John L. Russell Movies

In this thriller, Jonathan Fields (Bradford Dillman) awakens in a strange apartment and finds a dead woman floating in the bathtub after he suffered an LSD-flashback the night before. Finding blood upon his hand, he can only wonder how he is involved in the woman's death. He hires private detective Arthur Belding (Harry Guardino) who has him take another dose of LSD in order to see if he can remember what had happened. They learn that Fields' co-worker Lew Haley (Pat Hingle) had slipped acid into his coffee as part of a blackmail conspiracy. Haley was after his girlfriend and after his job in a government think tank. They also learn that his supervisor Dr. Arkroyd (Victor Jory) had been in a relationship with the deceased woman. She too was being blackmailed by Haley, who killed her when she threatened to call the cops. Dr. Arkroyd knew about it all and did nothing. Eventually Fields and Haley fight it out. The blackmailer ends up crashing through a high-rise window and falling to the unforgiving pavement below. Hope Lang, Susan Saint James, James Doohan and Michael J. Pollard also star in this psychedelic murder mystery. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Billie is a screen version of Ronald Alexander's perennial stage favorite Time Out For Ginger. Patty Duke plays a tomboyish high schooler who excels in athletics but who continues to strike out socially. Jim Backus and Jane Greer perform yeoman service as Duke's parents, who wonder how long it's going to be before their daughter stops trying to be their son. Backus is particularly concerned because he's running for mayor on a platform of "male supremacy" (this is 1965, remember?). From time to time, Duke expresses her frustration in song: her big number finds her holding her gym shoes in one hand, a bottle of perfume in the other. Warren Berlinger also stars as Duke's long-suffering boyfriend. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This horror film is an updated remake of the 1919 classic tale of horror and domination. This time a deeply troubled woman must go to a spooky, ramshackle old manse after her car breaks down. The owner takes her in and then subjects her to numerous humiliating torments. Just before she is to die, the woman awakens from the nightmare and then remembers that she is in a mental hospital and that the sadistic host in her dream is really her doctor. Noted author Robert Bloch penned the script. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This sexually explicit, low-budget film makes no pretensions about being anything other than offensive. There is no plot since none is especially necessary. Director Charles Haas (his last film was the following year), opens with a scene of sexually active men and women at a party. Then one of these women, Silver Morgan (Mamie Van Doren), is mistakenly accused of a crime and sent to an institution, run by Catholic nuns, for wayward young women. As it turns out, the inmates in the institution actually run it through sadistic means. One of them is even more seriously mentally disturbed than the others, and so the nuns welcome her as a novitiate, making even a non-Catholic viewer grimace. The content of this story, such as it is, is made all the worse by an accompanying disregard of the craft of filmmaking. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this crime drama, mobsters swear to get revenge upon a zealous public prosecutor as he tries to get them put into prison. The desperate mobsters try to stop him by using his innocent daughter in a blackmail scheme. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Lt. Dick Chasen (Casey Adams) narrates the strange story of Charles "Butcher" Benton (Lon Chaney, Jr.), a condemned man who came back for revenge. In prison, Butcher refuses to reveal to his crooked lawyer Lowe (Ross Elliott) where he hid $600,000 from a bank robbery. Even though he's due to be executed, Butcher vows revenge on Lowe and his partners, Squeamy (Marvin Ellis) and Joe (Ken Terrell). Lowe visits stripper Eva (Marion Carr), to whom Butcher has sent a map of the spot in the Los Angeles sewer system where he hid the loot, but Lowe opens the letter first, and secretly takes the map. After the execution, Butcher's body is taken to San Francisco scientist Prof. Bradshaw (Robert Shayne) who's trying for a cure for cancer, but instead his experiments bring Butcher back to life. His cellular structure has been increased to the point where he's nearly indestructible, and he is incredibly strong. He kills the scientist and his assistant, and heads for Los Angeles. When stripper Eva turns out to be very different from the person he was expecting, Dick becomes attracted to her. Butcher, who can no longer speak, arrives and learns she doesn't have the map. Aware of Butcher's vow, he tries to inform Squeamy, but Butcher kills both Squeamy and Joe. The panic-stricken Lowe punches a cop and gets tossed in jail as a way of hiding from Butcher; when the cops threaten to release him, he talks and reveals the map. Butcher overhears Dick and the others planning to take care of him with flamethrowers, but just as he finds the loot, he's hit with a bazooka and blasted with the flamethrowers. Hideously burned, he leaves the sewers and climbs to the top of a big crane, which runs into high tension wires, and Butcher is disintegrated. And in the end, Dick and Eva get together. ~ Bill Warren, All Movie Guide

Mark Hill Rod Cameron is the attorney for Emmet Devrey, a real estate developer with a past, who is being blackmailed by his former partner Sam Baggett. When Sam's unfaithful wife Marge cooks up a scheme with her used car salesman lover Jeff Calder to bilk both Devrey and her alcoholic husband, Sam is killed and Devrey is accused of the crime. Mark is then called upon to prove his employer (and father of his fiancée) innocent. Without much suspense, Double Jeopardy is enjoyable in its portrayal of money both as aphrodisiac for the illicit lovers and as the reason for their mutual double cross. ~ Steve Press, All Movie Guide

In this drama, the eagerness of a rookie reporter gets him into deep trouble after he finds himself entangled with big city racketeers. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The Atomic Kid strives mightily to wring laughs from the otherwise humorless topic of atomic radiation. Mickey Rooney (who also produced the film) and Robert Strauss play a couple of brainless prospectors who stumble upon a A-bomb testing site. Led to believe that the area is rich with uranium, Strauss goes off to stake a claim, while Rooney relaxes in a "test" house. Before long, a bomb is dropped, a mushroom cloud sprouts in the desert. . .and Rooney emerges from the rubble unharmed. Later on, however, our hero discovers that he's so full of radiation that he glows in the dark, which makes him both dangerous and world-famous. The plot then veers into Cold War territory as Rooney routs a nest of Soviet spies, led by Robert Emmet Keane. The leading lady of the proceedings is Elaine Davis, Mickey Rooney's then-wife (her marital status, transitory though it may have been, was emphasized in the film's opening credits) Believe it or not, this monumentally unfunny comedy was based on a story by Blake Edwards. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Hell's Half Acre was written directly for the screen by Steve Fisher, whose I Wake Up Screaming remains one of the definitive "film noirs". The scene is a rundown section of Honolulu, where there dwells a group of wannabes, hasbeens and never-weres. While trying to go straight in this environment, ex-racketeer Chet Chester (Wendell Corey) is shaken down by his former criminal cohorts. Chester's girl friend Rose (Nancy Gates) kills one of his tormentors, whereupon Chester takes the blame, assuming that he's still got enough pull to get off with a light sentence. Meanwhile, Dona Williams (Evelyn Keyes) arrives on the scene, certain that Chester is her long-lost husband. When Rose is murdered, Chester escapes from jail, intending to prove Dona's innocence--and to square accounts with the 10-year-old son he never knew he had. Elsa Lanchester provides much-needed laughs as a dotty cabdriver. Dismissed upon its first release, Hell's Half Acre is now considered one of the most durable of Republic's mid-1950s features. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Released by RKO, Sword of Venus was independently produced by "B"-flick mavens Aubrey Wisberg, Jack Pollexfen and Albert Zugsmith. Set in the early 19th century, the film stars Robert Clarke as Dantes, the son of the legendary Count of Monte Cristo (the film, in fact, was released in Britain as Island of Monte Cristo). Like his father before him, Dantes is cheated out of his vast estate by villainous conspirators. This time, however, Dantes is able to turn the tables on the bad guys before too much damage can be inflicted. The heroine of Sword of Venus is played by Catherine McLeod, whom baby-boomers of the 1960s will recall as the woman in the Anacin commercials who uttered the immortal phrase, "Mother, PLEASE! I'D RATHER DO IT MYSELF!" ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A longtime "dream" project of production designer-turned-director Eugene Lourie, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms sees the titular beast unleashed on the world via nuclear testing. Making its way from the Arctic Circle, the monster-a carnivorous "rhedosaurus"-begins advancing towards New York. It stomps its way around Wall Street, pausing to have a policeman for lunch. By the time it has reached Coney Island, the rhedosaurus is more of a danger than ever because of the deadly bacteria it carries within its system. It's up to researcher Paul Christian and sharpshooter Lee Van Cleef to try to liquidate the beast with a grenade chock full of radioactive isotopes. Beast From 20,000 Fathoms represented effects artist Ray Harryhausen's first solo effort, after assisting Willis O'Brien on Mighty Joe Young (1949). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide