William Girder died in a helicopter crash while scouting locations in 1978. If that hadn’t ended his life, who knows the heights of lunacy he would have achieved?

In just six years, he directed nine feature films — Asylum of Satan, The Get Man, Three on a Meathook, The Manitou, Sheba Baby, Project: Kill, the astonishing Abby, Grizzly and this movie.

This had to have been the first movie about the loss of Earth’s ozone layer. Who knew that it would drive everyone nuts, including animals? Certainly not the hikers in this tale who turn against one another and try to survive all of the animal assaults.

Steve Buckner (Christopher George, who is fighting with Michael Pataki and George Eastman for most appearances on this site) has a dozen or so hikers who are about to go to Sugar Meadow for a nature hike, even though Ranger Chico Tucker (former NFL player Walt Barnes) tells him that the animals have been acting strangely.

Along for this nature trail to hell are anthropologist Professor MacGregor (Richard Jaeckel, Grizzly), a married couple named Frank and Mandy Young (Jon Cedar, who in addition to being a recurring Nazi on Hogan’s Heroes was also the co-star, co-screenwriter and associate producer of The Manitou and Susan Backlinie, the first victim in Jaws), rich Shirley Goodwyn (Ruth Roman from The Baby!), her son Johnny, teenage lovers Bob Dennins (Andrew Stevens, who was in the Night Eyes films) and Beth Hughes, a former pro football player dealing with cancer named Roy Moore, a magical Native American guide named Daniel Santee (Michael Ansara, Killer Kane from the 1980’s Buck Rodgers series as well as the voice of Mr. Freeze), a television reporter named Terry Marsh (Lynda Day George, always ready to scream “BASTARDS!”) and finally, a frenzied Leslie Neilsen in the role of his career as Paul Jenson, an ad executive who acts like every account guy I’ve ever had to deal with in my 24-year-long ad career.

Before you know it, wolves are attacking people in sleeping bags, vultures circle overhead, hawks knock women off cliffs, Leslie Nielsen goes beyond bonkers and kills a dude with a walking stick and threatens to assault women before wrestling a bear and getting his neck torn out, rats attack the sheriff who decides to eat before trying to figure out how to deal with this emergency, dogs turn on the people they loved, rattlesnakes bite people and the military dons hazmats suits to deal with all of it.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this movie is stupid. And awesome. It’s stupid awesome. And if you only know Nielsen from his later comedic roles, take a look at him in this movie. I love this movie. I don’t care what you think of me.

Here’s the drink I’ll be bringing to the drive-in.

Tentacle Painkiller

• 2 oz. Kraken spiced rum
• 4 oz. pineapple juice
• 1 oz. orange juice
• 1 oz. cream of coconut
• Dash of nutmeg
• Pinch of salt

1. Pour rum, pineapple juice, orange juice and cream of coconut into a cocktail shaker with ice. Mix it up.
2. Pour into a glass filled with ice. Drop in salt to give it the taste of the ocean and then top with nutmeg.

Can’t make it to the drive-in? You can watch this on Tubi or get the blu ray from Severin.

If there’s one thing that’s been sure this year, it’s that every few weeks I get to watch a new Chris Stokes movie. The director, working again on the script with Marques Houston, is set to deliver another thriller that plays on one of the biggest fears of married women: a husband who has an affair.

Kenneth (Robert Ri’chard) and Skyler (Annie Ilonzeh) have the dream marriage. However, her best friend Camilla (La’Myia Good) has lost the love of her life, Lance, who has started sleeping with his much older boss. Of course she can live with the couple until she gets on her feet, right?

Can you see where this is already going wrong?

There’s also a friend named Kim played by exotic dancer, socialite and social media personality Blac Chyna, who I only knew from Kardashian gossip. My hatred for that show knows no bounds and somehow, my wife has convinced me to watch so many seasons of it that I can discuss the storylines with some level of intelligence. I mean, as much intelligence as that entails.

Seeing how Kenneth treats Skyler, Camilla starts thinking that maybe she could get some of that. When her best friend is felled by kidney stones, she gets in the marriage bed and makes it happen. But this film at least pushes things where Kenneth wants nothing to do with her and honestly feels contrite, but she forces him again and again to make love to her, using the power that she has to destroy him and his marriage.

The character of the woman who goes mental once she makes love to you seemingly will never go away and this is just one more example of a Fatal Attraction movie, albeit one with a smaller budget. That said, it’s entertaining, as all of Chris Stokes’ films are.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

Piranha almost never made it to the theater. Universal Studios had considered obtaining an injunction to prevent it from being released, particularly as they had Jaws 2 out that year, but the lawsuit was called off after Steven Spielberg himself gave the film a positive comment (he also called the film the “best of the Jaws ripoffs”).

Joe Dante is my favorite type of filmmaker. Even when you think you know what to expect, he zigs and zags, giving you genuine surprises and fun at every turn.

The action starts with two teens swimming in the waters of an abandoned military base — as you do. Of course, they’re instantly obliterated by an unseen creature.

Skiptracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies, who beyond being the wife of Robert Urich was Louisa Con Trapp in The Sound of Music and even appeared in an August 1973 Playboy pictorial entitled “Tender Trapp”) is looking for those missing teens and she’s hired Paul Grogran (Bradford Dillman, who battled many an ecological horror in Bug, The Swarm and Lords of the Deep) for help. He’s a drunk and surly mountain man, which in the 1970s makes you a sex symbol.

Why is Grogan so multi-layered? It turns out that Bradford Dillman wasn’t pleased with how flat his character originally was, so he asked writer John Sayles why. The response was that producer Roger Corman never hired good actors, so he rarely wrote nuanced characters. However, Dillman offered Sayles the opportunity to do something deeper, if you’ll pardon the pun.

They discover the abandoned compound where the teens died and discover that it’s a militarized fish hatchery. Maggie drains the outside pool and discovers too late that she’s released Operation: Razorteeth, a strain of piranha made to survive the cold North Vietnamese rivers and win the war in Southeast Asia.

That’s when Grogan realizes that if the local dam is somehow opened, the piranha will attack the Lost River water park and the camp where his daughter is spending the summer. Everybody pays the price for the piranha, like their now crazed creator Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Soon, the military is involved and our heroes are on the run, trying to warn the media and anyone that will listen that these killer fish are on their way. Nothing will stop them, not even the poison that Colonel Waxman and Dr. Mengers (Barbara Steele!) think will do the job.

Of course, the fish survive and attack the summer camp, wiping out nearly everyone but Suzie thanks to her fear of water. Now, they’re on their way to Buck Gordon’s (Dick Miller, perfect as always) waterpark, where they end up killing Waxman.

Grogan and Maggie come up with a totally ridiculous plan: to use the hazardous waste from the smelting plant to kill off the fish before they spread into the ocean. Our hero, such as he is, must go deep underwater to make this happen and he barely survives, left in a catatonic state at the end of the film.

Dr. Mengers gives the government’s side of the story, downplaying the danger of the piranha and saying there’s nothing left to fear, but as we see another beach, we now hear the sound of the deadly school of fish.

Beyond Dick Miller, this film features plenty of actors that Dante would work with again and again, like Belinda Balaski, the film’s writer John Sayles and the always welcome Paul Bartel. Plus, Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn shows up, but we all know him better as his stage name, Keenan Wynn. And another Invasion of the Body Snatchers alum, Richard Deacon, is here as well.

Piranha is the rarest of films — one that rises above being a simple ripoff and comes close to eclipsing the source material. It’s quick, bloody and fun as hell, with awesome effects from Phil Tippett and the debuting Rob Bottin, who was only 17 at the time.

Can’t make it to the drive-in? You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Miracle Beach was on USA Up All Night on March 10 and October 7, 1995; December 21, 1996 and September 19, 1997.

Scotty McKay (Dean Cameron) is a beach bum who used to be rich. Then he finds a lamp and a genie named, well, Jeannie (Ami Dolenz). Thanks to her, he’s pretty much rich again and has Jeannie to do everything he wants, even win over a supermodel named Dana (Felicity Waterman, Vanessa Hunt from Knots Landing). Except that Jeannie isn’t allowed to assist her master with love and why would she? She’s the one in love with him.

Sometimes I get down on myself. Then I think about Vincent Schiavelli. He was seriously talented and yet here he is, playing a mystic in Miracle Beach when he should have been acting in way better movies. Yet he always showed up and worked hard. Martin Mull, too, who is in this as the stock bad guy. Pat Morita and Alexis Arquette are also in the cast.

This movie was made in PG, R and unrated editions. So the family could watch one version and another could be on USA Up All Night. Oh yeah! Monique Gabrielle shows up! And it was called Miracle Beach: Hard Bodies II in Australia.

Director Skott Snyder directed a whole bunch of Playboy videos and writer Scott Bindley wrote the cartoon The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature as well as Cop and a Half: New Recruit and Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite. That totally all makes sense.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force was on USA Up All Night on March 29 and 30 and November 9, 1991; April 3 and October 9, 1992 and February 6, 1993.

Donald Jackson is the same man who brought us Hell Comes to Frogtown as well as forty more movies, including The Demon Lover, I Like to Hurt People, an entire series of roller blade-themed movies that includes the movie I’m going to talk about now, as well as Roller Blade, The Roller Blade Seven, Legend of the Roller Blade, Return of the Roller Blade Seven, Rollergator and Hawk Warriors of the Wheelzone and an entire series of sequels in Frogtown like Frogtown 2, Toad Warrior, Max Hell Frog Warrior and Max Hell Frog Warrior: A Zen Rough Cut.

Donald Jackson’s movies started weird and stayed that way.

Gretchen Hope (Elizabeth Kaitan!) is traveling the wasteland protected by a nun from The Cosmic Order of the Roller Blade named Karin Cross (Kathleen Kinmont). Except that Karin gets hit with a rock and some mutants drag Gretchen to be sacrificed.

This also has Rory Calhoun in it, which kind of blows my mind, and Suzanne Solari played Sharon Cross, the same character she was in Roller Blade.

I have so many questions, like how do people roller blade in the desert and how can a movie with half-naked women warriors on roller blades actually be boring, but this movie figure that out I guess.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hamburger: The Motion Picture was on USA Up All Night on November 9, 1990; May 31 and June 1, 1991 and February 1 and September 18, 1992.

My wife asked me, “Why would anyone watch this movie?” She doesn’t get it. She wasn’t around in the 1980s, when we had no internet. She wasn’t going through puberty. She’ll never understand staying up until 3:15 AM to catch a movie about Hamburger University and the joy that it can bring.

Russell Proco (Leigh McCloskey, who improbably is also in Argento’s Inferno) has been kicked out of multiple schools because he can’t stop hooking up. There’s a trust fund waiting for him if he can get a diploma. So he picks the one school he knows he can graduate from — Buster Burger University.

You know why the 1980s were great? Because Dick Butkus could be in a movie and we all knew exactly who his character was. Here, his job is to beat the hell out of the students so they don’t screw up Buster Burger. Everyone has to follow the rules:

1. Outside consumption of food is prohibited.
2. All candidates are to stay on the grounds of Buster Burger University until graduation.
3. Since sex and success make lousy partners, all candidates are not to engage in sex while students.

This is a movie that follows the best formula: just get a bunch of crazy characters together, get them into some insane situations and let the hijinks ensue. Along the way, Russell makes a friend who is obsessed with the CEO’s sexy wife (the pneumatic Randi Brooks, who is also in TerrorVision), a nun who for some reason is going to burger school, a sex-crazed guerilla fighter, a soul singer who was arrested and is at the school on work release and so much more.

Where else other than Buster Burger University can you learn to yell things like “Put those cookies back, motherfucker,” get stuck inside a giant pickle and then have to battle against bikers and cops on your first day of work?

Most amazingly, director Mike Marvin would go on to make a movie that is even less connected to reality, The Wraith.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tomboy was on USA Up All Night on February 4 and September 11, 1994; March 3 and November 4, 1995; May 10 and December 21, 1996 and July 18, 1997.

Tomasina “Tommy” Boyd isn’t like the other girls. No, she’s not sneaking into school and switching her gender like Terri/Terry Griffith. But unlike all her friends, she’s more into fixing and racing cars than boys. This is presented as something completely out of the sphere of reality, as if she were some mutant.

Herb Freed, who directed Tomboy, has a pretty fun resume, with movies like Beyond Evil, Haunts and Graduation Day to his credit.

For some reason, this confident woman has a crush on a total jerk, racecar driver and male chauvinist Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher, Superboy), who doesn’t take her seriously because, you know, she’s a girl.

Certainly, the main reason to see this is because Betsy Russell has the lead. Modern folks may know her from the Saw movies, but for my generation, she was much better known for starring as Molly “Angel” Stewart in Avenging Angel, as well as appearances in Private School, Cheerleader Camp and Camp Fear, which steals its poster art from Body Count.

I love that someone once asked about Russell how the trailer for this movie positions Tomasina as a strong woman and then cuts to her in the shower. The actress replied, “I’ve never really paid attention to that. I guess strong females still have to take showers. They still like to feel sexy, so I don’t think there’s one thing that should stop someone from feeling sexy and showing their body if that’s what they choose to do. I don’t think it makes any difference in the world.”

Kristi Summers from Savage Streets and Hell Comes to Frogtown plays our heroine’s friends, who cares more about boys than cars and she’s normal, of course. Plus, Cynthia Thompson — Cavegirl! — and scream queen Michelle Bauer also show up.

If this movie came out in 2020, it would be decimated on social media and rightly so. I mean, can you imagine a movie that purports to being female empowerment coming out today where the main character only proves herself by repeatedly showing off her breasts?