EDITOR’S NOTE: Murder Mansion was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 2, 1980 at 1 a.m. It also aired on July 31, 1982.

Originally released as La Mansion de la Niebla (The Mansion in the Fog) and also known as Murder Mansion, this Spanish/Italian film fuses old school haunted house horror with the then new school form of the giallo.

The plot concerns a variety of people drawn to a house in the fog, so the original title was pretty much correct. There are plenty of European stars to enjoy, like Ida Galli, who also uses the name Evelyn Stewart and appeared in Fulci’s The Psychic as well as The Sweet Body of Deborah. And hey, there’s Analía Gadé from The Fox with the Velvet Tail. Hello, George Rigaud, from All the Colors of the Dark and The Case of the Bloody Iris! They’re all here in a movie that seems to make little or no sense and then gets even more bonkers as time goes on.

This was one of the 13 titles included in Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated in 1975 (the others were Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch). How did these movies play on regular TV?

There’s a history of vampires in the house, the previous owner was a witch and hey — this is starting to feel like an adult version of Scooby Doo with better-looking ladies. That’s not a bad thing. But if you’ve never watched a badly dubbed giallo-esque film before, don’t expect any of this to make a lick of sense.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Airplane II: The Sequel was on USA Up All Night on March 12, 1994 and March 4 and October 6, 1995.

While most of the cast came back and Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker were involved in the early stages of development, the ZAZ team decided to distance themselves from this movie and worked with Leslie Neilsen on Police Squad! instead.

The movie went ahead without their permission. They have refused to watch a single frame of it upon its release and still have never watched it.

They made the right move.

It’s not that Airplane II: The Sequel is bad. It’s that such a high bar was set that it’s impossible for any movie to be even close.

It was directed and written by Ken Finkleman, who in 1982 either had the biggest challenge or the largest balls. In the same year, he wrote not only this sequel, but also Grease 2. Again, the risk to reward was so astronomical; Ken Finkleman was flying too close to the sun on wings of wax.

That said, this movie does get more serious actors playing themselves in the way they’ve always acted but in a comedy, including Richard Jaeckel, Chad Everett, Rip Torn, Kent McCord, William Shatner and Raymond Burr while finding roles for some of my favorites like Chuck Connors, Laurene Landon and Sandahl Bergman.

It’s supposedly more science fiction based, but at no point does this movie point to the almost insane devotion to old movies that the original does. Then again, the matte painting from Logan’s Run showing up is pretty funny, as is the fact that Lloyd Bridges is in a mental hospital because his character thinks that he’s Lloyd Bridges.

EDITOR’S NOTE: 48 Hours was on USA Up All Night but I can’t find the date!

Walter Hill forever, you know?

He credits Lawrence Gordon for the idea of this movie. It was originally about the Governor of Louisiana’s daughter getting kidnapped by a criminal who strapped dynamite to her head and threatened to blow her up in 48 hours if he wasn’t paid. To save her, the toughest cop around gets the worst prisoner in jail — the one-time cellmate of the kidnapper — to save her. Roger Spottiswoode would write the script, along with Hill, Tracy Keenan Wynn, Larry Gross and Steven de Souza.

Hill couldn’t sell them on his idea of making it more of a comedy and teaming Clint Eastwood and Richard Pryor. But then something changed. Hill said, “Paramount felt that the combination of Nick Nolte and a good black actor would be commercial. What happened is very simple: Richard Pryor is now an enormous movie star, and that’s changed everybody’s mind about black lead players.”

The movie was not without issues. Gross and Hill rewrote the film until the last day of shooting, pressured to making it more of a comedy. Producers thought the movie was too violent and claimed that Hill would never work for Paramount again. Those same bosses hated dailies of Murphy’s performance and wanted him fired, but co-star Nick Nolte and Hill fought to keep him.

All of these things were forgotten when this became the seventh-biggest movie of 1982.

Career criminal Albert Ganz (James Remar) escapes from prison with the help of his accomplice Billy Bear (Sonny Landham). They travel to San Francisco where they kill a former associate Henry Wong (John Hauk) as well as two cops, Detectives Algren (Jonathan Banks) and Van Zant (James Keane). Only Inspector Jack Cates (Nolte) survives but loses his gun.

Jack tracks down Ganz’s former partner Reggie Hammond (Murphy) who only has six months left in his jail sentence. The cop gets a 48-hour release so that Reggie can help him track down Ganz and Bear. Their relationship is somewhat rocky, but Reggie impresses Jack by taking down an entire redneck bar called Torchy’s by himself, using the power of the badge, his attitude and some BS to get all the info they need to track down Billy’s old girlfriend. I mean, the guys still end up fighting one another, but that brings them even closer as they work the case.

This movie feels like lightning in a bottle, as Murphy was ready to break even bigger than just being on Saturday Night Live. Having Nolte and Hill supporting him helped and I just remember everyone being so excited about this movie. Murphy would follow this with Trading Places and from then on, he’s always be a major star.

I love Murphy. Beyond his comedic gifts, he has a deep love of all genres of cinema. He said he had no idea how to hold a gun, so he just did an impression of Bruce Lee’s face before he fought. He also said this about Rudy Ray Moore in a recent interview and I want to ask him so many more questions: “I started thinking of him like a guerrilla filmmaker. And then I started seeing different types of movies. And if you watch 8 ½ by Federico Fellini and then you watch The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, and then you watch Human Tornado by Rudy Ray Moore, you have the exact same reaction. You go, “What the … am I watching?””

He even got a sample from Santa Sangre — “The elephant is dying” — into his song with Michael Jackson, “Whatzupwitu.”

Anyways. 48 Hours is so raw compared to the buddy cop movies that came after. You should totally check it out if you haven’t and just thought it was like any other action movie of the 80s.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th Part III 3D was on USA Up All Night on October 30, 1993 and January 13 and 14, 1995.

With Amy Steel uninterested in returning to the series, the filmmakers had to reboot and figure out what made Jason tick. And that ticking was a hockey mask — three movies into the series. The original plan was that Ginny would be confined to a psychiatric hospital and he would track her down, then murder the staff and other patients at the hospital. If this sounds kind of like Halloween 2 to you, well surprise. This is not a movie series known for its originality.

He starts the film by killing a store owner and his wife just for clothes. Then, he goes after the friends of Chris Higgins: Debbie (Tracie Savage, who played the younger Lizzie in the awesome made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden), Andy, Shelley, Vera (Catherine Parks, Weekend at Bernie’s), Rick, Chuck and Chili. They run afoul of bikers Ali, Fox and Loco, who follow them back to their vacation home.

Jason starts killing quick, but he’s already mentally scarred Chris, as she survived an attack from him two years ago. This has left her with serious trauma and an inability to enjoy intimacy (which, come to think of it, comes in handy in these movies).

Jason takes the mask from the dead body of prankster Shelley and it’s on, with speargun bolts to the eye, heads chopped in half with machetes, knives through chests, electrocutions, hot pokers impaling stoners and even someone’s skull getting crushed by Jason’s supernaturally powerful hands.

Of course, it ends up with Final Girl Chris against Jason, who she kills by hitting him in the head with an ax before falling asleep on a canoe. She then dreams that an unmasked Jason runs toward her before Mrs. Vorhees — decomposed but with head reattached — drags her into the lake. Jason’s body is lying in the barn. For now.*

Here’s some trivia: To prevent the film’s plot being leaked (I could tell you the plot in less than a sentence, so this seems like bullshit), the production used the David Bowie song “Crystal Japan” as the title of the movie. They’d use Bowie songs as working titles during several of the other films.

There is a ton of footage that was cut from the film so that it didn’t get an X rating. And there’s an alternate ending where Chris dreams that Jason decapitates her. None of these things make this a better movie.

*Thanks to Bill Gordon for pointing out that I totally wrote that Jason was at the bottom of the lake. In my mind, Jason is at the bottom of the lake all the tinm. Or maybe, as Mike Justice said, “The killer’s body is at the bottom of the lake” is an old Pittsburgh expression meaning, “All’s well that ends well.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Invincible Obsessed Fighter was on USA Up All Night on August 31, 1990.

Directed by Kim Jung-yong and starring Elton Chong — which may be my favorite martial arts movie actor name other than Casanova Wong — this is the tale of Chuck, an expert in swords and the 13 Shaolin styles. Now, he must battle Eagle, the henchman of General Ching and the killer of his master Leon Chan.

Chong is a Jackie Chan clone, given to humorous over cranked fights and a lot of serious martial arts movies fans hate all of his movies. This also has zombies in it out of nowhere, zombies that rise out of maggots no less. Nobody really has a name, things just happen and, well, this was on third on USA Up All Night in the kind of timeslot where I can only imagine people were either post-coitus, post-drinking or the drugs were kicking in.

There’s a bad guy named Fat Ho and lots of discussion of Eight Chopper Fist as a fighting style.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cat People aired on USA Up All Night on September 17, 1993 and July 29, 1994.

Producer Milton Subotsky — all hail Amicus! — bought the rights to Cat People from RKO and began developing a remake, with the rights going to Universal eventually. Roger Vadim was going to be the director with Alan Ormsby and Bob Clark — all hail Children Shouldn’t Play With Death Things — working on several versions of the script.

Paul Schrader ended up making this, making a movie that is way more sexual — man, understatement of the year — than the film that inspired it.

Irena (Nastassja Kinski) and Paul (Malcolm McDowell) Gallier have been separated since their parents died. He’s now involved in a church in New Orleans and lives with his housekeeper Female (Ruby Dee), but has gone missing.

Of course, panther attacks start happening — look out Lynn Lowry (I Drink Your Blood, The Crazies) — and zoologists Oliver Yates (John Heard), Alice Perrin (Annette O’Toole) and Joe Creigh (Ed Begley Jr.) are on the case. They capture the panther, who Irena finds herself attracted to. If you think that this is the end of the animal and human sexual attraction in this film, well, stay tuned.

Joe ends up getting mauled by the panther, which disappears just as Paul reappears to make a Flowers In the Attic move on his sister. Oh yeah — that’s when we find out that his basement is filled with the remains of people, so everyone thinks the big cat belongs to him.

Oh man — where do we go now? We find out that in the mythology of this movie, any time one of these catpeople do the horizontal mambo with a human they turn into a cat and can only become human again by killing another person. Mama and papa Gallies were siblings because werecats are ancestrally incestuous and — oh yeah — only aardvarking between two catpeople doesn’t cause a transformation. So Paul tries to get with his sister again, just in time for Oliver to save her and her to shoot her brother.

This movie ends in perhaps the most insane way possible. Irena begs to be with her kind, so Paul ties her up and dips the stinger in the honey, as it were, until she transforms back into a panther, at which point he donates her to the zoo.

Holy cow, movies were absolutely insane in 1982. Wow and the soundtrack! Bowie and Giorgio Moroder? You can not get more absolutely 80’s than that. Oh yeah — and another RKO movie was remade in 1982. The Thing. Both failed at the box office, but only one is remembered quite so fondly.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night Shift aired on USA Up All Night on February 17, 1995.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eldon Glen is a horror fanatic/part-time reviewer.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Girls Nite Out definitely aired on USA Up All Night — I remember watching it! — even if my lists can’t give me an exact date.

First off, the fact that one of the posters for this film rips off Night School‘s art makes me love it before I’ve even seen one second of footage. Second, when I did watch it, it so shamelessly takes from other slashers that you’d very nearly be convinced that it was made in Italy.

Originally released as The Scaremaker, this was shot over the weekend at New Jersey’s Upsala College. That means that most of the scenes were shot in two takes or less.

After Dickie Cavanaugh kills his girlfriend in a jealous rage, gets committed and then hangs himself, all hell breaks loose. The men trying to bury him are killed and the school’s all-night scavenger hunt could not come at a worse time. Yes, I had no idea that when your college basketball team wins the big game everyone has to engage in just such a contest.

There’s a killer on the loose wearing the school’s bear costume, using serrated knives as if they were bear claws. There are lots of POV shots as if you’re being attacked by the bear and I always enjoy being the participant in a bear battle.

For a movie made on a shoestring, they got some big names. Hal Holbrook is on hand! Julia Montgomery from Revenge of the Nerds and Stewardess School (yes, she’s a star in my world)! Lauren-Marie Taylor (Vickie from the second Friday the 13th)! Page Mosely (who is something of a scream queen, with appearances in Open House, Edge of the Axe and this movie)! And most importantly Rutanya Alda, who makes this film all hers in the last few minutes, despite the fact that this movie rips off Mrs. Vorhees’ motivation, as all lower-level slashers must. I love Rutanya, who claims that she still hasn’t been paid her $5,000 fee for this movie. She should get way more than that, as the close is literally made so much better because of her commitment to more than one role.

If you’ve seen the trailers or poster for this, you may wonder, “Where are the girls in the artwork? Who is this girl in the trailer?” You are right to question these things, as the sales material was made reverse-Corman, in that it was created years after the film was complete.