Category Archives: Movie reviews

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: If You Don’t Stop It…You’ll Go Blind!!! (1975)

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Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”

Vincent Canby said it was, “a collection of witless blackout sketches dealing with infidelity, wedding nights, impotence and masturbation, played by a small cast of not very talented actors.”

Gene Siskel called it a “sleazy, unfunny sec comedy” that was so bad that a no refunds sign was posted.

It was a dog of the week five years after it was released because it had staying power.

Yes, it’s If You Don’t Stop It…You’ll Go Blind!!!, which was followed by Can I Do It…’Til I Need Glasses? Directed by Keefe Brasselle, the star of The Eddie Cantor Story, who plays himself in this, and I. Robert Levy, the idea is that there’s the World Society of Sexual Arts and Science, and each year, they give away the World Sex Awards. You know, the Dildies.

Tallie Cochrane was out of town, and when she returned, her husband allowed producer Michael Callie to film in their home. The production crew saw her and asked who she was. She said, “I live here.” When the actress no-showed her nude scene, Tallie ended up being the woman stuck on the toilet seat. She was also in Wam Bam Thank YoU Spaceman.

67 punchlines in 79 minutes, and a few of them hit. This does have Pat McCormick as the master of ceremonies for the awards. Patrick Wright is in this, too. He’s Mr. Peterbuilt in Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens and in Track of the Moon Beast. There’s also George Spencer from Massage Parlor Murders! and Garth Pillsbury from Malibu High and Vixen.

A lot of reviews of this movie say that most of the cast were one-and-done actresses just in it for nudity, but they didn’t look into the depths as deep as I did. Maybe I wasted my time. You tell me.

First off, Uschi Digard is in it as “various big-breasted characters.” She’s in the king of these movies, The Kentucky Fried Movie, as one of the Catholic high school girls in trouble. She’s also one of the most recognizable softcore (and later hardcore) actresses of all time.

There’s also Jane Kellem, who was in The Thing With Two Heads; Herb Graham, one of the white gangsters from The Human Tornado; Alan Sinclair from The Goddaughter and Deep Love; Lew Horn, who was an MC in plenty of things and is a game show host in this one; Russ Marin from The Sword and the Sorcerer; Barry Cooper, who was in Fear No Evil and The Witch Who Came from the Sea; Leon Charles, Boss in The Candy Snatchers; Ina Gold, who had various old lady roles in everything from The Day of the Locust to The Silent Scream; Thelma Pelish, who was also in The Silent Scream; adult actress Maria Arnold, who was in Fantasm, Country Hooker and Meatcleaver Massacre; William Hartman, a dialogue coach on Can’t Stop the Music who is also in Steel and St. Helens; Sandy Dempsey, in a ton of adult as Terry Rich, Darlene Saunders, Tiffany Stewart, and Cora Cuze and Jim Drigger, the hanging priest in The Beastmaster.

Then again, this does feature Becky Sharpe, who played adult roles as Joan Brooks, Mona Leasah, Holly Bridges, Dora Douche, and Mona Poll, as well as appeared in Curse of the Headless Horseman as Rebecca Pearlman. Mary Miller, one of the dancers, was in Raw Force and Tiger Commando. And Cathy Hall, one of the girls who sings the song about being a prostitute, was on the season 7, episode 13 Unsolved Mysteries, attending a seance with James Van Praagh.

Who else? Michael Flood, who was in Criminally Insane and .357 Magnum; Nancy Frechtling, who did makeup for both Supervan and The Van; Doug Frey, who was in Five Loose Women and Drop Out Wife; Brenda Fogerty from Fantasm and Trip With the Teacher; Charla Hall, who was in Vice Squad Women and Lemora; Kathy Hilton, who was in Invasion of the Bee Girls and was also Joanne Stevens, Lacy Stewart and Judy Pilot (she was shot by her boyfriend in what was claimed to be a suicide pact which she denied; it caused lifelong seizures that ended her career, but she does show up as Show-Me, the same character name she used in Heads or Tails in the 1986 adult film Honey Buns); Bebe Kelly, the schoolteacher who loves snakes in Fangs; Gary Leibman, a sound guy on The Last House On the Left; Hal Miller, the second actor to play Mr. Gordon on Sesame Street; Gene Stowell from Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? and Rod Hasne, who was The Flash on the Legends of the Super Heroes TV special.

The jokes are rough — sex is a pain in the ass for a gay man -some will absolutely leave you angry if you are too young to remember dirty joke paperbacks. Otherwise, you can watch it as a time capsule of a dirtier yet more innocent time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Savage Beach (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Savage Beach was on USA Up All Night on March 18 and October 1, 1994; April 21 and December 9, 1995 and September 6, 1996 and November 23, 1996.

Dona and Taryn are back again, this time flying missions as federal drug enforcement agents based in Hawaii. After a successful drug bust, they are asked to fly a vaccine from Molokai to Knox Island. However, they soon run afoul of nefarious forces within the Philippine government and some double agents at home, who are searching for a sunken World War II-era ship loaded with gold.

Meanwhile, a storm forces Donna and Taryn to land their plane on the island, where a Japanese soldier and a samurai named the warrior still thinks that World War II is going on.

Michael J. Shane shows up as Shane Abilene, the next member of the family to be in a Sidaris film. He’s joined by Teri Weigel (April 1986 Playboy Playmate of the Month, adult film star and victim in Predator 2), Al Leong (an Asian actor who continually shows up in films, including Big Trouble in Little China), Lisa London (H.O.T.S.) and making her last Sidaris film appearance, Patty Duffek (May 1984 Playboy Playmate of the Month) who plays Pattycakes for the third time.

None of this makes any sense at all. Are you watching these movies to make sense of them? No. You are watching them to have fun and probably see naked people in hot tubs at least every three minutes. I won’t cast any shame on you.

If you like Savage Beach, good news. Eventually, Andy Sidaris makes his way back here.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Uninvited (1988)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Uninvited was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find a date when it aired. Do you know?

I love George Kennedy and want to state for the record that he deserved way better than this film, which is a total piece of shit. That said, I’ve proved time and again that my favorite movies to watch are mostly made out of fecal matter, so let’s dish.

Genetic Laboratories has decided to create a poisonous mutant cat that lives inside the body of a cute house cat. Why would they do this? Who knows, but it’s a good thing they did, or we wouldn’t have a movie.

The cat ends up on the yacht of “Wall Street” Walter Graham (Alex Cord, Michael Coldsmith Briggs III of TV’s Airwolf), who is running away to the Cayman Islands to escape the SEC. Along the way, he’s brought his bodyguard (Kennedy) and a bunch of hot girls and their boyfriends. Holy shit, there’s Clu Gulager, Burt from Return of the Living Dead! There’s Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, Horror High, Battle for the Planet of the Apes)! And Rob Estes from USA’s Silk Stalkings!

This Japanese box art should tell you all that you need to know:

Or perhaps you’d like to see the German artwork:

The Uninvited was written and directed by Greydon Clark, who also directed Joysticks, Wacko and Satan’s Cheerleaders. I would hope that any of those films is better than this. Becca looked at a photo from this movie and said, “Is that a stuffed animal?” Yes, it is. That’s the level of special effects you’ll see here.

There’s also George Kennedy getting bitten by a demonic cat. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this, I don’t know what will.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Bedroom Eyes II (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Bedroom Eyes II was on USA Up All Night on July 5, 1996.

Don’t worry if you never saw Bedroom Eyes. This Chuck Vincent-directed film has nothing to do with it. Yes, the characters have the same names, but it’s all different actors. This insane film can really stand on its own, as it combines a Cinemax After Dark film with a giallo. If I’ve learned anything from the movies of Mr. Vincent, it’s that you have no idea where they’re going.

Harry Ross (Wings Hauser) lives in a world of little to no morals. His business partner gets an inside trading tip that could make them rich from one of his friends with benefits. But when it comes to love, his life is an even bigger mess.

Let me see if I can summarize it for you: His ex-wife JoBeth (adult film star and Vincent’s favorite actress Veronica Hart) tried to kill Harry five years ago and went to prison. Meanwhile, his wife Carolyn (Kathy Shower, Playboy Playmate of the Year 1986) has been all messed up since Harry broke up with one of his girlfriends, Alexandria, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident the very same night that Harry broke up with her.

Things get worse when Harry catches his wife aardvarking with Matthew, a hip young artist. To fix things, our hero, such as it is, decides to get horizontal with Sophie (B,r), an artist. He promises her that his wife can make her famous, but he soon falls for her.

Somehow, Sophie is Alexandria’s sister, there’s some murder, and there’s plenty of fishing for kippers. Moistening the Pope. Punching the cow. You know what I mean — sweet, sweet lovemaking. Even after Harry gets stabbed multiple times, he is still able to play some slophockey.

Linda Blair has brought me down many dark corridors. This is one of them, a movie that takes Wings Hauser through hell and finally jumping across rooftops and beating up cops. That’s what happens when you go in too deep.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: UHF (1989)

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Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”

Where else could Weird Al go after several albums and music videos? To the far end of the TV dial lies this film, in which he plays George Newman, who takes over Channel 62. When he’s mistreated by the boss of Channel 8, R.J. Fletcher (Kevin McCarthy), he decides to lead his station — which is mostly reruns that everyone has already seen — to success.

Soon, the janitor (Michael Richards) is hosting Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse, and the ratings are great. Except that George’s gambling uncle (Stanley Brock) and the owner of the station, well, he owes money to his bookie, and they’re about to lose the station. Fran Drescher, Victoria Jackson, Anthony Geary (as an alien!), Billy Barty, John Paragon, Belinda Bauer, Dr. Demento, Emo Philips and many more appear.

But these are just simple descriptions of this movie. The joy is in watching it, a movie that has TV shows in it like Wheel of Fish and Raul’s Wild Kingdom. That has Weird Al become Rambo. Spatula City — “I liked the spatulas so much, I bought the company.” — and a car salesman who says, “I’ll club a seal to make a better deal.” You can see the station’s line-up in one scene. They are — including the ones I already mentioned — Beastiality Today, Beat the Loan Shark, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bowling for Burgers, Buddha Knows Best, Dog Racing from Rio de Janeiro, Druids on Parade, Eye On Toxic Waste, Fun with Dirt, Leave it to Bigfoot, Mr. Ed, My Three Mutants, Name that Stain, News, That’s Disgusting, The Flying Pope, The Lice is Right, The Young and the Dyslexic, Town Talk, Traffic Court, Secrets of the Universe, Underwater Bingo for Teens, Strip Solitaire, Volcano Worshippers Hour, Wide World of Tractor Pulls, Wonderful World of Phlegm and You Bet Your Pink Slip.

Anyways, you either get it or you don’t. I do, I hope you do, let’s talk about it in the comments. Ghandi II? Conan the Librarian?

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Bedroom Eyes (1984)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Bedroom Eyes was on USA Up All Night on January 6, 1996 and February 1 and September 27, 1997.

If you enjoy Canadian horror, then you know who William Fruet is, the maker of Death Weekend (released here as The House By the Lake), Cries In the Night (better known as Funeral Home), redneck rampage film Trapped (AKA Baker County U.S.A.), Spasms and the kinda-sorta Alien by way of animal experimentation oddity Blue Monkey.

This time, he’s taking on the genre of adult thriller, which by 1984 is kind of what giallo was leaning toward and then would completely become in the wake of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. The ideas are the same — identity, secrets, sex, shame, violence — but it’s missing the great music and the fashion for the most part.

If you’re nostalgic for a film that aired on USA Up All Night, this movie is for you. This is the type of universe where a peeping tom is the hero, where a psychologist can see past his perversion — or encourage it — to see the man he is inside and where every other woman is evil.

This was, of course, followed by Bedroom Eyes II, which is way better because it has Wings Hauser, Veronica Hart and Linda Blair in the cast, as well as Chuck Vincent directing, and that movie also has no compunctions about feeling sweaty and filthy, while this one seems clean and wrapped up, like some of the 80s felt.

This one does get points for having its female antagonist repeatedly beat the protagonist up, including a slapstick bonk at the end as the police take her away.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling IV was on USA Up All Night on July 3, 1992, April 23, 1994 and April 13, 1996.

John Hough has some great movies in his directorial history, including Twins of Evil, The Legend of Hell House, The Watcher in the Woods, The Incubus, American Gothic, Escape to Witch Mountain, Return to Witch Mountain and Biggles. That’s a great run. He also made this movie, which attempts to revive The Howling series, bringing it closer to the original film.

Author Marie Adams keeps having visions of nuns and werewolves attacking her from a fire. It seems that the same imagination that helps her write is also driving her to madness. Her husband takes her moving all the way to madness, to Drago, where a small cottage will be the place that she plans on resting and relaxing away all the terror that she is going through. That would work if she didn’t keep hearing howling in the woods.

Much like the first film, her man can’t stay faithful. The small town is also rife with werewolves, ghosts and visions of the nun. The whole thing ends in a burning church, and yes, that same werewolf leaps through the flames.

Well, if anything, this is the only werewolf movie I’ve seen that has a theme song by the lead singer of the Moody Blues. So there’s that.

That said, this is a more faithful version of the book than The Howling. Yet it’s not as good a movie. Writer and co-producer of the film, Clive Turner, was originally going to direct, but when the financiers pulled out, he had to get Hough on board.

That’s one story. The other is the one that Hough told Fangoria. The script was written by someone named Freddie Rowe and he would also receive notes and messages from him, as well as additional pages of the script, while making the movie. However, when the director asked for Rowe’s contact information, he was never given it, leading him to suspect Rowe of actually being Clive Turner, who really wanted to be the director of the movie. Seeing as how Rowe only wrote one other movie — Howling V: The Rebirth, which Turner also wrote — that may or may not be true.

Making that story sound even more true is the fact that Turner recut and re-edited the film, adding scenes like the one where the evil werewolf queen Eleanor went bobbing for hot dogs with Marie’s husband.

You can watch this for yourself on Tubi and try and make better sense of it than I did.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: The Howling III (1987)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling III was on USA Up All Night on January 19, 1991 and March 6, 1998.

This is the last Howling movie to play in U.S. theaters. Gary Brandner, author of the Howling novels, approved director Philippe Mora’s purchase of the rights to his novels. The credits even claim that this is based on his book The Howling III: Echoes. However, in truth, it has a different setting and primarily features werewolves as sympathetic characters.

Professor Harry Beckmeyer is an Australian anthropologist who has found footage of aborigines sacrificing a deer in 19Aboriginal people. Hearing that a wolf-like wolf has killed a man in Siberia, he tries — and fails — to warn the President of the U.S. about the potential of lycan assaults.

Meanwhile, an abused girl who just might so happen to be a werewolf is running away from home. Her name is Jerboa, and after meeting a young American named Donny Martin, she gets a role in the horror film, Shape Shifters Part 8. She gets into horror movies, and after watching a werewolf film with Donny, she reveals that transformations don’t happen that way. He asks her how she knows, she goes full furry beast, and he responds as we all would, by engaging her in some interspecies aardvarking.

As the movie wraps, strobe lights cause Jerboa to transform. She runs into the night and is hit by a car. When the doctors try to save her, they notice that she is with child and has a marsupial-like pouch on her belly. Holy cow, this movie! I can’t believe that I watched that, much less typed it out for you to read.

There’s also a Russian ballerina that happens to be a werewolf, because I guess if you bark at the moon you have a re,allsuppose,derful artistic abilitie,s as a secondary mutation.

Suffice to say that you should stick with this movie, if only to see Dame Edna out of drag as  Barry Humphries and a pack of werewolves go wild at the cheapest looking Academy Awards outside of The Lonely Lady.

Phillipe Mora has made some out there movies, like The Beast Within, The Howling II, The Return of Captain Invincible, Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills and many more. His films aren’t always great, but they’re never boring.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling II was on USA Up All Night on April 23, 1994, April 13, 1996 and March 28, 1997.

Even though Gary Brandner, author of The Howling novels, co-wrote the screenplay to this movie, it has nothing to do with his 1979 novel The Howling II, much less the original The Howling. It tries, but this movie is just too weird to fully close the loop.

There’s never been another werewolf movie like this one. Whether that is positive or negative all depends on how much you like werewolves having sex.

Ben White (Reb Brown, who is in a little movie called Yor Hunter from the Future that I could tell you about for many days) is dealing with the death of his sister Karen White, who just so happens to be the heroine of the first of these movies. He joins up with Jenny (Annie McEnroe, who was in Snowbeast and Battletruck) and the mysterious Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee, who apologized to Joe Dante for making this movie) to battle werewolves.

This brings them on a journey to Transylvania and a battle against Stirba (Sybil Danning!), the queen of the werewolves, who is joined by Mariana (Marsha Hunt, who the song “Brown Sugar” is about) and Erle (Ferdy Mayne, who is in another film I can discuss for days and days, Night Train to Terror).

What follows is complete lunacy: werewolf witchcraft, lycan orgies, Sybil Danning repeatedly ripping off her top (the same shot repeated again and again to no complaint), dwarves, priests being killed and punk rock from the band Babel.

Director Philippe Mora actually made some pretty good films, like Mad Dog Morgan, The Beast Within and The Return of Captain Invincible. I’m insane and love this movie, so I will include it in my list of his good ones.

Finally, let’s talk about another subject I can hold court on: Christopher Lee. Mora didn’t know that Sir Lee was a war hero in Czechoslovakia, where this was filmed. Actually, no one did, because he wasn’t allowed to talk about his intelligence work during World War II. When he showed up for filming, he was greeted with a hero’s welcome, as he had killed a top Nazi official named Reinhard Heydrich. In fact, before he became an actor, Lee remained a Nazi hunter for several years.

I also love that this movie was sent the wrong costumes by 20th Century Fox. Instead of wolf suits, they were sent the monkey suits from Planet of the Apes. Lee tried to help fix this by ad-libbing, “The process of evolution is reversed.”

Want to know more about The Howling movies? Check out this article.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: It Came from Hollywood (1982)

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Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”

Directed by Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt (This Is Elvis) and written by Dana Olsen (The ‘Burbs, Wacko, Going Berserk), It Came from Hollywood came along at a significant time for me. I’d been watching SNL and SCTV, so seeing so many of my favorite comedy people in one film — Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Cheech and Chong, and Gilda Radner — all in one movie was a huge deal to me. I’d also started reading The Golden Turkey Awards at the library that my uncle was in charge of, and in 1982, it was impossible to know when you could see some of the films in it. This movie, which was on HBO all the time, gave me a chance to see clips of them and discover that they were real.

Movies in this are broken into twelve segments — Aliens, Gorillas, Monsters, The Brain, Giants and Tiny People, Musical Memories, Technical Triumphs, Troubled Teenagers, Previews of Coming Attractions, A Salute to Edward D. Wood, Jr., Getting High in the Movies and The Animal Kingdom Goes Berserk — and include: A*P*E, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!, Attack of the Puppet People, Atomic Rulers, Bat Men of Africa, Battle in Outer Space, Beginning of the End, Black Belt Jones, Blonde Savage, Bride of the Monster, The Bride and the Beast, The Brain from Planet Arous, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The Blob, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Cool and the Crazy, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Curse of the Faceless Man, Daughter of the Jungle, The Cyclops, The Creeping Terror, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Deadly Mantis, Don’t Knock the Rock, Dragstrip Girl, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Evil Brain from Outer Space, Fiend Without a Face, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, First Man Into Space, The Flying Saucer, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster, Frankenstein’s Daughter, From Hell It Came, Glen or Glenda, The Giant Claw, The Hideous Sun Demon, High School Confidential!, High School Hellcats, House on Haunted Hill, The Horror of Party Beach, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, The Incredible Melting Man, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Invasion of the Neptune Men, Isle of Forgotten Sins, The Killer Shrews, The Loves of Hercules, Maniac, Marihuana, Married Too Young, Mars Needs Women, Matango, Missile to the Moon, Monster from Green Hell, The Monster and the Ape, Musical Movieland, Octaman, Perils of Nyoka, Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Party Crashers, Prince of Space, Reefer Madness, Reptilicus, Robot Monster, Rocket Attack U.S.A., Rock Baby: Rock It, Runaway Daughters, Shake, Rattle & Rock!, Slime People, Son of Godzilla, The Space Children, Street Corner, Sunny Side Up, Teenagers from Outer Space, Teenage Monster, The Thing with Two Heads, The Tingler, The Trollenberg Terror, The Violent Years, The War of the Worlds, The Weird World of LSD, The White Gorilla, Wonder Bar, The X from Outer Space, Yongary, Monster from the Deep, Zombies of the Stratosphere.

Directors and executive producers Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo spent about five months researching and collecting movie clips from about 500 feature films. They then decided to expand their search beyond the 75 titles that the Paramount Pictures studio, the film project’s production house, had licensed for the documentary. However, this meant that it would never be released on home media, as licensing it would be too difficult.

Since I first saw this, I’ve learned that making fun of films isn’t the right way to enjoy them. But for a ten-year-old version of me, I got to see Ed Wood Jr. movies for the first time and couldn’t wait to see even more.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.