EDITOR’S NOTE: The Pom-Pom Girls was on USA Up All Night on June 30, July 1 and November 18, 1989; April 14 and December 7, 1990 and August 24, 1991.

Director Joseph Ruben has made some pretty good movies like Dreamscape, The Stepfather, Sleeping With the Enemy and The Good Son. This Crown International Pictures movie was directed by him and written by Robert J. Rosenthal, who also wrote The Van and directed and wrote Zapped! and Malibu Beach.

Johnnie (Robert Carradine) is the hothead. He has a crush on Sally (Lisa Reeves) but he’s dating a tough guy named Duane (Bill Adler). Jesse (Michael Mullins) is the ladykiller and he’s all into Laurie (Jennifer Ashley). These teens end up hanging out, stealing fire engines, getting in chicken races and falling in and out of love.

It’s not as sexual as you think. I mean, there’s sex. But it’s more about growing up. It’s a hang out movie and so much of it doesn’t go anywhere, like the coach who doesn’t like Jesse. But look, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith is in it and when I saw her name in the credits, I literally said a little prayer thanking whatever intelligent design created her.

For maniacs like me: There’s a scene where Ashley wears a Boy Scouts Of America shirt from the San Gabriel Valley Council. She’s wearing that same shirt again in  Tintorera…Tiger Shark.

You can download this movie with USA Up All Night clips at the Internet Archive.

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

Chuck Vincent made a women in prison movie and yes, I’m shocked too.

Politician Jerry Calwell (Henri Pachard!) has become governor thanks to being tough on crime. Then someone shoots him in the sack the night of the election. There’s a big push to get someone in jail for this crime and it ends up being the innocent Melody Campbell (Devon Jenkin, Twisted Nightmare).

Newspaper reporter Harry Weiner (Jeffrey Hurst) goes undercover at the jail where she’s sent to and he hopes to expose that the ballless Calwell also sells electric chairs, which explains his love of capital punishment.

The prison is packed with adult film actresses because this is a Chuck Vincent movie. There’s Tantala Ray as Tank, Samantha Fox (not the singer) as Mosquito, Sharon Kane as Rita, Colleen Brennan as Professor and Sheri St. Claire as Ginny. There’s also Candy Treat, played by Tally Chanel, who is Calwell’s mistress who wants revenge for her man’s perforated ballbag. Oh yeah! How could I forget that Veronica Hart is in this as the matron, Crabapples, who has a bigger connection to our heroine than anyone knows.

There are also musical numbers.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Mom was on USA Up All Night on December 23, 1994 and January 13 and April 26, 1996.

Mr. Mom sets up so many comedy patterns for the 80s.

Michael Keaton: Born in Pittsburgh — Kennedy Township or McKee’s Rocks — and starting his career on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Keaton went to LA and his first big role was Night Shift, which led to this movie. His character in his early films is often a very Bill Murray smart everyman who deals with life’s pains before being smart enough to come out on top, a role he would play in Gung Ho — made close to home in Beaver, PA — and Johnny Dangerously. By Beetlejuice and Batman, he was as big a star as it gets. He’s a rare star in that even though his career has had ebbs and flows, he’s always been great in everything he’s made and comes off as, well, a Yinzer. Someone you’d like to have an Iron with. He’s playing that character he’s known for here, a smart guy whom life has treated badly named Jack Butler. He’s lost his auto job and is now the stay-at-home dad while his wife works.

Teri Garr: I wonder if Keaton and Garr ever got into silly Pittsburgh versus Cleveland spats; she’s from Lakewood. Trained in ballet and a student of Lee Strasberg, her career has vacillated between comedy — Young Frankenstein, Tootsie — and drama — The Conversation, One from the Heart, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I always think of her as the mom who is way funnier than she should be, probably because this movie is what I knew her from. Her Caroline is intelligent, capable and more than a match for anyone in the movie.

Martin Mull: It’s difficult to explain to young folks the impact and strangeness of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and the spin-off Fernwood 2 Night. Soap operas were all normal, straight affairs before that show and the fact that a supposedly legitimate talk show from the setting of that show could exist on its own outside of the show is even stranger. By this point in his career, Mull was often the smarmy bad guy, a role he would play in Take This Job and Shove It, Cutting Class, Ski Patrol and so many more.

Important friends: This film follows what would be an 80s staple. Often, the friends and small roles are just as funny as the main characters, like Christopher Lloyd as fellow unemployed car worker Larry, Edie McClurg as a check-out lady (McClurg’s career is filled with memorable small roles), Ann Jillian as flirty mom Joan (as an 11-year-old boy, I had no idea what I was feeling when I saw Ann Jillian, but I knew she didn’t look like any other woman I knew) and another Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman actor Graham Jarvis.

John Hughes: Story editor and producer Lauren Shuler read a John Hughes article in National Lampoon which caused her to become friends with him. A story he told her about taking care of his kids made her laugh; could it be a movie? They finished the script together, but the fact that Hughes lived in Chicago and not Hollywood led to Universal firing him and bringing in TV writers to redo the script. Shuler always claimed that the original script was a lot funnier.

Don’t feel bad for Hughes. He’s already sold National Lampoon’s Class Reunion and National Lampoon’s Vacation. This movie got him a three-picture deal and he made Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science in just two years. By the 90s, he moved back to Chicago and died too young at 59. If you were alive in the 80s, his comedy shaped so much of what you watched, from the popular teen comedies to secretly anarchic movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Vacation.

The idea for this is simple. Jack loses his job, his wife is smarter than him and becomes a success in advertising (a field Hughes knew well, he had created the Edge Credit Card Shaving Test ads) while he stays home all day doing what she used to do. Where it works is the creativity of director Stan Dragoti (Love At First Bite), cinematographer Victor J. Kemper (The Hospital, Eyes of Laura Mars, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) and Keaton, who is beyond likable and never gets to be too much like other stars would be in such a high energy role.

Where this movie is ahead of its time is that Caroline still gets the career that she wants. The movie ends seeing her commercial on TV and her getting more money and more respect from her boss.

If anything, Mr. Mom has given us this dialogue, which is as funny today as it was in forty years ago.

Jack: No problem. Come on over here Ron. Let me show you what I’m doing, taking advantage of some of the time off. To, uh, add a whole new wing on here. Gonna rip these walls out and, uh, of course re-wire it.

Ron: Yeah, you gonna make it all 220?

Jack: Yeah, 220, 221. Whatever it takes.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Pink Chiquitas aired on USA Up All Night on September 8 and 9, 1989; January 20 and August 3, 1990 and April 20 and August 9, 1991.

Frank Stallone as Tony Mareda Jr., a former Olympic athlete and now a detective who fights with the mob the whole way to a drive-in located in Beamsville that soon has a meteor crash down and transform all of the women in sex-obsessed maniacs. Soon, Tony and news anchor Bruce Pirrie are trying to save the men of the town from Mary Anne Kowalski (Elizabeth Edwards) and her literal army of women. And their pink tank, too.

The meteor has the voice of Earth Kitt. Along with Stallone, she performs the Paul Zaza-written songs.

Why do I keep doing this to myself? Don’t I need sleep?

This is the only full-length movie that Tony Currie directed and wrote, but he also worked on sound for Prom Night, Naked Lunch and Eastern Promises.

But seriously, this movie doesn’t have much to say. I was hoping that this would be some kind of secret classic — I mean, look at the poster art — but I struggled throughout. In a world where Invasion of the Bee Girls and Voyage of the Rock Aliens are already made, why did this even happen? What new could it say?

The filmmakers did, however, get all they could out of Art of Noise’s “Peter Gunn theme.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: House II: The Second Story aired on USA Up All Night on July 7, 1990; February 8, 1991 and June 13, 1992.

Ethan Wiley, who injected the humor into the original House script, returns to direct the sequel, which comes from a story by Fred Dekker that Wiley adapted. If you disliked the comedy in the original film, well, get ready. This one has no interest in being serious.

Prologue: a young couple gives up their child before an undead gunman murders them in their mansion. That baby grows up to be Jesse (Arye Gross, who was the original voice of Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years before Daniel Stern took over), who decides to move back into that house with his girlfriend Kate (Lar Park Lincoln, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood). They’re soon joined by goofball friend Charlie (Jonathan Stark, Fright Night) and his wannabe rock star girlfriend Lana (Amy Yasbeck, who met husband John Ritter on the set of Problem Child).

Jesse has insomnia, which leads to him digging through the basement. He discovers a photo of his great-great-grandfather (Royal Dano, who starred in plenty of cowboy films) standing in front of an Aztec temple with a crystal skull in his hand. In the background is Slim Reeser, his one-time partner turned enemy over the ownership of the skull.

At this point, anyone would be happy to discover this photo and move on with their life. But that’s normal life. Here, Jesse and Charlie decide to dig up his ancestor’s grave to find the skull. Imagine their surprise when Gramps is still alive inside his coffin. Compound that with the fact that he wants to bond with his grandson.

It turns out that the house was built with stones from an Aztec temple and that it contains gateways into other time periods with the skull acting as the remote control, if you will. The forces of evil are drawn to the skull, though, so the boys better be ready to defend it.

Meanwhile, a Halloween party ends up with the boys losing their girls and an appearance by Bill Maher as a record exec. A caveman also attacks the party guests looking for a skull and a baby pterodactyl and a caterpillar-dog come along for the ride.

To compound the film’s weirdness, Bill (John Ratzenberger, who like George Wendt in House was a star on TV’s Cheers) comes to inspect the wiring, but he’s really an adventurer with a sword in his toolbox. He leads the guys through a portal — he’s incredibly nonchalant about the proceedings — and helps them save a virgin who is about to be sacrificed.

During a meal where Jesse embraces his new family — yes, a family that includes a dinosaur and a dog-headed caterpillar — Slim makes his return, rising out of a serving dish. He shoots Gramps, who reveals that this is the man who killed Jesse’s parents. Jesse defeats the evil gunfighter, but can’t save Gramps, who tells him that its time to say goodbye.

The cops come to the house, alerted by all the gunfire, and prepare to fire on Jesse. He uses the skull to go back in time to the Old West, taking his friends and pets with him. The film ends with him burying Gramps and using the crystal skull to make his grave, as he follows the old man’s dying advice and doesn’t become addicted to the skull’s magic.

Interestingly enough, Marvel Comics did an adaption of the film!

House 2 is something else. It’s never sure what kind of movie it wants to be, but it gets so strange that you just feel like you have to go along for the ride. The scenes with Bill are great fun and the ending drama always makes me tear up. And you have to love the caterpuppy.

If you’re confused by the fact that this movie has nothing to do with the original House, the way the movie was released in Italy is going to blow your mind.

The Evil Dead was called La Casa there and Evil Dead II followed that numbering. But as we all know, Italian filmmakers are fond of making their own sequels. That’s what led Joe D’Amato to make La Casa 3, which was released here as Ghosthouse*.

Two other sequels in name only, La Casa 4 (released in the US as Witchery) and La Casa 5 (Beyond Darkness) followed. Yes, those are coming up this week as well!

So here’s where it gets confusing. Our House 2 is La Casa 6. And The Horror Show, a movie that is pretty much the same film as Shocker, is La Casa 7. But in the US, The Horror Show was sold as House 3, despite having nothing to do with any of the other movies. Huh? What? A final sequel with William Katt reprising his Roger Cobb role would come out in 1992.

I totally love how confusing things like this can be. And I love the La Casa series!

Check out this article to learn even more about how all of these movies work together.

*Even more confusing — House of Witchcraft is called Ghosthouse 4.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: House aired on USA Up All Night on January 31, 1998.

Steve Miner has so many cinematic sins to deal with — Soul Man, My Father the Hero, Big Bully (the next to last live action film Rick Moranis would appear in), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later — that you almost forget that he started his career making the second and third installments of Friday the 13th and today’s movie, House.

Roger Cobb (William Katt, Carrie) has some issues. As a Stephen King-ian popular horror writer, he feels fenced in by the horror genre. He has writer’s block. His wife has left him. His son disappeared and no one can find him. And the aunt that raised him just hung herself in the haunted house where he was raised.

Cobb intends his next book to be about what he went through in Vietnam, so he decides to move into the house. His strongest memories involve Big Ben (Richard Moll, fulfilling the contract that either he or Robert Englund appear in every 80s horror film), a soldier who bullied him back in ‘Nam who was injured and left behind for the enemy to capture.

Everyone’s a fan of Cobb, from his new neighbor Harold (George Wendt from TV’s Cheers) to his real estate agent and the cops that investigate him. He just wants to write. But with all the monsters in his head — and real monsters in the house — that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.

Things get worse when his wife visits and turns into a monster, only to be killed by a shotgun blast. At this point, the film flirts with making Cobb the real monster, but it’s a narrative shift that is never followed up on. Then, as he buries his wife, his hot neighbor comes on to him. What he thinks will be a night of hot sex turns out to be him watching her young son, but that goes wrong when little monsters try to steal the kid,

Finally, Cobb falls into his medicine cabinet into an alternate dimension that predates the Upside Down of Stranger Things by several decades. He rescues his son, but not before Big Ben attacks him again. Finally, Cobb realizes that all of his fears are inside his head and he destroys the monster with a grenade before leading the house to find his son and wife, who is magically returned to life.

House was produced by Sean S. Cunningham and featured music by Henry Manfredini, who also worked on the Friday the 13th films. Fred Dekker wrote the original script, but most of the humor is credited to Ethan Wiley.

This is a good example of pre-CGI monster moviemaking. Big Ben looks great, a triumph of practical makeup, as do the creatures that populate the film. And it’s interesting that this movie explores PTSD and the dark side of war years before many were ready to face it.

The look of the film reminds me of late-period Fulci minus the gore. I’m referring to the film stock itself, which doesn’t have much richness, looking more like a TV movie than a theatrical film.

House isn’t a movie that demands that you watch it, but if you’re looking for something in the middle of the night, it always provides a fun distraction. You can’t dislike a film that has a large fish on the wall come to life and try to kill someone.

You can watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hot Times at Montclair High aired on USA Up All Night on December 7 and 8, 1990; July 26, 1991; January 25 and November 27, 1992 and June 5 and October 1, 1993.

At Montclair High School — can you believe the audacity of the filmmakers naming this movie — football player Sean Willis (Ross Hamilton) struggles to get good grades and has a dad who wants him to toughen up as his girlfriend Jenny Rush (Kim Valentine, who was on the TV show Tribes) finds herself in the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll thanks to her friend Susan (Leslie Owen). Then there’s Ziggy Karpkinski (Johnathan Gorman), a nerd who can’t find a girlfriend, and Jason Miller (Brent Jasmer, who was on The Bold and the Beautiful), the punk bully who is abused at home.

This is when the double audacity hits you and you wonder: Is this movie cosplaying The Breakfast Club, at least for it’s three male leads? Perhaps the stay in detention that changes the lives of Sean, Ziggy and Jason will tell you all you need to know.

This is a movie where Jenny gets assaulted by the rock singer she’s in love with and her boyfriend gathers his new friends for revenge just as much as it’s a movie where the boom mic should have been in the cast. Troy Donahue is one of the teachers and the foreign teacher is Ziggy’s love interest, which made me wonder if this was a Menahem Golan movie. Menahem never fails to put in a sexed-up older blonde musician or music teacher who shows a young boy the ways of love to the point that I believe that this is either his main fetish or tells us how he lost his cherry.

This is not a Menahem Golan movie. It would be way better.

It is directed by Jose Altonaga, who made Reawakened as recently as 2020, and written by Mark S. Simpson, who left behind writing after this. He did direct Lost Island in 1994.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Sisters was on USA Up All Night on March 29 and October 12, 1992 and April 18 and November 20, 1992.

Isn’t it strange — and wonderful — that the only force that could unite every heterosexual teenage boy’s dream of seeing Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer together in the same movie would be David DeCoteau and that he would do it more than once?

Quigley is Melody, a girl with bad teeth. Come on, who is going to love her? And Brinke as Marci? She has glasses! Surely a fate worse than death. Or what Bauer’s Mickey must endure, as she’s overweight. Luckily — or not — for our girls, they’re possessed and suddenly make the minor cosmetic changes needed to become popular.

Of course, before they get revenge, they must take a bath together.

I guess never let it be said that DeCoteau didn’t know what his audience wanted.

Made for $40,000 using left-over film, cast, and crew from Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, this is the kind of film where the actresses do their own makeup and posters from past films are considered set decoration.

Except something weird happened. The company distributing the film went out of business and less than 2,000 copies of the tape were ever distributed. The film became an instant collector’s item as tales of the bath scene grew legendary. When it eventually aired on USA Up All Night, that scene was no longer in the movie, replaced with the girls jumping on a bed.

Luckily, today we have companies like Vinegar Syndrome willing to put stuff out like this for the masses. And by masses, I mean maniacs like me that laid awake at night wondering if they’d ever see this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fraternity Demon aired on USA Up All Night on November 24, 1995; June 8, 1996 and March 28, 1997.

C.B. Rubin directed one more and this is it. Written by Steve Tymon, who also was the writer for Ring of Fire II: Blood and Steel, Witchcraft V: Dance With the Devil, Deadlock: A Passion for Murder and Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur, Fraternity Demon starts with an entire opening scene edited together from outtakes from Getting Lucky.

A sex demon by the name of Isha (Trixxie Bowie) is brought to our world by sexed-up Professor Erickson (Charles Laulette) and she proceeds to run wild, basically aardvarking young men and taking their sexual energy. As you can imagine, all the fray boys are afraid of her. And if you enjoy any of her lovemaking scenes, don’t worry. They play again in a montage — or is it padding? — near the end of the movie, as if Fraternity Demon is having its running time flash before its eyes before the credits.

That said, Shock-Ra, the band playing the party, is pretty good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vice Academy 5 aired on USA Up All Night on April 25 and November 29, 1997.

An x-rated computer game gets out of control when the commissioner’s son Irwin (Chad Gabbert, who played the role in the fourth through sixth films of this series) unleashes a virtual reality hooker that tries to take over the world of crime from his father’s basement. Meanwhile, the commissioner is also dealing with his new wife Ms. Devonshire (Jayne Hamil, who was in the first, fifth and sixth of these), who just wants to consummate their marriage.

Candy (Elizabeth Kaitan, who is in every one of these but the first film) and newcomer Traci (Raelyn Saalman) are our Vice Academy girls this time out and they have their hands full dealing with the aforementioned Heidi Ho (J.J. North, Vampire Vixens from Venus), a virtual criminal. There’s also appearances by Tane McClure (who would go on to play Elle’s mother in the Legally Blonde movies), Karen Knotts (yes, the daughter of Don), Honey Lauren (who made Wives of the Skies) and an uncredited Ginger Lynn, who briefly shows up as an inmate, but we should all pretend that she’s Holly working undercover, right?

Pretty much shot in writer/director Rick Sloane’s garage, this movie had such a small budget that Kaitan and Saalman’s outfits came off a dollar rack at an outlet store. This is a movie for those that want the storytelling of pornography without the semen all over the star’s faces. I don’t know who you are, but they made six of these movies just for you. And somehow, I have watched all of them more than once.

You can watch this on Tubi.