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.

From 1972 to 1978, William Girder directed nine feature films and would have probably never stopped, were it not for the helicopter crash that took his life while scouting the Philippines filming locations. From Asylum of Satan and Three on a Meathook to The Manitou, Sheba Baby and Project: Kill, his films may have been derivative but they made money.

Here’s the best example. Around these parts, Girder is celebrated for Abby, a movie that was removed from theaters because of its similarity (let’s say total ripoff) of The Exorcist. That brings us to Grizzly, which is essentially Jaws on dry land. With a bear. A grizzly bear.

Grizzly found its inspiration when its producer and writer, Harvey Flaxman, came face to face with a bear during a camping trip. Co-producer and co-writer David Sheldon thought about how they could make a bear version of Jaws and they wrote a script that Girdler discovered and offered to finance, as long as he could direct.

Grizzly begins with military vet and helicopter pilot Don Stober (Andrew Prine, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, The Eliminators, Amityville II: The Possession) flying over a national park and explaining how the woods remain untouched, much like they were in when Native Americans made their homes here.

The first two attacks happen quickly — in bear POV no less — when two female hikers are dismembered by the ursus arctos horribilis villain of this story. That brings in park ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George, Gates of Hell/City of the Living Dead, Day of the Animals, Mortuary, Pieces) and photographer Allison Corwin (Joan McCall, who besides being in Devil Times Five is also married to the film’s writer, Sheldon) in on the case.

At the hospital, a doctor tells the park ranger that a bear killed the girls, but the park’s supervisor blames the ranger and naturalist Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel, The Dark, Mako: The Jaws of Death and TV’s Salvage 1) for the girls’ deaths. And guess what? Just like Jaws, there’s no way the park is getting closed before tourist season.

The rangers all decide to search the mountain for the grizzly, which isn’t accounted for in their census of animals in the park. One of the rangers — of course — decides to get nude in a waterfall because that’s what you do when you’re hunting a killer bear and gets murked for her stupidity.

Kelly and Stober think they have found the bear from the air, yet it’s just naturalist Scott wearing an animal pelt and tracking the bear himself. Scott tells them that this bear is actually a prehistoric version of the grizzly that stands 15 feet tall and weighs at least 2,000 pounds.

No matter how many people the grizzly kills, no one will close the park. So when the story becomes national news, the owners of the park — a national park can have owners? — allow amateur hunters to shoot the shark (this has nothing to do with the very same thing happening in Jaws, right?). Those hunters are pretty much the worst people ever, as they use a bear cub as bait, thinking the grizzly will protect its young. Nope — it eats that baby bear and keeps on coming.

The grizzly literally shreds his way through the park and nobody closes it down until it murders a young mother and mutilates her child. And get this — the grizzly is so smart, it knows how to bury the naturalist in the ground and then waits for him to wake up so it can kill him. Can a bear be a slasher killer? Well, we already know that Bigfoot can be, thanks to Night of the Demon.

The grizzly kills every hero in this movie other than Kelly the photographer, who magically finds a bazooka in the wrecked helicopter and remembers the end of every shark movie: you must blow this beast up real good. She does and that’s the end of Grizzly.

An interesting personal note: I was telling my dad about this movie and he remembered that it has played on a bus that took he and my mother on a casino trip. That’s right — at 1 AM, pitch blackness, the TV on their bus blared this gorefest as loudly as possible. “I couldn’t wait for that movie to end,” was my mother’s review. My father’s was a bit kinder.

Warner Brothers originally wanted to finance Grizzly, but were furious that Edward L. Montoro and Film Ventures International (FVI) had taken the project. That’s because a year before, the studio sued both of these companies for copyright infringement when they released Beyond the Door in the US.

Sadly, while Grizzly was one of 1976’s best-performing films, earning $39 million worldwide (adjusted for inflation, that’s around $177 million in 2018 dollars), its distributor Edward L. Montoro and Film Ventures International kept all the profits. Girdler and Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon (the film’s screenwriters/producers) had to sue to get their share.

Even after all that, Girdler still directed Day of the Animals, a spiritual sequel to Grizzly, for Montoro. While this film added Leslie Nielsen and Lynda Day George to the returning cast of Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel, it wasn’t as successful.

Grizzly just seems like a movie that’s buried in legal shenanigans. A sequel, Grizzly II: The Predator (also known as Grizzly II: The Concert, a title that would assuredly guarantee that I would buy this film) was made in 1983.

Filmed in Hungary by André Szöts and written by Sheldon, the co-producer and writer of the original, it was never released. The film had Louise Fletcher, John Rhys-Davies and unknowns but about to be big stars like Charlie Sheen (who took this movie over the lead in Karate Kid), George Clooney and Laura Dern in the cast, as well as live performances (hence Grizzly II: The Concert) by musicians like Toto Coelo (who had one song I can name, “I Eat Cannibals Part 1”) and Landscape III.

The movie was such a mess that the film’s caterer ended up rewriting it. And while the main filming was completed, special effects and all of the actual bear footage wasn’t. That’s because the film’s executive producer Joseph Proctor had disappeared with the money (and may have even been already jailed when filming began). While a mechanical bear was to be used, there was still footage shot of a live bear attacking concert-goers filmed (!). There’s a bootleg workprint, but the full film has ever emerged. This New York Post article has even more amazing info about Grizzly 2. Now that film has been released, if you’d like to see it.

Finally, a trivia note for comic book fans. The amazing poster for this movie? Neal Adams did the art.

And in the universe of Tarantino, Don Stober was played by Rick Dalton, not Andrew Prine.

Here’s the recipe I’ll be bringing.

Honey Bear

• 1 oz. bourbon
• 2 oz. apple cider
• 1/2 oz. Cointreau
• 1 oz. honey, orange and sage syrup
• Sliced orange

Pre-work: To make the syrup use the following ingredients:

• 1 cup water
• 1/3 cup honey
• 3 tbsp. sugar
• 1 tsp. ground sage
• 2 orange slices
• 1 tsp. orange zest

1. Heat a small pan on high, then heat up all ingredients to boiling.
2. Simmer for 3 minutes and let cool. Store in refrigerator for up to a week.

To make the drink:

1. Pour bourbon and honey, orange and sage syrup in an ice-filled glass.
2. Top with apple cider.

You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.

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.

Did Roger Corman sit in a room screaming, “Make me more amphibian monster movies NOW!” into the telephone? Because this week, that’s the feeling that I’m getting. This time, Barbara Peeters got the call (Joe Dante turned this one down), although the final film was nothing like she wanted it to be and she tried — and failed — to get her name removed from the credits.

Fishermen catch what looks like a monster. Then, the son of one of them is dragged under the waves by an unseen beast. Another fisherman fires a flare gun that sets the whole boat on fire, killing everyone. Pre-credits, this movie is already meaner and better than most of what we’ve watched this week.

Jim Hill (Doug McClure, TV’s The Virginian) and his wife Carol (Cindy Weintraub, The Prowler) see the boat blow up and then their dog gets eaten (and his remains thrown up on their porch). So yeah. Things are off to quite the start.

Meanwhile, Jerry and Peggy (Lynn Schiller, Without Warning) are swimming and fooling around, but Jerry ends up torn apart and a fishman rapes the girl, causing the director to want to leave the picture. Seriously — they kept her name on the film. Time’s up, Roger Corman.

That scene is repeated with Billy (future ventriloquist David Strassman) and Becky, with yet another fish on female rape. All manner of folks are attacked, but Peggy somehow survives.

Meanwhile, Canco is opening their new canning operation in town. It turns out that the monsters that are fucking everyone to death are the result of Canco using HGH on salmon that were in turn eaten by larger fish who then turned into humanoids. From the deep? Yes. Humanoids from the Deep.

Luckily, Jim and Dr. Susan Drake are on the case. Their big plan? At the town’s fish fest, when the beasts attack, they dump gasoline in the lake and set it on fire. So not only is there no safe zone for women, fuck the environment, too. While all this is going on, Carol is attacked by two monsters but survives. Oh yeah! Vic Morrow is in this mess, too. And if you think Peggy is going to give birth to a fish baby, then you haven’t been watching this film.

Actress Ann Turkel chose to do this film — originally titled Beneath the Darkness — because: “It was an intelligent suspenseful science-fiction story with a basis in fact and no sex.” She was enraged as well at what the final film ended up being.

Corman remade this film for Showtime in 1996, with the sex and violence scaled down. That said, he of course reused the Salmon Festival footage for the remake. Why actually shoot something new?

Well, if you’re looking for a grimy, fishy film, this is it.

Won’t be at the drive-in? You can watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Basic Training was on USA Up All Night on March 4, August 5 and December 8, 1989; June 29 and 30, 1990; January 4 and August 31, 1991 and May 15, 1992.

I love that this movie had the working title Up the Pentagon, like the abortive 1980 Mad Magazine movie Up the Academy. It’s the only movie ever directed by Andrew Sugerman, who has executive produced movies like Shopgirl, Death Sentence and Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

Ann Dusenberry, Tina — the beauty queen from Jaws 2 — is Melinda, a newcomer to the Pentagon who is shocked by the way that they sexually harass her. For a few minutes, I was thinking that this 1985 comedy was incredibly woke and ahead of its time.

Then I realized that I was watching a 1985 sex comedy and that Melinda will instead use her sexual wiles to get back at everyone via a campaign of her own harassment and making old men think she’s going to sleep with them.

Angela Aames from Fairy Tales and Chopping Mall — she was also Linda “Boom-Boom” Bangs in H.O.T.S. — and Rhonda Shear of USA’s Up All Night are also in this.

Tying into my love of spy films, Walter Gotell plays a KGB head. This is a role he knew well, what with playing General Anatol Gogol in The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View To a Kill and The Living Daylights. He’s joined by Marty Brill as an American general.

You can watch it on YouTube:

EDITOR’S NOTE: Staying Alive was on USA Up All Night on September 16, 1995.

Saturday Night Fever producer and writer Robert Stigwood and Norman Wexler dreamed of a sequel to the film pretty much since the original was released. What they came up with, Staying Alive, was a script that John Travolta disliked. It was too much of a downer and he couldn’t be convinced to do the film for several years.

Finally, after four years of this, Travolta and Stigwood met. The star had an idea. What if Tony Manero became a dancer on Broadway? And what if he was a big star? Wexler thought that it would be better if Manero ended up in the chorus and the two reached an agreement to start the film.

Travolta had just seen Rocky III and wanted the same energy for Staying Alive. Paramount got Sylvester Stallone on board, Travolta told him his idea of the happy ending and toned down the rawness of the original film.

What emerged was…well, whatever this movie is.

Tony Manero was once the king of 2001 Odyssey, ruling the disco dance floor. Now, he lives in poverty and works on his dream of being in a modern dance musical. When he isn’t teaching or dancing, he’s a waiter that’s constantly beset upon by beautiful women. Ah, the sad life of Tony Manero — constantly getting laid and dancing his heart out.

Our hero has changed — moving away from Brooklyn has matured him somewhat and toned down the levels of profanity he used to freely toss around. But he’s still horrible to women, particularly his dancer and rock singer girlfriend Jackie (Cynthia Rhodes, Tina Tech from Flashdance and Penny from Dirty Dancing; she’s also in Xanadu, but let’s cut her some slack). He can go after anyone, but she has to be his alone. Speaking of guys that surround Jackie, Richie Sambora and Frank Stallone play in her band.

Tony’s really into Laura (Finola Hughes, who was nominated for both the Worst New Star and Worst Supporting Actress Razzies for her role in this film; she’s also in The Apple, pretty much damning her soul to bad dance movie hell for all eternity). He pursues her right into a one night stand and can’t understand why that’s all it ends up being. She replies, “Everyone uses everybody.”

Jackie and Tony break up just in time for the two of them — and Laura — to try out for the biggest dance musical to ever hit Broadway — Satan’s Alley. They get small parts and our villain gets the lead. Look for Patrick Swayze as one of the other backup dancers.

This leads Tony into his very own walkabout spirit quest, where he takes the 16 mile walk from Manhattan to Bay Ridge. The 2001 Odyssey is now Spectrum, a gay club, and this makes him realize how much his life has changed. He apologizes to his mother for how he was. She tells him that being so selfish is how he escaped a dead-end life. Of note, Donna Pescow was to return in the audience of Tony’s Broadway show and Tony’s father (Val Bisoglio) filmed scenes that were deleted. Now, the film implies that he is dead.

Tony and Jackie get back together, with her helping him work hard and take over the vacant lead male role. While he and Laura openly hate one another, they have as much chemistry dancing vertically as they once did horizontally. Tony takes things too far on the sold out opening night and kisses her at the end of the first act; she responds by slashing at his face.

Backstage, the director flips out on Tony and Laura tries to lure him back into bed. The second act is everything of the 1980s — fog, lasers, glitter, silver lame and probably metric tons of white flake. Our hero throws away Laura at the end and goes wild with his very own solo dance before she jumps back into his arms to a standing ovation. He reunites for good with Jackie and celebrates as only he can — by recreating the strut from the beginning of Saturday Night Fever.

Despite being a critical failure — that’s putting it mildly —  Staying Alive was a commercial success. The film opened with the biggest weekend for a musical film ever with a gross of $12 million dollars, finally earning $127 million on a $22 million budget.

I have my own theory on this film: it’s a Jacob’s Ladder situation.

Some time after Saturday Night Fever, Tony died. As dance was the most important thing in his life, his limbo — the time between heaven and hell — is spent trying to get a role as a dancer. The play Satan’s Alley is quite literally the place he could go to, if he makes the wrong choice. His apartment building is filled with other dead people; his life of constant temptation is the devil trying to convince him to follow him and give up on purity, just as Satan once led his brother Frank Jr. to renounce the priesthood.

Tony’s walk back to his hometown is literally a journey to the land of the dead — his mother is the one who has passed on and that’s why she can now forgive him. 2001 Odyssey, once a place full of life, has now become Tony’s worst fear, a loss of his masculinity. The place where his racist, gay bashing friends once called home has become their hell.

When Tony dances on to the Broadway stage, he must choose — heaven or hell. Or, as he does, making one’s own choice. He tosses Laura — the scarlet woman, the temptress — down to joyously dance and realize his full potential. He offers a hand in forgiveness to her before realizing his one true love — no, not Jackie. Himself. He struts down the street and on his way to heaven, which is embodied in the alpha and omega of Saturday Night Live and Staying Alive as that strut, down the street, to the Bee Gees.

Sometimes, a movie is so bad that you have to invent your own mythology to get through it. This, obviously, would be one of those films. Just don’t ask me to explain that Stallone cameo in the beginning.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Virgin High was on USA Up All Night on June 4 and December 4, 1993; November 25, 1994; August 12, 1995 and March 8, 1996.

Christy Murphy’s (Tracy Dali, who was June in Click: The Calendar Girl Killer) strict Catholic parents — Burt Ward is her dad — are worried that their daughter is having sex with her boyfriend Jerry (Richard Gabai, who directed and co-wrote the script; he also made Assault of the Party Nerds). They send her to the Academy of the Blessed Virgin, an all-girls religious school but Jerry shows up as a priest, more determined than ever to finally sleep with Christy.

This is a movie that dares have Linnea Quigley as a character who looks down on teens who have sex, so that’s definitely a twist I didn’t see coming. Michelle Bauer is also in the cast as sex education teacher Miss Bush and this was Leslie Mann’s first movie.

Somehow — and don’t worry, we’ll get to it — Jerry would return in Hot Under the Collar, another movie in which he had to become a priest and get the girl. One would think that this plan has no way of working but somehow Jerry was able to pull it off both times.

To learn more about this movie, I invite you to check out The Schlock Pit, where the great David Wain interviewed Gabai.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Paperboy was on USA Up All Night on December 8, 1995 and January 16, 1998.

Canada may seem like our polite neighbor to the north, but they really export some amazingly bonkers movies. Under the surface, they’re boiling with films that challenge convention and embrace the weird. Take this movie, which starts with its 12-year-old antagonist, paperboy Johnny McFarley smothering an old woman with a plastic bag.

After that stunning open, we meet Melissa (Alexandra Paul, the virgin Connie Swail from Dragnet), a teacher who returns home to learn that her mother — yep, the old woman — is dead. She takes her daughter Cammie home with her for the funeral, where Johnny is way too excited to see her. He ingratiates himself into the funeral proceedings and then hides a baby monitor in a vent so he can keep up on what Melissa is doing. Yep. Our paperboy is in love.

What he can’t deal with is the fact that she has a boyfriend, Brian (William Katt). But he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win her over, from turning busybodies into paraplegics to killing his own father with a golf putter and giving another old lady a heart attack by faking the death of her dog. He even smacks Brian with a baseball bat and leaves him inside a burning boat.

Yes, this is a child who goes from sweet and approachable to pure menace in seconds. How dare you go on a date when he wanted to make you some barbecue, Melissa!

This is a sort of remake of 1992’s Mikey by way of another Canadian movie where all someone wants is a happy family, 1987’s The Stepfather.

Sadly, this is a movie that’s near impossible to find, as it’s never been released on DVD. You can, however, find it at the VHSPS.

BONUS: You can listen to us discuss this movie on our podcast.

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.

There are tons of Bigfoot films to watch. Trust us, we know. We have an entire Letterboxd list packed with the ones we’ve made it through. And we know that Scarecrow has an even larger section in the store that’s all Yeti, skunkape and Sasquatch-based.

We decided to go back to the classics and rewatch this 1974 Michael Findlay film, in which Professor Ernst Prell takes four of his graduate students — Keith Henshaw, Karen Hunter, Tom Nash and Lynn Kelly — into the woods to discover if the Yeti really does exist.

Despite a mysterious dinner the night before — their dish of gin sung is broken up by a drunken former student and his wife who loudly proclaim that the last trip to see a Bigfoot got everyone killed — everyone decides that going into the brush to find the beast is a dandy idea.

As if that isn’t enough, that lout keeps drinking and decides to cut his wife’s throat with an electric turkey knife before she responds in kind by dumping a toaster into the bloody bathwater as he tries to clean himself up.

When the students get to Boot Island, they have more gin sung, meet a mute Native American named Laughing Crow and listen to Tom strum a little tune he wrote about the Yeti, who liked that song so much that he rips Tom apart, leaving only his leg as evidence.

The professor isn’t someone I’d like to have as a teacher, as he’s willing to use that leg and the body of another of the students, Lynn, as bait to catch his white whale. Or white Yeti, you get the allusion.

That said, the reveal of this all — spoiler warning for a 46-year-old movie — is that there’s no Bigfoot at all, but a big society of cannibals looking for either victims to be fresh meat or those willing to help them consume the flesh of their fellow man.

If you’re a big film geek like me — seeing as how you’re reading about a Sasquatch film from the last century when you could be doing something much more productive, I get the feeling that you are — you’ll wonder, did the print Sam saw have Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” in the soundtrack? Yes. It did. It sure did.

In 1982, if you were lucky enough to still have a drive-in around ou, chances are you could have seen this movie as part of an event named 5 Deranged Features. Don’t be fooled by some of these titles, as you may have seen them all before! They’re Coming to Get You is not All the Colors of the Dark, but instead Al Adamson’s Frankenstein vs. Dracula. House of Torture is The Wizard of Gore. Night of the Howling Beast is The Corpse Grinders. And Creature from Black Lake wasn’t so lucky as to get a name change.

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

Yeti

• 1 1/2 oz. gin
• 1/2 oz. blue Curaçao
• 3 oz. lemonade (you can make it yourself or just go off the shelf)
• Club soda
• Lemon wedges

1. Combine gin and the lemonade in a glass with ice.
2. Add blue Curaçao and top with club soda. Stir using a mixing spoon and garnish with lemon wedges.

Can’t make it to the drive-in? Watch it 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.

When a movie has the working title Want A Ride, Little Girl? you know it’s going to be scummy. What may surprise you is that William Shatner — who director William Gréfe met at an airport — is in the lead role.

Don’t be fooled by the supernatural looking poster. No, this is a slasher with Shatner’s Matt Stone as the bad guy picking up young women, freaking out Shat-style and getting rid of their bodies. He’s being trailed by a detective named Karate Pete (Harold “Oddjob” Sakata), which is, pardon the pun, pretty odd. He’s on the trail because Stone keeps bilking and killing old women for their money.

Jennifer Bishop (who is also in Gréfe’s Mako the Jaws of Death) plays the daughter of one of these older women who suspects that the leisure suit-wearing Stone is a shyster. And oh yeah — Ruth Roman is in this!

Sakata almost died making this, as the rig that was used for his hanging death failed and he was nearly hung for real. Shatner saved his life — breaking a finger in the process — and the entire accident can be seen on the He Came from the Swamps documentary.

This movie belongs to Shatner. As a child, his character kills William Kerwin with a sword in a kind of pre-Pieces opening, then murders a puppy and gets so worked up in one scene that he supposedly farts on camera. His assortment of 70’s fashions are pretty astounding and every single frame of this feels as sweaty and gross as a night in the Everglades.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rock ‘n’ Roll High School Forever was on USA Up All Night but I can’t find the dates!

I love Rock ‘n’ Roll High School inversely to how much I dislike this movie.

Maybe I’m too old and it’s too loud, but the kids in this movie aren’t fun and rebellious. They’re actually annoying and that kind of makes me sad.

Blame is to be laid at the feet of Jesse Davis, the lead singer of  the Eradicators and the leader of the rebellious kids who defy authority by blowing up toilets. He hangs with Mag (Evan Richards) and critiques his burps. Richards was hired because he looked like Corey Haim and, well, they could have just hired Corey Haim.

When he isn’t singing like Michael Jackson or opining like an expert on everything, Jesse is trying to pick up a new music teaching named Rita (Sarah G. Buxton) which doesn’t feel high school cool, it feels like pressure on his end and oh yeah, she’s an adult older than him and that’s illegal.

The rest of the band is sax player Jones (Patrick Malone) and really, I hate bands that have dedicated sax players. They also have a karate kicking bass player named narock (Steven Ho) and Stella, the only female member, guitarist and also only reason to watch this movie — with one upcoming exception — who is played by Liane Curtis, who always is the sidekick in these movies. For evidence, watch Sixteen Candles. Is it any surrpise she became a Girlfriend from Hell? Also: Her father is Jack Curtis, who directed, produced, shot and edited The Flesh Eaters and did the dubbing for everything from Speed Racer (he was Pops Racer and Inspector Detector), Gamera the Invincble and Planet of the Vampires to Prince of Space and Mothra vs. Godzilla. Sadly, he died at the age of 40 because he was allergic to penecillin and there was no other treatment for his pnuemonia.

The other reason to watch is, of course, Mary Woronov, who plays Dr. Vadar, the new Vice Principal who can remove her hand and replace it with a metal claw or a whip. Also: Rob Zombie had to have seen this movie, as the witch Tabatha is played by Brynn Horrocks. In The Lords of Salem, she plays one of the first witches of Salem, Mary Webster.

It’s directed and written by Deborah Bock, which is a disappointment, as I love her Slumber Party Massacre II. It starts on Rock ‘n’ Roll High School Day, which honours the day in the first film where the students blew up Vince Lombardi High. But there are no Ramones here — don’t your parents know that you’re Ramones? — just posters of them randomly. Principal McGee returns, but it’s not Paul Bartel. Instead it’s Larry Linville. Eaglebauer also comes back, but instead of Clint Howard, it’s Michael Cerveris.

Well, Dee Dee is on the soundtrack. And the part with Mojo Nixon as the Spirit of Rock ‘n Roll is kind of cute. It’s not Mojo’s best role — that would be Toad in Super Mario Brothers — but he does elevate the proceedings.

But Corey Feldman playing 50s classics as 90s versions is not Joey showing up in Riff Randell’s bedroom to sing “I Want You Around.” Speaking of music, the soundtrack is all over the place with The Pursuit of Happiness, Thompson Twins, The Divinyls, Eleven, Tackhead, The Ventures and, as you imagined, Corey Feldman & The Eradicators. SBK was going to release the soundtrack but supposedly Feldman’s rehab stint put them off, because all record labels are against rock stars getting off drugs.

In his book Coreyography — ugh — Feldman writes about how he was a heroin user during filming and came to set with heroin residue dripping from his nose. When a stage hand discretely brought it to his attention, Feldman and turned it into an angry scene, claiming the stuff under his nose was from an engine he was fixing.