You gotta love some of the crap they dig up to fill those cheap multi-movie boxed sets. Here’s my take on five 1970s horror films that I inadvertently added to my collection because I bought boxed sets that included one hard-to-find movie I desperately needed!
DEVIL’S NIGHTMARE (1971)
The most shocking moment in this European gothic horror flick is in the opening scene, in which a Nazi stabs a baby to death. WTF?
Cut to modern times and a group of tourists arrives at an old castle. There’s a dead body, a frog, a pigeon, creepy servants, a laboratory, dripping blood, a rainstorm, a torture chamber, a family curse, numerous stories of deaths in the castle, and…a succubus! She walks around the house with a pale semi-demonic face, leading the characters to their deaths based on the seven deadly sins: money lover, food lover, sex lovers, etc.
There’s also a hot lesbian sex scene and a highly disappointing confrontation between a priest and a guy who’s supposed to be the devil.
MOON OF THE WOLF (1972)
This TV movie isn’t much more than a remake of The Wolfman. Someone is found dead in the woods, David “The Fugitive” Janssen is the local sheriff investigating the murder, and eventually, FINALLY, the truth comes out and the wolfman attacks the “final girl” in the most thrilling segment of the movie. Unless you really love classic monster movies, just hunt down the final scene on YouTube…or watch the original The Wolfman.
THE BAT PEOPLE (1974)
I’m going to be honest here. There’s only one bat person. A bat scientist and his wife are exploring a cave and he’s bitten. Soon, people start getting attacked and killed. The local sheriff—a real scumbag who even hits on the scientist’s wife—believes the scientist did it.
Of course he’s right! The scientist is having bat attacks. But we don’t get to see him as a “bat” until the very end of the movie. And he kind of looks like…the Wolfman! Between the tame kills and the lack of any bat people until the very end of the movie, again, I’d highly suggest you just search YouTube for the final scene if you want to see what the monster looks like.
SNOWBEAST (1977)
Sasquatch and Yeti were pretty dang major in the 1970s—especially if you were a fan of The Six Million Dollar Man. The same year Steve Austin first encountered Bigfoot, a snowbeast terrorized a ski resort in this made-for-TV movie, which predominantly features monster POV and an occasional hairy hand waving in front of the camera, along with a whole lot of padded scenes of people skiing. But there are two major attack scenes in which the snowbeast appears at windows. Don’t expect blood or gore; all kill scenes are implied by a red filter covering the camera. Cut to commercial!
This one is pretty much a nostalgia lover’s dream only.
GOOD AGAINST EVIL (1977)
I actually remembered seeing this one on TV when I was a kid…because it was a pilot for a TV show that never happened! I must say, they did a pretty good job of capturing the dark and sinister Satanism that was so popular in theater films those days (probably why the show wasn’t picked up).
The opening scene is a total rip-off of Rosemary’s Baby as a woman has a trippy labor and realizes the staff at the hospital is plotting to take her baby. Flash to modern times , when a young woman begins a relationship with a handsome guy who comes on so strong he’s essentially a stalker, but she loves it.
Meanwhile, awesome evil character actor Richard Lynch and his devil worshipping cohorts are after the chick. But before that plot can fully materialize, a very young Kim Cattrall shows up as a mother with a possessed daughter (the little girl from The Amityville Horror and The Entity)! The priest in the demon-less The Exorcist rip-off scene would later go on to create the silver shamrock masks in Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Needless to say, Good Against Evil ends with a cliffhanger that only a second episode could have taken the edge off of.
