"Losin' It" (1983)

For some reason, this one always gets the shaft. Okay, so it's essentially a Porky's ripoff (with a gang of guys going to Tijuana to get laid, instead of some rowdy redneck honky-tonk), but to me, it's a hell of a lot better than Hot Chili or Hot Bubblegum or countless other early '80s raunchy teen comedies.

For me, Jackie Earle Haley was the star of this movie, as Dave. He had the best bits, the funniest lines, and...that sock. The scene at the pharmacy where he's trying to score some Spanish Fly, using pantomime and some really bad mock-Spanish is an absolute riot. I liked Shelley Long a lot then; too bad she just kind of faded away after a point. She was good in this. Tom Cruise...what can we say? He's there...not much else to say. But, of course, he's the only one who really scores.

One other scene worth mentioning has John Valby (aka "Doctor Dirty"), as a sleazy guy banging on the piano, singing really filthy songs about gangbangs to a drunken crowd. Kind of a lost art these days. The dirty songs, that is!

This was a personal favorite when I was in the third grade. It was a longtime staple on TBS for years afterward, although I couldn't bring myself to watch it after the censors got hold of it. I'm sure all the good stuff would be gone. But they loved to show the scene where Dave is shouting "We're going to be as crude as we want, as filthy as we want, and as gross as we want!". Choice words!

"Strange Brew" (1983)

This is one that was shown one night in the summer of 1984. I had no knowledge of SCTV, never heard of Bob & Doug McKenzie, but I was in stitches over these two guys in winter clothing who were guzzling beers, scarfing donuts, and calling each other "hoser". Too funny!

These two guys try to scam a case of free beer from a local beer store, but somehow end up with jobs at the brewery, and outsmart (!) the evil Brewmeister Smith's plan to take over the world via a mind-control ingredient in the beer. Along the way, they guzzle down more beer and call each other "hoser". Beauty, eh?

I could never figure out the opening, though. They somehow have the budget to make a movie (and even an album, which is referenced to), but they're actually unemployed schmucks who live at home with their parents? Weird!

Seriously, though, this ended up being one of my favorites for years afterward. I was initially let down that there was never a sequel or follow-up, but how could this be topped or equaled? Even so, this was on cable a lot during the '80s, and was a fixture in the VCR. They connected well with Lynne Griffin, who played Pam Elsinore, and I thought she was a major cutie, as well as a great foil to the brothers' antics.

The scene where the guys drink the last few beers, and then pour the last one from the dog-dish into a glass has me in hysterics every time I see it. Mel Blanc was an unexpected but welcome voice in that scene, and also when he happily goes insane with laughter when he learns that the guys brought home a vanful of cases of Elsinore Beer.

Speaking of which, some people have always said that Bob and Doug didn't seem like brothers, but to me, they had it down to a "T". Having known plenty of kids who had brothers (or even just one), it was not uncommon for one of the kids--usually closer to my own age--to be the cool one, but his older brother would be the annoying know-it-all who thought he was the tough guy, but would piss and whine about being left out of the clubhouse, and would try to "narc" on us for that, or anything else he would lie about us to the parents, getting us in trouble in the process.

The "Amityville" trilogy

This one stretches back to the fall of 1980, when something came on, featuring the silhouette of a house that looked like a jack-o'-lantern.

Wow, what a strange one this was to me. I saw a guy get covered with flies, and then a scary voice whispering and then telling him to GET OUT!!! A toilet was flushed, and a bunch of black stuff came oozing out. Weird, oily stuff began running down the walls, dipping down the stairs in the process. And then the dad fell though the basement steps, landing in a hole filled with a black, oily substance that looked like tar.

Weird stuff to my four-year-old mind, yet I thought it was great. Prior to my teen years, I found a paperback copy of the book the movie was based on, and not only could I not put it down, I carried it around with me throughout my seventh-grade year. The movie wasn't shown on TV or cable very much at the time. It kind of had a reputation of being "dumb" and "not scary", but after a number of years, it became a cult favorite of many, and is now usually included on lists of "Greatest Horror Movies" or "Halloween/Haunted House Movies".

But I had seen a the two following sequels in the '80s when they came on cable. Amityville II: The Possession was truly frightening and disturbing to me when I first saw it. But, later on, I noticed that it was a weird rip-off of The Exorcist...the only things missing were the spinning head and green puke.

This one, however, was disappointing in the extreme. It's bad enough that it seemed like a rip-off of Poltergeist, but the 3-D effects were chintzy at best, and the movie really had no story to it. The poster art is laughable, and gives an idea of how tacky the whole idea was.

After a long gap, there were further "sequels", most of them centering around an evil object that came from "an old house in New York that was torn down"...a mirror, a clock, and even a dollhouse...I was waiting for one with either an evil sink-trap or a doorstop causing all the trouble. It might have made a better movie than that truly awful remake of the original 1979 one, done in 2005. The only reason I saw it was because the DVD boxed set of the original three movies included a free movie-ticket to see the new remake. The latter half of it seemed like a bad ripoff of The Shining, what with Ryan Reynolds going after his family with an axe. Another potentially good outlet for telling a creepy story was wasted.