Sure, a lot of this movie feels like Booksmart, which was the female-centric Superbad, but that’s a very superficial review, as both movies are about the relationship between two girls as they grow up in their last year of high school. And much how all of us are different people despite surface similarities, this film can stand on its own.

After co-writing and directing Language Lessons this year, Natalie Morales directed this film from a script by Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy that is unafraid to be sentimental and wildly inappropriate, often at the same time.

Lupe and Sunny are high school girls planning out their first party and hoping Sunny’s first crush will attend. The hijinks that ensue — an unplanned sexual encounter leads to a stuck condom and a trip to get a Plan B prescription in case Sunny is pregnant — lead to a road trip movie that obviously will change both girls’ lives.

That road trip has to happen because their South Dakota town has a pharmacist (Jay Chandrasekhar from Super Troopers, always a welcome sight) who invokes that state’s conscience clause, which allows him to not have to give the young girls the contraceptive.

He’s just one of the great cameos in this movie, which also has Rachel Dratch in a really wonderful scene as a health teacher not ready for how smart her students are and how bad the used car as abstinence metaphor she’s been given to teach is.

The best teen movies leave us wishing that we could spend more time with their characters. I can honestly say that I’d love to see where else Lupe and Sunny’s lives will go. There were more uproarious and moments of genuine feeling in this than anything else I’ve seen in years. It’s not for everyone — it certainly does not shy away from frank sexual discussion nor actual male genitalia — but for those with an open mind and a love of ribald humor, it’s a winner.

Patton Oswalt once famously yelled of the Star Wars prequels, “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT WHERE THE STUFF I LOVE COMES FROM! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE!” This was in a time before movies like Joker took the villains from our favorite old films and made them someone that we could care about and perhaps even come to love.

To wit: the only thing I know about Cruella de Vil from One Hundred and One Dalmations is that she’s fixated on murdering, well, a hundred and one little dalmatians just so she can get a new coat. That really doesn’t sound like someone I want to know more about, but here we are with a movie with a MAC cosmetics tie-in and an anti-heroine that can pretty be Arthur Fleck for the Hot Topic set.

Craig Gillespie comes from advertising into directing and it shows, as he’s great at breaking this movie into set pieces that have very unique looks. His films are hit and miss with me. I was fine with I, Tonya but his Fright Night is an abomination. Here, he’s making a decent movie, albeit one that is two hours and fourteen minutes, which seems about twice as long as this movie needs ot be. Imagine if I had the attention span of a child! Oh wait, I do!

Did you ever wonder how Cruella met her henchmen Jasper and Horace? Were you lying awake at night wondering who her mother was and just why she hated dalmatians so much?

Probably you were, if you watched this. This film was enjoyed in our home because there was a dog named Wink who was a chihuahua and we all know how much those tiny yet feisty beasts are beloved in the B&S About Movies HQ.

I guess if you have kids and you want to introduce them to popular music, this is a decent movie to do so. I’m still failing to see any reason for why it exists, but I could say that about so many of the sequels and remakes and reimaginings that I find myself watching.

I should not have seen this movie at nine or ten years of age, nor should I have read the magazine. I should have been blissfully ignorant of the mindblowing nature of what I was about to see and waited until I was ready, but here we are, literally forty years later and not a day goes by that this movie doesn’t cross my mind.

Directed by animator Gerald Potterton and produced by Ivan Reitman and publisher Leonard Mogel, this movie takes on the near-impossible task of taking the stories of an unwieldy adult science fiction magazine and making them into a coherent story about, well, evil? Or something? Honestly, who cares, there’s animated Roger Corben and zombie bombers and half-nude warrior women riding dinosaurs and stabbing people.

Based on the comic book tale, “Soft Landing” starts the film. Created by Dan O’Bannon and Thomas Warkentin, it has a man fly a car from space to Earth. He’s an astronaut home to see his daughter, but in the next sequence, “Grimaldi,” what he has brought back kills him and his daughter soon learns of a galaxy and time-spanning evil called the Loc-Nar. That entity is present in every story throughout the film and actually works really well.

Moebius’ “The Long Tomorrow” has become “Harry Canyon,” the story of a film noir detective in a 2031 New York City that looks and feels a lot like Blade Runner, because, well, Blade Runner looked a lot like Moebius. In this installment, the Loc-Nar is a Maltese Falcon-ish McGuffin.

In “Den,” based on the Richard Corben comic of the same name, that ultimate evil is the magical element that everyone on the world of Den wants. Our hero is a nerdy kid who has been transported to another world and become a superheroic character that everyone wants to either get in their bed or put in the dirt. For me, this is the center of this movie and other than the closing section, it stands hands, shoulders and various nude parts above the other segments. Plus, that’s John Candy as Den.

Bernie Wrightson’s “Captain Sternn” follows, with Eugene Levy as the Sternn and a court trial that shows just how dirty of a future spaceman its hero can be. A section called “Neverwhere Land” was deleted from the film, which would have connected these segments and would have been a loop set to either Pink Floyd’s “Time” or Krzysztof Penderecki ‘s “Magnificat: Passacaglia.”

The zombie segment with the haunted “B-17” is next, followed by an adaption of Angus McKie’s “So Beautiful, So Dangerous,” a tale of alien pilots, Earthwomen and lines of Plutonian Nyborg.

In the last story, based on “Arzach” by Moebius, “Taarna” and her reptile bird battle mutants and the Loc-Nar itself, sacrificing herself to save the world before she is reborn in the young girl in the framing device that began the story. As she walks outside, the reptile bird returns and the adventure begins all over again.

The soundtrack to this movie — that kept it from legally being released for years — is amazing. There’s everything from Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” and “Prefabricated” by Trust to the theme song by Don Felder and Blue Öyster Cult’s “Veterans of Psychic Wars.” The band originally wrote the song “Vengeance (The Pact),” but the makers of the film thought it too closely told the story of the segment.  Both songs appeared on BÖC’s Fire of Unknown Origin.

For years, there had been talk of a reboot. Whatever that ended up being aired on Netflix as the series Love, Death & Robots.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn’t only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let’s examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!”

You know how I always say, “They could have stopped making movies after this?” This is the movie at the center of my argument. I really don’t know how any movie gets any better than this, unless Russ Meyer is directing it.

The three worst women you’ve ever met — and also the finest — finish their dance routines at a club and then head out to the California desert where they race their car and verbally abuse one another. They are Billie (Laurie Williams), Rosie (Haji) and Varla (Tura Satana, perhaps the finest thing Satan ever made for the Lord). They follow that up by sizing up the guy mansplaining things to his girl and snap his neck before drugging his woman, Linda (Susan Bernard).

Stopping to fill up, they learn that a wheelchair-bound man and his feebleminded son are literally sitting on a treasure. So they do what you or I would do — manipulate, manhandled and murder everyone in their way.

Originally known as The Leather Girls and then The Mankillers, this isn’t a movie as much as a religion to me. No less a cultural giant as John Waters said, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”

Tura Satana is the kind of woman that if she wasn’t born, we would have created her and made her into a goddess. There have been many pretenders to her throne, but none will ever ascend it.

Seriously, I wore the t-shirt of this movie for most of the 90s before it fell apart. If you dislike this movie, we can never, ever be friends.

I’ve discussed the video store of my youth often, but no movie in Prime Time Video inspired such dread as Faces of Death, its gigantic clamshell package covered with a note scrawled in sharpie: YOU MUST BE 18 TO RENT.

This feels like a movie made from VHS, as where were people going to see this in 1978?

Written and directed by John Alan Schwartz (using the name Alan Black for the screenplay and Conan LeCilaire for directing, as well as Johnny Getyerkokov for second unit and appearing with no screen name for his role as the leader of the cannibal cult), this film made $35 million at the box office, despite being outlawed in the UK and made a video nasty. It was not banned in forty countries, no matter what the box art may scream at you, and it really doesn’t contain all that much real death either.

Try telling that to the kids in my hometown in the mid-80s.

They believed that pathologist Francis B. Gröss — actually portrayed by Michael Carr — was a real doctor who was using video to explore the phenomena of death itself. They spoke breathlessly of the moments in this movie and it was another torture test film, one people bragged about surviving.

As this was a non-union film, there weren’t many credits, so it could have seemed real. But today, so many people have come forward discussing how they were involved in the movie. Estimates are that 40% of the film is fake, but the death scene of the female cyclist is real and the alligator scene also shows up in Naked and Cruel.

In today’s world, we have the internet, which has non-stop access to the kind of footage that Faces of Death could only dream of having access to getting. As such, we are numb to the kind of panic and worry that one would have with this movie staring back at them from the shelves of a mom and pop video store.

Is it any wonder that Legendary is rebooting this film series but making it friendlier? Here’s the logline for the film: “A female moderator of a YouTube-like website whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, who stumbles across a group that is re-creating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age of online misinformation, the question is: Are the murders real or fake?”

Nobody is going to have nightmares about that movie.

Shot entirely on location in Ireland, employing mostly Irish actors and crew, Excalibur was an important film for the Irish filmmaking industry and helped start the careers of Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds.

It was also known as the Boorman Family Project, as several members of director Jonathan Boorman’s family appear, with his daughter Katrine Boorman playing Igrayne — Arthur’s mother — as well as his daughter Telsche as the Lady of the Lake and his son Charley acting in the role of Mordred as a boy. It was shot a mile from his home, so he was able to be at home for the entire making of the movie.

Boorman has been wanting to make the movie since 1969, yet the three-hour script was seen as too costly by United Artists and instead, he was offered The Lord of the Rings, which he did not make yet did develop. He ended up using some of the work that went into that adaption here, as well as potentially being inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

He’d worked with Rospo Pallenberg on that canceled film (as well as Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Emerald Forest; Pallenberg would also direct Cutting Class), so he worked with him here to bring Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to theaters. Boorman said that his film was about “the coming of Christian man and the disappearance of the old religions which are represented by Merlin. The forces of superstition and magic are swallowed up into the unconscious.”

I love Roger Ebert’s review of this movie, in which he said that the film was both a wondrous vision and a mess, “a record of the comings and goings of arbitrary, inconsistent, shadowy figures who are not heroes but simply giants run amok. Still, it’s wonderful to look at.”

It’s beyond gorgeous, actually, a movie that combines shocking gore with artistic flourishes, like the three ladies in white who attend Arthur to Avalon at the close. Boorman was also smart enough to cast Nicol Williamson as Merlin and Helen Mirren as Morgana Le Fay, two actors who had had a conflict when they acted in Macbeth together. He felt that tension would be seen on screen and it certainly is. That said, Mirren claimed that the two become friends while making Excalibur.

It rained every single day of the shoot, which adds to the foggy look of the film. It had many issues, as the first fight scene had to be filmed three times. It was filmed at night and the exposure meter was broken, leading to two different scenes of underexposed film.

Boorman’s career is pretty great. Sure, there are the big movies like Deliverance, but I love that he shoots for the fences and makes off the wall stuff like Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic. Here’s to less playing it safe for directors, even if the misses end up being spectacular losses. I don’t think that that can happen any longer in entertainment.

My initial exposure to this film came from Mad Magazine. Often as a kid, we wouldn’t see an R-rated movie until it was on HBO, so many of the films I’ve had to find as an adult were first seen through the eyes of Mad’s Usual Gang of Idiots. This time, Don Martin did the movie adaption. I’m happy to share a few panels with you thanks to Jesse Hamm on Twitter.

Directed and produced by Charles Band, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn feels like the movie that goes with all of my favorite stoner metal albums. It’s also in 3D, which makes it even better and it was already a movie in which the bad guys spray people with green drugs that put them into a dream state where they’re killed with crystals.

Dogen (Jeffrey Byron, who co-wrote The Dungeonmaster) is a space ranger searching for the supernatural evil that is Jared-Syn, the leader of the One Eyes who have torn out their own eye and started a holy crusade against the humans that have come to their planet. Except that Syn is probably not really one of them and just wants to destroy everyone.

Our hero rescues Dhyana, a crystal miner’s daughter played by Kelly Preston, and together they meet a prospector named Rhodes (Tim Thomerson), who takes him to the nomads. This leads to a battle with one of them, Hurok (Richard Moll, whose shaved head for this movie led to the producers of Night Court loving that look) that ends with them as friends.

I kind of love that this movie combines a western, a post-apocalyptic movie, science fiction, sorcery and whatever else it feels like throwing at the screen. I just wish that I had seen it in 3D as a kid, because I really feel like my life would be in a very different place today as a result.

The world needs more movies that make as little sense and are as entertaining as this.

Seriously, this article should just say, “This is the best movie of all time” and nothing else.

It is absolutely impossible for me to be impartial to this movie. How can you be? A western set inside a destroyed New York City that’s been converted into a prison for the worst people in America being invaded by someone even worse than all of them put together to rescue a President with only 24 hours to do it? Yeah, they don’t make them like this anymore.

Actually, they never did. This is a once in a lifetime film.

AVCO Embassy Pictures wanted Charles Bronson or Tommy Lee Jones to play Snake. Kurt Russell was still seen as a Disney kid. But Carpenter saw in him someone who could be a Clint Eastwood-like mercenary who lived for the next minute and nothing else.

The film slams us into 1997, a time and place where the world is constantly at war. As the President of the United States flies to a peace summit in Hartford, Connecticut, Air Force One is hijacked and crashed, with the President (Donald Pleasence!) being taken to New York City and captured by the Duke of New York City (Isaac Hayes!).

The police would never make it on a rescue mission. That’s when Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) gets an idea. Instead of sending in a military force, he sends Snake into the Hell on Earth that is New York City to save the President. If he completes the rescue mission, he gets a full pardon. And if not, well…he was going to die anyway. To keep Snake from running, he’s injected with micro-explosives that will kill him in 22 hours.

Driven in an armored cab by Ernest Borgnine to Harold “Brain” Hellman (Harry Dean Stanton!) to attempt to find the leader of the free world, Snake encounters all manner of enemies that he outwits, outfights and outright murders to complete his mission, including an incredible fight with pro wrestler Ox Baker (originally it was going to be Bruiser Brody, but he was in Japan at the time). Plus, you get appearances by Carpenter regulars like Adrienne Barbeau, George Wilbur, Dick Warlock, Nancy Stephens, George “Buck” Flower, John Strobel, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers and a voice cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis.

At the end, the President tells Snake he can have anything he wants. Snake only wants to know how he feels about everyone that had to die so that he could live. The President barely conveys gratitude as Snake walks away in disgust.

You can see echoes of Snake in nearly every post-apocalyptic movie that came after this film. In a perfect world, there would have been way more than just one sequel to this movie.

You know, I purposely didn’t watch this movie because it was rated PG-13.

I’m a moron.

Co-written (with his brother Ivan) and directed by Sam Raimi, this is the kind of delirious rollercoaster kind of movie that I love.

Loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) wants a promotion but has to show that she can make tough decisions. When an elderly woman asks for the third extension on her mortgage, Christine says no. The woman begs her on her hands and knees for mercy and Christine calls security on her.

Later, as Christine walks to her car, the woman attacks her and places a curse on one of her buttons. That night, her nose begins to bleed after a fortune teller says that a dark force is after her in the form of the demon Lamia. In three days, Christine will be dragged to hell unless the old woman forgives her. However, that seems impossible, because she’s dead.

Maybe a sacrifice will help. At least that’s what the fortune teller explains to our heroine, who goes home and kills her cat. Well, the only thing that does is make me hate our lead. Then there’s the attempt to place the demon into a goat and that goes about as well as you can expect Finally, they learn that she can pass the curse off to someone else, even someone dead, so she digs up the old women and shoves the button into the woman’s dead body.

Of course, it’s a horror movie, so it’s not over. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I loved the ending. Actually, I liked the whole movie, even if the effects dated a little sooner than the filmmakers planned. Any movie that takes inspiration from Night of the Demon is going to be just fine with me.