Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast that watches all the zombie movies. Today, we have a collection of horror stories, starting with Witches, You didn't like your mother-in-law?

Spread the word she's a witch. Before you know it, no more problems. Those were the good old days.

A poor man's Frankenstein. And the undead bent on vengeance. It's the 1967 anthology film, Dr. Terror's Gallery Of Horror.

You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures. What do they call them, zombies or something?

Zombie. What's a zombie?

Just what is a zombie?

Well a zombie…there’s um... ...Mr. Bill there’s... ...the living dead.

They are the living dead.

Get me the zombies!

Against an army of zombies, no armies could stand.

Because a Zombie has no will on his own.

What is wrong, what is wrong.

Welcome to Zombie Strains. I'm John.

I'm Andy.

And I'm Brad.

Andy, Brad and I have to sports for just one second. Go blue.

Go blue.

All right. Moving on. Hi everybody. Welcome to an anthology horror film. Not our first. We also had Tales Of Terror. And this time we have a gallery of horrors. So this is pretty exciting. Let's get this right out of the way. I think it's important. Cause I think you guys are going to agree. Best film we've seen so far. Yes?

Oh, easily. Yeah.

I think it's the best drive-in film we've seen.

Yes.

I would love to have seen this in a drive-in.

I know. It's very goofy. It's delightfully goofy, this movie. I had a blast watching it.

I had so much fun watching this, you guys.

Yeah. So, today's movie, as noted, is the 1967 anthology film, Dr. Terror'S Gallery Of Horror. And why don't we just get right into it. Brad, tell us how this came about. I did a little research and I'm interested to see what you have to say. And I maybe have a couple things to throw in there.

All right. Dr. Terror'S Gallery Of Horrors was released in the US on April 17th, 1967. It's an anthology film composed of five different stories. Gallery has many alternate titles, mainly because there was a 1965 amicus productions film called Dr. Terror'S House Of Horrors. And clearly the producers of Gallery were trying to ride the coattails of the first film.

I saw that in IMDB and I was like, so is this like a series? And no, it's just a blatant ripoff.

The alternate titles are Return From The Past, The Bloodsuckers, Alien Massacre, The Witch's Clock and Gallery Of Horrors. Notable films from 1967 include The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Dirty Dozen. The last two are known for pushing the level of violence into the mainstream films. So what we've been witnessing in the early to mid 60s is finally reaching the modern audience.

So I feel like we've been waiting for transgressive films and there's four of them right at the top of the chart and we're not watching any of them. You know, The Graduate is definitely about, The Graduate's about a young man and an older woman having an affair. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner is about a white woman who dates a black man. Like The Dirty Dozen is hyper violent, so it's interesting.

So is Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde was extra hyper violent. I think that I need to rewatch that in the not too distant future, but anyway, carry on.

David L. Hewitt co-wrote and directed, this is his second of 10 films. Hewitt's films were all low-budget films with titles like Hell's Chosen Few, The Mighty Gorga, The Girls From Thunderstrip, and The Lucifer Complex, which was his last film.

Like, okay, the four movies you listed at the beginning are all better than this movie, but all of those titles are better than the best four movies from this year. I just want to be clear about that.

Hewitt, after directing, moved into special effects and has 40 credits, including Gulley's Four, The Kindred, Willow, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and, since both of you are Graham Greene fans, Hewitt worked on the special effects for Philip Noyce's 2002 adaptation of The Quiet American.

Great movie.

Oh.

Have you seen that one?

I've never seen the movie. I've read the novel, but not seen the movie.

It's Michael Caine. It's really good. You should watch it.

So, the Willow, so he was involved with the Willow movie, not the recent Willow miniseries.

Correct, the special effects for the movie.

Interesting.

I was a big fan of Willow as a kid.

All right, carrying on. Russ Jones is one of three writers on the film. He has only four screenwriting credits. He was a young actor getting bit parts on TV shows. He then started writing and drawing for both comics and magazines. He worked at DC on romance comics and at Charlton Comics on Ghostly Tales. Jones was also the founding editor of Creepy, a black and white horror comics magazine started in 1964. Jones said in an interview that David Hewitt wanted to make a film version of Creepy. The two of them collaborated on the stories, and Jones also appears on screen as the decaying corpse in the story Monster Raid. John, do you want to add to Creepy?

You know what? I'll let you finish because I wanted to talk not so much about Russ Jones, but about how the Creepy magazine influences film and why it's different. Anyway, I'll hold my thoughts until you're done.

Sure. The third writer was Gary Heacock. This is his only writing credit. He also worked in the special effects department on three films, The Time Travelers, The Astro Zombies, and The Corpse Grinders. The Astro Zombies is on our list and we will see it soon.

I'm sorry, just the way you rattle these off like it's nothing. Astro Zombies and The Corpse Grinders, anyway.

Well, I've been staring at these for like two years, reading these over and over. So to me, they're just titles. But, as I was going to say, and while The Corpse Grinders sounds like it could be a zombie film, it's not. It's about human corpses being ground into cat food, which in turn makes cats go crazy and attack people.

Is this a prequel to Soylent Green or something?

I don't know, but I think it's interesting how before we started recording, Andy was telling us how he's a cat person and asked us if we were. Austin McKinney was the director of photography. His DP credits include Galaxy Of Terror and Jaws 3D. He also worked in special effects on the films.

Also by the way, a film featuring Michael Caine, Andy, in case you're looking for two Michael Caine movies to watch.

Which of those Michael Caine movies should he watch, John?

That's a tough call. It depends what you're looking for. If you want a good drama, Jaws 3D. No, The Quiet American.

McKinney also worked in special effects on the films Escape From New York, Battle Beyond The Stars, The Terminator, and Beastmaster 2 through the Portal of Time. All right, on to the cast. This cast has two big name horror actors. John Carradine is the narrator and played Tristram Halban in the first story. He had a long career in horror films. We have seen him in three zombie films. In 1943, he played the mad scientist in Revenge of the Zombies. In 1944, he played one of Bela Lugosi's henchmen in Voodoo Man. And in 1959, he played a zombie in Invisible Invaders.

That's right.

Is he on our zombie hall of fame? Well, did we induct him?

We did not induct him. We were waiting. So we'll have to see if this second season he's done enough.

Carradine was a neighbor of the writer Russ Jones. The two had appeared in an episode of Wagon Train and were drinking buddies. It was Jones who suggested Carradine to director David Hewitt. Carradine will be back in at least two more zombie films. Lon Chaney played Dr. Mendel in the story Spark of Life. Chaney Jr. was the son of Lon Chaney, the 1920 star of The Phantom Of The Opera. Lon Jr.'s breakout role was as the Wolfman in 1941. He's also played Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy, and Dracula. And like Carradine, he met Jones while on a TV show, and they, too, were drinking buddies.

I just gotta say, Lon Chaney, seeing Lon Chaney in this did make me a little sad. He doesn't...

Yes.

I mean, John Carradine never looks great. You know, he always sort of looks sort of skeletal. Lon looked like he was not doing great.

Well, Russ Jones talked about working with him on this film and that he was such a big drinker that he was sweating profusely. And he had a stack of shirts, so in between takes, he would go and change shirts that he was fresh again.

That's why he's just wearing a white button down, loose collar shirt.

Okay. Rochelle Hudson played Helen Spalding in the story Monster Raid. She started acting at the age of 14 in 1930. She played cassette in the 1935 version of Les Miserables, Shirley Temple's older sister in Curly Top, and she played Natalie Wood's mother in Rebel Without A Cause.

Oh, wow.

Gallery Of Terror was her last film. She died in 1972 at the age of 55.

Man.

The rest of the cast doesn't have any notable roles in their credits, and a few only worked in David Hewitt films anyway. However, we have seen Mitch Evans before. He's the actor who played Count Alucard.

Yes.

Does he look familiar?

Uh, no. I didn't pick up on it.

How about if you put him in a gorilla suit?

Oh, no. It's not. What?

He was the gorilla in Teenage Zombies.

Well, I'm shocked. I'm very disappointed in myself for not catching that.

Yeah. How could you, John?

Dr. Terror's Gallery Of Horror made money. It was pre-sold to Pacific Drive and theaters for more than its cost. And those are the facts behind this film.

Man.

Yeah. Wow. I don't have a lot of historical context for this. It's 1967. It's in the middle of the counterculture is emerging here. Hippies, Woodstock, all of that is coming together here. And this movie actually seems out of joint with all of that, right? All the movies you mentioned at the top, like The Graduates, are very in sync with that because they're transgressive and strange and cool. And this one seems like an old Gothic, seems like a Hammer film dropped in the middle of the Summer of Love or something. It's very strange. But I do want to take a minute and just talk about the magazine Creepy for a second, because it started in, did you say what year it started, Producer Brad? I think it was...

64.

64. So back in the late 40s and early 50s, there was a series of very horrific comic books called the EC Comic Books, that actually were sort of one of the driving forces that caused the comics code to come into effect, basically saying these comics are too gruesome for children and we're going to restrict the kind of content you could put in comics. We don't need to go into that in detail, but Creepy came out after that and was sort of an attempt to get back to those more lurid stories. It's interesting because when you watch the movie, once I found out it was in that vein of EC Comics, Creepy, it all made sense. There were all these very short stories with dramatic endings where there's a big reveal like, oh, it's really a werewolf or oh, the wife was dead all along or something like that, that aren't great in long form. So it feels like a creepy-

But they would make a great panel in a comic book.

Exactly. I think this movie was a lot of fun, but it showed to me why a magazine like Creepy can pull that off in a short story, whereas this movie with those dramatic reveals, like at one point, spoiler, we reveal that a man who had been hunting vampires is actually a werewolf, that reveal would have been amazing in a comic book panel, and it's just a little lame here in this movie. You know what I mean? It just showed me that sometimes, sometimes things don't translate from one medium to another. I think comics are unique.

It does make a big difference. This movie has such comic book energy.

Yes, it does. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say about Creepy.

Well, the original intent was to make Creepy into a movie, because the writer-director was a big fan of Creepy, which is why he reached out to Russ Jones. And they intended to use Uncle Creepy as the narrator of this. And Uncle Creepy was the character who introduced the stories in the comic books, like the Crip Keeper.

Kind of like the Crip Keeper, yeah.

Exactly. And instead, they have John Carradine in a fancy tuxedo between, which is kind of odd.

Which is lame. First of all, that tuxedo does not fit him at all. Just a tip, if your bow tie is so loose, it's sloping downwards, like down. It's facing downwards, that's not a good fit. Anyway, that would have been awesome if they'd had a Crip Keeper kind of thing here. I think it would have fit perfectly with these stories.

Yeah. So Dr. Terror's Gallery Of Horror, as you say, is an anthology film with five short stories within it, which is maybe like one and a half stories too many, I would argue. But so by my count, at least two, maybe 2.5 of these stories feature zombies.

Yes, I would agree.

The others feature vampires. So we're going to walk through each of these stories in turn. Just as a note, these stories are very much Twilight Zone type stories and that there's a twist in the final 10 seconds.

Yes.

So if that is something that delights you, and I did derive a lot of delight out of this movie, despite its low budget and bad production quality. So I guess we'll be spoiling these stories is what I'm saying. So if that sounds fun to you, and I hope that it does actually, pop over and watch this before you finish listening to this episode. Otherwise though, I'm going to dive right in. So I think to start with though, let's talk about the general framing of this movie. Each of these five segments is introduced by John Carradine in a sort of Rod Serling style mode of introduction. And the most important thing I learned from this is that this sort of thing works really well when Rod Serling is delivering these introductions in 15 seconds. They work more poorly when they stretch on for as long as three minutes, I timed it. And they start to feel more like really boring lectures by John Carradine.

Like you could see an abbreviated version of this being kind of fun as a comics panel being that you would read, right? Not having read to you. But no, as a spoken description of what you're about to watch, it was like, I'm lost already.

And in like a comic book, the background behind them is a frozen image. So he's standing and moving, but this big landscape picture of a cliff in the ocean, it's frozen, it's still, which is kind of diminishes the action.

Yeah, it's almost like a, I think that what I wish is they'd gone a little further to make it more comic book-y. You know what I mean? They sort of went only went halfway, and that's why it's not quite as good as a comic book.

They do have a couple of good comic flourishes though, and we'll get to those when we get to them. But so that's the framing. Each of these five stories is introduced by John Carradine, who talks for too long of a time, and often what he's talking about doesn't have that much to do with the story.

No, he's like, back in the time of witches and warlocks, there was a blah-dee-dee, blah-dee-blah, and then there's like a zombie part, like, yeah.

Right, exactly. But the first story we have is not one of the zombie ones. Well, this is like the half zombie one, so maybe we don't have to spend too much time on this, but the first story is called The Witch's Clock, and the overview of the story is the young married couple, Bob and Julie Farrell, have arrived at their new home. They've moved from the big city out to a creepy old castle, for some reason. I truly mean like castle. It's not like a mansion, it's like a castle with a dungeon.

Yeah. My favorite line is like the wife asked with glee as they're touring the upstairs, is there a dungeon?

Yes, exactly. All of the stairs don't have railings, they just open out into some pit. Yes. We meet this charming young couple, they've arrived at their home and they're basically rooting around, owing and owing at all the old antique stuff that they're finding in this castle. Everything's under those sheets and things like that. And Bob admits when Julie presses him that, yes, this castle has a dungeon like any good castle does, and Julie of course wants to see it. So they descend into the dungeon down this stairwell with no rails. What is the, was it, I walked with a zombie that had a big stairwell like this, like an Empire, or Empire Strikes Back style, no guard rails over a pit.

Yeah, our hero goes into this tower where, I forget, I'm blanking on the name of the zombie from my walk to the zombie, not Lydia. I can't remember what it.

Anyway, I didn't mean to distract you.

Yeah, it was that scene where she's at the top of the stairs and there's this giant staircase that runs along the wall.

And yeah. So they descend into the dungeon and amidst all the old junk they find down there, what is the cool thing that they find, John?

You're not talking about the clock, are you?

I am talking about the clock.

Okay, they find a grandfather clock.

I mean, cool is maybe over-selling it, just a little bit.

It's the thing that draws their interest.

That's a better way to put it. So Julie is obsessed with this clock and she wants to bring it up into their, up into like the main living portion of the castle. Right. But it's not working and Bob can't get it open. It's been sealed as if somebody didn't want anyone else to use it.

Why did they leave the key right next to it then?

Yes, but then they find the key right next to it. So they open it up and they get the pendulum swinging again, and they set it, and there is a knock at the door. This was a delight.

It was.

Who is at the door?

It is John Carradine. I forget his character's name, but it's John Carradine wearing-

Tristram.

Tristram, and he's wearing 16th century garb. He looks like a hobo from 300 years ago.

Yes. He looks great, honestly. And so he acts kind of confused. He was expecting the previous owners because Tristram was like a groundskeeper for the previous owners of the castle, the-

Sarah Mailer, is it?

The Mailer family. The Mailer family, yeah. So we've learned a couple of other things at this point. We've learned that Bob's a successful mystery writer, so and he's writing an article about New England witchcraft.

Yeah.

I also noted here that Julie is showing a fair amount of cleavage at this point. So next, the local Dr. Finchley shows up, and this is where we get a bunch of backstory that ends up not really mattering in any way, but it's kind of fun.

Dr. Exposition here, yeah.

He tells the story of Lucy Mailer, who is buried in the castle. And let's hear the tale of Lucy Mailer.

I'd like to hear more about Lucy Mailer and the graves.

Most people won't talk about it, you know. She was a real witch, all right. Town folk finally get rid of her and her whole family. Buried them all right down in their crib, along with her friends. Then she was the one who lived here. That's right. Lucy Mailer had powers, not witch powers, mind you, but magical powers. There's even talk that she enchanted a clock, but nobody's had the nerve to find out for sure.

A clock?

Yes. People say it could bring back the dead.

That's a fun little fact about your new home.

Yes.

This doctor is no Scully. He believes.

So made curious by this. So basically this movie is, or this episode is really playing up this The Legend Of Lucy Mailer, The Witch. So Bob heads down into the crypt to see for himself, and he starts looking at the names on the crypts, but he doesn't find the name you're expecting him to find. No. Whose name is on the crypt?

He finds Tristram's name on the crypt.

Yes, and Tristram died in the 1600s.

That's right.

So that's a cool left turn.

Yes.

So he rushes upstairs and he finds that Tristram has hypnotized his wife Julie, and he's hypnotizing her to hate her husband and to want to run off with him, Tristram, instead. And so Bob confronts them. And then John, do you want to describe, like we're at the, actually at the end of the episode here.

It was a bit of a leap.

So can you describe the big finale?

So Bob realizes that the clock, this is all related to the clock. So he goes to stop the clock from running, and Tristram says, no, you don't understand the curse. And then everything catches on fire.

Yes. And it kind of shows them screaming and presumably being consumed in the conflagration, right?

Yes. However, that's not the end.

No, we get a good, I would love to know what the patient zero of this type of horror movie finale is.

Yeah.

But this episode ends with a new young couple arriving at the castle. They also are entranced by the clock, and who other than Tristram shows up at the door looking for the mailers.

That's right. And so it all starts over until you realize this is a cycle of time plot involving the evil Tristram. It's kind of fun. I liked it.

Yeah. So I enjoyed this. So we haven't really talked about it, but the production values of this are, I would describe them as like high school play level, acting and props and set and lighting.

Yeah, community theater is the thing that came to mind, but yes.

Yeah. That said, I enjoyed this more than it probably deserves.

I agree. It was pretty fun.

Yeah. I enjoyed the faint towards like Lucy Mailer as the witch, but it's actually a different kind of horror story. It's this sort of time loop horror story. Yes. So John, do we want to consider Tristram a zombie or no?

He is undead, but he's a fully capable human. I think of him more as an immortal, right? Like he's, I don't think he's actually a zombie here.

I think so. I think he's more of a ghost, closer to a ghost than a zombie.

Yes. He's closer to a ghost or a revenant or something. Yeah.

Yeah. A revenant. Yeah. So this is the one where I said it was like.5 of a zombie, but not quite. We do have some more legit zombies coming though in future stories. So that's the first of five stories. John, did you have any final statements about The Witch's Clock before we move on?

No. You said it's like community theater level acting, and it's always so funny to see an absolute pro stuck in the middle of something with a bunch of amateurs. Now, the husband Bob here appears in I think most of the entries, right? Yeah, he's in three or four of them. I'm not kidding. He looks a little bit like Hugh Jackman. I'm not just saying that because I said it before. I'm really trying to find the Hugh Jackman connection. It is a passing resemblance. Anyway.

Yeah.

I don't want to say I'm obsessed with Hugh Jackman, but anyway.

No. We know that you're obsessed with Hugh Jackman. That's fine. It's fine. Just admit it. All right. The next story in this anthology is called King Vampire. We're going to learn that the title is itself a fake out.

Trickja.

Yeah. This one is not one of the zombie ones. It's not even a half zombie one. It's a vampire story. I'm going to move through this fairly quickly. But in John, if you think there's something important we need to talk about.

Well, the other reason you move through it quickly is this is why a comic book is better here than this movie. Because if you don't have effects or sets to show off a bunch of different stuff, what you have to do is tell people everything that has and it's going to happen. This is the worst one of the group for just being a bunch of exposition slopped together.

Yeah. In most of these stories, if you haven't noticed, very little happens. Correct. Most of these stories take place in one or two locations.

Maybe that's the community theater vibe, right? Yeah.

They consist of people kind of standing around until something scary happens at the end. So there are exceptions, I guess we'll get to. But anyway, King Vampire starts us off at a police station. We are led to believe this is in London, although these police detectives have very American accents. So I don't know if there's some sort of a transfer program going on at Scotland Yard or something. We learned that the 13th murder victim in a row has been found, a woman with puncture wounds on her neck. Which says the 13th victim of something that seems an awful lot like a vampire, which is why they're calling the killer King Vampire, which is a pretty good name for a serial killer.

Yeah, I think so.

The police think that the killer is just a cruel, cunning person. And I want to say, they specify, they don't think he's crazy. He's not a mad, they say, he's not a madman.

He's not one of the madmans.

Madman, yeah. So I'm obsessed with that particular pronunciation. So at any rate, so our lead character here is Detective Brenner. He heads down to the last murder scene to investigate. He's interviewing sort of the locals who are kind of hostile to the presence of the police here. This scene is shot in such overwhelming darkness. I don't know if this was like an artistic choice or if they literally only had like one light.

I feel like they shot it because they didn't really have a set, so they just put people in dark clothes and just highlight their faces and then that's it.

You cannot see any scenery or props, only people. At any rate, he's interviewing these people. He interviews the brother of the most recently murdered woman and you've never met anyone less upset about the fact that his sister was just murdered by King of the Empire. I'm like, this guy is like, oh yeah, oh yeah, the last victim was my sister.

Yeah, you're like, what?

Yeah. So we get another pronunciation. Someone pronounces dead man as deadman.

Of the New York deadmans, yep.

Yeah. And so as this is going on, another woman is murdered. This is kindly old Mrs. O'Shea.

Yeah, she's the one who had given the clue to the police officer. So yeah.

She was like the only one who was helpful to the police. She gave like a very vague description to the police of the murderer. And the cool thing here is that when O'Shea is killed, we get a cool animated blood effect.

Yes.

It's like an animated like streak of blood that goes across the screen. It's kind of reminded me of the James Bond openings where he shoots you and this blood drips down from the top of the screen.

Is it called a wipe? Like they have wipes in here that are just like blood splotches and like in Star Wars, they're all sort of funny.

Transitions.

Yeah, transitions.

In a couple of cases, it's used when something that would be gory happens. This effect kind of wipes across the screen and it also closes most of the stories. Yes. I find this extremely charming. Yep. Yada, yada, the investigation goes on. The police are kind of wrangling with the locals.

By the way, the police do say it's almost as if the killer knew what we know.

Yes. Oh, do they? I missed that. That really clued me in to what was going on in this dense tale of mystery. But, at any rate, the locals find a person that they think was the vampire and they kill him. The police are horrified. But the murders continue after this man's death. The big shocker here is back at the police station, Detective Brenner wonders if King Vampire might actually be a...

Woman.

A woman. What?

And they go, no, that's not possible.

And so they spend a very long time saying that couldn't possibly be the case. Yep. And then we're at the end of this episode, by the way. And at the very end, we learn that the diminutive woman secretary...

I wouldn't say she's diminutive. She's taller than her boss.

She looks like she's six feet.

Yeah. Diminutive in the sense that they've been including her in all the police scenes, but trying not to draw attention to her. Correct.

Yes.

There's this secretary who's been taking notes and stuff in the background. Well, it turns out that she is the vampire killer. And so our final shot is that she lunges at the police chief and we get another blood animation and that's the end. John, thoughts on King Vampire?

I liked King Vampire a little bit. But again, it was sort of like, again, the community theater, not only community theater performed, but also written, right? Like if you're going to do that story better, you introduce, could it be a woman? And then you dismiss it and then like maybe you're suspecting Mrs. O'Shea or there's different, you could introduce more potential candidates, but they bring it up at the end and then immediately resolve it, which doesn't really work.

Yeah. When there's only one living woman in your story and you start hypothesizing that the killer might be a woman, it tends to, it takes away a little of the surprise. That said, my favorite detail was that when she lunges at the police chief with her like mouth open and her teeth bared, she's not wearing vampire teeth. It's just normal teeth. So what is she going to do? Like amasticate him? Like, yeah, like it's going to take some work. So my legitimate question is, is she a vampire or is she an insane person that believes she's a vampire?

You know what? Let's give this film the better of the doubt. Let's say it's an insane person who thinks they're a vampire and not because they didn't have the budget or forgot the plastic teeth that day.

So later episodes in this movie have people wearing vampire teeth.

That's true.

So that makes me think this was a legitimate choice and she's just a nut job who thinks she's a vampire and she's chewing on people.

You know what? I think that's a way better story and I'm going to go with you on that.

Okay. But that has nothing to do with zombies.

No.

Fortunately, the next one has everything to do with zombies.

It is all zombie all the time. Actually, it's all carriage running through the desert all the time, but that's a different story.

So before we move on, listeners, I'm going to apologize in advance for this. I want you to just get a sense of John Carradine's introductions to these stories.

Oh no.

So we're going to listen to what I promise you is the shortest of his introductions to these stories.

In the days when zombies, werewolves and other monsters roamed wild, stalking their victims over the face of the earth, everyone was afraid of the unknown. They were called the undead. A dedicated scientist, who some called mad, wished to rid the earth of this evil curse. He was aware of the terrible danger, but he was willing to take the risk in order to understand the workings of these creatures. He hoped to work out a formula that would remove the curses placed upon them and permit their tormented souls to rest in peace. The people of the surrounding countryside heard weird screams and strange noises in the night. Open graves frightened them more. No one would go to such places for any reason. But the scientist was not afraid. He was submerged in his work. But he began to lose the sense of values we all have. He lost his original idea and swung around to a new one. Why not try to find the tiny spark of life that gives these long dead creatures their energy? The brute force they could summon with it was awesome to behold.

I would love to have watched that movie. I don't know what he's talking about.

These introductions, they're just rambling. They just ramble on and they don't really have anything. Compare these to a good Twilight Zone Rod Serling intro. Is it just like three sentences that chuck you right into the story? Yes.

It's like a six-year-old trying to tell a joke. There's zombies and werewolves and vampires, and then there's a scientist, and then he does this other, it's just very strange.

But at any rate, what that's all leading up to is the third story in this anthology, the Monster Raid. Yes. This one is very simple, maybe less happens in this story than in any other story. What is going on here? Well, I guess, so this story, well, I'll start at the beginning. We open with a creepy man addressing his master who is in a sarcophagus. He pushes it open. A creepy undead hand reaches out from the sarcophagus to help this guy shove the lid off, which is kind of funny.

Yes.

And then what rises from the sarcophagus, John?

A zombie.

A zombie.

Yeah, it looks like a desiccated sort of mummy-like zombie, but it's clearly a zombie.

And I will give this one props for having pretty good zombie makeup.

Yeah, I feel like they blew all their budget in two things. There's a scene in the graveyard later in a different story and this zombie makeup, and I feel like that's half the budget right there.

Yes, exactly. We are going to learn this is Zombie Charles. In Zombie Charles, unlike a lot of the zombies we've seen, he remembers his old life and he has full freedom of action, basically. And so this is the story of his revenge. So this story takes place as he slowly travels back to his home, his home from life, in a carriage. We get flashbacks of the moments leading up to his murder, and we learn why he wants revenge. So let's see. So his servant starts transporting him back home, and we get this series of flashbacks. And what they boil down to is Charles in life was some sort of a scientist. And I think John Carradine was trying to explain to us like what kind of research he was doing, but it's just not really very clear.

And they don't touch on any, they never discuss it in the story. Like I wonder if they were in the story being like, you know what, we never said what he's actually doing. He's just a scientist and then he injects himself and this stuff happens and we haven't said anything about it. So they try to fix it with a prologue.

Exactly. So the gist of what's going on here is Charles has an assistant named Dr. Savard, and he has a beautiful wife named Helen. Helen and Savard are having an affair, and they eventually plot to murder Charles and take the credit for Charles' research. So a lot of stuff happens, but that's what it all boils down to. In the course of this, somebody pronounces the phrase guinea pig as guinna pig. So there's a lot of pronunciation going on in this movie, I have to say. So what it all boils down to is Charles has suspected that his wife is having an affair, but he just couldn't bring himself to acknowledge it. Charles summons Sivard into a pretty good mad scientist lab, I'd say. It's got lots of tubes and stuff like that.

It's got one of those weird beakers that's like a globe, but it has this long tubes sticking out the side at an angle. I've always wondered what those were called. Do you remember? Anyway, it doesn't matter.

I don't, but so you know those long tubes that are in a spiral shape?

Yes.

Is there a value, scientific value to the spiral shape?

I know they use them in like stills, so they must separate out, I don't know what they do.

Write us in and tell us why the tubes are all shaped like spirals. At any rate, Charles volunteers to be the guinea pig for his own science that he's been researching. Yes. So Savard injects Charles with something. Again, it's like never really establish what they're even working on.

No.

But Savard has massively increased the dosage, which causes Charles to die or appear to die. The two lovers bury Charles quickly and they chortle about how they're going to profit from his experiments and live a good life.

We get a little bit where the new guy doesn't appreciate me either. He just wanted Charles' notes and she has a forlorn moment. She might be the worst actress in this whole thing, by the way.

I think so, although that is the touch of extra story that I think isn't needed, but it's delightful that it's here for some reason.

For one moment, Charles is on to them, right? His assistant has just told him that they're having an affair, and she comes in and his notes are there, and she's like, here, let me clean up your notes for you. He's like, haha, I'm on to you.

It's just very-

Yes. But all this time while we've been seeing these flashbacks, Charles has been racing back towards his home in this carriage, and he's been giving us these absolutely top-notch monologues.

Yes.

And we're going to hear one of them right now.

Yes, they buried me, my faithful wife dressed in black, the lack of tears hidden by a heavy veil, and my good friend, Dr. Zavard, who conveniently signed my death certificate, standing by her side in deep sympathy. They did not realize that the highly concentrated injection of my formula had placed me in a state of suspended animation and had preserved my brain, heart and lungs long after the exterior of my body had begun to rot and decay and yield to the elements. But faithful Desmond came for me as I knew he would. I wonder if dear Helen will recognize me.

Like what a long-winded mad scientist monologue.

But can we all agree that is the best laugh since the guy from Maniac?

It's pretty good, I will say. He's got a great mad scientist laugh. A great zombie mad scientist laugh.

We should take a moment and talk about in the background that you heard the horses. What you see on the screen is the silhouette of this carriage being pulled by horses just racing somewhere. We see this over and over.

The film is weirdly exposed. It reminded me almost of the Lord Of The Rings animated movie, the first one, the backsheet one.

Yeah, the rotoscoped one.

The rotoscoped one, yeah.

This movie, they purchased footage from Roger Corman, left over unused or used footage from some of his gothic horror films in the 60s. And so they just repurposed it. And so you see the same thing happen over and over. And the scenes of the establishing shots of the house on the cliff with the water and the crashing waves, that's also from some other film.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

Amazing. So this story is the one that does not really have a twist ending because it ends in exactly the way you expect. The zombie abruptly shows up and kills both Helen and Zavard.

Though that bit is delightful because you get the camera angle, you see the hands of the reaching zombie as it looks, so you're looking like the zombie's perspective as it's reaching towards them. That was probably the most fun part of this whole thing.

I loved it and he's saying, we'll be together forever.

Yes.

As he reaches out for Helen and then the manner burns, and then that blood animation wipes the screen, and we're into the fourth story, the spark of life.

I think now that you say that, Brad, producer Brad, I seem to recall the fire behind the castle in a previous story. Maybe it was in the Vincent Price Tales Of Terror.

Oh, in a different previous movie?

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like it.

It's possible.

Yeah. I could be wrong, but I just had a sense of deja vu.

What we're trying to say is this film is so cheap, they bought footage from Corman.

Yes, which is hilarious. I remember seeing this once, like the first time I ever encountered anything like this. It was in the early 80s, it was a bad science fiction film and for the battle in space, they had just used clips from the original Battlestar Galactica.

Yes.

I know what you're talking about. I was like, wait, I know that. You can't do that. That's a famous thing. You can't just use it like young me was stunned that somebody would do that.

Yes.

Now we got to find out what movie that was. But anyway, producer Brad, if you have a moment, we don't want to put any pressure on you.

How about the 1988 film Space Mutiny?

Oh, that sounds promising.

Yeah, because I saw it in Mr. Science Theater.

Yeah. I'm like, you can't do that.

All right, John, so we're about to move into story number four, The Spark Of Life. But before we do, do we want to have any discussion about the zombie in this episode?

Other than to say, it's just a good-looking one. You know what I mean? It's actually very different from the invisible invaders ones and the ghouls that we're going to encounter soon in Night Of The Living Dead. It's actually like a really convincing gross decaying corpse, which goes a little further than other things have gone.

It is. The mechanism of it is a little different than most of the zombies we've seen. They have killed his body, but not his intellect.

Yes. He can barely walk.

I kind of suggest that he's still alive inside a decaying corpse body, which he is having the time of his life based on all the laughing he does. But that sounds like a pretty horrific fate to me.

Yes, it does.

So two things on the zombie. One, it was played by the writer Russ Jones.

Nice.

And he gave an amazing interview in the book, Eye On Science Fiction, 20 Interviews With Classic Science Fiction Horror Filmmakers. And he describes how he did the zombie. He used rubber bands to distort his face and ears and pinch himself up.

Oh, wow.

And the second story is the actress Rochelle Hudson would not be in the same room with the corpse. So when you see her recoiling in horror, she only sees the camera coming at her. But when they had the zombie going at the camera, she's not in the room because she wouldn't be in the room with the zombie.

Yeah, that does not surprise me because he... I could see somebody in the 1960s being like, that is too scary, you know?

No, that's fascinating actually. All right, well, The Spark Of Life is our fourth story. And this one features a trio of scientists who are trying to replicate Dr. Frankenstein's experiment in bringing a corpse back to life using big jolts of electricity.

Yes.

So, it's set in Scotland in the 1800s.

All right, can I? John, go ahead. Can I pause here? So, all of these look like people are wearing period costumes at some point or another. This one, they say, is in the 1800s. They're wearing 1960s shirts and ties with lab coats.

Yeah, I had to double check my notes that it specifically says it's Scotland in the 1800s.

It specifically says it's the least 1800s one. And yeah, it was very strange.

And how are those Scottish accents?

So good?

Yeah.

Not present.

There's nothing like period about this at all. Like the set looks like a 1960s mad scientist lair. Yes. At any rate, John Carradine's introduction has at great length explained to us that at this time in history, grave robbing was a common way to get bodies for medical experiments. Yes. So that's where we are. We're in a medical lab. Dr. Mendel played by Lon Chaney, right?

Played very sadly by Lon Chaney. And this really did break my heart.

It's got to be the nadir of his film career. He's playing Dr. Mendel, and he's here with his two students. There's a body here under a sheet, and they're all talking about experiments by a Dr. Frankenstein, not Dr. Victor Frankenstein. It's like Dr. Alfred Frankenstein. I don't know what the purpose was of being coy with this.

I don't know either. Probably just copyright. Frankenstein's probably not copyrighted anymore, but there's some film version of it that is.

Oh, for sure. Yes. They're talking about the idea that the dead could be brought back to life with electricity. I wanted to say here, at any time they have all the equipment here, they could just try this out and find out if it works or not. But it hasn't occurred to anyone that they would actually try and test this theory.

Yeah, he's got a theory, but his theory is literally just like hooking up the body to an electrical current. He talks like it's some great discovery.

Yes, exactly. At any point, they could hook their device to the body that's one foot away and discover if their theory is true. But anyway, let's hear them. So the doctor zaps this dead body just to demonstrate, and it shows that electricity causes the corpse to move around a little bit, but not in a way that brings it back to life. So here is Dr. Mendel explaining his theory to his students.

Good electricity sounds.

Yes. I want this sound in my everyday life.

Yeah. Apply a simple electrical stimulus to the forearm. The muscles contract and the hand closes. But my theory is, if you apply enough electrical stimulus over the entire body for a certain length of time, it will rejuvenate the dead cells and muscles, and the dead will live again.

So there you have it.

Yes.

There is this long sequence, very little happens in this story, but they make it convoluted anyway. Yes, they do. So I'm going to spare you some of that. But at the end, the gist of it is that the three of them agree, hey, we've got this body here, we've got this machine that induces lots of electricity. Let's test out this theory and find out if Dr. Mendel's theory is correct. Can the dead be brought back to life?

Now, this was the one twist, I mean, actually, the twists were all delightful, but this one was actually kind of good.

This has a great twist, so hang on to your hats and glasses, folks, because it's going to get real good in a minute. So they prep the corpse for redupination, and they zap it, and they give it lesser amounts of electricity, and see that they can make it sit up and groan menacingly and stuff. But until they give it all the power, and Lon Chaney's sentence is, power, I need more power, which he delivers, and that's when they decide to turn the device all the way up to 11, which causes the corpse to lurch to life. It jumps up for a few seconds, and here's where we discover, so they have brought this corpse back to life, and it can talk. It thanks them, we heard audio from the beginning of this episode, for returning it to the world of the living. It talks so much haltingly.

Would you like to hear that again?

Yes, please.

Yeah, let's hear it.

Thank you for returning me to the realm of the living.

Yes.

So there you go. It turns out, though, that this isn't just some regular person that they've brought back from the dead. This is famous murderer Amos Duncan.

Yeah.

He was executed for murdering three people with a knife, and he says such ominous things as, now I shall have my revenge.

Yeah, not good.

Which causes the doctors to wonder if perhaps they've made a mistake. So they all conference, they all convene in a nearby room, and they decide that, like, well, we've brought this murderer back to life, and that's bad news. And although this is an amazing scientific development, if we share this with the world, it will come out that we're just robbing cemeteries for bodies and that's illegal. So the only thing we're... So we have to kill this guy again, this zombie we've raised.

And they essentially draw straws to see who has to do it.

They do. I love this. So here is how they decide which of the... None of them wants to have to go in and kill the zombie. So they spin a knife, and they agree that when the knife stops spinning, whoever it's pointing at will have to go in and kill the zombie. Hilariously, the knife spins, and then, I think, because they didn't want to do tons of takes until it pointed at the right person, someone just reaches out and stops the knife when it's pointing at Dr. Mendel. So that was kind of funny. Poor Dr. Mendel has been volunteered to go in and kill the corpse. He goes in there. He's preparing a solution. He's going to chloroform the corpse. We've had good discussions of chloroforming and Dr. Blood's coffin and a few other movies. And so Mendel has killed Amos the zombie, right?

Or has he?

So John, walk us through the awesome reveal at the end of this.

So the two doctors come in to see that the deed was done. And they go, oh, Dr. Mendel is not here, but at least he did the deed. And they have a brief chat and then they pull back the blanket and it's Dr. Mendel. And then Amos was hiding behind the door behind them and he leaps out with a knife, and we get one of those bloody wipes.

Hold on, he doesn't leap. Well, he doesn't leap.

I'm sorry, I was trying to, look, I'm trying to punch this thing up a little bit, guys. Give me a break. He stumbles like a drunken man slowly out from behind the door, and then we cut to a bloody wipe and that's the end.

So I enjoyed this one quite a bit, John. This was our last zombie that we're gonna get in this movie, so let's take a sec to talk about it. What kind of a zombie is Amos?

Well, it's a science-created zombie, and it's different than Frankenstein. I mentioned this in a couple of episodes, but when we were all talking about doing this, we thought, where do we start? I think producer Brad said, what about Frankenstein? I think you weren't proposing it, you were just trying to see what do I think about Frankenstein? I said, well, Frankenstein is not a zombie, he's a golem, because he's assembled from a bunch of different people. But this is literally a corpse just brought back to life. So it's a science-created zombie, even though it's in the vein of Frankenstein, it's a different thing.

Yeah. Once again, we have this strange lack of curiosity that zombie movies have about the afterlife.

Yes.

Right? We had this at least, I think it was The Walking Dead, was the only zombie movie we've seen, where the people bringing the zombie back to life were interested in what the zombie had been experiencing while it was dead.

Yeah.

But here this guy comes back to life and it doesn't occur to anyone to ask any questions at all. Yeah.

It's just like the Dungeons and Dragons movie with Chris Pine where they...

Yeah. Yes, exactly. So that's a wrap on The Spark Of Life. And we're about to move into our final story, which is my favorite.

It's probably the best one.

Yeah. Did you have anything else about The Spark Of Life before we move on, John?

No. The acting in this one also felt particularly bad.

Yes. The worst acting I think is to come in this final episode. Okay. Like it can't be overstated how amateur this production is. Like I just everything about it. So, yes. All right. Well, let's move right along. So in the introduction, speaking of Dungeons and Dragons, John, in the introduction to the fifth story, Count Alucard, I had the same thought. John Carradine mentions he's rattling off a list of like mythical creatures. And what is the one that jumped out at us, John?

Cobolds.

Yes, exactly.

I never heard of Cobolds since before I read Dungeons and Dragons, and I haven't ever heard of them in any other context. So how in 1967, do Cobolds get introduced here? I'm fascinated. Yeah.

I'm genuinely interested. D&D doesn't come out until the 70s.

74, yeah.

But Cobolds are a thing. So, all right. Well, you see it, you saw it here, folks. Cobolds in 1967.

Well, I expect a follow up from one of you D&D masters to answer that question in a later episode.

I'm on it. I'll do some digging.

Well, we'll do some dueling digging on this, Andy.

This final episode is called Count Alucard. That is, of course, Dracula spelled backwards. Do you guys know, when was the first time that a Count Alucard appeared? Do you guys know? I don't know. This isn't like a trick question.

No, I think there was a, wasn't one of, like there was a sequel to the original Dracula or in that series long ago where there was a, an Alucard was a character. And I can't, I don't remember what it was, but I feel like it's from a long ago.

It was in 1943, Son of Dracula.

And his name was Alucard. Correct.

Okay, there you go. I remember this from a much less classy reference and that is the Castlevania video games than the Nintendo had an Alucard in them. Anyway, okay, well, we open. So until the end of this story, it seems like you are watching a run of the mill remake of Dracula. Right. Until our awesome twist ending, which I can't wait to get to. Jonathan Harker, our hero from the novel Dracula, is traveling to a creepy castle on a seaside cliff. I was trying to figure out the location of this footage. He passes some things that look a lot like Southern California to me, which is not where you find big Gothic vampire castles.

No. At one point, he asked Count Elio Cardiff, his family is from Transylvania, and he's like, no, no, not at all.

At any rate, he's traveling there in a horse-drawn carriage, and the carriage driver won't go any closer. He kicks Harker out of the carriage and says, I'm not going closer to that castle. That castle is evil. And whatever you do, don't go outside after midnight if you have to stay at this castle. Right. Fair enough. So far, so good. We've seen this a million times before. He gets to the castle. The Count Alucard welcomes him. It is the most, whatever you picture in your mind, when you think Hollywood Dracula is what this actor is attempting to convey.

It's a similar outfit. He's at the top of a staircase. It is trying to emulate the original Dracula.

The Count says all kinds of vampire stuff. He can't go out at day. He doesn't drink wine.

He has some condition. I think this is how they actually managed to get me on the twist because it was like, why are you doing all this dumb stuff to pretend he's not a vampire when you've gone to so much trouble to tell us he's a vampire?

I didn't get it. Again, there's more here than this story really deserves. Yes. Of background building. Yeah. But the count is saying all sorts of creepy stuff about blood basically. He won't shut up about it. We learn that he is descended from Attila the Hun, and he resents the Turks, and he talks about some blood debt that's not been paid back yet. This had me, I will confess.

Yeah.

This got its hooks in me. Anyway, that night, Harker is staying overnight in this creepy castle. That night, a creepy woman slinks into Harker's room, and she has vampire teeth, and she bites him. I mean, no one has ever resisted a vampire less than Harker does in this scene.

Absolutely.

Well, he even says, have you been sent for me?

Yeah.

He always gets gifts in bed like this.

Yeah. It's a little weird. It is. They're interrupted. So she has started to bite him. He has bite marks on his neck, but they're interrupted by a bunch of villagers that have showed up at the castle.

Yes, including a gnome in Lederhosen.

Yes, a guy in Lederhosen. I cannot convey the casual joviality of this leader of the peasant mob as he recounts that a vampire has just killed a child in the village. They've chased the vampire here. It's a vampire woman in a white dress, which we know is the woman who just visited Harker in his bedroom. Right. In that chipper voice, he asks Harper if he wants to join the hunt for the vampire woman. Harker's like, heck yeah.

I'm in.

They all head off. Go ahead, John.

No, I was just going to say Harker's like, let's do it.

Yeah.

Can I come? Let's go. Yeah, he's super pumped.

We do get this movie's other special effect, which is after all of the villagers run off to chase the vampire woman, we see the count raise his cape bellow the ghostly style and he turns into a giant bat that flies at the screen.

Yeah, or put another way, somebody takes a Sharpie and draws on the film the shape of a bat that zooms towards the screen.

That could also be what is happening, yes. But the action now moves to a cemetery and actually things are drawing to a close here. So the vampire woman is here. She's trying to get back to her grave, but the torch-wielding mob has followed her here. So they're searching throughout the cemetery for her. She kills one of the people of the mob. The lead villager I put here on my notes is the worst actor we've seen in quite a while.

The gnome with the hat.

Yeah, you said that Helen was the worst actor earlier. Well, I don't know. I put these two in a room. I want to see who comes out.

I got to give this one to you, you're right.

His actual title is The Burger Meister.

Oh, excellent.

Yes. They find a crypt that's been disturbed. They find a sarcophagus that has a woman, not the one they're looking for, but it has a vampire woman.

I know, it's just like another one. I'm like, what?

Exactly. It's like, why is this here? It's like a minute and a half of the movie. Anyway, they stake her. And it's funny when they pound the stake in, you get that animated blood wash across the screen. Then they find another empty sarcophagus nearby. So they're like, this must be the sarcophagus that our quarry is going to. So they stake it out, ha-ha. And they wait for the vampire to appear. She shows up and they stake her. It's actually not very dramatic at all.

And Harker does it too.

And Harker is the one that stakes her.

Yeah, like dude is blood thirsty.

And he's so casual about it. Like in a minute, he's going to be like, oh yeah, we just killed two vampires. Like as if this is a routine happening.

You were just in my bed. Yeah, I can stake you.

Yeah. It's not a rich text we're dealing with here, guys. Okay, the final scene though, this is so good. I'm beside myself with excitement. Back at the castle, the count thanks Harker for his help in hunting down the vampires. And Harker confronts the count. And we have this listeners describing it would not do it justice. So you're going to live through it with us as we hear Harker and Count Alucard's confrontation.

Were you of any assistance to the Burgermeister?

I was. We dispatched the vampires.

Well, now the villagers can live in peace without fear of the night.

Not quite.

Oh, how can that be?

There's still the vampire that created the two girls.

He also must be dispatched.

Hmm.

That may prove a very difficult task. Vampires are hard to find, very elusive.

I will have to look for him.

I know who he is.

Mr. Harker, you are much too clever for your own good. And now for your meddling, you shall have to pay.

I won't let you drain this village of its blood. I need it for myself.

That is so great. Yeah, that's the part that charmed me. At the end, I was like, this is a bit of a slog, and then that happened, and I was like, yeah.

Exactly, this redeemed the 20 minutes of slog that has come before it. So there's so much to talk about in this little moment. First is Dracula shouting, ah, of a werewolf, ah, which is very funny. I want to know if that was in the script. Secondly, I am just delighted that in order for Harker to turn into a werewolf, he has to be like, they block the scene so that he turns away from the camera. Yeah. He walks into a shadowy doorway, and then the vampire steps in front of him to block him so we can't see him while he quick puts on a werewolf mask.

Or changes with another person, we're not sure.

Or changes with another person.

My guess is he actually pulls on a mask really quick.

I think so too. I think there's a mask hanging in the alcove, and he went over there and quick put it on. I think that the quality of the lighting was so bad that they had to dub in a werewolf because otherwise you would not understand what you were seeing.

Yes. I think you're right.

Any thoughts on that, John?

No. This was a delight, but it also made me imagine it as a comic panel where the werewolf leaps out of the dark alcove with slavering fangs and how great a twist that would be on the comic book page that they can't quite pull off in a low budget movie. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, that's the energy of this. I think it truly would be fantastic on a comic page. Yes. And this movie has enough dopey earnestness about it that you meet it halfway and you can imagine how good it would be on a comic page. Yeah. So, I mean, I ended this. This is the end of the movie. I ended this with a smile on my face, John. I don't know about you.

Yeah.

Like this is one of our weakest productions as far as acting and script and stuff like that goes. But it has heart to it and it has 2.5 zombies.

And 2.5 zombies, yes.

Any closing thoughts or do you want to move into our wrap up questions?

Let's move into our wrap up questions. I'm curious how we're going to do this just because there's five stories.

Yeah. So, let's focus here on the two stories that have definite identifiable zombies.

All right.

We'll make our way through these questions. Are there hero parties in this collection here?

No. Well, in the first one, kind of, no, there aren't. I mean, there's couples that are... There are no heroes. There are no heroes. Yeah. No, there's no heroes. Yeah.

This is a movie where the zombies, in both cases, are taking vengeance on evil doers, essentially. Yeah. There's no kind of heroes or survivors in a traditional sense.

Well, and that goes back to that sort of EC comics. There's no good guys, like everyone's just trying to run a scam or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm going to skip through a couple of these questions, which will be a little bit difficult to answer, but we have a pretty good kill count across this movie, I would say. A fair amount of people get implied to kill because we see almost no violence on screen. In this movie, are there zombies that are destroyed or killed, and if so, how?

Well, in both cases, the zombie escapes or does the killing. They end with it uncertain. We presume the zombie is free to roam after this.

So while this is a classic horror movie trope, the monster is still around at the end of the movie, we actually, most of the movies we see, the zombies are put down or put to rest by the end. It's pretty rare that when the credits roll, there are still zombies walking around. Is that true, John?

I think so. It depends on the movie. At least so far, that's the case.

Well, in both cases for these, not only does the zombie win, but he kills everyone else that's present, except for the desmond, the servant.

That's right.

Who helps the master. But everyone else is killed that we've seen.

Yeah.

Yeah. What kind of zombie strains are we dealing with in these stories?

Well, we've got a science zombie, we've got two science zombies, actually. One is a serum, one is electricity, but they're both science zombies.

Can they return to being human?

No.

They can't. Although, interestingly, so the murderer zombie.

He looks very human.

There's not much to differentiate his zombie state from his human state. I think you could say he's just simply been brought back to regular life.

Yes. Yes. Except he's changed in some way because he's got the halting speech and all that stuff.

He's got the halting speech, which isn't quite explained. It might be because of his zombie state. Maybe he was like that before he died. We don't really even know. Right. Right. All right, John, I don't know how we'll do these pillars exactly, but you did identify four pillars of the zombie film genre in this podcast. Let's see if any of these crop up in these episodes that involved zombies. In these episodes, were there apocalypses?

No apocalypses.

No. These were hyperlocal zombie situations.

Yes.

Is there contagion anywhere in this movie?

Not really. Not in the way intended. You could make an argument that the half zombie is creating other zombies by using the clock, but not really. I will say no. Yeah.

Agreed. Are there tough moral choices?

I think you have to have good guys to have tough moral choices, and these are all bad guys.

You have people making bad moral choices, but they're not really hard decisions.

You didn't expect them to make good ones.

Right. Does this movie feature loved ones turning against you?

That's the only thing. In the first one where, well, it's a loved one technically because it's the ex-husband, but they don't really love each other, but he does turn against them. So, I mean, technically, this one is covered.

Well, she turns against him.

Yes. Yes.

So, I want to give this movie credit. The scene, the juicy moment from the loved ones turning against you is the scene where the human recognizes the horror that is their loved one. And this movie does deliver that. Helen, dire acting, set aside for the moment, is horrified to see her zombie husband lurching at her. And I think that that has to get a yes. Yeah.

I'd say yes.

All right. All right. Over to you for a few wrap up questions.

Let's zip through some of these 60s questions. As I pointed out earlier, I feel like a lot of the things that you predicted are happening, they just happened to be happening in other movies. So increase of violence and grittiness here.

No. This is a strangely toothless movie.

Yeah. They won't even show you Staking a Vampire.

Yeah. They don't show any violence. It's like a chaste bloodless film.

Yeah. Is there more questioning of authority here?

No, I don't think so.

Focus on a hero's inner life or personalized horror. You can kind of make a case for the one where the zombie scientist comes back, because he's narrating his inner life and his vengeance.

I mean, I give it like a quarter credit on this question, because there is a little bit of that. It's a very personal horror story, and the horror is hooked around the trauma and sins of the characters.

Yes. Yeah. How about fear of crime, societal chaos, anarchy?

Eh.

Eh.

Maybe a little, but not enough to be a strong theme, I would say. There's a little bit of that in the King Vampire episode, where there's a serial killer running amok.

Yeah.

And then there's a little bit of it when in... Also, in King Vampire, the mob kind of goes crazy, and they kill an innocent person. That's true. I mean, there's a little bit of that. That said, I think the answer is no here.

Looming sense of apocalypse and psychological stress.

Not really.

Not really. How about horrors without solution, or lack of clear villains to defeat?

Well, interestingly, so it is interesting to me, this type of story... Well, there are no villains exactly.

No.

Kind of the monsters win in all of these stories. Yes. Sometimes, maybe half the time, the monsters are actually the morally good people.

Andy, I have a question to add here. Who are the real monsters, Andy? People. People are the real monsters.

Okay, okay. I was gonna say the vampires, zombies, and the murderer brought back to life anyway. Yes. So, yes. All right, John, we always wrap up our discussions with three closing questions, so let's have at it. John, would you and I survive in the zombie world of Dr. Terror's Gallery Of Horror?

I feel like in all of these cases, the people are involved, like, I don't know, like maybe in the first one where John Carradine comes back, I could get got if I were dumb enough to go buy an old castle in the country.

Yeah.

The other ones, I feel like it would be so hard to get involved, right? Because they're so location and person specific.

It's possible that like a vampire serial killer could get me, I guess. Yeah.

So probably not. As an average Joe, there's a chance we get taken out, because the monsters do win in every case.

Yeah. All right. Is this a zombie movie or is this a movie that happens to have a couple of zombies?

It's a movie that happens to have a couple of zombies.

Yeah. No argument there. Lastly, do you recommend this movie, John? Firstly, generally is a good movie that everyone should go and check out. Secondly, do you recommend it specifically as a zombie artifact that our zombie loving listeners should check out?

I struggle here because it was charming. But I have to say for most of it, until the end where it was ridiculously charming, I was like, I think I have to say no to both, despite the fact that there were some virtues as a movie that were fun. It's just so low budget. Like I said, I would read a comic book of this and it would be absolutely delightful. I probably wouldn't, but that would only take me 30 minutes, not an hour and a half.

Yeah, well put. I don't disagree. If you are the sort of person that likes this kind of movie, you know who you are and you're already looking this up online.

Yeah, exactly.

The rest of you, you can give this a go.

It has its merits, but it's hard to recommend generally.

Yeah. All right. Well, hey, that means it's time for the scariest part of this episode, which is when Brad reveals to me and John what zombie movie we will be watching next.

All right. Before we get into our next film, our countdown to Night of the Living Dead, we have four films to watch before we reach 1968 in Night of the Living Dead.

I know, I can't wait.

It's coming. All right. Up next, we have our first film from South America.

Oh, whoa.

And I'll play a clip from the trailer first, and then after it finishes, I'll show you the poster. So, here's the clip.

A deadly organ.

It will blow your mind.

This is a movie about a haunted musical instrument.

It's a nightmare in psychedelic suspense.

All right, here's your poster.

It will blow your mind. This is the grooviest, can we agree this is the grooviest poster we've seen so far?

Oh, by far. This is the first one that feels like the swing in the 60s to me. Yeah. The movie is called The Deadly Organ, and that appears to be a musical instrument because we see some ghoulish hands playing a keyboard, and we see a pretty psychedelic series of images. There's a bunch of scannily clad women cavorting in different poses.

There's a headline in the back that just says, Love Drug Killer Nude Victim Found.

And central to all of this, there's a creepy looking mad scientist kind of guy with a syringe full of a green substance.

And the byline for the movie is, turned on and tuned in. So that couldn't be more 1960s. Finally, the 1960s groove fest that we've been waiting for is here. All right, folks. Hey, if you haven't had a chance to rate us in your podcast app of choice, we really appreciate it. Tell your friends, we've got some new listeners and we really appreciate you. Thanks for joining us. And in any case, we'll be back next episode for The Deadly Organ. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like minded people find the show. See you next time.