EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th Part III 3D was on USA Up All Night on October 30, 1993 and January 13 and 14, 1995.

With Amy Steel uninterested in returning to the series, the filmmakers had to reboot and figure out what made Jason tick. And that ticking was a hockey mask — three movies into the series. The original plan was that Ginny would be confined to a psychiatric hospital and he would track her down, then murder the staff and other patients at the hospital. If this sounds kind of like Halloween 2 to you, well surprise. This is not a movie series known for its originality.

He starts the film by killing a store owner and his wife just for clothes. Then, he goes after the friends of Chris Higgins: Debbie (Tracie Savage, who played the younger Lizzie in the awesome made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden), Andy, Shelley, Vera (Catherine Parks, Weekend at Bernie’s), Rick, Chuck and Chili. They run afoul of bikers Ali, Fox and Loco, who follow them back to their vacation home.

Jason starts killing quick, but he’s already mentally scarred Chris, as she survived an attack from him two years ago. This has left her with serious trauma and an inability to enjoy intimacy (which, come to think of it, comes in handy in these movies).

Jason takes the mask from the dead body of prankster Shelley and it’s on, with speargun bolts to the eye, heads chopped in half with machetes, knives through chests, electrocutions, hot pokers impaling stoners and even someone’s skull getting crushed by Jason’s supernaturally powerful hands.

Of course, it ends up with Final Girl Chris against Jason, who she kills by hitting him in the head with an ax before falling asleep on a canoe. She then dreams that an unmasked Jason runs toward her before Mrs. Vorhees — decomposed but with head reattached — drags her into the lake. Jason’s body is lying in the barn. For now.*

Here’s some trivia: To prevent the film’s plot being leaked (I could tell you the plot in less than a sentence, so this seems like bullshit), the production used the David Bowie song “Crystal Japan” as the title of the movie. They’d use Bowie songs as working titles during several of the other films.

There is a ton of footage that was cut from the film so that it didn’t get an X rating. And there’s an alternate ending where Chris dreams that Jason decapitates her. None of these things make this a better movie.

*Thanks to Bill Gordon for pointing out that I totally wrote that Jason was at the bottom of the lake. In my mind, Jason is at the bottom of the lake all the tinm. Or maybe, as Mike Justice said, “The killer’s body is at the bottom of the lake” is an old Pittsburgh expression meaning, “All’s well that ends well.”

Ismael (Karra Elejalde, Timecrimes) breaks into the house of a fine art restorer of religious icons and shoots her dead and a second bullet makes her daughter mentally handicapped. It also leaves Leire (Ana Álvarez) traumatized to the point that she will forever be in an institution. Twenty years later, he’s working in a bar and sees her. He’s convinced that she’s seen him, so he kidnaps her and demands a ransom. Yet they soon come together and build a strange relationship, even if he keeps threatening to throw her in the path of an oncoming train.

Directed by Juanma Bajo Ulloa, who wrote it with his brother Eduardo, this film finds Ismael going from wanting to murder Leire — with the help of his lover Maite (Lio) — before she turns him in. Yet he feels something for her. Is he her savior? Her father? Her lover? Can he be all of these things?

Can a man who casually murdered a mother and crippled a child become someone with empathy and even love? This movie asks that question while not being afraid to get dark and uncomfortable getting there.

The Radiance Films blu ray release of The Dead Mother has a 4K restoration of the film supervised and approved by director Juanma Bajo Ulloa, who also provided a commentary track. It also has a documentary about the making of the movie, a short film titled Victor’s Kingdom, a photo gallery, the trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, a book with writing by Xavier Aldana Reyes, Ulloa, co-writer Eduardo Bajo Ulloa and an appreciation by Nacho Vigalondo. There’s even a soundtrack CD.

You can get this from MVD.

Once abandoned to the wilds of public domain DVD sets, Messiah of Evil was for a time the gold amongst the dross, a film of incredible power. Hidden amongst old television shows, near-unwatchable transfers of Spanish horror and video store-era throwaways, it held a haunting power. Did I see that? Is this movie real? Can I explain it to anyone who hasn’t seen it?

Today, Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once-lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones slumber until time untold to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.

You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her lost artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.

It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead yet uninfluenced by it, where an entire town slowly becomes something like the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, they begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.

Or maybe it’s about something else. Is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price is Right model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style and sophistication. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.

Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality.

I don’t want that.

This is what I want. A transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.

Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with Jaws and Star Wars. Yet at this point, as this film’s commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower reminds us, even the creators of the blockbusters that changed entertainment forever, all the way back then, all wanted to be artists. And in a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Grafitti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.

This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.

I love that this movie once appeared in DVD bundles easily available in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume or Arietty spreading the infection into other towns, it found the right people. It always discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost for so long.

How wonderful it is to have what was once occult brought into the light and yet it loses nothing of its infernal power. In fact, it retains its power now, all the furtive watches and evangelists that loved this movie and spread that message. It’s just easier to access it thanks to the Radiance Films blu ray.

Featuring a 2023 restoration from a 4K scan of the best-surviving elements of the film from the Academy Film Archive, their blu ray release is something I never thought would happen. It creates new moments and feelings in me; I always believed that Arietty felt trapped in a comic strip world in her father’s house, but thanks to this new restoration, it appears that his paintings are real, that the mirrors and colors and brushstrokes are his way of showing how the outside city has become sick and wrong. They are as trapped in this reality as any other. The colors on her face as she drives through the night, the hum of the marquee in the center of town, the faces that appear in Ralph’s supermarket hungry for something, anything — all more vital. All more fresh. All more dead.

This release also includes an archival interview with co-writer-director Willard Huyck by Mike White from the Projection Booth Podcast; a documentary titled What the Blood Moon Brings: Messiah of Evil, A New American Nightmare that is co-directed by Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger and has appearances by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Maitland McDonagh, Guy Adams, Mikel Koven and David Huckvale; and a visual essay by Ellinger on American Gothic and female hysteria.

There’s also a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, as well as a book with contributions by Bill Ackerman, Joseph Dwyer, Amanda Reyes, Andy Marshall-Roberts and Larissa Glasser. 

The extras have added even more to my love of this film, even if Newman and Thrower can’t tell the difference between Joy Bang and Anitra Ford. Not just once. Multiple times. I don’t expect two British film experts to know what Ralph’s supermarket is, but my love for both Bang and Ford — and of course Hill — is beyond human measurement. I yelled at my television!

If you love movies, you should have already bought this.

You can order it from MVD.

You can also listen to the commentary track that I did with Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum here:

EDITOR’S NOTE: Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown was on USA Up All Night on March 20 and June 6, 1992; June 12, 1993; April 2 and December 16, 1994.

Tromaville’s nuclear reactor has been rebuilt since Class of Nuke ‘Em High and the Nukamama Corporation that funded it has added a new college, the Tromaville Institute of Technology (T.I.T.), inside the design to pay back the city.

Professor Melvina Holt (Lisa Gaye, Mona Malfaire from The Toxic Avenger movies) has created Subhumanoids to do menial tasks. After losing his girlfriend, Roger Smith (Brick Bronsky, a former pro wrestler who is also in The Quest and Death Match) starts investigating these Subhumanoids and falling in love with one of them, Victoria (Leesa Rowland). The Subhumanoids tend to melt down, so he has to save her and fight Tromie, a gigantic mutant squirrel.

Directed by Eric Louzil (Fortress of Amerikkka) and Donald G. Jackson (yes, the man who made all the Roller Blade movies, that explains why I loved this) and written by like twenty people — I’m kidding, it was just Lloyd Kaufman, Eric Louzil, Carl Morano, Marcus Roling, Jeffrey W. Sass and Matt Unger — this movie even has the Toxic Avenger show up to break the movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Class of Nuke ‘Em High was on USA Up All Night on February 8 and 9 and September 14, 1991 and March 20 and June 6, 1992.

Directed by Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman as Samuel Well and written by Kaufman, Richard W. Haines, Mark Rudnitsky and Stuart Strutin, Class of Nuke ‘Em High is about New Jersey’s Tromaville High School, a school in the shadow of an unsafe nuclear reactor that goes into the drinking water. This turns the honor students into a gang called The Cretins.

They also sell drugs and that’s how Eddie (James Nugent Vernon) gets the radiative joint that gets trampled at a dance and causes Warren (Gil Brenton) and Chrissy (Janelle Brady) to have sex and dream of mutating. She’s instantly pregnant and throws up their child into a toilet where it escapes and becomes a gigantic mutant just in time for Warren to go to war with The Cretins.

This movie somehow has four sequels — Class of Nuke ‘Em High 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown, Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid, Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 and Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High AKA Volume 2 — and I have to say that so far, the second one is perhaps the best movie I’ve seen from Troma. That bar was tripped over but I still enjoyed it.

I actually liked this one too. What is happening? Is the radiation making my brain lumpy enough to actually like Troma?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Summer Rental was on USA Up All Night on July 15, 1995 and April 12, 1996.

I never related to the teens in John Candy movies. Even when I was a kid, I knew how his characters felt, beat down by life, hangdog in expression. I get how his air traffic controller character Jack Chester feels, overwhelmed by his job yet doing it because he has to and always on the edge of everything flaming out.

Given five weeks off to chill out, Jack and his family — Sandy (Karen Austin) and children Jennifer (Kerri Green), Bobby (Joey Lawrence) and Laurie (Aubrey Jene) — leave Atlanta for Citrus Cove, Florida. They’re barely there when Jack makes an enemy of rich man and sailing champion Al Pellet (Richard Crenna), who forces the entire family out of a fancy restaurant and into the pirate-themed diner of Richard Scully (Rip Torn). The fight gets so bad between them — well, Jack does smash Pellet’s boat — that he buys their vacation home and tries to send them home.

As you can imagine, this ends with a snobs vs. slobs boat race at the Citrus Cove Regatta.

Directed by Carl Reiner and written by Mark Reisman and Jeremy Stevens, Candy felt that the movie was shot too fast. It’s funny but owes so much to National Lampoon’s Vacation. Yet every time I see Candy’s face, it makes me sad. Can you miss someone you never knew?

This was all based on a real vacation that producer Bernie Brillstein took to a beach house. According to Army Archerd, “He returned one night to find the house crawling with uninvited guests-invited by his client John Belushi, who, in soaking wet and sand-filled trunks, was sleeping in Brillstein’s bed.”

Brillstein himself said, “I have five children and I weigh 240 pounds. Being heavy in California is not a terrific thing. Being heavy on the beach is worse. The house on the left was occupied by two elderly sisters, one of whom had a 6-foot-4 inch mentally challenged son who was out of Arsenic and Old Lace. The house on the right was out of Death in Venice, occupied by a chic group of homosexuals who had 28-inch waists and wore peach sweaters.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Screwballs II was on USA Up All Night on January 10 and September 20, 1997.

The protagonists of this movie are Brad Lovett (Bryan Genesse), Marvin Eatmore (Jason Warren), Steve Hardman (Lance Van Der Kolk) and Hugh G. Rection (Alan Deveau) have been sent to Cockswell Academy with the hope that Principal Arsenault (Mike MacDonald) can calm them down.

They’re also misogynistic jerks who have a point score for each woman they sleep with. The ultimate girl for them is Mona Lott (Cynthia Belliveau, Blue Monkey) and they all keep failing. And there’s pretty much the movie.

Also called Loose Screws, this movie was directed by Rafal Zielinski (Hangman’s Curse, Spellcaster and the other Screwballs movies) and written by Michael Cory. Beyond stealing from itself — Screwballs is a ripoff of Porky’s so it’s like when you keep Xeroxing the same Xerox — it has the absolute, well, balls to have a strip club called The Pig Pen that looks just like, you guessed it, Porky’s.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m Dangerous Tonight was on USA Up All Night on June 20, 1992;  July 3, 1993 and June 24, 1994.

Based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich, this Tobe Hooper-directed movie first aired on USA on August 8, 1990. Bruce Lansbury and Philip John Taylor wrote the script.

Tiverton College professor Dr. Jonas Wilson is sent a sacrificial altar that has a carcass inside it that’s wearing a red cloak. Wilson decides to wear the cloak, which possesses him. He murders a security guard, kills his wife and then commits suicide.

Another teacher, Professor Gordon Buchanan (Anthony Perkins), uses Wilson in his lecture on animalism. One of his students, Amy (Madchen Amick) goes from his class to Wilson’s estate sale, where she buys the red cloak and decides to make it into a dress, but not before Eddie (Corey Parker)  — one of the students in a play — tries it on and nearly kills someone.

Amy’s life isn’t too great. Her parents are dead, she lives with her Aunt Martha (Mary Frann), cousin Gloria (Daisy Hall) and invalid grandmother (Natalie Schaefer, Lovey Howell!) who she is made to take care of. This usually keeps her from anything but class, yet she sneaks out to see Eddie at the dance and the red dress she’s made from the cloak compels her into nearly stealing away Gloria’s boyfriend Mason (Jason Brooks).

When she gets home, her grandmother somehow is able to tear the dress off her and tries to save her from it. She falls down the stairs and dies. Gloria, for some reason, now wants the dress. She thinks that Mason is going to propose to her but after they have sex, he tells her that he just got drafted to play in the NFL. She puts on the dress, kills him, rams into Amy and Eddie’s car while they make out and then drives off a cliff, dying in a gigantic fireball.

Wanda the coroner (Dee Wallace) finds the dress on Gloria’s body and it possesses her into killing people. Amy tries to find her, but Wanda finds her first — but not before killing her aunt — and forces her into the dress. Things get, well, as crazy as a made for cable movie can get. Actually, they get real crazy, because this was directed by Tobe Hooper.

Can a movie about a possessed dress be awesome? Yes. This one does it right. It’s a ridiculous idea but some of the most fun movies are, too. I also love when R. Lee Ermey shows up in a movie and he’s the cop on the trail of the dress.