Popcorn Crunchers, Reel 143 Trivia Quiz

Answer: a living man who chokes and stabs his victims

Edward Styles is executed in 1860 for a series of horrendous murders. In 1880, writer James Rankin decides Styles was unjustly accused and convicted. He suspects that Dr. Tennant was the true killer and had disposed of the knife/scalpel used to disembowel his victims by dropping it in Styles' coffin. Rankin has Styles' body exhumed and finds the murder instrument.

When he touches it, the homicidal spirit of Dr. Tennant enters and overpowers him, setting him off on a killing spree.

Answer: The Night of Voodoo

"Voodoo Island" (1957) is a Boris Karloff picture filmed on Kaua'i. "Voodoo Woman" (1957) starred Marla English in her last role on screen, from which career she retired at 21 years of age. "Teenage Zombies" (1959) is a rather dreadful effort produced, written, directed and edited by Jerry Warren, who also acted in some of his movies but not this one.

Blue System released a song titled "Voodoo Nights" on their album "Walking on a Rainbow" (1987). "Voodoo, the Terror of Night" was a made-for-television documentary broadcast in 1987. Carl Wessler and Alfredo Alcala's story "Night of the Voodoo Curse" appeared in a DC Comics issue of "The Unexpected" (#191, May-June 1979). No 1950s feature-length movie called "The Night of Voodoo" appears to have been made.

Answer: part human/part spider

Doctor Aranya has transferred hormones from a spider into human beings. The males being treated in this manner have become horribly stunted dwarves. The females, however, become highly attractive women with spider-like instincts and behaviours, the ability to regenerate their own body parts, and a lifespan of hundreds of years.

Answer: Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi was touring the U.K. in a stage production of "Dracula." The play failed. The producers declared bankruptcy and left town with the receipts. Lugosi was stranded in England with insufficient funds to return to the U.S. The producers of "Mother Riley Meets the Vampire" offered him a job.

When this 1952 film was released to American audiences in 1963 (as "My Son, the Vampire"), Lugosi had been dead for seven years.

Answer: Dictorobitary, a language computer

In "Plan 9 From Outer Space," General Roberts (Lyle Talbot) says that scientists have "developed a language computer": a machine that breaks down any language" into English. Eros, the leader of the aliens (Dudley Manlove) identifies this machine as a "dictorobitary -- or as you on Earth put it, the language computer". Such a device is necessary to connect English speakers and aliens who speak another language.

This is solved, for example, in the "Star Trek" universe, by the Universal Translator ("UT"), which is a hand-held device that allows communication even with those who speak a previously-unknown language.

Answer: hypnotism and regression to past lives

According to the producer Alex Gordon, the idea for "The She-Creature" came from Los Angeles movie exhibitor Jerry Zigmond. Morey Bernstein's book "The Search for Bridey Murphy" concerned his hypnotic regression of Ruth Simmons to a former life as Bridey Murphy in 19th-century Ireland. AIP executive producer Samuel Z. Arkoff (1918-2001) commissioned his brother-in-law, Lou Rusoff (1911-1963), to write both the story and screenplay.

Bernstein's book was made into the motion picture "The Search for Bridey Murphy" (1956). "The She-Creature" was one of many movies which tapped the then-popular interest in hypnotic regression, e.g. "I've Lived Before" (1956), "The Aztec Mummy" (1957), "Blood of Dracula" (1957), "I Was a Teenage Werewolf" (1957), "The Undead" (1957), and "The Bride and the Beast" (1958).

Answer: Ronald Stein

Ronald Stein (1930-1988) wrote the scores for a remarkable number of motion pictures in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them low-budget horror or science fiction films. His movie scores include "The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues" (1955), "Day the World Ended" (1955), "It Conquered the World" (1956), "The She-Creature" (1956), "Not of This Earth" (1957), "Attack of the Crab Monsters" (1957), "Invasion of the Saucer Men" (1957), "The Undead" (1957), "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" (1958), "She Gods of Shark Reef" (1958), "Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow" (1959), "Last Woman on Earth" (1960), "Dinosaurus!" (1960), "The Little Shop of Horrors" (1960), "Journey to the Seventh Planet" (1962), "The Underwater City" (1962), "The Premature Burial" (1962), "The Terror" (1963), "The Haunted Palace" (1963), "Dementia 13" (1963), "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet" (1965), "Blood Bath" (1966), "Queen of Blood" (1966), and "Spider Baby" (1968).

The Missouri-born composer also taught musical composition at California State University Northridge, the University of Colorado Denver, and Washington University in St. Louis. Max Steiner was an Austrian. Ennio Morricone was Italian. John Barry was British.

Answer: acting

American actress Virginia Leith (1925-2019) played roles in both television and motion pictures. She had early roles in "On the Threshold of Space" (1956) and "Toward the Unknown" (1956). Her best-known role was as the disembodied head in "Brain That Wouldn't Die", which was shot in 1959 but not released until 1962.

She disliked her part in this film intensely and refused to attend the post-production sessions to sync voice and film, leaving a voice actress to fill in for her in some scenes.

Answer: a volcano on the island of Back Cup

The evil Count Artigas built a secret fortress in a cavern on the volcanic island of Back Cup in the Bermudas. There, he keeps the weapons with which he intends to conquer the world. It is to this pirates' lair that Roch and Gaydon are taken. Aepyornis Island is a fictional island imagined by H.G. Wells in his 1894 short story "Aepyornis Island." Odo Island is a principal location in the 1954 motion picture "Godzilla." Two Japanese ships -- Eiko-maru and Bingo-maru -- are destroyed there. Catches are seriously reduced in the Odo fishery.

After reporters gather there, Godzilla emerges, stomps around, and kills nine people.

Answer: They are former lovers.

Miles and Becky had been romantically involved in the past. When Becky returns from living in England, she and Miles see each other to discuss her cousin Wilma who insists that her father was not himself but an identical impersonator. In the course of their conversation, each tells the other of their recent divorce.

They end up fleeing the pod people so as not to be transformed themselves. They hide in an abandoned mine. Miles goes to look for help and returns to find an exhausted Becky asleep. He kisses her but, when she shows no passion, realizes that she has been changed into a pod person.

He flees and later tells a doctor, "A moment's sleep and the girl I loved was an inhuman enemy bent on my destruction."