EDITOR’S NOTE: The Beach Girls was on USA Up All Night on February 19, October 14, 1991 and July 14, 1995.

Bud Townsend directed Terror at Red Wolf Inn. For this, we should not make too much light of The Beach Girls, a movie with little to no plot and frequent appearances of the boom microphone. We should also realize that this movie is a lot like other beach films, mostly Malibu Beach, which was also a Crown International Picture.

Sarah (Debra Blee, Savage Streets), Ginger (Val Kline in her only movie) and Ducky (Jeana Keough, now a Real Housewife of Orange County) are staying in a beach house. Ginger and Ducky are pretty much degenerates, but Sarah is a virgin. Suddenly, a whole bunch of marijuana washes up and their house becomes an even bigger party palace.

Uncle Carl, who owns the whole place, is played by Adam Roarke from Frogs and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. So there’s that, you know?

Honestly, I’ve watched a million of these movies and they’re the cinematic equivalent of smoking the sticky green that these girls found on the beach, then eating like seven bowls of cereal. They used to make so many of these movies and I think I watched them all. Now that I’m way older than all of the kids in this movie, I think, “Man, this would have been a fun movie to make.” So maybe you should think thoughts like that instead of thinking how sex comedies are problematic — all exploitation movies are problematic, that’s why they’re exploitation movies — and just inhale.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Burned at the Stake was on the CBS Late Movie as The Coming on September 16, 1987 and March 3 and July 6, 1988.

Also known as The Coming, this movie starts in the late 1600s in Salem, as Ann Putnam (Susan Swift) is caught experimenting with black magic. To protect herself, she turns over the names of those who were also involved, sending Reverend Samuel Parris (John Peters) on an orgy of stake burnings to not only destroy all of the witches but to bring back the fear of the Lord in his worshippers. Meanwhile, in 1982, Loreen Graham (also Susan Swift) is possessed by Ann’s spirit.

By 1982, Bert I. Gordon had given up on giant animals after Empire of the Ants and would go on to make movies like Let’s Do It, The Big Bet, Secrets of a Psychopath and Satan’s Princess. That said, along the way, he’d made Picture Mommy Dead and Necromancy, so he was about more than Costco-sized vermin.

Ann Putnam is a real person who, at the end of her life, tried to atone for all the people who died at her hands — well, as the result of her identifying them — and said that they were innocent. As for Gordon, making this near the end of a long career, he’s put together a movie that can’t decide if it wants to be supernatural or a dream. He’s still making an occult movie that could play as a made-for-TV film minus all the profanity and gore the genre had embraced by 1982.

In this film. Putnam can only save a young girl by changing history and bringing someone back in time to fix it. It honestly makes no sense, but it had enough eerie visuals to keep me watching. There’s a skeleton-handed killer who the movie never really explains and we wonder who the protagonist is, who the villain is and how we’ll get the story all figured out. I wonder if Gordon ever divined it himself.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fast-Walking was on the CBS Late Movie on June 19 and November 16, 1987.

Frank “Fast-Walking” Miniver (James Woods) is a prison guard making money on the side selling drugs and engaging in the transport of sex workers. His cousin, Wasco (Tom McIntire), is in the same jail and gets an entire business turned over to him by Frank after he intimidates Bullet (Timothy Carey).

In return, Wasco has his girl Moke (Kay Lenz) seduce his cousin. But things won’t be perfect forever, as when Frank develops feelings, Wasco becomes enraged. They also come to a head about the murder of Galliot (Robert Hooks), a political prisoner. Galliot pays Frank $50,000 to get him out alive. He didn’t count on how good a shot Moke is.

Director, writer and producer James B. Harris read Ernest Brawley’s The Rap and was inspired to make it into a movie. Shot in the Montana State Prison building in Deer Lodge, Montana, it feels real.

I can’t imagine how much was cut for the CBS Late Movie, as Lenz is volcanic in her nude and love scenes, while this also has M. Emmett Walsh full frontal. Plus, Susan Tyrrell is in it? Wow.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The World According to Garp was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11 and November 27, 1987.

For some reason, my parents let me watch this when I was ten and between someone losing their penis in the mouth of a lover when their car is hit from behind and the tragic ending, I was changed. In fact, the end upset me so much, as it made me realize that I too would die, that I didn’t sleep for days.

Directed by George Roy Hill (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, Slaughterhouse-Five, Funny Farm) and written by Steve Tesich (Breaking Away), this was based on the book by Clifford Irving.

T.S. Garp (Robin Williams) was born after his mother, Jenny Fields (Glenn Close), took advantage of a brain-dead tailgunner, injured in combat during World War II. She mounted him, he got her pregnant, he died, Garp was born. Jenny writes Sexual Suspect, the story of her life, and becomes a feminist icon, while Garp marries Helen (Mary Beth Hurt), has two boys named Duncan and Walt, and becomes a fiction writer.

A girl named Ellen James (Amanda Plummer) has been assaulted and her tongue cut out. The women who gather around Garp’s mother all begin to cut out their own tongues, despite Ellen telling them not to. Helen cheats on Garp; he rams into the car where she is going down on one of her students, causing the death of their son, Walt and Duncan to lose an eye. His mother is killed by an assassin, and he can’t even go to her funeral until transgender football player Roberta Muldoon (John Lithgow) sneaks him in.

Speaking of Roberta, she’s why Irving wouldn’t write the script: “It was the early 1980s when George Roy Hill asked me if I would write the screenplay for Garp, but I knew we didn’t see eye to eye about Roberta. George was a World War II guy; he couldn’t see past the comedic part of a transgender woman who’d been an NFL player. A pity, because John Lithgow, who was cast as Roberta in the film, could have played her as I wrote her. Roberta is a force of normality in an otherwise extreme world; she is the only character who loves Garp and his mother equally, the only character who isn’t in a rage about someone or something. I declined to write the Garp script because George wouldn’t do Roberta my way.”

At the end, Garp is shot and is airlifted to the hospital and maybe Heaven as he remembers his mom throwing him in the air as “When I’m 64” plays. I had loved that song as a kid, so hearing it in this way horrified me.

I still don’t know how I feel about this movie.