We start in an asteroid prison, where the Krites hijack a spaceship and escape to Earth. The warden hires Ug (Terrence Mann) and another shapeshifting bounty hunter to follow them.

As they study Earth transmissions, Ug takes the form of rock star Johnny Steele and the second remains blank. You will hear the song “Power of the Night” so many times in this movie that you’ll be able to sing it yourself.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, the Brown family is enjoying rural Earth life. There’s father Jay (Billy “Green” Bush, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday), mother Helen (Dee Wallace Stone, The Howling, Cujo, Popcon), and their kids April and Brad. As the kids go to school, Jay waits for mechanic Charlie (Don Keith Opper, who is in all four Critters films) to show up. Once a major league prospect, he started getting messages from radios and possibly even UFOs through his fillings and went insane.

That night, the Krites’ ship crashes. Thinking it’s a meteorite, Jay and Brad check it out only to catch one of the monsters eating its way through a cow. They cut all the power to the farm, take out a cop and shoot Jay with one of their tranquilizing quills.

While all this is going on, April is horizontally dancing with NYC transplant Steve (Billy Zane!) who gets eaten almost immediately. Her brother saves her with some firecrackers. Just then, the bounty hunters come to town, with one of them continually changing shape to become different townspeople.

Everything works out well, with the Krites being wiped out. The bounty hunters even leave behind a device to call them in case of a sequel as we see eggs that are about to hatch.

There’s a funny scene with a Critter playing with an E.T. doll, which Dee Wallace Stone also starred in. And I almost forgot — genre vet Lin Shaye (the Insidious films) shows up too!

The character design of the Critters is probably the best part of the film. The Chiodo Brothers also worked on Ernest Scared Stupid, Team America: World Police, Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the “mousterpieces” in Dinner for Schmucks and, of course, Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

Depending on when you grew up, Critters is either silly fluff or a treasured part of your childhood. I tend to the former while Becca is definitely on the latter choice. Director Stephen Herek also directed plenty of her other favorites like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter is Dead and The Mighty Ducks.

Sue (Rene Bond) and Jan (Sandy Dempsey) look like they’re stranded and two musicians, Dave Anderson (Bond’s man Ric Lutze) and Billy B (John Paul Jones), pick them up. The truth is, they’re setting them up to get taken by their pimp Mike (Louis Ojena ) and forced to play as his band, but they both have hearts of gold and decide to save the men.

Director Lew Guinn was the DP for Deadwood ’76 and Terror In the Jungle, as well as the editor of Invasion of the Star Creatures. This is the only directing credit he had.

Executive produced by Harry Novak — who paid for Bond’s breasts, making her the first American adult actress to get implants, unless some pervert writes and proves me incorrect — this also has Marie Arnold (The Toy Box, Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!, Meatcleaver Massacre, Fantasm) and Penny King (The Training of Bunny).

The sex scenes are boring, the movie is kind of gross looking, the country songs are horribly mimed and Rene Bond is an angel that lifts this all on her own and makes it watchable. I can’t tell yoy how many movies I’ve watched just for Rene Bond. Maybe I can. Maybe I shouldn’t have made fun of other perverts, because now I feel bad.

The ending kind of comes out of nowhere!

Also known as On the Run and One for the Money, Two for the Show, Country Blue has the balls to rip off a Janis Joplin song for its tagline, “For Bobby Lee and Ruthie, Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

I like this one more: “Young and in love, she broke the law…the law broke her.”

Bobby Lee Dixon (Jack Conrad, who also directed, co-wrote, produced and edited this film; he’s not the only Hicksploitation director to make an auteur project as the entire genre is predicated on movies like Billy Jack) has just been released from jail and wants to make a better life for his lover Ruthie Chalmers (Rita George). But she can’t even afford to leave her husband, so her father, J.J. “Jumpy” Belk (Dub Taylor) and Arneda Johnson (Mildred Brown) convince them that crime is the easy way to get what you want.

IMDBS says “Negotiations with Jeff Bridges and Robert Blake to play the role of Bobby Lee broke down because of budget limitations, so Jack Conrad had the choice of canceling the shoot or playing the role himself.” I bet Conrad brought it up to them at a bar. They said, “Call my agent.” That was it.

This was filmed in the least affluent parts of the U.S. and has a hard scrabble, doomed feel about it. It’s not a great find, but it’s still interesting, made at a time when Bonnie and Clyde and essays on the downtrodden and their ruined lives were big screen fodder. Bank robberies, bad decisions, short tempers…you know how the song goes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed and written by Ossie Davis, based on the book by Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem is an early blaxploitation film. It starts big and bold, as Deke “Reverend” O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart) is raising money for a ship to sail black people back to Africa when armed and masked men attack, stealing the cash. This brings on detectives “Gravedigger” Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and Ed “Coffin Ed” Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) — who were in nine of Himes’ The Harlem Detective books — on the case. They see through O’Malley and despite their Nixon-respecting boss telling them to leave him alone, they do anything but.

His mistress, Iris Brown (Judy Pace), is being tracked by them and narrowly escapes them, only to find O’Malley in bed with Mabel (Emily Yancy), the wife of one of the men killed just hours ago in the robbery. The truth is that the preacher is working with white criminal Calhoun (J.D. Cannon) and the robbery was all a scam. The money is now in a bale of hay that’s been taken by scrap dealer Uncle Budd (Redd Foxx, always a junkman).  By the end, the bad guys get exposed and Uncle Budd makes his way to Ghana, where all that cash buys him a harem.

Davis didn’t make the sequel because of disagreements with the studio. That’s why Mark Warren made Come Back, Charleston Blue, a movie loosely based on Himes’ The Heat’s On.

A film made with the protection of John Shabazz and the Black Citizen Patrol, and one that pushes that self-determinism and the ghetto policing itself are the only ways out, was a volatile mix. It would be now, much less back in 1970.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As the trailer will tell you, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.

That’s debatable.

What is not is that Corruption is a ripoff of Eyes without a Face.

But hey — some of my favorite movies are total rip-offs.

Renowned plastic surgeon Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) starts the movie at a swinging 60s party with his beautiful fiancée Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Hysteria). Sir John isn’t dealing well with all this counterculture excess, so when a pervy photographer makes a pass at his girl, he attacks the man, sending a hot light into Lynn’s face. This party may seem like a parody when seen today, but this is a serious scene, with Cushing facing the Summer of Love and not dealing so well with all of it.

Rowan pledges to fix Lynn’s scarred face through a combination of laser technology and a pituitary gland transplant. Sound good? Well, it’s fueled by murder, giving the fluids of young women to his wife, to keep her face from scarring and it needs to be repeated again and again to stop the scars from coming back. Everything goes well — as well as repeatedly killing people and basically feeding their skin to your wife can go– until Sir John and Lynn try to seduce a new victim who ends up being part of a gang of robbers.

Those criminals break into the home of Sir John and they soon learn his secret. However, no one profits from this knowledge, as everyone ends up getting killed by a surgical laser. And then, get this — it’s all a dream!

Cushing would say, “It was gratuitously violent, fearfully sick. But it was a good script, which just goes to show how important the presentation is.” You have to love a movie where Van Helsing flips out at a party that Austin Powers would say is way too mod. And wow, it’s pretty gory for a late sixties British movie!

Director Robert Hartford-Davis would also make Incense for the Damned, Gonks Go Beat and The Fiend.

Also, just to remind you one more time, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.