Introducing the Nightmare U.S.A. podcast!

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If you are looking for a podcast where two 50-something year old white guys talk about horror movies from the 1970s and 80s, we are finally here to help fill that need! Join Adam and Sam as we take a deep dive into all of the films discussed in Stephen Thrower’s massive film reference book Nightmare USA. An introductory episode is available now.

New episodes will drop every other Wednesday starting on 6/24/26. Join us as we discuss Don’t Go in the House and find out who that man is with the flamethrower on the cover of the book. Available wherever you listen to podcasts and part of the Someone’s Favorite Productions Podcast network.

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Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: Enduring Destiny (2014) and First Feature (2026)

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Enduring Destiny (2014): If you ever wanted to see what happens when the ambition of a film school student collides with the total lack of a budget and a massive amount of hubris, you’ve found it. Enduring Destiny is the reason to be for Thomas Reilly-King (TRK), a college student who has been in school for what could be a decade. He cared less about being a student and more about creating an auteur film — or vanity project, the line is so thin — that’s a sprawling, unclassifiable epic.

TRK plays the lead, writes the script and directs the madness, forcing his friends to inhabit his world. He approaches the lead role with the kind of unflappable intensity usually reserved for Method actors playing historical figures, not kids making movies in their dorms. He also insisted on an 80s-style theme song that sounds like it was recorded on a Casio keyboard in a wind tunnel. It is the perfect, misplaced anthem for a movie that doesn’t actually exist in the 80s but wishes that it could.

Max Kenner is our hero, a scholarship wrestler and aspiring C.I.A. agent. He has traveled from his suburban California home and is away from his high school sweetheart, Jessica Bateman (Ariel Vida). All alone during a bitterly cold semester at Michigan State University, he will endure triumphs, romance, comedy, mishaps and downright misery. Once a squeaky-clean, slightly cocky guy of privilege and self-determination, he is thrust into a humbling life of physical dependence after tragedy strikes. As a man in a wheelchair, Max’s masculinity is challenged by his reliance on others. 

Don’t step on my brakes, as the song sings. This feels like it lives in the same world as A Karate Christmas Miracle or the zero-budget religious movies that I love, except it’s secular and therefore somehow even more innocent, charming and just plain off. Or maybe a movie like Heard She Got Married, if it had no sense of collaboration. Anyway, whatever it is, it’s entertaining.

First Feature (2026): If you’ve ever spent your last dime on a roll of film, bullied your friends into acting in your magnum opus, or realized halfway through production that your vision is absolutely insane, then you know exactly what’s going on in First Feature. This isn’t just a documentary; it’s a time capsule of ambition, ego and the beautiful, messy reality of DIY filmmaking.

The film follows the journey of Thomas Reilly-King (TRK), an indefatigable student filmmaker with a singular goal: to birth his masterpiece, Enduring Destiny, into the world. Shot over several years, the documentary tracks TRK as he stretches his budget, his friendships and his sanity to the breaking point.

Intercut with this chaos is the perspective of his classmate and documentarian, Curtis Matzke. Looking back ten years later, Matzke provides the necessary distance to examine the absurdity of the original production. It’s a classic case of the tortured artist trope played out in a dorm room setting, capturing that specific, frantic energy of someone convinced they are making the next Citizen Kane while actually operating on a shoestring budget and sheer willpower.

The heart of this film is TRK himself. He serves as the writer, director and lead actor, the holy trinity of the independent filmmaker’s complex. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t just want to make a movie; he wants to build an empire. We watch as he calls in every favor available, treats his student crew like a Hollywood production team  and dives headfirst into the pitfalls of digital-age filmmaking. Watching him navigate the professional aspirations of a student filmmaker against the bizarre, homemade reality of Enduring Destiny is both painful and deeply relatable for anyone who has ever tried to create something out of nothing.

First Feature captures that unique moment in a filmmaker’s life when good doesn’t matter as much as getting it done. It’s a raw, funny and surprisingly poignant look at the obsessive nature of the creative process. If you’ve ever sat through a local screening of a movie that clearly meant everything to its director, you’ll find yourself nodding along to every frame of this documentary. It’s a love letter to the process, warts and all.

I love that TRK made talking action figures of himself and characters from the movie that cost $5,000, which is more than half of Enduring Destiny‘s budget.

This is an essential watch before or after Enduring Destiny.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

JUNESPLOITATION: Sugar Cookies (1973)

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DAY 22. Revenge!

The 1970s New York film scene was a magical, grimy sandbox. If you ever needed proof that the line between high art, avant-garde theater, and pure exploitation was completely non-existent back then, look no further than Theodore Gershuny’s Sugar Cookies (also known by the arguably sleazier title, Love Me My Way).

Just look at the credits on this thing! It’s a mind-melting collision of future Hollywood prestige, future exploitation royalty and Warhol superstars. It was co-written by Lloyd Kaufman, produced by Oliver Stone and stars Mary Woronov and Lynn Lowry.

The movie centers around Max Pavell (George Shannon), a pornographer and drug dealer. Max treats people like disposable tissues, a point proven when he psychologically warfares his attractive model girlfriend, Alta (Lynn Lowry), into committing suicide while his cameras are rolling. He figures it’s just another day in the office and a great way to sell some snuff-adjacent photos.

Enter Camilla (Mary Woronov), Alta’s deeply intense lesbian partner. Camilla isn’t going to let Max get away with it, but instead of just shooting him, she cooks up a complex, psychological revenge plot. She crosses paths with Julie (also played by Lynn Lowry), an aspiring actress who looks exactly like the late Alta.

Camilla takes Julie under her wing, molds her, trains her to mimic Alta’s every mannerism and unleashes this doppelgänger right into Max’s psychological blind spot. What follows is a bizarre, erotic and tense game of cat-and-mouse that feels like a Euro-sleaze thriller dropped directly into a trashy New York loft.

Lowry is an absolute goddess of 70s independent horror and cult cinema (The Crazies, Shivers). Here, she gets to flex her acting muscles playing two entirely different personalities. She brings that ethereal, slightly unhinged, yet deeply fragile vibe that only she can deliver. And of course, Woronov is the ultimate screen presence. Whether she’s dominating the screen for Andy Warhol, ruling Rock ‘n’ Roll High School or being hilarious in Eating Raoul, she commands attention. Her chemistry with Lowry is electric, cold and captivating.

Keep your eyes peeled for Warhol superstar Ondine as Roderick, legendary adult film icon Jennifer Welles as Max’s secretary, and Monique van Vooren (Flesh for Frankenstein).

Director Theodore Gershuny (who was married to Woronov at the time) shoots this with a cold, stylistic eye that elevates it above its exploitation roots. It oscillates between an arthouse psychodrama and a total sleazefest, never quite settling on either, which is exactly why it works so well.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Subterranean Psychotronica 2026: Satan’s Storybook (1989)

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Week 1 (June 21 – 27) – Welcome to HELL

The summer’s here, so get ready to broil!

Satan’s Storybook prefigures the streaming horror anthology films that litter our streaming services today, yet it’s miles above them, not just in its two tales, but in a connecting story that makes you want even more.

Directed and co-written by Michael Rider, who was also a zombie in the shot on video Hororama, this movie starts with the bride of Satan (Leslie Deutsch) — who by the way looks amazing and just like a late 80s heavy metal album cover come to life — being abducted by ninjas, one of whom is her sister, who is played Ginger Lynn, so of course I was beyond in love with this segment. This upsets Satan so much that he demands that his jester tell him some stories to keep his mood light. This segment hints at a third story, as well as more of the story that is never delivered, and honestly, that’s the only thing about this movie I dislike, because it leaves you wanting so much more.

“Demon of Death” is all about Zeek Heller (co-writer Steven K. Arthur), a serial killer who abducts metal and horror fans — she has a Scared Stiff poster on the all-black walls of her room — Jezebell Jones (Leesa Rowland) and even wipes out her family before being sent to rot in jail. He’s just like so many metal dudes I knew in 1989, except, you know, he randomly looks up girls in the telephone book — placing this firmly in 1989 — and kills them. Then he gets arrested by the law, who say things like “The only thing that stands between you and Old Sparkey is us, and we don’t give a lizard’s dick if you do fry, you buttplug!” The trial goes on and on, and right before they throw the switch, Jezebell does some black magic that doesn’t turn out the way she planned. It’s grimy and grainy, and you can see people reading their lines off scripts, which some reviews proclaim as the sign of a bad movie, as if they’d never watched SOV before.

The second segment, “Death Among Clowns,” has a clown named Charlie (Grady Bradner, the writer of The Howling and Cameron’s Closet in his only movie as an actor) hanging himself in his dressing room and then engaging in lengthy dialogue with another clown named Mickey La Mort, who is played by this film’s director and writer, Rider. This is the segment that usually makes people hate this movie, as it seems to go on forever, yet I love it. Mickey the clown keeps getting more demonic as the segment moves on, and basically this is two writers putting together endless dialogue in one location — with a Howling IV: The Original Nightmare poster no less — and no twist ending. Exactly what you think is going to happen — a clown dragging another clown to Hell — happens. It’s. Kind of fascinating, like a near murderdrone with no murder.

This movie has so much fog throughout that one wonders if it was considered a pack-in with fog machines so people could learn of their power.

Satan’s Storybook has the feel of Night Train to Terror, and I mean that in the best of mind-melting ways. There are so many moments in this that make little to no sense at all, and that’s what I demand from my films. If anything, this is a movie where Ginger Lynn magically transforms from a ninja to a barbarian princess, and if you can’t find some wonder in that, I think you should give up watching films and reading this site. Bring on the synth and distorted voices. Bring on the rubber-masked demons. Bring on the fog, the glorious fog.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Murder, She Wrote S4 E6: It Runs in the Family (1987)

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Jessica’s British cousin, Emma MacGill (Angela Lansbury!), is charged with an old flame’s murder.

Season 4, Episode 5: It Runs In the Family (November 1, 1987)

You see, most folks know Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, the Cabot Cove death-magnet who publishes paperbacks and stumbles over more corpses than the entire Corleone family. But the real heads know that the producers occasionally let Lansbury completely cut loose and play her own identical British cousin, Emma McGill. When Emma’s on the screen, the show stops being a cozy New England procedural and transforms into a full-blown British melodrama. We’re talking gothic manor houses, inheritance disputes and family members who hate each other.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

  • Richard Johnson (Lord Geoffrey Constable): The doomed love interest in a smoking jacket here, but genre fans worship him as the desperate Dr. Menard from Lucio Fulci’s legendary, eye-gouging, shark-fighting gore-fest Zombie, as well as Sergio Martino’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail.
  • Carolyn Seymour (Pauline Constable): The insecure, overcompensating villainess of the manor, but genre fans know her as the resilient Abby Grant from the bleak, post-apocalyptic BBC cult series Survivors and a beautifully icy Romulan Commander in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • Anthony Newley (Insp. Frost): The baffled local inspector, but genre fans know him as the avant-garde mastermind who directed, scored and starred in the unhinged, deeply surrealist 1969 psychedelic comedy-drama Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?
  • Ian Abercrombie (Dr. Blandings): The stuffy aristocratic physician, but you know him as the robed, Necronomicon-guarding Wise Man from Sam Raimi’s medieval-slapstick horror masterpiece Army of Darkness.
  • Mark Lindsay Chapman (Johnny Constable): The unpleasant nephew who sneaks poisoned chocolates, but he was also the mutated, maniacal arch-nemesis Dr. Anton Arcane from the USA Network’s beloved ’90s Swamp Thing TV series.
  • Jane Leeves (Gwen Petrie): The bit-part housemaid way before her Frasier fame, but she was also one of the high-kicking dancers in the legendary “Every Sperm is Sacred” musical extravaganza from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
  • Christopher Hewett (Humphrey Defoe): The family lawyer looking over the will, but genre fans know him way before his Mr. Belvedere sitcom days as the flamboyant, dress-wearing theatrical assistant Roger De Bris in Mel Brooks’s comedy classic The Producers.
  • John Standing (Arthur Constable): The only sane member of the family heritage, but genre fans know him from Peter Greenaway’s visually obsessive arthouse drama The Belly of an Architect and the gritty, star-studded WWII thriller The Eagle Has Landed.
  • John David Bland (Derek Constable): The spoiled brat kid who gets shot in the arm for a frame-up, but genre fans know him as the ultimate, leather-jacket-wearing ’90s television hunk from the syndicated, high-camp action explosion Acapulco H.E.A.T.
  • Rosemary Murphy (Sybil Constable): The legendary, icy matriarch who drives her daughter-in-law to commit double homicide just by turning up her nose. She played Sara Delano Roosevelt in Eleanor and Franklin, but you may have also seen her in To Kill a Mockingbird and A Case of Rape. 
  • Lester Fletcher (Rev. Twilley): The pious man of God trying to keep the peace. He was also the dramatic, silk-scarf-wearing elite art critic from the high-camp, neon-soaked ’80s detective classic Remington Steele.
  • Pamela Kosh (Mrs. Dexter-Hundley): The ultimate disapproving upper-crust aristocrat, but genre fans know her as the deeply eccentric, bird-brained substitute teacher Miss Davis who tried to bring British discipline to Bayside High in Saved by the Bell.
  • Peter Browne (Butler): The stiff-lipped servant carrying the poisoned herring on a silver platter. He also has a career in stunt-adjacent, blink-and-you-miss-him background work across high-concept ’80s action cheese like Knight Rider and Airwolf.
  • Peter Ashton (Burt): The local working-class bloke hanging around the edges of the estate. He was a certified background legend of British television, having spent years playing various soldiers, sailors and sketchy dockworkers in everything from Doctor Who to The Twilight Zone.
  • D.J. Sullivan (Pru): The gossiping village local keeping tabs on the manor house. You may recognize her as Mrs. Williams from the Killer Tomatoes movies.

What happens?

We open at a lavish family dinner at Blackraven Manor. The atmosphere is so thick with snobbery you could cut it with a silver butter knife. Sybil and Pauline are treating Emma like she’s a stray dog that wandered into the dining room. They think she’s a gold digger after Geoffrey’s fortune.

But Geoffrey? He’s glowing. The doctor said he was a goner, but The Power of Love is real, folks. Emma gets up, winks at the piano player, and launches into a lively rendition of “Spoon With Me” (a total actor allusion to Lansbury’s 1946 flick Till the Clouds Roll By). Geoffrey is captivated. Pauline looks like she swallowed a lemon.

Later, in the library, Geoffrey pours his heart out to Emma, mentioning his old friends Oliver and Kitty Trumbull. He tells her he’s rewriting his will.

The next afternoon, the family gathers for high tea and snacks. Geoffrey enjoys his favorite treat: pickled herring. Ten minutes later, he’s clutching his throat and collapsing onto the Persian rug. The local inspector arrives, and because the family points their manicured fingers right at Emma, she becomes the prime suspect. But Emma isn’t Jessica Fletcher’s cousin for nothing. 

Emma starts snooping. She realizes something fishy. Geoffrey’s ninety-year-old father died a month ago. Everyone blamed old age, but Emma realizes both men were poisoned. Meanwhile, family drama boils over. Derek demands money from his dad for a ski trip. Arthur, stepping up as the new Viscount, finally grows a backbone.

To throw the cops off the scent, Pauline does the unthinkable: she shoots her own son, Derek, in the arm, trying to frame Johnny (who was already a suspect because he sneaked grandfather those poisoned chocolates). But Emma pieces it all together. The snobbery, the timing, the inheritance. She gathers everyone in the grand drawing room for the classic Fletcher-style reveal.

Emma lays it out: Pauline killed the old Viscount, then killed Geoffrey, all so Arthur would inherit the title immediately, making Pauline the new Viscountess Blackraven. Then, she produces the evidence, as she’s found the poison trace in Pauline’s vanity.

Pauline collapses into a sobbing, pathetic heap on the floor as Sybil realizes that her snobbery literally killed her father and her brother.

Who made it?

Another episode by TV vet Walter Grauman, written by series creator Peter S. Fischer.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

Yes. A whole episode of Emma! 

Was it any good?

Yes! A classic episode even without J.B.

Any trivia?

Jessica Fletcher never appears in person. This is the only time in the entire series where this happens. 

Richard Johnson revealed that while he was on set getting poisoned by pickled herring for this episode, it was his long-time partner-in-crime, Angela Lansbury, who staged a full-blown career intervention. The two of them went way back. They’d shared the screen two decades earlier in Terence Young’s costume-comedy romp The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders. By the time 1987 rolled around, Johnson had largely stepped away from the camera to play the suit, running his own outfit called United British Artists. He was busy producing heavy-hitting arthouse fare like Harold Pinter’s Turtle Diary, Nicolas Roeg’s desert-island drama Castaway, and the utterly devastating Jack Clayton flick The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. But Lansbury wasn’t having any of it. She looked her old pal dead in the eye and laid down the law, telling him: “Anybody can be a producer, Richard. You actually have talent as an actor, and you are completely wasting it!” Do you think she saw Island of the Fishmen?

Give me a reasonable quote:

Emma: “Well, Jessica always said mystery has a way of finding our family. I suppose it really does run in the blood.”

What’s next?

The night deputy, who has been paying attention to various Cabot Cove ladies, needs Jessica’s help when he becomes the prime suspect in his wife’s murder.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Subterranean Psychotronica 2026: Poor Devil (1973)

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Week 1 (June 21 – 27) – Welcome to HELL

The summer’s here, so get ready to broil!

Sammy Davis Jr. was a fascinating, walking contradiction of a man. He was an absolute dynamo who could smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, draw and fire a Colt Single Action Army Revolver in a quarter of a second and effortlessly balance being a parody of himself while simultaneously parodying himself. But beneath the Mr. Show Business grin was a life of unbelievable grit and complexity.

Davis battled rampant racism his entire career, even from the wings of the stage where his own Rat Pack cohorts would casually toss racial slurs like “smokey” at him. In a searing interview with Roots author Alex Haley in Playboy, Sammy talked about the first time he truly collided with American racism: in the Army. He was brutally beaten just for looking at a white female commanding officer while she gave him orders. He woke up with his body covered in anti-Black graffiti and doused in turpentine. Yet that very night, and every night after, he was still expected to perform for the troops. That’s where Sammy learned he’d have to fight just to be respected. Once he broke into Hollywood, he stayed in by any means necessary, even if it meant putting on a grin that sometimes came off as insincere.

Despite his massive fame, he was never allowed full membership in the Hollywood elite. His romances with white actresses like Kim Novak rubbed the establishment the wrong way. And while he was a massive financial engine for the Civil Rights Movement, his relationship with the Black community was incredibly complex. He earned plenty of ire when he publicly hugged and supported Richard Nixon in 1972. But look at the context: Sammy was originally a Democrat who campaigned heavily for JFK in 1960 and RFK in 1968. Yet, John F. Kennedy notoriously revoked Sammy’s invitation to the presidential inauguration because he had married white actress May Britt. Nixon, on the other hand, invited Sammy to be the first Black guest to ever sleep at the White House. You can see why his allegiances shifted.

Once, Jack Benny asked Sammy about his handicap on the golf course. Sammy didn’t miss a beat: “Handicap? Talk about a handicap. I’m a one-eyed Negro Jew.”

That brings us to the 1970s, where Sammy fully embraced the free-swinging sex scene of the era. He reportedly learned how to deep throat from porn star Linda Lovelace herself and it’s widely believed he was first introduced to Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan during an orgy at his own star-studded nightclub, The Factory.

It makes a weird kind of sense. And it all perfectly aligned with a bizarre NBC television pilot Sammy starred in, one that actually led to him accepting an honorary second-degree membership in the Church of Satan.

Originally airing on February 14, 1973, Poor Devil stars Sammy Davis Jr. as, well, Sammy. He’s a low-level bumbling demon who has completely screwed up his job for the last thousand or so years. Now, he’s desperate to succeed and prove his worth to his big boss in Hell: Lucifer, played by the towering, majestic Christopher Lee. Honestly, if you don’t immediately go hunt this up on YouTube, just stop and appreciate the sheer madness of Dracula himself playing Satan opposite a Rat Pack icon.

To finally win over the dark lord, Sammy is given a seemingly simple task: he has to convince a miserable, downtrodden accountant named Burnett J. Emerson—played by the great Jack Klugman!—to sell his soul.

What does Klugman get in return? Oh, just total wealth for seven years and the chance to get sweet, petty revenge on his insufferable boss, who happens to be played by none other than Adam West! It’s a television fanatic’s dream. The catch, of course, is that after those seven years are up, Klugman is headed straight to Hell for eternity. As Sammy describes it, Hell is “a lot like Miami, only less humid.”

Sammy flirted with the Church of Satan heavily around the production of this flick. He painted one fingernail blood-red, wore a heavy Baphomet medallion and flashed the horns from time to time on stage before finally dropping out of the scene by the mid-1970s (right around the time Anton LaVey went into seclusion).

You really have to wonder where this show would have gone if NBC had picked it up as a weekly series. Would Sammy tempt a different guest-star celebrity every week? Would Klugman have stayed on as a regular? Would LaVey have made a cameo in the sweeps episode?

Instead, all we are left with is this 1973 pilot. It’s a wonderful artifact of early-70s network strangeness, completely devoid of a laugh track and dripping with overt occult imagery. It was a wild, lawless time to be alive, and it’s a era of television we will never truly see again. But hey, if the only thing that ultimately came out of this bizarre experiment was the infamous, real-life photo of Sammy Davis Jr. hanging out with Anton LaVey and future Temple of Set leader Michael Aquino, I’m calling Poor Devil an absolute, unholy success.

You can watch this on YouTube.

JUNESPLOITATION: Twilight Theater (1982)

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DAY 21. Free Space!

Aired on February 13, 1982, this 90-minute bizarro sketch comedy pilot was co-executive produced by Steve Martin. NBC was trying to figure out what to do to relieve the pressure on Saturday Night Live‘s grueling production schedule, so they preempted SNL for a week to give Steve’s brain-child a test drive. What we got was a head-on collision between old-school variety show cheese and the new-wave, cocaine-fueled, anarchic comedy of the early 80s.

The framing device is honestly the best part. It plays like a parody of Masterpiece Theatre, celebrating the show’s 25th season. The legendary Roddy McDowall hosts from a plush wingback chair, wearing a tuxedo and cape, seated beneath oil portraits of the cast members (women included), all in formal wear, holding pipes. It sets you up for some high-concept satire. Instead, you get greeted by a black guy in drag humming the theme from Gone With the Wind and then things get really weird.

Like any pilot, this thing throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it is pure late-night genius; some of it makes you wonder if the writers’ room was just a pile of loose scripts and paranoia.

  • Playhouse Minus-One: This is the absolute crown jewel of the special. It’s a Civil War melodrama where the camera is the main character, a Southern belle named Mary Lou. You play Mary Lou, and your dialogue flashes on the screen with stage directions, and actors like George Peppard, Michael York and Steve Martin wait patiently for you to deliver your lines at home. It culminates in Steve Martin aggressively making out with the camera lens.
  • Auto Interruptus: Steve Martin plays a guy driving a carpool of three dudes to work. He turns on a radio talk show only to hear his own wife blabbing to the host about his terrible sexual performance. The punchline? She’s sleeping with all three guys in his carpool. It’s a dark, cynical take on the mockery of 80s machismo.
  • Women Who Have Made It With Me: Martin Mull hosts a talk show where he interviews three of his ex-lovers, only for them to systematically dissect how completely unmemorable he was in bed.
  • The No-Arms Bandits: Martin Mull plays a bank robber with no arms. He holds up a couple with a gun in his mouth, but the victims can’t understand his muffled orders, and he steals their wallets out of their pockets using his teeth.
  • Party in My Pants: A literal interpretation of the phrase in a song written by Robert Haimer and Billy Mumy, better known as Barnes & Barnes. You watch well-dressed people shrink down and disappear into the giant pant cuff of a derelict’s trousers to dance to disco music. It’s a classic Steve Martin concept—absurd merely for the sake of being absurd.

Plus, you get Harry Anderson (right before Night Court fame) playing an overage grade-school pervert and a hidden-camera sketch where Steve Martin tries to romance a girl using a series of terrible visual puns (she asks for flowers, he brings her cooking flour; she tells him to “stuff it,” so he slam-dunks a basketball in his bedroom).

Because it’s 1982, the musical interludes are delightfully all over the place. You get a performance by the legendary Devo, some cowboy yodeling from Riders in the Sky and the Temple City Kazoo Band playing Strauss.

The critics at the time absolutely hated this. They complained about the obtrusive, unconvincing laugh track that sounded like a drunk guy guffawing at his own jokes. They called it tedious, juvenile and a pale imitation of Fridays or SNL.

But looking back at it now through the lens of obscure television history? It’s a fascinating time capsule. It sits right in that awkward transitional phase where comedy was trying to evolve past the Carol Burnett Show format but hadn’t quite figured out how to sustain that new-wave, anarchic energy for a full 90 minutes.

The cast includes Candy Clark, Rosemary Clooney (singing on a show called “Common Nightmares”), Pam Dawber, Shelley Duvall, Bill Murray, Carl Reiner, Rick Moranis, Mr. T, Leslie Neilsen, Betty Thomas and even Pee-wee Herman, fresh off his Groundlings days and his 1981 HBO special, performing a bit of The Pee-wee Herman Show on network TV before the world even knew what hit ’em. This was written by Jim Fisher and Jim Staahl from SCTV; Carmen Finestra, the writer and executive producer who guided The Cosby Show and co-created Home Improvement; Gary Jacobs, who would go on to write for Newhart and create Empty Nest; SNL writer Kevin Kelton and sitcom vet Jeffrey Barron. They were joined in the writer’s room by executive producer Neal Israel, who, along with Pat Proft, pretty much shaped 80s movie humor. Or they made Police Academy. Director Perry Rosemond worked on a variety of shows and directed episodes of Bizarre.

It ends with Steve Martin doing his classic stand-up routine in front of a giant American flag, reciting the ridiculous things he believes in. There’s a second one of these with Leslie Nielsen hosting, and you better believe I’m looking for it now.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: Demonetize (2026)

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Influencer culture is the new slash-and-burn territory for horror, providing many victims in movies today. It’s the perfect target—vain, desperate, and begging to be offed. Alexander Boyd Watson’s Demonetize takes that premise and runs it through a meat grinder.

A washed-up paranormal investigator, Martin (Sean Carrigan), is desperate to reclaim his glory days. He figures out that if ghosts really are drawn to the energy of smartphones and clout-chasing, the best bait in the world is a house full of insufferable social media influencers.

His plan? A Big Brother-style lockdown in the infamous Blackwood Estate. He rounds up a quintet of absolute bottom-feeders from the influencer sphere to live-stream a 24-hour challenge. The catch: they think it’s a staged reality show with a big monetary reward and the promise of social clicks, likes and clout. Martin locks them in, expecting a ratings bonanza. Instead, he gets a bloodbath.

Once the door locks and the cameras start rolling, the entities inside realize these people are full of the exact kind of hollow vanity they feed on. As the Wi-Fi signal begins to flicker and the influencers realize they’re actually dying, the social media facade drops. It turns into a claustrophobic, survival-of-the-fittest nightmare where the ghosts are just the beginning of their problems.

If you’ve ever sat there watching a TikTok influencer act like a fool and thought, “I really hope something terrible happens to them,” well, consider Demonetize your wish fulfillment for the year. Oh yeah — I loved seeing Doug Jones out of makeup as Hunter Zollinger, the slick, soulless agent behind the scenes. There have been plenty of streamer horror films as of late, but this one has a fun energy.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: Dead Media (2025)

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Alright, I feel seen beyond seen. Uncle Heppy Sloke (Sam Landman) is the crazy relative we all wish we had, someone who has every movie on bootleg, sneaks us beer when we’re in our teens, and stays friends with us when we grow up and grow away from them. 

His niece Maggie (Sammi-Jack Martincak) just wants to unwind with a quick stream, but one text to her uncle brings him over with a DVD. It’s Night of the Lurchers, a fictional horror flick, but instead of just settling in for a movie, Maggie triggers a hidden Easter egg on the disc. Suddenly, the boundary between the movie and reality dissolves. They aren’t just watching the horror; they’re trapped in it. They’re getting pulled into special features, interacting with the director and running for their lives from the titular Lurchers. It’s a meta-horror nightmare that treats the DVD menu screen like a gateway to hell. 

It’s going to put Heppy and Maggie face-to-face with one of his heroes, Dr. Sven Rendall (James Urbaniak), as well as the actor who plays him, Guy Leopold. The movie has some wild rules, as every menu on the DVD becomes another part of reality. 

Director Joseph Scrimshaw—who you might know from his work with RiffTrax and his podcasting history—clearly understands the rituals of the movie-watching experience. The film is a satire of how we let pop culture dictate our lives, but it also genuinely loves movies.

The coolest trick in the bag? The way the film plays with the actual mechanics of a DVD. It’s not just monsters in the house; it’s about the frustration of commentary tracks, the weirdness of behind-the-scenes featurettes and the idea that some movies are just too dead to stay on the shelf. If you’ve ever felt like your collection was starting to stare back at you, Dead Media is for you.

I also enjoyed how it fleshed out Maggie’s friends, Daniel (Antonio Teodoro), and her landlady/potential lover, Brenda (Jessica Fenton). They feel like real people, so when horrifying things happen, we feel for them, unlike so many of the slashers all over my shelves. Obviously, Scrimshaw loves horror, too. There’s a director who locks everyone in the theater and an owl-masked serial killer right out of Stage Fright, a theater set that feels like Demons, and plenty of Romero zombie feel. There’s a push to something beyond, as the Lurchers steal movement, which is a great scientific explanation for why characters in Fulci films just freeze while spiders eat their faces.

Uncle Heppy is someone who makes me look at myself. As someone surrounded by walls of DVDs and missing the past — a 20-minute burst of watching old music videos last night both made me happy and depressed — I know his ending, even if the film doesn’t reveal it to us. 

Other than being a little long, this movie is pretty great. There’s a great twist, decent effects and kills, and Dead Media accomplishes what so many larger movies fail at: mixing funny and frightening. It has heart, which is more than I can say for most movies made after the 1980s.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026: Blood and Guts (2025)

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The Adams family — John, Tobey Poser, Zelda and Lulu — isn’t your typical suburban clan. They don’t just watch horror movies. They live them, breathing life into a DIY empire of low-budget, high-splatter independent horror. In this 80-minute deep dive, directors Carlye Rubin and Katie Green pull back the curtain on a family where the dinner-table talk is just as likely to be about practical effects and gore gags as about day-to-day life.

At its heart, Blood and Guts explores the blurring of boundaries, both professional and personal. We follow the Adams family as they navigate the relentless grind of indie filmmaking. Their living room is a practical effects workshop, their backyard a soundstage, and their relationships are forged in buckets of fake blood.

The film captures the chaotic beauty of their creative process, showing that while they might be covered in synthetic gore and tossing profanity around like confetti, they are subject to the same universal pressures as any other family. As the industry changes and its internal dynamics shift, the Adams have to figure out how to keep their unique brand of cinematic terror and their family unit intact.

Much like the legendary family-run operations of exploitation history (think of the communal, all-hands-on-deck nature of early regional horror sets), Blood and Guts suggests that when your work is your life, you never really clock out. And while many documentaries focus on the how-to of filmmaking, this leans heavily into the“why, painting a portrait of a family that has embraced the fringes of cinema not just as a career, but as a way of being together.

I’d recommend watching any of their films, including Hellbender, The Deeper You Dig and Where the Devil Roams. Then come back, watch this and see how much work goes into their art.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.