Jake and Elwood Blues (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) went from a musical comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live to a $30 million budget mission from God as they careers of the Not Ready for Prime Players left New York City and set out for Hollywood.

There was a bidding war for this movie. After all, SNL, Animal House and The Blues Brothers album were all huge. Belushi was suddenly the star of the week’s top-grossing film, top-rated television show and singing on the number-one album all at the same time.

Universal won and what they got was a new writer in Aykroyd who wrote a long script that director John Landis was still writing and didn’t have a final budget until well after shooting started, at which point Belushi was already going wild in Chicago, drinking and drugging up a storm while cars were crashed everywhere and money was pretty much set ablaze.

It doesn’t matter. This movie is still remembered long after its star and all that money have gone away.

Raised in an orphanage and taught the blues by Curtis (Cab Calloway), the brothers became blood when they cut their middle fingers with a guitar string from Elmore James, the King of the Slide Guitar.

The past is important in this film, as Aykroyd demanded Calloway, James Brown, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin to be cast and get musical numbers. Universal wanted younger acts and disco stars. They lost.

The story is simple. The brothers want to raise money to save their orphanage. That’s it. That’s the story. The rest is a road movie full of comedic scenes that you can basically come into any time that you want.

They could have filmed what happened during the making of the film and had just as great of a film. For example, there was an entire bar on set, The Bles Bar, staffed with drug dealers. And on one night shoot, Belushi disappeared. Aykroyd looked around and saw a single house with its lights on. He walked over and the owner of the house said, “You’re here for John Belushi, aren’t you?” He had walked into their home, asked if milk and a sandwich, and went to sleep. This is why he was nicknamed “America’s Guest.” Belushi was also called “The Black Hole” because he would lose his sunglasses after nearly every scene.

Beyond Paul Reuebens, Steven Spielberg and Carrie Fischer, there’s a secret Colleen Camp cameo. Look for her Colleen Camp’s Playboy poster on Ellwood’s hanging up in a scene.

I remember this movie running so many times on HBO in my youth and watching it nearly every time. I could watch it right now, even after watching it to write this.

Two ghost hunters have been summoned to protect a family against something known as The Candy Witch. This might be their hardest case yet, filled with so many twists and turns, as this evil curse begins to kill nearly everyone connected to it.

Writer-director Rebecca J.Matthews also made the amazingly titled Pet Graveyard and has movies named Witches of Amityville Academy (my OCD for watching every movie with Amityville in its title is my curse, much worse than any Candy Witch), Jurassic Island, Bats: The Awakening and Cam Girls in the works. Great names. Hopefully they are all better films than this.

That said, someone gets killed with boiling chocolate and another with cotton candy. I’ve never seen that, so it has that going for it.

The Candy Witch is available June 9 on DVD and Digital from Uncork’d Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR department.

Michael O’Donoghue is one of my heroes. A major contributor to National Lampoon and the first head writer of Saturday Night Live, he was also the first performer to utter a line on that series. When he returned to the show in 1981, as Dick Ebersol hoped that he could add back a sense of the old days to the program, O’Donoghue screamed, “This show lacks danger!” As he said this, he spraypainted the word on the wall, but ran out before finishing the word. It must have worked. Catherine O’Hara quit before she was even in a sketch.

O’Donoghue was fired after writing the never-aired sketch “The Last Days in Silverman’s Bunker”, which compared NBC president Fred Silverman to Hitler, with John Belushi coming back to play the man and a giant Nazi eagle clutching the NBC logo already constructed.

He was hired back by Lorne Michaels in 1985 and he wrote a monologue for Michaels’ friend Chevy Chase that started, “Right after I stopped doing cocaine, I turned into a giant garden slug, and, for the life of me, I don’t know why.” Needless to say, he was gone again.

After a lifetime of chronic headaches, he would die from a cerebral hemorrhage but left behind some wicked humor that still adds up. I always refer to his attack on SNL, referring to it as “an embarrassment. It’s like watching old men die.”

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that NBC would pay him to make a parody of Mondo Cane, including using the Riz Ortolani song “More.” It was also to feature a performance of the Sex Pistols playing “My Way,” but the owners of that song’s copyright would not allow that to happen.

The copy I have of this movie was the version released on home video in the early 1980s by Mike Nesmith’s Pacific Arts label. The Shout! Factory release is missing the theme from Hawaii Five-O.

Much like any mondo, this is a journey through a strange world, with everything from Dan Aykroyd showing his webbed toes and worshipping Jack Lord, Kalus Nomi in a dream sequence, swimming cats, a Tom Schiller-directed take on nudie cuties, Laserbra 2000 and a restaurant where patrons are yelled at.

Tons of famous people are in this, including Carrie Fisher, Teri Garr, Debbie Harry, Margot Kidder, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman, Golda Radner and Paul Shaffer.

Oh yeah — the haunting theme to Mondo Video? That’s “Telstar” with singer Julius La Rosa on vocals, both in English and Italian.

Much like a real mondo, this film at times is uneven and makes little sense. But when it’s good, it’s really good. You can watch this on YouTube.

Stephen Surjik, who directed the filmed segments of The Kids in the Hall, takes over for Penelope Spheeris, who claims that star Mike Myers blocked her from getting to make the sequel. Myers wanted Federico Fellini to direct. I have no idea if that was a joke or not.

As for Myers, he was already in trouble with Paramount Pictures boss Sherry Lansing. That’s because the original story for this movie had Wayne and Garth starting their own country in an update of the movie Passport to Pimlico. The film was well into pre-production — sets were being made — when Myers confessed that he was basing it on another movie. Lansing threatened to ruin the star’s life if he didn’t get a new script finished right away.

Jim Morrison and Sammy Davis Jr. meet Wayne in a dream and tell him to create a concert called Waynestock. Of course, Cassandra (Tia Carrere) and her band Crucial Taunt will play. And Wayne will marry her, if he can get through her father (James Hong, Big Trouble in Little China)and her manager Bobby Cahn (Christopher Walken).

Garth’s (Dana Carvey) line, “That was just like the first movie,” was taken out of the trailer. But this movie — rushed into production to capitalize on the success of the original — really does feel like more of the same. That’s not the worst thing, but if you have to make a choice of which to watch, go with the first film.

That said, any movie that has a Rip Taylor cameo in it can’t be all bad.

It does seem like an audacious gamble, taking a sketch that previously only existed as a short take on public access TV and getting the director of The Decline of Western Civilization to make a full-length story, but hey — Wayne’s World is the most successful of all the Saturday Night Live movies. It gets by on heart, on weirdness and on the likeability of its leads.

Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) are on the cusp of making it, if making it is selling the rights to their public access show for $10,000. Wayne is trying to escape his last girlfriend Stacy (Lara Flynn Boyle) and has fallen for Crucial Taunt lead singer Cassandra Wong (Tia Carrere), a knockout who learned English from the Police Academy movies.

The rest of the movie is basically a collection of great small scenes strung together with put the tiniest of plots, including a moment where Alice Cooper explains that Milwaukee is Algonquin for the good land. Ed O’Neil also has a great cameo as the manager of Stan Mikita’s Donuts, with several asides to how death and murder have entered his life.

Wayne’s World is the second film that Coleen Camp appears in that has three endings. She’s also Yvette the maid in Clue. Please enjoy my trivial knowledge that will help no one.

Garrett is trying to recover a lost memory by returning to his family’s vacation home where an unspeakable act took place leaving him institutionalized as a child. If any of this sounds like a bad idea to you, good news. You are not a character in a horror film.

Psychiatrists call what happened to our hero — such as he is, he’s kind of a jerk — dissociative amnesia, but really, pure evil is loose in this house and it’s about to get back at him. It also shows up as a red balloon that cares about as much as copyright infringement as a 1980s Italian moviemaker.

This is the first full length film from writer, director and producer Christopher Wells.

The film festival poster and the online streaming poster.

What you read above was our original review back on June 10, 2020.

After that ran, the director of the movie reached out and felt that our take on the film “. . . seems vindictive. Like I did something to you or something. I don’t mind anyone disliking my film, but this is different because you just cut and pasted the synopsis and then made a snide remark, like you’re trying to be . . . vindictive.” Since we take our thoughts on film seriously and respect the work of filmmakers, we promised to watch this again. And seeing as how the fine folks at Wild Eye Releasing also sent us the DVD (as well as the online screener; but the director gave it to us prior to that), this gave us another opportunity to watch The Luring and take one more look — on October 11, 2020.

So, here we go!

Garrett lost an important memory at his tenth birthday party and hopes to get it back when he visits his family’s vacation home. His doctors call it dissociative amnesia, but perhaps he doesn’t want to learn what he’s really done. While his girlfriend wants this trip to bring them closer, there’s a chance that this could be the end of them both.

Let me lead with the good. Garrett (Rick Irwin) and Claire (Michaela Sprague) seem like a real couple, one that you wouldn’t want to invite to your party because all they do is fight. You feel for her way more than him, which leads us to the bad.

I don’t feel that every movie needs a trustworthy narrator or a heroic protagonist, but Garrett is such a jerk from moment one that when the major reveal happens, it’s not so much horrifying or shocking as much as it elicits a “Yeah, I can see him doing that.”

There’s also a mystery woman who has lured Garrett back here, a red balloon (to the director’s credit, he claims that he took the idea from The Red Balloon and not Stephen King) and an end scene that stuck with me because it seems like it came out of another film.

A nanny notices the boy she is watching is holding the red balloon. The kid, named Doug, states that he was given the balloon by a man, but there’s no one around. The nanny takes the balloon and Doug goes wild, yelling that the man told her she would do that. He then starts yelling, What time is it, what time is it, what time is it?” According to IMDB: “Another hidden message. The frustrated Nanny yells ‘It’s 2:13! it’s 2:13! it’s 2:13!’ Her life will never be the same. Pure evil doesn’t take pity on her or on Doug. Some say the man was the devil because 2:13 when added up is 6. The Nanny yells that time three times which is 666.”

I have no idea what this has to do with the rest of the film, because the kid ends up getting hit by a car like he wandered in off the set of Pet Semetary.

So, in summation, it feels like there’s some talent here. I still didn’t like the movie — it feels disjointed and there’s a moment where a stilt-walking clown shows up to menace Claire for seemingly no reason. But hey — I haven’t put the time and energy into making this. It wasn’t my passion project. All I have is an opinion and you may watch it and fall in love with it.

Movies are great that way.

You can learn more at the official Facebook page. The Luring is available available on DVD and digital June 16 from Wild Eye Releasing.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie from Wild Eye and that has no impact on our review.

Nothing Lasts Forever has never been released theatrically or even on VHS, DVD or blu ray — hell, it isn’t even streaming — in the United States. The closest anyone ever came to seeing it was when a fan uploaded a copy to YouTube, which was up for moments before Turner Entertainment demanded it be removed. Ever since, it has aired only at live screenings and rarely on the TCM Underground late night movies on Turner Classic Movies.

Good luck finding it.

The writer and director of Nothing Lasts Forever, Tom Schiller, is perhaps most famous for the short films he made for Saturday Night Live. Perhaps the best-known one is Don’t Look Back in Anger, a tale where a much-older John Belushi dances on the graves of all of the other Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Even in art, Belushi knew that he would pass away before them all, so this sketch is at once hilarious and heartbreaking. Another of his films, Love Is a Dream, featured the gone too soon Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks, and is equally depressing yet full of optimism.

Yes, the work of Schiller is often a juxtaposition. Much like this film, which tries to be a crowd-pleasing 1940’s mainstream film made in 1984 for audiences that probably wanted nothing to do with it.

Adam Beckett (Zach Galligan) starts the film in a dream, forced to sit behind a player piano and miming through songs before he is caught. As he awakes, he is asked what he wants to be.

Surely, he could be an artist. But the Port Authority has assumed control of New York City and forces him into manual labor, led by Buck Heller (Dan Aykroyd), his probably mentally deranged boss.

However, he soon learns that the true power in the world lies in the hands of the tramps who huddle around open fires and live underground. As he has been kind to them, they help him travel to the moon on a bus driven by Ted Breughel (Bill Murray) where he will be inspired by his true love Eloy (Lauren Tom). Her name is a reference to the future people in The Time Machine.

We end where we began, with Beckett on stage playing the piano, yet now fulfilled and sure of himself.

Along the way, Eddie Fisher plays himself as an entertainer on that aforementioned bus to the moon, Imogene Coco shows up and Mort Sahl appears. Yes, this movie was made in 1984. It also features a cameo from Dr. Emanuel Bronner, the man who made the soap with all of the Bible verses and strange words all over the packaging. I knew who he was the instant he began to speak.

There are many lessons to be learned in this film, with dialogue like “You will get everything you want in your lifetime, only you won’t get it in the way you expect.” This is the kind of movie that makes me tear up when I think of it. I wish that it was easier to share, something that could be found, but perhaps the occult nature of it being lost adds to its power, its mystique.

Someday, it may be available on a Criterion blu ray or able to stream whenever you want to watch it. But in a world where everything is at our fingertips, it gives me some joy to know that not everything is so easy to touch.

After the end of the first film, you’d think the Ghostbusters would be heroes for life. However, they’ve been sued out of existence and are barely able to get back together in time to stop a whole new evil, Vigo the Carpathian, who is trapped inside a painting that Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) is restoring along with her boss, Janosz Poha (Peter MacNicol, a bright spot here).

Yes, Dana went from playing the cello at a high level to being an art expert of the same caliber. Obviously, we’re dealing with a Buckaroo Banzai level individual here.

This film never lived up to the original for audience, critics or the people who made it. It took five years of rough gestation to even get to the screen, which needed suits, agents and even a lunch for the stars to decide whether or not they wanted to work together.

Vigo is pretty great though. While his voice comes from Max Von Sydow, he was played by Wilhelm von Homburg, a German boxer, wrestler and weight lifter who also shows up in The Last of the Secret Agents?, Die Hard, The Wrecking Crew and In the Mouth of Madness. This Deadspin account of his life is pretty astounding, telling the story of a man who lived for excess and may have even fathered his own half-sister.

Remember how I said in a past review that Ghostbusters has no hero’s journey for its characters? Well, they’ve done the third — and hardest — act off-screen, as now Ray (Dan Aykroyd) owns an occult bookstore and works a side job with Winston (Ernie Hudson) doing kid birthday parties, Egon (Harold Ramis) works in a lab and Venkman (Bill Murray) hosts a ridiculous psychic TV show.

Luckily, everything works out despite a river of slime. Rick Moranis returns as Louis Tully and Annie Potts comes back as Janine Melnitz, ready to fall for Egon.

Sure, this is nowhere as good as the first, but that Bobby Brown song sure is catchy. Actually, they could make several of these films and I’d watch them all. I even made it through the toss away the past reimagining.

Sometimes, when under quarantine, you watch a movie you’ve never seen that makes you so happy that you’ve discovered it. Other times, you watch the bomb that pretty much wiped out the film career of Mike Myers, which would be this, a strange character sketch that goes on around eighty-six minutes and forty-fix seconds too long.

After the death of his father, Myers became a devotee of Deepak Chopra, who appears in this film and inspired Guru Maurice Pitka, the character who will bring the Toronto Maple Leafs back to the Stanley Cup. Wish fulfillment on a $62 million dollar budget, this movie also features Jessica Alba as the love interest, Verne Troyer as an angry coach, John Oliver as a man named Dick Pants and Ben Kingsley of all people.

Between this and The Cat in the Hat, Myers earned a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Actor of the Decade. This film also won the 2009 Worst Picture, Worst Actor and Worst Screenplay.

Well, the Leafs haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967 and no one remembers this movie any longer. The first is a shame and the second is a relief.