Herschell Gordon Lewis, aka the Godfather of Gore, has still got it! By “it,” of course, I mean goofy jokes, amateurish acting, not-much-better direction, loads of gross-out shots and generally dirt-cheap production values, but if it all adds up to pure entertainment, who cares? The Uh-Oh! Show is the end of that equation. I kinda loved it.

Only Lewis’ second film since 1972, The Uh-Oh! Show is a schizophrenic comedy centered around a demented game show of the same name, in which correct answers garner priceless prizes for its contestants, but also in which incorrect answers take limbs away from them, courtesy of one Radial Saw Rex, a large, African-American man who uses his electric tool like a phallus. The body part to go is chosen by a spin of the Wheel of Misfortune. No anesthetic is offered.

Producers want to bring the hit cable series to network prime time, but not without changes that greatly upset host Jackie (Brooke McCarter, Thrashin’). Meanwhile, a nosy reporter (Nevada Caldwell) wants to expose the show for the people-killin’ vehicle it truly is, and Uh-Oh! somehow morphs into a quasi-anthology that turns fairy tales into splatter stories.

Supplemented with boobs, boners and buckets of blood, The Uh-Oh! Show also comes packed with oodles of Lewis’ charm, evident from the start as he essentially hosts the film itself, sometimes commenting on how terrible it is. But his brand of terrible is different from other kinds of terrible, in that it translated to insanely watchable. I laughed a lot in its 88 minutes, all with it, as opposed to at it. Those with strong stomachs and an affection for his glory days of Blood Feast should do the same. —Rod Lott

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Legendary one-take helmer William Beaudine (Billy the Kid vs. Dracula) directed Bela Lugosi in Ghosts on the Loose, an alleged comedy starring The East Side Kids, who look to be almost 30. They’re kind of a gang of juvenile delinquents who sing and slap each other and fall down a lot, and are led by pint-sized Leo Gorcey and lanky Huntz Hall.

When Hall’s sister (Ava Gardner in an early role) gets married, The East Side Kids decide to fix her new house, yet they mistakenly enter the one next door that’s rumored to be haunted. It’s not — although the best scenes involve them thinking it is — but rather occupied by a group of Nazis in the cellar who print propaganda on “The New Order” (not the band) and are led by Lugosi.

Watch for when he sneezes and slips in a “Shit!” The loosely plotted Loose is filled with stoopid comedy (“I said sweep, not sleep! Now get to woik!”), to the point that it’s virtually laughless, but also utterly harmless. —Rod Lott

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Nine times out of 10, when you pick up an obscure movie you know nothing about based solely on its poster, you’re going to get burned. I expected as much when I bought a copy of Dom DeLuise’s 1979 directorial debut, Hot Stuff, based purely on its leggy illustration of Suzanne Pleshette. The fact that it also featured a drawing of Jerry Reed didn’t bode well for its overall quality, but it turns out, I had nothing to worry about.

The film is a slight affair that mostly takes place in one location, but the script (co-written by famed genre writer Donald E. Westlake) is filled with lively, funny characters brought fully to life by the talented cast. DeLuise, Reed and Pleshette star (along with The Electric Company regular Luis Avalos) as Florida cops assigned to a burglary and theft division whose spotty conviction record has placed it on the chopping block.

With just over a month to save their unit, they decide (with the blessing of their captain, Ossie Davis) to take over a local fencing warehouse and buy stolen goods while filming the perps through a two-way mirror. The mob soon gets involved, causing some amusing mayhem, but the majority of the running time is spent on the amusing array of criminals who come in to unload their stolen goods.

Hot Stuff definitely has an easy, unsophisticated feel that keeps it from rising to a particularly high level, but despite featuring a “thank you” to Hal Needham in its end credits, it still manages to earn some genuine laughs. The cast is great and Pleshette’s performance once again reminds the audience that Hollywood really fucked up by not allowing her to become the much bigger star she should have been. —Allan Mott

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In the realm of bad musicals, most know about Can’t Stop the Music and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But Train Ride to Hollywood is so bad, I’m told it was barely released. Before the Village People and Bee Gees made their ill-fated attempts at box-office glory, the four-man R&B group Bloodstone — perhaps best-known for the hit “Natural High,” which you heard in Jackie Brown — gave it a try.

I’m thinking they shouldn’t. Playing themselves, Bloodstone is about to go onstage for a concert when one of the members slips and conks his noggin, forcing him into an unconscious world that we must endure along with him for 80-some-odd minutes. When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, certainly he meant the opposite of this, which casts the guys as train conductors only a step or two above the demeaning level of Stepin Fetchit.

Said choo-choo is headed to Tinseltown, and the passengers are impersonations of movie legends Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields, Dracula and Clark Gable, who uses the “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” joke more than once. Also aboard are a sheik with seven whores, Caged Heat’s Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow, and most notably, Terminal Island’s Phyllis Davis squeezed into Scarlett O’Hara’s corset. Marlon Brando kills some of the passengers by having them smell his armpits. Oh, sorry: spoiler alert. And one of the guys boxes a gorilla.

Yes, it sure sounds wacky, but it’s a groaner without a clue, much less a successful gag. Admittedly, the songs Bloodstone wrote for the film aren’t bad — a couple of them are even as catchy as herpes — but it’s like wrapping a pizza not in a cardboard box, but a discarded diaper. Would you want to eat that? —Rod Lott

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As an actor, Sidney Poitier is an icon, a living legend, and one of the most important performers in the history of cinema, but as a director, he left a lot to be desired. The success of his biggest hit, Stir Crazy, had far more to do with the chemistry of stars Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor than anything he brought to the table, while Ghost Dad, his fourth collaboration with fellow icon, living legend, etc., Bill Cosby, is remembered only as one of the worst movies of the early ’90s (although such is Poitier’s bulletproof pop-culture status, few are aware he had anything to do with it).

Poitier’s third go-round with Cosby, A Piece of the Action (it followed 1974’s Uptown Saturday Night and 1975’s Let’s Do It Again) is about a million times better than Ghost Dad, but that doesn’t stop it from being a bizarre amalgamation of blaxploitation crime comedy and serious social-message movie. The first and best part is a comedic thriller about a thief (Cosby) and con man (Poitier) whose past crimes cause them to be at the mercy of both a retired police detective (James Earl Jones) and the local mobsters whom Poitier once ripped off to the tune of $400,000.

The second part, which bears the clear mark of Poitier collaborator Stanley Kramer (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones) deals with Poitier’s To Sir, with Love-esque attempts to teach a group of “Afro-American” teenagers how to become desirable job candidates, when he and Cosby are blackmailed by Jones to perform community service for a local charity organization. While this portion is a tad earnest and preachy, it’s far from unbearable. The problem is that for all of the time we spend with it, it never connects with the events from the first half, thereby feeling tacked-on and unnecessary. Add romantic subplots for both protagonists, and it’s amazing the film isn’t longer than its already overstuffed 135 minutes.

Despite this, A Piece of the Action is worth seeking out. The only frustration that comes from watching it is the knowledge that if someone at Warner Bros. had the balls to tell its director to cut 40 minutes from the running time, a good film might have become great one. But then again, who among us would have the balls to tell Sidney Fucking Poitier to do anything he didn’t want to do? —Allan Mott

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