EDITOR’S NOTE: The Falling was on USA Up All Night on June 29, 1990.
Also known as Mutant 2 and for having the tremendous extraterrestrial balls to call itself Alien Predator, this was directed by Drew Sarafian, the son of Richard C. Sarafian (Vanishing Point) who went on to make Interzone and Death Warrant.
Damon (Dennis Christopher, Fade to Black), Michael (Martin Hewitt, Killer Party) and Samantha (Lynn-Holly Johnson, Where the Boys Are ’84) are traveling through Spain in a van.
The Falling was owned by Film Ventures International before Edward Montoro took that million dollars and disappeared. It was picked up by Trans World Entertainment. The sheer hell of making it was why producer Carlos Aured quit making movies. Yes, the same man who directed Horror Rises from the Tomband Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll.
Aured wanted the filmmakers to be more professional and the Spanish crew was very laid back, which meant that this went way over budget and he had to pay for that. This was shot at the same time as Monster Dog. A lesser film lover would say something like, “When a Claudio Fragasso movie is better than this,” but I can’t lie. I love Fragasso.
Anyways…
Aliens from all the way back on the Apollo 14 Moon Mission and SkyLab have infected animals that have come to Earth and are now killing human beings.
But really, this is an RV movie where two young men love the same woman. There are aliens, yes, but we’re here for the love as well as Dennis Christopher doing horrible impressions. I mean, there are effects — Mark Shostrom makes some really gross stuff — but so much of this is a hangout movie which is frankly why I like it so much.
Sarfian was working as a script doctor/movie fixer at this point — according to Matty at the essential Schlock Pit he fixed up Young Warriors— but he was hoping to make his own movies. The Film Ventures International deal — working with Eduard Sarlui — producer of She, Jailbird Rock, Killer Klowns fromOuter Space and I, Madman — was going to package this movie with Mutant and a sequel to Scared to Death that finally became Syngenor.
As Sarlui formed Trans World Entertainment with Moshe Diamant, he was so shameless that he took the art from Creature to make the poster for this movie.
This movie may not be the Alien clone that you want it to be, but it’s something else. Something much stranger.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Class of Nuke ‘Em High was on USA Up All Night on February 8 and 9 and September 14, 1991 and March 20 and June 6, 1992.
Directed by Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman as Samuel Well and written by Kaufman, Richard W. Haines, Mark Rudnitsky and Stuart Strutin, Class of Nuke ‘Em High is about New Jersey’s Tromaville High School, a school in the shadow of an unsafe nuclear reactor that goes into the drinking water. This turns the honor students into a gang called The Cretins.
They also sell drugs and that’s how Eddie (James Nugent Vernon) gets the radiative joint that gets trampled at a dance and causes Warren (Gil Brenton) and Chrissy (Janelle Brady) to have sex and dream of mutating. She’s instantly pregnant and throws up their child into a toilet where it escapes and becomes a gigantic mutant just in time for Warren to go to war with The Cretins.
This movie somehow has four sequels — Class of Nuke ‘Em High 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown, Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid, Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 and Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High AKA Volume 2 — and I have to say that so far, the second one is perhaps the best movie I’ve seen from Troma. That bar was tripped over but I still enjoyed it.
I actually liked this one too. What is happening? Is the radiation making my brain lumpy enough to actually like Troma?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Recruits was on USA Up All Night on December 29, 1990; August 23, 1991; March 14, May 29 and September 4, 1992 and June 18 and October 15, 1993.
Mayor Bagley learns that the governor is coming to his town of Clam Cove to announce that they’re getting a freeway. To make sure nothing goes wrong, he demands that Police Chief McGruder (Mike McDonald, who was also in Oddballs and Screwballs II) add more people to the police force. That means that anyone can be a cop. And before you can ask, “Isn’t this almost the same movie as Police Academy?” I’m ready to answer that this is a Canadian tax shelter movie made in Ottawa’s Wasaga Beach, just like Fireballs, which was filmed at the same time.
If you want to win a trivia contest — actually I don’t know who would ask this question — this would be Lolita Davidovich’s third movie. It’s also the first movie for Jon Mikl Thor, who would make Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare the very next year.
Director Rafal Zielinski would also make two Screwballs movies, as well as State Park, which you know that I’ve watched several times. He also made Spellcaster, which has Adam Ant, DJ Richard Blade and Traci Lind from Fright Night Part 2. You better believe I’m hunting that movie down as you read this.
The writer behind this is Charlie Wiener, who wrote and directed a bogus ’80s SOV horror that’s actually a Canadian TV movie called Blue Murder and a martial arts movie Dragon Hunt, in addition to writing Screwball Hotel, so let me assure you — his scumbag skills are in full effect here. And don’t confuse the Hotel one with Screwball Academy.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hamburger: The Motion Picture was on USA Up All Night on November 9, 1990; May 31 and June 1, 1991 and February 1 and September 18, 1992.
My wife asked me, “Why would anyone watch this movie?” She doesn’t get it. She wasn’t around in the 1980s, when we had no internet. She wasn’t going through puberty. She’ll never understand staying up until 3:15 AM to catch a movie about Hamburger University and the joy that it can bring.
Russell Proco (Leigh McCloskey, who improbably is also in Argento’s Inferno) has been kicked out of multiple schools because he can’t stop hooking up. There’s a trust fund waiting for him if he can get a diploma. So he picks the one school he knows he can graduate from — Buster Burger University.
You know why the 1980s were great? Because Dick Butkus could be in a movie and we all knew exactly who his character was. Here, his job is to beat the hell out of the students so they don’t screw up Buster Burger. Everyone has to follow the rules:
Outside consumption of food is prohibited.
All candidates are to stay on the grounds of Buster Burger University until graduation.
Since sex and success make lousy partners, all candidates are not to engage in sex while students.
This is a movie that follows the best formula: just get a bunch of crazy characters together, get them into some insane situations and let the hijinks ensue. Along the way, Russell makes a friend who is obsessed with the CEO’s sexy wife (the pneumatic Randi Brooks, who is also in TerrorVision), a nun who for some reason is going to burger school, a sex-crazed guerilla fighter, a soul singer who was arrested and is at the school on work release and so much more.
Where else other than Buster Burger University can you learn to yell things like “Put those cookies back, motherfucker,” get stuck inside a giant pickle and then have to battle against bikers and cops on your first day of work?
Most amazingly, director Mike Marvin would go on to make a movie that is even less connected to reality, The Wraith.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Reform School Girls aired on USA Up All Night on March 11, August 12 and November 13, 1989; May 18 and 19 and November 24, 1990; August 16 and November 23, 1991 and May 1 and August 15, 1992.
Seeing as he already made two women in prison films, Prison Girls and The Concrete Jungle, DeSimone decided that it was time to make a parody.
Yet this movie is a force of nature. I mean, Wendy O. Williams*, the lead singer of the Plasmatics, plays Charlie Chambliss, the top dog of the reform school who sleeps with Edna (Pat Ast, Halston’s muse and the star of Warhol’s Heat), the head of the ward, for special privileges.
Jenny (Linda Carol, who may have been 16 when they shot this, making her nudity underage) is our heroine, a girl who gets caught in a shootout thanks to a bad boyfriend and ends up becoming the newbie who runs afoul of, well, everybody.
And to make this even better, Sybil Danning plays Warden Sutter, a religious zealot with a radio tower that she uses to blast the Word of God while the girls try to sleep.
Sherri Stoner, who plays Lisa, who would go on to write for Animaniacs and voice Slappy Squirrel. Other actresses** that appear in this are Denise Gordy (D.C. Cab), Tiffany Helm (Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), Darci DeMoss (Friday the 13th Part VI), Michelle Bauer, Julia Parton and Leslee Bremmer (Hardbodies).
The only sad thing I can say about this movie is that Mary Woronov was originally cast to play Dr. Norton. Unfortunately, DeSimone thought she played the role too hard during the first cast reading. Any movie that would have had Woronov, Williams and Danning in the same story may have been too much for my fragile mind to deal with.
*Williams was 36 when she played this teenage role. She also refused any outfits that were suggested for the movie, providing her own clothes and refused to take off her boots, even for the shower scenes.
**Linnea Quigley is on one of the posters, yet isn’t in the film.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing In Common was on USA Up All Night on October 28, 1989.
Nothing In Common is responsible for what I do for a living.
I won tickets to see this movie from a trivia contest on WKST radio in New Castle, PA. As I sat in the theater, I was amazed by the office that David Basner (Tom Hanks) worked in as ad guy. There were markers everywhere, everyone was stressed but having so much fun and people were playing guitars at their desks. Surely advertising was the most fun job ever!
Almost three decades later I can tell you that none of this is true.
David’s parents Max and Lorraine (Jackie Gleason and Eva Marie Saint) have finally split up. David’s just broken up with his girlfriend Donna (Bess Armstrong). And what’s even worse, his dad has lost his job. And at the same time, he’s pitching Colonial Airlines and dating the owner Andrew Woolridge’s (Barry Corbin) daughter Cheryl (Sela Ward).
You can imagine that 14-year-old me was amazed that normal looking guys could dare Sela Ward if they were funny and worked in advertising.
Max has been a horrible husband, father and even caretaker of himself. His diabetes is out of control, leading me to a lifelong fear of losing my feet after watching this. But David comes through for him, even though his father doesn’t deserve it. Oh Garry Marshall, you got me.
This is the movie that took Tom Hanks from funny guy to someone who could be in dramatic movies. Sadly, Gleason would be dead just a year after this film. He’s pretty fearless in it, playing someone who we should have no sympathy for whatsoever. He made this while he was deathly sick with colon cancer, liver cancer, thromboses hemorrhoids, diabetes and phlebitis.
Writers Rick Podell and Michael Preminger would write the TV movie Gleason which starred Grad Garrett as The Great One.
And hey — it has Thompson Twins playing “Nothing In Common” which was their first release as a duo.
EDITOR’S NOTE: House aired on USA Up All Night on January 31, 1998.
Steve Miner has so many cinematic sins to deal with — Soul Man, My Father the Hero, Big Bully (the next to last live action film Rick Moranis would appear in), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later— that you almost forget that he started his career making the second and third installments of Friday the 13thand today’s movie, House.
Roger Cobb (William Katt, Carrie) has some issues. As a Stephen King-ian popular horror writer, he feels fenced in by the horror genre. He has writer’s block. His wife has left him. His son disappeared and no one can find him. And the aunt that raised him just hung herself in the haunted house where he was raised.
Cobb intends his next book to be about what he went through in Vietnam, so he decides to move into the house. His strongest memories involve Big Ben (Richard Moll, fulfilling the contract that either he or Robert Englund appear in every 80s horror film), a soldier who bullied him back in ‘Nam who was injured and left behind for the enemy to capture.
Everyone’s a fan of Cobb, from his new neighbor Harold (George Wendt from TV’s Cheers) to his real estate agent and the cops that investigate him. He just wants to write. But with all the monsters in his head — and real monsters in the house — that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.
Things get worse when his wife visits and turns into a monster, only to be killed by a shotgun blast. At this point, the film flirts with making Cobb the real monster, but it’s a narrative shift that is never followed up on. Then, as he buries his wife, his hot neighbor comes on to him. What he thinks will be a night of hot sex turns out to be him watching her young son, but that goes wrong when little monsters try to steal the kid,
Finally, Cobb falls into his medicine cabinet into an alternate dimension that predates the Upside Down of Stranger Things by several decades. He rescues his son, but not before Big Ben attacks him again. Finally, Cobb realizes that all of his fears are inside his head and he destroys the monster with a grenade before leading the house to find his son and wife, who is magically returned to life.
House was produced by Sean S. Cunningham and featured music by Henry Manfredini, who also worked on the Friday the 13th films. Fred Dekker wrote the original script, but most of the humor is credited to Ethan Wiley.
This is a good example of pre-CGI monster moviemaking. Big Ben looks great, a triumph of practical makeup, as do the creatures that populate the film. And it’s interesting that this movie explores PTSD and the dark side of war years before many were ready to face it.
The look of the film reminds me of late-period Fulci minus the gore. I’m referring to the film stock itself, which doesn’t have much richness, looking more like a TV movie than a theatrical film.
House isn’t a movie that demands that you watch it, but if you’re looking for something in the middle of the night, it always provides a fun distraction. You can’t dislike a film that has a large fish on the wall come to life and try to kill someone.
EDITOR’S NOTE: State Park was on USA Up All Night on December 21, 1991; August 1, 1992; April 23 and October 16, 1993 and January 10, 1997.
I love saying the name of the director of this movie. Boon Collins.
He also directed Spirit of the Eagle, Abducted II: The Reunion, The Protector and Sleepover Nightmare. But he also wrote the story and screenplay of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, so wow, you know? He wrote this, too, along with Lindsey Bourne, who also wrote the sequel.
Renee (Roberta Weiss) is a city girl trying to jog in the Canadian Rockies who is being chased by a crazed mountain man named Vern (Lawrence King-Phillips) who finally takes her to his cabin in the middle of nowhere. But Vern didn’t count on the fact that his father Joe (Dan Haggerty) would help Renee escape.
Based on a true story, well, Joe eventually gets hurt, Renee loses her pants and Vern goes shithouse. Actually, I buried the lead because it’s totally based on a true story, the one about Kari Swenson, a pretty major athlete who was a bronze medal winner as a member of the 1984 U.S. relay team competing in the first women’s Biathlon World Championships in Chamonix, France.
Following the 1984 biathlon season, Swenson took a job at a Big Sky, Montana ranch where she could also Also our country doesn’t do enough for our Olympic athletes. That said, one day as she was training, she was abducted by Don Nichols who wanted to make her his son Dan’s wife. As twenty people searched for her, Don warned that he would shoot anyone who tried to take her. When they got close, Swenson yelled to warn the searchers away. Don Nichols ordered his son to shut her up and shoot her. He did and she survived — thanks to her breathing abilities as a runner — when the bullet collapsed her lung.
Swenson hated how the men were presented in the media as mythical mountain men, as she only saw them as criminals. There was another movie, The Abduction of Kari Swenson, made for NBC with Tracy Pollan in the lead and Swenson as a technical advisor.
She returned to training, earning a spot on the United States Biathlon team again and competed in the 1986 biathlon competition in Oslo, Norway. She finished fourth, retired and became a veterinarian.
I really have to see the sequel because it gets supernatural and has Jan-Michael Vincent and Debbie Rochon in it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Raiders of the Living Dead definitely aired on USA Up All Night — I remember watching it! — even if my lists can’t give me an exact date.
A regional New Hampshire film with a synth score that was reedited with new footage by Sam Sherman with that iconic Independent-International Pictures logo at the start of the show?
If you’re wondering, “Is it weird?” My answer is, “Would it be on our site if it wasn’t?”
While filming on this movie originally began in New Hampshire by co-writer Brett Piper as a movie called Graveyard, it was finished by writer-producer Samuel Sherman, the man who formed Independent-International Pictures with Al Adamson.
In an abandoned prison, a doctor is using executed convicts to form a labor force of the living dead. Meanwhile, Jonathan (the one-time Flick and future adult actor Scott Schwartz) has turned his dad’s LaserDisc into a laser gun and decides that he should hunt down zombies with the help of his girlfriend, grandfather, a reporter and a librarian (who was played by Zita Johann, the female star of Universal’s The Mummy, lured out of retirement by Sherman).
There are three versions of this. A sixty-minute version by Piper called Dying Day, an initial take on the footage by Sherman called Dark Night and then Raiders of the Living Dead, which is one of the best carny movie titles ever.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Message from Space aired on USA Up All Night on September 30, 1989 and October 5, 1991.
I’ve seen Spookies in the double digits and I still have no answers for so many parts of the movie’s plot, motivations or reasons for existing. Hours of research have been spent reading up on the film, looking for the truth as to how such a strange movie escaped from some wall beyond sleep to infect my waking life.
There are moments of Spookies that are utterly terrifying — an incredibly realistic looking grim reaper, a spider sucking the life out of a man and zombies good enough to fit into a Fulci film. Then there are farting monsters, a wolf boy and acting on sub-Ed Wood level. How can all of these pieces fit into one movie?
That’s because, well, Spookies is more than just one movie. And despite its flaws, I love it.
Much like another of my favorite bits of 1980’s video insanity, Night Train to Terror, Spookies has its roots in a strange fashion. Whereas the former film is three movies all stitched into one, Spookies is a movie that was finished, then torn apart and finished again by a totally different creative team.
Spookies was once a movie called Twisted Souls, which was written and produced by Frank Farel, Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran, with the latter two men directing. It was filmed at the home of James Jay — one of the Founding Fathers — in the summer of 1984 before the producers and their financial backer ran into artistic differences. That meant that while the film was shot, the editing and post-production was never finished.
How much of Twisted Souls is left? Everything where the people arrive in two cars, as well as the monster attacks in the house came from this footage, including the demon girl with the Ouija board, the muck men, the snake demon, the grim reaper and the muck men.
A year later, the financial backer hired Eugenie Joseph to direct more footage and splice it into the original film. She hired an entirely new cast, which would be the scenes where the boy looks for his birthday party, the guy in the tree, the cat boy, the old magician, all of the zombies, the blue boy and the witch in the basement.
This would all make some semblance of sense if any of these multiple plot points and characters ever crossed over. But they really don’t. Unlike Night Train to Terror, which at least attempts to weave its three stories into one portmanteau narrative, Spookies just throws things at you until you really have no idea what’s next. Imagine if Evil Dead made even less sense and changed its tone and narrative every five minutes and you’ll gain some idea of what this movie is like. Think Demon Wind, but with more rambling insanity, more characters and way better effects.
Here’s the best I can do at summing it up: Billy runs away from home when his parents forget his birthday like he’s Samantha Baker or something. As he goes through the woods, he meets a man who is soon stabbed by a werecat dressed like Adam Ant and then finds an old mansion decorated like a birthday party. Thinking it’s for him, he opens a gift and finds a severed head before the werecat buries him alive.
We’re never going back to Billy. Seriously, that’s it.
A group of teenagers — along with some adults who are way too old for them to all be hanging out together — come across the mansion and decide to party. There’s Duke, who claims to be the leader and brags that he’s a horny ghost. Linda, his girlfriend. Her friend Meegan and her older boyfriend/daddy figure Peter who seems exasperated by the teenage antics. Then there’s Rich, who wears a t-shirt of himself and only speaks through a hand puppet. Oh yeah — and Carol, who gets possessed by the Ouija board. And a British woman and her American husband. I may have missed or combined a few characters, because watching this movie is very much like doing a gravity bong hit and then trying to describe everything that happened in the last twenty minutes you spent lying on the floor and attempting to stay within this plane of existence.
None of these mismatched pals counted on battling Kreon, an ancient warlock who has kept his dead wife Isabelle preserved for seventy years. He needs human victims, so he uses his bootleg Ouija board and an army of demons of all shapes and sizes to kill them off. We’ve covered some of them above, but there are also an electric octopus, a skeleton witch and reptile demons. Oh yes — I nearly forgot that an Asian woman becomes a spider.
Everyone finally dies, but Kreon’s wife runs away, chased by zombies in a scene that actually approaches true fright. It’s seriously one of the best parts in the film. She escapes to a car and a man drives her away, but he’s really the werecat. A man bursts from his grave and it’s Kreon, who laughs as the credits roll.
I have so many questions.
Why does Kreon burst out of the ground other than to just act cool? I mean, is bursting from your grave cool?
Why do the muck men — who appear terrifying — fart?
is Korda the werecat the son of Kreon and the queen who has been trapped for seventy years?
How did they talk Richard Corben, the noted comic book artist and painter of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell album cover to do the poster for this?
Why does the grim reaper explode?
Why does RIch have a hand puppet that he talks to?
Why has this never been released on blu ray in an era where every film has been rediscovered?
To answer some of that, this movie ran mostly on USA between 1988 and 1991. There was also a Sony Video VHS release. In 2003, UK company Vipco Entertainment released a Region 2 PAL DVD mastered from that VHS. My copy is one of the ones released in 2017 by French company Intercontinental Film and Video under the title Les Spookie, which claims to be from a new 2K scan. It still looks beat up and worn, so who knows.
This is not the first copy of Spookies that I have bought.
This article at The Dissolve gives some answers, though.
From the film’s ex-Green Beret cinematographer’s son dying from crib death on the set to the film’s original FX guy getting fired (he was replaced by a 16-year-old Gabe Bartalos (who created the Leprechaun) and future Emmy Award winner Jennifer Aspinall), it’s packed with info. And the blame for the farting zombies lies with executive producer Michael Lee, who wanted to call the movie Bowel Erupters. And somehow, out of all of this, Errol Morris’ cinematographer Bob Chappell ended up shooting the new footage (much of the crew went on to work with J, Michael Muro on Street Trash).
This is truly a lost film, despite what the back of the French release claims (“We have found the lost film!”). The original ending has never been seen, although Al Magliochetti, the visual effects artist, has an interpositive of it. And the rights, which were owned by Michael Lee, Sony, then Vestron, and then Lionsgate, are murky. No negative or print has been found.
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