Martin Davidson directed the teen classics The Lords of Flatbush and Eddie and the Cruisers, but today we’re talking about his lone superhero movie, an early entry in the form that starred Three’s Company lead John Ritter and Anne Archer. Obviously, the success of Superman had a lot to do with this movie.

Steve Nichols (Ritter) is a struggling New York City actor posing as Captain Avenger to promote a film, but when he stops a robber in costume, he learns that he loves playing hero for real. Soon, he’s working for the mayor’s staff and Bert Convy and Kevin McCarthy, which thrills me to no end.

The mayor’s goons, however, are shady and their plan to fake Captain Avenger’s heroics gets exposed by the media. However, Nichols girlfriend Jolene (Archer) convinces him to leave the mask behind and become a real hero.

Keep an eye out for former Howard Stern Show reporter Penny Crone, a young Kevin Bacon, Dr. Joyce Brothers and Robin Sherwood from Tourist Trap and Death Wish 2.

There are also several references to Taxi Driver in this movie, such as several scenes of cab drivers hanging outside of the Belmore Cafeteria at night and Leonard Harris, who played Senator Charles Palantine in Scorcese’s film, as the mayor.

Sergio Corbucci is known for making some of the most violent spaghetti westerns ever committed to the screen, including Django, The Mercenary, Navajo Joe and The Great Silence. In fact, his contributions to exploitation film are so important, he received a special thanks at the end of Kill Bill Volume 2. He was also known for the exact opposite type of film later in his career — ridiculous comedies.

Police officer Dave Speed (Terence Hill, The Call Me Trinity) going to the electric chair for what will be the fourth time the state has tried to execute him for the murder of his superior officer and friend Sergeant Willy (Ernest Borgnine, The Devil’s Rain!). Yes, this is a comedy. Yes, I saw this when I was eight.

Dave gets blasted by nuclear radiation while trying to serve a parking ticket and ends up with all manner of powers, like super speed, endurance, telekinesis, ESP, hypnotism and invulnerability. The only problem is that the color red shuts his powers off. He and Willy soon battle the mob forces of Torpedo (played by formerly blacklisted actor Marc Lawrence, who was Mr. Weiss in The Nightmare Never Ends segment of Night Train to Terror) and his girlfriend Rosy Labouche (Joanne Dru, older sister of Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall).

The bad guys set up Dave and leave Willy to drown on their ship the Barracuda, but our hero finally escapes from prison and rescues his friend, despite him being frozen for weeks. He also flies on a giant bubble of gum and then drops into the Earth and emerges on the other side in China.

Hill and his frequent partner Bud Spencer made plenty more movies with Corbucci, as well as two other cop movies — Crime Busters and Miami Supercops.

If you had HBO in the 1980’s, there’s no way you missed this movie. I think that it aired every single night. According to the February 1983 HBO Guide, Super Fuzz aired 8 times in one month. Seriously, people never got sick of this one.

I ask you this: why did they keep making movies after Caddyshack? This is as perfect as film gets, quite literally a movie that you can drop into and out of at any time with your damage to the timing or spirit of the film. It has never failed to lift my mood or make me feel better about life. It is all that movies should endeavor to be.

It’s based on the memories of writer and co-star Brian Doyle-Murray as he worked as a caddy at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Illinois, along with his brothers Bill and John. Director Harold Ramis had also worked as a caddy and even been hit in the genitals with a golf ball once, just like the film. Even better — that Baby Ruth candy bar in the pool came directly from Murray’s high school.

Is there a plot? Sure, Danny Noonan is supposedly the hero and its all about how he wants to escape his huge family and go to college. But really, it’s the personalities that this movie is all about, like Ty Webb (Chevy Chase), the son of one of the club’s founders who has turned slack into zen. Then there’s Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight), who is perhaps the best bad guy ever in a comedy. Or newly rich construction boss Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield) who is a buffoonish man out to annoy every wealthy person in the club. And of course, there’s Carl Spackler, the groundskeeper who is at war with a gopher.

It’s also the only movie where Chase and Murray appear in a scene together. Famously brawling on the set of Saturday Night Live once, where Murray referred to Chase as “medium talent” before punching him — the best insult ever — they got along here and wrote a quick moment where Ty’s golf ball ends up in Spackler’s ramshackle hovel.

Murray dialogue in the film is completely unscripted, including his Cinderella story scene. There, he was told only to act as if he were a child announcing his own imaginary golf moment. He was only on set for six days.

The constant improv really bothered Knight, an actor who prided himself on knowing his lines. Dangerfield never did the same take twice, so their constant battling has its roots in reality. In fact, Rodney would never begin doing anything when Ramis yelled “Action!” Instead, he had to be told, “Rodney, do your bit.”

The original cut of this film was around 4 and a half hours with Bill Murray’s Cinderella speech coming in at around half an hour. No one was happy with the second cut, so the gopher was added at the last minute to give the movie some structure. It was shot on a soundstage, so that’s why the film stock in these scenes looks completely different.

Caddyshack was a failure upon release and was hated by critics. It’s gone on to show them all the error of their ways.

Sadly, writer Doug Kenney would never see this movie be embraced. At the press conference for this film, he drunkenly yelled at reporters, convinced it would be the end of his Hollywood career. A trip soon after to Hawaii with Chase lifted his spirits, but only for a brief time. He either slipped on a rock or jumped while there and was dead at 33, leaving behind work with the National Lampoon and the film Animal House along with this one. You can learn more about Kenney in the movie A Futile and Stupid Gesture.

Terry Marcel also was behind Prisoners of the Lost Universe, The Last Seduction II and Jane and the Lost City (he was also A.D. on The Pink Panther series of films, as well as Straw Dogs) but today, we’re going to discuss his 1980 sword and sorcery epic Hawk the Slayer, which predates the Conan ripoff film cycle.

The wicked Voltan (Jack Palance, who is amazing in everything he did, no matter how silly the films get) murders his own father (Ferdy Mayne, who we all know and love from Night Train to Terror) over the magic of the last elven mindstone. Before he dies, the old king gives his son Hawk (John Terry, who was on TV’s Lost) a magic sword that responds to his mental commands. Our hero then promises to kill his brother in revenge.

Soon, though, Voltan has taken over the country. An injured soldier named Ranulf (W. Morgan Sheppard, who is also in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark) is taken in by the nuns of a convent who heal him but can’t save his hand. But Voltan soon descends on the convent and takes away their Mother Superior and Ranulf seeks Hawk to stop his brother.

Soon, Hawk learns of his new quest from a sorceress (Patricia Quinn, who was Magenta in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and gathers his friends: Gort the giant (Bernard Bresslaw, who would go on to play a similar role in Krull), Crow the elf and Baldin the whip-wielding elf. Even though they raise enough gold to pay for the ransom on the nun, Hawk knows that his brother won’t live up to his word. After all, Voltan killed Hawk’s wife Eliane (Catriona MacColl! Holy cow! The star of City of the Living Dead, The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery!).

You can also watch out for Roy Kinnear (Henry Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as an innkeeper and Patrick Magee (Tales from the Crypt, Asylum) as a priest.

The five warriors decide to attack Voltan and Hawk succeeds in killing his nephew Drogo (Shane Briant, who is in Lady Chatterley’s Lover), but Baldin is horribly wounded after one of the nuns turns heel on our heroes. Finally, Hawk gets his revenge, but an evil spirit brings Voltan back, so Hawk and Gort travel to find him. The battle isn’t over…and sequels called Hawk the Hunter and Hawk the Destroyer have been teased for years.

British kids who grew up in the 80’s LOVE this movie. For example, Simon Pegg worked plenty of references to it into the TV show Spaced. And The Darkness song “Nothin’s Gonna Stop Us” has Drogo’s line “I am no messanger. But I will give you a message. The message of DEATH!” in its lyrics.

This film is more influenced by Star Wars than Conan. Will you enjoy it? How do you feel about Krull? Because this movie feels so close to that one — except this one has a magic sword and that one has the Glave. Also, this movie has a great shouted line that makes me laugh every single time: “The hunchback will have something to say about this!” And an elf that talks like a robot, which makes no sense. Oh yeah — and Jack Palance being as over the top as it gets!

I don’t have a favorite movie to be honest. There are tons of worthwhile movies that I adore, thinking of them as old friends. They’re experiences that transport me away from my day to day concerns. How does one choose just a single solitary individual movie to hold above all others as their top choice?

My tastes are broad, too. So it could be a blockbuster like Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is a perfect distillation of so many influences, a movie serial for eighties kids, packed with flying wings and Nazis and a flawed hero with a bullwhip and a hat that never comes off? Or would it be something arty like Jodorowsky’s El Topo or The Holy Mountain, films about image and religion and violence and transformation? Something gory like Fulci’s The Beyond or Romero’s Dawn of the Dead? A movie that will never fit into the time it was released and is still finding an audience, like Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China or The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai? Or maybe Strange Brew or The Kentucky Fried Movie or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls?

Man, this is hard.

If hard pressed, I’ll have to pick Flash Gordon. It’s not the best movie ever made, but the more I think about it, it’s my favorite film ever made. It’s like a warm bowl of soup on a cold winter’s day. Someone tucking you in and letting you sleep in. A cool fresh squeezed lemonade when you’re parched. It is all of these things and more.

When they were planning this movie — and look, I wasn’t there, I was right when this came out — I imagined that they all stopped doing coke for a second — because in my heart of hearts, I fervently believe that every movie pre-1990 was dreamed up with mountainous piles of cocaine for fuel — and said, “You know, instead of making this movie realistic, let’s make it as fake and garish and ridiculous as we can. Fuck it.”

Whereas Star Wars and Alien – movies influenced by the aforementioned Jodoworsky’s abandoned Dune project — envisioned working class spaceships, everything in Flash Gordon is shiny and new and fresh out of Studio 54.

It’s a film daring enough to find its star, Sam J. Jones, from TV’s The Dating Game. Then, take that untested star and match him with master thespians like Max Von Sydow and Topol.

It’s also a film stupid enough to feature a football fight as one of its main action pieces. But I’ll punch anyone square in the face that makes fun of that scene. The cheerleading, the sound effect when Flash gets knocked out, the lizard aliens cheering, Klytus calling plays — it’s really the craziest thing committed to celluloid. This wasn’t some art film or ragtag B movie — this was a major blockbuster motion picture.

And at the same time, it has the greatest soundtrack ever recorded. Queen was at the top of their game — hey, they had just released The Game — and they went nuts on this epic. Pretty much every drum part I’ve ever tracked for my many metal projects starts here, with the loud pounding tribal beat featured in the song “In the Space Capsule (The Love Theme).” I’m listening to this while I type these words and I can envision exactly what is on screen, Dale, Flash and Dr. Zarkov. Man — dialogue all over these songs on the soundtrack, like it should be.

Flash is such an influence on me that I randomly scream things from it just about every single day. Stuff like, “DIVE!” and “Gordon’s alive?!” and “No, daddy, not the bore worms!” or “Ah, well; who wants to live forever?” and “Klytus, are your men on the right pills?” and “Rocketship Ajax approaching!”

It’s packed with everything a movie needs: crazy scenery that isn’t afraid to throw glitter and day-glo everywhere; Ornella Muti steaming up the screen in every single frame she appears in (I didn’t get a ton of the sexual stuff in here until maybe my mid-teens, then I started watching the film all over again from a totally new perspective); both the funniest and most awesome wedding scene in the history of film; a button marked HOT HAIL that Ming just fires at the Earth because he can. I could, can and will go on — it’s that good.

The first time I saw this movie was at the Westgate Plaza Cinema in New Castle, PA. I forced my parents to watch it twice the same day and I was a completely maniac, standing on my seat and screaming, “KILL MING!” until I had to be told to settle down. Then, HBO saw fit to air it every single minute of every single hour or every single day, except for when they showed Burt Reynolds movies like Hooper and Sharky’s Machine. And I watched it every single time.

I should have just wrote this piece like a disjointed screed from a maniac of things that make me go goo goo in this flick: Klytus’ eyes bugging out when he melts and dies; the jump at the end and the YEAH!; the Hawkmen spelling Flash’s name at the victory celebration; Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien showing up on Arboria; even an ending that promised more. Well, 37 years later, I’m still waiting.

They say you should never meet your heroes. And I hate bugging celebrities and being a fanboy, but there’s one picture that I have — and Sam J. Jones is in it. That pretty much says it all.

PS – The end of the movie, when they play Queen’s “The Hero?” Let me quote:

“So you feel that you ain’t nobody/ Always needed to be somebody/ Put your feet on the ground/ Put your hand on your heart/ Lift your head to the stars/ And the world’s for your taking”

I can run through walls after listening to that song or watching this movie.

NOTE: This article originally ran on Super No Bueno.

I love Mario Bava. I can’t say enough good things about the movies he’s made. His son Lamberto, however? Between Devilfish, Blastfighter, Delirium and Demons, his movies are a mixed bag with only the last one being a film I’d recommend (look, I love Blastfighter, but people usually think most of the movies I recommend are bonkers and I’ve scared enough people). So how does he fare this time?

Jane Baker is a middle-aged woman whose affair suddenly ends with the death of her lover Fred thanks to a car accident. Things get worse — her son is drowned by her daughter Lucy as they play unattended. All that remains is for her to spend a year in a mental hospital.

When she’s released, she can’t go back home and determines to live in the apartment where she once made love to Fred. Sound normal? Well, her blind landlord — named Robert Duval — keeps hearing her make love all night and screaming her dead lover’s name.

Did her daughter drown her brother on purpose? Is Jane still having sex with a dead man — or part of him? Is the New Orleans mansion she leaves behind enough to make my wife jealous and ask when we are moving there?

Mario Bava died two months after seeing this, but felt that he could die happy as his son had made a great film. While slow in parts, I’ll admit that this is one of his better efforts with a truly inspired and demented final act. Between the reveal of Fred, Jane’s insane daughter coming to visit and even the Pieces-esque shock ending, all of the build-up really pays off at the end. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a movie where pieces of a dead lover are served in a stew to a blind man and the woman who has kept making love to parts of him. So, I guess, that’s a kind review for Lamberto!

You can check this out on Shudder.

By 1980, every holiday was taken. All writer and director Emmett Alston had left was New Year’s Evil. It would have to do.

TV’s most beloved punk, Diane “Blaze” Sullivan (“Pinky” Tuscadero from TV’s Happy Days) is getting ready to count the night down from a Hollywood hotel. Things are great until Evil himself call, saying that in each timezone, he’ll be killing a naughty girl, with Diane being the last to die.

In an insane asylum nearby, a nurse is the first victim, with the killer audiotaping each kill and replaying them. Who is he? A crazy fan? A religious nut? Her son? Her husband?

Whomever it is — I won’t tell — he dies by jumping off the roof of the hotel. But as Diane is loaded into the ambulance, her son (Grant Cramer, Killer Klowns from Outer Space) is at the wheel, wearing the mask of the killer.

The big selling point of this movie for me? Fake 1980’s punks. There is nothing like the Hollywood mainstream ideal of what punk rockers are like, because it is always far from the truth and always awesome.

This is fine, I guess. I wanted it to be something more, but maybe I demand too much from 1980’s slashers. There are good ones out there. This isn’t one of them. But you can always find out for yourself with the Scream! Factory blu-ray or watch it on Amazon Prime.

If you ever meet me in person, there’s a 90% chance I’ll be wearing a t-shirt of this movie. Therefore, I find it near impossible to be objective about this film. I love it too much. I can only share my adoration with you, dear reader.

Alternatively known as Paura Nella Città dei Morti Viventi (Fear in the City of the Walking Dead), Twilight of the Dead, The Gates of Hell and Ein Zombie hing am Glockenseil (A Zombie Hung on the Bell Rope), this is the first unofficial chapter in what has become known as Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, along with The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery.

It all begins with a seance in the apartment of a medium, where Mary Woodhouse (Fulci heroine supreme Catriona MacColl, who appears in all three of the Gates of Hell movies) has a vision of Father Thomas as he commits suicide and opens the gates to the City of the Living Dead. That priest must be destroyed by All Saints Day or the dead will walk the Earth.

The images that she sees send her into a coma, which everyone else believes is her death. She’s buried as the police and journalist Peter Bell (Christopher George, Pieces) investigate her murder. As Peter visits her grave the next day, he hears her screams as the gravediggers discuss porn where a guy has sex so much that he dies (one of those guys is pornstar Michael Gaunt, who was in Barbara Broadcast and the other is an uncredited Perry Pirkanen from Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox).

Peter uses a pickaxe (!) to smash his way into the grave, nearly killing her as he saves her life. This scene has been ripped off twice that I know of, once informing the scenes of the Bride in the coffin in Tarantino’s Kill Bill (also look for a scene that takes Rose’s tears of blood later in that movie) and in this year’s abysmal The Nun. Neither of these have the frightening power that Fulci pulls of in this scene or the painful closure at the end, where Mary screams and pants in the open air, her eyes filled with pure terror.

Once Mary recovers, she and Peter visit the medium who reveals the answers behind her visions. As that’s all going on, a weirdo kid named Bob (Anyone named Bob is a Fulci movie is one to be feared) find a sex doll that somehow inflates itself before being scared off by a rotting fetus. And at Junie’s Lounge, a discussion of how weird Bob is leads to the mirror behind the bar shattering. As they say, strange things are afoot and this is just the start of Fulci’s descent into surrealism.

While all this is going on, psychologist Gerry (Carlo De Mejo, Manhattan Baby) is consulting Sandra (Janet Agren, Night of the Sharks, Hands of Steel) about life and how she used to want to marry her father before he ran out on her family. Just then, his girlfriend Emily arrives and tells him that she’s on the way to try to help Bob. When she finds him, he’s crying on the floor and shoves her away, just as Father Thomas appears and smothers her to death with a hand full of maggots.

Obviously, if you think anything is goign to make sense in this movie from here on out, you aren’t ready for this era Fulci. There are no filters left, just a demented Italian madman let loose in America with tons of fake blood, guts and film to burn.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is when Rose and Tommy (a young Michele Soavi ) are making out in his car and she thinks she hears a noise. It’s a total slasher moment that any other director would handle in a rote way. Instead, Fulci has the couple turn on the headlights and there is no joke or defusion of the tension. Instead, we see the priest hanging by the neck in front of them as Rose’s eyeballs bleed and she throws up her intestines (Daniela Doria is pretty much decimated by Fulci in every movie she did for him, including being knifed through the back of the head in the opening of The House by the Cemetery, has her chest and face sliced up brutally in The New York Ripper and asphyxiated in The Black Cat. I have no idea what he ever did to her, but you can read a great interview with her here. And yes, she did this scene by throwing up tripe and fake blood.). Then, Tommy’s head is ripped open.

Everyone suspects that Bob is behind the many disappearances in Dunwich, which totally isn’t going to keep Peter and Mary from heading there.

We’ve fully descended into Fulci world at this point. Bob is seeing visions of Father Thomas, a mortician gets bitten by a corpse when he tries to steal her jewelry, Emily’s zombie visits her little brother John-John, the same corpse that bit the mortician shows up in Sandra’s kitchen and broken glasses fly all over her house, spraying the room with blood. Meanwhile, Bob’s just trying to hide out and smoke a joint with Mr. Ross’s teenage daughter when the man comes in, nearly insane, and kills him with a drill press.

Yep. In any other movie, they’d tease death by drill or show you the moment before impact. Fulci revels in this scene and makes it last. Yes, that drill is going inside Bob’s head. And it’s coming out the other side, too.

Peter and Mary make their way to Dunwich, where they meet up with Gerry and Sandra. While they’re talking, a storm of maggots — oh that Fulci! — rains down on them. To top it of, Gerry gets a call that his dead girlfriend has risen from the grave and killed John-John’s parents. Sandra offers to take the kid to her apartment, but Emily is there and rips her scalp off before they save the boy just in time for a state of emergency to be declared.

Remember that bar at the beginning? Zombies invade it and kill everyone just as All Saints Day begins. Peter, Gerry and Mary (not Peter, Paul and Mary) go into the family tomb of Father Thomas, filled with skeletons, cobwebs and fog. Just to prove that this is 100% a Lucio Fulci film, Peter, who we’ve been led to believe is the main male hero, is killed when a zombie rips his brains out. Mary and Gerry battle Sandra and an army of zombies until they encounter the sinister priest, who makes Mary’s eyes bleed.

Before she can throw up her innards, Gerry stabs him with a cross and his guts fall out as he and the rest of the zombies go up in flames and become dust, with the Gates of Hell closed.

Mary and Gerry exit from the tomb to discover John-John and the police, but she soon screams as he comes near her and the film shatters to blackness. Wait — what just happened?

There are a ton of stories about the true ending of this movie. Some say John-John was supposed to be a zombie and the negative of the original recording was destroyed by a lab. I’ve also heard that the editor spilled coffee on the footage, forcing Fulci to improvise. And then some stories claim Fulci changed his mind about the end after the shooting was complete and just went with this. Interestingly, the Danish version of the film ends with a dark move across the graveyard and this text: “The soul that pines for eternity shall outspan death, you dweller of the twilight void come Dunwich.”

Trivia note: The movie Uncle Sam ends exactly the same way with the only exception being a title card that says, “For Lucio.”

Who knows how it ends! Who knows what the hell is going on for long stretches of this movie! It doesn’t matter! as Fulci would say, this is an absolute movie of images, a triumph of style (and gore) over substance.

The first time I saw this film was a third generation — or worse — dub on Hart Fischer’s American Horrors ROKU channel. As much as I love having 4K versions of things on blu ray, this is just about a movie made for the fuzzy quality of an old VHS tape.

Obviously, this was written by Dardano Sacchetti, who was behind so many of Fulci’s scripts, like Zombi, Manhattan Baby and Conquest, as well as so many other awesome movies like Thunder and Demons.

Eibon Press has put out two issues of a comic book adaption of the film that you should check out. I’m interested to see if issue #3 will feature the real ending of the story (or if there even is one)! You can also grab the new Arrow Video reissue of this movie at Diabolik DVD.

Don’t feel like leaving the house? You can watch this for free on Vudu or Amazon Prime. It’s also on Shudder and their version looks great.