EDITOR’S NOTE: Till Death was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January, 1981 at 1 a.m. It also aired on December 25, 1982 at 1 a.m.

Directed by Walter Stocker — the only movie he directed, he was usually an actor — and written by his son Gregory Dana, Till Death starts with Paul Ryan (Keith Atkinson) dreaming that he’s picked up a woman on a foggy road, then is trapped in a crypt — with his name on it — with her dead body. He wakes just in time to get married to Anne (Belinda Balaski!) and after some making out in the fog, there’s a car crash and she dies on the way to the honeymoon.

Yes, this one is dark.

Once healed, Paul goes to Eden Glen Cemetery and the Eternity mausoleum where his wife is buried. The shock is too much and he passes out, waking inside her tomb. And as you can imagine, he’s not alone.

Filmed in 1972 and having a 1974 copyright, this was not released until 1978 but as other reviewers have pointed out, it didn’t really show up until some UHF horror hosts played it in the early 80s. Like Chiller Theater in Pittsburgh, which even chose it for a Christmas night airing.

This is a love story with horror slightly getting involved. It’s nearly elevated horror — well, if early 70s can be — but knows to stay in the mood and deliver an actual ending. It predates The Iron Rose, but I doubt Jean Rollin ever saw this. So many lovers can get locked in the cemetery, don’t you know.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Malibu Beach was on USA Up All Night so many times: June 7 and November 11, 1989; April 6 and 7 and October 6, 1990 and April 12 and August 24, 1991.

Malibu Beach is not Malibu Bikini Shop, Malibu Hot Summer, Malibu Summer and it most certainly is not Malibu High, one of the most deceptively mean-spirited movies of all time.

That dog with a bikini in his mouth on the poster? He’s in this movie. He’s the pet of Dugan Hicks (Steve Oliver, who worked as a “cab driver, roughneck, bounty hunter, and fitness instructor to the stars”), the kind of sort of bad guy of this movie. Yes, the same Dugan Hicks from The Van. I just freaked out — do we have a Crown International cinematic universe?

Well, our lead character and lifeguard Dina (Kim Lankford, Street Corner Justice, The Octagon) lives in the same house that Laurie did in The Pom Pom Girls. I do believe that this shared reality exists.

Crown International movies are great because they say, “We have girls, a beach, some hunky guys, some music…what are we missing? A plot? What if they just all hang out for 90 minutes and occasionally have sex instead?”

This is the kind of movie that has a shark attack — it was a beach and 1978, you know? — and no one gets killed. It barely gets in the way of the breasts and beer and disco and weed. It also has Susan Player (Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Pom Pom Girls) and Tara Strohmeier (The Student Nurses, Truck Turner, Candy Stripe Nurses) in its cast and that’s a good thing.

Director Robert J. Rosenthal also wrote — you guessed it — The Pom Pom Girls and The Van and only directed one other movie, Zapped! He was joined on the writing of this movie by Celia Susan Cotelo, his co-writer on those two aforementioned Crown International movies.

As I prepare these articles, I often read through what other people think. I just read review that referred to this movie as a waste of time and how sad for people who don’t just want to watch a mindless hour and a half of dogs stealing bikini tops while young love blooms on the beach with no responsibility or worries of tomorrow.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

Piranha almost never made it to the theater. Universal Studios had considered obtaining an injunction to prevent it from being released, particularly as they had Jaws 2 out that year, but the lawsuit was called off after Steven Spielberg himself gave the film a positive comment (he also called the film the “best of the Jaws ripoffs”).

Joe Dante is my favorite type of filmmaker. Even when you think you know what to expect, he zigs and zags, giving you genuine surprises and fun at every turn.

The action starts with two teens swimming in the waters of an abandoned military base — as you do. Of course, they’re instantly obliterated by an unseen creature.

Skiptracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies, who beyond being the wife of Robert Urich was Louisa Con Trapp in The Sound of Music and even appeared in an August 1973 Playboy pictorial entitled “Tender Trapp”) is looking for those missing teens and she’s hired Paul Grogran (Bradford Dillman, who battled many an ecological horror in Bug, The Swarm and Lords of the Deep) for help. He’s a drunk and surly mountain man, which in the 1970s makes you a sex symbol.

Why is Grogan so multi-layered? It turns out that Bradford Dillman wasn’t pleased with how flat his character originally was, so he asked writer John Sayles why. The response was that producer Roger Corman never hired good actors, so he rarely wrote nuanced characters. However, Dillman offered Sayles the opportunity to do something deeper, if you’ll pardon the pun.

They discover the abandoned compound where the teens died and discover that it’s a militarized fish hatchery. Maggie drains the outside pool and discovers too late that she’s released Operation: Razorteeth, a strain of piranha made to survive the cold North Vietnamese rivers and win the war in Southeast Asia.

That’s when Grogan realizes that if the local dam is somehow opened, the piranha will attack the Lost River water park and the camp where his daughter is spending the summer. Everybody pays the price for the piranha, like their now crazed creator Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Soon, the military is involved and our heroes are on the run, trying to warn the media and anyone that will listen that these killer fish are on their way. Nothing will stop them, not even the poison that Colonel Waxman and Dr. Mengers (Barbara Steele!) think will do the job.

Of course, the fish survive and attack the summer camp, wiping out nearly everyone but Suzie thanks to her fear of water. Now, they’re on their way to Buck Gordon’s (Dick Miller, perfect as always) waterpark, where they end up killing Waxman.

Grogan and Maggie come up with a totally ridiculous plan: to use the hazardous waste from the smelting plant to kill off the fish before they spread into the ocean. Our hero, such as he is, must go deep underwater to make this happen and he barely survives, left in a catatonic state at the end of the film.

Dr. Mengers gives the government’s side of the story, downplaying the danger of the piranha and saying there’s nothing left to fear, but as we see another beach, we now hear the sound of the deadly school of fish.

Beyond Dick Miller, this film features plenty of actors that Dante would work with again and again, like Belinda Balaski, the film’s writer John Sayles and the always welcome Paul Bartel. Plus, Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn shows up, but we all know him better as his stage name, Keenan Wynn. And another Invasion of the Body Snatchers alum, Richard Deacon, is here as well.

Piranha is the rarest of films — one that rises above being a simple ripoff and comes close to eclipsing the source material. It’s quick, bloody and fun as hell, with awesome effects from Phil Tippett and the debuting Rob Bottin, who was only 17 at the time.

Can’t make it to the drive-in? You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Starhops aired on USA Up All Night on June 2, 1989; June 1, 1990 and April 26 and 27, 1991.

Stephanie Rothman was studying at UC Berkeley when The Seventh Seal made her want to become a filmmaker. She was the first woman to be awarded the Directors Guild of America fellowship, which was one of the reasons why Roger Corman hired her as his assistant (selecting her over another applicant, the woman who became his wife Julie).

She directed It’s a Bikini World, which was not the kind of movie she wanted to do and was semi-retired until working on the film Gas-s-s-s. She then directed The Student Nurses, an exploitation film that she was not aware was an exploitation film, as she had carte blanche to explore political and social issues in the film that interested her.

She said, “I went and did some research to find out exactly what exploitation films were, their history and so forth, and then I knew that’s what I was doing, because I was making low-budget films that were transgressive in that they showed more extreme things than what would be shown in a studio film, and whose success depended on their advertising, because they had no stars in them. It was dismaying to me, but at the same time I decided to make the best exploitation films I could. If that was going to be my lot, then that’s what I was going to try and do with it.”

She wasn’t interested in making a sequel to The Student Nurses or making The Big Doll House, but her next movie was The Velvet Vampire. Moving to Dimension Pictures, she directed Terminal Island, The Working Girls and Group Marriage.

However, attempts to go mainstream were stigmatized by the films that she had made. Before ending her movie-making career, the rumor was that she reshot some scenes in Ruby and definitely wrote Starhops before taking her name off it, as it was not the film she wanted it to be.

It is, however, directed by Barbara Peeters, the only other female director from New World Pictures. She famously warred with Corman over the additions to Humanoids from the Deep and directed favorites like Bury Me an Angel and the TV series The Powers of Matthew Star.

But what about the movie itself? Well, it’s a trifle, about three waitresses, Danielle, Cupcake and Angel, who all work together to stop their fast food restaurant from going broke. Of course, Dick Miller shows up, as this is a Roger Corman-associated film.

What’s interesting about Angel is that she’s played by Jillian Kesner-Graver, who was not only Fonzie’s girlfriend Lorraine on Happy Days, but worked with her husband Gary to preserve the films and legacy of Orson Welles.

Starhops isn’t really funny. Or sexy. It’s just kind of there. But sometimes, you watch a bad movie and learn about some interesting people.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Message from Space aired as the third movie on USA Up All Night on December 1, 1990.

At nearly half the budget of Star Wars — $6 to $7 million dollars — Message from Space was the most expensive movie in Japanese history up until 1980. At the time, it was routinely panned by the critics. Yet watching it nearly 40 years later, I was struck by just how ambitious, fun and strange it is.

Jillucia was once a planet of peace, but that was before the Gavanas Empire turned it into one of their military bases. Kido, one of the planet’s leaders, sends eight Liabe seeds into space to find soldiers strong enough to liberate the planet from the steel grip — and faces — of the Gavanas. Princess Emeralida (Etsuko Shiomi, Sister Street Fighter) and Urocco follow them into space in a space galleon.

We meet some space racers — Shiro (Hiroyuki Sanada, Shingen from The Wolverine) and Aaron — and a spoiled rich kid named Meia who are chasing one another through some asteroids. These guys mess up the Kessel Run and wreck, but then find some Laibe seeds in their ships.

General Garuda (the name means phoenix and the role is played by Vic Morrow, who graced the screen in films like 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Humanoids from the Deep before dying while making Twilight Zone: The Movie) is a drinking man, embittered by the loss of Beba-1, his robot. He orders that a rocket send the body of his faithful companion into space, which gets him in trouble with his superiors, who see it as a waste. This leads him to retire and take up a bar stool on Milazeria, where he also finds a Liabe seed.

In that very same bar, Jack puts the pressure on Shiro and Aaron to repay their debts, as he himself owes the gangster Big Sam (no relation to Jabba) plenty of dough. Oh — he also finds a seed. To get the cash, they agree to take Meia to a forbidden zone where she can watch fireflies. On the way, the Gavanas attack, destroying the space galleon and a police ship.

All of our heroes battle, but when the seeds — and Garuda, who is sleeping off his drinking — reveal themselves, Emeralida explains that the seeds have chosen them to liberate her planet. Garuda responds by leaving in a huff, but Beba-2 promises to get him to change his mind. There’s supposedly a Chris Isaak cameo as a gambler in the bar scenes, way before he became famous.

What follows next is a confusing mess of double crosses and people trying to get rid of their seeds and ten-year-old Sam would probably be not paying attention, just wishing that some aliens would show up and have a laser battle. Luckily, the Gavanas do show up to declare war on Earth and Garuda realizes his destiny is to defend his home planet. And to make the film a million times more exciting, they meet Prince Hans, the rightful leader of the Gavanas. He doesn’t have their silver skin, but he is played by Sonny Chiba.

Urocco, Jack, Shiro and Aaron fly to Jilutia, with Shiro and Aaron’s ships mounted on Mayah’s ship. As they near their destination, Mayah’s Leyabe seed explodes, causing the ship to crash on a planet in the Bernard system. There they find what appears to be a Gavanas warrior without a metallic skin, and wearing a Leyabe seed around his neck. The warrior introduces himself as Prince Hans, the rightful heir of the Gavanas’ throne. He explains that Rockseia killed his royal parents and took the throne for himself.

The Emperor and Empress of the Gavanas meet with Garuda, who challenges one of their warriors to a duel. After walking less than ten paces, that warrior sneak attacks Garuda, who shrugs off a laser beam to the back (it must have been his snazzy military uniform and phoenix patch). Garuda bests the soldier, yet gives him mercy before the Emperor wipes the disgraced soldier out. The leaders — who had to have inspired Prince Zarkon and Haggar from Voltron — destroy the moon and demand that Earth surrender.

Garuda, Jack and Beba-2 leave Jilutia but then turn around. All three parachute to the surface. In the meantime Maya’s ship approaches Jilutia, making the ‘chicken run’ approach used earlier by Aaron and Shiro. The pair separate their ships near the surface, and the three ships pull up and fly through a rocky canyon, simulating a meteor impact. The ships then re-connect and land. Urrocco finds the Jilutian survivors hiding in the hull of a space galleon. Urrocco and the others meet Jack, Garuda and Beba-2. They realize there are now six Leyabe warriors, but wonder who the other two might be.

Finally, it’s time for space battles and sword fights. Sonny Chiba goes off slashing everyone with his sword. There are suicide runs — Meia uncomfortably says, “They don’t call me kamikaze for nothing.” — and ships blowing up and planets exploding and all manner of space opera nonsense, ending with all of the heroes being saved from death by the seeds.

Message from Space was popular enough that it became a TV series in Japan. Over here, it didn’t fare as well. It’s a crazy looking movie, with gigantic sets, gorgeous costumes and lunacy aplenty, like people skydiving from space and silver faced aliens doing battle with drunken space captains and a rich girl and dudes who just like to race rockets.

Director Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale) really has a great time with the budget he’s been given and wastes none of it. It’s a glitzy, gaudy spectacle that the cynical amongst us would choose to deride and make fun of. I chose to watch it through younger eyes and find a fun and infectious joy at the heart of the film. Sure, it’s no Star Wars, but it’s still a fun Saturday afternoon film.