Tag Archives: 1992

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Sister Act (1992)

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Aug 11-17 Whoopi Goldberg Week: She’s become a corny tv lady these days, but let’s not forget that at her peak Whoopi was one of the funniest people alive.

Directed by Emile Ardolino and written by Paul Rudnick, Sister Act was one of the most financially successful comedies of the early 1990s. It’s about Deloris Wilson (Whoopi Goldberg), who made fun of the nuns when she was in school, becomes a lounge singer dating organized crime figure Vince LaRocca (Harvey Keitel) and goes into hiding at Saint Katherine’s Parish as Sister Mary Clarence along with Reverend Mother (Maggie Smith), Sister Mary Lazarus (Mary Wickes), Sister Mary Patrick (Kathy Najimy) and Sister Mary Robert (Wendy Makkena).

The new Sister ends up leading the choir to national attention, which leads to the criminals finding her, putting a price on her head. Of course, everything turns out just fine.

Initially intended for Bette Midler, this was the subject of a major lawsuit. Actress Donna Douglas and her partner Curt Wilson filed a $200 million lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company, Whoopi Goldberg, Bette Midler, their production companies and Creative Artists Agency, claiming Sister Act was plagiarized from the book A Nun in the Closet. In 1994, Douglas and Wilson declined a $1 million offer as they wanted to win the case. They didn’t. Neither was a nun by the name of Delois Blakely, whose autobiography, The Harlem Street Nun, was similar and was sent to Disney several times.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Brain Donors (1992)

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July 21-27 Eddie Griffin Week: This motherfucker is funny!

Inspired by the Marx Brothers comedies A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, Brain Donors finds Roland T. Flakfizer (John Turturro), Jacques (Bob Nelson) and Rocco Melonchek (Mel Smith) as its heroes, as they screw up an opera being put on by Lillian Oglethorpe (Nancy Marchand), a wealthy widow.

Director Dennis Dugan wanted Adam Sandler for this, but Paramount disagreed. He’d work with the comedy star on several films after this. It was written by Pat Proft, along with some assistance by David and Jerry Zucker, who produced this. When they left Paramount, the name was changed from Lame Ducks and a theatrical run was pretty much shelved, leaving this movie to find its audience on home video.

If you love slapstick humor or are ready to call out the Marx Brothers references in this, you’re going to love it. As for Eddie Griffith, he shows up as a messenger. I love how much fun Turturro seems to be having, as he’s usually in serious roles.

 

Tales from the Crypt: Two-Fisted Tales (1992)

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Most folks only know EC Comics for Tales from the Crypt — OK, maybe MAD Magazine — but the truth is, there were a ton of other titles that that venerable publisher released. Just in the horror realm, they also had the Vault of Horror (yes, there was an Amicus film with that title) and Crypt of Terror. But there was also Weird Fantasy, Weird Science, Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Frontline Combat, Piracy, Weird Science-Fantasy and even the New Direction post-Comics Code books Impact, Valor, Extra!, Aces High, Psychoanalysis, M.D. and Incredible Science Fiction.

I was surprised that none of these other EC Comics had ever gotten a movie or series until I learned about Two-Fisted Tales.

Strangely enough, as Harvey Kurtzman was the editor of the book, these war stories didn’t always follow their title and often had a very anti-war prejudice. Kurtzman had been drafted in 1942 and knew the horrors of war firsthand. As he saw the other war comics on the news racks, he was upset by how much they glorified war. He saw no heroes in his stories, only people trapped in situations beyond their control. He would later comment in The Complete EC Library: Two-Fisted Tales Volume 1, “Nobody had done anything on the depressing aspects of war, and this, to me, was such a dumb—it was a terrible disservice to the children.”

I guess no one explained that to anyone who worked on this show.

In 1991, a TV pilot was put together by producers Joel Silver, Richard Donner and Robert Zemeckis. Other than using the logo and some of the art in the opening, that’s pretty much all that feels like the comic. Instead, this is very similar to Tales from the Crypt, with William Sadler played Mr. Rush, a violent man who connects all of the stories.

“Showdown,” written by Frank Darabont and directed by Richard Donner, is the story of a gunfighter’s last stand. “King of the Road,” written by Randall Jahnson and directed by Tom Holland, is about a drag racer’s past coming to haunt him. Brad Pitt appears in the one. And “Yellow,” written by Jim Thomas, John Thomas, A. L. Katz, and Gilbert Adler, and directed by Robert Zemeckis, is about a soldier who keeps letting down his military man father. It’s the best episode in here, with great acting by Kirk and Eric Douglas, Lance Henriksen and Dan Aykroyd.

Of the three, “Yellow” is the only one based on an EC Comics story, as it was taken from the first issue of Shock SuspenStories and was written by Al Feldstein and illustrated by Jack Davis.

Sadly, this was a letdown, and after one airing, the three episodes all appeared as part of Tales from the Crypt. I was always upset when the show didn’t use the material it was based on. This is really no different, but the last tale is tense and brutal, a rare Zemeckis-directed story that isn’t overly dependent on special effects.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend (1992)

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June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!

Named “Best Drive-In Movie of the Year” by Joe Bob Briggs, this was directed by Richard Cramer, who also made Highway Amazon — the story of bodybuilder Christine Fetzer, who made her money driving across the country wrestling men in hotel rooms — and painted, played guitar and created art installations. When you see this film, you’ll quickly realize that it’s about more than just exploitation, even though it is exploitation.

Marcus Templeton works as a security guard and when he isn’t obsessed about his physical appearance, he’s watching porn, hiring escorts or talking to phone sex operators. His father — a face on a TV screen — keeps yelling at him as he tries weight loss creams and contracts STDs from all the sex workers he’s frequenting. He starts audio and video taping them, which ends when one of them catches him and shoots him right in the head.

Andren Scott, the star of the film, is genuinely great in what is essentially a thankless role. He was shot in a convenience store robbery and wasn’t able to be in the sequel, The Hitler Tapes.

There’s definitely an influence — or outright theft — of Aggy Read’s Boobs A Lot — in the beginning. There’s constant nudity and women on display, yet you never get turned on, just like the narrator of this, who can’t get it up despite all of the women who have been in his bed. You don’t feel sexy; you feel filthy and worried and sad. None of it feels like a life you want; you’re glad that you can finally walk away at the end.

You can watch this on Tubi.

APRIL MOVIE THON 4: Jackpot (1992)

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April 26: Oh Giorgio! — Pick a movie with a Giorgio Moroder score. Here’s a list to get you started.

Also known as Cyber Eden, this movie is wild.

Gloria Ruckhauser (Carroll Baker) has enabled scientists to reverse the aging process. However, they have done their job too well, as all the old people are becoming children. And also — all of the scientists are little kids.

The budget for this movie had to be insane or maybe I just think Christopher Lee should cost more money.

Giorgio Moroder doing the music, Luciano Tovoli shooting, Pietro Scalia editing and a whole vault of cash and this movie, which gets into AI and virtual reality years before that was a thing…it’s just weird.

It’s also the last acting role outside of a TV mini-series for Adriano Celentano. IMDB says that he was “one of the most important singers of Italian pop music, but he’s also been a creator of a comic genre in movies, with his characteristic way of walking and his facial expressions. For the most part, his films were commercially successful, in fact in the 70s and part of the 80s, he was king of the Italian box office in low budget movies.”

This TCM write-up tries to explain the movie: “Special effects comedy about seven brilliant children, hidden away in a secluded laboratory where they are perfecting an anti-aging drug. To help them relax, a lovable “idiot” is engaged to teach them about “lunacy”, but the results are too much for one of the young geniuses who creates a fantasy city.”

It’s like Toys but even harder to understand.

This proves that I will watch anything with Carroll Baker in it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

APRIL MOVIE THON 4: Whispers In the Dark (1992)

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April 12: 412 Day — A movie about Pittsburgh (if you’re not from here that’s our area code). Or maybe one made here. Heck, just write about Striking Distance if you want.

Yes, Whispers in the Dark is mostly shot in New York City, but there are scenes shot in Pittsburgh, and that’s good enough. I wish I could tell you it was a Yinzer Giallo, but no. It’s close to real Giallo, but it has no Iron City, no one goes to eat at Primanti Brothers or walks past the Kaufmann’s clock.

Directed and written by Christopher Crowe (who also wrote the Marky Mark goes crazy movie Fear), this has Annabella Sciorra as Ann Hecker, a psychiatrist who gets obsessed over a patient, Eve Abergray (Deborah Unger, who A.C. Nicholas told me has never not been nude in a film and reminded me again of the beginning of Crash), who makes every man around her want to dominate her sexually. Like, totally nice guys suddenly become sexist and want to slap her around like she’s Barbara Bouchet or something.

Ann wants that life now and gets so upset that she confides in her teachers, the married couple Leo and Sarah Green (Alan Alda and Jill Clayburgh). She also starts dating a new guy, Doug McDowell (Jamey Sheridan), a former Air Force pilot.

But let’s get back to Eve, who comes into their next session, takes off her dress, and tells Ann how much she wants to jill off in front of her. Is Ann having a fantasy? Why doesn’t she react? How freakish is Eve? And is she also with Doug because she claims the lover who treats her the worst is Francis Douglas McDowell?

This leads to Doug and Ann fighting, which Eve sees and realizes they’re dating. She accuses Ann of living out her fantasies by going after someone she dated. And then, when Ann comes to apologize, Eve is dead at her own hand. Or maybe not, as Detective Morgenstern (Antony LaPaglia) says that she was murdered.

Is this a Giallo? Yes, we already went over that.

Who killed Eve? One of her patients, Fast Johnny C. (John Leguizamo)? Ann? Doug? Well, it’s probably not Johnny, who breaks into Ann’s place and ends up jumping to his death, just like Ann’s dad. Then, Doug is in a hangar with the detective’s dead body, but he gets hit by a car. This is filled with red herrings.

Gene Siskell said this was the worst movie of 1992, so you know I loved every minute.

You’ll ask, “Can the think woman’s sex symbol be a psycho sexual killer?” Look, he’s no Ivan Rassimov, but if you got this far, spoilers — he’s the one who beats his wife with a wine bottle and talks filthy in that Alan Alda voice you know so well. For that moment alone at the end, when he gets a hook right through his skull and he takes a bump into the surf, you probably should watch this.

Reanimator Academy (1992)

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Edgar Allan Lovecraft (Steve Westerheit) is the brainy outcast of the hard-partying Delta Epsilon Delta Fraternity and now, he’s invented — you guessed it — a reanimator formula.

In the video store era, the box art and title were all you needed. So if you combine long rental favorites Police Academy and Re-Animator, you get this.

The Delta Epsilon Delta (DED) frat is all about partying. Except for the aforementioned Edgar Allan Lovecraft, who is busy bringing a severed head named Fred back to life, which brings in a local gangster, Mugsy, who wants Edgar to do the same for his girl, Hotlips (executive producer Connier Speer, who was also in Nail Gun Massacre). Things don’t go to plan as the reanimated gangster’s moll starts killing the student body. Can Edgar, Mugsy, his henchman Bruno, and Fred the severed head stop her?

Directed and written by Judith Priest — a one-and-done talent who may or may not be someone else — this was set up by Fred Olen Ray with David DeCoteau (using the name Ellen Cabot, which comes from an episode of Batman) producing. The instructions? “Give a good title and make it 70 minutes and horror.”

Shot on 8mm consumer format with a two-month turnaround from script to final product, it was shot over a weekend. And there was a Super VHS on hand to edit the dailies. It was co-written by Benton Jennings, who was also Bruno.  He’s also in tons of movies and TV shows: Highway to Hell, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Profiler, Dexter, Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, American Carol, the soap opera Passions, Our Flag Means Death and I Think You Should Leave. He also played Alex Trebek’s dead body on Jimmy Kimmel in addition to Hitler on that show, a role he’d play again in Poolboy: Drowning In Fury. He was also the historical consultant on Frontier: The Decisive Battles and Last of the Mohicans.

This movie has so many talented people making it, including Greg Synodis, who composed the music for this and Highway to Hell, while also making the music videos for “Ice Ice Baby” and “Play That Funky Music” for Vanilla Ice. There’s also JP Black, who shot and starred in Redneck County Fever; as well as assistant director Richard Perrin, who was in Bret McCormick’s Blood On the Badge and Fred Williamson’s Steele’s Law. Plus, you get Fred the Head, who has a list of credits a forehead long. He was in Head, A Bullet to the Head, Sergeant Deadhead, A Hole In the Head, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte. Virginia Leith is his mom, or so he says.

Released to video on February 28, 1992, this was filmed in Fort Worth, Texas — a clue to who the person who made this is, and shows up in the Tomb of Terrors box set along with such other incredible movies as Demon Sex, Granny, Gorno: An American Tragedy, Kill the Scream Queen, The Night Owl, Purvos, Redneck County Fever, Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death and Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires.

Is this made by movie lovers? All I can say is that in the frat house scene, you can see posters for Zachariah, Terror Circus (Barn of the Naked Dead), School Spirit and America 3000.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Zombie Rampage (1992)

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Todd Sheets forever.

Back in 1992, it didn’t seem like zombies would be coming back from their graves. They weren’t mainstream. It was left to gut crunching gore lovers like Sheets to make low budget tributes to the films they loved. This starts with two gangs — Sheets leads one — fighting in the streets of Kansas City, leaving bodies everywhere. Most gangs would regroup and get better guns. One of these ones gets an occult book, conducts a ritual and all hell breaks loose.

As Glenn would sing, “Yea, evil is as evil does.”

Tommy (Dave Byerly) and Dave (Erin Kehr) barely make it to a bar, years before the Winchester served the same purpose, holed up with their girlfriends while the dead are alive outside the doors. Sheets has said for people to turn this movie off, but look, when everyone is drinking in a bar and a stolen song from The Beyond plays, I stick around. I mean, this starts with a fist fight set to a “Spirit In the Sky” cover and once, I had a girl from Lawrence, KS write out all the lyrics to that song and mail it to me as part of our long distance romance. I wondered if that means anything, like if Norman Greenbaum was from Kansas, but no. Sometimes life makes no sense.

More on Sheets hating this, thanks to IMDB: “It took a year and a half because I was held hostage by an insane cameraman (who thought he was in charge and always wanted more money), a local bar owner named Lonzo who was supposed to be funding the film but disappeared and a cast of well meaning local theater students who went away for the holidays and some of them didn’t come back! Some left because they were tired of being held up for 3 or 4 hours by the jerk cameraman every time we were supposed to shoot. I was left with 68% of a once good script and I finished it the only way I knew. It was my first film. It was NOT shot on VHS — but on 3/4 inch video and Betacam like the TV stations of the time used. It was a horrible experience and I almost never made another film.”

Sheets would make better movies, but look, if you come up with a movie indebted to Mattei, Fulci and Romero, I’m going to love it. Every review I read calling this sloppy and amateurish, well, fine. But did it entertain you? Nobody wants to talk about that, they just want to be high and mighty, cooler than the films they talk about.

If you’re wondering, does this seem like a movie that Visual Vengeance would put out? Well, the trailers are on their latest Blu-rays and it comes from Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares, which also has Suburban Sasquatch amongst its fifty movies for one low price. Some would say you’d overpaid, but I’m the kind of viewer to drop big money on this set if I ever find it.

Poison Ivy (1992)

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Katt Shea launched her directing career with Stripped to Kill, which is, as I always say, way better than it should be. She followed that up with several movies for Roger Corman — Dance of the Damned, Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls and Streets, which led to this movie. Since then, she’s made The Rage: Carrie 2, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and the Netflix movie Rescued by Ruby. She draws on her acting past to help inform her films and can turn what should be exploitation movies into exploitation art movies. She doesn’t forget where she came from but still rises above it.

This won the Grand Jury prize of Best Film at Sundance, but it became a success on video and cable. In 88 short minutes, we meet misfit Sylvie Cooper (Sara Gilbert), watch her become friends with Ivy (Drew Barrymore) and then everything falls to pieces.

Sylvie doesn’t fit in at her rich school, paid for by her TV newsman father, Darryl (Tom Skeritt). Her mother, Georgie (Cheryl Ladd), is close to death, stuck on an oxygen machine and barely there most of the time. Ivy senses that there’s a place she can belong here, as a poor girl at the school on a scholarship. She shows her legs to Dad, fixes Mom’s oxygen and lets Sylvie think that she has someone with whom she can fit in with. Maybe that mercy killing of a dog was intense, but Ivy seems like she could be good, right?

Ivy moves in and slowly becomes a part of the entire family’s life, replacing Georgie in Darryl’s bed. The first time, she drugs Sylvie and has Daryll kneel between her young thighs. Soon, she’s wearing his wife’s clothes, and even the dog chooses her as a favorite over Sylvie.

Then she shoves Sylvie’s mom off the balcony, and no one suspects her because Georgie is mentally ill and near death. Finally, Sylvie confronts her, which ends up with a car accident, a hospital visit and her almost death, Ivy becomes her mother as she fights her way through the pain and the drugs, and they kiss…only for Ivy to shove her tongue in Sylvie’s mouth, ending the dream and bringing back the reality where this friend has murdered her mother and stolen her father.

Shea never presents Ivy as the villain. She does horrible things, but we understand her and the fact that she wants love. Everyone in this wants love. The original ending — this had four of them — saw Ivy getting away with it, and New Line — who wanted a teenage Fatal Attraction — needed a square-up reel where the villain needed to be punished. She dies, even though Shea wanted to make sequels. That said, there are sequels, but not with her characters, Alyssa Milano, Jamie Pressly and Miriam McDonald starring.

That said, Ivy only exists in this movie as the manifestation of the desire that others have. For Dad, she’s a younger version of his wife who wants to have sex and isn’t dying. For Sylvie, she’s a best friend who she can come out to. But what does Ivy want? Love. To be a mother. I think she’s been played as much as she’s playing everyone else.

The strangest thing? This movie is based on truth. Producer Melissa Goddard had a friend stay with her and her family when she was young, and that friend slept with her stepfather, Mike Medavoy, the co-founder of Orion Pictures.

I know we all get old, but when I see Drew Barrymore in ads for phone games, I get sad. For most of my teen years, she was my ideal, a strange creature who was barely understood, someone who would bring trouble into your life, like a manic pixie femme fatale. I hate seeing her selling crock pots at WalMart. You used to ruin families. Now you have a talk show.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Invasion of Privacy (1992)

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The Jennifer O’Neill career trajectory has me obsessed. Cover Girl and Eileen Ford model to Rio Lobo in the Summer of ’72, followed by Reincarnation of Peter Proud and a career in Italy, where she made The Innocent and The Psychic before coming back to America and drinking while Disney cut her hair for The Black Hole, losing the part after a car crash on the way home. She’s also in A Force of One opposite Chuck Norris, and in Scanners before she was in Cover Up opposite Jon-Erik Hexum, who accidentally killed himself on set.

Married nine times to eight husbands, she’s been through lifelong pain from a horse riding injury, postpartum depression that led to electroshock therapy, an abortion, accidentally shooting herself, a husband who abused her daughter and becoming a born-again Christian. Today, she is part of Hope & Healing at Hillenglade, an equine therapy foundation in Nashville, Tennessee, that helps war veterans. She also turns up in religious and right-wing (and they can be both) movies like Time Changer, Last Ounce of Courage and Reagan.

Anyways…

In 1992, she could be the lead in an erotic thriller, playing Hillary Wayne, a reporter who is trying to write about prison reform. She hires an assistant who has been in jail, Alex Pruitt (Robby Benson), without knowing he’s been obsessed with her forever. He’s also super into her actress daughter Vickie (Lydie Denier, who was Jane on Tarzan and Nicole on Alculpco H.E.A.T., plus Midnight Cabaret, Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue and David Prior’s Night Trap), who has a thick French accent for reasons unknown. I’m not demanding the JCVD treatment, where you spend ten minutes in every movie learning why Jean Claude speaks like that, but maybe a little explanation would go a long way because Vickie is sometimes unintelligible.

Hillary is already in one bad relationship with her editor Brian (Ian Oglivy, Witchfinder General), and now, her daughter is drama-coached by the jailbird with a video camera. That said, Robby Benson is great in this, way better than this movie deserves. He actually creates a character that you care about.

This movie had to have been cast just for me. Beyond O’Neill, John Agar shows up as an old criminal. I was expecting John Carradine to be in this, but he died in 1988, not that this ever stopped him from being in a movie.

Lydie Denier has claimed that her sex scene with Robby Bensen was the most erotic she had filmed, and he didn’t do promotion for this movie because it got him in trouble. Maybe she means the total creep scene where he forces her to wear her mother’s underwear.

Director Kevin Meyer also made Perfect Alibi, in which Lydie Denier cucks Teri Garr. Wait, what’s the female term for cucking? According to Wikipedia, “A cuckquean is the wife of an adulterous husband (or partner for unmarried companions), and the gender-opposite of a cuckold.” I don’t like that word. It needs a new word. Meyer also made Under Investigation, which stars Harry Hamlin, Ed Lauter, Joanna Pacula and, you knew it, Lydie Denier.

I love that Robby Benson is the voice of Disney’s The Beast and here he is, ruining a family.

You can watch this on Tubi.