Monster of the Day

Hard to get more Gothic than this. Blacula was pretty close, but the whole 'black Dracula' thing still injected a very modern note into things. This is one of those films (Warlock is one of the best of them) exploring how Evil can exploit a society that's too 'sophisticated' to believe in Evil anymore.…

I haven't actually seen this one, but I've only heard good things. Of all the '70s revisionist vampire films, this one might be the most revisioniest.

What a wonderful film. So far ahead of its time that if they revived it now, it would be considered utterly derivative. (Plus they would completely ruin it.) This is one of those projects, like Buckaroo Banzai or Remo Williams, that clearly was meant to kick off a series, and that makes you weep…

'70s exploitation offered examined the intersection of traditional, gothic monsters with (then) modern American scene. Today this fish out of water element is largely forgone; vampires and werewolves are more likely to be love interests than atavistic monster. Surely the greatest '70s vampire was Prince Mamuwalde, aka Blacula, who we've already featured in the…

Well, I mentioned this flick in the last MotD, so it's a natural segue. Not Quarry's more famous character, of course, but this is floating around on DVD for completists. And again, not a bad double bill with Werewolves on Wheels, a film it has a lot in common with.

We close out '70s Wolfmen Week with this oddity (which, unlike yesterday's subject, is available on DVD). Genre-crossing films were a lot rarer back then, although this film is a lot like Robert Quarry's Deathmaster, made during the same period only with werewolves instead of vampires.  The pace is pretty slow and the scenes…

Oddly, I couldn't find a good color still of this. This seems like the old Sam Arkoff sort of thing, where they thought of a title and then made the movie around it. For all that, it's pretty good. It really is a very traditional wolf man movie, with the guy (Kerwin Matthews, Harryhausen's…

Take that, Nixon!

The prime time movies of the week back in the '70s tended to be pretty solid. The studios supplying the networks eventually fed the maw by creating TV movie units. Like the B-movie units the studios ran back in the '40s, these churned out films that were generally inexpensive and derivative but also professionally…

So, '70s wolf man week, because...I don't know, I found five pictures? Sure, why not. I don't recall this as being any great shakes--we wait until the end to see the werewolf, and as you'll note, he was pretty minimalist--but the cast was typically fantastic (for us old fart character actor fans), and like…