John G. Avildsen had an interesting career. There are movies like Rocky and three Karate Kid films, along with Save the Tiger, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Lean on Me, Neighbors and this 1983 kind sorta coming of age film.

Rick Malone (Christopher Atkins) is one of the more popular students at his college and used to getting away with just about everything. However, when he makes a joke of his speech professor Faye Hanlon’s (Lesley Ann Warren) final, she fails him and forces him to take the class again.

Faye and her husband Whitney are going through a rough patch after he gets laid off, so when her sister suggests that they go to a strip club, she jumps at the opportunity. There, she watches Ricky the Rocket perform and realizes that he’s her student. Of course, she’s soon going to be cattle-prodding the oyster ditch with the lap rocket, as they say, with Ricky so that he can get his grades up.

Of course, this is going to end with Faye’s husband shooting at Ricky on a boat dock while demanding that he strip. So, there’s that.

The movie itself may not be much, but the soundtrack has all sorts of great stuff on it, like Jan Hammer composing much of the music, along with Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” and “Obsession” by Holly Knight and Michael Des Barres. That song would be covered a year later by Animotion and become a much bigger song.

Deney Terrio, the man who taught Travolta to dance in Saturday Night Fever, the man who hosted Dance Fever, the man who sued Merv Griffith for sexual harassment, the man who sued Hasbro for making a Littlest Pet Shop gecko disco character named Vinnie Terrio is also the man who appears in this film.

Also, for those who care about these kinds of things — you know who you are — Atkins has no underwear on for his love scenes.

Bob Logan made a movie called Up Your Alley that dared to pair Murray Langsdon, the Unknown Comic, with Linda Blair. That is reason enough to allow him to direct the fourth Meatballs movie and in true form, this has nothing to do with any of the other films in the series. It was originally going to be called Happy Campers.

Ricky Wade (Corey Feldman) is the best waterskiing teacher around, but he’d rather chase girls. There’s a waterskiing competition coming up to determine which of the two summer camps in this movie will survive and just when I was thinking how trope-heavy this movie is, Jack Nance, the star of Eraserhead, shows up.

This is the movie Nance was making when his wife Kelly Jean Van Dyke committed suicide. She called him to tell him she was going to do it and he was attempting to talk her down over the phone when lightning took out the phone lines. By the time the LAPD got to their apartment, she had hung herself.

Christy Thom (Playboy Playmate of the Year 1992), Monique Noel (Playboy Playmate of the Month May 1989) and Neriah Davis, who was in both The Bikini Carwash Company movies before being selected as the March 1994 Playboy Playmate of the Month appear in this. These things are, of course, important to these types of films. Perhaps more interesting is that Sarah Douglas, the villainous Ursa from the 70s Superman movies, is in this too.

It’s hard to say that this dosn’t really live up to the Meatballs legacy, when said legacy includes a great first movie, a film about an alien and a street boxer trying to aardvark the girl from the Witch Mountain movies and another installment where God demands that a porn star help Patrick Dempsey lose his virginity.

The Meatballs movies aren’t big on continuity, seeing as how Meatballs 2 wasn’t even intended to be a sequel. But at least the third one brings back Rudy, now all grown up and Patrick Dempsey. Over the summer, he’s working and working at a marina for Mean Gene.

Sure, I guess that works, the producers thought. But what if, since the last one had an alen, this episode of the Meatballs story has the ghost of an adult movie star played by Sally Kellerman? What if she has to help our protagonist lose his virginity? And what if her boss was Shannon Tweed? Now we have a movie, they shouted, and shoved their faces into a mountain of white powder.

Yes if Roxy Dujour can’t get Rudy in bed with a lady, she goes to Hell. The God of the Meatballs continuity is definitely one that movies in very, very mysterious ways.

Director George Mendeluk also made The Kidnapping of the President and Doin’ Time, a movie I have been hunting down for a long time.

Yes, Meatballs Part II may have no Bill Murray, but what it does have is Ken Wiederhorn as the director. Somewhere, somehow, someone saw Eyes of a Stranger and Shock Waves and said, that’s the guy to make a teen movie. Actually, I’m being silly, because we all know — we do, right? — that Ken also made King Frat and that alone probably qualified him for this. Or punitive damages.

Richard Mulligan plays Giddy, the owner of Camp Sasquatch. He’s battling Colonel Batjack Hershy (Hamilton Camp, who played the robot in Starcrash), who owns Camp Patton and wants the entire lake for himself. They decide that an end of the summer boxing match is a great way to settle matters, so Giddy recruits an inner-city tough kid named Flash (John Mengatti, Tag: The Assassination Game) for that pugilistic task, but the kid just really wants to crash the custard truck with Cheryl (Kim Richards).

Also, of course, the kids at the camp have an alien named Meathead staying with them. He’s played by Felix Silla and voiced by Archie Hann, who was one of the Juicy Fruits/Beach Bums/Undead in Phantom of the Paradise.

This movie has some decent actors in it, like Misty Row from Hee Haw, John Larroquette, a pre-Pee-Wee Paul Ruebens, Jason Hervey, Elayne Boosler, Tammy Taylor (Don’t Go Near the Park), Blackie Dammit and Donald Gibb. Just seeing a few of those names and I knew that I had to watch this.

I cut grass from 15 to 25 years old and that’s how I put myself through college and even made extra money once I started my advertising career. I certainly would not have used the money I made to save for a telescope or to date the popular girl in school like Ronald Miller (Patrick Dempsey).

The girl next door of his dreams, cheerleader Cindy Mancini (Amanda Peterson, whose career and life didn’t go as brightly as this movie would seem to make me think that it would), has wrecked her mother’s new suede dress, so she agrees to be his girlfriend for a month for the sum of $1,000.

This is the kind of movie that makes me hate the second act of the three-act structure. Ronald gets popular, gets rid of his old friends and even turns on Cindy. She thought they were in love and he probably did as well, but no one knows how to connect. He’s already hanging out with her friends instead of Malachi and Seth Green, but isn’t that the way these things always go.

Director Steve Rash started his career making movies like The Buddy Holly Story and Under the Rainbow and now makes direct-to-video sequels to the American Pie, Road Trip and Bring It On films.

So yeah. In the 80s, a tender romantic comedy about making young women into prostitutes was the kind of thing we saw as romance. Weird, huh?

Written and co-produced by John Hughes and directed by Bryan Gordon (a writer for Fridays that has gone on to direct Curb Your Enthusiasm, Freaks and Geeks and the Arnold Palmer 30 for 30 documentary), Career Opportunities was a rare misfire for Hughes.

It does have one thing going for it and that’s Jennifer Connelly after she made Etoille and Phenomena but before The Rocketeer. And I guess Target, which is pretty much a character in this movie in the same way that people say that New York City is a character.

That’s where Jim Dodge (Frank Whaley) and Josie McClellan (Connolley) are spending the night; him because he’s an overnight janitor and her because she’s been sleeping in one of the stockrooms after debating shoplifting to make her rich father angry.

There’s literally no conflict in this movie, as it’s a series of montages until the crooks Nestor Pyle and Gil Kinney (Dermot and Kieran Mulroney) break in and threaten their lives, leading to Josie seducing them both by riding a child’s quarter horse in the front of the store (this scene was pretty much the entire advertising campaign of this movie).

Hughes would refer to this film as cheap, vulgar and a disappointment. Seeing as how he was behind it, this film was released in Germany as Kevins Cousin allein im Supermarkt (Kevin’s Cousin Alone in the Supermarket). It does have some similarities — being left behind in a place the adults have left, two inept bandits and a winter in Chicago setting — but that’s because this film and the somewhat similar elements in the Hughes scripted Dutch were both written before Kevin Arnold became a big deal.

The John Candy cameo makes this movie.

You can get this from Kino Lorber, who has just released it on blu ray.

Originally produced in 1973 and re-discovered and restored in 2017, The Amusement Park was commissioned by the Lutheran Society, which had commissioned it as an educational film about elder abuse and ageism. However, they had issues with the content of the film and it wasn’t seen until 2019 (and now it’s running on Shudder).

People seem to be falling over themselves to proclaim this a lost classic and a definitive artistic statement instead of what it really is — an interesting curio from a director who has a celebrated run of films. It has more interest to Pittsburghers yearning to see West View Park one more time, as well as celebrate the weird fact that a film about an amusement park being used to show the perils of ageism would soon be destroyed for retail stores and now is a mainly empty parking lot where a K-Mart once stood.

In fact, I once did a marketing survey at a beer distributor out there and the bubbly account expert I was working with asked an older man if he drank Iron City Beer. He answered, “Oh, I used to. My friends and I all used to drink Iron City.” She asked back, “Why don’t they drink it anymore?” The reply still haunts me as much as her horrified reaction amused me: “Oh, honey. All of my friends are dead.”

The lead in this, Lincoln Maazel, would play Tata Cuda in Romero’s best-realized film — in my opinion — Martin. Other than him, most of the cast are volunteers and not professionals. This — and the reasons for the making of this movie — make it unfair to rate against Romero’s other films.

Go into this with the intent to see a curiosity and the opportunity to see lost parts of Western Pennsylvania. That’s really what it is, not a lost film per se. It feels very much like the parts of Romero’s films I dislike, like There’s Always Vanilla and, well, everything after Creepshow. But as someone who respects the director as someone who helped create modern horror and put Pittsburgh on the map (well, until he didn’t film Land of the Dead here, but sour grapes and that was probably more due to the city’s film office no longer offering tax breaks), this was still worth watching. I just kind of refuse to blindly accept any artists’ work as universal genius, even people whose work I adore such as Argento, Fulci and, yes, George Romero.

Also, as a denouement, this RogerEbert.com review makes it sound like Romero was living hand to mouth until Dawn of the Dead was made. To wit: “Broke and hungry, he shot low-budget features in the early ’70s and directed eight episodes of a sports documentary series called “The Winners,” profiling the likes of OJ Simpson and Reggie Jackson at the height of their popularity.” Now, I wasn’t around and can’t speak to that, but Romero was shooting tons of commercial work for companies like Calgon, got movies made and The Winners was a pretty big show. I’ve spent twenty-five years or more in Pittsburgh’s marketing community and know that directors back then — from other people in the industry and those with similar roles — were working steadily and hardly starving. Perhaps artistically he was hungry, but this review makes Romero’s life into a great tragedy when I see it as a success. Then again, this same review refers to “Rob Zombie’s marvelously outré Americana” as an actual thing, so there you go.

That said — even after pretty much saying I didn’t enjoy this — I recommend supporting The George A. Romero Foundation and their mission of preserving and promoting Romero’s legacy, as well as creativity within the horror genre and independent filmmaking in general. Here’s hoping that they can help us discover new heroes and not just comb through the past for bits and pieces of what once was, or Romero’s message in The Amusement Park truly will be lost.

Also known as Pick-Up Summer and Flipper Girls in Germany, this Canadian film comes after the Crown International beach movies and before Porky’s. Most of the action revolves around a place called Pete’s, an arcade that is hosting a pinball competition, which also has a Miss Pinball pageant, which I really hope was a thing at some point.

Speaking of movies leading to something more, director George Mihalka and cinematographer Rodney Gibbons would make My Bloody Valentine* after this, a movie that is much better remembered than this teen summer comedy that revolves around disco, burger joints, amusement parks and hijinks between a biker gang and our heroes over the pinball trophy.

Film Ventures International bought this for America and changed the name, thinking pinball was dead. It did pretty well and people didn’t even notice that it was made in Quebec and not California. It’s a pretty innocent movie when it comes to teen comedies.

*Helene Udy, who played Sylvia in that classic slasher, Thomas Kovacs, who played Mike, and Carl Malotte, who played Dave, are all in Pinball Summer as well.