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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Survivor was on the CBS Late Movie on April 7 and August 3, 1988.

A man known only as The Survivor (Christopher Mayer) returned from space ten years ago to find the Earth looking like the cover of Defcon-4. And yes, that is Vance Duke, the man who tried to ruin many a childhood when Bo and Luke had a contractual dispute.

He’s met less than a handful of people in ten years of wandering the nuclear cursed lands and even meets a woman (Sue Kiel) who claims to know of a city filled with people. She’s kidnapped before she can tell him more, which leads to him searching for her.

Who kidnapped her? Well, seeing as how this was made in 1987, this movie is contractually obligated to have Richard Moll as the bad guy, Kragg. Don’t be confused if you saw the 1998 film The Survivor, in which Moll plays Kyla.

This movie may move a bit slow, as it is mostly told through narration and flashbacks. Kragg’s plan is to repopulate the Earth by taking every woman and fertilizing them, while encouraging suicides to keep the numbers low. He also wants to castrate The Survivor, which seems like a pretty rude way to deal with an enemy. At least let them keep their cock!

Director Michael Shackleton only directed this one film but did shoot two different Benji movies. It was written by Bima Stagg and Martin Wragge. Wragge produced another Stagg script for Black Trash and also wrote The Last Warrior, which sounds like an end of the world movie, but is not.

Shot in South Africa and distributed by Vestron, this is way more high falutin of post nuke movie than you’d expect from Vance Duke and Bull Shannon. Did you know Bull’s first name was Nostradamus? As slow as this plays, I can’t even imagine how long it seemed with commercials when it played the CBS Late Movie.

Byron Cherry, who played Coy Duke, never got to be in a post-apocalyptic movie. He did, however, show up in Blood Salvage.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Kirlian Witness was on the CBS Late Movie on August 13, 1986 and July 20, 1987.

“For the first time on the screen a strange thriller that takes you into the psychic world of plants.”

Yes, in 1979, people were talking to their plants, using biofeedback devices to hear from them and even singing to them. For everyone obsessed with the 80s, let me tell you, the 70s were way better.

Director Jonathan Sarno did post-graduate work in playwriting and directing at the Yale School of Drama under directors Arthur Penn, George Roy Hill, Elia Kazan, Roberto Rosselini and novelist Jerzy Kozinski. He’s an artist and yet here he is, making a horror movie about psychic plants, but life is great that way. Sarno wrote this, along with Lamar Sanders, and also produced the movie and acts in it.

I don’t even know where to start with this movie. I mean, the phrase Kirlian is because the photographer detective at the heart of this movie, Rilla Hart, has a photo in this style that represents the energy field of the exotic plant that her sister Laurie owned before her death. And oh yeah, her sister could literally talk to that plant.

An occult low budget movie about talking plants and a psychic named Dusty who brags about how he has surpassed human existence and is one with the plants despite mainly working the night shift loaded trucks and also knows the exact moment that they will expire? What could make this better? How about a cameo by Lawrence Tierney as a police detective? Yeah, that’ll do it.

There’s another release of this called The Plants Are Watching that cuts a fair amount of footage, so go for this one. It’s so twisty and oddball that it could pretty much be classified as an American giallo, what with its dream logic and ending which reminded me of The Cat o’ Nine Tails. It’s a relatively sexless journey through the same end of the world New York City as Driller Killer, but you know, with plants.

Honestly, this movie is way better than it has any right to be. In a perfect world, it would have been the first film that Sarno turned into a cult film and we’d be celebrating everything he made afterward instead of him going into making travel videos. There’s honestly nothing else like it.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

In the credits, it thanks the owner of Day of the Triffids for the use of a scene from that movie. That man? Philip Yordan, whose strange movie Night Train to Terror is a nexus point in my strange film obsessions. Much like how the Church of Satan connects The Car, Tippi Hedren’s Roar and Jayne Mansfield, that movie is the crux of so many of the pathways that researching weird films has led me down.

Here’s a drink for this movie.

The Plants Are Drinking

• 1 oz. Midori
• 1 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. white rum
• 5 oz. lemonade

1. Stir the first three ingredients in a glass with ice.
2. Pour lemonade over and enjoy.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This release was an instant purchase for me. Should you buy it? Here are my thoughts. Then you can order it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Intrepidos Punks (1980): Folks kept making movies over the last 40 some odd years, but after Intrepidos Punks, why did they bother?

Imagine if you will. The best biker movie that you never saw in the late 1960’s, but instead of Bud Cardos or Russ Tamblyn, you have an army of punk rockers and luchadors that look like they emerged straight out of a 1980’s Capcom beat ’em up. Now, give them all the drugs, dress them like nuns while they rob a bank and watch as they play Russian roulette and have rough sex like there’s no tomorrow because there isn’t.

Everything the Satanic Panic feared has become true in this film, as these mowhawked and bemasked biker maniacs swear allegiance to every demon you can imagine when they’re not shooting off weapons, playing surf rock or assaulting the citizens of a small town before you know, setting them on fire.

Let me explain something about this movie. It’s not enough to kidnap the wives of every jail guard and abuse them. No, you have to cut off their hands and send it to their men, letting them know that you’re coming to kill them, too. Beast, the leader of the women, rescues Tarzen (El Fantasma, who was an awesome luchador and whose son is Santos Escobar in WWE now and he has a gang too) and takes off for a cave concert black mass orgy.

It’s that kind of movie.

There are two annoying cops and a mob association that the punks have to deal with, but thanks to their makeup heavy bedazzled forces, blasting around on trikes and dune buggies and predating even The Road Warrior and the post-apocalyptic cinematic magic of Italy and the Philippines, you know that they’ll win eventually.

They made another one of these — La Venganza de Los Punks — that’s just as good. If you ask me, they could keep making them until the world stops rolling around the sun.

Let me translate the lyrics to the theme song for you and explain why you need to watch this movie right now.

“On the roads and cities too / stealing from anyone they always break the law.

On motorcycles with their girls they go / Looking for adventures.

They worship Satan.

Sex, drugs, violence  / they always look for action.

Sex, drugs, violence and a lot of rock & roll.”

Princesa Lea, who plays Beast, was born in Montreal and made her way to Mexico via Miami, soon becoming Majestad de las Vedettes, a queen of cabaret, where she did acrobatic dance and appeared nude in a giant champagne glass. She’s a Russ Meyer-esque dream who isn’t afraid to be the toughest woman you’ve ever witnessed. She also appears in The Infernal Rapist, Midnight Dolls and 1981’s El Macho Bionico, an erotic film that dares to mix up The Six Million Dollar Man and The Incredible Hulk.

The sequel to 1980’s Intrepidos Punks, this one ups the ante from the very first five minutes. After Tarzan (luchador El Fantasma, father to WWE star Santos Escobar) is freed from prison, he instantly gets revenge on the man who put him away, Marco (Juan Valentin) by interrupting the cop’s daughter’s quinceanera. His gang proceeds to rape and kill every single person there, leaving Marco alive so that he can be tormented by his loss.

Let me sum this up the best way I can: Tarzan and his gang look like the best Italian post-apocalyptic movie ever, if a Mexican wrestler led a gang that’s mostly made up of Japanese women wrestlers circa the Crush Girls era that had constant Satanic orgies. Tarzan even yells, “Long live death, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol!” at one point, sending me into ecstatic bliss.

Marco’s partner says that “We are all guilty. We are all accomplices. All of us!” Probably no one listened to the police chief when he claimed that the gang was only the tip of the iceberg at the end of  the last film. Now, Marco is getting kicked off the force, slowly eating soup and planning his horrible vengeance on the gang.

This movie quite literally comes from inside my brain. It’s the only place where luchadors can lead Satanist drug gangs against an ex-cop willing to take things so far that he pours acid on people, all whilst a surf punk band jams out and curvy dancers gyrate to their completely offbeat (and off beat) performance. Everybody has aluminum foil on their spikes or metallic hair or is naked or has a bad dye job or looks likes the random dudes you beat up in Final Fight. Throw in a black mass where a goat is beheaded and devoured and you have the feel good movie of 1987!

The only thing I don’t like about this movie is its ending, which Roberto Ewing explains away the entire movie as one bad dream. Fuck that. If you just stop the movie right before that, all will be much better with your world. I also want there to be more movies in this series and am willing to Kickstart anything that attempts to make this happen.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ghost Fever was on the CBS Late Movie on August 26, 1988.

Sherman Hemsley from The Jeffersons is Buford Washington. Luis Ávalos from The Electric Company is Benny Alvarez. And they’re Greendale County, GA — yes, a black man and a Latino in the South! — police officers sent to serve an eviction notice to a plantation when the ghosts of the former slavemaster that owned the house, Andrew Lee (Monogram Pictures star Myron Healey) and one of his slaves named Jethro (also Hemsley) defend the home from beyond. Yes, a black man and his owner working together!

There’s also a torture room that neither Lee nor Jethro know about. That’s because it was the super racist grandfather vampire who did it all and his granddaughters — Linda (Deborah Benson) and Lisa (Diana Brookes) — need help.  Cue the scary music, bring in Madame St. Esprit (Jennifer Rhodes) and the ill-fated seance. Meanwhile, zombies pop up and Buford has to win the house from the bank in a boxing match against Joe Fraizer.  Smoking Joe isn’t the only combat sports veteran in this, as former pro wrestler Pepper Gomez is in the cast.

Then, the ghosts kill Benny and Buford, keeping the house — and the girls — all for themselves. If this seems like a narrative shift in a slapstick comedy, then you’re correct.

Screenwriter Oscar Brodney hadn’t written a movie in 16 years before this, but he did write Harvey, which does not translate into making this movie a success. The Alan Smithee credited for this film is really Lee Madden, who made Hell’s Angels ’69, The Manhandlers, Angel Unchained, The Night God Screamed and Night Creature. He hadn’t made a movie in eight years, but that could be because he was busy making commercials for car lots.

This was filmed in 1985 but not released until 1987 due to extensive re-shooting and re-editing, resulting in Madden demanding that his name be removed from the credits. It was produced by Hemsley and he lost most of the money he’d made in his career on this.

Oddly enough, Hemsley was super into prog rock and allegedly worked with Yes’s Jon Anderson on a funk-rock opera by the name of Festival Of Dreams about the “spiritual qualities of the number 7.” Daevid Allen from Soft Machine and GONG claimed that Hemsley had an LSD lab in his basement and had a room named the “Flying Teapot room,” named for the GONG song, with “…darkened windows and “Flying Teapot” is playing on a tape loop over and over again. There were also three really dumb-looking, very voluptuous Southern gals stoned and wobbling around naked. They were obviously there for the guys to play around with.

They used to call PCP Sherman Hemsley because it made people rude, just like his character. I believe that maybe he was making it!

Here’s the man dancing to Nektar’s “Show Me the Way.”

Let’s therefore forget this movie and enjoy the magical world we live in, where Yes and George Jefferson make music together.

You can watch this on YouTube.