Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE WITCHES MOUNTAIN (1972)

Gotta say, The Witches Mountain was one film in the ol' Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection that I was really looking forward to seeing again. Yes, I say this despite the fact that back in 2010 I deemed it "...so, so bad. So bad. Bad. Bad movie." In recent times I'd felt in my heart-place that the problem likely wasn't The Witches Mountain--not completely, anyway--but 2010 me. (Well, 2010 me and the atrocious picture quality standard flowing through the waters of the ol' Mill Creek.) Bits of it that couldn't possibly be bad lingered in my memory, such as the knife-on-wig violence of the film's opening moments, and the leading man's incredible moustache. But more, it's that I know 2010 me rarely appreciated a weird Euro sleaze-adjacent movie that's all about vibes. But 2026 me is so much more cultured, you know? My capacity for continental delights is no longer limited to heat lamp eggs and a corn muffin at the Hampton Inn! Vibes are my vibe!

So, armed with the Mondo Macabro blu-ray edition of The Witches Mountain, I settled in and prepared myself to be sail away into a pure mood (cue the "Orinoco Flow"). 

Knowing in advance that this is a vibes flick helped immensely, as did...you know, being able to actually see (mostly, anyway) what was going on thanks to the power of high definition. All of this made the story, such as it is, a bit more scrutable: To avoid his recent ex-girlfriend, photographer Mario (Cihangir Ghaffari) and his moustache accept an assignment that will take them deep into the Pyrenees. Soon Mario has a meet-creep when he takes photographs of an unaware sunbathing beauty named Delia (Patty Shepard of the 1988 gross-out funfest Slugs). In true 1972 fashion, Delia agrees to accompany Mario for the rest of his adventure. Such is the power of the 'stache!

The pari quickly runs afoul of all kinds of weird happenings, including but not limited to:

-- fog that comes and goes

-- Mario's car getting stolen

-- Victor Israel (from FG fave Horror muthafucking Express!) as a sinister-seeming innkeeper

-- hooded figures spying on Delia in particular

-- a caveman dream...?

-- an old woman who sure seems like a witch living alone in an abandoned village on the mountain

-- creepy goat herders that come and go

Eventually they find the place in the woods where the witches get together and do witch stuff. If you've seen The Witch or Suspiria you know what I'm talking about: They are dancing and singing and holding induction ceremonies! 

Thanks to that there high-definition, I now know the fate of all the characters. I know that Mario's ex is in the witch gang. I know that they had their designs on Delia. And I know that Mario will be shackled in the caveman cave, presumably to be the coven's boy toy.Yes, it's true, thanks to the lousy Mill Creek transfer I was clueless for pretty much all of that back in 2010. No wonder I thought it was bad!

Truthfully, even in 2026 I wouldn't say it's great. The early scenes where we see the aforementioned knife-on-wig violence and Mario's ex sets a child on fire (to be fair, the child killed her cat and then was shit-talking like "You suck and your cat sucked!" so...okay, I'm not exactly saying the child deserved it but I'm also not not saying it!) remain absolutely batshit and baller, but they're also kinda just glommed on to things and don't fit with the rest of The Witches Mountain. I also found that I wanted more vibes from the film--more surreality, maybe, or more eerie atmosphere. The landscape does a lot of the atmospheric heavy-lifting, and I think director Raúl Artigot could have done a lot more with everything that wasn't a pan across the Pyrenees. 

Unfortunately, my mind still wasn't blown by The Witches Mountain, even though I was hoping it would be. But hey, it's not a bad movie by any stretch! At least I get it now, unlike that total uncultured rube who wrote this blog back in 2010.

Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (1975)

Ah, a new year. What a time! Saying goodbye to 2025 and its respective Chippendales wall calendar, saying hello to 2026 and its respective Chippendales wall calendar. It's a time for promises and hope (I know things are hellish out there, just go with it) as we refresh and reflect. I've been doing a lot of reflecting since the ol'...uh, ball dropped and during my reflectin' times I've had some major realizations. The first is that although my brain had me thinking the contrary, I have not, in fact, finished up my Chilling Classics Cthursday journey through the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. Somewhere, someway, somehow, I'd crossed it off the to-do list of my mind. Should I be concerned I'd given it the signed-sealed-delivered-up yours! treatment when the finish line is actually still around 13 films away? It's possible. Likely, even! But hey, I can't be held accountable for lapses like that. It's hellish out there, in case you didn't know. 

My second realization is this: Today is Friday! But you know what, who cares? Do "days" and "time" even matter anymore? I would argue NO they do not, and I'm not just saying that as some weird way to cover up the fact that I am posting a Cthursday post on a Cfriday. Besides, when you take into account Realization #1, this post going out on the wrong day makes total sense. It's a theme, okay.

On the bright side of these Memento moments: hey, Chilling Classics Cthursday is back, hooray! And I'm kicking off my grand return with a little curio called The Legend of Bigfoot (1975), which brings me to my next major realization: 

I think I love Bigfoot?

Honestly, it might not be strictly true, but I can't deny the facts, which are as follows:

-- I've been to the International Cryptozoology Museum on more than one occasion! There I was absolutely delighted by exhibits like...someone's painting of a Bigfoot, or a glass case with a hairball in it and a little placard saying, like, "Bigfoot fur?"

-- I think about that scene in the 1980 film Night of the Demon where the Bigfoot grabs two Girl Scouts by the arms and makes them stab each other to death rather often

-- I watched some documentary a couple of years ago about a Bigfoot maybe committing some murders...? Look I don't remember the name of it but it was good 

-- I finally saw Willow Creek! As a found footage aficionado I was prone to like it and I sure did, especially the scene that seems to be the most divisive: The long sequence in the tent where we just listen to stuff maybe happening outside of the tent. It was intense and a terrific example of how found footage's ability to put the viewer in the midst of the action (or in this case, the anticipation of the action)

-- When RNGesus chose The Legend of Bigfoot for this week's movie, I thought "oh neat" or something along those lines 

So you see, Your Honor, while I never really thought about it all that much, the evidence strongly points to the incontrovertible truth that I love Bigfoot. Again I say: What a time!

As a certified Bigfoot lover (not in a weird way), how did The Legend of Bigfoot stack up? Well, first of all, let's make sure we're talking about the right movie here. Please do not confuse The Legend of Bigfoot with any of these other films:

• The Bigfoot Legend...Lives
• Bigfoot: Beyond the Legend
• Beyond the Legend: Bigfoot Gone Wild
• Bigfoot: The Legend is Real
• On the Trail of Bigfoot the Legend
• Bigfoot: Still Tracking a Legend
• The Legend of Billie Jean

Now that we've established that...The Legend of Bigfoot is a...documentary? Hmm, can a film be a documentary if the approach is straight-up sincere but the subject matter is less so? It's not a mockumentary, but is it then a pseudo-documentary? Is the taxonomy dictated by the proven scientific veracity of the topic? Hold on while I take another huge bong rip and think about it.

Let's just call it a cryptodocumentary for anti-simplicity's sake. In this cryptodocumentary, a wildlife tracker named Ivan Marx finds some big-ass footprints and a ball of unidentifiable hair (gross) and decides to put his skills to the test to search for Bigfoot. 

Marx and his wife Peg hit the road in their red VW Bug and travel all up and down the west coast chasing leads, listening to tales from hunters, "Eskimos," and "Indians" (it was the time, okay), and trying to capture irrefutable evidence that ol' Sassy exists. Yes, somehow the scientific community didn't just give Marx an "oh dip, I guess Bigfoot is real!" when presented with the hairball and plaster casts of the footprints. The nerve! And these same people think I should be vaccinated?? Please. 

Looks super real to me for sure! Science is the worst.

Marx nabs some genuine, bonafide Bigfoot footage in Washington--footage that the scientific community once again refuses to verify. Jerks.

Marx draws Xes and circles on a map that correspond to sightings and stories, and the patterns lead him to conclude that Bigfoot is a migratory creature, and our intrepid couple takes off in pursuit. They travel from the desert to the Redwood forest to the tundra. They hit Oregon, Wyoming, Alaska, and head all the way up into the Arctic Circle. 

Things get trippy at times as Marx temporarily abandons his scientific methods in lieu of a more folklore approach to finding the elusive cryptid; after an aurora light show (the screen kind of oscillates between white and red...?) Marx gets a hot tip from a phantom white raven that eventually leads to a long-distance nocturnal encounter with Bigfoot's bright, shining eyes. They are definitely not headlights!! Nor are they superimposed!! They are Bigfoot eyes. Sadly, Marx is unable to get a better look because come morning, the Bigfoot eyes have "disappeared behind a rainbow."

This causes Marx to wail (à la James Brolin-as-George Lutz) "I feel like I was coming apart at the seams!" and get back to his tracking roots...and man, there is a huge payoff! We are eventually treated to so much Bigfoot footage it's nuts. With extended sequences of a Bigfoot and a juvenile Bigfoot eating grass and kind of splashing in some water, Marx totally dunks on the brief Patterson-Gimlin footage. And believe me (yes, I'm talking to you, science) this is definitely a Bigfoot and a juvenile Bigfoot. It is not a man and his wife in costumes! Sure, the Bigfoot seems more regular-man-sized and not the 8-foot-tall, 500-pound beast that leaves 18-inch footprints as Marx describes. That's just a...uh...a trick of the film. Everyone knows that the camera subtracts 350 pounds and a few feet!

Yeah those vaguely humanoid-shaped black blobs are the Bigfoots. The transfer is pretty terrible ("In the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection?" you shriek. "Say it ain't so!"), reminiscent of the atrocious AI upscaling of Roseanne that's currently on Peacock, wherein no text is legible, background elements are frequently but smears, and elements occasionally look superimposed. And don't even get me started on the extreme cuts and editing! Two minutes have been excised from each episode, which is a-fucking-lot considering the episodes are only 22 minutes to begin with. Jokes are gone, characters are magically transported from one room to another, conversations end mid-conversation, and there are jarring close-ups and framing. Haven't I suffered enough over the years as a Roseanne fan? Does Grok have to take this, too??

Anyway, while it reminds me of that AI upscaling, for the most part the blobby blurring of imagery actually works to The Legend of Bigfoot's benefit as the fakery comes off as less fake if you can't, you know, make out any details. Not that this stuff is fake of course!

The majority of this film--the entirety of which is narrated in voiceover by Marx himself--is nature footage. Some of it is distressing and I'm thankful for that blobby blurring: Goats committing ritual suicide, an injured squirrel limping along, a squirrel mourning its dead mate, animals hunting other animals, the scene of a caribou slaughter by human hunters. None of it is explicitly graphic, but that doesn't make it any less impactful. At other times, the blobby blurring is a bummer because the footage would probably be terrific under more highly-defined circumstances. I want to see the majesty of the massive and metal AF antlers on the caribou and the moose!

"Curio" is indeed the right word for The Legend of Bigfoot. It's an entirely self-serious endeavor composed of equal parts Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the Tippi Hedren film Roar, and found footage sometimes-almost-but-not-horror. It's as much about Marx and his journey as it is about Bigfoot itself, as his tale weaves in and out of science and folklore and touches on 70s newly-hot topics like environmental awareness, colonialism, and violence against indigenous people. At times, this results in the sense that the entire affair is a little padded on occasion, but there is all that big, beautiful, blurry, blobby Bigfoot footage at the end. Footage, I might add, that the scientific community still refuses to verify! As a certified Bigfoot lover (not in a weird way), I find this completely unacceptable and just more evidence that science has never done anything good more me. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to finish this big glass of room temperature raw milk and watch Roseanne! Season 10 I mean!

Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE DEMON (1981)

Whether it's because yes, I'm still in the grip of this grippe or whether it's because it is simply his nature, RNGesus did me a kindness this week by selecting The Demon, a South African slasher curio that stars 50-pack King Cameron Mitchell as a psychic ex-Marine. It is the pleasures of life such as this that will see me through this time of plague.

Dig a little and you'll see that The Demon has a plethora of dates attached to it: 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985...for simplicity's sake I'd call The Demon a relic from The Age of Macramé, but a few in situ pop culture cameos put its filming squarely in 1979: namely a marquee showing The Amityville Horror and disco dancers getting TF down to the Lipps Inc tune "Funkytown" (which, incidentally, still slaps). The rest is a matter of release dates and the such, and I leave those kinds of decisions up to the courts, thank you very much.

By the way, those disco dancers are getting TF down at a place called Boobs Disco and I don't know...things weren't perfect but surely society was a little better when your average white folk got TF down regularly, sublimating their troubles by stepping all over a light-up floor instead of all over the lives of everyone else? 

Anyway. A heavy-breathing, hulking maniac breaks into a suburban home, ties up the mother and puts a plastic bag over her head, then absconds with the teenage daughter. The mother survives, but when police have no leads on the daughter after two months, the parents do the only thing they can: they call for the services of retired Marine Colonel Bill Carson, psychic. 

Move over, Sylvia Browne

Carson humbly explains his ESP powers ("Sometimes I get feelings--vibes, as the kids would call them") and gets to work touching objects in the daughter's bedroom. He sketches a few of his related visions and the dad somehow decides they are a good enough lead to go searching for the maniac, whom Carson super helpfully describes as "less than a man, and more than a man."

Most movies would follow this main plotline that features their main star, but not The Demon! Writer/director Percival Rubens dedicates the bulk of the film to a B-plot concerning a teacher I christened 1979 Amy Poehler (Jennifer Holmes) and her cousin as they navigate their love lives while sort-of being stalked by our resident Less-n-More Than a Man. 

Yes indeed, The Demon likes to show off both its Black Christmas influences and its Halloween influences. I'm not really complaining.

Nor am I really complaining about that bulk of the film that many a viewer would likely call "boring." I'm not saying I'm not calling it that, necessarily, but I didn't hate it. In fact, I was rather curious to see how the two plotlines would converge.

Spoiler: they do not! The only thing linking them together is our resident Less-n-More Than a Man, who seems to choose his victims at random. Of course, the majority of his victims are women and his motivations seem to come down to "woman-hating." 

While this and the random excuses for nudity put The Demon squarely into the realm of typical slasher stuff, the film does manage to hide a few surprises up its billowy sleeves. Rubens wisely employs a restrained hand when it comes to showing our Less-n-More Than a Man, but unfortunately this is your standard Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection transfer; The glimpses we do get of the killer are often too dark to really enjoy. It's a shame because he sports some bitchin' gloves that are like Giallo Freddy Krueger specials and I wanted to see 'em in action.

I don't think The Demon rises even to the level of Great Value Slasher, but its surprises and left turns and last ten minutes push it to the level of Hey Maybe Slasher Aficionados Should Check It Out. That's something, right? I mean, a psychic Cameron Mitchell! Boobs Disco! Not even the mighty Halloween can boast that stuff.

Chilling Classics Cthursday: COVID (2025)

I thought I might be able to take a dip in the Mill Creek this week but it is not happening, I am sorry to say. I felt a bit better yesterday but I feel a bit worse today, and I know it's only been a couple of days but time has been very amorphous and I now fear I will be trapped in this forever. 

Time has been very amorphous because, you know, quarantine fugue. But it also owes to the fact that I am not engaging in usual home activities: movies, books, games. Besides reading two chapters of a book, literally the only thing I have done is watch Vanderpump Rules.

If you don't know, it's a Real Housewives spinoff that follows the lives of the young folk who work at the West Hollywood restaurant SUR, co-owned by Lisa Vanderpump, formerly of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It's been airing since 2013. 

I never indulged (though Housewives friends have long told me to) because what care I for the exploits of the young? Besides, knowing there are 11 seasons of it to catch up on is awfully intimidating. Well, something in my brain decided that the time was finally right, and while I am certainly not going to say I'm grateful for catching Covid, I will say that I am grateful to myself for using Covid as an excuse to indulge. It is magnificent.

So when I am not wandering aimlessly around my apartment or ordering more supplies, I am watching VPR. Time has not only been amorphous, it truly no longer has meaning. 

Here is a selfie of me between episodes, calling the grocery store to demand they SEND MORE ONIONS.

"Stacie," you are surely thinking, "We barely tolerate your Real Housewives asides, references, and blather. This tolerance will absolutely not extend to Vanderpump Rules, so please don't start."

Don't worry, I won't! I only mention this at all because check this out, it's relevant, I swear.

So in season 2, Tom Sandoval's band has a ~~big moment~~ opening for Martha Davis and The Motels at Lake Arrowhead, a mountain resort east of Los Angeles. What I was not expecting was this:

1) Yes, their band is called "Pierce the Arrow." No, I don't know what that means.

2) Yes, I took a vertical video of my TV in the moment! Leave me alone, I have Covid.

3) REGGIE BANNISTER??? On my Vanderpump Rules??? Introducing acts at Lake Arrowhead????? 

Well knock me over with a ponytail! 

It's the most random cameo of all time, surely. 

I love Phantasm so much. Like I don't know if I'd put in in my top 20 ever--maybe my top 50? But I do have such feelings for it, mostly because it scared the heccccckkkkk out of me as a youth, so badly that were I to watch it now, I'd probably still be a bit unsettled at least. I don't know how someone watching it for the first time today would feel about it, but for me it'll always be a bit of a nightmare.

Okay that's the update from Plague Central. This has wiped me out, back to the couch...and VPR. Fingers crossed an uncredited Lance Henriksen shows up in the background at SUR as the youths tear into one another over today's betrayal.

Chilling Classics Cthursday: SLASHED DREAMS (1975)

Given its title and the fact that the DVD's cardboard sleeve boasts "Starring: Robert Englund," I was surprised that I'd never given Slashed Dreams a go. However, now that it's in my rearview mirror I see that skipping it was my past self doing me a kindness. Thanks, me!

I came down with a big case of the uh-ohs right away, with the title card looking like something added hastily in iMovie when production realized they'd forgotten to include an opening credits sequence.

Turns out, I wasn't so far off the mark. The film was released in '75 as Sunburst, but Englund's Elm Street fame and the rise of the home video market gave an enterprising distributor a bright idea circa 1985: Give it a quasi nightmare-slasher title and slap some salacious artwork on the VHS box. With this cover, one wonders how many horror fans nabbed it at the video store with, you know, expectations.

Would those same horror fans have rented it if the cover still bore the art from the film's original poster?

At least their expectations might have aligned with what they got: a holdover hippie flick about finding yourself, feeling feelings, and, uh, learning how to simply be mind over matter about things, even if one of those things is rape. Yes folks, we've got another Chilling Classics outlier (à la Death Rage and Medusa), a not-horror movie that's been dumped in yon Creek de Mill. 

Mind you, even if you were to watch Sunb--uh, Slashed Dreams knowing what it actually is, there's a good chance you'd still end up disappointed. It is a slog-and-a-half, padded beyond belief with full five-minute scenes of people walking, or driving, or sitting. It's not so much "poorly paced" as it is "not paced." Like, somehow it completely defies everything we know about time as it moves ever-forward. It's kind of admirable, in its own way.

We begin at A College, where Jenny receives a letter from her old friend Michael, who has ditched the trappings of The Man to go live in the woods as many a headstrong young fellow has done throughout the ages. Unlike those headstrong (and ultimately doomed) young fellows you read about in non-fiction, Michael seems to be thriving. After breaking up with her boorish, wealthy boyfriend Marshall, Jenny goes on a trip to find Michael along with Robert, another childhood friend who might turn out to be her One True Love. 

During their journey, they make a pit stop at a small town general store, where they find The Proprietor (that's his name in the credits!) performing for an audience of no one in his back room. He then sings them a song, which is because The Proprietor is portrayed by the legendary 1920s crooner Rudy Vallée, and if you're going to get a Rudy Vallée cameo in your film you'd might as well let him sing.

Jenny and Robert continue on their way and we get so many scenes of them hiking and walking. SO MANY. There is a brief brown bear encounter, and then more walking and hiking. All of these types of scenes are set to ENTIRE tunes...warbled...by Roberta Van Dere. These songs sound like something that didn't make the cut on any volume of the Time-Life Singers and Songwriters series, but you might find them on, say, a "Songwriters and Singers" compilation CD sold for $5.99 at a truck stop. You know, they're like the musical equivalent of the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. When they do feature a singer you know by name, the song is a z-side of the absolute shittiest quality imaginable. No I would never buy one or more of those CDs why do you ask!!!

The point is, these songs will make or--oh hell, they're just gonna break you.

Also I love that the picture quality is so bad, this screencap looks like an impressionist painting.

They arrive at Michael's cabin, but Michael is nowhere to be found. Also, calling it a "cabin" feels generous, as this place is literally made of sticks and it's got giant, gaping holes in the roof. It kind of makes Jason's lean-to in Friday the 13th Part 2 look positively luxurious. 

As Robert and Jenny are engaging in a little platonic skinny-dipping (they are truly an iconic will they-or-won't they couple!!!) when they're happened upon by two local Cletuses, Danker and Levon, played by Sunburst co-writers David Pritchard and James "not Stacy" Keach. (Fun fact: James "not Stacy" Keach was once married to Holly "not Judy" Collins!)

They're cartoonish and vaguely menacing in the way all post-Deliverance local Cletuses are, making threats to Robert and weird, leering threats to Jenny ("I'd like to dive for her sponge!"). Sure enough, they show up at the cabin later that night and slap around and rape Jenny. Then we get lengthy scenes of Jenny crying and traumatized while Robert goes outside to be sad that he couldn't/didn't do anything to help her.

Finally, Michael comes home to his cabin and hey, it's the actor everyone who rented Slashed Dreams was waiting for: Robert Englund!

He comforts Jenny by offering her some homemade herbal tea and drawing an analogy between her sexual assault and his poison oak: The best way for him to not go crazy because of the itching is to move beyond it and ignore it. Or hey, maybe this traumatic ordeal was just her fate and she can learn something from it! Errrr, he gets points for actually talking to her and trying to help, I suppose, which is more than we can say for Robert. But it's sure something to watch him dole out this "advice." It's even worse to see Jenny say "I feel so--" and get interrupted by Michael with "LET IT GO."

Robert then decides he's going to go after the Cletuses, and I bet all those video renters were expecting the "revenge" part that horror movies of this ilk deliver. Well, he finds the Cletuses arguing whether or not they should head back to the cabin, he gets in a tussle with Levon...Michael and Jenny show up (seems like a great idea for her to be there), the Cletuses run off, and Robert is like "Well, that was dumb." 

We get another song, another skinny dip (by all three pals this time), Jenny reading a bit of Khalil Gibran to perk herself up, and then she and Robert merrily walk off into the...you know, the sunburst.

Do I recommend Slashed Dreams? Fuck no! And yet...

And yet I find it to be a fascinating little curio. As I mentioned, it's some holdover hippie shit--I mean, the director's end credit is "Created by James Polakof" for fuck's sake--but it's decidedly a 1975 take on those remnant late-60s peace and love ideals, rendering them all about loving yourself. The self-help movement emerged into the mainstream and was a bonafide boom in the 70s, and if nothing else, Sunburst comes off as an earnest (if severely misguided) attempt at joining the conversation. 

In terms of actual cinema, it's difficult to parse what, exactly, the filmmakers (that is, the creators) were trying to do. By '75, Deliverance, Straw Dogs, and The Last House on the Left were all a couple of years old--was this feeble effort meant to be a self-help rebuttal to those? That the way to resolve these kinds of terrible events is not through violence and revenge, but through self-reflection? Is it simply a cash-in mash-up? Is it an outta left field bridge between those films and 1978's I Spit on Your Grave? 

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the way it predicts some tropes of the slasher boom that would arrive before long, but it does so in a sort of negative-image light. There's a scene in the small, sorta run-down country grocery store, but it's a wholesome place instead of a decrepit place you're wary of, à la The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. We get a Crazy Ralph-type doomsayer in The Proprietor, who warns Robert and Jenny to beware of "strange things" in the woods and advises them not to go...but he's also wholesome and nice, and he sings for them and offers them licorice candy. Early on, there's a classroom scene that predicts what themes the movie will touch on, reminiscent of the "FATE!" classroom scene in Halloween and others. Robert and Jenny are literally headed to a cabin in the woods--not to drink and screw (though they do consummate their relationship eventually!!!!) like proper horror youths, but rather to be closer to nature and "find themselves." There's even a tiny handful of first-person POV shots as the local Cletuses spy on our skinny-dipping heroes that would have been at home in Friday the 13th.

Again, it's impossible to decide whether or not any of the slight (and I do mean SLA-HIGHT) whiff of horror in this thing was even intentional beyond the awful plot device that leads to Jenny being immediately healed by the power of positive thinking. If nothing else, against all odds Slashed Dreams is the worst movie I'll be contemplating for some time to come.

Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE REVENGE OF DR. X (1967)

The last thing I expected to happen whilst watching the 1967 film The Revenge of Dr. X is that I'd quickly begin asking myself some of life's deepest, most philosophical questions. You know, stuff like "Would it be better to be dead than to have to watch this movie?" and that sort of thing.

Mind you, it didn't start that way. In fact, when I read the synopsis on the cardboard Chilling Classics sleeve, I was immediately looking forward to it as it sounded like it might be "fun."

A NASA scientist is ordered to take a vacation due to showing signs of stress whiule working on his latest missile project. Traveling to Japan, the scientist decides to indulge in his botany hobby and begins experimenting on a Venus Flytrap he brought along on the trip. Using radical techniques and falling into madness, the scientist eventually creates a plant creature that feeds on flesh and blood, which then sets off to find food in the form of the people of a nearby community.

See? "Fun," right? And technically, the description is totally accurate. But descriptions and descriptions realized can often be leagues apart, and in the case of The Revenge of Dr. X, there are leagues and leagues and leagues separating the two. I think I knew this the moment the title screen appeared, when I immediately had what was a decidedly sinking feeling:

On the bright side (???) of things, the opening credits are actually for another film entirely: a 1969 Philippine film called The Mad Doctor of Blood Island. None of the actors in the credits are in the movie that follows. In fact, the film I watched has such a convoluted shit-show of a history that it took a while to figure out exactly which film I watched. It's sometimes called Venus Flytrap, it's sometimes called Body of the Prey, sometimes The Devil's Garden. The release year might be 1967 or perhaps 1970. It's purported to be based on a lost Ed Wood story, and whether that's true or not the very idea that it might be ought to give you a clue about the nature of this thing.

Of course, none of that would matter a lick if this movie was enjoyable to watch and not a turgid plod. I could easily get over the lack of any revenge or any doctors X if it wasn't about 3 minutes of good stuff trapped within 94 minutes of dullness so dull that again, left me wondering if I'd be better off dead than trying to get through it.

The soundtrack, if such a term even applies, is library stock music trash. One moment it's Bach's Toccata and Fugue (you know, the classic Dracula's castle organ shit), then we get ten minutes of xylophone madness followed by some of the worst stereotypical "Japanese" music imaginable followed by a toddler day care marching band. It's all over the place, and the place is hell.

But the stock footage isn't restricted to your ear holes! There is plenty for your eyes to feast on, including NASA mission control and the same footage of a rocket blasting off that MTV started with and used forever. Hey man, don't get me wrong--stock footage can be cheeky fun! And this is, for about five seconds.

I was rather surprised to find that our leading man James Craig had a lengthy career and massive filmography (dating back to the 1930s) because as Dr. X Bragan he delivers one of the worst performances I can recall. He's boorish, shouting virtually every line and often facing away from the camera completely. The "madness" he supposedly descends into doesn't feel any different than his days in the office at NASA. Maybe I'm missing the point and it's a brilliant performance showing that stress is stress and it's all the same, no matter if you're talking about rockets in Florida or plants in Japan. Yeah, that must be it! At any rate, the most positive things I can say about him are 1) he kind of looks like the guy at the office you think looks like a Silly Putty Clark Gable, and 2) his voice sorta reminded me of Charles Napier, whom I love.

A fucking hour into this padded-as-no one's-business crap we get the world's saddest attempt at a Frankenstein lab scene,  complete with a "lightning" storm, an open roof, a body-hoisting, and the best thing about it, a couple of bzzt bzzt machines.

Bragan has been trying to prove that all human life originated with plants, and to do this he splices a Venus Flytrap with some deep sea plant that is only a deep sea plant so the movie can work in a scene with some topless ladydivers. Say what you will about Bragan's ideas/methods/everything, he does create a plant creature that we finally get to see after the hour mark comes and goes, taking all of our joy and hopes and dreams with it. The plant monster has giant Venus Flytraps for hands and feet, and it kind of waves its arms around sometimes and makes weird noises. 

This movie, whatever it's called, was distributed by Japan's Toei Company, so a dude standing there in a bad costume waving his arms around sometimes isn't completely unexpected. But even so, it's bottom of the bottomest-barrel stuff. I will say that the plant creature accounts for about two minutes and fifty seconds' worth of the three minutes of fun in this disaster. The other ten seconds belongs to one of the shots near the very end, which is a goat standing on what is supposed to be the edge of a volcano.

As you can tell from all the screencaps, especially the color of the sky in that last one, this movie lingers in the depths of public domain heck, which is how it ended up one of the worst offerings in the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. (Honestly, typing out her full name gives me more happiness than this film did.) I'd say it's theeeee worst offering in there, but hey, I've still got like 15 movies to go. Chin up, kids, this could very well just be the worst Chilling Classics Cthursday so far!

Chilling Classics Cthursday: SCREAM BLOODY MURDER (1973)

I hesitate to call the 1973 exploitation flick Scream Bloody Murder a gem, but surely it qualifies as at least gem-adjacent. After all, this is a movie in which a young boy runs over and kills his father with a piece of farm equipment, only to promptly fall and lose his hand after being run over by the very same farm equipment...all in the first minute of the movie, before the title pops up.

Okay, yeah, by the end of this post I might just be calling Scream Bloody Murder a straight-up gem.

The young boy in question, Matthew, is promptly sent to an institution run by strict-looking nuns of the Silent Night, Deadly Night variety (as opposed to the fun-having nuns of the Sister Act variety, or the hot nuns of the Whichever Annabelle Movie That Was That Had the Nun In It variety). They replace his missing hand with a hook and eventually send him back home. Everyone in the movie continues to call Matthew a "boy," and he certainly speaks like a boy, but actor Fred Holbert was 28 at the time and looks every year of it. So who's to say what's going on with Matthew? Maybe it's none of my business.

One thing you can say about Matthew with total certainty, however, is that he was and continues to be a stone-cold hater. He hates that while he was away in the institution, his mother met an married a nice man and they sometimes touch each other in their private no-no parts, so he promptly kills his new stepfather and then accidentally kills his mother...all in the first ten minutes of the movie.

Matthew goes on the lam and is picked up by some kind newlyweds. They all stop to frolic in a stream (as you do) and when the newlyweds hug...well, you might figure out where this is going. That's right, Matthew is not just any hater, he is a sex hater who has tasked himself with "saving" women from the gross advances of men, whether the women enjoy said advances or not. He kills the men and he's plagued by weird visions of his dead mother Daisy, so then he kills the women, too. A Hater and a Killer: The Matthew Story.

Matthew goes on the lam 2.0 and ends up in Venice, where he meets a cool artist-prostitute named Vera, and well, you might figure out where this is going.

Vera is super chill, meeting johns in her house to pay the bills so she can spend the rest of her time painting. Matthew immediately becomes attached, and Vera is okay with being friends with him, but she's not interested in being saved: "You stay a nice little boy and I'll stay Vera who throws it down for a couple of bucks." 

Again I say: "little boy"? Whatever you say, Scream Bloody Murder! 

Matthew isn't happy taking "I'm happy" for an answer, however. He's concocted a wild tale, that he's from a wealthy family and lives near a mansion nearby, where Vera--whom he now calls 'Daisy' after his mother--can live out her artistic dreams without having to do all that gross sex stuff. He murders one of her johns and then sets out to make his wild tale a reality.

There is nobody Matthew won't kill to make this happen: innocents, old women, dogs...anyone that stands in the way of this dream will end up dead. After he clears the house of its rightful owner, Matthew brings Vera over for a visit, one he demands will be permanent. Vera, of course, says no thank you, so as you might expect, Matthew kidnaps her.

She continues to be ungrateful, even when Matthew points out the lengths he goes to to make her happy: "See what I do for you? I get groceries and clothes and art stuff and kill people."

This is the point when Scream Bloody Murder peters out a bit. Vera's tied up, and we get all the standard someone's being held captive sequences: the foiled escape attempts, the missed phone call, the missed visiting neighbor, and so on. One of these sequences features a pre-Tall Man Angus Scrimm, but I'll have to take imdb's word on that one because I didn't recognize him at all. 

Then again, I also didn't recognize that the same actress plays Vera and Daisy! In my defense, the print for this film is terrible and at times, faces (and end credits) aren't much more than a smear.

It all picks up again during the climax, which finds Matthew on the lam 3.0, literally running from his demons. It's got a somewhat bonkers end that sorta predicts the end of the 1980 Maniac, though Scream Bloody Murder's finale features 100% more cackling and a score that can only be called "church organ madness." 

Like Maniac, Scream Bloody Murder is not as exploitative as you might anticipate. More often than not it's having fun with its premise, which is remarkable because in a parallel universe this movie about a man who murders sex-enjoyers and takes a sex worker captive could be an uncomfortable watch to say the least. Instead, it's got some truly humorous sequences (a montage of one of Matthew's crime sprees is a delight) and Vera is really the rad hero of the hour-and-a-half. 

Like I said from the very start, Scream Bloody Murder is a straight-up gem!

Chilling Classics Cthursday: LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971)

Let me spoil this review by saying right up front that I really loved Lady Frankenstein and I'm glad I did...because I finally saw The Substance recently and it was so good--like, "the best thing I've seen since...maybe Suspiria?? and I'll be digesting it and thinking about it forever" good--that it would have been extra excruciating if I'd pulled something terrible from the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. Know what I mean? So I guess bless Lady Frankenstein extra hard for being such a delight. 

I was in it to win it pretty much from the jump, when the title card popped up. I mean, just look at her!

Those fonts told me everything I needed to know, and what I needed to know was that this movie was going to be a drive-in dream. And was it, ever! It's the off-Hammer monster movie I never knew I wanted or needed, but it immediately earned its place in the ongoing spooky season rotation here at Stately Final Girl Manor.

By the early 70s, the iconic Joseph Cotten was in the "I love to work, gimme work!" phase of his career, where he'd class up joints left and right, often alongside his storied contemporaries. He featured in Airport flicks, Italian Airport knock-off flicks, made for TV horror films (including The Devil's Daughter and The Screaming Woman, where he reunited with his Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte co-star (and perennial Final Girl fave) Olivia de Havilland)...you name it, Joseph Cotten would appear in it. Here he steps into the lab coat of one Baron Frankenstein--perhaps the most genial Baron Frankenstein you'll ever meet. He makes paying for corpses and experimenting with dead bodies seem like stuff you just do, a passion as normie as woodworking or latch hook rug-making. 

Soon his daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri, appearing here as "Sara Bey") returns home, having completed her medical studies. Yes, her medical studies. Tania was studying to be a surgeon, like her father, and her father is very proud of her for it and they're both like "fuck yeah, we're Frankensteins and we are both surgeons and it's hard being taken seriously as a woman, never mind as a woman in medicine, never mind as a woman lady Frankenstein in medicine."

When I tell you that I fell off of my couch when I got a whiff of the feminism in Lady Frankenstein! To not have to go looking for it, even...for it to be right there in the text because director Mel Welles deliberately wanted to have feminist themes at play...honestly. I was told that politics in horror was a new thing because woke...? And here I must hear Lady Frankenstein roar? You can keep it!

Keep it in my eyeballs and earholes, that is, Lady Frankenstein rules.

But hey, you can still enjoy this movie even if you hate women because it's just that much fun.

The Frankenstein family lab is full of all the sorts of lab equipment you'd expect, from the bzzt bzzt machine to the bubbling bottles to a...clock. 

Frankenstein's assistant Charles (Paul Muller) warns the Baron that the brain they're trying to reanimate is too damaged to be good--something about the hypothalamus and science-sounding jargon and look, I have never claimed to be a Lady Frankenstein, okay? I will take Charles's word for it. The Baron, however, is tired of waiting and forges ahead with his experiment. One lightning strike (and two flaming eyeballs) (it was so good) later, and you know how it goes: It's alive.

The Monster promptly kills Baron Frankenstein and fucks off into the night, where he clomp-clomps around the countryside and kills a bunch of people. 

Charles professes his love for Tania, and she's like...yeah, I love you too, but you're old and unattractive, and so what if your brain was in the hot young body of our simpleton groundskeeper Thomas? 

She makes a compelling argument and Charles agrees. But let's face it, Tania is a babe and so Charles probably would have agreed regardless. And so Tania fires up the bzzt bzzt machine, not only to see to her """womanly needs""" but also to launch her mad scientist pyramid scheme. After all, the best way to kill The Monster is to create a better Monster. 

I will leave it to you to see how things suss out, though yes, rest assured there is some Monster vs Monster action before the abrupt-as-hell-but-kinda-nuts ending. Lady Frankenstein is so much fun--more fun for me, honestly, than most of its Hammer ilk. It's taken me a while to admit that I love the Hammer aesthetic and the idea of many a Hammer flick more than I love actually watching them. So sue me! But this Italian drive-in cheapie has the atmosphere (the soundtrack in particular adds a great mood), the right amount of light-sleaze (besides all of her other crimes, Tania's only real crime was being horny!), and a better-than-it-should-be cast (including Mickey Hargitay as the dashing police captain) that hits all the right notes. If you've never seen it, the time is right. If you have seen it, the time is right to see it again. Bzzt bzzt!

Chilling Classics Cthursday: A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959)

If you're still wigged out over the black-n-white beatnik-n-bongos stylings of previous Chilling Classic The Bloody Brood, well you're about to blow your jets, daddy-o, because today we're heading back to the café and diving into A Bucket of Blood. 

There ain't much to this li'l black comedy, to be honest, what, with its scant 64-minute runtime. But hey, those 64 minutes come courtesy of Roger Corman in the director's seat and feature Dick Miller in the leading role--so what kind of John Joe Jim Jerk wouldn't want to check it out? I don't want to know!

Miller stars as Walter Paisley, a simple and affable busboy in a beatnik café. He soaks up every saxophone toot and line of poetry, parroting their beat ethos and trying his darndest to become an artist himself so's to earn a little respect and, hopefully, win the heart of pretty patron Carla (Barboura Morris). Unfortunately for Walter, his artistic abilities add up to precisely zilch.

But all is not lost! When he accidentally kills his landlady's cat, inspiration strikes and soon Paisley presents café patrons with his first successful sculpture, simply called "Dead Cat."

As you probably anticipated, it's a hit and there's more demand for Paisley's "genius." When a wacky heroin mixup with an undercover cop sees Walter lashing out in self-defense, he's got a new sculpture to unveil: "Murdered Man."

Side note, it always trips me up when heroin is mentioned in films from anytime before...oh, let's say 1992. Heroin just feels like a 90s invention to me, even if I know it ain't.

And on and on. Walter must go to more and more extremes to keep up the charade, even as he basks in his newfound elevation from busboy to king of the café. I wonder if he had the duds, a beret, and a cigarette holder already, anticipating the day he'd become a "real artist," or if he went and purchased them with his "Dead Cat" earnings. Either way, I delight in it.

Look, are you going to be "sick, sick, sick from LAUGHING" as the film's poster claims? Personally I was not, but even my dour ass found A Bucket of Blood smile-worthy. Anything that takes the piss out of snooty artist types (especially those who don't simply own their snootiness) is fine by moi, and Corman and Co have a good time doing it. The implied violence is actually a wee bit brutal, the cast is winsome, and the beatnik vibes are an undeniable gas. Miller--already a Corman mainstay by 1959--is terrific as Walter Paisley, a nebbish you can't help but root for even with his misplaced ideals and flashes of serious creepiness. 

Yet again, I got my kicks with a real cookin' Chilling Classic. Thinking about covering this one in clay and calling it "Fun Movie."

Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE COLD (1984)

Aw yeah baby, I've been waiting for this movie's number to come up: It's The Cold, another "$50,000 wonder" from Wisconsin's own Bill Rebane. You might remember him from an earlier Chilling Classique, the train station-space virus-quarantine flick The Alpha Incident. This won't be the last we see of his work on Chilling Classics Cthursday--he truly is the multi-pack maestro--but it's quite possibly my favorite.

My love of The Cold starts right at the start (go figure), when we are treated to the credit sequence, which features some jaunty bargain bin Scott Joplin tunes and static shots of printed cards on tableaus of various recognizable board games, including Clue, Monopoly, and the Mad Magazine Board Game, which you'd best believe I played the ever-loving shit out of when I was a wee bonny lass. 

The shadows of the center card and playing pieces are one thing, but it's the random shadow on the left that gets me. And the way the credit for the director is off-center. Remember the not-so-long-ago trend of having opening credits sequences (usually from Blur, usually for David Fincher films) be all fancy and made of computer and like five minutes long? That fad was all fine and well I suppose (though exhausting, really. I don't need five minute opening credits!), but the janky-ass verité of this Rebane production is where it's at.

Now if you are unfamiliar with this particular movie, you might be wondering what's up with the game boards. Again, this is a Rebane production so you wouldn't be out of line to think that those games boards have nothing to do with anything. But! This film is also known as The Game, which explains not only the credits but also the fact that it's all about a game called...The Game, which is pronounced THE GAME.

"Okay, so is there cold in The Cold at all?" you might ask. Yes, there is! We'll get to it. But first, THE GAME. 

THE GAME comes courtesy of three "millionaire eccentrics," George, Horace, and Maude, who grew tired of Cribbage ages ago and had to really up their personal entertainment stakes. You can tell Maude is rich, especially, because she uses a cigarette holder.

They make things exciting for themselves by inviting a bunch of random people to The Northernaire, a Wisconsin island resort, where they will be tasked with...enduring some...stuff...for a while? Survivors who don't leave the island will win a million dollars. On the surface this sounds like a most dangerous kinda game, and I suppose it is. But it's all vague and nonsensical, and even the participants are confused, like they don't even know why they're there. If only they knew that this was all simply ~*~REBANE MAGIC~*~ at work, amirite?

So. How does THE GAME play out exactly? First and foremost, there is a dance party. No, I am not lying. The millionaire eccentrics get down with all the participants, to a tune that is obviously not played by the band, who are also participants in THE GAME. This movie weaves a complex web, I tells ya.

Things begin proper and random shit happens...and I do mean random. There is a shark in a swimming pool. There is an Alien homage of a type that only Bill Rebane could deliver.

Participants disappear mysteriously, sometimes leaving behind clues: "That's Ronnie's bandanna! What's happened? He never goes anywhere without it!" Sometimes a tarantula will appear, sometimes there are rats, or maybe a snake. And yes, sometimes, there is...THE COLD, which rolls out of vents or doorways or wherever and is clearly dry ice. But the actors sell it, man, from their shivering to their delivery of dialogue such as "There was the smell of death in that room. And the cold. Like a December grave."

Meanwhile, the millionaire eccentrics are having the time of their lives engaging in their Spirit Halloween foolery, often dancing and skipping down hallways, singing hits like "Jimmy Crack Corn," or going "mwa ha ha" over the intercom. I love them.

This guy is also randomly wandering around. No one sees him, but someone knows he's there and tells us he used to be in a mental asylum, but now he's the gardener, but only when THE GAME isn't happening.

Exactly who is involved in THE GAME, who ends up dead, what is really happening? If you don't really know the answers to those questions at the end of this thing, that's okay. A voiceover bookends the film, and before the final credits roll, said voiceover is basically like..."Exactly who is involved in THE GAME, who ends up dead, what is really happening? Fuck if I know."

Even Bill Rebane himself calls this semi-scripted story a "brain fart." The Cold is the quintessential cheapie quickie: one location, 3-4 crew, actors straight outta Milwaukee central casting, and a shoot lasting maybe a week, all done simply so Rebane could make another movie and maybe get his friends some publicity for their Northernaire Resort.

And as far as I'm concerned, like all of the director's other films, it's a weirdo bonkers delight. It's got all the Rebane hallmarks: the occasional out-of-focus shot, the copious (terrible) foley work, the floozy-music nudie shots, the odd clothed T-n-A shots that are filmed in such close-up that it takes a moment to register exactly what body part you're looking at, and so on.

As I mentioned in my review of The Alpha Incident, and on Evolution of Horror, when Mike Muncer and I briefly discussed Rebane's Giant Spider Invasion (which actually makes a cameo in The Cold!), these films are a decidedly acquired taste. Their journeys and their destinations are inscrutable to be sure. But I'm also sure that it's a taste I've definitely acquired, so I'm telling you now: when it's time for the next Rebane-helmed Chilling Classique 'round these parts, I will be dancing and skipping down all the hallways. Jimmy Crack Corn and I do care!