Editor’s Note: This review originally ran on August 6, 2020, a part of our reviews for Mill Creek’s Savage Cinema 12-Movie collection. We’re bringing it back as part of Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-Film pack.

The Savage Cinema set from Mill Creek just keeps on rolling this week, bringing to us not only some NASCAR, but former racer turned country star Marty Robbins, who sang “El Paso” and “Honkytonk Man.”

Three brothers — stock car driver Marty (Robbins playing himself), mechanic Del (John Ashley, the man from Blood Island) and revenue agent Steve — all have their issues. Marty is trying to be a star, Del wants to be Marty and Steve is busting some moonshiners.

Del tries to out do his brother to prove himself to his girlfriend Sue (Gigi Perrau, The Cool and the Crazy) and the gang ends up almost killing them all. Meanwhile, Connie Smith and the Stonemans play a whole mess of songs.

The entire film was independently made in Nashville, Tennessee. John Ashley told Trash Compactor, “Marty was a terrific fellow and a great singer, and I was a big fan of his. He was a stock car racer, loved stock cars, and the producers had put this thing together. They said to me that this was going to be his motion picture debut, and they needed me to play his brother and basically carry the movie. So I went down there for six or seven weeks.”

This was directed by Will Zens, who also made Trucker’s Woman and Hot Summer in Barefoot County, two Joe Bob Briggs-approved redneck movies.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review originally ran on August 8, 2020, as we watched the Savage Cinema box set. Then we brought it back on November 22, 2020, as part of our “William Grefe Week.” And Mill Creek, never to let a cool film die, has brought it back as part of their B-Movie Blast 50-Film pack.

William Grefe came right out of the Florida swamps and demanded that you watch his films. He was second unit on I Eat Your Skin before unleashing films like Mako: The Jaws of Death, Death Curse of Tartu and Stanley, a movie in which a young man menaces Alex Rocco and Marcia Knight with snakes.

Rod Tillman (Steve Alaimo, whose life took him from being in the Redcoats, whose song “Mashed Potatoes” hit #75 on the Hot 100, hosting Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is and even owning TK Records, who dabbled in the Miami bass scene) is a stock car racer out of cash. He sells everything he owns and enters Swinger’s Paradise where he does nothing if not swing. Actually, that’s where he meets Satan’s Angels, a biker gang who needs a getaway driver for a con they have in mind.

They are Banjo (Willie Pastrano, who held the unified world light heavyweight boxing titles (WBA, WBC, The Ring) from 1963 until 1965), Fats (Jeff Gillen, yes, Jeff from Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and the director of Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile, as well as Santa Claus in A Christmas Story), Linda (Bobbie Byers, the voice of Johnny Sokko in Voyage Into Space) and Jester (John Vella, who played for the Oakland Raiders).

The cops try and get Rod on their side too, but he’s all into Linda, who claims she doesn’t do the crimes for the financial prize, but for the kicks. It all ends up in a lighthouse shootout between the cops, the bikers and our hero, who is caught between both sides.

Featuring real-life members of the Hell’s Angels and a Tampa garage rock band known as The Birdwatchers — you know, for the kids — this movie is probably amongst the best on this set. It also has, I can assure you, motorcycles in it.

You can either watch this on YouTube or see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version on Tubi.

Never doubt my commitment to Crown International Pictures or Mill Creek Entertainment. As I prepared to watch this movie, I learned that my B-Movie Blast set actually had the disks for the Dark Crimes set. A quick Amazon order was made, but I wouldn’t be getting a delivery in time to write this for the site. And Weekend Pass, in a world where everything is streaming, was not streaming, even on Mill Creek’s great movieSPREE app.

There’s one place on the internet that movies go and hide. That would be OK.ru, the Russian lawless land of video, where you can often find the movie you want — it was the only place I could find Armed and Dangerous — but you have to hear someone screaming the dialogue in Russian over the real audio track of the movie.

Lawrence Bassoff made two movies: this one and Hunk. Both are on the B-Movie Blast set — as well as Mill Creek’s Too Cool for School collection. Yes, I am that guy buying multiple Mill Creek 12, 20, 50 and even 100 movie sets just because I love them that much.

Basically, four Navy recruits get out and about on shore leave after finishing their initial training. This is what we call a hijinks ensue movie. Just re-read that first sentence and add “hijinks ensure” and you’ve got the entire movie figured out.

Have I seen too many teen sex comedies to instantly recognize Chip McAllister as Magneto Jones from Hamburger: The Motion Picture? That D.W. Brown was in Mischief? That Hilary Shepherd was also in Scanner Cop, Theodore Rex and, yes, Bassoff’s other film Hunk?

Look, some people use their minds to make the world a better place by inventing great things or leading others in peace and harmony. I just sit here in my pajamas watching teen movies from when I was a teen and write them up for you to read. I’d argue I’m doing the Lord’s work.

PS: Phil Hartman is in this, which makes how boring the rest of the film is a necessary exercise and maddening, because he should have just been the whole movie.

In the Mill Creek B-Movie Blast box set, you will encounter the only two movies that writer director Lawrence Bassoff made, Weekend Pass and this film. It’s not often that you can say that you’ve seen every movie a director has made, so this is a real opportunity. Or perhaps I tell myself that to get through these films.

Where Bedazzled had the devil as Peter Cooke ready to give Dudley Moore seven wishes for his soul — or Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser in the 2000 remake — in Hunk we have James Coco — he died days before this was released — as Dr. D, the man who tempts this film’s hero with just one wish.

That wish? Well, to be a hunk. What else did you expect?

Bradley Brinkman (Steve Levitt, Last Resort) is a computer programmer who doesn’t yet know that all of the geeks will get rich and he’ll never have to worry about his fiancee who ran off with an aerobics instructor. But hey, it’s 1987 and those years are far away.

Bradley says something about selling his soul to finish a computer program, which means that his next creation, The Yuppie Program, is a huge success. He moves in next door to Chachka (Cynthia Szigeti, who may have appeared in a few films but is best known for her work running The Groundlings and starting the ACME Comedy Theater; she taught plenty of folks, with a short list being Will Forte, Joel McHale, Conan O’Brien, Cheri Oteri, Julia Sweeney and Lisa Kudrow) and immediately all of the yuppies hate him because he doesn’t fit in.

By the way, if you’re reading this and wondering what a yuppie is in the year of 2021, it stood for young urban professional. It went from a demographic term to a pejorative pretty quickly, to the point that my father-in-law uses the term interchangably with socialists and liberals, which isn’t what yuppie means, but I’d need an entire second website to discuss some of these conversations.

The truth is that the program that made Bradley rich was really made by the devil’s agent O’Rourke (Deborah Shelton, who was Miss USA 1970 and runner-up to Miss Universe that year; she was on Dallas and in Bloodtide, as well as DePalma’s Body Double, where he disliked her voice enough to have her redubbed; her second husband was Shuki Levy who wrote the theme songs for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the Mister T cartoon, M.A.S.K. and many, many others, in addition to directing several episodes of the series he helped produce with Saban Entertainment). She makes him a deal that if he wants a new body, he can have it for the summer and he agrees (or else this movie would end about seven minutes or so in to its running time).

He becomes Hunk Golden (John Allen Nelson, Deathstalker from Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell and Dave from Killer Klowns from Outer Space), the ultimate man, a person whose teeth never break, who can eat all the junk food he wants and who is also a martial arts master. I mean, sure, he’s going to burn for all eternity, but the next few years will look pretty great what with all the women he’s sleeping with and fashion trends he’s setting.

The whole reason for this demonic soul bargain is that there’s a shortage of demons, so Dr. D plans on Hunk and O’Brien going through time along with Ivan the Terrible, Jack the Ripper and Benito Mussolini. That’s pretty imaginative, as is the idea that the therapist who has been working with Hunk — Dr. Sunny Graves (Rebecca Bush, who played Florence Henderson in Growing Up Brady) — is really O’Reilly too.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, a drunk television host named Garrison Gaylord (Robert Morse, who was in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying as well as playing Bertram Cooper on Mad Men; here he is in an 80’s sex comedy which seems like a step down but work is work) nearluy hits them on the beach and Hunk stops the car with just his strenngth. He becomes an instant celebrity while Dr. D worries that Sunny/O’Brien has fallen in love with another client. If she fails again, he promises to return her to her original form.

Instead of helping Dr. D start World War III, Bradley and O’Brien end up cancelling their contracts, with her going back to being a 10th Century princess who sold her soul to avoid an arranged marriage. I mean, now she has centuries of experience and is a great programmer, so I think she’ll be fine.

You’ll also see some familiar faces here. And by familiar faces, I mean the kind of people that maniacs like me shout out loud when they see them, like Avery Schreiber, who was in the Doritos commercials when I was a kid and shows up in Airport ’79 and Silent Scream. He also taught the master improvisation classes at Chicago’s Second City, so the fact that both he and Szigeti are in this is kind of a big deal for comedy nerds. If only Del Close had been in town that day!

Hilary Shepherd, who was in the band American Girls and played Divatox in Power Rangers: Turbo — maybe she met the Saban guys through Shelton? — is in this too. She’s also in Weekend Pass, Scanner Cop, Radioactive Dreams and Theodore Rex, all movies again that none out of a hundred people have seen, but all ones that get obsessed over here.

You’ll also find Melanie Vincz (The Lost Empire), Page Mosely (Edge of the Axe), John Barrett (who did the stunts for Gymkata and Steel Dawn) and Andrea Patrick, who plays a mermaid and was a beauty queen from the town of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, just a half an hour from my home. Her name may not mean much to you, but she’s married to Fabian Forte and we all know just how much Fabian and his films get coverage here.

Yet perhaps the biggest name in this movie barely is in it. Brad Pitt was an extra in this film, making it his very first screen appearance.

Can you write over a thousand words on a forgotten 1980’s sex comedy? Yes. You sure can.

Bud Townsend directed Terror at Red Wolf Inn. For this, we should not make too much light of The Beach Girls, a movie with little to no plot and frequent appearances of the boom microphone. We should also realize that this movie is a lot like other beach films, mostly Malibu Beach, which was also a Crown International Picture.

Sarah (Debra Blee, Savage Streets), Ginger (Val Kline in her only movie) and Ducky (Jeana Keough, now a Real Housewive of Orange County) are staying in a beach house. Ginger and Ducky are pretty much degenerates, but Sarah is a virgin. Suddenly, a whole bunch of marijuana washes up and their house becomes an even bigger party palace.

Uncle Carl, who owns the whole place, is played by Adam Roarke from Frogs and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. So there’s that, you know?

Honestly, I’ve watched a million of these movies and they’re the cinematic equivalent of smoking the sticky green that these girls found on the beach, then eating like seven bowls of cereal. They used to make so many of these movies and I think I watched them all. Now that I’m way older than all of the kids in this movie, I think, “Man, this would have been a fun movie to make.” So maybe you should think thoughts like that instead of thinking how sex comedies are problematic — all exploitation movies are problematic, that’s why they’re exploitation movies — and just inhale.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Yes, there are two movies named Jocks. There’s this one — a ripoff of Revenge of the Nerds down to even having Donald Gibb in the cast — and the Italian disco movie. Guess which one I would have rather watched?

Well anyways, Richard Roundtree is the coach of the wackiest tennis team you’ve ever seen, led by The Kid (Scott Strader, in his last movie), who is the kind of person who would be the villain in any other teen movie. The real star of the team is Jeff (Perry Lang, who became a director).

The team is made up of all manner of madcap characters — can you guess how many Porky’s and Police Academy films and their ripoffs I’ve watched — like Chito (Trinidad Silva), whose entire character is that he’s Mexican and the aforementioned Gibb, who plays Ripper, who is really just Ogre. That said, I don’t think anyone expects Gibb to do anything other than to show up in a sleeveless shirt with iron-on letters and scream unintelligible nonsense at the screen before burping and farting.

Somehow, this maelstrom of a movie catches so many talented people in its wake, like Mariska Hargitay in her third role (she was in Ghoulies and Welcome to 18 before this, but who’s counting?), character actor R.G. Armstrong, Stoney Jackson (that’s right, Phones from Roller Boogie), Tom Shadyac (the director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), Katherine Kelly Lang (Evilspeak) and perhaps most improbably, Christopher Lee. Yes, Sir Christopher Lee as a college dean.

Director Steve Carver also made the American parts of The Arena, as well as Big Bad Mama, An Eye for an Eye and Lone Wolf McQuaid. Roundtree, Armstrong and Lee all did this movie as a favor for him, which is nice, but man, that’s asking so much.

You can watch this on YouTube.

As you stared across the shelves of Prime Time Video — or whatever the mom and pop in your town was called — as closing time grew near, you knew that you had to pick a movie. Cavegirl feels like one of those movies that was always there when you needed a rental.

Take it from someone who has seen enough cave and jungle girl movies to do nearly an entire week of them — this is no Caveman* with Ringo Starr. It is no 10,000 B.C. with Raquel Welch. Hell, it’s not even George Eastman in Ironmaster.

Daniel Roebuck, who always gets parts on Rob Zombie and Don Coscarelli movies, is our hero, such as it is. His name is Rex and he goes back in time “25,000 ago to the Stone Age” even though the Paleolithic period really was 3.3 million years ago. But that’s a minor quibble when this movie has a magic crystal that sends him back to the past. And when he gets there, all he wants to do is aardvark with Eba (Cynthia Thompson, Tomboy, Body Count), the Ayla of our story.

Seriously, that’s it. Instead of worrying about screwing up the history of the world, Rex is trying to teach her how to say, “I want you to sit on my face.” He may be evolved, but his definition of consent isn’t. Also, at this stage of evolution, Rex and Eba bam-bamming in the ham is pretty much bestiality.

Stacey Q is in this movie. Yes, the girl who sang “Two of Hearts.” She contributes a song to the soundtrack, “Synthicide,” which is probably the best reason to watch this, unless you’re a fan of direct to video actresses like Ms. Thompson. Actually, that’s a good reason to watch this, I guess.

Director David Oliver Pfeil made the music video for Steely Dan’s “Aja,” the credits for Knight Rider and made the titles for movies like Star Trek VI, Innerspace and Footloose. This was his one and only full movie and he went all out, writing, producing, doing the cinematography and even the aerial camera work for it. He should have realized he was making a movie for Crown International Pictures, who demanded that he insert the locker room scene in the beginning to ensure that his passion project had enough bare breasts.

*That said, in Spain, this movie is known as Cavegirl: Cavernicola 2, making it seem as if it were a sequel to Caveman.

You can watch this on YouTube as an age-restricted sign in. Yeah, thanks to Mill Creek’s box set repeating, we gave this film a second, fresh take on their Excellent Eighties set.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to Mill Creek Month! As you know, we love those Mill Creek sets, so we’re doing an entire month of these films. The first set we’re getting into this month is B-Movie Blast, which has — as is par for the course with these bricks of films — a real mashup of movie mayhem. We originally reviewed this movie on November 1 as part of our reviews for Mill Creek’s Sci-Fi Invasion set.

Jerry Sangiuliano was born and died in Scranton, PA. He left behind four short films and one full-length movie, which will be the one we discuss today. It’s a movie that says, “WARNING! An experiment in mind control is out of control … and the body count is building!”

Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke, Hitman’s Run) is one of several college students who have signed up to improve the world of video games and end up becoming killers when flashes of light begin to reprogram their brains.

Yes, it’s Polybius all over again, with the games that kids love being the cause of everything evil in the world, just like they always warned us they would be. They probably shouldn’t have sat so close to the TV while they were at it.

Sangiuliano re-released this movie in 2013 as Fractals, which is an amazing piece of carny hucksterism, because as far as I know, video game graphics do not improve over the course of 22 years.

I’ve never understood movies where evil video game companies try to kill off their main target audience. It’s the same reason why I never understood why Judas Priest and Ozzy wanted me to kill myself. Who else was going to buy their records?

You can watch this Crown International release on so many Mill Creek sets, including the one we’re featuring this month (Sci-Fi Invasion), the Gore House Greats 12-movie set, Drive-In Cult Classics Volume 4 and the Drive-In Cult Cinema 200 Classics box and the B Movie Blasts set. I am certain that it just might be a bonus feature on everything Mill Creek has ever and will ever release. It’s also on YouTube.