Monthly Archives: September 2019

Friday night at the home drive-in: The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)

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As I discussed in my #NotQuiteClassicCinema post a while back, my Friday nights at the home drive-in are all about trying to relive the joy of the Not Quite Classic Theatre television show I loved as a teenager. And if there is one phrase that might sum up the contents of that show it would be “old monster movies’. I seem to recall that they screened sequels to movies like Dracula (1931), and The Wolfman (1941) – not the originals, mind you, but their lesser known offspring. The great Hammer films of the 1950s and ’60s would have been a perfect addition to the lineup, but I don’t recall any of them being shown. As a result, my exposure to Hammer films was sadly limited in those days. Continue reading →

Friday the 13th at the home drive in: The original Friday the 13th (1980)

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I remember seeing the poster for Friday the 13th at a movie theatre and thinking it looked scary. Too scary. I had always enjoyed watching scary movies, but something about this poster made me wonder if I should stay away. Fortunately, I was too young to buy a ticket anyway. Continue reading →

Friday night at the home drive-in: I Eat Your Skin (1964) or was it (1971)?

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Who doesn’t know the story of this movie? Shot in 1964, but not released until 1971, it was originally titled Zombie, or maybe Invasion of the Zombies, but when producer Jerry Gross needed a second feature to send out with I Drink Your Blood he retitled it to I Eat Your Skin.

I Eat Your Skin got panned in every horror review book I ever read. Terror On Tape, by James O’Neill, gave it one and half stars and noted that the acting was “as gruesome as it gets.” Creature Features, by John Stanley, also gave it one and half stars and said “Credit (or discredit) Del Tenney for writing-producing-directing this mess.” Thanks to reviews like these, I avoided watching I Eat Your Skin for many years. But there was always a nagging voice somewhere in the back of mind telling me that this movie needed to be seen. And since it came as a bonus feature on my super-deluxe blu-ray of I Drink Your Blood, I no longer had any excuse to ignore it. Continue reading →

Friday night at the home drive-in: Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy (1971)

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I first read about Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy in Gerald Pratley‘s book A Century of Canadian Cinema. I’d been working on a a research project that had me searching for obscure Canadian crime films, and Pratley’s book had been a good source of unfamiliar titles. Unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of them were impossible to track down. In some cases, I wondered if the movies had ever had a real release. Pratley saw them, so they must have played a festival, or had a premiere screening somewhere.  But it seemed like some of them had never secured a real distribution deal, and simply vanished. Others may have been distributed, either theatrically, or on VHS back in the day, but were now totally out of print and/or circulation. Continue reading →