True or false: The movie Saving Christmas begins with a three-minute lecture to the audience from Kirk Cameron.

The answer is “false.” It takes up four.

In that prologue — scooch, Alistair Cooke! — the erstwhile ’80s teen heartthrob of TV’s Growing Pains sits in front of a glorious fireplace next to a glorious Christmas tree in a glorious living room and, with awkward pauses to sip from a glorious prop mug, relays all that he appreciates about the most wonderful time of the year: “I love the cookies. I love the fire. I love the fudge. … And I love hot chocolate!” he exclaims. “But some people want to put a big, wet blanket on this.”

Yes, Virginia, Cameron’s talking about the nonexistent “war on Christmas.” And he’s here to narrate and star in a high-definition sermon all about it. Playing himself (and producing), Cameron attends a glorious Christmas party for wealthy people at the glorious home of his big sister (real-life sibling Bridgette Ridenour). The problem — other than Sis’ apparent addiction to Hobby Lobby kitchen decorations — is that Kirk’s brother-in-law with the punchable face (the movie’s writer/director, Darren Doane) isn’t feeling the spirit; he just can’t get over all the people partying because he’s too busy moping about how Christmas trees and Santa Claus aren’t in the Bible, for God’s sake.

True or false: The bro-in-law’s character name is Christian White. The answer is “true”; I’m guessing Christian Aryan was deemed too on-the-nose.

I won’t fault the Liberty University-funded Saving Christmas for its religious beliefs — not even the one justifying material things as being “right.” I fault Saving Christmas because it’s lazy and deceitful. Narrates Cameron toward the beginning, “Stories are tricky things,” which must be why Doane didn’t adorn his project with one. For an hour, Kirk and Christian sit in a car while the former reassures the latter that the Christmas symbols he worries about are indeed holy. Then they rejoin the party so a hip-hop musical montage (complete with Doane breakdancing) can extend the running time into a feature; Kirk jumps in to scream, “Let’s feast!”; the end.

That’s not a plot; that’s a commercial, essentially for itself. (Choir, you have been preached to!) I feel sorry for well-meaning people who paid good money to see “wholesome family entertainment” and soon realized they were hoodwinked into an audiovisual presentation, considerable stretches of which have no movement in them — just inanimate objects shot from rotating angles. If Doane’s digital camera and editing equipment didn’t allow for scenes in slow motion, Saving Christmas would be half the length, but interminable all the same.

Thou shalt not laugh, either, because Doane’s idea of comedy is summed up by an end-credit “blooper” in which the stereotypical black friend improvs, “I’m just gonna keep talking and move my hands until your camera gets what it needs.” Hell, even Cameron’s 2008 hit Fireproof is more accidentally funny.

True or false: I can achieve the same wonderful feeling that Saving Christmas wishes to espouse from Bill Murray’s epic monologue at the end of Scrooged. The answer is “true.” And I can get legitimate jokes with it! —Rod Lott

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Cop shows ruled the prime-time lineup in the late 1970s, and the Aaron Spelling-produced Murder Can Hurt You! poked fun at seven of them. Like a massive Mad magazine parody come to made-for-TV life, its sights were set on Ironside, Baretta, Starsky & Hutch, Kojak, McCloud, Police Woman and — oh, yeah, one more thing — Columbo.

The telepic boasts a cast that appears to have been drawn, lottery-style, from a complete series roster of The Love Boat (with which this movie shares director Roger Duchowny), because not only do we have Gavin MacLeod, but Victor Buono, Jimmie Walker, Tony Danza, Jamie Farr, John Byner, Buck Owens, Connie Stevens and Burt Young. These Los Angeles “defectives — I mean, detectives” (per the narrator, Get Smart star Don Adams) match their collective wits (which ain’t much) against the one-person crime wave known only as the Man in White (Mitch Kreindel, Modern Problems), so named because … hell, you figure it out. One by one, the cops are thwarted by such cartoon-ready devices as giant balloons, wet cement and magnetic beds.

The level of humor in this thing is every bit as low-aiming as you would expect from an ABC Wednesday-night movie. A recurring bit has flames shoot high every time Palumbo (Young, Paulie of the Rocky franchise) flicks his Bic to light a smoke. The climactic slapstick set piece atop — and hanging from — a ladder connecting two buildings is like the finale of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as if adapted by sixth graders.

What once was a laugh riot upon its broadcast premiere — hey, I was 9 — is largely an embarrassment now. One thing that hasn’t changed: how unbelievably sexy Connie Stevens is in this. Spoofing Angie Dickinson’s Sgt. Pepper Anderson, the bubble-voiced Grease 2 faculty member plays Sgt. Salty Sanderson by squeezing herself into one homina-homina-homina getup after another, from blue hot pants and, um, purple hot pants to a gold nightie. So what if the bra we glimpse as she plays Strip Go Fish is rather plain in its whiteness? It’s what I remembered most. —Rod Lott

After the unprecedented success of National Lampoon’s Animal House, it seemed only natural that the nation’s other most influential comedy magazine of the period would get into the movie game as well.

Unfortunately for the usual gang of idiots at Mad, the result wasn’t nearly as financially rewarding. In fact, the Mad men were so disappointed with the way Up the Academy turned out, they eventually took the Mad Magazine Presents out of the title and disavowed any association with the film — instantly turning Alfred E. Neuman’s cameo into a strange non sequitur.

In retrospect, though, you have to wonder how they ever thought hiring the iconoclastic filmmaker Robert Downey could have ever resulted in a successful mainstream comedy. Best known (aside from siring the future star of Iron Man) for his cult masterpiece, Putney Swope, Downey Sr. was an auteur whose gifts pretty obviously didn’t extend to the creation of a sophomoric teen comedy (or at least one that could actually be appreciated by its intended audience).

Sloppy, deliberately offensive (the film’s casual jokes about race and teen pregnancy seem especially shocking today) and almost angrily broad, the film plays less like an actual movie than a feature-length version of one of Swope’s infamous commercial satires. But then at the same time, it also feels strangely restrained for a film supposedly inspired by the anarchic spirit of Mad (a spirit much better exemplified onscreen that same year in Airplane!).

For this reason, Up the Academy is one of those films I personally find interesting even though it clearly fails on all of the levels by which it should be judged. An experiment gone hopelessly awry, it’s one of those strange projects that should be viewed if only because it somehow manages to exist even though it probably shouldn’t.

And it has an awesome soundtrack. —Allan Mott

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Originally broadcast on Oct. 31, 1987, the WNUF Halloween Special has to be the craziest live television program since the medium’s invention. Or rather, it would be, if only it were real.

Actually a movie made to resemble — really resemble — a local newscast of the chroma key-happy era, WNUF is a damned fine hoax. Masterminded by writer/director/producer Chris LaMartina (Call Girl of Cthulhu), the show parodies and draws obvious influence from Geraldo Rivera’s infamous satanic-panic “exposé” of ’88. Here, mustachioed TV 28 reporter Frank Stewart (a thoroughly winning Paul Fahrenkopf, President’s Day) is on assignment at the Webber House, boarded up for 20 years after its owners were murdered by their Ouija-using son, whose evil spirit is said to haunt the abandoned home ever since.

Following WNUF’s nightly newscast — complete with seasonal stories from a cop providing trick-or-treat safety tips to a dentist paying kids to relinquish their loot for cash — the dogged Frank explores the Webber House with the assistance of the Bergers, a paranormal-investigating couple (played by Brian St. August and Helenmary Bell), who are to conduct a live, call-in séance. The Bergers clearly are spoofs of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the controversial duo involved in the real-life Amityville Horror and more recently immortalized and fictionalized in 2013’s The Conjuring.

As satisfying as the story of Frank’s on-the-spot reporting is, the reason WNUF stands out as a unique viewing experience is the lengths to which LaMartina and his co-conspirators go to make their Halloween Special meet its conceit of being a time-capsule relic. Sporting no credits, the program begins as an old VHS tape would: the word “PLAY” appearing in the corner of a bright-blue screen and an image whose quality has degenerated with each viewing and the passing of the years. And boy, do the commercials sell it; the local-looking ads are so well-done — which is to say they are hokey and no-budget — that one would be right at home wedged within breaks of any given syndicated sitcom rerun.

These words from our sponsors include several Halloween-themed spots (“With prices so low, you’ll think we’re out of our gourds!”), plus PSAs, political-attack ads and 30-second pitches for ambulance-chasing attorneys, public events, a 1-900 line, a computer store — even tampons! The ones advertising TV 28’s other programs — from the mummy-shuffling-amok movie Sarcophagus to some sci-fi series titled Galaxy Pilot and the Lazer Brigade — ring particularly choice. To further pull that proverbial wool, some ads get repeated, only to be fast-forwarded through by whomever is controlling the signal.

I’d be curious to watch the WNUF Halloween Special with unsuspecting friends, to see how long it would take before they got the joke, assuming they would. LaMartina and friends have achieved perfection in imperfection, making the Special truly that — a cult classic worthy of annual viewing. —Rod Lott

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Rey Ciso, the editor of The Editor, has cut some killer movies: suspense pics such as The Mirror and the Guillotine and The Cat with the Velvet Blade. So dedicated is he to his craft that he continues chopping film despite having only one good hand, having accidentally sliced off the other one’s fingers while working feverishly on a previous project.

The wooden appendage he wears as a replacement is functional enough, but he’s not what he used to be — a shadow of his former self, a “cripple” in the eyes of fellow crew members, an embarrassment to his whorish wife (Paz de la Huerta, Nurse 3D). Now a punch line and a punching bag, Rey (Adam Brooks, the film’s co-director with Matthew Kennedy) finds himself unfairly fingered when the talent begins being slaughtered by a masked killer similar to the villain in the flick on which they’re working. He may take lives, but at least they are lost with impeccable style.

Although it takes its cues from Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, the 1970s-set The Editor is a comedy — another pitch-perfect pastiche from the five guys behind Astron-6, the retro-recreationist kids of the 1980s VHS era. The Canadian filmmaking collective made its name through many hysterical shorts that ape a specific genre to a tonal T, before doing the same at feature length, first with 2011’s Manborg and, later that year, Father’s Day.

As those films respectively send up post-apocalyptic science fiction and the revenge thriller, so does The Editor with its punctured eye on the giallo. As always, the gang nails the elements of its “target”; here, that means music by Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti, Argento’s unmistakable color gels, and even going so far as to dub the entire film so the dialogue and mouth movement are never quite in sync.

In a departure from Astron-6’s prior work, however, The Editor may perplex viewers unaccustomed to the Italian source material. So specific are its references that the movie could be — and likely will be — off-putting to the unfamiliar; it’s the team’s least accessible picture yet. That might be Astron-6’s “fault,” but the loss is all the consumer’s. Yet even for those who can recite the Argento filmography in chronological order and in reverse, The Editor’s ending feels like an irrational rush job, as if Brooks, Kennedy and co-writer Conor Sweeney had no clue how to take their surreal story to a stopping point. I just wish it had concluded as Manborg had: with an uproarious fake trailer for another cleverly executed Astron-6 joint. —Rod Lott

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