Saturday night at the Gasparilla International Film Festival, I'll have the pleasure of joining drive-in moviemaker William Grefe for an 8:10 p.m. screening of his 1966 schlock-shocker Death Curse of Tartu, a worthy successor to the Blood Feast screening that went so well (except for the bungled throat-slashing gag) last year.

I promised Grefe (pronounced gre-FAY) yesterday that we won't try that stunt again, after the fake blood splattered on Herschell Gordon Lewis and the theater screen. As long as he doesn't surprise me with a rattlesnake from his 1972 hit Stanley, the heartwarming story of a boy and his venomous pet. We're on the same page, I think.

Grefe is now 79 years old, living in south Florida and 22 years past his last release, the motorcycles-and-psychos saga Whiskey Mountain. He's still revered by grindhouse cinema fans like Quentin Tarantino, whose Los Angeles theater housed a tribute to Grefe last year, showing Stanley and 1974's Impulse, filmed in Tampa at the long-gone Causeway Inn and starring none other than William Shatner as a homicidal ladies man.

As a sample of the stories Grefe will share Saturday night, here's his account of a day filming Impulse when a stunt involving Harold Sakata -- Goldfinger's "Oddjob" -- went terribly wrong, and Shatner's enduring friendship:

"There’s a scene where Shatner is supposed to hang him. We had this (stunt) rig on Sakata that slipped, so he was accidentally choking himself. Everybody thought he was acting except Shatner. He grabbed Sakata – who was a big guy, like a football player – and started yelling: ‘Cut the rope, cut the rope.’ They got him down and he was okay.

"Some crew member shot that from behind the scenes, and I found that footage about a month before I went to L.A. I called up Shatner and told him about it. He said: ‘My god, I’d love to see it. Come by my office and we’ll have lunch.’ He watches it and says: ‘It’s great but there’s no sound to it. Why don’t I narrate this?

"I called up a young filmmaker who's doing a documentary on my career and told him to get over there quick. And Shatner narrated it. He was so funny that we were gagging from laughing: ‘And here’s this big guy, 250 pounds, and I’ve got my hand on his ass and his legs on my shoulders..’ He goes on and on. The guy is really funny.

"He’s always coming up with something. He has a horse ranch in Kentucky, so I asked him one time how his horses were doing. Shatner looked at me and said: ‘Bill, let me tell you something. Never invest in anything that eats while you’re sleeping.'"

We'll also talk about Grefe's 1976 shark thriller Mako: The Jaws of Death, which he freely admits was riding the wake of Jaws: "I wrote Mako way before (Steven) Spielberg ever did Jaws but I couldn’t get arrested as far as getting money is concerned. All of a sudden, Jaws comes out and, oh, the publicity; Life magazine, Time magazine, everywhere it’s Jaws and sharks. My phone starts ringing off the hook from producers who read my storyline and knew I should get it out immediately.

"Before I finished editing the film I made a 7-minute promo for Europe, so we could ride Universal’s publicity machine. We had our money back out of Europe before Mako was even edited.

And, of course, Death Curse of Tartu: "That’s a movie that was just thrown together. I’d made a horror movie called Sting of Death and in those days, all horror movies – basically all drive-in movies – were released as double features. The distributor couldn’t find another horror movie, so he said if you guys can do one, I’ll put up the money. That was the magic word: money.

"In those days it was a nightmare to do a film, with the heavy equipment and editing took months and months to do. He told us we had to have it in theaters by April 15 because that’s when all the drive-ins up north would open up. This was probably the first of December. So, I wrote that script in 24 hours and shot it in seven days.

"I’ve made 20 features and of all the movies, that one has probably sold more DVDs than any movie I ever made. I have no idea why."

See if you can guess from this preview trailer: