EDITOR’S NOTE: I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist was on USA Up All Night on January 14, April 29 and October 13, 1989.

Directed by Sanford Singer (The Body Politic) and co-written by Singer and Kevin McDonough, this film was produced by Lloyd Kaufman’s sister, Susan. Paul (Adam Nathan) and his girlfriend Donna (Juliet Hanlon) move to Jersey City, where he works for his father’s Romance Entertainment and she acts in asparagus commercials. He makes a deal selling forgotten equipment and runs into problems with his boss, Murphy (Mikhall Druhan). Somehow, this all turns into Paul and Donna kidnapping a CEO and being live on the air terrorists with a bomb threat. Remember when people did those?

This may have been distributed by Troma, but it isn’t a Troma movie. It’s too smart for that. When you’re young and bored, you really will try anything. I really liked Guillermo Gonzelez, who plays the Cuban building manager Rico, who should be in this a lot more than he is. It’s strange — most people who have discussed this online either think that it’s vapid or smart enough to be a cynical take on movies that are just like this. That’s a hell of a balancing act.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cameron’s Closet was on USA Up All Night on July 10, 1992.

Directed by Armand Mastroianni (He Knows You’re Alone, The Clairvoyant) and written by Gary Brandner, who was the author of The Howling, Cameron’s Closet is about Cameron Lansing (Scott Curtis), a psychic boy living with his father (Tab Hunter), who has been studying his son’s abilities since he was born. One night, he falls on a machete — sure, I guess — and Cameron goes to live with his mother Dory (Kim Lankford) and her boyfriend Bob Froelich (Gary Hudson).

Sergeant Sam Taliaferro (Cotter Smith) — who has prophetic dreams — and his partner, Pete Groom (Leigh McCloskey), are at odds due to Sam’s absent-mindedness, which stems from his inability to sleep. Hey — there’s William Lustig as a porn director! Sam is sent to Dr. Nora Haley (Mel Harris), who soon becomes part of the investigation team as Bob is killed when his eyes are burned out of his head and he’s thrown out a window. Both murders are connected to not just Cameron, but also Sam’s dreams. Also, Dead bodies come back to life as murderous zombies, and Cameron is obsessed with the Deceptor, a statue of a demon that his father gave him.

Why would they trust the dad’s old assistant, Professor Ben Majors (Chuck McCann)? Well, I don’t know. He soon gets his blood boiling in his body, and Cameron has to fight the demon in…the closet.

Cotter Smith and Mel Harris met during this movie and married soon after.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bug was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find any info on the date. Do you know?

Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by William Castle and Thomas Page, based on Page’s novel The Hephaestus Plague, this is the last film Castle would make.

Bradford Dillman spent so much of the 70s at war with nature. Now he’s Professor James Parmiter, whose wife (Joanna Miles) dies spectacularly when one of these fire farting cockroaches gets into her hair and then her ear. He keeps one of the bugs alive and experiments on it. But before you know it, he can talk to the insects and breeds them with other bugs to make them more intelligent than humans. Why would you do this?

Miles was afraid of cockroaches and told Szwarc that she couldn’t do the scene. Castle told them they were harmless and put one on his arm. It then bit him.

Castle wanted a gimmick. First, he thought of putting brushes — like windshield wipers — near the seats that would rub against the audience’s legs to make them feel like bugs were crawling on them. Theater owners turned him down, so he insured the giant cockroach for $1 million.

This sets more than a woman’s head on fire. It also cooks a cat and starts a fire inside the Brady Bunch house.

Unlike every disaster movie, this starts with an earthquake and gets worse from there. Ken Middleham was the man to go to for directing insects, as he also directed Phase IV — this is like that movie, but almost relentlessly stupid, and I say that with pure love — and The Hellstrom Chronicle.

This starts with trucks and people going up in an inferno and ends with Bradford Dillman, a diving helmet and bugs who spell things. It’s so goofy yet so earnest, a movie unaware of how dumb it gets, and those are the best kinds of movies because they’re not dull – and that’s what I look for.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Blind Date was on USA Up All Night on May 11 and 12 and July 27, 1990 and June 28 and September 14, 1996.

Years ago, when I first started the site, I wrote “Kim Basinger: Professional idiocy, circa 1987 and 1988.”

Here’s a quick summary:

In 1987, Kim Basinger appeared in Blake Edwards’ Blind Date with Bruce Willis.

In 1988, she appeared in Richard Benjamin’s My Stepmother is an Alien with Dan Aykroyd.

In both films, she plays nearly the same role: a woman so devastatingly gorgeous, she decimates the brains of weak-willed men everywhere before settling for a man who is obviously the worst possible mate for her — falling in the kind of love that transforms your life in under 24 hours.

However, she has one downside: she is an utter moron, almost incapable of comprehending how the most basic societal behaviors should be observed. In Blind Date, it’s alcohol that’s to blame. One drink and her character, Nadia, loses control. It’s as if no woman could be both gorgeous and competent, even if she was able to pilot a starship the whole way here.

Despite her foibles, she’s presented as an inherently good person in both films. But in no way do you watch and see her as a real person, someone who can be more than a sexual object, which is probably the whole point of 1980s comedy, one supposes.

Anyways…

Walter Davis (Bruce Willis in his first movie lead) is trying to make a deal with Japanese industrialist Mr. Yakamoto (Sab Shimono). He needs a date for the dinner where they’ll shake hands on it, so his brother Ted (John Larroquette) plans a blind date with his wife Susie’s (Stephanie Faracy) cousin Nadia (Basinger). Simple, right?

Ted and Susie warn Walter not to let Nadia drink alcohol. If he does, she will go crazy. Additionally, she has an ex named Ted (played by Phil Hartman), who is stalking her.

Walter tells Susie that he wanted to be a musician but ended up taking an office job. Oh, if only this movie would give Bruce Willis a chance to sing!

During the party, Nadia turns champagne into an insanity power-up, getting the Japanese mogul’s wife to leave him, abusing a co-worker of Walter for hitting on her and spraying champagne at Walter’s boss. The deal gets called off.. Walter gets fired. This gives Walter license to embarrass her once she sobers up, showing up at a party at her friend’s house acting like a crazy person and even pulling a gun on David, which gets him arrested.

Nadia bails him out and even agrees to marry David if he’ll represent Walter. David’s father, Judge Harold Bedford (William Daniels), basically agrees to letting Walter out if his son moves far away. Nadia leaves Walter a note telling him not to give up on playing the guitar. David replies by sending chocolates with alcohol in them; she goes wild at her wedding and says that she’s in love with someone else, then marries Walter.

This was supposed to star Madonna and Sean Penn.

Oh, Blake Edwards. I’m sure there was a time when I would have liked your movie,s but I grew up watching these ones. I haven’t changed my opinion. This movie makes everyone act like a moron, mostly Basinger, who deserves better. Why would this couple get married?

EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice was on USA Up All Night on April 5, 1996.

Directed by David Price, the son of studio boss Frank Price, and written by A. L. Katz and Gilbert Adler (who also worked on Bordello of Blood), Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice is anything but, as it’s the first of what would be nine sequels. Two of them were reboots.

Hemingford, Nebraska isn’t Gatlin, but it’s close enough. Two days after the events of Children of the Corn, the people of this town adopt the orphans of Gatlin and one of them, Micah (Ryan Bollman), starts talking to He Who Walks Behind the Rows and yes, the sequel is ready.

John Garrett (Terence Knox) is in town reporting on the children, and his son Danny (Terence Knox) has come along for the ride. John’s career is bad, but not as bad as his life, as he’s going through a divorce and Danny hates him for it, so he fits right into all these creepy children.

After some lighting wipes out some reporters John knew from back when life was better, he gets down to business and starts sleeping with bed-and-breakfast owner Angela Casual (Rosaline Allen), and no, I won’t go for the easy joke and say that she lives up to her name. Danny might, because he’s mad that his dad is getting it on so quickly, but he also meets the creeptastic Lacey Hellerstat (Christie Clark), who drops some knowledge on him about her hometown.

While all that drama is happening, Micah and his child gang get to work dropping houses on people and using voodoo dolls to kill people while they’re in church. They even throw an old woman and her mechanized wheelchair through a window. I am a strange person; I realize this, but I laughed like a lunatic during this.

Somewhere in all of this, there’s a Native American professor named Dr. Frank Red Bear (Ned Romero), who throws some exposition on this sequel fire and claims that this has happened before. However, there’s good news: a prophecy suggests that there’s a good spirit, not a bad one. Or maybe it’s people selling bad corn which has a green gas that comes out of it.

Dr. Frank Red Bear gets some great dialogue.

Dr. Frank Red Bear: Koyaanisqatsi. It means life is out of balance. My ancestors would have told you that man should be at one with the earth, the skies, and water. But the white man has never understood this. He only knows how to take. And after a while, there’s nothing left to take. So, everything’s out of balance. And we all fall down.

John Garrett: Wait a minute… so that’s what happened here in Gatlin?

Dr. Frank Red Bear: No… what happened in Gatlin was that those kids went ape-shit and killed everyone.

As if they’re been challenged to go as hard as they can, the children lock every adult in a building and set it on fire, killing almost every character in the movie before kidnapping Angela and Lacey, taking them into the cornfields and trying to get Danny to sacrifice them.

Now, as you sit there, you may ask yourself, “Do I want to watch a child get pulled into a harvester, but not before he has a demon face?”

Of course you do. This movie delivers.

He Who Walks Behind the Rows is now a benevolent spirit by the end, as Dr. Frank heals from being dead after being shot with an arrow, and his ghost paints some rocks.

The director claims that a local Christian group protested the movie and left a dead rodent as a warning, so they created their own church for the movie.

You can blame former New World exec Larry Kuppin for this. After there hadn’t been a sequel for years, he picked up the filming rights and formed Trans Atlantic Entertainment. This studio existed solely to produce sequels to several New World Pictures films, including this movie, Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, Hellraiser III, and Avenging Angel. They also announced sequels to Wanted Dead or Alive and Crimes of Passion, which didn’t get made.

Trans Atlantic also produced Female Perversions, Death Ring, The Vineyard, Rage and Honor II, Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II, Tollbooth, Cirio Santiago’s Vulcan, ’68, I Shot a Man In Vegas and The Tale of Tillie’s Dragon.

In fact, the same crew shot this and Hellraiser III back-to-back to save money.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Demonwarp was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find a date. Do you know?

Whoa, boy, Demonwarp.

Originally meant to be directed by John Carl Buechler and star Jack Palance, budget woes changed things up and this ended up being made by Emmett Alston (Nine Deaths of the Ninja, New Year’s Evil) on board and George Kennedy — who stipulated that his daughter Shannon must have a role, that he’d only be on set for three days and that he’d get $15,000 for his work.

Jack Bergman has led four of his friends — Fred Proctor, Carrie Austin, Cindy Ossman* and Tom Phillips (Billy Jacoby!) — to his uncle’s cabin for a weekend of booze, sex and hijinks.  That was the plan, but the truth is that his uncle was taken away by a sasquatch, and a woman was killed right in the place where they’re supposed to be hanging and banging.

Then there’s Bill Crafton (Kennedy), an angry older man who is both the crazy man warning them all to stay out of the woods and the tough elder seeking his missing daughter. After the girls get naked, the beast attacks and wipes out everyone but Jack, Carrie and Cindy, who survive the night only to have to wander a path back to civilization.

If you’re like, “Oh, cool, another Bigfoot slasher ala Night of the Demon,” just stay tuned.

That’s when they meet Tara (Kennedy’s daughter Shannon) and Betsy (Michelle Bauer!), who are seeking a field of marijuana, which leads to Bauer getting nude — shock of shocks! — and zombies showing up. That’s when this movie goes off the rails, seemingly throwing everything you’ve ever seen in ten horror movies, proving you a 5 for $5 for 5 nights rental experience all in one film.

Shot in the Bronson Cave section of Griffith Park — a setting for many a science fiction and horror film and TV show — Demonwarp then piles on everything it can, like space devil worshippers in a giant UFO experimenting on teenagers, zombies in The Residents t-shirts, George Kennedy running around and Bauer remaining naked for nearly the entire time she’s on screen, as well as a trick ending.

Have you ever put Chinese food on top of a pizza and then dunk it into a bowl of chili? This film Taco Towns that concept and throws you a crepe, some gruyere cheese, a layer of special guacomolito sauce, wraps it in a corn husk filled with pico de gallo and then layers it with zombies, a Bigfoot who looks more like a gorilla, shoots it all in broad daylight and serves it up in a commemorative tote bag filled with spicy vegetarian chili.

More movies should be this wild.

*Note that Bergman, Proctor, Ossman and Austin’s last names are all taken from members of the Firesign Theater.