Director Michael Anderson’s career had come a long way since he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for 1956’s Around the World in Eighty Days; unfortunately, it was mostly in the wrong direction. The ’70s hadn’t been kind to him. Logan’s Run had been a hit, but it had been preceded and followed by the famous flops Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and Orca.

By the ’80s, he was reduced to working on Canadian tax shelter movies (1982’s Murder by Phone and 1986’s Separate Vacations) and the Australian sex comedy Second Time Lucky, which was produced by Roger Corman’s closest non-union Down Under equivalent, Tony Ginnane.

Originally planned as a full-length comedic look at the story of Adam and Eve, Second Time Lucky eventually morphed into an epoch-crossing episodic film detailing the battle of good and evil waged between God and the Devil as fought through one of the dudes from Porky’s and the woman you instantly will recognize as the French foreign exchange student John Cusack ended up with in Better Off Dead.

Ultimately, it is this young woman (Diane Franklin) who ends up giving the movie its only reason to exist. Indifferently directed by Anderson on an Australian sex-comedy budget, Second Time Lucky is less a cohesive narrative than a good excuse to see a very attractive lady-person in some state of undress every 10 minutes.

Such is the devotion and precision with which it unclothes Franklin that it borders on being the cinematic equivalent of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. And as a strategy to get 98 minutes to fly by, it’s not a bad plan. Franklin is almost pathologically adorable and does the naked thing very well. Enough so that it’s easy to forgive how utterly terrible everything else is around her.

And — make no mistake — everything around her is pretty goddamn terrible. British character actor Robert Morley clearly filmed his entire role as God in one day without ever leaving his chair, and although famed Aussie dancer Robert Helpmann once portrayed one of moviedom’s scariest villains as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he fails to do much besides camp it up in all the wrong ways as Satan.

As an excuse to see Franklin naked a lot and to witness the heights from which mighty directors can fall, Second Time Lucky is probably worth a view. I know I’ve personally watched worse movie for worse reasons, but those who hold themselves to much higher standards can be forgiven for giving it a miss. —Allan Mott

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‘Tis with a fiery passion that I detest comedy writer Steve Oedekerk’s many thumb-based parody shorts, which include Thumbtanic, Bat Thumb and Thumb Wars: The Phantom Cuticle. They’re simply fucking stupid. I dislike them so much that I half-wish he would lose those two digits in an accident, in a bizarre twist of irony.

So I fully expected to despise his chopsocky parody, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, with a passion. But other than an instantly dated Matrix bit, a lame gopher gag and the inane talking-tongue business (thus replacing the thumb), I really, really, really enjoyed it.

And to this day, I’m pretty embarrassed to admit it.

For the movie, Oedekerk removed the soundtrack from Hong Kong’s 1976 Jimmy Wang Yu vehicle Tiger and Crane Fist, and dubbed most all the voices himself. Using blue-screen technology, he also stars in the movie as the Chosen One, a martial-arts master seeking revenge for the murder of his parents at the hands of evil guy Master Pain, who now calls himself Betty.

All the conventions of the kung fu film are sent up with a mix of mindless Airplane!-style humor and good-natured Farrelly brothers raunch. But it most resembles a solid episode of TV’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, minus the silhouettes. Repeat value is strong with this one. —Rod Lott

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To say professor Percy Corly (Robert Wood, She-Devils on Wheels) knows nothing about women is an understatement: “Could it be,” he asks himself, “that girls are better than textbooks?”

Eff yes they are. Well, the sexy ones, at least.

In the harmless How to Make a Doll, one of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ more obscure pictures, the 32-year-old Corly lives with his henpecking mother (Elizabeth Davis, The Gruesome Twosome) who looks not unlike Cruella De Vil and pesters her son about the opposite sex to the point where he snaps, “I’m not queer, y’know!”

There’s hope for Corly’s virginity yet, when colleague Dr. West (Jim Vance, Scream Baby Scream) shows him his latest invention: a supercomputer that sometimes makes fart noises and speaks with a stereotypical Asian accent. Oh, but it also spits out hot-to-trot honeys in swimwear. For Corly, it’s a blonde in an orange bikini complete with camel toe; for West, a brunette made of “acres of warm, bouncing flesh.”

Much making out ensues, but Doll proceeds no further than first base. Perhaps that’s because Lewis’ precursor to John Hughes’ Weird Science suggests that such a machine would not be all it’s cracked up to be. That’s bullshit, Herschell — I still want one.  —Rod Lott

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“Badassery is not born, but often thrust upon you.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Because tragedy plus time famously equals comedy, we can laugh along with something like FDR: American Badass!, a low-budget film built upon bad taste, but with the skills good enough to pull most of it off. “Who ordered the burnt honky with a side of polio?” is but one example of its anarchic and anachronistic sense of humor.

Appearing to have more fun onscreen than ever before (The Rocky Horror Picture Show included), Barry Bostwick tears into the role of POTUS 32 like the old pro he is, portraying the Depression-era prez as a trash-talkin’, freestylin’ blowhard who’s okay with never walking again as long as his penis still functions. His legs stop working when he contracts polio from the bite of a werewolf, naturally.

As the film posits, the werewolves (whose makeup makes them look like stand-up comedian Richard Lewis) are the doing of Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a bid to rule the world, thus kick-starting World War II. The only thing standing in the pack’s way? FDR and his Einstein-pimped machine-gun wheelchair.

This hysterical historical is an extension of the literary mash-up craze that quickly infiltrated Hollywood with the likes of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. But what that megamillions project forgot is something FDR: American Badass! does not: Don’t let the humor end at your film’s title. This entry may be dirt-cheap, but good jokes cost nothing to deliver. You have nothing to fear but the fact that Ross Anderson’s script bears too many gags relying on oral sex (inching toward either homophobia or latent desire?), but blessedly more that do not. It helps that the entire supporting cast is game and without shame.

Directed by Garrett Brawith (Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury), FDR is a spirited spoof with enough LOLs to merit multiple terms of office; today, we call them “viewings.” —Rod Lott

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Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello first frolicked together in Beach Party, the start of American International Pictures’ loose, teen-oriented franchise concerned with sun, sand, surf, song and squeaky-clean sex. The pair plays Frankie and, um, Dolores, young lovebirds who venture toward the SoCal waves for a vacation.

Ironically, neither is the film’s real star. That honor belongs to Bob Cummings (Dial M for Murder) as Professor Robert Sutwell, a woefully unhip, but amiable academic with a presidential beard and the entire shoreline under surveillance. It’s strictly for research, as he’s studying the mating habits of the American teenager. The virginal Dolores feigns interest in this square in order to make Frankie jealous, since he’s been drooling over a milk-jugged Hungarian sexpot (Eva Six, 4 for Texas) who waitresses at the local hangout run by the goateed Cappy (comedian Morey Amsterdam).

That’s about all the story the movie needs, as TV sitcom director William Asher (Bewitched) is basically filling space between all the ass-shakin’ dance sequences, many to the tune of surf-guitar king Dick Dale (sporting an earring the size of a bracelet) and the Del-Tones. Providing comic relief in a flick packed with it is Harvey Lembeck (Stalag 17) as Eric Von Zipper, a dopey motorcycle gang leader who comes with not only his own catchphrase (“You stupid!”), but his own sound effects.

A real time capsule of a motion picture, Beach Party is fluff, yet vibrant, inoffensive, smile-inducing fluff that generates as many genuine laughs as it does inadvertent ones, i.e. “What is with Annette’s pumpkin hairdo?” It’s hard to hate a movie that ends with a pie fight and a Vincent Price cameo that serves solely to advertise AIP’s The Haunted Palace, and I don’t. Quite the opposite. —Rod Lott

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