Return to Horror High (1987) is probably intended as a comedy parody of teen slasher films, but is too bad to work on even that level. As the film opens, we are led to believe that a movie crew has been slaughtered filming the story of a massacre that occurred in the same High School years before. Then we spend a confusing 95 minutes switching between flashbacks of the original crime, making of the film, the film being filmed, and the present investigation. Most of what we learn ends up not being true. I see my share of films, and have some skill in following them, and this one had me wondering which time period we were seeing about half of the time.

There was some nudity, including a couple of Unknowns, and breasts from Darcy De Moss and Joy Heston. The DVD transfer is very dark, 4/3, and not very well focused. IMDB readers say 3.1/10, and I will add to that a well deserved F.

The Beast is one of the strangest things ever filmed, centered around an 18 minute short about a woman raped by a guy in a bad gorilla suit with a cheesy wolf head, including graphic genital close-ups (human and other), and several money shots - from a beast with a penis the size of a Louisville Slugger!

• Sirpa Lane (1, 2, 3)
• Lisbeth Hummel (1, 2, 3)
• Pascale Rivault (1, 2)
• Sirpa and the well equipped "Beast" (1, 2, 3)

Lost and Delirious. Basically a chick-flick for young girls, except that it has fairly explicit nudity. Perhaps that explains why it never found an audience. The girls who would have liked the movie couldn't get in because of the r rating. Tuna hit the highlight when he used the word "overwrought". Picture Wuthering Heights with teenage lesbians.

The arithmetic IMDb rating of this movie is a mystery to me. The average score of all votes is 7.9, and the median is 8. 77% of all voters have voted seven or more, but the IMDb score, the "weighted average", is 6.5.

IMDb says it has a special system which determines the rating by tossing out suspicious ballots. Get this, "to prevent abuse of the system, we do not disclose what the additional factors and calculations are." In other words, one additional factor might be a dartboard, and that may account for 99.99% of the score.

To look at it another way, IMDB uses the Dean Wormer method, and puts all films on double top-secret probation!

Tell you what, I don't know much about their method, but I understand arithmetic. There have been 307 votes. 108 of those votes were 10/10. Even if you arbitrarily throw out every one of the 10's (which are more than a third of the total votes), the mean is still 6.7 - more than the IMDb score!

So let's re-word IMDB's message as follows "we can't disclose what our methods are, but we can reveal that the score has nothing whatever to do with your votes, or any type of mathematics"

On the other hand, I suppose 6.5 is probably about the correct rating, not 7.9, so whatever method they used produced a sensible result.

• Piper Perabo (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
• Jessica Paré (the second image is a composite of two frames in an upward pan). Perabo has to carry the acting load in the movie, but Paré is a real doll. (1, 2)

This movie only did something like $300,000 at the box, but might have been a financial success if there was a PG-13 version. My 15 year old daughter would love this movie, but I'm not going to let her watch it.

Speaking of ratings, how important is a rating to profits? Pretty important. Today's silly list from IMDB - the only NC-17 films ever to top a million in domestic box in the 90's. (Showgirls was shown in the r-rated version in many theaters, so its numbers aren't accurate for NC-17 showings.) Of the films which were only shown in an NC-17 version, Henry and June is the only one to gross $10 million or more. 

"Kids" made a profit. I don't know for sure if any others did. Click on titles to visit the IMDb page.

Charlie's French Cinema Nudity site is updated

Each of these collages by Nicnac features at least one pair of bare breasts.