Before this movie, director Pim de la Parra and producer Wim Verstappen were the kings of Dutch sleaze. Operating under their legendary Scorpio Films banner, these guys were cranking out high-energy, low-budget, skin-filled exploitation flicks like Blue Movie and Frank and Eva. They knew how to put butts in seats. But then, after Suriname gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975, Pim got a massive dose of national pride and decided it was time to make art with a capital A.

The result was Wan Pipel. The very first feature film produced in the newly independent nation of Suriname. And holy hell, did it ruin them. Pim completely lost his mind over the budget, blowing past every financial guardrail, which caused a massive, permanent blowout between “Pim and Wim.” The movie tanked at the box office, Scorpio Films went belly up, and a glorious era of Dutch grindhouse cinema died right then and there.

But man, what a way to go out.

The plot plays out like a sweaty, politically charged daytime soap opera. Borger Breeveld stars as Roy, an Afro-Surinamese student living the good life in the Netherlands with his blonde Dutch girlfriend, Karina (Willeke van Ammelrooy). Roy gets a telegram saying his mother is dying, so Karina lends him the cash to fly back home.

Once Roy touches down in Suriname, the tropical heat and the cultural awakening hit him like a freight train. He forgets all about his studies and the Netherlands and falls head over heels for Rubia (Diana Gangaram Panday), an Indo-Surinamese Hindu nurse. The problem? The local Afro-Surinamese and Hindu communities are locked in deep-seated, conservative cultural divides. The romance starts a literal community revolt. Even when Karina flies in from the Netherlands to drag Roy back to reality, he refuses to leave. He’s home, he’s staying, and he’s going to build “One People” if it kills him.

For a guy like me, who usually watches movies about people getting eaten by mutated swamp monsters, Wan Pipel is an absolutely fascinating watch. It has that raw, sun-baked, mid-70s aesthetic where everything feels intensely real, sweaty and slightly dangerous. It’s a movie caught between two worlds — just like Roy. On one hand, you have the gorgeous, lush backdrops of Paramaribo and the Surinamese landscape, and on the other, you have the heavy, heartbreaking weight of post-colonial trauma and racial tension.

Willeke van Ammelrooy is fantastic as the jilted Dutch girlfriend, bringing a weirdly tragic European perspective to a movie that is actively trying to break away from Europe. Borger Breeveld plays Roy with an earnest, stubborn intensity that makes you root for him even when he’s being an absolute disaster of a human being.

The Cult Epics release of this film features a new restored 2K transfer; commentary by film historians Lex Veerkamp and Bodil de la Parra; an introduction by Pim de la Parra; the making-of; an interview with Willeke van Ammelrooy by Guido Franken; and a bonus short film, Aah… Tamara, a gallery; trailers; new artwork design by Juan Esteban R.; a double-sided sleeve with original poster art and a slipcase. You can get it from MVD.

The sophomore feature from Celine Song, the director who had everyone crying into their popcorn with Past Lives, Materialists is all about the high-stakes, maximum-dollar world of New York City matchmaking. Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, a professional love-broker who fixes up wealthy elites but can’t seem to sort out her own damage. She finds herself locked into a classic, agonizing love triangle between Harry (Pedro Pascal), a ridiculously smooth, billionaire unicorn client who represents the ultimate material jackpot and John (Chris Evans), her rough-around-the-edges, emotionally raw ex-boyfriend who is still dreaming about growing old, getting wrinkles and having kids together.

Song uses this glossy, high-society setup to deliver a deeply cynical, yet strangely hopeful examination of how modern capitalism has basically colonized our love lives. It’s a rom-com where people actually talk about the financial math of marriage, the cost of a twelve-million-dollar apartment and the cold reality of trading youth for security.

The pacing can be incredibly deliberate, and some dialogue-heavy scenes drag out just a few beats longer than they need to. But if you appreciate a movie that takes a trashy, daytime-television plot structure and elevates it into a sharp, beautifully shot critique of modern existence, it’s well worth the entry fee.

The A24 Blu-ray has a director commentary, a making-of feature, a composer deep dive with Japanese Breakfast and six postcards. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Founded in 1974 by harmonica player/vocalist Kim Wilson and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan (brother of Stevie Ray Vaughan), The Fabulous Thunderbirds were originally just a blues band, before their sound evolved to include rock and soul.

Recorded live at Warehouse Live on June 30, 2006,  this release captures Kim and the boys playing songs like “Tuff Enuff,” “Painted On,” “Wrap It Up” and “Pretty Baby” live. I don’t even want to tell you how earwormy these songs are to me.

Directed by Alan Ames, the visual quality feels like a glorious, upscale time capsule from the mid-2000s standard-def era. But honestly, if a blues-rock concert looks too clean, it loses half its soul anyway. You want to feel like you’re standing in a packed Houston venue with a slightly sticky floor and an iron-clad rhythm section echoing off the concrete walls.

You can get this from MVD.

Look, I usually spend my time watching 1970s Italian cannibal flicks, shot-on-video weirdness or movies that get under a 2 on IMDb. But every now and again, a movie comes along that is so completely outside of the B&S comfort zone that I just have to sit down and watch it.

That brings us to Someone Like You.

It’s a 2024 faith-based tearjerker directed by Tyler Russell and written by his mom, Karen Kingsbury, based on her own bestselling novel. This is pure, unadulterated, wholesome melodrama made for the crowd that thinks a PG rating is pushing the envelope.

The plot sounds like something out of a weird 80s sci-fi soap opera, but played with absolute, deadpan earnestness. Sarah Fisher pulls double duty here as London Quinn and Andi Allen. London tragically dies early on, leaving her architect boyfriend, Dawson Gage (Jake Allyn), utterly shattered. But wait! It turns out London was an IVF baby and there was a secret second embryo donated to another family. Dawson tracks down the biological secret twin sister, Andi, and healing, tears and clean romance ensue.

What makes this movie worth talking about for a drive-in mental case like me? The cast connections, of course! Well, the moms are played by Robyn Lively — yes, Lana from Teen Witch — and Lynn Collins, who was Silver Fox in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Dejah Thoris in John Carter.

Someone Like You knows exactly who its audience is. It’s sentimental, it’s glossy and it moves with the slow, deliberate pace of a Sunday morning. It treats its bizarre embryo-swap plot with the kind of soft-focus reverence that secular critics hate, but Kingsbury fans absolutely devour.

You can get this from Deep Discount.

After flipping the bird to the Shaw Brothers assembly line in Hong Kong to set up his own Grand Motion Picture Company in Taiwan, director Li Han-hsiang decided his opening statement shouldn’t just compete with his former bosses. It should make Hollywood’s bloated historical epics look like a local high school theater production.

The result? An absolute monolith of mid-century Asian cinema. This was a massive, 120,000-extra, 334-day shoot, a movie so big that it premiered as a colossal two-part epic released months apart. The version in the 88 Films release is the condensed, 2.5-hour omnibus edit prepared for a later re-release. While the complete, multi-hour mega-cut is tragically lost to time, this version remains a gorgeous testament to classic filmmaking on a scale that will make your jaw drop.

The kind and noble King of Yue, Goujian (Zhao Lei), finds his kingdom thoroughly subjugated and himself thrown into a degrading, years-long exile by the sadistic, lecherous King of Wu, Fucha. When Goujian is finally allowed to crawl back to his ruined home, he doesn’t just plan a standard-issue counter-attack. Instead, he orchestrates a twenty-year-long game of court intrigue, psychological warfare and total economic destabilization.

The ultimate weapon in this multi-decade chess match isn’t a massive division of chariots, but rather a young woman named Hsi Shih (Jiang Qing). Ostensibly sent to the Wu palace as a submissive gift of fealty to satisfy King Fucha’s legendary lust, she is actually a highly trained political operative. Her mission? Infiltrate the royal bedchamber, weaponize her own staggering beauty and slowly rot the Wu government from the inside out while her king builds a secret army back home.

If you come to this expecting the kinetic, acrobatic swordplay of late-sixties King Hu or the razor-sharp martial arts choreography that would soon define the region’s output, you are going to get left behind in the palace corridors. This is a massive, slow-burning period piece where the primary weapons are whispered rumors, political double-bluffs and the heavy silence of impending betrayal.

Did this thing have a big budget? You better believe it. The sheer scale of the old-school production design—with enormous, practical palace sets, sprawling armies that stretch to the horizon without a single digital pixel, and stunning widescreen compositions—is breathtaking. The 4K digital restoration rescues the film’s vibrant palette from decades of fading, letting the ornate costumes and massive crowd scenes pop with the kind of grand cinematic illusion that no longer exists.

If you miss the days when epic meant thousands of actual humans standing in a field wearing hand-stitched armor, you need this on your shelf. 88 Films has absolutely knocked this one out of the park for collectors. You get a brand-new 4K remaster of the movie, an interview with Asian cinema expert Tony Rayns, a trailer and a restoration comparison. Buy it from MVD.

We’ve all spent late nights falling down the rabbit hole of weird internet mysteries, clicking from one creepy, low-res YouTube video to another until the sun comes up. YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann turned that exact modern obsession into his Kickstarter-funded directorial debut, Shelby Oaks. Starting out as a viral, real-world alternate-reality game called The Paranormal Paranoids, the original videos convinced som epeople this was all real.

This starts with those Paranormal Paranoids — Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), Laura Tucker (Caisey Cole), David Reynolds (Eric Francis Melaragni) and Peter Bailey (Anthony Baldasare) — disappearing while investigating a prison in Shelby Oaks. The bodies of all but Riley are found. One camera is recoved and it shows Riley losing her mind. Then, the film follows her sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) twelve years after her sister Riley  and her amateur ghost-hunting crew vanished from the face of the Earth in an abandoned Ohio town.

When a crazed stranger shows up on Mia’s doorstep, mutters a cryptic warning and paints the porch with his brains, he leaves behind a mini-DV tape that blows the cold case wide open. Soon, Mia is divorced from reality (and her husband, played by Brendan Sexton III), chasing down the former prison warden of Shelby Oaks (Keith David) and hiking into the decaying heart of the penitentiary to find out what happened to her sister.

The first 17 minutes of this movie play out like a slick, dread-inducing true-crime documentary mixed with found footage. Shooting at real-deal spooky midwest locations like the Ohio State Reformatory and Chippewa Lake Park gives the film a gritty, rust-belt decay that you just can’t fake on a Hollywood soundstage.

Once the movie ditches the found-footage/documentary style and shifts to a conventional narrative, it loses its footing. It’s like watching two different movies stitched together by a mad scientist. By the time we get to the basement of a dilapidated farmhouse, the movie throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. We get a violent prison inmate who didn’t want to escape, an elderly cultist mother (Robin Bartlett, a parasitic incubus named Tarion, a squad of Swedish-imported hellhounds and a demonic pregnancy plotline.

Neon bought the movie after its 2024 Fantasia premiere, ordered reshoots to amp up the gore, altered the ending, and cut 11 minutes of backstory. Is that why the result feels rushed and a bit incoherent by the time the credits roll?

Stuckmann clearly knows his horror history and shows flashes of real directorial confidence, especially when he’s letting the quiet dread build. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but as a calling card for a new filmmaker, it’s fine. You could do a hell of a lot worse.