EDITOR’S NOTE: 48 Hours was on USA Up All Night but I can’t find the date!

Walter Hill forever, you know?

He credits Lawrence Gordon for the idea of this movie. It was originally about the Governor of Louisiana’s daughter getting kidnapped by a criminal who strapped dynamite to her head and threatened to blow her up in 48 hours if he wasn’t paid. To save her, the toughest cop around gets the worst prisoner in jail — the one-time cellmate of the kidnapper — to save her. Roger Spottiswoode would write the script, along with Hill, Tracy Keenan Wynn, Larry Gross and Steven de Souza.

Hill couldn’t sell them on his idea of making it more of a comedy and teaming Clint Eastwood and Richard Pryor. But then something changed. Hill said, “Paramount felt that the combination of Nick Nolte and a good black actor would be commercial. What happened is very simple: Richard Pryor is now an enormous movie star, and that’s changed everybody’s mind about black lead players.”

The movie was not without issues. Gross and Hill rewrote the film until the last day of shooting, pressured to making it more of a comedy. Producers thought the movie was too violent and claimed that Hill would never work for Paramount again. Those same bosses hated dailies of Murphy’s performance and wanted him fired, but co-star Nick Nolte and Hill fought to keep him.

All of these things were forgotten when this became the seventh-biggest movie of 1982.

Career criminal Albert Ganz (James Remar) escapes from prison with the help of his accomplice Billy Bear (Sonny Landham). They travel to San Francisco where they kill a former associate Henry Wong (John Hauk) as well as two cops, Detectives Algren (Jonathan Banks) and Van Zant (James Keane). Only Inspector Jack Cates (Nolte) survives but loses his gun.

Jack tracks down Ganz’s former partner Reggie Hammond (Murphy) who only has six months left in his jail sentence. The cop gets a 48-hour release so that Reggie can help him track down Ganz and Bear. Their relationship is somewhat rocky, but Reggie impresses Jack by taking down an entire redneck bar called Torchy’s by himself, using the power of the badge, his attitude and some BS to get all the info they need to track down Billy’s old girlfriend. I mean, the guys still end up fighting one another, but that brings them even closer as they work the case.

This movie feels like lightning in a bottle, as Murphy was ready to break even bigger than just being on Saturday Night Live. Having Nolte and Hill supporting him helped and I just remember everyone being so excited about this movie. Murphy would follow this with Trading Places and from then on, he’s always be a major star.

I love Murphy. Beyond his comedic gifts, he has a deep love of all genres of cinema. He said he had no idea how to hold a gun, so he just did an impression of Bruce Lee’s face before he fought. He also said this about Rudy Ray Moore in a recent interview and I want to ask him so many more questions: “I started thinking of him like a guerrilla filmmaker. And then I started seeing different types of movies. And if you watch 8 ½ by Federico Fellini and then you watch The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, and then you watch Human Tornado by Rudy Ray Moore, you have the exact same reaction. You go, “What the … am I watching?””

He even got a sample from Santa Sangre — “The elephant is dying” — into his song with Michael Jackson, “Whatzupwitu.”

Anyways. 48 Hours is so raw compared to the buddy cop movies that came after. You should totally check it out if you haven’t and just thought it was like any other action movie of the 80s.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was on USA Up All Night on October 28, 1995; April 5, 1996 and July 19 and October 11, 1997.

What can you say about a movie where the director, Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2, Judgement Night), says “What started out as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can’t even watch it anymore.”?

A year after the last film, the returning Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel) have been dating and seen no sign of Freddy until a shower turns into Alice going back in time to witness the creation of Freddy by the maniacs of the asylum. She tries to forget the dream as she’s graduating high school the next day, along with comic book lover Mark, model Greta (Erika Anderson, Twin Peaks) and aspiring nurse Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter, Maria, the video store clerk from The Lost Boys).

The dreams don’t go away, with Alice witnessing the birth of a Freddy baby that makes its way to the church from the last film. He tells her he’s learned how to come back to life, just at the moment that he kills Dan. At the same time, she also learns that she’s pregnant with her dead boyfriend’s child.

No one believes that Freddy is after Alice, but Greta soon is killed by being forced to overeat in her dreams. Oh yeah — Alice is also seeing a fully grown boy she calls Jacob who she believes is her future son. Freddy is feeding his victims to her unborn baby — who yes, is also Jacob — to make him evil.

There is an imaginative scene where Freddy kills Mark within a comic book world, as well as the world that Freddy lives in now. But the ending, where Amanda Krueger seals away Freddy and Jacob decides to stay with his mother amidst strange puppet heads gets a little ridiculous. Actually, this entire movie is, supposing that teens we’d want to watch a movie about the terrors of teen pregnancy mixed with the terrors of being an Elm Street teenager.

Supposedly, there’s an uncut version of this movie that’s never been released that would change a lot of people’s opinions on the film. I’ll watch it again if that ever comes out. Yes, I know there was an unrated VHS release but supposedly there’s even more missing.

Maybe it’d be a better film if New Line had given the director more than four weeks to work on it. And get this — the poster was released before the producers had a clear idea what the movie was going to be about, other than the idea that Freddy would be a fetus and the title would be The Dream Child.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge was on USA Up All Night on October 2, 1993; July 15, 1994; October 28, 1995; August 2, 1996 and January 25, 1997.

With Craven stepping aside, Jack Sholder (Alone in the Dark, which was the first New Line movie before the original Elm Street and The Hidden) was selected as the director and David Chaskin was selected to write this (it was his first Hollywood script and he’d go on to write I, Madman and The Curse).

Chaskin’s theme for the film — which until the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy he would always say was just subtext — is the main character Jesse (Mark Patton) coming to grips with his homosexuality. Patton struggled with his anger over this film for years, as he felt betrayed as the filmmakers knew that he was in the closet. Between this role and playing a gay teenager in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, he feared being typecast at best and labeled at worst. Yes, in 1985, this was the world that we lived in. You can see the movie Scream, Queen to get more of the story.

Chaskin claimed in interviews that Patton just played the role too gay, but Patton bristled at that claim. The emotional stress led Patton to quit acting for some time to pursue a career in interior design. That said, Chaskin claims that he has tried to reach out and apologize to the actor over the years.

Director Sholder has said that he didn’t have the self-awareness to think that the film had any gay subtext, but an unfilmed scene almost had Krueger slide a knife into Jesse’s mouth. Makeup artist Kevin Yagher talked Patton out of filming that scene for the sake of his career.

Years later, Patton would write Jesse’s Lost Journal, a series of diary entries that would set his feelings — and his character’s — straight, pardon the horrible pun.

The sequel starts with a dream sequence where Jesse Walsh (Patton) dreams of being stuck inside a school bus with Freddy at the wheel. Jesse’s circle of friends include Lisa, who he’s friends with but too shy to ask out, and Grady (Robert Rusler, Sometimes They Come Back), a frenemy that seems more like a crush.

Jesse has moved into Nancy Thompson’s home, which was on the market for five years after she was institutionalized and her mother killed herself. His family has Clu Gulager from Return of the Living Dead as his dad, Hope Lange from Death Wish as his mother and a little sister that he bothers when she’s trying to sleep.

Lisa and Jesse discover Nancy’s diary, which explains how ridiculous the house is to live in. It’s always 97 degrees, birds attack you at will before they spontaneously combust and your parents accuse you of setting it all up.

Meanwhile, Jesse is dealing with all sorts of strangeness, like a sadistic gym teacher who really likes to go to punk clubs and get whipped. One night, a dream takes him to that bar and the gym teacher makes him run laps in the middle of the night. That gym teacher is played by Marshall Bell, who was George in Total Recall, the host for Kuato. Freddy possesses our hero and the coach gets clawed up in the shower. The cops find Jesse wandering the highway naked, which doesn’t seem all that weird to his mother.

Lisa and Jesse go to Freddy’s lair in an abandoned factory, then she has a pool party. Yes, I just wrote that sentence. At the party, they kiss and have perhaps the most awkward make out session ever, until Freddy causes changes in Jesse’s body that make him run to Grady for help. Yes, he gets so upset about making up with a girl that he runs to his male crush, only to transform into Freddy in an astounding practical effects sequences and kill Grady. He returns to the pool party and lays absolute waste to the partygoers as Freddy before getting chased off by multiple shotgun blasts.

Only Lisa’s love — and kisses — can bring Jesse out of Freddy. But it’s all for nothing, as the nightmare from the beginning becomes real and their schoolbus turns into a deathtrap. Even though their friend Kerry (who has the best outfits in the movie) tries to calm them down, Freddy’s claw emerges from her chest.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare On Elm Street was on USA Up All Night on July 25 and October 30, 1992; October 2, 1993 and July 15, 1994.

Upon watching this again for the first time in probably thirty years, I was struck by how European the movie feels. Perhaps it’s the color tones throughout, suggesting the patina of Italian horror cinema (both Fulci and Craven cite surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel as an influence). It could also be John Saxon having lead billing. Or just that it doesn’t feel like any horror cinema that was currently being made in the United States.

The real villain of this piece is not Freddy Krueger — more on him in a bit — but the parents of Elm Street who have allowed secrets and their assumed authority over their children to do unspeakable and unspoken things. All of them are haunted by it, divorced, depressed and self-medicating with over-dedication to their jobs or their addictions.

There are stories that David Warner was originally going to play Freddy, but that’s been disproven. After plenty of actors tried out and failed to win the part, it went to Robert Englund, who darkened his eyes and acted like Klaus Kinski (!) to get the part.

The other feeling I have about this movie is that it owes a major debt — as all horror movies post 1978 do –to John Carpenter’s Halloween. Much like that film, the true horror happens within the foliage of the suburbs, with shadow people showing up and disappearing. Much of the action on the final night happens within two houses. One of the main characters has the ultimate authority figure, a policeman, for a father. And the cinematography by Jacques Haitkin glides near the characters and around them, much like the Steadicam shots that start Carpenter’s film.

The film starts with Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss, who puts the events of Better Off Dead into motion by breaking up with Lloyd Dobler) waking up from a nightmare where a disfigured man chases her with a bladed glove. I loved the way this scene looks, as you could almost consider Freddy off-brand here, as his arms grow comedically long and he moves way faster than he would in the rest of the series. Yet by keeping him in the shadows, he’s absolutely terrifying.

When Tina awakens, her nightgown has been slashed and she’s afraid to go to sleep again. She learns that her friends, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp, who left Stamford University to be in this), Glen (introducing Johnny Depp) and Rod (Jsu Garcia, credited as Nicki Corri) have all been having the same dream. To console Tina, they all stay at her parent’s house overnight. But when Tina falls asleep, Krueger is waiting. Rod awakes to find Tina flying all over the room and up the walls — an astounding effects sequence in the pre-CGI era — and he flees the scene after her death.

Soon, Rod is arrested by Lieutenant Don Thompson (Saxon), Nancy’s father. Freddy now starts pursuing her, chasing her as she falls asleep in class (look for Lin Shaye as the teacher) and later in the bathtub, as his claw raises like a demented and deadly phallus between her thighs. Rod tells her how Tina dies and now she knows that the same killer is definitely after her (Garcia’s watery eyes and lack of focus made Langenkamp think he was acting his heart out; the truth is he was high on heroin for real in this scene). She tries to find the killer, with Glen watching over her, but he’s a lout and easily falls asleep. Only the alarm clock saves her, but no one can save Rod, who is hung in his sleep while rotting in a jail cell.

Nancy’s mom Marge (Ronee Blakley, who was married to Wim Wenders, sang backup on Dylan’s song “Hurricane” and is also in Altman’s Nashville) takes her to a sleep clinic, where Dr. King (Charles Fleischer, Roger Rabbit’s voice) tries to figure out her nightmares. She emerges from a dream holding Freddy’s hat to her mother’s horror. Soon, she reveals to her daughter that the parents of Elm Street got revenge on Freddy Krueger, a child murderer after a judge let him go on a technicality. In a deleted scene, we also learn that Nancy and her friends all lost a brother or sister that they never knew about.

While Nancy is barred up in her house by new security measures, Glen’s parents won’t allow him to see her. Soon, he’s asleep and is transformed into an overwhelming fountain of blood. Nancy falls asleep after asking her father to come in twenty minutes. He doesn’t listen and she pulls Freddy into our world. On the run, she screams for help until her father finally comes to her aid, just in time to watch a burning Freddy kill his ex-wife and them both disappear.

This is an incredibly complex stunt where Freddy is set ablaze, chases Nancy up the stairs, falls back down and runs back up — all in one take! At the time, it was the most elaborate fire stunt ever filmed and won Anthony Cecere an award for the best stunt of the year.

Nancy then realizes that if she doesn’t believe in Freddy, he can’t hurt her. She wakes up and every single one of her friends is still alive, ready to go to school. As the convertible hood opens up in the colors of the killer’s sweater, she realizes that she’s still trapped by Freddy, who drags her mother through a window.

In Craven’s original script, the movie simply ended on a happy note. Producer Robert Shaye wanted the twist ending so that the door was open for a sequel, something Craven had no interest in. Four different endings were filmed: Craven’s happy ending, Shaye’s ending where Freddy wins and two compromises between their ideas.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Teen Wolf was on USA Up All Night so many times: January 28 and September 8, 1995 and June 29, 1996.

After the surprising success of Valley Girl, the producers of this film realized that they could make an easy-to-shoot and cheap-to-make movie. As fate would happen, Michael J. Fox’s Family Ties co-star Meredith Baxter-Birney was pregnant and the show went on hiatus, so he was available. They got with Jeph Loeb — who went on to make Commando and write comics — and hired director Rod Daniel (Beethoven’s 2nd, Home Alone 4) to make this movie happen.

It’s so exciting that one of the extras gets so into it that they pull out their penis and begins to furiously masturbate at the conclusion of the film’s basketball game.

Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) is an unremarkable high school basketball played who wishes he had the love of Pamela Wells (Lorie Griffin), who is instead dating his bully on the court, Mick (Mark Arnold). He should really be paying attention to his best friend, the nerdy girl Boof (Susan Ursitti, Funland,  Zapped!) but you know how 80s teen comedies are.

At a party, Scott and Boof are forced into a closet in one of those teen makeout games. He loses it and starts clawing her up because, well, if you didn’t know by the title of this movie, Scott is a werewolf, just like his father Harold (James Hampton). Unlike every other movie ever made about lycanthropy, everyone just accepts that Scott can turn into a wolf and they even allow him to play basketball. His friend Stiles (Jerry Levine) even makes money off it, selling merch that Scott doesn’t know about until it’s already for sale. Also: Coach Finstock (Jay Tarses) is the worst coach whose entire strategy is “pass it to the wolf.”

This is the kind of movie that has a school administrator urinate all over himself in fear and ends with the stuck up girl being told to drop dead and we all laughed. How we laughed. And we learned nothing, except that if you make this movie about boxing and switch out Michael J. Fox for Jason Bateman, I will watch it again.

Beyond that sequel, there was a cartoon and a planned female version that would star Alyssa Milano. There was a second female version planned that was eventually turned into Teen Witch. And then, of course, there was the MTV series that got six seasons and a movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Troma’s War was on USA Up All Night on March 14, April 17 and July 17, 1992.

Troma’s War was the movie that made me fall out of love with Troma. Yes, 16-year-old Sam loved The Toxic Avenger and the sequel and devoured everything that came out of this New Jersey-based company, but young and cynical me was so let down by this movie that I started to hate everything after. Now, thirty years or so away, it’s not all that bad.

A commercial airliner crashes on an uncharted island that ends up being a terrorist training facility. That means that Vietnam vet Parker (Michael Ryder) and Taylor (Sean Bowen) have to get it together and save their fellow passengers. Some of them are captured, tortured and killed by neo-Nazis led by conjoined twins, who include amongst their number Senor Sida (Paolo Frassanito), whose name means Mr. AIDS and who wants to start a one-man STD epidemic in the U.S. Actually, all of his soldiers have AIDS, so maybe he’s just leading that assault.

Jessica Dublin, who plays Dottie in this, spent most of her career in Italy where she was in Fragment of Fear; So Sweet, So Dead; Sex of the Witch and Death Steps In the Dark. She was also in a sort of remake of The Wasp Woman — Rejuvenatrix — as the older woman who wants to be young again and is Mrs. Junko in the second and third Toxic Avenger movies.

Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman — as Samuel Well — are responsible for this. As I watch it as an older person, I can appreciate just how over the top it is, as nearly every scene has nudity, gore, breasts being shot or genital mutilation. At $3 million, it was Troma’s biggest movie and when it had issues with the MPAA, that group’s president Richard Heffner said that it was “no fucking good.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Malibu Beach was on USA Up All Night so many times: June 7 and November 11, 1989; April 6 and 7 and October 6, 1990 and April 12 and August 24, 1991.

Malibu Beach is not Malibu Bikini Shop, Malibu Hot Summer, Malibu Summer and it most certainly is not Malibu High, one of the most deceptively mean-spirited movies of all time.

That dog with a bikini in his mouth on the poster? He’s in this movie. He’s the pet of Dugan Hicks (Steve Oliver, who worked as a “cab driver, roughneck, bounty hunter, and fitness instructor to the stars”), the kind of sort of bad guy of this movie. Yes, the same Dugan Hicks from The Van. I just freaked out — do we have a Crown International cinematic universe?

Well, our lead character and lifeguard Dina (Kim Lankford, Street Corner Justice, The Octagon) lives in the same house that Laurie did in The Pom Pom Girls. I do believe that this shared reality exists.

Crown International movies are great because they say, “We have girls, a beach, some hunky guys, some music…what are we missing? A plot? What if they just all hang out for 90 minutes and occasionally have sex instead?”

This is the kind of movie that has a shark attack — it was a beach and 1978, you know? — and no one gets killed. It barely gets in the way of the breasts and beer and disco and weed. It also has Susan Player (Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Pom Pom Girls) and Tara Strohmeier (The Student Nurses, Truck Turner, Candy Stripe Nurses) in its cast and that’s a good thing.

Director Robert J. Rosenthal also wrote — you guessed it — The Pom Pom Girls and The Van and only directed one other movie, Zapped! He was joined on the writing of this movie by Celia Susan Cotelo, his co-writer on those two aforementioned Crown International movies.

As I prepare these articles, I often read through what other people think. I just read review that referred to this movie as a waste of time and how sad for people who don’t just want to watch a mindless hour and a half of dogs stealing bikini tops while young love blooms on the beach with no responsibility or worries of tomorrow.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fortress of Amerikka was on USA Up All Night on March 7 and July 10, 1992 and February 27 and December 10, 1993.

Of all the Troma directors, I seem to enjoy the movies of Eric Louzil (Class of Nuke ’Em High Parts II and III, Bikini Beach Race) the most. They just move quick, often don’t laugh at their own jokes and have just what you want: sex and violence.

In this one, a secret mercenary team called the Fortress of Amerikka is terrorizing the entire nation. They’ve been hired by the elite to destabilize the country and increase their control. Yes, this was made in 1989 and not today.

Troma City, California is where the last stand of American freedom will happen. Only John Whitecloud (Gene LeBrock, Father Peter from Beyond Darkness and Dr. Peter Houseman in Metamorphosis) and Jennifer (Kellee Bradley) can stop them.

Kascha, who was in plenty of adult films and was in Caged Fury using the name Alison LePriol, is in this. You know who isn’t? The blonde girl on the poster.

Fortress of Amerikka was famously a dark and murky movie on VHS. Luckily, Vinegar Syndrome has fixed that and released an uncensored version that looks great. The actual movie is about a hundred minutes of rambling violence and nudity that goes nowhere and the idea that it’s a revenge picture between Whitecloud and the sheriff who murdered his brother is, well, I guess what happens even if it feels like it takes forever to get there. Also John Whitecloud gets his ass kicked so many times in this movie.

There’s a beheading, there’s nudity every two minutes, the politics are more muddled than a Cannon movie, a couple playing ukelele gets murdered, almost a whole town gets killed…this movie is a mess and I wallowed in it.

You can watch this on Tubi.