Conceived as an affectionate send-up of the days when you (read: your parents) could go to the theater to see two movies, a serial, a cartoon, a newsreel and a handful of previews on one ticket, Flicks offers just that. Peter Winograd’s film is like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, but in half the running time and the fake trailers aren’t any good.

What little notice Flicks attracted on its way from skipping theaters for video store shelves flagged the animated “Cat and Mouse at the Home” as the standout. From the retirement home for cartoon actors, former teammates Cat and Mouse reminisce about their golden years before proceeding to beat the crap out of one another for old times’ sake. In taking the classic Tom and Jerry rivalry to an extreme, it’s an undeniable precursor to The Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy.

Then, in appropriate black and white, the “News ’R’ Us” segment (“All the news that be or ever were”) casts its roving-reporter eye on a unique medical experiment (compression of Siamese twins versus separation) and America’s ball-whacking craze — the latter because the joke wrote itself.

In the film’s first “feature,” Martin Mull (Ski Patrol) and Betty Kennedy (Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie) stars as spouses who move into the House of the Living Corpse, so named for the disfigured, malnourished, shellacked dog-loving creep who lives within the walls, Bad Ronald-style. Mull may be the name, but Kennedy’s in the driver’s seat as the dim-bulb blonde, delivering an excellent comedic performance that could go unnoticed if you’re disarmed by her sex appeal.

The second feature on this double bill is Philip Alien, Space Detective, a noir parody with a sci-fi gimmick: The third-rate gumshoe is a 6-foot bug from outer space. Voiced by Simpsons vet Harry Shearer, Philip falls for a human dame (Pamela Sue Martin, 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure) while looking for a runaway husband. While it may not land as intended, it earns a few laughs nonetheless, like when a flummoxed Philip tries to unhook Martin’s bra using four of his insect limbs.

Shown purposely out of order, two consecutive chapters of Lost Heroes of the Milky Way bookend the phony features. The Flash Gordon-style serial chronicles the intergalactic mission of the S.S. President Nixon patrol vessel, captained by Joan Hackett (The Last of Sheila) in her final film role. The serial also features Mull as the evil Emperor Tang, comedian Richard Belzer as a stoner, more dated counterculture humor and a henchman made of chocolate ice cream.

Penned by its director and three writers from HBO’s Not Necessarily the News, Flicks could illegitimately hail from the National Lampoon; it certainly reps the magazine’s spirit better than the Lampoon’s own similar project of ’82, the triple-spoofing Movie Madness. Unlike that partial-birth abortion, I find something new to appreciate in Flicks, however insignificant, each time I give it a whirl. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

A week before its 50th annual Alligator Festival, the Louisiana town of Thibodeaux is suddenly plagued with gator attacks. Lest more citizens be chomped to chum, Sheriff Mitch pleads with city officials to call off the festivities. They don’t.

If that sounds like Jaws, it’s intentional, as Paul Dale’s Sewer Gators is a gentle, purposely toothless parody. Opening credits like “DON’T WORRY THE FILM WILL START SOON” make that as transparent as Claude Rains.

The reptiles’ raids start in the unlikeliest of places: in the butt, Bob. A redneck is obliterated as his bowels do the same, with all but one very fake foot yanked down the toilet. Over the course of the flick, the gators surface thrice through a porcelain stool, twice through a bathtub drain and once through a washing machine, Jacuzzi and everything including the kitchen sink. Hell, not even a cup of ramen noodles is safe. Is nothing sacred?

Only an attractive zoologist (Manon Pages, Purgatory Road) proves any help to aspirin-guzzling Sheriff Mitch (Kenny Bellau, Dale’s Fast Food & Cigarettes), because Thibodeaux’s good-ol’-boy mayor (Sean Phelan, Dale’s Silent but Deadly) is all about the almighty dollar.

Phelan and Dale himself (as obnoxious TV reporter Brock Peterson, whose “mustache reeks of corn chips”) are often hysterical. As Sheriff Mitch’s right-hand woman, Gladyis, Sophia Brazda shines in a droll cluelessness, not unlike Aubrey Plaza. Consider her delivering the news on the first victim:

Gladyis: “Reggie says he got ate.”
Sheriff: “Ate what?”
Gladyis (after long pause): “Up?”

Gleefully stupid and nearly as amiable, Sewer Gators is smart enough to know to scram before it’s asked to leave. The fun concludes at the 52-minute mark, followed by nearly 10 minutes of the slowest end-credits crawl you’ll ever see, with each name’s rise from bottom to top taking a good 120 seconds. Not even the most desperate Lake Placid sequel would dare pull that time-stuffing trick; however, since Sewer Gators is scads more entertaining than any Lake Placid sequel, who cares?

When it hits, ketchup-packet effects and all, Dale’s goof of a spoof is reminiscent of the $6K wonder Bad CGI Sharks. And when it doesn’t, I’m reminded of my own bored, preteen days of camcorder buffoonery. But I can sanction that. —Rod Lott

Get it at By the Horns.

You may not find it in your version of the Bible, but on the eighth day, God created Mamie Van Doren. And He saw that she was good — very, very good.

So to me, it kinda makes sense to have her play the world’s first woman in Albert Zugsmith’s first sex comedy, The Private Lives of Adam & Eve. After all, it makes perfect sense to cast Mickey Rooney as Satan, a fancy way to say “himself.”

The film begins in black and white in present-day Paradise, Nevada, population 7. Van Doren’s Evie and husband Ad (Martin Milner, 1960’s 13 Ghosts) are among eight passengers on a bus headed for Reno. Also aboard is Rooney, resplendent in Col. Sanders regalia as a casino owner. All’s well until the 27-minute mark, when stock footage of flash floods and landslides forces them to take cover in a church. Ad and Evie pass the time with a shared dream, kicking the flick into “SpectaColor,” a fancy way to say “color.”

Cue the meat on Private Lives’ calcium-starved bones: a wacky take on the Book of Genesis. Ad, now Adam, frolics with animals as he runs around in his little Tarzan pants. Among his harem of sexy sinners named after days of the week — The Bellboy and the Playgirls’ June Wilkinson among them as Saturday — Rooney’s devil sends cat-eyed Lilith (foxy Fay Spain, 1957’s Dragstrip Girl) to seduce Adam over to the dark side. Tempting … until Adam gets a load of Evie — er, Eve — despite her long hair prodigiously pasted over her bosom.

An entire decade and a half have passed since my two-year stint teaching Sunday school, so I assume all of the above remains biblically accurate. Still, Zugsmith skirts the fact that Adam and Eve’s all-fruit diet would lead turn the Garden of Eden into one of chronic diarrhea.

If you can turn yourself away from trying to catch glue failing, you’ll note Van Doren’s adorable breathy lines: “Maybe next time we can have apples. Big … red … apples.” When Adam finally takes a bite, so does the movie, reverting to B&W and an ending that makes one wonder the point of the entire exercise.

As chaste as it is overly cast (with Tuesday Weld, Mel Torme and Paul Anka also taking part), The Private Lives of Adam & Eve is light of heart and dryer-lint disposable. Zugsmith and Van Doren reunited twice that year for the far more fun College Confidential and Sex Kittens Go to College. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

Professedly a remake of 1960’s Where the Boys Are, Hy Averback’s final film as director, Where the Boys Are ’84, does retain the simple premise: Four college girls drive to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Whereas the original was a bubbly comedy with a serious streak of date rape painted across its middle, ’84 dumps that paint on the floor — and flings it on the walls and ceiling — as an all-out, balls-out, R-rated parrrrrtyyyyy!

So why isn’t it any fun?

The short answer may boil down to a combo of “producer Allan Carr” and “cocaine,” but hey, you’re here already, so let’s talk.

Among our four leading ladies, top-billed Lisa Hartman (then on TV’s Knots Landing) is such a pure cypher as the studious one, she may as well be invisible. A lemon-mouthed Lorna Luft doesn’t stray far from her Grease 2 role, while For Your Eyes Only’s Lynn-Holly Johnson runs hornier than the loot from an Africa safari. Finally, in her first movie since 1977’s Record City, Wendy Schaal plays the stuffy straight arrow. Only one of the women exudes true sex appeal, and here’s a hint: It’s Schaal.

Individually and/or collectively, their characters pounce from man to man while bouncing from party to party. One is arrested for driving drunk. Drugs are taken. A gigolo is bedded. A “hot bod” contest entails suggestive motions with a sizable cucumber. And in a scene that actually provoked mild controversy at the time, the girls take a moment of respite to take turns engaging in foreplay with a blow-up doll.

With debauchery but no discernible fun, Where the Boys Are ’84 hovers just above zero. Averback (Chamber of Horrors) doesn’t quite build a story as much he does stack scenes atop one another until all the songs needed for a soundtrack album had found a home. Due to that — and especially T&A abounding from anonymous actresses — Carr’s final comeback attempt post-Can’t Stop the Music finishes as little more than a massively overfunded Hardbodies. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Crash Course, NBC’s teen-dream melding of Moving Violations and Summer School, pulls in with the shakiest of premises: Hamilton High School’s sports program is endangered due to tanking grades in driver’s education. The principal (Ray Walston, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) gives the class’ blithering, scaredy-cat teacher (Charles Robinson, TV’s Night Court) six weeks to steer it into shape, with hired muscle (and sass) from Jackée Harry (TV’s 227): “This is supposed to be driver’s ed, not a Bananarama audition!”

The crazy classroom comes culled almost exclusively from hit sitcoms of the time, including:
• Mr. Belvedere’s Rob Stone as an Ivy League-bound senior, if only he can pass the class;
• soap star Brian Bloom and his eyebrows as a juvenile delinquent with two failed tries;
• Who’s the Boss?’s Alyssa Milano as a transfer student enrolling against her mother’s wishes;
• Family Ties’ Tina Yothers as the not-so-great Santini, daughter of a cement truck driver;
• The Wonder Years’ Olivia d’Abo as the token hot foreign exchange student;
• and eventual Jurassic Park employee BD Wong as the token Asian who raps.

Somehow, every one of these otherwise functional young humans treats the automobile as alien and Gordian as performing open-heart surgery using a construction backhoe while on the nose of the Space Shuttle at launch. Accelerator versus brake, curb versus street, left versus right — never before has a movie contained so many scenes of motorists letting go of the wheel and shrieking “AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!” in the face of opposing traffic, fire hydrants and fruit stands. To quote Bloom’s tough-talkin’ Riko, “There’s a lot you don’t know, diaper head.”

Bustin’ Loose helmer Oz Scott navigates this flat, vanilla-pudding mayhem with all the story intricacies of a Trapper Keeper. In place of jokes are a Wang Chung shout-out, a clumsy Chariots of Fire bit and Dick Butkus in a chicken suit. Harvey Korman (Munchies) says it all when his sabotage-minded faculty member yells at himself in frustration, “Why do you do things like this? Why me?”

Because a paycheck’s a paycheck, I guess. Movie drinking games are stupid, but if you were to do one during Crash Course, you’d have a Cadillac-sized liver for imbibing at each rap number, mention of “symbiosis” and usage of a rubber-plunger dart gun. You might even experience the tremors before the big closing song, “We Be Drivin’.” I not be kiddin’. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.