You know what the Academy Award-winning film Rain Man was missing? A sneak peek at the upcoming Super Mario Bros. 3 video game!

Thankfully, this was generously rectified in The Wizard, the 1989 cult film starring then teen dream Fred Savage and current indie queen Jenny Lewis as two kids taking possibly autistic little brother Jimmy (Luke Edwards) to the Nintendo-sponsored gaming competition Video Armageddon at Universal Studios.

While many proto-nerds were pumped for Batman that summer, most of the kids I knew were eager to see this quasi-promotional flick because it featured not only a glimpse of the then-unreleased new Super Mario game, but what was possibly the coolest gaming device ever … until you actually used it: the Power Glove.

I wasn’t that excited for it, though, mostly because my brother and I lost out on getting a Nintendo the previous year; while my parents were out shopping one Saturday afternoon, we decided to coat the entire side of our farmhouse in thick, red-staining mud. (Honestly, I think they just didn’t want to spend the hundred bucks on the now-ancient console and used the wet dirt as an excuse. Bastards!)

Still, The Wizard mostly holds up if you lived in that era. It’s pretty amazing, cinematically, to remember there was an internet-free period when trios of youths traveled across the country, got viciously beaten up, chased by skunky private investigators, entered national 8-bit gaming competitions and, in the case of Lewis, falsely accused men of touching her prepubescent breasts. What a time to have been alive! —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Circa 2000, Troma’s Terror Firmer was one of a handful of discs I purchased when I picked up my first DVD player and man, what a high point that was. I must had watched the film a hundred times that summer and, even worse, tried to show it to every single person who dared set foot in my then-hovel.

As impressionable as I was back then, true to form, I firmly believed Terror Firmer to be more than just another Troma flick; I believed it to be director Lloyd Kaufman’s testament to his life in independent cinema, straight from the fart heart.

Twenty years later, while much of the offensive humor is now, admittedly, “of the time,” the spirit of the film and what it stands for is still more important than ever, an idealized and wholly personal take on the now long-dead sentiment of art for art’s sake, something this generation has forgotten in the search for easy cash and easier fame.

On the set of blind director Larry Benjamin’s (a meta-Kaufman) latest Toxic Avenger flick, the cast and crew of the film are graphically murdered by a long cool woman (?) in a black dress, seemingly with an ax to grind (literally) against independent film. But even that’s a minor quibble when compared to the constant trouble that goes on behind the scenes.

Besides the ample nudity that is more questionable than erotic, there are plenty of gross-out gags and gag-out grossness, such as busty actor Joe Fleishaker chewing on his own guts as he’s mutilated by an escalator; caged monster Ron Jeremy singing “Amazing Grace” as his appendages are hacked off; and, most famously, Yaniv Sharon as a P.A. with a tiny pecker who goes on an all-nude tour of NYC before having his head crushed by a piece of Troma’s best stock footage.

And while all of that still works in goo-covered spades, the oft-repeated rallying cry of “Let’s make some art!” is the message of this medium; if you have a vision, you’ll do anything to get it up on the screen, even if it means capturing random acts of tractor-truck maiming, dill-pickle coitus or transsexual immolation. It’s something that Troma’s been doing it for well over 40 years, dollar signs be damned. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.