AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was posted way back on October 30, 2019 and ignited my love of late 80’s Mexican horror. Please check this out and join me in bugging every horror DVD label about releasing this. 

It appears like director and screenwriter Ruben Galindo Jr. wanted to make his own version of A Nightmare On Elm Street but somewhere along the way he decided to he’d like to make a Mexican version of an American teen sitcom, too. Honestly, if you told me Ruben came from another dimension, I’d believe you just as much. This is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen — I’ve watched it three times just to try and get my thoughts together — and if you take a look through the films on our site, you can see that that is no idle boast.

Our hero Michael is going through some stuff. His parents are fighting so much that his dad sends him and his mom to Mexico City, where his mother decides to drink herself into oblivion. While trying to fit into his new school, he turns seventeen and his frien Tony gives him a Ouija board.

Now, unbeknowst to us, the viewers, Michael and Tony had a past session go wrong with a Ouija board, so this really was a bad idea. Virgil — what a name for a slasher villain — is released and begins killing people.

Now, up until this point in the film, this has felt like a teen coming of age movie, filtered through the lens of a Mexican filmmaker trying to create a movie that would make sense for American audiences. But just like how huge chunks of The Last American Virgin seem to make no sense to Western eyes, this movie also feels like it was beamed down directly from space.

How else do you explain the fact that our hero — who appears to be in his late 20’s playing a high schooler — wears dinosaur pajamas for nearly the entire film? This isn’t some Troma movie trying to play it all for laughs. This is a serious movie with such lunacy inside it that you can’t take it seriously.

It does, however, have awesome special effects courtesy of Screaming Mad George, including a face that emerges from a TV years before The Ring and huge chunks of gore, like a person stabbing through the chin and the blade emerging inside their mouth.

This film was a total surprise and delight to me. I’m shocked that Mondo Macabro or Severin hasn’t picked this up yet, because this is the kind of movie that would sell for them. I found it heartwarming just how insane and inane and odd this all was. Now pardon me, I’m about to watch this movie for the fourth time.

I love that we live in a time when the movies we once watched on fuzzy VHS rentals that were scored with wear and tear are now available on pristine blu rays from boutique labels. For example, 1988’s Dream Demon is now in my hands and instead of a tape that might fall apart in my battered VCR, I have a director’s cut blu ray that’s been lovingly restored from the original camera negative.

Diana (Jemma Redgrave) is about to marry the man of her dreams, a war hero named Oliver, freshly home from the Falklands. Yet as she moves into a huge new home near London, she starts to experience terrifying and gore-strewn dreams where she’s beaten, abused and tormented. She’s also being stalked by two journalists (Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail, who were on the show Auf Wenderstein, Pet) who are determined to dig some dirt up about her future husband. Things get even stranger when an American named Jenny (Kathleen Wilhoite, Witchboard, Fire in the Sky) shows up not only in her waking life, but in the dream world as well.

Director/co-writer Harley Cokeliss made the first filmed version of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, as well as working second unit on The Empire Strikes Back before he made films like Battletruck and Black Moon Rising.

Here, he shows a deft hand for telling a dream logic story that is packed with practical effects and so much of the goopy red stuff. Not all of it makes sense, but you can pretend that it’s the late 80’s, you’re in a video rental store and this looks pretty great from the box cover. It lives up to that promise.

Like all Arrow releases, this movie is absolutely loaded with features, including interviews with nearly everyone involved, two cuts of the film, a making of feature and commentary by Cokeliss and producer Paul Webster.

You can get this from Arrow Video, who were nice enough to send us a copy.

Let me tell you, when I read about this movie — about Brigitte Nielsen playing a music video director who is obsessed with finding love and making a movie about Billie Holiday while taking care of her jewel-covered turtle — I knew I had to track it down.

It’s running on our site during giallo week and it’s not particularly a giallo. But I honestly have no idea what kind of movie this is. That said, it does have Tomas Arana (The Church), David Warbeck (The Beyond) and Geretta Geretta (Demons) in it, so there’s that.

To top that off, writer and director Ivana Massetti was pretty much the same person as the lead character in this film, a female director in a time where that was quite rare. She had the idea to experiment here and make a film with hardly any dialogue. Or story, to be honest.

Domino wants love, so when she gets a phone call that promises her that romance is possible and that love can be real, she starts to see the world with much different eyes. She can certainly do better than having a mannequin for a lover, right? But what if that voice on the other end of the phone is a lie?

I guess it has some giallo feel as she’s being stalked by a man and wants to turn the tables on him. There’s also a dream where she speaks to the ghost of Holiday. Honestly, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether this movie is art or pretension, because I tend to love things that make no sense and any time I recommend them to people, I get the strangest looks.

Shh — I loved this insane, gorgeous and yet completely inane film. You can watch it on YouTube and decide for yourself.

Mondo Cane kept influencing movies a quarter a decade after it was released, as this film uses its all over the place format — in this case, a girl explores New York City — to showcase a variety of performance artists and give you an idea of what was happening in the late 80’s art scene. It was produced by Night Flight creator Stuart S. Shapiro.

This movie includes performances by Charlie Barnett (who was nearly selected for Saturday Night Live; Eddie Murphy was picked instead. He’s also Tyrone in D.C. Cab), drag star Joey Arias (Big Top Pee-Wee), Rick Aviles (who in addition to hosting It’s Showtime at the Apollo, also killed Swayze in Ghost), Phoebe Legere (the Toxic Avenger’s girlfriend), poet Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe collaborator Veronica Vera, no wave star Lydia Lunch, shaman artist Frank Moore, performance artist Ann Magnuson and Joe Coleman, who eats mice heads and nearly blows himself up.

Director Harvey Keith also was the creator of the Fat Boys’ video for “Are You Ready for Freddy,” which is just one of the many pieces of art he’d created.

Everyone talks about Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, but nobody talks about this movie. I mean, it has Susan Tyrell — yes, from Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker and Forbidden Zone — as a miniature woman who is married to Kris Kristofferson. Why is nobody talking about this?

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 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 be 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 biggest 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.

Beyond being a historian of exploitation films, Frank Henenlotter has made some outright insane movies like Frankenhooker and Basket Case. What other kind of mad genius would hire horror host Zacherle to be a worm named Aylmer, who creates drug-like relationships with his hosts while demanding to eat the brains of everyone they love?

That blue phallic worm secretes a highly addictive hallucinogen directly into the brain, forcing Brian to leave behind his life, his girlfriend and any hope of normalcy, all while being pursued by the old couple that had imprisoned the parasite and who know way too much of his history, leading to some of the longest and most hilarious expository dialogue I’ve seen in a film.

During the fellatio scene — yes, a woman puts Aylmer inside her mouth — the crew walked out, refusing to work on the scene.

There’s a great moment where Duane and Belail from Basket Case meet Brian on a train before he ends up killing his girlfriend. I realize that’s a spoiler, but nothing can prepare you for this movie. It’s truly one of a kind.

You can watch this on Tubi or on Shudder with and without commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.

Steve Guttenberg is gone, off filming Three Men and a Baby. That’s the cover story, because he not only turned down the lead role, he said no to all of the sequels that came after. Years later, he would say that he regretted this decision and has been trying to make a comeback for the series.

Sadly, the producers replaced him with Matt McCoy as Sergeant Nick Lassard, the grandson of series regular Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes). Bobcat Goldthwait and Tim Kazukinsky also did not return.

The elder Lassard is a central character, as he’s due for mandatory retirement due to the machinations of the villainous Captain Thaddeus Harris (G. W. Bailey) and his henchman Lieutenant Carl Proctor ( Lance Kinsey). Can the boys in blue save their boss? Of course. Come on. This is Police Academy.

Before he retires, Lassard is chosen as Police Officer of the Decade and brings his favorite students, including Hightower (Bubba Smith), Jones (Michael Winslow), Tackleberry (David Graf), Hooks (Marion Ramsey), Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook) and his newest graduate Officer Thomas “House” Conklin (Tab Thacker), along for a vacation to Miami Beach. Janet Jones — soon to be the wife of Wayne Gretsky — is also on hand as Officer Kate Stratton.

In between the many gags at the police convention, Lassard unwittingly takes a bag of stolen diamonds. The finale of the film, where Lassard has no idea that he’s part of a real hostage situation, is one of the funniest moments of the franchise.

I love that the Police Academy movies have great actors n them as the villains. This time, that would be Rene Auberjonois, who surely deserves better but is a game sport. In an interview, he would say, “Why I choose to do things is a mystery to me sometimes. I’ve done things that, on the face of it, you think, “Why would anybody do Police Academy 5?” I had to look at the role, and see if there’s a reason to do it. I did it because it was an opportunity to play a character that nobody else was ever going to let me play. I had a great time doing it, don’t regret it for a moment, and I’d do it again in a minute.”

As a side note, I’d like to call out that there was a Police Academy stunt show at Australia’s Warner Brothers Movie World which was was also one of the longest-running stunt shows in the world, with over 18,000 shows performed. The show also ran in their Germany location and if this website is any indication, the Madrid location still has this show running. Police Academy lives — even 26 years after the last film.

When Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol was released, critic — and star of Myra Breckinridge — Rex Reed said, “If they make another Police Academy movie, I’ll leave the business.” Producer Paul Maslansky would say when this movie was released, “Reed’s one of the reasons I’m making Police Academy 5. I expect him to be a man of his word.” Sadly, Rex kept at it.

Yes, Nico Mastorakis, the same maniac who made Island of Death, Blind Date and The Zero Boys, made a Police Academy ripoff. It also checks off another box with an appearance by Phillip, who is pretty much James Bond. Also, because this is Mastorakis, there’s some full-frontal nudity.

Also, Mastorakis never meant to actually direct the film, but after seeing that some of the dallies, he fired the original director and took over.

Gerald Okamura, the Hard Master from the first G.I. Joe movie and one of the hatchet men in Big Trouble In Little China, is Chiba, a man who owns a ninja academy in Topanga Canyon. His enemy owns Beverly Hills Ninja Academy. And just like Camp North Star and Camp Mohawk, they must battle.

There’s a mime, a klutz, some attractive women, a wiseacre and all the things you expect from this genre. Is Police Academy ripoff a genre? It is now.

Becky LeBeau, whose IMDB resume has Joysticks, multiple David Lee Roth videos, Hollywood Hot Tubs, Back to School, The Under Achievers, Not of This Earth, Rock-A-Die Baby and both Munchie movies, is in this. That alone should give you reason to find a copy of your own.

Also: a band on the soundtrack is called The Piggy Dicks. That is now my favorite band name ever.

Also known as Heavy Metal Summer, this movie seems to be about Johnny Rocket and drummer Louis, who are on their way to Los Angeles to be part of the Sunset Strip hair metal scene in the three years they have left before “Nevermind” comes out.

It’s also about Eve (Kim Myers, A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2) trying to win the Weewankah Wilderness Challenge so she can go to college. She’s helped by Linnie (Jennifer Inch, Screwballs) and Marsha (Isabelle Mejias, Julie Darling in the flesh!), but more. importantly, those two just want to hook up with guys.

This movie from Screwballs director Rafal Zielinski, who also made Last Resort, the one with the Coreys, not the one with Charles Grodin, and Recruits. Somehow, he was able to get Ted Nugent to show up for this movie, which shows how close Detroit and Canada really are. Actually, the movie is set in Michigan, despite being filmed up north. And by up north, I don’t mean Northern Michigan.

Man, that’s a joke you’d only get if you were from Michigan, which may be another reason why this movie isn’t so well known.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.