Tag Archives: 1995

2025 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 30: The Jerky Boys: Don’t Hang Up, Toughguy! (1995)

Posted on by

30. DEVIL’S NIGHT: Mischief, mayhem or pranks – oh my!

I refuse to play into the notion that just because something is juvenile, it’s stupid.

In this, The Jerky Boys make prank calls with hidden cameras at MTV’s intern offices, on a double-decker tour bus in Manhattan, on supermarket intercoms and from payphones. These are things that probably couldn’t happen in our world of caller ID and mobile phones, but whatever. It’s a moment in time.

Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed first started making their pranks in the 1980s, often calling unsuspecting people or answering the phone in character for classified advertisements placed in local New York City newspapers. Their first actual album came out in 1993, but bootlegs had been circulating for years. I remember a cassette that I got had this and the Tube Bar all on one 90-minute blast of outlaw insanity. They were Frank Rizzo, Sol Rosenberg, Kamal, Jack Tors, Kissel, and so many more characters. The first time I heard the call “Uncle Freddie,” I may have laughed the hardest I’ve ever laughed, as it’s one of the most uncomfortable comedy acts of all time, as Kissel and his entire family keep asking about Uncle Freddie, who has maybe died, with his son Anthony getting on the phone when his father can’t speak. Brennan’s voice as Anthony is nearly unhinged, as it feels like he’s floating in space, as a woman screams in the background, and Kissel screams that someone has killed their uncle and wants to kill him as well. It’s really an excellent few minutes of madness.

Even people we’d think of as being ultra serious, like Radiohead and Slowdive, named songs for Jerky Boys references (Pablo Honey and Souvlaki, which is a Jerky Boys line the band loved: “My wife loves that Greek shit. She’ll suck your cock like souvlaki.”). Their humor permeates so many parts of the comedy (just like the Tube Bar tapes) and yet, when you ask people about it, they’ll tell you how stupid and immature it is. But does it make you laugh?

Their film, The Jerky Boys, was savaged by critics, and the duo would split up a few years later. But the material is here, especially in this video, which felt like an undiscovered country for me. So many Jerky Boys references litter my daily utterances that some people just think they’re weird things that I say, like “Real proud of ya,” “for some people,” and “I hear you Greeks like trains.”

Yes, it’s stupid. But it all makes me laugh. The world is rough, so I don’t need to be all high-falutin’ about humor these days. A video where the Jerky Boys talk in a grocery store? Put it in my eyeball like heroin. I no longer need to shoot it between my toes.

Also: This is the second Jerky Boys-related Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge entry I’ve made. I really yearn to be taken seriously as a film critic and look forward to becoming Rotten Tomatoes-certified.

You can watch this on YouTube.

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE DAY 25: Project Metalbeast (1995)

Posted on by

25. A Horror Film That Has a Good Review on The Schlock Pit Website

I love The Schlock Pit so much, and if a movie is good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

1974: Special ops soldier Donald Butler (John Marzilli) is inside an island castle where he finds a werewolf, which he soon kills with silver bullets, then takes some blood to create super soldiers along with Colonel Miller (Barry Bostwick). Nothing seems to work, so he injects himself with what’s left of the blood and soon goes crazy, murdering and sexually assaulting everyone in his path. Only three silver bullets to the heart from Miller stop him, and he’s frozen, stuck between life and death. 

Twenty years later, Anna De Carlo (Kim Delaney) and her team — Larry (Lance Slaughter), Roger (Tim Duquette) and Philip (Dean Scofield) — are working on ways to add metal allos to human skin. Miller offers them the bodies of his dead soldiers, and as you can guess, they operate on Butler. When they remove the bullets from his heart, he comes to life as an unstoppable metal werewolf.

How do you stop a metal wolf? With a silver bazooka.

Directed by Alessandro De Gaetano (UFO: Target Earth), who co-wrote it with Timothy E. Sabo (later director of the AVN Awards) and Roger Steinmann, this is the kind of movie I would get obsessed with when I rented it. It played a lot of cable and look out, Kane Hodder is the Metal Beast.

You can watch this on Tubi.

2025 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 23: The Langoliers (1995)

Posted on by

23. SURVIVORS?: If anything walks away from a plane crash, the chances of it being healthy are pretty slim.

Directed and written by Tom Holland and based on the novella by Stephen King, this first aired on May 14 and 15, 1995 on ABC. Richard P. Rubinstein produced through his company Laurel Entertainment and King mainly stayed hands-off.

The effects for The Langoliers were provided by Image Design and you know, when King wrote beach balls with teeth, he may not have been thinking of a movie being made of his story.

On a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston,pilot Brian Engle (David Morse), MI6 agent Nick Hopewell (Mark Lindsay Chapman). schoolteacher Laurel Stevenson (Patricia Wettig), tool and die worker Don Gaffney (Frankie Faison), violinist Albert Kaussner (Christopher Collet), Bethany Sims (Kimber Riddle), mystery author Bob Jenkins (Dean Stockwell), blind Dinah Bellman (Kate Maberly), businessman Rudy Warwick, (Baxter Harris) and bond trader Craig Toomy (Bronson Pinchot) wake up alone no pilots, no crew. Craig has a mental breakdown and Dinah — a telepath because she’s blind, you know how it works, enters his mond.

They land in Bangor and no one is there either. That’s when Craig tells them that the Langoliers are monsters that eat lazy children. Yes, beach balls that snack on kids, how do you do it U of M grad Steve King?

According to IMDB: “The Langoliers themselves were originally going to be portrayed by puppets, but were replaced with CGI instead. Unfortunately, the poorly rendered and animated monsters ended up looking laughably hokey, and are regarded as some of the worst CGI effects ever.”

Oh man are they ever.

Anyways, this was always considered a mess — at least by me — until I saw the remix of the film, Timekeepers of Eternity. Made with cut paper, it really works, remixing this film into something that is exciting and different.

W.E.I.R.D. World (1995)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last week of Tales from the Crypt content, as I got through all of the Perversions of Science episodes. Do you have another anthology you’d like me to tackle?

W.E.I.R.D. (Wilson Emery Institute for Research and Development) It is a place where the world’s most intelligent scientists get unlimited budgets to come up with whatever they want, all under the watch of Dr. Monochian (Ed O’Neill!). Three of the stories of this scientific lab form the basis of this TV movie, which seems to have been a pilot for a show.

When you see William Gaines’ name on this, know that’s because these three stories — like Tales from the Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales and Perversions of Science — were based on EC Comics. Specifically, stories from Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, the science fiction books of EC. Unlike the other shows based on the comics, these are all part of an overall tale and are all directed by the same person, William Malone.

In one, Dr. Dylan Bledsoe (Dana Ashbrook) is spending just as much time making a virus as he is trying to hook up with Dr. Noah Lane’s (Jime-True Frost) assistant Diane (Audie England, who was Kitana and Mileena on the Mortal Kombat TV show and was a girl rolling around in bed in Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” video), all while robotics expert Lane tries to figure out if Bledsoe killed his last girlfriend, Catherine (Cyia Batten, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning). Meanwhile, Dr. Abby O’Reardon (Paula Marshall) and her husband Dr. Bryan Mayhew (Clayton Rohner) are constantly arguing — did any EC Comics creative have a good marriage? — and she wants a baby, despite all of that. And then there’s Dr. Patty Provost (Gina Ravera, Molly from Showgirls), who has figured out time travel, which leads to her brother Bob (Miguel A. Núñez Jr., Spider from Return of the Living Dead), a security guard, to sell out W.E.I.R.D.

Written by A.L. Katz, Gilbert Adler and Scott Nimerfro, this never reaches the levels of the other shows, but from all accounts — read The Schlock Pit — this was a troubled production. Does anyone know what comics this was based on?

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold (1995)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold was on USA Up All Night on January 31, 1998.

I’m sure you’ve seen Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, but this has ten more feet on that.

Inga (Raelyn Saalman), Betty (Tammy Parks) and Angel Grace (J. J. North) are the three finalists for Plaything’s Centerfold of the Year, which finds Angel heading to Dr. Lindstrom (John LaZar) to continue beauty treatments that he’s already told her could be dangerous. But when the first new dose makes her breasts grow, why would she stop?

After sleeping with the magazine’s photographer, Angel forgets to take a dose and sees wrinkles, so she starts taking beyond her prescription. This causes her to grow, as you can expect, into the titular 60-foot centerfold.

With a cast that includes Tommy Kirk, Michele Bauer, Ross Hagen, George Stover, Stanley Livingston and Russ Tamblyn, this movie delivers what you expect: two centerfolds brawling in the middle of Los Angeles, but giant ones, and then a doctor gets speared with a big needle, which is kind of what you really, really wanted.

The urge to be beautiful is strong. When left unchecked, you end up really tall. There’s a moral somewhere.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Black Ice (1992)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Black Ice was on USA Up All Night on July 21, 1995.

It’s still early fall as I write this, and the last thing I want to think about is snow or icy roads, and here I am, watching a movie shot in Winnipeg, where huge snow piles are all over the place.

Called A Passion for Murder in the UK, this stars Russian actress Joanna Pacula as Vanessa, a government agent who is sleeping with a married politician named Eric Weaver (Arne Olsen). After they have a fight, he’s killed when she shoves him out a window, and she has to go on the run, as she’s left out in the cold by her black ops boss. The only person who can help her is Ben Shorr (Michael Nouri), a cab driver.

Directed by Neill Fearnley, whose career was primarily in TV, and written by Olsen and John Alan Schwartz — the Conan le Cilaire who wrote as well as the Alan Black who wrote Faces of Death — the main reason I watched this was Michael Ironside, who plays Quinn, Vanessa’s boss who tells her that she’s a loose end that needs to be killed.

Ben, an author who can’t get a break, has to drive her from Detroit to Seattle, all on back roads. Those roads are all in Canada, and man, they’re cold. And kind of boring. There is a sex scene in a rest stop, where Nouri bends Pacula over a sink and someone accidentally walks in.

The real star here is Michael Nouri’s fake long hair. It looks like they threw yarn at him and just gave  p. You can’t stop looking at it.

I just wanted Ironside to kill everyone.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Backfire (1995)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Backfire was on USA Up All Night on November 10, 1995, July 20, 1996 and February 21, 1997.

In a city where firefighters are traditionally women, Jeremy Jackson (Josh Mosby) tries to follow in the steps of his mother (Edie Falco!) and sister (Mary McCormack, Howard Stern’s movie wife), who are firefighting heroes. Yet at the same time that he starts, toilets start to explode all over the city.

This film parodies Backdraft with elements of Falling Down, Cliffhanger, and Aladdin, as well as MST3K-style shadows that appear to comment on the movie at one point. The cast is something I would have picked: Telly Savalas as the bad guy in his last film, Kathy Ireland as a firefighter, and Shelley Winters as an older firefighter, Lt. Shithouse and Robert Mitchum as Marshal Marc Marshall. I almost forgot to mention that Kristen Johnston is in it.

Filemed back-to-back with Cyber Vengeance, this was nearly a sequel to another film written by J. Chris Ingvordsen, Firehouse. It was directed by A. Dean Bell. There’s a scene where a Middle Eastern terrorist asks someone for directions to the World Trade Center in this. That would be offensive in 1995, when two years ago the building was bombed, but outrageous after 9/11. Even weirder, the tagline is “A bonfire of the insanities,” which references a movie that people who would watch this would never see.

I wish this had the budget for the KISS song “Firehouse,” which is when Gene breathes fire and features the lyrics, “She’ll adore you and she’ll floor you / With her wisdom and her vision / And you’ll love it and think of it / Till you lose all intuition, c’mon.” It may be too intelligent for this movie, which somehow gathered great talents and made something beneath them.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EUREKA BLU RAY RELEASE: The Adventurers (1995)

Posted on by

Wai Lok-yan (Andy Lau) was just eight years old — during the Khmer Rouge — when his parents were killed as he watched, the victims of Pol Pot, as his father was working for the CIA. Years later, Wai is a member of the Thai Air Force and learns that his father’s murderer — a double agent named Ray Liu (Paul Chun) — is now a rich arms dealer who has moved to America. He makes his way there, thanks to the CIA, but ends up falling in love with Liu’s daughter, Crystal (Jacklyn Wu) and must save her when she’s kidnapped by a gang. Oh yeah — he also has an affair with Liu’s lover, Mona (Rosamund Kwan).

Remember when every Hong Kong director had to work with Van Damme first? Ringo Lam made this before he did Maximum Risk. This was filmed in the U.S., Hong Kong, and the Philippines, showcasing the international scope Lam wanted to achieve in his films.

If you’re going to kill the man who murdered your father, I have some advice for you. Perhaps, just maybe, don’t fall in love with his daughter. I mean, you can cuck him by sleeping with his mistress. That’s fine.

Eureka Classics is releasing this film for the first time in North America from a brand new 2K restoration. A limited edition of 2,000 copies, it features new artwork by Time Tomorrow and includes extras such as audio commentary by film critic David West, interviews with Gary Bettinson and Sandy Shaw, a trailer, and a limited edition collector’s booklet with a new essay by Hong Kong cinema scholar Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park. You can get it from MVD.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Stuart Saves His Family (1995)

Posted on by

June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

How does a character who was in short sketches get to be in a movie? Ask nearly everyone in the 1990s who had a recurring Saturday Night Live character.

Al Franken created and played the character Stuart Smalley, basing it on people he met in Al-Anon as he went through it to support his wife. First appearing on February 9, 1991, Stuart shared on his public access show how he was a member of many 12-step groups. He became popular enough to have a book, I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!: Daily Affirmations by Stuart Smalley. This led Harold Ramis to get with Franken and push for a film.

By the way, in Live From New York—an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Franken says that he wanted Mike Myers to play the part, but when they did the read-through, it only worked when he did it, as he wrote it in his voice. Robert Smigel suggested he do the part. He also admitted that he would always be around when Lorne Michaels picked the sketches to make sure Stuart got on.

In the film, Stuart loses his show. He has to come back home for a funeral, facing off with his dysfunctional family of brother Donnie (Vincent D’Onofrio), sister Jodie (Lesley Boone), mom (Shirley Knight), and dad (Harris Yulin). There’s also a battle over where the body will be buried between Dad and his cousins, Ray (Joe Flaherty) and Denise (Robin Duke). By the end, you will be sure of why Stuart has needed all of this therapy, but at least he becomes famous for his self-help and ends up with a good friend, Julia (Laura San Giacomo, always perfect).

Sadly, despite Gene Siskel calling it “smart and hip” and Roger Ebert calling out that “it has more courage than a lot of serious films,” it made under a million at the box office. Stuart would return one more time to the show and cried, yelling, “You didn’t want ‘funny and poignant. You wanted Dumb….and Dumber….and Dumber….and Dumber!” He would also return in 2004 when Al Gore hosted.

This movie’s failure did exactly what Stuart worked to fix. It put Al Franken into a depression. At least it made more than It’s Pat, which grossed $60,000. It’s a sweet film with a good heart and way better than it should be.

JUNESPLOITATION: One Man’s Justice (1995)

Posted on by

June 11: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is ‘90s Action!

I’m the biggest fan of Stone Cold, so I hoped this movie would have the same insanity as Brian Bosworth’s more famous action film. Sadly, no.

This time, rogue FBI agent Karl Savak (Bruce Payne) is selling weapons to our enemies and one of his henchmen, Marcus (Jeff Kober) kills the wife (Deborah Worthing) and daughter (Rachel Duncan) of soldier John North (Bosworth). This is also known as One Tough Bastard, which is appropriate because North survives being shot multiple times and gets his own justice.

Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium) started his directing here, even if he was removed and replaced by producer Kurt Anderson, who also directed Martial Law II: Undercover, Martial Outlaw and Dead Cold. This was written by Steve Selling, his only writing credit on IMDB.

There’s also M.C. Hammer as nasty dude Dexter Kane and DeJuan Guy from Candyman as a kid who becomes Boz’s sidekick. Yes, a movie where we want to watch Bosworth kill everyone, and he ends up having a kid help him. This is not what anyone wants to see. As good as Payne and Kober are in this, Bosworth’s fights feel like late-era Dusty Rhodes, standing in the center of the ring while his opponents pinball and feed back into him, taking his slow-motion offense and bionic elbows. It feels like going through the motions when I wanted more.

You can watch this on YouTube.