EDITOR’S NOTE: The Pink Chiquitas aired on USA Up All Night on September 8 and 9, 1989; January 20 and August 3, 1990 and April 20 and August 9, 1991.

Frank Stallone as Tony Mareda Jr., a former Olympic athlete and now a detective who fights with the mob the whole way to a drive-in located in Beamsville that soon has a meteor crash down and transform all of the women in sex-obsessed maniacs. Soon, Tony and news anchor Bruce Pirrie are trying to save the men of the town from Mary Anne Kowalski (Elizabeth Edwards) and her literal army of women. And their pink tank, too.

The meteor has the voice of Earth Kitt. Along with Stallone, she performs the Paul Zaza-written songs.

Why do I keep doing this to myself? Don’t I need sleep?

This is the only full-length movie that Tony Currie directed and wrote, but he also worked on sound for Prom Night, Naked Lunch and Eastern Promises.

But seriously, this movie doesn’t have much to say. I was hoping that this would be some kind of secret classic — I mean, look at the poster art — but I struggled throughout. In a world where Invasion of the Bee Girls and Voyage of the Rock Aliens are already made, why did this even happen? What new could it say?

The filmmakers did, however, get all they could out of Art of Noise’s “Peter Gunn theme.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: House II: The Second Story aired on USA Up All Night on July 7, 1990; February 8, 1991 and June 13, 1992.

Ethan Wiley, who injected the humor into the original House script, returns to direct the sequel, which comes from a story by Fred Dekker that Wiley adapted. If you disliked the comedy in the original film, well, get ready. This one has no interest in being serious.

Prologue: a young couple gives up their child before an undead gunman murders them in their mansion. That baby grows up to be Jesse (Arye Gross, who was the original voice of Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years before Daniel Stern took over), who decides to move back into that house with his girlfriend Kate (Lar Park Lincoln, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood). They’re soon joined by goofball friend Charlie (Jonathan Stark, Fright Night) and his wannabe rock star girlfriend Lana (Amy Yasbeck, who met husband John Ritter on the set of Problem Child).

Jesse has insomnia, which leads to him digging through the basement. He discovers a photo of his great-great-grandfather (Royal Dano, who starred in plenty of cowboy films) standing in front of an Aztec temple with a crystal skull in his hand. In the background is Slim Reeser, his one-time partner turned enemy over the ownership of the skull.

At this point, anyone would be happy to discover this photo and move on with their life. But that’s normal life. Here, Jesse and Charlie decide to dig up his ancestor’s grave to find the skull. Imagine their surprise when Gramps is still alive inside his coffin. Compound that with the fact that he wants to bond with his grandson.

It turns out that the house was built with stones from an Aztec temple and that it contains gateways into other time periods with the skull acting as the remote control, if you will. The forces of evil are drawn to the skull, though, so the boys better be ready to defend it.

Meanwhile, a Halloween party ends up with the boys losing their girls and an appearance by Bill Maher as a record exec. A caveman also attacks the party guests looking for a skull and a baby pterodactyl and a caterpillar-dog come along for the ride.

To compound the film’s weirdness, Bill (John Ratzenberger, who like George Wendt in House was a star on TV’s Cheers) comes to inspect the wiring, but he’s really an adventurer with a sword in his toolbox. He leads the guys through a portal — he’s incredibly nonchalant about the proceedings — and helps them save a virgin who is about to be sacrificed.

During a meal where Jesse embraces his new family — yes, a family that includes a dinosaur and a dog-headed caterpillar — Slim makes his return, rising out of a serving dish. He shoots Gramps, who reveals that this is the man who killed Jesse’s parents. Jesse defeats the evil gunfighter, but can’t save Gramps, who tells him that its time to say goodbye.

The cops come to the house, alerted by all the gunfire, and prepare to fire on Jesse. He uses the skull to go back in time to the Old West, taking his friends and pets with him. The film ends with him burying Gramps and using the crystal skull to make his grave, as he follows the old man’s dying advice and doesn’t become addicted to the skull’s magic.

Interestingly enough, Marvel Comics did an adaption of the film!

House 2 is something else. It’s never sure what kind of movie it wants to be, but it gets so strange that you just feel like you have to go along for the ride. The scenes with Bill are great fun and the ending drama always makes me tear up. And you have to love the caterpuppy.

If you’re confused by the fact that this movie has nothing to do with the original House, the way the movie was released in Italy is going to blow your mind.

The Evil Dead was called La Casa there and Evil Dead II followed that numbering. But as we all know, Italian filmmakers are fond of making their own sequels. That’s what led Joe D’Amato to make La Casa 3, which was released here as Ghosthouse*.

Two other sequels in name only, La Casa 4 (released in the US as Witchery) and La Casa 5 (Beyond Darkness) followed. Yes, those are coming up this week as well!

So here’s where it gets confusing. Our House 2 is La Casa 6. And The Horror Show, a movie that is pretty much the same film as Shocker, is La Casa 7. But in the US, The Horror Show was sold as House 3, despite having nothing to do with any of the other movies. Huh? What? A final sequel with William Katt reprising his Roger Cobb role would come out in 1992.

I totally love how confusing things like this can be. And I love the La Casa series!

Check out this article to learn even more about how all of these movies work together.

*Even more confusing — House of Witchcraft is called Ghosthouse 4.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: House aired on USA Up All Night on January 31, 1998.

Steve Miner has so many cinematic sins to deal with — Soul Man, My Father the Hero, Big Bully (the next to last live action film Rick Moranis would appear in), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later — that you almost forget that he started his career making the second and third installments of Friday the 13th and today’s movie, House.

Roger Cobb (William Katt, Carrie) has some issues. As a Stephen King-ian popular horror writer, he feels fenced in by the horror genre. He has writer’s block. His wife has left him. His son disappeared and no one can find him. And the aunt that raised him just hung herself in the haunted house where he was raised.

Cobb intends his next book to be about what he went through in Vietnam, so he decides to move into the house. His strongest memories involve Big Ben (Richard Moll, fulfilling the contract that either he or Robert Englund appear in every 80s horror film), a soldier who bullied him back in ‘Nam who was injured and left behind for the enemy to capture.

Everyone’s a fan of Cobb, from his new neighbor Harold (George Wendt from TV’s Cheers) to his real estate agent and the cops that investigate him. He just wants to write. But with all the monsters in his head — and real monsters in the house — that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.

Things get worse when his wife visits and turns into a monster, only to be killed by a shotgun blast. At this point, the film flirts with making Cobb the real monster, but it’s a narrative shift that is never followed up on. Then, as he buries his wife, his hot neighbor comes on to him. What he thinks will be a night of hot sex turns out to be him watching her young son, but that goes wrong when little monsters try to steal the kid,

Finally, Cobb falls into his medicine cabinet into an alternate dimension that predates the Upside Down of Stranger Things by several decades. He rescues his son, but not before Big Ben attacks him again. Finally, Cobb realizes that all of his fears are inside his head and he destroys the monster with a grenade before leading the house to find his son and wife, who is magically returned to life.

House was produced by Sean S. Cunningham and featured music by Henry Manfredini, who also worked on the Friday the 13th films. Fred Dekker wrote the original script, but most of the humor is credited to Ethan Wiley.

This is a good example of pre-CGI monster moviemaking. Big Ben looks great, a triumph of practical makeup, as do the creatures that populate the film. And it’s interesting that this movie explores PTSD and the dark side of war years before many were ready to face it.

The look of the film reminds me of late-period Fulci minus the gore. I’m referring to the film stock itself, which doesn’t have much richness, looking more like a TV movie than a theatrical film.

House isn’t a movie that demands that you watch it, but if you’re looking for something in the middle of the night, it always provides a fun distraction. You can’t dislike a film that has a large fish on the wall come to life and try to kill someone.

You can watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hot Times at Montclair High aired on USA Up All Night on December 7 and 8, 1990; July 26, 1991; January 25 and November 27, 1992 and June 5 and October 1, 1993.

At Montclair High School — can you believe the audacity of the filmmakers naming this movie — football player Sean Willis (Ross Hamilton) struggles to get good grades and has a dad who wants him to toughen up as his girlfriend Jenny Rush (Kim Valentine, who was on the TV show Tribes) finds herself in the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll thanks to her friend Susan (Leslie Owen). Then there’s Ziggy Karpkinski (Johnathan Gorman), a nerd who can’t find a girlfriend, and Jason Miller (Brent Jasmer, who was on The Bold and the Beautiful), the punk bully who is abused at home.

This is when the double audacity hits you and you wonder: Is this movie cosplaying The Breakfast Club, at least for it’s three male leads? Perhaps the stay in detention that changes the lives of Sean, Ziggy and Jason will tell you all you need to know.

This is a movie where Jenny gets assaulted by the rock singer she’s in love with and her boyfriend gathers his new friends for revenge just as much as it’s a movie where the boom mic should have been in the cast. Troy Donahue is one of the teachers and the foreign teacher is Ziggy’s love interest, which made me wonder if this was a Menahem Golan movie. Menahem never fails to put in a sexed-up older blonde musician or music teacher who shows a young boy the ways of love to the point that I believe that this is either his main fetish or tells us how he lost his cherry.

This is not a Menahem Golan movie. It would be way better.

It is directed by Jose Altonaga, who made Reawakened as recently as 2020, and written by Mark S. Simpson, who left behind writing after this. He did direct Lost Island in 1994.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Sisters was on USA Up All Night on March 29 and October 12, 1992 and April 18 and November 20, 1992.

Isn’t it strange — and wonderful — that the only force that could unite every heterosexual teenage boy’s dream of seeing Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer together in the same movie would be David DeCoteau and that he would do it more than once?

Quigley is Melody, a girl with bad teeth. Come on, who is going to love her? And Brinke as Marci? She has glasses! Surely a fate worse than death. Or what Bauer’s Mickey must endure, as she’s overweight. Luckily — or not — for our girls, they’re possessed and suddenly make the minor cosmetic changes needed to become popular.

Of course, before they get revenge, they must take a bath together.

I guess never let it be said that DeCoteau didn’t know what his audience wanted.

Made for $40,000 using left-over film, cast, and crew from Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, this is the kind of film where the actresses do their own makeup and posters from past films are considered set decoration.

Except something weird happened. The company distributing the film went out of business and less than 2,000 copies of the tape were ever distributed. The film became an instant collector’s item as tales of the bath scene grew legendary. When it eventually aired on USA Up All Night, that scene was no longer in the movie, replaced with the girls jumping on a bed.

Luckily, today we have companies like Vinegar Syndrome willing to put stuff out like this for the masses. And by masses, I mean maniacs like me that laid awake at night wondering if they’d ever see this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fraternity Demon aired on USA Up All Night on November 24, 1995; June 8, 1996 and March 28, 1997.

C.B. Rubin directed one more and this is it. Written by Steve Tymon, who also was the writer for Ring of Fire II: Blood and Steel, Witchcraft V: Dance With the Devil, Deadlock: A Passion for Murder and Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur, Fraternity Demon starts with an entire opening scene edited together from outtakes from Getting Lucky.

A sex demon by the name of Isha (Trixxie Bowie) is brought to our world by sexed-up Professor Erickson (Charles Laulette) and she proceeds to run wild, basically aardvarking young men and taking their sexual energy. As you can imagine, all the fray boys are afraid of her. And if you enjoy any of her lovemaking scenes, don’t worry. They play again in a montage — or is it padding? — near the end of the movie, as if Fraternity Demon is having its running time flash before its eyes before the credits.

That said, Shock-Ra, the band playing the party, is pretty good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vice Academy 5 aired on USA Up All Night on April 25 and November 29, 1997.

An x-rated computer game gets out of control when the commissioner’s son Irwin (Chad Gabbert, who played the role in the fourth through sixth films of this series) unleashes a virtual reality hooker that tries to take over the world of crime from his father’s basement. Meanwhile, the commissioner is also dealing with his new wife Ms. Devonshire (Jayne Hamil, who was in the first, fifth and sixth of these), who just wants to consummate their marriage.

Candy (Elizabeth Kaitan, who is in every one of these but the first film) and newcomer Traci (Raelyn Saalman) are our Vice Academy girls this time out and they have their hands full dealing with the aforementioned Heidi Ho (J.J. North, Vampire Vixens from Venus), a virtual criminal. There’s also appearances by Tane McClure (who would go on to play Elle’s mother in the Legally Blonde movies), Karen Knotts (yes, the daughter of Don), Honey Lauren (who made Wives of the Skies) and an uncredited Ginger Lynn, who briefly shows up as an inmate, but we should all pretend that she’s Holly working undercover, right?

Pretty much shot in writer/director Rick Sloane’s garage, this movie had such a small budget that Kaitan and Saalman’s outfits came off a dollar rack at an outlet store. This is a movie for those that want the storytelling of pornography without the semen all over the star’s faces. I don’t know who you are, but they made six of these movies just for you. And somehow, I have watched all of them more than once.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fireballs was on USA Up All Night on January 15 and September 10, 1994 and August 14, 1995. Firehouse was on May 8 and December 31, 1992. On July 23, 1993, this was a USA Up All Night double feature.

Fireballs (1989): Canada made the move in the late 1980s from slashers to sex comedies, so it seemed. This next Police Academy ripoff concerns firefighters and was filmed days after a very similar 80’s sex on the job comedy, Recruits.

Writer, producer and star Mike Strapko — along with his brother and an actor named Goran Kalezic — were production assistants on that Wassanga Beach shot, Charlie Wiener-directed film.

Wiener made a TV movie called Blue Murder and Dragon Hunt in addition to this movie (he also wrote Screwball Hotel), so let me assure you — his scumbag skills are in full effect here.

We meet our heroes — such as they are — Sam (Kalezic), Keith (Eric Crabb) and Baduski (Strapko) as they leave the beach to fight a fire, which really ends up being a surprise party for the firefighting parrot Fireballs, who loves beer and breasts.

I really think I might never have to write again after that sentence.

The movie then becomes Gung Ho, as Japanese business owner Mr. Matsuro wants to bring his company to town, but thinks that the fire department can’t handle things. He wants to bring in his own team of Japanese firefighting experts.

Can you believe I just wrote that?

Strapko was supposedly an actual firefighter, so one would assume he’d want to make the profession look more heroic than this. Actually, scratch that. He just wanted to see as many breasts as possible, much like the character he’s playing, which is really more John Belushi cosplay than anything.

This movie is my kind of film. It’s neither sexy nor funny, so the more that it attempts either, it actually becomes more of the latter. For example, the idea of a bird that is dubbed to sound like it’s swearing is mildly fine the first time, becomes grating and then annoying before becoming incoherently amazing. This is the kind of movie that demands to be watched with an entire table full of mind-altering substances and a group of people who refuse to judge it and instead demand that it get worse so that it gets better.

Firehouse (1987): When someone asks, “What was Julia Roberts’ first movie?” you can tell them it was as Babs in the 1987 sex comedy Firehouse, despite her not appearing in the credits. She’d have to wait until the next year and Satisfaction to see her name up on the screen.

This was made by J. Christian Ingvordsen, who would eventually go full auteur and write, direct and star in Blue Vengeance. Here, however, he’s made a film about some young ladies who have to deal with the seamier side of firefighting and convince the boys that they can make it.

Take it from someone who watched but this and Fireballs. They’re both horrible, but at least that one has a talking bird and aggressively tries to be so bad. This one just…is. We never got the sequel Firehouse: The 2nd Alarm.

One of the writers was Rick Marx who also wrote Gor, Outlaw of Gor, Dragonard, Platoon Leader, Doom Asylum, Tenement, Wanda Whips Wall Street and adult films with titles like Taboo American Style: The Ruthless Beginning, Vagablonde and Sex World Girls as well as Chuck Vincent’s Roommates, Slammer Girls and Warrior Queen.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Pinball Summer aired on USA Up All Night but I can’t find the date!

Also known as Pick-Up Summer and Flipper Girls in Germany, this Canadian film comes after the Crown International beach movies and before Porky’s. Most of the action revolves around a place called Pete’s, an arcade that is hosting a pinball competition, which also has a Miss Pinball pageant, which I really hope was a thing at some point.

Speaking of movies leading to something more, director George Mihalka and cinematographer Rodney Gibbons would make My Bloody Valentine* after this, a movie that is much better remembered than this teen summer comedy that revolves around disco, burger joints, amusement parks and hijinks between a biker gang and our heroes over the pinball trophy.

Film Ventures International bought this for America and changed the name, thinking pinball was dead. It did pretty well and people didn’t even notice that it was made in Quebec and not California. It’s a pretty innocent movie when it comes to teen comedies.

*Helene Udy, who played Sylvia in that classic slasher, Thomas Kovacs, who played Mike, and Carl Malotte, who played Dave, are all in Pinball Summer as well.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bikini Beach Race was on USA Up All Night on September 10, 1993; May 28 and November 18, 1994; September 23, 1995 and January 3, 1987.

According to Dave Wain, on his amazing The Schlock Pit, other than the director, Ron Jeremy and Dana Plato, this movie is totally a University of Miami film school movie.

It’s about a bed race — yes, a race with kid race car beds — that Milo (Xavier Barquet), Jaime (Nick Santa Maria), Byrdie (Waverly Hill) and Cheese (Mathew Mark) are trying to win. Luckily, they have a boat pilot by the name of J.D (Plato) who is their ringer.

Speaking of Plato, she was struggling to get her career back on track. She’d appeared in the January 1989 issue of Playboy and this same year she would be in the controversial Sega CD game Night Trap. A year before, she had gone to a Las Vegas video store, pulled out a pellet gun and asked for all the money in the cash register. The clerk called 911 and said, I’ve just been robbed by the girl who played Kimberly on Diff’rent Strokes.” She came back to the scene of the crime — she took $134 — and was arrested. Wayne Newton paid her $13,000 bail, half of which she was able to give back to him with her salary from this movie. Sadly, she would die in her sleep on May 18, 1998. It was thought to be an accidental overdose but later ruled a suicide. The day before, she had a Howard Stern Show appearance where she was lambasted by his callers. Around a decade later, her son would also kill himself.

I won’t even talk about Ron Jeremy and his sex pest arrest because this whole thing has been dark enough for a USA Up All Night beach sex movie. Actually, it’s all kind of dark, because writer Xavier Barquet — who was also the actor who played Milo — died at 46, way too young, of respiratory failure.

Director Eric Louzil also made Fortress of AmeriKKKa, Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown and Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid.

You can watch this on Tubi.