EDITOR’S NOTE: Mirror of Death was on USA Up All Night on August 3, 1991 as Dead of Night. 

Sara (Julie Merrill) escapes her abusive partner, Bobby (John Reno), and winds up at the home of her actress sister, April (Janet Graham, the wife of TV movie director William, who made Get Christie Love! and Return to the Blue Lagoon), who is leaving town and lets her stay. Bobby breaks into the house, slaps her around, tries to rape her and then gets stopped by April’s boyfriend Richard (Richard Fast).

Sara takes a bath, reads a book of magic and ends up doing a ritual. This creates a mirror version of herself — yes, this is a spooky mirror movie — that walks into her, heals all her wounds, and resolves her problems. Tell me why demonic possession is an issue again?

That said, the mirror does tell her,  “Goodbye, Sara. I’ll give you back this body if it’s not to my liking…” when she goes to work. She then starts picking up bartenders with strange dances, tells people she’s the goddess of love and beauty, and also picks up salsa dancers, just to remind you this was made in 1988.

Sara hooks up with the bartender, who writes on her possessed mirror, causing her to kill him, which feels logical. Bobby then breaks in and gets killed, too. So many men get killed that at one point, three of them fall out of a closet, and Sara is shocked. She can’t even remember murdering them.

How do you solve a possessed mirror? John Smith (Bob Kipp), who rides a bicycle through Los Angeles and seems pretty good-natured for a possession remover. Sara responds by zapping out his eyes, just as her sister is possessed to kill her boyfrien,d and Sara even kills a few cops to make this even crazier. April shoots Sa,ra and get this, the surviving cops shoot the mirror demon until it dies. How is that a thing? And why would John Smith have blanks that April could use? Was she faking? Man, so many things are left up to us, the audience, right?

In another movie made the same year by the same director, Deryn Warren’s The Boy from Hell, characters watch this film on TV. He also made the Apolonia-starring Black Magic Woman, working with the same writer, Jerry Daly.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Going Overboard was on USA Up All Night on June 15 and 16, 1990; February 16 and October 11, 1991; March 13 and June 12, 1992 as Babes Ahony. 

It seemed like every time I tuned into USA Up All Night, this movie — Going Overboard is its primary title, but it was also known as Adam Sandler’s Love Boat in Germany — was playing. This is understandable since it was one of Adam Sandler’s early films that could be aired without incurring significant costs.

Directed and written by Valerie Breiman, the film boasts a large cast, including Burt Young, Billy Zane, Adam Rifkin, Terry Moore, Milton Berle, and Billy Bob Thornton.

The plot follows Shecky Moskowitz (played by Sandler), a stand-up comedian who isn’t very good at his craft. He lands a gig on a cruise ship as a janitor but gets a stand-up job after the on-ship comedian, Dickie Diamond (Scott LaRose), falls overboard. Complications arise when General Noriega (Burt Young) decides he wants to kill Miss Australia (Lisa Collins) for insulting him. Fortunately, Billy Zane appears as Lord Neptune to inspire our hero. Yes, that really happens.

The film was shot on a small, rundown cruise ship that sailed for a week from New Orleans to Cancun, Mexico. It was en route to the Miss Universe Pageant, hosting fifty past and present beauty queens from across the United States. As much as I appreciate Sandler, this is one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and you can imagine how low that bar goes.

It’s rumored that Rifkin co-wrote this film. Yes, the same person responsible for The Dark Backward. Really. Honestly, I have no idea how this film came to be, nor can I explain why I’ve watched it so many times. Somehow, Sandler recovered and has been a huge success. Anything can happen, you know?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Child’s Play 3 was on USA Up All Night on October 31, 1997.

Written by the returning Don Mancini and directed by Jack Bender, whose career has primarily been on TV, but he also directed The Midnight Hour, so he brings a horror perspective. Child’s Play 3 would be the last Chucky movie Mancini would be involved in until Bride of Chucky.

Eight years after the events of the last movie, the Good Guys factory is reopened, and it’s reopened near-immediately — why do they keep opening this place? — the blood of Chucky gets on a new doll, the CEO gets killed and Andy (now played by Justin Whalen) is tracked down at Kent Military School, as he has had so many foster families ruined by his PTSD from Chucky that he has to be drafted into this place. By the end, Chucky turns the place into a real warzone, trying to possess a young kid named Tyler (Jeremy Sylvers), slicing throats and throwing grenades.

This movie was made under pressure, as it was greenlit before Child’s Play 2 was even released and was in theaters nine months after that film. It also only made $20.5 million on a $13 million budget, ending the franchise for seven years.

In a replay of the video nasties era, Child’s Play 3 was part of a tabloid panic in Great Britain, where journalists claimed the film had influenced two 10-year-old boys in their murder of two-year-old James Bulger. It was later determined that neither had actually seen this movie. Additionally, sixteen-year-old Suzanne Capper of Manchester was kidnapped and tortured by former friends for several days, then set on fire and left to die. She was forced to listen to the song “Hi, I’m Chucky (Wanna Play?)” by 150 Volts while being abused, and one of her abusers, Bernadette McNeilly, started each torture session with the phrase “Chucky’s coming to play.” As you can imagine, tabloids also had a field day with this story, blaming it on the movies when that song was in heavy rotation at the time. Child’s Play 3 was the movie they claimed was responsible for all of this.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Child’s Play 2 was on USA Up All Night on October 29, 1994 and October 31, 1997.

John Lafia was one of the co-writers of the first film and returned to direct the sequel, with creator Don Mancini also returning. Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is also back. Still, unlike many slasher sequel characters, his life has undergone significant changes since encountering the possessed doll with the spirit of Charles Lee Ray. His mother was institutionalized after the end of the last movie. Now he’s in foster care being raised by Phil and Joanne Simpson (Gerrit Graham and Jenny Agutter) along with Kyle (Christine Elise), a punk rock mean girl that my wife, when questioned on this film, said, “She had the wardrobe and attitude that I wanted when I was a kid. And she smoked!” Keep in mind, Becca was six or seven when she watched this at least a hundred and fifty times.

Meanwhile, the Play Pals Corporation has convinced shareholders that the Chucky incident never really happened. That means that as soon as the line fires up, there’s an incident, and Charles Lee Ray finds himself back in the body of a Good Guy doll.

Of course, this ends in the factory where the dolls are made, as Chucky starts to become human and needs Andy as a host. Kyle bonds with him and together they blow the doll’s head up real good.

I love how John Lafia made this movie from the perspective of a kid. He used very wide lenses, low angles, bright colors and a deep depth of field to show the world as a place larger for children than grown-ups.

This was a number one box office smash the day it was released. Not everyone loved it. Gene Siskel asked, “Who was this trash made for and would you want to sit next to them in a theater?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold was on USA Up All Night on January 12, March 4 and September 8, 1989.

Directed by Charles Kaufman, who wrote it with Straw Weisman, this is a movie that follows a family — led by father Greg Van Waspishes — as they retreat to nature to escape the city. It’s an excuse for a scattershot comedy with tons of cameos, including Willie Mays, Morey Amsterdam, G. Gordon Liddy, Gates McFadden, William Smith, James Eckhouse and professional wrestler Fred Blassie, who goes from lawyer to maniac in no time at all.

I shouldn’t be surprised that I liked this so much. After all, Charles also directed Mother’s Day. So you get trailers for movies like Baby Bullets, Martin Snoreseasy’s Raging Bullshit and Gena’s Story, a stop-motion intermission that turns into a hot dog cocaine orgy, David Strathairn playing a Native American and a marquee that has Deep Throat on it, even if this was shot in 1982, ten years into that movie’s run.

Also: Daughter Bambi (Tina Marie Staino) goes from teddy bear to assaulting a real bear.

This is way better than any of the many Kentucky Fried Movie rip-offs. In fact, I laughed a few times.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Breakfast In Bed was on USA Up All Night on July 8 and December 10, 1994; October 21, 1995; March 29, 1996.

Marilyn Chambers was born into a middle-class family in Rhode Island; she started skipping school at sixteen to move to New York City and try out for movies. That’s how she ended up in The Owl and the Pussycat as Evelyn Lang. She’d later — infamously — be one of the 99 & 44/100% pure Ivory Snow girls before being in Sean S. Cunningham’s Together and starting to be a dancer. She then answered an ad from the Mitchell Brothers and pitched that if everyone was tested and that she got a major payday and 10% of the profits, she’d be in a sex film.

Behind the Green Door is one of the three biggest movies of porno chic, along with The Devil In Ms. Jones and Deep Throat. Despite performing sex on screen — she was the first to do an interracial scene in mainstream pornography — Chambers became known as the wholesome all-American girl next door. At some point, she had a falling out with the brothers and began a relationship with Linda Lovelace’s ex, Chuck Traynor. After a few years, they reunited to make two BDSM films, Beyond de Sade and Never a Tender Moment. 

She struggled to break into the mainstream. Nicholas Rey said that she’d “eventually be able to handle anything that the young Katie Hepburn or Bette Davis could,” but he died before he could film the movie he had in mind with her. Often, she was brought into auditions just so actors could meet the porn star in person. Or when it came to Hardcore, they thought she looked too innocent to be someone who had sex on film.

She had better luck with Rabid and Croenenberg; she also released the disco single “Benihana” and achieved some success in Las Vegas, performing in several plays. She also wrote several books, including My Story, Xaviera Meets Marilyn Chambers, Sensual Secrets, and  The Illustrated Kama Sutra.

But by 1980, she was back in adult, making the huge home video success Insatiable and had her own line of videos, Marilyn Chambers’ Private Fantasies. A fear of AIDS — and an 1985 arrest for trumped up sex worker charges — got her out of adult and back to making the kind of movies — Bedtime Stories, Breakfast In Bed, The Marilyn Diaries, Party Girls, New York Nights — that were perfect for USA Up All Night.

She made yet another porn comeback in the Veronica Hart-directed Still Insatiable, Dark Chambers and Edge Play.  Plus, Chambers ran for vice president on the Personal Choice Party ticket, a libertarian political party, in 2004 and 2008. Sadly, she died before her 57th birthday from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by an aneurysm related to heart disease.

Ernest G. Sauer (also known as Eric Drake) directed this, as he did many of her later softcore films. It was written by Don Shiffrin and Gary P. Conner. It’s a basic softcore story: Chambers is Marilyn Valentine, an actress who suddenly inherits a hotel that she decides to renovate instead of continuing to act. After all, her manager took all her money! Soon, it becomes a house of ill repute, but one perfect for honeymoons.

The same song plays over and over. Chambers is charming, and everyone eventually makes love, as you’d expect from a Cinemax After Dark movie. Or USA Up All Night, edited to remove all nudity. This, without the breasts, is like pizza with no toppings, cheese, or sauce, but you know, not everyone’s parents were wealthy enough to afford pay channels.

You can watch an edited version of this on YouTube.