Author: aunt john

Hi!  Long time lurker with a request that has plagued me my whole life:

I'm looking for a movie that I saw the tail end of back when I was a little girl, probably in the late 1970s, on network television.

I walked over to my childhood friends' house and found their older teenage brother Ritchie sitting on the couch watching a movie that he said was about to go over any minute.

I remember a scene of devastation, a never-ending field of treeless wilderness and a woman — perhaps with long dark hair and ragged peasant clothes, carrying a baby in a bundle close to her chest as she trudges across the scorched Earth. There may be bunkers… maybe even bodies littered along the countryside; something that indicated an incredible tragedy. Her silent walking while dramatic music swelled in the background made me ask Ritchie what was the movie about.

His explanation to this day is barely recalled. Although I do faintly remember something about a natural disaster, and him telling me that, "The world became very sick," and everyone died except for a very few people.

The next scene has the woman finally kneeling on the ground as if she can trudge no more, cradling her baby closer and weeping. A man approaches her — he perhaps with shoulder-length dark hair and a beard — and asks her if she is okay.

The woman looks sadly up at the man and, with a vague accent, states, "My baby… is dead."

Next scene we see is the man and the woman standing next to a grave that they had dug for the baby. Or perhaps it was a pyre to burn the infected little body. Either way I remember them standing side by side, both now silently grieving for the lost little life. And it broke my child-like heart.

I've been searching for this movie for years, but have never run across it in all my movie-watching habits. Googling movies about "plague" and the film METEOR came up that sounds as if it might have been a similar premise. But METEOR came out in 1979, which would have probably made it too late to air on television for me to see it as a child. Doing a plot search on several other disaster films from the ‘70s also came up unhelpful.

Then again it might not have been a natural disaster that caused the plague, although a part of me wants to remember that it was. I was really terrified of the whole out-of-control concept of natural disasters as a kid, and it had to have been something like that to have frightened and saddened me so much at the time.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: If anyone knows the title, please leave a comment or shoot us an email.

UPDATE: It sounds to me like reader Tychoanomaly may have hit the nail right on the head with Arch Oboler's FIVE (1951)….

I have a vague recollection of having seen a movie on T.V. many (many) years ago (early to middle 1960s) about a cruel prison warden who kept these fierce hounds as guard dogs. I recall that the prisoners were mistreated, perhaps they were political prisoners, and, at times tortured, and, perhaps, fed to the dogs. I also recall that their blood was sometimes drained, and, perhaps consumed by the warden (none of this is very clear to me and given the time, none of this would have been explicitly shown). I recall the film had a Mexican or Spanish setting, but this may be my own childish interpretation of the uniforms of the guards (I was a child, and may have misread the setting).

However, the conclusion was something that has frightened me for years, even though it was an off-screen event: the warden, fleeing from some disruption in the prison (perhaps a revolt, I cannot recall), is torn to death by his own dogs. His shrieks and the dogs' howls were quite vivid and terrifying, "blood-curdling" as goes the cliché.

Perhaps this is why I am, to this day, so wary around dogs.

UPDATE: It seems Joe D. (with assistance from Leonard Maltin) has answered his own question with 1958's BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE…

One of my co-workers has a Traumatic memory he can't place, and has promised me tee-shirts if I can figure out what it is. Help me, you Traumatized legions!

Here are his clues:

Scene 1: An Asian-looking guy is stuck in a closet or something and he can look into the room and there is a woman laying on a cot and her skin looks like she has leprosy or something. He's locked in there and there are two people trying to dig through the wall to get him out. The leper woman wakes up and comes to the door and knows he's in there, so the guy flips out and starts beating his way through the wall with his mag light. He gets through and they cover the hole.

Scene 2: The same girl with the leper skin is reaching into a glowing mirror or doorway and is pulling some kind of demon or monster into our world, dimension, or whatever. There is another girl in the room and she heroically charges the leper chick and knocks her into the portal and falls in with her. At the same instant some dude throws something on the portal and it closes. I remember the chick reaching out to get saved and that always creeped me out. The dimension where the demon/monster was like water…if that makes any sense…like the chick was floating down into water reaching out.

Not much to go on, I know, but if it were easy everyone would do it. That first clue had me thinking THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, but nothing else in it fits and my co-worker knows T.P.U.S. and swears that's not it. Hope you guys can solve this mystery, or else I'll have to do laundry.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Since the holidays are the times that we should be doing things for others, let's put on our helper hats and see if we can spare the VICAR OF VHS the indignity of doing laundry and into a free t-shirt. If anyone knows what this one is, please sound off in the comments or shoot us an e-mail.

UPDATE: It took reader EegahInc all of two minutes to recognize this one as JOHN CARPENTER's classic PRINCE OF DARKNESS!!