EDITOR’S NOTE: School Spirit was on USA Up All Night on September 9, 1989; January 12, June 22 and 23 and September 28, 1990; January 5 and September 20, 1991 and January 24 and March 13, 1992.

Roger Corman sold New World Pictures and started making movies again. The new owners refused to distribute Wheels of Fire and this movie and that’s how we got Concorde Pictures.

Geoffrey Baere wrote a script for College Ghost, all about a college cocksmith who comes back as a ghost because it was 1985. It didn’t get bought, but Allan Holleb (Candy Strip Nurses, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom) worked on the script with inspiration from the Italian movie Il Sorpasso. Yes, a classy bit of filmmaking to get a teen sex comedy going.

Billy Batson is not Captain Marvel or Shazam. He’s the college student played by Tom Nolan who dies while coming back from buying a condom so that he can finally sleep with his dream girl Judith Hightower (Elizabeth Foxx). Beyond being a 31-year-old teenager, Batson is now a ghost. His Uncle Pinky (John Finnegan) tries to take him to Heaven but he escapes.

Meanwhile, Lavatoire College President Grimshaw (Larry Linville, who should be getting pretty good residuals for all the USA Up All Night appearances he’d made) is celebrating major school contributor Madeleine Lavatoire at the same time that the fraternities are celebrating Hog Day, a day during which naked people go down oily Slip ‘N Slides. He’s concerned that his daughter Ursula (Marta Kober) will get involved in these shenanigans and he’s definitely correct.

Also: He’s married to Helen and is batting way out of his league because she’s played by Roberta Collins.

Also also: Lavatoire sends up being a young girl, played by Danièle Arnaud, who was in Down On Us and played one of the Eliminator girls in the ZZ Top videos for “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs.” In case you wondered, the other two girls were Playboy Playmate of the Month for March 1981 Kymberly Herrin (who was the ghost who, well, blew Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters) and the Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1980, Jeana Keough, who was also in The Beach Girls, Lovely but Deadly, 10 to Midnight and is now on The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Anyways, Billy has to help Ursula somehow but most of the movie is the typical drinking and debauchery. Cast members participating include Leslee Bremmer (Hardbodies, Reform School Girls), Pamela Ward (Hellhole), Toni Hudson (Just One of the Guys), Miss Pennsylvania Teen USA 1983 Diane Hoyes, Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1982 Marlene Janssen, Theresa Mesquita (whose only other movie appearance is Hot Chili), Linda Carol (Back to the Beach, Reform School Girls and the Filmrage Henry and June ripoff La stanza delle parole) and the nearly always nude Becky LeBeau who is in the hot tub with Rodney in Back to School.

Oh yeah, I forgot that Jim Wynorski is in this as Man in Car with Cigarette Pack Under Sleeve.

This movie is actually pretty scummy because both Billy and Pinky use their ghost powers to look at women naked, get in bed with them and nearly assault them. Sure, it’s all fun loving, but it is not anything to do with the idea of consent. Times have changed since 1985 and I realize that this is a USA Up All Night movie, but when you watch these movies, sometimes you’re shocked by these things.

Also also also: The Gleaming Spires, the band in this movie, is the band that sings “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?” Originally known as Bates Motel, members Leslie Bohem and David Kendrick also played in the 1981-1985 version of Sparks. In fact, the Mael brothers wrote the liner notes for their first album, Songs of the Spires.

The year School Spirit was released, Tom Nolan got a job teaching at Crossroads School, a private school in Santa Monica. He’s remained there for decades, eventually gaining the position of dean of students and then the dean of faculty.

This movie has a lot of continuing education amongst its cast, as Arnaud went on to be a French professor at MiraCosta College and Frishman has taught drama at high schools in Los Angeles, Reno and Sacramento.

If you think movies have too much product placement today, well, Jack Armstrong himself was an ad.

Known as the All-American Boy, he was created by the vice president of advertising for General Mills Samuel Chester Gale. The Jack Armstrong character is a fictitious “everyboy” who got into adventures on his radio serial and always ate his Wheaties.

Gale based the character on a member of Sam Gale’s college fraternity, Phi Sigma Kappa at the University of Minnesota. The ad whiz met the real Jack while serving as an advisor to the fraternity and was impressed by both Jack’s name and his”wholesome nature.”

Gale also created another character who a lot of people think is really: Betty Crocker.

The radio serial was on from 1933 to 1951, which is a lifetime in media.

In the Wallace Fox-directed movie serial, Vic Hardy (Hugh Prosser) is a scientist working for an aviation company. When he learns that Jason Grood is using radiation on his secret island headquarters to conquer the world, he’s caught and used to help the madman conquer the world. Only Jack Armstrong (John Hart, who for a time replaced Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger; he also played Billy Batson in The Adventures of Captain Marvel) can stop him, along with Princess Alura (Clair James) and her island men.

I love that VCI is releasing these serials and keeps on improving how they look. The fact that I can have historical movies like this in my collection makes me overjoyed.

You can get the 4K restoration of Jack Armstrong from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Recruits was on USA Up All Night on December 29, 1990; August 23, 1991; March 14, May 29 and September 4, 1992 and June 18 and October 15, 1993.

Mayor Bagley learns that the governor is coming to his town of Clam Cove  to announce that they’re getting a freeway. To make sure nothing goes wrong, he demands that Police Chief McGruder (Mike McDonald, who was also in Oddballs and Screwballs II) add more people to the police force. That means that anyone can be a cop. And before you can ask, “Isn’t this almost the same movie as Police Academy?” I’m ready to answer that this is a Canadian tax shelter movie made in Ottawa’s Wasaga Beach, just like Fireballs, which was filmed at the same time.

If you want to win a trivia contest — actually I don’t know who would ask this question — this would be Lolita Davidovich’s third movie. It’s also the first movie for Jon Mikl Thor, who would make Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare the very next year.

Director Rafal Zielinski would also make two Screwballs movies, as well as State Park, which you know that I’ve watched several times. He also made Spellcaster, which has Adam Ant, DJ Richard Blade and Traci Lind from Fright Night Part 2. You better believe I’m hunting that movie down as you read this.

The writer behind this is Charlie Wiener, who wrote and directed a bogus ’80s SOV horror that’s actually a Canadian TV movie called Blue Murder and a martial arts movie Dragon Hunt, in addition to writing Screwball Hotel, so let me assure you — his scumbag skills are in full effect here. And don’t confuse the Hotel one with Screwball Academy.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Barbarian Queen was on USA Up All Night on February 1 and 2, September 27 and December 28, 1991; April 27, 1992; August 20, 1993; March 5 and October 8, 1994.

After co-starring in the first Deathstalker film, Lana Clarkson would return to star in this Roger Corman-produced schlockfest. Sadly, despite comedic turns in films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (she’s Vincent Schiavelli’s wife in a quick scene) and Amazon Women on the Moon, as well as other action films like Vice Girls. Her career stalled by the early 2000’s. Sure, she did comic conventions and sold autographed memorabilia on her web site, but she was subsidizing her nascent stand-up career — her dream was to be a comedic actress — with a part-time job at the West Hollywood House of Blues.

A month later, she followed famous music producer and noted lunatic Phil Spector back to his mansion and “kissed his gun” in his words. A major trial ended with 19 years of jail time for the creator of the Wall of Sound. But let’s not dwell on the sadness of Clarkson’s end. Let’s celebrate her starring role in a movie that somehow is at once a feminist adventure epic and a misogynistic wallow in the muck.

A peaceful barbarian village — is there any other kind — is all in a tizzy about the wedding of Queen Amethea (Clarkson) to Prince Argan (Frank Zagarino, Tan Zan: The Ultimate Mission). But look out! Lord Aarkur and his men attack, taking Argan and Taramis (Dawn Dunlap, Forbidden World) captive.

You may be thinking — oh cool, this movie is woke and the man is the captive in peril, not the woman, who is the hero — but this is a Roger Corman sword and sorcery movie. So even through Amethea, Estrild (Katt Shea, who went on to direct Stripped to Kill, Poison Ivy and The Rage: Carrie 2) and Tiniara are going to fight and kill lots of evil creatures and baddies, they’re also going to get naked, tortured and me too’d for pretty much the entire film.

I was going to write, “I don’t know the audience for a movie that wants to see barbarian women get raped,” but I totally know the audience.

Let’s try and get past it. Actually, you can’t get past it. But maybe you can get revenge.

By the end of the movie, Estrild is a harem girl, Tiniara has been killed, Taramis becomes Arrakur’s concubine and our main heroine, Amethea, has been tortured repeatedly but comes out on top, tossing the interrogator into a pit of acid after using “her feminine strength to squeeze his manhood painfully” as per Wikipedia. Yes, this is a woman where a woman literally kills with her vagina.

So there’s that, I guess.

Amethea, Argan and the rebels join with a bunch of gladiators in the attack to fight Arrakur’s army. Man, that’s a lot of alliteration. Anyways, our hero fights the big bad and is disarmed and nearly killed before Taramis stabs him in the back and kills him. So even in her moment of triumph, a Corman film reveals that women need treachery to win, not outright skill.

The first film from Corman’s Concorde company, Barbarian Queen was directed by Héctor Olivera as part of a nine-picture deal. Corman wanted low-budget sword-and-sorcery films. Olivera wanted to create more personal film projects. This union led to this film, as well as Cocaine Wars, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, Two to Tango and Play Murder for Me.  I think Corman’s vision won out, sadly.

There’s an in-name-only sequel and Clarkson played a character called Amethea in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II who has nothing to do with this character. There was also a third film planned.

In later years, Corman has claimed that this movie inspired Xena: Warrior Princess. I must have missed all those episodes where Xena was tied up for most of the story and repeatedly diddled. Seriously, Corman’s movies are more and more troublesome the further we get away from them. I’m all for sleaze and shock, but not when they’re presented to me as empowerment.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Loch Ness Horror was on USA Up All Night on January 19, 1990.

You can get this sticker from Exploitation-Vocation on Tee Public.

Shot in Lake Tahoe, California which is supposed to be Scotland and featuring the Nessie puppet that would return to the screen to play Jack the Ripper in the “Bullshit or Not?” section of Amazon Women on the Moon, this Larry Buchanan movie is, well, complete junk and I say that in the best of ways.

The Loch Ness Monster is wilding out on swimmers while waiting for her egg to hatch, all while a World War II German bomber lies beneath the freshwater loch and Scottish scientist George Sanderson (Sandy Kenyon) and American sonic expert Spencer Dean (Larry’s son Barry) hunt it down. Also: Jack Stuart (Doc Livingston), the person to first take a photo of the monster and he’s not George Spicer, who did that in our reality, has a daughter named Kathleen (Miki McKenzie) who Spencer falls in love with. And yes, Professor Pratt (Stuart Lancaster) and his team are looking for the German bomber, finds the egg and every one of Pratt’s crew gets eaten by the monster. Pratt won’t give the egg back and soon kidnaps Kathleen.

Every time the monster shows up it’s awe-inspiring just how bad it looks, which makes me love this movie even more. I can’t believe how cheap this movie is, that the creature bites necks and that it’s set in the 40s and yet no pains were taken to make it look that way. Well done all around.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Black Roses was on USA Up All Night on February 17 and September 11, 1990 and May 18, 1991.

Growing up, two things both saved and damned me: heavy metal and horror movies. They go together like guitar and bass, guns and roses, beer and weed, leather and denim. Off the top of my head, I can name plenty of bands for whom horror movies are a central element: Electric Wizard, Hooded Menace, The Misfits, Acid Witch, Mortician, Uncle Acid . . . seriously, I could name bands all day long.

But what movies meet the metal grade? Which ones would you be able to put on the back of your battle vest? Also — a tip of the horns to Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s evil and doom filled tome, Heavy Metal Movies.

You probably remember Black Roses more for its garish VHS case than the actual movie. A 3D standout on rental shelves everywhere, it’s a favorite of many 80s horror fans. Believe it or not, I’d never seen the movie until this year. I was inspired by Acid Witch covering the song “Soldiers of the Night” on their Midnight Movies EP and had to look up the film that goes with it.

The small town of Mill Basin is about to become the first place where the band Black Roses will ever play a show. Up until now, they’ve only been a studio band. And parents are concerned because these guys have taken over the hearts and souls of the town’s kids. But do you blame the kids? Mill Basin reminds me of where I grew up — there’s nothing to do but fuck and do recreational drugs. And if you have bad self-esteem issues, you’re gonna just stay in your room reading comic books, playing guitar, drawing pictures of Leatherface and staring at your Traci Lords poster while listening to Among the Living on repeat. Oh wait — I was wallowing in the past.

There’s one teacher who cares — Matthew Moorhouse, who several of the students believe is having an affair with goody two shoes Julie. He’s stuck in a loveless relationship with an ice queen named Priscilla (Carla Ferrigno, yep, Lou’s wife). And the parents remain up in arms about Black Roses until the mayor calms them, reminding them that their parents hated rock and roll, too. The parents decide to be open-minded and go see the concert, which is the lightest, softest hair ballad cheese that you can ever imagine . . . until they leave and the real Black Roses starts playing and zombifying the crowd.

The kids come back at their parents with knives, just like Charley claimed they would, like a patricide by stereo (Vincent Pastore of The Sopranos), a mother killed by a car, another kid shooting his dad in the face and one watching while her best friend humps her father to death (one of these deaths is not like the other). Even virginal Julie goes astray, killing her lecherous stepfather and Moorhouse’s ex-girlfriend before transforming into a creature that I can only describe as a snaggletoothed fetal pig that makes cat noises.

This leads him to the band’s final concert, where lead singer Damian doffs his hair and shows off his demon dome. Moorhouse responds by setting the demon on fire, killing it. Wait a second — a demon that can be killed by fire? That just seems like poor planning.

So often, if you meet me in person, I get evangelical about movies, selling everyone on how amazing they are. I realize I often make bad movies sound way better than they really are. And when people are not ready for the onslaught of offal that I so often enjoy, they wonder, “Is Sam insane?”

Yes, I am. And if I were to be sitting next to you in person, I’d tell you that this movie is awesome because the lead singer turns crowd members into skeletons and purple zombies. That little dinosaur people that sound like kittens come out of speakers to kill fat dads. That my real dad, Carmine Appice, is in this movie, because his band King Kobra did most of the Black Roses music and that his name in this movie is Vinny Apache, which is the best name maybe ever, except for Sheriff Gene Freak. That Julie Adams from The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dennis Hopper’s insane The Last Movie is in it.

But then you’d watch it and be like, why should I be cheering for the obvious pedophile teacher with a sweater who is trying to set all the kids on fire with gasoline? Why are the creature effects so fucking weirdly bad? Is the film on the side of the parents or the kids? Why is the biggest band in the world playing such a small town shithole? How did they survive to play Madison Square Garden two weeks later and everyone is like, “Oh well” like it means nothing to them?

I should really start sharing disclaimers when I get all excited about movies. But yeah. Purple zombies. Dinosaur cats. Plenty of nudity. Metal lifers playing ridiculous songs (Carmine Appice was also in the solo bands of Ozzy Osbourne, Paul Stanley, Ted Nugent and Rod Stewart, which has to help you in a trivia contest someday). And you know, kids rising up to kill their parents. You can forgive a bad movie for a lot when it has all of these elements.

You can watch it over at the Internet Archive for free.

Director Philip Barantini is known for the British TV show Boiling Point. Here, he’s made one of the best Tubi originals I’ve seen, a tense thriller that feels like it could be happening right now.

Harri (Chaneil Kular) leaves London to dog-sit the family dog Flynn when his parents go on vacation. He doesn’t pay attention to much — he’s an animator so he devotes his mind to one thing at a time — and is shocked when a friend calls to tell him he nearly missed a bombed on the tube. When a camera image of the suspect who set the bomb goes viral, even Harri’s girlfriend jokes that it looks like him. Even worse, an old school friend posts a message that she feels proves that Harri is the terrorist.

This is how easily this happens. Harri isn’t a foreigner. He’s lived in London his whole life. He just looks different.

And it gets worse.

Harry is a British citizen of South Asian descent, but he’s brown. To anyone watching him — even neighbors of his parents who have known him his whole life — he’s the other, an enemy, someone to fear. The tension builds as every message Harri reads paints him as a criminal. Even calls to the police and visits to a kindly old lady next door become nightmarish mirror sides of real life. Then the vigilantes come for him and invade his parent’s home.

Writers Barnaby Boulton and James Cummings have crafted a fable of how far paranoia and the bubble of doing your own research and “I’m just saying, but…” can go when pointed at a target. Kular is really great in this, an everyman faced with a night of terror that not every man would have to live through.

You can watch this on Tubi.