Watching, absorbing and trying to stay awake during Gold, you not only realize why Kent State happened, but why it was also fully justified. As a matter of fact, I was so charged up after viewing this musty, shot-in-1968 relic that I went down to my local college campus and shot three kids playing Hacky Sack.

Okay, not really, but I did kick their sack into the sewer just to spite them, and to spite this movie. Like many lost-film obsessives, when word hit that Gold was going to get a proper DVD release, I was excited, picturing an Alejandro Jodorowsky-lite countercultural epic, possibly a pre-indie, all-hippie take on the well-documented American Dream of the ’60s, complete with multicolored acid trips, psych-rock freak-outs and plenty of flower-power pubic hair. At least that’s what I was promised, dammit.

Instead, I got a fifth-rate group of stoned community theater rejects/draft-dodgers — led by “comedian” Del Close — dressed as famed mass-murderer Che Guevara, rolling around in the mud while espousing anti-war sentiments and aimlessly driving sputtering jalopies. Improvised elections are held on a train, The MC5 blares on the soundtrack, and everyone remains happily unemployable. If this is what the young people were doing while our boys were dying face-down in the Vietnam jungles, sign me up to the Ohio National Guard and hand me a bayonet!

With no rhyme, reason or proper editing techniques, it’s as if the school from Billy Jack made a movie and decided to write the screenplay after the thing was already in theaters. Never clever, funny nor enlightening, Gold is a total, unwatchable mess. It’s the Altamont of free-love flicks with every frame a pool cue to Meredith Hunter’s skull. And this Del Close guy: In every book about comedy, every tastemaker to come out of Second City or The Groundlings raves on and on about this so-called “father of improvisational comedy” as “the funniest man you’ve never heard of.” If Gold is any inclination of his talents, there’s a reason for that.

Gold: You blew it, man. —Louis Fowler

Buy it at Amazon.

After an incognito viewing of herself in an adult movie shown on a commercial airline (!), American actress Betty Williams (Pia Degermark, Elvira Madigan) lands in Transylvania, where she has just inherited the requisite spooky old castle whose basement is laden with torture devices specifically for use on naked women.

The place also bears — bares? — a nude portrait of her great-grandmother, Baroness Clarimonde (also Degermark), who looks just like her, except that Betty’s hair is blonde to her ancestor’s brunette. Also, Clarimonde is a vampire who emerges from her coffin and corrupts nearby villagers, in particular the leering Catholics next door. Seduction follows, several times over.

All this culminates in quite the swingin’ party-cum-orgy where the guest of honor is none other than Count Dracula himself (Ferdy Mayne, Conan the Destroyer), who swoops in on his own branded helicopter, flashes the devil’s horns to his admirers, and goes inside to enjoy a banana. If you couldn’t tell by now, The Vampire Happening is a stab at sexy horror comedy à la The Fearless Vampire Killers, but minus the touch of Roman Polanski. (In his place is Hammer/Amicus vet Freddie Francis.)

In the most riotous scene, Betty flashes a monk from her window, prompting the lust-suffering holy man to the imagine all the surrounding trees as naughty parts, moss and all, like something from the height of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker era. Speaking of, the gay male flight attendant gags in the opening scenes are as un-PC as Stephen Stucker’s running ones in Airplane!, but not as funny. In fact, little in Vamp Hap is truly funny, but the movie is so odd, so laden with nudity, so goofily self-aware, you gotta see it anyway. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have firsthand experience dealing with the misery that comes from being a smoking-hot, 18-year-old girl (but if you do, please feel free to email us — with an attached photo). Luckily for us, though, we have Just One of the Guys to share with us the insight our own lives thus far have failed to provide.

Terri (Sandra Bullock lookalike Joyce Hyser) is a high school reporter who believes she isn’t taken seriously because of her impressive rack. In order to test her theory, she decides to transfer to a nearby school and pose as a male student (where she is accurately described by female admirer Sherilyn Fenn as looking, “like the Karate Kid”).

Speaking of a certain Ralph Macchio movie, professional ’80s asshole William Zabka shows up to play the school bully who picks on “Terrance” and her new friend, Rick (April Fool’s Day’s Clayton Rohner), whom she inevitably falls in love with and has to flash in order to prove she’s a lady-girl and not a really cute gay dude.

While lacking the verisimilitude that made the concurrent John Hughes films so special, Just One of the Guys has a fun, timeless quality that keeps it from being another dated ’80s teen comedy (and as a bonus, it has a much happier ending than Boys Don’t Cry). Hyser is a genuinely charming lead, and it’s a shame her work here didn’t allow her to go on to bigger and better things. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

One thing I truly love about watching forgotten exploitation films are coming across moments where the filmmakers manage to transcend their obvious limitations (be it budget, talent or a combination of both) and create a sequence that truly stands out as something far more memorable than it has any right to be.

For the majority of its running time, Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (aka The Great American Girl Robbery) is little more than a blatant excuse to connive scenarios in which its titular characters are compelled to expose their breasts, but hidden at the end is a genuinely engaging heist sequence as breathlessly enjoyable as anything you could expect to see in a major studio film of the era.

So what I’m saying is that to get to the good part of this movie, you’ll have to sit through a lot of nudity featuring a bunch of attractive young women dressed in short skirts and very tight T-shirts. There are clearly worse ways to spend your time.

As the kidnapper/mastermind/former pro football player, co-writer Jason Williams (of Flesh Gordon fame) manages to walk the hero/villain line surprisingly well — at least enough to earn the final moment of connection he shares with the film’s nominal heroine (Kristine DeBell, a Playboy cover girl who went hardcore in the X-rated Alice in Wonderland before moving on to mainstream fare like Meatballs and The Big Brawl).

The rest of the performances are mostly abysmal, but in that amusingly porno way, that actually adds charm to a production rather than detracts from it. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Found National Lampoon’s European Vacation too mature and sophisticated? Then Eurotrip is for you. Not only is it from the producers of Road Trip, its plot seems like a discarded draft of Road Trip. After being dumped by his girlfriend on the day of his high school graduation, Scotty (Scott Mechlowicz) receives an e-mail from his German pen pal, who suggests some face-to-face consolation. Wrongly believing Mieke to be a guy, Scotty tells his online friend to “fuc off,” only to learn that Mieke (Euro pop tart Jessica Boehrs) is, in fact, a hot blonde. His hasty reply results in her blocking his e-mails, so he foregoes a summer internship to hightail it to Berlin to explain himself. (Couldn’t he just have e-mailed her from another account?)

Accompanying him is the requisite annoying/horny best pal, and because no Hollywood teen-trip movie is complete without crazy shenanigans and hee-larious misunderstandings, they also encounter enraged soccer hooligans, a robot mime, a creepy Italian guy (SNL’s Fred Armisen), lots of scraggly naked fat dudes, oft-topless hookers and, most belabored, the Pope.

Eurotrip aims for crude laughs and earns some in gags involving a cymbal-playing monkey, David Hasselhoff and the aforementioned Armisen. But much of it is just being vulgar or stupid for vulgar and stupid’s sake. I guess either you find a near-incestuous encounter between inebriated brother and sister incredibly humorous or you don’t. Ditto a kindergartener who apes noted Jew-killer Hitler, or a impoverished girl peeing while standing up on the sidewalk. I’m sure the kids will eat it up.

It’s worth noting that minute for minute, Eurotrip contains more gratuitous nudity than any movie of recent memory; the film is bustling with breast-rubbing, barely dressed prostitutes and public sexual encounters … and, unfortunately, dozens of uncircumcised Europenises in full view. Not since The Exorcist has the big screen seen such horrors. How in the hell did they get Matt Damon to cameo? —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.