Jefferson Bailey (Scott McGinnis, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) owns the hottest business in 1983: a video arcade. It’s driving local business tycoon Joseph Rutter (Joe Don Baker, a man whose name I screamed into the ear of a sleeping girlfriend once, which is a long story I should really get to sometime) nuts, so he gets his two nephews and plans on shutting down the arcade. Mean! Unfair! No!

Bailey’s too smart for Rutter and has two pals named Eugene Groebe (Leif Green, Davey Jaworski from the legendary bomb Grease 2) — who is molested by swimsuit girls before he even gets to the arcade — and McDorfus, who are ready to deal with this affront.

This movie was such a big deal that Midway allowed the image of Pac-Man, their new game Satan’s Hollow, and the as-yet-unreleased Super Pac-Man to be used during the big showdown at the movie’s end.

Corinne Bohrer, who is pretty much teen movie royalty thanks to appearances in films like Surf II, Zapped! and Stewardess School, shows up, as does John Voldstad, who played “my other brother Daryl” on TV’s Newhart.

There are two real reasons to watch this movie. One is the theme song, which has beeps, boops and promises “video to the max” and “totally awesome video games!” This song will infiltrate your mind and not leave, trust me.

The other big reason is John Gries, who completely owns every scene he appears in as King Vidiot, a punk rock maniac surrounded by punker girls who communicate only in video game noises when they’re not all riding miniature motorcycles. In a more perfect world, King Vidiot would be the star of the film. Every other person pales in comparison to his greatness. Gries would go on to steal the show in plenty of other films, including Real Genius, Napoleon Dynamite, Fright Night, The Monster Squad, and TerrorVision.

This all comes from Greydon Clark, who directed The Uninvited — a movie where George Kennedy does battle with a house cat — Without Warning and Wacko, as well as appearing in movies like Satan’s Sadists.

The saddest part of this movie was that, even though the good guys won, arcades would be dead by the mid-1980s. So really, the bad guys did win. King Vidiot? Well, no one knows what happened to him.

René Clément, fresh off the success of Purple Noon (another Delon vehicle), opted to shoot iJoy House in lush black-and-white. This choice turned the Mediterranean villa into a labyrinth of shadows. While the plot sounds like a standard potboiler, Clément treats the house itself as a character—a gilded cage where everyone is both predator and prey. Clément also wrote the script with Pascal Jardin and Charles Williams, which was based on the book Joy House by Day Keene.

Marc (Alain Delon) is a gambler on the run, not too many steps ahead of gangsters who want him for sleeping with their boss’s wife. He ends up getting work for Barbara (Lola Albright, Peter Gunn‘s girlfriend) as a driver. Of course, her young niece Melinda (Jane Fonda) becomes attracted to the roguish man, but soon they learn that Barbara is hiding another man, Vincent (André Oumansky), in her house, keeping him almost as a slave after he killed her husband for her. They plan on killing Marc and using his passport to get away from the police. Marc and Barbara are also sleeping together, so Vincent kills her, and the gangsters mistake him for Marc and kill him. Whew!

That’s not the end of things. Melinda helps Marc get rid of the bodies, but when she figures out that he’s leaving town, she calls the police and keeps him, just like she learned from Barbara. Fonda’s performance is pivotal. She starts as the ingénue, but the film tracks her evolution from a curious girl to a cold-blooded successor. By the end, she isn’t just saving Marc; she’s collecting him. The cycle of the house remains unbroken; only the warden has changed.

A few years ago, Fonda revealed that Clément tried to have sex with her, but she refused. He was 51 at the time, while she was only 27. He wasn’t the only one who tried this; she was asked by Delon as well. Clément’s move was that “he wanted to do it because her character had to have an orgasm in the movie and he needed to see what Fonda’s orgasms were like.” Afterward, he was kind for the rest of filming and never asked again. As for Delon, he was at the height of his “most beautiful man in the world” fame. His off-screen reputation for being difficult and predatory often bled into his roles, making his portrayal of the desperate Marc feel uncomfortably authentic.

Johnny Firecloud (Victor Mohica, Don’t Answer the Phone) just got back from Vietnam and made his way back home to New Mexico. If he thought it sucked before he left, well, it sucks even more now. Colby (Ralph Meeker) runs the town and has a mad on for Johnny, probably because his daughter June (Christina Hart) lost her virginity to him and never got over the Native American getting drafted. The cops, like Sheriff Jesse (David Canary), are bought and paid for. So when the one person who believes in Johnny, his drunken grandfather and tribal chief White Eagle (Frank DeKova) is killed by the cops and some alcoholic rich punks and then the virginal teacher Nenya (Sacheen Littlefeather, who accepted the Oscar for Brando) gets assaulted in a way too long scene, well, Johnny is going to take everything he learned in the white man’s army and go nuts. 

Imagine: Billy Jack and Paul Kersey with no budget or restraint.

Produced by David Friedman, directed by William Allen Castleman (Bummer) and written by Wilton Denmark, this is a movie filled with wild moments like Johnny scalping people, slicing their eyelids off so they fry in the son, burying a dude neck deep and letting snakes crawl around him, putting George Buck Flower’s head inside a sack filled with poisonous snakes, blowing up trailers and plenty of bar fights. There’s also a bad guy who threatens, “One of these days, you and me gonna tangle assholes,” and I have no idea how to answer that.

I would 200% play this in a fancy art theater as a double feature with The Farmer, and that’s why no smart movie place should ever give me a chance.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Much like the Italian western, after so many years and so many movies, the blaxploitation film needed to be more than just comedy or crime. Horror — witness Blacula, Sugar Hill and Abby, as well as Ganja and Hess, Scream Blacula Scream, and Dr. Black and Mr. White — could also be made for black audiences.

Isaac “Ike” Hendrix (Glynn Turman, who is absolutely incredible in this movie) is a hard-working taxi driver and law student in New Orleans who takes a break from studying for the bar and heads out with his girlfriend, Joan Pringle (Christella Morgan), for an evening. He’s hypnotized at a show, and immediately after, everything is different. That’s because he’s become the host for the spirit of murdered hustler J.D. Walker, changing completely from a quiet man struggling to change his life to a love machine ready to slay on the dance floor, in the bedroom and on the killing floor. The transformation is astounding, as is the backstory: J.D. was once tied to Elijah Bliss (Louis Gossett Jr.), now a preacher; his older brother, Theotis (Fred Pinkard); and the woman they all loved.

There’s a powerful scene at the end as brother battles brother and J.D. — fully owning Ike — dances and laughs like a demon who has taken this proud holy man and city leader back to their roots as simple criminals, a microcosm of the black experience of attempting to climb out of the horrors of poverty reduced to falling back down the chasm of violence. It’s really something else.

Director Arthur Marks also made Detroit 9000, Friday Foster, Bonnie’s Kids and Bucktown. The script is by Jaison Starks, who also wrote The Fish Who Saved Pittsburgh. It also has a doctor who tells his patient that he’d probably get better if he smoked some weed, which is quite forward-thinking for 1976.

There’s also the absolutely wild scene where J.D. picks up a woman at a bar — this is after he’s dominated Joan, who Ike had such a sweet and mutually giving relationship, having rough sex with her, saying “Daddy’s doing you good baby” and then beating her just to show who is in charge — and gives her “the best fucking she ever had” before her boyfriend gets home. She’s in a panic. J.D. simply says, “You better go talk to him then,” before grabbing a straight razor and slashing the man’s throat with no effort at all.

Everything wraps up way too neat and clean, but who cares? Getting there features some great performances and an interesting story that must have influenced later black horror like Bones.

I’ve been pretty fascinated by the filmography of John Hayes lately. The man who gave us the atmospheric dread of Garden of the Dead and Grave of the Vampire takes a hard turn here, trading in gothic horror for the neon-and-pavement grit of the exploitation circuit, though he also directed adult films.

The story centers on Vicki March (played with a mix of wide-eyed innocence and questionable judgment by Therese Pare). At just seventeen, Vicki is navigating the hormonal minefield of teenage life. Her boyfriend, Robert (Roscoe Born), is practically turning blue in the nether regions because she won’t go all the way.

Vicki isn’t exactly a prude, though. In a sequence that feels less like a teen romp and more like a low-rent Joe D’Amato Caligula rip-off, she throws a party while babysitting that quickly spirals into hedonistic chaos. This leads to a harrowing moment where a partygoer attempts to assault her, only for Vicki to be rescued by the sophisticated Lorraine (Lydia Wagner), who claims to be an executive liaison, a title that sounds prestigious until you realize it’s just 1970s shorthand for high-end sex work.

Eventually, Vicki tries to get into the trade but doesn’t charge her first client, who has a heart attack just trying to sail the seas of mayonnaise. 

This has a van called The Desert Fox, a story that comes around to having Vicki’s man knocking out her would-be rapist and a title that promises filth and does not deliver. Yet I enjoyed it. It could be the strange line readings, the dialogue like “No way was I training you to be a hooker, but I can teach you how to watch out for dog shit!” and an appearance by Mariwin Roberts, Penthouse Pet Of The Month April 1978. And is that Michael Pataki? It sure is. And Billie Mae Richards, the voice of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

You can watch this on Fawesome.