I love the original Naked Gun movies so much that I knew that no matter what, this probably wouldn’t make me happy. Taking on the mantle of Leslie Nielsen is basically a suicide mission, like trying to out-drink Oliver Reed or out-scream Klaus Kinski. It shouldn’t work and it really doesn’t, but I still had some fun with this.

Liam Neeson steps into the oversized, slapstick-covered shoes of Frank Drebin Jr. He’s investigating the death of a software engineer that smells fishier than a cannery in a heatwave. Along for the ride is Pamela Anderson as Beth Davenport. She honestly handles the deadpan absurdity better than most “serious” actors could (after her Criterion Closet appearance, I love her even more) and Paul Walter Hauser, who is slowly becoming the patron saint of character actors, is decent.

The villain is Richard Cane (Danny Huston), a tech billionaire who wants to use a P.L.O.T. Device to turn humanity back into primal beasts. It’s the kind of high-concept nonsense that would make the Zuckers proud, and it gives the movie an excuse to jump from a threesome with a magical snowman to a chase scene involving an electric car, a swarm of bees, and a replacement windshield.

The thing about the original films—and the short-lived Police Squad!—is that they weren’t just funny; they were relentless. They attacked the frame from every angle. Schaffer (the man who gave us Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a film I will defend until the day I die and Becca buries me with my Jess Franco blu-rays) understands gags.

Neeson is the secret weapon here. We’ve spent the last twenty years watching him growl into burner phones and punch people’s throats, so watching him use a bank robber as a literal human shield or get airlifted by the spirit of his father—who has manifested as an owl—is fun.

Is it high art? No. Is it as good as the 1988 original? Nothing is. But in a world of elevated horror and meta blockbusters that take themselves way too seriously, seeing a man lose his pants at a Ponzi-scheme.com Arena while trying to save the world is a cinematic palette cleanser.

I love dystopian end-of-the-world movies.

I adore most dangerous game movies.

I heart future game-show movies about violence. 

By all rights, I should love this movie, and no, I didn’t.

It comes close, so close to what I want it to be, but it feels like it can barely get out of its own way.

If you grew up in the 80s, Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man was a neon-soaked, Lycra-stretching movie filled with Arnold one-liners and Richard Dawson’s oily charisma. It wasn’t Stephen King. It wasn’t even Richard Bachman. It was a cartoon. It also came several years after the book, as did much better versions of this story, like Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072, and Death Race 2000.

Edgar Wright—the man who gave us the Cornetto Trilogy—has spent years obsessing over the actual book. He didn’t want sub-zeros and chainsaws; he wanted the grim, soot-stained nihilism of King’s 1982 novel. It also feels weird that they gave him such a huge budget and that he took on a very mainstream film, but we’ll get to that.

In a future that feels uncomfortably like next Tuesday, the U.S. is a bankrupt wasteland ruled by The Network. If you aren’t rich, you’re starving, and the only thing keeping the lights on is the high-def bloodsport of The Running Man.

Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, but forget the tanned, grinning flyboy from Top Gun: Maverick. Here, he’s a desperate, blacklisted union worker in the slums of Co-Op City. His kid is dying of the flu, he’s broke,  and his only option is to sign his life away to executive producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin).

The rules are simple: Survive 30 days. You get a head start, a camcorder and the entire world is encouraged to murder you for cold, hard cash.

Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall turn the hunt into a paranoid, cross-country trek through a decaying America. Along the way, Richards meets a gallery of losers and rebels, including Michael Cera as an ill-fated activist in Derry, Maine (nice King nod there), and William H. Macy as a black-market disguise artist.

The film pulls no punches on the media satire. We get deepfakes, manipulated live feeds, and Colman Domingo as Bobby T, a game-show host who makes modern influencers look like saints. Even Lee Pace shows up as Evan McCone, the lead hunter who is less a gladiator and more a state-sponsored executioner.

Wright ditches his usual stylized editing for a more grounded, gritty approach. Powell does well, carrying the weight of a man who knows he’s already dead. As for Arnold, he shows up on the face of the $100 bill.  And it’s bleak. Really bleak. Audiences in late 2025 apparently weren’t in the mood for a $110 million bummer about the end of the world and the death of truth, which explains why it sank at the box office like a stone. It only clawed back $69 million, making it a certified bomb.

I wonder, beyond the love of the book, why Wright made this. It feels like anyone could have made this movie and not him. It’s missing his style and only retains the needledrops, which are more annoying in this than fitting. It all feels very static, perhaps because it also feels like something I could turn on the news and watch for real. Maybe that’s the beauty of the original film: it has these themes but also realizes that, as a cartoon, the medicine and message go down a lot smoother.

This shot-on-video martial-arts double feature from Joseph Lai and IFD Films unleashes pure 1980s ninja chaos as two unlikely heroes are dragged into a war over stolen germ-warfare secrets. Featuring disappearing ninja assassins, endless waves of thugs, criminal masterminds, insane effects and the mysterious hocus pocus magic fighting style. These are both full-tilt SOV insanity, delivering cult ninja action at maximum volume.

Also: I love that Godfrey Ho movies have songs in them from bands like Clan of Mymox, Jean Michel Jarre, Wendy Carlos, Joy Division and more.

Born a Ninja (some year between 1978 and 1987): Ninjas. “Life means nothing to them,” says Mister Tanaka, a man who shows up in this wearing an outfit like my dad in the mid-80s, a striped red polo and short shorts.

If you ask IFD what this Joe Law-directed and written movie is about, they’d say, “A Japanese scientist tries to conceal a deadly formula, but an undead ace and his ninja devils are determined to use it to cause mischief and mayhem. It is up to Lung, a master of the lost art of Hocus Pocus, to keep evil at bay and prevent mass destruction on a global scale.”

Sure, maybe.

IMDB lists the director as Chi Lo, who used the name Joe Law to make Crippled Masters and Lo Ke to direct Deadly Hands of Kung Fu.  Seeing as how this was produced by Joseph Lai and Betty Chan, all bets are off.

This flick is a Frankenstein of footage. It combines a Taiwanese TV show, another movie, actually called Born a Ninja, and the kind of dialogue that only occurs when a 1980s script is translated from Cantonese to English by someone who primarily speaks “American Action Movie Trailer.” It could also be Silent Killers. It could be Ninja Destroyer. It could be titled Breakfast with a Shuriken, and it would still be impossible to tell you what actually happened.

Let me try.

Mister Tanaka has a secret formula from World War II that could destroy the world. That much is true. Two women want the formula: Becky, who wears a yellow vest and Confederate-flag shorts. Still, I think that means she’s into late 70s and early 80s redneck trends in America a little too late as they move across the globe and this isn’t racist like my neighbor who wears short shorts and threw away all his kids toys after his wife left with the kids and also has a huge Southern Cross up on his garage wall despite being an Italian man in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Also, his fiancée’s last name is Gambino. She backed right into our car, and he came over in just a G-string to see if we were OK.

Did I go on a tangent?

Becky is joined by Brenda. She loves denim so much she’s rocking the full Canadian tuxedo while doing high kicks. They’re joined by Larry, a master of the hocus pocus style. This involves your everyday kung fu, supplemented by the ability to shoot fire from your fingertips. It’s the kind of martial arts I used to try in my backyard until my mom threatened to take away my bang snaps.

As for the bad guy ninja, that’s Meng Fei, who was also in the Ninja Death trilogy, Night Orchid, Everlasting Chivalry, The Sun Moon Legend and Middle Kingdom’s Mark of Blood. He’s pretty amazing in the last fight scene.

Anyways, Mister Tanaka keeps dreaming of dead people that were killed by this secret back in the war, and the secret is a mirrored mustache that you put on a devil mask. Then there’s a white ninja named David. He battles Larry in the woods—because all ninja battles must occur in a public park with visible power lines—before they decide to be best friends. They get a room, drink beer, and eat fried cabbage. Honestly? That’s the most relatable thing I’ve ever seen in an IFD production.

Or maybe that was the last movie? Have years of drinking, substances, and Godfrey Ho movies dulled my reason, and when confronted by this synth-scored shot on video, my mind just wanders between different martial worlds, unsure of all the things I’ve seen, all the ninja deaths I’ve felt as if they were my own? In truth, the only important thing is that ninjas can become straw men and that you can swallow a sword in the middle of a fight and live.

Music in this one includes Jerry Fielding’s soundtrack for The Gauntlet, the Ken Thorne score for The Protector and Roy Budd’s “Fb M15.” Check out the Letterboxd list of IFC music cues here, I’ve commented several times on it.

I do know one thing. When David sees Larry hanging out with the two ladies, he says, “Two chicks? You one animal!” That’s exactly how I felt watching this movie. I was an animal. A confused, beautiful, ninja-obsessed animal.

Commando the Ninja (1983): Also known as American Commando Ninja, IFD claims it was made by Joe Law. Really, who can tell you the truth? Who even knows how many titles this has, how much music it stole or what it’s about? Hocus pocus, as the sensei says at the beginning. It doesn’t have to make sense. Seeing as how this was produced by Joseph Lai and Betty Chan, all bets are off.

Jow Law is also Law Chi AKA Chi Lo, the director of The Crippled Masters, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (using the name Lo Ke), Girl with Cat’s Eyes and Magic Swords.

This poster has nothing to do with the movie you’re about to watch. Who cares? You’re here, one assumes, for ninjas. Or commandos. Or Commando the Ninja.

In the world of 80s Hong Kong chop-socky cinema, truth is a relative term. Who knows how many titles this has? Who knows how many synth-pop tracks were borrowed from Tangerine Dream? Who even knows what’s going on?

IFD also lets us know what this should be about: “David, an up-coming young master of Ninjitsu, is recruited by his Master to steal the formula for a bacteriological weapon and to free the Japanese scientist who is responsible for developing it. He is pitted against two wily opponents: Mark, a KGB operative, and Martin, who are bent on using the formula in a bid for world domination. The fate of humanity is in the hands of David and a group of four surprisingly acrobatic young fighters.”

Is it? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a ninja wears a bright neon headband in a forest of green, is he truly invisible?

Allow this koan to expand your reality.

The student asked, “Master, how can the hero fight the villain when they are never in the same frame together?”

The Master replied, “The sword that strikes in Taiwan draws blood in Hong Kong. The bridge between them is not made of stone, but of a 1984 Scotch tape splice.”

Look, all I know is that only a ninja can kill a ninja.

Extras include SD masters from original tape elements, Commando the Ninja commentary with Justin Decloux and Will Sloane of The Important Cinema Club, Born A Ninja commentary by Justin Decloux of The Important Cinema Club, The Essential Godfrey Ho and The Law Chi Touch video essays, an interview with Kwan Chung, an image gallery, trailers, two mini-posters, a reversible sleeve featuring original VHS art, a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set, a limited edition O-Card by Uncle Frank, a booklet with essay by ninja movie expert C.J. Lines and a Blu-ray sleeve featuring art by The Dude.

Holy fuck, this is everything. It’s more effort than went into the original filming of the movie, and I am 100% here for it. If you want to see a man in a red polo shirt talk about the futility of life before a white ninja eats fried cabbage, this is your Holy Grail.

I also have to call out how amazing the menus are on these releases. The arcade inspired one on this release is perfect and something few labels would put that much time and effort into making. Just another reason why you need to buy this.

You can get this from MVD.

Some movies make you want to grab a snack, and then there’s Feed, a movie that makes you want to join a monastery, take a vow of silence, and never look at a calorie again. Directed by Brett Leonard (the man who gave us The Lawnmower Man and Hideaway), this is a nasty, slick and deeply nihilistic movie.

Jerome (Patrick Thompson) is an Interpol cybercrime investigator who is already mentally fraying after a case in Germany involving consensual cannibalism. If you think that’s just a throwaway backstory, you don’t know this movie. Jerome is a mess; his sex life is a violent disaster, and his girlfriend leaves him with the word pig scrawled on his chest in lipstick. He’s the perfect candidate to fall down the darkest rabbit hole on the World Wide Web.

That hole leads to Michael Carter (Alex O’Loughlin, long before he was the face of Hawaii Five-O), a sadistic feeder operating out of a destroyed house in Toledo, Ohio. Michael isn’t just feeding women for a fetish; he’s running a high-stakes gambling site where creeps bet on when his victims, like the captive, ballooning Deirdre, will finally kick the bucket based on their blood pressure and BMI. It’s the ultimate commodification of the human body, served with a side of weight-gain slurry.

O’Loughlin is terrifyingly charismatic here. He plays Michael with a cold, clinical detachment that makes his mommy issues (which involve a dead, immobile mother and some light matricide) feel genuinely dangerous rather than just a trope. Between the decaying remains of Lucy and tube-feeding Deirdre a mixture that includes carved human fat, your stomach will be doing somersaults.

This is the kind of Extreme Cinema that actually has something on its mind besides just grossing you out. It’s a pitch-black satire of the internet’s ability to turn any tragedy into a spectator sport.

But Jerome doesn’t save the day and return to normalcy. Instead, he replaces Michael. The movie ends with Jerome living in suburban bliss, driving out to that same cottage to eat sandwiches in front of a starving, emaciated, wheelchair-bound Michael. The lawman didn’t break the cycle; he just took over the lease.

Extras include commentary by Brett Leonard; deleted scenes; an alternate ending; interviews with Leonard, Alex O’Loughlin, Jack Thompson and producer Melissa Beauford; behind-the-scenes; an infomercial; a photo gallery; and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.

Sean Whalen is the guy whose face you know from everything from The People Under the Stairs to that “Aaron Burr” Got Milk? commercial. He directed, wrote and stars as Vegas Winters, a former child star whose glory days are so far in the rearview mirror they’re practically in black and white. Now, he’s scrubbing stains and living a life of quiet desperation in a failing laundromat. He’s lonely, he’s depressed, and he’s surrounded by the one thing every laundromat has in abundance: abandoned, crusty socks.

But we don’t remain in sad indie drama territory for long. Through a cocktail of Vegas’s tears, misery and probably some questionable laundry chemicals, a pile of his filth-caked socks merges into a sentient, googly-eyed creature named Crust. At first, Crust is a quirky little buddy, the kind of offbeat companion a lonely guy needs. But it turns out this sock monster is fiercely protective. And by protective, we mean he’s willing to violently dispatch anyone who makes Vegas’s life difficult.

Whalen is a character actor treasure, and seeing him take the lead in his own twisted vision is a treat. He brings a genuine, heartbreaking pathos to Vegas that makes you root for him, even when he’s talking to a pile of hosiery. And look for favorites like Felissa Rose, Daniel Roebuck and Rebekah Kennedy. 

Crust is a bizarre, blood-stained love letter to the outcasts and the forgotten. It’s dark, it’s damp, and it’s definitely not permanent press. If you’ve ever felt like a single sock lost in the dryer of life, this movie is going to speak to you. Just maybe wash and fold your laundry before you sit down to watch it.

Extras include a commentary by Sean Whalen, two short films and a Q&A. You can get it from MVD.

In a dystopian California that feels uncomfortably close to our own headlines, the State has finally seized the means of reproduction. You don’t just get to be a dad; you have to earn it. We follow four men, each desperate for the government’s golden seal of virility, as they trek into the remote mountains for a mandatory sanctioned retreat. They expect a drill sergeant or a clipboard-wielding bureaucrat. Instead, they find… nothing. Just an empty site and a collection of the most soul-shattering, creepy infantile automatons you’ve ever seen.

These aren’t your niece’s dolls. These are mechanical government tests designed to push these men to the brink. Left without instructions, the men descend into a tribal, frantic madness to prove they can provide and protect.“It’s a pressure cooker where the steam is made of repressed masculinity, and the whistle is the sound of a robotic baby crying in the dark.

Kelley and Sherman (who also star) have crafted something that is darkly hilarious one second and genuinely horrific the next. It’s a satire of the “Alpha Male” industrial complex that manages to be both a sci-fi nightmare and a timeless fable.

If you like your sci-fi with a side of existential dread and your horror served in a government-mandated diaper, this is the one for you. It’s a bold, bizarre debut that marks Kelley and Sherman as filmmakers to watch—preferably with the lights on and your own kids safely in bed.

Extras include commentary with Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman, two episodes of the C.U.P.S. web series, extended and alternative scenes and an improv reel. You can get this from MVD.

You know Jeff Daniel Phillips. Whether he’s playing Uncle Gilbert or a frantic warden in Rob Zombie’s filmography, he has a face made for the flickering light of a drive-in screen. In Cursed in Baja, Phillips steps behind the camera as writer and director, casting himself as Pirelli, an ex-lawman who looks like he hasn’t slept since the mid-90s and has spent every waking hour since carrying the collective sins of Los Angeles on his back.

Pirelli is tasked with a simple job: head south of the border, find the wayward heir to a massive L.A. fortune and bring him home. It’s the kind of setup that usually leads to a standard action flick, but Phillips isn’t interested in being predictable. Once Pirelli crosses into Baja, the movie takes a hard left turn into a hallucinatory, soul-searching nightmare.

This isn’t just a hunt for a rich kid; it’s an existential dive into the dirt. After all, the last person who took the job just up and faded away. And just when you think you’ve settled into a gritty neo-noir, the film throws a curveball: a Russian cult that worships the Chupacabra. Yes, you read that right. Pirelli has to navigate double-crosses, his own crumbling psyche and goat-sucking-cryptid zealots.

Even better, Barbara Crampton has a cameo.

Extras include a commentary track by Jeff Daniel Phillips and a making of. You can get it from MVD.

If you’ve spent any time digging through the bargain bins of independent horror, you know that clown movies are usually a dime a dozen. Most of them rely on a scary mask and some greasepaint to do the heavy lifting. But every once in a while, a movie comes along that decides to swap the greasepaint for five-gallon buckets of stage blood.

Enter Marcus Koch’s 2007 splatter-fest, 100 Tears.

Gurdy (Jack Amos) was just an average, introverted circus clown until a false accusation of rape led to a brutal beating by the circus strongman. Gurdy didn’t take the turn the other cheek approach; instead, he took the strangle everyone and start a cross-country massacre way. 

Fast forward, and Gurdy is now the Teardrop Killer, an urban legend following the circus from town to town, leaving behind a trail of bodies and a signature teardrop drawn in blood. When two reporters, Mark Webb (Joe Davison, who also wrote the script) and Jennifer Stevenson (Georgia Chris), start sniffing around the trail of bodies, they find themselves trapped in a warehouse of horrors.

But this isn’t just a “kill-the-intruders” flick. Gurdy finds his long-lost daughter, Christine (Raine Brown), and instead of a heartwarming reunion, they decide to make mass murder a family business.

If you know Marcus Koch, you know he’s an effects wizard first and a director second. The budget here was a mere $75,000, but every cent is on the screen in the form of viscera. We’re talking giant meat cleavers, decapitations, and a halfway house massacre that sets the tone early: this movie wants to make you lose your lunch.

100 Tears is the definition of a cult film. It’s rough around the edges, the acting can be “theatrical” (it is a circus movie, after all), and the plot logic occasionally takes a back seat to the next practical effect.

Extras include two commentaries—one with director Marcus Koch and a second with Koch and Stephen Biro; an interview with Koch; a making-of; behind-the-scenes; outtakes; Koch’s childhood shorts; and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.

Everyone wants to be in the record books. John Penney’s Zyzzyx Road is in them for the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history.

How low? We’re talking thirty dollars.

If we’re being honest and subtracting the ten bucks that producer/star Leo Grillo refunded to the film’s own makeup artist, the actual theatrical run of this movie netted a crisp twenty-dollar bill. That’s not a box office return; that’s lunch at a diner.

But behind the trivia is a sun-baked noir that feels like it was cursed from the jump. Shot in 18 days in the Mojave Desert, the production was a gauntlet. You’ve got Tom Sizemore, acting his heart out while being arrested mid-production for failing drug tests. You’ve got Katherine Heigl, right as Grey’s Anatomy was making her a household name, stuck in the sand with a shovel. And you’ve got Leo Grillo as Grant, an accountant who makes the classic mistake of thinking a Vegas tryst with a girl named Marissa won’t end with a dead body in his trunk.

The plot is pure desert-noir fever dream: Grant and Marissa (Heigl) kill her jealous ex, Joey (Sizemore), or at least they think they do. They head out to Zyzzyx Road to bury the evidence, but the trunk ends up empty, and the desert starts playing tricks on Grant’s head. Is Joey a ghost? Is Marissa a succubus? Is the heat just melting Grant’s brain?

Zyzzyx Road isn’t actually the bottom-of-the-barrel trash its reputation suggests. It’s a gritty, sweaty little thriller that suffered from a bizarre distribution loophole. Because of the Screen Actors Guild rules for low-budget films, the producers had to give it a domestic theatrical run before they could sell it overseas. So, they rented one screen in Dallas, Texas, for a week, played it once a day at noon and hoped nobody would show up.

Mission accomplished.

Sizemore is predictably great as the menacing Joey. He always excelled at playing guys you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley or an abandoned mine. Heigl does the femme fatale-in-over-her-head bit well enough, and the Mojave scenery provides enough natural production value to keep things from looking too cheap.

It’s a movie that exists in the shadow of its own zero-dollar mythos, but if you look past the $30 price tag, it’s a solid piece of independent filmmaking that captures the feeling of a bad weekend in Vegas that just won’t end.

You can get this from MVD.