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based on Edgar Allan Poe's “The Black Cat” that bears next to no resemblence to the source material — except perhaps in showing a man's descent into madness. It's been more than seventy-five years since this film was unleashed upon an unsuspecting audience, and parts of it still remain startling and appalling. Of course, Esper was looking for an excuse to show the girls in their undies. The film exists to shock and outrage. It's what Esper and his creative and marital partner did with their movies.

Thumbs Down Rating:

The Crappies

The Worst Picture Award goes to … Dwaine Esper and Hildegards Stadie for making a movie that just wants to provoke an extreme reaction. That was Esper's specialty, and he went noholds barred for this one. The eyeball eating and zombie rape is as gross and pointless now as it was in 1934.

The Worst Actor Award goes to … Bill Woods, who gives hams a bad name.

They Really Said It!

Don Maxwell: I think too much of Satan to use cats as experiments.

Betcha Didn't Know

Dwain Esper handled the distribution of this picture himself, personally taking prints from town to town, theater to theater. He used this same method when he acquired the distribution rights to MGM's controversial 1932 horror film Freaks, helping to earn it its legendary reputation and possibly saving it from oblivion.

Dwain Esper and Hildegarde Stadie married in 1920. They remained faithful to each other until his death in 1982 and raised two children together. This goes to show that one can't make judgments about the people behind the movies based solely on their movies.

Trivia Quiz

Which of the following was not a movie produced by Dwain Esper?

A: Reefer Madness

B: Sex Madness

C: How to Take a Bath

D: The Nun's Habit

Answer: D. Surprisingly, no one seems to have made a movie titled The Nun's Habit. I can think of three or four awful films that are lurking behind a title like that

MONSTER A-GO-GO

BI & L Releasing Corp., 1965

PRODUCERS Sheldon S. Seymore and Bill Rebane

WRITERS Jeff Smith, Dok Stanford, and Bill Rebane

DIRECTORS Bill Rebane and Herschell Gordon Lewis

STARS Phil Morton (Col. Steve Connors), June Travis (Ruth), and Henry Hite (Frank Douglas/the Monster)

In the wake of a space mission gone wrong, an astronaut (Hite) transforms into a ten-foot-tall rampaging beast that menaces a freeway underpass and an apparently deserted countryside. Or does he?

Why It Sucks

Schlock movie producer Herschell Gordon Lewis bought an unfinished, failed movie and finished it with almost inconceivable incompetence. He stuck in a narrator who either explains the blindingly obvious or rambles incoherently; characters who vanish halfway through the film because the cast couldn't be reassembled; and an ending that is so astoundingly lame that it renders this already crappy movie the textbook definition of pointless.

Thumbs Down Rating:

The Crappies

The Lifetime Achievement Award for Awful Writing goes to … Whoever came up with the movie's ending, most likely Herschell Gordon Lewis. It either relegates everything that went before to the status of a hallucination or suggests that an exact duplicate of the astronaut was the rampaging monster. On the whole, the hallucination makes a bit more sense.

And the Rock and a Hard Place Award goes to … Herschell Gordon Lewis for finding the worse possible solution to the problem of finishing a movie after the cast has moved on and there is no money to hire them back.

They Really Said It!

Narrator: With the telegram, one cloud lifts and another descends.

Betcha Didn't Know

This was the directorial debut of Bill Rebane, a filmmaker who spent the majority of his career making movies in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Herschell Gordon Lewis leaped safely from the film industry as it crashed onto financial rocks during the 1970s, going on to a successful career in advertising. He has in recent years returned to script writing and directing, with Grim Fairy Tale in 2010.

Trivia Quiz

When Lewis was able to get back one of the original actors in the film in order to finish it, the man had