This Blu-ray release from the MVD Rewind Collection marks the first high-definition appearance of both features, presented in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Because both films were originally shot and edited on standard definition videotape, they’ve been carefully remastered using advanced AI upscaling from 480p to 1080p resolution. Packaged with a collectible slipcover, this release is the definitive way to revisit these irreverent, sun-soaked cult comedies that turned a bucket of water and a bikini into box office gold.

The Bikini Carwash Company (1990): George “Buck” Flower was working on a TV show called Nutz, Yutz and Klutz and it was set in a car wash. He wondered what a movie would be like with attractive women working in a car wash and here we are.

Directed and co-written by Ed Hansen (Takin’ It Off, Takin’ It Off Out West), this starts with Jack McCowan (Joe Dusic) looking for the local Sunshine Car Wash, which he is supposed to manage for his Uncle Elmer (Michael Wright). He meets Melissa Reese (Kristi Ducati, Meatballs 4, Sorceress), makes a date and a business plan. She has plenty of friends who wear swimsuits. Perhaps they can wash cars.

For some reason, things hit a stumbling block when Assistant District Attorney Donovan Drake (Matthew Cory Dunn) and the police show up to try and stop the nearly-naked car spraying. But that’s a minor bump as most of this movie is just breasts on windshields. Seriously, it’s devotion to women buffing and sudsing cars is single-brained.

I mean, there are also butts.

So yes, the car wash is open and Amy (Rikki Brando, Buford’s Beach Bunnies), Sunny (Sara Suzanne Brown, who shows up in the sequel as well as Gregory Dark’s Secret Games 2: The Escort), Tammy Joe (Brook Lynn Page in her only role), Stanley (Eric Ryan), Big Bruce (Scott James) for the ladies and Rita (Neriah Davis, Playboy Playmate of the Month March 1994).

Also: Jim Wynorski shows up.

The Bikini Carwash Company II (1993): What questions remained unanswered by the first movie? So many cars need to be washed, so I guess there’s some reason for this movie, which at least has a different director in Gary Dean Orona, who started a career of sexy movies with this effort.

At least this has a reason to be: the carwash gets so big that a gigantic company buys it and the girls need to raise $4 million in a week to get the car wash back. The carwash women — nearly all of them are back, such as Melissa Reese (Kristi Ducati), Amy (Rikki Brando), Sunny (Sara Suzanne Brown) and Rita (Neriah Davis) are here — decide to sell lingerie on TV to get the cash they need.

I applaud that Melissa has become the CEO and Amy the lawyer. They realize their bodies have power but so do their minds. But sometimes, I wonder why so many of my friends are successes. They can discuss strategy and money and investing. I can at length with no research discuss sex comedies.

I won’t change.

You can get this from MVD.

Junko (Sho Aikawa), a young yakuza in the service of Yoshikawa (Toru Minegishi), just wants to look cool. Then he meets Yumeko (Chikako Aoyama), a runaway sex machine slash narcoleptic who loves guns and stealing cars. They meet when she steals Yoshikawa’s car and soon moves in with him.

Yet duty soon calls. When a member of his crime family is killed by a high-ranking member of the Kazama Family, he’s called on to get revenge. Can he handle it? Well, he always dreamed of being a gangster. Actually being one is an entirely different thing.

This was such a success that Neo Chinpira 2: Zoom Goes the Bullet came out a year later. Director Banmei Takahashi also made Door, and writer Takuya Nishioka wrote Mermaid Legend. They bring to you a world where young people who grew up idolizing cool-looking gangsters in Yakuza films suddenly discover that they have to fill unfillable shoes and do impossible things. A winner.

Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet is just one of the movies in the Arrow Video V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal set. The set includes a newly filmed introduction by Japanese film critic Masak Tanioka, an interview with writer-director Banmei Takahashi and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.

Midnight Cabaret (1990): Directed and co-written by Pece Dingo, this movie has the kind of cast that I look for, which includes former member of Detective and MacGyver enemy Michael Des Barres and Thom Mathews (Tommy Jarvis!).

This is a musical, strange theatrical play, a Satanic movie, an erotic thriller and a giallo-adjacent — you know, the Italian movies where you have no idea what else to call them, so you say that they’re giallo — film all thrown into a shaker with ice, then covered with bongwater and grain alcohol.

It’s Euro-trash but made at home; like how tariffs will someday soon cause the finest in Euroscum movies to cost too much, except we can never make them at home this good. That said, this tries and often looks like an old music video while it’s throwing vampires with straight razors, a cult that wants to impregnate an actress with the Antichrist and moments that feel sexually ambiguous. It’s something. Whether that something is good is up to you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Midnight Cabaret (2012): As I was looking for the former movie, I discovered this on YouTube and was so far into it before I realized it was a different movie that I just went with things.

Directed by Donna R. Clark, who wrote it with Peter C. Foster, this is the story of Adam (Brad Hilton), a young man struggling to find acceptance and definitely not getting help in his hometown, where he remembers being bullied at home and at school, his mother killing herself and his brother Todd (Jason Mac) going to prison. Now, he becomes inspired by a drag queen named Eve (Elexius Kelly) and becomes a performer at the Midnight Cabaret, finding a world of drugs, crime and who he is inside.

There’s something in this, a movie that feels trapped in digital video but wanting to break free. I don’t know who it’s for, as there are so many gay slurs that it may turn off those it needs to reach most. But otherwise, it wasn’t an unwelcome watch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

Saturday, April 26 has Frankenhooker, Doom Asylum, Brain Damage and Basket Case 2.

Eight years after Basket Case, Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and his brother Belial are still alive, despite falling out of a window. They’re kidnapped by Granny Ruth (Annie Ross) and are nursed back to health by her and her granddaughter, Susan (Heather Rattray).

Granny Ruth’s home is filled with what others would call freaks, like Eve, a female version of Belial, with whom he soon falls in love. But Duane still hates his brother and doesn’t want to be surrounded by these people and their deformities. The brothers are separated, but then reporters Marcie (Kathryn Meisle) and Artie (Matt Mitler) find them, wanting to bring them to justice. Belial scars Marcie for life, making her a freak just like him.

On the night Eve and Belial finally make love, Duane tries to run away with Susan, only to learn that she has been pregnant for six years with a creature. He shoves her out the window and sews Belial back onto his body as the film ends. Well, there’s more, but you need to see Basket Case 3: The Progeny.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

Saturday, April 26 has Frankenhooker, Doom Asylum, Brain Damage and Basket Case 2.

Has there ever been a better video box?

Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a bioelectrical scientist who works at a power plant. His life in New Jersey was going so well until his fiancee Elizabeth’s (Patty Mullen) father (J.J. Clark) gives him a lawnmower as a wedding present. It goes wild — yes, really — and mows down Elizabeth.

Anyone else would move on or kill themselves. Not Jeffrey. He gets into self-trepanation, drilling holes into his own skull to take the edge off, as well as eating dinner surrounded by all of Elizabeth’s body parts that he could find. But hey, he knows circuits. So maybe he should leave New Jersey and go to New York City and kill sex workers to build his wife the perfect body, because that’s worked out so well in so many movies like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

Jeffrey rents all of Zorro’s (Joseph Gonzalez) girls for one night but gets second thoughts about giving them the super crack he’s invented. They find it, they smoke it, they blow up real good. And now Jeffrey has to assemble a puzzle of bloody body parts to create the perfect new body for his fiancee. She’s impressed but angry at where the parts came from and that she’s slept with — and blown to pieces — several clients before she got her memory back.

This ends with a monster made of sex worker parts dragging an evil pimp to a dungeon and Jeffrey’s head on another woman so that he and his bride can be in love forever. That’s creative.

Another trip into the hellish New York City of Frank Henenlotter, this was a movie that screamed at you in the horror department of your mom and pop video rental place. Literally. The box could talk. The movie that was inside more than lives up to the marketing.

This has an awesome cast. Beverly Bonner shows up as Casey, the same character she played in Brain Damage, Basket Case and Basket Case 2. Elizabeth’s mother is Louise Lasser, the star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Horror host Zacherly is the weatherman. The girls of Zorro are played by Kimberly Taylor (Bedroom Eyes II), Charlotte J. Helmkamp (Playboy December 1982 Playmate of the Month), Jennifer Delora, Lia Chang, Susan Napoli (Penthouse Pet of the Month February 1986, AKA Stephanie Ryan in mainstream movies and Carrie McKayan in adult films), adult legend Heather Hunter, Gittan Goding, Vicki Darnell, Sandy Colosimo, Kathleen Gati and Sonya Hensley.

As for Spike the bartender, that’s the awesome Shirley Stoler from The Honeymoon Killers.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Jag Mundhra and written by Tom Citrano and Andrew Stevens, Night Eyes was inspired by Stevens meeting a woman whose house was shadowed by her soon-to-be ex, a rock star. Rod Stewart is the rumored cucked man, so the woman could be Alana Hamilton Stewart, Kelly Emberg or Britt Ekland; way to go, Andrew Stevens. As Stevens walked around the house, he ran into a security guard who handed him his card, which read “Night Eyes Security.” This inspired the actor to make this groundbreaking — well, money-making, at least — effort.

Will Griffith (Stevens) has been hired by British musician Brian Walker (Warwick Sims), who is in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Nikki (Tanya Roberts). According to her angry ex, he’s to use his cameras to record the house and catch her in the act with the lovers she must have. The more time Will spends around her — and watching her — he starts to fall for her and become protective. You know the film noir story, but this is 1990, and in the world of VHS and cable erotic thrillers, this was one of the first to become big business.

There is only one other critic review on IMDB, and of course, it’s from The Schlock Pit. They understand its value, at least to the canon of the genre, saying, “Plodding and clumsy, Night Eyes is more interesting for its historical value than it is to actually experience. Essentially ground zero for the straight-to-video erotic thriller…”

Like all the best noir, this proves that women are wise, men are stupid and that any red-blooded male can be enticed by Tanya Roberts and really, who can say anything bad about that? People murder for all kinds of reasons. At least this one seems pleasurable.

Yes, this is a clunker, but the three sequels? That’s the kind of erotic thriller I’m here for.

I did things backward, like I usually do, watching Body Chemistry III and Body Chemistry II before the original film.

Kristine Peterson was a member of the staff at Zoetrope Studios during the filming of Apocalypse Now before making the kind of movies that I love, like Deadly Dreams and Critters 3, as well as being an assistant director on Exterminator 2, Chopping Mall, The Supernaturals and Tremors. The script comes from Jackson Barr, who is really Jack Canson. He used that name to write the series’ second and third movies, Seedpeople, Subspecies and Trancers II. Peterson worked with Thom Babbes to push the script further, as this was a direct-to-video cash-in on Fatal Attraction. They went for the carnal content to be darker and dirtier than what played on big screens.

Tom Redding (Marc Singer) is a human sexuality researcher living a blessed life. He’s rich from his work; he has a great wife named Marlee (Mary Crosby), and might be the next director of the clinic he works for.

Then, he meets Dr. Claire Archer (Lisa Pescia).

Her theory is that sex is all about power, and she can prove that by breaking down all of Tom’s defenses and seducing him, dominating him, unlike every other woman he’s ever been with. As you’d expect, Tom wants this affair to end and for him to be able to go back to his safe family life. Dr. Claire is willing to send porn to his house as a first salvo before things eventually reach her using propane tanks to nuke his home.

For as much as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct — a movie similar to this one, coming out two years after — are seen as the movies from which the well of erotic thrillers springs from, Body Chemistry establishes the template from which many films would copy. Saxophone and fog-filled love scenes, evil women who introduce fallen men to a world of dirty love, and good women who want their man back in their safe vanilla beds. What they miss is the kink that this has, including a shower scene that makes it appear that Dr. Claire is taking Tom from behind, supplanting his role as the male dominant partner. That’s pretty wild for today, much less nearly thirty-five years ago.