EDITOR’S NOTE: The Marilyn Diaries was on USA Up All Night on October 23, 1993 and July 8, 1994.

Ernest G. Sauer — using the name Eric Drake here — also made Breakfast In Bed, another Marilyn Chambers-starring softcore film that shares the same writing team as this movie, Don Shiffrin and Gary P. Conner. Sauer, Shiffrin and Chambers also teamed for Bedtime Stories, New York Nights, Bedtime Fantasies, Bikini Bistro, Fantasies Vol. 1 (Debbie Rochon is in that), Desire (Amy Lynn Baxter is also in that), Little Shop of Erotica (which has witchcraft and Veronica Hart), Naked Fairy Tales (again with Hart and 80s adult actress Raven) and Sex and the Girl Next Door. Sauer and Shiffrin also made Broadcast Bombshells (with Baxter and Rochon), Affairs of the Heart (which has New York Blue‘s Robin Byrd in it), Web of Desire (an early cybersex-themed softcore movie with Baxter), while Sauer on his own made Marilyn Chambers’ All Nude Peep Show, Incredible Edible Fantasies (Chambers and Juli Ashton from Night Calls is in that), Lusty Busty Fantasies (Chambers and Rochon), All My Best, and the Chambers-less The Naked Detective and Beauty School (which has Sylvia Kristel and Hart).

As you can see, the 80s and 90s were a big era for Marilyn Chambers to do movies that could play on Cinemax, Showtime and USA Up All Night. These movies often have similar casts and crew, like John Altamura, who was also the Toxic Avenger in the second and third movies. He’s also in Party Girls, the Chambers movie that gets reused in every one of her movies or so it seems.

In this movie, ex-lovers Jane (Tara Buckman) and Jim (Michael Rose) have reunited to look for the author (Chambers) of an erotic diary. This would be the part where the fog comes in and the sax solo begins.

Seriously, not a single person has written about this movie on IMDB or Letterboxd, it’s not available on any DVD or blu ray that I can find, it’s not streaming and it took a long time to even find a video to watch. Why would I spend so much time on it? Because, well, Tara Buckman was also in Night Killer and a host of Italian movies, so I’m fascinated by her. She was in a ton of TV shows to start her career (Buck Rogers, Quincy, Hart to Hart), the TV movie Death Car On the Freeway and then her big break in The Cannonball Run where she played Jill Rivers and drove the Lamborghini Countach with Marcie Thatcher (Adrienne Barbeau). She’s also in Silent Night, Deadly Night, Never Too Young to Die, Xtro II: The Second Encounter and two Joe D’Amato movies, Blue Angel Cafe and High Finance Woman. She was one of the last contract players Universal had, appearing in their TV series in the 70s and also having a regular role in the second season of Lobo. She finished up her acting career after making the Nico Mastorakis-directed Terminal Exposure, which has a cast that I love: John Vernon, Joe Estevez, and Hope Marie Carlton (Taryn from the Sidaris movies).

The cinematographer for this movie had quite the career. Larry Revene had more than a hundred camera operator and cinematographer credits, including Barbara Broadcast, Hot T-Shirts, The Devil In Miss Jones Part II, Hollywood Hot Tubs, Doom Asylum, Deep Throat II, Young Nurses In Love, Slammer Girls, New York’s Finest, Bedroom Eyes II, the Joe D’Amato movie The Crawlers and Charlton Heston Presents the Bible. He also directed Wanda Whips Wall Street.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bikini Carwash Company was on USA Up All Night on January 16, June 25 and December 18, 1993; May 20, 1994; June 20, 1997 and March 7, 1998, both times with the sequel. 

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m Dangerous Tonight was on USA Up All Night on June 20, 1992;  July 3, 1993 and June 24, 1994.

Based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich, this Tobe Hooper-directed movie first aired on USA on August 8, 1990. Bruce Lansbury and Philip John Taylor wrote the script.

Tiverton College professor Dr. Jonas Wilson is sent a sacrificial altar that has a carcass inside it that’s wearing a red cloak. Wilson decides to wear the cloak, which possesses him. He murders a security guard, kills his wife and then commits suicide.

Another teacher, Professor Gordon Buchanan (Anthony Perkins), uses Wilson in his lecture on animalism. One of his students, Amy (Madchen Amick) goes from his class to Wilson’s estate sale, where she buys the red cloak and decides to make it into a dress, but not before Eddie (Corey Parker)  — one of the students in a play — tries it on and nearly kills someone.

Amy’s life isn’t too great. Her parents are dead, she lives with her Aunt Martha (Mary Frann), cousin Gloria (Daisy Hall) and invalid grandmother (Natalie Schaefer, Lovey Howell!) who she is made to take care of. This usually keeps her from anything but class, yet she sneaks out to see Eddie at the dance and the red dress she’s made from the cloak compels her into nearly stealing away Gloria’s boyfriend Mason (Jason Brooks).

When she gets home, her grandmother somehow is able to tear the dress off her and tries to save her from it. She falls down the stairs and dies. Gloria, for some reason, now wants the dress. She thinks that Mason is going to propose to her but after they have sex, he tells her that he just got drafted to play in the NFL. She puts on the dress, kills him, rams into Amy and Eddie’s car while they make out and then drives off a cliff, dying in a gigantic fireball.

Wanda the coroner (Dee Wallace) finds the dress on Gloria’s body and it possesses her into killing people. Amy tries to find her, but Wanda finds her first — but not before killing her aunt — and forces her into the dress. Things get, well, as crazy as a made for cable movie can get. Actually, they get real crazy, because this was directed by Tobe Hooper.

Can a movie about a possessed dress be awesome? Yes. This one does it right. It’s a ridiculous idea but some of the most fun movies are, too. I also love when R. Lee Ermey shows up in a movie and he’s the cop on the trail of the dress.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sorority Girls and the Creature from Hell was on USA Up All Night on May 23 and December 18, 1992; January 21, 1994 and February 17, 1996.

Gerome Desenso (Glen Vincent) has escaped from the cops thanks to the accidental distraction of Denise (Stacey Lynn) and her spandex-tight bicycling outfit. She’s stuck all weekend with a geek named Sara (Lynette McBrearty, who co-wrote this movie with her husband, director John McBearty, who played a cadet in Taps and only made one more movie, the unreleased Roadside). The other girls are on their way to a camp owned by Kristina’s (Gloria Hylton) Uncle Ray (Doug Koth), who is in the middle of being possessed by a Native American spirit.

What will Belinda (Dori Courtney, Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal) and Mary Anne (Deborah Dutch, who is in Tender Loving Care and Jokes My Folks Never Told Me; her IMDB lists her birthday as May 17, 1967, which would make her nine-years-old when she made her debut as the love interest in Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave) do when the killer is in the woods and so is a dude in an obvious mask that wants blood?

Also: Uncle Leo from Seinfeld.

Also also: A head rolls and there’s a homophobic rant by someone who is supposed to be the person we’re rooting for.

Also also also: This is Vicki Darnell’s last movie. She’s in Frankenhooker, Brain Damage, Senior Week and Alien Space Avenger. She shows up in the “for foreign investors” role as a stripper who is in this just to get naked.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vice Academy 2 aired on USA Up All Night on July 13 and December 27, 1991; August 14 and 15, 1992; May 22 and December 31, 1993; November 11, 1994; June 10, 1995 and October 19, 1996.

In this sequel, Honey Wells (Ginger Lynn) and Didi (Linnea Quigley) are back to battle Spanish Fly, who is about to dose the city with, well, Spanish Fly.

Miss Thelma Louise Devonshire is back as well. She’s played by Jayne Hamil, who was in all of these movies but the third one. The actress would go on to write for The Nanny and Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures, which seems quite far from Vice Academy.

Teagan — yes, the very same Teagan who was Alienator — is in this as BimboCop, who Honey dislikes so much that she blows up the cyborg cop and goes to jail at the end of the movie, just in time for Didi to graduate and leave Vice Academy behind.

Rick Sloane directed this one again. If you haven’t seen these, imagine a 1980s VCA film with all the lead up to the sex and none of the actual sex. It’s the best we could do before the internet, when all we had was USA Up All Night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Girl That I Want aired on USA Up All Night on January 4 and 5 and  September 6, 1991; April 11, 1992; April 2 and November 6, 1993.

Director David DeCoteau is made for USA Up All Night. In this movie, he’s showing us all about Amy (Elizabeth Kaitan, Vice Academy 5, Silent Madness), a high school girl who feels like she isn’t as pretty as the other girls. Only in an 80s teen sex comedy could Elizabeth Kaitan be the not attractive girl. She gets Teri (Linnea Quigley) and Lisa (Karen Russell, Vice Academy) to make her over and yes, when you have to compare the relative attractiveness of these women, you regress to being a teenage boy and are overcome by just how brain wrecking each is, but let’s be honest, Linnea Quigley forever.

At the same time, her boyfriend Scott (Steven Craig Daugherty) is failing school so he needs to study hard for a test, so hard that his father (Burt Ward) thinks that his son is gay because he spends so much time with his friend Hubie (Marcus Vaughter). That’s kind of amazing that this movie has so many homophobic moments seeing that DeCoteau was directing it. Then again, it’s all in fun, I guess.

Maybe not. The name he used on this movie was Ellen Cabot, which he told Draculina was the name of a girlfriend he had a bad breakup with in high school. Whenever he made a bad movie, he used her name. However, he has changed this story to say that it was a pseudonym to cover up his homosexuality.

The cast is fun with Lyle Waggoner as the coach, Kitten Natividad as a Spanish teacher and Deanna Lund as Amy’s mom. Yes, the mom from Elves. I will never not mention that movie.

For some reason, this movie has a lot of heart. I wish there were more movies where the stars of Murder Weapon did makeovers for shy high school girls who really love their boyfriends. It seems like it should be a total teen sex comedy but it ends up being so sweet.

You can download this episode from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Getting Lucky aired on USA Up All Night on May 24 and 25 and December 6, 1991; July 11, 1992; April 2 and July 31, 1993; August 19, 1994 and February 26, 1995.

Bill Higgins (Steven Cooke) is saving up for medical school by acting as the basketball team’s towel boy. He’s also has a crush on Krissi (Lezlie Z. McCraw), who he ends up pouring spoiled milk all over. So he quits that job and goes back to recycling for a living and finds Lepkey (Garry Kluger) the leprechaun, who gives Bill the three wishes you expect.

Those wishes include a date with Krissi that has her leave him for her boyfriend, a new car wish gets Bill a Pinto and then, as Tony tries to sexually assault Krissi — this movie got strange quick — Bill asks to be transformed in a way that he can protect her. So he becomes a cat. Later, he gets shrunken down into her underwear and somehow still gets to be her boyfriend and eventual husband, but first, he has to fight that rapist boyfriend again.

Michael Paul Girard directed and wrote this, but wanted to call it Wish Me Luck. Getting Lucky was remade, sort of, under that title in 1995 by Phillip J. Jones. Girard also directed Witchcraft 7: Judgement Hour, Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh and the recent Over-sexed Rugsuckers from Mars.

If you’ve seen Fraternity Demon, the entire opening of that movie is cut from scenes from this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cyber-C.H.I.C. aired on USA Up All Night on January 6 and June 24, 1995.

Directed and written by Ed Hansen (whose career includes Takin’ It Off, Party Favors, Party Plane, The Bikini Car Wash Company, Hell’s Belles, The Bikini Car Wash Company and editing episodes of The Bullwinkle Show and 9 1/2 Weeks) and Jeffrey Mandel (Super Force and way to bury the lead, the writer and director of Elves), Cyber-C.H.I.C. (or Robo-C.H.I.C. which is the better name and even better, itw as called Thunder-Tronic in Germany) is about Dr. Sigmoid Von Colon (Kip King) creating Robo-C.H.I.C. (Kathy Shower, Playboy‘s Playmate of the Month for May 1985 and Playmate of the Year for 1986., who appeared in a lot of stuff, including The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck and Frankenstein General Hospital; later in the movie Jennifer Daly takes on the role) to fight the forces of bad.

In this movie, that bad would be Harry Truman Hodgkins (Burt Ward), a nuclear bomber planting death traps all over town. This movie is so bad that Shower, despite an Executive Producer credit, left before it was done. The one good thing is the joke that the biker gang is called Satan’s Onions because of a printing problem.

In case you wondered, C.H.I.C. stands for Computerized Humanoid Intelligent Clone.

Also: Kip King was Chris Kattan’s dad.

The idea of this is right. It was better done in Steel and Lace, so I hear, as well as Programmed to Kill, The Demolitionist, Lady Battle Cop, Robotrix and my beloved Vice Academy 2 and BimboCop.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Caged Fury aired on USA Up All Night on December 18, 1992; February 13 and November 26, 1993 and August 13, 1994. This movie is by request of Mike Justice, who said, “Please tell me you’re gonna cover that one. I caught that one night, and for years I’d describe it to people (girls escape from prison and find out they were being held under Hollywood blvd) and nobody believed me. I literally thought I’d made it up.”

At one point in this movie, the female inmates begin to fight and Crazy Daisy (Tiffany Million, once a GLOW girl and later an adult star) says, “I seen this in Chained Heat!”

Yes, you sure did.

While Cirio H. Santiago also made a movie called Caged Fury just six years earlier, this one — directed and written by Bill Milling (who also wrote Silent Madness and Savage Dawn; he also directed adult films under the name Philip Drexler Jr. (A Scent of Heather), G.W. Hunter (Heart Throbs), Craig Ashwood (All American Girls), William J. Haddington Jr. (When A Woman Calls), Chiang (The Vixens of Kung Fu (A Tale of Yin Yang), Jim Hunter (Up Up and Away), Luis F. Antonero (Temptations) and Bill or Dexter Eagle (Virgin Snow).

Wikipedia claims that Fernando Fonseca (The Unholy) and one of my obsessions, Philip Yordan, wrote this, but I see no other evidence anywhere. Fonseca only wrote one other film, South Beach Dreams, and Yordan and Cannon never worked together, which is a fact that still makes me sad.

Kat Collins (Roxanna Michaels) is living out the first stanza of Poison’s “Fallen Angel:”

“She stepped off the bus out into the city streets

Just a small town girl with her whole life

Packed in a suitcase by her feet

But somehow the lights didn’t shine as bright as they did

On her mama’s TV screen

And the work seemed harder

And the days seemed longer

Than she ever thought they’d be”

After kissing her daddy (Michael Parks) goodbye and leaving Utah for Hollywood, she meets Rhonda Wallace (April Dawn Dollarhide) who gets her work with a photographer named Buck (Blake Lewis). After posing, the girls head off for the Sunset Strip and get into it with some bikers, which seeing as how this is a 1990 direct-to-video movie gets rapey and then they get saved by good guy bike enthusiast Victor (Erik Estrada) and American Combat Karate school leader Dirk (Richard Barathy).

Buck then introduces the ladies to a porn director, but that ends up setting them up as prostitutes and sent off to Honeywell Prison, which is where this movie really gets going. You know exactly all of the women in prison moments you’re going to receive and the guards are as bad as you’d think they’d be. They’re led by Spyder (Gregory Scott Cummins, former San Diego Chargers punter) and include Pizzaface (Ron Jeremy), Paul Smith remembering everything he once did years ago in a similar role in Midnight Express and Mindi Miller (Sugar from Penitentiary III) as Warden Sybil Thorn, an S&M catsuit wearing evildoer named for two WIP legends: Sybil Danning from Caged Heat and Dyanne Thorne, who forever will be Ilsa.

So while Roxanne is getting indoctrinated into white slavery, her sister Tracy (Elena Sahagun) figures that the best plan is to do the exact same things her sister did and get put in the same prison. She’s also helped by giallo-level policework from Detective Randall Stoner (James Hong). Of course, Estrada and Barathy have to rescue her, but Estrada catches a bullet, so the white kung fu expert has to fight his way out of this lingerie hell, which magically releases them right in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater.

This movie is also replete with adult stars as prisoners, including Kascha using her more mainstream name Alison LePriol, Janine Lindemulder — who knows a little something about the big house after serving a six-month federal prison sentence for tax evasion — as Lulu (you may recognize her, if you didn’t watch adult movies, as being on the cover of Blink 182’s Enema of the State album cover or for her relationship with Jesse James) and Julia Parton (yes, a relative of Dolly and once the publisher of High Society).

As for the bad guys putting this all together, there’s Jack Carter as the big bad Mr. Castaglia, as well as Beano, who you may remember from Deathrow Gameshow, as Tony “Two A Day” Tarentino. This movie feels like it knows way too much about the dark side of Los Angeles, what with Jeremy in the cast and Big G being played by Bill Gazzarri.

So Gazzari’s…

The three hundred feet or so on Sunset Boulevard that started at Gazzarri’s and ended at the Rainbow and the Roxy Theatre was where rock and roll lived in the 90s (although the place was hot from the 60s on, with The Doors being a house band and the Miss Gazzarri’s Dancers counting Catherine Bach and Barbi Benton as alumni). When Gazzarri died in 1991 and the club closed down in 1993, it was damaged in an earthquake and went through many name changes before becoming the nightclub 1 Oak. If you want to see the club, I recommend The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Nearly every major metal band played Gazzarri’s, including longtime house band Van Halen, Ratt, Cinderella, Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Warrant and Faster Pussycat, as well as bands you may not know if you didn’t read Hit Parader and Rip! like Shark Island, Hurricane and, if you saw the aforementioned Decline, Odin.

This movie is pure sleaze. I mean, it’s a women in prison movie. Would you want it any other way? Why are you watching it if you’re just going to judge me? You’ve read this far. You’re complicit.

You can watch this on Tubi.