This is one of my all time favorite Movie of the Week offerings from the 70s starring Kim Darby who inherits a family house with husband Jim Hutton and becomes taunted by little demons who live in the darkness and want her to stay with them forever! Directed by John Newland
Happy Trailers! MonsterGirl
Nothing is creepier than ventriloquists and their faithful dummies. Here is director Richard Attenborough’s taut thriller starring the ever brilliant Anthony Hopkins as Corky Withers and the voice of Fats his ruthless wooden pal, the sexy Ann -Margret and the always wonderfully droll Burgess Meredith. Based on the novel by William Goldman
A ventriloquist is at the mercy of his vicious dummy while he tries to renew a romance with his high school sweetheart.
Happy Trailers! MonsterGirl
A bit of film noir by director Sidney Gilliat. Also known as Fortune is A Woman (UK) Starring Arlene Dahl, Jack Hawkins and Dennis Price, Ian Hunter and Christopher Lee!
An insurance investigator runs into an ex-girlfriend, who is still as beautiful as he remembered her but is now married. He soon finds himself involved in arson, blackmail and murder.
Trailer is in French, the film is in English!
Happy Trailers! MonsterGirl
Starring Barbara Stanwyck ,Robert Taylor, Lloyd Bochner, Hayden Rorke and Marjorie Bennett
A woman (Barbara Stanwyck) is haunted by recurring nightmares, involving a dream lover played by Lloyd Bochner and her freakish looking blind late husband (Hayden Rorke) who supposedly died in a fire in his locked laboratory. A great chiller from William Castle the master showman!
Happy Trailers! MonsterGirl
“The nightmare terror of the slithering eye that unleashed agonizing horror on a screaming world!”
A mysterious radioactive cloud hides giant eyeball monsters with tentacles leaving a trail of bodies with no heads and a town in mortal peril… The Crawling Eye (1958) was penned by Jimmy Sangster and stars Forrest Tucker, Laurence Payne, and Jennifer Jayne.
A LOVECRAFTIAN NIGHTMARE…..!!!!!!!!!
Karloff stars as Professor Henry Morlant a fanatical Egyptologist who rises from his tomb to seek revenge!
Also co-starring Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger, and Ralph Richardson. Directed by T. Hayes Hunter.
Happy Bump in the Night-Yours Truly…MonsterGirl
I had the honor of being the next person interviewed with Tura in Indie Filmmaker Steve Balderson’s experimental art film, Phone Sex. It was a thrill to come after the vivacious and wonderful Ms. Satana!
Three wild women, Tura Satana as Varla, Haji as Rosie, and Lori Williams as Billie, are strippers thrill-seeking cross paths with a young couple in the desert. Once they get rid of the boy, they take the girl hostage and set out to steal a crippled man’s stash of cash, that he’s supposedly hiding. The old man has two sons who they try to seduce in order to get at the old man’s money. But they don’t realize that they’re dealing with something a little more than a feeble man in a wheelchair. Exploitation at its best. Satana is a treasure to watch. She just plain kicks ass!
R.I.P you warrior woman! (July 10, 1938 "“ February 4, 2011).
This timeless Gothic masterpiece is also known as The Demon’s Mask, Revenge of the Vampire, and House of Fright. It is the Maestro Bava’s first film as a solo director, since first working as a cameraman with another auteur of the dark Riccardo Freda, Bava co-directed I Vampiri (1956)
With the presence of the enchanting & luscious beauty of Steele– the film becomes a romantic exercise in the Gothic style of European horror. Her eyes alone could mesmerize an audience with an effervescence that few possess with their gaze.
Bava also controlled the prowling camera style and Nedo Azzini’s sets are emblematic of the netherworld the story is steeped in.
Like a malefic allegory shown with gruesome keenness, Black Sunday is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Vij.
Barbara Steele manifests two characters the mirror image of each other–Princess Asa Vajda is tortured and burned as a witch. This is how the film opens with a ferocity that propels the film to a whole other level of classical horror. It is the stuff that dark fairy tales are made of… and nightmares.
The iconic spiked Devil Mask that is pounded into Asa’s face for the crime of adultery, or what was considered to be an act of ‘witchery’ Women’s wiles have always been considered powerful, tempting, and dangerous to men.
The local Inquisitor calling Asa a witch, and condemning her to such a brutal death bears ironing for he is Asa’s own brother. Once Asa returns to claim her revenge she vampirizes Katia in order to rejuvenate her life force.
It is now 200 years later, and Katia Vajda the descendent of the persecuted Princess Asa, is the spitting image of the beautiful ‘witch.’ Asa and her lover Javuto (Arturo Dominici) rise up from the tomb, cobwebs, scorpions, and spiders to wreak revenge on the legacy of the Vajda family curse.
One of the most memorable scenes in horror film history is the resurrection of Javuto from the crumbling ground, the smoky dark clouds surround his devil-masked rotting visage underneath–as he claws his way out of his grave and lurches off into the ghostly night.
The special effects, masks, faces, matte painting, etc. were done by Bava himself with his brother Eugenio Bava. The face of Asa which bears the marks of the spike holes from the devil mask adds a chilling effect to the film. It also creates the image of the monstrous feminine that strives to conquer and drain the life of those she’s fixated on. The two characters that Steele plays are contradictory figures, one virginal and innocent, the other bloodthirsty and evil. Asa was unholy because of her sexual desires.
Black Sunday’s expressive influence and its grand sense of classical horror are rooted in the idea that a woman’s sexuality cannot be destroyed, and will always inevitably return by its own primacy enduring the scars of the violence inflicted upon her. That which the world order, particularly religious zealotry and patriarchal law attempt to oppress come back twofold just to shake up the order of things.
The ultimate threat appears as the merger of the two Vajda’s women Asa & Katia… the virgin and the whore. Bava continued to make films where men desperately tried to destroy the lure of women’s desire and their desirability…
BRIDES OF HORROR – Scream Queens of the 1960s! – Part 4: The Dark Goddess-This Dark Mirror
Virginia – “I caught a big fat bug right in my spider web and now the spider gets to give the bug a big sting. Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting!”
Spider Baby is one of the most original psychological horror gems that is as queerly frightening as it is endearing. It opens with Bruno the Chauffeur played by Lon Chaney Jr. singing a little nursery song about werewolves and vampires and it’s quite effectively eerie as the opening hymn. Chaney’s character delivers one of my favorite lines–it’s a childish hymn that tributes oddballs in the world who struggle to find their place in the world.
Bruno, The Chauffeur: “Just because something isn’t good doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
The film is special partly due to the presence of Lon Chaney Jr. as Bruno who looks after the Merrye children with undying devotion. Living in the decrepit and crumbling old family mansion, they are the last generation of surviving Merryes occupying the odd space like a whimsical little fun-house.
Because of inbreeding the family has been cursed with a type of mental regression, and arrested development. Bruno sort of cleans up any of the messes or homicidal fatalities that happen due to the Merryes being like wild unchecked gremlins.
Including the postman (Mantan Moreland busy actor in the 40s who often took off on black caricatures for the all-white films he played all jittery or stereotyped buffoonery Hollywood made a brand out of his name and his ebullient persona. Anyway, he should have known better than to try and leave a package any further than the steps, instead of poking his head inside the window and being trapped in Virginia’s theoretical web and being sliced up with a large pair of knives, losing an ear that will be kept in a little box as a token. He was a big bug caught in her net after all.
Directed by Jack Hill (Blood Bath 1966, The Big Doll House 1971, Coffy 1973 and F0xy Brown 1974) who brilliantly populates this queer little world with the perfect characters, all on a budget of $65,000.
Lon Chaney was only paid a flat fee of $2,500 for his role and it was a little poignant to watch his performance with bits of his alcoholism seeping through the character, he had been drinking pretty heavily at that point but had remained sober during filming. The role had meant a lot to Chaney, who got the part after John Carradine turned it down.
Ronald Stein’s music is often lyrical & offbeat (Attack of the 50 Ft Woman (1958), Dementia 13 (1963), It Conquered the World & She Creature (1956) Not of this Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Undead, Dragstrip Girl (1957) The Girl in Lovers Lane (1960) The Haunted Palace (1963).
The film’s alternative titles are The Liver Eaters. Cannibal Orgy– I assure you there is no orgy, and there isn’t any cannibalism on screen. There is the family bible or a reference book that explains how exclusive Merrye Syndrome affects only that family, where the disease: causes its victims to regress mentally to a pre-infantile state of savagery and cannibalism. The three surviving children of Titus Merrye are Elizabeth who dresses like a little girl (creepy) and Virginia who thinks she’s a giant spider.
The Merrye sisters Virginia (Jill Banner) and Elizabeth (Beverley Washburn) are suited as the demented girls, and then there’s Ralph, adorable feral little Ralph manifested by the quirky Sid Haig who would later take on grittier roles as screen heavies in exploitation films.
Carol Ohmart (House on Haunted Hill 1959) comes into the picture as Cousin Emily Howe who is after the family fortune not expecting to uncover the house of Merrye madness.
31 Flavors of Noir on the Fringe to Lure you in! Part 4 The last Killing in a Lineup of unsung noir
The film has been compared to the work of iconoclast Luis Buñuel. who was considered a moralist director who definitely populated his films with the sense that revolution was necessary to change the stagnant ways people conform to their lives.
I can see the dinner scene as a nod to his The Exterminating Angel, as the table is set where everyone but the guests are vegetarians. Ralph has caught a Rabbit. Unfortunately, it’s the neighborhood cat. When Ralph grabs the ‘rabbit’ and starts tearing into it, Cousin Peter (Quinn Redeker)Â is confused because he thought he was a vegetarian. Bruno tells him “But Ralph is allowed to eat anything he catches!”
Spider Baby creates its own little universe of characters who move in their own orbit with a sense of unorthodoxy. Virginia with that large bow in her hair is ridiculous as it is uncomfortably creepy for an obviously grown young woman to sport a child’s ribbon like a doll, where she evolves into a monstrous assassin with her two sharp knives in her anxious hands elevating her to a truly gruesome character and not just a childish simpleton.
It’s this teetering irony of the film that takes us from darkly whimsical to suddenly going for the jugular that creates the uneasy feeling surrounding the Merrye family.
It’s one of THE definitive Cult films for sure, as it’s witty, macabre, quirky, irreverent, and a bit of film noir in its use of shadows and devious figures doomed from the beginning. Spider Baby is an adult fairy tale with dark corners and speculative questions about madness and responsibility and who gets to make those decisions. And Carol Ohmart just looks damn sexy in her black lingerie as she runs around amidst the ‘old dark house’ trope as the woman in peril.
IMDb Fun Fact:
The film was shot in August and September of 1964 with the title “Cannibal Orgy, or The Maddest Story Ever Told”, but its release was held up for years because the producers went bankrupt, which tied up the film in legal limbo. Independent producer David L. Hewitt acquired it for distribution in 1968 and changed the title to “Spider Baby” and “The Liver Eaters.”
From Outer Space they Came! Now these amazing Monolith Monsters reveal Powers… Shocking beyond belief! The most startling Science-Fiction concept ever brought to the screen! Stranger than anything science had ever discovered as THRILL CROWDS UPON THRILL…”The Monolith Monsters”
The film starts out with the constellation of stars and planets. The vast universe in the scope of the night sky. The narrator in typical 50s vox populi style not unlike the control voice from the original The Outer Limits yet more cornball, warns us, setting up the prologue as the “explaining” portion of the film’s story. The origin of the phenomena will soon hold a small desert town hostage with sheer panic and terror.
The earth comes into central focus on the screen surrounded by tiny lights of stars and darting flames like arrows pelting the strata that we see as long-distant spectators. Continue reading “Obscure Scream Gems: The Monolith Monsters 1957 “The desert’s full of things that don’t belong””