You have to love Helen "Supergirl" Slater as a Capenters-loving scientist, and Martin Landau as an evil mad genius. You just have to. [IMDB]

In the episode "Fallen Star," Easton plays a washed-up rock star who used to play in front of 80,000 people, and now she plays to small nightclub crowds. She's about to kill herself, when a mega-fan from the future travels back to stop her. It turns out that in the future, not only have they discovered time travel (by inhabiting the bodies of people in the past) but they've also ruined music. Everybody just listens to cookie-cutter bland music — not the vibrant adult-contemporary "quiet storm" slow jams that Ms. Easton belts out. It's a tragedy.

But by preventing Easton from killing herself, the time-traveling fan totally changes the future — it's now a better world for your great-grandchildren to grow up in, because everybody's listening to songs like the one you can hear Easton singing at the end of the above clip. Easton's character still has to die, of course, but luckily her backup singer randomly dies and they're able to transfer Easton's consciousness into the backup singer's body — so she can inspire the world, with lyrics like, "I'm growing stronger/Like a flower in the rain/I can feel the power/I can see the light/I can hear my heart telling me/It's going to be all right."

Somehow we overlooked this gem during both CG week and our roundup of scary sex scenes. We're even more embarrassed that we somehow missed this great moment of terrifying fellatio:

In Thralls, a group of five women are neither vampire nor human, cursed with the need to feed on human blood but unable to turn others. And they need to become free from their demonic master — so they open an underground rave club. You know it makes perfect sense. Thanks to Madeline Ashby for suggesting this one!

Starstuff, produced in 1980 by WCAU-TV in Philadelphia, was thought to be gone forever. But thanks to some found footage and an active fanbase online, we can remember Starstuff fondly with another io9 video:

Find out more about the show here, including a complete episode to download for your viewing pleasure.

The tender tale of a guy who becomes a ninja after being apprenticed to a funeral director (???), the story meanders between strange white guys fighting - often in gold foil tops - and our main character learning ninja skills so that he can save a town. Here's a great moment where his master teaches him to fight a zombie.

I love that the scene starts in winter and ends in spring. Also, I have no idea if the original dialog was that awesome - "I've never seen anybody shit like that before!" - or it's all the fault of some snarky dubbing. Somehow, having heard the English-language dialog in the first clip, I don't think it's a bad translation. Director Ho is sometimes called Hong Kong's answer to Ed Wood.

Zombie vs. Ninja via IMDB (Thanks Gregor and Lorena!)

The awesome dance routine, of course, really comes from the very end of Radioactive Dreams, directed by the great Albert Pyun. Philip and Marlowe have been trapped in a fallout shelter for the past 15 years, with no entertainment other than classic noir detective stories — hence their names and their determination to be Bogart-esque. They have launch keys to one of the last remaining nuclear missiles, so in addition to the cannibals wanting to eat their uncontaminated bodies, they also have gangsters and "disco mutants" chasing after them. It's not much of a spoiler to say they prevail, and succeed in teaching all the mutants how to dance properly. And of course, this movie has classic 1980s post-apocalyptic mutants, with the punk hair and KISS makeup.

The English-dubbed version of Indonesia's Lady Terminator contains the only English phrases you'll need to get through your day: "Is there any man who can satisfy me?" "I'll come back in a hundred years and have revenge on your great-grandaughter." Oh also, "I'm not a lady, I'm an anthropologist." And: "Hey listen, Jack and I have seen more dead bodies than you've eaten hot dogs. So just shut up and eat."

"It says here all three of these guys died with their cocks bitten off. Could be a small animal." "An eel?" "I've heard of the ultimate blow job, but this is too much."

Lady Terminator, made in Indonesia in the late 1980s, is that rare rip-off of a U.S. movie that forges off in a new direction, and approaches its own levels of sublimeness. The slogan, "First she mates, then she terminates," pretty much says it all. I love the flickering blue lightning coming out of her eyes and trashing the room — not to mention the "if the car is rocking" scene. Oh, and the guy scratching his head with a submachine gun.

Grad Student Madness explains what the hell this movie is about:

Here's the story: Years ago, the South Seas Queen, a figure from Javanese folklore, was perfectly happy killing men by letting the snake in her vagina bite off their dingly-danglies during intercourse. Unfortunately, some jerk yanks the snake out of her cootch and turns it into a dagger. She's pissed (who wouldn't be?) and vows revenge on his great-grandaughter. His thought, no doubt, at this point is, "Okay, Crazy, good luck with that grandaughter thing!"

Fast-forward to the 80s, when Tania, an anthropologist, is investigating the South Seas Queen. We know she's an anthropologist because of the immortal line: "I'm not a lady! I'm an anthropologist!" Anyway, Tania is scuba diving in the general vicinity of the old South Sea Queen place when her boat is capsized by a tsunami and she is dragged to the bottom of the sea and onto a bed in a perfectly dry room (No, I can't really explain that) where that sea serpent enters her vag (via really bad animation) and possesses her.

Tania emerges from the surf possessed and naked and the film proceeds to blatantly rip off entire sequences from Terminator as she hunts the grandaughter, who is an Indonesian pop singer, and get hunted by a cop with the worst mullet this side of country music. Countless people get shot, numerous scenes get lifted, clothes get shed with abandon. What's amazing to me about Lady Terminator is how it adapts James Cameron's movie for the Indonesian working-class audience by incorporating so much local mythology. It looks like the film we know until it gets into sea serpents and witchy queens who live at the bottom of the ocean. It's all fairly strange.

Big props to YouTube user Slasherfan, who put up 20 minutes of the best moments from this instant classic online. Here's another 10 minutes of Lady Terminator goodness:

So in Witches Of Breastwick, there's an ancient witch who died or something, and now she fucks men to death if they come too close to her cabin. And a group of young witches have their eye on some strapping young dude whom they want to sacrifice to her. Meanwhile, Bare Wench Project is pretty much what you'd expect: A group of people ventures into the woods and discovers the sinister truth behind the Bare Wench, who makes them horny:

And here's what happens towards the end of the movie, when everything is unraveling and the Bare Wench has them in her sway:

So what do you think?

Released in 2005, this movie doesn't have much going for it other than spiritedness and gore, both of which are shown off admirably in this scene.

The plot is a by-now routine mishmash of Buffy and fast zombie lore, which one amusing twist. Our protagonist is accidentally killed by his mother in a zany drunken noose chair kerfuffle. Totally unfazed, his mother grabs some books about the undead from her local church basement and raises him from the dead in time for school the next day. Most of the humor comes from our zombie trying to get the girl he likes to go out with him, while struggling with the urge to eat people. I love that the zombie transformation scene happens in about 1 minute, just so we can get to the good stuff: adolescent zombie romance.

Though uneven, the movie is still pretty amusing - especially in the blood-soaked climax.

Boy Eats Girl via IMDB

The little interlude in the middle of that clip involves Robert Conrad and his partner investigating the cyborg killing spree... which, whatever. But the subplot, about the cyborg and the woman who loves him, is actually surprisingly great. (In a bit of forced irony, in a later scene she tells the cyborg he's a wonderful man and laments that all the men she usually meets are "so plastic.")

Made by the great B-movie master Albert Pyun, Adrenalin: Fear The Rush was filmed in Slovakia but takes place in Boston, where a plague has the city walled off and quarantined. As Reelviews puts it:

Attention to detail is not exactly Adrenalin's forte, either. All of the police cars in Boston look like Yugos and have the word "Policia" stamped on them. Why "Policia" instead of "Police"? Who knows. Who cares. One character apparently comes back from the dead without a word of explanation. Other characters are still around, alive and kicking, after getting riddled with about a dozen bullets. If I tried to list all the holes, inconsistencies, and other obvious problems with this movie, it would take me the rest of the week to write this review.

Christopher Lambert and Natasha Henstridge are cops, investigating a slew of nasty killings. And then they discover that something is lurking in the sewers:

And here's a glimpse of Henstridge taking down the sewer mutant, in an awesome, bondage-escaping, gun-toting scene:

Seth Shostak, currently the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, was one of the young filmmakers behind 1969's The Turkey That Ate St. Louis. In a 2008 blog post, he explained just what exactly he and his cohorts were thinking:

One of the many doubtful activities of my youth was making films. I started doing this at age 11, and by the time I was a teenager, my buddy Jerry Rebold and I had already constructed a sound system that occasionally worked with our wind-up, 16mm camera.

In 1967, while in grad school, fellow student Bob O'Connell, Jerry Rebold and I made a half-hour film entitled "The Teenage Monster Blob from Outer Space, Which I Was." This parody of 1950s sci-fi films starred six pounds of Play-Doh.

The film bombed. It was, as O'Connell called it, "a turkey." This disgusting failure prompted us to change our cinematic strategy in two ways: (1) our next film was just going to be a trailer, rather than a complete film — that way we could save money and just put in the good parts, and (2) if we were making turkeys, why not make a REAL turkey?

Ergo, this short "preview" film, shot mostly at Caltech and at that school's Owens Valley Radio Observatory. Observant viewers will note then-department chair Jesse Greenstein in the role of Walter Cronkite, and a few other astronomers too (including yours truly).

"The Turkey that Ate St. Louis" was entered in the Baltimore International Film Festival, and automatically inserted into the feature-film category, where it faced competition from major motion pictures from both America and Europe. Despite this uneven playing field, "The Turkey" lost.

"The Teenage Monster Blob" eventually became more popular. Too late.

I've scoured the Internet for a good hour looking to find out just which classic piece of cinema defeated The Turkey That Ate St. Louis at the film festival, but it appears lost to history. I guess the Baltimore International Film Festival wasn't quite the cultural arbiter I thought it was. Either way, I'm ready to declare this Turkey the real winner. Now if only we could get some hotshot filmmaker to expand this gem to two and a half hours...

This soft-core mindbender from the mid-1980s was directed by none other than Just Jaeckin, the French filmmaker who brought the classic flesh flick Emmanuel to the world in 1974. Apparently he wanted to try his hand at science fiction, and the result is this bizarre tale of Gwendoline's search for the elusive, unnamed butterfly her dead father once sought. It begins as a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure, with Gwendoline wandering around in various "savage" countries (?), meeting rapscallions and her plucky pal Beth while being yelled at in untranslated Chinese by random people.

At last she and Beth find a guy named Willard to take them to the forbidding Land of the Yik Yak, where the butterfly is rumored to be. Unfortunately, nobody has ever survived the journey there, and in these clips you find out why! It turns out the Yik Yak are a female-dominated society of warriors who live in a vast underground city. For some reason, every part of the city is full of giant steampunky gears and other industrial objects that happen to have mostly-naked women in them. Why are there strange steamy machines with women popping in and out of them?

Luckily Gwendoline is able to cross-dress Willard as a woman (complete with fetching g-string), as you can see in the top clip. Then she stages a dramatic rescue of Beth from another inexplicable region full of water fetish scenes. Did Just Jaeckin travel through time and film this at Kink.com? I'm starting to wonder.

Anyway, everything ends happily, but not without more bared flesh and sex-hungry ladies attacking the lone man in their midst. This is a must-see, and perfect for Thanksgiving!

Gwendoline via IMDB

Thanks, Gregor and Lorena!

When I watched this film on TV a while back, I was on the fence about whether those were real-life lizards fighting — their motions were so jerky, their skins so fake-looking, I just thought they were really well-done Harryhausen-style stop-motion creations. But no — as various commenters have pointed out, those are real life lizards, being harmed in the making of this film. As English professor Michael Delahoyde puts it on his Dino-Films page:

The dinosaurs are photographically enlarged lizards, and are enjoyable to see eating and slurping the air, but distressing to see encumbered with all the glued-on crap to make them into things that look like dinosaurs only insofar as they don't look like lizards anymore. Pitting the two lizards against each other for the fight scene is inexcusable. More humans need to be killed instead.

It is really depressing to think of the film-makers making the lizards fight, just for a dumb spectacle. We definitely do not condone cruelty to lizards or other critters in the making of terrible monster movies.

In any case, to make it up to you, here's a giant green spider that hopefully was allowed to scuttle away unharmed after this take:

Watch as The Asylum's masterminds use rubber cement for explosions and blow a Porta Potty up 30 feet in the air. And use fan-refurbished military vehicles to add a layer of verisimilitude. These people are total culture heroes, the Roger Cormans of our generation.

This awesome behind-the-scenes snippet is from MegaFault, a movie starring er's Eriq LaSalle which comes out on DVD on Nov. 24. Yes, just in time for Thanksgiving, so you can give thanks that you're not actually in this movie. Here's the official plot summary:

In West Virginia, Charley "Boomer" Baxter (LaSalle) is supervising the placement of mountaintop-removal explosives. As he detonates the TNT, a massive earthquake liquefies the terrain. Within hours, Dr. Amy Lane (Murphy), a government seismologist, arrives at the epicenter. Amy determines that the initial quake has exposed a deep seismic fault that runs across the center of the North American continent and threatens to tear the world in half. Now, Amy and Boomer must race ahead of the massive crack in the earth while devising a plan to stop the devastation and warn everyone in its path.

Tragically, Reign of Fire did not deliver on any count other than the Star Wars fight scene. The dragons were meh and never fought directly against helicopters, plus all efforts at creating a credible post-apocalyptic world are thrown out the window in a scene where Bale brews coffee with an electric coffee maker. Really, now - you think these dragon-menaced weirdos in a castle are going to have electricity for making coffee, but won't have a DVD player to show the kids Star Wars?

I love how Bale says he created the Star Wars story too - no fear of copyright violations after the fall of civilization, I guess!

Also I will confess that Reign of Fire is worth a watch, if only for the "so bad it's good" factor. And because this flick has the distinction of being the only science fiction film to feature dragons (at least that I am aware of).

Thanks for the tip, Esther!

Reign of Fire via Intertubes

This piece of awesomeness comes from Contamination aka Alien Contamination, the masterpiece by Luigi Cozzi, who previously directed the amazing Star Wars ripoff Star Crash — the one featuring a mascara-wearing David Hasselhoff fighting androids in a stop-motion sword duel. Having so perfectly captured the spirit of Star Wars, Cozzi moved on to Alien, with... uh, mixed results.