Co-opting more than a cue from Mel Brooks’ The Producers, a studio mogul played by Tony Curtis faces debt so deep, his only hope is to make a movie guaranteed to fail in order to claim it as a tax write-off. In walks a nebbish kid filmmaker (Dean Jacobson, Child’s Play 3) with his latest opus, a 1950s-style sci-fi cheapie called Lobster Man from Mars.

As you can guess, Lobster Man tonally plays like the titular spoof of Amazon Women on the Moon. But that all-star comedy has the good sense to include about 20 other sketches. This sticks to its one, only occasionally cutting to the studio screening room where Curtis watches the mess unspool. The look on Curtis’ face is so pained, one can infer he’s thinking of the great works of art he used to be in, like Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Janet Leigh’s cleavage.

In the movie within the movie, the red planet’s king (Bobby “Boris” Pickett of “Monster Mash” fame) sends the giant crustacean creature (S.D. Nemeth, RoboCop) to Earth to steal our air supply. Witnessing the alien’s crash-landing are an all-American sweater girl (Valley Girl’s Deborah Foreman, adorable as ever) and her British beau (Anthony Hickox, Foreman’s Waxwork director). Few believe their story, other than Tommy Sledge, P.I., played by comedian Tommy Sledge, which is to say he performs his stand-up routine parodying noir detectives. He’s also the best part.

I put off seeing Lobster Man from Mars for decades because I had my fill of its trailer while working at Blockbuster Video in college. For months on the store’s overhead TVs, management played a preview tape with a spot pairing the movie with Girlfriend from Hell, presumably due to their schlocky titles. With the opening notes of “Rock Lobster” announcing its arrival, I heard it multiple times a shift. To this day, any second of The B-52s’ hit elicits a Pavlovian shudder, although the flick uses a soundalike band in place of the real cosmic thing.

There’s a reason the radio version of “Rock Lobster” trims two minutes or more. I bring that up because here, Stanley Sheff (Vincent Price: The Sinister Image) and co-writer Bob Greenberg grossly misjudge audiences’ tolerance for their lampoon. It suffers from the same problem as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: The joke just isn’t good enough to drag into lollygagging territory, wearing my goodwill down so much, I turned on it. That leaves me without the patience to discuss Billy Barty in swami get-up, narration by Dr. Demento, a clown named Nose-O, former Playboy Playmate Ava Fabian, future Price Is Right model Mindy Kennedy, Robot Monster’s space gorilla or opening credits that feature scissors-cut faces of the actors next to their names. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Before Sinners was picking undead chords and From Dusk Till Dawn strummed along to a scantily clad Salma Hayek, 1986’s Vamp busted out massively bombed in empty theaters. With the statuesque domme Grace Jones bringing New Wave androgyny to the neck-biting role as a vampire demigod, Vamp set up the whole blueprint of the “vampiric whores” mythology. It’s a blood-caked piece of dark erotica with a pulsating electronic beat sequenced with shrill screams, grimy alleys and an artistic flair for the supernatural. 

On the other side of the churched-up coin, Vamp is a long-forgotten piece of semi-demonic trash that implies a much better movie, a conceit of both vampire lore and semi-nude ladies, one I still enjoy in all its low-budget, badly edited, completely rushed grandeur.

Released when horror-comedies were trying to get their foot (and other extremities) through the door, the movie starts with a trio of ’80s movie teens, Keith (Chris Makepeace, Meatballs), A.J. (Robert Rusler, Thrashin’) and Duncan (Gedde Watanabe, countless Asian stereotypes), trying to find strippers for their frat party. Craigslist hadn’t been invented yet, so they drive to the big bad city with a soundalike copy of Robert Palmer’s “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)” blaring.

They enter the After Dark Club, a rough but serene establishment where white women with jiggly asses in spandex dance onstage. Then Katrina (Jones) performs a very arty, very kabuki, very unerotic striptease; think David Bowie meets Keith Haring at a downtown art show with fusion tapas and no lube, and you’ll get the vibe. Being a hungry vampire, she eats A.J.’s heart, drains him and, sadly, is put on ice for most of the movie.

That’s okay, though, because Keith meets a ditsy waitress (Dedee Pfeiffer, Michelle’s sister), eats some cockroaches and wars with an albino punk (Billy Drago). Eventually, the undead A.J. helps him save the day (night?). In the climax, Katrina flips the bird from beyond the grave.

The best part of Vamp is the casting. Even though she’s barely part of the movie and has no discernible dialogue, fresh off Conan the Destroyer and A View to a Kill, Jones casts an intimating shadow over the comedic proceedings, made all the stranger by the club managers who look like they came out of a Goodfellas casting call. What’s her story, I wonder …

The guys are also well cast. As the hero , once-a-nerd Makepeace holds his own, with ’80s mainstay Rusler doing his preppy-punk thing that, kudos, he does well. The biggest surprise is Watanabe, doing an Asian take on a W.A.S.P. that’s kind of groundbreaking when you think about the time.

What hurts Vamp is that it’s half-baked. It has a real storyline and some great characters, but does nothing with them. I could see someone wanting to remake this in the Sinners/From Dusk Till Dawn vein, but I guess that ship has been burned, most likely with a raised finger. Oh, well, at least Jones’s end-credits song, “Vamp”, is actually pretty darn good. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

If your bucket list line-items “Hear Barney Miller utter the phrase, ‘knee-deep in pussy,'” I come bearing great news: Micro Budget allows you to cross that off. It’s merely one surprise in a movie that qualifies as a surprise itself. After all, “improvised indie mockumentary” doesn’t engender confidence these days, and its generic, Google-challenged title further diminishes hope.

Give yourself over to it anyway, because here’s even greater news: Micro Budget is capital-F funny — enough to threaten triggering a hernia.

Speaking of do-or-die to-dos, Ohio nobody Terry (Patrick Noth) has always longed to make a movie. His ever-patient, exceedingly pregnant spouse, Erica (real-life wife Emilea Wilson), supports her hubs so much, she’s agreed to uproot their lives to L.A. so Terry can achieve his dream before their firstborn arrives to forever postpone such folly.

Naturally, in tackling an ambitious disaster film, Terry has bitten off more than he can chew, much less get his big mouth around. Lucky for us, his cousin (director Morgan Evans, who co-wrote with Noth) is around to document it all the behind-the-scenes chaos. While shooting in a rented Airbnb home in Malibu, the cast members inquire about their motivation, which Terry answers: “A big, scary meteor coming to Earth.” The dialogue he’s given them is equally clueless: “I can’t believe Toronto’s gone. I can’t believe Drake died.” A running gag hinges on Terry’s inability to understand movies don’t have to be shot in order.

If Terry has no idea what he’s doing, wait until you meet the intimacy coordinator, a skeevy guy (Neil Casey, 2016’s Ghostbusters) whose first question arriving to set is, “Now, who’s porkin’?”

Bawdy and boisterous without slipping into hateful, Micro Budget boasts a solid lineup of comedians both known (Chris Parnell, Maria Bamford, Bobby Moynihan, sitcom legend Hal Linden) and deserve-to-be (Nichole Sakura, Brandon Michael Hall, Carla Jimenez, Jon Gabrus), as well as a superstar cameo I won’t spoil. There’s not a weak spot in the bunch.

If you can’t handle cringe comedy, move along, little ones. Not for nothing does the “Lights. Camera. Asshole” tagline adorn its poster. While Micro Budget isn’t quite as successful as Christopher Guest’s Best in Show, it’s the next best thing. This isn’t Pulp Fiction, Scorsese. —Rod Lott

Get it at OVID.tv.

As the slightly sweet, slightly menacing bed of “chugga-chugga” piano music wildly encapsulates Tim Burton’s feature debut, you know something magical is going to take place from the first minute — no, scratch that — the first second of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

Usually, when I review movies, they’re either new (or newish) or something I haven’t seen in eons and want to revisit. But in this case, I’ve watched Big Adventure an average of two or three times a year for the past 40. Safe to say, it attached itself to and in me. I still love this film and, even more, I want the generations after mine to enjoy this film. It’s a fantastic, wondrous and completely absurdist joyride on the vintage handlebars of Pee-wee’s treasured bicycle.

That bike starts the plot rolling, as one day, Pee-wee’s bike is stolen outside a shopping center. Everyone is a comical suspect until a fake psychic tells him his bike is currently in the basement of the Alamo in Texas. With this information, Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) sets out on a road trip with hardened criminals, lovelorn waitresses, a ghosty trucker and, of course, the Satan’s Helpers motorcycle gang. When he eventually finds his bike, Big Adventure becomes a madcap chase through a movie studio with Godzilla, Twister Sister’s Dee Snider and two handfuls of snakes.

I’d say it all makes sense, but you’ve seen this before, right? Instead, I implore all you well-read, mostly subversive, somewhat alternative culturists who grew up on Pee-wee Herman to dust off that VHS tape, bargain buy DVD or the gorgeous Criterion Blu-ray, and share it with the next generation of smart alecks, obnoxiously conceited and, really, the only people I want to be around in the future.

With its kitschy color scheme and surreal set design, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a true love letter to all the weird kids, informing them of their life options as they go out into the world and make their own art, hopefully with an oddball bike and original persona to match. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

In contrast to the words of Ray Parker Jr., Sherman Hemsley is totally ’fraid of ghosts in Ghost Fever. And, apparently, laughs. If Hemsley was attempting to move on up to a movie career after 11 seasons of TV’s The Jeffersons, he went in the wrong direction. It’s the rare Alan Smithee film so wretched, Alan Smithee might rethink his pseudonymous credit of disownment.

Plainclothes policemen Buford (Hemsley) and Benny (Luis Avalos, TV’s The Electric Company) are ordered to evict any remaining residents of Magnolia House, a former plantation home supposedly haunted by the spirits of its slaves and their evil owner. And it is! An odd concept for a PG family comedy, but let’s go with it, because Ghost Fever gives us no other choice.

Minutes after entering the mansion, Buford’s buried his nose deep in a book about groins. Two of the place’s transparent specters, Jethro (also Hemsley), and the slaveholder’s nonbigoted son (Myron Healey, 1977’s Claws), set about shooting animated lightning from their palms to put Buford through the ringer. Thus, Hemsley engages in the lowest-order form of slapstick shenanigans, including:
• running on a treadmill to avoid a wall of spikes
• dodging swinging pendulums
• sliding up doors and twirling ’round like a pinwheel as if he were controlled by magnets
• being tickled by ghosts while scaling a bedsheet rope
• tap dancing against a breakdancing mummy
• and, in the coup de grâce, shimmying left and right to protect his testicles from being sledgehammered into flapjacks, all while nearly having his rectum perforated by a whirling metal drill

And what of Benny? He gets to play pool against a phantom he can’t see, which leads to a swordfight with cue sticks. For another fight, Smithee Lee Madden (Angel Unchained) also cuts to a boxing match where Benny spars with pro pugilist Joe Frazier.

No one in Ghost Fever contracts ghost fever, but both men risk ghost chlamydia by falling in lust with two blonde sorta-babe spirits (Diana Brookes and Just Before Dawn’s Deborah Benson) who can’t leave Magnolia or they’ll turn old and ugly. At the movie’s close, as Buford and Benny drive away sad and mutter they’re better off dead, Jethro zaps their car to crash, killing both men instantly so they can bone their way through the afterlife. Kids gotta learn sometime, right?

The film is startlingly out of touch with how comedies operate. Not even the combined might of three writers cracked that code; their script exhibits the rhythm of jokes without the reasoning to select proper words that would make a joke. For example: “If that’s a French accent, I’m speakin’ Italian!”

Funny? Fuggedaboutit. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.