"Friday the 13th Part 6 - 8" (1986 - 1989) The Series' Silver Age

"Friday the 13th Part 1 - 5" (1980-1985) The Series' Golden Age

The most shocking thing about the FRIDAY THE 13th series, is that the story begins in 1958. That's sixty years ago! Only 13 years after World War 2 for crying out loud. 

Ironically, although FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 5 is called THE NEW BEGINNING, it's actually the last chapter of the series first era, a time period I like to think of as the Golden age. From part 6 onward, FRIDAY THE 13TH goes in a radically different direction, creatively, tonally, even technically. 

"Rogue One" (2016) Dollarama Action Figures

Lots of Rogue One action figures cluttering up Dollarama.

"Psycho IV" (1990) - The Sad Fate of Anthony Perkins

In 1990, Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates for the final time. Twice, actually.

PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING, is a step-up from NBC's BATES MOTEL. Made by Showtime, the film had the freedom to include the graphic violence and gratuitous nudity people plunked down their hard-earned cash to see. Would they paid to have see this as a theatrical release like PSYCHO II or III? Probably not.

The movie is directed by Stephen King's favourite director; Mick Garris, who helmed SLEEPWALKERS and countless awful TV adaptations of King's work.

Anthony Perkins was interested in directing, and pitched a story idea he created in collaboration with Charles Pogue, the writer of PSYCHO III, but Universal chose to go with a script by Joseph Stefano, the original screenwriter of Hitchcock's PSYCHO.

Well, you can hardly fault them for that decision. Seems like a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, Stefano didn't have any interesting ideas about where to take Norman or the series. Instead, he succumbs to the creative bankruptcy that afflicts far too many once great story-tellers; the old let's do a prequel shuffle.

There are few things more boring than watching tepid re-enactments of backstory you already know. Yes, Norman had a bad relationship with his mother. Yes, he poisoned her and her lover. Yes, he stole her body and put his taxidermy skills to use to preserve her. The only reason for dramatizing all this stuff thirty years later is because the filmmakers were too lazy to come up with their own ideas.

The details of what went on between Norman and his mother are sprinkled throughout Hitchcock's PSYCHO. Only at the end do we have the full the picture. It lingers in our mind like a ghost story, or a nightmare. When you think about young Norman poisoning his mother, or robbing her grave, your imagination makes these images more creepy and disturbing than anything that appears on screen.

I think the makers of PSYCHO II understood this, because rather than have a full-fledged flashback depicting Norman poisoning his mother, the movie is restrained. We see the reflection of a young boy in a doorknob, hear the gasps of an angry, dying woman. They show just enough to keep the horror thriving in our imagination.

After the wonderfully cinematic PSYCHO III, it's a huge letdown to see how small PSYCHO IV feels.  It was crafted for television, not the cinema.

There's one of those radio talk shows that used to exist back in the 80s, that got millions of listens across the country. Tonight's show is about boys who murder their mother, and wouldn't you know it, Norman Bates just happens to be listening, so he phones in to tell the story of his youth.

For most of the movie, Anthony Perkins is basically doing a cameo. He sits on the phone, leading us into lengthy flash-back scenes where Norman is played by Henry Thomas, who only eight years prior was Elliot in ET.

Mrs. Bates is played by Olivia Hussey, best known for her role in 1968's ROMEO AND JULIET. This is the version with the lengthy bedroom scene of underage nudity. Everyone I know had to watch this movie in high school, and more than one person has shared the same awkward story, about how the creepy teacher "just happened" to pause the movie for discussion on a shot of Romeo's ass, or the quick flash of Juliet's tits. It's like they'd been waiting all year for the day they got to show the kids this movie. See, back before Columbine, high school was a lot more lax.

Joseph Stefano writes in callbacks to the original movie that don't make any sense. Like, when Mr. Cassidy asks Marion if she's unhappy, she replies "Not inordinately." So throughout PSYCHO IV, we hear Norman repeating the same line.

It's such a random line to bring back. And doesn't even make sense, since Norman wasn't the one using it in the original movie. It's like if in THE PHANTOM MENACE, Mace Windu kept mentioning he needed to go to Toshi's to pick up some power converters.

Another bothersome thing about PSYCHO IV is I have no idea where it takes place in relation to the other sequels. At first, you get the impression it's ignoring Parts II and III, and is just supposed to be a direct sequel to the original, but Norman mentions his last murders were four years ago. Is he referring to the events of PSYCHO III?

Stefano can't even keep the details from his original script in check. Norman says the peephole in the parlour was made by his father. But in the original movie, his father is dead long before the hotel is built. They don't build the hotel until mother shacks up with her new boyfriend.

During the making of PSYCHO IV, Anthony Perkins was diagnosed with HIV. Two years later, he passed away on September 12th 1992.

His beloved wife, actress Berry Berenson, died one day shy of the ninth anniversary of Perkins passing. Perkins wife died on September 11th 2001, as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Centre.

To end on a positive note, I could point out Perkins' played Norman Bates one more time in 1990, the same year as PSYCHO IV.

Oddly enough, Perkins' appeared as Norman in a commercial for Oatmeal Crisp cereal.

I think this speaks to how popular the character of Norman Bates was in the public mind, that the good people at General Mills chose to have a vicious serial killer as the spokesperson for their product. Not a fantasy character like Dracula or Frankenstein, but a human, based of the real-life murderer Ed Gein. I can just imagine the pitch meeting in the big boardroom. "Hey, Norman Bates, the guy best known for hacking naked women to death with a butcher knife, that's the who we ought to get to tell people our cereal tastes good!"

"Bates Motel" TV Pilot (1987)

Although PSYCHO III has aged well, and now stands out as one of the more interesting and stylish horror films of the 80's, back in the day it's meagre box-office returns were a major disappointment.

Roger Ebert tried to help spread some good word, but his positive review was torpedo by old Baldy McSourpuss.

The message from Universal was clear: PSYCHO III had disgraced the franchise, and there would be no more feature films.

The facade of the PSYCHO house was a major attraction at the Universal Studio tour. I'm pretty sure one day an executive looked at it and said, "Well jeez, we have the house on the backlot. We might as well make a TV show with it."

So in the summer of 1987,  NBC aired the pilot of a proposed television series based on PSYCHO, called BATES MOTEL, a title so good, twenty-five years later A&E would use it for their new series.

From the very beginning, it obvious BATES MOTEL isn't attempting to re-create the atmosphere of the films. Just listen to its opening theme. This is your PSYCHO TV series? It sounds like the background music they play on Oprah when some woman's talking about her dumb kid who overcame an eating disorder or something.

It seems Universal didn't want Anthony Perkins anywhere near this production. One of the first things they do is kill off Norman. In the flashbacks, he's played by a different actor. 

The TV show centres on a new character, this kid Alex, who comes from a very sad background. After his mother dies, he's left in the care of an abusive stepfather, who constantly beats him, until one day he fights back and kills his stepfather.

Seems kind of extreme that would get little Alex thrown into a mental hospital for the criminally insane, but that's not even the weird part. The doctor decides the best course of therapy is for little Alex to become friends with Norman Bates.

Yeah, let's take this fragile child and make him become best buddies with the sex maniac who's committed multiple vicious murders. Aw, isn't that cute, look at the two of them together. I know Norman mostly killed women he was sexually attracted to, but seeing him frolic with a little boy makes me uncomfortable.

When Norman dies, he leaves the Bates Motel to Alex. Once Alex gets his walking papers, he decides to run the motel. His way of keeping Norman's spirit alive.

Carrying an urn full of Norman's cremated ashes, Alex inspects the abandoned motel. There's an interesting moment when he looks at the ledger, and you can see where Marion Crane signed in as Marie Samuels. Nice call-back to PSYCHO.

But the ledger in-joke goes further.

In the original PSYCHO, the previous guest to sign in before Marion was one Michael Scott of San Fransisco. How about that, Michael Scott stayed at the Bates Motel.

Now in the TV show, the name is now Mildred Scott of San Fransisco. Weird they would decide to change the name from Michael to Mildred. They didn't have to include the ledger at all. It isn't some important piece of exposition. Why go through the trouble of copying all the unimportant details of Michael Scott's sign in, and then change his first name?

I'd say either it's some kind of joke, like the prop person who made the ledger had a mother-in-law named Mildred, or, they couldn't read the writing in the original movie and misread the name of Michael as Mildred. Remember, this is back in 1987 where you couldn't get HD screen shots with the snap of a finger.

Another interesting detail about the ledger is the date. July 1960. In PSYCHO, Marion Crane arrived at the Bates Motel in December, not July.

As most fans of PSYCHO know, the decision to have the movie take place in December was on account of the footage shot for the rear-projection scenes of Marion driving. When this footage was filmed, the street poles still had Christmas decorations on them. Wanting to keep the budget as low as possible, Hitchcock figured it would be easier to insert a title card with the date December 11th at the beginning of the movie than it would be to reshoot all that driving footage.

After BATES MOTEL prompted me to compare the two ledgers, I noticed something I'd never seen before.

This Michael Scott character signed in to the motel on April 18th. Most likely, this sequence was shot before the Christmas decoration problem was noticed in the driving footage, so that would suggest this is the time period PSYCHO was originally conceived of taking place during; not December, but late April or early May.

Since Alex comes off as a weirdo (I mean, until yesterday he's been in the nuthouse his whole life) the producers were probably worried audiences would think he was gay or asexual, so they shoehorn in a love interest--TANK GIRL wearing a chicken suit.

During construction of the new motel, a worker is electrocuted, leading to the discovery of a body buried in the ground. It's Norman's mother.

Huh?

What the hell is she doing buried down there? Did the makers of this not watch the original movie? Surely they're not suggesting that after Sam subdued Norman and unmasked him as the killer, that the police grabbed her old bag of bones from out of the fruit cellar and buried her on the grounds of the motel? 

I can understand them ignoring PSYCHO II and III, but if you're going to ignore the continuity set down in the ORIGINAL FILM, why even bother to make the show?

They end up stealing the plot from PSYCHO II, where Lila Loomis was pretending to be mother in order to drive Norman crazy. In BATES MOTEL, a greedy bank manager dresses up like mother in order to scare Alex away so he can buy the valuable property.

This pilot is actually two shows in one, as I guess they weren't 100% certain what the format of the show was going to be. The first half is a show about Alex and the Chicken Lady living in the spooky old Bates House. The second half imagines BATES MOTEL as an anthology series, like THE TWILIGHT ZONE, where every week a new guest would check in and have some kind adventure.

A woman arrives and is about to slit her wrists in the tub… really? You know for a show that wants to pretend the PSYCHO sequels don't exist, they're sure taking a lot from them.

Anyway, she's about to kill herself, when some nosey party girl wanders into her room. All of her buddies have checked into the motel, and they're boogie-ing down in the cafe. The girl introduces suicide lady to a young Jason Bateman, and even though she's old enough to be his mother, soon they're about to get hot and heavy. Yowza.

However, it turns out all these young revelers are the ghosts of kids who committed suicide. Judging from their dress, I'd say back in the fifties. They're doomed to roam the earth, warning others not to kill themselves, lest they end up like them.

But I don't know, that kind of looks like a pretty good afterlife to me. They all get to pal around together, traveling the country, wild parties every night, maybe get some nookie from old MILFS... I can think of worse ways to spend eternity.

Of course, none of these people ever came back, as BATES MOTEL did not become a TV series. There was only one final kick at the cat. For that, they decided to bring back Norman.

And we'll warn you right now, it is not a happy ending.

"Psycho III" (1986) Norman ❤️ Suicidal Nun

PSYCHO III was directed by Anthony Perkins. I'm guessing that was his stipulation for returning to this franchise. You want me back as Norman? Then you give me the chance to direct.

The movie has a most unusual opening. A suicidal nun accidentally causes the death of one of her compadres. This scene bring to mind Hitchcock's VERTIGO, both with its clock tower and innocent person plunging to their death.

Obviously, it would be too awkward for her to remain in the convent. I bet every time the bells rung, everyone would be looking at her like, "Yeah, we remember what you did."

We see the rundown hotel. There are some subtle call-backs to PSYCHO II.  Abandoned in the dirt, we see the book Lila Loomis' daughter was reading. On the storm window, we see the marks left behind by the murdered horny kid. Wait, the murderer didn't clean those up when they disposed of the body before the police arrived?

The scene introducing us to Norman is great.  He poisons the bird feeder so he can collect sample for his "hobby". What a ghoul.

Now, it's obvious the camera pans away to Norman, so that the live birds can be switched out with fake dead ones by the time the camera pans back, but I wonder how they achieved the effect of the birds falling to the ground and flopping around. Can you really train a bird to do that? I think the animal wranglers pulled a Bill Cosby and drugged those birds.

There's a newspaper reporter digging up dirt on Norman. She starts with his previous place of employment.

The restaurant owner claims Norman was a great employee, but he only worked there a couple of days before quitting to run the motel. And during that time he broke plates, got into fights with customers, and burned the restaurant guy's arm. He's remembering Norman's work record with rose-coloured glasses.

The ex-nun meets some sleazy musician named Duke, and the both of them wind up moving into the motel. Norman immediately gives Duke a job, putting him in charge of the business. As for the Nun, Norman immediately begins watching her undress through the back parlour peephole. Don't the motel TV's have Skinemax or something Norman can watch to get his rocks off to? He's getting too old for this peeping through the wall nonsense.

I like that they've kept the same painting hanging over the peephole since the original movie.

The painting depicts the Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders. As it goes, Susanna was bathing alone in the lake when these two horny old guys came by. The elders threaten Susanna, saying they'll claim they saw her having sex with some guy, unless, of course, she has sex with them. Back in those days, promiscuous women were put to death. However, just before Susanna is executed, Daniel questions the elders and figures out they're full of shit, and they get executed instead of her.

In PSYCHO III, when Norman looks at the picture, he hallucinates, now seeing Susanna as enjoying the company of the elders. It's his twisted mind telling him, "She's a slut, she deserves to die."

But the jokes on him! After he dresses up like Mother and prepares to stab her, it turns out she's already slit her own wrists.

For the second time, the Nun fails at her own suicide.

Perhaps frustrated he didn't get to kill her, Norman stabs some bar girl Duke brought back to the motel. Clearly, this scene is supposed to mirror the shower murder, having the victim trapped in a confined space. They even repeat Norman's "Oh God, Mother! Blood! Blood!" dialogue. 

Now before she was murdered, Duke gave the girl a five dollar bill with a missing corner. The next day, he knows something is up when he finds that same bill in the cash register.

This feels really off that Norman would take the five dollars. She had it tucked into the waistband of her underwear. You mean he patted her down looking for cash? That isn't his MO at all.

The movie spends a lot of time throwing romance our way, as Norman and the Nun get friendly. It's kind of sweet, seeing two damaged people make a connection. Instead of rooting for her to get the hell away from Norman, you're pulling for him to get his shit together.

And stop doing stuff like this. Jeez, poor woman is just trying to take a dump, and the next thing you know she's the most brutal murder in the movie.

The filmmakers clearly want you to feel bad for her. They shoehorn in some random scene of her telling the Nun to keep her door closed. I guess that's supposed to be enough to make me think she's a wonderful, full-fledged character, so I'll feel bad when she gets killed. But I'll be honest, it has no where near the same effect as the murder of a character you've been sympathizing and rooting for for over twenty minutes.  

This is likely the best scene in the movie, where the Sheriff, there to investigate the disappearance of the toilet lady, eats bloody ice cubes out of the chest where her body is hidden. It's such a great gag. Suspenseful, darkly humorous. It reminds me a bit of that episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where the woman murders her husband by beating him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb, and then cooks and serves the lamb to the officers investigating his murder, tricking them into eating the murder weapon. No doubt, Hitchcock would loved to have had this ice chest scene in one of his movies.

Perkins really did a fantastic job directing PSYCHO III. The photography is elegant, the atmosphere is rich, both the barren desert landscape and the seedy neon-lit hotel rooms. It's a shame he didn't direct more movies, as PSYCHO III demonstrates his ability to craft wonderful cinematic moments.

Of course, the movie ends tragically, with the Nun being killed when Norman accidentally knocks her down the stairs. I guess it's supposed to be punishment, for her accidentally knocking that old Nun off the tower at the beginning of the movie. I suppose Alanis Morrissette would call this ironic. Don't you think?

Just as PSYCHO II ret-conned PSYCHO I, PSYCHO III decides to ret-con PSYCHO II, by getting rid of Missuss Spool being Norman's real mother. They weren't clever about it or anything. They just had the reporter tell Norman, "Yeah, she was crazy. She made all that shit about being your Mother up."

The final shot of the movie is interesting. As Norman is being hauled away to the mental hospital, most-likely for good this time, Perkins' films the scene using an obvious, out-dated rear-projection. It looks nothing like the other driving scenes in the movie, which as far as I can tell were shot with car rigs on real roads. My guess is Perkins wanted to honour the sort of technology Hitchcock used decades earlier, and for the last image of his film to look like it belonged in that era.

Released in the summer of 1986, PSYCHO III didn't do as well at the box office as PSYCHO II, grossing only 14 million. So it made more money than BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (11 million), but not as much as HOWARD THE DUCK (16 million).

For better or worse, this was the end of the Anthony Perkins PSYCHO franchise.

At least, on the big screen.

"Psycho III" plays at the Can-View Drive-In in June of 1986

"Psycho II" (1983) The Far Better Sequel Than Anyone Expected

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Freddy Krueger as "The Phantom of the Opera" (1989)

After playing Freddy Krueger in four NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies, Robert Englund was probably itching to do something different. I mean, he was a classically trained actor, capable of playing more than a wise-cracking, murderer with a scarred face.

Yet when Robert Englund was asked if he wanted to play Freddy Krueger, only as the Phantom of the opera, he said Yes.

Well what was he going to say? Nobody was offering him the Tom Cruise role in Rain Man.

The late 1980's saw a Phantom of the Opera-mania. Based on a french novel, there's been a silent film, a Tchnicolor version, a Hammer-film version, yet it was the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that really put the Phantom of the Opera in the public eye. For awhile, you couldn't avoid seeing the iconic white mask or hearing the music. Even Roger Ebert wrote a novel set against the backdrop of a production of Phantom of the Opera.   

In Toronto, Phantom played at the Pantages theatre, which meant if you went to school in the surrounding area, you likely went on an expensive field trip to see the play. It was a smart move on the part of the producers. What better way to sell thousands of matinee tickets than by busing in school children.

Using the pretence this was somehow educational, the Phantom tricked school groups into coming back year after year. I knew some people who saw that dumb play three or four times.

What leaves a bad taste in my mouth is how unfriendly the Pantages theatre was to ticket buyers. Unlike the Broadway theatres of the time, the Pantages was enormous, practically the length of the airplane hanger. About half the seats were so far away from the stage, you couldn't see shit, unless you rented those dopey binoculars. The Phantom was a very visual play, with fancy costumes, and one of a kind props, and special effects. Can you image paying a hundred bucks for a ticket, and then having to watch the show squinting through binoculars?

We went on one of those field trips, and our school was sitting so far back, most of us didn't realize the Phantom lost his mask and spent the last half-hour of the show running around in hideous face make-up. When the play was over you felt like you'd been ripped off. I'm pretty sure the Phantom made a lot of people swear off going to the theatre in Toronto.

Since interest in the Phantom of the Opera was riding high, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to release a new film version. I like how the poster has the disclaimer: This motion picture is not associated with any current or prior stage production.

First thing you notice is that the movie takes place not in Paris, but New York City. And that it takes place in present day, not the early 20th century. There's weird quote by a Saint who was supposedly executed in 1544, but I couldn't find any trace of him, so I'm pretty sure he was just made up for the movie.

Our lead character is getting ready for her big opera audition. For some reason, she wants to find an obscure piece to sing, so she gets her buddy to dig an old, forgotten opera out of a big pile of stacked up papers. She decides to go with it, despite the fact these pages are clearly cursed.

Her buddy is played by Molly Shannon, the future Saturday Night Live superstar.

At the audition, a sandbag comes free and she winds up hitting her head and going back in time to what I guess is supposed to be her previous life. But frankly, you find yourself wonder, why didn't they just start the movie here. Was this modern-day prologue necessary?

The Phantom has a crush on the young opera singer, so it pisses him off when the stagehand who almost killed her with the falling sandbag, falsely claims the accident wasn't his fault, and blames it on the phantom. If the guy had just manned up and taken responsibility for his own bumbling, I'm pretty sure the Phantom would have let him live.

The big star of the opera house is this blonde lady, who turns out to be a real prima donna. I love how the owner of the opera casually threatens to murder her.

The Phantom puts the body of the stagehand in the opera star's closet, and she has a shit-fit, screaming so loud she loses her voice. Which means her understudy, the Phantom's crush Christine, now has the chance to sing.

Y'know, for a movie monster, that was pretty nice. He could have just killed the opera star in order to give Christine the chance to sing, but he chose to scare her instead. I guess that means he's reasonable.

We see the Phantom pick up a prostitute who vaguely resembles Christine. Was there a version of this scene in the Andrew Lloyd Webber version? Probably, but I don't remember 'cause I couldn't see shit.

A group of thugs try robbing the Phantom, and he uses his knife to dispatch them one by one. This movie must have run into a lot of trouble with the MPAA, because these murders are very tame compared to the graphic screen-shots published in Fangoria magazine.

The next morning, the Phantom's hooker wakes up to find gold coins under her pillow. Man, that Phantom is real gentleman.

Except that his face looks like shit. Rotted or burned up or something. Makes him look a lot like you know who. He covers this disfigurement by sewing fresh skin over his face. Once he touches up the seams with make-up, he looks pretty good. Very dashing.

As the movie goose on, the Phantom's blood lust increases. He kills a critic who gave Christine a bad-review. He kills some old bum who knows his secrets. 

Despite everything the Phantom's done for Christine (I mean, he's practically handed her her entire career), she's put off by his hideous looks and his vicious murders. She's rather be with her hunky new boyfriend. This leads to a fiery confrontation in the Phantom's lair.

Christine wakes up back in the modern day. I'm pretty sure the same actor who played the police inspector also plays the director. And the same actress who played the blonde opera star also appears at the beginning, auditioning before Christine. So I guess this is the new lives they've been reincarnated into. Not sure why Molly Shannon didn't play the past life version of her character, Meg.

You know what I bet it was, I bet they cast the British actress first, and were too cheap to fly her over to America for the New York scenes, so they hired an American actress instead.

"Paradise Motel" (1985)

Back in the day, the drive-in stayed open from March all the way to November.

They had heaters for your car, so the only thing that closed down the screens was snow.

During the tail end of the drive-in season, the double-features got pretty random. Like Martin Scorsese's AFTER HOURS playing with NATIONAL LAMPOONS EUROPEAN VACATION, or REVENGE OF THE NERDS with COMMANDO, or the Patsy Cline bio pic SWEET DREAMS with GHOSTBUSTERS. It's pretty clear they were just slapping together whatever random film prints were still kicking around the projection booth from the summer.

One such double-feature to catch my eye is Chuck Norris's INVASION USA, with a movie I've never heard of called PARADISE MOTEL. Lo and behold, a thoughtful soul named DANIEL FITZGERALD uploaded a VHS sourced copy of the movie to YouTube, so finally I was able to give it a look.

The movie stars Bobby Brigg's best friend Mike from TWIN PEAKS. Since I know him best for playing Donna's abusive ex-boyfriend and the asshole Khroner representative from SIX FEET UNDER, it's strange seeing him play a shy, awkward, young nerd. In fact, I don't buy it. This kid has some major rage hidden under his demure demeanour. I just know it. 

So he lives in this Hawaian themed hotel with his practically elderly parents. They must have had him when they were in their late 40's, which really isn't a good idea. Supposedly, at 40 the woman's chance of having a child with down's syndrome is 1 in 100, but by age 45 the chance shoot up to 1 in 30.

The movie begins on Mike's first day at a new school.

Why is he starting a new high school in the middle of the year? What, did he threaten to shoot up the old one?

He immediately finds a new girl to stare at from a distance, and follow around. He finds her missing ID card, but instead of giving it back and saying, "Hi, my name's Mike," like a normal person, he decides to keep it, kind of the same way serial killers like to hold onto souvenirs from their victims.

Back at the hotel, Mike can't get any sleep, because his sadistic father has made the room over his bed into the honeymoon suite, so night after night it's full of couples fucking loudly. God, that's gotta torture an incel like him to madness. This kid is going to blow.

Now back at the school, the grumpy gym coach has a little shack where he likes to go to catch naps. However, the cool kids also use this as a place to bang their girl friends.

Having been evicted from their fuck-hut, the cool kids realize if they befriend Mike, they can use the hotel for their sexcapades. So they're paying for his videogames and offering him free burgers like he's some hot chick they're trying to woo.

Mike comes through in spades, letting his new friends use the honeymoon suite practically every night. Hanging out with them does wonders for his confidence, and soon, one of their hot girls wants to go on a date with him.

However, it turns out this is all part of a prank. The address Mike is given is not the house of the hot girl, but the grumpy high school coach.

For reasons I don't quite understand, Mike doesn't knock on the door, or even honk the car horn to let the girl know he's here. Instead, he jimmies open the window and climbs into the house like a burglar. He does this so smoothly, you kind of get the impression he's done it before. 

Now that he's in the house, he hears the shower running, so he immediately strips down and prepares to jump in with her. Look, I realize she's a loose girl, and she's already flashed him her tits at the pool, but holy cow slow it down a little bit tiger. I can't believe he even has the confidence to make such a bold move.

Of course, it's not the hot chick in the shower, but the coach's pretty-hot-too wife. Now he can never, ever go to gym class.

After the prank has been revealed, it turns out the hot chick still wants to sleep with him. They go back to the motel, and suddenly it cuts to the next day. How could they skip over the big sex scene with their lead character? Shouldn't this be a huge moment in the film? I would have assumed the guy's never been with a girl before, but the movie treats this moment so blase, like he's already up to his neck in pussy. 

Near the very end of the movie, to symbolize he's over her, Mike finally gets around to giving his dream girl her ID card back. She's probably thinking, wow, I just escaped with my life. I had no idea this guy was so disturbed. It reminds me of the story about Debbie Harry getting picked up in a car by Ted Bundy, but because she had the wherewithal to notice he'd stripped the door handles off the inside of the passenger side, she knew something was up and managed to jump out of the car before he could clobber her.

The other interesting thing about PARADISE MOTEL is the actor who plays Mike's father. He's an actor named Bob Basso, who made a name for himself amongst supporters of the tea party in 2009, when he released a video of himself as Thomas Paine speaking an open letter to president Obama. 

This video was so popular, it resulted in an urban legend that Obama was so angered by Bob Basso, he summoned the actor to the White House, supposedly never to be seen again.

"Paradise Motel" plays at the Can-View Drive-In with "Invasion U.S.A" in late October 1985

Marvel Comics Screws Up "RETURN OF THE JEDI" Comic Book (1983)

April of 1983, a young Mark Hamill must have been feeling pretty good. He'd completed his role as Luke Skywalker in the third and final STAR WARS movie. Currently he was starring on Broadway as Mozart in the play AMADEUS.

So one day during the play's intermission or something, nerd-boy Mark sneaks out to the comic book shop to stock up on his superhero fix. Inside West Side Comics, he saw something on the shelf that shocked and angered him:

This book:

Marvel Comic's adaptation of RETURN OF THE JEDI. In Full Colour. The entire story in one prestigious book.

Only problem was, the book was being sold a month before the movie's release. Marvel wasn't supposed to do that.

The final instalment of the STAR WARS saga, RETURN OF THE JEDI went into production under a massive cloak of secrecy. As all fans know, the working title was BLUE HARVEST. No one was trusted with a full copy of the script.

They couldn't even advertise all the toys! On the back of the action figure card, the new ewok figures were blacked out. Lucas didn't want you to know what they looked like until the movie premiered.

So the filmmakers put all that effort into keeping things quiet, but then a month before the movie comes out, Marvel publishes the entire story in a 64 page comic any bozo can breeze through in five minutes. All the secrets are in there; clumsy Bobba Fett dying, the revelation Luke and Lea are siblings, Darth Vader turning from the dark side of the force and sacrificing himself to save Luke.

The only odd omission is Yoda's death scene. We see him yammering away at Luke, lecturing him about some shit, and in the next panel he's gone, and the caption just says, "Luke leaves Yoda to much-needed rest."

I guess they wanted the kids to read between the lines. Yoda's taking The Big Sleep.

Mark Hamill must have blabbed to LucasFilm, because the next thing you know, Marvel is going into full-fledged damage control. Two members of Marvel's PR department show up at West Side Comics and grab all the RETURN OF THE JEDI books. Store manager Dave Toplitz is quoted in the July 1983 issue of The Comic's Journal, describing the encounter as "kind of nice, but very threatening." 

This was a pretty big screw-up. Marvel was probably worried about being sued by LucasFilm for breaking their contract not to release the book before the film, or even worse, losing the license to publish Star Wars comics.

So now Marvel is making phone calls, sending letters, telegrams even, insisting store owners stop selling the RETURN OF THE JEDI comic. Naturally, most of the stores told them to go pound sand.

Most comic shops are independently owned business, that operate on a razor thin margin. The RETURN OF THE JEDI comic was an expensive book, retailing for $2.50 at a time when the average comic cost 60 cents. Store owners couldn't afford to sit on expensive stock for weeks on end. They needed to sell those books to get their money back so they could pay for next week's comics. It was really unfair of Marvel to demand store owners sacrifice their business just to fix a mistake they made.

The comic stores had no agreement with LucasFilm. Marvel didn't stipulate the books couldn't be sold until May 25th. So once the comic shops had paid for the books, there really wasn't any legal or moral reason they couldn't do with them what they wanted.

An estimated tens of thousands of copies of RETURN OF THE JEDI were sold, but that didn't seem to hurt the movie. It quickly became one of the highest grossing films of all time, kids bought action figures, toothbrushes, and ewok stuffed toys by the millions. The movie was a big success, and Lucas raked in a lot of money.

Curiously, the novelization was also released before the film, but only by a week. No one seemed to care that. As time went on, LucasFilm seemed to become less and less concerned with spoilers. When The Phantom Menace soundtrack came out in '99, one of the tracks was titled: "Qui Gone's Noble End" and just in case you missed it, another called "Qui Gone's Funeral".

I looked at the track listing for the earlier STAR WARS movies, just to confirm they didn't give anything away. They're titled stuff like "Darth Vader's Theme", "Han Solo and the Princess", "The Battle in the Snow". You'll notice none of them are titled something like, "Lando Double-Crosses Han and Lea", or "Vader is Luke's Father", or even, "In the Next Movie You'll Find Out He's Kissing His Sister".

Return of the Jedi plays at the Famous 4 Drive-In in Windsor, Ontario

"Fright Night Part 2" (1989)

After practically going straight-to-video, the entire franchise is derailed by a double-homicide.

At the end, Red Coat Black Coat pay tribute a long running cast member, Manna the cat, who will be sorely missed.

Bill Cosby Records

For reasons only known to himself, Red Coat isn't throwing 'em out.

"Fright Night" (1985)

Remembering Fright Night at the drive-in. Best film of 1985?

Fright Night plays as the supporting feature for The Bride at the Can-View Drive-in in August 1985

Bill Maher Buzzkill

Jeez, Bill, we're just trying to have some fun.

"The Unholy" (1988)

Suave, super priest battles demonic forces in 1988's The Unholy.

The Unholy plays at the Can-View Drive-In in May of 1988

"Loose Screws" (1985)

Late comedian Mike MacDonald and Hostess chips play prominent roles in this 80's canuxploitation tax-shelter sex comedy.

Kenny Rogers in "Six Pack" (1982)

Country music sensation Kenny Rogers looks after little kids in his only theatrical-release starring role, Six Pack.

"Harry and the Hendersons" / "The Secret of My Success" (1987)

Recalling the sneak preview double-features of the 1980's, specifically the pairing of Harry and the Hendersons with Michael J Fox in The Secret of My Success.

Harry and the Hendersons plays as the supporting feature for Born in East LA at the Can-View Drive-In in July 1987

The Jedi Master's Quiz Book (1982)

Red Coat and Black Coat challenge themselves to some questions from 11 year old Rusty Miller's The Jedi Master's Quiz Book.

"The Blob" (1988)

30 years after the release of Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont's re-make of THE BLOB, time has proven who the real Jell-O monster of the 1980s was.

The Blob plays with supporting feature Short Circuit 2 at the Can-View Drive-In during September 1988