No sooner has this delightfully creepy children’s video began than a giant bear with a pleasant voice starts shaking his massive behind while singing a self-penned ditty about the benefits of “going potty.” One of the lyrics is “You’ll feel like a millionaire / When you pull up your underwear.” What correlation exists between financial independence and the ability to hike one’s briefs successfully to waist level is lost on me, but that’s really beside the point.

With Bear in the Big Blue House: Potty Time with Bear, what I should be most concerned about is that there is an obese bear who, although a total stranger, really wants to teach our children about proper anal usage, and his eagerness to do so just strikes me as — how to put this? — wrong and illegal in most of the 48 contiguous states.

As he plays checkers with a mouse who I think was named Tutter, Bear asks his little friend if he needs to use the bathroom. Tutter says no. Bear asks again. Tutter again declines. Undaunted (or perhaps blessed with the power of mind control), Bear asks yet again, practically willing a full intestinal tract on his rodent pal, so Tutter rushes off to the toilet to take a dump. We join Tutter on the pot as he tells Bear he won’t be much longer: “I just have to wipe!”

I never thought I’d see the day when a Jim Henson program would feature a puppet in mid-defecation, and not only that, but one that would use the word “wipe” as a verb, in a context that involved wadded-up two-ply and the risk of fecal contamination. But that day indeed came, and it was Dec. 8 — a date that will live in infamy.

Bear excuses himself upstairs, where another of his noticeably younger chums is engaged in voiding bodily waste. Bear joins this tot in the bathroom and they carry on a conversation while the little one has his pants ’round his ankles. And I really couldn’t watch any further. —Rod Lott

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The defining moment of KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park comes when drummer Peter Criss (aka Cat Man) first speaks aloud and the familiar Saturday-morning cartoon voice of male Wonder Twin Zan (Michael Bell) comes out of his mouth. It’s then that you realize this made-for-TV film:
1) was produced by Hanna-Barbara,
2) stars a bunch of people who really had no desire to be involved, and
3) is far more wonderful than we probably deserve.

Starring the world’s greatest terrible rock band of all time, the original members of KISS play themselves — with the fictional license that along with being unapologetic cash whores, they also each possess super powers, which they’ll need in order to stop the titular villain (a slumming Anthony Zerbe) who is turning amusement park customers into robotic slaves. The band is alerted to his evil doings by a pretty young fan named Melissa, (Deborah Ryan) who — in the film’s most fantastic and unrealistic contrivance — Gene Simmons doesn’t try to fuck.

Normally talented genre director Gordon Hessler (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) couldn’t overcome the nonexistent budget and, as a result, the telefilm has an almost Ed Wood-ian level of unintentionally amusing shoddiness (i.e. Ace Frehley’s stunt double is clearly an overweight black man). Definitely not for the serious-minded, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park is one of those nostalgia pieces whose glaring imperfections actually makes it far more lovable than a well-made film. —Allan Mott

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I have seen a lot of crazy shit in my life, but nothing prepared me for the utter insanity of Penitentiary director Jamaa Fanaka’s debut feature. Welcome Home Brother Charles (also known as Soul Vengeance) opens with a bizarre R&B/industrial theme while the camera scrolls over an African penis statue. Cut to local drug dealer Charlie (Marlo Monte) getting busted by a cop who just caught his wife with a black man, so instead of just booking Charlie, the cop tries to castrate him.

Charlie is sent to prison for three years where he has a frightening nightmare (told through black-and-white stills). After he’s released, the film becomes a “make the ghetto a better place” film, where Charlie does good in the neighborhood, getting a girlfriend out of prostitution and talking to his young brother about the dangers of gangs. But then, Charlie goes psycho and starts killing the honkies who put him in prison … with his magic penis.

I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, Charlie’s member has the power to make white women go into a hypnotic trance and do his bidding. Once he has his enemy cornered, he simply takes off his pants and his dick grows bigger and bigger until it wraps itself around the judge’s neck, strangling him.

So, in other words, Welcome Home Brother Charles is one of the greatest films of all time. —Louis Fowler

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I am a sucker for trailer collections. The problem with that is one tends to see the same coming attractions pop up, ad infinitum. That is not the case with Video Dimensions’ Mondo Sleazo: The Sleaziest Trailers in the World, which immediately became apparent, as electroshocked nipples tend to do. Even better, unlike a majority of the movies it features, it lives up to its title!

The program’s two hours are separated loosely into six categories that collectively represent a hodgepodge of weird genres, from kung fu (The Flying Killer) to blaxploitation (Disco Godfather), and weirder subgenres that include the sexy swashbuckler (Tower of Screaming Virgins), the spoof film (The Sex O’Clock News) and even puppet porn (Let My Puppets Come), the latter of which can’t be unseen and forces me to rethink my stance on yarn.

By the time you get to the third grouping, their interchangeability becomes startlingly obvious. See if you can guess what theme links these titles: The Smut Peddler, Blazing Stewardesses and Another Day, Another Man. If you guessed “sex,” you’re correct, and possibly gutter-minded.

Yes, as something titled Mondo Sleazo should be, it is filled with flicks about Child Brides and Street Girls, about Caged Virgins and Girls for Rent. Mind you, this is no complaint — not when something like Sugar Cookies dares to compare itself to Hitchcock (not once, but twice) and when Mundo Depravados pits stripper Tempest Storm against “a sex fiend killer,” the former playing Agent 48-24-36. That’s exploitation genius, as much of this disc is. —Rod Lott

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Happy nine-month anniversary, Yan and Elise! My gift to you two lovebirds is this glimpse into your immediate future: It’s gonna suck!

So goes the game of Eroticide, a truly twisted tale of romance by Canadian filmmaker Matthew Saliba, ringleader of 2009’s underseen Frankenstein Unlimited anthology and director of the 2011 Italian exploitation homage Amy’s in the Attic.

This short begins with Yan (Jocelin Haas) and Elise (Stephanie van Rijn), our heretofore happy couple, celebrating their momentous occasion at a restaurant. Who should walk in and interrupt but Kendra (Lisa Di Capa), Yan’s ex-girlfriend; she evidently hasn’t let go of their half-decade together, because she delights in disparaging Elise in general and Yan’s erectile dysfunction.

Later that night, as Yan and Elise make love (she puts it rougher, actually), Saliba skillfully intercuts their thrusts with Yan’s imagined submissive activities with Kendra rather than his “silver medal” gal. But the real weirdness doesn’t kick in until the next morning.

Saliba’s specialty isn’t off-kilter subject matter; it’s whatever lies at taking a hard left turn when one reaches off-kilter subject matter. Viewers never can be sure what awaits them in the next scene. What does can be shocking, but never just for the cheap sake of doing so; it serves the story.

And this story hints at a lot that it does not depict, adding layers of mystery to an unsettling surface. It’s suggested that Yan and Elise had their “meet cute” via gruesome car crash which may have resulted in his bedroom troubles; says the French-speaking Elise, “The road to your heart was paved with my blood.”

That you want to know more about its origins speaks highly of Eroticide. All three cast members do great work, but Di Capa gets the juiciest role as the manipulative rhymes-with-blunt. She also gets the last word at the harsh ending — abrupt but appropriate. If you’ve seen Brad Pitt deliver the denouement of Killing Them Softly, you have a hint of the cruelty to come. —Rod Lott