EDITOR’S NOTE: Fireballs was on USA Up All Night on January 15 and September 10, 1994 and August 14, 1995. Firehouse was on May 8 and December 31, 1992. On July 23, 1993, this was a USA Up All Night double feature.

Fireballs (1989): Canada made the move in the late 1980s from slashers to sex comedies, so it seemed. This next Police Academy ripoff concerns firefighters and was filmed days after a very similar 80’s sex on the job comedy, Recruits.

Writer, producer and star Mike Strapko — along with his brother and an actor named Goran Kalezic — were production assistants on that Wassanga Beach shot, Charlie Wiener-directed film.

Wiener made a TV movie called Blue Murder and Dragon Hunt in addition to this movie (he also wrote Screwball Hotel), so let me assure you — his scumbag skills are in full effect here.

We meet our heroes — such as they are — Sam (Kalezic), Keith (Eric Crabb) and Baduski (Strapko) as they leave the beach to fight a fire, which really ends up being a surprise party for the firefighting parrot Fireballs, who loves beer and breasts.

I really think I might never have to write again after that sentence.

The movie then becomes Gung Ho, as Japanese business owner Mr. Matsuro wants to bring his company to town, but thinks that the fire department can’t handle things. He wants to bring in his own team of Japanese firefighting experts.

Can you believe I just wrote that?

Strapko was supposedly an actual firefighter, so one would assume he’d want to make the profession look more heroic than this. Actually, scratch that. He just wanted to see as many breasts as possible, much like the character he’s playing, which is really more John Belushi cosplay than anything.

This movie is my kind of film. It’s neither sexy nor funny, so the more that it attempts either, it actually becomes more of the latter. For example, the idea of a bird that is dubbed to sound like it’s swearing is mildly fine the first time, becomes grating and then annoying before becoming incoherently amazing. This is the kind of movie that demands to be watched with an entire table full of mind-altering substances and a group of people who refuse to judge it and instead demand that it get worse so that it gets better.

Firehouse (1987): When someone asks, “What was Julia Roberts’ first movie?” you can tell them it was as Babs in the 1987 sex comedy Firehouse, despite her not appearing in the credits. She’d have to wait until the next year and Satisfaction to see her name up on the screen.

This was made by J. Christian Ingvordsen, who would eventually go full auteur and write, direct and star in Blue Vengeance. Here, however, he’s made a film about some young ladies who have to deal with the seamier side of firefighting and convince the boys that they can make it.

Take it from someone who watched but this and Fireballs. They’re both horrible, but at least that one has a talking bird and aggressively tries to be so bad. This one just…is. We never got the sequel Firehouse: The 2nd Alarm.

One of the writers was Rick Marx who also wrote Gor, Outlaw of Gor, Dragonard, Platoon Leader, Doom Asylum, Tenement, Wanda Whips Wall Street and adult films with titles like Taboo American Style: The Ruthless Beginning, Vagablonde and Sex World Girls as well as Chuck Vincent’s Roommates, Slammer Girls and Warrior Queen.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Pinball Summer aired on USA Up All Night but I can’t find the date!

Also known as Pick-Up Summer and Flipper Girls in Germany, this Canadian film comes after the Crown International beach movies and before Porky’s. Most of the action revolves around a place called Pete’s, an arcade that is hosting a pinball competition, which also has a Miss Pinball pageant, which I really hope was a thing at some point.

Speaking of movies leading to something more, director George Mihalka and cinematographer Rodney Gibbons would make My Bloody Valentine* after this, a movie that is much better remembered than this teen summer comedy that revolves around disco, burger joints, amusement parks and hijinks between a biker gang and our heroes over the pinball trophy.

Film Ventures International bought this for America and changed the name, thinking pinball was dead. It did pretty well and people didn’t even notice that it was made in Quebec and not California. It’s a pretty innocent movie when it comes to teen comedies.

*Helene Udy, who played Sylvia in that classic slasher, Thomas Kovacs, who played Mike, and Carl Malotte, who played Dave, are all in Pinball Summer as well.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bikini Beach Race was on USA Up All Night on September 10, 1993; May 28 and November 18, 1994; September 23, 1995 and January 3, 1987.

According to Dave Wain, on his amazing The Schlock Pit, other than the director, Ron Jeremy and Dana Plato, this movie is totally a University of Miami film school movie.

It’s about a bed race — yes, a race with kid race car beds — that Milo (Xavier Barquet), Jaime (Nick Santa Maria), Byrdie (Waverly Hill) and Cheese (Mathew Mark) are trying to win. Luckily, they have a boat pilot by the name of J.D (Plato) who is their ringer.

Speaking of Plato, she was struggling to get her career back on track. She’d appeared in the January 1989 issue of Playboy and this same year she would be in the controversial Sega CD game Night Trap. A year before, she had gone to a Las Vegas video store, pulled out a pellet gun and asked for all the money in the cash register. The clerk called 911 and said, I’ve just been robbed by the girl who played Kimberly on Diff’rent Strokes.” She came back to the scene of the crime — she took $134 — and was arrested. Wayne Newton paid her $13,000 bail, half of which she was able to give back to him with her salary from this movie. Sadly, she would die in her sleep on May 18, 1998. It was thought to be an accidental overdose but later ruled a suicide. The day before, she had a Howard Stern Show appearance where she was lambasted by his callers. Around a decade later, her son would also kill himself.

I won’t even talk about Ron Jeremy and his sex pest arrest because this whole thing has been dark enough for a USA Up All Night beach sex movie. Actually, it’s all kind of dark, because writer Xavier Barquet — who was also the actor who played Milo — died at 46, way too young, of respiratory failure.

Director Eric Louzil also made Fortress of AmeriKKKa, Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown and Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend was on USA Up All Night on August 1, 1992; January 8 and August 28, 1993 and February 25, 1994.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mike Justice is the only illegitimate offspring born of a short-lived union between a frustrated English horror movie star and an American film festival groupie. His legacy, therefore, is to obsessively pursue a litany of ill-defined ambitions in the industry (editor, director, actor) while also falling hard and fast for anything with an accent and/or mutton chops. Fortunately, he’s pretty good at distilling his various fizzles, faux pas, and let-downs into uproariously absurd, snarky tales filled with wit, wisdom, and (sometimes) redemption. You can follow Mike on Facebook. 

Something traumatic happened the summer between seventh and eighth grade: the USA Network canceled Commander USA’s Groovie Movies, my favorite Saturday afternoon monster-movie showcase. There was to be no more Video Vault, no more wacky characters, no more Commander USA, himself—soaring superhero and retired Legion of Decency officer—to introduce me to enduring classics like Mausoleum and House of Psychotic Women. He didn’t even get a proper sendoff—he just walked out the door one day and never came back—like Richie Cunningham’s older brother, or my dad that time he left to buy stamps. It took weeks of crestfallen Saturdays to ultimately accept that I’d been ghosted by the Commander.

Naturally, I turned to delinquency; in this case, that meant immediately taking up with a rebound show: USA’s newly launched, more “mature” late-night B-movie series, USA Up All Night. I’d been collecting Elvira’s Thriller Video cassettes for years, and I was already an avid viewer of Saturday Nightmares—so staying up late past The Hitchhiker and Alfred Hitchcock Presents to watch racy comedians host heavily censored sex comedies felt like the next natural step to adulthood. And what an adulthood it promised to be.

USA Up All Night hit at precisely the right age when I was too young to drive, but too jaded for the TGIF lineup, and just beginning to fantasize about what being an independent adult with my own apartment, car, job, and (gasp) love life would be like. If Commander USA had been a weekend Fred Rogers with a fondness for Filipino creature features, then Rhonda Shear, Gilbert Gottfried and company were a cocktail party at the grown-ups table with foot-fetish gags and Vice Academy playing in the background. Every weekend, that VERY 90’s show opener beamed me from my lonely house in the sticks to somewhere infinitely cooler. It all felt so urban (and urbane), like the opening credits to Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, or that Michelob ad with Steve Winwood. I was sure my upcoming adult life was to be a hazy blur of neon, sax solos, palm trees, and guitar riffs. In fact, this whole USA Network era had me thinking I’d most likely grow up to live in a black lacquer-furnished condo with a skyline view, work some ill-defined but highly successful job in some posh office where I’d sport pastel neckties and flirt with my boss, and in my free time I’d call a LOT of chat lines and hang out in night clubs with Sally Kirkland or grocery stores with Linnea Quigley. (The fact that my life really did turn out something like this might possibly be USA’s fault, but I digress).

I devoured the good (Young Frankenstein, Eating Raoul, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), the not-so-good (Hot Chili, Meatballs 3, Hot Times at Montclair High) and everything in between (H.O.T.S., Summer School Teachers, Troma, Cannon, Chuck Vincent, Andy Sidaris, David DeCocteau, New World). One of my favorites was Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (1979) AKA The Great American Girl Robbery. It opens with a Vestron Video logo followed by the Dimension Pictures emblem, so you know it’s class. It was also the producing debut of Chuck Russell (yes, THE Chuck Russell) working with Bill Osco (that dude who was married to Jackie Kong and made Flesh Gordon and Alice in Wonderland: an X-Rated Musical Fantasy). Along for the ride are Osco alums Kristine DeBell (Meatballs) and Jason Williams (Flesh Gordon, himself). Leon Isaac Kennedy (Penitentiary), the exquisite Marilyn Joi (The Kentucky Fried Movie), and The Hills Have Eyes’ own Robert Houston round out the cast—along with a bunch of other actresses any fan of 1970’s T&A will recognize. Speaking of The Hills Have Eyes the movie also boasts a cute actress named Janet Blythe for whom this was her sole credit (subsequently run out of Hollywood by Janus Blythe, no doubt).

The plot is simple: three rival squads of catty, twenty-something “high school” cheerleaders headed for the California state tournament are abducted off a school bus by a small coalition of ex-football players and one random lesbian calling themselves the National American Army of Freedom. The girls are corralled into a cabin in the woods where they’re forced to sit on pillows and bicker amongst themselves. Eventually, the kidnappers get too rapey, so the cheerleaders put their differences aside to mount a daring escape using quaaludes, their panties, and a cigarette lighter. Meanwhile, Flesh Gordon and Bobby from The Hills Have Eyes are off collecting a ransom for the girls in a fun sequence that’s a lot more entertaining and expertly directed than it has any right to be.

Cheerleaders Wild Weekend is a little darker than advertised (not to the extent that, say, Malibu High was, but it does feel like the most Crown International-y non-Crown International film ever). Sold as a hot-and-heavy summertime make-out comedy, it’s really more of a kidnapping adventure/heist thriller with bouts of slapstick, peek-a-boo nudity, and girl fights shoehorned in. As far as summer feels go, it’s more The Final Terror than Little Darlings. Only in the 1970s would producers think it’s cute to slap together a sexy farce based loosely on the Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping where teenage hostages stage a striptease contest to kill time (it WAS the decade when Benji the dog’s girlfriend got kicked, after all).

Deadly Midwife starts with Lauren (Jessica Lowndes, Adrianna Tate-Duncan from the 2000s version of 90210) meeting with her midwife Julie (Lauren K. Robek), the same woman who helped her mother give birth to her. It’s a sweet scene but there’s a hint of something wrong: Julie needs a door camera and is worried enough about something happening that she gives Lauren the same camera. 

Add that to the flash-forward that we see of Lauren near death and the title Deadly Midwife and you know something bad is about to happen.

Directed by Monika Mitchell and written by Helen Marsh and Carolyn Woolner, this movie wastes no time in letting you in on the fact that something weird is happening. Lauren’s husband Anthony (Matthew MacCaull) is one of those Lifetime — well, Tubi — husbands who starts every day by asking, “Did you take your medication?”

Julie has gone missing. He claims she went back to England to see her ex-husband Harrison and Lauren even gets an email from her, but it all seems suspect. Soon, the new midwife Olivia Wright (Elysia Rotaru, Taiana Venediktov from Arrow and the voice of Black Canary in the Justice Society: World War II cartoon) has taken over. If  I’ve learned anything about having a baby from movies, it’s to never eat or drink anything anyone slightly off ever offers you, like tannis root, red meat or a special smoothie. I mean, Lauren is puking in her kitchen sink and Olivia is pushing this drink on her.

The whole relationship between Lauren and Anthony is weird. After her mother, an art gallery owner, killed herself, he was her therapist and they fell in love which is ethically so not what should happen. Anthony is now a college professor of psychology and — umm, yeah — ethics at Weston College. When she goes to visit him on campus, a young woman named Rachel (Gabrielle Jacinto) is hacking his computer. She claims she’s from the IT department. She also says that Anthony has been fired. He tells Lauren that he was getting around to telling her that.

There are so many things that go wrong here, like Olivia smashing her face into a sink to appear abused and then get to stay in the house, at which point she starts wearing lingerie and eating all the cheese in the fridge, then we learn that Julie has been kidnapped and oh yeah, the cop in charge — Detective Brooks (John Cassini) — is near giallo police in his level of effectiveness. And how does Olivia know the sex of the baby before Lauren?

You can see where this is all going but if you love these movies like I do, you enjoy each twist and turn of ridiculousness. I often yell at the TV during movies like this and I am quite immature, but I feel that we all find our own joy in life.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vice Academy 4 aired on USA Up All Night on June 9, 1995; March 2, 1996 and March 29, 1997.

Candy (Elizabeth Kaitan, who played this role in Vice Academy 3 to 6) and her new partner Samantha (Rebecca Rocheford) are up against Malathion (Julia Parton), who has broken out of jail again. Yes, it’s the same plot as just about every other one of these films, but you aren’t watching this for the plot.

The Commissioner and Miss Thelma are getting married, as long as our villain and her new man Anvil (Steve Mateo, who was Professor Kaufinger in 3 and Brock in 5) have their sinister way.

Rick Sloane based one of the characters in this movie on his mom. Yes, in a sex comedy. That’s why I love life. Even when things seem dark, weirdness in all its wonder is all around us.

You will learn nothing from this movie. You will not find the secret to any mystery. You will see some girls in 90s underwear and some dumb cop jokes. That said, perhaps those two things are the answer to life.

You can watch this on Tubi.