Before he directed Happy Gilmore; Brain Donors; Beverly Hills Ninja; Saving Silverman; Big Daddy; The Benchwarmers; I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry; You Don’t Mess with the Zohan; Grown Ups; Just Go with It; Love, Weddings and Other Disasters; Jack and Jill and Grown Ups 2, Dennis Dugan was an actor, appearing as Captain Freedom on Hill Street Blues and being in everything from The Girl Most Likely To and Night Call Nurses to She’s Having a Baby and Parenthood.

The first movie he directed was Problem Child and you know, I totally came in cynically and found myself laughing at loud at several moments.

Ben Healy Jr. (John Ritter) lives a miserable existence. His father (Jack Warden) runs his life at work at the sporting goods store and only cares about running for mayor. What little existence he has at home is dominated by his wife Flo (Amy Yasbeck). All he wants is to give and receive love, dreaming of having a child, which ends up happening when Igor Peabody (Gilbert Gottfried) introduces him to Junior (Michael Oliver).

Igor has sold Junior as a perfect angel but that’s because he wants him out of the orphanage, as the title of this movie will tell you exactly the kind of person he is. In the first few minutes of the movie, we learn that Junior is pen pals with serial killer “The Bow-Tie Killer” Martin Beck (Michael Richards) and in the first day he’s in his new house, he breaks the cat’s legs when he sends his grandfather tumbling down the steps.

Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Dolemite Is My Name) had read a newspaper article where a couple learned their new adopted child had been brought back to the orphanage ten times. That sounds like a story of pure sadness, but they decided to make a comedy where Junior has been brought back thirty times.

Where the laughs came in for me is that this movie has no issues with going too far. A birthday party is ruined with explosives and that’s followed by Junior hitting every single player on the opposing baseball team in the balls to win the game. Maybe I was in the right mood, but I found myself laughing harder than I have in some time. I know it’s not the kind of movie that any critic in his right mind would enjoy. Luckily, I am not that critic. This is somehow a PG comedy that is as black as it gets, a movie where a woman cheats on her husband with a serial killer and debates murdering their adopted kid and yet, somehow, it’s actually hilarious.

Problem Child was a big enough movie to get two sequels and an animated series, as well as a Turkish remake, remix ripoff called Zipcikti. It’s also the movie that Max Cady loves beyond all human deceny in Cape Fear.

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Problem Child is that this movie is where Ritter and Yasbeck met. They were married in 1999 until his way too early death in 2003.

My favorite thing about this movie are all the hints that Junior may very well be Satan. If you watch it with that in mind, it’s even funnier.

You can buy this Mill Creek retro blu ray from Deep Discount.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on October 17, 2018.

Man, these student teachers. They’re changing the old ways of high school and making it better — well, maybe more interesting — for the hip now generation. The sequel to Roger Corman’s The Student Nurses, this movie is all about the issues, man.

Directed and co-written by Jonathan Kaplan, who would go on to direct The Accused, this movie follows three student teachers: Rachel who wants to teach the good parts of sex education after school (that is, birth control and that sex isn’t this alien, frightening thing); Tracey dates an art teacher who cheats on her and Jody works with an inner-city education effort but also gets involved in selling drugs.

Chuck Norris made his debut in this film as a karate instructor. In his autobiography, he revealed that he knew nothing of the film other than the scene he was in. When the movie was released, Norris and his family went to see it and were shocked by the explicit sex and nudity. In fact, Norris almost changed his mind about becoming an actor!

To say this movie is dated is an understatement. That said, it’s packed with the earnestness of the end of the 1970s and the feeling that young people would change the world. They all ended up repeating the same cycle as their parents by the early 80s. But for now, they would be the student teachers.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Have I ever told you that I like Andy Sidaris? This was originally on the site on May 12, 2019.

Before he made Stacey, Andy Sidaris was known as a pioneer in the world of sports television, directing thousands of hours worth of football, basketball, Olympic games and special events for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. He eventually won seven Emmy Awards, but is perhaps best known for his invention of the “honey shot,” where he’d zoom in on the cleavage of female audience members and cheerleaders.

After helping make Monday Night Football into a ratings powerhouse and working on shows like Kojak and Gemini Man,  Sidaris moved into making his own movies by partnering with Roger Corman, raising half the funds for his debut film, Stacey. This is not truly his first film, as that would be The Racing Scene, a documentary about actor James Garner’s racing team.

Stacey Hanson (Anne Randall, May 1967 Playboy Playmate of the Month) has two jobs: private eye and race car driver. Wealthy older woman Florence Chambers hires her to determine whether or not her three family members are worthy of being in her will: the secretly gay John, his adulterous wife Tish (Anitra Ford from Messiah of Evil!) and Pamela (Cristina Raines from The Sentinel!), who is in a Manson-esque cult.

Meanwhile, houseboy Frank, who has been sleeping with and blackmailing everyone in the family, has been killed and no one is safe. This is the movie where I learned that none of Sidaris’ heroes and heroines knows how to shoot a gun, yet the villains are easily able to shoot everyone around them resulting in spectacular crimson geysers of gore.

If this all seems rather close to a later Sidaris film, Malibu Express, that’s because other than a few characters, they’re largely the same film. The sad fact that I can logically discuss Andy Sidaris films and know enough facts about them that I can drop at will either makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing or ponder where it all went wrong. There’s a thin line between madness and genius. The films of Andy Sidaris make me confront that head on.

Whereas the later films of Sidaris postulate a shared universe of L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies and various drug dealing enemies that eventually become friends, this is a self-contained affair. But as he’d move on from doing TV — he was still working on shows like The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and ABC’s Monday Night Football — Andy was ready to embrace the world of film completely. Yet one thing never changed: Sidaris loved showing off gorgeous women, but don’t write off his films as simple exploitation. His women are always capable, empowered and intelligent.

Despite being directed by Cirio H. Santiago (so many movies to pick from, but today I’d mention Vampire Hookers and Wheels of Fire), Roger Corman didn’t want this movie to look like it was shot in the Philippines. That’s why it has that opening with Toby (Pat Anderson, Bonnie’s Kids) getting picked up by Dick Miller and taken to LAX. It was shot by Curtis Hanson. Some of the kung fu scenes were shot by Johnathan Demme, so man, three directors!

There’s also Sherry (Lyllah Torena) who juggles men at every destination and sneaks drugs everywhere she goes, which ends up getting her trapped in white slavery. Then there’s Andrea (Lenore Kasdorf), who is kung fu fighting through Hong Kong while Toby is hounded by her mom (Naomi Stevens) and pursued by a hunky doctor (Richard Young, who was the man who gave Indiana Jones his hat at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

In case you were wondering, yes, Vic Diaz shows up. As a cop, no less!

Yet another in the series of Roger Corman female occupation movies, this one is quite episodic and ends, as one imagines, with all the ladies meeting up to save one another’s days. I imagine most people were watching this through steamed up windows at a drive-in in 1973 and weren’t thinking of the story structure or multiple directors.

Directed, written and starring Owen Conway (Eminence Hill), Ghost Town has Conway has Solomon, a drifter with a dead horse, no gun and little prospects who ends up in a nowhere town with a go nowhere job. And then, well, people start dying and he takes the blame.

With a name like Ghost Town, you can imagine that there are some supernatural things going on. Try visions of death, ghosts rambling on in and so much more to test Solomon, even if he ends up saving the entire bar — and saloon girls — when he kills three criminals trying to knock over the saloon. This town’s rough, though, with a sheriff who deals with dead cowboys by pouring booze all over them and burning them right in the street.

Can Solomon handle working for Hagan (Robert Sprayberry), who seems abusive at best to the girls in his employ, Kate (Eva Hamilton) and Stella (Becky Jo Harris)? And what’s up with that spider that just crawls out of a girl’s hair and into her mouth and no one notices?

While it all falls apart by the end, I do enjoy when western movies and horror come together. There are a few fun ideas here, the action and effects look good, plus I think Conway has promise in making something good someday.

Ghost Town is available on digital and DVD March 7 from Uncork’d Entertainment.

The fourth of the five movie New World Pictures nurse cycle — preceded by The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses, The Young Nurses and followed by Candy Stripe Nurses — this was directed by Clint Kimbrough, who played Dr. Bramlett in Night Call Nurses, and written by Howard R. Cohen, whose awesome output includes Unholy Rollers, Cover Girl Models, Vampire Hookers, Fighting Mad, Saturday the 14th, Space Raiders, Stryker, Deathstalker, Barbarian Queen, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, Barbarian Queen 2, Deathstalker IV and Lords of the Deep. He also directed Saturday the 14th, Space Raiders, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, Time Trackers, Deathstalker IV and Space Case.

As usual, there are three nurses: Kitty (Jeane Manson, Terror Circus, 10 to Midnight), Joanne (Ashley Porter, who other than an uncredited role in The Student Nurses was never in another movie) and Michelle (Angela Elayne Gibbs, Cleopatra Jones, Party Line).

They all have their own storylines. Kitty falls in love with a boat racer named Donahue (Zach Taylor), even though there’s never a moment where he seems charming or even likable. Plus, his father who pushes him to be a sailing man seems like too much to deal with. Joanne is sick of the doctors failing at their jobs and hurting patients, so she starts to do their work for them. And Michelle discovers that patients are overdosing on bad drugs and investigates for herself.

Beyond these dramatic moments, this film is filled with cameos, with Sally Kirkland, Dick Miller, Mantan Moreland and Samuel Fuller all showing up.

My favorite part of this entire movie is when Joanne is dealing with probably losing her job as a nurse by tearing her clothes off on a beach and diving into the ocean. It’s just so out of nowhere and an excuse to get a gorgeous young actress nude, which you know, is kind of everything Roger Corman was about.

How did this site come to have an Ingmar Bergman movie about four women dealing with cancer on it?

Roger Corman.

After nearly every film distributor in America rejected this movie — Bergman had only asked for an advance of $75,000 — New World Pictures bought it for $150,000 and spent an additional $80,000 to market it. It made a million dollar profit and was Bergman’s biggest American film ever.

Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is in the final stage of uterine cancer and her maid Anna (Kari Sylwan) and sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) have gathered. It’s hard for Anna, who has lost a daughter yet she has stronger faith than the sisters. This allows her to be more comfort to Agenes, while Maria is dealing with the fact that the man who broke up her marriage, David (Erland Josephson) is the doctor of her dying sister. So while

Both she and Karin have had their issues with men, as the affair with David led to Anna’s husband stabbing himself, an act close to what Karin did, stabbing herself in the genitals to avoid her husband’s touch. At the end, as the women deal with the death of their friend or sister, the best they can hope to have would be memories of one day.

There are many themes here, depending on what you wish to see. Bergman claimed it was influenced by dreams as a young child and his feelings about his mother. The four women can all be seen as one aspect of her. He also believed that this movie was as far as he could go in cinema, saying “I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.”

Is it about the Bible? The way women explore the world? Gender roles? Myth existing within the actual world? All of those things?

I’m just still amazed that somehow a Bergman movie ended up on this site next to all the Jess Franco and Dario Argento movies.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on March 18, 2018.

The basic story of Bone is simple: a rich couple deals with a home invasion. But this movie has Larry Cohen at the helm, so it’s going to be anything but basic. The man who is there to take them for everything soon learns that the couple is anything but rich. And they’re anything but happy.

Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten, St. Elmo’s Fire, Grown Ups) and Bill (Andrew Duggan, In Like Flint, It Lives Again) are a seemingly rich Beverly Hills couple. Bill’s a used car salesman who feels that he’s the only one working hard, symbolized by his wife refusing to even getting up to answer the phone while he cleans the pool. Then, a rat gets stuck in the drain. That’s what brings Bone (Yaphet Kotto, Alien, Live and Let Die) into their lives.

Mistaking him for an exterminator, they ask him to pull the rat out. He does and instead of hiding it from them, he confronts them with it. He then takes them hostage as he goes through their home looking for money.

It turns out that the couple has little in liquid assets and is deeply in debt. Their son may be in Vietnam or he may be in jail. And it turns out Bill has a secret bank account that Bernadette knows nothing about. Bone commands him to clean out that account and bring him the money in an hour or he’ll rape and kill his wife.

Bill ends up taking his time as he realizes how little he loves his wife. He drinks with a lady (Brett Sommers from TV’s Match Game) that explains how her husband died from too many dental x-rays. Soon, he’s been seduced by a young girl (Elaine May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin, The Heartbreak Kid, Inherent Vice) who steals from the system, attracted to her offbeat ways and youthful spirit.

He comes home without the money. But meanwhile, after learning how to make eggs — she doesn’t cook anymore — Bernadette and Bone have gotten drunk and ended up on the couch together. He explains to her how raping white women and the black mystique used to take him so far, but today, black and white love is commonplace. What started as him continually saying he was going to rape her has turned and she begins to seduce him, kissing him and “doing all the work.” He talks about how black men have trouble now making love and she tells him that it’s not just black men.

After they bond, Bernadette tries to convince Bone to help her murder Bill for his insurance. They ride the bus to the end of the line, then chase Bill to the beach. He tries to win them over with a used car pitch to keep him alive, but Bernadette smothers and kills him. Bone realizes that he wants nothing to do with this life and leaves.

On Cohen’s website, the characters in this film are broken down by how they relate to the world: Bill is The Establishment who may be open to change. Bernadette is liberation and feminism that has been held down. The X-Ray Lady is the real Establishment, the old guard ready to die off. The Girl is the hippy love generation already giving way to the darkness of the 70’s. Then there’s Bone — facing racism but willing to play with it to get what he wants, as he says, “I’m just a big bad buck, ready to do what’s expected of him.” He even talks about how he’s held onto the past, enjoying his part of the world of racism because it was easier and there was a role. Now, in this new world, he doesn’t know who to be.

The character work in this film is superb. Witness the scene where the girl explains to Bill how she was raped as a child and that’s why she’s attracted to old men like him. Even when he tries to connect with her by telling her about the Street & Smith pulps he bought as a kid, she still tries to connect him to the rapist who took her virginity as she begins to make love to him.

If I didn’t say it yet, Yaphet Kotto is fucking amazing in this movie. His performance is quite literally a tour de force. He’s always great in everything he’s in, but in this film, he’s transcendent. I also love that he borrowed Cohen’s red sweater for a scene late in the movie and never returned it.

Amazingly, this was Cohen’s first film. It’s assured and poised, straddling the line between art film and exploitation.