(if you read my post on The Brain That Wouldn’t Die you knew this was coming. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!!)

When it comes to the title of “Worst Film of All Time”, BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA has to be considered a top contender. This is the only movie for Martin & Lewis knockoffs Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. It’s easy to see why. Not only are they unfunny, they’re just barely passable as copies of the original duo. Mitchell does have a good crooning voice (more like Elvis than Dino), but Petrillo just flat out stinks! He’s not helped  by a lame script written by comedy veteran Tim Ryan. Ryan was a vaudeville star with his ex-wife, Irene (later Granny on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES). Someone should have told Tim that vaudeville was dead. The jokes were old even in 1952, and have grown a lot of…

Quick question — would you buy a house from a doctor who had been running a pediatric clinic out of if and who told you, right to your face, that they’d experienced a “family tragedy” there and decided to close up shop and split town because no one wants to hire a pediatrician “who can’t keep her own children alive”?

Nope, I wouldn’t either, but if the Asher family — consisting of father Alan (Brian Wimmer), mother Emily (Ione Skye — remember her?), teenagers Evan (Harrison Gilbertson) and Sara (Danielle Chuchran), and youngest daughter Anita (Ella Harris) don’t buy the place from sole-survivor-of-the-aforementioned-tragedy  Janet Morello (Jacki Weaver), well, then — we wouldn’t have director Mac Carter’s 2014 indie horror effort Haunt to talk about here, would we?

Which, truth be told, probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing, because even for a Netflix weeknight time-waster, this movie is pretty goddamn…

Sleazy is the best way to describe THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE. But I mean that in a good way. This trashy drive-in classic is a mix of gory horror and outright voyeurism. Right up my alley! Made in 1959, the picture sat unreleased until American-International picked it up in 1962. Producer/cowriter Rex Carlton always seemed to have money problems. Carlton toiled mainly in the exploitation field, producing and writing for Al Adamson films BLOOD OF DRACULA’S CASTLE and HELL’S BLOODY DEVILS, before putting a bullet in his own brain in 1968. It’s been said he owed some mobsters a ton of cash borrowed to finance his filmmaking endeavors.

The movie is all about brilliant but arrogant surgeon Bill Cortner. Bill’s been conducting some experiments at his country home involving “complete transplantation” of body parts and organs. He’s also been “borrowing” these parts from the hospital where he works. Bill gets a call from his assistant…

When I sat down to watch BLOODY BIRTHDAY, I was expecting a big slab of 80s cheese. What I got instead was a suspenseful (albeit far-fetched) horror film about three murderous children. The little darlings were born during a solar eclipse which, according to astrology buff Joyce (Lori Lethin), blocked Saturn during their births. This makes then completely without empathy. I don’t know about that, but I do know one thing: these are the creepiest fucking kids since Spider Baby!

Cutie-pie Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy) keeps a murder scrapbook and charges 25 cents to let kids watch her teenage sister Beverly undress through a closet peephole. Steven (Andrew Freeman) is a shy child with a fondness for knives. And nerdy looking Curtis (Billy Jacoby, later Jayne) is a total psycho who shoots people. These enfants terrible kill a teenage couple doing the wild thing in a cemetery in the opening scene, bash Debbie’s sheriff…

THE MAN FROM PLANET X is low-budget early sci-fi movie about an alien coming to Earth. The mysterious Planet X is drawing close to our world. Discovered by Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond), Planet X will come closest to the foggy coast of Scotland. Intrepid reporter John Lawrence (cult actor Robert Clarke of THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON) travels there to meet his old friend, and falls in love with the professor’s daughter Enid (Margaret Field, mother of Sally). A spaceship is found with an alien inside. The professor’s assistant Mears (a very young William Schallert) wants to use the alien for his lightweight metal and get rich. But the alien has other plans, capturing Mears and the Professor, along with some townspeople.

The alien is an advance scout for the coming invasion of Planet X. The Scottish town is cut off from contacting the rest of the Earth as the fiend gets ready to…

Every classic comedian worth his bottle of seltzer water made a “scare comedies” or two back in the Golden Age of Hollywood. The following short, YOU’RE NEXT, is a funny 1940 Columbia Pictures effort starring comedy vets Walter Catlett, Monty Collins, Dudley Dickerson, Roscoe Ates and former Keystone Kop Chester Conklin. Directed by Del Lord, here’s YOU’RE NEXT:

Must-see TV for ‘Monster Kids’ in the late 60s meant watching DARK SHADOWS every weekday at 4:00 on ABC. The Gothic soap opera gave us daily doses of vampires, werewolves, witches, and man-made monsters courtesy of producer/director Dan Curtis and a talented cast of mainly New York based stage actors, led by Hollywood veteran Joan Bennett. Capitalizing on the show’s popularity, MGM greenlighted a feature version titled HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS.

The movie is a condensed and revised telling of the Barnabas Collins story arc that began in 1967. The film takes us to Collinwood, where governess Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) is assaulted by drunken caretaker Willy Loomis (John Karlen). Loomis is fired by Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds), but sneaks back onto the property to search for the hidden family jewels. Using an old map as a guide, he breaks into the family mausoleum and, opening an ancient coffin, is startled when a hand…

After watching and reviewing MAD LOVE last night, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the original silent version of HANDS OF ORLAC. I’ll let the visuals do the talking. Conrad Veidt stars in this 1924 classic, directed by Robert Weine. Enjoy!

I mentioned in my review of Body Parts that it was a variation of THE HANDS OF ORLAC, a 1920 novel by French author Maurice Renard. The book was first adapted to film in a 1920 silent starring Conrad Veidt. The story has been retold many times, in many different ways, but none have surpassed the 1935 adaptation MAD LOVE. This film really doesn’t get its due as one of the top horrors of the 1930s. Director Karl Freund (THE MUMMY) uses his background in German expressionism and, together with cinematographer Gregg Toland, gives us a Grand Guignol thriller that’s hard to resist.

Peter Lorre makes his American film debut as Dr. Gogol, a brilliant surgeon obsessed with beautiful actress Yvonne Orlac. Yvonne is married to concert pianist Stephen Orlac, and rebuffs the strange looking doctor. Returning to Paris via train, Orlac sees the convicted knife-throwing murderer Rollo board, heading for the…

The label “Eli Roth Presents” is becoming positively ubiquitous on the purportedly “indie” horror scene lately — to the point, one could convincingly argue, that it probably doesn’t even really mean anything anymore. And yet, writer/director Guillermo Amoedo (who hails from Uruguay but makes his movies in Chile) seems to have at least something of a bona fide working relationship with Roth insofar as he penned the screenplay for The Green Inferno, so maybe ol’ Eli isn’t just helping himself to an air-quote credit as executive producer on the film we’re here to talk about today, 2014’s The Stranger (no relation to Albert Camus’ existentialist classic) — or maybe he is. I dunno. And I guess I don’t really care all that much, either, because it’s not like he would have all that much to do with the finished product here even if he did help cobble together financing…