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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Doctor Detroit was on USA Up All Night on January 1, 1994; July 8, 1995; August 10, 1996.

I have no idea why my parents let me watch this on HBO, but I thought Doctor Detroit was a pirate. No idea what a pimp was.

Well, a pimp named Smooth Walker (Howard Hesseman) needs to get out of town, as Mom (Kate Murtaugh) has lost her patience with him. He invents a new pimp, Doctor Detroit and convinces Professor Clifford Skridlow (Dan Aykroyd) to take up this character. A night with all of Smooth’s girls — Monica (Donna Dixon), Jasmine (Lydia Lei), Karen (Fran Drescher) and Thelma (Lynn Whitfield) — convinces him to take the role, despite his needing to focus on getting a new endowment from wealthy CEO Harmon Rauseh (Andrew Duggan).

Directed by Michael Pressman (The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze) and written by Bruce Jay Friedman (Stir Crazy), Carl Gottlieb (Jaws) and Robert Boris (who directed Steele Justice), this movie is good because of the efforts of Akyroyd, in his first movie — and first solo lead — since the death of John Belushi. There’s also a James Brown cameo and the promise of a sequel that never got made, Doctor Detroit II: The Wrath of Mom.

Donna Dixon and Akyroyd married soon after making this.