Incredibly loosely based on the novel Headlong by Emlyn Williams, King Ralph supposes what would happen if the entire royal family of England was electrocuted and an heir needed to be found, which ends up being Ralph Hampton Gainsworth Jones (John Goodman), a Vegas lounge singer who must be groomed by Sir Cedric Charles Willingham (Peter O’Toole).

Directed and written by David S. Ward, who wrote stuff like The Sting and Sleepless In Seattle and directed other perhaps not so prestige stuff as Major League and Down Periscope, it also has John Hurt as Lord Percival Graves, another upper crust snob who wants the House of Stuart take over for the House of Wyndham after all the controversy of an American king, much less one dating a commoner.

Bill Murray was going to do this — makes sense with the lounge singer character — and so was John Candy, who picked Nothing But Trouble instead. As for Goodman, he even said in an interview, “I don’t think anybody’s ready to pay good money to see me get the girl in the movie. I know I wouldn’t go see something like that.”

The movie is better than he thinks it is.

You can get King Ralph in retro VHS packaging from Mill Creek at Deep Discount.

Cross My Heart (1987): Armyan Bernstein is usually known as a producer, but he directed and co-wrote this movie with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman co-creator Gail Parent.

It has similarities to When Harry Met Sally as David Morgan (Martin Short) and Kathy (Annette O’Toole) — our lead couple — are continually advised by their respective friends Bruce (Paul Reiser) and  Nancy (Joanna Kerns). Now, they prepare themselves for their third date, the one where they may finally make love, and more importantly the one where they’ll reveal themselves for better or worse to one another.

It’s an interesting film, as I never saw Short as a sexual romantic lead before and there it is. This is a movie where their conversation nearly happens in real time. O’Toole is gorgeous and if you have a strange crush on short, well…allow this to be your film.

Pure Luck (1991): One of Becca’s favorite movies, Pure Luck has Martin Short in the traditional role you know and enjoy him for, as a bad luck office worker who can’t help but be overly sure of hismelf despite destroying everything in his path.

Directed by Nadia Tass and written by Francis Veber (it’s based on his French movie La chèvre and it’s not the only movie he made that got remade by Hollywood; there’s also Le Grand Blond Avec une Chaussure Noire (The Man with One Red Shoe), L’emmerdeur (Buddy Buddy), La Cage aux Folles (The Birdcage), Le Jouet (The Toy), Les Comperes (Fathers’ Day), Le Diner de Cons (Dinner for Schmucks) and Les Fugitifs ( Three Fugitives)), Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris.

Short’s Eugene Proctor is just as clumsy as his boss’ missing daughter Valerie (Sheila Kelley), so a psychologist named Monosoff (Harry Shearer) decides that he’d be the perfect person to find her. To ensure that he doesn’t screw up, he’s assigned Raymond Campanella (Danny Glover) to the rescue trip to Puerto Vallarta.

In an interview, Tass said, “It was successful in a financial sense but not in a satisfying sense. It was congenial doing a Martin Short comedy, but American comedy is different from Australian comedy. It is broader. American audiences enjoyed Pure Luck, but audiences in other countries did not enjoy it so much with the exception of the Germans. I wanted to do something else with the comedy and so did Danny Glover. I would like to have put a lot more pathos and pain into it. But they wanted a comedy for America.”

He still gets residuals from the film, so there’s that.

It’s a silly film that has a stand out scene with Short’s face swelling up from a bee sting that never fails to make me laugh. Yeah, it’s not much, but if you get one laugh from it, can it be that bad?

You can get the Mill Creek Martin Short Double Feature – Cross My Heart / Pure Luck from Deep Discount.

Detective Sean Thompson is no longer Chad McQueen, now he’s Jeff Wincott, but Billie Blake is still Cynthia Rothrock and that’s the whole reason why I’m watching this.

This time, they’re on the case of Club Syntax where the elite get favors from beautiful women while being protected by numerous martial arts masters who are all battling to determine which fighting group rules the world of combat. Well, they eventually are, but their team is briefly split up while Thompson moves up to detective and gets a new boss, Captain Krantz (Billy Drago).

I mean, it’s pretty much what you want it to be. A fight club gets infiltrated by Wincott and Rothrock; also she dresses up as a hot dog vendor and then becomes a bartender inside that nefarious club.

Directed by Kurt Anderson with a script by Richard Brandes and exploitation producer master Pierre David, this movie is like ordering a hamburger. You know exactly what it is, but you take that first bite and it’s so rewarding and you think — this is why I ordered this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Infernal Machine Gun has a submachine gun with supernatural powers that never misses. It stars Julian Garza, a Northeastern Mexico singer of more than 150 corridos. A corrido is a popular narrative ballad often about farming life, dealing with oppression or what it’s like to be a criminal. Garza recorded several albums of these songs, including Pistoleros Famosos (Famous Gunfighters), Se Están Robando el Marrano (They Are Stealing the Pig) and Andamos Borrachos Todos (We’re All Drunk). Garza was also part of a subgenre known as narcocorrido or drug ballads.

Roman (Edgardo Gazcon) has a pretty horrible life, as he’s stuck cleaning a bank and staring at the gorgeous Nancy (Claudia Guzman). He never approaches her because of his lowly station and scarred visage. Meanwhile, his brother Juan (Garza) and his girlfriend basically abuse him in between all their gambling.

On the way home from another losing night, Juan searches through a car accident and finds the blessed gun, which he names Cuerno De Chivo (Horn of the Goat). He starts by killing all of the other gamblers, then Roman steals the weapon, robs the bank and kidnaps Nancy, all in a potentially insane plot to fix his face and find true love.

Garza wrote this movie originally as one of his corridos and probably hoped to be the star, but he was 56 when it was made and didn’t fit the idea of a young man finding this powerful firearm. Beyond the gunfighting action, there are plenty of other corridas singers that make appearances both in the film and on the soundtrack.

You can watch this on YouTube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

A B-movie movie about making B-movies, Bad Girls from Mars features a stressed-out director named TJ McMasters (Oliver Darrow) struggling through the production of a sexy sci-fi pic while someone bumps off every actress who takes the lead role. To decompress, TJ takes shots from the bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer, chews Alka Seltzer like candy and fools around with his hot secretary Martine (Dana Bentley.) Edy Williams plays Emmanuel, the newest actress to accept the role, whose most memorable scene is changing her clothes in the back of a moving convertible in broad daylight on the streets of Beverly Hills. Jay Richardson plays arrogant lead actor Richard Trent who takes his job way too seriously and Brinke Stevens plays his wife the jealous costume girl Myra who would absolutely kill to get the lead. Most of the humor in the film centers on the harsh yet absurd realities of working in low-budget films. Comedy highlights include crewmembers suggesting an over-the-shoulder shot on a murdered actress because “that’s what Roger would do,” a crew stampede at lunch time (100% accurate), a long ride in a police car stopping off at all the best eateries in town (120% accurate) and Fred Olen Ray himself, who walks into the frame just long enough to throw a few pages of the script away to keep the film on schedule. The spoof giallo ending is perfect for a film that’s meta to the max. 

Fred Olen Ray said, “I didn’t really know what an erotic thriller was when I did Inner Sanctum. I watched Wild Orchid — fast-forwarded through it, actually — to see what was expected of me.”

Made for $650,000 and a big success, well…Ray definitely knew what erotic thrillers were after this.

Jennifer Reed (Valerie Wildman, Neon City) should be happy with all her money, but you know how rich people are in these movies. She’s sure her insurance husband Baxter (Joseph Bottoms, Blind Date) is cheating on her, so she overdoes on pills, falls down the stairs and ends up in a wheelchair. Now, she’s even less happy because she has Tanya Roberts for a nurse, a woman who may have killed her last rich female patient and then married her husband and killed him too.

Jennifer has a million dollar policy on her life that doesn’t cover suicide. Actually, what insurance does in the first two years of the police? Someone is trying to kill her, whether its Tanya Roberts or the other woman that her husband really wants, played by Margaux Hemingway.

While Margaux Hemingway’s nudity and sex scenes were doubled by Michelle Bauer, Roberts choreographed her own sex scenes. And her scene Brett Baxter Clark — Nick the dick from Bachelor Party and Thomas the gardener from Young Lady Chatterley II no less — was too sexual for even the unrated version of the movie.

Director Fred Olen Ray said that he hated working with Roberts so much that he was depressed for a year and almost quit directing, he still made two more movies with her.

Arch Stanton is Jim Wynorski and Bill Carson is Fred Olen Ray and we have entered the place where their at times very similar movies cross into the nexus point between their work. Yes, Scream Queen Hot Tub Party is at once a padded out clip fest — look for Sorority House Massacre, Slumber Party Massacre, Emanuelle 5, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Hard to Die, Nightmare Sisters and Evil Toons — and an opportunity for Brinke Stevens, Monique Gabrielle, Kelli Maroney, Michelle Bauer and Roxanne Keronhan to play themselves and, well, get naked.

Ray plays a stalker who keeps trying to kill the girls while Wynorski is a monster in the basement. Somehow, Linnea Quigley only shows up in clip form. At least there’s an Ouija board, which is used before the hot tub, which makes sense in the world of 90s VHS movies that didn’t worry about how up front exploitation could be before the internet.

There are a lot of IMDB reviews that state how upset they were with the quality of this film.

I ask what they expected.

Power Pack — first appeared in 1986 and created by Louise Simonson and June Brigman — is the first team of preteen superheroes in the Marvel Universe that operated without adult supervision. However, unlike many other young heroes, they had supportive parents and weren’t orphans.

The Power kids — Alex, Julie, Jack and Katie — each received their powers from a dying alien, with Alex gaining gravity control, Julie being able to fly, Jack getting mass control and Katie being able to disintegrate objects. The initial run lasted sixty-one issues along with Simonson and Brigman undoing some of the damage other teams did to the book in the Power Pack Holiday Special.

The same year that the comic was canceled, Paragon Entertainment Corporation and New World Television created a Power Pack pilot in the hopes it could be a live-action show for NBC’s Saturday Morning Kids block. They passed but Fox bought the pilot and aired it several times on Fox Kids in 1991.

This short finds the kids getting used to their new home and neighborhood while promising their parents — who unlike the comic know they have powers — that they will be as normal as possible. There’s also a haunted house and the spirit of Dr. Mobius (Greg Swanson, the class president from Terror Train) to deal with.

Alex was played by Nathaniel Moreau from Are You Afraid of the Dark?, while Julie was Margot Finley from Mighty Ducks 3. Jack was Bradley Machry and Katie was Jacelyn Holmes.

Directed by Rick Bennett (who was Juggernaut and Colossus on the animated X-Men series) and written by Jason Brett (who wrote and acted in the movie Checkered Flag, as well as writing episodes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by way of Power Rangers by way of Dragonball Z live-action show Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills), this seems like it would have been a great show for kids if it ever got off the ground.

Power Pack is scheduled to be part of the MCU sometime. It’ll be interesting to see how they fit in.

John Anderson (Colin Friels) has a passion for jazz, which will find him traveling from the outback Western Australia to the jazz clubs of Paris where he hopes to meet his idol trumpeter Billy Cross (Miles Davis).

Probably the best part of this movie is the opening, as Davis and his band play a set on a remote airstrip in the Australian outback as the locals watch.

This film has some basis in reality, as Australia’s best jazz saxophonist Bernie McGann would often leave his mailman job to practice out in the wild.

Directed by Rolf de Heer (Bad Boy Bubby) and written by Marc Rosenberg, who had worked with de Heer on Encounter at Raven’s Gate, this is one of the last filmed performances of Davis, who also scored the film along with Michel Legrand.

Dingo has been screening at arthouses across America but will be available on digital and DVD as of April 12 from Dark Star Pictures.