EDITOR’S NOTE: Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend was on USA Up All Night on August 1, 1992; January 8 and August 28, 1993 and February 25, 1994.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mike Justice is the only illegitimate offspring born of a short-lived union between a frustrated English horror movie star and an American film festival groupie. His legacy, therefore, is to obsessively pursue a litany of ill-defined ambitions in the industry (editor, director, actor) while also falling hard and fast for anything with an accent and/or mutton chops. Fortunately, he’s pretty good at distilling his various fizzles, faux pas, and let-downs into uproariously absurd, snarky tales filled with wit, wisdom, and (sometimes) redemption. You can follow Mike on Facebook. 

Something traumatic happened the summer between seventh and eighth grade: the USA Network canceled Commander USA’s Groovie Movies, my favorite Saturday afternoon monster-movie showcase. There was to be no more Video Vault, no more wacky characters, no more Commander USA, himself—soaring superhero and retired Legion of Decency officer—to introduce me to enduring classics like Mausoleum and House of Psychotic Women. He didn’t even get a proper sendoff—he just walked out the door one day and never came back—like Richie Cunningham’s older brother, or my dad that time he left to buy stamps. It took weeks of crestfallen Saturdays to ultimately accept that I’d been ghosted by the Commander.

Naturally, I turned to delinquency; in this case, that meant immediately taking up with a rebound show: USA’s newly launched, more “mature” late-night B-movie series, USA Up All Night. I’d been collecting Elvira’s Thriller Video cassettes for years, and I was already an avid viewer of Saturday Nightmares—so staying up late past The Hitchhiker and Alfred Hitchcock Presents to watch racy comedians host heavily censored sex comedies felt like the next natural step to adulthood. And what an adulthood it promised to be.

USA Up All Night hit at precisely the right age when I was too young to drive, but too jaded for the TGIF lineup, and just beginning to fantasize about what being an independent adult with my own apartment, car, job, and (gasp) love life would be like. If Commander USA had been a weekend Fred Rogers with a fondness for Filipino creature features, then Rhonda Shear, Gilbert Gottfried and company were a cocktail party at the grown-ups table with foot-fetish gags and Vice Academy playing in the background. Every weekend, that VERY 90’s show opener beamed me from my lonely house in the sticks to somewhere infinitely cooler. It all felt so urban (and urbane), like the opening credits to Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, or that Michelob ad with Steve Winwood. I was sure my upcoming adult life was to be a hazy blur of neon, sax solos, palm trees, and guitar riffs. In fact, this whole USA Network era had me thinking I’d most likely grow up to live in a black lacquer-furnished condo with a skyline view, work some ill-defined but highly successful job in some posh office where I’d sport pastel neckties and flirt with my boss, and in my free time I’d call a LOT of chat lines and hang out in night clubs with Sally Kirkland or grocery stores with Linnea Quigley. (The fact that my life really did turn out something like this might possibly be USA’s fault, but I digress).

I devoured the good (Young Frankenstein, Eating Raoul, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), the not-so-good (Hot Chili, Meatballs 3, Hot Times at Montclair High) and everything in between (H.O.T.S., Summer School Teachers, Troma, Cannon, Chuck Vincent, Andy Sidaris, David DeCocteau, New World). One of my favorites was Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (1979) AKA The Great American Girl Robbery. It opens with a Vestron Video logo followed by the Dimension Pictures emblem, so you know it’s class. It was also the producing debut of Chuck Russell (yes, THE Chuck Russell) working with Bill Osco (that dude who was married to Jackie Kong and made Flesh Gordon and Alice in Wonderland: an X-Rated Musical Fantasy). Along for the ride are Osco alums Kristine DeBell (Meatballs) and Jason Williams (Flesh Gordon, himself). Leon Isaac Kennedy (Penitentiary), the exquisite Marilyn Joi (The Kentucky Fried Movie), and The Hills Have Eyes’ own Robert Houston round out the cast—along with a bunch of other actresses any fan of 1970’s T&A will recognize. Speaking of The Hills Have Eyes the movie also boasts a cute actress named Janet Blythe for whom this was her sole credit (subsequently run out of Hollywood by Janus Blythe, no doubt).

The plot is simple: three rival squads of catty, twenty-something “high school” cheerleaders headed for the California state tournament are abducted off a school bus by a small coalition of ex-football players and one random lesbian calling themselves the National American Army of Freedom. The girls are corralled into a cabin in the woods where they’re forced to sit on pillows and bicker amongst themselves. Eventually, the kidnappers get too rapey, so the cheerleaders put their differences aside to mount a daring escape using quaaludes, their panties, and a cigarette lighter. Meanwhile, Flesh Gordon and Bobby from The Hills Have Eyes are off collecting a ransom for the girls in a fun sequence that’s a lot more entertaining and expertly directed than it has any right to be.

Cheerleaders Wild Weekend is a little darker than advertised (not to the extent that, say, Malibu High was, but it does feel like the most Crown International-y non-Crown International film ever). Sold as a hot-and-heavy summertime make-out comedy, it’s really more of a kidnapping adventure/heist thriller with bouts of slapstick, peek-a-boo nudity, and girl fights shoehorned in. As far as summer feels go, it’s more The Final Terror than Little Darlings. Only in the 1970s would producers think it’s cute to slap together a sexy farce based loosely on the Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping where teenage hostages stage a striptease contest to kill time (it WAS the decade when Benji the dog’s girlfriend got kicked, after all).

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: H.O.T.S. aired on USA Up All Night on May 11 and September 15, 1990; March 2, 1991; January 4, 1992; February 19 and March 20, 1993; March 4 and October 22, 1994 and May 5, 1995.

Honey Shayne (Susan Kiger, Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 1977; Angels Revenge, Galaxina, Death Screams), O’Hara (Lisa London, Savage Beach), Teri Lynn (Pamela Bryant, Playboy Playmate of the Month for April 1978; Don’t Answer the Phone) and Sam (Kimberly Cameron,) have come together to start the H.O.T.S. after Honey fails to pledge the Pi sorority and is publicly ridiculed by its president Melody Ragmore (Lindsay Bloom, a former Miss Utah who was in Sixpack Annie, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood and Terror At London Bridge). Their goal? Steal all the Pi girls’ boys.

Oh Fairenville University. God old F.U. This is the kind of school where pranks happen all day long, where there are kissing booths, where public strip football is attended by a huge crowd. Is it any wonder why college for real would disappoint so many of us raised on movies like this? And we had to pay for it for the rest of our lives?

At one point, Melody Ragmore says, “Everyone knows what H.O.T.S. stands for, and it’s disgusting!” What does it mean? Well, it could stand for Hands Off Those Suckers. Or Help Out The Seals. Maybe Hold On To Sex. But it really is the first names of the four main girls.

This is a movie where someone is naked — well, someone female, come on — every scene while two old criminals (Dick Bakalyan and Louis Guss) are digging through the house for stolen money. The plot is so thin but then again, it also has a scene with a naked parachute girl — Boom-Boom Bangs (Angela Aames, Bo Peep in Fairy Tales; she’s also in Chopping Mall and Bachelor Party) — skydiving into the pool of the dean while an unfortunate opera singer (Bunny Summers, Mrs. Boone from The Last Starfighter) is performing, a moment that made me stare at the screen and forget work and life and the crushing ennui of trying to make it in the midst of crushing disappointment. Thanks, H.O.T.S.!

The cast also includes Mary Steelsmith as the too large for most sororities Clutz (she’s also in Death Valley and Weird Science); Marjorie Andrade; Karen Smith (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, X-Ray, Freaky Friday); K.C. Winkler (The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood — a movie that has a lot of the same actresses as this movie — and Armed and Dangerous); Sandy Johnson as Stephanie (she started posing nude to pay for her father’s cancer bill; you probably know her best as Judith Myers; she’s also in Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, Surfer Girls and Gas Pump Girls); Donald Petrie (who would go on to direct Mystic Pizza, Welcome to Mooseport, Miss Congeniality and How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days); Larry Gillman (Final Destination); Danny Bonaduce, who of course gets to sing; Marvin Katzoff (who played a geek in Hardbodies and Delta Pi; he’s also in Lovely but Deadly); Steve Bond (Massacre At Central High, Gas Pump Girls); Tallmadge Scott (who fought Jackie Chan in Battle Creek Brawl and was a zombie in Shock Waves); Slinky the seal and Sugar Bear as the bear Honey Bear.

This was directed by Gerald Seth Sindell, who also made the way better than it should be film Teenager. It was written by producer W. Terry Davis, Joan Buchanan and associate producer Cheri Caffaro. If her name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s Ginger McAllister from Ginger, The Abductors and Girls Are For Loving. She was also in Savage Sisters and Too Hot to Handle. So yes, this may be a basic T&A movie, but it made money for the woman who wrote and produced it.

Turin Headquarters of Vice also known as Lust* has Jones Brown listed as its director on some posters, but that’s a combination of Bruno Vani, who was a production manager on movies like Oscenità and Mania, and the man who made those movies, Renato Polselli. Vani also made several other films afterward, mostly adult films like Oh…Angelina!, Angelina Superporno, Dyane, Teresa altri desideri (also with Polselli) and the mainstream Mia nipote Emilia and Ragazzi de’ borgata.

Actor Sandro Moretti is also credited with the screenplay.

Mirko (Raúl Martínez) and Helen (Rita Calderoni, who seems game for whatever Polselli had for her in many movies) are in love. He’s a journalist, she’s, well, we don’t know what she does. Maybe she dealt drugs. Maybes she was a sex worker. She does all she can to convince Mirko that she’s the wrong person for him, telling her that she was a lesbian, that she sold herself, that she was a criminal. Well, she’s everything to him and he won’t hear it. They get married and live happily ever after until one day she just disappears.

This sends Mirko into the dark side of Turin and Rome, as he gets too close to the organized crime that still has his beloved in its grip. Or maybe it’s all in Mirko’s head? Who can say. There is a fight scene at the end with a pitchfork and a rake, which feels right for Polselli, even if this movie doesn’t go as hard as his other films. I have a suspicion that the cut I’ve seen is missing inserts or rougher footage. There is some pretty rad Stelvio Cipriani blasting over all of this, which makes it all go down a lot smoother.

*It should not be confused with another 1979 movie also called Lust, Raniero Di Giovanbattista’s Libidine which has a scientist’s daughter fall in lust with his snake. It also has an awesome Stelvio Cipriani score.

The description of this movie on IMDB: “The seven sisters of the outcast LeFleur family try to survive in a post-Civil War Deep South.”

My wife’s description: “What is all that screaming downstairs?”

There’s a version of this movie online and it’s as complete as it can be. Milligan ran out of money before he could film the last scenes and the ending. So how should it have ended? No one is sure, as the only surviving shooting script ends at the same point the film does. So who is the killer? Who knows! The only part of the ending that is known is that the mansion was going to burn down.

In 2019, this premiered on byNWR, Nicolas Winding Refn’s free cult movie streaming website. Jimmy McDonough, Andy Milligan’s biographer, had the only surviving copy of the workprint, given to him by the director before he died. Whatever survived was restored, along with another unfinished Milligan movie, Compass Rose.

Who else would film a Southern gothic in Staten Island other than Milligan? And who else would have people stabbed in the neck with a pitchfork, a face burned with acid and decapitated heads rolling around in the midst of a talky — well, screamy? — blast of a family in decline, repeatedly slapping and spitting and yelling at each other? Not to mention voodoo and costumes that are so good that they stand in defiance of the actors attempting to get all they can out of the overly detailed dialogue!

Seven sisters try to survive the South with a serial killer on the prowl. Write your own ending while you’re at it. You’ll get an Andy Milligan No-Prize or something.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Naki Yurter and written by Recep Filiz, Intikam Kadini (Revenge Woman) is the story of Aysel (Zerrin Dogan), One evening, four men had their car break down and her father generously allowed them to stay at their home. Later that evening, their assaulted her and killed him.

By the end of this movie, Aysel will have cut, chopped, broken and burned four men beyond recognition… but no jury in Turkey would ever convict her! That’s because Intikam Kadini is inspired by the film whose tagline I just quoted: I Spit On Your Grave. Well, by inspired, I mean that Aysel goes to the city and seduces and kills each of the men one at a time. She doesn’t race a boat or castrate a man on camera like Camille Keaton did before her.

This film barely survived the purge of Turkey’s seventies sexploitation films and all that survives is a multiple generations removed videotape that has been uploaded to the web again and again.

Between the Muzak-sounding “Penny Lane” and Vangelis’ “Pulstar,” this has the music thievery that I demand in my movie watching. It’s just that I’ve never really gotten into rape revenge movies. The act itself is a real-life horror and so often, it seems like the movies wallow in the crime more than than they show the retribution. They should be empowering but they come off as shallow; I get that this is all exploitation but I have no interest in seeing women get treated this way unless they’re going to set people ablaze and go even further.

A lot of people — me included — get excited about Turkish riffs on films, even if Turkish Star Wars is so much more its own movie — Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — than just slavish devotion to remaking Lucas’ movie. Yet most of the movies that are being remade, remixed and ripped off are ones that people have some level of affinity for. Creating a new version of Mr. Majestyk is a much bigger swing.

Directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz and written by Ahmet Ündag, Karpuzcu starts with an incredibly long scene of men picking fruit — yes, this is also about watermelons, just like the Bronson-starring inspiration — with star Dilber Ay sweating under the sun as a woman holds two large melons to her chest, laughing.

Whereas Vincent Majestyk’s main concern was getting his crop in on time so he can survive another season, this has our hero’s woman abducted and sexually assaulted in a scene that goes on forever and worse, it’s pretty close to hardcore — indeed, this movie has inserts from another reel with the exact same actors — and it causes Dilber Ay’s character to get his revenge. He has a little over an hour — well, like half of that by the time the scene is over — to kill them all.

The name of the movie, according to the translation site I am using, is Watermelon Maker.

You can download this on the Internet Archive.

Never forget that Brian De Palma started in the underground and initially had setbacks in Hollywood before coming back to be a success. He didn’t forget the fight.

He didn’t forget his alma mater Sarah Lawrence College either.

Home Movies was created as a hands-on training exercise for students he was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. They were given the responsibilities of raising money, arranging the shooting schedule and editing the film, all under De Palma’s supervision. Students like Gilbert Adler (the producer of Tales from the Crypt for HBO and the House On Haunted Hill remake), Sam Irvin (Oblivion, Elvira’s Haunted Hills), Mark Rosman (The House On Sorority Row) and Charlie Loventhal (My Demon Lover) all went on to produce and direct their own films.

Kirk Douglas plays The Maestro — he’s credited with the film — a teacher tor loosely modeled on De Palma while Keith Gordon is one of his pupils who films everything that happens. So much of this movie — and what happens to Gordon’s character, much like what would later happen to him in Dressed To Kill — were modeled on events from De Palma’s young life, particularly his sibling rivalry, having a mother prone to dramatic outbursts and a father who was always cheating.

He was able to get Vincent Gardenia as dad, Geritt Graham as the older brother and Nancy Allen as his fiancee.

In addition to De Palma, it had six writers: Loventhal, Kim Ambler, Dana Edelman, Robert Harders, Stephen Le May and Gloria Norris, who was Woody Allen’s assistant on Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Zelig.

It’s ramshackle and often self-indigent, but still an interesting reminder of where De Palma came from.