CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Bimini Code (1983)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bimini Code was on the CBS Late Movie on May 8, June 4 and November 20, 1986. 

Stacey (Vickie Benson, Cheerleader Camp) and Cheryl (Kristal Richardson) own a scuba shop, but also decide to help save a missing boy along with their friends Rick and Fuji. They end up being kidnapped themselves and taken to the undersea base of Madame X, AKA Countess Magda von Cress (Rosanna Simanaitis), a totally mean, totally eyepatched super villainess who of course is my favorite person in this movie. She even has a small dog!

Madame X is after the Power Stone — “The secret of the ancient Mayans! The secret of nuclear fusion!” — but she didn’t count on two women who can swim underwater and ride motorcycles. Not even a tarantula can stop them. And then in the last half of this movie, it becomes Raiders of the Lost Ark!

The bad guys in this work for the Scorpio Peanut Company. Let that set in.

This movie taught me that people can speak underwater, that if you’re a bad guy you can dress however you want no matter how hot the jungle is, that a film can have tons of action and locations and still drag, that women in bikinis are our last line of defense and that you should always screen your henchmen.

Director Barry Clark and writer Gabrielle Rivera have made a movie that feels like if Andy Sidaris didn’t care at all about showing naked women. It has the feel of his movies, but none of the sheer wildness of them and no one remembers that you’re supposed to have several hot tub scenes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: A Night to Dismember (1983)

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

Doris Wishman produced and directed at least thirty films over four decades, mostly in the usually male-dominated genres of sexploitation and pornography. Her film career began as a hobby after the death of her husband in 1958 and her feature debut was 1960’s Hideout in the Sun.

She’d already had experience in the film industry, as she worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg as a film booker for his art and exploitation films. The 1957 New York appeals court that allowed nudism to be shown in movie theaters inspired her to make that first film, which she followed in 1961 with Nude on the Moon, a film that was banned in New York because nudist colonies were legally permissible but nudism on the moon was not. She also worked with the legendary burlesque dancer Blaze Starr but as the nudie cutie genre started losing money, she moved into sexploitation.

That’s when some of her most famous — well, amongst lovers of ridiculous cinema like me — films got made, like Bad Girls Go to Hell and the Chesty Morgan vehicles Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, films in which Morgan kills people with her monstrous 73-inch breasts.

Wishman also produced 1972’s Keyholes Are for Peeping, which starred comedian Sammy Petrillo, a Brooklyn nightclub performer who eventually made Pittsburgh his hometown in the 1990’s. He’s probably better known for his teaming up with singer Duke Mitchell (yes, the guy who made Massacre Mafia Style and Gone with the Pope) as the poor man’s Martin and Lewis. They teamed up for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which also somehow rips off Abbott and Costello monster films at the same time.

As the industry moved from softcore to hardcore, Wishman directed two Annie Sprinkle features, Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me, My Love. She wasn’t really excited about the shift and denied working on these films. As the 70’s were coming to a close, she released a film she’d been working on since 1971, Let Me Die a Woman, a groundbreaking semidocumentary on transgender issues filtered through the lens of exploitation.

That brings us to today’s movie, A Night to Dismember, which she started filming in 1978 to cash in on the slasher craze begun by Halloween. Wishman was ready to direct and produce the film from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. Most of the shoot took place in 1979 in New York at Wishman’s home.

From there, things get weird. Wishman claimed that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to reshoot several scenes and use stock footage to make a releasable final film. After four years (!) of post-production, the film would remain unreleased until MPI Media Group put it out in 1989.

There’s also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film’s cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman’s film.

According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn’t know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox. You can read more about that story here.

Whew! That’s a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let’s get into what it’s really all about!

The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.

Broderick Kent’s wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.

That’s when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.

Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.

Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they’re all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.

This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn’t help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator’s voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki’s sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.

The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That’s when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she’s escaped after killing a cab driver. And that’s the movie, I guess.

To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It’s got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970’s super 8 home movie. It’s the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they’d scoff and laugh. And that’s why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There’s also plenty of 1970’s fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.

Back to Wishman. Before her death in 2002, she was finally honored for her groundbreaking work, with John Waters featured a clips from her films in Serial Mom, appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, appearances at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals and a showing of her films at Los Angeles’s Nuart Theatre entitled “Doris Wishman: Queen of Sexploitation.”

Chattanooga Film Festival 2024 Red Eye #5: Nate and Hayes (1983)

Directed by Ferdinand Fairfax and written by Lloyd Phillips, David Odell (the writer of Masters of the Universe, Supergirl and The Dark Crystal, as well as the director of Martians Go Home and “No Strings” and “The Yattering and Jack” episodes of Tales from the Darkside) and John Hughes — yes, that John Hughes — I would have no idea this movie existed if not for the magic that is the Red Eye movie section of the Chattanooga Film Festival.

Based on the adventures of real-life blackbirders Bully Hayes and Ben Pease and shot in New Zealand — Sir Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop claims that it started the 1980s Kiwi filmmaking boom — this is known as Savage Islands everywhere but America.

It’s one of the many movies made in the wake of Raiders of the Lost Ark like Hunters of the Golden CobraTreasure of the Four CrownsThe Perils of Gwendoline In the Land of Yik-YakKing Solomon’s MinesSky PiratesJane and the Lost City, Ark of the Sun God — and yes, I am just listing movies that I love — that went back to movie serials for inspiration, this goes back even further and mines another Hollywood genre that had fallen out of favor: the pirate movie.

Missionary Nathaniel “Nate” Williamson (Michael O’Keefe from Caddyshack) is at sea, trying to save souls. Bully Hayes (Tommy Lee Jones, a few years from The Eyes of Laura Mars but looking like some kind of young lady killer) is a pirate who is trying to make money anywhere he can. They’re forced to work together and are both in love with the same woman, Sophie (Jenny Seagrove, Appointment With Death) and have to save her from slaver Ben Pease (Max Phipps).

Does this sound somewhat similar to the triangle between Will Turner, Captain Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann in Disney’s multifilm Pirates of the Caribbean movies? Perhaps. Except those films made millions and this one was forgotten.

Roger Ebert referred to it as “one of the more inexplicable films I’ve encountered recently. The part I can’t explain is: Why did they make it? The movie is a loud, confusing, pointless mess that never seems to make up its mind whether to be a farce or an adventure.”

For some reason, more than these filmmakers wanted to bring pirates back in the 80s. So I’ll say that this is better than most of them, but it’s up against Yellowbeard, The Pirate Movie, The Pirates of Penzance and the excoriable Pirates, a movie that could be the worst thing Roman Polanski ever did that wasn’t a crime against humanity and also had Cannon buy a boat and leave it shipwrecked at Cannes for years.

Speaking of Cannon, this feels a lot like the kind of movie they’d make, except it’d be directed by Michael Winner or Sam Firstenberg, which means that it would be a lot weirder.

Maybe the fault isn’t in the movie — at least in the U.S. — but in Paramount, the studio that made it.

Allegedly, when they saw the final cut, they were concerned about how close it was to Raiders. And Temple of Doom was being filmed and ready to be their next big summer movie. They didn’t want two swashbuckling movies out at the same time — much less two that rip off the rope bridge scene from The Lady Hermit (shoutout to The Betamax Rundown) and have a scene where the female lead is about to be cooked in a pot — so they released it in November when no one would go see it.

So despite all of that, by the end of this — and the last dramatic rescue — I was cheering. It won me over. Isn’t it cool when that happens and you don’t expect it?

You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Junesploitation: Wavelength (1983)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to A.C. for sending this. It would fit Junesploitation on June 12, which was New World day. This was also covered in “Exploring: 10 Tangerine Dream soundtracks.”

These days, we live lives of great convenience. Just about any movie we want to watch is only a few clicks of the remote control or keyboard away. Yet, even with this luxury, I yearn for the days of old when I used to scour the catalogs of mail-order businesses like Video Search of Miami and Sinister Cinema or the dealers’ tables at cons in search of elusive films. Those treasure hunts were thrilling when you unearthed a gem that had never been released on home media in the United States, such as Death Line a/k/a Raw Meat (my blurry VHS dupe bore the title Tren de la Mort and had Spanish subtitles) or Jess Franco’s The Bloody Judge a/k/a Night of the Blood Beast (my copy was
entitled The Throne of Fire and was in French with no English subtitles).

But I realized those fun times were over when even Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, a film never released theatrically in the United States, got a special edition DVD. For years, I’d stared at the same three stills from that film in books on horror films. But now, it was mine to own. Today, everything, no matter how obscure, gets an official home-media release. Well, almost everything. Wavelength, a science-fiction film from 1983, still has never been released to DVD or streaming in this country.

Robert Carradine is a down-on-his-luck musician. One day, when things are looking bleak, he meets an attractive young woman in a bar. She’s played by the estimable Cherie Currie of the groundbreaking rock band The Runaways. They quickly hit it off, hook up, and become a couple. He soon learns that his new girlfriend is psychic. She starts hearing strange voices, leading them to an underground bunker in the desert where the evil government is experimenting on three captured aliens. With the help of a drunken old coot played by Keenan Wynn (of course), they work to free the child-like aliens so that they can return to their mothership and go home. In other words, it’s the same plot as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with bigger ambitions, but on a fraction of the budget. The beautiful special effects shot in the finale delayed the film’s release until after E.T. had become a box-office behemoth. Perhaps in an alternate universe, Wavelength came first. One can only imagine.

Sincerely written and directed by Mike Gray, a former documentary filmmaker who wrote The China Syndrome and Chuck Norris’s Code of Silence, charmingly acted by Carradine and Currie, with a typically great score by Tangerine Dream, Wavelength was once a staple of HBO. Now it’s fallen into the black hole of forgotten films. (A soft-looking rip from an old VHS tape is available on YouTube.) It’s not a world-beater, but it’s a well-done B-movie, which was released theatrically by New World Pictures with little fanfare and even less box-office success. (I saw it in an empty theater during its original run.) Here’s to Wavelength’s rediscovery. Like an artifact from a film grail quest in the good old days, it’s a tiny gem.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: American Taboo (1983)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

This was directed by Steve Lustgarten, who won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Student Film. When you read the plot — “Unstable thirty-something introvert, who works as a photographer’s assistant, becomes obsessed with his underage female neighbor” — you might think that this is going to be exploitative. It’s not. Instead it comes across as completely real even if we’d never make the decisions that the characters live through.

Written by Lustgarten and his leads, Jay Horenstein (who plays Paul) and Nicole Harrison (who plays Lisa), this movie feels like we’re looking at actual lives. Sadly, American Taboo was the only movie Harrison made during a time that she said that she was “a poet from the Northwest who joyously misspent her youth in Hollywood.” Even more depressing is the fact that she died in 2011 from brain cancer. She feels like someone who could have broken through in some way to be a star.

You can see this as troublesome and wish fulfillment because the young girl is the aggressor in this movie, but it’s also so well made that I didn’t come away feeling strange or grossed out by it. Paul seems like someone who can’t connect with anyone and so when he does feel something with Lisa, it does seem like something that is only happening in his head even if it is the reality within the movie. He feels regret because he sees this as something that he could have kept from doing but Lisa is more of a realistic person, knowing that she wanted it and that it seemed like it was happening regardless of whatever front of morality Paul had erected.

What a strange film to be in the Visual Vengeance library of movies.

FVI WEEK: Pod People (1983)

This movie is, of course, Juan Piquer Simón’s Extra Terrestrial Visitors. The opening and end credits use footage from The Galaxy Invader by director Don Dohler.

Simón also made Pieces and Slugs, so we can forgive him for Supersonic ManThe Rift and Cthulhu Mansion (which I like for some reason). With this movie, he’s challenging us a bit.

Los nuevos extraterrestres was meant to be a frightening movie about an alien on a murderous Earth rampage, but then E.T. came out and who better than the man who made Pieces to create a clone of Spielberg’s family classic?

It starts with poachers trying to get to the alien eggs that they find in the woods and being killed in the process, as well as a rock band getting involved. Then Tommy (Óscar Martín), our child protagonist, brings one of the eggs home and ends up helping it hatch, at which point he gets a new telekinetic friend he calls Trumpy.

Maybe that name hasn’t aged well.

Meanwhile, the band — Rick (Ian Sera, Kendall from Pieces and obviously his genitals have healed well as he has a roving eye), his girlfriend Lara (Susana Bequer, who shows up in Hostel: Part II), Kathy (Sara Palmer) and Tracy (Maria Albert), along with a hitchhiker named Sharon (Nina Ferrer) they found on the way — show up at Tommy’s house and Lara soon dies with a Big Dipper symbol on her forehead, which happens after she’s attacked by Trumpy’s mother and falls off a cliff.

This movie alternates between sweet moments between alien and child versus angry alien mother killing people left and right before being shot tons of times by Rick after she kills Tommy’s angry Uncle Bill (Manuel Pereiro). The boy and alien say their goodbyes and you’re like, well, didn’t we just watch Bambi’s murderous mother get killed? Has anyone learned anything in this? Is Trumpy going to grow up and murder us all?

By the way, if Tommy’s room feels familiar, it’s the same room where Timmy was working on his dirty puzzle in Pieces

I have no idea who this movie is for, but I have to respect the lengths it takes to make us think that it was shot in America, as Tommy’s bedroom has tons of Boston sports pennants to the point that you question why there are so many of them and start to realize that no, this didn’t come from the colonies and no, in no way is this a sequel or in the same world as E.T., no matter what they want to tell you.

The chocolate of alien murder in the woods and peanut butter of human and alien childhood friendship does not taste that great when smashed together, but it sure is fascinating and man, Trumpy looks legitimately like an alien to the point where if you told me that he was an escapee from Groom Lake, I’d believe you.

This is being released on blu ray from Severin. It has a 4K scan from the 35mm negative, plus extras such as The Simon’s Jigsaw — A Journey Into the Universe of Juan Piquer Simon, interviews with Emilio Linder and composer Librado Pastor, a private concert with Pastor, the Pod People credits and a CD soundtrack single. You can get it from Severin.

FVI WEEK: Hundra (1983)

Who has had a crazier life than Matt Cimber? Born Thomas Vitale Ottavian, he met his first wife Jayne Mansfield when he directed her on Broadway in Bus Stop. Just think about how his other two wives felt, competing with Jayne Mansfield. Come on.

He’s directed everything from Mansfield’s last movie Single Room Furnished to The Sexually Liberated Female, a cycle of three Blaxploitation films (The Black Six, which featured six currently playing football stars in Gene Washington, a San Francisco 49er Gene Washington, Pittsburgh Steeler Joe Greene,  Miami Dolphins’ running back Mercury Morris, Detroit Lions cornerback Lem Barney, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Willie Lanier and Minnesota Vikings defense end Carl Eller;  as well as Lady Cocoa and the Candy Tangerine Man), The Witch Who Came from the Sea and two Pia Zadora films, Fake-Out and Butterfly. He also created and directed the original Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling TV show (he’s played by Marc Maron and named Sam Sylvia in the Netflix series).

Today, we’re here to discuss Hundra, one of the two films he made with Laurene Landon (the other is Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold). 

Hundra is the only youngster in her tribe of Amazons who hasn’t been with a man and she has no problem letting the other ladies know. Sadly, every member of her tribe soon gets killed by barbarians and the old wise woman wants her to have kids rather than get revenge. And that means she needs a baby daddy.

One dude has bad manners and tries to kill her. Another is a thief who only wants to kill her. The other is a gay pimp. Finally, she meets a healer, but other ladies have to teach her how to seduce him. Obviously, they teach her well, because she’s soon with child until a sorcerer takes her baby and forces her into a humiliating ritual, but she soon escapes and takes everyone out.

Luckily, as the narrator tells us, the spirit of Hundra lives within women from then until now. Also, somehow, someway, Ennio Morricone was conned into doing the soundtrack for this film, which is way under his legendary talent.

Star Laurene Landon also shows up in the recently released Terror Tales, as well as The StuffIt’s Alive III: Island of the AliveManiac Cop, Wicked Stepmother and many others. She’s the best part of this movie, totally devoted to the action sequences and doing every stunt except for one fall off a 180-foot building.

FVI WEEK: The Act (1983)

Directed by Sig Shore (Sudden Death) and written by Robert Lipsyte (who wrote another Shore movie, That’s the Way of the World), The Act is a political thriller and comedy smooshed together. Or, as the sell copy says, “Blackmail, a complex heist, and political snakery collide into a complicated caper full of disguises and surprises, where it’s never clear who’s really working for whom.”

Filmed as Bless ‘Em All, this stars Robert Ginty as Don Tucker, a union lawyer pressed into service as a presidential assistant. He helps get labor boss Harry Kruger (Eddie Albert) out of jail to save him from a hunger strike as long as Krugers successor Frank Boda (Pat Hingle) pays the President of the U.S. (John Cullum) $2 million dollars toward his re-election campaign.

Meanwhile, Boda doesn’t want to pay and gets his man Mickey (James Andronica) to get the payoff back, which has Mickey hiring Julian (Nick Surovy) all while Don and Elise (Jill St. John) are taking advantage of a hotel room. And John Sebastian did the soundtrack, if that brings you in.

There isn’t a single critic review of this on IMDB and 32 views on Letterboxd. Sometimes that means that a movie is an uncovered treasure. This is not one of those times.

You can watch this on Tubi.

FVI WEEK: The House On Sorority Row (1983)

This film was inspired by the 1955 French film Les Diaboliques and was originally titled  Screamer and Seven Sisters by its writer and director Mark Rosman. It also has the alternate title House of Evil, but none of those are as evocative and interesting as The House On Sorority Road.

Vincent Perronio, who often works with John Waters, was the film’s production designer. It was shot in Pikesville, Maryland and used the University of Maryland for its establishing shots. The crew used a house that was being foreclosed on for shooting and discovered two squatters living there, who were hired to be video assistants on the film.

The movie opens with a flashback sequence that was requested by its distributor, Film Ventures. It was shot in black and white, then tinted blue. We see a baby being delivered via c-section, but the mother is told that the child died.

Fast forward to today, as seven sorority sisters are drinking up at their own small graduation party. Katey (Kathryn McNeil, Monkey Shines), Vicki (Eileen Davidson, who went from acting on soap operas to appearing in the real-life soap opera The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Liz, Jeanie (Pittsburgh’s own Robin Meloy Goldsby, who is now a piano player in Germany), Diane (Harley Jane Kozak, Parenthood) Morgan  and Stevie want to spend a few more weeks in their sorority house before heading out into the real world, but their house mother Mrs. Slater isn’t having any of their shenanigans.

Seriously, Mrs. Slater is a real pip. For example, when Vicki is batter dipping the corn dog on a water bed with her boyfriend, Slater bursts in and stabs the bed with her walking cane. So that leads to the girls playing a prank — making the old woman jump into the swimming pool to get her cane at gunpoint. There’s a stumble, the gun goes off and the old woman dies. The seven sisters all decide to hide her body in the pool until after their big blowout.

Of course, that’s when the killer shows up, who is Slater’s deformed son Eric. Turns out that doctor from the beginning had given her an illegal fertility drug that led to him turning out like this. So the doctor drugs Katey — our final girl — and tries to kill Eric to cover up his crimes, but Eric easily dispatches him. This leads to a showdown between a clown-costumed maniac — who has even decapitated one of the other girls and left her head in the toilet — and Katey which ends inconclusively.

Film Ventures also asked for the ending, where Katherine is discovered floating dead in the pool, dead at the hands of Eric. They felt like that the ending was too downbeat, so that’s why we got the ending we did, where Katey stabs Eric but his eyes open right before the final credits.

This is a movie filled with not just plenty of murder, but lots of party scenes too. The Washington, DC-based power pop band 4 Out of 5 Doctors shows up to play five of their songs. If you’ve ever seen The Boogeyman, they’re in that too.

Ronin Flix was selling a limited edition blu ray of this film earlier this year, but it’s currently sold out. It’s definitely worth a watch, as it predates films like I Know What You Did Last Summer where the teenagers are as much victimizers as victims.

You can watch this on Tubi.

MVD REWIND COLLECTION BLU RAY: Joysticks (1983)

Jefferson Bailey (Scott McGinnis, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) owns the hottest of all businesses in 1983: a video arcade. It’s driving local business tycoon Joseph Rutter (Joe Don Baker, a man whose name I screamed into the ear of a sleeping girlfriend once, which is a long story I should really get to sometime) nuts, so he gets his two nephews and plans on shutting down the arcade. Mean! Unfair! No!

Bailey’s too smart for Rutter and has two pals named Eugene Groebe (Leif Green, Davey Jaworski from the legendary bomb Grease 2) — who is molested by swimsuit girls before he even gets to the arcade — and McDorfus who are ready to deal with this affront.

This movie was such a big deal that Midway allowed the image of Pac-Man to be used as well as their new game Satan’s Hollow and the as-yet-unreleased Super Pac-Man during the big showdown at the movie’s end.

Corinne Bohrer, who is pretty much teen movie royalty thanks to appearances in films like Surf IIZapped! and Stewardess School shows up, as does John Voldstad who played “my other brother Daryl” on TV’s Newhart.

There are two real reasons to watch this movie. One is the theme song, which has beeps, boops and promises “video to the max” and “totally awesome video games!” This song will infiltrate your mind and not leave, trust me.

The other big reason is John Gries, who completely owns every scene he appears in as King Vidiot, a punk rock maniac surrounded by punker girls who only communicate in video game noises when they’re not all riding around on miniature motorcycles. In a more perfect world, King Vidiot would be the star of the film. Every other person pales in comparison to his greatness. Gries would go on to steal the show in plenty of other films like Real GeniusNapoleon DynamiteFright NightThe Monster Squad and TerrorVision.

This all comes from Greydon Clark, who directed The Uninvited — a movie where George Kennedy does battle with a house cat — Without Warning and Wacko, as well as appearing in movies like Satan’s Sadists.

The saddest part of this movie was that even though the good guys win, arcades would be dead by the mid-1980’s. So really, the bad guys did win. King Vidiot? Well, no one knows what happened to him.

The MVD Rewind Collection release of Joysticks has a 2K scan and restoration from 35mm film elements, new fan commentary featuring MVD Rewind Collection’s Eric D. Wilkinson, Cereal at Midnight host Heath Holland and Diabolik DVD‘s Jesse Nelson, audio commentary by director Greydon Clark, an interview with Clark and a fake trailer for a movie called Coin Slots directed and written aby Newt Wallen and starring Mr. Lobo and Eric D. Wilkinson.  It all comes in incredible retro packaging, as well as reversible artwork, a collectible 2-sided mini-poster and more.

You can get it from MVD.