EDITOR’S NOTE: Black Roses was on USA Up All Night on February 17 and September 11, 1990 and May 18, 1991.

Growing up, two things both saved and damned me: heavy metal and horror movies. They go together like guitar and bass, guns and roses, beer and weed, leather and denim. Off the top of my head, I can name plenty of bands for whom horror movies are a central element: Electric Wizard, Hooded Menace, The Misfits, Acid Witch, Mortician, Uncle Acid . . . seriously, I could name bands all day long.

But what movies meet the metal grade? Which ones would you be able to put on the back of your battle vest? Also — a tip of the horns to Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s evil and doom filled tome, Heavy Metal Movies.

You probably remember Black Roses more for its garish VHS case than the actual movie. A 3D standout on rental shelves everywhere, it’s a favorite of many 80s horror fans. Believe it or not, I’d never seen the movie until this year. I was inspired by Acid Witch covering the song “Soldiers of the Night” on their Midnight Movies EP and had to look up the film that goes with it.

The small town of Mill Basin is about to become the first place where the band Black Roses will ever play a show. Up until now, they’ve only been a studio band. And parents are concerned because these guys have taken over the hearts and souls of the town’s kids. But do you blame the kids? Mill Basin reminds me of where I grew up — there’s nothing to do but fuck and do recreational drugs. And if you have bad self-esteem issues, you’re gonna just stay in your room reading comic books, playing guitar, drawing pictures of Leatherface and staring at your Traci Lords poster while listening to Among the Living on repeat. Oh wait — I was wallowing in the past.

There’s one teacher who cares — Matthew Moorhouse, who several of the students believe is having an affair with goody two shoes Julie. He’s stuck in a loveless relationship with an ice queen named Priscilla (Carla Ferrigno, yep, Lou’s wife). And the parents remain up in arms about Black Roses until the mayor calms them, reminding them that their parents hated rock and roll, too. The parents decide to be open-minded and go see the concert, which is the lightest, softest hair ballad cheese that you can ever imagine . . . until they leave and the real Black Roses starts playing and zombifying the crowd.

The kids come back at their parents with knives, just like Charley claimed they would, like a patricide by stereo (Vincent Pastore of The Sopranos), a mother killed by a car, another kid shooting his dad in the face and one watching while her best friend humps her father to death (one of these deaths is not like the other). Even virginal Julie goes astray, killing her lecherous stepfather and Moorhouse’s ex-girlfriend before transforming into a creature that I can only describe as a snaggletoothed fetal pig that makes cat noises.

This leads him to the band’s final concert, where lead singer Damian doffs his hair and shows off his demon dome. Moorhouse responds by setting the demon on fire, killing it. Wait a second — a demon that can be killed by fire? That just seems like poor planning.

So often, if you meet me in person, I get evangelical about movies, selling everyone on how amazing they are. I realize I often make bad movies sound way better than they really are. And when people are not ready for the onslaught of offal that I so often enjoy, they wonder, “Is Sam insane?”

Yes, I am. And if I were to be sitting next to you in person, I’d tell you that this movie is awesome because the lead singer turns crowd members into skeletons and purple zombies. That little dinosaur people that sound like kittens come out of speakers to kill fat dads. That my real dad, Carmine Appice, is in this movie, because his band King Kobra did most of the Black Roses music and that his name in this movie is Vinny Apache, which is the best name maybe ever, except for Sheriff Gene Freak. That Julie Adams from The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dennis Hopper’s insane The Last Movie is in it.

But then you’d watch it and be like, why should I be cheering for the obvious pedophile teacher with a sweater who is trying to set all the kids on fire with gasoline? Why are the creature effects so fucking weirdly bad? Is the film on the side of the parents or the kids? Why is the biggest band in the world playing such a small town shithole? How did they survive to play Madison Square Garden two weeks later and everyone is like, “Oh well” like it means nothing to them?

I should really start sharing disclaimers when I get all excited about movies. But yeah. Purple zombies. Dinosaur cats. Plenty of nudity. Metal lifers playing ridiculous songs (Carmine Appice was also in the solo bands of Ozzy Osbourne, Paul Stanley, Ted Nugent and Rod Stewart, which has to help you in a trivia contest someday). And you know, kids rising up to kill their parents. You can forgive a bad movie for a lot when it has all of these elements.

You can watch it over at the Internet Archive for free.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rambo III was on USA Up All Night on March 22 and July 4, 1997.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to have toy guns and military toys were not allowed in our house. I can remember thinking how strange it was that my grandfather loved war movies so much, hearing him listen to screaming and bullets and explosions in films late into the night when he’d get home from a double shift at the mill. And yet here I am, thirty years later or so, pretty much doing the same thing, watching Stallone movies at 6:12 AM while the rest of the world enjoys their last few minutes of sleep.

The first time I saw Rambo III was at a friend’s house unbeknownst to my parents. And this kid was obsessed with Rambo, right down to the necklace and knife that had a compass and opened up to hold tools. Yeah, 1988 was the kind of time when kids idolized war movies. We didn’t know that war was a funny thing and that the very Taliban soldiers that we cheered on in this film would one day change sides because global diplomacy is funny that way. It was simpler to just hate and fear Russia back then than it is today, where nothing at all seems sure and everything feels made up.

But I digress. Let’s talk about John Rambo.

Colonel Sam Trautman tracks down Rambo in Thailand, where he’s stick fighting for a monastery. He wants nothing of the war, even when shown how Russian troops in Afghanistan are killing civilians. Trautman goes on the mission and is captured, with all of his men killed. That’s when Rambo tells the man in charge of this op, government suit Robert Griggs, that he’ll rescue Trautman.

That leads me to one of my many rules of movies. This one is simple. Never trust a government spook. And my second rule: never, ever trust Kurtwood Smith.

Rambo soon meets arms dealer Mousa Ghani and asks him to bring him to Khost, where Trautman is being held. The Mujahideen in the village take to Rambo after he plays a game on horseback with them, but after a Russian helicopter attacks them, they refuse to help him. Instead, only Mousa and a young boy named Hamid are willing to help.

Rambo — of course — destroys everyone in his path to save his mentor. He uses everything from his bare hands to explosive arrows and even a tank to kill everyone in his path. And while the Russians almost take them out, the brave Afghani people rise up to rescue our heroes.

This movie used to end with a dedication to the brave Mujahideen, but now just thanks the gallant people of Afghanistan. That said, Masoud is based on Ahmad Shah Masoud, a real-life Afghan resistance who later became the minister of defense before leading the resistance against the Taliban. And in the original cut, Rambo felt so at home with the freedom fighters that he stayed here versus going back to America.

Up until Back to the Future Part II, this was the most expensive movie ever made. And, like many Stallone films, it was fraught with issues. Just a few weeks into filming, most of the crew including the director of photography and director Russell Mulcahy (Razorback, Highlander) were fired.

Stallone told Ain’t It Cool News that Mulcahy “went to Israel two weeks before me with the task of casting two dozen vicious-looking Russian troops. These men were supposed to make your blood run cold. When I arrived on the set, what I saw was two dozen blond, blue-eyed pretty boys who resembled rejects from a surfing contest. Needless to say, Rambo is not afraid of a little competition but being attacked by third-rate male models could be an enemy that could overwhelm him. I explained my disappointment to Russell and he totally disagreed, so I asked him and his chiffon army to move on.” Mulcahy was replaced by Peter MacDonald, a veteran second unit director.

The Guinness Book of World Records went on to label this the most violent film ever made, with 221 acts of violence, 70 explosions and over 108 on-screen deaths. They should have held on for the next one in the series, which goes way beyond this. Of course, this won Stallone another Razzie for Worst Actor, but I don’t think he was all that concerned. After all, he got paid a Gulfstream jet to be in this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hellraiser II: Hellbound was on USA Up All Night on October 26, 1996 and July 25, October 25 and November 8, 1997.

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 (which trust me, we’re getting to).

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Party Line was on USA Up All Night on May 11 and August 12, 1990 and June 27, 1992.

This is the most 1988 movie that I have ever seen, one that is equal parts Cinemax After Dark semi-sleaze mixed with some last gasps of celebrity fame, along with a late model slasher and even giallo-esque elements all with the gimmick of party lines, which before the interest used to dominate the late night airwaves, promising live sex over the phone for anyone. Oh man, if you could scrape this movie onto a mirror and do lines of it, I totally would.

Seth (Leif Garrett, who we can pretend is the kid from Devil Times Five grown up because, well, that’s totally the truth and that kid was a transvestite and this character is too, so let’s just pretend, OK?) and Angelina (Greta Blackburn, who played Lorraine, one of the aliens on V) are a brother and sister duo who hide out in their family’s Hollywood Hills mansion and use the party lines to lure people into having threeways with them and then slashing their throats with razor blades. Yes, incest and sex is violence and L.A. scum all in one glorious package.

But what if there was a bad boy cop? Oh, there is and his name is Detective Dan (Richard Hatch, who battled Cylons once upon a time). He’s under investigation for all his bad cop antics, but when his CHiP woman gets killed by Seth, he teams up with a psychologist (Shawn Weatherly, who knows a thing or two about cops, seeing as how she was in Police Academy 3: Back in Training) to take on the case.

This is the kind of movie where Detective Dan handcuffs a cokehead to a toilet before shoving his face into the urinal cake while two siblings sex murder a dude in the alley. Also, because this is a late 1980’s cop movie, the boss cop has to be a gruff older black guy and hey, Richard Roundtree is perfect for that role.

The guy who played Simmons in this, Terry McGovern, has a pretty interesting claim to fame. Sure, he was the voice of Launchpad McDuck. But he was also the guy who invented the word wookie. While making THX-1138 for George Lucas, they were riding in a car together and he shouted, “‘I think I ran over a Wookiee back there,” which made the future Star Wars director laugh so hard that the word — which McGovern invented — stuck in his head.

Director William Webb uses Garrett and Roundtree in a lot of his films, which include Delta Fever (which has Martin Landau and Wendi Jo Sperber in it) and The Banker (along with Teri Weigel and Robert Forester). This is the kind of movie that I’d be watching at 1:37 AM on a Friday when I was 16 years old, so in case you thought that I ever did anything productive with my life, you are sadly wrong. At least now I document my movie watching, I guess.

Oh man, I almost forgot that this teenage girl is coercing her friend into calling the party line too and then she goes to the cops and they make her call the party line while they listen to her basically have phone sex. So this movie riffs on I Saw What You Did, but there’s no Joan Crawford to make it better.

That nightclub also looks like it totally came out of a Rinse Dream movie.

You can watch Party Line on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Sisters was on USA Up All Night on March 29 and October 12, 1992 and April 18 and November 20, 1992.

Isn’t it strange — and wonderful — that the only force that could unite every heterosexual teenage boy’s dream of seeing Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer together in the same movie would be David DeCoteau and that he would do it more than once?

Quigley is Melody, a girl with bad teeth. Come on, who is going to love her? And Brinke as Marci? She has glasses! Surely a fate worse than death. Or what Bauer’s Mickey must endure, as she’s overweight. Luckily — or not — for our girls, they’re possessed and suddenly make the minor cosmetic changes needed to become popular.

Of course, before they get revenge, they must take a bath together.

I guess never let it be said that DeCoteau didn’t know what his audience wanted.

Made for $40,000 using left-over film, cast, and crew from Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, this is the kind of film where the actresses do their own makeup and posters from past films are considered set decoration.

Except something weird happened. The company distributing the film went out of business and less than 2,000 copies of the tape were ever distributed. The film became an instant collector’s item as tales of the bath scene grew legendary. When it eventually aired on USA Up All Night, that scene was no longer in the movie, replaced with the girls jumping on a bed.

Luckily, today we have companies like Vinegar Syndrome willing to put stuff out like this for the masses. And by masses, I mean maniacs like me that laid awake at night wondering if they’d ever see this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: State Park was on USA Up All Night on December 21, 1991; August 1, 1992; April 23 and October 16, 1993 and January 10, 1997.

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hell Comes to Frogtown aired on USA Up All Night on June 24 and September 29, 1989; February 3 and July 28, 1990; January 11, May 11, July 19 and July 27, 1991.

Donald G. Jackson sure made a lot of post-apocalyptic films. Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force, The Rollerblade Seven, The Legend of the Rollerblade Seven, Return of the Rollerblade Seven and three different movies in the Helltown series. He also made I Like To Hurt People, a movie all about pro wrestling. These things would all come together to create this film, where “Rowdy” Roddy Piper plays Sam Hell, the last fertile man on Earth.

In the post-apocalyptic wasteland of this film, atomic fallout has led to men and women being unable to breed. The government seeks out those that can make children and uses them to keep the human race alive. Meanwhile, frogs have become able to walk and talk like humans, all while falling for human women.

Sam Hell (Piper) has been located by the government as they followed the trail of pregnant women left in his wake. They wanted to use him to breed their collection of fertile women, but it turns out that the frogs took all of them. So now, he must use his fighting skills to break into Frogtown and rescue the women, then knock every single one of them up.

The team behind this operation — Spangle (Sandahl Bergman, who was also in the near-perfect post-apoc film She) and Centinella (Cec Verrell, Hollywood Vice Squad) — outfits Hell with a codpiece that will cause his junk to explode if he tries to run off.

Of course, hijinks ensue. A Frog lady named Arabella (Kristi Somers, Savage Streets, Girls Just Want to Have Fun) falls for Hell. Spangle is drugged and ensures the Dance of the Three Snakes for the Frog leader Commander Toty. And Nicholas Worth — serial killer and necrophiliac Kirk Smith from Don’t Answer the Phone — shows up as a Frog who tortures Hell.

This film is worlds better than I ever imagined that it could be. The part of Sam Hell was written with Tim Thomerson in mind, but New World wanted Daniel Stern. The final two actors considered for the role came down to Piper and Ed Marinaro. I think they made the right choice.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama was on USA Up All Night nine times: April 1, August 26 and December 1, 1989; June 1 and 2, 1990; February 2, September 13, and December 28, 1991 and February 7, 1992.

You know when they say that something is loosely based on something? I just read that this movie is loosely based on The Monkey’s Paw. Sure, they both have wishes that go wrong, but I think the similarities stop there.

Directed by David DeCoteau, who went on to bring us Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge, Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper and the completely unhinged Eric Roberts-voiced A Talking Cat!?!, this movie delivers everything its title promises (which is a much better one than its original name, The Imp).

Three frat guys spy on three sorority girls (Babs, played by Robin Rochelle from Slumber Party Massacre; Rhonda and Frankie, who is Carla Baron, now a real-life psychic profiler) as they prepare two new members (Taffy is scream queen Brinke Stevens and Lisa, Michelle Bauer, the scream queen who was Penthouse Magazine’s July 1981 Pet of the Month and also known as adult star Pia Snow) for an initiation, which consists of paddling and whipped cream. The boys get caught and to make up for it, they have to go with the girls to steal a bowling trophy.

While they try and get said trophy, they run into a burglar named Spider (scream queen supreme Linnea Quigley), who helps them break in. They quickly screw up and break the trophy, freeing Uncle Impy. That wacky little guy promises three wishes for freeing him. One of the guys wants gold, Taffy wants to be prom queen and one of the dudes just wants to have sex with Lisa (well, you can see his point). Impy senses that the sorority girls are watching him (indeed, Babs’ dad runs the mall) via cameras and he possesses both of hem.

Hijinks, as they say, ensue, with human heads being used as bowling balls, sorority girls getting turned into demons, bowling ball-fu (as Jim Bob would say), all-knowing janitors, Molotov cocktails, more severed heads and so much more.

Most of the cast stuck around to be in another DeCoteau film, Nightmare Sisters. Both are very much Charles Band direct to video films — a bit of gore, a little comedy and some T & A. And they’re the only two movies that have all three of the major scream queens — Quigley, Stevens and Bauer — appear in the same movie together.

I mean, if you like demons, bowling and attractive women, this movie would have everything you’re looking for. You can watch this on Shudder and even get commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jack’s Back was on USA Up All Night on July 30, 1994 and May 12, 1995.

I’m kind of obsessed with young James Spader. Let’s face it, in movies like The New Kids and Tuff Turf he exuded either a coked-up menace or a hardscrabble heart that was hard to beat. Here, he plays two roles. First, he’s a young doctor who becomes a suspect in a series of Jack the Ripper copycat murders. But then he dies — and his twin brother may or may not be the true killer.

Written and directed by Pittsburgh native Rowdy Herrington (Roadhouse, Striking Distance), this film also stars Cynthia Gibb (the TV version of Fame), Jim Haynie (the dockmaster from The Fog), character actor Robert Picardo and Rod Loomis (Zed from The Beastmaster).

Herrington wanted the movie to be titled Red Rain and for the Peter Gabriel song to be in the film. However, this was his low budget debut, he couldn’t get the rights, so he had a song composed called “Red Harvest,” which sounds exactly like the Gabriel ditty. However, the studio felt that the title had nothing to do with the movie, so they renamed it.

The story isn’t any great shakes: the good twin has found one of the victims before becoming one himself, while the troubled brother becomes the prime suspect. It’s also one of those movies packed with red herrings and endings that aren’t endings. So it’s kinda sorta an American giallo — minus the black gloves, inventive camerawork, fashion and neon colors. But the story — where a protagonist is dragged into a situation that he must investigate himself — comes off that way. And despite all the things I’ve said above, I ended up enjoying this one.

Spader is great — he always is — and you have to wonder about Cynthia Gibb’s character. It seems weird for the same woman to be involved with two brothers, but I guess identical twins makes that a little easier, if no less creepy.

You can watch this on Tubi.