Craig William Macneill directed the first season of Channel Zero that I loved so much, Candle Cove. I wish I could say the same for his latest movie, this exploration of the life of Lizzie Borden starring Chloë Sevigny as Lizzie and Kristen Stewart as her lover and maid Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan.

Lizzie is a 32-year-old unmarried woman, which makes her an old maid in 1892. Her father dominates her life and she’s sickly, but she has a new friend, an Irish immigrant named Bridget Sullivan who has come to work as a servant in the rich Borden household.

Threats are left at the door of the house, as many in the town are jealous of Lizzie’s father and the way he takes land. He informs a family member, Uncle John, that the girls are to get none of the money from the estate upon his death. Lizzie attempts to sell all of the family’s jewelry but is caught and her beloved pigeons are hacked to bits by her father’s axe.

The bond between Bridget and Lizzie grows after the death of the servant’s mother and the discovery that Mr. Borden is abusing her. Finally, her father catches the two making love in the barn and forbids their relationship.

You know what happens next: axe mayhem. But what should have happened was both girls committing the murders. Only Lizzie completed hers and she comes back to kill her father in front of Bridget. The two are separated by the court case and never see one another again.

I wanted to like this way more than I ended up enjoying it. Then again, I love the 1975 made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which this is nowhere near.

You can watch Lizzie on Shudder.

Tales Of Frankenstein is packed with stars: Mel Novak (Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death), Ann  Robinson (Imitation of Life and both the George Pal and Tom Cruise versions of The War Of The Worlds), Beverly Washburn (Elizabeth from Spider Baby!), Robert Axelrod (Lord Zedd from Power Rangers), Jerry Lacy (Bogart from Play It Again, Sam) and even Len Wein, the creator of Swamp Thing and Wolverine!

This horror anthology comedy film was written, directed and produced by Don Glut, who also wrote the bestselling novel version of The Empire Strikes Back.

This is the movie version of Glut’s Tales of Frankenstein short stories, presented in an anthology format.

The first story, “My Creation, My Beloved” is all about a deformed descendent of the doctor trying to make the ultimate man and woman.

“Crawler from the Grave” is about another relative of Frankenstein who dies because of a serum he created and his reanimated hand protecting his jewelry.

“Madhouse of Death” is a 1940’s hard-boiled tale of a detective, three dragon ladies, a mad doctor, a headhunter and a gorilla.

The final story is “Dr. Karnstein’s Creation” and as you can tell by the name, it’s all about creating new life in Transylvania.

While this movie doesn’t have a huge budget, it has plenty of heart. There are tons of references to other films and each chapter has a totally different feel for its era and the style of films popular within it. If you can keep the budget in mind, this is a fine way to enjoy the evening.

Machete first appeared as a character in Robert Rodriguez’s kid-friendly Spy Kids films, then came back as a fake trailer in the Grindhouse movie.

The origins of the character come from when Rodriguez worked with Danny Trejo on the film Desperado, thinking, “This guy should be like the Mexican Jean-Claude Van Damme or Charles Bronson, putting out a movie every year and his name should be Machete.” He was inspired by the films of John Woo, wanting to make a movie in their spirit that would be for a Latino audience.

Machete Cortez (Trejo) was once a Mexican Federal but his partner and wife were killed when he was betrayed to former cop and current drug cartel leader Rogelio Torrez (Steven Seagal).

Now, he’s an immigrant to the U.S., barely scraping by doing yard work. Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) pays him to shoot Texas State Senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), which is an easy job to take because the politician is anti-Mexican, sending many immigrants back to Mexico and collaborating with Von Jackson (Don Johnson) and his militia of border patrol ruffians.

Booth offers Machete $150,000 — and makes threats on his life if he doesn’t do the job — so our hero takes the assignment. However, he’s been set up again and barely escapes with his life.

The rest of the film concerns Machete’s bloody revenge and dealings with all manner of characters, from Immigration Agent Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba) to underground leader Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), his brother Padre (Cheech Marin) and even Booth’s wife and daughter (Lindsay Lohan). Tom Savini even shows up as Osiris Amanpour (Tom Savini), a hitman who has an infomercial.

It’s all rather ridiculous, but that’s a lot of the fun of this movie. How often do you see a movie where the hero uses a man’s entrails as a rope to climb down a building? They could make a thousand of these movies and I’d probably watch every single one of them.

Remember when that Universal Dark Universe of their horror movie properties was going to happen? Ah, sadness. To fill the void of mummies, here’s Dan Allen and Scott Jeffrey (The Unhinged) with their film, The Mummy Reborn.

A group of teens in financial ruin decide that they’re going to steal an ancient amulet from an antique store that’s going out of business. However, it comes from a cursed tomb and the mummy will do anything to get it back.

Keep in mind, this is the first mummy movie I’ve seen start with a quote from Kanye West.

Tina’s mom is dead, leaving her with a mortgage and a mentally challenged brother named Max. The aforementioned antique store where she works is closing. And her boyfriend Luke has a plan: steal the mummy that for some reason is in the shop and get the jewel from it to make money.

At one point, this is a serious and sad film. And in others, it’s ripping off lines from Snakes on a Plane and having characters able to read subtitles as if they were truly there. To say that it jumps around a lot is like saying mummies are wrapped up.

I really wanted to like this. There are some fun parts once it stops being so serious and the mood breaks to even feel like an anime. But it takes so long to get there. Yet it’s still better than that Tom Cruise mummy movie, which is faint praise.

The Mummy Reborn is available on VOD and DVD from High Octane Pictures.

NOTE: We were sent this movie by its PR team and that has no bearing on our review.

On April 1, 2011, the Criterion Collection announced that it was releasing a special-edition DVD and Blu-ray Disc of this movie. It was just a joke to them but then Arrow Video did exactly that in 2016. Short for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller (there is also a scene where some crates say Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal), this is a film that went from failure to video and cable success. In fact, the beginning of Jordan Peele’s Us directly references this movie with its VHS box clearly visible.

While they don’t share any screen time, C.H.U.D.‘s two main actors, John Heard and Daniel Stern, would later go on to play roles in the Home Alone films. Here, they are battling human beings who have been transformed by toxic waste into cannibals that target New York City’s homeless population.

C.H.U.D. also stars Kim Greist in her first movie role. She’d go on to be a star of plenty of cult 80’s movies, like the angel in Brazil and William Petersen’s wife in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. This is the kind of movie where you can spot talent left and right, like John Goodman and Jay Thomas (who acted on TV’s Mork and Mindy and had a radio show on Howard Stern’s channel until his untimely passing) as cops.

This is also a movie that has led to better memories than it really is, thanks to its incredible name and great poster art. It’s not bad, but it’s talky and boring in parts. What you really want the movie to be about is the battle against the C.H.U.D.s, not folks discussing their relationships. Plus, the main creatures rarely show up, often only being hands.

You can watch this on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

Katt Shea was a director for Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater, as well as the movies Poison Ivy and The Rage: Carrie 2. As a screenwriter she penned Frank Harris’s The Patroit for Crown International Pictures. Before that, she was an actress in films such as Barbarian Queen. Here, she attempts to update Nancy Drew for today’s kids with the help of writers Nina Fiore and John Herrera (The Handmaid’s Tale).

Sophia Lillis from the new version of It and Sharp Objects plays Nancy, stuck in the town of River Heights after her mother’s death. She’s against authority and big on helping people against bullies, which leads her to having to do community service.

She meets Flora (Linda Lavin from TV’s Alive!), who needs help with a haunting in her house. The only problem is that Flora’s niece is Nancy’s rival, Helen Corning. That mystery – and a train that’s coming to town — create the main story thrust of this film.

It’s fine — but honestly, the only thing making it Nancy Drew is the name. Becca has every single hardback book and even she couldn’t make it through this whole film. It doesn’t seem like it had many fans — it was in theaters in March and available for rent by April.

Mining town Valentine Bluffs hasn’t had a Valentine’s Day dance for over twenty years — ever since the accident. Two supervisors messed up and left several miners trapped below just so they could go to that dance. They didn’t even check the methane levels, which led to the explosion that trapped the men. Only Harry Warden survived, living off the bodies of his co-workers, until he could escape and kill the supervisors. He was committed for two decades and finally forgotten. Now, the dance is back on. Someone, somehow, is going to pay.

My Bloody Valentine right when slashers were king, complete with so much gristle that nine minutes of offensive violence was removed. Just imagine — the film starts with a nude woman impaled on pickaxe, so it still got worse than that.

Even after officials decide to close down the dance, a bunch of young miners have their own party at a bar. Why would you do that when Harry Warden wants to kill everyone? This movie is packed with death, from nailguns to the face and beheadings to people being impaled on shower heads.

It’s also a giallo-esque story, with the murders in the past warping one of the characters so badly that he or she commits the murders in the present. The mystery of who this character would end up being was kept hidden even from the actors until the final scene was filmed.

Interestingly, once the producers decided to shoot in the Sydney Mines in Nova Scotia, the town cleaned the sets up so they would be more presentable. This led to a set that looked like Disneyland, according to reports. The filmmakers had to go back and make the sets look darker to fit the script. That said, because the movie was filmed in legitimate mines 900 feet underground, special lighting devices were required because of the danger of methane explosions.

My friend used to have an apartment that had a swimming pool. It was great when she’d sneak us in, but never once did I worry if there was going to be some tentacled monster inside it ready to murder me. Which is a relief after seeing this, because according to Drowing Echo, that can and does happen.

Originally titled Nereus and The Complex, this movie is all about Sara, who starts the movie by having visions and is soon attacked by a creature beyond time and space in her friend’s swimming pool. I guess they weren’t checking the pH levels properly!

Even when Sara comes back to her room and has a drink, she wakes up back in the deep end. This is why I am concerned about staying at air BNBs.

You may enjoy it more than me. I struggled through the last hour of the film, to be honest. There’s a lot of discussion via Facetime, cameos by Mexican wrestling masks, trips to Greece, psychic sessions, hard to decipher accents, monks turned into slaves, a Blair Witch ripoff scene and some The Abyss-style CGI and one of those “it isn’t over” endings.

This is available on demand now.

NOTE: This was sent to us by the movie’s PR team but that has no impact on our review.

Kermit Gosnell was a Philadelphian physician and abortion provider convicted of three cases of first-degree murder for infants that were alive when he killed them, the involuntary manslaughter death of a patient undergoing an abortion, 21 felony counts of illegal late-term abortion and 211 counts of violating the 24-hour informed consent law. Obviously, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This film tells his horrible tale.

The film was originally intended to be a made for TV movie, but the filmmakers later decided to make it into a feature film. They finished filming in 2015 but ran into difficulties finding a distributor to carry the film, as well as a lawsuit by a judge who objected to his portrayal. It also had negative run-ins with Kickstarter, which censored its email advertising before raising over $2 million dollars on Indiegogo.

Finally, this movie — directed by character actor Nick Searcy (General Frank Hoyt from The Shape of Water) — was finally released in 2018.

This controversy went on after the film was released, with the filmmakers claiming that multiple theater chains dropped the film after its first week. And Searcy later wrote an op-ed for the National Review where he claimed that the film would cause him to be shunned in Hollywood.

Honestly, it all feels rather like a rerun of a second string Law and Order ripoff. But hey — Dean Cain is in it! And the owner of Rob’s Place from What’s Happening! plays Kermit!

If you want to know more, you can visit the film’s official site. Or check out the superior 3801 Lancaster: American Tragedy, an astounding documentary on the case. It’s playing for free on Amazon Prime.

In the world of Abnormal Attraction, mythical creatures are real and must learn to co-exist with humans. However, if you thought there was prejudice before, it gets even worse. However, this film has three different storylines that all come together. Plus, it’s literally packed with stars.

It all starts when Dr. Stanley Cole (Bruce Davison, Willard) takes over the AA group from the usual leader Nick, who has been kidnapped by a witch (Leslie Easterbrook from Police Academy) and the Boogeyman (Malcolm McDowell) as his fiancee tries to track him down.

If you love horror, you’ll be delighted by some of the heavyweights that show up here, like Tyler Mane (the Michael Myers of Rob Zombie’s Halloween films) as a cyclops. For big stars, there’s also Jim Hanks, Tom’s brother, as Frankenstein’s Monster. If you’re more of the Howard Stern school of humor, you’ll find a lot to like with Gilbert Gottfried as the Pig Man and Ron Jeremy as the tooth fairy.

There’s plenty of gross-out gags and gore, too. I enjoyed the film, as it has a great look, but it could have used some trimming as it’s hour and forty-seven-minute running time feels a little long. But don’t let my short attention span keep you away from this fun movie!

I mean, how often do you see a guy try to sleep with Bigfoot and get torn to pieces?

You can learn more at the official site for the movie.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team and that has no bearing on our review.