EDITOR’S NOTE: Alien was on USA Up All Night on November 17, 1995 and December 28, 1996.

What else can I say about Alien that so many others have already said?

Directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O’Bannon, based on a story by O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Alien influenced just as many movies as Star Wars.

The designs of H. R. Giger, Ron Cobb and Chris Foss took what Lucas started — the future didn’t have to be clean and in working order — and took it further, while the story shared that space wouldn’t be like a comic book or movie serial. It’d be just more hard work for a gigantic corporation, and death would not be dignified.

It also has one of the best taglines ever: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

For all that Alien influenced, the DNA of this movie comes from many places:

Queen of Blood: Astronauts respond to a distress call and take an alien on board that slowly kills them off, one by one. Its director, Curtis Harrington, said, “Ridley’s film is like a greatly enhanced, expensive and elaborate version of Queen of Blood.”

Planet of the Vampires: Mario Bava’s movie features a crash landing, where the disembodied inhabitants of an alien planet possess the crew of a rescue ship and take over their bodies. There’s a scene where the crew examines an alien ship and discovers the gigantic remains of the long-dead inhabitants of this planet, which is 100% stolen by Alien, regardless of what Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott said otherwise.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space: This 1958 black and white horror film — about the sole survivor of a crashed ship being rescued and slowly killing the crew of another vessel — is incredibly close to the ideas in Alien.

But no matter. This remix succeeds and has the crew of the Nostromo — Captain Dallas (Tom Skeritt), executive officer Kane (John Hurt), warrant officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright, who was also in The Birds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers), science officer Ash (Ian Holm), and engineers Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), along with the ship cat Jonesy — have answered a distress call and end up bringing back an alien attached to Kane’s face.

The scene that results, where an alien bursts from Kane’s chest, shocked audiences and is still perfect today. That’s all you need to know: these aliens are perfect killing machines that can’t be reasoned with; they live to kill. This is a haunted house in space, in some ways, but also a chase.

I love that this movie led to a toy that no parent wanted their children to have, as well as a series of films that, well, are one good and the rest bad. But you know, I show up for all of them, because the memory of what this movie is gets me every time. This is the ultimate movie monster in one of the greatest horror films ever made. It’s just that simple.

Note: Thanks to Andrew Chamen for pointing out a typo I made!

Sept 22-28 Chuck Vincent Week: No one did it like Chuck! He’s the unsung king of Up All Night comedy, a queer director making the straightest romcoms but throwing in muscle studs and drag queens. His films explore the concept of romance from almost every angle – he was deeply passionate about love.

T. B. Dumore (Nicholas Saunders), the owner of Beaver Bras, gets his ad executive, Albert Zack (Chris Lemmon, Just Before Dawn, Thunder In Paradise), to create a new campaign: they need five famous women to wear their intimates so that people know they’re fashionable. Albert is the one who has to make it happen. He goes after an actress (Corinne Alphen, ex of Ken Wahl and now a pro tarot card reader) who is in the middle of a zombie movie; a disco singer named Debbie Winter (Marilyn Joi, Cleopatra Schwartz!) brings him to the dance floor; wealthy Contessa Bazzini (Carole Davis,  Piranha II) leads him to an orgy with a neon sign that exclaims “THE FUCK IS ON.” And then he dresses as a Yellow Peril villain to meet the First Daughter Lisa Foster (Teresa Ganzel, The Toy). Luckily, Albert has the help of Holly Fox (Olivia Pascal, Bloody Moon).

This was Chuck Vincent’s second try at mainstream after American Tickler. He directed it with German director Sigi Krämer; it was written by producer Wolfgang von Schiber, Rick Marx (who co-wrote Joe Franklin’s autobiography, Doom Asylum, and numerous films), Ian Shaw (who composed music for countless softcore films), and Vincent.

This also has Ron Jeremy and American adult star — not the British singer — Samantha Fox as reporters and roles for Dolly Dollar (not a porn star, a German actress), Pat Finnegan (AKA adult actress Patricia Dale), Jennifer Richards (Madusa in TerrorVision), Michelle Mais (the voice of Eebee the Evil Bong), Jack Wrangler (Lucifer in The Devil In Miss Jones Part II), Kurt Mann (Wanda Whips Wall Street), “Clown Prince of Porn” Bobby Astyr, an early role for Dan Lauria as a Secret Service man, Jake Teague (who did adult and Cannibal Ferox), Lou Leccese (who was C.H.U.D.), Juliet Graham (Bloodsucking Freaks, Vixens of Kung Fu, Miss Ohio in Emanuelle Around the World), pro soccer goalie Sepp Maier and  Lynette Sheldon (Let My Puppets Come).

Cinematographer Larry Revene shot Night Visions, Fright Housemanyts, and Marilyn Chambers’ softcore movies, including Deep Throat II, Raw Talent, the Roger Watkins-directed Corruption, Charlton Heston Presents the Bible, and several of Vincent’s movies, as well as directed Wanda Whips Wall Street.

Not a great movie, but a fun one. And the cast, right?

EDITOR’S NOTE: You Can’t Hurry Love was on USA Up All Night on June 28, 1991.

Video dating is a way of learning a lot about yourself, if we follow this film. Eddie (David Packer) got left at the altar and moved to LA. His cousin Skip (Scott McGinnis) gives him a car, a place to live and a job with Peter Newcomb (David Leisure), who sends him to work for his combat shock-addled brother Tony (Anthony Geary). As he hands out ads on the beach, Eddie decides to try video dating, which is run by Peggy (Bridget Fonda).

He claims to be a director, so his first date is with an actress who wants to be Madonna. Her father (Charles Grodin) tells him to make sure and wear a condom. As you can imagine, things don’t go well. Neither does trying to date rock girls, like Rhonda (Kristy McNichol), who nearly shoots him with a crossbow. And Monique (Merete Van Kamp) wants to have sex in public with him while his parents are at dinner.

As you can imagine, Eddie realizes that love isn’t found in this way and asks Peggy out.

Six years before this was made, Packer was a witness to the murder of Dominique Dunne, who was strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, while Packer was at her home for a rehearsal. He called the police and later found Sweeney kneeling over Dunne’s unconscious body. Dunne died from her injuries days later, and while Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, the judge and others felt the crime was murder.

Cinematographer John Schwartzman also shot “Video Valentino,” the short film on which this movie is based, for director Richard Martini. Martini promised Schwartzman that if the short ever became a movie, he would hire him to shoot it. He lived up to the claim, but the completion bond company wouldn’t approve both a first-time director and a first-time cinematographer. Schwartzman asked Peter Lyons Collister, who had prior feature experience, to co-shoot the movie with him.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold was on USA Up All Night on January 31, 1998.

I’m sure you’ve seen Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, but this has ten more feet on that.

Inga (Raelyn Saalman), Betty (Tammy Parks) and Angel Grace (J. J. North) are the three finalists for Plaything’s Centerfold of the Year, which finds Angel heading to Dr. Lindstrom (John LaZar) to continue beauty treatments that he’s already told her could be dangerous. But when the first new dose makes her breasts grow, why would she stop?

After sleeping with the magazine’s photographer, Angel forgets to take a dose and sees wrinkles, so she starts taking beyond her prescription. This causes her to grow, as you can expect, into the titular 60-foot centerfold.

With a cast that includes Tommy Kirk, Michele Bauer, Ross Hagen, George Stover, Stanley Livingston and Russ Tamblyn, this movie delivers what you expect: two centerfolds brawling in the middle of Los Angeles, but giant ones, and then a doctor gets speared with a big needle, which is kind of what you really, really wanted.

The urge to be beautiful is strong. When left unchecked, you end up really tall. There’s a moral somewhere.

Sept 22-28 Chuck Vincent Week: No one did it like Chuck! He’s the unsung king of Up All Night comedy, a queer director making the straightest romcoms but throwing in muscle studs and drag queens. His films explore the concept of romance from almost every angle – he was deeply passionate about love.

Chuck Vincent always gave Veronica Hart something great to work with. In Deranged, she’s Joyce, a woman trapped in her own home, reliving the moments of her life after a home invasion and a miscarriage. Influenced by Gerald Damiano’s movie Memories Within Miss Aggie, Vincent saw this as a stage play, shooting it in continuity over five days. It also has lots of Repulsion in its heart.

Joyce (Veronica Hart using the alias Jane Hamilton) and her half-sister Maryann (Jennifer Delora) drop Joyce’s husband Frank (Paul Siederman, who is really “Raw Talent” Jerry Butler) off at the airport, as he’s going to London for a month. As for Joyce, she’s stuck with her controlling family as she’s in the final weeks of her pregnancy. Despite her mother, Sheila (Jill Cumer), throwing her a baby shower, she’s trapped in her own mind, hearing the voices of her family, her husband, and herself. Even her home isn’t safe, as a man attacks her, stomping on her stomach until she miscarries; she stabs him with scissors right in the eye.

You or I would call the police. We’re not Joyce, who fakes her pregnancy and hides the body in her house while remembering how her father Eugene (Jamie Gillis!) killed himself after learning that Maryann wasn’t his child, but instead belonged to Darren (John Brett). The family accuses Joyce of the murder; she marries Frank, who is really in love with her half-sister. Additionally, she was probably sleeping with her father, so there are many reasons why the voices in Joyce’s head are screaming.

While the neighbors complain about the smell of the rotting food and dead body, and her only visitors are Maryanne and a deliverman named Nick (Gary Goldman), who is into pregnant women, she starts to believe that the dead are alive inside her small, even more confining apartment.

This has the line, “Joyce, I don’t want to fuck you, I want to cut you!” and I don’t know how anyone can dislike it. I mean, I know how they can, but they shouldn’t.

This is so much better than it has any right to be, and it’s a shame that Hart’s adult past kept her from being a mainstream actress. No matter — she’s better than any of them.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

Like nearly every other genre director in the Old Country, Amando De Ossorio had a possession movie in him and if their films feel purer than their American counterparts, it may be because they’re all true believers, raised in countries that had way more religion in their blood than the freer — and yet often more repressed — New World.

Our titular demon witch child is possessed by a witch named Mother Gautère (Kali Hansa) who starts this movie off by destroying a church, stealing a chalice and killing herself in the name of Satan by jumping out of a police station window rather than revealing where the baby she’s kidnapped is, telling the forces of law and order that the child would be dead by the time they found it. Meanwhile, young Susan (Marián Salgado), the daughter of head inspector Barnes (Angel del Pozo) is given a pendant that instantly begins her possession. Avoid all gifts from hippies as you would tanis root from old Hollywood actors.

Perhaps she can be saved by Father Juan (Julian Mateos), the priest who left behind love and condemned a good woman to a broken heart and a life on the streets? Or maybe the maid Anne (Lone Fleming) can get through to her. Well, no on either account and young Susan neatly slices off the penis of Anne’s lover and presents it to her in a napkin, along with crawling the walls like a prepubescent Dracula.

What strange coincidence that when The Exorcist came to Spain, Salgado was the voice of Linda Blair.

You can watch this on Tubi.