Judith Belushi, the widow of comedian John, and his manager Bernie Brillstein asked Robert Woodward — the writer of All the President’s Men and the man who joined who Carl Bernstein to break the story of Watergate — to write a book about Belushi to counter the many rumors that had started after the comedian’s death on March 5, 1982.

I can remember that day. I was ten years old, came home from school and we heard the story on the radio on the way to dinner. I’d been a fan of Saturday Night Live since it started, even if in Pittsburgh we watched it on a different channel that the NBC affiliate as Chiller Theater was such a big deal.

Woodward and Belushi were from the same town in Illinois and had friends in common. Belushi was even a fan. But after the writer interviewed numerous people and wrote his book, he never showed it to John’s widow. What followed was Wired. a sensationalist book that painted exactly the picture that Judith and Brillstein wanted to never be known.

Tanner Colby, who had co-authored the 2005 book Belushi: A Biography with Judith, said of Woodward’s book: “It’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.”

A major example that critics cite is that in the book, John Landis has to guide Belushi by the hand in how to perform the cafeteria scene in Animal House. Those there content that Belushi did the scene in one improvised take all on his own.

Belushi’s best friend and fellow Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd beyond hated the book and said that Woodward “spoke with me about an hour and a half, and you know there’s things in the book I don’t remember saying to him…”

He went on to say “He certainly has avoided the issue of what a funbag John was, what a great guy he was, what a warm, humorous, really, you know…concerned, and bright, educated, well-read individual this guy was. How did he get to be so successful? He was smart, you know, he wasn’t just given his break, and he had to work for what he had, and Woodward completely skirts that, and it’s a depressing, sordid, tragic book…and for my part I just think that it’s really depressing reading.”

Woodward wanted to sell the movie rights as soon as the book was published, but found no buyers. He said, “A large portion of Hollywood didn’t want this movie made because there’s too much truth in it.”

Producers Edward S. Feldman (the man who got both Hot Dog…the Movie and Hamburger the Motion Picture made; he also produced The Hitcher, The Truman Show and Witness) and Charles R. Meeker were the folks brave enough to fund the film. It was written by Earl Mac Rauch — yes, the same writer of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension — and directed by Larry Peece, who also made AIP’s The Big T.N.T. Show, The Other Side of the Mountain and A Woman Named Jackie.

The movie makes a wild departure from the book by having Belushi be followed by a guardian angel (Ray Sharkey!) who is leading him to either Heaven or Hell. They had to do something, as they were given no rights to anything connected to Saturday Night Live. If that something was a The Seventh Seal pastiche with pinball instead of chess, that was what they did.

Wired had problems finding a distributor as many of the major studios refused to distribute it. Now was that because of the conspiracy that people didn’t want the public to know how bad drugs were or because the movie is so insufferably bad? The jury is out but leaning toward the latter.

Brillstein believed that the filmmakers made up the controversy to sell this movie like William Castle would, saying “The only thing that the producers have to hang on to is the image of Wired as “the movie that Hollywood tried to stop.” When it played Cannes, the reception was hostile, with reporters attacking Woodward with questions about why he was a character in the movie.

John Landis threatened to sue and he’s not even named in the movie but suggested. Then again, helicopter noises play when he appears to hammer home that this is the same person who killed Vic Morrow and two children on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie. And Aykroyd pulled no punches, saying “I have witches working now to jinx the thing. I hope it never gets seen and I am going to hurl all the negative energy I can and muster all my hell energies. My thunderbolts are out on this one, quite truthfully.” A year later, he got J.T. Walsh, who plays Woodward in this movie, fired from the movie Loose Cannons.

You know who got the worst out of this? Michael Chiklis, in one of his first roles, who isn’t horrible as Belushi. He was picked out of tons of actors for the role and it took years for his acting career to recover. That said, he personally apologized to Jim Belushi when they met and the two embraced, as Belushi was always under the impression Chiklis was deceived as well by the producers. For his part, Jim visited the office of Feldman and trashed his desk.

As for the film itself, it moves through Belushi’s life in a non-linear fashion, with made up sketches like “Samurai Baseball,” the Blues Brothers singing Wilson Pickett’s “634-5789” and Belushi as a bee singing Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” invented for the film — again due to Lorne Michaels refusing to allow the movie to use any of Saturday Night Live‘s IP — and then a close where Belushi sings Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful to Me” alongside the real Billy Preston, the only person from that era to be involved with this film.

It also totally takes a few pages from Sid and Nancy by having a cab ride symbolize the boat across the river Styx and having Joe Strummer’s song “Love Kills” play.

There’s a great story about the life and death of John Belushi, one of triumph and tragedy, intelligence and sadly, stupidity. But this? This will never be it.

Dr. Johns (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Emanuelle in Bangkok, War of the Planets) has spent 78 days in a hole and set a record, but now he’s claiming that everyone will die if they come down to rescue him.

Umberto Lenzi directed five movies in 1989 and of those, this is the weakest (in case you want to know, I’d rank the others in this order: Nightmare Beach, Hitcher In the Dark, House of Witchcraft AKA Ghosthouse 4 and House of Lost Souls/AKA Ghosthouse 3). Maybe he was beyond busy, so busy that he thought no one would noticed if this movie was endless cave exploration and the end from Nightmare City.

Maybe he really loved his wife Olga Pehar and wanted to encourage her as this was her first script. She’d go on to write Hitcher In the Dark, After the Condor, Karate Rock, Black Demons, Hunt for the Golden Scorpion, Navigators of the Space and Karate Warrior 3 – 5.

I really wanted to love this movie. It has caves, it has gore, it has Lenzi. That said, he made some other movies that I’d totally recommend, such as Orgasmo, So Sweet…So Perverse, A Quiet Place to Kill, Spasmo, Ghosthouse, Cannibal Ferox, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Oasis of Fear.

I find it incredibly humorous that after Alan Moore, Stephen Bisette and John Totleben reinvented comic books with Saga of the Swamp Thing, director Jim Wynorski and writers Neil Cuthbert and Grant Morris were making this sequel to the original Swamp Thing and went nearly full camp.

After her mother’s mysterious death, Abigail Arcane (Heather Locklear) has come to confront her wicked stepfather Dr. Arcane (the returning Louis Jordan) who has somehow come back from the grave and is working to stop the aging proccess with Dr. Lana Zurrell (Sarah Douglas). Oh yeah, he’s also making an army of monsters.

Luckily, Swamp Thing is around and still played by stuntman Dick Durock, who wore a seventy plus pound suit in the humid swams so we’d have a movie to watch. This being a Wynorski movie, Monique Gabrielle shows up as well.

I love that in the midst of this wackiness — I mean, Swamp Thing drives a jeep at one point sending me into fits of laughter — the movie takes the time to recreate the love scene between its hero and Abby from “Rite of Spring,” which appeared in Swamp Thing #34. In the hands of the comic creative team, it’s poetic, gorgeous and full of deep meanings about man’s spiritual place in nature. In the hands of Wynorski, it’s Heather Locklear eating a cucumber out of a swamp person.

In my youth, I used to look down on the director’s movies as fluff. As I’ve grown older, I appreciate them for their entertainment value and how well made they are. Not everything has to be so deadly droll all the time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Back in my Fangoria fanboy mania, I kept seeing the Pittsburgh-made Heartstopper get listed and it supposedly had tons of Savini gore, as well as a role for him as a police detective. Every con Savini was at, I asked, “Is Heartstopper coming out yet?” And he’d laugh and say, “I hope so.”

It took me 33 years to see it.

Pittsburgh has seen more than one vampire movie get made here, from the lo-fi Fist of the Vampire to the big budget Innocent Blood and perhaps one of the best vampire movies ever made, Martin.

And oh yeah, Heartstopper.

Benjamin Latham (Kevin Kindlin, The Majorettes) was a doctor back around the Revolutionary War who was experimenting with blood when his sister-in-law and brother proclaim him a vampire. He’s hung and not just lynched, but held down by her, his heart has a stake put through it and he’s covered with garlic. And two hundred years later, he rises in Pittsburgh’s Point State Park. Unlike your run of the mill vampire, he lives by day and has poisonous saliva that either kills or brings people to his side, such as his lover Lenora Clayton (Moon Unit Zappa!?!), who introduces him to our modern world while having a tie to the past, as she’s a museum curator.

Meanwhile, one of Benjamin’s descendants has become a serial killer himself and he’s conflicted over saving him or destroying him. There’s also the matter of Lt. Ron Vargo (Savini), whose daughter was killed by someone who had a very vampiric MO, so all he does is talk about it and refuses knocking up his wife again because he’d rather work out down in the basement, so if you want to watch Savini grunt it out and do sets, trust me, this is your movie.

It also has a tremendous metal soundtrack and by that, the kind that will earworm you. The band N.M.E. (metal is not always clever) is a power/thrash band from the City of Bridges made up of David Paul Snyder on drums, C.E. Robinson on bass, Brian Keruskin and Michael Weldon on guitars and Jirus on vocals. They had two songs in the movie, “The  Gates of Hell” (“Walk On”) and “Heartstopper” (“Eat Me Alive”) and they’re pretty decent, along with a solo Jirus song called “Killer In the Park” and two songs by The Sound Castle, “What Kind of Love Is This?” and “In Principio,” which sound like progressive metal by way of Meat Loaf and I’m all for that, too.

“Heartstopper” (“Eat Me Alive”) was released on the VHS Horror Rock, which also has Hurricane’s “Over the Edge,” Wrath’s “Children of the Wicked,” The Pandoras’ “Run Down Love Battery,” The Dickies’ ” Booby Trap,” Elvis Hitler’s “Hot Rod to Hell” and The Del-Lords’ “Judas Kiss” all playing over clips of Night of the Living Dead, The Majorettes, Midnight and Heartstopper, which as you may have put together are all movies owned by this film’s writer and director John Russo  (or public domain, as is the case with Night).

Heartstopper is an interesting film at the level of The Majorettes in quality. It tries to be a different take on the vampire story and for that, it succeeds, while also being a great time capsule of 1989 downtown Pittsburgh. And of Tom Savini’s workout. Seriously, the dude made gains while making this.

Five humanoid turtles from the planet Battlestar and Princess Yesular have crash landed on Earth after a battle with the dreaded Shark Gang, who are all rats, but it’s a cool name. So yes, this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remix asks us to imagine an alternate universe where Master Splinter is the bad guy, that there are five turtles that can transform into human beings and that Go-Bots is in the same time and space as our heroes in the halfshell.

This was not the first time that Shin Hyun-hwan had teamed with Popeye Science, a toy company in South Korea, to make a movie directly based on toys. Of course, none of the toys he made movies about were unique. According to How the World Remade Hollywood, he started by reverse engineering Japanese mech toys to look close to other films that were coming out, including Space Gundam V, which has nothing to do with Gundam and instead a remix of Space Dimension Fortress Macross.

This time, the turtles are using a Bandai Machine Robo design while the Sharks have Galactic Gale Baxingar as their weapon. You have to love that level of sheer bul-al, right?

Also, this movie does not care at all about giving kids nightmares, as the moment the Sharks hit Earth, they go to the woods and outright murder some children.

Not only does this movie jump between live action and traditional animation, it has a robot to shoots lasers out of its pelvic area, which is also a good power to have.

Imagine how strange it would be to grow up with Our Friend Power 5 and then learn that it’s all a lie. Kind of like how we played with Transformers without realizing that they were multiple lines of mechs all remixed for Western sensibilities. Kind of like Robotech, which took the aforementioned Macross and mixed that show with Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, two entirely unrelated shows, to make a new narrative for U.S. audiences. Or how Voltron combined Beast King GoLion and Armoured Fleet Dairugger XV to create one Americanized cartoon continuity. 

You can watch this on YouTube.