EDITOR’S NOTE: For another take on this film, click here.

A strange unknown source — just like the Max Headroom signal hijacking in Chicago on the night of November 22, 1987 — takes over America’s airwaves and replaces them with even more sexual shows — in the middle of jiggle TV? — and the President demands that it be fixed.

Directed by Bradley R. Swirnoff (who also directed the similar Tunnel Vision) and written by Swirnoff with  John Baskin (who actually wrote some jiggle TV with Three’s Company), Stephen Feinberg (the proctologist from Tunnel Vision) and Roger Shulman (who created the series Crazy Like a Fox), it includes fake shows like Celebrity Sportsman Presents: The Charles Whitman Invitational, in which celebrities like Warren Oates get to shoot at real people from a tower just like the Texas Tower Sniper; Manny’s Nymphs, a Charlie’s Angels show with heavy set women and a Mamorax commercial that does the “Is it real or is it Memorex” idea with a speech from Hitler.

As you can see, there’s no filter in this movie, as it sees where the line is and steps it over and over again. After all, one of the shows is called The Shitheads and people on the street get buckets of waste put on their heads, as well as American Excess instead of American Express and a frontier gynecologist who performs horseback exams. That should reveal to you the level of sophistication that you’re about to get into.

The cast includes Joanna Cassidy, Fred Dryer, Kinky Friedman, Dick O’Neill, Stephen Furst, Harry Shearer, Art Fleming, vaudevillian Paul “Mousie” Garner and many, many more.

Warner Bros. was the original distributor but found it unreleasable. Cannon Films took over, changed the title from Prime Time and released it as American Raspberry.