EDITOR’S NOTE: Dangerous Curves was on USA Up All Night on May 17 and 18, 1991; January 24 and August 22, 1992 and March 26 and April 17, 1993.

Chuck (Tate Donovan) is the quintessential uptight college student who lands a golden opportunity: deliver a pristine Porsche to a businessman, Louis Faciano’s (Robert Stack) daughter in Lake Tahoe. If he completes the assignment, a great job is his for the taking. Of course, he makes the classic mistake of letting his hormone-driven roommate, Wally (Grant Heslov), talk him into a detour to San Diego.

Naturally, the car gets stolen. Instead of coming clean, the duo decides to play detective to avoid losing the gig. They cross paths with two pageant-bound friends, Blake (Valerie Breiman) and Michelle (Danielle von Zerneck, who is married to the accordion player in The Pogues, James Fearnley).

The car thief happens to be another big business guy, Greg Krevske (Leslie Nielsen, not yet the king of parody), who is using the stolen Porsche as the grand prize for the beauty pageant. After a WetBike chase and a high-stakes infiltration of Krevske’s yacht, the boys and the girls join forces to outsmart the villain, recover the car, fall in love and expose his shady business dealings just in time for the pageant finale.

This is a movie filled with people you will be comfortable seeing again, like Robert Romanus (always Mike Damone) as a cab driver, Robert Klein, Elizabeth Ashley (from Windows!) as a pageant mom, MTV VJ Martha Quinn and Tool Time Girl Debbe Dunning.

It was directed by David Lewis, who was the cinematographer on UHF, Night of the Demons and the Olsen Twins’ Our Lips Are Sealed. It was written by Michael Dugan (who created the MTV series Remote Control), Michael Zand (the suicidal terrorist in the beginning of To Live and Die In L.A.) and Paul Brown, who wrote Thrashin’.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Darkman was on USA Up All Night on May 24 and October 3, 1997 and November 5, 1994.

Before he had the chance to make Spider-Man, Sam Raimi had wanted to make a comic book movie. Having failed to get the rights to The Shadow and Batman, he just decided to create his own hero. Drawing inspiration from Universal Monsters like The Phantom of the Opera as well as The Elephant Man, he created Darkman, the tale of a once noble man driven to savagery as well as a tragic love story.

Raimi submitted the treatment to Universal Pictures, which was greenlit for a budget of $8-12 million dollars. Over twelve or more drafts — working alongside writers like Chuck Pfarrer, brothers Daniel and Joshua Goldin, and Raimi’s brother Ivan (a doctor who ensured that the medical and scientific aspects were authentic) — Raimi and his producer Robert Tapert pushed the character and movie further and further until they ended up with a three-part character arc: It starts with a sympathetic hero being destroyed. He becomes filled with hatred before finally hating who he has become as he fades away from humanity.

Despite the movie performing worse than probably any Universal movie ever in test screenings, a great ad campaign — the Who Is Darkman? posters are amazing — and decent reviews allowed this film to gross $49 million on a $ 16 million budget.

Dr. Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is developing a new type of synthetic skin to help burn victims. However, every time the skin is exposed to light for more than 99 minutes, it disintegrates.

Meanwhile, his attorney girlfriend, Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand), has discovered evidence proving that developer Louis Strack Jr. has been bribing zoning commission members to build a brand-new city. When she confronts him, he confesses that it was necessary to create new jobs while warning her of Robert Durant (Larry Drake, who is incredible in this), a mobster who also wants the evidence to use against him.

At Westlake’s lab, our hero and his assistant Yakatito continue to test the skin when Durant and his men — including Ted Raimi as Nicky, Nicholas Worth (The Glove, Don’t Answer the Phone) as Pauly, Dan Hicks (Evil Dead II) as Skip and Dan Bell (who you’ll remember from Wayne’s World) as Smiley — break in to take the documents that Julie has found. Yakatito is killed, and Westlake is torn to shreds — his hands are burned, his face is dipped in acid, and an explosion throws him through the building as Julie watches from the street.

Westlake is found and brought to a hospital that experiments on him with a treatment that severs the nerves of the spinothalamic tract. Now, he no longer feels physical pain, and the lack of sensory input overloads his adrenaline, giving him enhanced strength. However, he’s now susceptible to frequent bouts of alienation and madness. Look for Jenny Agutter (Logan’s Run, An American Werewolf In London) in a cameo here as the doctor who treats Westlake.

The rest of the world thinks he’s dead, so Westlake starts creating a mask of his original face to cover his burns. Seriously, Tony Gardner’s makeup is great. As he works away in his skid row lab — an homage to the Tesla coil-filled lairs of Universal movies — he also works on wiping out Durant’s henchmen one at a time.

Darkman balances horror and superheroics in equal measure, along with romance and pathos. The end of the film, as Westlake fully disappears into his new identity as The Darkman and escapes from Julie into a crowd, is the best comic book ending I’ve ever seen in a film. Raimi gets it, even ending the film with dialogue where the hero finally accepts his name: “I am everyone and no one. Everywhere. Nowhere. Call me … Darkman.”

I love that Raimi took a somewhat Hollywood budget and turned in a movie that’s pretty much a modern take on Dr. Phibes, while keeping the spirit of Universal Monsters, filtered through the hyper colors of Bava and the kinetic zooms of Fulci. It’s also a movie that presents a hero who has completely and utterly lost his mind, yet we are still with him every step of the way.

Darkman would return in two direct-to-video sequels without Neeson playing the lead role, Darkman 2: The Return of Durant and Darkman 3: Die, Darkman, Die. There was also a thirty-minute pilot for a TV series made in 1992 that never aired.

Marvel Comics also published an adaptation of the movie and a sequel mini-series. Darkman would return to comics in 2006 in a crossover with the Evil Dead and Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell was the original choice for the lead and shows up at the end). There were also four Darkman paperbacks — The Hangman, The Price of Fear, The Gods of Hell, and In the Face of Death — published in 1994.

Scott Reynolds’ directorial debut, The Ugly, isn’t just any slasher. It’s a grim, stylized and genuinely uncomfortable look at a fractured psyche. The film takes place within the decaying, claustrophobic walls of an Auckland asylum. Simon Cartwright (Paolo Rotondo), a young, soft-spoken serial killer who has already racked up a body count in the double digits, is looking for a way out. He requests a reevaluation specifically from Dr. Karen Schumaker (Rebecca Hobbs), a psychiatrist with a reputation for high-profile forensic cases.

As the two begin their sessions, the film unwinds through a jagged series of flashbacks. We learn about Simon’s traumatic upbringing under a mother (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) who viewed him as a burden to be broken. It’s here that the title reveals its meaning—a sick, twisted take on the Ugly Duckling fable. Simon isn’t just a killer; he’s a vessel for The Ugly, a violent, psychic alternate persona that demands blood. While Dr. Schumaker tries to diagnose him, she realizes too late that she isn’t just treating a patient. She’s playing with a predator.

Beyond the story, The Ugly is all about great visual storytelling on a budget. Director Scott Reynolds made the bold choice to render all the blood in the film as a thick, viscous black. It’s a striking stylistic decision. And let’s talk pedigree: the makeup effects were handled by the legendary Wētā Workshop. Before they were winning Oscars for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, they were busy turning this low-budget New Zealand shocker into a visceral, squirm-inducing experience.

The Unearthed Films Blu-ray of this film features a new 4K scan from the 35mm interpositive, along with extras such as commentary with actors Paolo Rotondo and Rebecca Hobbs, moderated by Nathaniel Thompson; two of Scott Reynolds’ short films; a visual essay; a photo gallery; and trailers. You can get it from MVD.

Do you like and/or know who Cradle of Filth is? Then you may/may not care about this movie, which features nearly everyone from the band’s Midian era lineup, as well as placing leader Dani Filth into a role that connects all of the stories.

It was written and directed by Alex Chandon, who had directed the band’s videos for “No Time to Cry” and “Her Ghost in the Fog.”

Things start with The Man (Filth) being attacked by two muggers before he turns things around and kills both of them. The stories are a mixed bag — that’s putting it lightly — generally involving goth-looking girls dying horribly, like a girl who sleeps with The Man and has a monster rip its way out of her womb and kill one of her friends.

Everything and every story is the fault of Kemper, the son of a Satanist who has been using his occult abilities to abduct and kill children while even now continuing his rampage through his son — The Man — from a mental ward.

There’s an amputee who can’t have sex with his wife until he kills his friend and takes his leg. Then his wife dies in a car crash, and he kills himself. When the police arrive, The Man kills them both. That’s the whole story of that segment, which feels like an excuse to show amputee sex and the gore of a woman who has gone through a car window.

The cop who is trying to get to Kemper keeps hitting dead ends, and even his son is caught up in this, growing obsessed with internet snuff chatrooms and ending up killed in one. He finally makes his way to the sanitarium, but even after he shoots The Man in the head, tentacles emerge from the wounds to end the movie.

You can see the Amicus influence in this, but it’s kinda like a Cradle of Filth song: long, overblown and yet still fun in parts. Your mileage, as they always say, may vary.

The Unearthed Films Blu-ray release has plenty of extras, including a making-of for Cradle of Fear; the special German DVD making-of for Thing Something for Cradle of Fear; a gallery; trailers; Alex Chandon shorts, including Chainsaw Scumf***, Bad Manor, Bad Karma, Drillbit and Night Pastor; and more. You can order it from MVD.