EDITOR’S NOTE: Bachelor Party was on USA Up All Night on September 24, 1994; May 12 and November 25, 1995.
Directed by Neal Israel, who co-wrote it with Pat Proft, this was a formative movie in my teenage years. Probably yours, as well. I mean, who doesn’t remember Nick the Dick?
Rick Gassko (Tom Hanks) has finally decided to settle down with his girlfriend Debbie Thompson (Tawny Kitean), which leads his friends to plan one last night to look back on when Rick is tied down. Led by Jay O’Neill (Adrien Zmed), they create a party that even ends up killing a mule. This was the kind of party I thought I would go to when I grew up. I can tell you have never been to a single party that has this level of chaos.
Can Rick have fun while avoiding his new in-laws (George Grizzard and Barbara Stuart)? Will his friend Brad (Bradford Bancroft) kill himself? How good is Michael Dudikoff at comedy? Did you kickstart puberty when Monique Gabrielle arrived?
At the end of the movie, there’s a 3D film festival playing. There are some real films — House of Wax, Dial M for Murder and Comin’ at Ya! plus these fakes: Syborg, The Bug, Boulxi Blood Bath, Chainsaw Child, Hell House, Battle for Berkely, Bat Beast, Zenobia, Pedestrian Bondage, Glendale Girls Go Beserk, Zulu, Watts Wilderness, Richard III, Death Cult Bar-Mitsva and Sioux City.
I must confess that I watched this movie every time it aired. It actually has a heart and isn’t just all nudity, as it turns out.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Footloose was on USA Up All Night on September 15 and December 23, 1995.
Herbert Ross (The Owl and the Pussycat, Steel Magnolias) is directing, Dean Pitchford (the co-writer of “You Should Hear How She Talks About You”) is writing, and America is loving it. Imagine — a town where no music is allowed. How can it be! How could a lack of the First Amendment ever happen in our country?
Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon) and his mother Ethel (Frances Lee McCain) have come from Chicago to Bomont, Utah. Here, Reverend Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) runs the town, keeping kids like Willard (Chris Penn), Rusty (Sarah Jessica Parker), Woody (John Laughlin), Lulu (Lynne Marta) and his own daughter Ariel (Lori Singer) from dancing.
Ariel’s brother died after a night of drinking and dancing, which is how we got here. So can this city kid come to town and change it all? Of course.
This was almost a Michael Cimino movie, but even after Heaven’s Gate, he had considerable demands. There’s also a world where Tom Cruise or Christopher Atkins was the lead, while Madonna, Haviland Morris, Valerie Bertinelli or Jennifer Jason Leigh would be the love interest.
This is loosely based on a real-life movie story. The town of Elmore City, Oklahoma, had no dancing since its founding. Rev. F. R. Johnson said, “No good has ever come from a dance. If you have a dance, somebody will crash it, and they’ll be looking for only two things — women and booze. When boys and girls hold each other, they get sexually aroused. You can believe what you want, but one thing leads to another.” In 1980, the students of Elmore City’s high school made national news when they requested permission to hold a junior prom. The school board was tied at 2–2 when President Raymond Lee said, “Let ’em dance.”
If you were alive when this came out — I was 12 — you know the songs: “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins, “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” by Deniece Williams, “Almost Paradise” by Heart’s Ann Wilson and Loverboy’s Mike Reno, “Holding Out for a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler, and so many more. Writer Dean Pitchford did more than the script. He also co-wrote the songs.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Bedroom Eyes was on USA Up All Night on January 6, 1996 and February 1 and September 27, 1997.
If you enjoy Canadian horror, then you know who William Fruet is, the maker of Death Weekend (released here as The House By the Lake), Cries In the Night (better known as Funeral Home), redneck rampage film Trapped(AKA Baker County U.S.A.), Spasmsand the kinda-sorta Alien by way of animal experimentation oddity Blue Monkey.
This time, he’s taking on the genre of adult thriller, which by 1984 is kind of what giallo was leaning toward and then would completely become in the wake of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. The ideas are the same — identity, secrets, sex, shame, violence — but it’s missing the great music and the fashion for the most part.
If you’re nostalgic for a film that aired on USA Up All Night, this movie is for you. This is the type of universe where a peeping tom is the hero, where a psychologist can see past his perversion — or encourage it — to see the man he is inside and where every other woman is evil.
This was, of course, followed by Bedroom Eyes II, which is way better because it has Wings Hauser, Veronica Hart and Linda Blair in the cast, as well as Chuck Vincent directing, and that movie also has no compunctions about feeling sweaty and filthy, while this one seems clean and wrapped up, like some of the 80s felt.
This one does get points for having its female antagonist repeatedly beat the protagonist up, including a slapstick bonk at the end as the police take her away.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Cartier Affair was on the CBS Late Movie on May 5, 1988.
Curt Taylor (David Hasselhoff) is released from California State Prison, and to settle a debt to Phillip Drexler (Telly Savalas), he pretends that he’s gay and becomes the secretary for soap opera star Cartier Rand (Joan Collins). The goal? Steal her jewelry. But then he falls in love.
Rod Holcomb only made two theatrical films: Stitches, for which he used the pseudonym Alan Smithee instead of his name, and Chains of Gold, the only thing that John Travolta ever wrote. The rest of his career was spent in TV. The writer crew included Scarecrow & King creators Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner, who wrote the script from a story by Michael Devereaux.
What a guest cast! Ed Lauter, Randi Brooks as the Hoff’s girlfriend, Rita Taggart as the maid who wants to basically sodomize Hasselhoff, Charles Napier and Harry Reems as a cop! As for the film, well, it’s as good as a 1984 TV movie with Hasselhoff and Joan Collins should be. There’s one great scene where the Hoff is trying to run from mob henchman David (John Bloom, The Reaper from The Hills Have Eyes Part II, The Dark from The Dark, Frankenstein’s Monster in Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein). He keeps trying to talk his way out of it, while the hitman keeps telling him that he has to shoot him. Bloom was more than seven feet tall but had some great comic timing.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Toughest Man In the World was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and September 14, 1988.
Mr. T’s first starring made-for-TV movie role has him playing, well, himself. Or Bruise Brubaker, a tough and scowling secret softy nightclub bouncer who is in charge of a neighborhood center. He’s a Vietnam vet, he has a mohawk to honor his roots, and he’s illiterate. And he’s gonna help kids, fool!
As he’s helping kids, he’s also trying to keep Billy (John P. Navin Jr.) from being part of the crime that rules the streets. He gets Tanker Weams (Tom Milanovich) to show up at the center but also screws up and promises everyone will be a winner in a fake charity giveaway, so he has no idea how to keep working people, kind of like Mr. T’s buddy Hulk Hogan and no, I won’t let death stop me from sharing stories of the Hulkster’s lies when they’re as funny as him being in Metallica or not getting the Foreman Grill deal because he missed one phone call.
Mr. T is a little like the Hulkster. Born Laurence Tureaud, he grew up in a family with twelve kids in Chicago, calling himself Mr. T so no one would call him boy. A city wrestling champion, he went to Prairie View A&M University on a scholarship but was kicked out in the first year. Then, he was in the army and tried out for the Green Bay Packers before inventing himself as he bounced at Dingbats Discotheque. He claimed that he was in more than 200 fights and that his chains were from the people he beat in fistfights. This turned into being a bodyguard for Steve McQueen, Michael Jackson, LeVar Burton, Diana Ross, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Leon Spinks — to Wiki name just a few — as well as whispered assassination and runaway tracking deals.
Then, ABC aired two of the World’s Toughest Bouncer contests, with Mr. T bloodying huge Tongan fighter Tutefano Tufi and defeating someone in the second in under a minute after saying, “I just feel sorry for the guy who I have to box. I just feel real sorry for him.” Sylvester Stallone saw this, cast him as Clubber Lang, and the rest was history.
After a role in Penitentiary 2, he was on The A-Team, had a cartoon, a cereal, was in D.C. Cab and even had a motivational video, Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool! Also: an action figure that told you to always respect your mother and a rap album, Mr. T’s Commandments. Also, he became a wrestler, backing up the Hulkster, and this is where it gets funny. Despite being in all those toughman fights, T was freaked out about the idea that his image would be destroyed by a wrestler going off script. Maybe the rumor that Bruiser Brody was getting paid big money to hurt him — this would have never happened, Brody knew that at some point in his career, he would work for McMahon — got to him. He kept no-showing almost until the day of the event.
An aside. A few weeks before Mania, Mr. T and Hogan were on the USA Network show Hot Properties. According to Remind Magazine, “After some encouragement from Mr. T, Hogan agreed to demonstrate a chokehold on host Richard Beltzer, but ended up applying too much pressure and rendering him temporarily unconscious. Belzer recovered quickly enough to send the show to a commercial break, but he officially filed a $5 million lawsuit against both guests in 1987. The case was settled quietly in 1990.”
They also hosted Saturday Night Live the night before the show, a last-moment replacement for Steve Landesberg.
Roddy Piper, Bob Orton and Paul Orndorff, Mr. T’s opponents at Mania, may not have liked this outsider and made him nervous, but they knew where their money was coming from. That’s why the stories — Hogan wrote that “security at Madison Square Garden resisted letting Mr. T’s entourage into the building the day of the show. He was distraught by the confrontation and declared that he would just leave. The Hulkster, however, took credit for finding the actor and talking him down, getting him to see through the planned main event attraction. Paul Roma claimed that he even no-showed a few years later, as Mr. T was to manage the Young Stallions — started.
OK, another aside. Wrestlers are notoriously full of shit. There’s no way a big payday guy like Mr T was going to be with enhancement talent like the Young Stallions. And Hogan’s book isn’t non-fiction.
Then again, comedian Chris Burns once said, “I can – again, inside baseball – tell you Piper was not a fan of Hulk Hogan, moreso, Mr. T. I mean, rest in peace, Roddy, I don’t think he’d have a problem with me telling this story. He legitimately was going to kill Mr. T. I’m not kidding around. He said, he thought, “You know what? If I just back suplex him and arch it a certain way, he lands on his neck, they can’t tell me that I did it on purpose.” Piper had that thought several times, and then was like, “I’m not gonna mess up WrestleMania like that.”
Roddy Piper, also a wrestler, was probably full of shit a lot of times.
Anyways, back to Mr. T in a TV movie.
He falls for Leslie (Lynne Moody), beats gangsters and ends up knocking everyone out, including running through a wall like he’s on Takeshi’s Castle. It’s as stupid as you want it to be, and I wanted it to be really stupid.
This was directed by Dick Lowry. Yes, the same man who made Smokey and the Bandit 3. It was written by Vincent Bono, Dick Guttman and, of all people, Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster. How did that happen?
July 7-13 Teen Movie Hell Week: From the book description on the Bazillion Points website: All-seeing author Mike “McBeardo” McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies) passes righteous judgment over the entire (teen movie) genre, one boobs-and-boner opus at a time. In more than 350 reviews and sidebars, Teen Movie Hell lays the crucible of coming-of-age comedies bare, from party-hearty farces such as The Pom-Pom Girls, Up the Creek, and Fraternity Vacation to the extreme insanity exploding all over King Frat, Screwballs, The Party Animal, and Surf II: The End of the Trilogy.
Twenty-four years before, Connie Francis, Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss, George Hamilton, Yvette Mimieux, Jim Hutton, and Frank Gorshin learned about Where the Boys Are. There were no topless scenes in that movie. There are in this one.
The last movie directed by Hy Averback — who kept directed TV for a few years after this; he also made I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, Chamber of Horrors and The Girl, the Gold Watch & Dynamite — and the first Tri-Stars Pictures release, this reimagines the virginal beach film for a post-sexual revolution world, as four girls — Carole (Lorna Luft), taking a vacation for her preppie boyfriend Chip (Howard McGillin); Jennie (Lisa Hartman), who has liasons with a classical pianist (Daniel McDonald) and a rock star (Russell Todd); Sandra (Wendy Schaal), looking for Mr. Right and Laurie (Lynn-Holly Johnson), who wants to make love to a real man — go to Fort Lauderdale and stay with Aunt Barbara (Louise Sorel) and her friend Maggie (Alana Stewart).
Yes, Judy Garland’s daughter, grown-up Tabitha Stephens/Cathy Geary Rush from Knots Landing, Bonnie Rumsfield from The ‘Burbs and Bibi Dahl/Lexie Winston from Ice Castles are trying to get laid, just like the boys in the other teen sex comedies.
One of the boys in this is the future Shooter McGavin, Christopher McDonald, and another is Howard McGillin, the longest-running Phantom of the Opera. This was produced by Allen Carr, who managed to continue making movies after Grease 2 and Can’t Stop the Music. There was a party every day and the weed smoked in the beach scenes? Real.
July 7-13 Teen Movie Hell Week: From the book description on the Bazillion Points website: All-seeing author Mike “McBeardo” McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies) passes righteous judgment over the entire (teen movie) genre, one boobs-and-boner opus at a time. In more than 350 reviews and sidebars, Teen Movie Hell lays the crucible of coming-of-age comedies bare, from party-hearty farces such as The Pom-Pom Girls, Up the Creek, and Fraternity Vacation to the extreme insanity exploding all over King Frat, Screwballs, The Party Animal, and Surf II: The End of the Trilogy.
Michael (Adam Silbar), Barry (Michael Zorek), Scotty (Johnny Timko) and Joey (Jeff Fishman, who is now in the band Survivor and did the score for Gregory Dark’s Carnal Crimes) are four guys at the beach just looking to lose their virginity. Yes, it’s another Lemon Popsicle, doing that thing way before Porky’sand American Pie.
Michael already has a girlfriend, Julie Ann (Jill Schoelen!) who won’t put out, so he’s scheming with his friends and wondering if he should cheat. Now, Barry does hook up with Monique Gabrielle, so perhaps he has a point. But I kind of think Schoelen is worth waiting for. Debi Richter from Cybor is also in this, as is Virgil Frye as “the porno man,” the store owner who sells the guys condoms. A biker in Easy Rider, a survivor in Xtro 3, the father of Sean Frye and Soleil Moon Frye.
This was directed by Jim Sotos, who also made Sweet Sixteen, Little Scams on Golf, The Last Victim (AKA Forced Entry) and The Super Weapon. His real name? Dimitri Sotirakis.
It was written by Larry Anderson and Pete Foldy, who is still working in Hollywood, producing the TV movie Get Rich or Die Trying and directing Love Unleashed.
A breakdance scene, Venice Beach travelogue footage, nude ladies running in slow motion to Vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire” and the songs “Hot Moves” and “Ladykiller” by the British New Wave of Heavy Metal band Raven, who called their sound athletic rock and like Oasis, had two Gallagher brothers. Their drummer, Rob “Wacko” Hunter, would wear hockey gear and face paint; he’d throw himself into his drums. Today, he’s an audio engineer on jazz albums for artists such as Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis. Most of all, this is a movie about dudes trying to have an awkward ten seconds of sex and then apologizing after.
One of the last films produced at Hong Kong’s legendary Shaw Brothers studio, this is the story of a poet named Yu (Patricia Ha, Nomad) who refuses to comply with the way that ladies should behave in the conservative time that she has been born into. She becomes a Taoist priestess so that she can do whatever she wishes, but can society allow her to love nomadic warrior Tsui Pok Hau (Alex Man) and her maid Lu Chiao (Lam Hoi-Ling)?
Directed by Eddie Ling-Ching Fong, this is more of an art film than exploitation, regardless of the title. It’s based on the life of Tang Dynasty poet Yu Xuanji and was Fong’s first film, with the original cut said to be almost three hours long.
Once she leaves the convent, Yu expands on how she feels about free love and falls for a rich man, Yung (Poon Chun-Wai). Yet Tsui Pok Hau is never far behind. Her love for him could doom them both.
I wasn’t expecting anything with this film and was really knocked out by its scope and just how incredible it looks. It’s definitely nothing like anything that Shaw Brothers put out. Well worth seeking out.
The 88 Films release of this film comes with four art cards, commentary by David West, a stills gallery, a trailer and a gorgeous slipcover with art by Justin Coffee. You can order it from MVD.
He had been writing horror stories, doing home remodeling and attending a filmmaking correspondence course. Home video cameras had democratized movie making, and you can make fun of Turner’s films, but what have you done?
Well, people thought Turner died until 2013, when Massacre Video tracked him down and got permission to release his films.
With his girlfriend at the time, Shirley L. Jones, in the lead role, Turner pressed record and made some art, if by art you mean a movie in which a Rick James devil doll has sex with a woman, ruining her for other men, even when his head falls off mid-romping. A doll bought in a hobby shop with a tongue made from latex and a coat hanger, operated by Turner’s nephew.
This isn’t the kind of movie with fleeting sex scenes. These go on so long that they go from gratuitous to just plain demented, and there’s never really been anything else like it. What if Amelia hadn’t run from her Zuni fetish doll and spread for him? This is that. I can’t believe it either, but here it is, ready for you to be upset about. Or enjoy. Maybe somewhere in the middle?
June 14: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space!
In August of 1979, Kit Williams published Masquerade, a book that had clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare that Williams had created and hidden somewhere in Britain. He had been challenged by publisher Tom Maschler to create an illustrated book that did something no one else had before. He made sixteen detailed paintings of the story of Jack Hare, who is taking a treasure from the Moon to the Sun. He loses the treasure, and the reader is asked to help him find it.
In a box that said, “I am the keeper of the jewel of Masquerade, which lies waiting safe inside me for you or eternity,” he buried a gold rabbit pendant with celebrity witness Bamber Gascoigne.
He said, “If I was to spend two years on the sixteen paintings for Masquerade I wanted them to mean something. I recalled how, as a child, I had come across “treasure hunts” in which the puzzles were not exciting nor the treasure worth finding. So I decided to make a real treasure, of gold, bury it in the ground and paint real puzzles to lead people to it. The key was to be Catherine of Aragon’s Cross at Ampthill, near Bedford, casting a shadow like the pointer of a sundial.”
Three years later, Williams received a letter containing a sketch with the solution from a man named Ken Thomas, whom the writer soon realized had made a lucky guess. After he was given the prize, physics teachers Mike Barker and John Rousseau wrote in with their answer, but had not found the prize. That’s because the rabbit’s box went unnoticed in the dirt they dug up; Thomas saw it and lucked into winning. According to Wikipedia, “It was later found that Thompson had not solved the puzzle and had guessed the hare’s location using insider knowledge obtained from a former acquaintance of Williams.”
Ken Thomas was really Dugald Thompson, and his business partner, John Guard, was the boyfriend of Veronica Robertson, who had previously been Williams’s girlfriend. Guard allegedly convinced Robertson to help him win the contest because he wanted the money donated to animal rights causes.
William wrote a sequel, The Bee on the Comb, and a video game, Hareraiser, with a jewel as a prize that was never found. Other books like this — this was a big success — included The Piper of Dreams, The Secret, The Golden Key, The Key to the Kingdom, On the Trail of the Golden Owl, The Merlin Mystery, Forest Fenn’s The Thrill of the Chase: A Memoir and the movie/book we are talking about today, Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse.
Published by Intravision, there was a movie directed by the man who came up with the idea, Sheldon Renan, and a book illustrated by Jean-Francois Podevin and published by Warner Books. A gold horse was the prize in this contest designed by Paul “Dr. Crypton” Hoffman, who was the president and editor-in-chief of Discovery magazine, president and publisher of Encyclopedia Britannica and the man who made the treasure map for Romancing the Stone.
Renan wrote the first book about underground movies, An Introduction to the American Underground Filmand “The Blue Mouse and The Movie Experience,” an influential Film Comment article about how the Blue Mouse Theater in Portland went from Hollywood movies to grindhouse films. Wildly, he also directed The Killing of America,wrote Lambada and has been a speechwriter for every CEO of Xerox since 1990.
While IMDB says that cinematographer Hilyard John Brown (also a cameraman on This Is Spinal Tapand Solomon King) came up with the idea of a film with treasure — but “opted out of working on the film because director Sheldon Renan wanted a lot of helicopter shooting, and Brown had had too many close calls in helicopters” — every other article I have found says that this was Renan’s project.
The movie is about a girl (Dory Dean) trying to find her father and her lost horse, Treasure (Galahas). She’s helped by Mr. Maps (Elisha Cook Jr., Mr. Nicklas in Rosemary’s Baby), a blacksmith (John Melanson, who was an actual blacksmith and is also the Man with the Black Gloves), a sushi chef (Yasumasa Adachi), Mr. Night Music (Herman Sherman), Dream Dancers and the Ghost Party, all narrated by Richard Lynch. Yes, Richard Lynch, who says things like “The city. It was no place to find a horse. Not her horse. She knew that roads that started in the city led in all directions. How could she leave the city and find the right direction?”
This came out during the early console video game era, and there was also going to be a Colecovision game. A silver horse was buried and is still there, as the puzzle to find it never got made.
My dad was obsessed with this book, staring at it in B. Dalton and wondering how to solve it. We couldn’t afford it, so he would sit on the floor and draw sketches of it. No one won, and the prize money was given to Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Seven months after the contest was over, Nick Boone and Anthony Castaneda discovered where the horse was with the Captain Nemo solution.
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