Adolf Hitler or his marching minions. These movies played on knowledge of the very real mad scientist experiments of Joseph Mengele, which reached levels of atrocity that no fictional mad doctor could hope to match.

The theme ran through to the end of the 1960s with films like Search for the Evil One, and was still potent enough to turn up late into the 1970s – The Boys from Brazil had Mengele and a Jewish Nazi hunter racing to track down clones of Hitler and influence them to their way of thinking before they reached adulthood – the question perhaps being was Hitler a result of nature or nurture – while an episode of The New Avengers TV series saw Peter Cushing (also involved with Nazi zombies in Shock Waves) being forced to bring a preserved Hitler back to life on a remote Scottish island!

However, the grubbiest Naziploitation boom began when the 1960s saw the loosening of censorship rules.

Unable to show much actual sex, mid Sixties adult films would fill the gaps with violence, often S&M tinged. Showing a disregard for any sense of taste or decency, it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before some enterprising producer realised the – ahem – ‘erotic’ potential of the Nazi concentration camp. That man was Bob Cresse, and his film was the notorious Love Camp 7, a worryingly personal movie.

Directed by Lee Frost, the film sets the ground rules for the flood of titles which came almost a decade later. It tells the story of two American female spies who are sent to a Nazi ‘love camp’ in order to help another informant escape. This they do, but only after an hour of unrelenting torture and abuse. Women are depicted as being sexually abused, whipped, strapped to unspeakable devices and generally treated badly throughout the movie.

Cresse played the Commandant himself with a barely disguised gloating glee. He was, to a large extent, living out his own sado-masochistic fantasies in the nasty narrative, and stories abound about how he would insist on take after take of the torture scenes, until the suffering on screen was seemingly matched in reality by the actress.

After this pioneering effort, the genre was suspiciously quiet until 1973. It was then that sleaze producer David Friedman decided that the time was right to revive the dubious concept. He went to Canada and produced Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS under the pseudonym Herman Traegar, a name that remained shrouded in mystery until Friedman finally owned up a couple of decades later. Why the false name? Perhaps some things were just too sleazy for even ‘The Mighty Monarch of the Exploitation Film World’ to admit to.

And Ilsa is very sleazy. The title role was taken by busty nightclub performer Dyanne Thorne, who attacked the part with relish. She’s a cold, heartless sadist who is first seen castrating a male prisoner who is of no further sexual use. During the rest of the film, she tortures women, takes part in appalling experiments, and has sex with the only male inmate (American, of course) who can satisfy her.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a breathtakingly tasteless affair, yet it does have a (warped) sense of humour. Much of the action is so OTT, it teeters the film into the realms of ‘camp’, and it’s this which saves the film. Two sequels followed, though neither had Nazi themed story lines, instead having Ilsa as entirely separate characters in each.

While Ilsa was shaking the drive-ins, the art house theatres were rocking to The Night Porter, in which Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling indulged in assorted sexual antics that stopped short of the atrocities performed by Ilsa, yet still dwelled indulgently in uniform fetishism and Nazi decadence. The film was another box office success, and suddenly, the Italians – never slow to spot a trend – began to sit up and pay attention. Or stand to attention, perhaps?

The floodgates were opened in 1976 by Salon Kitty, which managed to combine the sleaze of Ilsa with the artiness of The Night Porter. The masterpiece of Nazi sleaze cinema, Tinto Brass’ twisted epic switches from making serious political points about the impotence of fascism (often with heavy handed political symbolism) to lip-smacking scenes of sexual perversion with alarming ease. It also established another great Nazi sexploitation plot-line: Salon Kitty is a brothel with an ulterior motive. SS officers use hidden microphones to listen out for any soldiers who might be less committed to the Third Reich cause than they should be.

The same year saw Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, one of the most notorious films ever made. Based on De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini transposed the story to Fascist Italy, and the parade of atrocities committed by the ‘libertines’ – all fascist big wigs – would become as significant a factor in several Naziploitation films as the uniforms, the prison camps and the soft porn.

The popularity of Salon Kitty ensured it would be followed by a frenzy of titles, mostly emerging from Italy and France. Best known of these in Britain is SS Experiment Camp, which was one of the original ‘video nasties’, thanks in no small part to Go Video’s enthusiastic advertising campaign. The enterprising label took full page adverts in the top video magazines, showing the film’s cover – a topless girl, crucified upside-down. Some magazines found the image offensive, so Go supplied a version that had the breasts covered by a bra… this version was, apparently, considered perfectly acceptable.

After all that, Sergio Garrone’s film is quite ordinary, more softcore melodrama than anything… but there is at least one stand-out moment. The evil camp Commandant is devoid of testicles, and so decides to take those belonging to the one nice-guy guard who, in the great tradition of the ‘good Nazi’, hates what is going on. This is done via some gruesome medical stock footage. Our hero is then seen having sex with his girlfriend, at first blissfully unaware that anything is amiss. Once the awful truth emerges, however, he rushes into the Commandant’s office and screams the immortal line, “You bastard, what have you done with my balls?”…

As for the rest of the movies: all have moments of outrageous bad taste, but are mainly dull, with mind-numbing footage of partisans and battle-field stock footage padding out the moments between softcore groping and limp flagellation. Garrone returned to the genre in the somewhat sleazier SS Camp 5 – Women’s Hell, which saw Sirpa Lane – more used to arthouse Euro sleaze like La Bete and Charlotte – subjected to assorted indignities in a concentration camp. Without the ‘camp’ (no pun intended) aspect of SS Experiment Camp, it proved even less fun to watch.

The Beast In Heat is noteworthy as one of the rarest video nasties, but is also one of the dullest Naziploitation movies out there because the tasteless footage was appended to an already existing war movie. Thus, we have to endure seemingly endless footage of partisans fighting off their German oppressors interspersed with occasional torture scenes that would be repulsive if they weren’t so amateurish.

The infamous scene where Sal Boris (also in the aforementioned Salon Kitty), the titular beast who is the result of fiendish experiments overseen by the Ilsa-like camp commandant, bites off a woman’s pubic hair is fairly outrageous, but it’s a brief moment of bad taste respite from the general tedium. The attention to detail in the film is perhaps summed up by the clumsy on-screen title – Horrifing (sic) Experiments of the SS, Last Days. [Read Daz Lawrence's review on Horrorpedia]

Hack director Luigi Batzella – using the pseudonym Ivan Kathansky (or Katansky, depending on how much attention the credits producer was paying) – also made Kaput Lager: Gli ultimi giorni delle SS, released on video in the UK as The Desert Tigers (amusingly, The Dessert Tigers on a Dutch video sleeve mispelling). This was an even more ham-fisted effort, with exploitative prison camp footage grafted onto the end of a dull war movie starring Richard Harrison.

The Deported Women of the SS Special Section has a certain gritty authenticity to it that makes it stand out from the other films, but is otherwise rather average. It’s one of the more downbeat Naziploitation movies, despite the best efforts of director Rino Di Silvestro (Werewolf Woman) to crank up the sleaze factor, but its saving grace is the presence of Euro cult favourite John Steiner (Shock), who refuses to take it at all seriously and instead delivers a fantastic, eye-rolling, ranting and raving performance. It’s worth seeing the film for this alone, as he flits from obsessing over an inmate he’s known in the pre-war years and buggering his faithful servant Doberman.

The Gestapo’s Last Orgy also uses the ‘camp commandant obsessed with a prisoner’ plot, and becomes a curious hybrid of The Night Porter, Salon Kitty and the Nazi atrocity film. It’s a classier production that most examples of the genre, at least visually – a fait amount of money was obviously lavished here. This, the stylish direction and decent performances goes to make the atrocities seem all the more unsavoury – There are moments of such astonishing repulsiveness that you can barely credit them being in such a handsome film – the throwing of a menstruating woman to a pack of dogs, the burning alive of a woman during the cannibal orgy and the dipping of another woman in a pit of lime. The female cast are naked for much of the film and of course there are numerous sexual assault scenes. It’s so shamelessly horrible that you have to admire its audacity, especially as none of it seems to be pandering to the audience – this isn’t soft porn by any stretch of the imagination, and it seems designed to repulse. In the end, the film is perhaps best seen as a prime example of 1970s Italian excess, where restraint was for wussies. It’s from the same mindset that brought us films as diverse as Cannibal Holocaust and Suspiria, the notion that too much is never enough and that everything should be shown. It’s not on the same level as those two films, of course, but it is strangely admirable within its own perimeters.

Less ambiguous was the particularly unpleasant Women’s Camp 119, directed by Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead; Rats – Night of Terror). This unpleasant film seems designed to leave a bad taste in the mouth, even managing to work actual concentration camp footage into the credits sequence (an all-time low in filmmaking?). Yet it doesn’t have the style, the audacity, or the intelligence to get away with its parade of grim atrocities. (Read Stephen Thrower’s review on Horrorpedia)

As well as the films exploiting concentration camp atrocities, there were also a number of less brutal films exploiting the uniform fetish. SS Girls was another blatant imitation of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter while The Red Nights of the Gestapo was a fairly sumptuous affair that tended to concentrate on the decadence of the SS top brass. Elsa – Fraulein SS, on the other hand, was cheap and deliciously tacky, and despite the title similarity to Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (coincidence I’m sure!), was more of a T&A romp than a parade of atrocities, following the Salon Kitty theme of prostitutes being used to spy on Nazi officers who might be slipping in their love for the Third Reich. Many of the same cast and crew returned in Special Train for Hitler and Helga, She Wolf of Spilberg, which utilised the same sets and much the same plot.

Erwin C.Dietrich’s Frauleins in Uniform is a softcore movie that is notable for the strange normalising of the Nazis. While it briefly deals with the horrors of war, it does so from the point of view of the German army recruits – female German army recruits – and while there are hints at a totalitarian state, much of the film is surprisingly uncritical of the Nazi war machine. There’s little in the way of dramatic threat (though one deserter is caught and told “we have ways of making you talk”!), but the constant stream of bare flesh and dialogue like “cleanliness is next to Naziness” ensure that it passes by quite painlessly.

Meanwhile, American porno producers were dabbling in the concept with Prisoner in Paradise and Hitler’s Harlots. But for whatever reasons, the theme didn’t catch on in the adult movie theatres. In Hong Kong, film-makers replaced Nazis with Japanese invaders and unleashed the likes of Concentration Camp for Girls and Bamboo House of Dolls, the latter of which was used as an example of the worst excesses of cinema by British BBFC censor James Ferman during lectures about censorship. This sub-genre eventually led to the notoriously nasty Men Behind the Sun series.

By 1978, the Nazi sexploitation genre was all but dead. Perhaps the moral outrage and censorship problems which greeted such films proved to be too much trouble for producers only interested in profit. Who knows? Whatever the reason, there hasn’t been a single significant addition to the cycle since, making it one of cinema’s most short-lived genres. The only films to dabble in the genre now are zero budget affairs aimed squarely at the cult horror audience.

Keith Crocker’s Blitzkreig: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008) attempts to channel the spirit of the Italian films, but despite star Tatyana Kot spending the whole film naked, either gunning down Nazis or (more frequently) being tortured, plentiful nudity – male and female – throughout, two castrations, tongue pulling, eye stabbing, throat slitting and plenty more gory mayhem, all delivered with bargain basement FX, the film still manages to be the dullest Naziploitation film since The Beast in Heat. Why it needed to be 135 minutes long is anyone’s guess.

More interesting, but still unrealised beyond being a fake trailer in Grindhouse, is Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, which has Sybil Danning taking on the Ilsa role and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu. The trailer was, by far, the best thing about the whole Grindhouse project and hopefully Zombie will eventually get around the making the complete film.

It’s understandable that many people will be upset at the idea of Nazi fantasies. But I’ve never yet come across a genuine fascist amongst fans of this grubby sub-genre, and even the worst of the films doesn’t attempt to portray the Third Reich as being remotely admirable. If we can laugh at sit-coms like Allo Allo (okay, no-one should laugh at Allo Allo, but you know what I mean…), then surely we can be amused by these cheesy, high camp exercises in bad taste without feeling guilty about it? In fact, it’s probably our duty to do so, reminding ourselves that Nazis are little more than a bad joke in a good uniform…

Heinz Von Sticklegruber

Nazis on Horrorpedia: BloodRayne: The Third Reich | Cataclym aka The Nightmare Never Ends | Dead Snow: Red vs Dead | The Flesh Eaters | Frankenstein’s Army | Night of the Zombies | Night Train to Terror | Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz | She Demons | Women’s Camp 119

The Hell of Frankenstein - original title: Orlak: infierno de Frankenstein (“Orlak: Hell of Frankenstein”) – is a 1960 Mexican horror film written, produced and directed by Rafael Baledón (Swamp of the Lost Souls; The Curse of the Crying Woman) from a screenplay adaptation by Alfredo Ruanova (Bring Me the Vampire; Genie of Darkness; Satanás de todos los horrores) and Carlos Enrique Taboada (The Witch’s Mirror; Nostradamus y el destructor de monstruos; Even the Wind is Afraid). Publicity material states the title as Orlak – El Infierno de Frankenstein.

The film stars Armando Calvo, Rosa de Castilla, Irma Dorantes, Andrés Soler (as Professor Frankenstein), Pedro de Aguillón, David Reynoso, Carlos Ancira, Antonio Raxel, Carlos Nieto, Julián de Meriche, Joaquín Cordero (as Jaime Rojas/Orlak). 

Plot teaser:

Jaime Rojas (Joaquín Cordero), a suspected murderer, is completing his prison sentence for a minor crime, when he aids Professor Frankenstein (Andrés Soler) in escaping from prison. The scientist creates an artificial man made from assorted body parts, which Rojas uses to avenge himself against the officials and his former partners. Meanwhile, Frankenstein is unaware of the criminal acts his killer automaton, wearing a black sombrero and cape, is carrying out…

Reviews:

Despite promotional material depicting Frankenstein’s creation as being disfigured, until the climax Joaquín Cordero is merely impassive-looking and his nefarious deeds more criminal than horrific. This betrays the film’s original form as a four-part serial and perhaps explains the pseudo-scientific/western approach, as opposed to the full-blown gothic of the best Mexican horror such as Baledón’s impressive The Curse of the Crying Woman. The result is reasonably diverting, with a lively and fiery ending but, aside for Mexican horror completists, this is hardly required viewing.

Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

“Frankenstein’s laboratory clearly shows the limitations imposed by the shoestring budget and whatever interest the picture has is probably due to Taboada and Ruanova’s uncanny ability to fill their labyrinthine plots with invention and keep things going at breakneck speed…” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

“Working in a chiaroscuro landscape and with not much funding, Baledon cleverly reverted at appropriate times to the minimalist approach of certain German filmmakers of the silent era, not in duplicating expressionistic poses and design, but in evoking an expressionistic sense of positioning and drama; at other times, he created a visual delight, part expressionistic, part surrealistic, as when filming about a wedge shaped building whose center juts toward the audience in the middle of the screen.” Mirek Lipinski, Vampiros and Monstruos

IMDb

Monsters to Laugh With and Monsters Unlimited was a magazine that was published by Marvel Comics between 1964 and 1966. It was edited by Stan Lee.

The magazine’s content consisted entirely of full page black and white images of classic movie monsters, mostly from Universal films, plus supposedly amusing captions that were mainly supplied by Stan Lee. It ran for just seven issues and, perhaps as an example of its lack of direction and that perhaps horror fans didn’t like their icons mocked, changed its title from Monsters To Laugh With to Monsters Unlimited.

Despite its short run, the magazine was revived in 1972 as Monsters Madness (co-published with Curtis) but this version lasted just three issues!

We are indebted to Monster Magazines and Mania Beyond Entertainment for info and images for this posting.

Jack the Ripper is a song written by Clarence Stacy, his brother Charles Stacy, Walter Haggin and Joe Simmons, and first recorded by Clarence Stacy in 1961. His recording, arranged by Lor Crane, was issued that year as a single on the Carol record label in New York City.

The most famous recording was by English musician Screaming Lord Sutch (who later formed the Official Monster Raving Loony Party in 1983), released as a 7″ single in the UK and Germany in 1963 by Decca Records. It was credited to “Stacey, Hagen, Symonds”, produced by Joe Meek and recorded in his tiny Holloway Road studio in Islington, England. In a typical knee-jerk censorial over-reaction, the song was banned by the BBC upon its release.

Sutch’s 1963 version of “Jack the Ripper” is two minutes and forty-eight seconds long, in the key of B-flat major, and 4/4 time. It begins with the sound of footsteps and a woman screaming, followed by a rendition of the “Danger Ahead” motif by the guitar and drum kit, accompanied by a ghoulish moan from Screaming Lord Sutch.

The song itself is a three-chord song, with a vamp played by guitar and bass, with accompaniment by piano and drum kit, which is repeated throughout. Sutch released a vile funk/disco version was released in 1977.

Further cover versions:

• Link Wray has also covered the song in typical guitar-histrionic feedback-fuelled style.

• In 1986, Canadian garage punk band The Gruesomes covered the song and released it on the Jack the Ripper EP.

• In 2004, Detroit garage rock duo The White Stripes performed a cover of “Jack the Ripper” live as part of the Under Blackpool Lights release, incorporating the guitar riff from the “Peter Gunn” theme by Henry Mancini.

• In 2006, English garage rock band The Horrors covered the song for the B-side of their debut single, “Sheena Is a Parasite“, later included on their 2006 debut EP, The Horrors EP. A re-recorded version was later included on their 2007 debut album, Strange House.

• In recent times, Mark E. Smith’s once excellent but increasingly embarrassing band The Fall have been known to attempt catastrophic versions:

Screaming Lord Sutch in the early 70s with his female fanbase, apparently…

Wikipedia

In the lacklustre Milton Subotsky production The Uncanny, Peter Cushing plays a man desperate to expose a sinister cat conspiracy against the human race: ‘They prowl by night… lusting for human flesh!’ Seemingly laughable… but an idea that possibly strikes home more than a similar theory about, say, dogs? For cats have always had a singularly spooky quality to them that has seen them both revered and reviled throughout history.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats as gods: to kill one was punishable by death and if yours was killed then the owner would shave their eyebrows in honour! On the other hand, in the middle ages, cats were often seen as demons or devils. Thought to be the familiars of witches (by virtue of often being the only companion of the poor old wretches who would be accused of witchcraft), many unfortunate moggies were hung, burned and stoned to death.

Undeniably, cats are odd creatures, at least by domestic standards. Independent and aloof, they often seem to stare at their owners’ inscrutably, almost contemptuously, before disappearing into the night. Their amazing athletic abilities and disturbing nocturnal cries only add to their aura of mystery. And there remains something strangely sexual about the image of the cat. Many films have used the word “cat” to conjure up images of the exotic and the mysterious, whether it be the sexy and seductive Catwoman, arch nemesis of Batman, or the outer space cuties of Catwomen of the Moon. It’s no surprise then that horror filmmakers have found them to be a rich source of inspiration.

The earliest “cat” chillers didn’t, in fact, feature a cat at all. 1919 saw the German film Unheimliche Geschicten, an omnibus collection directed by Richard Oswald that included a story based on several Edgar Allan Poe tales, including The Black Cat. The first of many films to use either the title or the plot (rarely, oddly enough, both together) of Poe’s tale, it was remade by Oswald as a comedy using the same title (renamed The Living Dead for English speaking audiences) in 1932.

The Cat and the Canary – first filmed in 1927, and remade in 1939 and 1978 – was an archetypal “Old Dark House” film, where an escaped lunatic (known as The Cat) may or may not be responsible for a series of murders. It was 1934’s legendary sideshow shocker Maniac that first brought genuine feline fright frolic to the screen. Again “inspired by” The Black Cat, this ‘ghastly-beyond-belief’ cheapie from Dwain Esper threw in every shock image it could think of, including a scene where a cat’s eye is seemingly gouged out.

The same year saw a rather more intellectual adaptation of Poe’s story. Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat saw the first teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a whacked-out, Bauhaus-infused, expressionist nightmare that, brilliant as it was, had no connection with the original story (at one point, a black cat runs across a room and is killed by Lugosi, presumably as a token gesture justification of the title).

Poe was even less present in the next version of the story, made in 1941 by Albert S. Rogell. A passable attempt to cash-in on the success of Bob Hope’s comedy chillers (started, ironically, in 1939 with The Cat and the Canary), it also featured Lugosi, alongside Basil Rathbone and Gale Sondergaard. The Case of the Black Cat, made in 1936 had even less connection to the story, being a Perry Mason mystery.

For a while, it seemed that cats were only good for movie titles. Then, in 1942, Val Lewton’s Cat People appeared. Here at last was a movie that fully exploited the sensual and supernatural aspects of felines. Making use of chilling atmospherics and suggestion, Cat People is ambiguous in its approach: we never see the heroine/monster transformation, and the film never explains if she really could become a cat, or if in fact it was all a mental delusion. The film was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Curse of the Cat People (1944), which despite its lurid title was a gentle fantasy with little connection to the original film.

Most cat-themed horror films were rather less subtle than Lewton’s poetic tales, though. The Catman of Paris (1946) was a Lewton-inspired twist on the popular werewolf theme, and is more murder mystery than supernatural horror film, while Erle C. Kenton – who had brought us the humanimal Panther Girl in his 1932 version of The Island of Dr Moreau, Island of Lost Souls, made The Cat Creeps in 1946 (unrelated to the 1930 film of the same name, which was another Cat and the Canary remake), from the same year had a cat possessed by a dead girl… a theme that would crop up in more than one future pussycat production. Indeed, the strongest theme of cat movies is the idea of the feline avenger, persecuting and punishing those responsible for its owner’s death.

A variation on this possession theme – mixed in with a claw-back of Cat People - cropped up in the entertaining British shocker Cat Girl (1957), in which Barbara Shelley, resplendent in a black shiny mac, was cursed with a psychic link to a leopard, causing her to have sporadic attacks of possession when aroused!

Barbara Shelley obviously enjoyed feline thrills, and returned in 1961’s The Shadow of the Cat, an effective John Gilling chiller in which the cat of a wealthy murder victim causes no end of trouble for the killers. Gilling keeps things relatively ambiguous: it’s never clear if the cat is actually taking vengeance, or if its presence simply adds to the guilt of the murderers and drives them to madness and death.

1966 saw another version of The Black Cat, once again showing only few connections to the Poe story. Rather, this was a gore shocker, featuring axes in heads and violence, ala H.G. Lewis, albeit in black and white.

Roger Corman also tackled the story in his Poe anthology Tales of Terror (1962), playing the story as black comedy, with Peter Lorre as the cat’s persecutor/victim. Cats also featured in another Poe-inspired Corman project, The Tomb of Legeia (1964), in which Vincent Price’s dead wife returns as a cat.

1969’s Eye of the Cat was a textbook “vengeful cat” movie, directed by David Lowell Rich and scripted by Psycho writer Joseph Stefano. Michael Sarrazin and Gayle Hunnicutt play a scheming couple who do away with a wealthy aunt, only to fall victim to her hordes of cats. The implausible plot is given a slight twist by making Sarrazin a cat phobic.

Cats have played a role in Japanese horror cinema, most notably in 1968’s classic Kuroneko, in which the ghosts of two women brutally murdered return to take vengeance, assuming the form of a cat at times.

Also from Japan, bizarre Hausu (1977) features supernatural cats amongst its series of strange events and genuinely surreal visuals.

Cats made their way into the Italian giallo thrillers in the 1970s. While Dario Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails and Antonio Bido’s The Cat’s Victims might not have actually featured feline killers, 1972’s The Crimes of the Black Cat had the novel idea of featuring a cat as a murder weapon: a mad old woman has poisoned the claws of her pet with curare and induced it to cause mayhem and mischief when irritated by dousing yellow scarves – sent as gifts – with an irritant!

Human beings became unwilling cat food in Ted V. Mikels’ The Corpse Grinders (1971), in which unscrupulous pet food manufacturers add corpses to their cat food mix! Before long, cats are attacking people on the street and in their homes… Although the original has some macabre merit, Mikels went on to make a forgettable and entirely unnecessary belated shot-on-video sequel in 2000.

Cats with a taste for human flesh cropped up in Rene Cardona’s Mexican schlocker Night of a Thousand Cats (1972), where a mad killer women feeds his victims to his half-starved pets; inevitably, the tables are turned in the grisly end.

The Cat Creature (1973) was a slightly above-average TV film, directed by Curtis Harrington (Night Tide) and written by Robert Bloch (Psycho screenplay). Despite the stifling restrictions of American TV at the time, the film is a fairly solid story of the reincarnation of an Egyptian cat goddess.

Sergio Martino’s Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, aka Excite Me (1972), was another retread of The Black Cat, staying slightly closer to the original tale than most others, and starring Edwige Fenech as the eye-gouging, walling up villainess.

Another Italian production, directed by horror veteran Antonio Margheriti, was Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eyes, a bizarre late entry in the gothic-style tales of the 1960s involving a Scottish castle, a family curse and a gorilla! As the title suggests, whenever a murder is in the offing, the omnipresent cat is in attendance. The film’s eccentricities make up for its defects (chiefly its languid pace, a trait from the Sixties) and there are some memorably absurd images.

In Britain, Ralph Bates fell off the deep end through a combination of sinister feline activity and a domineering mother (Lana Turner) in Persecution aka The Terror of Sheba (1974). It was the first production from Hammer wannabes Tyburn, and the only one that was actually worth watching.

Más negro que la noche (“Blacker than the Night”) was a 1975 Mexican gothic horror about four women that move to a creepy house, inherited by one of them from an old aunt; as a condition, they must take care of the aunt’s pet, a black cat.

Once the pet is mysteriously found dead, a series of bizarre murders begins…

The Uncanny (originally titled Brrr during shooting!) was produced by Milton Subotsky in 1977, shortly after the demise of Amicus and using the same tax shelter deals that made many Canadian productions possible. It was another compendium film, obviously designed to follow in the footsteps of previous Subotsky winners like Tales from the Crypt. However, thanks to the dull direction of Denis Heroux, and a change in public tastes, the film was a total disaster. Each story dealt with spooky cats taking revenge on generally bad eggs, something that didn’t quite gel with the linking theme of cats wanting to take over the world. Subotsky had also featured an evil cat in his earlier Amicus anthology Torture Garden in 1967.

A white cat was up to mischief in the low budget British film The Legacy (1979), which tried to emulate The Omen with a series of bizarre deaths (including The Who’s Roger Daltrey choking to death on a chicken bone!), but failed to ignite the box office – although the paperback tie-in was a surprise best seller. Also in 1979, an unlikely space traveller was Jones the cat in Alien (and briefly Aliens) but he was a feline friend not intergalactic foe.

Lucio Fulci, on a cinematic roll with gore-drenched surreal horrors such as The Beyond and House By the Cemetery, made his version of The Black Cat in 1981. Shot in the UK, this take on Poe’s tale stars Patrick Magee and David Warbeck, and, although generally considered to be a minor addition to the director’s canon, is actually one of his best films, with the emphasis on supernatural atmosphere rather than gore for once.

The film also managed to incorporate a few elements of the original Poe tale into its plot, including the walling up of cat and victim (interestingly, Fulci had also used a similar idea in his 1975 thriller Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes).

Director Paul Schrader updated Cat People with a glossy 1982 remake, but despite lashings of blood and eroticism, and the screen presence of Natjassia Kinski and Malcolm McDowall, the film doesn’t work as well as it should, coming across as little more than an expensive retread of the popular werewolf shapeshifter films of the previous year.

Far better, and considerable more honest in their treatment of the erotic aspects of cat mythology, were The Cat Woman (1988) and Curse of the Cat Woman (1991), two hardcore porn films from actor turned director John Leslie. While Cat Woman is merely above average, Curse… is quite startling, with unsettling but potent sex scenes as it delves deeply into the world of the cat people.

Somewhat less classy than Leslie’s film was Luigi Cozzi’s incredibly clumsy version of The Black Cat (1990), which attempts to bring Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy to a close. Filmed as a tribute to Argento (the plot concerns a film-makers attempts to make a sequel to Suspiria!), the film has nothing of Poe, and little of Dario Argento either. Argento himself, oddly, was also filming The Black Cat around the same time, as his contribution to the Poe film Two Evil Eyes. It was far from vintage Argento, despite a suitably deranged performance from Harvey Keitel, but it did follow the original story fairly closely, and benefited from being paired with George A. Romero’s truly awful The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

Romero also produced Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, a feature film based on the lacklustre TV series. Nevertheless, this three story anthology was better than it should have been, and includes a tale about a Cat from Hell that leaves a trail of victims in its wake.

Evil Cat arrived from Hong Kong in 1986, the tale of a cat demon that possesses human bodies and has to be killed every fifty years by a member of the same family. Cheerfully trashy, it’s a fun horror romp. More deranged is 1992’s The Cat, directed by Ngai Kai lam, which features a cat from space and features – as far as I’m aware – the only dog-cat kung fu battle ever captured on film!

Greydon Clark’s amusing Uninvited (1987) features a mutant cat on the loose aboard a cruise ship, where it terrorises horny teenagers and gangsters, to no great effect. 1991 TV movie Strays tries to make a house full of killer cats seem scary, but fails miserably, and has human characters so dull that you are actually rooting for the cats by the end.

Stephen King has been attached to a handful of cat related horrors. As well as the underrated 1985 film Cat’s Eye – a trilogy of stories linked by a heroic cat, and directed with style and fidelity to the original stories by Lewis Teague (Alligator), there was the 1989 Pet Semetary, which sees a zombie cat brought back to life after being buried on cursed ground, and 1992 saw Sleepwalkers, a gory and sexy retread of the Cat People theme based on a somewhat incoherent King screenplay. Mick Garris’ film tells the story of demonic cat people (who fear real cats!) and is ludicrous enough to be throwaway fun.

A hand-drawn Ghanian poster for Sleepwalkers!

More recently, in 2011, Korean film The Cat featured a feline that was the only witness to a murder, a ghostly child and possible demonic possession, as bad things start to happen to the woman who is looking after the titular cat.

The aforementioned 1975 Mexican movie Más Negro Que La Noche (“Blacker Than the Night”) has just been remade in 2014, in 3D, as a full-blown gothic Spanish production with a focus, like the original, on murders that occur once a cat has been killed.

It seems certain that cats will continue to provide a steady flow of ideas for film-makers looking for sinister ciphers. Only Alien and Cat’s Eye has shown cats in a particularly positive light within the context of the horror film. Other than this, the best they could hope for was to be witches familiars in the likes of Bell, Book and Candle or I Married a Witch. This might seem like an outrageous slander against this innocent animal. But, even if the feline population were made aware of their sly image in the cinema, one imagines that they would simply stare at you for a while, yawn disinterestedly, and then walk away. Cats have better things to worry about…

David Flint, Horrorpedia

Rosemary’s Baby is a 1967 best-selling horror novel by Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives; Dr. Cook’s Garden; The Boys from Brazil; Son of Rosemary), his second published book. The Random House book sold over four million copies “making it the top bestselling horror novel of the 1960s.” It has been reprinted by different publishers many times since.

Plot teaser:

Rosemary Woodhouse, is a young woman who has just moved into the Bramford, an old Gothic Revival style New York City apartment building with her husband, Guy, a struggling actor. The pair is informed that the Bramford has a disturbing history involving witchcraft and murder, but they choose to overlook this. Rosemary has wanted children for some time, but Guy wants to wait until he is more established.

Rosemary and Guy are soon welcomed to Bramford by neighbours Minnie and Roman Castevet, an eccentric elderly couple. Rosemary finds them meddlesome and absurd, but Guy begins paying them frequent visits.

After a theatrical rival suddenly goes blind, Guy is given an important part in a stage play. Immediately afterward, Guy unexpectedly agrees with Rosemary that it is time to conceive their first child…

Adaptations:

In 1968, the novel was adapted into a film produced by William Castle (House on Haunted Hill; The Tingler; Strait-Jacket) and directed by Roman Polanski (Repulsion; The Tenant; The Ninth Gate). It starred Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes (Incubus). Ruth Gordon, who played Minnie Castevet, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

A TV movie sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, arrived in 1976 following the success of The Omen.

In 2014, the book was adapted again as a television mini-series with Zoe Saldana as Rosemary.

Wikipedia

Dr Satan versus Black Magic (Dr. Satan y la Magia Negra) is a 1968 Mexican horror film directed by Rogelio A. González (Ship of Monsters) and starring Joaquin Cordero (Dr Satan; The Hell of Frankenstein; The Terrible Giant of the Snow), Sonia Furió and Noe Murayama (Blue Demon Versus the Infernal Brains). The film is a sequel to Dr Satan (1966) and retains the character and actor of the titular physician but changes director and transfers from black and white to colour.

Deep in the bowels of Hell, the notorious yet suave Doctor Satan (Cordero) is being given a thorough dressing-down by his employer, Lucifer. He is given one last chance to avoid Earthly punishment by doing his master’s bidding; he must return to Earth and steal the evil sorcerer, Lei Yin’s (Murayama) secret of turning base metals into gold. Preferring action and violence to an eternity in Purgatory, the doctor accepts.

Back on the Earth’s crust we meet Lei Yin, a somewhat Fu Manchu-like character who, alongside having a brilliant scientific mind, also happens to be a vampire of the old school changing-into-a-bat variety. Yin has come into possession of ‘the Sorenson Formula’ (by virtue of murdering Doctor Sorenson), which grants him alchemy via the use of an elaborate set-up involving a large ray-gun. Like any arch-villain worth his weight in recently transformed gold, he is always accompanied by his henchpersons played by Aurora Clavel (The Wild Bunch) and Nathanael León (Hellish Spiders; Night of the Bloody Apes; many Santo films).

Meanwhile, Dr. Satan is busy interviewing young ladies in his office, the lucky candidates rewarded by being transformed into super-strong go-go zombies, doomed to do whatever the good doctor decides. In a thoughtful touch, he dubs them Medusa (Furió) and Erata (Luz Maria Aguilar) and they sleep alongside him in coffins in his crypt. Whilst Dr. Satan and his slaves attempt to track down Lei Yin, the evil mastermind is attempting to relocate to Hong Kong but is rumbled by the police; luckily for him, his able assistant uses her desk-cum-tank the riddle to interferers with bullet-holes.

An early attempt to slay Yin is foiled when the doctor realises his bullets are useless and he can only kill him via the usual stake to the heart. Now aware of his pursuers, Yin makes the first of his regular transformations into a bat, a metamorphosis which only confirms Horrorpedia’s regular assertion that the manufacture of realistic fake flying mammals will forever remain out of Man’s reach.

In true Satanik/Diabolik fashion, it now becomes a battle of wits, with the permanently fog-greeted Lin maniacally laughing, as Dr Satan and his zombladies chase him in a red sports car, eager to please Lucifer. The doctor’s quick wits shift the advantage, as do Lin’s futile attempts to suck the blood of the zombies (“Ugh, zombies! Disgusting!”) but when The Infernal One checks in, will the doctor have succeeded in sparing his own life from an eternity in limbo?

Dr. Satan was considered a strong enough character to bring back for another crack at box office success, the advent of colour giving a whole host of new opportunities to exploit one of the more bizarre genre mash-ups from Mexico. The titular character is something of a novelty in himself, following in the footsteps of the likes of Italian characters Satanik and Kriminal but with an even closer bond to evil and Hell itself. Handsome and debonair, Cordero is a difficult villain/hero to either despise or root for, a little bland in himself and only of any real interest at all due to his winsome companions. Murayama, however, clearly relishes his role, cackling and cape wafting like it’s going out of fashion, equally diabolical when in his laboratory of bubbling vials or transforming into a bat in a flash of magnesium light.

The film is of the shaky sets kind but enjoyably so, the lurid, psychedelic colours redolent of some of the more trippy of Coffin Joe’s films, whilst retaining a cartoon innocence and throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-it fireworks mentality. Somehow, the film conspires to drag its heels on occasion, the pay-off being that when the action does hit, it’s with kaleidoscopic fervor, both visually and aurally, the blips of the lab combining with berserk electronic barrages to assault the senses.

Zombies, vampires, coffins, a mad scientist and his lab, bats, a stunning appearance by the Devil himself and fatal femmes and foes, this is Mexican fantasy horror at its most enjoyable, as you’d expect from the director of the jaw-dropping Ship of Monsters.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

‘A city of fear becomes a city of death!’

Dead Eyes of London (German title: Die Toten Augen von London) is a 1961 West German ‘krimi’ (crime) film with horror elements directed by Alfred Vohrer for Rialto. It stars Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Baal, Dieter Borsche and features Klaus Kinski in one of his earlier roles.

The film is based on the 1924 novel The Dark Eyes of London by Edgar Wallace which had been previously adapted into the 1939 British film The Dark Eyes of London, aka The Human Monster, introducing a number of horror elements which had not been in the original book. The British film had been released in Germany and proved popular. The German film is closer to being a remake of the 1939 film rather than a close adaptation of Wallace’s novel.

The Dead Eyes of london was the first Edgar Wallace film to be directed by Alfred Vohrer who directed thirteen more in the krimi genre.

Plot teaser:

A series of murders of wealthy, heavily insured men leads Scotland Yard investigators to a group of blind men with a mysterious “reverend” leader…

Reviews:

” … a mildly entertaining crime thriller with splashes of horror thrown in to awaken the more easily bored members of the audience. A lot of talk bogs down the film’s first half, and for a while the plot is a chore to follow, but once the puzzle pieces begin coming together, it transforms into a compulsively watchable krimi. Sure, there are better films in the genre, but this is a good starting place for the curious.” Casey Scott, DVD Drive-In

“Dead Eyes of London is a relatively violent Wallace production for its time. We see a torture chamber complete with specially designed drowning tanks and attacks by Bunsen burner. We also have smoky gambling joints, a happy hooker with strong Eastern European accent, a death through an elevator shaft, a TV set that shoots bullets and a skull that doubles as a cigarette dispenser … overall one of the best of the early Wallace series.” Holger Haase, Hallo, Hier Spricht…

“There are a number of standout performances, haunting imagery, and enough complexity to keep you guessing through to the end. Unlike some other violent stylized thrillers you might have heard me complaining about, the mystery here is logically constructed from the start, and the final reveal is a satisfying one. Kinski’s black-gloved and sunglassed Strauss is a villain worthy of Bava.” Where the Long Tail Ends

” … we cut from a skull that functions as a cigarette dispenser to a bell in the form of a black cat who’s eyes are shining when someone rings, and Kinski wears “stylish” shades that reflect a poker table and the face of his interlocutor in a scene that antedates the kidnapper’s legendary reflecting shades in Akira Kurosawa’s High & Low. Vohrer uses a lot of pans, even when they seem useless, and matching cuts that insist a little clunky on certain visual motives, thus creating a sort of Argento-like parallel world, that is equally unsettling but a lot more innocent.” Sporadic Scintillations

Cast:

• Joachim Fuchsberger as Inspector Larry Holt
• Karin Baal as Eleanor “Nora” Ward, née Finlay
• Dieter Borsche as David Judd aka Mr. Lennox aka Reverend (Paul) Dearborn
• Wolfgang Lukschy as Stephan Judd
• Eddi Arent as Sergeant / Inspector S. “Sunny” Harvey
• Anneli Sauli as Fanny Weldon (as Ann Savo)
• Bobby Todd as Lew Norris
• Franz Schafheitlin as Sir John
• Ady Berber as Jacob “The Blind Jack” Farrell (as Adi Berber)
• Harry Wüstenhagen as “Flimmer-Fred” (German version) / “Flicker-Fred” (English version)
• Rudolf Fenner as Matthew “Matt” Blake
• Hans Paetsch as Gordon Stuart
• Ida Ehre as Ella Ward
• Fritz Schröder-Jahn as Chief Inspector
• Klaus Kinski as Edgar Strauss

Filming locations:

Hamburg, Germany

Wikipedia | IMDb

The Addams Family is a group of fictional characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. The Addams Family characters include Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, Pubert Addams, Cousin Itt and Thing.

The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal American family; an eccentric, wealthy clan who delight in the macabre and are unaware, or do not care, that other people find them bizarre or frightening. They originally appeared as an unrelated group of 150 single panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker between their debut in 1938 and Addams’s 1988 death.

Addams’s original cartoons were one-panel gags. The characters were undeveloped and unnamed until the television series production.

Gomez and Pugsley are enthusiastic. Morticia is even in disposition, muted, witty, sometimes deadly. Grandma Frump is foolishly good-natured. Wednesday is her mother’s daughter. A closely knit family, the real head being Morticia—although each of the others is a definite character—except for Grandma, who is easily led. Many of the troubles they have as a family are due to Grandma’s fumbling, weak character. The house is a wreck, of course, but this is a house-proud family just the same and every trap door is in good repair. Money is no problem. — Charles Addams

The family appears to be a single surviving branch of the Addams clan. Many other “Addams families” exist all over the world. Charles Addams was first inspired by his home town of Westfield, New Jersey, an area full of ornate Victorian mansions and archaic graveyards.

Although most of the humour derives from the fact that they share macabre interests, the Addamses are a close-knit extended family. Morticia is an exemplary mother, and she and Gomez remain passionate towards each other.

The parents are supportive of their children. The family is friendly and hospitable to visitors, in some cases willing to donate large sums of money to causes, despite the visitors’ horror at the Addams’s peculiar lifestyle.

Characters:

Gomez – master of the Addams household and the Addams patriarch, married to Morticia and the father of Wednesday and Pugsley. In the original cartoons in The New Yorker, he appeared tubby, snub-nosed and with a receding chin.

In the 1960s television series, Gomez was portrayed as a naive, handsome, and successful man, although with a childlike, eccentric enthusiasm for everything he did. Though a peaceful man, he was known to be well-versed in many types of combat; he and Morticia fenced sometimes.

Gomez professed endless love for his wife, Morticia. He had studied to be a lawyer, but rarely practiced, one of the running jokes being that he took great pride in losing his cases. Gomez was depicted as extremely wealthy, through inheritance and extensive investments, but he seemed to have little regard for money.

Morticia Addams – matriarch of the Addams Family, a slim woman with pale skin, clad in a skin-tight black hobble gown with octopus-like tendrils at the hem. Her visual aspect suggested that of some kind of vampire. She adores her husband, Gomez, as deeply as he does her.

Gomez and Morticia had two children, a son called Pugsley and a daughter called Wednesday. In the television show she was a sweet-natured, innocent, happy child, largely concerned with her fearsome pet spiders.

The movies gave Wednesday a much more serious and mature personality with a deadpan wit and a morbid fascination with trying to physically harm, or possibly murder, her brother (she was seen strapping him into an electric chair, for example, and preparing to pull the switch); she was apparently often successful, but Pugsley never died. Like most members of the family, he seemed to be inhumanly resilient.

For his part, Pugsley was largely oblivious to the harm his sister tried to inflict on him, or an enthusiastic supporter of it, viewing all attempts as fun and games. In his first incarnation in The New Yorker cartoons, Pugsley was depicted as a diabolical, malevolent boy-next-door. In the television series, he was a devoted older brother and an inventive and mechanical genius. In the movies he lost his intelligence and independence, and became Wednesday’s sidekick and younger brother, cheerfully helping her in her evil deeds.

Fester is a bald, barrel-shaped man with dark, sunken eyes and a devilish grin. He seemed to carry an electrical charge, as he could illuminate a light bulb by sticking it in his mouth. In the original television series, Fester was Morticia’s uncle. In all subsequent animated and film media, Fester was Gomez’s older brother, save for The New Addams Family where Fester is portrayed as Gomez’ younger brother.

Grandmama is a witch who deals in potions, spells, hexes, and even fortune-telling. Her trademarks were her shawl and grey, frizzy hair. Charles Addams originally named the character Grandma/Granny Frump in his notes for the adaptation of the cartoons to television in 1965, thereby making her Morticia’s mother.

“Thing” as created by Charles Addams, was a shy creature mostly seen in the background of Addams’s drawings; however, the television series suggested it was a disembodied hand named “Thing“, and was Gomez’s friend since childhood. He (it is implied in the original television series that the character is male) often performed common, everyday tasks such as retrieving the mail, writing a letter, or just giving a friendly pat on the shoulder, appearing out of ubiquitous boxes or other convenient containers throughout the house. He communicated with the Addamses with a Morse-like alphabet, sign language, writing, and knocking on wood.

Lurch served as a shambling gravelly-voiced butler, unscarred yet reminiscent of Frankenstein’s Monster, and a funereal but obedient “jack of all trades”. He tried to help around the house, although occasionally he botched tasks due to his great size and strength, but is otherwise considered quite a catch by the Addamses for his skill at more personal tasks, such as waxing Uncle Fester’s head and amusing the children (to whom he was deeply devoted).

Surprisingly, Lurch was often seen playing the harpsichord or organ with great skill and uncharacteristic passion.

Cousin Itt, as so named by the television series producer, who frequently visited the family, was short-statured and had long hair that covered his entire body from scalp to floor. Cousin Itt drove a 3-wheeled car: a Messerschmitt KR175. Although in the series he was shown wearing opera gloves, it is unclear what, if anything, is beneath the hair.

The Addams family’s mansion had many different incarnations over the years. In one of Charles Addams’s cartoons. The house was depicted as being a dilapidated mansion that had been condemned (and was seemingly haunted, due to the strange creatures at the top of the staircase). Since then, it had become almost a character itself, and served as the main setting for the rest of the cartoons featuring the Addams family.

In the 1960s television series, the house was given an address: 0001 Cemetery Lane. Instead of being a dilapidated house, it was now practically a museum, filled with odd statues, trophies, and other interesting knick-knacks. The house also sported a playroom with medieval racks, nailbeds, iron maidens, pillories and stocks, used for family relaxation.

The house once again became a condemned mansion in the New Scooby-Doo Movies television show, in which the Addamses made a guest appearance. In the subsequent Addams Family 1970s cartoon, the mansion was mounted on a trailer and dragged all over the world with the globetrotting Addams clan.

The two Addams Family movies in 1991 and 1993, along with the second animated television series in 1992, resurrected the mansion’s original exterior design from the Charles Addams cartoons. The movie Addams Family Values had the mansion appearing exactly as it did in Charles Addams’s drawing of the family, about to dump boiling oil on a group of carollers from the roof (a gag that was acted out in the opening sequence of the previous film). The first film reveals the mansion to have a cavernous, pillared, vaulted-ceilinged canal system deep underneath it, traversable by gondola boat to reach the family vault, itself a cluttered room filled with childhood mementos, home movies, and a bar which revolves around to reveal vast halls filled with countless gold doubloons and other treasure.

Unlike The Munsters, which explicitly stated its characters’ supernatural origins, the exact nature of the Addamses is never established. They all seemed to share a bond with the occult and supernatural. Uncle Fester was often portrayed as something of a mad scientist, and Grandmama as a potion maker, and Morticia states that her study is spells and hexes in the 1991 movie The Addams Family but, these activities don’t really explain the Addams’s seemingly immortal state. Much of the food they live on is inedible or outright deadly to normal humans, and they take an interest in painful activities like walking across minefields or having a sharp pendulum cut them in half.

Television series, episodes, and films

In 1964, the ABC-TV network created The Addams Family television series based on Addams’s cartoon characters. The series was shot in black-and-white and aired for two seasons in 64 half-hour episodes.

The television series featured a memorable theme song, written and arranged by longtime Hollywood composer Vic Mizzy (who also wrote the score for William Castle’s The Night Walker). The song’s arrangement was dominated by a harpsichord, and featured finger-snaps as percussive accompaniment. Actor Ted Cassidy, in his “Lurch” voice, punctuated the lyrics with words like “neat”, “sweet”, and “petite”. Mizzy’s theme was popular enough to enjoy a release as a 45rpm single, though it failed to make the national charts.

The New Scooby-Doo Movies (1972)

The Addams Family’s first animated appearance was on the third episode of Hanna-Barbera’s The New Scooby-Doo Movies, which first aired on CBS Saturday morning September 23, 1972. Four of the original cast (John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Jackie Coogan, and Ted Cassidy) returned for the special.

The Addams Family characters were drawn to the specifications of the original Charles Addams cartoons. After the episode aired, fans wanted more animated adventures featuring the Addamses, and Hanna-Barbera obliged.

The Addams Family Fun-House (1972)

Meanwhile, in late 1972, ABC produced a pilot for a live-action musical variety show titled The Addams Family Fun-House. The cast included Jack Riley and Liz Torres as Gomez and Morticia, Stubby Kaye as Uncle Fester, Pat McCormick as Lurch and Butch Patrick (who had played Eddie Munster in The Munsters) as Pugsley. The pilot aired in 1973, but was not picked up for a series. Judging by the image below, we can see why!

The Addams Family  (1973–1975)

The first animated series ran on Saturday mornings from 1973–1975 on NBC. In a departure from the original series, this series took the Addamses on the road in a Victorian-style RV. This series also marked the point where the relations between characters were changed so that Fester was now Gomez’s brother, and Grandmama was now Morticia’s mother.

Although Coogan and Cassidy reprised their roles, Astin and Jones did not, their parts being recast with Hanna-Barbera voice talents Lennie Weinrib as Gomez and Janet Waldo as Morticia, while a ten-year-old Jodie Foster provided the voice of Pugsley. One season was produced, and the second season consisted of reruns. The show’s theme music was completely different and had no lyrics and no finger snaps.

A complementary comic book series was produced in connection with the show, but it lasted only three issues.

Halloween with the New Addams Family (1977)

A television reunion movie, Halloween with the New Addams Family, aired on NBC Sunday, October 30, 1977.

The Addams Family: The Animated Series (1992–1993)

The New Addams Family (1998–1999)

The New Addams Family was filmed in Vancouver, Canada, and ran for 65 episodes (one more than the original TV series) during the 1998–1999 season on the then newly launched Fox Family Channel. Many storylines from the original series were reworked for this new series, incorporating more modern elements and jokes. John Astin returned to the franchise in some episodes of this series, albeit as “Grandpapa” Addams.

The cast included Glenn Taranto as Gomez Addams, Ellie Harvie as Morticia, Michael Roberds as Fester, Brody Smith as Pugsley, Nicole Fugere (the only cast member from Addams Family Reunion to return) as Wednesday, John DeSantis as Lurch, Betty Phillips as Grandmama and Steven Fox as Thing.

Theatrical feature films

The Addams Family (1991)

In the 1990s, Orion Pictures (which by then had inherited the rights to the series) developed a film version, The Addams Family (released on November 22, 1991). Due to the studio’s financial troubles at the time, Orion sold the US rights to the film to Paramount Pictures. It took $191,502,246 at the box office.

Addams Family Values (1993)

Upon the last film’s success, a sequel followed: Addams Family Values. Loosened content restrictions allowed the films to use far more grotesque humour that strove to keep the original spirit of the Addams cartoons (in fact, several gags were lifted straight from the single panel cartoons). The two movies used the same cast, except for Grandmama, played by Judith Malina in the first film and Carol Kane in the second. A script for a third film was prepared in 1994, but was abandoned after the sudden death of actor Raúl Juliá.

Addams Family Reunion (1998)

Released direct-to-video on September 22, 1998, this time by Warner Bros. through its video division. It has no relation to the Paramount movies, being in fact a full-length pilot for a second live-action television version, The New Addams Family. The third movie’s Gomez, played by Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show; It), follows the style of Raúl Juliá.

Cancelled film

In 2010, it was announced that Illumination Entertainment, in partnership with Universal Pictures, had acquired the underlying rights to the Addams Family drawings. The film was planned to be a stop-motion animated film based on Charles Addams’s original drawings. Tim Burton was set to co-write and co-produce the film, with a possibility to direct but it was eventually cancelled.

Reboot

On October 31, 2013 it was announced in Variety that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer will be rebooting The Addams Family as an animated film with Pamela Pettler writing the screenplay, however this has not come to fruition, so far…

Adult features

Inevitably, as with The Munsters, there are adult-entertainment takes on the family’s exploits, namely The Maddams Family – with Ron Jeremy as Uncle Fester – and The Addams Family XXX. According to online reviews, the latter seems to be the better of the two…

Video games

Five video games released from 1989 to 1994 were based on The Addams Family.

• Fester’s Quest (1989) was a top down adventure game that featured Uncle Fester.

• In 1992, two versions of The Addams Family were released by Ocean Software based on the 1991 movie; an 8-bit version for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, as well as a 16-bit version released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Amiga, Atari ST and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. ICOM Simulations published The Addams Family video game for the TurboGrafx-CD in 1991.

• The games’ sequel, The Addams Family: Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt (1993), also by Ocean Software, was based on the ABC animated series and was released for NES, SNES, and Game Boy (although the latter two were just 8-bit remakes of the first SNES game, swapping Pugsley and Gomez’s roles).

• Addams Family Values (1994) by Ocean was based on the movie’s sequel and returned to the style of gameplay seen in Fester’s Quest.

• A Game Boy Color game was released in the 1990s for promotion of The New Addams Family. The game was simply titled The New Addams Family Series. In this game, the Addams mansion had been bought by a fictional company called “Funnyday” that wanted to tear down the house and surrounding grounds to make room for an amusement park.

Pinball

Books

The Addams Family

This first novelization of the television series, written by Jack Sharkey, was released near the end of the show’s second season by Pyramid Books in 1965. The book details the family’s arrival in their new home, and explains how it got its bizarre décor. The arrival and origins of Thing are explained. Each chapter reads as a self-contained story, like episodes of the television show. The novel concludes with the Addams family discovering that their lives will be the basis for a new television series.

The Addams Family Strikes Back

“The Addams Family Strikes Back” by W.F. Miksch tells how Gomez plans to rehabilitate the image of Benedict Arnold by running for the local school board. The tone and characterizations in this book resemble the TV characters much more closely than in the first novel. Cousin Itt appears as a minor character in this story, but as a tiny, three-legged creature rather than the hairy, derby-hatted character seen on television and in the movies. The novel was published in paperback form by Pyramid Books in 1965.

The Addams Family: An Evilution

Merchandising: Games and Toys

The success of the 1960s TV series spawned a vast array of merchandising including a board game and target game, both from Ideal.

The success of the 1990s feature films led to further merchandising of all kinds, plus arcade games.

Advertising

In 1994, the actors cast as the Addamses in the first two films (sans the recently deceased Raúl Juliá) were in several Japanese television spots for the Honda Odyssey.The Addamses—most prominently Gomez (for whom a voice actor was used to impersonate Juliá while footage from Addams Family Values was seen) and Morticia—are seen speaking Japanese.

In 2007 and 2008, the Addams Family appeared as M&Ms in an advertising campaign for M&Ms Dark Chocolate.

Musicals

The Addams Family (2010 onwards)

More Addams Family merchandise…

Fancy dress costumes

Wikipedia | Related: The Munsters