Movie Melt! Podcast - Psychotronic and Outsider Cinema

Four college students head to a cemetery for a little fun and meet Sean: a skull-masked occultist with opium, tarot cards, a jester belt, and enough speeches about the mental plane to make them wish they'd stayed home.

Originally released as Scorpio, this Florida shot-on-video nightmare was written by John Brodie, who also cast himself as Sean. Ron Atkins flew in from Las Vegas to shoot it in four days. Jeremiah digs through Atkins's Cutthroat Video catalog, while Matt opens Brodie's actual book on extraterrestrial astrology. Apparently there are wars on the Sun.

The movie runs about 53 minutes. We talk about it for nearly four hours. That should give you some idea of what happened.

PLUS: What We've Been Watching, our shot-on-video origin stories, and a feature presentation with Matt, C-bear, and Jeremiah.

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Shot on Video September starts here — but not with a horror movie?!

In 1998, Kathryn Hudson wrote, directed, scored and starred in her own vanity project as an alien monarch from the planet Neberon: crash-landed on Earth at nine, raised by Himalayan mystics, running a Santa Monica dance studio, and defending the beach from a businessman who turns swimmers green and sells them the antidote for a million dollars.

Then she never dropped the act. Twenty-eight years later she's still Queen Kathryn — ambassador of world peace, self-published recording artist, and an extremely active poster.

We get into the movie, the woman, and the thirty years she's spent as the character: Vista Street, David Sterling, Jeff Leroy's miniatures, Supreme Master Ching Hai, the Loving Hut, urine therapy, gold hot pants, and a merch line with its own perfume.

Plus Battle of the Bands: Celestial Edition, and what we've been watching.

Watch the movie here

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Sensitive Boy Sex Comedy Summer goes out with a failing stripper school, a hog farmer, a morality crusader named Dr. Percy Honeywell, and the least appetizing-looking pizzas ever caught on film.

Buck Flower's Pop Tate wins a bankrupt pizza-delivery business in a card game. The catch: it sells only pineapple pizza, has basically no customers, and the van isn't even paid off. His solution is to put the stripper-school dancers to work delivering the pizzas. The pizza remains terrible, but after one accidental topless delivery, Pop and Elliot — the school's flamboyant proprietor — finally figure out what people are actually willing to pay for.

We also try to reconstruct director Ed Hansen, a director with almost no public record at all — no interviews, barely any photographs, and one commentary track where Jim Wynorski mostly talks about Jim Wynorski. What's left is a strange trail from The Bullwinkle Show to advertising, documentaries, exercise tapes and a decade of cheap sex comedies built around failing businesses saved by women taking their clothes off. And every Friday, apparently, lunch at Musso & Frank.

The movie itself gives us Buck Flower in a lead role, prank stripper-grams, a cop courtship on playground equipment, a guy who just wants a rubber duck, Honeywell running surveillance from inside a garbage can while wearing a beer helmet with a teddy bear head on it, and John F. Goff's Elliot dressed like Colonel Sanders on an inflatable alligator.

Plus Battle of the Bands goes three rounds deep — Rodd Keith vs. Norm Burns, Exotic Adrian Street vs. Big Daddy, and disco Frank Sinatra vs. a children's version of "Disco Inferno" — along with Jonathan Winters being left unsupervised on a children's show to talk about bathtime.

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Continuing with our Sensitive Boy Summer, the gang dives into one of the sleaziest, stupidest, and most shameless sex comedies of the 1980s, The Party Animal (1984), the infamous tale of eternal virgin Pondo Sinatra and his spectacularly misguided quest to become the world's greatest ladies' man.

Along the way, we uncover the film's bizarre production history, the unbelievable reshoots, and ask whether this forgotten cult oddity is merely offensive, fascinating... or both?

PLUS: Battle of the Bands, Spencer proves once again that he's a moron, Heather somehow decides sharing a microphone with him is a good idea, and so much more!

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It's Sensitive Boy Summer at Movie Melt, so we're diving into the raunchy Canadian vanity project Fireballs (1989)! The sensitive special boys break down this gloriously bizarre comedy, crown another Battle of the Bands champion, and welcome special guest adam.cherry.comics!

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The Sensitive Boys™ head to the beaches of Ibiza with Summer Night Fever (1978), the West German sex comedy from director Sigi Rothemund. Riding the disco wave kicked off by Saturday Night Fever, this sun-soaked exploitation romp follows two friends on a vacation overflowing with girls, discos, bikinis, bell-bottoms, and a debatably awesome soundtrack.

PLUS: Battle of the Bands returns!

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Your sensitive boys are back! Listen as we pack into a grimy little Beach House and spend 76 sweaty minutes obsessing over one of the most forgotten sex comedies of the early 80s. From Jersey boardwalk hangouts and chaotic house parties to doo‑wop punks, softball grudges, and one especially questionable horndog named Marty, this hangout movie somehow dodges the usual sleaze and lands as a genuinely sweet, punk‑rock time capsule.

Along the way, the crew digs into the tangled history behind the film: New Line’s involvement, surreal mob‑adjacent production stories, how Adam Roth’s songs and band end up stealing the movie, and the wild six‑degrees connections from this tiny beach flick to Dennis Leary, Madonna soundtracks, Evil Dead, and beyond. They also talk about why the movie’s been so overlooked, what certain critics miss about it, and why Beach House deserves a spot in the summer‑party‑movie rotation.

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ALIEN ARSENAL (1999) | Charles Band Loves Teens

This week we’re covering Charles Band’s attempt at kid-friendly sci-fi — the Moonbeam years — then following the trail into Pulsepounders and its teen-skewing sub-label ActionXtreme, and eventually land on David DeCoteau’s ALIEN ARSENAL.

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The litigious duo is back! More lovely vanity-project-insanity from Craig Bruss and Vineeta Prasad! These two lovebirds are the heart and brains behind our favorite modern action saga, and the happy couple deliver the goods with their third installment of this very personal action film—complete with their very own real-life wedding! It’s a perfect union of nunchucks, romance, and weird times!

PLUS: CDR returns!, Battle of the Bands, what we’ve been watching and so much moreeeee!

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It's spring break. We're skipping the belly-flop contest and going artifact hunting — which is exactly what the cast of Camp Fear (1991) thought they were doing before the earthquakes, bikers, and George Buck Flower showed up. Betsy Russell stars in what was intended to be a Cheerleader Camp Sequel, but as will be explained, things went whacky in all the right ways to make a very very interesting film. Plus, we crack the case about the mysterious one-credit director!

Also on this episode: Waffle House Records Battle of the Bands, important news, and so much moreeeeee

Camp Fear (1991) / Mystic Mountain — dir. Thom Keith, distributed by Fred Olen Ray's Retromedia

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