Shot on video, the monster-mash monstrosity known as Franky and His Pals feels like the management team of your local Spirit Halloween store got drunk after closing and improvised a movie. In reality, it’s made by Gerald Cormier, producer of such X-rated fare as Hey! There’s Naked Bodies on My TV!

Thanks to an avalanche, the bolt-templed Franky, the vampire Drak, the wolfman Wolfie, the mummy Mummy and the hunchback Humper live captive in a cave, until Franky (Eric Weathersbee) eats so many chili beans that he farts the boulders away to clear a passage. This allows the group to escape and go looking for the rumored gold in town. Emerging from the mummy’s tummy to crack wise is a talking rat. Also, Wolfie (Wilson Smith) is gay, assumedly so Cormier and his pals could make light of a feminine man named Clover (Shawn West), who wears a tutu and walks around asking in a whiny pout, “Have you seen my Wolfie?”

They attend a costume party — conveniently enough, so no one knows their true nature — at a nearby hotel, where they dance, grope women, hop in the sack, judge a bikini contest and participate in one-joke setups that even Rowan and Martin would reject. One running gag has the monsters individually terrified whenever the obese Tammy appears … yet they overwhelmingly vote her the victor in the aforementioned contest — so much for consistency! The night ends when Franky stumbles upon a pot of chili beans in the kitchen, can’t help himself and farts the place into an explosion, which unearths the gold.

Oh, you’ll also be treated to a rap song that recounts the events of the prior 10 minutes, a pair of Stepin Fetchit stereotypes as gravediggers, an aerobics sequence, gratuitous Pepsi-Cola placement, and a scientist with a time machine that doesn’t come into play until the very end, when the monsters are zapped away to … well, who knows? The scientist (Cormier himself) breaks the fourth wall to inform viewers the sequel will reveal the quintet’s destination. Luckily, that follow-up never came, because one Franky is twice the amount anyone needs. It’s so corny, you’ll spot chunks of it in tomorrow’s stool. —Rod Lott

I hadn’t seen John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles in about 16 years. With changes to the culture happening so fast these days, I’d recently been wondering how this teen film has held up, especially with many accusations of Asian-based racism, possible date rape and so on.

The answer is “not great.”

I’m pretty sure we’re all familiar with the setup by now: Samantha’s (Molly Ringwald) family forgets her “fucking birthday” on the account of her sister’s upcoming nuptials, which sets into motion a series of event that includes giving her panties to a geek (Anthony Michael Hall) at a high school dance while, eventually, ending up with the quintessential hunk (Michael Schoeffling) of her dreams.

While the film is still riotously hilarious, some of these laughs come with pangs of guilt. One of the most troubling is foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe); while Dong has many of the film’s most memorable lines, his stereotyped character seems more like a one-note joke from one of Hughes’ equally troublesome National Lampoon pieces.

And while Samantha is a realistically relatable character at a time when some of the worst-written ones were often female, her dream guy — even more than ever — comes off more like the Patrick Bateman of date rapists. At one point, he brags how he could “violate” his drunk girlfriend “10 different ways” if he wanted to, and then gives the passed-out prom queen to the geek Farmer Ted, ostensibly to drive home.

Like her when she awakens, we’re not sure if anything happened between her and Ted, but she ultimately forgives him with a chance at a wholly unrealistic relationship. When I was a geeky youth myself, I thought it was the perfect situation; now I’m not so sure. He may be forgiven in and by the film, but it’s kind of hard for the audience, at least by today’s standards, to do the same.

I guess we can play it off with the trite “it was the ’80s” cliché, a different time with strangely lax mores when compared to today. Watched through that retrofitted eye, Sixteen Candles does stand up as one of the most memorable comedies of the time, but ultimately one you couldn’t get away with today and, honestly, why would you want to? —Louis Fowler

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From Coors Light commercials to Saturday afternoon horror flicks, the constant bosomy presence of Elvira on television did a real erotic number on me growing up, implanting a lifelong lust for buxom Gothic females fully loaded with a heart-ripping skill for double entendre and a heartbreaking like for me in their arsenal.

While those dark and stormy romances never turned out the way I devilishly hoped they would, when Elvira went to the big screen in 1988’s Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, it gave me an ironic glimmer of hope that someday a black-clad beauty would cross my path in her ever-lovin’ fight against demonic forces, real or imagined.

Working as a late-night horror hostess, Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) leaves her terrible job to collect an inheritance from a recently deceased aunt. Landing in the conservative town of Fallwell, Massachusetts, she soon learns her mother was the original Mistress of the Dark, which comes in handy when she also learns her Uncle Vincent (W. Morgan Sheppard) is an evil warlock with sights set on world domination.

But the real threat here is the small town, led by the stereotypical busybody Chastity Pariah (Edie McClurg), who, after eating a magical casserole, gets so aroused she sits on some guy’s face in a public park. With the help of the area’s equally horny teens, however, Elvira is able to win the town over and defeat her evil lineage.

With so many Mae West-ian jokes about breasts, fellatio and other sexually explicit acts, it’s amazing this film escaped with a PG-13 rating. But it was a different time, I guess — one where people could burn witches at the stake for surefire laughs. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a satanically overlooked comedy that should be rescued from the pyre. —Louis Fowler

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Sergeant Dead Head is what happens when American International Pictures forces the Beach Party formula to enlist in the military. With nary an Annette in sight, Frankie Avalon bumbles his way through the title role, pratfalling all over the U.S. Air Force’s Smedley Missile Base. It’s exactly the kind of locale you don’t want the accident-prone, where one might, say, plop his rear on the panic button sitting uncovered atop the general’s desk.

Despite never have expressing love for her, Dead Head is engaged to fellow enlistee Lucy (Deborah Walley, It’s a Bikini World). The nuptials are at risk when Dead Head catches a nap in a rocket, only to wake up as the spacecraft — commandeered by a chimpanzee in an astronaut suit and paid in bananas — lifts off (in black-and-white footage, mind you). It’s even stupider than it sounds …

… and gets stupider than that, because when he’s back on Earth, Dead Head and the chimp have somehow switched brains. Now he’s a stone-cold cad!

Avalon gives it his all, coming off like a cartoon character living in a cornball sitcom — purely on purpose, with frequent Jerry Lewis director Norman Taurog at the helm — even more so than the great Buster Keaton, who does his phys-com shtick! With lots of no-harm explosions and flowing water, Sergeant Dead Head hasn’t a mean bone in its body, but I’m afraid it doesn’t have much of a heart, either. Although every bit as colorful as its AIP brethren, the movie lacks that special something: unadulterated charm. And that’s with a cast that includes Eve Arden, Harvey Lembeck, Dwayne Hickman, John Ashley, Pat Buttram, Gale Gordon, Fred Clark and Cesar Romero, some of whom sing and dance.

Oh, did I mention this is also a musical? But its songs are lifeless and lackluster, plopped in like flung wall spackle to highlight how bereft of effort Louis M. Heyward’s script is. I can’t help but wonder if the movie was greenlighted just to get in the “JAMES BOND WILL RETURN”-style plug of the then-forthcoming Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine in the end credits, because Heyward and Academy Award-winning Taurog clearly saved the goods for that one. —Rod Lott

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It’s not like Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer is the only actress who could headline the Catholicism comedy Yes, God, Yes, but she’s perfect for the role. Dyer may be in the middle of her 20s, but her diminutive stature goes a long way in selling the illusion that her character, Alice, is stuck in the throes of her teen years — aches, angst and all — at the dawn of this new millennium, when “A/S/L” became the new “What’s your major?”

Appropriately mousy (church mousy, perhaps?), Alice is a good girl headed down what her parents, pastor and private school faculty no doubt would term a bad road — one paved straight to hell. When an afternoon AOL chat with a stranger suddenly turns saucy, the supremely naive virgin notices a feeling markedly distinct from her puppy love for Leo in Titanic: sexual arousal. With the scrunched face of the curious, she begins exploring those feelings at a church retreat, including masturbation with her cellphone — not by looking at pornographic material, but by enjoying the vibration that results from each wrong move in the built-in game of Snake.

Yes, God, Yes holds some precedent with 2004’s Saved!, starting with its female lead experiencing a crisis both cataclysmic and catechistic, but the satire here isn’t nearly as savage. Nor is it as sharp, best exemplified by a running joke that has Alice not understanding the crude meaning of “tossing salad.” As it’s played, the gag isn’t highly offensive, but also simply isn’t funny; writer/director Karen Maine so greatly misjudges its value — as both laugh line and story point — that her debut feature opens with a title card defining the sex act, like a big-screen adaptation of Urban Dictionary.

Maybe it was a move for pure padding; Yes, God, Yes is based on Maine’s 2017 short, and feels it. In all of 11 minutes, the same-named piece achieves near-greatness and a more consistent performance from Dyer, because the story doesn’t stray into tangents. In the expanded form of 78 minutes, tonal changes abound, with initial acidity all but neutralized by the addition of Alice delivering a patronizing speech more attuned to the pat rhythms of TV sitcoms. While I get Maine wanting to grant Alice an awakening of empowerment to go hand in hand with her sexual one, it rings false and unearned. Ten Hail Marys, please. —Rod Lott

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