EDITOR’S NOT: This was first on the site on December 7, 2020.

This is a vansploitation movie. Yes, that’s really a genre and there are several films in it, of which I can name Blue Summer, The Van (obviously), Best Friends, C.B. Hustlers (which has Uschi Digard in it), Mag Wheels, Van Nuys Blvd. and I guess you could almost count On the Air Live with Captain Midnight. There’s a great article on it by Jason Coffman that goes deep into the genre that I totally recommend.

The beauty of this movie is that it posits a world where solar energy is already happening, van culture is the driving force in society and there is no AIDS to worry about, so all of the vans are a rocking and absolutely no one is knocking. It is surely paradise, if paradise only gets 11 miles to the gallon, fuel crisis be damned.

Our hero Clint Morgan has traveled to The Invitational Freak-Out, a major event for custom van enthusiasts, which means that any time we’re near it, we get to see plenty of b-roll footage of painted vans and all of the accouterments — this is not a word you want to use when selling Winnebagos — that they have inside.

Clint saves Karen (Katie Saylor, Invasion of the Bee Girls) from some bikers from another exploitation genre and they destroy his van The Sea Witch. That’s when he goes to the super genius van designer Bosley and together, they all make Supervan, which uses solar power and lasers. It was really made by George Barris — who designed so many other Hollywood cars — and was based on a stock Dodge Sportsman van. This thing was so big that it had a phone intercom system inside it.

Oh yeah. It turns out that Karen’s dad owns a car company that is out to make a van that uses more gas than ever before — what does it get 3 miles to the gallon? — and they have to take Supervan to the show to prevent him from making it happen, but he puts the cops on their tail.

We’ve seen Clint before on our site, as Mark Schneider is also in the Crown International Pictures movie Burnout, which is one of the few dragsterpolitation movies I can think of, so perhaps he is the perfect star for all things vehicular in nature.

Director Lamar Card is also there, in the nooks and crannies of strange movies that I find myself obsessed with, like producing the scumtastic Nashville Girl and directing the only Fabian-starring, Casey Kasem-coke sniffing disco freakout Disco Fever.

Beyond the near gynecological explorations of all of these vans at the absolute expense of story,  this movie has a cameo by Charles Bukowski — the firebrand of a man who wrote “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire” — judging a wet t-shirt contest. I am in no way making that up.

There’s never really been a movie like Supervan. To be fair, I don’t think the world could have handled two. To quote the love ballad from the film, when I think of Supervan, “I’ll always remember you as a milestone in my life.”

Vansploitation got so insane during the ’70s, A&M Records gave away a Styx Van. Yes, Styx had a van you could enter to win!

Hospital researcher Mary (Shive Negar) is going through so much. She has a stressful job that haunts her, a separation from her drunken husband James (Johnathan Sousa) and her daughter Daphne (Bianca Sas) to bring up. She’s not doing well on any of those fronts, as she lost a patient a year ago, she’s debating a restraining order and her kid has to repeat fourth grade.

When new neighbor Eve (Kimberly-Sue Murray) offers to help, it seems like the perfect solution. This being a Tubi exclusive movie, viewers will instantly realize that all Eve wants is to take Daphne and start her own life, probably killing at least one of Mary’s friends.

Before you can say “Lifetime movie,” Eve has convinced Mary that James is throwing rocks through her window, that only she can properly watch her daughter and that best friend Natalie (Amber Goldfarb) isn’t all that great of a pal.

Of course, Eve is manipulating everything, even destroying Mary’s work so that she misses her daughter’s school presentation. Mary reacts by slowing down her life and making time for her daughter, which is a happy ending for everyone except Eve, whose help is no longer needed. She reacts as you imagine, by taking out Natalie and stealing Daphne.

Also, if you didn’t guess that the patient Mary lost was Eve’s daughter and that this is all one long and involved revenge scheme, you have not watched enough basic cable cinema. Please start your homework with any number of Tubi originals or Lifetime movies, then bask in the joy of a much more rich life.

How far reaching is her scheme? She drugged James on the night of his DUI, which broke up the marriage. She just didn’t figure on James and Mary coming back together as they search for their daughter.

Sure, the plot can be figured out in minutes, but movies like this are sheer junk food and I mean that as a compliment. This was directed by Pasha Patriki, who has mainly worked as a producer on movies like Lifechanger. It was written by Mallory Gibson and Courtney McAllister.

Remember: there really isn’t much difference between a cable potboiler and a giallo.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Has a movie ever been more cast for me? I mean, not just Carroll Baker but Susan Tyrell? Can the screen contain that much magic? Directed by Jed Johnson, who also edited Andy Warhol’s Dracula and designed the offices of his magazine Interview, it was written by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo, and was the last film that Warhol would produce.

Hazel Aiken (Carroll Baker) lives in Brooklyn, where she does electralysis out of her home. But her real job is hiring out women like P.G. (Stefania Casini, who followed this movie with Suspiria and this fact makes me overjoyed) and R.C. (Cyrinda Foxe, who left David Johnansen for Steven Tyler and was the mother of his daughter Mia) to perform dirty deeds for those who need them. Always women, until drifter L.T. (Perry King, coming off Mandingo) comes into her home and throws everything into a mess.

With $1.5 million to spend — the most of any Warhol film — this pretty much ended up being a non-John Waters John Waters movie. The cast is a mix of up and coming actors like King, non-actors from Warhol’s orbit and, in her first U.S. movie in nearly a decade, Baker.

Her part was meant to be played by Vivian Vance — Shelley Winters also turned down the role — but she left the production. Baker was looking to escape the films she made in Europe, saying “I’m looking to get away from that. People don’t realize you’re acting. They just see you’re sexy and they won’t take you seriously.” Oh Carol. I’ve watched every movie you made there — I recommend everything she did with Umberto Lenzi, like So Sweet, So Perverse, The Fourth Victim, Orgasmo, A Quiet Place to Kill, Knife of Ice and The Sweet Body of Deborah.

King and Baker struggled with their roles and asked Tyrell for advice, who told them their mistake was even reading the script. In a movie where everyone is horrible, the fact that Tyrell is the only somewhat good person is pretty insane.

Don Schain is probably best known for directing his wife Cheri Caffaro in the Ginger trilogy of Ginger, The Abductors and Girls Are For Loving. This is her last film before disappearing from the public eye. As for her one-time husband, he would go on to line produce H.O.T.S. and High School Musical.

Written with Jan-Michael Sherman and Don Buday (KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park), Too Hot to Handle has Caffaro as Samantha Fox, a socialite assassin who has come to the Phillippines on her yacht and proceeds to kill some bad people in wild ways, like suffocating an S&M enthusiast with a plastic bag and shoving a woman into a mudbath complete with electrodes.

She’s being chased by policeman Domingo De La Torres (Aharon Ipalé). and his partner Sanchez (Vic Diaz). Of course, he falls for her and you probably will too. Caffaro isn’t a typical sex symbol, she’s not the best at action scenes but she has some kind of unexplainable charisma that carries this entire movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site on August 25, 2019.

Cannonball is why I watch movies.

It stars a cast of people that honestly, only someone like me would care about, and it’s made by people just as colorful, a crew of folks that would go on to dominate the film industry after emerging from the Roger Corman film cycle. It’s everything great about Cannonball Run, but both more serious and ridiculous, sometimes within the very same scene.

This is everything I want to watch.

Much like the aforementioned Cannonball Run, as well as Speed Zone and The Gumball Rally, this movie was inspired by Erwin G. “Cannonball” Baker, who raced across the United States several times and by the race named after him, the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. This illegal cross-continent road race was started by Car and Driver editor Brock Yates to protest the 55 MPH speed limit.

David Carradine plays Coy “Cannonball” Buckman, who has just been released from serving time for the death of a girl while he was driving drunk. He’s been entered into the illegal Los Angeles to New York City Trans-America Grand Prix in the hopes that he can get his racing career restarted.

That’s because Modern Motors has promised a contract to either him or his arch-rival Cade Redman (Bill McKinney, Deliverance, First Blood). Meanwhile, Coy has to somehow convince his lover/parole officer Linda Maxwell (Veronica Hamel, When Time Ran Out) to allow him to race.

Redman doesn’t have it easy either — his expenses are being paid by Sharma Capri (Judy “The Ozark Nightingale” Canova, who hosted her own national radio show from 1942 to 1955) and client, country singer Perman Waters (Gerrit Graham, amazing as always, just like he is in Terrorvision and Phantom of the Paradise).

Other racers include:

• Young lovers Jim Crandell (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds) and Maryann (Belinda Balaski, every Joe Dante movie), who take her daddy’s Corvette and enter the race
• Terry McMillan (Carl Gottlieb, one of the writers of Jaws!), a middle-aged man driving a Chevrolet Blazer
• Beutell, who has taken a Lincoln Continental from a kindly old and rich couple and promised to get it to New York City safely
• A tricked out van driven by three waitresses — Sandy (Mary Woronov you have my heart), Ginny (stuntwoman Glynn Rubin) and Wendy (Diane Lee Hart, The Giant Spider Invasion)
• German driver Wolfe Messer (James Keach, Sunburst) in a De Tomaso Pantera
• Zippo (Archie Hahn, who was one of the Juicy Fruits in Phantom of Paradise), who is Coy’s best friend and drives a Pontiac Trans Am just like his buddy.

What Coy doesn’t know is that his brother Bennie (Dick Miller) has bet that he will win and will do anything to ensure that happens, including killing Messer. Meanwhile, McMillan has his car — and mistress Louisa (Louisa Moritz, Myra from Death Race 2000) — flown to the finish line.

Redman kicks Perman — who becomes a big country star when his song about the race takes off — and Sharma out of his car, but in his final battle with Coy, a piece of Perman’s guitar gets stuck in the gas pedal and he dies in a big crash. While all this is going on, Zippo is in the lead, so Bennie sends out a hitman to off him. Coy had put his girl in that car as he felt it was safer — actually it was Zippo who did the drunk driving and Coy covered for his friend — but a major crash ensues and Linda is taken to the hospital by Jim and Maryann.

Terry and Louisa arrive first at the finish line, but Louisa accidentally tells the judges that they flew most of the way. The girls in the van get lost and crash, while Coy makes it to the finish line. Just before he’s about to win, he learns Linda is in the hospital and races off to see her. This leaves his brother to be killed by gangster Lester Marks (Paul Bartel, who also directed the film) and his men (Sylvester Stallone makes a cameo, as does Martin Scorsese, as mafioso).

Jim and Maryann win the race and the $100,000, while Coy gets his racing contract and the girl, and Beutell delivers the now destroyed Lincoln to its owners.

Other actors who show up for the madness are John Herzfeld (who was in Cobra and wrote and directed the films Escape Plan: The Extractors and 2 Days In the Valley), Patrick Wright (Wicked Wicked, Caged Heat, Graduation Day), future directors and at the time Corman assistants/editors Allan Arkush (Rock ‘n Roll High School) and Joe Dante (more movies than I can name, all of them wonderful), Roger Corman himself as a District Attorney, Jonathan Kaplan (director of White Line Fever, The Accused and The Student Teachers), Aron Kincaid (who was the voice of the Iron Sheik and Bobby Heenan on Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling and Killer Croc on Batman: The Animated Series), Joseph McBride (writer of Rock ‘n Roll High School), Read Morgan (The Car), John Alderman (New Year’s Evil) and even superproducer Don Simpson, who co-write the movie with Bartel. This movie is what happens when everyone working for Corman at the time all gets together so the budget can have extras.

Paul Bartel did not enjoy making this film because he felt he was being typecast as an action director. But after he only made $5,000 after spending a year of his life making Death Race 2000, it was the only kind of movie people wanted from him. “Corman had drummed into me the idea that if Death Race 2000 had been harder and more real it would have been more popular. Like a fool, I believed him.”

Bartel wasn’t a fan of cars and racing, so he loaded the movie with cameos and character gimmicks. His favorite scene was when he plays the piano and sings while two gangsters beat up Dick Miller. And the end is pretty rough for a movie that’s so funny, so star David Carradine tried to talk to Bartel about how disturbing he intended it to be.

When Joe Bob Briggs did his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood show, he mentioned that this movie destroys Cannonball Run. As always, he was right.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie has been on the site twice before — on March 20, 2018 and July 19, 2022 — but hey, you should watch it again. 

According to Larry Cohen, God is one of the most violent characters in literature. Take that insight, toss in some Chariots of the Gods, a little police procedural and a gradually involving drama that ends up taking over the life of the hero and you have God Told Me To.

New York City in the 1970s. It’s a horrible place to be. And now, with a gunman atop a water tower shooting into a crowd below, it’s a deadly place. 15 pedestrians are already dead before Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco, The French Connection, TV’s Law & Order) climbs the tower to speak with him. Tony’s skilled at getting crazy people to back down and his technique is to communicate with them. He tells the killer everything — his age, what he’s doing, even the fact that he’s a devout Catholic — in the hopes that he can stop his rampage. Then, the killer looks Tony in the eye and says, “God told me to,” before he leaps to his death.

Attack after attack follows, all seemingly unconnected except for those words: “God told me to.”

There’s a stabbing in a supermarket. A cop (Andy Kaufman!) shooting into the St. Patrick’s Day crowd (there were no permits for this scene, which blows my mind. Also, while Cohen was organizing the crew to set up the shot, Kaufman antagonized the crowd by making faces, leading to people jumping the barricades to fight him, requiring Cohen to get in between the actor/comedian/force of nature and angry New Yorkers). And a man who kills his wife and children because God has always asked people to sacrifice their children since Abraham. This sends Tony over the edge and he attacks the man.

One of the killers says that his orders came from Bernard Phillips. Tony visits the address but is attacked by Phillips’ knife-wielding mother. She falls down the stairs as Tony dodges her attack and before she dies, she tells him that she was a virgin who was taken by aliens and given a pregnancy without taking her virginity, much like the conception of Jesus.

When Tony brings this information to his superiors, they tell him to put a lid on it. There’s no need for more religious panic. He leaks the story to the press anyway with the expected results.

That’s when Tony meets Bernard Phillips’ cult, who he contacts and controls with his psychic powers. He tells them when each murder will happen and now wants Tony to join them. Instead, Tony asks about Phillips’ mother, which causes a follower to drop dead. Another tries to kill him by pushing him in front of a subway train, but Tony defeats him and uses the man to come to Phillips’ underground lair. That follower — upset that he has come so close to his god — decapitates himself.

Upon meeting the glowing, ethereal and hermaphroditic Phillips, Tony realizes that the self-styled god cannot and will not kill him. Therefore, Tony realizes that he is special and has a purpose. Tony’s girlfriend and wife (look, it was the 70’s) come together to try and save him, but numerous revelations come out — Tony’s estranged wife had numerous pregnancies that her husband seemed to will into stillbirth, afraid of what his children would become.

Tony finds his adoption records, finally meeting his birth mother, who gave up her child — another divine birth — after being impregnated by an orb of light at the 1941 Worlds Fair. The footage accompanying this scene is digitally manipulated stock footage from Space:1999! This meeting nearly gives both a nervous breakdown and ruins Tony’s sense of self.

Tony decides to meet his brother/sister one more time and learns the truth: they are alien messiahs, children of an entity of light. Tony’s human side is dominant while Phillips is more like the alien that gave them life. Phillips reveals his true sex — a mixture of sex organs on his side and asks his brother to impregnate him so that they can create new life. Tony refuses and attacks his sibling, who retaliates by bringing the building down on both of them.

Only Tony survives and he is arrested for the murder of Phillips. As the police lead him away, a reporter asks him why he committed the crime. He answers simply, “God told me to.”

God Told Me To did not do well upon original release, but time has proven to be quite kind. Watching it forty plus years later, I was amazed by how prescient it is, with killers opening fire for no reason, with the schism between sexes being seen as divine and a public and leaders who are ill-equipped to deal with a true crisis of faith in their midst. It’s a brutal little film and a real triumph in the way that it starts as a simple police story and unravels not just the plot but the way the main character perceives himself. Even his multiple times a day shows of Catholic worship cannot protect him from the knowledge that he very well could be the Messiah — but not in the way that anyone expected.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on March 23, 2023.

Candy Morgan (Claudia Jennings, Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1969 and Playmate of the Year for 1970 and quite literally the most perfect actress for movies just like this) busts out of prison and goes right back to robbing banks with sticks of lit dynamite. She inspires Ellie-Jo Turner (Jocelyn Jones, Tourist Trap), a bank teller who has just been fired for lateness and total lack of character, who joins up. Wearing tight outfits and waving around them lit sticks of TNT, they spread mayhem everywhere.

Director Michael Pressman also directed Some Kind of Hero, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, Doctor Detroit and numerous episodes of Law and Order: SVU. Mark Rosin (Chatterbox) wrote the script from a story by Peter Macgregor-Scott, who would go on to produce Revenge of the Nerds and Batman and Robin amongst many other movies.

The best part of this movie is that it’s really about the friendship between the two women and how they aren’t getting back at banks for any reason. They just need money and are willing to take it. Sure, there’s a guy named Slim (John Crawford, who once dated Sharon Tate’s sister Debra, as well being one of the original Mousekateers and playing Chuck Connors’ son on The Rifleman. He also had four Top 40 singles, reaching #8 with “Cindy’s Birthday” and #12 with “Rumors”) that joins up with them and falls in love with Ellie Jo, but these ladies are the main focus.

This film is also known as Dynamite Women, in case the poster misleads you. Sadly, the queen of the B movies, Claudia Jennings, wouldn’t live to see her thirtieth birthday.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Eat My Dust perfectly fits the cultural zeitgeist at the end of the 70s, which matches the end of the 60s, as culture looked toward southern influences and maybe never stopped. During the 1970-71 season, CBS famously canceled all of its rural programming — Mayberry R.F.D., The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres — despite it being highly rated but not as appealing to those that bought commercials. Ironically, by 1979, the network would return to the same shows it turned its back on when The Dukes of Hazzard became a ratings success.

Star Ron Howard had written a comedy with his dad Rance called Tis the Season. He already half the budget and if Corman put up the rest, he’d be in this movie and direct and star in another, which ended up being Grand Theft Auto.

Charles B. Griffith, who directed and wrote the movie, suggested the title as a joke. He’d know about car films, as he wrote Death Race 2000. 

Hoover Niebold (Howard) is the son of the sheriff who is in love with Darlene (Christopher Norris, yes that’s her name) but she’s really in love with the car owned by Bubba Jones (Dave Madden). Hoover steals it and that’s pretty much the movie. All the Howards — including Clint — are in this and it’s more episodic humor than an actual narrative, but that’s perfect for what the kind of movie it is. This is meant to play drive-ins and be just enough entertainment but not enough distraction for what the drive-in is really all about to younger audiences.

But yeah — back to my point. Hollywood will always return to being inspired by and courting southern audiences and those that want to be part of what that audience is all about.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 30, 2019.

As you may have learned by now, I absolutely love movies that are based on true stories that aren’t really true. This is yet another, directed by Michael Miller, who also brought us National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, a slasher spoof written by John Hughes, the martial arts/slasher Chuck Norris-starring Silent Rage and the TV movies A Crime of Innocence, Danielle Steele’s Daddy and Roses Are for the Rich, a movie that would fit right into our redneck week, as Lisa Hartman plays an Appalachian widow who vows to destroy Bruce Dern, the man who got her husband killed.

Dinah Hunter (Yvette Mimieux, The Time Machine, Snowbeast) is an ad exec in LA who has just about had it. She quits her job after arguing with a client and leaves for NYC after catching her man having some aggressive cuddling in the swimming pool with another woman.

As she drives across our great nation, Dinah picks up Bobby Ray (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds) and his pregnant girlfriend Lola (Nancy Lee Noble, Honey Pot from She-Devils on Wheels). They end up robbing her for everything she’s got, so she walks to a bar and asks to use the phone. This being a 1970’s drive-in movie, the bartender (character actor Britt Leach, who was in the Jerry Lewis comeback movie Hardly Working that I endured as a child, as well as The Last Starfighter and Silent Night, Deadly Night) ends up assaulting her and then calls the cops when she defends herself. This isn’t the big city — the police believe the local, not her.

Dinah ends up in Jackson County jail — go figure, with a title like that — right next to Blake (Tommy Lee Jones), who awaiting extradition to Texas on a murder charge. Seeing as how Dinah has no ID, she has to wait until someone gets back to her from New York or Los Angeles. Deputy Hobie can’t even deal with her being in a cell for one night before he too attacks her, but she ends up killing him with a wooden stool and Blake helps her escape by stealing the keys. Sheriff Dempsey (Severn Darden, an original member of Second City and Kulp in the Planet of the Apes films) chases after them before running into a drunk driver in an accident that kills both of them.

Blake and Dinah go on the road, chased by the cops after being charged for Hobie’s death. She wants to turn herself in as she still believes in the law, even after everything. He lets her know that every small town cop is corrupt and that no one will believe that she acted in self-defense.

The police finally catch them during a parade in Fallsburg, gunning down Blake in the street, with him bleeding out all over the American flag. We’re left watching our heroine in the back of a cop car, going back to jail for what presumably is more hell on earth. And that’s it — were you expecting a happy ending from a 1970’s Roger Corman deep fried crime movie?

Jackson County Jail was written by Donald E. Stewart, who would go on to win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for the movie Missing. He also wrote the films Deathsport, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and the TV movie Death of a Centerfold – The Dorothy Stratten Story.

Roger Corman would remake this movie in 1997 as Macon County Jail with Ally Sheedy and David Carradine as the leads and Charles Napier as the sheriff.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on May 24, 2020.

I was telling someone who doesn’t watch movies like I do — well, that could be just about anyone — that this film has a cast packed with stars. That’s when I realized that Hollywood Boulevard has a cast that is all famous to me and probably me alone. I don’t care. These are my people. Join me as I celebrate them.

Candice Rialson, the inspiration for Bridget Fonda’s character in Jackie Brown, stars as Candy Wednesday, new in town and ready to be a big star. She gets an agent named Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, with the same name as his character in A Bucket of Blood) who can’t get her any work until she gets mixed up in a bank robbery.

Those of you who read the site know that I watched this movie specifically because Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov are in it. What kept me around was the fact that this movie is basically making fun of every Corman movie of this era, with the three girls formula and a script pretty much taken from the Bela Lugosi movie The Death Kiss.

Seeing as how this was directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, there are a ton of inside jokes. Bartel’s director character, Eric Von Leppe, is the name of Boris Karloff’s character from The Terror. John Kramer’s character, Duke Mantee, is named for Bogart’s character in The Petrified Forest. Tara Strohmeier’s Jill McBain is named for Claudia Cardinale’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West. You also have a movie named Machete Maidens, as well as almost every Corman director showing up in cameos, plus Forrest J. Ackerman and Robby the Robot popping up.

This movie was the result of a bet between producer Jon Davison and Roger Corman. Davison believed that he could make the cheapest New World Pictures movie ever, so he was given $60,000 and ten days.

Consider it a greatest hits collection, with scenes taken directly from Battle Beyond the Sun, The Terror, The Big Bird Cage, Night of the Cobra Woman, The Hot Box, Night Call Nurses, Unholy Rollers, Savage!, Caged Heat, Big Bad Mama, Death Race 2000 and Crazy Mama all here.

Let me sum this up: Candice Rialson looks better in the Frankenstein costume than David Carradine.

You can watch this on Tubi.