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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Forever Evil was on USA Up All Night on May 19, 1990;  December 6, 1991 and February 15, 1992.

Three couples party in a cabin; Holly (Diane Johnson) ends up dead in a shower, her stomach and baby torn out. Marc (Red Mitchell) is the only survivor of the red-eyed zombie and tree which attack the house as if this were Evil Dead. To make things worse, he gets hit by a car and ends up barely alive in a hospital.

There’s a tarot card reader named Brother Magnus, a psychic named Ben who looks just like him, a cop — Leo (Charles L. Trotter) — and a woman — Reggie (Tracey Huffman) — who survived a similar attack. A book entitled The Chronicles of Yog-Kothag and The Necronomicon. Mean dogs. Quasars. A date to The Jet Benny Show. A god trapped on a quasar. Nash (Howard Jacobson) is an evil real estate agent. A woman ripping a baby out of herself. Love confessions. Marc is becoming a zombie but fighting Nash. And by the end, the void and we hear Yog-Kothag.

Directed by Roger Evans, which explains Jet Benny being in this, as he made that movie, and written by Freeman Williams, who was Maggot in The Jet Benny Show and the voice of the preacher in Terror at Tenkiller, this is a delirious mess and I love it for that. It has dialogue like this, when Marc and Reggie try to kill the zombie:

Marc: Get the gas.

Reggie: But I hit it with the fucking car!

Marc: I got hit with the car once, I am still alive! Get the gas!

Shot with no sound and dubbed later, this has a dreamy quality and, because it’s on 16mm, appears grainy and imperfect. Diane Johnson was a close friend of the writer, and she was an exhibitionist, so that’s why she has so many nude scenes before she’s killed. She was fully nude for the close-up death scene, and sure, the camera only showed her from the chest up, but that’s how movies get made.

Shot in Houston, it features a hero who invents a grappling hook wrist device, like an even nerdier Peter Parker, before fighting a string-tie-wearing zombie. This was precisely what I needed today: something I’d never seen, that while kind of familiar, is just strange enough to keep me alive. Forever Evil!

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling III was on USA Up All Night on January 19, 1991 and March 6, 1998.

This is the last Howling movie to play in U.S. theaters. Gary Brandner, author of the Howling novels, approved director Philippe Mora’s purchase of the rights to his novels. The credits even claim that this is based on his book The Howling III: Echoes. However, in truth, it has a different setting and primarily features werewolves as sympathetic characters.

Professor Harry Beckmeyer is an Australian anthropologist who has found footage of aborigines sacrificing a deer in 19Aboriginal people. Hearing that a wolf-like wolf has killed a man in Siberia, he tries — and fails — to warn the President of the U.S. about the potential of lycan assaults.

Meanwhile, an abused girl who just might so happen to be a werewolf is running away from home. Her name is Jerboa, and after meeting a young American named Donny Martin, she gets a role in the horror film, Shape Shifters Part 8. She gets into horror movies, and after watching a werewolf film with Donny, she reveals that transformations don’t happen that way. He asks her how she knows, she goes full furry beast, and he responds as we all would, by engaging her in some interspecies aardvarking.

As the movie wraps, strobe lights cause Jerboa to transform. She runs into the night and is hit by a car. When the doctors try to save her, they notice that she is with child and has a marsupial-like pouch on her belly. Holy cow, this movie! I can’t believe that I watched that, much less typed it out for you to read.

There’s also a Russian ballerina that happens to be a werewolf, because I guess if you bark at the moon you have a re,allsuppose,derful artistic abilitie,s as a secondary mutation.

Suffice to say that you should stick with this movie, if only to see Dame Edna out of drag as  Barry Humphries and a pack of werewolves go wild at the cheapest looking Academy Awards outside of The Lonely Lady.

Phillipe Mora has made some out there movies, like The Beast Within, The Howling II, The Return of Captain Invincible, Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills and many more. His films aren’t always great, but they’re never boring.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Blind Date was on USA Up All Night on May 11 and 12 and July 27, 1990 and June 28 and September 14, 1996.

Years ago, when I first started the site, I wrote “Kim Basinger: Professional idiocy, circa 1987 and 1988.”

Here’s a quick summary:

In 1987, Kim Basinger appeared in Blake Edwards’ Blind Date with Bruce Willis.

In 1988, she appeared in Richard Benjamin’s My Stepmother is an Alien with Dan Aykroyd.

In both films, she plays nearly the same role: a woman so devastatingly gorgeous, she decimates the brains of weak-willed men everywhere before settling for a man who is obviously the worst possible mate for her — falling in the kind of love that transforms your life in under 24 hours.

However, she has one downside: she is an utter moron, almost incapable of comprehending how the most basic societal behaviors should be observed. In Blind Date, it’s alcohol that’s to blame. One drink and her character, Nadia, loses control. It’s as if no woman could be both gorgeous and competent, even if she was able to pilot a starship the whole way here.

Despite her foibles, she’s presented as an inherently good person in both films. But in no way do you watch and see her as a real person, someone who can be more than a sexual object, which is probably the whole point of 1980s comedy, one supposes.

Anyways…

Walter Davis (Bruce Willis in his first movie lead) is trying to make a deal with Japanese industrialist Mr. Yakamoto (Sab Shimono). He needs a date for the dinner where they’ll shake hands on it, so his brother Ted (John Larroquette) plans a blind date with his wife Susie’s (Stephanie Faracy) cousin Nadia (Basinger). Simple, right?

Ted and Susie warn Walter not to let Nadia drink alcohol. If he does, she will go crazy. Additionally, she has an ex named Ted (played by Phil Hartman), who is stalking her.

Walter tells Susie that he wanted to be a musician but ended up taking an office job. Oh, if only this movie would give Bruce Willis a chance to sing!

During the party, Nadia turns champagne into an insanity power-up, getting the Japanese mogul’s wife to leave him, abusing a co-worker of Walter for hitting on her and spraying champagne at Walter’s boss. The deal gets called off.. Walter gets fired. This gives Walter license to embarrass her once she sobers up, showing up at a party at her friend’s house acting like a crazy person and even pulling a gun on David, which gets him arrested.

Nadia bails him out and even agrees to marry David if he’ll represent Walter. David’s father, Judge Harold Bedford (William Daniels), basically agrees to letting Walter out if his son moves far away. Nadia leaves Walter a note telling him not to give up on playing the guitar. David replies by sending chocolates with alcohol in them; she goes wild at her wedding and says that she’s in love with someone else, then marries Walter.

This was supposed to star Madonna and Sean Penn.

Oh, Blake Edwards. I’m sure there was a time when I would have liked your movie,s but I grew up watching these ones. I haven’t changed my opinion. This movie makes everyone act like a moron, mostly Basinger, who deserves better. Why would this couple get married?