Amicus Productions

But for listeners of this show, most significantly, he directed – the TV movie of The Night Stalker, which introduced us to the intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak, which we also did an episode about in season one.

City of the Dead is also significant because it is the – Unofficial first production of Amicus Productions.

Amicus was a rival to Hammer, the great British horror studio in the 60s and 70s.

Incidentally, the Amicus people are two Americans, Milton Sabatsky and Max Rosenberg.

But before we give our views on Cat's Eye, there's a bit of history to discover first.

Producer Milton Sabotsky, famous for setting up Amicus Productions, a British company that had its finest moments with Portmanteau films.

Films like Tales from the Crypt and Asylum are excellent examples and well worth tracking down.

He optioned some short stories from Stephen King in the late 70s.

and the work of another less celebrated outfit, a studio that seemed more preoccupied with the horrors of the present day, and which sometimes gave you four or five stories for the price of one.

Stories from Amicus Productions.

And so that was the impression I had, and also of course all those ghastly kids who are actually not kids, they're actually adults, who are pretending they're teenagers, which is very, very annoying as well.

But over the years, I've actually come to love both of them, and actually almost regarded them as probably being two of the finest of the whole Dracula cycle.

See, so I was...

I got into, like, specifically this one series, this film production company out of England called Amicus Films, who were, like, kind of considered the little brother to Hammer, who were, like, doing all the horror movies in the, like, 60s, 70s.

And...

Hammer had the money to do, like, period pieces, and so they could have sets and costumes, but Amicus did not have that much money, so, like, everything had to take place in the present, and all of their movies, or at least they did a whole series that were basically horror anthology movies, where there'd be... kind of uh overarching theme like a haunted house like there's there's one called the house that drips blood where it's like this house something fucked up happened at this house four different times every single one of them has basically four four different stories that are each 20 minutes and they're kind of vaguely tied together by like a main story and like so the house that drips blood is basically all of them like have of the four like one to two are good and then two are like okay this kind of sucks but uh uh i kind of want to do a compilation of the best of because um if you just piece together the best of it would be a sick movie they did like five or six of them There's like the house that drips blood asylum, which was like the insane asylum one.

The film released at an interesting moment in cinematic history.

The British studio Amicus Productions sparked a bit of a resurgence of interest in dinosaur movies in the early 70s with their Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, The Land That Time Forgot, At Earth's Core, and The People That Time Forgot, all of which were directed by Kevin Conner.

While successful with adults, they were relegated to kitty matinees.

Fun fact, the iron mole in At the Earth's Core likely inspired the polar borer here in The Last Dinosaur.

These films are called Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror.

The first of these Tales from the Crypt was a British horror anthology film released in 1972 by the aforementioned Amicus Productions.

It consisted of five separate segments and a wraparound.

The stories in it were based on the short stories from the EC Comics series as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear.

Uh, it says, "Excerpts from an unfinished 1976 zombie western anthology film by Wes Craven in the style of popular...

in the style popularized by Amicus Films," which we know-

Mm-hmm

... which were given an official home video release with The Last House on the Left and placed in sections of an American version of the Italian film Zombie Holocaust.