Using the name that came in second for Eat My Dust and working on the script with his father Rance, this was the first movie that Ron Howard directed. It takes what worked in that aforementioned New World Pictures movie and makes it even more charming.

Paula Powers (Nancy Morgan) wants to marry Sam Freeman (Howard) but as far as her parents — Bigby (Barry Cahill) and Priscilla Powers (Elizabeth Rogers, who was the substitute communications officer for Uhara on Star Trek) — are interested, she should be with the wealthy Collins Hedgeworth (Paul Linke, Motel Hell) instead of a poor kid who is studying the environment. She responds by stealing their Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud and racing out to Las Vegas.

Bigby is running for political office, so he sends Ned Slinke (Rance Howard) after the couple to stop this whole foolish enterprise, while Collins heads out after his would-be fiancee, but not before he steals a car, which sends the police — and his mother, played by Howard’s Happy Days castmate Marion Ross — after him.

He also calls KTNQ’s DJ Curly Q, who is the “Real Deal” Don Steele, a fixture in so many Corman movies like The Student Teachers, Death Race 2000 and Rock ‘n’ Roll High School as well as Corman alumni films like Gremlins and Eating Raoul. Speaking of high speed and cars, one of the promotions Steele was involved in ended in tragedy. When he was at KHJ in the summer of 1970, the station had a “Super Summer Spectacular” with Steele driving around Los Angeles in a red sports car. They would broadcast clues about his location and. give $25 to anyone who found him. During this contest, two teenagers attempting to track Steele by car at speeds of roughly 80 miles per hour rammed another car into a highway divider, causing the death of Ronald Weirum. Weirum’s family sued and won, saying that the promotion caused recklessness. Steele would also often yell. “Tina Delgado is alive! Alive!” on the air and would never reveal why. I’ve heard two stories: one that she was a girl whose obituary was incorrectly written and he was always trying to make up for it. Or it was the scary version, where she was a teenager listening to Steele on the air and not paying attention, which led to her walking right into a train. His guilt led to him saying her name on every broadcast to pay tribute. You can also hear him in the Cheap Trick song “On the Radio” (“Heaven Tonight”) and when his career was down in the 80s, Ernie Anderson — the one-time Ghoulardi and the father of Paul Thomas Anderson — got him the agent he needed to return to stardom, to the point that he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

I digress, but man, whenever Don Steele shows up in a movie, I love it.

By this point, our leads are being chased — for a $25,000 reward given by Collins’ mother for the safe return of her beloved boy — by all manner of weirdos like mechanics Ace (Ron’s brother Clint) and Sparky (Pete Isacksen); a preacher (Hoke Howell, who had been on The Andy Griffith Show with Howard); a demolition derby and even an organized crime family led by Garry Marshall (Howard was calling in all his Happy Days people) that has Leo Rossi — Bud from Halloween 2! — amongst its members.

I love how the radio station takes the couple as bad guys, then good guys, then bad, then by the end Don Steele is chasing them from their wedding on the way to their honeymoon, promising coverage of their lovemaking before crashing into a house. A total New World all-star film, this also has Allan Arkush as a clown and Paul Bartel as a groom.

Shot without permits in 15 days, Howard impressed the crew with how fast he was able to understand directing a movie. Then again, he’d been on films sets for a decade. Corman told him, “Do a really good job on this one, kid, and you’ll never have to work for me again.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on December 15, 2018.

The Hammer Sisters are the kind of tough Southern girls that deal with their daddy’s murder by taking over his moonshine business, grabbing some weapons and being way tougher than any of the men they battle. Is that enough to get you to watch this movie?

What if I told you that it was directed by the same man who brought us The Evil, The Side Hackers and the movie based on the song Take This Job and Shove It?

Not yet? How does John Saxon playing a Southern stock car racer and moonshine runner sound? Not yet?

How about Susan Howard, former Dallas actress turned 700 Club host and NRA supporter?

William Conrad? Jeff Corey? Len “Uncle Leo” Lasser? Maurine “Marcia Brady” McCormick? Still not sold?

I get it. John Saxon was enough for me. But then I thought, I bet this movie has Claudia Jennings in it. And I was right. And that’s all it took.

What was it about American pop culture that took hicksploitation from the drive-in to the mainstream? I remember it myself — everyone had a CB radio, we all turned into The Dukes of Hazzard and watched Smokey and the Bandit on HBO. Heck, I even had a silver NASCAR jacket that made me look like a 5-year-old pit crew member.

From the very first moment that John Saxon appears on screen and does his best version of a Southern accent, I was thoroughly entertained by this silly trifle of a film. It’s a Roger Corman 1970’s drive-in movie, so you’re going to get plenty of cars getting smashed up, scummy bad guys and “100 proof women” like Candice Rialson (Chatterbox, Pets).

You can watch this on Tubi.

Millicent (Morgan Saylor) is taking a semester off of college and making money by caring for Johnny (Danilo Crovetti), a mute child whose allergies are so bad that he has to wear something that looks like a spacesuit. Meanwhile, the kid’s mom Rebecca (Kat Foster) is a self-help sex positive guru obsessed with being a perfect mother yet cursed with a philandering handyman husband named Jacob (Myko Olivier) who walks around with his shirt off in front of his son’s new live-in companion.

Millicent has never had a family before and the foster dad she does have is played by David Yow from the Jesus Lizard as exactly the kind of character you’d expect he’d play. And her therapist Dr. Welsh (Keith Powell) has the hypothesis that LSD can make her less childish and awkward.

If tripping can fix her, maybe it can fix Johnny. Right?

Like every movie about a nanny ever except probably the one it references in title, Mary Poppins, Spoonful of Sugar is about a strange young woman trying to work her way into a family and take it over.  Isn’t that what she’s done with every family she’s been part of — spoilers coming up — which always ends with her killing them? She’s also a woman in a young girl’s body, something men seem to want to sully, and they all pay for it.

But that’s not the only twist, which is appreciated. And that one, well, I won’t reveal.

Directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan and written by Leah Saint Marie, this has some intriguing turns and looks interesting, but man, who would bring someone like this around their family? It isn’t until that final surprise that it all makes sense.

Hunter White (Alicia von Rittberg) started her life as a baby, abandoned in a cemetery, left in a blanket covered with occult symbols. After a DNA test determines that she’s all Scandinavian, she leaves her adopted father Raylan White (Clarence Smith) behind and heads to Norway to learn the truth and oh man, never ever go home in a horror movie, right?

If you’re going to Norway, you’re going to get into some metal, right? Hunter meets a singer of a band named Cecilia (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) who she thinks is her mother. She’s not, but leads her down the path to finding out who they really are. Hunter is really the daughter of her old bass player Kristian and his partner Anna. Anna had her when they were on tour in America and left her in that cemetery.

After that, Anna went missing and when Kristian found her, he locked her inside a church and set it on fire. This led to a jail sentence of 21 years — the maximum sentence, pretty much, because that’s how long Varg Vikernes got for burning churches and killing Euronymous — before he was sent to a mental hospital.

The truth of it all is that her mother’s family has been involved in some dark business for years and she probably never should have sought them out. They go the opposite way of the darkness of Black Metal to true Christian darkness. Actually, they’re Calvinists. Cecilia keeps seeing visions of a woman being set on fire who warns her to give up, but she feels that she must know the full truth of where she came from.

Directed by Alex Herron and written by Thomas Moldestad, this movie promises some Satanic Panic and gives you very little of it. Ah well — we can’t always get what we want.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site on September 29, 2022 when I watched at Fantastic Fest. Now it’s playing on a roadshow with director and writer Micker Reese in attendance on the following dates: 

3/29 – Chicago, IL (Alamo Wrigleyville)
3/29 – Denver, CO (Alamo Sloans)
3/29 – San Francisco, CA (Alamo New Mission)
3/29 – Yonkers, NY (Alamo Yonkers)
3/30 – 4/3 – Oklahoma City, OK (Rodeo Cinema)
3/30 – 4/3 – Tulsa, OK (Circle Cinema)

It will be released digitally April 4 on Fandor in North America. 

Visit linktr.ee/countrygold to learn more.

Mickey Reece makes a movie a year and every time, it’s something different. Like the exorcism movie Agnes or Climate of the Hunter, a movie that plays with horror and age. This time, he’s made a comedy — kind of, as always the genre isn’t always absolute — about Troyal Brux (Reece), a country singer on the rise who pretty much seems like Garth Brooks, seeing as how this was made in 1994. In fact, it was Garth until the Oklahoma film commission took away the tax rebates they promised; when the name was changed, those rebates came back. Brooks is from Tulsa and his real first name is Troyal, so you understand.

In the middle of his rise to fame, Troyal gets a written invite from George Jones (Ben Hall). Jones is on the opposite side of life as Troyal and he wants to spend one night out in the world before he gets frozen the very next day.

This is the night they spent together.

Reece has already made Alien, a film about Elvis, but this one is about the gulf between country of old and modern country. The outlaw world of Jones and the commercial world of Troyal. Is Jones trying to make fun of the new family man who is trying to be a star? Or does he see something of himself at the start of his career, when he could see into people and write songs that connected to people?

I grew up in a town with one radio station, all country, so Jones’ songs — “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “You and Me and Time,” “She Thinks I Still Care” — mean so much more to me than anything country has had to say for itself in decades (and don’t tell me that Sturgill Simpson and today’s presented alternatives are any more authentic country than Garth was). The songs that played on WFEM — well, with the exception of “The Bird” — were raw expressions of life gone off the rails. The life of Jones parallels Brooks in that they both had marriages to fellow performers — Jones famously with Tammy Wynette, who sang “Stand By Your Man,” and Brooks to Trisha Yearwood — but while it took Jones until 1999 to get sober and stop blowing off concerts — “No Show Jones” — Brooks has been a steady superstar. Well, except for that whole Chris Gaines thing, which this movie hints at.

I loved that this movie has asides about Tasha Yar and Denise Crosby coming back to be on later seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as fantasies — or maybe not? — of Jones killing people for organized crime figures or destabilizing anti-government officials. I’m of the feeling that the best stories don’t have to be true if they’re entertaining.

Sure, this is a movie of basically two men in a room talking. Yet it’s that conversation and where it goes that make for an incredible tale, ending with perhaps the strangest baby reveal and musical number I’ve seen in a movie. That pushed this way over the victory line for me.

Hollywood stuntman Jingo Johnson (Jesse Vint, Pigs) has come back home to see his mother before she dies. The family farm has been taken over by a mining company, his old girl Lucy (Karen Carlson, The Student Nurses) is dating one of the mining crew (Robert F. Lyons) and Sheriff Otis Grimes (Albert Salmi) has it in for him.

He learns from Nurse Beulah Barnes (Mary Charlotte Wilcox, Beast of the Yellow Night and, strangely, two seasons of SCTV) that the mining company also owns the hospital that his mother is in, amongst other farmers, and has been keeping them asleep with a concoction of narcotics. Even worse, the pills they gave her caused the disease that soon takes her life.

It turns out that the law is behind all of this — the title makes sense! — and they want Jingo to take the fall for several murders. Oh man, the 70s, a time when redneck — I say this in the kindest of ways as taught by Joe Bob — movies played with conspiracy film!

This was directed by Bob Kelljan, who made Count Yorga, Vampire; The Return of Count Yorga; Scream Blacula Scream and Flesh of my Flesh. It was written by Hugh Smith (Moonshine County Express, The Glove, Night Creature) and Vint, who clashed with Kelljan and felt he was the wrong director for this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 17, 2018.

I’ve stayed away from talking about David Cronenberg movies on here because, well, better and smarter people have already done so. After all, there’s an entire zine devoted to discussing his works, House of Skin. And friend of the site Bill Van Ryn has already written an incredibly well-written appreciation of this one. But hey — I made it through the whole Joe Bob Briggs marathon and am trying to share my thoughts with you. So please indulge me. Thank you.

The film starts with Rose and her boyfriend Hart getting into an accident in the remote countryside. With no other option, they are sent to the Keloid Clinic for Plastic Surgery, with Hart suffering only a broken hand, a separated shoulder and a concussion. Rose, however, is barely alive, needing several operations and skin grafts from being burned. Dr. Dan Keloid decides to try something new: he uses “morphogenetically neutral grafts” to heal her damaged tissue, hoping that it will heal on its own. A month later, Hart is ready to go home, but she remains in a coma.

Sometime later — time isn’t really of the essence in this nightmare world — Rose awakens screaming. When Lloyd, another patient in the clinic, comes to help her, she somehow cuts him. He doesn’t remember how it happened, but his blood no longer clots and he can no longer feel pain. And Rose? Well, now she has a wound in her armpit that looks sexual — male and female at the same time. Shades of God Told Me To?

Now, Rose can only subsist on human blood, which she discovers after cow’s blood causes her to puke. A farmer watches and tries to rape her, but she is the predator now, soon devouring him and turning him into a zombie-like monster.

All hell soon breaks loose — Lloyd attacks a taxi driver after escaping from the clinic, killing them both. Dr. Keloid attacks everyone within his own clinic. Rose tries to get Hart to save her, but escapes on her own, infecting people all along the way.

Soon, Quebec is a nightmare city, with maniacs using jackhammers to tear people from cars, Santa Claus getting shot and a shoot to kill martial law policy being enacted on anyone showing signs of the virus.

Hart tries to reason with Rose — she is the cause of all of this and needs to be stopped. Of course, things can’t work out well. The world of Soylent Green has become near truth — there are so many dead people, garbage trucks are the only solution.

Cronenberg wanted to cast Sissy Spacek in the lead, but her accent didn’t work for the film’s producers. He heard from Ivan  Reitman, the executive producer, that adult film star Marilyn Chambers was looking for a mainstream role. Her being in the film would help sell it and she put in plenty of work, so Cronenberg was happy with the results. In fact, he had never seen the movie that made her famous, Behind the Green Door.

Chambers was quite literally a pure Ivory Soap girl — appearing on a box of that cleaning product as a young mother with the tag “99 & 44/100% pure.” Her appearance in the Mitchell Brothers’ film — released at the height of post-Deep Throat porn chic, when adult films entered mainsteam consciousness — was a sensation. It didn’t hurt that she was also the first white woman in a major adult film to have a scene with a black man, Johnnie Keyes.

Chambers was in the midst of trying a singing career — her song “Benihana” can be heard in this film — and she was married to Chuck Traynor, ex-husband of Linda Lovelace. You could write a novel about the mania of that dude.

That said — for being a sex queen, Chambers comes off as cold in this film. That’s probably Cronenberg’s goal, to subvert notions. Even his heroes are no heroes. No one can stop what is set in motion and everyone is ineffectual. Such is the Cronenberg universe.

One thing I’ve always wondered — why did they spoil the ending of this film in the original poster?

If you want to see Rabid, you can grab the Shout! Factory reissue. Or turn in to Shudder, who has versions with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

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!