Look, there’s no such person as Joe Livingstone, the director of this movie. Or William Palmer, its writer. They’re both Godfrey Ho, the Hong Kong Ed Wood who made at least eighty movies from 1980 to 1990 and may have used over forty screen names, making him the Asian Aristide Massaccesi.

Ho is the master of a cut and paste style of filmmaking that challenges the notions of art and copyright clearances — or he’s a hack out to make a quick buck. He’s also famous for dropping footage of ninjas into movies even if the plot doesn’t call for it. I take issue with this: movies always call for more ninjas.

His love of the word ninjas also led to making movies that have titles like The Ninja Force, Ninja The Protector, Full Metal Ninja, The Ninja Squad, Thunder Ninja Kids: The Hunt for the Devil Boxer, Ninja Terminator, Zombie vs. Ninja, Thunder Ninja Kids in the Golden Adventure, Ninja Force of Assassins, Ninja Knight Brothers of Blood, Ninja of the Magnificence, Ninja Powerforce, Ninja Strike Force, The Ninja Showdown, Power of Ninjitsu, Ninja’s Extreme Weapons, Ninja’s Demon Massacre, Cobra vs. Ninja, Death Code: Ninja, Golden Ninja Invasion, Rage of Ninja, Ninja: The Battalion, Empire of the Spiritual Ninja, Ninja Operation 7: Royal Warriors, Ninja Commandments, Ninja In Action, Ninja: American Warrior, Ninja Operation: Licensed to Terminate, Ninja Operation 6: Champion on Fire, Ninja Phantom Heroes, Bionic Ninja, Tough Ninja the Shadow Warrior, Twinkle Ninja Fantasy (that’s one I gotta track down), The Blazing Ninja and probably ten movie ninja movies. Seriously, those guys are like cockroaches.

He would film footage for one movie, then re-use those shots over and over, which kind of makes him the Asian Roger Corman, but then he’d also find obscure Thai, Filipino and other Asian films, then graft them onto his movies — making him the Asian Bruno Mattei? — and then have several movies made with the budget of one, except no one can even tell where his footage begins and where the other films end.

Ho didn’t stop with stealing footage. He has no idea that music is a copyrightable thing either, so his movies are filled with all manner of sonic thievery, including songs from Miami Vice, Star Trek, Star Wars, anime and even music from Wendy Carlos, Chris & Cosey, Tangerine Dream, Clan of Xymox, Vangelis and Pink Floyd.

Other than some rich musicians and the gullible film public, who gets hurt, right? Well, Richard Harrison, for one. He’d worked with Ho in the past at Shaw Brothers and made a deal to be in a few of his films. A few movies ended up being, well, a veritable onslaught of low-level ninjas films with his name above the title, which did damage to his career. Harrison was the unwilling feature actor in almost a dozen different movies, which sent him back to the United States. Yes, a guy who worked for everyone from Alfonso Brescia, Antonio Margheriti and Alberto De Martino to appearing in Bruce Lee ripoffs and Eurospy films had finally had enough.

And then, out of nowhere, Ho was making mainstream movies. Well, as mainstream as a Cynthia Rothrock film would be. After directing her in Honor and Glory and Undefeatable, he also made Laboratory of the Devil, a remake/remix/ripoff/ unauthorized sequel of The Man Behind the Sun. And then, he went back to his old tricks and used all the same footage to make a sequel to that movie, Maruta 3 … Destroy all Evidence. And then…

Somehow, this movie is 81 minutes and feels like nine hours. It’s all about Alex, who we also find out is the Shadow Warrior*, and now, he has to fight a smuggling ring who are all vampires, which as we all know, hop in China. No one at all is surprised that vampires exist. It is just matter of fact. There’s also a gambler looking to get even with the mob boss who sent him to jail, in case you get bored.

This is also somehow a sequel to Robo Vampire. Trust me, you have no reason to watch that. Or this. I mean, this movie has a silver lame suited superhero moonwalking against vampires, so really you can do whatever you want. Also, this movie makes so little sense that Robo Vampire could very well be the sequel, for all we know.

The poster is pretty awesome, though. And to be perfectly honest, I love these movies.

If you decide you can handle a director who makes Jess Franco look like Fellini, this is on Tubi.

I don’t know what I’m more upset about: the fact that I have watched six Vice Academy movies or that they never made the seventh film.

Candy (Elizabeth Kaitan), Traci (Raelyn Saalman), the commissioner (John Henry Richardson), Devonshire (Jayne Hamil) and Irwin (Chad Gabbert) are all back, while Holly Lauren is playing a new character named Monique McClure, soap star Tamara Clatterbuck shows up and Nikki Fritz is in this as a character named Savvy. And yes, Ginger Lynn shows up as Holly. She really should have had a spin-off.

Rick Sloane made all six of these. This time, the plot has masked bikini bandits who get our heroines put in jail, because, well, the universe of these movies makes no sense. But who cares, right? I mean, let’s face it. The world kind of is in a horrible place right now and it’s really simple for me to wallow in depression and wondering when people will start being decent to one another. So if I decide to watch all the Vice Academy movies in one day — perhaps more than once — and yell the lines out at the screen like a moron, aren’t I engaging in a form of self-care?

People make fun of how bad the Police Academy movies are. Let me tell you, these movies make Mahoney and company look like the cast of an Altman movie by comparison. But I could care less. The world is poorer for the fact that USA Up All Night is no longer on the air, playing movies like this that are complete — and wonderful — wastes of time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

An x-rated computer game gets out of control when the commissioner’s son Irwin (Chad Gabbert, who played the role in the fourth through sixth films of this series) unleashes a virtual reality hooker that tries to take over the world of crime from his father’s basement. Meanwhile, the commissioner is also dealing with his new wife Ms. Devonshire (Jayne Hamil, who was in the first, fifth and sixth of these), who just wants to consummate their marriage.

Yeah, I watched the last two Vice Academy movies. And yes, I am waiting for a second box set from Vinegar Syndrome.

Candy (Elizabeth Kaitan, who is in every one of these but the first film) and newcomer Traci (Raelyn Saalman) are our Vice Academy girls this time out and they have their hands full dealing with the aforementioned Heidi Ho (J.J. North, Vampire Vixens from Venus), a virtual criminal. There’s also appearances by Tane McClure (who would go on to play Elle’s mother in the Legally Blonde movies), Karen Knotts (yes, the daughter of Don), Honey Lauren (who made Wives of the Skies, which we recently covered) and an uncredited Ginger Lynn, who briefly shows up as an inmate, but we should all pretend that she’s Holly working undercover, right?

Pretty much shot in writer/director Rick Sloane’s garage, this movie had such a small budget that Kaitan and Saalman’s outfits came off a dollar rack at an outlet store. This is a movie for those that want the storytelling of pornography without the semen all over the star’s faces. I don’t know who you are, but they made six of these movies just for you. And somehow, I have watched all of them more than once.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Shot in 1967 but unreleased until 1970, this was the first movie from Brad F. Grinter, the man who would later bless the world with Devil Rider!, Blood Freak and the way late in the game nudist films Never the Twain and Barely Proper *.

It’s also the last movie of Veronica Lake, whose peek-a-boo hairstyle made her Hollywood royalty before alcoholism took it all away.

So yeah — the star of I Wanted Wings and This Gun for Hire was living in a woman’s hotel in New York City by the 1960’s, getting arrested for public drunkenness and working as cocktail waitress under the name Connie de Toth. The New York Post outed her and fans were so upset they sent her money, which she returned to each of them. After writing Veronica: The Autobiography of Veronica Lake — in which she laughed off the idea that she was a sex symbol and said that she was more like a sex zombie — she took the money and invested in this shot-in-Florida Nazis back from the dead blast of weirdness. Sadly, she’d die in 1973 from all the liver damage that drinking brings on and most of her ashes were scattered off the coast of the Virgin Islands. I say most of, because in 2004, they found some of them at a New York City antique store.

Lake plays Dr. Elaine Frederick, a scientist who has developed flesh-eating maggots because, well, why not? She goes along with the reborn Third Reich just long enough to get revenge, because her mother was a political prisoner executed in Ravensbrück concentration camp Basically, she brings back Hitler just long enough to throw those skin chewing maggots right in Der Fuehrer’s face. And let’s face it, that’s the happy ending that we all want.

With a great name like Flesh Feast, this movie had one of those lives that we obsess over, playing double and triple bills as late as December 1983. Pretty good for a movie whose budget was so small that cooked rice doubled for the maggots.

*Seriously, Never the Twain came out in 1974 and Barely Proper was released in 1975. I really have to track down the first one, which is all about a real-life supernatural event where the spirit of Mark Twain possessed actor Ed Trostle at the 1974 Miss Nude World Pageant. It’s shot in the very same theater where there all happened.

Will Vinton is probably best known for his Claymation California Raisins, but he also made this incredibly strange movie with a seventeen person crew, which is an astounding achievement.

Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher — yes, all creations of Mark Twain — have snuck on board an airship that will take the real Mark Twain to meet Hailey’s Comet. Twain believes that because he was born the last time the comet came to Earth, he is fated to die when it comes back.

This has some basis in truth, as Twain said, “I came in with Halley’s Comet* in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”” Twain died a day after the comet flew by, living up to his words.

There’s also a devil side to Twain, the Mysterious Stranger, and this movie has often shown up in memes because of just how strange it is*.* It also has scenes from plenty of Twain’s works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Mysterious Stranger, “The Diaries of Adam and Eve (Letters from the Earth),” “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

Not all children’s films are for children, as evidenced by this movie. While anyone in the family can enjoy this, those debating their mortality will get much from this wonderful creation, all made by human hands.

*The film — originally shot in live action black and white for reference, then animated in Claymation, was finished in 1984, but was not distributed until 1986 to commemorate another appearance by Hailey’s Comet.

**That segment was often deleted when this aired on TV, as it was so dark that it disturbed children.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie failed at the box office and nearly ruined the career of John Carpenter. Think of that as you watch it. But did it really fail? It made nearly $20 million on a $15 million budget, but audiences must have expected more. Studios certainly did.

Was it because E.T. came out at the same time, as well as so many other science fiction and fantasy films? Did the recession make people not want to watch something so nihilistic? Did the sheer level of gore turn people off? Were people upset that he remade a film some considered a classic*?

After one market research screening, Carpenter asked the audience what they thought. One answered, “Well what happened in the very end? Which one was the Thing…?” When Carpenter said that the answer was up to their imagination, the response was, “Oh, God. I hate that.”

How could audiences respond to a movie that did not spoon feed them any of the story beats? That doesn’t have a single character to root for or get behind? That is influenced by Lovecraft — as our the other Apocalypse Trilogy installments Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness — in that ordinary people face off with supernatural horror that they are doomed to be destroyed by, which isn’t really what mainstream America wants from a popcorn film?

Yeah, it could be all of those things. Or perhaps, the world was not ready for it. But watching the end of this film, as everyone sits around wondering who has a disease that they can barely understand and know will eventually impact them, yeah. I think the world of 2020 is ready for it.

I wonder what it’s like to watch this movie when it screens every year at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. I bet it feels pretty real there, too.

In an interview with the AV Club, Carpenter said, “If The Thing had been a hit, my career would have been different. I wouldn’t have had to make the choices that I made. But I needed a job. I’m not saying I hate the movies I did. I loved making Christine and Starman and Big Trouble in Little China, all those films. But my career would have been different.”

As it was, Carpenter was reluctant to make the film** and nearly quit before it ever started filming. A lifelong fan of Howard Hawks***, he felt that his version of the story — both are based on Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. — was unbeatable. But as he re-read the original story — spurred on by co-producer Stuart Cohen — he saw how he could make a movie with a vision for his time, just as Hawks had thirty years ago.

Beyond Carpenter, so many talents make this film work. Of course, there are the actors on screen, like Kurt Russell, Keith David, T.K. Carter, Wilfred Brimley, David Clennon and Richard Dysart. But there’s also the astounding production design and storyboards from Man-Thing artist Mike Ploog and Mentor Huebner, which were so detailed that several of the shots from this look like carbon copies of their sketches. There’s Dean Cundy working to make every shot look amazing — this is his first major studio movie with Carpenter. Want it to get even better? Sure, Carpenter could have done the score, but he got Ennio Morricone****. And finally, the Rob Bottin-lef effects team were pushed to the brink of exhaustion — Bottin was only 21 years old and ended up going to the hospital for  exhaustion, double pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer after working for an entire year on the film, sleeping on set — but the work they created will never be duplicated and puts any CGI efforts to remake this film to shame. Carpenter thought that having someone in a suit — like Alien — cheapened the film. He wanted something more. Well, he got it. In the last battle with the Thing, fifty different artists are operating the monster.

We’re lucky that this movie exists. I saw it at the drive-in this year and it felt like it could have been made today. It was too imaginative, too nihilistic and too good for most people, even nearly forty years later.

*One of the reviews that upset Carpenter the most came from the co-director of the original, Christian Nyby, said, “If you want blood, go to the slaughterhouse. All in all, it’s a terrific commercial for J&B Scotch.”

**Originally, Universal was going with Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel as the team for this movie, but were unhappy with their take. John Landis was also considered, but the film was really greenlit when Alien was such a big deal in 1979.

***How big of a fan is Carpenter? You can see scenes of The Thing from Another World during Halloween.

****Morricone’s score for this film was nominated for a Razzie, while his score for The Hateful Eight — which has some unused music from this film in it — won him his only Best Original Score Oscar.