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.

I’m proud to say that Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in the same town as me, Pittsburgh, PA. He was lured from a career as an educator into being a radio station manager and then, well, advertising got him. I can relate. I’ve spent the better part of 25 years doing the same. But then Lewis got smart. He learned how to make money.

He began making movies with David F. Friedman, starting with Living Venus. Their nudie cuties would be innocent today, but showed way more skin than mainstream films. These weren’t high art. They were made to turn a profit and they sure did, from movies like Boin-n-g! and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre to the world’s first — and probably only — nudist camp musical, Goldilocks and the Three Bares.

Once nudie movies got boring, Lewis needed another tactic. He found it. Oh wow, did he find it. Gore. Blood everywhere, guts all over the screen and no limits to the depravity that he’d fester on drive-in screens nationwide. It all started with Blood Feast.

This is a pretty simple film: Faud Ramses wants to make sacrifices to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar to resurrect her, so he kills beautiful young socialites when he’s not catering their coming out parties. He’s also wiping out anyone who requests a copy of his book, Ancient Weird Religious Rites.

Shot in Miami, Florida — where life is cheap! — in just four days for just $24,000, Blood Feast used all local ingredients for the gore, except for a sheep’s tongue that came from Tampa Bay. Friedman was a genius at publicity, helping the film succeed, giving out vomit bags at screenings and even applying to get an injunction against his own movie in Sarasota so that it couldn’t be shown.

Lewis and Friedman didn’t stray too far from their sexy roots, bringing in June 1963 Playmate of the Month Connie Mason to star in the film. She would come back for Lewis’ even more astounding Two Thousand Maniacs!

As for Lewis, he left filmmaking in the 1970’s, served some jail time for fraud and then began copywriting his way to even greater success, a second — maybe even third or fourth career — later in life. He wrote and published over twenty books, including The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion, Direct Mail Copy That Sells! and The Advertising Age Handbook of Advertising. His books were all over the place at my first agency job and I was shocked to discover that the author of these books — one of the godfathers of direct mail and eblasts — was also the American godfather of gore. Sometimes. life makes sense.

In 2016, Arrow Video released a huge box set of his films and the man whose work was often in grimy drive-ins and Something Weird video cassettes finally began to be appreciated as an auteur. Funny, as he was the man who said, “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form.”

You know those movies that they warn you about and tell you that they’ll warp your mind and make you a maniac, how you’ll never be the same again? This is that movie. You should probably watch it right now.

Can’t make it this weekend? Blood Feast is available on Tubi or on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Fly II was on USA Up All Night on September 8, 1995; July 26, 1996 and October 3, 1997.

I hate when sequels instantly kill off the characters that you loved in the first movie, but Geena Davis wasn’t coming back for this movie. After giving birth to a larval sac, the son of the child that she had with Seth Brundle, Veronica Quaife dies. Their son grows up to be the normal-looking Martin Brundle (Eric Stoltz) whose physical and mental maturity is highly accelerated. He’s a genius, has amazing reflexes and never sleeps. He’s also aging faster than a normal human and is growing up inside the labs of Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson).

Bartok is trying to figure out the teleportation that caused Seth to become the Brundlefly. By the time that Martin is five, he has the mental and physical abilities needed to be part of this experiment. A dog he had befriended years before was mutated like his father and Martin figures out where it is and euthanizes it. He is showing signs of mutation himself, but know that he will need to hurt someone else to stop it from happening. He also falls in love with Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga) but obviously that may not last long as he’s rapidly becoming the kind of monster that his father was.

Directed by special effects artist Chris Walas, who created the effects for the first movie. He’s only directed two other things, the Tales from the Crypt episode “‘Til Death” and The Vagrant. He created the Gremlins, the creature effects in House II: The Second Story and the effects in Naked Lunch.

The script had some big talent working on it. There’s Master of Horror Mick Garris, joined by Frank Darabont and Jim and Ken Wheat, the brother team who would go on to write The Birds II: Land’s End. Master of Horror Mick Garris’s original script was about Veronica being convinced not to abort her baby by a religious cult that adopted and raised Martin. As he rapidly ages, Martin learns that he can talk to bugs and would help a gang of kids escape the cult. Another idea had Seth being cloned and his son being the only one who could communicate with him, which became a family-friendly movie about a boy and his bug. Chris Walas hated these ideas and nearly quit because Fox hired Darabont. This is all IMDB conjecture, so it could be all kayfabe BS.

Also according to the always unreliable IMDB. they did an old 50s gimmick in some theaters where they had a nurse in each theater in case audiences were sickened by the movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rebel High was on USA Up All Night on January 5 and 6, August 17 and December 14, 1990 and June 15 and November 29, 1991.

New Africa High: A Low Comedy by Evan Keliher is a social satire on the plight of Western education in the 1960s and 70s, written by “a high school dropout turned retired teacher” who “smoked so much pot to save my sight that I developed X-ray vision and was arrested for seeing thru girls dresses.”

The movie of the book, Rebel High, was made in Canada by Harry Jakobs, who also produced Evil Judgement.  He also did a teen soap opera called Time of Your Life that Keliher wrote for.

New school principal; Edwin Swimper (Harvey Berger) has taken over after the last person to do the job died from stress. There are nonstop gang wars and teachers wear body armor just to survive, so he tries something new: anyone can take any classes that they want. This works out as well as you’d expect, as a gang leader by the name of Calvin Hampster (Kenny Robinson)  takes up archery to improve his combat skills and then burns down the Swimper’s office. Swimper quits and the school descends further into anarchy.

Vice principal Norman Relic (Wayne Flemming) is left to pick up the pieces. Organized crime figure and school board head Mr. Wilcox (David McCallum) wants to raze the place and put up a parking lot, but there’s one last chance: Red G. Peckham (Stu Trivax) will take over. He’s fresh from Africa and if he can get the school to pass an inspection, it can stay. He might be even crazier than the students, given to long speeches about Jesus. But then Peckham is shot in a battle between Calvin and Bruno Bataglia (Pierre Larocque). He’s not dead, just resting, as they stash his body in a school locker as the inspectors arrive.

According to the invaluable Canuxploitation, this movie was cast with members of Toronto’s Yuk Yuks stand-up comedy troupe, including Wayne Flemming, Kenny Robinson, Winston Spear, Freddie James, and Stu Trivaxa. It was filmed at the Baron Byng High School on St. Urbain Street in Montreal, a place that was soon torn down.

This tries to be a live action cartoon, but it feels like it last forever and has little joy in it. But you know, sometimes you watch these movies for, well, science.

“This is a story about a high school. It isn’t much of a story, but then, this isn’t much of a high school. It’s full of beer drinkers, dope smokers, hooky players, liars and assholes…and those are just the teachers.”

You can watch Rebel High on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Reform School Girls aired on USA Up All Night on March 11, August 12 and November 13, 1989; May 18 and 19 and November 24, 1990; August 16 and November 23, 1991 and May 1 and August 15, 1992.

Tom DeSimone is a maniac and I say that in the kindest of ways. Chatterbox, Hell Night, Savage Streets, Angel III: The Final Chapter…the dude knows exactly what I want to watch and delivers.

Seeing as he already made two women in prison films, Prison Girls and The Concrete Jungle, DeSimone decided that it was time to make a parody.

Yet this movie is a force of nature. I mean, Wendy O. Williams*, the lead singer of the Plasmatics, plays Charlie Chambliss, the top dog of the reform school who sleeps with Edna (Pat Ast, Halston’s muse and the star of Warhol’s Heat), the head of the ward, for special privileges.

Jenny (Linda Carol, who may have been 16 when they shot this, making her nudity underage) is our heroine, a girl who gets caught in a shootout thanks to a bad boyfriend and ends up becoming the newbie who runs afoul of, well, everybody.

And to make this even better, Sybil Danning plays Warden Sutter, a religious zealot with a radio tower that she uses to blast the Word of God while the girls try to sleep.

Sherri Stoner, who plays Lisa, who would go on to write for Animaniacs and voice Slappy Squirrel. Other actresses** that appear in this are Denise Gordy (D.C. Cab), Tiffany Helm (Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), Darci DeMoss (Friday the 13th Part VI), Michelle Bauer, Julia Parton and Leslee Bremmer (Hardbodies).

The only sad thing I can say about this movie is that Mary Woronov was originally cast to play Dr. Norton. Unfortunately, DeSimone thought she played the role too hard during the first cast reading. Any movie that would have had Woronov, Williams and Danning in the same story may have been too much for my fragile mind to deal with.

*Williams was 36 when she played this teenage role. She also refused any outfits that were suggested for the movie, providing her own clothes and refused to take off her boots, even for the shower scenes.

**Linnea Quigley is on one of the posters, yet isn’t in the film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night of the Living Dead was on USA Up All Night on July 29, 1995.

I’ve debated writing about this film for the site for a long time. It’s beyond a seminal movie and it’s also from right where we call home. There’s probably no modern horror movie as important as this one for so many reasons and so many films have their inspiration right here.

I’ve spent a lifetime in advertising, so I can see how making television commercials and industrial films as part of The Latent Image pushed George Romero, John Russo and Russell Streiner to make their own movie.

And horror movies? Horror movies sell.

Shot between June and December 1967 in Evans City with friends, relatives, local actors and interested locals, this movie was made for around $114,000 but looks like so much more. The crew had been through the ringer — they did the original Calgon “Ancient Chinese Secret” commercial — and they knew how to get the most out of every shot.

You have no idea what it was like as a kid to drive past Evans City nearly every day, knowing that the dead lived there.

The movie was a huge success, obviously. That’s why we’re talking about it here. And yet, there’s so much that makes it a regional film, as it has local people like horror host Bill Cardille in it. And it feels, well, exactly like living in Western Pennsylvania. We’ve been preparing for the zombie uprising since before people knew there was such a thing.

The movie starts with Barbara (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Streiner) in a cemetery, arguing over visiting their parents. Their sibling games soon give way to terror when what looks like a homeless man murders Johnny and sends Barbara racing away, finally discovering what seems to be an abandoned farmhouse. There, she meets Ben* (Duane Jones), a black hero saving a white woman in a time that these things just weren’t done. But the true joy of Night of the Living Dead is that unlike modern elevated horror, this is no message movie. These are just the right people to tell the story.

It’s funny because Romero has often cited Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend as his inspiration, but that author has said that this movie was “kind of cornball.” What does he know?

The movie ups the tension when we discover that a married couple, Harry and Helen Cooper, and their daughter Karen have been hiding in the basement, The young girl has been bitten by a ghoul and Harry is obsessed with barricading himself and his family in the house while Ben wants to escape. In truth, no one is right and everyone pays the price. There is no happy ending in Evans City.

Perhaps the most astounding thing to me about Night of the Living Dead is its public domain status. Its original distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, never put a copyright on the prints. There was one under its original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters, but when the name change occurred, Walter Reade also removed that copyright notice.

That’s why when the VHS era started, you could actually buy this movie, as well as why it shows up in so many other movies and in DVD multipacks. There’s also the unfairly maligned Savini remake that this site needs to get to someday, which I love because Barbara is a more capable heroine and also because I saw it in a theater near Zelienople and when they said the name of the town, people lost their minds.

Roger Ebert’s review of this film has always stuck with me: “The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying … It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.”

That’s probably why I like it so much.

*According to an interview on Homepage of the Dead, Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman said, “Duane Jones was a very well educated man [and he] simply refused to do the role as it was written. As I recall, I believe that Duane himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Party Line was on USA Up All Night on May 11 and August 12, 1990 and June 27, 1992.

This is the most 1988 movie that I have ever seen, one that is equal parts Cinemax After Dark semi-sleaze mixed with some last gasps of celebrity fame, along with a late model slasher and even giallo-esque elements all with the gimmick of party lines, which before the interest used to dominate the late night airwaves, promising live sex over the phone for anyone. Oh man, if you could scrape this movie onto a mirror and do lines of it, I totally would.

Seth (Leif Garrett, who we can pretend is the kid from Devil Times Five grown up because, well, that’s totally the truth and that kid was a transvestite and this character is too, so let’s just pretend, OK?) and Angelina (Greta Blackburn, who played Lorraine, one of the aliens on V) are a brother and sister duo who hide out in their family’s Hollywood Hills mansion and use the party lines to lure people into having threeways with them and then slashing their throats with razor blades. Yes, incest and sex is violence and L.A. scum all in one glorious package.

But what if there was a bad boy cop? Oh, there is and his name is Detective Dan (Richard Hatch, who battled Cylons once upon a time). He’s under investigation for all his bad cop antics, but when his CHiP woman gets killed by Seth, he teams up with a psychologist (Shawn Weatherly, who knows a thing or two about cops, seeing as how she was in Police Academy 3: Back in Training) to take on the case.

This is the kind of movie where Detective Dan handcuffs a cokehead to a toilet before shoving his face into the urinal cake while two siblings sex murder a dude in the alley. Also, because this is a late 1980’s cop movie, the boss cop has to be a gruff older black guy and hey, Richard Roundtree is perfect for that role.

The guy who played Simmons in this, Terry McGovern, has a pretty interesting claim to fame. Sure, he was the voice of Launchpad McDuck. But he was also the guy who invented the word wookie. While making THX-1138 for George Lucas, they were riding in a car together and he shouted, “‘I think I ran over a Wookiee back there,” which made the future Star Wars director laugh so hard that the word — which McGovern invented — stuck in his head.

Director William Webb uses Garrett and Roundtree in a lot of his films, which include Delta Fever (which has Martin Landau and Wendi Jo Sperber in it) and The Banker (along with Teri Weigel and Robert Forester). This is the kind of movie that I’d be watching at 1:37 AM on a Friday when I was 16 years old, so in case you thought that I ever did anything productive with my life, you are sadly wrong. At least now I document my movie watching, I guess.

Oh man, I almost forgot that this teenage girl is coercing her friend into calling the party line too and then she goes to the cops and they make her call the party line while they listen to her basically have phone sex. So this movie riffs on I Saw What You Did, but there’s no Joan Crawford to make it better.

That nightclub also looks like it totally came out of a Rinse Dream movie.

You can watch Party Line on Tubi.

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

Horror movies don’t scare me. Not anymore. Some of them disturb me, like the cannibal films. But only one still kind of scares me. And that would be Hellraiser.

There was a time, before the eight sequels to the film and BDSM became well-known fodder on shows like Law and Order that Hellraiser seemed like it came from some alien land more than its true origins. The monsters of the piece, the Cenobites, looked like nothing we’d never seen before, all leather, blood and open festering wounds. The idea that sex and pain could be united wasn’t trite back in 1987, so it’s difficult to convey the power and fear this film had. It feels wrong. It feels dirty. It feels evil.

How this movie was made for $900,000 blows my mind. It looks lush and gauzy at times and at others, like when we see Frank’s heart and veins being formed, positively nightmarish. It shouldn’t be this good — it was Clive Barker’s directorial debut after seeing two of his stories, Underworld and Rawhead Rex, get made into films he didn’t agree with. What kind of deal with the devil did this guy make to turn out something so perfect on his first try?

The misconception that many people have of this film is that the Cenobites are the villains or the horrific part of the film. If we go to the poster for proof, it says “Demon to some. Angel to others.” Pinhead and his gang are there to move the story forward and certainly look frightening, but they are bound by the rules of Hell and the Lament Configuration, the puzzle box that sets the events of the film in motion. Matter of factly, these rules aren’t truly defined yet — is Pinhead a tortured soul stuck in the wheels of some hellish bureaucracy? Who created these boxes? None of this matters — “You solved the box. We came.” Yes, it can be that simple. You don’t need to know all of those answers right now. When Frank buys the box and Morocco and solves it, he gets the answer to limitless pleasure and the drug of all drugs — as Frank says, “I thought I’d gone to the limits. I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible.”

That’s one of the real horrors of this film: people will do anything to chase a high. That high may be drugs. It may be pain. It may be a sexual experience that makes the mundane life you’re stuck in — like Julia, bored with a suburban life with a husband she never really wanted in the first place. The chance to be with Frank again, no matter if she has to seduce and kill for him, is everything. Notice that as he gains more muscle and skin with each drop of blood, she becomes more and more attractive, her skin gaining new color.

The main horrors of this film are family and other people. The Cotton family had issues before the Cenobites took one step out of Hell. The most horrific part of the film comes when Frank wearing Larry’s skin, stares at his niece in a moment of sexual longing and says, “Come to daddy.” Sure, there are horror film trappings, but this type of morally bankrupt behavior isn’t something confined to the cinema. So much of the betrayal and madness of Frank and Julia could happen. It happens every day.

Hellraiser exists on the border of reality. It’s fantastic, but it feels like it could happen. It’s the dangerous fiction that could overwhelm your truth if you go too far. In that it’s quite similar to Barker’s Candyman, which posits that saying the name of its titular character three times in a mirror is all it takes for him to come for you. That seems too unrealistic, but do you want to take the chance? And much like the black leather garbed creatures in this film, Candyman must adhere to a dream logic that only comes into our reality when you allow the genie from the bottle.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Almost Hollywood was on USA Up All Night on February 9, 1996.

After this movie, Crown International Pictures took nine years off. I will tell you that that is not because this is a good movie and they felt they’d done all they could do. Quite the opposite. However, in my endless quest to watch every single film they ever released, as well as my slavish addiction to Mill Creek box sets (and now revising it for this month of USA Up All Night), I find myself here, struggling to watch this supposed satire on Hollywood.

This is all about a producer of exploitation and sex videos who suddenly is accused of killing one of his star’s boyfriends and his mistress. It’s a wacky sendup of what I can only assume it was like to make movies in 1994.

I mean, this is a movie that pokes fun at the erotic thriller genre, with the character Abdu clearly an analog of Ashok Amritraj, Menaham Golan and Yorum Globus, played by Greg Rhodes from Ghosthouse and Deadly Manor as a filmmaker who is pretty much making post-porn Gregory Dark movies. Except this makes me wistful for Gregory Dark movies.

In a meta move, India Allen, who was Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1988, as well as ian actress in movies like Silk Degrees and Wild Cactus, plays herself.

Michael Weaver, who wrote and directed this, also shot Dark Eyes and The Sender. He also directed two segments in the movie Night Terror before heading off to do TV work, working as the DP on Pushing Daisies and directing episodes of Californication and Good Girls.

I’ll do anything for Crown International and Mill Creek (and USA Up All Night), I guess. Even this.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing In Common was on USA Up All Night on October 28, 1989.

Nothing In Common is responsible for what I do for a living.

I won tickets to see this movie from a trivia contest on WKST radio in New Castle, PA. As I sat in the theater, I was amazed by the office that David Basner (Tom Hanks) worked in as ad guy. There were markers everywhere, everyone was stressed but having so much fun and people were playing guitars at their desks. Surely advertising was the most fun job ever!

Almost three decades later I can tell you that none of this is true.

David’s parents Max and Lorraine (Jackie Gleason and Eva Marie Saint) have finally split up. David’s just broken up with his girlfriend Donna (Bess Armstrong). And what’s even worse, his dad has lost his job. And at the same time, he’s pitching Colonial Airlines and dating the owner Andrew Woolridge’s (Barry Corbin) daughter Cheryl (Sela Ward).

You can imagine that 14-year-old me was amazed that normal looking guys could dare Sela Ward if they were funny and worked in advertising.

Max has been a horrible husband, father and even caretaker of himself. His diabetes is out of control, leading me to a lifelong fear of losing my feet after watching this. But David comes through for him, even though his father doesn’t deserve it. Oh Garry Marshall, you got me.

This is the movie that took Tom Hanks from funny guy to someone who could be in dramatic movies. Sadly, Gleason would be dead just a year after this film. He’s pretty fearless in it, playing someone who we should have no sympathy for whatsoever. He made this while he was deathly sick with colon cancer, liver cancer, thromboses hemorrhoids, diabetes and phlebitis.

Writers Rick Podell and Michael Preminger would write the TV movie Gleason which starred Grad Garrett as The Great One.

And hey — it has Thompson Twins playing “Nothing In Common” which was their first release as a duo.

You can watch this on Tubi.