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.

Q: What do you get when you combine $200,000 of computer gear with a $20 budget?
A: Bill Rebane’s Twister’s Revenge!

That’s a terrible “joke.” Yet it’s better and more logical than those offered by the movie. I can prove it.

Kelly: “They can’t nail us for this. It’s not even our tank! Besides, I think it’s got something to do with habeas electi.”
Bear: “Does that mean we can’t have children?”

The defense rests.

Ostensibly a lighthearted caper in look and feel, Twister’s Revenge! — exclamation point entirely Rebane’s — gives us a setup seemingly straight from an improv’s show participatory “give me a word” portion: Dave (Dean West, Rebane’s Blood Harvest) seeks to rescue his brand-new wife, Sherry (Meredith Orr), from the clutches of kidnappers — and destroy their property while he’s at it — with the help of a talking monster truck (Mr. Twister). Said kidnappers — the greasy, bumbling Kelly, Dutch and Bear (respectively overplayed by David Alan Smith, Jay Gjernes and R. Richardson Luka) — have Sherry tied up with a serial-style load of TNT.

Meanwhile, Dave has his all-American guns and Mr. Twister, which his spouse has secretly outfitted with Knight Rider-style voice technology. Instead of William Daniels, however, Mr. Twister sounds like someone speaking into a desk fan. The intellitruck can calculate probability on the fly, even to the right of the decimal point. While Dave is clearly dressed to imply Indiana Jones, the viewer may infer Harry Anderson.

Watch in amazement as Dave steers Mr. Twister to level an outhouse — chalk-labeled with disturbing aggression as “SHIT HOUSE!” — in which the moronic Bear, a cork-on-fork version of Goonies’ John Matuszak, ducks to evade death by tire. Bear survives, but crawls out covered in feces — an apt metaphor for your experience as a viewer, potentially topped only by him going cross-eyed when kicked in the nuts.

This is, after all, a movie with:
• a morbidly obese bar singer (Liz Gray, Drop Dead Fred’s Namby Pamby) in blue spandex belting inane lyrics, e.g., “I stroke your feathers / While you do-do-do”
• men in that bar wearing gas masks and a bat’s head
• a running gag of Bear’s girlfriend (Tena Murray) fleeing Mr. Twister in fast-motion like a veritable Keystone Kop, struggling to keep her breasts contained with her dress and, at one point, sprinting through a Hardee’s for a sandwich on the go
• an opening-credits misspelling of its DP’s title as “photograpy”

And, hey, did I mention a monster truck that talks? Not unlike Al Adamson’s Carnival Magic, Twister’s Revenge! is Rebane’s amateurishly executed attempt at a comedy for families — specifically, the one sharing the surname Manson. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

With Werewolves Within, the big takeaway isn’t that it’s funny, but that it’s based on a video game. By that standard, it shouldn’t be good at all. And yet it is. Heck, even by regular movie standards, it’s great.

In quaint, quiet Beaverfield, there’s a new federal forest ranger in town: Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson, TV’s Veep). His arrival coincides with the discovery of a torn-up corpse that has residents on edge. It’s hardly the last body that’ll turn up — and specifically, at a local inn, where Finn and about a dozen others find themselves trapped due to a spell of bad weather — or, as bumblefuck Marcus (George Basil, Desperados) puts it, “streets is all storm-fucked.” Oh, and some of the guests believe a lycanthrope is to blame.

From Keystone-shaded pipeline drama to sabotaged generators, director Josh Ruben (Scare Me) and first-time screenwriter Mishna Wolff (ha!) give their cast a heckuva lot of obstacles to play against. In look and feel, Werewolves Within suggests an old-fashioned drawing-room mystery, but did Miss Marple ever have to face geysers of goo? Luckily, unlike too many of its horror brethren from the same litter, this film doesn’t forget to wrap a story around the gore or neglect to imbue its characters with personalities — not even the most hapless of victims.

Who survives or doesn’t is negligible when the cast is this well-stacked, making for a thoroughly winning ensemble with crack comic timing. Supporting Richardson are such reliable talents as Saturday Night Live vet Michaela Watkins, I Love You, Man’s Sarah Burns and, as Beaverfield’s mail carrier and Finn’s romantic interest, internet troll magnet Milana Vayntrub (aka Lily, “the girl from the AT&T commercials”). There are many more, each having a hand in making the movie to be the light, enjoyable and bloody romp it is — complete with The Free Design joyously buoying the conclusion. Oh, and maybe a lycanthrope. —Rod Lott