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Series: Film / TV


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Horror Double Feature: Womaneater & Please Don’t Eat My Mother

In today’s Shocktober Double Feature, we will encounter Amazonian natives, a carnivorous tree, a man-eating houseplant and full-frontal nudity. It’s Womaneater and Please Don’t Eat My Mother!

WOMANEATER (1958)

For those of you wondering whether Pittsburgh-born beauty Marpessa Dawn ever made another film besides 1959’s classic Black Orpheus, here is your answer. She appeared one year earlier, as an Amazonian native at the opening of Charles Saunders’ Womaneater, being sacrificed to a carnivorous tree. That tree is stolen by English scientist George Coulouris,


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Horror Double Feature: The Black Scorpion & Dinosaurus

In today’s Shocktober Double Feature, we will encounter giant insects, prehistoric beasties and a very befuddled caveman! It’s The Black Scorpion and Dinosaurus!

THE BLACK SCORPION (1957)

By the late 1950s, filmmakers must have been running out of insects that they could mutate and transform into giant monsters. Audiences had already been treated to such fare as Them (giant ants), Tarantula (spiders), The Monster From Green Hell (wasps), The Beginning of the End (grasshoppers), The Deadly Mantis (praying mantises),


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Horror Double Feature: The Bells & The Cat and the Canary

In today’s Shocktober Double Feature, we encounter mesmerism, murder, insanity, a spooky house and an escaped madman, in two wonderful old silent films! It’s The Bells and The Cat and the Canary!

THE BELLS (1926)

The Bells is a very fine silent movie from 1926 that is not at all creaky and should manage to impress modern-day viewers. As revealed in my beloved Psychotronic Video Guide, this story was, remarkably, filmed no less than four times prior to this 1926 version,


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Horror Double Feature: Killers From Space & Mars Needs Women

Although I was born a little too late to experience the Golden Age of the cinematic double feature – that is to say, the 1940s and ‘50s – I have been able to enjoy the next-best thing, thanks to where I happen to live. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, NYC boasted well over a dozen so-called “revival theaters” that showed the classic old movies, usually in double-feature format. Most of those theaters are no more, and the ones that remain today, sadly enough, no longer show two films paired together for a single ticket price. But those wonderful theaters still remain fondly in my memory.


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WWWednesday: Lost Season Two, by the Book

In Season 2 of Lost, the showrunners  hit both the zenith and nadir of characterization, with Ben Linus (Michael Emerson) and Ana Lucia Cortez (Michelle Rodriguez.) They succumbed to the Epic Fail technique of “fridging.” Pop-star character Charlie wrestled with addiction, as Locke did with faith. And as in Season One, lots of people run through the jungle. With Season 2, the show added the dramatic innovation, “running and falling down in the jungle.”

Starting in September, 2005, Season 2 led us through 24 episodes. Storylines include:

the Hatch

the Tail Section Survivors

Walt’s abduction

The Others

Courtesy of Lostpedia,


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WWWednesday: Lost, Season 1: By the Numbers

4,8,15,16,23,42

Lost opens in the immediate aftermath of an airliner crash on a deserted jungle island. The first character we see is a wounded Jack Shepherd, a spinal surgeon with a Messiah complex, but very soon the canvas of the Survivors of Oceanic flight 815 will be spread out before us, and what a broad canvas it is.

Filmed entirely, or nearly so, in the state of Hawaii, mostly on Oahu, Lost was beautiful, but it required some conscious suspension of disbelief to accept Honolulu as every other single city represented in the show.


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WWW: Lost, the Island of Terrible Dads

(Giveaway: One commenter will get the hardcover edition of Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes.)

Like the show itself, this is a very long column. Unlike the show, it’s only about one thing. 

Lost aired on ABC from 2004-2010, six enigmatic seasons that left a vocal and devoted fanbase, and a larger audience whose reaction seemed to be more like, “Huh? What?” when they watched the final season—especially the final episode.

Lost can be purchased via Youtube or Amazon Prime. I stopped watching the show early in its original run,


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Two Frightening Films Starring William Shatner

Born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1931, William Shatner, over the course of the last nine decades, has managed to carve out for himself a reputation that surely borders on the legendary. Whether playing the youngest captain in Star Fleet history, a cop, a lawyer, or any of the other dozens of roles he has essayed over the years, Shatner has always been one of the most entertaining of all actors to watch, no matter if he is playing it straight or engaging in some of his well-loved overemoting. And, the man has succeeded in pulling off the double hat trick – plus two – of having appeared in no fewer than eight of my favorite television shows of the 1960s: Route 66,


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A Witchy Double Feature

Is there any figure more commonly associated with the Halloween season than the good ol’ witch? I think not. Or perhaps I should more properly say, “the wicked ol’ witch,” as not many witches that we tend to encounter during the Shocktober season are of the Samantha Stevens variety, to put it mildly! Below, thus, you will find a pair of films dealing with witches of the nastier ilk; a pair of films that might make for a perfect double feature one dark and stormy October night…

WOMAN WHO CAME BACK (1945)

In the little-seen 1945 chiller Woman Who Came Back (not,


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Psychic Killer: Show me the fireball!

Psychic Killer directed by Ray Danton

We’ve all heard the expression “if looks could kill,” but how about thoughts? What if it were possible to kill somebody, no matter the distance, using the power of the mind to manipulate objects? Well, that is precisely the setup of Ray Danton’s 1975 horror outing Psychic Killer, an undeniably shlocky yet undeniably fun exercise in out-of-body homicide. In the film, we meet a 33-year-old mental patient named Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton, father of Timothy, 42 here in his final film), who repeatedly declares his innocence of the charge of murdering his dying mother’s doctor (his mother had had no health insurance,


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Next SFF Author: Joseph Fink
Previous SFF Author: Gemma Files

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