Allan Arkush is most known as the director of the late-’70s cult hit Rock ’n’ Roll High School, one of my favorite films of all time. But, in 1983, he made an even cultier flick, one that barely got released, despite a great cast and an even greater soundtrack: Get Crazy, also one of my favorite films of all time, if not more so.

Some have called this a sequel, but while it’s not a literal continuation, it’s definitely a spiritual one, featuring a group of regular shmoes who chaotically run the historic Saturn Theater as they go up against the ruling class of moneymen who wish to not only destroy the Saturn, but own the world with their dollar bills. Think Ms. Togar on a sleazier scale.

While the story of stage manager Neil (Daniel Stern) and his crazy crew taking on the slimy Colin Beverly (Ed Begley Jr.) might seem like a routine one, the comedy is very much in the same vein of Rock ’n’ Roll High School, filled with plenty of sight gags; here, even the drama is played for silly laughs, an artform that seems to be lost.

The music undeniably makes the movie so good, featuring (mostly) famous singers in faux roles, such as King Blues (Bill Henderson), Nada (featuring Fear’s Lee Ving) and the surprisingly hilarious Lou Reed as the reclusive Auden, who scores big with a transcendently gorgeous tune that plays as the credits roll. Best of all is the incomparable Malcolm McDowell as the Jagger-like prick Reggie Wanker, a veteran rocker so wrapped up in his self-importance that, when he’s accidentally dosed by the shadowy drug dealer roaming the theater, his most prized possession becomes his turgid conscience, showing him the error of ways — complete with a British accent.

While Arkush is still a director (mostly for television), it truly is a shame he never became as big as contemporaries like Spielberg and so on. As you watch Get Crazy, though, you realize it’s probably because his eye for truly bizarre and outlandish comedy was so far ahead of its time, they had no idea what do with him and, honestly, probably still don’t. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sean Chase is dead. As played by Suicide Squad stuntman Zion Forrest Lee, the “beloved party animal and jackass womanizing pro hockey fuckboy” is laid to rest in the beginning minutes of Ankle Biters. How he got to his grave takes up the remainder and majority of this utterly wicked Canadian comedy.

Five months earlier, retired from the ice after a broken neck, Sean uncharacteristically wants to settle down with his gorgeous girlfriend, a young widow named Laura (a winning Marianthi Evans, Max Payne). In fact, he plans to propose to her at a romantic weekend at his lake house. The only obstacle is Laura’s four tag-along daughters (real-life Reid sisters Lily Gail, Rosalee, Violet and Dahlia): Try as Sean might, they hate him.

When they mistake Mom’s moans and bruises — both the result of sexual pleasure — for domestic abuse, their dislike of Sean festers to all-out war. His resulting tête-à-tête with the tots is like Problem Child times four (except funny) and infinitely more cynical. The girls are adorable, but don’t be fooled as every character is, Laura included; they’re devious monsters — juvenile delinquents with juice boxes.

A comedy as dark as its home country’s flag is red and white, Ankle Biters (aka Cherrypicker, which means zip out of context) marks the first feature for Bennet De Brabandere, who wrote the script from a story by leading man Lee (who, fun fact, is the son of Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe creator Damian Lee). Because their movie doesn’t have to cater to a family audience — or any audience, really — they relish the freedom to be savage.

I was with them almost all the way. You may not like where it goes, but as it crosses the line of good taste — once, twice, three times, who’s counting? — you certainly can’t accuse it of wussing out. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thanks to the Oh, God! films I grew up with, when I think of the Lord Almighty in his human form, for better or worse, it’s typically in the guise of late comedian George Burns. In the trilogy, he aided grocery store produce manager John Denver, rode in a motorcycle with the single-monikered Louanne and, in his grandest casting ever, battled a doppelgänger devil over Ted Wass’ eternal soul.

It’s the third one, Oh, God! You Devil, that casts Burns as his own worst enemy, Satan. But instead of a devil who wants to murder and maim the world over, he instead uses evil to commit rather irritating pranks, usually the kind where someone falls into a wedding cake or pushes a couple of people into a pool.

Going by the name of Harry O. Tophet — “Tophet” is the Hebrew word for “hell,” so kudos on that — he comes across the path of failed songwriter Bobby (Wass, not to be confused with Craig Wasson, a regular mistake of mine), who, as you can guess, wants to make it big. He makes a deal with Tophet for instant stardom.

Being a deal with the devil, things don’t go exactly as Bobby thought. He is inserted into the body of rock star Billy Wayne and, for a while, things are great: fame, fortune and all the threesomes he can handle. Until, of course, he runs into his wife, who has no idea who he is; this meeting has him wanting to back out.

Too bad! As expected, the Prince of Darkness is a total asshole. With about 20 minutes of the film left, Burns enters the film as the deity you’d expect, God. They wager a game of high-stakes cards over Bobby’s soul, with stakes that make me feel a little uneasy.

Having not seen this entry since the constant HBO airings circa 1985, I was surprised by how much I actually liked it, despite it seeming like the cheapest film in an already cheap series. Wass — not Wasson! — is a decent enough foil for these satanic shenanigans, but Burns is likable even as the devil, even if he’s really not that far off from his interpretation of God.

I wonder how the actual God liked these movies though. I don’t want to step on any supernatural toes, mostly for the fear of eternal damnation. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Janek Ambros’ Mondo Hollywoodland is as hard to describe as it is to fully engage with. Even going into it knowing the experience will prove as nonlinear as a thousand Hula-Hoops makes the sit no easier. With a spark-quick attention span forever at odds with the pacing of individual scenes, it’s not everyone’s cup of mescaline.

To those of us familiar with that most peculiar style of cult film — the “mondo” movie — it’s obvious this experimental comedy name-checks the 1967 documentary Mondo Hollywood, which merited a memorable passage in David Kerekes and David Slater’s exhaustive tome, Killing for Culture: “The subjects for the most part are dull. People of local character (hippies) with over inflated egos, freely expound on the loveliness of Hollywood and their important place in it. One young man is something of a recurring motif, running around the film doing a madcap impression of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. Elsewhere, a woman recounts how she loves colors and once ate a piece of crayon in a sandwich while on acid.”

In spirit if not always specifics, those four sentences apply here. Mondo Hollywoodland’s audience surrogate is an omniscient visitor from the fifth dimension with one mission on the mind: “But what is today’s Hollywood really like? Indeed, we shall seek the answer.” The visitor (Ted Evans) pledges to find that resolve via “the titans, the weirdos and the dreamers.” In and out we flit about from one character to another, through freakout transitions like an art-school editing exercise (and I mean that as a compliment). The survey reveals overlapping lives and scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in Slacker, Richard Linklater’s microbudget ode to Austin, half a country away.

As with the latter, Hollywoodland appears to be heavily improvised, to a point that tests viewers’ patience and endurance. We get performance artists and dumpster divers, magic mushrooms and cocaine lines, a lost cat and a threat of rats, asshole agents and pompous teen stars. Although Ambros’ visuals often smack of the trippiest years of psychedelic ’60s, there’s contemporary talk of Antifa and Twilight, and one harsh — but funny — 9/11 joke.

Ambros and friends never appear incompetent on either side of the camera, but the film is frivolous without truly being fun. Perhaps — and this is possible — the movie works like gangbusters to the L.A. crowd it lampoons; either way, I felt excluded from the punchline. One thing’s for sure: Mondo Hollywoodland is produced — and assumedly funded — by James Cromwell, whom we know from the likes of L.A. Confidential and Babe. The actor did the same for Ambros’ previous film, the documentary Imminent Threat, but why this? I dunno, but that’ll do, pig. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

By all appearances, melancholy title aside, For Those Who Think Young sure looks like an AIP beach movie. It’s packed with the series’ essentials: surfing, swimsuits, rock ’n’ roll, Susan Hart and that Frank Tashlin-esque gag of a super-sexy woman’s aggressive shake of her curves causing nearby objects to burst in a fashion typically blamed on poltergeists. Even male lead James Darren looks like Frankie Avalon, right down to that unmistakable helmet of hair.

Gidget graduate Darren plays Ding Pruitt III, a horny trust-funder whose successful seduction technique is basically the lyrics of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” personified. His latest object of affection (toward penetration) is Sandy Palmer (Pamela Tiffin, The Fifth Cord), an orphaned college girl who’s “after a Bachelor of Arts, not a bachelor of bikinis.” She’ll have none of his coercive, date-rapey ways — until, of course, he becomes a changed man within 90 minutes, give or take. Unless, of course, the checkbook of Ding’s corpulent grandfather, B.S. Cronin (Robert Middleton, The Harrad Experiment), has anything to say about it; he literally wants Ding to dong as many girls as possible, rather than settle for the virginal Sandy.

That’s about all of the surfboard-skinny plot, another hallmark of the Frankie and Annette pics. Meanwhile, Pamela’s two uncles (corny comedians Paul Lynde and Woody Woodbury, the latter playing himself) struggle as musicians as unhip as your grandmother after a fall. They’re about to lose their filler club gig, where the understandable star attraction is the bump-and-grind act of stripper Topaz McQueen (Tina Louise, roughly a quarter away from Gilligan’s Island’s maiden voyage); in another Tashlin, um, touch, Topaz later descends a staircase with an extra-long wiener in each hand. Speaking of Gilligan, Bob Denver is here to serve as Kelp, Ding’s white slave. Denver’s big scene is a rather disturbing musical number that finds Kelp singing from a veritable coffin of sand up to his bearded mouth and chin, on which Nancy Sinatra has painted an upside-down face.

Although technically a Beach Party rip-off, For Those Who Think Young is a reasonable facsimile, with much of the credit owed to Pop Art-friendly Leslie H. Martinson (1966’s Batman: The Movie) in the director’s chair. The lovely Tiffin is a sexy and wholesome approximation of Funicello, although Darren isn’t nearly as likable as Avalon — because his character is a total ass! Not only is Ding not above stealing a woman’s crutches to pull a ruse for cooze, but he tells Sandy his ding-a-ling is “entitled” to a test run!

More than half a century later, that dated attitude unintentionally adds another layer of entertainment — as does future Exorcist mama Ellen Burstyn in her movie debut as a teetotaler unknowingly getting hammered by spiked fruit punch. Methinks Think Young exudes charm more discernible than all its in-your-face product placement for Pepsi and Baskin-Robbins combined. As the beach-bound extras chant at the close of Denver’s traumatizing tune, “Ho, daddy! Ho, daddy!” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.