FeistyUpper
If you don't like this, we can't be friends.
ChanBot
i must have seen a different film!!
Neive Bellamy
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Janae Milner
Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.
Rainey Dawn
"So Bad It's Good" yes it's one of those type of films. I have not a clue if the viewer is suppose to take the movie as a 'serious' horror film or if the filmmakers deliberately made this a tongue-in-cheek flick. Whichever it is, the movie is a bit camp. No it's not a good film yet it is a good film. I think each story was better than the last - and the very last story is Count Alucard (Dracula spelled backwards) is quite comical. They really did save the best for last.OK, so what if it's a bad film - it's great for those of us who love campy classic B-rated horror movies. I found the film quite entertaining.7.5/10
John Bender
I also saw this in the late 1960s and/or 1970s on Chiller Theater here in Pittsburgh (WIIC Channel 11 NBC affiliate). I only ever saw this on Chiller Theater - never anywhere else. The title it had when I saw it on Chiller Theater was "King Vampire". The title refers to one of the episodes. This film utterly amazed me in that it so completely had all the production values of a high school play! This thing makes Ed Wood look like a big-budget A-list director! I kept thinking that any minute Chilly Billy was going to break in and announce that the movie was a joke, a phony production slapped together by the Channel 11 guys. You have got to see this to believe it.
jonathan-577
Hewitt's trademark is vaulting ambition approached with the scantest possible means, and when he applies himself to a horror anthology format the result is gruesome and calamitous, and kind of fascinating for it. The first story relates to a bewitched grandfather clock and just about the whole damn thing is shot from a single camera setup. The second tackles vampirism, first from a police HQ with the unmistakable acoustics of an empty warehouse, then from a streetside crowd scene almost entirely composed of offscreen murmurs; the louts who do wander into frame offer the most fascinatingly various and mangled British accents on record. Volume three mainly features the rantings of a corpse over some looped footage borrowed from Roger Corman, to whose bountiful resources Hewitt can only aspire longingly, with the added bonus of Rochelle Hudson (James Dean's mom in Rebel Without a Cause!) playing one seriously antiquated love interest. Lon Chaney Jr. stumbles on set for part four, a Frankenstein variant whose loutish flatness does actually take on a certain lovable aspect in this company, especially the two lab guys with their frat boy impersonations. Finally we return to the vampire theme in part five, accompanied by the dumbest twist ending of the lot, not to mention the most haphazard pan-and-scan job in a crowded field. Toastmaster John Carradine shows up once in a while and mumbles into his sleeve.
madsagittarian
Okay, there's one thing about the 80's that I miss. At 4AM, one used to be able to see Grade Z gems like this on TV. Now it's nothing but those rotten Infomercials. You could say that Ted Turner killed film culture, but I would argue that it was Anthony Robbins. In fact, during that golden hour of the day/night, one could see many films unleashed by the maverick no-budget director David L. Hewitt. THE MIGHTY GORGA, WIZARD OF MARS and JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME used to tickle many a bad-film lover (or torture an unsuspecting insomniac) who tuned in.This film, which I saw under the title RETURN FROM THE PAST, is a gloriously inept, amazingly miserable cash-in on the then-popular trend of horror anthology movies (in which a few short, separate tales of horrific irony are strung together by an onscreen narrator). All the hallmarks of Hewitt's unmistakable authorship are in abundance here.First, there is the hiring of once-great, "anything for a buck" actors; in this case, John Carradine (naturally) and Lon Chaney Jr, in small roles which nonetheless gave the theater owners a name to put in the marquee. Secondly, Hewitt once again fills the cast with his oddball stock company of dreary, nasal-sounding "actors" (who is this Roger Gentry, anyway?). As well, the director's sterling use of half-finished sets, or plain black backgrounds (when there were none at all!) is such a feat that would even make Ed Wood blush if he worked under such insane conditions. Add to this, the surprisingly ambitious writing (for bargain-basement cinema, anyway) which paradoxes the miserable attempts at mise en scene. For such a bottom-of-the-barrel project as a Dave Hewitt film, one wonders why he bothered with such an adventurous screenplay (like WIZARD OF MARS or JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME, especially), when the insultingly bad production values would work against the ambition of the writing anyway. Thus, therein lies the strange dichotomy of Hewitt's work as a director. With a thrift-store budget, he really tried to make something out of nothing. Who can blame him if he didn't succeed?Add some haphazard dubbing, some great juvenile cartoon blood dripping on the screen, and you have a truly beguiling piece of work. Anyone who insists on making tired, threadbare projects like this has to get a medal for bravery alone.
