EDITOR’S NOTE: Cheerleader Camp was on USA Up All Night on February 28 and September 12, 1992; May 15, October 15, November 19 and December 10, 1993; May 7, December 9 and 30, 1994; January 4 and July 18, 1997.
You know, if I had my way, Betsy Russell would have been a much bigger star. I mean, she’s done well and is remembered — and got to be in the Saw movies and get a whole new audience — but she deserved better than a movie that forces us to watch Leif Garrett make sweet love to Playboy Playmate for April 1986 and adult star Teri Weigel. Nothing against Teri — she’s also in Predator 2, Marked for Death, Innocent Bloodand was the first Playboy girl to go into adult, which cost her a lot in her personal and professional life.
Making this movie work even harder for me? The appearance of Cannon Films star — I mean, she was in Breakin’,Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo and Ninja 3: The Domination — Lucinda Dickey. Also — Taleena from the Gor movies — and June 1986 Playmate of the Month — Rebecca Ferratti, George “Buck” Flower and Tom Habeeb, who would one day host the show Cheaters.
Based on the death of Kirsten Costas — just like the original Tori Spelling Lifetime movie Death of a Cheerleader — this movie is a paper-thin slasher that came in seven years after its expiration date and led to a sequel that’s not a sequel, the Russell feature — and yes, Buck Flower shows up again — Camp Fear.
It’s also directed by Randal Kleiser (Grease, The Blue Lagoon) and produced by Debra Hill, two people who I would also never think would have anything to do with a Pee Wee Herman movie. Sadly, this was the second and last of what could have been an entire series of these films.
It’s also the debut of Benicio Del Toro, so why should any of these people make sense?
The idea of the film was that Pee Wee had become famous, due to the James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild film made from his last movie, and now he is a Frank Sinatra-esque singer. Then, fame became a cruel beast, and Pee Wee went away to live as a farmer. This is never explained other than as an odd dream sequence, which is, I assume, all that remains.
Pee Wee and Vance the Pig (played by Wayne White, who helped with Pee-wee’s Playhouse and art directed the videos for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight) were once content to make giant plants and romance a schoolteacher (Penelope Ann Miller) before the storm brings a carnival led by Mace Montana (Kristofferson).
Soon, our man — or boy — has fallen for Gina Piccolapupula (Valeria Golino), a trapeze artist who inspires him to pursue a career in the circus. When the town says no, Pee Wee uses a hot dog tree to turn them into children and…well, that’s the whole movie.
The montage when Pee Wee and Gina finally make love is something that still makes me laugh to this day. This is so much stranger than the first film, while seeming normal, yet it has less of the whimsy of Tim Burton, so that hurts it.
Lynne Marie Stewart — Ms. Yvonne! — is a bearded lady, the one-time Henry and Predator Kevin Peter Hall shows up as a tall man (what else could he be?), Matthias Hues is a lion tamer, former Bozo Vance Colvig is a clown (and he was also in Mortuary Academy), Terrence Mann (Ug from Critters) is another clown, Franco Columbu (Arnold’s best man when he married Maria Shriver) is a strongman, Michu Meszaros (Hans from Waxwork and the man who played ALF) is a small person, Jay Robinson (Dr. Shrinker!) plays Cook, Kenneth Tobey (who shows up in plenty of Joe Dante films) is the sheriff, Leo Gordon (the Evil One in Saturday the 14th Strikes Back) plays the blacksmith, Frances Bay (Happy Gilmore‘s grandmother, plus Aunt Barbara in Blue Velvet) is Mrs. Haynes and former movie and kid host Jack Murdock is Otis.
You have to love that Pee Wee followed up his most significant career success with a movie about the circus filled with character actors. Of course, this made nowhere near its budget, and that brings us back to today. No one ever talks about this movie. They should.
Sept 15-21 Mockumentary Week: “Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery – and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside, in a marketplace, or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.”
If you had asked me the names of the California Raisins before this, I couldn’t tell you. Now I know they are singer A.C. Arborman, drummer Beebop Arborman, guitarist and pianist Red Raisin and bassist Stamford “Stretch” Thompson. From their rise as the Vine-Yls to their fall and rise back, this will tell you their tale.
Did you know their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” hit #84 on Billboard? Or that the album from this has them cover songs like “Green Onions” and “Tears On My Pillow?” Or that Will Vinton made the sequel, The California Raisins Sell Out, which has them trying other genres of music?
This is directed by Barry Bruce and features a writing crew that would go on to do much more afterward. Mark Gustafson would co-direct Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, while Craig Bartlett would create Hey, Arnold!
Raisins weren’t doing well before this. This concept was created by advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding for a 1986 Sun-Maid commercial on behalf of the California Raisin Advisory Board. Copywriter Seth Werner said, “We have tried everything but dancing raisins singing ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine.'” It worked and surprised everyone.
The sad real story is that ad agencies are scummy. I know this. I once owned one. Herschell Gordon Lewis ran one.
The California Raisin Advisory Board ended when members of the grape farming industry learned that Foote, Cone & Belding was continually raising the price of producing these commercials, with all the profits going back to the agency as well. In fact, the ads cost double what the farmer made.
The Raisins trademarks and copyrights became the property of the state of California, and in somewhat of a happy ending, they were licensed to the new California Raisin Marketing Board. After mergers, Foote, Cone & Belding is now Draft FCB, one of the largest agencies worldwide.
Sept 15-21 Mockumentary Week: “Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery – and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside, in a marketplace, or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.”
Nine years before Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson made this movie, which is not a drama but instead a documentary on the life of a dead porn star. This is all ragged charm without the crazy camera work, and yet it gets a lot of the same story beats, even if so much comes from the John Holmes documentary, Exhausted.
We learn the fact early: Dirk Diggler (Michael Stein) was born as Steven Samuel Adams on April 15, 1961, outside of Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father is a construction worker, and his mother is a boutique shop owner who attends church every Sunday.
Jack Horner (Robert Ridgely) discovers high school dropout Diggler at a falafel stand, and he soon meets his best friend, Reed Rothchild (Eddie Delcore), while working for the director. Then comes fame. Then comes drugs. Then comes the fall.
Anderson made this film when he was 17 years old and a senior at Montclair College Preparatory School. Anderson’s father, Ernie “Ghoulardi” Anderson, narrated the movie — he was the voice of ABC — and Robert Ridgely, a friend of his father, played Horner.
Shot on camcorder and edited with two VCRs, this is so close to Boogie Nights, even if in this, Dirk has a successful music career (and died after coming back to do gay porn, which is treated as the worst think ever, which is not PTA being homophobic; this feels like it was made by someone who was reading porn star interviews in Hustler regularly — ask me how I know that…)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hot Splash was on USA Up All Night on September 28, 1991; February 14 and September 5, 1992; April 9, 1993.
Sometimes I think about the people who took things from me and how they sleep well at night, and here I am, writing about a teen sex comedy in the middle of the night, unable to visualize being able to rest because I have so many of these films to discuss. They can never take that from me. They don’t want to.
Directed by James Ingrassia, Hot Splash is shot in Florida and has Woody (Richard Steinmetz), Jennifer (Andrea Thompson, Detective Jill Kirkendall on NYPD Blue) and Jimbo (James Michael Hall) getting ready for a surfing contest, but then Jimbo angers gangster T.J. Caruso (Jeremy Whelan). He gets kidnapped, and the surfing kids have to save him.
Then they surf, and you realize that the waves in Florida aren’t like the ones in the California beach movie. They’re pretty small. There are also two scenes at an Arby’s that go on so long that you start to understand that the filmmakers followed the ways of another man who made movies in Florida, Herschell Gordon Lewis, who got KFC to feed every film he made down there. So yeah. Arby’s. This movie will make you hungry for a French Dip and potato cakes.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Beach Balls was on USA Up All Night on August 30, 1991; February 22 and September 25, 1992; May 1 and July 2 and 24, 1993.
Charlie Harrison (Phillip Paley, Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost) wants to be a rock star, so he puts his own concert together. He has Christian parents, a sidekick named Scully (Steven Tash and a girl he wants that’s out of his league, Wendy (the late Heidi Helmer). He’s also on probation for driving drunk, which was less of a big deal in 1988. Our hero introduces her to the lead singer of Severed Heads In A Bag, Keith (Douglas R. Star), which is not the way to get the girl. Maybe if he gets his own guitar, he can win her back.
Director Joe Ritter wrote The Toxic Avenger and is a Steadicam guy now. This is the only film David Rocklin wrote.
The band in this is the D.R. Starr Band, led by Douglas Randall Starr. Yes, the guy who plays Keith., They were known for jazz-infused rock and glam metal. If you went to Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip in the 1980s, you might have seen them. Apparently, Steve Vai contributed to some of the songs on this album.
One of the punks, Mollusk, is Gary Schneider, Bozo from The Toxic Avenger.
This is a more innocent teen comedy than most. The artwork for it promises, well, beach balls. You get none.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Uninvited was on USA Up All Night, but I can’t find a date when it aired. Do you know?
I love George Kennedy and want to state for the record that he deserved way better than this film, which is a total piece of shit. That said, I’ve proved time and again that my favorite movies to watch are mostly made out of fecal matter, so let’s dish.
Genetic Laboratories has decided to create a poisonous mutant cat that lives inside the body of a cute house cat. Why would they do this? Who knows, but it’s a good thing they did, or we wouldn’t have a movie.
The cat ends up on the yacht of “Wall Street” Walter Graham (Alex Cord, Michael Coldsmith Briggs III of TV’s Airwolf), who is running away to the Cayman Islands to escape the SEC. Along the way, he’s brought his bodyguard (Kennedy) and a bunch of hot girls and their boyfriends. Holy shit, there’s Clu Gulager, Burt from Return of the Living Dead! There’s Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, Horror High, Battle for the Planet of the Apes)! And Rob Estes from USA’s Silk Stalkings!
This Japanese box art should tell you all that you need to know:
Or perhaps you’d like to see the German artwork:
The Uninvited was written and directed by Greydon Clark, who also directed Joysticks, Wacko and Satan’s Cheerleaders. I would hope that any of those films is better than this. Becca looked at a photo from this movie and said, “Is that a stuffed animal?” Yes, it is. That’s the level of special effects you’ll see here.
There’s also George Kennedy getting bitten by a demonic cat. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this, I don’t know what will.
Author Marie Adams keeps having visions of nuns and werewolves attacking her from a fire. It seems that the same imagination that helps her write is also driving her to madness. Her husband takes her moving all the way to madness, to Drago, where a small cottage will be the place that she plans on resting and relaxing away all the terror that she is going through. That would work if she didn’t keep hearing howling in the woods.
Much like the first film, her man can’t stay faithful. The small town is also rife with werewolves, ghosts and visions of the nun. The whole thing ends in a burning church, and yes, that same werewolf leaps through the flames.
Well, if anything, this is the only werewolf movie I’ve seen that has a theme song by the lead singer of the Moody Blues. So there’s that.
That said, this is a more faithful version of the book than The Howling. Yet it’s not as good a movie. Writer and co-producer of the film, Clive Turner, was originally going to direct, but when the financiers pulled out, he had to get Hough on board.
That’s one story. The other is the one that Hough told Fangoria. The script was written by someone named Freddie Rowe and he would also receive notes and messages from him, as well as additional pages of the script, while making the movie. However, when the director asked for Rowe’s contact information, he was never given it, leading him to suspect Rowe of actually being Clive Turner, who really wanted to be the director of the movie. Seeing as how Rowe only wrote one other movie — Howling V: The Rebirth, which Turner also wrote — that may or may not be true.
Making that story sound even more true is the fact that Turner recut and re-edited the film, adding scenes like the one where the evil werewolf queen Eleanor went bobbing for hot dogs with Marie’s husband.
You can watch this for yourself on Tubi and try and make better sense of it than I did.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Alien Nationwas on USA Up All Night on July 11, 1997.
Rockne O’Bannon created Farscape, seaQuest DSV, Defiance, Cult and the movie (and later TV series) Alien Nation. It was a spec script sent to Gale Anne Hurd, and she saw a lot of opportunity. What is the difference between other science fiction films? Herd explained, “We wanted the aliens to be more like a different ethnic race than like lizard people, … We didn’t want our audiences thinking, ‘Gee, look how different these aliens are.” Rather, after about five minutes, we wanted the audience to accept them as different from us, but not so different that no one would buy the storyline. We wanted the aliens to be characters–not creatures.”
In 1988, 300,000 enslaved aliens known as Newcomerslandedd in the Mojave Desert. Within three years, they’re settled in Los Angeles and some, like Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), become cops. His partner, Detective Matthew Sykes (James Caan) wants nothing to do with him, as he doesn’t trust the aliens once his partner is shot and killed in a robbery by several of them.
A case involving the wealthy newcomer businessman William Harcourt (Terence Stamp) and his henchman, Rudyard Kipling (Kevyn Major Howard, brings them together. There’s also a drug called Jabroka that can transform Newcomers into an even more dangerous form, and keeping it off the streets could be the difference between the two races existing as one.
This led to a 22-episode TV show, five TV movies, comic books and novels, all of which advanced the story.
Director Graham Baker also directed the last Omen movie.
You know who didn’t like this movie?
James Caan.
He told the AV Club, when asked about this movie:
James Caan: Why the f****…Why would you bring up that?
Will Harris: Many people actually like the film. I do, for one.
Caan: Yeah, well, I don’t know. I don’t have too many…I mean, I loved Mandy Patinkin. Mandy was a riot. But…I don’t know. It was a lot of silly stuff, creatively. And we had this English director whom I wasn’t really that fond of. I mean, nice guy, but…it was just one of those things where, you know, you don’t quit, you get through it. It certainly wasn’t one of…I wouldn’t write it down as one of my favorite movies. But it was pretty popular.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cameron’s Closet was on USA Up All Night on July 10, 1992.
Directed by Armand Mastroianni (He Knows You’re Alone, The Clairvoyant) and written by Gary Brandner, who was the author of The Howling, Cameron’s Closet is about Cameron Lansing (Scott Curtis), a psychic boy living with his father (Tab Hunter), who has been studying his son’s abilities since he was born. One night, he falls on a machete — sure, I guess — and Cameron goes to live with his mother Dory (Kim Lankford) and her boyfriend Bob Froelich (Gary Hudson).
Sergeant Sam Taliaferro (Cotter Smith) — who has prophetic dreams — and his partner, Pete Groom (Leigh McCloskey), are at odds due to Sam’s absent-mindedness, which stems from his inability to sleep. Hey — there’s William Lustig as a porn director! Sam is sent to Dr. Nora Haley (Mel Harris), who soon becomes part of the investigation team as Bob is killed when his eyes are burned out of his head and he’s thrown out a window. Both murders are connected to not just Cameron, but also Sam’s dreams. Also, Dead bodies come back to life as murderous zombies, and Cameron is obsessed with the Deceptor, a statue of a demon that his father gave him.
Why would they trust the dad’s old assistant, Professor Ben Majors (Chuck McCann)? Well, I don’t know. He soon gets his blood boiling in his body, and Cameron has to fight the demon in…the closet.
Cotter Smith and Mel Harris met during this movie and married soon after.
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