Before he directed Happy Gilmore; Brain Donors; Beverly Hills Ninja; Saving Silverman; Big Daddy; The Benchwarmers; I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry; You Don’t Mess with the Zohan; Grown Ups; Just Go with It; Love, Weddings and Other Disasters; Jack and Jill and Grown Ups 2, Dennis Dugan was an actor, appearing as Captain Freedom on Hill Street Blues and being in everything from The Girl Most Likely To and Night Call Nurses to She’s Having a Baby and Parenthood.

The first movie he directed was Problem Child and you know, I totally came in cynically and found myself laughing at loud at several moments.

Ben Healy Jr. (John Ritter) lives a miserable existence. His father (Jack Warden) runs his life at work at the sporting goods store and only cares about running for mayor. What little existence he has at home is dominated by his wife Flo (Amy Yasbeck). All he wants is to give and receive love, dreaming of having a child, which ends up happening when Igor Peabody (Gilbert Gottfried) introduces him to Junior (Michael Oliver).

Igor has sold Junior as a perfect angel but that’s because he wants him out of the orphanage, as the title of this movie will tell you exactly the kind of person he is. In the first few minutes of the movie, we learn that Junior is pen pals with serial killer “The Bow-Tie Killer” Martin Beck (Michael Richards) and in the first day he’s in his new house, he breaks the cat’s legs when he sends his grandfather tumbling down the steps.

Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Dolemite Is My Name) had read a newspaper article where a couple learned their new adopted child had been brought back to the orphanage ten times. That sounds like a story of pure sadness, but they decided to make a comedy where Junior has been brought back thirty times.

Where the laughs came in for me is that this movie has no issues with going too far. A birthday party is ruined with explosives and that’s followed by Junior hitting every single player on the opposing baseball team in the balls to win the game. Maybe I was in the right mood, but I found myself laughing harder than I have in some time. I know it’s not the kind of movie that any critic in his right mind would enjoy. Luckily, I am not that critic. This is somehow a PG comedy that is as black as it gets, a movie where a woman cheats on her husband with a serial killer and debates murdering their adopted kid and yet, somehow, it’s actually hilarious.

Problem Child was a big enough movie to get two sequels and an animated series, as well as a Turkish remake, remix ripoff called Zipcikti. It’s also the movie that Max Cady loves beyond all human deceny in Cape Fear.

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Problem Child is that this movie is where Ritter and Yasbeck met. They were married in 1999 until his way too early death in 2003.

My favorite thing about this movie are all the hints that Junior may very well be Satan. If you watch it with that in mind, it’s even funnier.

You can buy this Mill Creek retro blu ray from Deep Discount.

If anyone else made this movie, one would say it looked cheap. But man, this is a slick looking Jess Franco movie and I say that with love. He even had star power that he hadn’t had since the early 70s, if you consider Robert Forster — and Robert Foster, I mean Antonio Mayans — as well as George Kennedy, Ramon Estevez, Silvia Tortosa, Craig Hill and Brett Halsey stars. I definitely do.

A Eurocine film written by Franco, Daniel Lesoeur and H.L. Rostaine, this takes place in the country of Puerto Santo, which has Estevez and Halsey as rebels who get guns from Kennedy and President Ramos leading the country with the help of the military power of Madero, who is played by Forster. Meanwhile, the American government wants to be involved, so they place some of their CIA agents into this firecracker of geopolitics.

I wondered, “Is this a Jess Franco movie?” And then, in the middle of a somewhat fancy kitchen, appeared Lina Romay and I literally yelled her name out audibly. I’m weird, what can I say?

This movie helped me answer a question I have had for some time. Who would win between George Kennedy and a helicopter?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Carl Taylor and James St. James (Charlie Sheen and his brother Emilio Estevez, who directed and wrote this) dream of owning a surfboard store but for now they’re picking up trash. The thing is, if they kept at this job — and this is old me and not young me who saw this back in 1990 — they’d have great benefits and a pension and just about be ready to retire by now.

Their boss wants them fired for the way they behave, so he brings on his brother-in-law Louis (Keith David) to catch them breaking the rules, except he’s part of their hijinks when they find the body of city councilman Jack Berger (Darrell Lawson) in the trash, the same man that Carl shot at with a pellet rifle when he saw him treat his neighbor Susan (Leslie Hope) rough.

Before you know it, they’re involved in a scheme that got the councilman killed as Maxwell Potterdam III (John Getz) is planning on dumping toxic waste all over their beloved beach. He sends his goons Frost (Geoffrey Blake) and Mario (John Lavachielli) after them, plus the guys also have to stay one step ahead of two bullying cops, Mike (John Putch) and Jeff (Tommy Hinkley).

Emilio said of this film, “For me to be able to do a movie where saving the environment is the underlying theme is the greatest contribution I can make, I think. More people are going to see what I’m doing in a film and be educated through entertainment than if I show up at a rally. I’m working on putting the causes I think we need to address into my work and into the projects I choose.”

I was struck by how charming he is in this, just like everything else he’s done. His career hasn’t had the same popularity as it did in the late 80s, but he took some time off and has come back to produce, direct and appear in a few projects since 2018 and has come back to play one of his most famous roles, Coach Gordon Bombay, in the series The Mighty Ducks: Gamechangers.

As for Charlie, well, you know how that went.

The brothers would also star in another movie Emilio directed, Rated X, the story of the Mitchell Brothers.

You can get this on blu ray from MVD.

There’s this school of thought that Troll 2 is the worst movie ever made.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of a truly bad movie. At no time is it expected, boring or like anything you’ve ever seen before.

It’s not a romantic comedy that you can predict from the first story beat.

Instead, I put forth the argument that this movie is uniquely from its own world and therefore worthy of praise.

Director Claudio Fragasso — Drake Floyd — is no stranger to this site. He started his directing career by working alongside one of the most underappreciated of all Italian exploitation directors, Bruno Mattei, often making two of the same genre movies at the same time on the same set with the same actors like The True Story of the Nun of Monza and The Other Hell or Women’s Prison Massacre and Violence in a Women’s Prison.

Just a quick look through Fragrasso’s resume reveals movies I’ve gone on and on about. He wrote Rats: Night of Terror, Double Target, Strike Commando, Hell of the Living Dead and Zombie 3 while directing Monster Dog, Zombie 4: After Death, Beyond Darkness and Night Killer. Again, most of these movies would appear on worst lists yet I find something magical and fun within each of them.

As you look at the names of those who produced this, you’ll see David Hills. Do not be fooled. This is Joe D’Amato, a man whose Filmirage released movies that made a buck no matter what and cut corners everywhere and I say that with utter devotion.

To realize this story, Fragrasso’s wife Rosella Drudi started the story as a way of expressing her frustration with several of her friends becoming vegetarians. Neither Fragasso nor Drudi spoke fluent English, so their script was broken up into what English they could speak. They would give the cast that script scene by scene and when those actors tried to fix the dialogue, Fragrasso would grow angry. He still gets angry and refers to the actors as dogs (Italian movie slang for bad actors; one can imagine how often Fulci used this word) who lied about their experiences.

The only person who spoke English? Producer D’Amato’s longtime friend and frequent collaborator Laura Gemser. Yes, Black Emanuelle herself.

Can you imagine living in Porterville, Utah in the late 80s and a big international production comes to town and it’s D’Amato, Fragrasso and the most gorgeous and exotic woman you’ve ever seen in your entire life? And she’s there to design the troll costumes?

Well, goblin costumes. Drudi wrote this as Goblins — that’s why Nilbog makes sense — but the American producers changed the name of the movie to try and pass it off as a sequel to Troll. Before you get angry at American capitalism, be aware that D’Amato would follow this by naming both The Crawlers and Quest for the Mighty Sword — which at least recycles one of the troll costumes — as Troll 3.

The production crew was almost all non-English-speaking Italians brought to America by Fragasso, including director of photography Giancarlo Ferrando (All the Colors of the Dark, And God Said to Cain, Torso, Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, Hands of Steel, American Rickshaw), art director Massimo Lentini (The New York Ripper, The Beyond), makeup artist Maurizio Trani (Sinbad of the Seven Seas, Cinema Paradiso, Zombi, Dawn of the Mummy, Emanuelle In America) and assistant director Alessandra Lenzi (High Finance Woman, Cop Target, Hitcher In the Dark), whose Americanized name was Alexandra Humbert and if you didn’t guess, she’s Umberto Lenzi’s daughter.

As for the American cast, they’re a mix of would-be actors, like Michael Stephenson and locals such as George Hardy, a dentist who showed up to have fun and ended up playing one of the main roles in the movie. Or Don Packard, who played store owner Sandy Mahar. He seems like an absolute maniac because, well, he is. He was on a day trip from a nearby mental hospital and had also smoked a ton o marijuana before shooting, so his performance is as real it could be.

So what’s it all about, you may ask?

What isn’t it, I answer.

Michael Waits (Hardy) has always dreamed of being a farmer, so he packs his family up and moves to Nilbog, exchanging homes with the Presents family in a pre-air bnb bit of weirdness. Meanwhile, Grandpa Seth (Robert Ormsby) appears to his son Joshua (Stephenson) and warns him of that goblins wait for him and they plan on eating him and his family. At the same time, his sister Holly (Connie McFarland) is in the midst of dance routines and insinuating that her boyfriend Elliot (Jason Wright) is gay, so he gets all of his friends, packs them in an RV and follows them to Nilbog. On the way, Grandpa appears again as a hitchhiker and tells Joshua that his family will soon be plants that the goblins will devour.

This is literally twenty minutes of this movie and it hasn’t even really become strange yet.

Elliot’s friends Arnold, Drew and Brent are all dispatched whether by poisoned hamburger or drowning in popcorn or, in the case of Arnold, being transformed into a tree by Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed, who went on to be in the makeup department for Dumb and Dumber) and her Stonehenge Magic Stone. She then chainsaws the tree that Arnold becomes and this is presented as a side story and not even part of the plot because the film goes on wild tangents.

As for Elliot and the rest of the family, they all barricade them in the house — after Joshua urinates on their food in an attempt to keep them from eating poisonous goblin ingredients — and have to do a seance with Grandpa Seth for the ten minutes he has left before he returns to the afterlife.

Speaking of that pissing scene, the script called for him to act possessed, jump up on the chair and start screaming. In the documentary about this movie, Best Worst Movie, Stephenson said, “On the day of the shooting, Claudio Fragasso pulls me aside, looks at the script, and says, “Ah, possessed, that bullshit, boring, you stand up, you piss on the table.” Being ten years oldII was thinking, “What?,” but Claudio says, “You don’t worry, you jump on table, you unzip zipper, we cut, piss on table.””

Troll 2 is an odd movie, one that’s about a child’s grief when he loses the first adult in his life and has to come to terms with death, but it’s also about a community of people whose ways haven’t changed for years dealing with outsiders by devouring them. It’s also a horrifying movie because if you take the ending seriously, it’s really dark.

It’s also one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Just the line readings like “I’m Sheriff Gene Freak” send me into fits of laughter. It’s one thing seeing it at home all alone. Seeing it in a packed theater is just the most wonderful of theatrical moments.

This is a movie where every main actor came to be cast as an extra and got a major part.

When you think about all of that, how can you say that this is a horrible movie? A movie that has brought so much joy? Get over the listicles and so bad it’s good mindset and embrace Italian maniacs running loose in America. This isn’t even Fragrasso’s weirdest movie!

That title means Bloody Mansion Death and A Knife for Seven Cursed Women and man, this movie is… well, it’s something. For one, it looks like a shot on video 1990s adult film but one with no penetration and featuring its entirely female — save for a man in the beginning — cast in lingerie for its entire running time, except when they’re not showering. Is director and writer Kadir Akgün the Turkish Jim Wynorski?

Seven women — a lingerie model (Silver Türk), a sex worker (Ayşin Soylu), a belly dancer (Ayla Tuncer), a homemaker (Hicran) an actress (Hülya Konuk), an ingenue (Figen Aydoğdu) and an ex-wife (Nur İncegül) — have all received the same letter from the same old man banker lover.  They are to come to his mansion and get a gift that’s only for them. What, the lead role in his movie Audra?

When they get there — all by boat, of course — he’s already dead in the bushes. Instead of doing the sensible thing and getting out of there, they all start fighting and then decide to all put on lingerie, which is kind of what you do when you’re a fancy underwear model, but these ladies all have different jobs. They do all shop at Frederick’s and not Victor’s Secret if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Then the news comes on — it uses the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark because of course it does — and then they all get a bloody note: “You are all going to die!” One of them dies quickly and everyone runs outside to get a weapon instead of you know, getting the fuck out of there. They also all put on fresh lingerie.

With each death — by poisoned liquor, by garotte, by poisoned food, by necktie, oh man this killer has just a few tricks until someone else gets shot and another gets stabbed — the girls drag the dead body to a room, cover it with a sheet and keep partying. There’s also a Psycho shower scene that turns sapphic, accompanied by the theme from Jaws.

A Turkish SOV giallo/Sorority House Massacre ripoff with hardcoded Greek subtitles starring big-haired 80s women all screaming at the top of their lungs at one another for forty-five fifth generation video quality minutes until one is killed. Fuck you James Cameron, this is my Avatar 2.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I hope you don’t mind a used gift, because this was first posted on December 24, 2019.

This entry in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series has nothing to do with any of the others, dropping the killer Santa Caldwell brothers for an entirely new plot. It was directed by Brian Yuzna and written by Yuzna, Woody Keith and Arthur Gorson. In the UK, it’s called Bugs, which is a much more descriptive title.

Keith took several of the ideas he had for the movie Society but was unable to get into that movie. Thanks to the miracle of how movies are released, that film came out two years after this one.

Kim Levitt (Neith Hunter, who is also in Less Than Zero and Carnosaur 2) is an aspiring journalist working at the L.A. Eye. Her boss gives breaks to all the guys, including her boyfriend Hank.

However, when she finds a spontaneously combusted body on her sidewalk, she starts her own investigation. That brings her to the bookstore of Fima (Maud Adams, the titular heroine of the James Bond film Octopussy), who gives her a book on feminism and the occult.

On Christmas Eve, Kim spends a rough evening with her boyfriend’s family, dealing with way too many questions and anger about her lack of religious faith. On Christmas Day, she attends a picnic Fima invited her to, where she meets Katherine Harrison (Jeanne Bates, Mrs. X from Eraserhead) and Jane Yanana (Sheeva from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation), who tells her about Adam’s first wife Lilith.

Merry Christmas, huh?

Soon, our heroine’s writing career is going well but she’s eating bugs and drinking weird tea and you know, it’s tannis root all over again. She passes out, only to awaken to Jane, Fima, Katherine, and Li performing a ritual where they cut open a live rat, pulls out some larva and shoves it inside her secret garden. It then comes out of her mouth as a vomited giant roach, which their assistant Ricky (Clint Howard!) slices up and drips all over her face.

The mania continues with her running to her man’s apartment and Ricky following her to stab Hank to death. Her co-worker Janice comes to help  — no she doesn’t she’s in on all this — before taking her back to meet Fima. Janice is played by Allyce Beasley, who you may remember as the secretary from TV’s Moonlighting.

This all leads to the Curse of Lilith, burning bugs, Ricky wiping out a family, an office holiday party and Reggie Bannister from Phantasm playing Eli, the horrible boss. Oh yeah — you also get to watch a gigantic insect eat Clint Howard, which really sounds like the best Christmas gift possible for me. Thank you, everyone involved.

You can watch this for free — with ads — on Tubi.

You can also get it on the Vestron Video Silent Night Deadly Night set which you can buy from Diabolik DVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know Die Hard was a Christmas movie? Shut up. Let’s talk about Dolph Lundgren fighting aliens over the Yuletide. Also not Dolph’s only holiday movie.

We were just discussing this movie as we opened Christmas gifts, because it has a different title now. Over the last few years, people have started referring to it by its original title Dark Angel, which was changed in the U.S. because there were two movies with that title in 1925 and 1935.

Director Craig R. Baxley started his career as a stuntman before moving into stunt coordination and second unit directing. Since then, he’s directed one of my favorite movies no one ever talks about — Stone Cold — as well as Action Jackson and the Stephen King adaptions Storm of the Century, Rose Red, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer and Kingdom Hospital.

Jack Caine is a rough around the edges cop — he’s Dolph Lundgren, too — who is at war with the White Boys, a gang of white collar drug dealers who do stuff like kill partners and blow up police stations. They’re led by Victor Manning, played by Sherman Howard, who was Bub in Day of the Dead.

Caine is partnered with a by-the-book federal agent named Arwood “Larry” Smith, played by Brian Benben who you may remember from the HBO series Dream On. If you were a teen when there was no internet and you wanted guaranteed nudity.

Meanwhile, an alien drug dealer named Talec has come to Earth to leech out peoples’ brains. He’s portrayed by Matthias Hues, who is related to Engelbert Humperdinck and took over Van Damme’s role for No Retreat, No Surrender 2. He’s being pursued by Azeck, an alien cop. The guy who played him Jay Bilas, is on ESPN as a college basketball announcer, as he played for Duke University and was drafted fifth in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Dallas Mavericks. He was an assistant coach at Duke and is a practicing attorney in North Carolina.

David Ackroyd, who was in the TV movies Exo-Man and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, plays Smith’s boss. Betsy Brantley (the body model for Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) is Lundgren’s girlfriend, a coroner who helps him track the alien criminal. Michael J. Pollard has a cameo as a criminal, World Celebrity Chess Champion Jesse Vint (Forbidden World, Deathsport) is Talec’s first victim and Al Leong shows up too, because he has to in any movie with cops and/or aliens.

Screenwriter David Koepp would move from this movie into some real blockbusters, like Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Carlito’s Way, The Shadow, Mission: Impossible, Stir of Echoes (he also directed), Panic Room, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and many more. He’s had an incredibly successful career and it all really got rolling here.

There’s been talk of a sequel for years, but at this point, I think only people like me — and maybe you reading this — would care. That said — I’m there whenever it comes out.

You can watch this on Tubi.