Take it from someone who was there, 1990 belonged to Andrew “Dice” Clay.

That year, he became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row. His albums sold hundreds of thousands of copies, a fact that would never be possible in today’s streaming world. His controversial episode of Saturday Night Light was the fourth highest-rated show of the season and caused cast member Nora Dunn and music guest Sinead O’Connor to not appear on the show.

You kind of had to be there.

Yet how has a movie so critically reviled in its homeland been so well-received overseas?

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane will leave you with many questions.

Ford Fairlane (Clay) is smoking on a beach. He smokes for most of the movie, as so much of Clay’s Diceman routine — which started as just part of his act and grew and, well, grew — was about smoking.

He flashes back to how he got here, as Bobby Black (Vince Neil, who deserves a similar fate after murderously screwing up Hanoi Rocks) collapses on stage and dies. Ford is hired by shock jock Howard…no, Johnny Crunch (Gilbert Gottfried) to find out what happened and what groupie Zuzu Petals (Maddie Corman, who went from movies like this and Beer League to playing Lady Aberlin in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) had to do with it.

Crunch is electrocuted on the air and now our detective must deal with all manner of rogues, from former disco cop Lt. Amos (Ed O’Neill, always wonderful), Smiley the hitman (Robert England), numerous ex-girlfriends who want him dead and a record executive named Julian Grendel (Wayne Newton!) who is bootlegging his own label’s music when he isn’t blowing up Fairlane’s beloved car and home up real good.

There’s also a koala bear. And Lauren Holly as Ford’s assistant, Jazz. And an orphan named The Kid, played by Brandon Call from Step by Step.

Along the way, you get David Patrick Kelly (Luther from The Warriors, as well as T-Bird from The Crow and the fan from Penn & Teller Get Killed), Morris Day, William Shockley (the stuntman who played the first person dispatched by RoboCop), Lala Zappa (who keeps showing up in movies I’ve been watching like this and Amityville: A New Generation), Kari Wuhrer (oh man, whatever happened to her? If anyone deserved to be in 1990’s neon giallo films, who else? Also, she is in Beastmaster 2, Thinner, Anaconda and Berserker), Sheila E., showgirl Delia Sheppard (Penthouse Pet of the Month for April 1988 who is in Gregory Dark’s soft core movie Night Rhythms), Priscilla Presley, Kurt Loder and Tone Loc.

The music for this film is perhaps way better than the film, led by Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love,” which had an awesome video directed by David Fincher. The Black Plague band that starts the film features not just Neil on vocals, but also former Ozzy bassist Phil Soussan, Quiet Riot’s Carlos Cavazzo on guitar and Randy Castillo, who was in Ozzy’s band and played for some time in Motley Crüe before his death.

Somehow, this movie made $1 million more than it cost — $20 million if you were wondering —  and was the big winner at the 1990 Golden Raspberry Awards, winning Worst Actor (Clay), tying with Blake Edwards’ Ghosts Can’t Do It for Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay.

Speaking of that screenplay, the movie’s writers all went on to bigger and better things. Well, kind of. David Arnott wrote The Last Action Hero. James Cappe wrote for the Poltergeist: The Legacy TV show. And Dan Walters followed this up with Hudson Hawk (he also wrote Batman Returns and Demolition Man, so it’s not all bad). The characters came from Rex Weiner, who has the astounding title of creative consultant for Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (spoiler warning: he wrote it under the pen name Carlos Lazlo). He originally wrote tales of Ford Fairlane in The New York Rocker and L.A. Weekly.

Somehow, Renny Darlin just kept getting handed millions by Hollywood to make movies. Cutthroat Island? Deep Blue Sea? Exorcist: The Beginning? Oh Renny — what photos do you have and why do you keep using your blackmail to make these movies?

That said, I love this movie for this exchange:

Ford Fairlane: Hey, look. Write down my number: 555-6321 Got it?

Twin Club Girl: Yeah. Wait a minute. 555 is not a real number. They only use that in the movies.

Ford Fairlane: No shit, honey. What do you think this is? Real life?

You also have to love any movie that features fake bands like Ellen Aim and the Attackers (obviously from Streets of Fire), Brain of the Scarecrow, Alba Varden (the cruise ship from Lethal Weapon 2), Heather, Corey, Heather Cory and Young (a reference to the many Cory and Heather actors in the 90’s), Todd Times Two, 5000 Schizophrenics (10,000 Maniacs), Hot Tub Johnny and his Feline Friends, Mamma Waters Sings the Blues, Nine Sisters, Horses on Fire,  The Silver Belles, Fred and Ethyl (I Love Lucy), The Professor and Mary-Ann (Gilligan’s Island),  The Nakatomi Boys Choir (Die Hard), The Doctor Bellows Funk Machine (I Dream of Jeannie) and The Redheaded Gardner and his Flower.

Even better, Black Plague’s song titles are listed, such as “Hon, I Screwed the Kids,” “Polanski Nursery” and “I Love You.”

Also — as I know Joe Bob Briggs worries about these kinds of things, but the actual 1957 Fore Fairlane in the film was not actually blown up. That was a fiberglass replica.

So wait — remember what I said about this movie actually being a success in some places?

In post-communist Hungary, that’s where.

Pirated copies — featuring the voice of Hungarian singer and comedian Fero Nagy — became so popular that Hungarian youths would quote the film and the profanity filled lines Nagy added.

The film was also a big deal in Norway and in Spain, where it was dubbed by singer, actor and comedian Pablo Carbonell. I kind of dig the film’s title in Peru, which translates to Ford Fairlane: World Rock Police.

There was even a DC Comic book of this movie! Gerard Jones wrote it! I bought every issue!

What can I say? It was 1990. You had to be there.

Arrow Video put out José Ramón Larraz’s Edge of the Axe earlier this year and I loved every minute of it. While Deadly Manor isn’t quite as good, it’s still plenty strange. Just when you’re lulled into near-sleep by the numbers slasher plot, something absolutely and wonderfully bizarre happens, like the flashback to the bikers causing the accident or shocking nude photos of living, dead and perhaps not so dead people that show up throughout the film. Seriously, if nudity bothers you, this is not the movie for you.

On their way to a lake that no one can pronounce, some kids pick up a drifter with a dark past — don’t they all have those — and head to an abandoned mansion that has a car shrine up front, coffins in the basement and a closet full of scalps. And oh yeah — the same gorgeous yet evil woman has a photo up every few inches.

Everybody is soon about to be snuffed, but you knew that just from the first few seconds of the movie.

Greg Rhodes is in this movie and Ghosthouse, which would make a great movie to pair this up with if you’re looking for a fun evening. Jerry Kernion, who is Peter, has had a pretty nice career after this debut. And Jennifer Delora, who is pretty fun as the killer, was the second woman in Miss America history to be dethroned after her nude scenes in Bad Girls Dormitory became fodder for those easily upset. She’s also in all manner of genre favorites like Robot Holocaust, Suburban Commando, Bedroom Eyes II and Frankenhooker.

Seriously — hang out for the first hour or so of this movie. You’ll be rewarded with something really special when it comes to the final girl and the last twenty minutes or so.

As always, Arrow has gone all out for a movie that not many people were all that concerned about. So what! This features a new 2K scan, interviews with actress Jennifer Delora, Brian Smedley-Aston and Larraz (archival, not new, as he died in 2013) and a trailer for the Savage Lust VHS release. There’s also a commentary track with Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan.

You can buy Deadly Manor from Arrow Video, who were kind enough to send us a review copy.

Austrian-born ghost hunter Professor Dr. Hans Holzer wrote the book Murder In Amityville that the incredibly salacious and totally awesome Amityville II: The Possession was based on. Eight years later,  The Amityville Curse was made, based on another of his books. Holzer wrore a hundred plus books, so people really need to get on making more movies based on his crazy ideas.

This was directed by Tom Berry, who is mainly is known as a producer, helping make movies like Scanners II: The New Order, The Paperboy and Screamers. If you rented movies in the 1990’s, you probably picked up a movie that he touched from far away in the Great White North.

Marvin and Debbie bought the house next to the Amityville house because, well, we wouldn’t have a movie if they didn’t. It’s possessed because there’s a tunnel that connects the houses. And also, yes, if it wasn’t possessed I probably wouldn’t be watching this movie.

They bring up some of their friends to help get it back in shape, like Frank (Kim Coates, Carlo from Battlefield Earth), Abigail (Cassandra Gava, the witch who tries to seduce Arnold in Conan the Barbarian) and Bill.

Frank ends up possessed and kills just about everyone but the ladies. He also wipes out Mrs. Moriarty, the former housekeeper. And there’s also a story of a priest who died here when the house was once a rectory. This doesn’t reach the absurd heights of some of the other Amityville films, but it does have a dude getting shot with a nailgun, so there’s that.

Should you get it? Well, you know me and my curse when it comes to Amityville. Of course you should get it! It’s now available from Vinegar Syndrome.

Hungarian born director Tibor Takacs was the recording engineer behind Toronto punk bands The Viletones and the Cardboard Brains before he became a director. He’s probably best known for the 1987 movie The Gate, of course, which leads us to today’s film. He also made the pilot movie for the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which makes some sense somehow.

This was written — as was the original — by Michael Nankin. His first film was Midnight Madness, but he’s since moved on to directing, working on TV shows like American Gothic, Life Goes On, CSI, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Defiance, Van Helsing and more.

Five years after the events of the first movie, Terrence has had to say goodbye to Glen, who moved away. His own family has gotten much worse, as his father’s drinking has gotten out of control after the death of his mother. That means that the lure of the gate — and its power — is now stronger than ever.

Terrence breaks into Glen’s old house and begins the ritual all over again with the hopes of getting his father’s life together. Meanwhile, three teens — John (James Villemaire, who was in another movie I watched this week, Zombi 5: Killing Birds), Moe and Liz (Pamela Adlon, who in addition to being in Grease 2 was the voice of Bobby Hill on King of the Hill) — break in.

Liz is super down with demonology, so she convinces the others to help Terrance with his ritual. One of the minions from the last film comes through the Gate and John freaks out and shoots it. Luckily — or unluckily — it survives and Terrance keeps it as a pet.

The next day, Terrance’s wish comes true as his father gets a job flying for a major carrier. However, all of the wishes literally turn into, well, excrement. The food that John and Moe devour and the car that Liz wishes for turn into giant cow pies while the plane Terrance’s dad is flying crashes, critically injuring him.

Soon, the two boys are demons after the minion gets loose and turns them. They want to sacrifice Liz to Satan, as you do, but Terrence stops them with his mother’s jewelry box, which he’s transformed into a vessel of light.

Despite dying, Terrance is able to escape his coffin, followed by the human forms of John and Moe. Our hero gets the girl and even his hamster returns from the dead.

The Gate II is in no way as good as the original, but it’s still plenty of fun. It also boasts some great non-CGI effects from Randall William Cook, who started at Disney and also worked with  Takacs on the original film and I, Madman (he’s actually the title character, in addition to doing the effects). Since then, he’s been the Animation Director for all of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth films, as well as working on Fright Night and numerous Full Moon films.

You can get this from Shout! Factory or watch it on Amazon Prime.

And be sure to join us as we examine Tibor’s career and films with our “Drive-In Friday” featurette.

As you may know, I love lost films or movies that no one pays attention to any longer. Can you believe that I found one from 1990 with Jeff Goldblum in it? How does that happen?

Alan Bates (The Shout, The Wicked Lady) plays Felix Detweiler, a detective that starts the film by arresting the titular Mister Frost (Goldblum), who happily announces that he has all manner of bodies buried on his property.

Frost is arrested and goes to an insane asylum, where he doesn’t speak for two years. His identity can’t be figured out and Detweiler becomes obsessed by the case and the twenty four bodies they found at Frost’s home.

Frost finally speaks when he meets Dr. Sarah Day (Kathy Baker, The Right Stuff), telling her that he refuses to talk to anyone but her. Also, he’s Satan. Also also, he plans on getting her to murder him someday.

Detweiler, for one, is convinced that Frost really could be the devil. He might be right — Frost can do crazy things, like heal Day’s brother so that he can walk for the first time in years. Also, her patients and fellow doctors are being changed by Frost and not for the better.

To keep anyone else from Frost’s powers, Day agrees to kill him. He thanks her for believing in him, telling her that he’s now more powerful than anything or anyone in the world. Day shoots him mid-speech, yet finishes his last sentence in Frost’s voice. Now, she too refuses to speak.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s a fun one. And it’s not one you’re going to find easy — well, YouTube is your friend here — but one that you won’t be upset that you sat through. Goldblum as the devil? Yeah, I can see it.

Roslyn Frost shared a great list of holiday movies that no one else considers on her Twitter, which inspired this watch. You should totally check out her YouTube channel, which is awesome.

By the way, her list was…

1. Christmas Evil
2. Night of the Comet
3. The Oracle 
4. Calvaire
5. Blood Beat
6. Inside
7. I Come in Peace

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.

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 Vudu.

Greydon Clark. We have him to thank for Satan’s Cheerleaders, Without Warning, Wacko and many more.

Here he brings together Cybil Shepherd and Jan-Michael Vincent as a couple that were taken by aliens as children. Yes, the romance is anything but torrid, but sometimes, we work with what we’ve got.

While stopping at a gas station late one night, a young girl on vacation and a local boy are taken by a UFO.

Twenty-five years later, that boy is Wayne (Vincent), the sheriff of that town. There have been several cattle mutilations in town, which brings Jennifer (Shepherd), a scientist in to help. Of course, she’s the girl from the beginning.

It turns out that the cows are getting all messed up because the aliens also visited a prospector (Vincent Schiavelli!) who has been using an energy knife to slice up the bovines and send them into space using a teleporter the extraterrestrials left behind.

Somehow, this movie was able to acquire the star power of Martin Landau, Raymond Burr and Neville Brand. In her book Cybill Disobedience: How I Survived Beauty Pageants, Elvis, Sex, Bruce Willis, Lies, Marriage, Motherhood, Hollywood, and the Irrepressible Urge to Say What I Think, Shepherd said that the cast was “a rather sad group of actors, all trying to resurrect our diminished careers. Raymond Burr read his lines off a TelePrompter.”

But wait — there’s more! Darby Hinton, yes, the star of Malibu Express, also makes an appearance, as does Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 1977 Susan Kiger, who also appeared in Andy Sidaris’ Seven.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Two Evil Eyes is a very personal movie to me. It was filmed when I was 18, in my hometown of Pittsburgh, by two of the greatest minds to ever work in horror, George Romero and Dario Argento, who also brought along Luigi Cozzi and Tom Savini to aid and abet. It’s an anthology film inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, with both directors using their own unique vision to make one disjointed but interesting film. If you were around town at the time of its filming, Savini was often bringing the props to conventions, so seeing the incredibly gory “Pit and the Pendulum” girl up close was a shocking event.

The Facts In the Case of M. Valdemar is directed by Romero and is all about life beyond death. Jessica Valdemar (Adrienne Barbeau) travels to dahntahn Pittsburgh to meet with her husband’s lawyer (E.G. Marshall) about her husband Ernest’s (Pittsburgh acting legend Bingo O’Malley) will. Pike believes that Jessica is exerting undue influence on him,  but the old man explains over the phone that his wife is entitled to his money.

Of course, she’s been having an affair with the man taking care of him, Dr. Robert Hoffman (Ramy Zada) and they’ve both been hypnotizing him to ensure that they get his $3 million when he dies. However, while he’s still hypnotized, the old man dies and the couple hide him in a freezer.

Soon, the body is making noises and even able to speak, explaining that he is trapped in a void with other souls that want to bring others into their dark world. Jessica panics and shoots the corpse, but that’s not the end. Soon, she’s dead and Robert is being haunted by the others, who show up as strange human shapes only visible through the flashes of lightning.

When the police, led by Detective Grogan (Tom Atkins), break in to his apartment, it’s scattered with bloody cash and Robert has become a zombie who is awake forever.

Look for Romero’s second wife Christine Forrest in this, too.

The second story, directed by Argento, is The Black Cat, which is all about Rod Usher (Harvey Keitel) who is a crime scene photographer who often works with Detective LeGrand (John Amos). It also seems like the city of my birth was host to some insane giallo-style murders in 1990!

Rod’s home life isn’t fun. Sure, he has an attractive, if strange, violin-teaching girl named Annabel (Madeleine Potter), but they aren’t compatible and he’s given to abusing the black cat that she’s adopted, all the way to strangling it while he takes photos for his new book.

Annabel searches for her missing cat as Rod goes insane, even dreaming of a pagan festival where he’s murdered in retaliation for killing the cat.

Soon, a bartender (Sally Kirkland) gives him another cat that looks exactly like the cat he’s killed, so when he tries to repeat the crime, Annabel stops him and gets murdered instead. I love that Kim Hunter and Martin Balsam play the elderly couple who tries to investigate — it’s as if Argento is indulging in complete play instead of work here, excited to work with an American crew who worships him (this is apparent in the behind the scenes footage) and working with stars from his favorite movies of the past.

Of course, Annabel’s students — Julie Benz is one of them in her first film role — suspect Rod of her murder and the black cat keeps coming back to get killed again and again. It all ends in completely disgusting fashion, as the wall Annabel was buried behind is taken down to reveal that she’s been consumed by cats and then all hell breaks loose.

Argento originally wanted the film to be a collaboration between Romero, John Carpenter, Wes Craven and himself. Carpenter and Craven pulled out, but there were also plans to make this into a cable series, with Michele Soavi making The Masque of the Red Death and Richard Stanley directing The Cask of Amontillado. It’s a tragedy that none of this ever happened.

You can watch this for free on Tubi and Vudu.

For the best possible viewing experience, get the Blue Underground blu ray release of this film. It’s packed with extras, like a soundtrack CD and an entire disc of behind the scenes features, including interviews with the directors, a visit to Tom Savini’s home and new interviews with Barbeau, Ramy Zada, Madeleine Potter, composer Pino Donaggio, writer Franco Ferrini, assistant director Luigi Cozzi and more.

Blue Underground has had an amazing year of releases and this is a worthy addition.

The second disc astounded me, seeing Argento and Cozzi walking the streets that I have walked. The connection to my heroes and the place that I love moved me.

Two Evil Eyes didn’t get the release it deserved when it came out. You should rectify that by watching it as soon as possible.