EDITOR’S NOTE: Think Big aired on USA Up All Night on January 22, April 17 and August 27, 1993 and January 22, 1994.
Rafe and Victor (Peter and David Paul) are truckers down on their luck, trying to keep their truck from going back to the bank. For their last chance, they’re sent with a load of toxic waste and put on a timer, on their way to a company called Tech Star that uses child labor. One of the precocious geniuses is Holly Sherwood (Ari Meyers, Emma Jean from Katie & Allie), who hides in their truck with her invention that can turn off and turn on anything electronic. This puts them at odds with Dr. Bruekner (Martin Mull), the CEO of Tech Star, who wants Holly and her invention.
Claudia Christian is in this as a doctor, as is Richard Kiel as a hired thug and yes, Richard Moll is in it too. I wish we had had a buddy comedy with both of them in it. Throw in Michael Winslow, David Carradine and Tiny Lister? Man, who cast this movie!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Monster High aired on USA Up All Night on April 30 and August 6, 1994 and January 27 and August 25, 1995.
WARNING: Some scenes may be considered objectionable by sensitive viewers, dead people and farm animals. On the other hand, if you like that sort of thing…
Dume (Robert Lind) and Glume (Sean Haines) have brought a doomsday weapon named Mr. Armageddon (David Marriott) to Earth and let him loose on Montgomery Sterling High where eventually, everyone has to play basketball against him and his monsters to stop the end of everything for the next thousand years.
Along the way, there’s a spray can that leaves killer condoms on people’s faces, a horny gargoyle made out of rubber, zombies, a mummy and characters with names like Mel Anoma, Miss Anne Thrope, Slisa Beealzeberg, Coach Otto Parts, Norm Median and Candice Caine. There’s also a literal killer weed; that is marijuana as a murderous plant.
Somehow, people allowed director Rudiger Poe and writers Roy Langsdon and John Platt to work again. Poe would also direct a video called Imagine It!² the Power of Imagination that I wished that he had watched before he made this movie. He was also a producer for several Playboy videos that had college girls, girls next door, Farrah Fawcett, the women of Enron, Chyna, girls of reality TV, Pamela Anderson, the women of Fear Factor and the women of Starbucks. As for Langson and Platt, they would write The Forbidden Dance and the Graydon Clark movie Out of Sight, Out of Mind a year later.
Diane Frank, the French actress who stars in this as Candice Cain, was also in some other USA Up All Night movies like Mankillers and Eyes of the Serpent. If you’re the type who notices these things, she has multiple nude doubles in this movie and none of her breasts look alike from one scene to the next.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Fast Food aired on USA Up All Night on January 24, January 31 and February 1, 1992. Obviously, people were really into it to play that much that often.
Auggie Hamilton is all about making that fast buck. He’s just been kicked out of college for a gambling and drinking party after being there for way longer than four years, as well as trying to sleep with the dean’s daughter. What’s he going to do now?
So when he learns that his friend Samantha (Tracy Griffith, Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland) is about to sell her father’s garage to make way for Wrangler Bob Bundy (Jim Varney, yes, the Ernest P. Worrell playing, Slinky Dog voicing Jim Varney. Trivia note: Blake Clark, who is also in this movie, was friends with Varney and took over the voice of Slinky after Varney’s death) and his constantly growing burger empire.
How do you defeat a megacorporation? Well, you go get some drugs that make people horny and put them in your burgers, that’s how. And if you’re wondering how they get that drug, one of the way they get women in bed is to sneak them into a lab where men suffer from non-stop erections. The girls see all these bald-headed yogurt slingers and the next thing you know, they’re in bed with the guys. Because you know — that’s totally how romance works. Movies like this are why I didn’t get laid until I was 24.
How does the new fast food place get successful? Well, beyond the date rape drugs in the special sauce, they also cater a fancy preppie sorority bash being thrown by Mary Beth Bensen, who is played by the same person who played the grown-up Angela in Sleepaway Camp II and Sleepaway Camp III. That’s Pamela Springsteen and yes, she’s the Boss’s sister.
Stick around — Traci Lords also shows up as an industrial spy, sent by Wrangler Bob to ruin our heroes. And oh yeah — the judge of their big case is played Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Michael J. Pollard shows up, too.
This isn’t a movie you’d be proud to talk about with anyone, but who cares? Varney is great, Traci Lords is Traci Lords and burgers cause people to get laid. You could do much worse.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nightmare Beach aired on USA Up All Night — I remember watching it! — even if my lists can’t give me an exact date.
You can say that Umberto Lenzi’s films are trashy, sleazy paeans to mayhem and gore. I won’t disagree with you. There’s Cannibal Ferox, a movie that tries to take that genre further and deeper than even I thought it could go. It worked, as its advertising proclaims that it’s “the most violent film ever made” and “banned in 31 countries.” Then there’s Ironmaster, where George Eastman wears a lionpelt on his head and murders his way through a ripoff of Clan of the Cave Bear that’s a million times better than the movie that inspired it. And then there’s Ghosthouse, a slasher haunted house film that’s baffling in its ridiculousness and willingness to get weirder and weirder as time goes on, as just as much time is given to discussing chili and the question “Who is more popular in Denver, Kim Basinger or Kelly LeBrock?” than exploring the House by the Cemetery and watching teens get colorfully pulped into oblivion.
In short, Lenzi is the kind of filmmaker that makes me tear up and yell things at my TV like, “Genius!” and “I love you, Umberto!” Nightmare Beach — also known as Welcome to Spring Break — is his take on the slasher in Miami, halfway around the world from home, celebrating sin, sex and stabbings.
That said, Lenzi for years denied that this was his film.
Supposedly, he had a falling out with the producers and wanted to be taken off the film as he found it too similar to his film Seven Blood-Stained Orchids. Screenwriter James Justice, working under the name Harry Kirkpatrick, took over but convinced Lenzi to remain on set as an advisor. Now, knowing what we know of Italian horror, a name like Harry Killpatrick sounds like a fake Americanized name for the director. Lenzi would continually say, “My contribution consisted solely of providing technical assistance. Welcome to Spring Break should be considered the work of Harry Kirkpatrick.”
However, in his book Italian Crime Filmography, film historian Roberto Curti would claim that Lenzi really did direct the film and refused the credit when the film was done. After all, Lenzi and Justice would work with the same producers to make Primal Rage (with this movie’s writer Vittirio Rambaldi directing and heroine Sarah Buxton showing up, too).
No matter — I love this movie. Yes, the kind of love that I’ve only reserved for Lenzi’s films, where I ignore how patently insane the dialogue is. Actually, I love these films because of that. This movie is everything that you want from a slasher and so much more.
Diablo, the leader of the Demons motorcycle club, is about to be executed for killing a young woman. He confronts his accusers, like her sister Gail (Sarah G. Buxton, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead) and Strycher (John Saxon!), the cop who put him away for good. He tells that he’ll see them all in Hell because he’s innocent and plans on coming back to kill all of them.
A year later, it’s Spring Break time in Miami, which brings football players Skip Banachek (Nicholas De Toth, who left acting for editing, working on movies like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s also the son of Andrew De Toth, who was behind the camera for House of Wax and Crime Wave. He also had an amazing eyepatch, which he needed after he was attacked by a group of young men as he scouted locations in Egypt. They thought he was military leader Moyshe Dayan. He was also married to Veronica Lake, who was just the first of his seven wives) and Ronny Rivera (Rawley Valverde, who has gone on to a career in real estate) to the beach. Ronny is a pip, saying amazing things like “How would you like her to do squats on your tool?” and “You wanna bump short hairs?”
While all the sex and drinking of Spring Break is happening — this movie becomes a teen comedy like Porky’s for a bit — a masked biker has been offing people left and right. This slasher isn’t content to just use simple weapons. No, he’s custom-built his bike to include an electric chair that fries people just like Diablo. So he’s totally the killer coming back from the dead, right?
Of course, Ronny is fated to get in a fight with the Demons and get killed by the biker, just as Skip is due to hook up with Gail. Why does she find him so attractive? Because while everyone else is out and about pouring water all over t-shirts and throwing up all over themselves, he’s refusing beer and being sullen. Seems like perfect mating material, right ladies?
That’s when Nightmare Beach takes a page out of Jaws, with the town council covering up the murders and pinning the blame on Diablo while the real killer has been running free. This point is hammered home when a jokester puts a fin on his back and swims directly at some partying teens, leading a cop to just open fire without warning.
So it is Doc Willet (Michael Parks)? Strycher? Or Reverend Bates (Lance LeGault, Col. Decker from TV’s The A-Team and Elvis Presley’s stunt double in plenty of movies), whose daughter Rachel is out of control? Or Mayor Loomis (Fred Buch, who shows up in Caddyshack, Shock Waves, Porky’s II and The New Kids)?
Nobody is safe, because the killer even takes out Diablo’s girlfriend Trina by blasting her headphones with electricity, sending her eyeball straight out of her head. So is it Diablo? After all…his body is missing from its grave.
I’m not going to tell you who the killer is, other than to tell you that if you watch enough giallo, it all makes sense. After all, that’s kind of what this movie is, along with the added slashtastic gore that this era demanded.
While shot in Miami, this film boasts plenty of Italian connections. Claudio Simonetti did the score, the aforementioned Vittirio Rambaldi wrote it and his dad Carlo did the special effects. Supplementing the fine score are appearances and soundtrack songs by the bands Kirsten, Animal (whose song “Rock Like an Animal” lives up to the idea that every metal band needs a tune that references their own name), Derek St. Holmes (who played on Ted Nugent’s first solo albums and in the band MSG) and Ron Bloom, Rondinelli, Juanita and the band Rough Cutt, whose members included Jake E. Lee (Ozzy’s guitarist after Randy Rhodes, Badlands), Amir Derakh (Orgy), Paul Shortino (Quiet Riot) and Craig Goldy and Claude Schnell, who both played in Dio. If you liked how Demons mixed metal into the film, then you’re going to bang your head throughout this movie.
No moment in this movie that is boring. It’s like doing drugs with the band backstage and then getting to sit in, then go backstage and they offer you your pick of groupie. It has no morals, it knows no laws and all it wants is to ensure that you have the best time possible.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Matthew Hale on Letterboxd, I’ve learned that there are alternate versions of this Mill Creek box set. For the sake of completeness and my obsessive compulsive disorder, here’s this missing movie.
Sometimes, the right movie comes along at just the right time. This would be that movie. Today would be that day.
Memorial Valley Massacre — also known as Valley of Death, also known as Son of Sleepaway Camp (complete with the music cues from Sleepaway Camp and hardcore penetration footage) — was released beyond the golden years of the slasher, but damn if it doesn’t make me just as happy as if it had been released between 1979 and 1982.
Evil land developer Allen Sangster (Cameron Mitchell!) has just broken ground on the Memorial Valley Campground and wants some teenagers to build it for him. Nothing happens at all for the first hour, with just one murder — that said, it’s the murder of an obese rich kid on a quad that I was hoping would die painfully and oh yes, he did — but by the end, all manner of slashtastic violence is unleashed.
Did I mention this movie has a cave boy? Yes, much like Encino Man but with death, this wolf child lives in the woods and doesn’t like all these rich folks knocking down his trees.
Beyond Mitchell, this is a junk film fan’s dream, with John Kerry (Dolemite), William Smith (Red Dawn, Terror in Beverly Hills, so many more) and Karen Russell (Hellbent). It’s directed by Robert Hughes, who would go on to make Zadar! Cow from Hell, Hunter’s Blood and Lusty Liaisons II before directing episodes of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers.
Seriously, outside of Don’t Go Near the Park, this is probably my favorite prehistoric people in public lands killing people movie. That said, I only know two of movies of this genre and I love them both.
Order the Vinegar Syndrome reissue, which is packed with extras, including a 4K reconstruction of the film and interviews with actor John Kerry and director Robert C. Hughes. Or watch it on YouTube and be assaulted by its soundtrack, which seems way too chipper for the carnage that unspools over the last twenty minutes of running time!
Garagehouse did everyone a favor when they re-released The Weirdo on blu ray.
One of the last movies Andy Milligan made, it’s a film about teenage innocence being destroyed directed by someone who seemingly has no innocence left. Donnie (Steve Burington) just wants to stay in his secret hiding space looking for garbage, but continually he’s set upon by larger and larger packs of bullies. The only kindness he finds in this world is in the disabled Jenny (Jessica Straus).
Jenny has one of those rambling Milligan speeches that ends with a truly haunting few sentences: “When I woke up my dress was all torn and I was bloody…all over here. When I finally got home my mother and sister beat on me. They blamed me for everything that happened. Bobby didn’t call me names after that but he would whisper to the other boys and they would giggle at me in the halls. I never went back to school again after that. I don’t need school. I don’t need anything.”
Donnie finally explodes and destroys everyone that ever hurt him, even decapitating his horrific mother. Heads getting cut off is something that happens regularly in Milligan movies. And seeing as how Andy hated his mother, this time the act takes on more meaning.
Yes, someone is also killed with a pitchfork.
Donnie and Jenny have a love that must battle three thugs — Nails (Shawn Player), Dean (Patrick Thomas) and Vic (Dennis Robbins) — as well as a horrible religious figure named Reverend Cummings (John Miranda), Donnie’s drunken mother wanting to sell him into slavery and the fact that they are in an Andy Milligan movie, which means that these things never seem to end well.
Supposedly, there was going to be a sequel with Donnie has an unkillable monster being controlled by Jenny and coming back for even more revenge. I despise the idea of AI-based cinema, but if there’s any movie I’d want to see made that is impossible to make today, this may be it.
I’m struggling to find a complete copy of this movie, but when I read the words “shot on video Greek remake of Maniac,” I have to share some of it.
The Strangler of Syngrou was directed by Dimitris Tzelas and written by Alexandros Diamantis. It stars Apostolos Souglakos in the role that Joe Spinell made famous. Diamantis was a professional wrestler who didn’t just moonlight as an actor. He also recorded two comedy rap albums.
He plays Angel, a man who was abused by his mother as a child who grew into a larger and more muscular man that got a job as a mannequin maker. He got married to a woman named Mary who sadly died and to keep her in his life, he creates a life-size doll of her that stays in bed all day and has now taken on the voice and behavior of his mother, belittling him and telling him what to do.
That “what to do” is kill women at night then leave behind a rose and make a doll of them that he keeps in his apartment along with Mary.
It also is packed with nudity — from men, women, transgender actors and Diamantis — and has its lead dress as a woman for several scenes.
So yes, while I can’t find the full video — yet — I have some clips, including one that has disco dancing at a club filled with neon called Barbarella and Angel speaking in the ear of his doll lover. This one has three minutes of more disco dancing while another has two streetwalkers smoking and talking. I also found this English dubbed comedy trailer.
Making this even more interesting is that it outright rips off music like Vangelis’ work on the Blade Runner soundtrack, Giorgio Moroder’s Cat People soundtrack, Swiss synthpop singer Daphné Hendrickx AKA Do Piano singing “Again” and “Simply the Best” by Tina Turner. There’s also a porn VHS within the movie called Mondo New Wave Harlots — alert Gregory Dark and the estates of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco E. Prosperi — that are inserts, giving this movie hardcore scenes.
If you have this movie, please let me know. I don’t know if anything has been more created for more consumption.
Made in Indonesia two years after Hellraiserby director Susilo S.W.D. and writer Djoko S. Koesdiman, this remake remix ripoff follows the same beats as the original, but has a heart and energy that makes you love it. While later sequels seemed to not even be about the Cenobites — and often weren’t as they were films that started as other stories and had the Lament Configuration shoved in — and the recent film that has none of the lunatic joy and sexiness of the first two or three movies, it seems like everyone is having a blast making this.
Nadia — who is Kristy — has a bad relationship with her recently widowed father Bramasto — Larry — who has married an evil stepmother named Astria or Julia, as we know her in the Clive Barker-directed inspiration. Astria has a secret, as she slept with Bramasto’s brother Lukito — Frank — before her husband and the affair has continued beyond his death, as she’s now part of his occult rituals from beyond the grave.
The sex has been toned down, as you can imagine with this being made in a highly Muslim country, and the effects and Cenobites do their own thing. The Lament Configuration looks like a vegetable with a strange face in it, the Cenobites appear to be zombies in latex masks joined by a pretty decent female follower of Leviathan.
The effects are pretty fun, too. They often take the form of puddles of blood with eyes in them, which is kind of scary when you think long enough about it. Frank, I mean, Lukito’s transformation is also pretty close to the real thing.
Damian Lee is a Canadian filmmaker responsible for Ski Schooland Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe, as well as writing Watchers. H.G. Welles may not have made a sequel to his book, but that didn’t stop Lee or writers Richard Bennett and Mike Werb.
Bobby could never grow, so he was given an experimental serum from Dr. Kate Travis (Jackie Burroughs) that instantly made him a full grown and super violent adult. Travis’ student Dr. Neil Hamilton (Paul Coufos) is trying to find a cure, all while animal activists that include his girlfriend Alex Reed (Lisa Schrage, Mary Lou Maloney herself!) and Mark Hales (Réal Andrews) are protesting Prof. Edmund Delhurst (Colin Fox), who is trying to cure baldness with animal experiments.
Of course the rats get huge just in time for protestors to unleash them on the world. Dean White (David B. Nichols) has his Amity Island moment and refuses to shut down the college, all while big rats are just straight up gnawing — yes, this was also called Gnaw — humans. “But the swim competition,” you hear him yell and yes, you knew it, the rats descend on the swimmers and have a smorgasbord.
The end of this movie is amazing, as they use a rat in heat to lure all the male rats into the open and kill them in the least original way ever: machine guns. But what of Bobby? He’s even bigger and angrier. He kills Dr. Travis and escapes, setting up…well, nothing. There’s no Food of the Gods III.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Road Raiders was on the CBS Late Movie on June 22, 1990.
Directed by Richard Lang and written by Mark Jones (Leprechaun) and Glen A. Larson, The Road Raiders was a pilot that wasn’t picked up and aired as a TV movie.
It stars Bruce Boxleitner — who had just finished Scarecrow and Mrs. King — as Captain Rhodes, a disgraced soldier accused of being a deserter who is hiding from officials in the Philippines during World War II. When an officer comes to arrest him and dies, he takes that man’s identity to get back to the actual fighting. Teaming up with Harlem (Reed R. McCants), Lt. Johanson (Susan Diol), Crankcase (Noble Willingham), Einstein (Stephen Geoffreys), Schizoid (Mark Blankfield) and the twin brother muscle of Black and Blue (David and Peter Paul, the Barbarian Brothers), he just might save the U.S. Army from Japan, which is represented by Clyde Kusatsu, John Fujioka and Tia Carrere.
It feels a little like The A-Team, a bit like The Dirty Dozen, and it’s an anachronistic take on the war. The Barbarian Brothers even drove a monster truck at one point. This all means that if this had been a series in 1989, there’s more than a complete chance that I would have watched every airing.
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