An atmospherically photographed take on Jack the Ripper, The Lodger's Laird Cregar, the star villain, gets second billing on this Mexican lobby card and the credits. A travesty given his mesmerizing performance. He died too soon. Vincent Price delivered his eulogy.
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So bad it's fun. Here's the pressbook. I recall seeing this in the theater on its first run. I was a kid, but even then I realized how awful this was. Check my take on its silliness in Silly Monsters in Silly Movies.
Jungle Jim (Johnny Weissmuller) continues his adventures in this second entry in the movie series from Columbia Pictures. Once again, white natives living in a secret city in Africa need protection from exploiters (a plot premise reused in too many Jungle movies). The beautiful Elena Verdugo and Ray Corrigan, as the gorilla, make it worth watching.
Bela Lugosi plays a doctor who transforms Japanese agents to look like important Americans, who are then murdered and replaced by their Japanese impostors. Imprisoned, he escapes and takes his revenge. If you're an Outer Limits fan, this plot device should ring a bell: in the episode, The Hundred Days of the Dragon, a presidential candidate is replaced with an impostor by sinister Asian forces.
I don't know about you, but every time I watch a bug movie I start itching a lot and constantly glance around me, imagining creepy crawlies eyeing me with longing. Earth vs the Spider has a preposterous premise–a large arachnid "killed" by DDT is then propped up in High School gymnasium (what, the local dump wasn't good enough?), then a rock band starts sock-hopping the thing back to life. It's pure hokum. But the kind that made drive-in fare so much fun to watch. Here's the pressbook.
Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko (A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove) is a ghostly horror story. This Mexican lobby card captures that atmosphere rather well.
Okay, so the movie's scripting and editing are a bit stiffer than the zombies, but those zombies scared the heck out of me when I caught this on television, late at night, at that tender age when you love horror movies but get scared too easily. Of course I'm a pro now. No, really. George Romero may have watched this and got a few ideas. Just saying.
Jess Franco (not a good move there) directed this 5th and ignorable entry into the Fu Manchu series.
Lesbian vampires. Jess Franco. Nudity and crude film making galore. What else do you need to know?
I'm not sure what movie this may be from, but the lobby card design indicates it could be anywhere from the 1930s to 50s. Dorothy Short did Call of the Savage in 1935, but I don't see a credit for Paul Gifford on IMDb; and the inset scene with Amazonian women looks more like a 1950s movie than earlier. Anyway, the card illustration is what drew me to these cards. That, and the Amazonian women, of course.
Not to be confused with Swamp Woman, Swamp Women was directed by Roger Corman and ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I bet it still made money for the drive-ins that played it. Filmed on location in Louisiana, I'm not sure what was worse: the swamp the actors had to act in or the abandoned motel accommodations they had to endure. There's a future horror movie in that scenario I'd wager. This one's in the public domain, so you can probably watch it on YouTube. If you dare. Here's the pressbook to help you make up your mind.
Sabu (Sabu Dastigir), truly unforgettable in The Thief of Baghdad, stars in this 1942 version of the Jungle Book.