7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964, Warner Archive Collection, Blu-ray, NR, 100 min.). This engaging fantasy was the final film directed by the great George Pal, who previously had made “The Time Machine,” “The War of the Worlds,” “Atlantis: The Lost Continent” and “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.” In the film, Tony Randall (“Pillow Talk,” “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and TV’s “The Odd Couple”) plays seven roles, those of Dr. Lao, The Abominable Snowman, Merlin the Magician, Apollonius of Tyana, Pan, The Giant Serpent and Medusa. So successful was the various make-ups that they earned William Tuttle a special Academy Award. It also earned an Oscar nomination for Jim Danforth’s special visual effects.

The setting is the dusty Western town of Abalone, a town run by the cruel Clint Stark (Arthur O’Connell of “Anatomy of a Murder,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Picnic”). One day, Dr. Lao walks into town with his mule and hires town newspaper editor Edward Cunningham (John Ericson of “Bad Day at Black Rock,” “Bedknobs and Broomsticks”; here he also plays transformed Pan) to print a two-page ad for his circus in the newspaper.

Lao’s circus turns out to be more a collection of sideshows, including fortune telling, a serpent that can grow in size, magician Merlin, Medusa who can only be looked at via a mirror and others, rather than a tradition circus. However, he brings real magic to the two-night event.

Meanwhile on the romantic front, Cunningham has been after town librarian/teacher Angela Benedict (Barbara Eden of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” TV’s “I Dream of Jeannie”). She is a single mom with 8-year-old son Michael (Kevin Tate of “Bulley for a Badman”).

On the evil front, Stark is trying to rush the town’s occupants into selling their property, saying the pipe that brings water from 16 miles away is breaking and would cost $237 to fix. His real reason is he has learned the railroad will be putting a line through the town. Aiding Stark as his muscle are Carey (Royal Dano of “Killer Klowns from Outer Space,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales”) and Lucas (John Doucette of “True Grit,” “Cleopatra”).

The film is a charming, thought-provoking fantasy that appeals to all ages with its mythological characters and its genuineness and warmth.

Extras include a featurette on Tuttle, which shows how he makes masks for MGM Studios (12:23); and the Tom and Jerry cartoon “The Cat Above and the Mouse Below,” involving a duel during the cat’s opera singing on stage (6:40). Grade: film 3.75 stars; extras 2 stars

Rating guide: 5 stars = classic; 4 stars = excellent; 3 stars = good; 2 stars = fair; dog = skip it

Purchase link for some titles: https://moviezyng.com?bg_ref=ApLKdWV51k

Creepy Creature Double Feature: The Slime People and The Crawling Hand (1963, VCI Entertainment/MVD Visual, Blu-ray, NR, 164 min.). These two early Sixties science fiction films were very low budget. “The Slime People” (76 min.), directed by star Robert Hutton (his only directing; he acted in “They Came from Beyond Space,” “The Steel Helmet”), seems to have invested most of its budget in a fog machine – at no time are more than three of the rubber-suited slime people seen on camera – and most of the invasion action took place before the start of the film. “The Crawling Hand” (88 min.), directed and co-written by Herbert L. Strock (TV’s “I Led 3 Lives,” “Colt .45,” “Bronco”), main effect is a torn-off arm with a hand that crawls and likes to strangle people.

In “Slime,” when pilot Tom Gregory (Hutton) flies into Los Angeles – low through some fog – he lands at an abandoned airport, but comes across Professor Galbraith (Robert Burton of “The Big Heat,” TV’s “The Magical World of Disney”) and his two daughters, Lisa (Susan Hart of “Ride the Wild Surf,” “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine,” “City in the Sea”) and Bonnie (Judee Morton of TV’s “General Hospital,” “The F.B.I.”). They inform him the city has been invaded by slime people who have lived underground for centuries but apparently have been disturbed by underground nuclear bomb testing. They have invaded the surface world, killing with their spears and releasing a fog that turns solid, so the city’s temperature is lowered so they can exist above ground 24/7.

As the quartet tries to find a way to dissolve the fog – shades of bacteria in “War of the Worlds,” here the solution is simple table salt – they encounter former marine Calvin Johnson (William Boyce of “Café Purgatory”). Despite the dire circumstances, there is time for romance between Calvin and Bonnie and between Tom and Lisa. Amazingly, a meat store they hide in has not been looted and boy those big low meat price signs will be nostalgic for the older generation.

“The Crawling Hand” is the better of the two films and appeals to a more youthful audience, what with some rock and roll on the jukebox and a younger star-crossed couple in Paul Lawrence (Rod Lauren of “The Young Swingers”) and Swedish exchange student Marta Farnstorm (Sirry Steffen, actually Icelandic, of “Hitler!”), who find the astronaut’s severed arm on the beach.

The film opens with space command forced to self-destruct their second failed lunar launch, as something has gone wrong as it approached Earth, leaving the astronaut with no oxygen for more than 20 minutes. They believe there may have been an alien infection.

Yes, the hand crawls, first killing Paul’s landlady and then trying to kill him. While Paul lives, he seems infected and soon starts trying to strangle people himself. Handling the local investigation is Sheriff Townsend (Alan Hale Jr. of “Hang ‘Em High,” “The Giant Spider Invasion,” TV’s “Gilligan’s Island”). The space agency investigators are Steve Curan (Peter Breck of “Shock Corridor,” TV’s “The Big Valley”) and Dr. Max Weitzberg (Kent Taylor of “Smooth as Silk,” “Sued for Libel”).

The films come with the worst subtitling I have ever seen, with multiple wrong words and misspelled names. Extras include “Rubber Monsters, Real Fears,” a brief look at mid-century science fiction films (3:02); an entertaining gallery of posters from 1950s and 1960s science fiction films (7 min.; it includes “The Mysterians” that I saw as a pre-teen); and Tom Weaver’s discussion of “The Slime People,” including portions of his telephone interview with actress Hart (54:49). Grades: The Slime People 1.75 stars; The Crawling Hand 2.25 stars; extras 3 stars

Echoes of Dread (2026, Leomark, Blu-ray, NR, 80 min.). This is the better of three films released on Blu-ray from writer-director Philip J. Cook (TV’s “Malice”), who also served as the producer, cinematographer and editor, as well as built the sets, as he also did with his earlier “Despiser” (see next).

When “Nerd Warriors” digital creators Samantha (Michelle Principi of “Periphery”) and Rueben (Austen Greene of “Gettysburg 1863”) unearth a cursed film from 1908 that has been buried for more than a century, they unknowingly unleash a nightmare that spreads through their Internet audience. They then must race to stop an ancient evil before it turns the Internet into its hunting ground. The evil is called The Despiser, which would tie into Cook’s earlier film.

Helping them out are Gordon Hay (Mark Hyde of “Ghost Planet,” “Malice: Origin”) and Norman (Mike Diesel of “Caveat”).

The film perhaps shows the old black-and-white film bits too much, but it has some effectively creepy monsters, including a thing from the toilet that chases Rueben, people stuck in the wall of the underground drainage system and the super baddie. It did seem strange that such a small Virginia town would have such a giant drainage system, including a central cistern. Grade: film 3 stars

Despiser (2001, Leomark, Blu-ray, R, 104 min.). This is writer-director Philip J. Cook’s earlier film, which suffers from too much of it being digitally created. Gordon (Mark Redfield of “The Death of Poe”), a video game developer, gets fired, loses his apartment because of overdue rent, which forces his wife Maggie (Gage Sheridan of “Twilight of the Dogs”) to move into her mother’s apartment, and then he dies in a car accident. It’s been a tough day, but he ends up in purgatory and gets aligned with fighters against the Despiser. The fighters, for some unexplained reason, also were characters in the video game he was working on.

These fighters are led by Carl Nimbus (Doug Brown) and include Fumie Tomasawa (Frank Smith) and Charlie Roadtrap (Tara Bilkins). The car chases seem so fake, but there is fighting and explosions. Then, suddenly Gordon is back among the living, helped by Norman (Mike Cuccherini, later Mike Diesel of “Echoes of Dread”). However, an agent of the Despiser has Maggie jump to her death, so Gordon has to go back to purgatory to save her.

The script is somewhat incoherent and the excessive CGI is off-putting. Grade: film 1.5 stars

Invader (1991, Leomark, Blu-ray, R, 92 min.). In yet this column’s third film by writer-director Philip J. Cook, a crashed UFO and its reverse-engineered computer system take over the minds of soldiers at an air force base in Virginia. The alien entity (called A.S.M.O.D.S., or Asmodeus, an automatic strategic flight offense and defense system for fighter jets) is uncovered by National Scandal tabloid reporter Frank McCall (Hans Bachmann of “Beyond the Rising Moon”) and Department of Defense Capt. Harry Anders (A. Thomas Smith).

After several run-ins with under-control servicemen – the alien program “enlightens” people; think “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” – the duo escapes the base in a stolen F-19 and end up at the Pentagon, where they are met with skepticism by General Anheiser (John Cooke of “Now You See Me 2”). A running – bad – joke has McCall constantly calling him General Budweiser. Grade: film 2.5 stars

Destination Inner Space (1966, Leomark, Blu-ray, NR, 81 min.). In this probably made-for-TV film, a group of scientists working in a deep-sea research station discover a strange craft of extraterrestrial origin, which hatches silly-look monsters that want to destroy them. The film’s name is strange as it makes one think it might be exploring inside a human’s body.

Directed by Francis D. Lyon (“The Destructors”; winner of the 1948 Oscar for film editing on “Body and Soul”), the humans include Commander Wayne (Scott Brady of “Gremlins,” “Johnny Guitar”), Rene Peron (Sheree North of “Maniac Cop,” “Breakout”), Doctor LaSatier (Gary Merrill of “All About Eve,” “Twelve O’Clock High”), Hugh Maddox (Mike Road of TV’s “Jonny Quest,” “The Roaring ‘20s”), Dr. James (John Howard of “The Philadelphia Story,” “Lost Horizon”), Dr. Wilson (Biff Elliot of “I, the Jury”) and Sandra Welles (Wende Wagner of “Rosemary’s Baby,” TV’s “The Green Hornet”).

Wayne is the newcomer to the Institute of Marine Science platform and has a history with Maddox, which leads to Maddox hating him. That is about all the drama here, as the rest is some scientific stupidity in handling samples that grow into killer amphibians. The final underwater battle is a bit murky too. Grade: film 2.25 stars

The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966, Leomark, Blu-ray, NR, 85 min.). The hunt for movie monsters seems to have gotten a bit desperate in the mid-1960s. Here, they are tree-like creatures that can move and kill – of course – after they are carried from recently uncovered, previously frozen Antarctica location to a remote island with a U.S. Navy base. Directed by Michael A. Hoey, Jon Hall and Arthur C. Pierce, with Hoey and Pierce adapting Murray Leinster’s novel for the screenplay, the dialogue often seems suitable for a TV sitcom, and most of the action takes place offscreen.

Leinster, by the way, was the pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American novelist and short story writer renowned for pioneering science fiction concepts such as parallel universes, the universal translator and a proto-Internet in “A Logic Named Joe.” During his five-decade career, he published more than 1,500 stories, 14 movie scripts and hundreds of radio/TV plays, earning Hugo and Retro-Hugo awards and lending his name to the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Among his books are “The Brain Stealers,” “The Forgotten Planet,” “City on the Moon,” “The Pirates of Zan/The Pirates of Ersatz,” “Four from Planet 5,” “The Duplicators” and the time travel books “Time Tunnel,” “Timeslip!” and “Sideways in Time.”

The cast has a couple of familiar faces. Mamie Van Doren (“Teacher’s Pet,” “Girls Town”) plays Nora Hall, who is liked by Bob Spaulding (Edward Faulkner of “The Green Barets,” “McLintock!”), the station’s meteorologist, and Billy Gray (“The Day the Earth Stood Still,” TV’s “Father Knows Best”) plays CPO Fred Twining. In one scene, a character’s arm is ripped off, but the actor is too obviously hiding his arm under the front of his jacket. Grade: film 2 stars

Possessed (1931, Warner Archive Collection, Blu-ray, NR, 76 min.). Moving away from fantasy and science fiction is this sizzling pairing of Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, directed by Clarence Brown (“Anna Karenina,” “National Velvet,” “The Human Comedy”). Rumors at the time said their affair continued offscreen as well.

Crawford (“Mildred Pierce,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”) plays ambitious paper box factory girl Marian Martin, who rejects the marriage proposals of coworker Al Manning (Wallace Ford of “Freaks,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Harvey”), because he cannot offer her the life of luxury she craves.

Watching a train slowly pass one day, she meets passenger Wallace Stuart (Richard “Skeets” Gallagher of “Lightning Strikes Twice”), who offers her champagne and his card, should she ever end up in New York City. When months later, she shows up at Stuart’s NYC apartment, he is dismissive, but as she is leaving, she sees two men arrive by elevator and enter his apartment. Marian sneaks in behind them and meets lawyer Mark Whitney (Gable of “Gone with the Wind,” “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “It Happened One Night”) and he invites her to dinner.

The film then jumps forward three years, during which she has been Whitney’s mistress, cultured through living with him and traveling to Europe, but he will not marry her due to having been dumped by his previous wife. Instead, she is known as widow Mrs. Moreland and has been set up with her own apartment.

Their arrangement gets upset when Manning arrives, now successful in building projects and trying to get Whiteny’s approval to build a major road project. Seeing Marian, he again presses her for marriage, not realizing her arrangement with Whitney. One of the fun parts of the film, is their date among the attractions on Coney Island. Matters become further complicated when Whitney is pressed to run for governor, a goal that would make having a mistress a liability.

Extras include the all-dog cast “Love Tails of Morocco,” involving the Dogville Foreign Legion (16:21) and the Looney Tunes cartoon “Bosko the Doughboy” (7 min.). Grade: film 3.25 stars; extras

Follow Me Quietly (1949, Warner Archive Collection, Blu-ray, NR, 59 min.). There is not a lot happening in this police procedural that opens with magazine reporter Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick of “Come to the Stable”) trying to get information on a serial killer from police Lt. Harry Grant (William Lundigan of “Pinky,” “Mystery in Mexico”). The killer is known as “The Judge,” due to the notes he leaves behind. He kills when it is raining, strangling his seven victims from behind.

Gorman tags along with an at-first unwilling Grant, but she gives him an idea of a clue, which ultimately leads to discovering the killer’s identity. The film is pretty routine until the chase ending, even if the final result is predictable.

The extra is “Dark Shadows,” a “Crime Does Not Pay” subject that actually has more mystery in the case of a slain doctor (21:33). Grade: film 3 stars; extra 2.5 stars

You: The Complete Series (2018-2015, Warner Bros., 15 DVDs, NR, 40 hours). This collection contains all five seasons and 50 episodes of the psychological thriller series based on the books by Caroline Kepnes and developed by Greg Berlanti and Sara Gamble.

In season one, the show follows Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley of “Easy A,” TV’s “Gossip Girl”), a New York City bookstore manager and serial killer who falls in love and develops an extreme obsession with Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail of 2 “Five Nights at Freddy’s” films). Season two has Joe move to Los Angeles and fall in love with local heiress Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti of TV’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor”).

In season three, Joe and Love are married and raising their newborn son, Henry, in the suburb of Madre Linda. As their relationship dynamic takes a new turn, Joe continues to repeat his cycle of obsession with a burgeoning interest in Natalie Engler (Michaela McManus), the next-door neighbor, and local librarian Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle). However, Love ensures that her dream of having the perfect family will not be torn away so easily by Joe's compulsive actions.

In season four, after his previous life went up in flames, Joe has fled to Europe to escape his messy past, adopted a new identity and, of course, starts pursuing true love. Joe, however, soon finds himself in the strange new role of reluctant detective, as he discovers he may not be the only killer in London. During the season, Joe bonds with wealthy socialites, deals with a stalker and is drawn towards Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie of TV’s “Ghosts,” “Call the Midwife”).

Finally, in season five, Joe, after a long time, returns to New York City and is ready to live a good life at last, but his past and dark desires collide with this new life, in which he meets playwright Bronté (Madeline Brewer of TV’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Orange Is the New Black”). Grade: series 3.5 stars