EDITOR’S NOTE: Iron Eagle was on USA Up All Night on July 28, 1989.

The video store and cable era did not believe in “we have that at home.” It believed that if Top Gun was already rented or wasn’t on, we needed something just like it. That something was Iron Eagle, which came out the same year. Directed by Sidney J. Furie (The Entity), who co-wrote the script with Kevin Alyn Elders, the film features Doug Masters (Jason Gedrick) being rejected from flight school, just as his father, Colonel Ted Masters (Tim Thomerson), is shot down over Bilya. Bilya isn’t real, so we can hate everyone in it who has sentenced Doug’s father to die in three days.

Somehow, Doug and Col. Charles “Chappy” Sinclair (Louis Gossett Jr.) are able to steal two F-18 jets and make it to Bilya. That means that Doug — with a few days of training — must battle Ministry of Defense Colonel Akir Nakesh (David Suchet) to save his dad. He’s already learned how to napalm people, so he has that going for him.

Spoiler, but everyone makes it out alive. This is followed by Iron Eagle II, Aces: Iron Eagle III and Iron Eagle on the Attack, with Gossett being the only actor to appear in all of these movies. They were years ahead of that Top Gun sequel, huh? And that movie might have a great soundtrack, but this one features Kobra doing the theme song, Queen playing “One Vision” and Dio’s “Hide In the Rainbow.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Alien was on USA Up All Night. Does anyone know when?

How do I keep going down the rabbit hole of David DeCoteau films? Well, here we go again, with Ms. Xenobia (Judy Landers, Hellhole, Stewardess School) coming from space to teach biology to a bunch of horndog teenagers, including Bad Ronald’s half-brother Bill Jacoby. He’s Wesley Littlejohn and gets to aardvark with Ms. Landers after a vitamin supplement causes a phallic antenna to emerge from his forehead.

He also has a band called the Sex Mutants, who play along with another band called the Poon Tangs (who are made up of Ginger Lynn Allen, Linnea Quigley and Laura Albert). Sure, he was trained as a classical pianist, but what our alien sex fiend really wants to do is rock and roll.

Karen Russell from Shock ‘Em Dead and Memorial Valley Massacre is also in this, as are Michelle Bauer, Olivia Barash (Repo Man, Tuff Turf), Edy Williams, Troy Donahue and Arlene Golonka from Mayberry RFD.

Originally titled I Was a Teenage Sex Mutant, there was almost a sequel called “Star Pupil.” Writer Kenneth J. Hall was also behind Nightmare Sisters, Evil Spawn and Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout, among other films.

Nothing in this is as good as the poster of Landers with a ridiculous-looking alien. But you already know that going in.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Critters 2: The Main Course was on USA Up All Night on June 9, 1997.

The first film Mick Garris directed, Critters 2, brings the evil aliens back to Earth as a hidden number of eggs hatch, bringing Ug (Terence Mann), Lee (Roxanne Kernohan), and Charlie McFadden (Don Keith Opper) back to the planet to stop the Critters. However, when the evil creatures eat Lee, Ug begins to grow depressed and transforms from his rock star form to his actual alien appearance.

This time, the Crites have a new power to form a giant ball of black fur. It’s pretty intense, and this movie was intended to be scarier than the first one. Did they succeed? Roger Ebert said, “Unlike the original film, which was a genuinely entertaining ripoff of E.T., Starman, The Terminator and Gremlins, this movie is not even a competent ripoff of Critters.” He followed that up with this: “The makers of this film could not generate a single idea that was not provided for them by the makers of the original film. They went into the project with a ripoff on their mind.”

But hey — Eddie Deezen is in it!

They also made at least three more after it. As someone who has adopted two chihuahuas, I like these movies. Obviously. I lived with these aliens before.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Puppet Master was on USA Up All Night on January 30, 1993.

Puppet Master may have started with one direct-to-video movie, but since then, there have been ten sequels, a crossover with Demonic Toys and a recent reboot, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich.

After Empire Pictures went out of business, Charles Band started Full Moon Productions, which would partner with Paramount Pictures and Pioneer Home Entertainment to create direct-to-video movies. Puppet Master would be first and it’s very similar to another Band movie, Dolls. Yes, this was initially intended for theaters, but Band thought it would make more money as a home release.

Think Star Wars is confusing? Well, Puppet Master is really the sixth film in chronological order. It starts in Bodega Bay, California, in the year 1939. A puppeteer named André Toulon (William Hickey, Uncle Lewis from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) is finishing a puppet he calls Jester when Nazi spies come for him. He places Jester and the other puppets (Blade, Shredder Khan and Gengie) into a hidden panel before killing himself.

Fifty years later, psychics Alex Whitaker, Dana Hadley, Frank Forrester and Carissa Stamford take a journey to meet their old colleague Neil Gallagher, who has found Toulon’s hiding place, all thanks to a series of visions. Soon, a doll named Pinhead is taking out the psychics one by one, finally revealing that Neil has been alive all along, using Toulon’s Egyptian secrets of alchemy to reanimate himself. However, he’s dumb enough to cross the puppets and throw Jester at a chair. Those puppets stay together. Only Alex and Megan survive, along with Dana’s formerly taxidermied dog, which is now mysteriously back alive.

Such a small debut for a series that would go on to so many more installments, right? Even though they only have five minutes of screen time, people fell in love with the little guys. How can’t you adore Blade, who is based on Klaus Kinski and the Leech Woman? Strangely enough, most of the music in this movie comes from a film Band produced that’s also about bringing inanimate objects to life, Tourist Trap.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Going Overboard was on USA Up All Night on June 15 and 16, 1990; February 16 and October 11, 1991; March 13 and June 12, 1992 as Babes Ahony. 

It seemed like every time I tuned into USA Up All Night, this movie — Going Overboard is its primary title, but it was also known as Adam Sandler’s Love Boat in Germany — was playing. This is understandable since it was one of Adam Sandler’s early films that could be aired without incurring significant costs.

Directed and written by Valerie Breiman, the film boasts a large cast, including Burt Young, Billy Zane, Adam Rifkin, Terry Moore, Milton Berle, and Billy Bob Thornton.

The plot follows Shecky Moskowitz (played by Sandler), a stand-up comedian who isn’t very good at his craft. He lands a gig on a cruise ship as a janitor but gets a stand-up job after the on-ship comedian, Dickie Diamond (Scott LaRose), falls overboard. Complications arise when General Noriega (Burt Young) decides he wants to kill Miss Australia (Lisa Collins) for insulting him. Fortunately, Billy Zane appears as Lord Neptune to inspire our hero. Yes, that really happens.

The film was shot on a small, rundown cruise ship that sailed for a week from New Orleans to Cancun, Mexico. It was en route to the Miss Universe Pageant, hosting fifty past and present beauty queens from across the United States. As much as I appreciate Sandler, this is one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and you can imagine how low that bar goes.

It’s rumored that Rifkin co-wrote this film. Yes, the same person responsible for The Dark Backward. Really. Honestly, I have no idea how this film came to be, nor can I explain why I’ve watched it so many times. Somehow, Sandler recovered and has been a huge success. Anything can happen, you know?

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Back to the Future Part II was on USA Up All Night on January 16, 1998.

According to Wikipedia: “Director Robert Zemeckis said that initially, a sequel was not planned for the first film, but its huge box office success led to the conception of a second installment. He later agreed to do a sequel, but only if Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd returned as well.”

That’s BS. The sequel was set up at the end of the first movie!

Most of the original cast agreed to return, but a major stumbling block arose when negotiating Crispin Glover’s fee to come back as George McFly. When it became clear that he would not return, the role was rewritten so that George is dead in 1985, and reused footage and an actor in make-up would fill in. We’ll get back to that.

It took two years to build the set, and this film and the third movie were shot at the same time (or at least worked on simultaneously).

Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) comes back to get Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and his girlfriend Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) in an attempt to fix the future. If Marty Jr. (also Fox) is allowed to be part of a crime with Griff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), things will go wrong for the entire family. The problem is that as they fix this, Bigg (also Wilson) steals a sports almanac and becomes Donald Trump, taking over the world, killing Marty’s father, George, and marrying his mom, Lorraine (Lea Thimpson).

This gets dark. Super dark. But just when it seems like everything has worked out back in 1955 — everything is repeated — the DeLorean disappears. It looks like all is lost when, in one of my favorite scenes, Joe Flaherty appears as a Western Union man, having had a telegram for decades to give to Marty at this exact moment. Marty goes back to see Doc Brown, having just left, all to set up the last movie.

Back to Glover.

According to an interview with Howard Stern, the highest offer he got was for $125,000, less than half of what the other returning cast members were paid. The actor felt that the movie’s message was incorrect. The characters were successful at the end of the film because of money, not love.

Zemeckis went beyond using old scenes to shoot new footage of actor Jeffrey Weissman, who wore prosthetics including a false chin, nose, and cheekbones. Weissman would tell Glover that the molds that were created from his face to make the aging prosthetics in the first film were reused to make the prosthetics for Weissman. Glover filed a lawsuit against the producers as they neither owned his likeness nor had permission to use it. Today, thanks to Glover, Screen Actors Guild collective bargaining agreements stipulate that producers and actors are prohibited from using such methods to reproduce the likeness of other actors. The precedent he set is being upheld in the digital aagee as well

Glover wasn’t the only actor not to return. Claudia Wells, who played Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer, was dealing with her mother’s cancer. She was replaced by Elisabeth Shue and even erased from past footage shown in the film.