Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”

Directed by Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt (This Is Elvis) and written by Dana Olsen (The ‘Burbs, Wacko, Going Berserk), It Came from Hollywood came along at a significant time for me. I’d been watching SNL and SCTV, so seeing so many of my favorite comedy people in one film — Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Cheech and Chong, and Gilda Radner — all in one movie was a huge deal to me. I’d also started reading The Golden Turkey Awards at the library that my uncle was in charge of, and in 1982, it was impossible to know when you could see some of the films in it. This movie, which was on HBO all the time, gave me a chance to see clips of them and discover that they were real.

Movies in this are broken into twelve segments — Aliens, Gorillas, Monsters, The Brain, Giants and Tiny People, Musical Memories, Technical Triumphs, Troubled Teenagers, Previews of Coming Attractions, A Salute to Edward D. Wood, Jr., Getting High in the Movies and The Animal Kingdom Goes Berserk — and include: A*P*E, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!, Attack of the Puppet People, Atomic Rulers, Bat Men of Africa, Battle in Outer Space, Beginning of the End, Black Belt Jones, Blonde Savage, Bride of the Monster, The Bride and the Beast, The Brain from Planet Arous, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The Blob, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Cool and the Crazy, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Curse of the Faceless Man, Daughter of the Jungle, The Cyclops, The Creeping Terror, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Deadly Mantis, Don’t Knock the Rock, Dragstrip Girl, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Evil Brain from Outer Space, Fiend Without a Face, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, First Man Into Space, The Flying Saucer, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster, Frankenstein’s Daughter, From Hell It Came, Glen or Glenda, The Giant Claw, The Hideous Sun Demon, High School Confidential!, High School Hellcats, House on Haunted Hill, The Horror of Party Beach, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, The Incredible Melting Man, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Invasion of the Neptune Men, Isle of Forgotten Sins, The Killer Shrews, The Loves of Hercules, Maniac, Marihuana, Married Too Young, Mars Needs Women, Matango, Missile to the Moon, Monster from Green Hell, The Monster and the Ape, Musical Movieland, Octaman, Perils of Nyoka, Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Party Crashers, Prince of Space, Reefer Madness, Reptilicus, Robot Monster, Rocket Attack U.S.A., Rock Baby: Rock It, Runaway Daughters, Shake, Rattle & Rock!, Slime People, Son of Godzilla, The Space Children, Street Corner, Sunny Side Up, Teenagers from Outer Space, Teenage Monster, The Thing with Two Heads, The Tingler, The Trollenberg Terror, The Violent Years, The War of the Worlds, The Weird World of LSD, The White Gorilla, Wonder Bar, The X from Outer Space, Yongary, Monster from the Deep, Zombies of the Stratosphere.

Directors and executive producers Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo spent about five months researching and collecting movie clips from about 500 feature films. They then decided to expand their search beyond the 75 titles that the Paramount Pictures studio, the film project’s production house, had licensed for the documentary. However, this meant that it would never be released on home media, as licensing it would be too difficult.

Since I first saw this, I’ve learned that making fun of films isn’t the right way to enjoy them. But for a ten-year-old version of me, I got to see Ed Wood Jr. movies for the first time and couldn’t wait to see even more.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.