EDITOR’S NOTE: Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown was on USA Up All Night on March 20 and June 6, 1992; June 12, 1993; April 2 and December 16, 1994.

Tromaville’s nuclear reactor has been rebuilt since Class of Nuke ‘Em High and the Nukamama Corporation that funded it has added a new college, the Tromaville Institute of Technology (T.I.T.), inside the design to pay back the city.

Professor Melvina Holt (Lisa Gaye, Mona Malfaire from The Toxic Avenger movies) has created Subhumanoids to do menial tasks. After losing his girlfriend, Roger Smith (Brick Bronsky, a former pro wrestler who is also in The Quest and Death Match) starts investigating these Subhumanoids and falling in love with one of them, Victoria (Leesa Rowland). The Subhumanoids tend to melt down, so he has to save her and fight Tromie, a gigantic mutant squirrel.

Directed by Eric Louzil (Fortress of Amerikkka) and Donald G. Jackson (yes, the man who made all the Roller Blade movies, that explains why I loved this) and written by like twenty people — I’m kidding, it was just Lloyd Kaufman, Eric Louzil, Carl Morano, Marcus Roling, Jeffrey W. Sass and Matt Unger — this movie even has the Toxic Avenger show up to break the movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Class of Nuke ‘Em High was on USA Up All Night on February 8 and 9 and September 14, 1991 and March 20 and June 6, 1992.

Directed by Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman as Samuel Well and written by Kaufman, Richard W. Haines, Mark Rudnitsky and Stuart Strutin, Class of Nuke ‘Em High is about New Jersey’s Tromaville High School, a school in the shadow of an unsafe nuclear reactor that goes into the drinking water. This turns the honor students into a gang called The Cretins.

They also sell drugs and that’s how Eddie (James Nugent Vernon) gets the radiative joint that gets trampled at a dance and causes Warren (Gil Brenton) and Chrissy (Janelle Brady) to have sex and dream of mutating. She’s instantly pregnant and throws up their child into a toilet where it escapes and becomes a gigantic mutant just in time for Warren to go to war with The Cretins.

This movie somehow has four sequels — Class of Nuke ‘Em High 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown, Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid, Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 and Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High AKA Volume 2 — and I have to say that so far, the second one is perhaps the best movie I’ve seen from Troma. That bar was tripped over but I still enjoyed it.

I actually liked this one too. What is happening? Is the radiation making my brain lumpy enough to actually like Troma?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Summer Rental was on USA Up All Night on July 15, 1995 and April 12, 1996.

I never related to the teens in John Candy movies. Even when I was a kid, I knew how his characters felt, beat down by life, hangdog in expression. I get how his air traffic controller character Jack Chester feels, overwhelmed by his job yet doing it because he has to and always on the edge of everything flaming out.

Given five weeks off to chill out, Jack and his family — Sandy (Karen Austin) and children Jennifer (Kerri Green), Bobby (Joey Lawrence) and Laurie (Aubrey Jene) — leave Atlanta for Citrus Cove, Florida. They’re barely there when Jack makes an enemy of rich man and sailing champion Al Pellet (Richard Crenna), who forces the entire family out of a fancy restaurant and into the pirate-themed diner of Richard Scully (Rip Torn). The fight gets so bad between them — well, Jack does smash Pellet’s boat — that he buys their vacation home and tries to send them home.

As you can imagine, this ends with a snobs vs. slobs boat race at the Citrus Cove Regatta.

Directed by Carl Reiner and written by Mark Reisman and Jeremy Stevens, Candy felt that the movie was shot too fast. It’s funny but owes so much to National Lampoon’s Vacation. Yet every time I see Candy’s face, it makes me sad. Can you miss someone you never knew?

This was all based on a real vacation that producer Bernie Brillstein took to a beach house. According to Army Archerd, “He returned one night to find the house crawling with uninvited guests-invited by his client John Belushi, who, in soaking wet and sand-filled trunks, was sleeping in Brillstein’s bed.”

Brillstein himself said, “I have five children and I weigh 240 pounds. Being heavy in California is not a terrific thing. Being heavy on the beach is worse. The house on the left was occupied by two elderly sisters, one of whom had a 6-foot-4 inch mentally challenged son who was out of Arsenic and Old Lace. The house on the right was out of Death in Venice, occupied by a chic group of homosexuals who had 28-inch waists and wore peach sweaters.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Screwballs II was on USA Up All Night on January 10 and September 20, 1997.

The protagonists of this movie are Brad Lovett (Bryan Genesse), Marvin Eatmore (Jason Warren), Steve Hardman (Lance Van Der Kolk) and Hugh G. Rection (Alan Deveau) have been sent to Cockswell Academy with the hope that Principal Arsenault (Mike MacDonald) can calm them down.

They’re also misogynistic jerks who have a point score for each woman they sleep with. The ultimate girl for them is Mona Lott (Cynthia Belliveau, Blue Monkey) and they all keep failing. And there’s pretty much the movie.

Also called Loose Screws, this movie was directed by Rafal Zielinski (Hangman’s Curse, Spellcaster and the other Screwballs movies) and written by Michael Cory. Beyond stealing from itself — Screwballs is a ripoff of Porky’s so it’s like when you keep Xeroxing the same Xerox — it has the absolute, well, balls to have a strip club called The Pig Pen that looks just like, you guessed it, Porky’s.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m Dangerous Tonight was on USA Up All Night on June 20, 1992;  July 3, 1993 and June 24, 1994.

Based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich, this Tobe Hooper-directed movie first aired on USA on August 8, 1990. Bruce Lansbury and Philip John Taylor wrote the script.

Tiverton College professor Dr. Jonas Wilson is sent a sacrificial altar that has a carcass inside it that’s wearing a red cloak. Wilson decides to wear the cloak, which possesses him. He murders a security guard, kills his wife and then commits suicide.

Another teacher, Professor Gordon Buchanan (Anthony Perkins), uses Wilson in his lecture on animalism. One of his students, Amy (Madchen Amick) goes from his class to Wilson’s estate sale, where she buys the red cloak and decides to make it into a dress, but not before Eddie (Corey Parker)  — one of the students in a play — tries it on and nearly kills someone.

Amy’s life isn’t too great. Her parents are dead, she lives with her Aunt Martha (Mary Frann), cousin Gloria (Daisy Hall) and invalid grandmother (Natalie Schaefer, Lovey Howell!) who she is made to take care of. This usually keeps her from anything but class, yet she sneaks out to see Eddie at the dance and the red dress she’s made from the cloak compels her into nearly stealing away Gloria’s boyfriend Mason (Jason Brooks).

When she gets home, her grandmother somehow is able to tear the dress off her and tries to save her from it. She falls down the stairs and dies. Gloria, for some reason, now wants the dress. She thinks that Mason is going to propose to her but after they have sex, he tells her that he just got drafted to play in the NFL. She puts on the dress, kills him, rams into Amy and Eddie’s car while they make out and then drives off a cliff, dying in a gigantic fireball.

Wanda the coroner (Dee Wallace) finds the dress on Gloria’s body and it possesses her into killing people. Amy tries to find her, but Wanda finds her first — but not before killing her aunt — and forces her into the dress. Things get, well, as crazy as a made for cable movie can get. Actually, they get real crazy, because this was directed by Tobe Hooper.

Can a movie about a possessed dress be awesome? Yes. This one does it right. It’s a ridiculous idea but some of the most fun movies are, too. I also love when R. Lee Ermey shows up in a movie and he’s the cop on the trail of the dress.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th Part 2 was on USA Up All Night on August 13, 1993 and May 13, 1994.

Of course, there was going to be a sequel. Sean S. Cunningham refused to direct it because he was against the studio plan to bring Jason back from the dead. He said that it was too stupid and would never work. Hmm.

Beyond a plan to be an anthology of stories on Friday the 13th (which sounds a lot like the plans for Halloween), another thought was that Alice would be a reoccurring hero in this series, continually facing off against Jason again and again in sequel after sequel (again, think Halloween and Laurie Strode). Sadly, after was stalked by a fan, she said she wanted out (she even stayed out of acting for a long time).

That’s why this movie starts with her death. I always wondered why this happens, because it invalidates all of the emotional investment that you put into the last film!

So of course, everyone decides that re-opening Crystal Lake would be a great idea. We’ve got Ginny (Amy Steel, April Fool’s Day), Sandra, Jeff, Scott, Terry, Mark, Vickie and Ted, who sit around a campfire and listen to the legend of Jason. Even Crazy Ralph from the last movie shows up to warn everyone before getting killed.

Here’s my problem with this sequel: it rips a lot off. Jason doesn’t have his trademark hockey mask, so he steals the look of the Phantom of The Town that Dreaded Sundown. And then there’s the issue of taking two murders shot for shot from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood. A machete to the face and a couple stabbed together by a spear? Attention director Steve Miner: Bava did it first and better. Miner would go on to direct Halloween H20, so his sins are many.

Just like Shakespeare, everyone dies. Except Ginny. She discovers Jason’s altar to his dead mother and ends up stabbing him in the should with a machete. And then the movie does another shock ending, making you think Jason survived. He, of course, did not. Or he did. You know how these things go.

My question is: Did Jason rise from the dead? Or was he alive in the forest all these years? And how did he learn how to use a telephone? Let’s just stop asking questions.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Invincible Obsessed Fighter was on USA Up All Night on August 31, 1990.

Directed by Kim Jung-yong and starring Elton Chong — which may be my favorite martial arts movie actor name other than Casanova Wong — this is the tale of Chuck, an expert in swords and the 13 Shaolin styles. Now, he must battle Eagle, the henchman of General Ching and the killer of his master Leon Chan.

Chong is a Jackie Chan clone, given to humorous over cranked fights and a lot of serious martial arts movies fans hate all of his movies. This also has zombies in it out of nowhere, zombies that rise out of maggots no less. Nobody really has a name, things just happen and, well, this was on third on USA Up All Night in the kind of timeslot where I can only imagine people were either post-coitus, post-drinking or the drugs were kicking in.

There’s a bad guy named Fat Ho and lots of discussion of Eight Chopper Fist as a fighting style.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Invincible Superguy was on USA Up All Night on July 27, 1990.

This movie was meant to be played in the middle of the night.

A pair of rapist thieves get hired to steal gold from a palace which brings in a girl dressed as a man who wants to stop them and Devil Man, a metal masked man with a zombie army and oh yeah, there’s someone named Superguy, as the title promised there would be.

Devil Man has a giant birthmark and you will be pleased that he knows that he needs to wear a mask. For some reason, Super Guy is in this for literally a few minutes. That’s it. He gets the title and shows up for basically a cameo, but it’s good work if you can get it.

You can watch this on YouTube.