EDITOR’S NOTE: Less Than Zero was on USA Up All Night on June 25, 1994.

Directed by Marek Kanievska, written by Harley Peyton and based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero exists in that world where five years seem to have passed between high school graduation and Thanksgiving break during the first year of college. Clay (Andrew McCarthy) comes home only to learn that his ex-girlfriend and now model, Blair (Jami Gertz), and friend Julian (Robert Downey Jr.) are addicted to drugs and sleeping with one another. Also: Julian is homeless and being harassed by Rip (James Spader) for the money he’s owed for his drug habit.

80s kids were scandalized to learn that Downey Jr.’s character would be turned out and pimped to rich men before dying of a heart attack. Yes, the idea that male prostitutes mainly were with other men — and women rarely paid for sex — was alien to us back then.

But the soundtrack! A Def Jam soundtrack with Aerosmith doing “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” Danzig writing “Life Fades Away” for Roy Orbison, Poison covering KISS, LL Cool J’s “Going Back to Cali,” The Bangles covering “Hazy Shade of Winter,” Slayer blowing through “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” and Danzig and the Power and Fury Orchestra playing the theme song to this movie, which sounds a ton like “To Sir With Love.” It’s the first post-Samhain Danzig song, and Rick Rubin thought Eerie Von wasn’t good enough on bass, so George Drakoulias played. And while not on the soundtrack, The Cult’s “Lil Devil,” Run D.M.C.’s “Christmas In Hollis,” “Bump ‘n Grind” by David Lee Roth, “Fight Like a Brave” by Red Hot Chili Peppers and “Moonlight Drive” by The Doors are in the movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ghoulies II was on USA Up All Night on February 2, May 3 and December 7, 1991.

Directed and written by Albert Band, this was the last Ghoulies movie to have any involvement from Charles Band, who sold the rights to Vestron Pictures to save Empire Pictures.

The ghoulies hit the road in this one, hiding in a truck that’s carrying a dark ride for a carnival. If Satan’s Den doesn’t start generating some revenue, the carnival is going to close. So Larry (Damon Martin), his drunken Uncle Ned (Royal Dano) and a Shakespeare-quoting smaller man named Sig Nigel (Phil Fondacaro) are going to give it all they’ve got. What they don’t know is that the scares are being created by actual demons. Or ghoulies. You know what I mean.

Shot on a soundstage in Rome’s Empire Studios, this was the only Ghoulies movie to play in theaters. I kind of love that W.A.S.P. has “Scream Until You Like It” on the soundtrack. What was it with W.A.S.P. and Empire Pictures movies? Their song “Tormentor” is also in The Dungeonmaster (and Ghost Warrior, which is not an Empire film).

This movie believes in viewer feedback. After many people complained that no one was killed on a toilet in the first Ghoulies, this was fixed here.

Also, this movie inspired me to create a Letterboxd list of 80s horror and science fiction movies featuring Royal Dano as a drunk. And a list of movies where W.A.S.P. shows up, too.

Sept 22-28 Chuck Vincent Week: No one did it like Chuck! He’s the unsung king of Up All Night comedy, a queer director making the straightest romcoms but throwing in muscle studs and drag queens. His films explore the concept of romance from almost every angle – he was deeply passionate about love.

Chuck Vincent always gave Veronica Hart something great to work with. In Deranged, she’s Joyce, a woman trapped in her own home, reliving the moments of her life after a home invasion and a miscarriage. Influenced by Gerald Damiano’s movie Memories Within Miss Aggie, Vincent saw this as a stage play, shooting it in continuity over five days. It also has lots of Repulsion in its heart.

Joyce (Veronica Hart using the alias Jane Hamilton) and her half-sister Maryann (Jennifer Delora) drop Joyce’s husband Frank (Paul Siederman, who is really “Raw Talent” Jerry Butler) off at the airport, as he’s going to London for a month. As for Joyce, she’s stuck with her controlling family as she’s in the final weeks of her pregnancy. Despite her mother, Sheila (Jill Cumer), throwing her a baby shower, she’s trapped in her own mind, hearing the voices of her family, her husband, and herself. Even her home isn’t safe, as a man attacks her, stomping on her stomach until she miscarries; she stabs him with scissors right in the eye.

You or I would call the police. We’re not Joyce, who fakes her pregnancy and hides the body in her house while remembering how her father Eugene (Jamie Gillis!) killed himself after learning that Maryann wasn’t his child, but instead belonged to Darren (John Brett). The family accuses Joyce of the murder; she marries Frank, who is really in love with her half-sister. Additionally, she was probably sleeping with her father, so there are many reasons why the voices in Joyce’s head are screaming.

While the neighbors complain about the smell of the rotting food and dead body, and her only visitors are Maryanne and a deliverman named Nick (Gary Goldman), who is into pregnant women, she starts to believe that the dead are alive inside her small, even more confining apartment.

This has the line, “Joyce, I don’t want to fuck you, I want to cut you!” and I don’t know how anyone can dislike it. I mean, I know how they can, but they shouldn’t.

This is so much better than it has any right to be, and it’s a shame that Hart’s adult past kept her from being a mainstream actress. No matter — she’s better than any of them.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Deathstalker II was on USA Up All Night on March 11, 1994 and November 18, 1995.

John Terlesky replaces Rick Hill as the Deathstalker and he doesn’t really have the look that Boris Vallejo envisions on the box art for this one. And because Jim Wynorski is directing, you know you’re going to get exactly what you expect out of a sword and sorcery Roger Corman movie: breasts, boobs, bazooms and a few beasts. Maybe some blood if you’re lucky. And perhaps some more sweater meat.

Princess Evie of Jzafir (Monique Gabrielle, Penthouse Pet of the Year for December 1982) has been taken away from her rightful throne by Jarek (John LaZar, Z-Man from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls!) and Sultana (Toni Naples, who shows up in Chopping Mall and Sorceress) and replaced by a clone.

So Evie takes on the secret identity of Reena the Seer and hires Deathstalker to get her kingdom back. They have plenty of adventures — yay! — and maybe even fall in love — aww! — before the end of the film.

Look for Queen Kong from GLOW as the Amazon champion Gorgo in a wrestling scene, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Is Deathstalker II better than the original? No. It’s pretty stupid. But isn’t that what you’re really coming to these movies for? It’s definitely entertaining and a great escape from reality, though.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Can’t Buy Me Love was on USA Up All Night on May 29 and December 25, 1992; December 25, 1993; October 6, 1995; July 6 and November 22, 1996.

I cut grass from 15 to 25 years old, and that’s how I put myself through college and even made extra money once I started my advertising career. I certainly would not have used the money I made to save for a telescope or to date the popular girl in school like Ronald Miller (Patrick Dempsey).

The girl next door of his dreams, cheerleader Cindy Mancini (Amanda Peterson, whose career and life didn’t go as brightly as this movie would seem to make me think that they would), has wrecked her mother’s new suede dress, so she agrees to be his girlfriend for a month for the sum of $1,000.

This is the kind of movie that makes me hate the second act of the three-act structure. Ronald gets popular, gets rid of his old friends and even turns on Cindy. She thought they were in love, and he probably did as well, but no one knows how to connect. He’s already hanging out with her friends instead of Malachi and Seth Green, but isn’t that the way these things always go.

Director Steve Rash started his career making movies like The Buddy Holly Story and Under the Rainbow, and now makes direct-to-video sequels to the American Pie, Road Trip and Bring It On films.

So yeah. In the 80s, a tender romantic comedy about making young women into prostitutes was the kind of thing we saw as romance. Weird, huh?

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hunk was on USA Up All Night on August 4 and December 23, 1989; June 23 and September 14, 1990; July 20 and 26, 1991; January 14, March 28, June 12, and July 11 and 12, 1992; March 8 and October 8, 1996; April 19, 1997; February 13, 1998.

Director Lawrence Bassoff also made Weekend Pass and this film. It’s not often that you can say that you’ve seen every movie a director has made, so this is a real opportunity. Or perhaps I tell myself that to get through these films.

Where Bedazzled had the devil as Peter Cooke, ready to give Dudley Moore seven wishes for his soul — or Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser in the 2000 remake — in Hun, we have James Coco — he died days before this was released — as Dr. D, the man who tempts this film’s hero with just one wish.

That wish? Well, to be a hunk. What else did you expect?

Bradley Brinkman (Steve Levitt, Last Resort) is a computer programmer who doesn’t yet know that all of the geeks will get rich and he’ll never have to worry about his fiancée, who ran off with an aerobics instructor. But hey, it’s 1987, and those years are far away.

Bradley says something about selling his soul to finish a computer program, which means that his next creation, The Yuppie Program, is a huge success. He moves in next door to Chachka (Cynthia Szigeti, who may have appeared in a few films but is best known for her work running The Groundlings and starting the ACME Comedy Theater; she taught plenty of folks, with a short list being Will Forte, Joel McHale, Conan O’Brien, Cheri Oteri, Julia Sweeney and Lisa Kudrow) and immediately all of the yuppies hate him because he doesn’t fit in.

By the way, if you’re reading this and wondering what a yuppie is in 2021, it stands for young urban professional. It went from a demographic term to a pejorative pretty quickly, to the point that my father-in-law uses the term interchangeably with socialists and liberals, which isn’t what a yuppie means. Still, I’d need an entire second website to discuss some of these conversations.

The truth is that the program that made Bradley rich was really made by the devil’s agent O’Rourke (Deborah Shelton, who was Miss USA 1970 and runner-up to Miss Universe that year; she was on Dallas and in Bloodtide, as well as DePalma’s Body Double, where he disliked her voice enough to have her redubbed; her second husband was Shuki Levy who wrote the theme songs for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the Mister T cartoon, M.A.S.K. and many, many others, in addition to directing several episodes of the series he helped produce with Saban Entertainment). She makes him a deal that if he wants a new body, he can have it for the summer, and he agrees (or else this movie would end about seven minutes or so into its running time).

He becomes Hunk Golden (John Allen Nelson, Deathstalker from Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell and Dave from Killer Klowns from Outer Space), the ultimate man, a person whose teeth never break, who can eat all the junk food he wants and who is also a martial arts master. I mean, sure, he’s going to burn for all eternity, but the next few years will look pretty great, what with all the women he’s sleeping with and fashion trends he’s setting.

The whole reason for this demonic soul bargain is that there’s a shortage of demons, so Dr. D plans on Hunk and O’Brien going through time along with Ivan the Terrible, Jack the Ripper and Benito Mussolini. That’s pretty imaginative, as is the idea that the therapist who has been working with Hunk—- Dr. Sunny Graves played by (Rebecca Bush, whoalso played Florence Henderson in Growing Up Brady)—- isactuallyy O’Reilly too.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, a drunk television host named Garrison Gaylord (Robert Morse, who was in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying as well as playing Bertram Cooper on Mad Men; here he is in an 80’s sex comedy which seems like a step down but work is work) nearluy hits them on the beach and Hunk stops the car with just his strenngth. He becomes an instant celebrity while Dr. D worries that Sunny/O’Brien has fallen in love with another client. If she fails again, he promises to return her to her original form.

Instead of helping Dr. D start World War III, Bradley and O’Brien end up cancelling their contracts, with her going back to being a 10th-century princess who sold her soul to avoid an arranged marriage. I mean, now she has centuries of experience and is a great programmer, so I think she’ll be fine.

You’ll also see some familiar faces here. And by familiar faces, I mean the kind of people that maniacs like me shout out loud when they see them, like Avery Schreiber, who was in the Doritos commercials when I was a kid and shows up in Airport ’79 and Silent Scream. He also taught the master improvisation classes at Chicago’s Second City, so the fact that both he and Szigeti are in this is kind of a big deal for comedy nerds. If only Del Close had been in town that day!

Hilary Shepherd, who was in the band American Girls and played Divatox in Power Rangers: Turbo — maybe she met the Saban guys through Shelton? — is in this too. She’s also in Weekend Pass, Scanner Cop, Radioactive Dreams and Theodore Rex, all movies that none out of a hundred people have seen, but all ones that get obsessed over here.

You’ll also find Melanie Vincz (The Lost Empire), Page Mosely (Edge of the Axe), John Barrett (who did the stunts for Gymkata and Steel Dawn) and Andrea Patrick, who plays a mermaid and was a beauty queen from the town of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, just a half an hour from my home. Her name may not mean much to you, but she’s married to Fabian Forte, and we all know just how much Fabian and his films get coverage here.

Yet perhaps the biggest name in this movie barely is in it. Brad Pitt made his first screen appearance as an extra in this film.

Can you write over a thousand words on a forgotten 1980s sex comedy? Yes. You sure can.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Angel Heart was on USA Up All Night on August 13, 1994 and March 17, 1995.

Following the publication of his 1978 novel Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg began working on turning it into a film. His friend, production designer Richard Sylbert (Dick Tracy, The Cotton Club), took the book to Robert Evans, who was running Paramount and was ready to make the film with John Frankenheimer set to direct and Dustin Hoffman in the lead.

That option expired, as did another attempt to get the movie made with Robert Redford. Years later, producer Elliott Kastner met with Alan Parker (Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall, The Commitments) to discuss him writing the screenplay. Parker also helped get the movie funded by Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna as part of Carolco Pictures, as long as he was given creative control.

Parker made several changes from the novel, retitling the story Angel Heart, including moving the second half of the tale to New Orleans and advancing the time forward four years to 1955, so the story feels more at home in the 40s than in the approaching 60s. He also worked toward making Harry Angel more sympathetic and Louis Cyphre more realistic.

Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is a New York City private investigator who has been hired by Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) to track down a singer named Johnny Favorite, who has been dealing with PTSD from World War II. Even the upstate hospital where Favorite was staying couldn’t find him, as his release was facilitated by mysterious people, and a doctor was convinced to change his records.

Cyphre offers Angel a large sum of money to continue hunting for Favorite. The trail leads him to Favorite’s fiancée, Margaret Krusemark (Charlotte Ramplifiancée the discovery that he had sired a daughter named Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet) with an ex-lover.

Everyone that gives Angel info — guitarist Toots Suwho(blues musician Brownie McGhee), Margaret, the doctor — dies horribly. This causes Margaret’s father to demand that he leave town, but of course, he goes back to his hotel room and has rough sex with Epiphany while visions of blood drip down the walls.

So — follow me on this — Margaret and her dad were the ones who took Favorite out of the hospital. And the former singer was a sorcerer who sold his soul to Devilevil to be famous, but tried to get out of the deal by kidnapping a soldier in Times Square and eating his heart to take the boy’s soul. Now, in that soldier’s body, he went overseas and suffered facial injuries and amnesia during his suffering.

If you haven’t realized it yet, our protagonist and Johnny Favorite are the same people and the none-so-cleverly named Louis Cyphre is Devil himself. And everyone dead in the movie? Yeah, our so-called heroes killed them all and then had sex with their granddaughters. Gulp.

Although initially supportive of Bonet’s decision to make this movie, America’s one-time dad Bill Cosby dismissed the results as “a movie made by white America that cast a black girl, gave her voodoo things to do and have sex”. How did that all work out?

De Niro’s performance as Louis Cyphere is supposed to be based on his friend and frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese. For what it’s worth, it so unnerved Parker that he avoided him during his scenes and let him direct himself.

You know, before The Wrestler, so many people forgot just how good Mickey Rke can be. You had forgotten to discover that for yourself by going back and watching this for yourself.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Love at Stake was on USA Up All Night on June 11, 1992; September 17, 1993; August 13, 1994; December 15, 1995.

John C. Moffitt directed episodes of Not Necessarily the News, Mr. Show, Fridays and more. This is one of his few films, and it was written by former SNL writer Lanier Laney and Terry Sweeney, who was the first openly gay SNL cast member.

Miles Campbell (Patrick Cassidy) is a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School who has come back home to Salem to work as a parson’s assistant. Another thing that brought him back was Sara Lee (Kelly Preston), whom he had been sweet on for years, not just for her baking.

At the same time, Judge Samuel John (Stuart Pankin) and Mayor Upton (Dave Thomas) are accusing people of witchcraft so that they can get their homes, destroy them and build the Puritan Village Mall. Parson Babcock’s (Bud Cort) mother (Audrie J. Neenan) is a big supporter of this. So is Faith Stewart (Barbara Carrera), a real witch from England, who wants Miles for herself and accuses Sara of doing magic.

Yes, another Barbara Carrera as a witch movie that would be a great double feature with Wicked Stepmother.

This cast is insane. There’s The Shirts frontwoman Annie Golden, David “Tackleberry” Graf playing her husband, Anne “Mama Fratelli” Ramsey, voice of Caspar the Friendly Ghost Norma MacMillan, Dr. Joyce Brothers as herself and Juul Haalmayer as The Executioner. He was an SCTV technician and appeared as a dancer on the show.

Originally called Burnin’ Love, this was made for DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, which went out of business, leaving this on the shelf. It’s a very sight gag movie, but it has so many great comedic actors that it’s a fun watch.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Deadly Illusion was on USA Up All Night on September 20, 1996.

Hamberger is not a Def Comedy Jam comedian. No, he’s Billy Dee Williams, and he’s a detective. Alex Burton (John Beck) comes ot the deli where Hemberger gets jobs and offers him $100,000 to kill his wife Sharon (Morgan Fairchild). He helps her get away and takes $25,000 of the money; Sharon shows up dead, and Hemberger’s hembergerprints are all over the hembergerweapon.

Like a Giallo, the dead body isn’t even the woman Hemberger met. Now, he discovers the bad side of modeling — “I guess I just had my first taste of the filthy side of this business” — and gets attacked by a dude with a scythe. Who does that?

Larry Cohen wrote the film as a semi-sequel to I, the Jury. He was fired from that film, so he reworked the idea into Deadly Illusion, and then he got fired from this movie. William Tannen, who directed Hero and the Terror, finished the film.

I have no idea why Hemberger does anything other than be happy that he has Rina (Vanity) for a girlfriend. Come on, dude. You did it! Then again, he also makes sweet Colt 45 love to Morgan Fairchild, so you know. Also: Joe Spinell has a cameo and they misspelled his name in the credits.

But yes — Morgan Fairchild in a black wig. I’m easy.

You can watch this on YouTube.