Encounter with the Unknown(1973)d/Harry Thomason

The video box almost looks as disheveled as Serling does in this one.
A tv staple in the seventies,I wonder which aired more often,this Canadian horror anthology,or Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.Answer?That's right:Who cares.Narrator extraordinaire Rod Serling looks more than a bit under the weather here,rocking a frazzled toupee and looking as though he's just smoked seven thousand cigarettes with Yul Brynner somewhere.Director Thomason utilizes several of S.F. Brownrigg's regular players here,including 70's mega-fox Rosie Holotik(I may have to do a tribute post for Rosie one of these days,she was cute as a basket full of kittens in knit mittens,she was).Serling didn't write any of the three stories featured here,and though they suffer for that,there is a good deal of suspense and atmosphere present,and it succeeds in being adequately creepy after all these years.

Whoa,easy with the eyes,lady.You're giving me the effin heebie-jeebies.
After being informed that certain cemeteries in the country tend to draw more unexplained phenomena and strange deaths than others,we're introduced to the first allegedly true story.Three sporto-type college pukes play the obligatory cruel trick on the local groovy-looking nerd,only to get the dork killed when he pays an amorous call on a girl and he's accidentally shot in the process.At the funeral,the dork's mother,who looks like she's just hatched from a creepy egg,binds the wrongdoers together with a wide-eyed spell/puzzle,and informs them they will all be dead once seven has come around three times.One by land and two by air,beware the heptagon,Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,etc.,etc.They all die just like she predicted.Insert Serling's gravelly "I told you so" right here.

Creepy lady warned me and my buddies we'd die,two by air,one by land.Skydiving sounds pretty choice right now...
Next up,is a small rural community at the turn of the twentieth century that stumbles upon a sinister hole in the earth,that billows smoke like Michael Landon behind the prop barn between takes on the Little House set, and inhuman groans and growls echo out of.A young boy coaxes his father to get lowered down into the hole to search for their dog,but when he's pulled up,he's gone perma-crackers and runs off totally out of his mind.Cue Serling again.Last up is the familiar "ghost on a bridge" story,where a senator returning home from a party offers a young girl(Rosie) a ride home when he sees her standing on a bridge,but she disappears from his back seat,and is later informed by the girl's father that she died when her car drove off the bridge some years earlier.Rod,we're gonna need you to wrap this one up for us.You can smoke after you lay the audio.Yeah.

This hole in the ground billows more smoke than Rod Serling's lungs between takes.
In a decade that heavy-hitting anthologies like "Trilogy of Terror" and "Dead of Night" were released,this sleeper usually gets forgotten in the wake.In the spirit of the season,your humble N asks you to screen it for yourself,and see if it doesn't have a little bite to it.If this was 1973,I'd make Rosie Holotik a piece of my personal arm candy.If you're reading,Ro,appy-polly-lodgies in advance,because Christina Lindberg would STILL have to be my main squeeze...Anyway,I always enjoyed watching it when I was a kid,and you probably will too,if you can hunt down a copy.It merits a decent score of:

For the record,I'd ALWAYS give Rosie Holotik a ride ANYWHERE she wanted to go.Ghost or not,she's still a cute ghost.

"Don't Look in the Basement"(1973)d/S.F. Brownrigg

Here we have one of my favorite low-budget classics of the 1970's,a staple of both the drive in and late night television for years.I remember sneaking into the parlour in my footie pajamas late on Friday and Saturday nights and taking in Brownrigg's minor epic of bloody popsicles and dead telephone repairmen in the closet like the twisted little horror nut I always was.My buddy Rich just got his outrageous hands on an original one-sheet in great condition,and of course,I'm feeling a slight spark of envy on this end!Let's press ahead,wild things...

"Up the airy mountain,down the rushing glen.We never can go hunting,for fear of little men..."
Dr. Stephens helps Judge Cameron(Gene Ross)free pent-up personal demons by swinging an axe into a tree stump outside the Stephens Sanitarium (for the terminally bananas),when Judge shows his appreciation by planting the blade squarely in the good doctor's back.Charlotte Beale(played by groovy 70's Playboy cover model and genre lady-in-waiting,Rosie Holotik)arrives at the lonely loony bin in hopes of employment.She's shown around the place,reluctantly at first,by Dr. Masters(Annabelle Weenick) and is introduced to the sanitarium's gaggle of loonies.Sam's a big black goober whose world revolves around popsicles and launching plastic boats in the bathtub.Sergeant Jaffee thinks he's in the middle of a war.Harriet slavishly tends to a plastic baby doll as if it were her own offspring.Mrs. Callingham is a creepy old coot who repeats disturbing rhymes and thinks flowers are her children.Allyson is a washed-up-on-the-beach nymphomaniac,Jennifer is catatonic,and Danny,well he's cursed with a horrible orange cauco-fro and a lousy sense of humour.People have been institutionalized for less.

Dr. Stephens breaks Bruce Lee's cardinal rule:Never turn your back on a loonie.
Charlotte finds herself a good fit at the sanitarium,helping each patient with their respective suitcase full of manias,seemingly on the threshold of a dark secret that everyone's aware of but her.The previous nurse,Jane,gets her head squashed in a suitcase before she can get outski after Harriet's missing babydoll turns up in the nurse's quarters.Mrs. Callingham tries to fill Charlotte in,but mysteriously bites her own tongue off in the middle of the night.Sam raves on and on about Dr. Stephens,but he's dead,isn't he?Jennifer snoops around the office,but takes a sharp paperholder to the eye.When a missing case history turns up in Sarge's room,he's forced to let it painfully burn into ashes in his own hand.A repairman appears on the scene to fix the bum telephone,but runs into a horny Allison,then goes missing.As Nurse Charlotte slowly pieces together the sanitarium's sordid secret:the nuts are running the nuthouse,the good judge informs her that she,too,is a mental patient at the facility!A loopy finale finds our heroine uncovering a gaggle of corpses before Dr. Masters enlists Sam's retard strength to drag the nosy nurse to the operating table for a lobotomy.Reminded of his own failed operation,Sam goes totally crackers and drags Charlotte to safety,while the other maniacs rend Masters limb from limb,giving the she-psycho a taste of her own morbid medicine.Instead of fleeing the chunk-blowing scene with the innocent girl who helped him launch his plastic boat in the tub,Sam decides instead to go back inside,and slaughter everybody in one fell swoop.As the movie draws to a close,the slow-witted blood-soaked lummox is crying in his popsicle...

After mass murdering the whole asylum with his bare hands,Sam's bloody popsicle has lost some of its tastiness.
Also released as "The Forgotten" and "Death Ward #13",this sleeper was filmed in Tehuacana,Texas,more popularly known as "the middle of fucking nowhere" which adds to the sleeper's atmospheric thrills.Noteworthy for multiple shocks,groovy seventies bare loon-teat,liberal doses of the red stuff,and the comely Holotik of "Horror High" fame aptly carrying the twisted tale to its close.If you've actually never seen "Basement"(I'm gathering you must live somewhere NEAR Tehuacana,in this case)by all means do.It delivers!Dedicated to Texas Rich and his impressive new one sheet...

There's more than a coal stove in THIS basement,Miss Charlotte.