The sensational Mexican newsmagazine ¡Alarma! is legendary for the graphic violence and tremendous sex contained within in its bestselling pages, with images of severed heads and mutilated corpses right on the cover, usually in blazing full color. I’ve got a couple of old copies if you really want to take a look at one.

In 1986, the fotonovela titled Casos de ¡Alarma! made it to the big (well, big in Mexico) screen in a film subtitled SIDA or, as it’s more popularly known in America, AIDS. Of course, it’s a highly melodramatic and deeply pungent story that, even for the time, is hilariously uninformed about the disease. But, I guess if you’re watching a film from the makers of ¡Alarma!, you’re really not looking for integridad periodística.

A moody young man named Rodolfo (Servando Manzetti) comes to a small rural town, with uncomfortable flashbacks to an apparent murder as he looks out the window wistfully on the bus. Seems he’s confused about his sexualidad ever since a kid (who resembled a young John Candy) molested him at boarding school, leading to a life of being taken advantage of by old men and, for the most part, he didn’t really hate it.

However, when he meets atractiva clothes-washer Carolina (Alma Delfina), it energizes the fuerza de vida machista pura inside him, but, consequently, he gives her SIDA. Then, despite the romantic ranchera musical numbers by the mayor’s son, Ausencio (Julio Aldama), to her, he vengefully sexually assaults Carolina and that gives him SIDA, too, which apparently has a gestation period of three months before you die a horrible death on a tractor.

At two hours, the thing is surprisingly filled with dumb comedy, tired gay stereotypes and plenty of punishing filler. Regardless, it’s still very much like the death-obsessed magazine, from a bordello of breast-heaving prostitutas to the bloody gundown of Carolina from an angry padre; this first volume of Casos de ¡Alarma! is remarkably trashy and fully exploitative of the absolute temor surrounding SIDA at the time. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Many people today remember Johnny Cash mostly for his angsty Man in Black persona, but I’ll always remember him for his dumb Chicken in Black character. People tend to forget that Cash wasn’t always the dark and dreary troubadour that he’s portrayed as on licensed Hot Topic tees these days; instead, he lived most of the ’80s high on novelty tunes, chronic relapses and made-for-television movies like the wonderfully saccharine The Pride of Jesse Hallam.

Cash headlines as the titular Jesse, a good ol’ boy from Muhlenberg, Kentucky, who recently had to sell his farm and move to the big city because his daughter has a back disease, see, and needs an operation at the Children’s Hospital. Between enrolling his son in school, being hassled by an stereotypical cop and trying to find a job before the cash runs out, it slowly comes to light that Jesse has a big problem: Everyone in Cincinnati hates Kentucky trash.

Oh, and he can’t read.

For most of his life in Kentucky, he’s gotten along pretty good, always commanding a good attitude toward work, with plenty of down-home witticisms and a genuine “aw, shucks” demeanor that endears him; too bad that doesn’t really fly in the big city, as he’s forced to load fruit trucks in the middle of the night, at a business run by an old Italian stereotype (Eli Wallach, Baby Doll).

Jesse eventually confronts his illiteracy with the help of a toned-down Brenda Vaccaro (Airport ’77), eventually reading to his daughter (kinda) as she lay in a hospital bed; it’s an act that inspires both him and his somewhat illiterate son to take a GED class. As Cincinnati punks play rock music and create general chaos in the night class, Johnny sets them straight, letting them know he’s there to graduate, darn it, and nothing’s going to stop him.

Broadcast on CBS in the spring of 1981, Cash, though no actor, still has a commandeering screen presence that works for a by-the-numbers drama like this as both Wallach and Vaccaro happily take their paychecks; the soundtrack also contains plenty of high-quality Cash tunes, but, alas, no soundtrack album was made available.

Directed with a flat flair by Gary Nelson, who may remember as the guy behind the Gary Coleman theatrical vehicle Jimmy the Kid, which was, surprisingly, based on a novel by Donald Westlake — a book that I hope Jesse Hallam wasn’t too proud to read. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.