Hi HDTGM,
You've been knocking it out of the park recently, and it's hitting very close to home.
"My Step Mother is an Alien" was a favorite of mine as a kid. No joke! I was watching it on cable a week before your show came out and was laughing thinking, "this would make a great HDGTM episode." A few months before that I watched the "The Raif" and thought the same thing.
Other funny coincidence: I collected Garbage Pail Kids trading cards as a kid, and remember being disappointed and grossed out by the movie. My best friend had a poster of JCVD doing the splits from "Time Cop" in his bed room in high school. A 16 year old boy with a bedroom poster of JCVD's perky buns doing a split on kitchen counters! https://mail.google.com/mail/e/1f602 We teased him to no end. Oh yeah, and I also had the exact same Garfield phone you got in this mail this week for the mini episode in my room as a kid.
The signs were too many to ignore, so after years of listening I'm submitting my first film for your consideration. I have no doubt it would make for a great HDTGM Halloween episode.
When I was a kid in Mexico (80's and 90's) we had a huge old-school satellite dish at the house, and it was my window to American movies and TV shows. A lot of the wonderfully bad movies you guys have covered on the podcast were beamed into my house straight from space. One of them made such a strong impression on me, that I would spend the next 20 years of my life searching for it. For the longest time I didn't even know the title, but just remembered a few key disturbing images. Aside from the creepy feelings that it gave my pre-adolescent self, all I could remember for years was this version of the plot:
A man is cursed so that every time he became sexually aroused he would transform into a full-on demon monster! It wasn't necessarily scary; it was actually very campy and PG13 in nature. Anyway, every time the main character transforms, he becomes a stronger and more powerful demon (all the while he's still an insecure 90's street performer trying to get a girl.) the movie culminates with (and this was burned in my mind since the age of about 11) the demon guy's girlfriend being kidnapped and taken to a castle (in the middle of a city). The demon guy knows there's only one way to save his girl: so he does what anyone else would do and starts fucking the girl's best friend on a field by the castle. He transforms into his most powerful iteration of his demon-self, defeats some villain and saves the girl. You know, your basic romantic comedy horror fantasy story.
Just think about it: a messed up rom-com where women get into bed with a normal guy and all of a sudden they're having sex with disturbing prosthetic makeup creatures. It was particularly confusing as a young viewer because it gave me a confusing mix of peaking my interest about sex, then hitting me with a Garbage-Pail-Kids-sick-in-your-stomach-feeling.
Yup. It was messed up and disturbing, all the while trying to be witty and accessible. For years any time I met anyone who loved obscure movies at a party or work; I would tell them that synopsis and they would stare at me blankly and walk away.
Cut-to a couple of years ago, David Letterman was going off the air. I felt nostalgic and started IMDB-ing people from his show. Larry "Bud" Melman came to mind. And when I looked at his IMDB one title stood out: "My Demon Lover" from 1987. I clicked on the thumbnail, and my 20+ year question was finally answered!
It's definitely worth checking out. It seems to have had a descent budget, ok performances, and it looks good in terms of production for the time. But the script, subject matter, and some of the choices make for a bizarre viewing experience. It also has a lot of faces you'll recognize from TV and movies of that era. It has a 4.6, IMDB, 46% on rotten tomatoes, but suprisingly, 4.5 stars on Amazon, so you'll have some good second opinions.
It's available on google play, Amazon, YouTube, and iTunes.
Here's the trailer:
The way they tried to promote it is insane too. It barely scratches the surface of the demon-make ups they eventually get into.
Here's the IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093589/
Here's a clip that better captures the tone of the film:
Google Synopsis https://mail.google.com/mail/e/1f602:
"A street drifter (Scott Valentine) turns into a monster every time he tries to make friends with a girl (Michelle Little)."
Love,
A.C. from ATX
