EDITOR’S NOTE: Staying Alive was on USA Up All Night on September 16, 1995.

Saturday Night Fever producer and writer Robert Stigwood and Norman Wexler dreamed of a sequel to the film pretty much since the original was released. What they came up with, Staying Alive, was a script that John Travolta disliked. It was too much of a downer and he couldn’t be convinced to do the film for several years.

Finally, after four years of this, Travolta and Stigwood met. The star had an idea. What if Tony Manero became a dancer on Broadway? And what if he was a big star? Wexler thought that it would be better if Manero ended up in the chorus and the two reached an agreement to start the film.

Travolta had just seen Rocky III and wanted the same energy for Staying Alive. Paramount got Sylvester Stallone on board, Travolta told him his idea of the happy ending and toned down the rawness of the original film.

What emerged was…well, whatever this movie is.

Tony Manero was once the king of 2001 Odyssey, ruling the disco dance floor. Now, he lives in poverty and works on his dream of being in a modern dance musical. When he isn’t teaching or dancing, he’s a waiter that’s constantly beset upon by beautiful women. Ah, the sad life of Tony Manero — constantly getting laid and dancing his heart out.

Our hero has changed — moving away from Brooklyn has matured him somewhat and toned down the levels of profanity he used to freely toss around. But he’s still horrible to women, particularly his dancer and rock singer girlfriend Jackie (Cynthia Rhodes, Tina Tech from Flashdance and Penny from Dirty Dancing; she’s also in Xanadu, but let’s cut her some slack). He can go after anyone, but she has to be his alone. Speaking of guys that surround Jackie, Richie Sambora and Frank Stallone play in her band.

Tony’s really into Laura (Finola Hughes, who was nominated for both the Worst New Star and Worst Supporting Actress Razzies for her role in this film; she’s also in The Apple, pretty much damning her soul to bad dance movie hell for all eternity). He pursues her right into a one night stand and can’t understand why that’s all it ends up being. She replies, “Everyone uses everybody.”

Jackie and Tony break up just in time for the two of them — and Laura — to try out for the biggest dance musical to ever hit Broadway — Satan’s Alley. They get small parts and our villain gets the lead. Look for Patrick Swayze as one of the other backup dancers.

This leads Tony into his very own walkabout spirit quest, where he takes the 16 mile walk from Manhattan to Bay Ridge. The 2001 Odyssey is now Spectrum, a gay club, and this makes him realize how much his life has changed. He apologizes to his mother for how he was. She tells him that being so selfish is how he escaped a dead-end life. Of note, Donna Pescow was to return in the audience of Tony’s Broadway show and Tony’s father (Val Bisoglio) filmed scenes that were deleted. Now, the film implies that he is dead.

Tony and Jackie get back together, with her helping him work hard and take over the vacant lead male role. While he and Laura openly hate one another, they have as much chemistry dancing vertically as they once did horizontally. Tony takes things too far on the sold out opening night and kisses her at the end of the first act; she responds by slashing at his face.

Backstage, the director flips out on Tony and Laura tries to lure him back into bed. The second act is everything of the 1980s — fog, lasers, glitter, silver lame and probably metric tons of white flake. Our hero throws away Laura at the end and goes wild with his very own solo dance before she jumps back into his arms to a standing ovation. He reunites for good with Jackie and celebrates as only he can — by recreating the strut from the beginning of Saturday Night Fever.

Despite being a critical failure — that’s putting it mildly —  Staying Alive was a commercial success. The film opened with the biggest weekend for a musical film ever with a gross of $12 million dollars, finally earning $127 million on a $22 million budget.

I have my own theory on this film: it’s a Jacob’s Ladder situation.

Some time after Saturday Night Fever, Tony died. As dance was the most important thing in his life, his limbo — the time between heaven and hell — is spent trying to get a role as a dancer. The play Satan’s Alley is quite literally the place he could go to, if he makes the wrong choice. His apartment building is filled with other dead people; his life of constant temptation is the devil trying to convince him to follow him and give up on purity, just as Satan once led his brother Frank Jr. to renounce the priesthood.

Tony’s walk back to his hometown is literally a journey to the land of the dead — his mother is the one who has passed on and that’s why she can now forgive him. 2001 Odyssey, once a place full of life, has now become Tony’s worst fear, a loss of his masculinity. The place where his racist, gay bashing friends once called home has become their hell.

When Tony dances on to the Broadway stage, he must choose — heaven or hell. Or, as he does, making one’s own choice. He tosses Laura — the scarlet woman, the temptress — down to joyously dance and realize his full potential. He offers a hand in forgiveness to her before realizing his one true love — no, not Jackie. Himself. He struts down the street and on his way to heaven, which is embodied in the alpha and omega of Saturday Night Live and Staying Alive as that strut, down the street, to the Bee Gees.

Sometimes, a movie is so bad that you have to invent your own mythology to get through it. This, obviously, would be one of those films. Just don’t ask me to explain that Stallone cameo in the beginning.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Virgin High was on USA Up All Night on June 4 and December 4, 1993; November 25, 1994; August 12, 1995 and March 8, 1996.

Christy Murphy’s (Tracy Dali, who was June in Click: The Calendar Girl Killer) strict Catholic parents — Burt Ward is her dad — are worried that their daughter is having sex with her boyfriend Jerry (Richard Gabai, who directed and co-wrote the script; he also made Assault of the Party Nerds). They send her to the Academy of the Blessed Virgin, an all-girls religious school but Jerry shows up as a priest, more determined than ever to finally sleep with Christy.

This is a movie that dares have Linnea Quigley as a character who looks down on teens who have sex, so that’s definitely a twist I didn’t see coming. Michelle Bauer is also in the cast as sex education teacher Miss Bush and this was Leslie Mann’s first movie.

Somehow — and don’t worry, we’ll get to it — Jerry would return in Hot Under the Collar, another movie in which he had to become a priest and get the girl. One would think that this plan has no way of working but somehow Jerry was able to pull it off both times.

To learn more about this movie, I invite you to check out The Schlock Pit, where the great David Wain interviewed Gabai.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Paperboy was on USA Up All Night on December 8, 1995 and January 16, 1998.

Canada may seem like our polite neighbor to the north, but they really export some amazingly bonkers movies. Under the surface, they’re boiling with films that challenge convention and embrace the weird. Take this movie, which starts with its 12-year-old antagonist, paperboy Johnny McFarley smothering an old woman with a plastic bag.

After that stunning open, we meet Melissa (Alexandra Paul, the virgin Connie Swail from Dragnet), a teacher who returns home to learn that her mother — yep, the old woman — is dead. She takes her daughter Cammie home with her for the funeral, where Johnny is way too excited to see her. He ingratiates himself into the funeral proceedings and then hides a baby monitor in a vent so he can keep up on what Melissa is doing. Yep. Our paperboy is in love.

What he can’t deal with is the fact that she has a boyfriend, Brian (William Katt). But he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win her over, from turning busybodies into paraplegics to killing his own father with a golf putter and giving another old lady a heart attack by faking the death of her dog. He even smacks Brian with a baseball bat and leaves him inside a burning boat.

Yes, this is a child who goes from sweet and approachable to pure menace in seconds. How dare you go on a date when he wanted to make you some barbecue, Melissa!

This is a sort of remake of 1992’s Mikey by way of another Canadian movie where all someone wants is a happy family, 1987’s The Stepfather.

Sadly, this is a movie that’s near impossible to find, as it’s never been released on DVD. You can, however, find it at the VHSPS.

BONUS: You can listen to us discuss this movie on our podcast.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

There are tons of Bigfoot films to watch. Trust us, we know. We have an entire Letterboxd list packed with the ones we’ve made it through. And we know that Scarecrow has an even larger section in the store that’s all Yeti, skunkape and Sasquatch-based.

We decided to go back to the classics and rewatch this 1974 Michael Findlay film, in which Professor Ernst Prell takes four of his graduate students — Keith Henshaw, Karen Hunter, Tom Nash and Lynn Kelly — into the woods to discover if the Yeti really does exist.

Despite a mysterious dinner the night before — their dish of gin sung is broken up by a drunken former student and his wife who loudly proclaim that the last trip to see a Bigfoot got everyone killed — everyone decides that going into the brush to find the beast is a dandy idea.

As if that isn’t enough, that lout keeps drinking and decides to cut his wife’s throat with an electric turkey knife before she responds in kind by dumping a toaster into the bloody bathwater as he tries to clean himself up.

When the students get to Boot Island, they have more gin sung, meet a mute Native American named Laughing Crow and listen to Tom strum a little tune he wrote about the Yeti, who liked that song so much that he rips Tom apart, leaving only his leg as evidence.

The professor isn’t someone I’d like to have as a teacher, as he’s willing to use that leg and the body of another of the students, Lynn, as bait to catch his white whale. Or white Yeti, you get the allusion.

That said, the reveal of this all — spoiler warning for a 46-year-old movie — is that there’s no Bigfoot at all, but a big society of cannibals looking for either victims to be fresh meat or those willing to help them consume the flesh of their fellow man.

If you’re a big film geek like me — seeing as how you’re reading about a Sasquatch film from the last century when you could be doing something much more productive, I get the feeling that you are — you’ll wonder, did the print Sam saw have Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” in the soundtrack? Yes. It did. It sure did.

In 1982, if you were lucky enough to still have a drive-in around ou, chances are you could have seen this movie as part of an event named 5 Deranged Features. Don’t be fooled by some of these titles, as you may have seen them all before! They’re Coming to Get You is not All the Colors of the Dark, but instead Al Adamson’s Frankenstein vs. Dracula. House of Torture is The Wizard of Gore. Night of the Howling Beast is The Corpse Grinders. And Creature from Black Lake wasn’t so lucky as to get a name change.

Here’s a drink that I’ll be bringing to the drive-in.

Yeti

• 1 1/2 oz. gin
• 1/2 oz. blue Curaçao
• 3 oz. lemonade (you can make it yourself or just go off the shelf)
• Club soda
• Lemon wedges

1. Combine gin and the lemonade in a glass with ice.
2. Add blue Curaçao and top with club soda. Stir using a mixing spoon and garnish with lemon wedges.

Can’t make it to the drive-in? Watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

When a movie has the working title Want A Ride, Little Girl? you know it’s going to be scummy. What may surprise you is that William Shatner — who director William Gréfe met at an airport — is in the lead role.

Don’t be fooled by the supernatural looking poster. No, this is a slasher with Shatner’s Matt Stone as the bad guy picking up young women, freaking out Shat-style and getting rid of their bodies. He’s being trailed by a detective named Karate Pete (Harold “Oddjob” Sakata), which is, pardon the pun, pretty odd. He’s on the trail because Stone keeps bilking and killing old women for their money.

Jennifer Bishop (who is also in Gréfe’s Mako the Jaws of Death) plays the daughter of one of these older women who suspects that the leisure suit-wearing Stone is a shyster. And oh yeah — Ruth Roman is in this!

Sakata almost died making this, as the rig that was used for his hanging death failed and he was nearly hung for real. Shatner saved his life — breaking a finger in the process — and the entire accident can be seen on the He Came from the Swamps documentary.

This movie belongs to Shatner. As a child, his character kills William Kerwin with a sword in a kind of pre-Pieces opening, then murders a puppy and gets so worked up in one scene that he supposedly farts on camera. His assortment of 70’s fashions are pretty astounding and every single frame of this feels as sweaty and gross as a night in the Everglades.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rock ‘n’ Roll High School Forever was on USA Up All Night but I can’t find the dates!

I love Rock ‘n’ Roll High School inversely to how much I dislike this movie.

Maybe I’m too old and it’s too loud, but the kids in this movie aren’t fun and rebellious. They’re actually annoying and that kind of makes me sad.

Blame is to be laid at the feet of Jesse Davis, the lead singer of  the Eradicators and the leader of the rebellious kids who defy authority by blowing up toilets. He hangs with Mag (Evan Richards) and critiques his burps. Richards was hired because he looked like Corey Haim and, well, they could have just hired Corey Haim.

When he isn’t singing like Michael Jackson or opining like an expert on everything, Jesse is trying to pick up a new music teaching named Rita (Sarah G. Buxton) which doesn’t feel high school cool, it feels like pressure on his end and oh yeah, she’s an adult older than him and that’s illegal.

The rest of the band is sax player Jones (Patrick Malone) and really, I hate bands that have dedicated sax players. They also have a karate kicking bass player named narock (Steven Ho) and Stella, the only female member, guitarist and also only reason to watch this movie — with one upcoming exception — who is played by Liane Curtis, who always is the sidekick in these movies. For evidence, watch Sixteen Candles. Is it any surrpise she became a Girlfriend from Hell? Also: Her father is Jack Curtis, who directed, produced, shot and edited The Flesh Eaters and did the dubbing for everything from Speed Racer (he was Pops Racer and Inspector Detector), Gamera the Invincble and Planet of the Vampires to Prince of Space and Mothra vs. Godzilla. Sadly, he died at the age of 40 because he was allergic to penecillin and there was no other treatment for his pnuemonia.

The other reason to watch is, of course, Mary Woronov, who plays Dr. Vadar, the new Vice Principal who can remove her hand and replace it with a metal claw or a whip. Also: Rob Zombie had to have seen this movie, as the witch Tabatha is played by Brynn Horrocks. In The Lords of Salem, she plays one of the first witches of Salem, Mary Webster.

It’s directed and written by Deborah Bock, which is a disappointment, as I love her Slumber Party Massacre II. It starts on Rock ‘n’ Roll High School Day, which honours the day in the first film where the students blew up Vince Lombardi High. But there are no Ramones here — don’t your parents know that you’re Ramones? — just posters of them randomly. Principal McGee returns, but it’s not Paul Bartel. Instead it’s Larry Linville. Eaglebauer also comes back, but instead of Clint Howard, it’s Michael Cerveris.

Well, Dee Dee is on the soundtrack. And the part with Mojo Nixon as the Spirit of Rock ‘n Roll is kind of cute. It’s not Mojo’s best role — that would be Toad in Super Mario Brothers — but he does elevate the proceedings.

But Corey Feldman playing 50s classics as 90s versions is not Joey showing up in Riff Randell’s bedroom to sing “I Want You Around.” Speaking of music, the soundtrack is all over the place with The Pursuit of Happiness, Thompson Twins, The Divinyls, Eleven, Tackhead, The Ventures and, as you imagined, Corey Feldman & The Eradicators. SBK was going to release the soundtrack but supposedly Feldman’s rehab stint put them off, because all record labels are against rock stars getting off drugs.

In his book Coreyography — ugh — Feldman writes about how he was a heroin user during filming and came to set with heroin residue dripping from his nose. When a stage hand discretely brought it to his attention, Feldman and turned it into an angry scene, claiming the stuff under his nose was from an engine he was fixing.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rambo III was on USA Up All Night on March 22 and July 4, 1997.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to have toy guns and military toys were not allowed in our house. I can remember thinking how strange it was that my grandfather loved war movies so much, hearing him listen to screaming and bullets and explosions in films late into the night when he’d get home from a double shift at the mill. And yet here I am, thirty years later or so, pretty much doing the same thing, watching Stallone movies at 6:12 AM while the rest of the world enjoys their last few minutes of sleep.

The first time I saw Rambo III was at a friend’s house unbeknownst to my parents. And this kid was obsessed with Rambo, right down to the necklace and knife that had a compass and opened up to hold tools. Yeah, 1988 was the kind of time when kids idolized war movies. We didn’t know that war was a funny thing and that the very Taliban soldiers that we cheered on in this film would one day change sides because global diplomacy is funny that way. It was simpler to just hate and fear Russia back then than it is today, where nothing at all seems sure and everything feels made up.

But I digress. Let’s talk about John Rambo.

Colonel Sam Trautman tracks down Rambo in Thailand, where he’s stick fighting for a monastery. He wants nothing of the war, even when shown how Russian troops in Afghanistan are killing civilians. Trautman goes on the mission and is captured, with all of his men killed. That’s when Rambo tells the man in charge of this op, government suit Robert Griggs, that he’ll rescue Trautman.

That leads me to one of my many rules of movies. This one is simple. Never trust a government spook. And my second rule: never, ever trust Kurtwood Smith.

Rambo soon meets arms dealer Mousa Ghani and asks him to bring him to Khost, where Trautman is being held. The Mujahideen in the village take to Rambo after he plays a game on horseback with them, but after a Russian helicopter attacks them, they refuse to help him. Instead, only Mousa and a young boy named Hamid are willing to help.

Rambo — of course — destroys everyone in his path to save his mentor. He uses everything from his bare hands to explosive arrows and even a tank to kill everyone in his path. And while the Russians almost take them out, the brave Afghani people rise up to rescue our heroes.

This movie used to end with a dedication to the brave Mujahideen, but now just thanks the gallant people of Afghanistan. That said, Masoud is based on Ahmad Shah Masoud, a real-life Afghan resistance who later became the minister of defense before leading the resistance against the Taliban. And in the original cut, Rambo felt so at home with the freedom fighters that he stayed here versus going back to America.

Up until Back to the Future Part II, this was the most expensive movie ever made. And, like many Stallone films, it was fraught with issues. Just a few weeks into filming, most of the crew including the director of photography and director Russell Mulcahy (Razorback, Highlander) were fired.

Stallone told Ain’t It Cool News that Mulcahy “went to Israel two weeks before me with the task of casting two dozen vicious-looking Russian troops. These men were supposed to make your blood run cold. When I arrived on the set, what I saw was two dozen blond, blue-eyed pretty boys who resembled rejects from a surfing contest. Needless to say, Rambo is not afraid of a little competition but being attacked by third-rate male models could be an enemy that could overwhelm him. I explained my disappointment to Russell and he totally disagreed, so I asked him and his chiffon army to move on.” Mulcahy was replaced by Peter MacDonald, a veteran second unit director.

The Guinness Book of World Records went on to label this the most violent film ever made, with 221 acts of violence, 70 explosions and over 108 on-screen deaths. They should have held on for the next one in the series, which goes way beyond this. Of course, this won Stallone another Razzie for Worst Actor, but I don’t think he was all that concerned. After all, he got paid a Gulfstream jet to be in this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rambo: First Blood Part II was on USA Up All Night on February 10 and 23, 1996.

When it came time to do a sequel to First Blood, there was a thought that Rambo needed a partner.

Producers wanted John Travolta, but Stallone vetoed the idea. Lee Marvin (who almost played  Colonel Trautman in the first film) was offered the role of Marshall Murdock, but declined.

In fact, that sidekick character is in the first draft James Cameron wrote for this film. Stallone said of what he wrote, “In his original draft it took nearly 30-40 pages to have any action initiated and Rambo was partnered with a tech-y sidekick.”

What ended up on screen was very different.

“Rambo, John J., born 7/6/47 Bowie, Arizona of Indian-German descent. Joined army 8/6/64. Accepted, Special Forces specialization, light weapons, cross-trained as medic. Helicopter and language qualified, 59 confirmed kills, two Silver Stars, four Bronze, four Purple Hearts, Distinguished Service Cross, Medal of Honor.”

Yep — that’s our hero. Given that he kills 74 people in just two days in this film, he’s somehow more successful in Vietnam the second time. But we’ll get to that.

For now, it’s been three years and Rambo is paying for his actions in the original movie when he’s visited by Colonel Sam Trautman. Even though the Vietnam War is over, people remain convinced that POWs have been left behind. The government has authorized a solo mission to confirm if any are alive and Rambo is one of only three men suited for such a mission (who the other two are, I leave up to you, dear viewer, but if one of them isn’t Thunder, I don’t want to know about it).

Marshall Murdock (Charles Napier) is the suit in charge that tells Rambo that all he has to do is take photos, not rescue anyone or engage the enemy. As Rambo drops into enemy territory, his parachute becomes tangled, leaving him with only a knife and a bow. He doesn’t need all those guns, trust me.

A young intelligence agent named Co-Bao (Julia Nickson) and some pirates take Rambo up river, where he saves an American POW who has been crucified and left to die. The Vietnamese troops attack and the pirates betray Rambo, so he kills everyone. Rambo’s extraction is canceled, as Murdock says that Rambo has violated his orders and tells Trautman that he never intended for there to be any rescue — it would be too expensive and no one wants another war.

Rambo is turned over to the Soviet troops who are training the Vietnamese, Lieutenant Colonel Podovsky and Sergeant Yushin. They demand that he read the US government a message to stay away from future missions. Instead, he warns Murdock that he’s coming for him. He escapes thanks to Co and they kiss, only for her to die seconds later.

Rambo then becomes a slasher villain that we cheer for as he wipes out every single enemy one by one. He even steals a helicopter and uses it to destroy Murdock’s office before demanding that the rest of the POWs get rescued.

Trautman then confronts Rambo and tries to convince him to return home, but our protagonist angrily replies that he only wants his country to love its soldiers as much as its soldiers love it.

James Cameron claims that he only wrote the first draft of the script and that Sylvester Stallone made many changes to it. He claims that the star didn’t like that the sidekick got all the cool dialogue and scrapped most of the POWs’ backstories.

When the film was released, the political content of the movie was controversial, with many critics not ready to see any heroism in the Vietnam War. For his part, Cameron commented that he wrote the action and Stallone the politics.

That said — at the time of the making of this film, there were 2,500 soldiers missing in action, so you can see where the sentiments were coming from. There were even reports that Delta Force operatives were in training to try and find those prisoners.

Stallone explained the ending of the film quite passionately: “I think that James Cameron is a brilliant talent, but I thought the politics were important, such as a right-wing stance coming from Trautman and his nemesis, Murdock, contrasted by Rambo’s obvious neutrality, which I believe is explained in Rambo’s final speech. I realize his speech at the end may have caused millions of viewers to burst veins in their eyeballs by rolling them excessively, but the sentiment stated was conveyed to me by many veterans.”

This film was beloved by audiences worldwide just as much as it was savaged by critics. It won Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Screenplay and Worst Song (“Peace In Our Time” by Frank Stallone) in the  Razzie Awards. It doesn’t matter — it started an entire genre of military revenge pictures.

Director George P. Cosmatos would go on to work with Stallone again on Cobra, as well as direct the films Leviathan and Tombstone. He was recommended for the film by Stallone’s son Sage, who liked his movie Of Unknown Origin. Of course, Cosmatos’ son Panos would grow up to be the director of Mandy and Beyond the Black Rainbow.

This movie marks a true change from the way American audiences would view Vietnam and its veterans. It could have only been made in 1985, to be honest, and exists within that time to remind us of a completely different era.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hellraiser II: Hellbound was on USA Up All Night on October 26, 1996 and July 25, October 25 and November 8, 1997.

Most of the cast and crew of Hellraiser returned to make this movie and you know, despite the reduced budget, the dark tone of this movie and continuation of the themes from the original makes this one of the better horror sequels.

Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence, returning from the first movie) is admitted to a psychiatric hospital where Doctor Channard and his assistant Kyle MacRae listen to her story. She begs them to destroy the bloody mattress her stepmother Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins) died on but Channard ends up being a man who has been obsessed with the Lament Configuration. After a patient slices himself open upon that cursed object, Julia comes back to our reality.

Channard and Julia have been luring mentally disturbed men to his home so that Julia can feed off of them. Meanwhile, Kirsty meets Tiffany, a girl skilled at solving puzzles who is forced by the doctor and his demented mistress to open the gates of Hell with the infernal box at the heart of this story.

Within the dimension of Leviathan, the humans are more duplicitous than the demonic Cenobites that carry out the orders of their master.

Barker had plans to show how each of the Cenobites had once been human and how their own vices lead to their becoming angels to some, demons to others. You’d think that with the success of the first film they could have had a little more money here.

Another intriguing notion is that Julia was originally supposed to rise from the mattress at the end of the movie as the queen of hell and be the recurring character. As the first movie gradually became a success, Pinhead ended up becoming the favorite.

Back in the video rental days, I may have brought this home more than twenty times. I was obsessed by the look of Leviathan’s dimension and the strange sound that it makes — Morse code for God — blew my teenage mind. It still holds up today, despite a litany of lesser sequels (which trust me, we’re getting to).

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

It takes a certain kind of genius — or maniac — to make a gore drenched version of Brigadoon. I was explaining this movie to someone and said that the main reason why I like it so much is the completely joyful way in which the townsfolk of Pleasant Valley go about their murderous rampage. This is the time of their lives — well, post-death lives — and it’s worth hollering and singing and shouting about.

Shot over two weeks in the small Florida town of St. Cloud — not yet a cog in the omnipotent wheel of the Disney vacation empire yet — and featuring the gleeful participation of nearly every citizen in that sleepy community, this movie established the danger of the South to North audiences, a theme that would reach its creative apex in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Yankee tourists, made up of the Millers, the Wells and unmarried folks Tom White and Terry Adams (Lewis’ muse, if he ever had one and only because he never sliced off one of her limbs or cut out her tongue, Connie Mason) have followed the detours to Pleasant Valley where they’re the guests of honor for the centennial celebration.

Yes, a hundred years ago, the Union troops marched through the town and killed every man, woman and child. What a thing to celebrate!

The town’s mayor, Joseph Buckman (Taalkeus Blank, who used the name Jeffery Allen, could do such a Southern accent that Lewis would also use him in Moonshine Mountain, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! and Year of the Yahoo!), and the townspeople show everyone great hospitality at first, but before you can say Mason-Dixon Line they’re slicing off their guests body parts, drawing and quartering them, getting rolled down the hill in a nail-filled barrel, having rocks dropped on them and all other manner of grisly crowd pleasing hijinks.

After kidnapping little Billy, Terry and Tom make it out of town and come back with the police, only to discover that the town never existed. When they leave, the townspeople return and wonder what the world will be like when they come back in 2065 before disappearing into the fog.

This was Lewis’ favorites of his films and he even published a tie-in paperback version of the story.

Yes, that’s Herschell Gordon Lewis singing the theme song, too. You have to admire his dedication to filmmaking. This was produced by David F. Friedman, who met up with Kroger Babb before a career that has everything from nudie cuties and roughies to gore and Naziploitation, which he produced under the name Herman Traeger.

More movies should be like Two Thousand Maniacs!, but so few have the gumption to even try.

Here’s the drink I’m bringing to the drive-in for this movie.

Pleasant Valley Dew

• 4 oz. Mountain Dew
• 2 oz. moonshine
• ,5 oz. triple sec
• 2 oz. pineapple juice
• 2 oz. orange juice
• 2 oz. pomegranate juice

1. Pour it all in a shaker with ice and shake it like it’s a Yankee in a barrel.
2. Pour and savor all that booze.

Can’t make it to the drive-in? You can watch Two Thousand Maniacs! on Tubi.