Lenny (Mark Hennessy) and Bruce (Scott King) are taking photos of bikini girls on Venice Beach when they accidentally film a murder. The only clue? A woman with a rose tattoo on her butt. Now, Mr. Karrothers (John Vernon) is sending his hitmen after them.

Featuring a score by a very young in his career Hans Zimmer, this Nico Mastorakis directed and written movie moves fast and soon has Lenny and Bruce — along with Lenny’s bully brother Skip (Steve Donmyer) — catch up with that tattooed behind. It belongs to Christie (Hope Marie Carlton, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Picasso Trigger) who, of course, once dated Skip. The law thinks she’s a killer but Lenny thinks otherwise.

You may or may not know, but I’ve been trying to watch every Tara Buckman movie, so I am pleased that she shows up here as the wife of Vernon’s character. Ted Lange also plays a man who is at once unhoused on the beach but perhaps the smartest character in the film.

This is a mix of high and lowbrow, as most of Mastorakis’ movies are. It has allusions to Blow Up while also naming a character Mario Argento. It’s also ridiculous at times, but never boring. I don’t believe Mastorakis can make a boring movie.

This is part of Arrow Video’s The Nico Mastorakis Collection and has an interview with Dan Hirsch looking back on his role in the film and a trailer as extra features.

This set is available from MVD.

88 Films has been releasing some incredible things this year, but The Project A Collection is the best set yet. It features both Jackie Chan films in a 4K UHD presentation with both the Hong Kong and Taiwan versions, as well as English and Cantonese-language options. There are so many extras, including a perfect-bound book, six lobby cards, a double-sided poster, a slipcase with brand-new artwork from Kung Fu Bob and interviews with Jackie Chan, Lee Hoi San, Mars, Yuen Biao, Dick Wei, Michael Chan Wai-Man, Michael Lai and Edward Tang. There’s even more, such as new audio commentaries by Frank Djeng and FJ DeSanto, making-of videos, outtakes, trailers, still galleries, the Japanese ending and more!

You can order this from MVD.

Project A (1983): Project A has a clock tower stunt in it, but Jackie Chan had not seen the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd when he made this movie, as they were not available on home video. He saw this as the evolution of comedy, action and martial arts that he’d been working on since The Young Master.

This movie and Dragon Lord were the first films since Jackie came back from his initial failed time in America and he had something to prove.

Sergeant Dragon Ma (Chan) is part of the Hong Kong Marine Police, which is battling both pirates and their Hong Kong Police rivals. After one fight too many, the Marine and regular police have to join forces.

Beyond Dragon Ma, Project A also has Sammo Hung as Zhuo “Fei” Yifei and Yuen Baio as Inspector Hong Tin-Tzu. In time, they all join together to face pirate lord Sam Pau (Dick Wei), who is smuggling guns directly from the cops.

Up until Project A came out, Hong Kong movies didn’t have the large sets and attention to period detail that other movies did. It’s also a film that isn’t all fighting, but instead a mix of action and combat.

Project A Part II (1987):Sergeant Dragon Ma (Jackie Chan) is back and has been sent on a new mission, far from the pirates who have pledged to kill him at the end of the first film. He soon learns that his new assignment, Sai Wan Police Station, is full of corrupt police like Superintendent Chun (Lam Wai), all except for one officer. He takes that man, Ho (Kenny Ho) and three of his friends to try to arrest gangster Tiger “Awesome Wolf” Au (Chan Wai-man) and is nearly killed. He’s saved at the last moment by his friends in the Marine Police.

Once he gets through that challenge, Dragon gets set up for a jewel robbery and must work with revolutionaries to clear his name. If that’s not enough, he also has three incredibly attractive women to deal with in Yesan (Maggie Cheung), Miss Pak (Rosamund Kwan) and Carina (Carina Lau), who gets kidnapped by the same criminals who have tried to ruin Dragon Ma’s reputation.

Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung only have cameos in this, allowing Chan to take center stage. Who knew that a martial arts movie could pay tribute to the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton while changing the way fights would be filmed? Instead of lining the bad guys up one at a time, Chan battles numerous opponents at once.

By the end, even the pirates love Jackie. This movie is worth watching so many times as the sets, costumes and action has to be savored.

We’ve all seen Hellraiser, I hope, by now, but if this movie has eluded your collection, as it once did mine, this Arrow Box set is incredible and will fit the bill. As the Cenobites say, “We have such sights to show you.”

Hellraiser (1987): Horror movies don’t scare me. Not anymore. Some of them disturb me, like the cannibal films. But only one still kind of scares me. And that would be Hellraiser.

There was a time, before the eight sequels to the film and BDSM became well-known fodder on shows like Law and Order that Hellraiser seemed like it came from some alien land more than its true origins. The monsters of the piece, the Cenobites, looked like nothing we’d never seen before, all leather, blood and open festering wounds. The idea that sex and pain could be united wasn’t trite back in 1987, so it’s difficult to convey the power and fear this film had. It feels wrong. It feels dirty. It feels evil.

How this movie was made for $900,000 blows my mind. It looks lush and gauzy at times and at others, like when we see Frank’s heart and veins being formed, positively nightmarish. It shouldn’t be this good — it was Clive Barker’s directorial debut after seeing two of his stories, Underworld and Rawhead Rex, get made into films he didn’t agree with. What kind of deal with the devil did this guy make to turn out something so perfect on his first try?

The misconception that many people have of this film is that the Cenobites are the villains or the horrific part of the film. If we go to the poster for proof, it says “Demon to some. Angel to others.” Pinhead and his gang are there to move the story forward and certainly look frightening, but they are bound by the rules of Hell and the Lament Configuration, the puzzle box that sets the events of the film in motion. Matter of factly, these rules aren’t truly defined yet — is Pinhead a tortured soul stuck in the wheels of some hellish bureaucracy? Who created these boxes? None of this matters — “You solved the box. We came.” Yes, it can be that simple. You don’t need to know all of those answers right now. When Frank buys the box and Morocco and solves it, he gets the answer to limitless pleasure and the drug of all drugs — as Frank says, “I thought I’d gone to the limits. I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible.”

That’s one of the real horrors of this film: people will do anything to chase a high. That high may be drugs. It may be pain. It may be a sexual experience that makes the mundane life you’re stuck in — like Julia, bored with a suburban life with a husband she never really wanted in the first place. The chance to be with Frank again, no matter if she has to seduce and kill for him, is everything. Notice that as he gains more muscle and skin with each drop of blood, she becomes more and more attractive, her skin gaining new color.

The main horrors of this film are family and other people. The Cotton family had issues before the Cenobites took one step out of Hell. The most horrific part of the film comes when Frank wearing Larry’s skin, stares at his niece in a moment of sexual longing and says, “Come to daddy.” Sure, there are horror film trappings, but this type of morally bankrupt behavior isn’t something confined to the cinema. So much of the betrayal and madness of Frank and Julia could happen. It happens every day.

Hellraiser exists on the border of reality. It’s fantastic, but it feels like it could happen. It’s the dangerous fiction that could overwhelm your truth if you go too far. In that it’s quite similar to Barker’s Candyman, which posits that saying the name of its titular character three times in a mirror is all it takes for him to come for you. That seems too unrealistic, but do you want to take the chance? And much like the black leather garbed creatures in this film, Candyman must adhere to a dream logic that only comes into our reality when you allow the genie from the bottle.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988): Most of the cast and crew of Hellraiser returned to make this movie and you know, despite the reduced budget, the dark tone of this movie and continuation of the themes from the original makes this one of the better horror sequels.

Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence, returning from the first movie) is admitted to a psychiatric hospital where Doctor Channard and his assistant Kyle MacRae listen to her story. She begs them to destroy the bloody mattress her stepmother Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins) died on but Channard ends up being a man who has been obsessed with the Lament Configuration. After a patient slices himself open upon that cursed object, Julia comes back to our reality.

Channard and Julia have been luring mentally disturbed men to his home so that Julia can feed off of them. Meanwhile, Kirsty meets Tiffany, a girl skilled at solving puzzles who is forced by the doctor and his demented mistress to open the gates of Hell with the infernal box at the heart of this story.

Within the dimension of Leviathan, the humans are more duplicitous than the demonic Cenobites that carry out the orders of their master.

Barker had plans to show how each of the Cenobites had once been human and how their own vices lead to their becoming angels to some, demons to others. You’d think that with the success of the first film they could have had a little more money here.

Another intriguing notion is that Julia was originally supposed to rise from the mattress at the end of the movie as the queen of hell and be the recurring character. As the first movie gradually became a success, Pinhead ended up becoming the favorite.

Back in the video rental days, I may have brought this home more than twenty times. I was obsessed by the look of Leviathan’s dimension and the strange sound that it makes — Morse code for God — blew my teenage mind. It still holds up today, despite a litany of lesser sequels.

Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (1992): Anthony Hickox made both Waxwork movies, so that qualified him to take on the third trip to visit the Cenobites, which was necessary as the two films that had already come out were huge rental successes.

Series creator Clive Barker reprised his role as executive producer, though he was largely uninvolved until post-production, while Tony Randel at least contributed the story.

At the end of the last film, as Pinhead tried to reclaim his humanity, he finds himself split into his demonic form and as the limbo-trapped British Army Captain Elliot Spencer. As for Pinhead, he and the Lament Configuration remain within the Pillar of Souls that appeared as the last movie finished.

The pillar is bought as art by a club owner and when one of his sexual conquests is dragged into it and absorbed, Pinhead emerges and demands more blood. Without the influence of Spencer, Pinhead has become true evil and is using our reality for his own pleasure, which is against the regimented laws that the Cenobites live by.

Ashley Laurence returns for a cameo, as her Kirsty character explains the events of the previous films. And hey — Armored Saint plays the club!

Between the Barbie and CD Cenobites and the more American locale, this film suffers in comparison to the first two movies. That said, when viewed against what was to come, it ends up being pretty decent. The idea that Pinhead lost his faith in humanity after war rings true even many decades later.

Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996): Directed by Kevin Yagher and Joe Chappelle, this is the last Hellraiser to play theaters, only has one returning character in Pinhead (Doug Bradley), the last to involve Clive Barker and is both a prequel and a sequel.

Yagher left the production after Miramax demanded new scenes be shot. This is a theme that will appear in nearly every 90s horror movie that Miramax got their weird creepy hands on. The new scenes and re-shoots changed several characters’ relationships, gave the film a happy ending, introduced Pinhead earlier and cut 25 minutes of the original cut Yagher turned in. These were enough changes that he was able to use the Alan Smithee credit.

Dr. Paul Merchant has designed a space station to be in the shape of a giant Lament Configuration. Yes, within four movies, the Hellraiser franchise does what it took Jason Voorhees ten to arrive at. Yes, we’re in space. And we’re also going back in time, as Merchant’s ancestor creates the original box that starts all of these demonic events.

The Merchant bloodline has been cursed ever since they helped open the gates to Hell. There’s also a new Cenobite, Angelique, who tempts people and this puts her into conflict with Pinhead, who only believes in pain. There’s also a Merchant ancestor in 1996 that has created The Elysium Configuration, an anti-Lament Configuration that creates perpetual light and will close the pathways to Hell forever.

Bruce Ramsay ended up playing all of the Merchants and I kind of like that the end of this movie attempts to close the story. How crazy is it that this was Adam Scott’s film debut?

As you can imagine, Arrow has gone wild on this, packing this set. You get brand new 4K restorations of all four films from the original camera negatives by Arrow Films, as well as a 200 page hardback book, Ages of Desire, with new writing from Clive Barker archivists Phil and Sarah Stokes. There’s also a limited edition layered packaging featuring brand new Pinhead artwork.

Here are the extras by movie:

Hellraiser

Brand new audio commentary featuring genre historian and unit publicist Stephen Jones with author and film critic Kim Newman, an archival audio commentary with writer/director Clive Barker and actor Ashley Laurence moderated by Peter Atkins, another archival audio commentary with writer/director Clive Barker, a brand new 60-minute discussion about Hellraiser and the work of Clive Barker by film scholars Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (editor of Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer) and Karmel Kniprath, a brand new visual essay celebrating the Lament Configuration by genre author Alexandra Benedict (The Beauty of Murder), a brand new 60-minute discussion between acclaimed horror authors Paula D. Ashe and Eric LaRocca celebrating the queerness of Hellraiser and the importance of Clive Barker as a queer writer, a brand new visual essay exploring body horror and transcendence in the work of Clive Barker by genre author Guy Adams (The World House), newly uncovered extended EPK interviews with Clive Barker and stars Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, and effects artist Bob Keen, shot during the making of the movie , with a new introduction by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, the original 1987 press kit, archival interviews with Sean Chapman, Doug Bradley and Stephen Thrower on the abandoned score by his band Coil, trailers, TV ads, an image gallery and drafts of the screenplay.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Brand new audio commentary featuring Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, archival audio commentary with director Tony Randel, writer Peter Atkins and actor Ashley Laurence, another audio commentary with director Tony Randel and writer Peter Atkins, a brand new 80-minute appreciation of Hellbound, the Hellraiser mythos and the work of Clive Barker by horror authors George Daniel Lea (Born in Blood) and Kit Power (The Finite), a brand new appreciation of composer Christopher Young’s scores for Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II by Guy Adams, archival on-set interviews, behind the scenes footage, archival interviews with Sean Chapman, Doug Bradley, barker, Randel, Keen and Atkins, trailers, TV ads and an image gallery.

Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth

Alternative unrated version (contains standard definition inserts), brand new audio commentary by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, archival audio commentary with screenwriter Peter Atkins, archival audio commentary with director Anthony Hickox and actor Doug Bradley, previously unseen extended interviews with Clive Barker and Doug Bradley, FX dailies, archival interviews Paula Marshall, Anthony Hickox and Doug Bradley, a trailer and an image gallery.

Hellraiser: Bloodline

Brand new audio commentary featuring screenwriter Peter Atkins, with Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, a brand new featurette exploring the Cenobites’ connection to goth, fetish cultures and BDSM, a newly uncovered workprint version of the film, providing a fascinating insight into how it changed during post production — this is worth the price of the entire set! — as well as an archival documentary on the evolution of the franchise and its enduring legacy, featuring interviews with Scott Derrickson, Rick Bota and Stuart Gordon, an archival appreciation by horror author David Gatwalk of Barker’s written work, from The Books of Blood to The Scarlet Gospels and a trailer.

You can get this on 4K UHD or blu ray from MVD.

September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on September 27 and 28, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, September 27 are The Raven, The Terror, The Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Saturday, September 28 has The Beyond, Opera, Cemetery Man and A Blade In the Dark.

Mara Cecova is a diva and the star of a whole new way of performing Verdi’s Macbeth. But when she’s hit by a car as she argues with the director in the middle of the street, her role goes to her understudy, Betty. Ironically, in his book Profondo Argento, director Dario Argento claimed that the person playing the role of Betty, Cristina Marsillach, was the most difficult actress he would ever work with.

Despite her initial worries, Betty becomes an instant success on her opening night. At the same time, a black-gloved killer sneaks into one of the boxes to watch before murdering a stagehand with a coathanger. Grab your barf bags and motion sickness pills, everyone, Argento is behind the camera!

Of all the powerful shocks in Opera, perhaps the one that means the most to the viewer is that we share Betty’s torture — she’s repeatedly gagged, tied up and forced to watch the killer at work again and again as he tapes needles under her eyes. If she blinks too long or shuts her eyes, they’ll be shredded. It’s like Fulci’s wettest dream ever. In the same way, we are nearly complicit with the crimes we are forced to watch, particularly because they get more and more artfully composed.

Throw in the fact that Betty believes that the hooded killer is the same person who murdered her mother, she follows the giallo path for a protagonist and confides in someone else rather than the police. Her reason? The killer may know who she is.

Inspector Alan Santini (Urbano Barberini, Demons) is on the case, because there are so many clues, like the fact that the producer’s pet ravens were found dead after the show. As for Betty, she runs from the police and calls her agent Mira (Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s former wife and the writer of Suspiria and star of Shock) for advice.

Betty’s costume gets cut to ribbons, so she asks the wardrobe girl for help. While she works on the dress, they find a gold bracelet that they can almost read. But here comes the killer and his needles again, forcing her to watch him kill one more time. The wardrobe girl accidentally swallows the bracelet, so of course, we watch as the murderer slices her throat open to get it back.

Betty runs back to her apartment where Santini is waiting. He promises to send a detective named Soavi to watch over her (yep, The Church director Michele Soavi), but she doesn’t trust the man and leaves her apartment. That’s when her agent answers the next knock on the door by looking through the peephole. What follows is the most grand kill in the entire film — which is saying something — as we follow the bullet POV-style out of the gun and directly through her eyeball. Again, Fulci is somewhere wringing his hands.

Nicolodi had just ended a long relationship with Argento and did not want to be in this film. However, the shocking and complicated murder of her character changed her mind, even if she had to deal with an explosive device being put on the back of her head to achieve the final shot.

Betty escapes the killer again and runs to the opera house, convinced there is a connection between the murderer and her long dead and totally abusive mother. The next night, as she performs, the producer unleashes what is left of his ravens in the hopes that they’ll find the killer. Oh, they do alright — tearing his eyeball out of his head — FULCI ARE YOU THERE, IT’S ME DARIO — and rewarding you, the viewer, with POV shots that threaten you with vertigo. I’m getting dizzy even typing this.

I don’t want to give away the killer or even the second ending where the killer isn’t really dead. I just want to talk about the sheer Argento-ness of the final scene, where Betty wanders in a field and releases a lizard, giving him his freedom. Argento claims that this ending was inspired by Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. Of interest, the director does NOT like the Michael Mann movie Manhunter. Me? Well, I love that movie. But I’d love to see Argento’s take. There’s was also a thought to another ending where Betty would fall in love with the killer.

Your enjoyment of this film really comes down to how much you like shocking amounts of bloodshed and Argento’s arty side. He based the film on his own failed staging of Macbeth, basing the role of the nervous producer on himself. And the idea of pins under the eyes? It comes from a joke about how Argento hated when people looked away during the death scenes in his films.

Believe it or not, Orion Pictures planned on releasing an R-rated version of this in the US called Terror at the Opera with eleven minutes of mayhem removed, as well as the Swiss Alps epilogue. Argento refused and Orion was losing money at a fast clip, so the movie only saw a limited video release.

Opera is something else — filled with style and brutality. I loved it, but remember my warning as to how much you can handle.

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 bringing in some cash, 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 got me to make a Letterboxd list of 80s horror and science fiction movies where Royal Dano plays a drunk. And a list of movies where W.A.S.P. shows up, too.

The MVD 4K UHD release of this movie has a 2024 4K (2160p) restoration of the film presented in its original 1.85:1 Aspect Ratio in Dolby Vision. It includes both the 90 minute Theatrical PG-13 cut and the restored 91 minute R-Rated Director’s Cut of the film. Plus, you get an introduction by Screenwriter Dennis Paoli, a trailer, a reversible cover, a collectible 4K LaserVision poster, a making of, an interview with Paoli and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.

Let’s just assume that the events of Demons actually happened, as this movie does. Released just seven months after the original, this movie opens with the residents of a high-rise apartment building watching a movie dramatization of the events that took place in that film. They watch as several teenagers trespass into the closed-off city that was destroyed after the demonic outbreak. Finding the dead body of a demon, one of the teens accidentally drips blood in its mouth and the whole thing starts all over again.

Sally Day (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Mother of Tears, Opera) is upset that her boyfriend hasn’t come to her sweet sixteen party — or as they say in Italy, dolce sedici anni — and she decides to watch the movie. So, you know, as these things happen, a demon crawls out of her television set and infects her. She kills nearly everyone at her party and turns them into more demons, who begin to infect the entire apartment building. Little kids, dogs, cops, bodybuilders, pregnant women — no one is safe from these demons.

George and Hannah (David Edwin Knight and Nancy Brilli, who was also in Body Count) spend most of the movie trying to escape Sally so that they can have their child. She’s nearly unstoppable, plus she has a flying demon on her side.

Italian movie fans should keep their eyes open for Asia Argento, who debuted in this film as Ingrid. Plus, Bobby Rhodes (from the original, as well as Hercules and War Bus Commando), Virginia Bryant (who is also in the unrelated sequel Demons 3: The Ogre), Lino Salemme (Ripper from the first film), Davide Marotta (who played a child alien in a very famous series of Italian Kodak commercials and was also the monstrous boy in Phenomena) and Michele Mirabella (Dancing Crow from Thunder).

Originally, Hannah’s baby would become a demon inside her and claw its way out of her stomach. This scene was taken out when Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento decided they wanted a happier ending. Which is nice, I guess.

After all, this movie is more about jump scares and less about freaking you out with the sheer amount of gore that it features. Is it any wonder that it has less of a metal soundtrack and instead features new wave bands like The Smiths, The Cult, Fields of the Nephilim, Dead Can Dance, Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, Gene Loves Jezebel and The Producers?

The 4K UHD release of Demons 2 is newly remastered in 4K from the original camera negative in Dolby Vision and has new audio commentary by film critic Travis Crawford. There’s also interviews with Luigi Cozzi, Sergio Stivaletti, Federico Zampaglione, Roy Bava and Simon Boswell, as well as a new visual essay on the space and technology in Demons and Demons 2 by author and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and original Italian and English theatrical trailers. You can get this from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: He’s My Girl was on the CBS Late Movie on March 9, 1990.

David Hallyday was born in France as the son of singers Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Hallyday and became a star in Europe before he was signed to Scotti Brothers. The Scotti Brothers movie division decided to put him in one of their movies. After all, they had already named another of their films, Lady Beware, after one of his songs. Or maybe he wrote a song with that name. But hey — he has a song in that Pittsburgh-made American giallo. This would be the third Scotti Brothers movie I’ve seen — along with Eye of the Tiger — named for a song by one of their music artists.

There is no song for In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro.

There is a David Halladay song, “He’s My Girl.”

“Thought it was love for the first time
Did not know what I had in store
Big arms, big legs, big feet
But I could not see
Just what she hid behind her door

And my heart stopped
And my blood pressure dropped
Oh what a shock
You know he’s my girl
I’m a good man
So when she held my hand
That’s when I knew
That he’s my girl”

Hallyday plays a singer named Bryan, who wins a contest to go to Los Angeles. He wants to bring his best friend and manager Reggie (T. K. Carter, Nauls from The Thing), but has to bring a girl with him. Seeing as how it’s 1987 and no one would be upset by this or too smart to not make a movie about it, Reggie becomes Regina and shocks everyone in L.A. that people in Missouri can date across the color line.

Reggie falls for music assistant Tasha (Misha McK), who is trying to keep metal dude Simon Sledge (Warwick Sims) in line. As for Bryan, he falls for sculptor Lisa (Jennifer Tilly) who shows up on a motorcycle and kept me from fast forwarding through this movie.

Reggie/Regina is at once Flip Wilson’s Geraldine, the Three Stooges and Jerry Lewis, down to doing dialogue from them. As for Bryan, he’s a French singer trying to play an American innocent.

Everything you think will happen happens. Will evil music manager Mason Morgan (David Clennon) fall for Regina, despite being super racist? Will 80s hot tub girl Becky LeBeau show up? Will everyone end up happy after some confusion?

This was directed by Gabrielle Beaumont, one of the first women to break through and direct American prime time TV. She worked on everything from Baywatch and Melrose Place to Miami Vice, Dynasty, Hart to Hart and Beastmaster III: The Eye of Braxus. She also directed Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story and The Godsend.

He’s My Girl was written by Charles F. Bohl (Swimfan), Taylor Ames, Myrica Taylor, Terence H. Winkless (who wrote The Howling and directed The Nesting) and Fireside Theater founder Peter Bergman.

As you can imagine, this is the kind of movie that if people saw it today, they’d be enraged. Then again, this is also kind of fan fiction of The Thing, as you get numerous scenes of Palmer sexually harassing Nauls.

Somehow, Scotti Brothers Records were able to get “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain, “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones, “Neutron Dance” by The Pointer Sisters and “New Attitude” by Patti LaBelle in this. What was the music budget like?

Of all those songs, “Copper Colored Gal” by Joe Pizzulo — who sang on the Sérgio Mendes songs “Never Gonna Let You Go” and “Alibis” — seems out of place. Yes, I know it’s a Cab Calloway standard, but hearing “Copper, copper, copper, copper colored gal of mine!” as a black man dresses like a woman is a bit disconcerting. 

You can watch this on YouTube.