The Sting of Death (1965)

On a remote island somewhere off the coast of Florida near the Everglades, slime-corroded hands finish sabotaging some radio equipment -- the only form of communication for this isolated outpost. Then a pair of rubbery flipper'd feet stalks ever closer to a bikini-clad beach bunny sunning herself in the shade (?) on the nearby docks.

And this long and lingering look at these *ahem* ‘assets’ continues until the music on her transistor radio gets interrupted by a newsflash, which reveals yet another local fisherman has mysteriously disappeared in the vicinity. 

But the disinterested girl turns it off before things get too detailed as she starts applying copious amounts of sun-tanning oil all over her scantily clad frame.

Meanwhile, whoever or whatever that was attached to those flipper'd feet reaches the waterline. Undetected, they submerge and swim closer toward the oblivious girl; and then those slimy hands break the surface and seize the blonde beach bunny by the ankles and pull their victim toward the water!

And despite her valiant efforts, the doomed girl is violently wrenched from the dock and pulled to the bottom, where she is drowned by her still not yet fully visualized attacker, who then drags her off to parts unknown in, I have to admit, a rather grotesquely pleasing opening credit sequence:

A serene aquatic theme serenades us as the victim is slowly towed along by the strap of her top in the crystal clear water, like some obscene live mermaid show. And while we’re still not sure if this was supposed to be a man in a wetsuit, or an amphibious monster, or a man in a wetsuit pretending to be an amphibious monster, our answer will come soon enough and the evidence will explain why we’ve only seen the subjective POV, hands, and flippers so far.

Thus and so, I will keep you all in suspense a little while longer before the big reveal which is so, so, so worth it. Trust me.

Sometime later, a boat pulls up to the very same dock, where Dr. Richardson (Nagle), a noted marine biologist, whose island research compound this is, disembarks with the rest of his party. This includes his daughter Karen (Hawkins), his top assistant, Dr. John Hoyt (Morrison), and four other female victims -- I mean, fodder to be stalked and killed by the killer while in some state of undress -- shoot, no, wait; I mean four other plot conveniences, who are all dressed rather snappily, I might add, who’ll be properly introduced right before their untimely and ghastly demiseseses. There. Perfect.

Anyhoo, one can’t help but notice this research compound resembles more of an immaculate palatial mansion than a secluded fish laboratory nestled near one of the world’s largest swamps as Richardson’s party gathers around a table by the outdoor kitchen, wet bar, and swimming pool. And as Karen serves everyone refreshments, they address the most pressing question of the day.

No. Not the inexplicable absence of Richardson’s other lab assistant, Ruth (Lee), whom we briefly met earlier right before she met her untimely and ghastly demise, but the huge honking contusion on Richardson’s forehead. (More on this production mishap later.) Once that is put to bed, Hoyt announces he’s invited a gaggle of college pals to the island for a party this afternoon, triggering a mass-panic among the womenfolk, who quickly scramble for their assigned rooms to properly primp and preen for this pending shindig.

But their path is suddenly blocked by the spectral appearance of Richardson’s other assistant, Egon (Vella), which elicits several gasps from the startled guests due to his horribly disfigured face. Here, once the shock wears off, Hoyt properly introduces Egon. But as he scolds him for constantly sneaking up on people, the worm kinda turns as these ladies start poking fun at his appearance and laughing at his posture, especially Louise (Kane).

This draws a stern rebuke from both Richardson and Karen, whom Egon obviously dotes on as he slinks behind her for protection from this uncalled-for ribbing. And after a dictated hollow apology, this rabble finally clears off. Egon, obviously hurt in the feelings department, says they’re just like all the others, had no right to laugh at him that way, and then singles out Louise, adding she shouldn’t have said those things, which can be read as a plea or a threat or both.

Meanwhile, the men are drawn back to the docks by the arrival of the county sheriff. Seems he’s recovered the body of one of those missing fishermen in the swamp and was looking to get Richardson’s opinion on the cause of death due to the strange condition of the corpse.

Drawing back the tarp, the Sheriff (Stanton) reveals the waterlogged cadaver, which is covered in bruises and a series of strange welts. After a cursory examination, both Richardson and Hoyt agree if these welts weren’t so large it almost looks like the work of a Portuguese Man o’ War; a sea critter similar to a jellyfish with a very nasty sting.

Egon contests brushing this theory off, asserting it is possible to breed one of that size but no one takes him seriously. With that, Hoyt suggests the Sheriff perform some toxicology tests on the victim to rule it out completely; and as he leaves, Richardson asks him to keep an eye out for Ruth, whom he assumes has already headed back to the mainland and is never mentioned again.

Then, though he is welcomed to attend, Richardson, feeling this party will be a little out of his age-bracket, takes the boat and heads out to a nearby reef to check on one of his experimental hatcheries. Egon, meanwhile, seeks out Karen, who presses him on the secret experiments he’s been concocting in his shack way out in the Everglades.

But before he can finish his invitation to come see for herself, they are interrupted by the noisy arrival of Hoyt’s college friends, who immediately seize the opportunity to pick on the ogreish Egon’s appearance en masse when he tries to join in on their dancing and gyrating. Egon quickly flees from this pretty heartless ridicule, despite Karen’s protests. Completely humiliated, the outcast then leaves the island altogether by airboat.

Thus, once they’re done making fun of the handicapped, these collegians and grad-students and borderline Hitler Jugend return to their konga-lining, Caucasian flailing, and barely controlled seizures around the pool as, once again, the camera tends to linger on some shaking hinders and shimmying boobs, but mostly hinders. This rump respective perspective goes on for, like, six hours, and then Hoyt and Karen check out long enough to share a quick kiss in the kitchen while on a snack replenishing run.

Back at the pool, as the dulcet tones of Mr. Neil Sedaka takes over the soundtrack, the gesticulations that follow are, I think, an attempt to follow his melodic instructions on how to “Do the Jellyfish,” whose maneuvers turn out to be just as nonsensical as the lyrics.

And while the Jellyfish they be doing, these young adults are so enthralled by the music and keeping the beat, no one notices a familiar flipper'd menace crawl through the surrounding shrubbery and submerge into the pool completely unnoticed. And if you find that completely ridiculous, just wait until Louise dives in to cool off, does a few laps, and STILL doesn’t notice this intruder lurking at the bottom of the pool!

And if you don’t find that highly implausible, as well as utterly ludicrous, just wait until this reasonable human facsimile of a Man o’ War attacks her, complete with trailing streamers of stingers!

She screams, it slimes her, and still no one notices her thrashing about with her attacker until the dancing finally stops and one solitary girl spots Louise floating belly-up in the pool.

When they pull her out of the water, the girl is barely alive and covered in those same telltale bruises and bloody welts. And while Hoyt and Karen move the injured girl inside, the monster finally makes its presence known, emerging from the pool in force, its tentacles whipping and stinging as it rampages through the crowd and returns to the sea.

With that, the party-goers panic and decide to vacate the island as fast as possible, playing right into this monster’s hands as they pile into the boat, cast off, and head toward open water where, unbeknownst to them, their wholesale slaughter will soon begin in earnest… 

Regional and niche filmmaking in America was nothing new by the 1960s, but things kind of accelerated during this decade, especially in the state of Florida, which drew all kinds of soon to be exploitation legends to its sandy beaches and crystal clear waters to make some movies on the cheap:

Herschell Gordon Lewis and Dave Friedman, Barry Mahon, Larry Wolk, Robert Ground, and the Kerwin brothers; not to mention Brad Grinter, Doris Wishman, Ivan Tors, or K. Gordon Murray, who all plied their trade in the burgeoning drive-in markets with explicit sex and buckets of gore and, oddly enough, transforming foreign films into family-friendly matinee staples.

Enter Richard Flink, a very successful Miami Beach-based building contractor, who suddenly wanted to cash in on this regional boom and become a film producer -- even though he had no idea how, but was convinced it didn’t look all that hard. And on the heels of Mahon’s nudity-fueled Pagan Island (1961), and Lewis and Friedman’s gorenographic Blood Feast (1963), Flink took the plunge by producing and directing a mash-up of both: Six She’s and a He (alias Love Goddesses of Blood Island, 1964).

The barely extant plot sees a soldier stranded on a not-so-deserted isle, who is subsequently captured by a tribe of sadistic women, who torture and dismember all men who land on their shores. Only fragments of the film survive, mores the pity, but from what little remains one can easily see the film was gory as hell, totally bonkers, and morbidly hilarious!

The Montgomery Advertiser (March 5, 1965).

Now, Flink directed the film under the alias Gordon Heaver; as did the film’s screenwriter, Al Dempsey, who was really William “Bill” Kerwin, who starred in several of Lewis and Friedman’s pictures -- Blood Feast, Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963) and 2000 Maniacs! (1964); and who, along with his brother Harry Kerwin, crewed for several other local exploitation producers and directors. In fact, once you dig into it, it’s kind of amazing how much cross-polinization of casts and crews happened during this delightful spurt of Florida-exploitation.

Flink and Kerwin were soon back at it, too, this time under the banner Essen Productions with a bona fide monster movie. Perhaps inspired by the national success of Del Tenney’s regionally produced The Horror of Party Beach (1964) up in New England, along with a healthy dose of American International’s Beach Party (1963), Flink struck a deal with a couple of Florida based theater chain and drive-in owners, Joseph Fink and Juan Hidalgo-Gato. Together, they formed Thunderbird International Pictures to help finance and distribute Sting of Death (1965), where a fish-monster would menace a bunch of beachniks when they weren’t dancing up a storm.

The film would be scripted by Kerwin under his usual alias of Dempsey. Flink, however, would only wear a producer’s hat for this production and brought on a hired gun to direct; a fella by the name of William Grefe. (Editor's Note: Now, the online consensus is that Al Dempsey was an alias for Kerwin, but when you dig into the production, Grefe seems to reference them as two different people. As does Douglass Hobart, whom we’ll get to in a bit. I did my best to verify, but you all know what an ouroboros the internet is. Thus, whenever anyone mentions Al Dempsey from here on out I will leave it as is, but they might or might not be talking about Kerwin. Clear as the Everglades muck? Great. Moving on.) 

Unlike a lot of exploitation filmmakers in the burgeoning scene, Grefe was a native Floridian. “Ever since I was a kid, I loved the movies,” said Grefe in an interview with Martin Unsworth for Staburst Magazine (2020). “I used to go up to New York to visit my aunt in Long Island. And back then, on 42nd Street, they had maybe a dozen theaters that played three feature films for 25 cents. I would just go over in the morning and I lived in the theaters.”

Bitten by the acting bug early, Grefe would study drama at Florida State University and would luck into an early role as an extra in Slattery’s Hurricane (1948), which Fox partially shot on location in Miami. But after spending several years in summer stock, with the likes of Lee Marvin no less, his career plans were interrupted by the Korean War and a stint in the Navy. Upon his discharge, Grefe found himself married with three kids and working full time as a fireman in Miami to make ends meet.

However, Grefe stayed in the game, shifting from acting to writing screenplays. “After I got married, I said, ‘Boy, this acting is not too secure,’” said Grefe (ibid). “When I was at the fire department, you had a lot of spare time because we worked 24-hours on and 48 off. So I ended up writing screenplays. And I wrote probably five or six screenplays -- I have the rejection slips to prove I wrote them anyway!”

But after several years of rejections, a local south Florida outfit headed by Herb Vendig optioned one of his scripts. “I finally sold one called The Checkered Flag (1963), which was about automobile racing up at Sebring.”

Here, Grefe was invited to the shooting location in case rewrites were needed, and then fate stepped in. “I took a 30-day vacation from the fire department, and they brought me on set for rewrites. The director ended up having a nervous breakdown the first day. All of the investors panicked.”

The director in question according to later interviews was Vendig himself, who had apparently bitten off more than he could chew. This led to an emergency production meeting in a small motel room in the middle of the night, where they argued over where to find a replacement at this late date. And this debate raged on into the wee hours until Jack Remy, the film’s veteran cinematographer, interjected and cut to the chase.

“Look, by the time this [new] guy flies here, the races will be over,” said Remy as remembered by Grefe in an interview for Please Kill Me’s Anthony Petkovich (October 26, 2020). Remy contended even more time would be wasted as the new hire familiarized himself with the script, saying, “You just can’t step off the plane and direct this movie. What the hell, the writer knows all about it -- just make him the director.” Thus, as Grefe finished the story, “They drafted me in the motel room at one in the morning, and the next day I started directing a movie."

The Fort Lauderdale News (December 11, 1966).

As to how it went, “Directing a movie is half working with the actors to get the script on screen, and the other half is technical,” Grefe explained to Oscar Goff for Boston Hassle (September 7, 2023). “And I knew zilch technically, so I relied on [Remy] to help me. So that’s how I started directing. Fortunately, the movie made money. If your movie doesn’t make money you’ll never do another one.” Thus, this simple twist of fate officially launched one of the most fascinating runs in independent regional exploitation filmmaking.

Following up The Checkered Flag with Racing Fever (1964), Grefe moved the action from stock cars to thundering speedboats. “In a way, I’m sort of a mercenary,” said Grefe (Petkovich, 2020). “Checkered Flag made money and it had pretty good distribution, so I thought, ‘Well, racing movies are the key!’”

The subject was also inspired by a recent tragedy. “I was at a big boat race with big hydroplanes, and there was an Italian driver named Ezio Selva who had an Alfa Romeo engine in his hydroplane,” explained Grefe (Goff, 2023). Selva had announced he would be retiring after the race and turning the boat over to his son, but he never got the chance. “[Selva] got to going so fast the hydroplane flipped and fell right on top of him and killed him. And his son jumped off the pier and tried to swim out to him.

“I looked around, and there was a guy with a 16mm camera on top of a truck. I ran up to him and I said, ‘Did you get that shot?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I think I did.’ So I got his name, and a couple of days later I came by, and he got the shot perfectly, with that boat turning over and the guy falling out. So I bought that shot from him, and that’s the way I made Racing Fever, just based on that one shot and the experience of watching that race.“

The Miami Herald (October 1, 1964).

From these morbid beginnings the finished film would land with a critical thud. “It’s my uncomfortable duty to be a rat fink about Racing Fever, a made-in-Miami film which had its gala premiere at the scene of the crime,” said Miami Herald critic Jack Anderson (October 3, 1964). “The film is a banal, inept triple-header in script, directing and acting. If it had left its cameras on the boats and the scenery, it might have scraped by as a short subject on sports. But the cameras kept firmly focused on the foolishness of the plot and the players.”

Still, his followup made money, too. Enough to draw the attention of Ben Schwalb and Allied Artists, who would release the film nationally, where it made over $20,000 alone at its opening weekend in Kansas City.

The Grand Island Independent (July, 1975). 

With two features now under his belt, Grefe would then actually work with Tenney for a spell, who was down in Key Biscayne to shoot something called Caribbean Adventure, which was only a working title because Tenney didn’t want the locals to know he was actually filming something called Voodoo Bloodbath.

Grefe rounded up a local crew to help film the production and wound up serving as an assistant director. Once filming wrapped, Tenney took the footage back to Connecticut, spliced it together, didn’t like what he saw, at all, and shelved the film until producer Jerry Gross unearthed it in 1971 while looking for a double-bill for I Drink Your Blood (1970), got the rights, and finally sent it out as I Eat Your Skin (1970). And as it turns out, Tenney was right all along. It really was a pretty terrible film.

Apparently Kerwin knew Grefe, which got him the job for Flink, Fink and Hidalgo-Gato on Sting of Death. “I was the only one around with experience,” said Grefe on the commentary track for Something Weird Video’s 2001 release of Sting of Death. “I had made two films and those two films made some money.”

But while Grefe was the director it soon became clear Flink would be calling all the shots; much to his hired hand’s consternation. “The only film I made which was a nightmare,” Grefe told Alton Williams for Battle Royale with Cheese (December 25, 2020).

First, in an effort to save money, despite Grefe’s warning about the colossal mess they were about to make, Flink mandated his own mansion be used for Dr. Richardson’s home base, which was located on the canals of Miami Beach. This, of course, was not really on an isolated island, requiring many bizarre camera angles and some lab work to prevent any neighborhood houses from being seen. And as the production progressed, the location was slowly wrecked by both cast and crew.

“Having done two films I know what a movie crew can do to your house,” said Grefe (SWV, 2001). “He insisted on shooting in his home.” And while Flink didn’t have a problem, his wife sure did with all the smoking and ashing on her imported carpets. And then she finally reached her breaking point when something was broken.“They had an ancient Chinese vase on a stand by the door. The boom man is really following the scene, and bam! The boom knocked this vase over [and broke it] into a 1000 pieces.”

Also of note, since the waters of the Miami Beach canals weren’t very clear, Flink chartered a large boat to take them out onto the ocean to film the underwater scenes. And despite several storm warnings, and under protest from his director, Captain Flink forced his captive cast and crew several miles out, where the wind and chop were so bad they almost lost a diver in the swells. “30mph winds and 12 foot waves,” recalled Grefe (SWV 2001). It was like The Perfect Storm (2000). We couldn’t even anchor [the boat] it was so rough. All the crew was throwing up. All the beach bunnies were throwing up. There was nothing but puke all over the deck.”

With that, a compromise was reached to film all underwater scenes at Rainbow Springs, nearly 300 miles away, where the calm and crystal-clear waters would prove worth the effort. Here, Flink doubled as Richardson in the underwater scenes, even though he’d never really scuba-dived before because he was too cheap to haul the actor to the location. And that storm actually turned out to be a hurricane, causing some sound problems later, requiring the actors to over-emote over the howling winds in a couple scenes to prevent any looping for both cost considerations and the fact there were no real sound facilities in Florida yet.

Flink then struck again when he required them to use his friend’s hunting cabin deep in the Everglades for the exteriors of Egon’s lab. (The interiors would be built inside Flink’s double-car garage.) Said Grefe (Williams, 2020), “To get there you had to take airboats. We got all the way out there, and the camera had a cord that goes to the battery, and the cord fell overboard." (Other recollections said the battery itself was ruined.) "So we couldn’t film. And we had to send the airboat back, and go all the way back to Miami to the equipment house, so I didn’t start shooting until one or two in the afternoon.”

Now, I believe it was during this excursion when actor Jack Nagle (Dr. Richardson) whacked his head on one of the boats while trying and failing to get out of it, resulting in that huge contusion on his noggin that required a quick rewrite to explain the hideous thing away.

“We had to write that bump in,” explained Grefe (SWV, 2001). “The first thing we did, we were filming in the middle of the Everglades with an airboat. And this actor, on the very first day, flew out of the airboat and bashed his head. So we had to write it in because all throughout the movie he had this big scab on his head.” 

Not ideal, sure, but it is kinda fun to watch and chart how it shrinks and grows from scene to scene, allowing the viewer to suss out the film’s chaotic shooting schedule rather easily.

But as these mini-disasters kept piling up, one can kind of sense a shift in the balance of power behind the camera, moving away from Flink to Grefe, who did the best he could under some very trying circumstances, matching shots in editing from at least three different locations on some occasions; and who honestly turned nothing into almost something despite being saddled with one of the dumbest plots and quite possibly the goofiest damned monster this side of Ro-Man Special Agent XJ-2 and those pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, google-eyed and bratwurst bogarting Horrors of Party Beach.

Yeah. Thus far, Grefe has been pretty coy with his Man o’ War that walks like a man, giving us plenty of looks at its gooey hands, flippered feet, and Rastafarian tentacles, when not simply relying on a subjective POV shot. And turns out there was a pretty good reason as to why we haven’t seen the monster’s head yet. 

But keep sticking with it, trust me. The payoff will be worth it as we still don’t get to see the creature’s head while it lurks under the water and takes an axe to the bottom of the fleeing boat filled with agitated collegians.

Before the panicked students shoved off and headed for the mainland with the critically wounded, they get orders from Hoyt to send the Sheriff back fast once it’s discovered the radio has been destroyed.

Thus, not realizing they’re slowly sinking until it’s far too late, the boat hasn’t even cleared the channel before it runs into a horde of what I think is supposed to be some large jellyfish blocking their escape route and massing to attack -- or something, which is undoubtedly being orchestrated by the monster. Maybe.

Now I know what you’re thinking: These, uh, jellyfish sure do look like some garbage bags tied-off around some colored balloons and bedazzled by several strands of beads to me, too, but let's just roll with it, OK? I mean, the actors sure do when the boat finally capsizes and dumps them all in the drink, where the, uh, heh, sorry, jellyfish attack without mercy. 

Seriously. They all sell the hell out of this as they scream and thrash about and try not to pop and sink anything until all is silent and this great slaughter comes to an end with a dozen or so corpses silently floating out to sea.

Its job done, the creature returns to its underwater lair, where I believe we’ve just found all that missing equipment Richardson was referring to in an earlier scene. After messing with a few switches and diodes, the creature approaches an aquarium filled with more inflatable Man o’ Wars, picks up the largest one and plants its face into the critter as the machines spark and splutter until we finally reveal the monster’s identity as the marine animal is peeled away and we come face to face with Egon. (Nope. This isn’t the big reveal yet. Patience, people.)

This, of course, means we are dealing with some kind of mad-science induced Man o' War lycanthropy -- a Were-Jellyfish, if you will. 

Noodle that for a bit as we cut back to the island, where Richardson reassures his remaining guests everything will be fine. The plan is to wait for the sheriff to arrive (-- not knowing none of the others made it), but until then Richardson decides to round up Egon to keep him safe (-- not realizing he was the killer), leaving the women to fend for themselves. So, it should come as no surprise that several of them ask to tag along.

And so, Jessica (Lund) and Donna (Etleman) join the men as they first check on Egon’s shack in the swamp, where they don’t find him but do find a large aquarium full of Man o’ Wars so Richardson can pontificate to Jessica how deadly their sting is.

As for Donna, alas, she picked the wrong time to head back to the airboat for a smoke, where Egon in full Were-Jellyfish mode is lurking; who then chases her deeper into the swamp, and then keeps on chasing her; and chasing her; and chasing her, until the reel of film is exhausted before Donna finally decides to help out, plops down near the water’s edge, and lets the monster catch up and finish her off.

Here, we also get a brief glimpse of the monster’s head and a hint of the true glory to come.

Anyhoo, Donna’s death rattle wafts back to the shack alerting the others to her plight. A few surfacing air-bubbles convinces Richardson that Donna is in trouble underwater. And so, they take time to scuba-gear up, meaning if she wasn’t dead by drowning before, Donna most certainly is now.

Once underwater there’s no sign of Donna, and then Jessica lingers too far behind the others and is snatched away by the Were-Jellyfish never to be seen again. Meanwhile, Richardson and Hoyt find the entrance to Egon’s underwater cave but have run out of air before they can explore it any further. And after a cursory search for the now missing Jessica, they pull anchor and head back to the island...

… Where Karen’s last unmolested guest, Susan (Deveraux), fulfills our cheesecake quotient by stripping down as tastefully as 1965 standards and practices would allow before hopping in the shower. 

And as we watch her naked body through the frosted glass, the Were-Jellyfish manages to sneak into the house, navigate a staircase in those flipper'd feet, waddle into the bathroom, and kill her without alerting Karen despite her friend screaming bloody murder. Nope. Apparently, Karen was taking a nap as she kept vigil over Louise, who is still writhing and whimpering due to her massive injuries, until her father and Hoyt return and wake her up.

Thus, the plan now is to no longer wait for the Sheriff but to abandon the lab altogether. (And I’m pretty sure Donna, Jessica and Sarah would’ve really appreciated this Plan B being Plan A.) And while the men move Louise to the boat, Karen goes to round up Susan, finds her mutilated body, screams, and then runs out of the house, where she plows right into Egon.

Here, he confesses he did all of these terrible things so they could be together at last. With this news Karen faints, and Egon takes her to his airboat and skedaddles off to the secret lair.

Luckily for Karen, Hoyt spotted them leaving, notes his girlfriend’s unconscious state, puts two and two together, and he and Richardson are soon in hot-pursuit, leaving poor Louise who knows where. And this merry pursuit exhausts a whole ‘nother reel of film before the pursuing airboat suffers some engine trouble, which puts them far enough behind while they suss it out to give Egon time to swim Karen down to his super-secret lair.

Where, Egon gets to monologuing as he menaces the revived girl, and goes into full mad scientist mode as he reveals how his formula of sea water, electricity, certain chemicals, and human blood created a new hybrid Man o’ War of unbelievable size.

But this was only phase one of his experiments, as Egon moves to give Karen a practical demonstration of phase two, turning on his equipment before once again giving his creation in the aquarium a faceplant. When he peels it off, his face full of goo, Egon raves how they all laughed at him. And before his metamorphosis is complete, he warns a reluctant Karen that if he can’t have her, then no one will. With that, Egon turns toward her to reveal, finally, in all its glory: the Were-Jellyfish monster.

More on this lunacy in a second. For now, on the surface, Hoyt and Richardson have finally reached the underwater cave entrance. And armed with a flare, Hoyt dives down to save Karen, who is currently working up some lung butter as the monster stalks ever closer.

But when our hero pops up in the cave, the Were-Jellyfish has abandoned killing Karen and is feverishly working with his equipment and pulling another Man o’ War out of the aquarium. 

Now, I think the intent was to turn Karen into a creature like him, but Hoyt takes the opportunity to try and sneak the girl out while the monster is distracted.

But Egon-Jellyfish finally notices and attacks Hoyt -- well, they sorta circle each other as the hero keeps him at bay with the lit flare for a bit to, uh, impend the dread and danger, until the brawl proper starts and the flare is wrested out of Hoyt’s hand.

But this errant missile lands in the aquarium, which detonates for some reason. Also of note, this has an extremely detrimental effect on the Were-Jellyfish, who instantly keels over and, rather messily, reverts back to Egon.

The monster defeated, Hoyt tries to escort Karen out of the lair but she refuses to leave without Egon. But his injuries are fatal, and his equipment is overloading and threatening to explode. 

Hoyt promises to try and come back for him once Karen is safe. But once they leave the cave and reach the surface, Egon’s lair goes up in one massive belch of air-bubbles, bringing the menace of the Were-Jellyfish to an end.

And as Hoyt shuttles them back to civilization, when a sobbing Karen asks her father how something this horrible could’ve ever happened, her father has no answer. Which brings us to...

Since its limited release in late 1966, The Sting of Death has been rightfully known by the few who’ve actually seen it for two things: one, the goofy-assed Were-Jellyfish; and two, the contribution of Neil Sedaka’s hideously infectious piece of bubblegum pop, “Do the Jellyfish.” Well, three reasons if you count the wholesale slaughter of the Frankie and Annette clones.

Apparently, Sedaka was in Miami performing at one of the resort hotels, who was then approached by Flink and offered $2,000 on the spot to whip-up an original song for his feature. “He was doing a nightclub act,” recalled Grefe (Goff, 2023). “The producer went and offered him some big bucks to write the song. So I really had nothing to do with securing [Sedaka], but they just gave him some big money to write that song!”

A member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame for hits like "Calendar Girl, "Laughter in the Rain" and "Bad Blood," which is an absolute banger, Sedaka agreed and worked with Al Jacobs, who provided the rest of the score. Throwing the song together over a weekend, the net result of this collaboration was actually pretty catchy, and it's legendary among the B-movie brethren. 

One should also note the credits list not one, but two, choreographers for that scene -- Gary Holtz and Thelma Sherr. And kudos to Jacobs, too, who would score almost all of Grefe’s films, for his additional efforts give Sting a Death a lot more oomph than it probably rated, soundtrack wise.

As for Sedaka, he would return to contribute another song and teach us all how to do “The Water Bug” in Playgirl Killer (1967). Sedaka would also have a cameo in that film, which was written by Bill Kerwin, who also starred as a homicidal artist who murders women after they model for him for … reasons.

As for the Were-Jellyfish, its architect was a man named Doug Hobart. Starting in the late 1940s Hobart served as the host of a traveling Midnight Spook-Show called Dr. Traboh and His Chamber of Monsters (-- Traboh being Hobart spelled backwards), which featured appearances by the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolfman, a hunchbacked assistant, roaming Zombies, and three dancing girls known as the Dragonettes.

The Grand Island Independent (November, 1954). 

As the legend goes, at the age of 23, Hobart was inspired after catching Dr. Silkini's Asylum of Horrors at the Paramount Theater in his hometown of Middleton, Ohio. “I thought it was very good, but I thought I could improve on it,” said Hobart in an interview with Jon Kitley for Kitley’s Crypt (April 4, 2015). But despite all efforts he could not convince the local theater manager to let him stage his own show until several outlandish publicity stunts got him up on the stage. This included being caught in a cemetery at night with a shovel, and several neighbors phoning in a report of a man hauling a body wrapped up in a bloody sheet into the house across the street.

Said Hobart (ibid), “What I did differently was that Silkini did a lot of magic. He would have phosphorus ghosts on fishing poles being held over the audience’s head and all that kind of stuff. I wasn’t going to do any of that, too ridiculous. I figured I’m going to give them a real stage show." 

The Grand Island Independent (January, 1932). 

“When I was four years old, my father took me to see Frankenstein (1931). I never forgot that, it changed my life,” Hobart explained in his autobiography, The Last Ghost Master (2023). This fascination with the macabre was then cemented when Hobart learned some trade secrets from a local mortician (-- the father of a childhood friend). “I would sit and watch him work on the bodies of the deceased. On some occasions, he would rebuild the face of an accident victim for a funeral showing. He taught me a lot that came in handy later.” 

For the show, “I took the Frankenstein Monster and recreated it on the stage like with Strickfaden’s equipment that I built,” said Hobart (Kitley, 2015). “It was incredible. It was shooting bolts of lightning across the stage. We got the monster on a table, connected these things to his neck, and the sparks were flying all over. As soon as he’d get up off the table, the Wolfman would come in and there would be a big fight between him and the creature right on stage. Then we had a nurse come in and the Wolfman would go over and grab her, rip her dress off, and she ran off the stage nude! Well, she wasn’t really nude but had a “nude” outfit on.”

The Cincinnati Enquirer (February 14, 1954).

And that was just the opening act! The show also saw a beheading, the creation of a zombie, and the ritual sacrifice of a damsel in distress -- all covered in stage blood concocted from ketchup and tomato puree. “The show was a knock out,” said Hobart (ibid). “It hit the newspapers the next day and the first thing you know all the theaters wanted it … We did this for years, playing all over Ohio, down in Kentucky, and even the tip of Indiana. But what put us out of business was they started putting in the CinemaScope screens in the theaters, which meant no curtain or no stage. So that put me out of business.”

Hobart’s last performance as Dr. Traboh took place in March, 1955, at Middleton’s Strand Theater. Then, concerns over one of his son's chronic asthma found Hobart moving from Ohio to Florida, where the doctors told him the air would be much better for the boy’s health. But before he left, Hobart would provide a monster for a failed local TV pilot called The Professor (1958), where a Communist sleeper agent turned unwitting Americans into werewolves to upset the global balance of power. Hobart played the werewolf, the show didn’t sell. 

Once in Florida, Hobart got on Grefe’s radar through Al Dempsey, who told him about the picture being made from his script, then under the working title Man of Death. Said Hobart (2023), “I got there and there must’ve been fifty people there to try out for parts in the movie.” 

Hobart would audition for the part of Dr. Richardson, but was told he was too young. And so, with Dempsey's encouragement, he went to work with his trusty makeup kit and made himself look 20 years older. He held the ruse through the audition and got the role. Only he really didn’t want to portray that particular character, telling Grefe (ibid), no, “I want to play the monster because I’m the only one who can play the part." One of Grefe's stock players, John Vella, had already been cast as Egon, but Hobart was volunteering to play his alter-ego. Vella didn’t argue. And after seeing what Hobart was capable of, Grefe not only gave him the part but put him in charge as chief monster maker.

Sting of Death would be Hobart’s first credited work in the Florida exploitation boom but far from his last -- other credits include Scream Baby Scream (1969), the mutant maggots for Flesh Feast (1970), and a weird little bugaboo of a movie called Blood Stalkers (1976). With his skills at stunts, makeup, grue, and sleight of hand, as well as being an expert at bodily dismemberment with his honed spook-show gags, he would definitely be an asset to any production. And if you ever needed a corpse in your movie, Hobart was your man according to Grefe.

And so it came to be that Hobart, with an assist from Dempsey and Harry Kerwin, slapped this remarkable -- nay, unforgettable -- monster suit together. Its origins as an off the rack wet-suit were obvious; as are the rubber flippers, which are sometimes attached to the legs, other times both socks and skin are clearly visible as the monster clomps around. “We started off with a Neoprene wet suit one quarter-inch thick,” said Hobart (2023). “We covered it with rubber cement and sanded it to give it a rotting look.”

The pull-chains and streamers of beads and pipe cleaners, all slimed with rubber cement, too, for the tentacles were a nice touch; but the cherry on top was the inflatable trash bag used to represent the head-like polyp. And so, yes, there was a very good reason Grefe kept the monster's head just out of frame for the vast majority of the picture. I can’t even fathom trying to submerge that headpiece, but would dearly love to see some outtake reels where they tried. 

But if you look closely, it looks like they did manage it in the controlled environment of the pool. Apparently, what they did was actually fill the bag up with water, too. Said Hobart (2023), “I took a deep breath, they filled the head with water, and I swam to the end of the pool so they could get a shot of me swimming underwater.” However, “When I came up, I was still underwater in the bag. What seemed like a long time later, the film crew took off the head so that I could breathe again. I didn’t think I was going to make it, but I did. It’s difficult being a jellyfish monster for the movies!” 

As mentioned, Hobart subbed in for actor John Vella whenever he was in Were-Jellyfish mode, so that’s him doing most of the killing; and that’s him again donning the inflatable head piece for the climax, where it becomes quickly clear that Hobart couldn’t see a damned thing while he was wearing it, which also explains why he seldom wore it while he got his murder on.

“They didn’t want the audience to be able to see through it,” explained Hobart (Kitley, 2015). “So we took Vaseline and put it all over the thing so they couldn’t see me in there. That was more important than me seeing them. I was just going by the shadows and that worked out fine.” Well, sort of.

I mean, with those flippers, he could barely maneuver as it was on land, resulting in some pretty turgid chase scenes. And I love how during the climax, when Karen screams at the first reveal, she’s soon out of breath and panting by the time the monster actually gets close enough to menace her.

Now, you may be asking yourself, Wait. Wasn’t that a little dangerous, tying a plastic bag around your head? And the answer would be, Yes. Yes it was. According to Hobart (2023), “On the back of the wetsuit we installed a small hidden pocket to hold an air cartridge that would last for five minutes.” But for the scenes in the cave, this was replaced with an air-hose that was hooked to an air compressor. 

Hobart would later recount several harrowing instances while zipped up in the suit. While filming in the Everglades he dangerously overheated while shooting Donna’s death scene. This was compounded when they tried to fill the suit with ice to help cool him down, only this backfired, sending him into shock. “Al rushed back with smelling salts and I came around.”  

Then, as you watch the final fight, where Hobart is obviously using that flare as a beacon as he blindly stumbles around and reaches for his opponent, you can see the bag rapidly deflating as the oxygen inside is replaced with carbon dioxide. “We put on a good fight,” said Hobart (2023). “In the meantime, somebody outside the studio heard the compressor running and shut it down because he thought the sound might interfere with the filming. The head started deflating fast, and I was re-breathing my own air!” I tell ya, one can only watch and boggle, folks. 

Again, these are Hobart's recollections as all evidence during the climax finds nary a trace of any air hose running to the suit. But! As Lyz Kingsley said in her review of Sting of Death over at And You Call Yourself a Scientist, “[Hobart] rose to the challenge by whipping together a monster so hilariously, so mind-bogglingly inept, it almost circles right back around and becomes a work of sheer genius." 

According to Grefe, Egon's underwater lair was constructed on a rented soundstage at a local TV station, the CBS affiliate WOMETCO. And it's a pretty good guess that all the equipment and scientific doodads were repurposed leftovers from Hobart's spookshow, all made out of pilfered copper rods and pinball machine parts.   

Hobart would also team up with Harry Kerwin for some pretty gnarly special makeup effects, too. The scarring on Egon’s eye is top notch; and at the end, when Egon’s dreams go up in smoke and it looks like the back of his head detonated on impact is startlingly effective. (Pretty sure they ditched the ketchup and borrowed H.G. Lewis’ secret recipe for Kaopectate based stage blood.) Said Grefe (Williams, 2020), “When you look at it today, the jellyfish monster, they’d laugh you out of the theater. But back then they thought it was great, they loved the jellyfish monster!”

Acting wise, I think Grefe got the best he could out of his cast. Joe Morrison was a holdover from Grefe’s first two films, and comes off fine as a poor man’s John Ashley. The script does Valerie Hawkins no favors, as Karen is the worst kind of dense; and so, one hopes Hawkins was into the method if you know what I mean.

John Vella comes off as a poor man's Oliver Reed and actually brings some pathos to Egon. But the rest of the cast is pretty much a blur as they are all just there to be ogled at first and then get killed rather ridiculously. Sharp eyes will spot future Land of the Giants co-star Deanna Lund as Karen’s friend Jessica. She was Larry King’s fiancee at the time of filming, whose career in broadcasting began in Miami.

Once filming wrapped, all efforts to find a second feature to attach to it failed. And so, Flink and the boys at Thunderbird turned to Grefe to bail them out. Could he maybe cook something up quick and have it ready to release in less than four months?

“Back in those days, all horror movies were released on double bills,” explained Grefe (Williams, 2020). “The distributor couldn’t find another horror movie, so he said the magic words: he’d finance another movie if we could make one immediately. The dictated time for releasing these films was April 15th, 1966, because up north all of the drive-in theaters opened -- so we had to have both films ready. This was December. But I couldn’t turn the deal down, so I said, ‘No problem.’”

These efforts netted his producers the equally gonzo Death Curse of Tartu (1966), which Grefe wrote in less than 24-hours and started shooting about twelve hours later. “I knew I had to start shooting immediately. So I went home that night, sat down, and said, ‘What can I write about?’ I took the age-old [idea] -- a mummy, in Egypt, the pyramids -- anyone who disturbs the pyramid he’ll come back and haunt them.” Perfect.

Bill Grefe and friend.  

To save money, “I moved that [notion] to the Everglades and made Tartu an ancient Seminole witch doctor. I stayed up all night and wrote the script in 24-hours. I started shooting the next day and I shot the film in seven days.”

Hobart would return as the monster, too, who faced a similar time crunch while concocting his latest creation. According to the lore, Hobart had the suit slapped together in about four hours after seeing it in a dream. “He preferred playing Tartu as he created all the makeup,” said Grefe (Williams, 2020). "The jellyfish monster was just a big old balloon over his head.”

Alas, the monster suit was cumbersome and took nearly four hours to get it on and another three to get it back off. To save time and wear and tear, Grefe made the decision to make Tartu a skinwalker, who could change into different swamp animals whenever he killed someone. And with this compromise, the production might’ve inadvertently started a local cryptid legend: the Skunk Ape.

“Frank Weed, my animal trainer -- he did Tartu for me -- he had an orangutan that escaped. I think it was Frank Weed's ape -- it escaped, and suddenly it became the Skunk Ape.”

This creative decision was a huge disappointment to Hobart, telling an equally disappointed Kitley, “I said they should’ve let me kill some people as Tartu, like I was, with the spider webs all over me, but it just didn’t happen.”

When the whirlwind production wrapped, Grefe made his April deadline, but from what I found this notorious double-feature didn’t actually get released until late December in a few Florida drive-ins before going wider in 1967. Regardless, critical reviews were both scarce and fairly uncomplimentary.

The Lexington Herald-Leader (May 3, 1967).

“Sting of Death and Death Curse of Tartu are a pair of low-budget, locally made color films which make good use of the flora and fauna of the Everglades,” noted George Bourke, critic for The Miami Herald (January 28, 1967). “But they are rather lean on story delineation and burdened with too many inept performances in supporting roles … They are no worse -- and no better -- than dozens of similar exploitation screaming-meamies.”

Meanwhile, Steve Chighizola of The Miami News did his best to stay positive, saying (January 31, 1967), “It’s not whether you win or lose, but you play the game. In this instance, it’s how you use color film. Death Curse of Tartu and Sting of Death, two locally made films, are to some viewers a failure. Geared to a teen audience only, not even pre-teens could enjoy these flicks to the fullest extent. William Grefe makes very good use of the Everglades flora. Scenery is at its best in the ‘Glades and those who go for scuba diving really will go for the underwater scenes.”

The Bradenton Herald (February 17, 1967). 

Said Grefe in rebuttal (Williams, 2020), “Some of the critics used to criticize our films, and I’d say, ‘Let them try and make a film in seven days and get it distributed.’” Alas, this latest double feature did not get picked up nationally like his previous pictures. From digging into the archives looking for ads, looks like the films made it as far north as the Rust Belt and through the southwest from Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, and all the way to California before stalling out and disappearing completely by 1968. But it looks like the films would resurface in 1970 as the bottom bills for other Florida-based releases. 

After this double feature, Flink bowed out of production altogether but Grefe would continue to work for Fink and Hidalgo-Gato. Their follow-up feature would be The Devil’s Sisters (1966), a bizarre roughie about human trafficking and forced prostitution in Mexico, which was feared to be a lost film until recently resurfacing -- at least partially.

The Sun-Tattler (May 24, 1966).

Then Fink and Grefe would strike a deal with Harry Novak to produce the oddball biker film The Wild Rebels (1967) and the drug-induced The Hooked Generation (1968) for Crown International. Then Grefe sort of entered his stunt casting phase with Rita Hayworth in The Naked Zoo (1970), a tale of seduction and murder, and Impulse (1974), where William Shatner played a con-man / serial killer, who scams lonely hearts out of their money before killing them.

And then there was his brief knock-off phase, beginning with what I believe was Grefe’s most financially successful film, the eco-revenge thriller Stanley (1972), which was essentially Willard (1971) with poisonous snakes instead of rats. 

And while he always insisted his script predated JAWS (1975), it wasn’t until after that film exploded at the box-office before Grefe got a green-light for Mako: Jaws of Death (alias The Jaws of Death, 1976), a polarity reversed, shark as victim tale where the protagonist uses a psychic link to take revenge on those who would prey on his finned friends, which might just be my second favorite Bill Grefe movie. The first? Sting of Death, hands down. Though his redneck revenge caper Whiskey Mountain (1977) wasn’t half bad either.

And like his pal and fellow Florida filmmaker Riccou “Creature from the Black Lagoon” Browning, who pitched in on the underwater stunts for Thunderball (1965), Grefe would sign on with Cubby Broccoli to do some second unit work on the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), who arranged the shooting of the alligator pit and the underwater sequences off of Bimini.

“I’ve learned more about directing from working in the editing room, right along with the film editor,” explained Grefe (Freund, 1966). “I know what it’s going to look like while I’m shooting it.” And as you chart his career, you could plainly see that Grefe got better with experience. However, if I could best sum up his productions, I would use the phrase “pants on fire.” (Remind me to tell you about how Grefe almost killed Harold “Oddjob” Sakata during the filming of Impulse sometime.)

In later interviews when talking about his B-grade films, Grefe almost always got philosophical. “I know what sells and right now I’m dedicated to turning out this sort of picture. Some day I’ll make my David and Lisa (1962),” he explained to Bob Freund of The Fort Lauderdale News (Sunday, December 11, 1966).

“Many people consider movies an art. I agree, but where the director alone is responsible for spending the money for the most results, it becomes entirely a commercial venture. A recent Hollywood production made here in Florida shot 600,000 feet of film. They can afford this. I can’t.” On average, Grefe would expend about 40,000 feet. “In high budget films there sometimes are as many as 27 takes on one scene, all different, all various angles. I can’t afford to do that. I don’t rehearse my actors too much either because I don’t like them to lose spontaneity. I shot in 35 mm, which was expensive, so you’ve got to get it right in three takes or less.”

“Bill runs a happy set, and he’s a wizard to watch,” said Freund. “While his budgets do not match Hollywood’s, he avoids the cliches and pitfalls of, say, the producers of Beach Party and that sort of film. (I believe this is in reference to leaning on rear-projection for the surfing scenes.) He does most of his shooting outdoors, and extemporizes on his own screenplay as he goes along.”

“My first obligation is to my investors,” Grefe told Freund in a later interview (August 2, 1970). “My artistic ego comes second. But I do believe I turned out professional, commercial films.” Can’t argue with that.

And before I wrap this up, I will agree with those critics on one thing: how freakin’ amazing Sting of Death looks, and how much the amazing color just pops off the screen. The too blue water, the fashions, the hairstyles, just BOOM and KA-POW! I swear, each and every frame looks like a mint postcard from 1965, or a spread from a catalog or travel brochure of the same vintage. And I’m talking about the Something Weird release. I can only imagine what the recent Arrow Video release looks like in that William Grefe boxset.

Apparently, the film was shot on 35mm, too, and was almost lost forever due to some invasive mold damage when the folks at Something Weird Video got a hold of the original print. And after two labs took a pass, saying the film was unsalvageable, a third worked a miracle, preserving this vibrant piece of utter nonsense and filmmaking chutzpah in digital perpetuity.

And I will always contend that we, as film watchers, are better for it.

Originally posted on October 24, 2018, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

 

The Sting of Death (1965) Essen Productions Inc. :: Thunderbird International Pictures / P: Richard S. Flink, Joseph Fink, Juan Hidalgo-Gato / AP: Hank Rifkin / D: William Grefé / W: William Kerwin / C: Julio C. Chávez, Julio Roldan / E: Julio C. Chávez / M: Al Jacobs, Lon E. Norman / S: Joe Morrison, Valerie Hawkins, John Vella , Jack Nagle, Sandy Lee Kane, Deanna Lund, Lois Etelman, Blanche Devereaux, Doug Hobart, Judy Lee, Robert Stanton