EDITOR’S NOTE: Jurassic Women was on USA Up All Night on December 7, 1996, August 9, 1997 and February 6, 1998.

A meteor shower causes a spacecraft to crash-land on a planet inhabited by cavemen and gorgeous women, who have been at war for centuries. Captain David Clayton (James Phillips) and Dr. Cody Sinclair (Jonathan Vakeen) are the humans from our time who get captured by the men and saved by the women, but the captain goes all incel because none of the women want him.

This has a jurassic name but no dinosaurs. It does have Jan-Michael Vincent,

Director John Pieplow also made the Dee Snider movie Strangeland. He wrote this with David Heavener. There’s all the potential in the world for this movie and it somehow doesn’t live up to any of it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Backfire was on USA Up All Night on November 10, 1995, July 20, 1996 and February 21, 1997.

In a city where firefighters are traditionally women, Jeremy Jackson (Josh Mosby) tries to follow in the steps of his mother (Edie Falco!) and sister (Mary McCormack, Howard Stern’s movie wife), who are firefighting heroes. Yet at the same time that he starts, toilets start to explode all over the city.

This film parodies Backdraft with elements of Falling Down, Cliffhanger, and Aladdin, as well as MST3K-style shadows that appear to comment on the movie at one point. The cast is something I would have picked: Telly Savalas as the bad guy in his last film, Kathy Ireland as a firefighter, and Shelley Winters as an older firefighter, Lt. Shithouse and Robert Mitchum as Marshal Marc Marshall. I almost forgot to mention that Kristen Johnston is in it.

Filemed back-to-back with Cyber Vengeance, this was nearly a sequel to another film written by J. Chris Ingvordsen, Firehouse. It was directed by A. Dean Bell. There’s a scene where a Middle Eastern terrorist asks someone for directions to the World Trade Center in this. That would be offensive in 1995, when two years ago the building was bombed, but outrageous after 9/11. Even weirder, the tagline is “A bonfire of the insanities,” which references a movie that people who would watch this would never see.

I wish this had the budget for the KISS song “Firehouse,” which is when Gene breathes fire and features the lyrics, “She’ll adore you and she’ll floor you / With her wisdom and her vision / And you’ll love it and think of it / Till you lose all intuition, c’mon.” It may be too intelligent for this movie, which somehow gathered great talents and made something beneath them.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist was on USA Up All Night on January 14, April 29 and October 13, 1989.

Directed by Sanford Singer (The Body Politic) and co-written by Singer and Kevin McDonough, this film was produced by Lloyd Kaufman’s sister, Susan. Paul (Adam Nathan) and his girlfriend Donna (Juliet Hanlon) move to Jersey City, where he works for his father’s Romance Entertainment and she acts in asparagus commercials. He makes a deal selling forgotten equipment and runs into problems with his boss, Murphy (Mikhall Druhan). Somehow, this all turns into Paul and Donna kidnapping a CEO and being live on the air terrorists with a bomb threat. Remember when people did those?

This may have been distributed by Troma, but it isn’t a Troma movie. It’s too smart for that. When you’re young and bored, you really will try anything. I really liked Guillermo Gonzelez, who plays the Cuban building manager Rico, who should be in this a lot more than he is. It’s strange — most people who have discussed this online either think that it’s vapid or smart enough to be a cynical take on movies that are just like this. That’s a hell of a balancing act.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cameron’s Closet was on USA Up All Night on July 10, 1992.

Directed by Armand Mastroianni (He Knows You’re Alone, The Clairvoyant) and written by Gary Brandner, who was the author of The Howling, Cameron’s Closet is about Cameron Lansing (Scott Curtis), a psychic boy living with his father (Tab Hunter), who has been studying his son’s abilities since he was born. One night, he falls on a machete — sure, I guess — and Cameron goes to live with his mother Dory (Kim Lankford) and her boyfriend Bob Froelich (Gary Hudson).

Sergeant Sam Taliaferro (Cotter Smith) — who has prophetic dreams — and his partner, Pete Groom (Leigh McCloskey), are at odds due to Sam’s absent-mindedness, which stems from his inability to sleep. Hey — there’s William Lustig as a porn director! Sam is sent to Dr. Nora Haley (Mel Harris), who soon becomes part of the investigation team as Bob is killed when his eyes are burned out of his head and he’s thrown out a window. Both murders are connected to not just Cameron, but also Sam’s dreams. Also, Dead bodies come back to life as murderous zombies, and Cameron is obsessed with the Deceptor, a statue of a demon that his father gave him.

Why would they trust the dad’s old assistant, Professor Ben Majors (Chuck McCann)? Well, I don’t know. He soon gets his blood boiling in his body, and Cameron has to fight the demon in…the closet.

Cotter Smith and Mel Harris met during this movie and married soon after.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bug was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find any info on the date. Do you know?

Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by William Castle and Thomas Page, based on Page’s novel The Hephaestus Plague, this is the last film Castle would make.

Bradford Dillman spent so much of the 70s at war with nature. Now he’s Professor James Parmiter, whose wife (Joanna Miles) dies spectacularly when one of these fire farting cockroaches gets into her hair and then her ear. He keeps one of the bugs alive and experiments on it. But before you know it, he can talk to the insects and breeds them with other bugs to make them more intelligent than humans. Why would you do this?

Miles was afraid of cockroaches and told Szwarc that she couldn’t do the scene. Castle told them they were harmless and put one on his arm. It then bit him.

Castle wanted a gimmick. First, he thought of putting brushes — like windshield wipers — near the seats that would rub against the audience’s legs to make them feel like bugs were crawling on them. Theater owners turned him down, so he insured the giant cockroach for $1 million.

This sets more than a woman’s head on fire. It also cooks a cat and starts a fire inside the Brady Bunch house.

Unlike every disaster movie, this starts with an earthquake and gets worse from there. Ken Middleham was the man to go to for directing insects, as he also directed Phase IV — this is like that movie, but almost relentlessly stupid, and I say that with pure love — and The Hellstrom Chronicle.

This starts with trucks and people going up in an inferno and ends with Bradford Dillman, a diving helmet and bugs who spell things. It’s so goofy yet so earnest, a movie unaware of how dumb it gets, and those are the best kinds of movies because they’re not dull – and that’s what I look for.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Blind Date was on USA Up All Night on May 11 and 12 and July 27, 1990 and June 28 and September 14, 1996.

Years ago, when I first started the site, I wrote “Kim Basinger: Professional idiocy, circa 1987 and 1988.”

Here’s a quick summary:

In 1987, Kim Basinger appeared in Blake Edwards’ Blind Date with Bruce Willis.

In 1988, she appeared in Richard Benjamin’s My Stepmother is an Alien with Dan Aykroyd.

In both films, she plays nearly the same role: a woman so devastatingly gorgeous, she decimates the brains of weak-willed men everywhere before settling for a man who is obviously the worst possible mate for her — falling in the kind of love that transforms your life in under 24 hours.

However, she has one downside: she is an utter moron, almost incapable of comprehending how the most basic societal behaviors should be observed. In Blind Date, it’s alcohol that’s to blame. One drink and her character, Nadia, loses control. It’s as if no woman could be both gorgeous and competent, even if she was able to pilot a starship the whole way here.

Despite her foibles, she’s presented as an inherently good person in both films. But in no way do you watch and see her as a real person, someone who can be more than a sexual object, which is probably the whole point of 1980s comedy, one supposes.

Anyways…

Walter Davis (Bruce Willis in his first movie lead) is trying to make a deal with Japanese industrialist Mr. Yakamoto (Sab Shimono). He needs a date for the dinner where they’ll shake hands on it, so his brother Ted (John Larroquette) plans a blind date with his wife Susie’s (Stephanie Faracy) cousin Nadia (Basinger). Simple, right?

Ted and Susie warn Walter not to let Nadia drink alcohol. If he does, she will go crazy. Additionally, she has an ex named Ted (played by Phil Hartman), who is stalking her.

Walter tells Susie that he wanted to be a musician but ended up taking an office job. Oh, if only this movie would give Bruce Willis a chance to sing!

During the party, Nadia turns champagne into an insanity power-up, getting the Japanese mogul’s wife to leave him, abusing a co-worker of Walter for hitting on her and spraying champagne at Walter’s boss. The deal gets called off.. Walter gets fired. This gives Walter license to embarrass her once she sobers up, showing up at a party at her friend’s house acting like a crazy person and even pulling a gun on David, which gets him arrested.

Nadia bails him out and even agrees to marry David if he’ll represent Walter. David’s father, Judge Harold Bedford (William Daniels), basically agrees to letting Walter out if his son moves far away. Nadia leaves Walter a note telling him not to give up on playing the guitar. David replies by sending chocolates with alcohol in them; she goes wild at her wedding and says that she’s in love with someone else, then marries Walter.

This was supposed to star Madonna and Sean Penn.

Oh, Blake Edwards. I’m sure there was a time when I would have liked your movie,s but I grew up watching these ones. I haven’t changed my opinion. This movie makes everyone act like a moron, mostly Basinger, who deserves better. Why would this couple get married?