Steven Seagal is back as ex-Navy SEAL, Casey Ryback, now on a train instead of an aircraft carrier. Instead of Andrew Davis (The Final Terror, Above the Law) directing, Geoff Murphy (The Quiet Earth, Freejack) is making this. J. F. Lawton, who wrote the first one as well as Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Pretty Woman, Blankman and DOA: Dead of Alive, as well as creating the Pam Anderson show V.I.P., is out and Richard Hatem and Matt Reeves are in. That’s right. The same director who made The Batman once made a Steven Seagal movie. Busey and Tommy Lee Jones aren’t the bad guys. Now, you get Eric Bogosian and Everett McGill.

But hey — Admiral Bates (Andy Romano), Captain Garza (Dale Dye) and Tom Breaker (Nick Mancuso) come back. And you do get Katherine Heigl as Ryback’s niece. Morris Chestnut as a train porter and Sandra Taylor (who somehow was a Penthouse Pet in March of 1991 and also did a Playboy pictorial in July of 1995 to promote this movie; she mentioned not even knowing if her character survived) as a barmaid so calm down. And oh wow, it’s the same train from Runaway Train.

But hey, this is one of Becca’s favorite movies. She loves it more than the first one, no matter how many people say that this was horrible in comparison. You can’t change her loves, which makes me lucky, because she married a fat child who ran upstairs breathless today to let her know that Arabella the Black Angel — a movie that she doesn’t want to see, need to see or should ever see — is on Tubi. And she loves me at least as much as this movie.

It’s the John McClane issue: how can the same hero be in the same situation all over again?  Oh well. This would be the end for Seagal, who would not make it to the end of Executive Decision and not get many movies in theaters after 1996.

Originally, Jon Peters was slated to be a producer for the movie. He wanted to bring Gary Busey back, but after he was told Busey’s character had died in the original , he quit. That story sounds like BS, but so does the story that Busey was hired and the casting director had no idea he had died in the first movie. He had the kind of contract where he got paid no matter what. That can’t be true.

Based on an outline that Roger Zelazny wrote, his novella “He Who Shapes” and the novel The Dream Master, this wasn’t made with any other input from the author. At least he got paid!

The story is credited to David Loughery, who wrote the fifth Star Trek and I still wonder why God needs a starship. The script is from Chuck Russell, who would go on to make A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob. Director Joseph Ruben made The Pom Pom Girls, The Stepfather, The Good Son and Sleeping With the Enemy. He knows how to make entertaining trash and I say that in the kindest of ways.

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) might be a psychic, but he doesn’t want tested any more. Not after all the poking and prodding in his youth by Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow). But when Novotny saves him from some low level goons who want to use Gardner’s psychic powers, he starts listening to how he’s now involved in government-funded psychic research. What really gets Alex on board is one look at Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw).

The goal is to send people into the dreamscape. There’s some exposition about the Senoi natives of Malaysia thinking that the dream world is as real as our own and you know me, I’m always here for movie BS.

Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly) is the only person who has entered the dreamscape, but he’s a daddy and old lady murdering maniac, so luckily Alex can get in and help little kids get over their bad dreams. Horror novelist Charlie Prince (George Wendt) — who wrote a book called Stab, so is this Scream universe canon? — tells Alex that he’s just a weapon to be used by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer) to kill the President (Eddie Albert) and preserve the military industrial complex.

Yeah, a lot happens.

The end of this movie is wild. Alex is inside the President’s post-nuclear terror dream, as mutants hunt the President and Tommy Ray has nunchuks and can also be a snake man before Alex takes the form of Tommy’s dad, tells the final boss that he loves him and then the leader of the free world stabs the bad guy from behind, killing him, because even the most hopeful of Presidents still ordered drone strikes. Then our hero goes into Blair’s dream and straight up kills him so he can be with Kate Capshaw.

The second PG-13 movie ever released — after Red Dawn — this is also the second movie that Kate Capshaw would be in in 1984 where a man’s heart is ripped out of his chest.

You know, I love this goofy movie. The effects are dated, there’s fog everywhere and the poster is totally trying to make you think Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s one of the first movies I ever rented and watching it again, it made me so happy knowing that I can just put it on at any time.

I was ten years old when Blade Runner came out and it played theaters so briefly in my small hometown that I never got the chance to see it. Also, ten year olds didn’t get to see R rated films in 1982. So my first experience was reading the Archie Goodwin/Al Williamson Marvel Comics adaption, a book of which I literally read until the cover came off.

I must have read this issue a thousand times.

Steranko cover!

I also asked my uncle, a librarian, for a copy of Philip K. DIck’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Perhaps a ten-year-old was not yet ready for the complexity of Phillip K. Dick, but he never dumbed it down for me.

The first time I finally saw Blade Runner on HBO it was after a year of reading about the film in Starlog, obsessing over the comic book and the source novel, so my experience was so alien to anyone else that saw it in theaters in 1982.

For a movie seen as a failure — it made $41.6 million on a $30 million budget, so I have no idea how that is failure — this is a movie that literally changed the world and has grown to become our world.

And yet, this is a movie that has seven different versions thanks to all of the changes from studio executives. Even the voiceover, which was added by them, has star Harrison Ford reading the words as if he has no interest, perhaps hoping if they were bad they’d never be used.

The blade runner is former police officer Rick Deckard (Ford), who is charged by Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) with doing what he does best: hunting down robotic humanoids and retiring them. Now, he must stop four Nexus-6 replicants: Leon  Kowalski (Brion James), Zhora Salome (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).

Yet within this film noir story set in a neon-filled future straight out of a Moebius drawing, the real tale is about whether Rick and his lover Rachael (Sean Young) are humans or machines themselves. In fact, of all the characters, Batty is the most human of them all, a character of both deep menace and surprising tender thoughts.

Blade Runner arises from pain. Ridley Scott had left Dune and lost his brother in short order and wanted something to take his mind off life. Dick had no idea it was even being made, but his initial distrust was saved somewhat when he saw the script revisions and special effects footage. Ford and Scott also fought throughout.

Neither can agree if Deckard is human or replicant, even if they’ve made up.

I think about Blade Runner a lot. I think about Pris flipping across the room, how her face paint looks, how deadly these killing machines are with such grace. I think of Rutger Hauer ad-libbing “All those moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain” and caressing the dove. I remember the spinner police car and Deckard’s car that I had as a kid and played with constantly. And I wonder, does Gaff leave the silver unicorn after not killing Rachael as him telling Deckard to pursue his dream or is Deckard’s dream of the unicorn just one progammed into him?

Most of all, I’m so thankful for this movie because without it, I may not be so fascinated by Philip K. Dick, a person who I quote or reference every day. My uncle knew what he was doing.

When I wrote about CarousHELL, I said “Don’t expect a budget. Do expect women to have sex with unicorns. See? You can’t always get what you want, but when you try sometimes, you just may find a tusk in the meat locker.”

Well, the second movie blew my mind.

It’s like someone had fan fiction of the first movie and someone said, “Sure, here’s $1700.”

But seriously, writers Aleen Isley (who also plays Ilsa) and Steve Rudzinski (who directed both of these movies) have done the impossible and made a movie that blew what’s left of my mind, creating a story in which Duke the carousel unicorn seeks his purpose in life, learns that he’s a father and also discovers that his origins lie within the occult secrets of the Third Reich.

Also, he’s an unmoving carousel unicorn.

Steve Rimpici is back as Duke’s voice and Brittany Barnabei plays his son Robbie. The film actually has pathos and moments of sadness that make you feel something and yes, I was making myself realize that I was getting emotional about a wooden horse and a stuffed animal, but that really points to just how good this is.

Also, human heads blow up.

Look, I have no idea how this was so great. But I’m so happy that I found the magic inside this film.

You can watch this on Tubi or purchase it from the official Silver Spotlight site.

I love that the cover of this movie looks like it could very well be a kid movie about unicorns and the actual film is full of gore, cannibalism and that trait that Heavy Metal and The Hitchhiker always had where breasts just have to appear every few scenes.

A widow (Karin Brauns) goes on a dangerous quest to meet a mythical wish-granting unicorn which just so happens to live in a Wishing Forest. And that’s where the cannibals live and a feral goddess (Stormi Maya) who devours the hearts of non-believers.

This movie is like a Nightwish tour shirt come to life for 80 someodd minutes. And the effects are way better than they need to be, the gross moments are more than gross and the women are all universally the kind of gorgeous that red blooded boys enjoy. It made me wish that the 80s era of deathstalkers and sorceresses never ended and we got more of these movies.

Directed by Leia and Jadzia Perez from a script by Jamie Grefe, who has also write some new Emanuelle movies that aren’t out yet, this movie feels like getting dosed outside an Amon Amarth show, making out with someone you don’t know and will never see again, then coming to at a Melvins show across town in the midst of drinking your third beer. It doesn’t have to make any sense for you to enjoy it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Katt Shea was in My Tutor, Preppies, Hollywood Hot Tubs and Barbarian Queen before working with Andy Ruben to make The Patriot for Roger Corman. She’d go on to direct several films and even earn a four-day retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where Poison Ivy debuted. You can check out her movies Dance of the Damned, Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls, Streets, Last Exit to Earth, The Rage: Carrie 2, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and Rescued by Ruby.

While working undercover, Cody (Kay Lenz) and her partner Sergeant Heineman (Greg Evigan) are too late to save Angel (Michelle Foreman), a dancer who has been thrown off a bridge and set on fire. Of course, this means that Cody must become Sunny, dancing at the Rock Bottom for its owner Ray (Norman Fell).

As she gains the trust of the dancers, they’re all being killed one by one. Cody keeps dancing at the club, defying the orders of her superiors, sure she can catch the killer. Is it Pocket, the one handed creep? Is it Angel’s lover Roxanne (Pia Kamakahi)? And how does Roxanne’s brother Eric fit in?

In a New York Times article, Shea explained how she was inspired by a trip to a strip club: “I didn’t want to go because I felt it was humiliating to women. But I finally got myself there. I sat down and began watching these acts and they’re performing as if they really cared.”

So — spoiler: Roxanne is dead. Eric is Roxanne, taking over her life as he was sure Angel would take his sister away. You can imagine that this is incredibly problematic, as they say, but it’s also a Roger Corman movie. In fact, Corman was convinced that only a woman could be a convincing woman on stage. Shea surprised him and showed him up by fooling him. She would later explain: “He [Corman] turned every shade. He was purple by the end.”

Also, as this is a Corman movie, all the songs that are danced to in this film were added in post-production. They had been filmed with popular songs, but those songs had to be replaced in post, because clearing licensing would be too expensive.

Shea worked with real exotic dancers, teaching them to act. Debra Lamb was one of them and she has been in plenty of movies since this, including Deathrow Gameshow, All Strippers Must Die! and Point Break, often displaying her fire-eating skills. Shea works as an acting teacher to this day, with students including Christina Applegate, Alison Lohman, Sophia Lillis and Drew Barrymore.

She also claims that this was the first movie to show pole dancing.

It would not be the last.

Outside a small God-fearing American town, a cult of demon worshiping gender queer killers awaits their own savior, the one that will return to our planet and crush the Gender Binary underneathe its cloven hoof.

Pretty much everything people worry that trans people will do when they enter a bathroom, Trannysnatchers! seizes the SOV ethos of the 80s and makes a messy, gooey and ridiculous in the best way horror film.

Made over two summers in Portland, Oregon, this was directed by Caedmonster (who also played Hella and worked an assistant camera person, boom operator, sound editor, choreographer, production coordinator, writer, editor, producer, production designer, art director, script supervisor and set decortator), Nicholas Boxwell (also story, cinematographer, writer, digital effects, editor, associate producer, production manager and sound mixer) and James Gottleber (best boy, camera, story, editor, executive producer, production designer and set decorator).

According to the Kickstarter page for the movie, Caedmonster said, “Being that we are improvisational artists, this film is not constructed in the traditional sense. Working with a detailed outline, rather than a script, all the performances are improvised.

This film is a labour of love for us. It’s a very unique opportunity to create something that is thru and thru a collaboration between people who genuinely love one another. Each cast member has developed their own character, and the story was written by all of us over a series of meetings.

Transgendered people are marginalized so much in our society, which is why we are making a film that gives a voice to this group of people. Many of us on the crew are genderqueer, and we hope to offer up a piece of work that can shine a light on this issue. This film is our torch song.”

I had a blast watching it, as it really pushed as hard as you can push. Here’s hoping that this gets some kind of release someday outside of just YouTube, because I had a blast watching it.

Screenwriters Edward Hume and Lewis John Carlino both had some really incredible careers. Hume wrote the pilot episodes for Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco and Barnaby Jones, as well as The Day After while Carlino wrote Seconds, The Mechanic, Crazy Joe and Where Have All the People Gone? amongst other movies. Here, they adapt the Stanton Forbes novel Go To Thy Deathbed for director William A. Fraker, who usually worked as a cinematographer on movies like Games, Exorcist II: The Heretic and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. He wouldn’t direct another movie after this until The Legend of the Lone Ranger.

Inside a mansion lives the fifteen-year-old Marguerite (Sondra Locke), her mother Katherine (Mary Ure) and her grandmother Julia (Signe Hasso). Our heroine takes daily injections of something with no label, all while discussing her paranoia with her dolls, collecting amoebas and painting disturbing images. Now, her father Michael (Robert Shaw) wants to reconnect with her after nearly ten years, as he’s about to divorce her mother to marry Anne (Sally Kellerman).

Soon, her mother and grandmother are dead at the hands of one of her dolls, Aaron, and Anne is growing concerned by just how physical the relationship between father and daughter becomes. Even when they attempt to make love, the camera finds Marguerite joining in from another room, alone, in synch with her father.

There’s no way that this is going to end well for anyone, obviously, but the twist at the end? Oh yes, no one will see that coming. Also, Locke is 27 playing 15, a woman trapped in a child’s body, so perhaps the twist is one you will imagine.

This movie stayed hidden for some time, as actual filming completed in the early part of 1971, but its premiere was not until late 1972 and it wasn’t released until the winter of 1973. I wonder just how much the film’s subject matter had to do with that.