Also known as FEAR.com, HorrorVision is The Matrix from Full Moon, which means you get Brinke Stevens and Len Cordova as people named Toni and Dez whose job is getting more porn on the internet, which in 2001 wasn’t what it is in 2023. But after Toni and his girlfriend Dazzy (Maggie Rose Fleck) both go missing thanks to a creature born of the inherent negativity of the web, well…

Yes, the couple at the center of this movie is comprised of two people named Dez and Dazzy.

Anyways, Dez gets help from the wise Bradbury (James Black), who has to help Dez learn how to fight and how to get over his loss of creativity, as he gave up screenwriting for creating on-demand pornography.

Don’t be fooled. This is not a movie about a cool looking monster, although it has that. It’s really about endless drives to God Lives Underwater-sounding generic post-NIN music, a long trip to the goth store and lots of desert. So much desert that I’m shocked that Kyuss doesn’t show up to play a song.

This ends with no resolution and it feels like there’s about half the movie left but no. That’s all you get.

Charles Band intended to direct this, then J.R. Bookwalter and finally Danny Draven, who made the remake of Death Bed in 2002 and also was the guy who directed Cryptz. 2000s Full Moon is…rough.

There is a pretty rad cyborg demon who is downloading people onto CDs and you know, I would watch that dude for the entire length of this movie instead of what I saw.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Liberty (Mile O’Keefe)  and Bash (Lou Ferrigno) once were in the service and fought in Central America along with Jesse (Richard Eden). They’re trying to keep young people out of the drug trade and off the streets, but they can’t even keep Jesse from getting all mixed up and killed. That means it’s time for a new war. A war on the streets of America.

Reading this paragraph and thinking that Ator and Hercules are teaming up, well, you might think that this movie is going to be awesome.

I wish I could report that it was.

This is the second time that Myrl A. Schreibman has done this to me. His film Angel of H.E.A.T. figured out a way to make a spy movie with Marilyn Chambers and Mary Woronov boring.

The people that wrote it came from such disparate roles in the movie business. Monica Clemens produced two other movies, The Last Ride and Cop-Out; Douglas Forsmith was in the art department for films like Commando, Cobra, St. Elmo’s Fire, Memorial Valley Massacre and Hunter’s Blood and also worked as the assistant property master on Exorcist II: The Heretic; and Tina Plackinger appeared in roles that called for athletic women, such as health club woman #1 in Armed and Dangerous, working out in The BodySculpture System and as the harem mistress in Wizards of the Demon Sword.

Liberty also has a girlfriend who barely likes him, Sarah (Mitzi Kapture, Silk Stalkings) and when she gets pregnant, they spend a lot of the movie talking about abortion.

I wanted to see Miles and Lou beating up perps not a long talk about choice.

I mean, you have two guys who are more known for action than acting and you make them act.

Myrl A. Schreibman, you have done it again. And by it, I mean fuck it up.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Alright, I started this movie because I thought it was shot on video, only to learn that over the seven years it took to make (1984 to 1991), it went from 8mm to 16mm, giving it a distorted feeling as stock doesn’t always match. This actually took so long that there’s a BLOOD SYMBOL 1984-1991 REST IN PEACE credit at the end. The sound isn’t synched either, as it was shot without audio and the script changes were never tracked, so they had to guess what everyone was saying. It only adds to how strange this all appears, along with the fact that creative differences caused lead actress Micheline Richard to leave in the middle of filming, leaving all of her remaining scenes to be shot far away with a double whose face is never clear.

This Canadian microbudget film by co-directors and writers Maurice Devereaux and Tony Morello (who went on to make Slashers), this has a simple story: an undead monk named Olam (Richard Labelle) can remain immortal if he drinks the blood of college student Tracy Walker (Micheline Richard).

Where it gets beyond expectations is in the way it was shot: strobing moments, strong and confident handheld camera work, point of view stalking right out of Carpenter and incredible editing. It’s beyond a movie started in high school and sure, the plot is thin, but the work to make it happen is rich. There’s even a hint of giallo as Olam stalks his prey complete with black gloves, overcoat and fedora.

There’s also tons of footage of Tracy just doing things like going to class and playing softball, yet that “you are there” style of shooting makes this feel so much different than any other slasher. Sure, it’s creators were learning as they go, but they were definitely on to something.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Marius Penczner and filmed by students from Memphis State University, now known as the University of Memphis, this has a very familiar looking stop motion creature in it. If you were watching music videos in 1983, you saw ZZ Top’s “TV Dinners.” Well, that same monster appears in both, as that video was also directed by Penczner.

After landing in Pleasantville, United States, aliens convince two criminals to help them rule the world by using Uni-Cola, the most popular soft drink around. In addition to that monster, the aliens can put people into a zombie-like form, which gives this movie its title.

Made for just $27,000, most people of a certain age saw this paired with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes on USA’s Night Flight. Once it came out on DVD, it got ed-edited — 33 minutes less! — and what remains is a really fun film that feels as if it really was made in the 50s.

Jonathan Lynn directed Nuns on the Run, My Cousin Vinny and The Whole Nine Yards, as well as co-creating and co-writing  the television series Yes Minister. He also made Sgt. Bilko and I probably should forget to say that.

He also directed this movie, which he co-wrote this with John Landis, so he can do no wrong. That’s because whenever I’m down, this is the movie that gets me laughing.

You’ve played as Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull, a childhood superstar in my life), Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn, who explains every crush I ever had), Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Mr. Green (Michael McKean), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd) and Miss Scarlet (Lesley Anne Warren) before, but to see them come to life in a movie that has Lee Ving from FEAR as a dead body, Colleen Camp as a maid, Tim Curry as the butler and even my favorite Go-Go Jane Wiedlin as a singing telegram, well, this is what joy looks like.

How good is the set? Well, after the movie was done, it was bought by the producers of Dynasty and turned into The Carlton hotel. The rooms even connect exactly like the game.

I’m a sucker for the idea of movies with multiple endings. Other than the three endings here, the only other film I can think of that did it — which is all BS, William Castle never filmed the other ending — was Mr. Sardonicus.

Sam Adams (Jim Abel) has just moved to a new house in an all-American town. Everything seems perfect and he has a chance to get a scholarship thanks to his performance on the football team. But man, that team. Everyone in school loves them, but they might love them too much, especially Jack “Boot” Butkowski (Tony Carlin). In fact, one could say that the team are pretty much forming a new Third Reich inside the school and even the town itself.

Director Bill Milling produced Nightmare, Caged Fury, Savage Dawn and Silent Madness, but is probably best known for directing adult movies like A Scent of Heather, The Vixens of Kung Fu and Oriental Blue.

This feels so much like my high school that it started triggering flashbacks. That said, there weren’t as many thirty-year-old teenagers in the unhallowed halls of Lincoln High School.

That said, this movie is more nuanced than you think it would be, highlighting the dangers of mob mentality and why we can never let what happened in Germany happen here except, you know, it’s happening all over the place now.

That’s right. It’s the most well-intentioned and thought out anti-fascist movie made by a porn director.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

I’m certain as soon as I post this that I’ll get comments like “They could never make that movie today,” in a very smug way, but the point is, they already made it, you can still find it and no one is trying to take it from you. I kind of love that for all the profanity, flatulence and racist words thrown around in this movie, execs were just as upset that a horse gets punched.

The idea for Blazing Saddles came from Tex-X, a script that Andrew Bergman (Big Trouble, Striptease) planned on writing himself, with Alan Arkin directing and James Earl Jones as the sheriff. Mel Brooks bought it and despire not working with other writers since Your Show of Shows created a writer’s room with himself, Bergman, Richard Pryor, Alan Unger and Norman Steinberg. They worked under a sign that said, “Please do not write a polite script.”

The plot starts just like any Western you’ve seen: a new railroad will be redirected through Rock Ridge, making the town finally worth something, so territorial attorney general Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) sends his men, led by Taggart (Slim Pickens) to force the residents out. He starts by shooting the sheriff and Governor William J. Le Petomane (Mel Brooks in one of many roles in this) is coerced by Lamarr to hire a sheriff named Bart (Cleavon Little) in the hopes that the town won’t have anything to do with a black man. Yet Bart was about to be killed for beating up Taggart, so maybe Lamarr is hastening his own defeat.

With help from the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder), he soon wins over the town — future Higgins John Hillerman is one of them — and defeats the super strong Mongo (Alex Karras) and charms his would-be seducer Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn). Actually, he’s such a good person that he lets those two villains join him.

Of course everything works out well, but the idea that somehow the movie is on a lot next to Buddy Bizarre’s (Dom DeLuise) musical and the movies turn into a fistfight that ends when Lamarr runs into Mann’s Chinese Theater to see the end of his own movie. It’s an audacious close to a movie that’s equally willing to be incredibly smart and wonderfully stupid.

Casting was a big problem. Pryor was Brooks’ original Sheriff Bart, but the studio worried about his drug use and wouldn’t approve him as he was uninsurable. Brooks also wanted John Wayne for the Waco Kid, but the Western star turned down the movie for being too blue and his replacement, Gig Young, passed out from alcohol withdrawl.

A television pilot titled Black Bart was produced for CBS based on Bergman’s original story with Louis Gossett Jr. as Bart and Steve Landesberg as sidekick Reb Jordan. Bergman was listed as the sole creator and the show was made just to ensure that Warner Bros. had the movie rights to make sequels. It only aired one contractually obligated time on April 4, 1975.

As for the troublesome moments, Burton Gilliam. who played a henchman named Lyle, couldn’t say the word to Little, who pulled him aside and said, “If I thought you would say those words to me in any other situation we’d go to fist city, but this is all fun. Don’t worry about it.” And Brooks has said that he wrote the movie to fight back at “white corruption, racism and Bible-thumping bigotry.” The same people who argue that you couldn’t make this today are the same ones that saw Joe as the hero of that movie and were cheering on Archie Bunker.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site back on November 1, 2020 but now Arrow has released a UHD version. The beauty of the Arrow re-release — beyond the gorgeous 4K rescan of the 35mm negative — are all the extras. Not just one, but three commentary tracks are on this (star Lance Guest and his son Jackson Guest; Mike White of The Projection Booth podcast; director Nick Castle and production designer Ron Cobb), along with interviews with Catherine Mary Stewart, composer Craig Safan, screenwriter Jonathan Betuel, special effects supervisor Kevin Pike, a breakdown on the landmark effects and even a featurette with game collector Estil Vance, who has actually made the game from the movie.

I have to say, the Castle and Cobb commentary is packed with info, from who is playing the aliens to how the effects came together to even plenty of fun asides about how they tried to tie the video game world and real movie world together. It’s like listening to two friends talk about a really great time in their life. Castle is super honest about the lack of time they had to film and things he feels could be better today. It’s exactly the kind of thing that film lovers get into the most and, as always, Arrow delivers the goods.

I also love the reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Ferguson and the collector’s booklet featuring writing by Amanda Reyes and sci-fi author Greg Bear’s Omni magazine article on Digital Productions, the company responsible for the CGI in The Last Starfighter.

You can order the 4K UHD or blu ray from MVD.

As much as we decry practical effects over CGI — in the same way we demand physical media over streaming — there are times when it doesn’t have to be all that bad. I decided that instead of finding a poor example of computer generated animation, I’d share something that I love.

While the first CGI in mainstream film was probably 1976’s Futureworld (several modern techniques were innovated in this film, from an animated CGI  hand that was taken from Edwin Catmull’s 1972 experimental short subject A Computer Animated Hand and an animated face from Fred Parke’s 1974 experimental short subject Faces & Body Parts to an early example of digital compositing to place live actors over a previously filmed background), the two movies that I can really remember to use extensive computer-generated imagery were Tron and The Last Starfighter.

In place of physical spaceships, 3D rendered models were used to depict this film’s Gunstar and spacecraft. Their designs came from artist Ron Cobb, who also worked on Dark Star, Alien, Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian and wrote the initial script for Dark Skies, which Steven Spielberg rewrote into the mich friendlier E.T. He’s also listed in the credits for Back to the Future as DeLorean Time Travel Consultant.

There are over 27 minutes of effects in this film, which was a tremendous amount of computer animation for its time. However, this animation required half the time of the traditional miniature special effects, allowed the film to be made for just $14 million dollars.

That said — there are still plenty of practical effects, like the creature and Beta Unit special makeup, as well as the Centauri’s Starcar, which was a real vehicle created by Gene Winfield, who also created the spinners for Blade Runner and the 6000 SUX for RoboCop. His car design for The Reactor was used in a variety of TV shows, including Catwoman’s Catmobile on the Batman TV show, the Jupiter 6 car in the “Bread and Circuses” episode of Star Trek, Bewitched and Mission: Impossible, where it was part of a scheme to make a bank robber believe that they’d been asleep for 14 years.

The idea that video games were recruiting players for some high end military service started as an urban legend that games like Missile Command were saving information on its players so that they’d be ready to defend America from the inevitable Russian ICBM strike that was coming in the 1980’s. There was also the There’s also the weird tale of Polybius, a video game that never existed — or did it? — that was an MK Ultra style experiment unleashed on Portland, Oregon arcades that led to addiction, hallucinations and visits by the Men in Black. Obviously, those legends led to this film or this is all an elaborate piece of disinformation to hide the truth in plain site. I leave your version of reality up to you, dear reader.

Alex Rogan (Lance Guest, Halloween 2) is going nowhere, stuck in a trailer park taking care of everyone else. His scholarship has been rejected and he has to keep fixing things and watching his little brother instead of getting to spend time with Maggie (Catherine Marie Stewart, The Apple).

The only fun he has is playing the Starfighter arcade game in the trailer park, which allows him to pretend that he’s defending the Frontier from Xur and his Ko-Dan Armada.

After Alex becomes the game’s highest-scoring player, the game’s inventor Centauri visits, offering him a ride in his fancy car as a prize. He’s played by Robert Preston, who is really just reprising his role as Harold Hill from The Music Man, which is an ingenious gambit.

The car is really a spaceship and Alex is taken to meet the Rylan Star League while a Beta Unit is used to replace him on Earth. That’s when he learns that the game is actually a training unit meant to find starfighters ready to battle very real Ko-Dan Empire.

Alex is expected to be the gunner for the Gunstar along with the reptilian navigator Grig (Dan O’Herlihy, who pretty much owned the 1980’s between this movie, playing Conal Cochran in Halloween 3: Season of the Witch and the Old Man in RoboCop). However, all our hero wants to do is go home.

It takes alien assassins attacking the trailer park and the death of all of the other starfighters and Centauri — who takes a laser blast meant for our hero — for Alex to join the cause. While he fights the Armada in space, Beta and Maggie battle the Zando-Zan killers back down on good old Mother Earth.

Of course, Alex has the gift that all great starfighters need and saves the day. He lands his ship on the trailer park and takes Maggie into space with him, while his brother starts playing the game in the hopes of joining his brother.

This is a film with real heart, beyond its aspirations of being a blockbuster. It’s directed by Nick Castle, who you probably already know played Michael Myers in the original Halloween. What you may not know is that he wrote the movie Skatetown U.S.A. or directed Tag: The Assassination Game, The Boy Who Could Fly and Dennis the Menace. Plus, he, John Carpenter and Tommy Lee Wallace all formed The Coup De Villes and played much of the music for Big Trouble In Little China.

Despite the film being based on the idea of an arcade game, there never really was one despite the promise in the closing credits of an Atari-created edition. The game was actually started and would have been Atari’s first 3D polygonal arcade game to use a Motorola 68000 as the CPU. It would have used the Star Wars arcade controls and been much like the game Lance Guest plays in the film, but it was canceled once Atari representatives saw the film in post-production and decided it was not going to be a financial success. That said there were Atari home versions in development and they were eventually released as Star Raiders II and Solaris.

There is an NES game — it’s a reskin of the computer game Uridium — and Rogue Synapse created a freeware PC game in 2007 that’s very close to the game in the film.

The themes of The Last Starfighter have been repeated in plenty of other stories, like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Ernest Cline’s Armada, which is pretty much a note for note reboot of the same story. Of course, Cline wrote Ready: Player One and works in a reference to the original film, but he wears his influences on his sleeve. Interestingly enough, Wil Wheaton read the audio version of this book — which will be a movie soon enough that’ll cost a hundred times what The Last Starfighter did and have a sliver of the soul — and he appears in this film.

Galoob planned to create a toyline for this movie that sadly never came to be. You can see images of it and learn more about it at Plaid Stallions.

If you’re looking for a great slice of 1984, you can’t go wrong with this movie. I love that it has a lizard best friend, fun spaceship designs, the Music Man conning people for money in the midst of a galactic war and even the promise of a sequel which never came. It’s the kind of movie that would always be a rental that everyone could agree on or the perfect film to veg out whenever HBO showed it for the two hundredth time.

Claire Brennan plays Jade Cochran, a diner waitress who hates freaks and sadly for her, she’s pretty much in a remake of Tod Browning’s Freaks but, you know, 35 years later and somehow with a lower budget. Within minutes — and just one ferris wheel ride — she’s the wife of circus owner Steve St. John (Bill McKinney) and moments after that, rough trade Blackie Fleming (Lee Raymond) is treating her how she likes being treated behind her new old man’s back and then, even sooner than that, Steve’s dead at the hands and switchblade of Blackie and Jade owns it all.

Again, if you saw Freaks, you know how this all ends, the comeuppance of it all, right? The effects are rudimentary but effective and I mean, you can’t call a movie She Freak and not have a she freak.

Directed by Byron Mabe (The Acid Eaters, Space Thing, Nude Django) with inserts from Donn Davison. Donn was the manager of Florida’s Dragon Art Theatre and one of the guys who would work four-walled theaters and talk marks into buying gimmicks. He also narrated the trailer for The Crawling Thing and Creature Of Evil.

This was written by Michael B. Druxman (who also wrote Cannon movie Keaton’s Cop) and producer David F. Friedman, who produced this and also plays the carnival barker. He learned how to make movies in the army and when he was discharged, he sold army-surplus searchlights. His first customer? Kroger Babb, perhaps the most carny of all carnies. And this, Friedman entered the world of film, working with Herschell Gordon Lewis, making more money in softcore and retiring when hardcore took over.

Filmed during the Kern County Fair and the Ventura County Fair, She Freak takes advantage of the rides and attractions of West Coast Shows, which was such a major company that they could do five carnivals in different locations at the same time. Most of their crew are in this.

Even though Jade and Shorty (Felix Silla) are at odds in this movie, the truth is there’s a thin line between love and hate. This movie started a nine year affair between the two that was kept a secret, even when Brennan gave birth to Silla’s son.

You can watch this on Tubi.