For about a decade, a company called Hemisphere Pictures has released movies that are Filipino/American co-productions. Filmed on location in the Philippines, these are often war stories or adventure films. In order to get folks like me into theaters, they also make horror movies.
A quartet of these scare flicks takes place on a fictional isle known as Blood Island. As we'll see, the first one in the series is quite a bit different from the others. Think of it as a prelude to a fugue in three voices.
Since the Journey has expanded its scope to include horror films, especially since they often overlap with the Fantasy milieu, I thought you'd enjoy learning about the wonders that Hemisphere has to offer. Let's take a look.
There’s a volcano that’s ready to erupt on the silver screens, so prepare yourselves for a blast of truth, fury, and funk that has no patience for politeness. These three films, Watermelon Man, The Landlord, and Cotton Comes to Harlem, take a swing at the beast that is American racism as they stumble in their own strange ways trying to wrap their arms around it. These films attempt to not let their audiences off easy as they slap them across the face, daring white America to feel what it’s like to be on the wrong end of the stick. Whether you’re a white boy having your spiritual awakening in a Black neighborhood or a white man literally waking up Black, these films don’t just entertain. They challenge and provoke you with some honesty and a loud Black voice that is no longer asking to be heard.
Before you start reading this essay, let me warn you: I will be discussing major plot details from the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. This will include the movie’s conclusion. For that matter, this article also ruins the ending of the original film. So be warned in case you haven't yet been to your local multiplex to see these in double-feature. On the other hand, you may well wish to go in with your eyes wide open… because Beneath the Planet of the Apes is both a fascinating continuation and a jaw-dropping pivot.
If…. is a movie which came out a couple of years ago, but is rapidly becoming a staple of the college film society scene here in the UK and overseas. It’s firmly within the satirical-surrealist tradition that characterises the likes of The Prisoner (with whom If… shares an editor, South African activist Ian Rakoff), Monty Python, and The Bed Sitting Room. The question is, how well does that stand up as time and cinematic fashion move on?
The story is set at a British all-male boarding school, where young men from the privileged classes learn the rigid, brutal, complex hierarchies and rules which will characterise their adult lives as well. Through the lens of a new arrival, we encounter a world where senior prefects enforce a rigid regime, obsessed with trivialities like hair length and permitted foods but enforcing this through corporal punishment; where younger students are forced to act as servants to their elders, with an implied sexual dimension to this servitude; where religion and the military bolster and reinforce the regime. However, the school also has its rebellious counterculture in the form of three young men, the “Crusaders”, led by Travis (played by newcomer Malcolm McDowell, whose performance here has reportedly led to Stanley Kubrick casting him in his forthcoming adaptation of A Clockwork Orange). their rebellion begins with minor acts of disobedience like growing a moustache, but grows in commitment and brutality until the climax of the story.
When I was appointed, in recent weeks, as a cultural attaché of the Colombian embassy in Bonn, I was beside myself with excitement about the prospect of imbibing from the richness of Teutonic civilization, whose light was but briefly obscured during the war. I say this without intending in any manner to dismiss the graveness of the evil that merely one generation ago seared Europe, but not even an army of murderers can outweigh the numberless German generations possessed of extraordinary creativity that preceded them. With one glance at the poetry of Vogelweide or Eschenbach, one gives perpetual thanks for having studied the German tongue. And the pleasures aren't limited to the written word: I need only give two cardinal points, Bach and Strauss, and the mind delights in the long chain of beauty that extends between them. This is the proud nation that birthed Dürer, Gutenberg, Leibniz, Schiller, Humboldt, and that titan among titans, Goethe… And look at the Germany of today! Upon leaving the airplane, I nearly fainted as I realized I was setting foot on the land of Günter Grass, of Siegfried Lenz, of Heinrich Böll! I believe I could put you all to sleep reciting names long before I'm finished praising the inexhaustible wellspring of genius that is Germany.
Alas, the Fates judged it fit to make a mockery of my elation when it came time for me to experience my first taste of German culture in an official capacity as a foreign diplomat.
1970 has been a bit of a tough year for us in Seattle.
Our major local company, Boeing, has suffered the worst year in its history. The Boeing Bust keeps continuing, as the 1969 layoffs have grown into a full-scale decimation. Unemployment is up around 10% now, the worst since the Great Depression, and my family and I are starting to panic. Of course, the fall of Boeing hits many other local industries, so places like restaurants, bookstores and movie theatres are especially hard hit by this. And many of my friends have either moved or contemplated moving – even if they will lose money on their fancy $50,000 homes in the suburbs.
Sales of this widebody jet have been declining
To make matters worse, we’ve also lost our pro baseball team, which I wrote about last summer. The Seattle Pilots premiered in ’69, in a minor league park and with the worst uniforms in the Majors. But after just one season, the team is gone—relocated to Milwaukee, of all places, leaving behind a community that embraced them despite the challenges. For my friends and family, it wasn’t just about losing a baseball team; it was about losing a piece of the city’s identity. Just as we gained a second sports team to join our beloved SuperSonics, they were wrenched away from us.
Their home park, Sick’s Stadium, had its flaws. But it was our flawed park. Fans showed up, hopeful that the Pilots would grow into something more. Their financial struggles were well-known, reported faithfully in our local Times and P-I, but few expected the team to vanish overnight. When the sale was finalized on April 1, 1970, it felt like an April Fools’ joke—except it was real. The Pilots were rebranded as the Brewers, and we were left without a Major League Baseball team.
In fact, the Pilots trained in Spring Training as the Pilots before a chaotic moment as they traveled north from Arizona. Equipment trucks were redirected from highway pay phones, as the team learned they would be playing in Wisconsin rather than Washington. The new Brewers played their first game this week at Milwaukee County Stadium. The Pilots are no more.
Of course, the lawyers are getting involved and we may get a team in the future – but a city that deserved some good news has received some devastating news instead. We are like mariners without a destination as far as baseball goes.
The Machines Live
And in the midst of all that frustration comes a film that’s ultimately about mankind’s frustrating hubris.
Colossus: The Forbin Project, adapted from the 1966 novel, is claustrophobic, unsettling, and uncomfortably plausible. If Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey made us marvel at the potential of artificial intelligence, Colossus comes along and shakes us out of our dreamy optimism. This isn’t a sleek, cool machine with a calm voice and vague philosophical musings. This is cold, unrelenting domination, and there’s no arguing with it.
In my last article, I wrote that a feeling of hope and optimism was permeating West Germany ever since the general election last fall. Sadly, on February 13, 1970, those good vibrations were disrupted by a reminder of the darkest time of German history.
It was a cold Friday night in the Glockenbach neighbourhood of Munich. The shops on Reichenbachstraße had already closed for the night and in the Victorian apartment buildings lining the street, people were enjoying the start of the weekend.
On of the buildings along Reichenbachstraße is the Munich synagogue, built in 1931. It was the only synagogue in Munich to survive the Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938, because the Munich fire brigade stopped the Nazi mob from setting fire to the building, insisting that a fire would spread out of control and burn down the entire densely populated street.
After World War II, the synagogue reopened and now serves as the main synagogue for the Jewish population of Munich. The Jewish congregation of Munich also purchased an adjacent Victorian apartment building to serve as a community centre, library, restaurant, kindergarten and as a home for elderly members of the congregation and students.
Shortly before nine PM, an unknown person or persons entered the community centre, took the elevator to the top floor and spread gasoline in the wooden stairwell on their way down. Then, they struck a match, lit the gasoline and fled. The resulting fire spread rapidly through the old building.
The community center of the Munich synagogue on Reichenbachstraße all ablaze.
At the time of the arson attack, fifty people were inside the community centre, celebrating the sabbath. Forty-three of them were rescued by neighbours and the Munich fire brigade. However, the fire in the stairwell had cut off access to the upper floors of the building, trapping several resident in their rooms.
A resident of the old people's home at the Jewish community center on Reichenbachstraße in Munich has been rescued and is taken to hospital.Medical student Sara Elassari escapes the fire.
Twenty-one-year-old medical student Sara Elassari, who lived on the top floor, managed to escape through the window and scramble down a drain pipe, from where she was rescued by the fire brigade. Seventy-one-year-old Meir Max Blum, who had returned from the US to his city of birth only the year before, jumped from a window and succumbed to his injuries. Six other residents aged between fifty-nine and seventy-one were found dead in their rooms. All seven victims had survived the Holocaust – some in hiding, some in exile, some imprisoned in concentration camps – only to be murdered in their homes in supposedly peaceful West Germany.
A burned out room at the Jewish community center in Munich.
Too Many Suspects
As of this writing, we do not know who is responsible for this terrible tragedy. The Munich police are following various leads. The obvious suspects would be the far right, since West Germany has no shortage of old and new Nazis. However, there is also evidence pointing at an eighteen-year-old far left radical with a history of arson, because Anti-Semitism does not thrive only among the right.
Finally, the arson attack might also be connected to the Middle East conflict, especially since a Palestinian terrorist group had tried to hijack an El Al plane during a stopover at Munich-Riem airport only three days before. The hijack attempt failed, but one passenger, thirty-two-year-old German-Israeli businessman Arie Katzenstein, was killed and ten other people were injured, some of them critically. On February 17, another hijack attempt was foiled, also at Munich-Riem airport but thankfully without casualties. Were the same terrorists also responsible for the arson attack? So far, we don't know.
Two police officers examine the aftermath of the foiled hijack attempt at Munich-Riem airport on February 10, 1970.The transit lounge at Munich-Riem airport after the failed hijack attempt.The airport bus, where the would-be hijackers ignited a hand grenade, killing 32-year-old German-Israeli businessman Arie Katzenstein.
However, the sad truth remains that twenty-five years after the end of the Third Reich, eight Jewish people (the seven victims of the arson attack as well as the victim of the airport attack) were murdered and several others injured in the heart of Munich. The old venom of Anti-Semitism is back, if it ever left in the first place.
Nuclear War as Comedy
When the world outside becomes too terrible to bear, the cinema offers a respite for an hour or two. And so I headed out to see a movie that debuted at last year's Berlin Film Festival, but is only now reaching West German cinemas. And since the movie was billed as a comedy, it would seem to guarantee a good time.
Federico Fellini is unquestionably one of the most beloved filmmakers in the so-called international arthouse circuit. Despite shooting Italian productions, working well outside the Hollywood system, Fellini has already garnered a back-breaking eight Oscar nominations. I won't be surprised if his latest, Fellini Satyricon (which henceforth I'll simply refer to as Satyricon), nabs him another nomination, despite its immense strangeness. United Artists, responsible for distributing Satyricon here in the States, have been shrewd in their marketing, seemingly aiming at the overlap between those who frequent arthouse theaters (people like me) and those who watch B-movies at the drive-in (also people like me).
Fellini Satyricon
Normally, when writing about a film, or really any narrative, I try to give you a blow-by-blow of the plot; however, in the case of Satyricon, I don't think this would be feasible or desirable. This film is the latest effort from Fellini as both a fantasist and a storyteller who, at least since La Dolce Vita a decade ago, has clearly become disillusioned with traditional narrative. Satyricon is so loose in plot and yet so rich in imagery that to go over the plot would be doing it a disservice. I can at least give you the setup, though.
When reading my morning paper, it can feel like the whole world is determined to blow itself up.
Vietnamese peace talks are going nowhere, with American “help” possibly reaching its nadir when a US helicopter killed friendly South Vietnamese forces by mistake. Israel is once again fighting its Arab neighbours with both Communists and Capitalist countries pouring in military aid to their favoured sides. There is not even goodwill within their respective camps, with the Soviets and Communist China continuing to sabre rattle over the border. And this doesn’t even count the civil wars going on in places like Rhodesia.
Closer to home, British troops in Northern Ireland’s attempts to keep the peace so far seem to be counter-productive. Whilst we are also learning more of the atrocities committed by British troops during the so-called “Malayan Emergency” from the official enquiry.
With all this violence going on, it makes you wonder if there could be another way. Well Peter Watkins has come up with one, albeit not necessarily the most pleasant option:
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe is an hour-long film in which four Edgar Allan Poe stories are recited by Vincent Price. Originally made as a television play (and in a way which suggests it was based on a theatrical production, albeit with the addition of some new visual effects), it’s reminiscent of the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas segment, and I was recently asked to view it as a possible acquisition as a teaching tool by my university’s English Literature department.
The Cask of Amontillado
The programme is split into four segments, in each of which Price recites a different Poe short story. Fairly predictably, these are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Each segment is performed with Price in character as the narrator of each story, with appropriate costuming and sets. Although Price does show a decent range in playing different characters, they’re all very much within Price’s repertoire as an actor, so, although none of the performances are bad, there are no real surprises to be had here.
The Sphinx
I felt the best segment was “The Cask of Amontillado”. Price really seems to relish the role of Montressor and plays him with a wicked twinkle in his eye, surrounded by luxurious draperies and furniture and a banquet-table of food. The weakest for me was “The Sphinx,” which struggled to hold my attention, though it did have an effective use of special effects when we briefly see a skull overlaid over Price’s face at a crucial moment.
The Pit and the Pendulum
By contrast, “The Pit and the Pendulum” was a good enough dramatization of an exciting story, but the problem was that the producer seemed to feel it needed jazzing up with effects shots of Price falling into the pit, Price helpless before the pendulum, Price faced with colour separation overlay ("chroma-key" to yanks) flames, and so forth. The rats were far too cute, with inquisitive little faces and glossy fur, for me to find them horrific.
Finally, “The Tell-Tale Heart” was a good choice as the opening story, told simply with the set a bare garret, with Price steadily ramping up the hysteria as the narrator follows his path into murder and madness.
The Tell-Tale Heart
One great benefit I can see from this production is a chance to show audiences who may just know Poe from the cinematic productions loosely based on his work, just how skilled a horror writer Poe was in real life. The issue with something like “The Pit and the Pendulum” is that one can’t really get an entire 90-minute film out of it without adding a lot of material, which, while it can work as a movie, means you lose the terrifying economy of the original story (although if anyone wants to adapt “The Cask of Amontillado”, I think one could spend at least 90 minutes exploring the buildup of resentment in the two characters’ relationships that led up to the final murder). For this reason, I’m recommending that the English Literature department acquires a copy, and would also say that, if it turns up on TV in your region, it’s worth a watch.
3 out of 5 stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
There's A Signpost Up Ahead . . .
Two films I caught recently reminded me of Rod Serling's late, lamented television series Twilight Zone. Let's take a look.
The Moebius Flip
Less than half an hour long, this skiing film is the sort of thing that might be shown at a college campus, before the main feature in a movie theater, or to fill up time on television in the wee hours of the morning. The brief running time isn't the only thing that reminds me of Serling's creation.
We begin with scenes of people skiing, edited in a jumpy way. Jazz, rock, and folk music fill up the soundtrack. The skiers also fool around in the snow, eat some fruit, and so forth.
Suddenly, we see a news announcer. He tells us that scientists have determined that every subatomic particle in the universe has reversed polarity. I'm not sure what that means, but let's see what happens.
Somehow, this is supposed to change the way people perceive things. That means the film turns into a negative of itself.
This goes on for a while, then the movie goes back to normal. Once in a while, it turns back into a negative. I guess that's a Moebius Flip. Along with more skiing, we get folks at an amusement park and eating in a restaurant. This part of the film features some pretty impressive and scary scenes of dangerous winter sports. People ski over huge crevasses, wind up on top of a tower of snow, and hang from cliffs.
Is it worth twenty-odd minutes of your time? Well, if you like psychedelic images or are a big fan of skiing, it could be. The science fiction premise is just an excuse to reverse the colors of the film, and there's no real plot at all. I've never been on a pair of skis, so I can only appreciate the athleticism on display here as an outsider.
Two stars.
Sole Survivor
This is a made-for-TV movie that aired on CBS stations in the USA earlier this month. It begins with five men in World War Two uniforms standing around a wrecked American bomber of the time. They seem to be in pretty good shape, given that they're in a desert wasteland. Things get weird when we find out they've been waiting to be rescued for seventeen years.
The crew of the Home Run.
It quickly becomes clear that they are ghosts, waiting for their bodies to be found so they can stop haunting the wreck.
I should note here that the premise is inspired by the case of the Lady Be Good, a bomber that crashed in the Libyan desert in 1943 and was not discovered until 1958.
The real wreck.
Fans of Twilight Zone will remember the episode King Nine Will Not Return, which was also inspired by the fate of the Lady Be Good. That tale goes in a different direction, however.
Two men in an airplane discover the wreck. (By the way, the fact that the ghosts have been waiting for seventeen years means that the movie takes place in 1960 or so. There's no other indication that it's set a decade ago.)
The discoverers, who look more 1970 to me.
This leads to an official investigation by the United States Army. (Remember that the Air Force was part of the Army, and not a separate branch of the service, until a few years after World War Two.) Two officers are in charge of the mission.
William Shatner, fresh from Star Trek, as Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke and Vince Edwards, best known as Ben Casey, as Major Michael Devlin.
They pay a visit to the sole survivor of the Home Run. This fellow parachuted out of the plane and landed in the Mediterranean Sea, managing to make it out alive to continue his military career. (More details of what happened later.)
Brigadier General Russell Hamner, as played by Richard Basehart, recently the star of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Hamner agrees to accompany the two officers to the North African desert. He claims that all of the crew of the Home Run bailed out into the ocean, so the plane must have continued without them for several hundred miles before it crashed. Unlikely, but possible. Flashbacks tell us the real story.
Hamner as the navigator of the Home Run during the war.
The bomber was damaged in an attack by the enemy. The captain ordered Hamner to plot a course back to base, but he panicked and bailed out against orders. Without a navigator, the crew went off course and the plane crashed.
Tension builds as Devlin casts doubt on Hamner's story, and Gronke tells him not to make waves, lest he ruin his career. Both officers have their own concerns about their pasts, adding depth of character. Without giving too much away, let's just say that the truth comes out because of a harmonica, a rubber raft, and Hamner's guilty conscience. There's a powerful and poignant conclusion.
The last ghost faces an eternity playing baseball alone.
This is quite a good movie, particularly for one made for TV. I like the fact that the ghosts appear as ordinary men, rather than being transparent or something. The actors all do a good job. You'll never hear the song Take Me Out To The Ball Game again without having an eerie feeling.
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Over the past several years, AIP has adapted stories by H. P. Lovecraft for the big screen—or at least the drive-in. The results have been mixed, but they could certainly be much worse. The first and still the best of these was The Haunted Palace (adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) back in '63, directed by Roger Corman, with a script by the late Charles Beaumont, and starring an especially tormented Vincent Price. It was a very fine picture. Now we have the latest entry in this "series," The Dunwich Horror, taken from the Lovecraft story of the same name, although it's a pretty loose adaptation.
The Dunwich Horror
One warning I want to give about this movie, one which has nothing to do with sex or violence, is that, aside from being generally a pretty strange film, there are several scenes featuring flashing lights, or a color filter changing rapidly to give one the impression of a strobing light. Some people (thankfully not many) are susceptible to epileptic fits if subjected to such stimuli.
Now, as for the film itself, once we get past what I was surprised to find is an animated (as in a cartoon) opening credits sequence, we start with what seems to be a flashback of a woman giving birth, surrounded by two elderly sisters and an old man. We then flash forward to Miskatonic University, that college of the occult and Lovecraft's making, in Arkham. Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) is a student who, in the college's library, meets a good-looking but unusual young man named Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who is terribly interested in the Necronomicon. I'm sure his interest in the accursed book and his strange deadpan way of talking are perfectly innocuous. A certain professor at Miskatonic, Henry Armitage (Ed Begley), gets a bit of a hunch that Wilbur is up to no good, but for now does nothing about it.
The Necronomicon, kept in a cozy glass case.
"The Dunwich Horror" is one of Lovecraft's most celebrated stories, but it's also one of his trickiest. As with "the Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft wrote "The Dunwich Horror" as if it were a report or an essay, a work of journalism or academia, rather than a fiction narrative. There's no protagonist, properly speaking, although Wilbur is certainly the story's nucleus. This remains sort of the case with the film, although Nancy and Armitage now serve as our eyes and ears, or rather as normal people in what becomes an extraordinary situation. However, it's not Sandra Dee or Ed Begley who caught my attention, but Dean Stockwell as Wilbur, who gives almost what could be considered a star-making role (to my knowledge his most high-profile roles up to now were film adaptations of Sons and Lovers and Long Day's Journey into Night), if not for the movie that surrounds him. Unlike his short story counterpart Wilbur here is not physically deformed, but instead talks in a strangely deadened tone, as if human emotions are foreign to him. Stockwell as Wilbur manages to be uncanny simply through how he talks and acts, which is a major point of praise.
Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley and Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner.
Director Daniel Haller and his team of screenwriters have opted to streamline Lovecraft's story while giving it a sort of romance plot, as well as a dose of sex and violence. Sex and Lovecraft have always been uneasy bedfellows, even in something like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which explicitly involves sex in its plot. Wilbur is one of two twins, the other having supposedly died in childbirth, with the father being unknown, and his mother having been kept in an asylum for the past two decades. Wilbur lives with his grandfather, Old Man Whateley (Sam Jaffe, who some may recognize as that one scientist in the now-classic The Day the Earth Stood Still), who seems convinced his grandson is also up to no good, but arbitrarily (the film does nothing to explain this) does nothing about Wilbur being a scoundrel. For his part, Wilbur sees Nancy as a pretty fine girl—for a dark ritual, that is. The idea is that if he can steal the Necronomicon and impregnate Nancy (the implication, via a mind-bending scene, is that he rapes her), he can bring one of "the Old Ones" into the human world.
Sam Jaffe as Old Man Whateley and Ed Begley as Professor Henry Armitage.
As this point the plot splits in two, with one half focusing on Wilbur and Nancy's "romance" while the other sees Armitage tracking down the mystery of Wilbur's birth, since it becomes apparent the young man and the Necronomicon are somehow connected. One of the strangest (sorry, "far-out") scenes in the whole movie is when Armitage goes to see Wilbur's mother (Joanne Moore Jordan), who apparently had lost her mind many years ago upon giving birth to Wilbur and his dead twin. When it comes to this movie, there are two types of strange: that of the unnerving sort, and that of the cheesy sort. There are parts (sometimes moments within a single scene) of this movie that do a good job of spooking the audience, and others where it's rather silly. With that said, the nightmarish effect of Jordan's performance combined with the changing color tints in this scene make it one of the most effective. This is a movie that generally shines brightest when it focuses on Stockwell's performance and/or the Gothic cliches (including a creepy old house) that clearly also influenced Lovecraft's writing. Maybe it's because they didn't have the budget for it, but the lack of an on-screen monster for the vast majority of the film's runtime also works in its favor.
Joanne Moore Jordan as Wilbur's mother, who's spent the past two decades as a mental patient.
When Old Man Whateley finally decides to take action, Wilbur kills him for his troubles, along with imprisoning one of Nancy's friends and turning her into some kind of abomination. Meanwhile Wilbur gives his grandfather a heathen burial and in so doing provokes the wrath of the Dunwich townspeople, who never liked the Whateleys anyway. It's revealed, or rather speculated, that Wilbur's twin may not have died after all, but instead gone to the realm of the Old Ones while Wilbur got stuck on Earth as a human. Armitage and the townsfolk succeed in stopping Wilbur from completing his ritual with the unconscious Nancy, Armitage being well-versed enough in the Necronomicon to use the book against Wilbur, killing him with a blast of lightning. So the last of the Whateley men is dead. Unfortunately, the final shot, eerily showing a fetus growing inside Nancy (which is odd, because she's probably only been pregnant a day or two), implying an Old One may be born after all.
Dean Stockwell at his most devilish.
Lovecraft purists will surely be much disappointed with this movie, and even as someone who is not exactly a Lovecraft fan, I have to admit it's by no means perfect. Even at 90 minutes it feels a bit overlong, and it tries desperately to contort one of Lovecraft's more unconventional stories into having a three-act structure. I also get the impression that the addition of blood and breasts was to appease those (people my age and younger) who are suckers for AIP schlock. Not too long ago we had Roger Corman's so-called Poe cycle, which for the most part did Edgar Allan Poe's (and in one case Lovecraft's) fiction justice on modest budgets. I would say The Dunwich Horror is on par with one of the lesser of Corman's Poe movies.
A high three stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!
![[June 28, 1970] Welcome to Blood Island (Four Filipino Fright Films)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/700628movies-672x372.jpg)
![[June 14, 1970] Talkin' Loud, Swingin' Soft (June 1970 <i>Watermelon Man, The Landlord, and Cotton Comes to Harlem</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/700614movies-672x372.jpg)
![[June 8, 1970] Beneath the Planet of the… Mutants? (Not Apes)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/beneath1-565x372.jpg)
by Jason Sacks
![[May 26, 1970] A Regrettable Case of Runaway Apophenia (Erich von Däniken's <i>Memories of the Future</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Image-1-672x372.jpg)
![[April 12, 1970] And What Happens When the Machines Take Over? (Colossus: the Forbin Project)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/colossus4-672x372.jpg)
![[March 28, 1970] Cinemascope: No Vacancy (The Bed Sitting Room)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/The_Bed-Sitting_Room_film-256x372.jpg)
![[March 26, 1970] A Quartet of Whimsy (<i>Satyricon, Skullduggery, Horton Hears a Who, Necropolis</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700324cinemascope-672x372.jpg)
![[February 6, 1970] All We Are Saying Is Give The Peace Game A Chance (<i>The Peace Game, AKA The Gladiators</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/PG10.jpg)
![[January 28, 1970] Cinemascope: Just a Poe Boy (<em>An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe</em>, <em>The Moebius Flip</em>, </em>Sole Survivor</em>, and <em>The Dunwich Horror</em>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/12970-an-evening-of-edgar-allan-poe-0-460-0-690-crop-2830000383-460x372.jpg)
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
The Sphinx
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
