EDITOR’S NOTE: Of course American Ninja has been on the site before. It’s back because Kino Lorber has released a new blu ray special edition. Extras include two different audio commentaries: one has director Sam Firstenberg and stunt coordinator Steven Lambert and the second has Firstenberg moderated by filmmaker/eitor Elijah Drenner. There’s also a making of feature, A Rumble in the Jungle: The Making of American Ninja, as well as the trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber. It has my highest recommendation.

According to Vintage Ninja — and who are we to doubt a ninja with photographic evidence — this film was in production as Sho Kosugi finished Ninja 3: The Domination and before he had a falling out with Cannon and went off to make 9 Deaths of the Ninja, which was called American Ninja in some markets which meant that this movie was called American Warrior in other countries.

Cannon often tried to sell movies before they were made, so the next version of this movie would star Chuck Norris — wearing the evil ninja costume from the aforementioned Ninja 3 — but then Chuck decided — allegedly — that he didn’t want to cover his face. He also probably would have said that ninjas were sneaky and too violent and to please, think of the children. But hey — that’s no insult to Chuck. He knew his brand.

So Cannon went with Michael Dudikoff, who while athletic wasn’t a martial arts star like Kosugi and Norris. Luckily, he had stuntman and Enter the Ninja creator Mike Stone to help.

Joe Armstrong (Dudikoff) has a choice: join the Army or go to jail. He’s barely settled in when he saves Colonel William Hickock’s (Guich Koock) daughter Patricia (Judie Aronson, After Midnight, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter) from the ninjas of the Black Star Order. He’s the only man who survives and he ends up protecting Patricia — and being targeted by the Black Star Master Ninja (Tadashi Yamashita, Seven, The Octagon) — while still getting thrown in the brig.

The rest of the soldiers dislike what they perceive as him not caring about others. But because he’s so silent — he can’t remember anything about his past and has no idea how he became such a skilled hand-to-hand fighter — he’s targeted by Corporal Curtis Jackson (Steve James, who is amazing in this) but after one fight they become friends.

Patricia — against her father’s wishes — sets up a date with Joe but during their dinner they’re noticed by Sergeant Rinaldo (John LaMotta, who was director Sam Firstenberg’s first movie One More Chance) who is selling weapons to Victor Ortega (Don Stewart, Markov from Carnival Magic), the main bad guy who has been hiring all of those ninjas.

As Rinaldo and the ninjas work to set up Joe for the weapons thievery and several murders, our hero is saved by Ortega’s butler Shinyuki (John Fujioka). He’s a soldier who never knew World War II ended, but still was able to save and rescue Joe after the death of his parents. Fujioka specialized in Japanese soldiers still fighting the war, playing similar parts in The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark and the Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movie Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure.

Only Jackson, Patricia and an MP named Charlie (Phil Brock) are on Joe’s side and things get worse when we discover that Patricia’s dad is the one really selling the weapons to Ortega, who is about to host an entire convention of criminals and terrorists in the Philippines to sell off all of the weapons. They didn’t figure on an American Ninja ruining all of their plans.

While I prefer Kosugi in the Cannon ninja movies, this is a fine film and Firstenberg really knows how to keep the story and action moving. Steve James is another favorite and he’s great in literally every second he gets on screen. It’s a shame that he died so young.

This movie is a million times better than it should be. They may have made four sequels and a few associated movies like American Samurai and Lethal Ninja, which was also sold as American Ninja 5: The Nostradamus Syndrome.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about American Ninja here. There’s also a watchalong here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was on USA Up All Night on November 13, 1992; May 14, 1994 and January 13 and October 13, 1995.

Presenting the scummiest, vilest Friday of them all — a film packed with more kills (22!), more nudity and more drugs behind the scenes than several of the other films combined!

Years after killing off Jason, Tommy Jarvis has nightmares that the man he killed has returned. That’s why he’s in Pinehurst Halfway House, where Pam Roberts and Dr. Matt Letter (Richard Young, who gives young Indy his fedora in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) are trying to help him to get over his violent past and the death of his mother.

But are there a bunch of teens to get killed? Sure there are. There’s Reggie, Tommy’s roommate whose grandfather George works there as a cook. Plus, we have Robin (Juliette Cummins, Slumber Party Massacre 2), Violet (Tiffany Helm, O.C. & Stiggs, Reform School Girls), Jake, Vic (Suicide from Return of the Living Dead), Joey, Eddie and Tina (Debi Sue Voorhees, no relation). There’s also rich neighbors Ethel Hubbard and Junior, who want the halfway house closed down.

What follows is a bit of a mystery movie, at least for a bit. Is one of the kids the killer, like Vic, or has Jason come back from the dead? Even the end of the movie leaves that up in the air, to be honest. It’s kind of a mess, but along the way there’s a ton of blood and gore.

Danny Steinmann is the director here, perhaps better known for The Unseen and Savage Streets. Well, maybe not by most people, but by me? Of course. He also broke into movies by directing and writing the adult film High Rise and probably would have created more films in the Friday the 13th saga, but a bicycling accident and long recovery meant that this would be the last film that he would direct. The working title for this film was Repetition. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge was on USA Up All Night on October 2, 1993; July 15, 1994; October 28, 1995; August 2, 1996 and January 25, 1997.

With Craven stepping aside, Jack Sholder (Alone in the Dark, which was the first New Line movie before the original Elm Street and The Hidden) was selected as the director and David Chaskin was selected to write this (it was his first Hollywood script and he’d go on to write I, Madman and The Curse).

Chaskin’s theme for the film — which until the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy he would always say was just subtext — is the main character Jesse (Mark Patton) coming to grips with his homosexuality. Patton struggled with his anger over this film for years, as he felt betrayed as the filmmakers knew that he was in the closet. Between this role and playing a gay teenager in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, he feared being typecast at best and labeled at worst. Yes, in 1985, this was the world that we lived in. You can see the movie Scream, Queen to get more of the story.

Chaskin claimed in interviews that Patton just played the role too gay, but Patton bristled at that claim. The emotional stress led Patton to quit acting for some time to pursue a career in interior design. That said, Chaskin claims that he has tried to reach out and apologize to the actor over the years.

Director Sholder has said that he didn’t have the self-awareness to think that the film had any gay subtext, but an unfilmed scene almost had Krueger slide a knife into Jesse’s mouth. Makeup artist Kevin Yagher talked Patton out of filming that scene for the sake of his career.

Years later, Patton would write Jesse’s Lost Journal, a series of diary entries that would set his feelings — and his character’s — straight, pardon the horrible pun.

The sequel starts with a dream sequence where Jesse Walsh (Patton) dreams of being stuck inside a school bus with Freddy at the wheel. Jesse’s circle of friends include Lisa, who he’s friends with but too shy to ask out, and Grady (Robert Rusler, Sometimes They Come Back), a frenemy that seems more like a crush.

Jesse has moved into Nancy Thompson’s home, which was on the market for five years after she was institutionalized and her mother killed herself. His family has Clu Gulager from Return of the Living Dead as his dad, Hope Lange from Death Wish as his mother and a little sister that he bothers when she’s trying to sleep.

Lisa and Jesse discover Nancy’s diary, which explains how ridiculous the house is to live in. It’s always 97 degrees, birds attack you at will before they spontaneously combust and your parents accuse you of setting it all up.

Meanwhile, Jesse is dealing with all sorts of strangeness, like a sadistic gym teacher who really likes to go to punk clubs and get whipped. One night, a dream takes him to that bar and the gym teacher makes him run laps in the middle of the night. That gym teacher is played by Marshall Bell, who was George in Total Recall, the host for Kuato. Freddy possesses our hero and the coach gets clawed up in the shower. The cops find Jesse wandering the highway naked, which doesn’t seem all that weird to his mother.

Lisa and Jesse go to Freddy’s lair in an abandoned factory, then she has a pool party. Yes, I just wrote that sentence. At the party, they kiss and have perhaps the most awkward make out session ever, until Freddy causes changes in Jesse’s body that make him run to Grady for help. Yes, he gets so upset about making up with a girl that he runs to his male crush, only to transform into Freddy in an astounding practical effects sequences and kill Grady. He returns to the pool party and lays absolute waste to the partygoers as Freddy before getting chased off by multiple shotgun blasts.

Only Lisa’s love — and kisses — can bring Jesse out of Freddy. But it’s all for nothing, as the nightmare from the beginning becomes real and their schoolbus turns into a deathtrap. Even though their friend Kerry (who has the best outfits in the movie) tries to calm them down, Freddy’s claw emerges from her chest.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Teen Wolf was on USA Up All Night so many times: January 28 and September 8, 1995 and June 29, 1996.

After the surprising success of Valley Girl, the producers of this film realized that they could make an easy-to-shoot and cheap-to-make movie. As fate would happen, Michael J. Fox’s Family Ties co-star Meredith Baxter-Birney was pregnant and the show went on hiatus, so he was available. They got with Jeph Loeb — who went on to make Commando and write comics — and hired director Rod Daniel (Beethoven’s 2nd, Home Alone 4) to make this movie happen.

It’s so exciting that one of the extras gets so into it that they pull out their penis and begins to furiously masturbate at the conclusion of the film’s basketball game.

Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) is an unremarkable high school basketball played who wishes he had the love of Pamela Wells (Lorie Griffin), who is instead dating his bully on the court, Mick (Mark Arnold). He should really be paying attention to his best friend, the nerdy girl Boof (Susan Ursitti, Funland,  Zapped!) but you know how 80s teen comedies are.

At a party, Scott and Boof are forced into a closet in one of those teen makeout games. He loses it and starts clawing her up because, well, if you didn’t know by the title of this movie, Scott is a werewolf, just like his father Harold (James Hampton). Unlike every other movie ever made about lycanthropy, everyone just accepts that Scott can turn into a wolf and they even allow him to play basketball. His friend Stiles (Jerry Levine) even makes money off it, selling merch that Scott doesn’t know about until it’s already for sale. Also: Coach Finstock (Jay Tarses) is the worst coach whose entire strategy is “pass it to the wolf.”

This is the kind of movie that has a school administrator urinate all over himself in fear and ends with the stuck up girl being told to drop dead and we all laughed. How we laughed. And we learned nothing, except that if you make this movie about boxing and switch out Michael J. Fox for Jason Bateman, I will watch it again.

Beyond that sequel, there was a cartoon and a planned female version that would star Alyssa Milano. There was a second female version planned that was eventually turned into Teen Witch. And then, of course, there was the MTV series that got six seasons and a movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Summer Rental was on USA Up All Night on July 15, 1995 and April 12, 1996.

I never related to the teens in John Candy movies. Even when I was a kid, I knew how his characters felt, beat down by life, hangdog in expression. I get how his air traffic controller character Jack Chester feels, overwhelmed by his job yet doing it because he has to and always on the edge of everything flaming out.

Given five weeks off to chill out, Jack and his family — Sandy (Karen Austin) and children Jennifer (Kerri Green), Bobby (Joey Lawrence) and Laurie (Aubrey Jene) — leave Atlanta for Citrus Cove, Florida. They’re barely there when Jack makes an enemy of rich man and sailing champion Al Pellet (Richard Crenna), who forces the entire family out of a fancy restaurant and into the pirate-themed diner of Richard Scully (Rip Torn). The fight gets so bad between them — well, Jack does smash Pellet’s boat — that he buys their vacation home and tries to send them home.

As you can imagine, this ends with a snobs vs. slobs boat race at the Citrus Cove Regatta.

Directed by Carl Reiner and written by Mark Reisman and Jeremy Stevens, Candy felt that the movie was shot too fast. It’s funny but owes so much to National Lampoon’s Vacation. Yet every time I see Candy’s face, it makes me sad. Can you miss someone you never knew?

This was all based on a real vacation that producer Bernie Brillstein took to a beach house. According to Army Archerd, “He returned one night to find the house crawling with uninvited guests-invited by his client John Belushi, who, in soaking wet and sand-filled trunks, was sleeping in Brillstein’s bed.”

Brillstein himself said, “I have five children and I weigh 240 pounds. Being heavy in California is not a terrific thing. Being heavy on the beach is worse. The house on the left was occupied by two elderly sisters, one of whom had a 6-foot-4 inch mentally challenged son who was out of Arsenic and Old Lace. The house on the right was out of Death in Venice, occupied by a chic group of homosexuals who had 28-inch waists and wore peach sweaters.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Screwballs II was on USA Up All Night on January 10 and September 20, 1997.

The protagonists of this movie are Brad Lovett (Bryan Genesse), Marvin Eatmore (Jason Warren), Steve Hardman (Lance Van Der Kolk) and Hugh G. Rection (Alan Deveau) have been sent to Cockswell Academy with the hope that Principal Arsenault (Mike MacDonald) can calm them down.

They’re also misogynistic jerks who have a point score for each woman they sleep with. The ultimate girl for them is Mona Lott (Cynthia Belliveau, Blue Monkey) and they all keep failing. And there’s pretty much the movie.

Also called Loose Screws, this movie was directed by Rafal Zielinski (Hangman’s Curse, Spellcaster and the other Screwballs movies) and written by Michael Cory. Beyond stealing from itself — Screwballs is a ripoff of Porky’s so it’s like when you keep Xeroxing the same Xerox — it has the absolute, well, balls to have a strip club called The Pig Pen that looks just like, you guessed it, Porky’s.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Las Vegas Weekend was on USA Up All Night on April 1 and September 18, 1989 and February 17 and September 7, 1990.

Dale Trevillion wrote They Call Me Bruce and directed a whole bunch of erotic thrillers with titles like Heart of Stone, Timeless Obsession and Play Time. He was once married to Sharon Farrell and looks a lot like Michael “PS” Hayes.

This is all about Percy Doolittle (Barry Hickey), a nerd who comes to Vegas with a card-counting system. Then, as the tagline says, “When the dice are hot and the women sizzle you’re in for a wild … Las Vegas Weekend.” Anyways, Ray Dennis Steckler kicks Percy out of college and he heads out for adventure and acting like Eddie Deezen. I mean, they should have just hired Eddie Deezen.

Do you think when Joseph Campbell put together his thoughts on the Hero’s Journey that he knew that I’d be applying it to this movie? Because all the money changes Percy and he loses the kind of sort of crush that he had and all his money and then has to get it back together in the last act.

Man. even the poster for this movie makes me angry. I struggled through this one, I have to be honest. Just look at that poster and how smug that guy is.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: School Spirit was on USA Up All Night on September 9, 1989; January 12, June 22 and 23 and September 28, 1990; January 5 and September 20, 1991 and January 24 and March 13, 1992.

Roger Corman sold New World Pictures and started making movies again. The new owners refused to distribute Wheels of Fire and this movie and that’s how we got Concorde Pictures.

Geoffrey Baere wrote a script for College Ghost, all about a college cocksmith who comes back as a ghost because it was 1985. It didn’t get bought, but Allan Holleb (Candy Strip Nurses, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom) worked on the script with inspiration from the Italian movie Il Sorpasso. Yes, a classy bit of filmmaking to get a teen sex comedy going.

Billy Batson is not Captain Marvel or Shazam. He’s the college student played by Tom Nolan who dies while coming back from buying a condom so that he can finally sleep with his dream girl Judith Hightower (Elizabeth Foxx). Beyond being a 31-year-old teenager, Batson is now a ghost. His Uncle Pinky (John Finnegan) tries to take him to Heaven but he escapes.

Meanwhile, Lavatoire College President Grimshaw (Larry Linville, who should be getting pretty good residuals for all the USA Up All Night appearances he’d made) is celebrating major school contributor Madeleine Lavatoire at the same time that the fraternities are celebrating Hog Day, a day during which naked people go down oily Slip ‘N Slides. He’s concerned that his daughter Ursula (Marta Kober) will get involved in these shenanigans and he’s definitely correct.

Also: He’s married to Helen and is batting way out of his league because she’s played by Roberta Collins.

Also also: Lavatoire sends up being a young girl, played by Danièle Arnaud, who was in Down On Us and played one of the Eliminator girls in the ZZ Top videos for “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs.” In case you wondered, the other two girls were Playboy Playmate of the Month for March 1981 Kymberly Herrin (who was the ghost who, well, blew Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters) and the Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1980, Jeana Keough, who was also in The Beach Girls, Lovely but Deadly, 10 to Midnight and is now on The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Anyways, Billy has to help Ursula somehow but most of the movie is the typical drinking and debauchery. Cast members participating include Leslee Bremmer (Hardbodies, Reform School Girls), Pamela Ward (Hellhole), Toni Hudson (Just One of the Guys), Miss Pennsylvania Teen USA 1983 Diane Hoyes, Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1982 Marlene Janssen, Theresa Mesquita (whose only other movie appearance is Hot Chili), Linda Carol (Back to the Beach, Reform School Girls and the Filmrage Henry and June ripoff La stanza delle parole) and the nearly always nude Becky LeBeau who is in the hot tub with Rodney in Back to School.

Oh yeah, I forgot that Jim Wynorski is in this as Man in Car with Cigarette Pack Under Sleeve.

This movie is actually pretty scummy because both Billy and Pinky use their ghost powers to look at women naked, get in bed with them and nearly assault them. Sure, it’s all fun loving, but it is not anything to do with the idea of consent. Times have changed since 1985 and I realize that this is a USA Up All Night movie, but when you watch these movies, sometimes you’re shocked by these things.

Also also also: The Gleaming Spires, the band in this movie, is the band that sings “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?” Originally known as Bates Motel, members Leslie Bohem and David Kendrick also played in the 1981-1985 version of Sparks. In fact, the Mael brothers wrote the liner notes for their first album, Songs of the Spires.

The year School Spirit was released, Tom Nolan got a job teaching at Crossroads School, a private school in Santa Monica. He’s remained there for decades, eventually gaining the position of dean of students and then the dean of faculty.

This movie has a lot of continuing education amongst its cast, as Arnaud went on to be a French professor at MiraCosta College and Frishman has taught drama at high schools in Los Angeles, Reno and Sacramento.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Barbarian Queen was on USA Up All Night on February 1 and 2, September 27 and December 28, 1991; April 27, 1992; August 20, 1993; March 5 and October 8, 1994.

After co-starring in the first Deathstalker film, Lana Clarkson would return to star in this Roger Corman-produced schlockfest. Sadly, despite comedic turns in films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (she’s Vincent Schiavelli’s wife in a quick scene) and Amazon Women on the Moon, as well as other action films like Vice Girls. Her career stalled by the early 2000’s. Sure, she did comic conventions and sold autographed memorabilia on her web site, but she was subsidizing her nascent stand-up career — her dream was to be a comedic actress — with a part-time job at the West Hollywood House of Blues.

A month later, she followed famous music producer and noted lunatic Phil Spector back to his mansion and “kissed his gun” in his words. A major trial ended with 19 years of jail time for the creator of the Wall of Sound. But let’s not dwell on the sadness of Clarkson’s end. Let’s celebrate her starring role in a movie that somehow is at once a feminist adventure epic and a misogynistic wallow in the muck.

A peaceful barbarian village — is there any other kind — is all in a tizzy about the wedding of Queen Amethea (Clarkson) to Prince Argan (Frank Zagarino, Tan Zan: The Ultimate Mission). But look out! Lord Aarkur and his men attack, taking Argan and Taramis (Dawn Dunlap, Forbidden World) captive.

You may be thinking — oh cool, this movie is woke and the man is the captive in peril, not the woman, who is the hero — but this is a Roger Corman sword and sorcery movie. So even through Amethea, Estrild (Katt Shea, who went on to direct Stripped to Kill, Poison Ivy and The Rage: Carrie 2) and Tiniara are going to fight and kill lots of evil creatures and baddies, they’re also going to get naked, tortured and me too’d for pretty much the entire film.

I was going to write, “I don’t know the audience for a movie that wants to see barbarian women get raped,” but I totally know the audience.

Let’s try and get past it. Actually, you can’t get past it. But maybe you can get revenge.

By the end of the movie, Estrild is a harem girl, Tiniara has been killed, Taramis becomes Arrakur’s concubine and our main heroine, Amethea, has been tortured repeatedly but comes out on top, tossing the interrogator into a pit of acid after using “her feminine strength to squeeze his manhood painfully” as per Wikipedia. Yes, this is a woman where a woman literally kills with her vagina.

So there’s that, I guess.

Amethea, Argan and the rebels join with a bunch of gladiators in the attack to fight Arrakur’s army. Man, that’s a lot of alliteration. Anyways, our hero fights the big bad and is disarmed and nearly killed before Taramis stabs him in the back and kills him. So even in her moment of triumph, a Corman film reveals that women need treachery to win, not outright skill.

The first film from Corman’s Concorde company, Barbarian Queen was directed by Héctor Olivera as part of a nine-picture deal. Corman wanted low-budget sword-and-sorcery films. Olivera wanted to create more personal film projects. This union led to this film, as well as Cocaine Wars, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, Two to Tango and Play Murder for Me.  I think Corman’s vision won out, sadly.

There’s an in-name-only sequel and Clarkson played a character called Amethea in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II who has nothing to do with this character. There was also a third film planned.

In later years, Corman has claimed that this movie inspired Xena: Warrior Princess. I must have missed all those episodes where Xena was tied up for most of the story and repeatedly diddled. Seriously, Corman’s movies are more and more troublesome the further we get away from them. I’m all for sleaze and shock, but not when they’re presented to me as empowerment.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tomboy was on USA Up All Night on February 4 and September 11, 1994; March 3 and November 4, 1995; May 10 and December 21, 1996 and July 18, 1997.

Tomasina “Tommy” Boyd isn’t like the other girls. No, she’s not sneaking into school and switching her gender like Terri/Terry Griffith. But unlike all her friends, she’s more into fixing and racing cars than boys. This is presented as something completely out of the sphere of reality, as if she were some mutant.

Herb Freed, who directed Tomboy, has a pretty fun resume, with movies like Beyond Evil, Haunts and Graduation Day to his credit.

For some reason, this confident woman has a crush on a total jerk, racecar driver and male chauvinist Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher, Superboy), who doesn’t take her seriously because, you know, she’s a girl.

Certainly, the main reason to see this is because Betsy Russell has the lead. Modern folks may know her from the Saw movies, but for my generation, she was much better known for starring as Molly “Angel” Stewart in Avenging Angel, as well as appearances in Private School, Cheerleader Camp and Camp Fear, which steals its poster art from Body Count.

I love that someone once asked about Russell how the trailer for this movie positions Tomasina as a strong woman and then cuts to her in the shower. The actress replied, “I’ve never really paid attention to that. I guess strong females still have to take showers. They still like to feel sexy, so I don’t think there’s one thing that should stop someone from feeling sexy and showing their body if that’s what they choose to do. I don’t think it makes any difference in the world.”

Kristi Summers from Savage Streets and Hell Comes to Frogtown plays our heroine’s friends, who cares more about boys than cars and she’s normal, of course. Plus, Cynthia Thompson — Cavegirl! — and scream queen Michelle Bauer also show up.

If this movie came out in 2020, it would be decimated on social media and rightly so. I mean, can you imagine a movie that purports to being female empowerment coming out today where the main character only proves herself by repeatedly showing off her breasts?