“Take This Job and Shove It”, was written by David Allan Coe and sung by Johnny Paycheck, the only number one song Paycheck would ever have. Beyond Coe doing his own version, it was also covered by the Dead Kennedys, Canibus with Biz Markie and Chuck Barris and the Hollywood Cowboys during the last episode of The Gong Show.

Shot in Dubuque, Iowa at the Dubuque Star Brewery and in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this is the very first movie to feature monster trucks. Bob Chandler’s Bigfoot #1 is Ray’s (Tim Thomerson) pick-up truck and Everett Jasmer’s USA-1, called “Thunderin’ Lightning,” is also in the film.

Take This Job and Shove It is all about The Ellison Group, run by Sam Ellison (Eddie Albert), who buys up local businesses and makes them profitable by making them just like every other business. His two hatchetmen are Dick Ebersol* (Martin Mull) and Frank Macklin (Robert Hayes). Macklin usually goes well at assignments like this, but now he has to go back to his hometown and just might have to fire his childhood best friends.

This film has an amazing cast, with Art Carney as brewery owner Charlie Pickett and Barbara Hershey as Macklin’s old girlfriend J.M. Halsted, plus David Keith, Royal Dano,  James Karen, George Lindsey, Len Lasser, Penelope Milford and cameos for Charlie Rich, Coe and Paycheck.

Take This Job and Shove It was directed by Gus Trikonis, who knows all about making great drive-in and redneck movies like Supercock, Nashville Girl, The Sidehackers, Moonshine County Express and The Evil. It was written by Barry Schneider, who wrote another song-based film, Harper Valley P.T.A. (plus Ruby, Roller Boogie, Class of 1984, Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction and Deadly Force, so great work Barry) and Jeffrey Bernini.

You can get this on blu ray from Kino Lorber.

*This has to be no accident and a joke at the expense of the former chairman of NBC Sports and Saturday Night Live producer.

Bob Clark wrote and directed this film — the adventures of the students of Florida’s Angel Beach High School in 1954 — that ended up inspiring an entire generation of movies much in the same way that Animal House inspired it. Clark based the movie on his own experiences growing up.

At one point, every studio in Hollywood turned down Porky’s. Clark got the movie produced through Melvin Simon Productions and a Canadian firm, Astro Bellevue Pathe, making the film up north to take advantage of tax benefits. So yeah. This is yet another Canadian tax shelter film.

Much like, well, every teen sex comedy that would follow this,  the boys all want to lose their virginity. They go to Porky’s, a strip club in the swamp, thinking they can hire a girl there, but they’re all dumped into the Everglades by the club’s owner, Porky. They demand their money back, but Porky’s brother is the sheriff, which means that they lose even more cash.

The movie revolves around getting back at Porky and also getting into the pants of the ladies, including Lynn “Lassie” Honeywell (Kim Cattrall). In 1954 and 1981, this was a common part of growing up. Today’s viewers may not see the film in such a comedic light, but you can’t expect things made forty years ago to understand the progress that has happened since they were made. The fact that you recognize that these movies are outdated points to how much progress we have made; enjoy them for the parts that you can enjoy them for.

The real Porky’s — Porky’s Hide Away in Oakland Park — is now an L.A. Fitness. That makes me incredibly depressed.

This movie starts with a female weightlifter* luring a guy into the gym showers with the promise of sex, then she and her friends shave his head as she laughs. Trust me, if young Sam had seen this in 1981 — he would have been nine — he would have had yet another obsessive crush.

Robert Freeman directed one movie. This is it. He also was the negative cutter on True Blood and the absolutely deranged movie The Forest. It was written by Roger Stone — not the right wing maniac but instead the writer of A Night at the Magic Castle, Lethal Pursuit and Paradise Motel. He also wrote several of the songs in this movie** — “Goin’ All The Way,” “Love or Nothing at All,” “No Time Like Now,” “Secret Hideaway,” “She’s a Bad Girl” and “Hot Spell” — as well as music for Talk Dirty to Me: Part 2, Bodies In Heat, Adult 45 Volume 1 and An Unnatural Act. He also wrote the song “Get Even” from Gymkata. He was joined by Jack Cooper, who was not Jackie Cooper.

Artie wants to sleep with his girlfriend Monica and she won’t give in, so they break up, because high school. Actually, because guys, too.

There’s also a big beefy dude named Bronk who is played by Joshua Cadman, Johnny Big Head from Surf II and you should really just go watch that movie instead of this movie. He was also Spike in Angel and yeah, you should watch that instead, too.

The movie ends at a Sadie Hawkin’s Dance, which was an invention of Al Capp in the comic strip Li’l Abner. This dance is one where the girls ask the guys and yet another invention by the high school elite to remind geeks why they must remain in their caste, unasked to the party and home playing Dungeons & Dragons and listening to Grim Reaper. Oh, that was me? Yes it was.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*Seeing as how this is a guy-centered movie, her only name is weightlifter in the credits.

**He was joined by Richard Hieronymus on some of these tracks. He also composed the music for Lethal Pursuit, as well as The Forest, Sweater Girls, The Love Butcher, Amanda By Night and more.

Yeah, I have no idea how we haven’t covered this yet.

Actually, we try to avoid movies that everyone has seen and said things about, because I often worry, “What else can I add to the conversation?”

In truth, I’d seen Evil Dead II before the original and preferred the comic take on the same story. And Army of Darkness takes that goofiness, mixes in some peplum and Harryhausen and gets even cooler. I’ve ever seen — and been coated with gore during — the stage play. And we even talked about Within the Woods, the proof of concept that sold this movie.

What can I say about this movie that’s new and different? Do you want me to say something like, “It’s a less claymation version of Equinox?” Because, yes, I absolutely believe that to be true but I’m still pretty amazed by what Sam Raimi and his skeleton crew were able to get out of this movie.

How great is it that Raimi’s career started here, mounting a camera to a board and running through the woods chasing people to try and get the perfect shot? Evil Dead is infused with a heavy metal energy and blows through 85 minutes like a band blasting as many songs as it can in one set so it can rock your face off.

Where the later movies lose their edge slightly — there’s no way Ash is getting killed — everyone in this movie is fair game. It feels dangerous and unhinged, as only the best horror movies can be.

I mean, it must have worked out. They’re still making sequels and video games and toys, after all.

After Popeye, this was the second joint production with Paramount of films that were more mature than the expected Disney offerings. That meant that Drahonslayer’s violence, themes and even brief nudity ended up being controversial, despite only being rated PG.

Set the film after the Roman departure from Britain, prior to the arrival of Christianity, the film shows a world of sorcery unlike many others in the genre. Co-writers Hal Barwood (who also wrote The Sugarland Express, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, MacArthur and Corvette Summer, as well as writing and directing Warning Sign and creating video games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) and Matthew Robins (who wrote Crimson Peak and wrote and directed Batteries Not Included and I would be remiss not to mention that he also directed The Legend of Billie Jean) were inspired to make something new. Barwood said, “our film has no knights in shining armor, no pennants streaming in the breeze, no delicate ladies with diaphanous veils waving from turreted castles, no courtly love, no holy grail. Instead, we set out to create a very strange world with a lot of weird values and customs, steeped in superstition, where the clothes and manners of the people were rough, their homes and villages primitive and their countryside almost primeval, so that the idea of magic would be a natural part of their existence.”

Vermithrax is also one of the best dragons ever made, even forty years after the film’s release. More than 25% of the movie’s budget went to realizing the dragon. This was the first movie to use go-motion, which had parts of the mechanical dragon be programmed and filmed by computer. The forty-foot tall beast was brought to life by sixteen puppeteers. Its full name — Vermithrax Pejorative — means The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse.

As for the story, it’s all about Galen Bradwarden (Peter MacNicol, who is embarrassed by this movie, perhaps because you can fully see his ween in it) saving Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) from being a virgin sacrifice to the dragon. She’s no damsel in distress, however, as she’d hid her gender identity to help create the sword that can destroy the beast.

But yeah. It’s worth watching for just the dragon.

I should not have seen this movie at nine or ten years of age, nor should I have read the magazine. I should have been blissfully ignorant of the mindblowing nature of what I was about to see and waited until I was ready, but here we are, literally forty years later and not a day goes by that this movie doesn’t cross my mind.

Directed by animator Gerald Potterton and produced by Ivan Reitman and publisher Leonard Mogel, this movie takes on the near-impossible task of taking the stories of an unwieldy adult science fiction magazine and making them into a coherent story about, well, evil? Or something? Honestly, who cares, there’s animated Roger Corben and zombie bombers and half-nude warrior women riding dinosaurs and stabbing people.

Based on the comic book tale, “Soft Landing” starts the film. Created by Dan O’Bannon and Thomas Warkentin, it has a man fly a car from space to Earth. He’s an astronaut home to see his daughter, but in the next sequence, “Grimaldi,” what he has brought back kills him and his daughter soon learns of a galaxy and time-spanning evil called the Loc-Nar. That entity is present in every story throughout the film and actually works really well.

Moebius’ “The Long Tomorrow” has become “Harry Canyon,” the story of a film noir detective in a 2031 New York City that looks and feels a lot like Blade Runner, because, well, Blade Runner looked a lot like Moebius. In this installment, the Loc-Nar is a Maltese Falcon-ish McGuffin.

In “Den,” based on the Richard Corben comic of the same name, that ultimate evil is the magical element that everyone on the world of Den wants. Our hero is a nerdy kid who has been transported to another world and become a superheroic character that everyone wants to either get in their bed or put in the dirt. For me, this is the center of this movie and other than the closing section, it stands hands, shoulders and various nude parts above the other segments. Plus, that’s John Candy as Den.

Bernie Wrightson’s “Captain Sternn” follows, with Eugene Levy as the Sternn and a court trial that shows just how dirty of a future spaceman its hero can be. A section called “Neverwhere Land” was deleted from the film, which would have connected these segments and would have been a loop set to either Pink Floyd’s “Time” or Krzysztof Penderecki ‘s “Magnificat: Passacaglia.”

The zombie segment with the haunted “B-17” is next, followed by an adaption of Angus McKie’s “So Beautiful, So Dangerous,” a tale of alien pilots, Earthwomen and lines of Plutonian Nyborg.

In the last story, based on “Arzach” by Moebius, “Taarna” and her reptile bird battle mutants and the Loc-Nar itself, sacrificing herself to save the world before she is reborn in the young girl in the framing device that began the story. As she walks outside, the reptile bird returns and the adventure begins all over again.

The soundtrack to this movie — that kept it from legally being released for years — is amazing. There’s everything from Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” and “Prefabricated” by Trust to the theme song by Don Felder and Blue Öyster Cult’s “Veterans of Psychic Wars.” The band originally wrote the song “Vengeance (The Pact),” but the makers of the film thought it too closely told the story of the segment.  Both songs appeared on BÖC’s Fire of Unknown Origin.

For years, there had been talk of a reboot. Whatever that ended up being aired on Netflix as the series Love, Death & Robots.

Shot entirely on location in Ireland, employing mostly Irish actors and crew, Excalibur was an important film for the Irish filmmaking industry and helped start the careers of Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds.

It was also known as the Boorman Family Project, as several members of director Jonathan Boorman’s family appear, with his daughter Katrine Boorman playing Igrayne — Arthur’s mother — as well as his daughter Telsche as the Lady of the Lake and his son Charley acting in the role of Mordred as a boy. It was shot a mile from his home, so he was able to be at home for the entire making of the movie.

Boorman has been wanting to make the movie since 1969, yet the three-hour script was seen as too costly by United Artists and instead, he was offered The Lord of the Rings, which he did not make yet did develop. He ended up using some of the work that went into that adaption here, as well as potentially being inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

He’d worked with Rospo Pallenberg on that canceled film (as well as Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Emerald Forest; Pallenberg would also direct Cutting Class), so he worked with him here to bring Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to theaters. Boorman said that his film was about “the coming of Christian man and the disappearance of the old religions which are represented by Merlin. The forces of superstition and magic are swallowed up into the unconscious.”

I love Roger Ebert’s review of this movie, in which he said that the film was both a wondrous vision and a mess, “a record of the comings and goings of arbitrary, inconsistent, shadowy figures who are not heroes but simply giants run amok. Still, it’s wonderful to look at.”

It’s beyond gorgeous, actually, a movie that combines shocking gore with artistic flourishes, like the three ladies in white who attend Arthur to Avalon at the close. Boorman was also smart enough to cast Nicol Williamson as Merlin and Helen Mirren as Morgana Le Fay, two actors who had had a conflict when they acted in Macbeth together. He felt that tension would be seen on screen and it certainly is. That said, Mirren claimed that the two become friends while making Excalibur.

It rained every single day of the shoot, which adds to the foggy look of the film. It had many issues, as the first fight scene had to be filmed three times. It was filmed at night and the exposure meter was broken, leading to two different scenes of underexposed film.

Boorman’s career is pretty great. Sure, there are the big movies like Deliverance, but I love that he shoots for the fences and makes off the wall stuff like Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic. Here’s to less playing it safe for directors, even if the misses end up being spectacular losses. I don’t think that that can happen any longer in entertainment.

My initial exposure to this film came from Mad Magazine. Often as a kid, we wouldn’t see an R-rated movie until it was on HBO, so many of the films I’ve had to find as an adult were first seen through the eyes of Mad’s Usual Gang of Idiots. This time, Don Martin did the movie adaption. I’m happy to share a few panels with you thanks to Jesse Hamm on Twitter.