April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

At one point, in the midst of the comic book boom of the early 90s, Malibu Comics — owned by Dave Olbrich and Tom Mason with the private financing of Scott Mitchell Rosenberg — was big enough to encompass Eternity Comics, Aircel, Adventure and from 1992 to 1993, Image Comics.

That’s right. Despite the small origins of starting with Ex-Mutants, Maliby eventually was published licensed comics for Planet of the Apes and Alien Nation, as well as being the publisher in record of books like Youngblood and Spawn, becoming 10% of the entire comic book industry and for a time, they were bigger than D.C.

Their own characters like the aforementioned Ex-Mutants and Dinosaurs for Hire got video games and the company was doing well when Image got big enough to publish its own books. This led to Malibu’s Ultraverse, which looked quite different than other comics on the racks, as Malibu premiered digital coloring and higher quality paper.

The continuity of the Ultraverse was, well, ultra tight and packed with crossovers. There was also plenty of talent on the first books. Prime has Bob Jacob, Gerard Jones, Len Strazewski, Norm Breyfogle and Bret Blevins. Hardcase was created by James D. Hudnall. And the last of the initial three books, The Strangers, was by Steve Englehart and Rick Hoberg. Other major creators would come on board like Mike W. Barr, Steve Gerber and James Robinson.

There was a thirteen-episode Ultraforce cartoon — and toyline! — and a Glen A. Larson-created Nightman series that came out of the imprint before Marvel Comics bought the company in November 1994 supposedly so they could purchase their in-house coloring studio or maybe to keep D.C. from buying them. The Ultraverse became Earth-93060 and gradually was whittled down to fewer and fewer titles until the line ended by the end of 1997.

In 2003, Steve Englehart was commissioned by Marvel to relaunch the Ultraverse, but it never happened. There’s a rumor that the way profit sharing was part of the company — or allegedly the. shady business dealings of Rosenberg — will keep these characters in limbo.

But I told you that to tell you this.

At one point — 1993 — Malibu introduced their new hero Firearm by making a 35-minute VHS that came with an issue of the comic.

Created by writer James Robinson and artists Howard Chaykin and Cully Hamner, Firearm lasted nineteen issues and told the story of private detective Alec Swan, who keeps getting pulled into ultra-human work.

Directed by Darren Doane — who also made Blink 182’s “Dammit” and oh Lord, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas — and written by Robinson, this introduces you to Alec Swan (James Jude Courtney, yes, the man who would one day by The Shape), a British SBS commando who became a member of the secretive Lodge, a group of secret agents who operate outside of the rules of governments. He’s called Firearm because, well, he can kill anyone and just about anything thanks to his gun shooting abilities. He’s also obsessed with film noir, hence relocating to Los Angeles and trying to be an old-fashioned detective.

The movie introduces his antagonist Duet (Joe Hulser) and is a basic 80s tough cop action film, but man, it has tons of squibs in it. It leads directly into issue zero of the comic, which it was packed with for $14.95.

Robinson went on to write one of the best comics of, well, ever in Starman and a comic book movie that is the inverse in quality of the comic that inspired it, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

As for this movie, well, it’s certainly interesting that it even exists.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

The Green Hornet started as a radio show on January 31, 1936 on WXYZ, the same Detroit station that aired Challenge of the Yukon and The Lone Ranger, a show that this is connected to, as The Green Hornet is newspaperman Britt Reid, the son of Dan Reid Jr., who is the nephew of the Lone Ranger.

It was so successful that starting on April 12, 1938, it was syndicated by the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network, and then NBC Blue and its successors, the Blue Network and ABC. The show ran the whole way until September 8, 1950 and then came back for a short run from September 10 to December 5, 1952.

Created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, with input from radio director James Jewell, The Green Hornet was so popular that he got this thirteen-episode serial, which was followed by a fifteen-episode sequel, The Green Hornet Strikes Again!

Britt Reid (Gordon Jones with Al Hodge as the voice of the Green Hornet; he also did the voice on the radio) is the publisher of The Sentinel newspaper by day and The Green Hornet by night, along with his Korean valet — and also the inventor of his Black Beauty car and gas gun — Kato. For this serial, Kato would be no longer Japanese, due to World War II, and is instead a Korean man that Britt saved from the Japanese. He’s played by Keye Luke, who was Charlie Chan’s number one son and in everything from Kung Fu to Gremlins.

Directed by Ford Beebe (The Invisible Man Returns, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe) and Ray Taylor (Outlaw Country, Frontier Revenge) and written by George H. Plympton (Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Freedom), Basil Dickey (The Crimson Ghost) and Morrison Wood, this serial finds the Green Hornet and Kato stopping faulty bridge and tunnel construction, insurance fraud, bus and truck sabotage, dry cleaning and zoo extortion, election fraud, gun running and the attempted bombing of the offices of The Sentinel, all commanded by the evil mastermind known as The Chief.

It’s really interesting to see this character before the TV show that most discovered him from, but I’ve always loved the radio show and this even gets the buzzing noise and theme song right.

The Green Hornet is available from VCI on blu ray. It comes with liner notes by author Martin Grams Jr., two radio episodes of the show, an audio piece by Clifford Weimer and a photo gallery. You can get it from MVD.

April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

OK, I’m cheating. This is a comic strip not a comic book, but Dondi was created by Gus Edson and Irwin Hasen and at the height of its fame, it ran in more than a hundred newspapers from September 25, 1955, to June 8, 1986. When I was obsessed by the comic pages in the Sunday paper — and, as always, the movie section with huge drive-in listings — Dondi was one of the strips I hated. I had no interest and I always wondered who did.

Dondi started as a five-year-old World War II orphan from Italy who didn’t know his name or family who was brought to America by soldiers Ted Wills and Whitey McGowan. By the early 1960s, he was a Korean War orphan and by the 70s, he was a Vietnamese kid. If there’s a tragedy or a war, Dondi is like Tom Joad and he will be there.

In 1961, Dondi was such a big thing that there was this movie, which stars David Kory in the title role and David Janssen as Dealey. Amazingly, Whitey died in the comic, so for some reason, they avoided all of that. Patti Page plays Liz and the creators of the comic show up, with Edson as a cop and Hansen as a sketch artist.

I was obsessed by the Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time as a kid. As an adult, I realize that so many of the movies they made fun of — Robot Monster, Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia — are really good.*

Dondi is not one of those movies.

Director and producer Albert Zugsmith** said that Allied Artists made the film to prove that they could make movies for kids and then “arbitrarily cut the wrong twenty minutes out of it.”

How bad is it? Arnold Stang, who is in some horrible movies — Skidoo, Hercules In New York — is not the worst thing in it. The whole soundtrack is on one instrument, the most annoying of all musical implements, the harmonica. And David Kory was just seven years old and can’t be blamed for how bad he is in this movie. He’s like…there’s never been a bad this bad. He was the son of Diane Kory, who was once a Rockette and was supposedly spotted on a New York City sidewalk because yes, he looks a lot like Dondi. I guess, knowing how much I hated the daily adventures of this kid, I should hate his movie just as much, so mission accomplished.

*Come back on April 20 for more of me against the Medveds.

**Zugsmith also produced Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill, Captive Women and Touch of Evil and directed one of the weirdest movies I’ve seen, The Chinese Room. He also made Mamie Van Doren a star with High School Confidential!, The Beat Generation, The Big Operator, Girls Town and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, so I can forgive him this movie.

April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.

Rem Lazar is not a comic book but man, he’s a hero and one that has obsessed me since I first saw him as part of the Found Footage Festival.

Director and writer Scott Zakarin may have gone on to create one of the first web series called The Spot, but I always thought that Rem Lazar was either a Christian kid video or something from one of those alien planets that was sent to our world and would always seem like we would never understand it. You know, like it was from Canada.

Ashley (Courtney Kernaghan) and Zack (Jonathan Goch) have the same imaginary friend, superhero Rem Lazar and they paint a mannequin to look just like him. And by just look like him, it looks like the deranged dreams of children left alone for too long.

Those fantasies come true and Rem Lazar (Jack Mulcahy, who was Frank in the first two Porky’s movies) comes to magical life — no hat like Frosty needed — and he’ll go away in a day unless they find his Quixotic Medallion. This will involve battling the frightening CGI video effect known as Vorock, who is played by Zakarin. Yet all they must do to best him is tell him how much they love him. Also: they must sing. Sing a lot.

This was also part of a list of movies that the essential Scarecrow Video was attempting to keep alive after the death of VHS. Nick Prueher of the Found Footage Festival said, “We first saw Creating Rem Lezar on VHS in a stranger’s living room in Denver at about 3 in the morning — ideal viewing conditions for this wonderfully strange artifact from the 80s. We thought it was religious at first — either that or Canadian — because something just seemed off. But it turns out it’s neither! It’s just a wholly original kids movie with catchy songs that are still in our heads years later.”

Now the Found Footage guys are part of re-releasing this movie in high definition for its 35th anniversary. It also has a 30-minute documentary on the making of this oddity with interviews from Mulcahy, Zakarin and composer Mark Mulé. It’s exclusively available on the Found Footage Festival web store.

If I am left to my own devices for long enough, I end up singing songs from this movie. After all, “When I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming of a dream.” You can’t argue with that kind of thinking.

April 1: New boss, same as the old boss — Start the month off with something that’s April Fool’s in nature.

I Saw What You Did had William Castle screaming on posters “This is a motion picture about UXORICIDE!” and installing seatbelts in theater seats. But he had the best gimmick of all: Joan Crawford.

Libby Mannering (Andi Garrett), her younger sister Tess (Sharyl Locke) and Kit Austin (Sara Lane) spend the day

Steve Marak (John Ireland), a man who had just murdered his wife Judith (Joyce Meadows) pramk phone call people. It’s all good fun saying, “I saw what you did” to random people before caller ID until you get Steve Marak (John Ireland). After all, he’s just killed his wife Judith (Joyce Meadows). He shares a party line — yes, back in the 1960s several people shared the same phone line — with Amy (Crawford), his neighbor who has always loved him. She hears the conversation as he invites the girls to his address as he plans to wipe them out.

In the confusion when the girls visit, Marak gets their home address, making this a really tense near home invasion movie. It’s also wild in how it can in some scenes be a comedy and in others intense.

Crawford did four days of work on this movie, making $50,000. Her doctors had to sign a statement saying that she was healthy enough to appear as she had just left the set of Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. She’d next appear in Della, Trog and Berserk before appearing in some TV roles and retiring.

In 1988, there was a TV movie directed by Fred Walton that starred Robert and David Carradine as well as Tammy Lauren and Shawnee Smith.

April 1: New boss, same as the old boss — Start the month off with something that’s April Fool’s in nature.

Tamara Riley (former dancer Jenna Dewan) is, well, Carrie and is in love with the only person who treats her with any kindness, her teacher Mr. Natolly (Matthew Marsden). She’s also a talented writer, but when an article about steroid abuse amongst her school’s athletes gets published, two of them — Shawn (Bryan Clark) and Patrick (Gil Hacohen) — want revenge.

Did I mention that Tamara is Carrie? Well, she’s also a witch and tries a love spell that binds her to her beloved teacher. How amazing is it that he calls her right away and asks her to join him in a motel? That’s really the jocks, along with Kisha (Melissa Elias) — who is in on the plan — and Chloe (Katie Stuart), Jesse (Chad Faust) and Roger (Marc Devigne) — who aren’t. And said plan goes horribly wrong, as when they surprise her and start filming her nude, she flips out and is killing seconds later. Just like I Know What You Did Last Summer, everyone is guilty even if they were just there as they all agree to cover it up.

Except that Tamara shows up for school the next day, looking like a whole new woman. Beyond looking like the most gorgeous girl in school, she’s also able to suggest that people do things, like making Roger broadcast his self-mutilation and suicide. She then visits Mr. Natolly’s wife (Claudette Mink) and calls her infertile, a secret the couple had, before forcing her father — who wants to sleep with her because, well, horror movies — to eat a beer bottle.

She can now even control her tormentors, sending them to kill Allison. I mean, nearly everyone dies in this movie — yes, spoilers for a movie made 17 years ago — even the best of people, all because of pranks. Will we ever learn?

Directed by Jeremy Haft and written by Jeffrey Reddick (whose writing of the first Final Destination gets mentioned on the poster), Tamara is pretty much a mid 2000s horror film trying to redo the past and not getting all that far with it.

April 1: New boss, same as the old boss — Start the month off with something that’s April Fool’s in nature.

Directed by Alexis Wajsbrot and Damien Macé (working as part of Framestore, they’ve done visual effects for most of the MCU films) and written by Joe Johnson (The Skulls III), Don’t Hang Up is all about some young pranksters in over their heads. Those boys are Brady Mannion (Garrett Clayton), Sam Fuller (Gregg Sulkin), Jeff Mosley (Jack Brett Anderson) and Roy (Edward Killingback) who is known as PrankMonkey69. Most of their pranks are harmless, like sending pizza to neighbors or getting Peyton Grey (Bella Dayne) out of work.

But one of their pranks wasn’t so nice. Now Mr. Lee (played by Parker Sawyers and voiced by Philip Desmueles) is going all torture porn Saw by way of Scream by way of I Know What You Did Last Summer to them, calling and sending them video footage of loved ones all tied up. They take him seriously, as after all, he’s already killed Jeff and Roy and has the video to prove it.

He’s also using more captured video to turn them against one another, as Brady had been sleeping with Peyton, who is Sam’s girlfriend. Of course, he videotaped it, because he’s a scumbag. They’re all scumbags. That’s why Mr. Lee has been after them for a year, ever since one of their pranks killed Mrs. Kolbein (Sienna Guillory, Jill Valentine from the Resident Evil movie series) and her daughter Izzy (Connie Wilkins). And those may have been Mr. Lee’s wife and daughter, but regardless of that implication, he’s getting rid of anyone who loves April 1.

It’s weird that to these filmmakers, the later works of Wes Craven and imitators mean more than the slashers I grew up on, but that’s how time and influence work. I mean, I don’t have to like it, but that’s how it is.

This is fine, though, and I do appreciate an ending this cynical and mean spirited.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Judith Belushi, the widow of comedian John, and his manager Bernie Brillstein asked Robert Woodward — the writer of All the President’s Men and the man who joined who Carl Bernstein to break the story of Watergate — to write a book about Belushi to counter the many rumors that had started after the comedian’s death on March 5, 1982.

I can remember that day. I was ten years old, came home from school and we heard the story on the radio on the way to dinner. I’d been a fan of Saturday Night Live since it started, even if in Pittsburgh we watched it on a different channel that the NBC affiliate as Chiller Theater was such a big deal.

Woodward and Belushi were from the same town in Illinois and had friends in common. Belushi was even a fan. But after the writer interviewed numerous people and wrote his book, he never showed it to John’s widow. What followed was Wired. a sensationalist book that painted exactly the picture that Judith and Brillstein wanted to never be known.

Tanner Colby, who had co-authored the 2005 book Belushi: A Biography with Judith, said of Woodward’s book: “It’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.”

A major example that critics cite is that in the book, John Landis has to guide Belushi by the hand in how to perform the cafeteria scene in Animal House. Those there content that Belushi did the scene in one improvised take all on his own.

Belushi’s best friend and fellow Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd beyond hated the book and said that Woodward “spoke with me about an hour and a half, and you know there’s things in the book I don’t remember saying to him…”

He went on to say “He certainly has avoided the issue of what a funbag John was, what a great guy he was, what a warm, humorous, really, you know…concerned, and bright, educated, well-read individual this guy was. How did he get to be so successful? He was smart, you know, he wasn’t just given his break, and he had to work for what he had, and Woodward completely skirts that, and it’s a depressing, sordid, tragic book…and for my part I just think that it’s really depressing reading.”

Woodward wanted to sell the movie rights as soon as the book was published, but found no buyers. He said, “A large portion of Hollywood didn’t want this movie made because there’s too much truth in it.”

Producers Edward S. Feldman (the man who got both Hot Dog…the Movie and Hamburger the Motion Picture made; he also produced The Hitcher, The Truman Show and Witness) and Charles R. Meeker were the folks brave enough to fund the film. It was written by Earl Mac Rauch — yes, the same writer of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension — and directed by Larry Peece, who also made AIP’s The Big T.N.T. Show, The Other Side of the Mountain and A Woman Named Jackie.

The movie makes a wild departure from the book by having Belushi be followed by a guardian angel (Ray Sharkey!) who is leading him to either Heaven or Hell. They had to do something, as they were given no rights to anything connected to Saturday Night Live. If that something was a The Seventh Seal pastiche with pinball instead of chess, that was what they did.

Wired had problems finding a distributor as many of the major studios refused to distribute it. Now was that because of the conspiracy that people didn’t want the public to know how bad drugs were or because the movie is so insufferably bad? The jury is out but leaning toward the latter.

Brillstein believed that the filmmakers made up the controversy to sell this movie like William Castle would, saying “The only thing that the producers have to hang on to is the image of Wired as “the movie that Hollywood tried to stop.” When it played Cannes, the reception was hostile, with reporters attacking Woodward with questions about why he was a character in the movie.

John Landis threatened to sue and he’s not even named in the movie but suggested. Then again, helicopter noises play when he appears to hammer home that this is the same person who killed Vic Morrow and two children on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie. And Aykroyd pulled no punches, saying “I have witches working now to jinx the thing. I hope it never gets seen and I am going to hurl all the negative energy I can and muster all my hell energies. My thunderbolts are out on this one, quite truthfully.” A year later, he got J.T. Walsh, who plays Woodward in this movie, fired from the movie Loose Cannons.

You know who got the worst out of this? Michael Chiklis, in one of his first roles, who isn’t horrible as Belushi. He was picked out of tons of actors for the role and it took years for his acting career to recover. That said, he personally apologized to Jim Belushi when they met and the two embraced, as Belushi was always under the impression Chiklis was deceived as well by the producers. For his part, Jim visited the office of Feldman and trashed his desk.

As for the film itself, it moves through Belushi’s life in a non-linear fashion, with made up sketches like “Samurai Baseball,” the Blues Brothers singing Wilson Pickett’s “634-5789” and Belushi as a bee singing Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” invented for the film — again due to Lorne Michaels refusing to allow the movie to use any of Saturday Night Live‘s IP — and then a close where Belushi sings Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful to Me” alongside the real Billy Preston, the only person from that era to be involved with this film.

It also totally takes a few pages from Sid and Nancy by having a cab ride symbolize the boat across the river Styx and having Joe Strummer’s song “Love Kills” play.

There’s a great story about the life and death of John Belushi, one of triumph and tragedy, intelligence and sadly, stupidity. But this? This will never be it.

I thought LSD was going to make me see the gods that live beyond the wall of sleep and wait for us to notice us and then drive man mad, but instead this movie taught me that I’ll just think I’m a chicken, play with cats or eat a ham sandwich, which are all things I do just about every day without needing to take any drugs.

Fog, so much fog. Chocolate blood. So many stripteases. Are acid trips really in black and white? Rubber masks. Mannequins. How is this made in Tampa — I think — and no one from a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie shows up?

This is under an hour and feels like four and I think that should tell you what LSD is all about.

Nice poster, though.