EDITOR’S NOTE: Jack’s Back was on USA Up All Night on July 30, 1994 and May 12, 1995.

I’m kind of obsessed with young James Spader. Let’s face it, in movies like The New Kids and Tuff Turf he exuded either a coked-up menace or a hardscrabble heart that was hard to beat. Here, he plays two roles. First, he’s a young doctor who becomes a suspect in a series of Jack the Ripper copycat murders. But then he dies — and his twin brother may or may not be the true killer.

Written and directed by Pittsburgh native Rowdy Herrington (Roadhouse, Striking Distance), this film also stars Cynthia Gibb (the TV version of Fame), Jim Haynie (the dockmaster from The Fog), character actor Robert Picardo and Rod Loomis (Zed from The Beastmaster).

Herrington wanted the movie to be titled Red Rain and for the Peter Gabriel song to be in the film. However, this was his low budget debut, he couldn’t get the rights, so he had a song composed called “Red Harvest,” which sounds exactly like the Gabriel ditty. However, the studio felt that the title had nothing to do with the movie, so they renamed it.

The story isn’t any great shakes: the good twin has found one of the victims before becoming one himself, while the troubled brother becomes the prime suspect. It’s also one of those movies packed with red herrings and endings that aren’t endings. So it’s kinda sorta an American giallo — minus the black gloves, inventive camerawork, fashion and neon colors. But the story — where a protagonist is dragged into a situation that he must investigate himself — comes off that way. And despite all the things I’ve said above, I ended up enjoying this one.

Spader is great — he always is — and you have to wonder about Cynthia Gibb’s character. It seems weird for the same woman to be involved with two brothers, but I guess identical twins makes that a little easier, if no less creepy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Think Big aired on USA Up All Night on January 22, April 17 and August 27, 1993 and January 22, 1994.

Rafe and Victor (Peter and David Paul) are truckers down on their luck, trying to keep their truck from going back to the bank. For their last chance, they’re sent with a load of toxic waste and put on a timer, on their way to a company called Tech Star that uses child labor. One of the precocious geniuses is Holly Sherwood (Ari Meyers, Emma Jean from Katie & Allie), who hides in their truck with her invention that can turn off and turn on anything electronic. This puts them at odds with Dr. Bruekner (Martin Mull), the CEO of Tech Star, who wants Holly and her invention.

Claudia Christian is in this as a doctor, as is Richard Kiel as a hired thug and yes, Richard Moll is in it too. I wish we had had a buddy comedy with both of them in it. Throw in Michael Winslow, David Carradine and Tiny Lister? Man, who cast this movie!

Jon Turteltaub went from making movies like this to 3 Ninjas, Cool Runnings and While You Were Sleeping to both National Treasure movies and The Meg. He wrote the script with Jon Turteltaub (Xtro II: The Second Encounter) and David Tausik. The story came from Jim Wynorski and R.J. Robertson (Forbidden World, Deathstalker II, Big Bad Mama II, Not of This Earth, Munchie, House IV and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time).

Want more Barbarian Brothers? Check out this Letterboxd list.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Wild Malibu Weekend! aired on USA Up All Night on June 23 and December 2, 1995; August 23, 1996; February 8 and November 1, 1997.

Directed by Jason Williams, who played Flesh Gordon, this has The Ultramatics playing while in one long cut women spray whipped cream all over their breasts and play other supposedly sexy games with one another and look, it was the 90s, you know?

Let’s just discuss the cast.

Mary Johnson is played by Barbara Moore, who the Playboy 1992 Playmate of the Month, as well as a National Pro-Am dancing championship with dance partner Igor Suvorov and an NDCA Ballroom Dance instructor. Her sister in the movie, Kelly, is played by Kathy Pasmore who was in Takin’ It Off Out West. Shauna O’Brien may be the best known of the contestants. She was Lady Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Stories and was also Penthouse Pet of the Month in January 1992. If you watched a direct to VHS mature and not adult movie, you probably saw her in it.

Behind the camera, writer Gregory Poirier also scripted National Treasure: Book of Secrets, The Lion King II and the Jackie Chan movie The Spy Next Door. Yes, really. An even loftier career was found by executive producer Bob Murawski, who edited The Hurt Locker, Spider-Man and oh yeah, co-founded Grindhouse Releasing. As for this film’s editor, it was Paul Hart, who also edited Nude Bowling Part, a movie many in the crew worked on, as well as editing Gone With the Pope.

That said — this isn’t good unless you’re a teenager watching USA Up All Night.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thirst aired on USA Up All Night on March 17, 1990 and March 30 and October 25, 1991.

What happens when you mix Soylent Green with Elizabeth Bathory and throw in the end of the world pre-millennial tension and madness that was 1979 in one movie? Then you get this Australian freakout, which I really want more film lovers to discover.

Director Rod Hardy had the literal balls to remake High Noon in 2000. He also made the Hasselhoff-starring Nick Fury movie, which is a really crazy directorial doubleshot, huh?

The Brotherhood has taken Kate Davis (Chantal Contouri) captive, as they feel that she could be a direct descendant of Elizabeth Bathory. They use fake silver fangs and brainwashing with hallucinogenic drugs — Henry Silva, being evil as always — to bring her into their fold, a practice that Dr. Fraser (David Hemmings, who made some awesome movies in Australia at this time, including the also-somewhat unknown Harlequin) does not agree with.

When she leaves, she thinks it was all a dream until she wakes up draining another woman of her blood. She’s trapped in a nightmare. I mean, did you see the tagline on the poster? “This woman is doomed to feel the awful, ancient hunger of the damned!”

There’s a crazy scene that double steals from Hitchcock, putting the shower scene from Psycho up against Marnie’s fear of the color red to create a blood shower that featured prominently in the film’s ads.

I love that this movie juxtaposes the clean metallic future that we in 1979 thought was coming, along with the dehumanization of mankind as cattle for the elite that couldn’t possibly ever come true. Right?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Booker T. Mattison is an associate professor in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies at Grady College and the director and writer of this movie, as well as The Gilded Six Bits and The Sound of Christmas.

Marija Juliette Abney (who was one of Black Panther’s personal bodyguards, the Dora Milaje, in the MCU movies) is Yolanda Carver or, as her TV fans refer to her, Dr. Yo. She’s an empiricist and claims that she handles marriages based on what she can see, not her opinions, and that she follows the scientific method.

She may also be — as the title spoils — twisted.

Liam (Pha’rez Lass) and Armeka Jasper (Jennifer Sears) are in the middle of a marriage that isn’t working for either of them. She wants children and he has no idea what he wants, suffering from PTSD from two tours of duty yet unable to communicate with anyone just how emotional he is.

This movie is everything I want in a Tubi original. Seemingly throughout the movie, everyone wants to get with Armeka, including her work friend Ivy (Jackie Dallas), who offers hugs on the regular, and Dr. Yo, who already has a down low relationship with her producer Tonya (Bree Webber).

Meanwhile, she keeps sneaking up on Liam — even when he’s trying to have sex with his wife — and tells everyone that her husband died in Afghanistan, yet Liam discovers a secret ladies only therapy session in which she states that he came home, had PTSD and attacked her. So what is it? And just who was getting stabbed in the beginning when he was getting ridden by another woman?

The scam that Dr. Yo has is amazing. She picks out attractive women in the audience of her show and give them free marriage counseling that gets their husband killed. The wild thing is that Armeka literally looks like she’s going to freak out at any minute, no matter what happens, in every single scene. That’s the kind of acting I appreciate.

But Dr. Yo calling the cops on Liam? And of course, white cops? Man, Twisted Marriage Therapist goes there. Then when Dr. Yo can’t convert Armeka? It’s time for zipties, ground and pound and 50 Shades of Gray red ribbon restraints while Liam is locked up in a co-ed asylum that she runs.

I’m so glad that this set up a sequel. Let’s see one now, Tubi.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Home from Afghanistan, a Spect Ops Marine named Jessica (Jet Jandreau) learns that the suburbs may be just as dangerous as a DMZ when her thirteen-year-old sister Aimee (Jamie M Timmons) is abducted by sex traffickers.

Director Lee Whittaker is better known for his stunt work in more than a hundred movies, such as Sound of Freedom (which this film has a lot in common with), Captain Marvel, The Spy Next Door, The Replacement Killers and he has assistant directed around twenty films. This is his fourth directed effort and he co-wrote the script along with Kara Myers.

That stunt experience comes in handy here as the last ten minutes of this film have several exhilarating hand-to-hand fights, including one between Jessica and a female kidnapper named Carmen (Laur Allen) that goes through multiple rooms and walls.

When the cops can’t do anything to save her sister, Jessica turns to her military training and military friend Dan (Eric Pierce) who creates software that allows her to find out exactly where the traffickers are. The major issue is that the PTSD that ended her military career happens to emerge at the worst times and the film does a strong job of visualizing it.

Whittaker and team have been working on this since before the pandemic and the results are really strong. It’s another good choice for Tubi as one of their original films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Student Affairs aired on USA Up All Night on November 1, 1996 and September 20, 1997.

Directed by Chuck Vincent, who co-wrote the script with Craig Horrall, Student Affairs is about the making of a movie with the same name, so any write-up that says that this is a 50s movie like Porky’s is missing that part of the overall story.

It’s also got a pretty strong cast playing the cast within, well, a cast. Louie Bonanno, Jim Abele and Beth Broderick are joined by adult stars Tracey Adams and Veronica Hart — who always has great roles in Vincent’s movies — to play the young and hopefuls. I like that Vincent always found roles for adult actors and didn’t just have them playing nude extras. Adams also shows up in The Lost Empire and Vincent’s Wimps (as does Bonanno and Hart). As for Ms. Hart, you can find her in plenty of mainstream movies — often under the name Jane Hamilton — like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh, Bedroom Eyes II and many, many more. At 67 years of age as of this writing, she’s still showing up in non-sex roles in several adult films to this day.

The director of the movie in this movie, Ron Sullivan, is really Henri Pachard, who knows a thing or two about directing. He made over 360 adult films in his career. And the character of Mr. Evans is David F. Friedman, who partnered to make several nudie cuties with Herschell Gordon Lewis like The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and Goldilocks and the Three Bares before pretty much inventing the roughie with Scum of the Earth and the gore movie with Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red and Two Thousand Maniacs!, again along with Lewis. He also produced, co-wrote and even acted in movies like A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro. As hardcore overtook the adult film, he left the industry, coming back in the early 2000s to work with Lewis again.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Return of the Killer Tomatoes aired on USA Up All Night on June 10 and October 28, 1989; March 30 and 31, 1990; March 23 and October 21, 1991 and May 26, 1992.

Directed by John De Bello, who co-wrote the script with Costa Dillon and Stephen Andrich. De Bello, Dillon and J. Stephen Peace started making movies together in high school and worked together not only on this movie, but on the original short and movie versions of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, as well as Killer Tomatoes Strike Back!, Killer Tomatoes Eat France! and the animated series, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. In fact, in the 90s, Mattel released an entire line of toys based on the cartoon series. There were even two video games!

Set ten years after Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which characters refer to as the Great Tomato War, we find that tomatoes have been outlawed in the United States. Wilbur Finletter (Steve Peace) — who was in the first movie — is a hero of the Great Tomato War and now owns the tomato-less Finletter’s Pizzeria, employing his nephew Chad Finletter (Anthony Starke) and Chris’ roommate Matt Stevens (George Clooney).

Professor Mortimer Gangreen (ohn Astin) and his assistant Igor (Steve Lundquist) were the ones who started the last Tomato War and they’re back for another one. Barely defeated by the song “Puberty Love,” he vows that this time, music will be part of his plot for revenge. That means that he is making Miami Vice tomato people, Michael Jackson pomme d’amour and seductive female tomate, as well as an army of rock music-obsessed tomatillos. His big goal is to break out Jim Richardson (Rick Rockwell) and make him the new President.

There’s also a female tomato human named Tara (Karen Mistal) who falls for Chad just at the point that movie runs out of money and breaks the fourth wall, adding product placement to every scene. Tara is also hiding a mutated tomato named FT — Fuzzy Tomato — that she keeps like a pet. In a world that hates and fears tomatoes — not to mention the carrot soldiers on the rise — can their love survive?

In the scenes with Clooney and the Playboy Playmates, look for Teri Weigel. She was the Playboy Playmate for April 1986. She was also only the second Playmate to appear in Penthouse — after Ursula Buchfellner who was in Jess Franco’s Devil Hunter and Sadomania — appearing in the November 1985 issue. After working at the Bunny Ranch Nevada and a car accident that broke her neck and back ruined her family’s finances, she became one of the first Playmates to openly do adult films and trade on her popularity from the magazine. She was also in plenty of mainstream movies, like Cheerleader Camp, Savage Beach, Night Visitor, Marked for Death and perhaps most famously, in the beginning of Predator 2.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night Shift aired on USA Up All Night on February 17, 1995.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eldon Glen is a horror fanatic/part-time reviewer.