EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare On Elm Street was on USA Up All Night on July 25 and October 30, 1992; October 2, 1993 and July 15, 1994.

Upon watching this again for the first time in probably thirty years, I was struck by how European the movie feels. Perhaps it’s the color tones throughout, suggesting the patina of Italian horror cinema (both Fulci and Craven cite surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel as an influence). It could also be John Saxon having lead billing. Or just that it doesn’t feel like any horror cinema that was currently being made in the United States.

The real villain of this piece is not Freddy Krueger — more on him in a bit — but the parents of Elm Street who have allowed secrets and their assumed authority over their children to do unspeakable and unspoken things. All of them are haunted by it, divorced, depressed and self-medicating with over-dedication to their jobs or their addictions.

There are stories that David Warner was originally going to play Freddy, but that’s been disproven. After plenty of actors tried out and failed to win the part, it went to Robert Englund, who darkened his eyes and acted like Klaus Kinski (!) to get the part.

The other feeling I have about this movie is that it owes a major debt — as all horror movies post 1978 do –to John Carpenter’s Halloween. Much like that film, the true horror happens within the foliage of the suburbs, with shadow people showing up and disappearing. Much of the action on the final night happens within two houses. One of the main characters has the ultimate authority figure, a policeman, for a father. And the cinematography by Jacques Haitkin glides near the characters and around them, much like the Steadicam shots that start Carpenter’s film.

The film starts with Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss, who puts the events of Better Off Dead into motion by breaking up with Lloyd Dobler) waking up from a nightmare where a disfigured man chases her with a bladed glove. I loved the way this scene looks, as you could almost consider Freddy off-brand here, as his arms grow comedically long and he moves way faster than he would in the rest of the series. Yet by keeping him in the shadows, he’s absolutely terrifying.

When Tina awakens, her nightgown has been slashed and she’s afraid to go to sleep again. She learns that her friends, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp, who left Stamford University to be in this), Glen (introducing Johnny Depp) and Rod (Jsu Garcia, credited as Nicki Corri) have all been having the same dream. To console Tina, they all stay at her parent’s house overnight. But when Tina falls asleep, Krueger is waiting. Rod awakes to find Tina flying all over the room and up the walls — an astounding effects sequence in the pre-CGI era — and he flees the scene after her death.

Soon, Rod is arrested by Lieutenant Don Thompson (Saxon), Nancy’s father. Freddy now starts pursuing her, chasing her as she falls asleep in class (look for Lin Shaye as the teacher) and later in the bathtub, as his claw raises like a demented and deadly phallus between her thighs. Rod tells her how Tina dies and now she knows that the same killer is definitely after her (Garcia’s watery eyes and lack of focus made Langenkamp think he was acting his heart out; the truth is he was high on heroin for real in this scene). She tries to find the killer, with Glen watching over her, but he’s a lout and easily falls asleep. Only the alarm clock saves her, but no one can save Rod, who is hung in his sleep while rotting in a jail cell.

Nancy’s mom Marge (Ronee Blakley, who was married to Wim Wenders, sang backup on Dylan’s song “Hurricane” and is also in Altman’s Nashville) takes her to a sleep clinic, where Dr. King (Charles Fleischer, Roger Rabbit’s voice) tries to figure out her nightmares. She emerges from a dream holding Freddy’s hat to her mother’s horror. Soon, she reveals to her daughter that the parents of Elm Street got revenge on Freddy Krueger, a child murderer after a judge let him go on a technicality. In a deleted scene, we also learn that Nancy and her friends all lost a brother or sister that they never knew about.

While Nancy is barred up in her house by new security measures, Glen’s parents won’t allow him to see her. Soon, he’s asleep and is transformed into an overwhelming fountain of blood. Nancy falls asleep after asking her father to come in twenty minutes. He doesn’t listen and she pulls Freddy into our world. On the run, she screams for help until her father finally comes to her aid, just in time to watch a burning Freddy kill his ex-wife and them both disappear.

This is an incredibly complex stunt where Freddy is set ablaze, chases Nancy up the stairs, falls back down and runs back up — all in one take! At the time, it was the most elaborate fire stunt ever filmed and won Anthony Cecere an award for the best stunt of the year.

Nancy then realizes that if she doesn’t believe in Freddy, he can’t hurt her. She wakes up and every single one of her friends is still alive, ready to go to school. As the convertible hood opens up in the colors of the killer’s sweater, she realizes that she’s still trapped by Freddy, who drags her mother through a window.

In Craven’s original script, the movie simply ended on a happy note. Producer Robert Shaye wanted the twist ending so that the door was open for a sequel, something Craven had no interest in. Four different endings were filmed: Craven’s happy ending, Shaye’s ending where Freddy wins and two compromises between their ideas.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Teen Wolf was on USA Up All Night so many times: January 28 and September 8, 1995 and June 29, 1996.

After the surprising success of Valley Girl, the producers of this film realized that they could make an easy-to-shoot and cheap-to-make movie. As fate would happen, Michael J. Fox’s Family Ties co-star Meredith Baxter-Birney was pregnant and the show went on hiatus, so he was available. They got with Jeph Loeb — who went on to make Commando and write comics — and hired director Rod Daniel (Beethoven’s 2nd, Home Alone 4) to make this movie happen.

It’s so exciting that one of the extras gets so into it that they pull out their penis and begins to furiously masturbate at the conclusion of the film’s basketball game.

Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) is an unremarkable high school basketball played who wishes he had the love of Pamela Wells (Lorie Griffin), who is instead dating his bully on the court, Mick (Mark Arnold). He should really be paying attention to his best friend, the nerdy girl Boof (Susan Ursitti, Funland,  Zapped!) but you know how 80s teen comedies are.

At a party, Scott and Boof are forced into a closet in one of those teen makeout games. He loses it and starts clawing her up because, well, if you didn’t know by the title of this movie, Scott is a werewolf, just like his father Harold (James Hampton). Unlike every other movie ever made about lycanthropy, everyone just accepts that Scott can turn into a wolf and they even allow him to play basketball. His friend Stiles (Jerry Levine) even makes money off it, selling merch that Scott doesn’t know about until it’s already for sale. Also: Coach Finstock (Jay Tarses) is the worst coach whose entire strategy is “pass it to the wolf.”

This is the kind of movie that has a school administrator urinate all over himself in fear and ends with the stuck up girl being told to drop dead and we all laughed. How we laughed. And we learned nothing, except that if you make this movie about boxing and switch out Michael J. Fox for Jason Bateman, I will watch it again.

Beyond that sequel, there was a cartoon and a planned female version that would star Alyssa Milano. There was a second female version planned that was eventually turned into Teen Witch. And then, of course, there was the MTV series that got six seasons and a movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Troma’s War was on USA Up All Night on March 14, April 17 and July 17, 1992.

Troma’s War was the movie that made me fall out of love with Troma. Yes, 16-year-old Sam loved The Toxic Avenger and the sequel and devoured everything that came out of this New Jersey-based company, but young and cynical me was so let down by this movie that I started to hate everything after. Now, thirty years or so away, it’s not all that bad.

A commercial airliner crashes on an uncharted island that ends up being a terrorist training facility. That means that Vietnam vet Parker (Michael Ryder) and Taylor (Sean Bowen) have to get it together and save their fellow passengers. Some of them are captured, tortured and killed by neo-Nazis led by conjoined twins, who include amongst their number Senor Sida (Paolo Frassanito), whose name means Mr. AIDS and who wants to start a one-man STD epidemic in the U.S. Actually, all of his soldiers have AIDS, so maybe he’s just leading that assault.

Jessica Dublin, who plays Dottie in this, spent most of her career in Italy where she was in Fragment of Fear; So Sweet, So Dead; Sex of the Witch and Death Steps In the Dark. She was also in a sort of remake of The Wasp Woman — Rejuvenatrix — as the older woman who wants to be young again and is Mrs. Junko in the second and third Toxic Avenger movies.

Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman — as Samuel Well — are responsible for this. As I watch it as an older person, I can appreciate just how over the top it is, as nearly every scene has nudity, gore, breasts being shot or genital mutilation. At $3 million, it was Troma’s biggest movie and when it had issues with the MPAA, that group’s president Richard Heffner said that it was “no fucking good.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Malibu Beach was on USA Up All Night so many times: June 7 and November 11, 1989; April 6 and 7 and October 6, 1990 and April 12 and August 24, 1991.

Malibu Beach is not Malibu Bikini Shop, Malibu Hot Summer, Malibu Summer and it most certainly is not Malibu High, one of the most deceptively mean-spirited movies of all time.

That dog with a bikini in his mouth on the poster? He’s in this movie. He’s the pet of Dugan Hicks (Steve Oliver, who worked as a “cab driver, roughneck, bounty hunter, and fitness instructor to the stars”), the kind of sort of bad guy of this movie. Yes, the same Dugan Hicks from The Van. I just freaked out — do we have a Crown International cinematic universe?

Well, our lead character and lifeguard Dina (Kim Lankford, Street Corner Justice, The Octagon) lives in the same house that Laurie did in The Pom Pom Girls. I do believe that this shared reality exists.

Crown International movies are great because they say, “We have girls, a beach, some hunky guys, some music…what are we missing? A plot? What if they just all hang out for 90 minutes and occasionally have sex instead?”

This is the kind of movie that has a shark attack — it was a beach and 1978, you know? — and no one gets killed. It barely gets in the way of the breasts and beer and disco and weed. It also has Susan Player (Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Pom Pom Girls) and Tara Strohmeier (The Student Nurses, Truck Turner, Candy Stripe Nurses) in its cast and that’s a good thing.

Director Robert J. Rosenthal also wrote — you guessed it — The Pom Pom Girls and The Van and only directed one other movie, Zapped! He was joined on the writing of this movie by Celia Susan Cotelo, his co-writer on those two aforementioned Crown International movies.

As I prepare these articles, I often read through what other people think. I just read review that referred to this movie as a waste of time and how sad for people who don’t just want to watch a mindless hour and a half of dogs stealing bikini tops while young love blooms on the beach with no responsibility or worries of tomorrow.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fortress of Amerikka was on USA Up All Night on March 7 and July 10, 1992 and February 27 and December 10, 1993.

Of all the Troma directors, I seem to enjoy the movies of Eric Louzil (Class of Nuke ’Em High Parts II and III, Bikini Beach Race) the most. They just move quick, often don’t laugh at their own jokes and have just what you want: sex and violence.

In this one, a secret mercenary team called the Fortress of Amerikka is terrorizing the entire nation. They’ve been hired by the elite to destabilize the country and increase their control. Yes, this was made in 1989 and not today.

Troma City, California is where the last stand of American freedom will happen. Only John Whitecloud (Gene LeBrock, Father Peter from Beyond Darkness and Dr. Peter Houseman in Metamorphosis) and Jennifer (Kellee Bradley) can stop them.

Kascha, who was in plenty of adult films and was in Caged Fury using the name Alison LePriol, is in this. You know who isn’t? The blonde girl on the poster.

Fortress of Amerikka was famously a dark and murky movie on VHS. Luckily, Vinegar Syndrome has fixed that and released an uncensored version that looks great. The actual movie is about a hundred minutes of rambling violence and nudity that goes nowhere and the idea that it’s a revenge picture between Whitecloud and the sheriff who murdered his brother is, well, I guess what happens even if it feels like it takes forever to get there. Also John Whitecloud gets his ass kicked so many times in this movie.

There’s a beheading, there’s nudity every two minutes, the politics are more muddled than a Cannon movie, a couple playing ukelele gets murdered, almost a whole town gets killed…this movie is a mess and I wallowed in it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th Part III 3D was on USA Up All Night on October 30, 1993 and January 13 and 14, 1995.

With Amy Steel uninterested in returning to the series, the filmmakers had to reboot and figure out what made Jason tick. And that ticking was a hockey mask — three movies into the series. The original plan was that Ginny would be confined to a psychiatric hospital and he would track her down, then murder the staff and other patients at the hospital. If this sounds kind of like Halloween 2 to you, well surprise. This is not a movie series known for its originality.

He starts the film by killing a store owner and his wife just for clothes. Then, he goes after the friends of Chris Higgins: Debbie (Tracie Savage, who played the younger Lizzie in the awesome made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden), Andy, Shelley, Vera (Catherine Parks, Weekend at Bernie’s), Rick, Chuck and Chili. They run afoul of bikers Ali, Fox and Loco, who follow them back to their vacation home.

Jason starts killing quick, but he’s already mentally scarred Chris, as she survived an attack from him two years ago. This has left her with serious trauma and an inability to enjoy intimacy (which, come to think of it, comes in handy in these movies).

Jason takes the mask from the dead body of prankster Shelley and it’s on, with speargun bolts to the eye, heads chopped in half with machetes, knives through chests, electrocutions, hot pokers impaling stoners and even someone’s skull getting crushed by Jason’s supernaturally powerful hands.

Of course, it ends up with Final Girl Chris against Jason, who she kills by hitting him in the head with an ax before falling asleep on a canoe. She then dreams that an unmasked Jason runs toward her before Mrs. Vorhees — decomposed but with head reattached — drags her into the lake. Jason’s body is lying in the barn. For now.*

Here’s some trivia: To prevent the film’s plot being leaked (I could tell you the plot in less than a sentence, so this seems like bullshit), the production used the David Bowie song “Crystal Japan” as the title of the movie. They’d use Bowie songs as working titles during several of the other films.

There is a ton of footage that was cut from the film so that it didn’t get an X rating. And there’s an alternate ending where Chris dreams that Jason decapitates her. None of these things make this a better movie.

*Thanks to Bill Gordon for pointing out that I totally wrote that Jason was at the bottom of the lake. In my mind, Jason is at the bottom of the lake all the tinm. Or maybe, as Mike Justice said, “The killer’s body is at the bottom of the lake” is an old Pittsburgh expression meaning, “All’s well that ends well.”

Ismael (Karra Elejalde, Timecrimes) breaks into the house of a fine art restorer of religious icons and shoots her dead and a second bullet makes her daughter mentally handicapped. It also leaves Leire (Ana Álvarez) traumatized to the point that she will forever be in an institution. Twenty years later, he’s working in a bar and sees her. He’s convinced that she’s seen him, so he kidnaps her and demands a ransom. Yet they soon come together and build a strange relationship, even if he keeps threatening to throw her in the path of an oncoming train.

Directed by Juanma Bajo Ulloa, who wrote it with his brother Eduardo, this film finds Ismael going from wanting to murder Leire — with the help of his lover Maite (Lio) — before she turns him in. Yet he feels something for her. Is he her savior? Her father? Her lover? Can he be all of these things?

Can a man who casually murdered a mother and crippled a child become someone with empathy and even love? This movie asks that question while not being afraid to get dark and uncomfortable getting there.

The Radiance Films blu ray release of The Dead Mother has a 4K restoration of the film supervised and approved by director Juanma Bajo Ulloa, who also provided a commentary track. It also has a documentary about the making of the movie, a short film titled Victor’s Kingdom, a photo gallery, the trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, a book with writing by Xavier Aldana Reyes, Ulloa, co-writer Eduardo Bajo Ulloa and an appreciation by Nacho Vigalondo. There’s even a soundtrack CD.

You can get this from MVD.

Once abandoned to the wilds of public domain DVD sets, Messiah of Evil was for a time the gold amongst the dross, a film of incredible power. Hidden amongst old television shows, near-unwatchable transfers of Spanish horror and video store-era throwaways, it held a haunting power. Did I see that? Is this movie real? Can I explain it to anyone who hasn’t seen it?

Today, Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once-lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones slumber until time untold to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.

You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her lost artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.

It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead yet uninfluenced by it, where an entire town slowly becomes something like the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, they begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.

Or maybe it’s about something else. Is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price is Right model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style and sophistication. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.

Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality.

I don’t want that.

This is what I want. A transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.

Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with Jaws and Star Wars. Yet at this point, as this film’s commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower reminds us, even the creators of the blockbusters that changed entertainment forever, all the way back then, all wanted to be artists. And in a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Grafitti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.

This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.

I love that this movie once appeared in DVD bundles easily available in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume or Arietty spreading the infection into other towns, it found the right people. It always discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost for so long.

How wonderful it is to have what was once occult brought into the light and yet it loses nothing of its infernal power. In fact, it retains its power now, all the furtive watches and evangelists that loved this movie and spread that message. It’s just easier to access it thanks to the Radiance Films blu ray.

Featuring a 2023 restoration from a 4K scan of the best-surviving elements of the film from the Academy Film Archive, their blu ray release is something I never thought would happen. It creates new moments and feelings in me; I always believed that Arietty felt trapped in a comic strip world in her father’s house, but thanks to this new restoration, it appears that his paintings are real, that the mirrors and colors and brushstrokes are his way of showing how the outside city has become sick and wrong. They are as trapped in this reality as any other. The colors on her face as she drives through the night, the hum of the marquee in the center of town, the faces that appear in Ralph’s supermarket hungry for something, anything — all more vital. All more fresh. All more dead.

This release also includes an archival interview with co-writer-director Willard Huyck by Mike White from the Projection Booth Podcast; a documentary titled What the Blood Moon Brings: Messiah of Evil, A New American Nightmare that is co-directed by Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger and has appearances by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Maitland McDonagh, Guy Adams, Mikel Koven and David Huckvale; and a visual essay by Ellinger on American Gothic and female hysteria.

There’s also a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, as well as a book with contributions by Bill Ackerman, Joseph Dwyer, Amanda Reyes, Andy Marshall-Roberts and Larissa Glasser. 

The extras have added even more to my love of this film, even if Newman and Thrower can’t tell the difference between Joy Bang and Anitra Ford. Not just once. Multiple times. I don’t expect two British film experts to know what Ralph’s supermarket is, but my love for both Bang and Ford — and of course Hill — is beyond human measurement. I yelled at my television!

If you love movies, you should have already bought this.

You can order it from MVD.

You can also listen to the commentary track that I did with Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum here: