EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was on USA Up All Night on November 13, 1992; May 14, 1994 and January 13 and October 13, 1995.

Presenting the scummiest, vilest Friday of them all — a film packed with more kills (22!), more nudity and more drugs behind the scenes than several of the other films combined!

Years after killing off Jason, Tommy Jarvis has nightmares that the man he killed has returned. That’s why he’s in Pinehurst Halfway House, where Pam Roberts and Dr. Matt Letter (Richard Young, who gives young Indy his fedora in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) are trying to help him to get over his violent past and the death of his mother.

But are there a bunch of teens to get killed? Sure there are. There’s Reggie, Tommy’s roommate whose grandfather George works there as a cook. Plus, we have Robin (Juliette Cummins, Slumber Party Massacre 2), Violet (Tiffany Helm, O.C. & Stiggs, Reform School Girls), Jake, Vic (Suicide from Return of the Living Dead), Joey, Eddie and Tina (Debi Sue Voorhees, no relation). There’s also rich neighbors Ethel Hubbard and Junior, who want the halfway house closed down.

What follows is a bit of a mystery movie, at least for a bit. Is one of the kids the killer, like Vic, or has Jason come back from the dead? Even the end of the movie leaves that up in the air, to be honest. It’s kind of a mess, but along the way there’s a ton of blood and gore.

Danny Steinmann is the director here, perhaps better known for The Unseen and Savage Streets. Well, maybe not by most people, but by me? Of course. He also broke into movies by directing and writing the adult film High Rise and probably would have created more films in the Friday the 13th saga, but a bicycling accident and long recovery meant that this would be the last film that he would direct. The working title for this film was Repetition. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell was on USA Up All Night on July 18, 1992 and January 22, July 23 and August 27, 1993.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Airplane II: The Sequel was on USA Up All Night on March 12, 1994 and March 4 and October 6, 1995.

While most of the cast came back and Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker were involved in the early stages of development, the ZAZ team decided to distance themselves from this movie and worked with Leslie Neilsen on Police Squad! instead.

The movie went ahead without their permission. They have refused to watch a single frame of it upon its release and still have never watched it.

They made the right move.

It’s not that Airplane II: The Sequel is bad. It’s that such a high bar was set that it’s impossible for any movie to be even close.

It was directed and written by Ken Finkleman, who in 1982 either had the biggest challenge or the largest balls. In the same year, he wrote not only this sequel, but also Grease 2. Again, the risk to reward was so astronomical; Ken Finkleman was flying too close to the sun on wings of wax.

That said, this movie does get more serious actors playing themselves in the way they’ve always acted but in a comedy, including Richard Jaeckel, Chad Everett, Rip Torn, Kent McCord, William Shatner and Raymond Burr while finding roles for some of my favorites like Chuck Connors, Laurene Landon and Sandahl Bergman.

It’s supposedly more science fiction based, but at no point does this movie point to the almost insane devotion to old movies that the original does. Then again, the matte painting from Logan’s Run showing up is pretty funny, as is the fact that Lloyd Bridges is in a mental hospital because his character thinks that he’s Lloyd Bridges.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Airplane was on USA Up All Night on March 12, 1994 along with Airplane II.

If you combined Zero Hour! with Airport 1975, you get Airplane, a movie that changed lives. Seriously.

The ZAZ team — Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker — were part of the Kentucky Fried Theater and they’d often record late night TV and watch the tapes to get ideas. They recorded Zero Hour!  and thought that it was the perfect structure for them to do jokes around. Originally calling the movie The Late Show, their script borrowed so much got the rights to create the remake from Warner Bros. and Paramount for about $2,500.  They couldn’t get it sold but learned how to make movies when they made The Kentucky Fried Movie with John Landis.

Eventually, the script found its way to Paramount through Michael Eisner. They made the ZAZ team shoot it in color instead of black and white and on a jet instead of a plane. If they followed those rules, they would be allowed to cast serious actors for the film rather than comedy performers.

The ZAZ casting is what changed lives. Or careers, really.

David Zucker said, “The trick was to cast actors like Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges. These were people who, up to that time, had never done comedy. We thought they were much funnier than the comedians of that time were.”

It wasn’t easy. To get Stack to play the role the way they wanted, they showed him a tape of John Byner impersonating the actor, so in effect, Stack was doing an impression of John Byner doing an impression of Stack. While Bridges’ children advised him to take the part, Graves rejected the script at first, as he thought so much of it was tasteless.

As for Neilsen, his career has been serious leading roles but he wanted to work in comedy forever. He was just looking for a film to help in the transition. For years, he had pranked actors with a fart machine on set and he took to being in the film quite well. He’s lucky Christopher Lee turned the role down to be in 1941.

That’s why this movie works. No one is acting like it’s a comedy, no matter how ridiculous it gets. Even the Elmer Bernstein score gets the joke and plays its part.

It’d be stupid to just recount the movie and every joke, but let me tell you, this is a movie I can watch from any point and just not be able to stop watching. I think I watched it hundreds of times as a kid and my love of stupid humor comes from this. Any time Stephen Stucker was on screen, I’d laugh like a maniac, the same as everything Bridges does.

In fact, my love of the original Airport movies comes directly from how much I adore this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: 48 Hours was on USA Up All Night but I can’t find the date!

Walter Hill forever, you know?

He credits Lawrence Gordon for the idea of this movie. It was originally about the Governor of Louisiana’s daughter getting kidnapped by a criminal who strapped dynamite to her head and threatened to blow her up in 48 hours if he wasn’t paid. To save her, the toughest cop around gets the worst prisoner in jail — the one-time cellmate of the kidnapper — to save her. Roger Spottiswoode would write the script, along with Hill, Tracy Keenan Wynn, Larry Gross and Steven de Souza.

Hill couldn’t sell them on his idea of making it more of a comedy and teaming Clint Eastwood and Richard Pryor. But then something changed. Hill said, “Paramount felt that the combination of Nick Nolte and a good black actor would be commercial. What happened is very simple: Richard Pryor is now an enormous movie star, and that’s changed everybody’s mind about black lead players.”

The movie was not without issues. Gross and Hill rewrote the film until the last day of shooting, pressured to making it more of a comedy. Producers thought the movie was too violent and claimed that Hill would never work for Paramount again. Those same bosses hated dailies of Murphy’s performance and wanted him fired, but co-star Nick Nolte and Hill fought to keep him.

All of these things were forgotten when this became the seventh-biggest movie of 1982.

Career criminal Albert Ganz (James Remar) escapes from prison with the help of his accomplice Billy Bear (Sonny Landham). They travel to San Francisco where they kill a former associate Henry Wong (John Hauk) as well as two cops, Detectives Algren (Jonathan Banks) and Van Zant (James Keane). Only Inspector Jack Cates (Nolte) survives but loses his gun.

Jack tracks down Ganz’s former partner Reggie Hammond (Murphy) who only has six months left in his jail sentence. The cop gets a 48-hour release so that Reggie can help him track down Ganz and Bear. Their relationship is somewhat rocky, but Reggie impresses Jack by taking down an entire redneck bar called Torchy’s by himself, using the power of the badge, his attitude and some BS to get all the info they need to track down Billy’s old girlfriend. I mean, the guys still end up fighting one another, but that brings them even closer as they work the case.

This movie feels like lightning in a bottle, as Murphy was ready to break even bigger than just being on Saturday Night Live. Having Nolte and Hill supporting him helped and I just remember everyone being so excited about this movie. Murphy would follow this with Trading Places and from then on, he’s always be a major star.

I love Murphy. Beyond his comedic gifts, he has a deep love of all genres of cinema. He said he had no idea how to hold a gun, so he just did an impression of Bruce Lee’s face before he fought. He also said this about Rudy Ray Moore in a recent interview and I want to ask him so many more questions: “I started thinking of him like a guerrilla filmmaker. And then I started seeing different types of movies. And if you watch 8 ½ by Federico Fellini and then you watch The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, and then you watch Human Tornado by Rudy Ray Moore, you have the exact same reaction. You go, “What the … am I watching?””

He even got a sample from Santa Sangre — “The elephant is dying” — into his song with Michael Jackson, “Whatzupwitu.”

Anyways. 48 Hours is so raw compared to the buddy cop movies that came after. You should totally check it out if you haven’t and just thought it was like any other action movie of the 80s.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was on USA Up All Night on October 28, 1995; April 5, 1996 and July 19 and October 11, 1997.

What can you say about a movie where the director, Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2, Judgement Night), says “What started out as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can’t even watch it anymore.”?

A year after the last film, the returning Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel) have been dating and seen no sign of Freddy until a shower turns into Alice going back in time to witness the creation of Freddy by the maniacs of the asylum. She tries to forget the dream as she’s graduating high school the next day, along with comic book lover Mark, model Greta (Erika Anderson, Twin Peaks) and aspiring nurse Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter, Maria, the video store clerk from The Lost Boys).

The dreams don’t go away, with Alice witnessing the birth of a Freddy baby that makes its way to the church from the last film. He tells her he’s learned how to come back to life, just at the moment that he kills Dan. At the same time, she also learns that she’s pregnant with her dead boyfriend’s child.

No one believes that Freddy is after Alice, but Greta soon is killed by being forced to overeat in her dreams. Oh yeah — Alice is also seeing a fully grown boy she calls Jacob who she believes is her future son. Freddy is feeding his victims to her unborn baby — who yes, is also Jacob — to make him evil.

There is an imaginative scene where Freddy kills Mark within a comic book world, as well as the world that Freddy lives in now. But the ending, where Amanda Krueger seals away Freddy and Jacob decides to stay with his mother amidst strange puppet heads gets a little ridiculous. Actually, this entire movie is, supposing that teens we’d want to watch a movie about the terrors of teen pregnancy mixed with the terrors of being an Elm Street teenager.

Supposedly, there’s an uncut version of this movie that’s never been released that would change a lot of people’s opinions on the film. I’ll watch it again if that ever comes out. Yes, I know there was an unrated VHS release but supposedly there’s even more missing.

Maybe it’d be a better film if New Line had given the director more than four weeks to work on it. And get this — the poster was released before the producers had a clear idea what the movie was going to be about, other than the idea that Freddy would be a fetus and the title would be The Dream Child.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge was on USA Up All Night on October 2, 1993; July 15, 1994; October 28, 1995; August 2, 1996 and January 25, 1997.

With Craven stepping aside, Jack Sholder (Alone in the Dark, which was the first New Line movie before the original Elm Street and The Hidden) was selected as the director and David Chaskin was selected to write this (it was his first Hollywood script and he’d go on to write I, Madman and The Curse).

Chaskin’s theme for the film — which until the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy he would always say was just subtext — is the main character Jesse (Mark Patton) coming to grips with his homosexuality. Patton struggled with his anger over this film for years, as he felt betrayed as the filmmakers knew that he was in the closet. Between this role and playing a gay teenager in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, he feared being typecast at best and labeled at worst. Yes, in 1985, this was the world that we lived in. You can see the movie Scream, Queen to get more of the story.

Chaskin claimed in interviews that Patton just played the role too gay, but Patton bristled at that claim. The emotional stress led Patton to quit acting for some time to pursue a career in interior design. That said, Chaskin claims that he has tried to reach out and apologize to the actor over the years.

Director Sholder has said that he didn’t have the self-awareness to think that the film had any gay subtext, but an unfilmed scene almost had Krueger slide a knife into Jesse’s mouth. Makeup artist Kevin Yagher talked Patton out of filming that scene for the sake of his career.

Years later, Patton would write Jesse’s Lost Journal, a series of diary entries that would set his feelings — and his character’s — straight, pardon the horrible pun.

The sequel starts with a dream sequence where Jesse Walsh (Patton) dreams of being stuck inside a school bus with Freddy at the wheel. Jesse’s circle of friends include Lisa, who he’s friends with but too shy to ask out, and Grady (Robert Rusler, Sometimes They Come Back), a frenemy that seems more like a crush.

Jesse has moved into Nancy Thompson’s home, which was on the market for five years after she was institutionalized and her mother killed herself. His family has Clu Gulager from Return of the Living Dead as his dad, Hope Lange from Death Wish as his mother and a little sister that he bothers when she’s trying to sleep.

Lisa and Jesse discover Nancy’s diary, which explains how ridiculous the house is to live in. It’s always 97 degrees, birds attack you at will before they spontaneously combust and your parents accuse you of setting it all up.

Meanwhile, Jesse is dealing with all sorts of strangeness, like a sadistic gym teacher who really likes to go to punk clubs and get whipped. One night, a dream takes him to that bar and the gym teacher makes him run laps in the middle of the night. That gym teacher is played by Marshall Bell, who was George in Total Recall, the host for Kuato. Freddy possesses our hero and the coach gets clawed up in the shower. The cops find Jesse wandering the highway naked, which doesn’t seem all that weird to his mother.

Lisa and Jesse go to Freddy’s lair in an abandoned factory, then she has a pool party. Yes, I just wrote that sentence. At the party, they kiss and have perhaps the most awkward make out session ever, until Freddy causes changes in Jesse’s body that make him run to Grady for help. Yes, he gets so upset about making up with a girl that he runs to his male crush, only to transform into Freddy in an astounding practical effects sequences and kill Grady. He returns to the pool party and lays absolute waste to the partygoers as Freddy before getting chased off by multiple shotgun blasts.

Only Lisa’s love — and kisses — can bring Jesse out of Freddy. But it’s all for nothing, as the nightmare from the beginning becomes real and their schoolbus turns into a deathtrap. Even though their friend Kerry (who has the best outfits in the movie) tries to calm them down, Freddy’s claw emerges from her chest.