Hollywood and religion don’t often mix. However, many of the most successful movies of all time have been faith-based. Writer and director Tyler Smith explores that holy — and at times unholy — union of the sacred and the secular in the film industry.

I was surprised at how even-handed this film was, even taking time to defend the slasher genre from Siskel and Ebert of all things. It also shows a deft understanding that faith films made just for money totally miss much of the point of faith-based films. Seeing this much open-mindedness in a movie like this is enlightening.

To learn more, check out the film’s official page.

After testing his sobriety at a bachelor party on the Vegas strip, a recovered drug addict and former TV star learns that dealing with his childhood friends and girlfriend may be what causes him to relapse. He’s not leaving the room and neither are they, so something has to happen.

This movie was directed by Ryan Brookhart, and written and produced by James Liddell, who also plays Gavin. If you don’t recognize Ryan’s name, you may know his artwork, as he’s created plenty of the cover art and posters for Full Moon.

Levy Tran, who was in The First Purge, The Haunting of Hill House and the new version of MacGyver is also in this movie. She plays Addy, the dancer that they are waiting for in their hotel room as all hell breaks loose inside it.

You can get this movie on demand from Global Digital Releasing, who was kind enough to send us a copy. There’s also an official Facebook page to learn more.

Of course, Maxine isn’t all that dead. And the podcasts in our heroine’s brain aren’t helping her at all. This is a surprising film filled with humor and some good emotion, too. Mikael Kreuzriegler shows skill as a director and Volk has delivered an interesting script.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Andrew Marton had an interesting career. Sure, he made The Thin Red Line, but he also made a Soupy Sales vehicle Birds Do It and even had his name taken off the movie Demon of the Himalayas by Joseph Goebbels because he was Jewish. As for his second unit work, he filmed the iconic chariot race in Ben-Hur and the opulence of Cleopatra. He also worked in TV, making nature shows and family fare like Flipper and Daktari.

So yeah, this movie has none of what he’s known for. It does have Jayne Mansfield.

Made by Associated Producers Incorporated, but really 20th Century Fox, this was Mansfield’s last big budget film. She’s only in a supporting role, but her name was big enough to open a movie.

Fox used API to make the B movies that would support their A features. If they were anything like Cleopatra, they were bleeding the studio out.

Trax Colton is in this as well. Who? Well, after being discovered by Henry Willson, Trax was going to be a big matinee idol. He was even billed directly below Mansfield in this, his second — and last — film. He had a brief affair with his co-star and never made another movie.

He plays Spiridon Loues, a man running in a marathon where the winner gets to marry Mansfield’s character. That seems like a publicity stunt that she’d do in real life.

The story of the people who almost ended up in this movie — Ricardo Montalbán, Fernando Lamas, Robert Wagner, Dean Stockwell — and the many titles — And Seven From America, Winged Victory In Athens — are way more interesting than the actual movie. Then again, you can just shut the volume off and stare into space at Mansfield, I guess. I know I did.

Under the working titles Jayne Mansfield Reports, Mansfield Reports Europe and Mansfield By Night, this mondo was shot from 1964 to 1967 as Mansfield toured Europe. It has to be a mondo, because the movie really is all over the place, with the star meeting Italian roadside prostitutes, running from the paparazzi and attending the Cannes Film Festival, where she pretty much runs toward the paparazzi.

Complicating matters was that Mansfield died in a car accident in June 1967.

That didn’t stop producer Dick Randall, whose career took him from the Catskills as a joke writer for Milton Berle to producing all manner of movies that I obsess over, such as Pieces, Mario Bava’s Four Times That Night, The French Sex Murders, The Girl In Room 2A, For Your Height Only, Slaughter High and the only movie he directed, the absolutely ludicrous and completely awesome Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks.

Randall did what you’d expect. He hired Carolyn De Fonseca, the actress who often dubbed Mansfield in European movies like Primitive Love and Dog Eat Dog. So yeah. That’s not even Jayne talking in a movie that’s supposedly all about her deepest and darkest thoughts.

De Fonseca’s voice is all over the movies covered on this site. She’s a tourist in Eyeball. That’s her doing Barbara Steele’s voice in Terror-Creatures from the Grave. Marisa Mell in Secret Agent Super Dragon. She’s Florinda Balkan’s English voice in Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling. And she makes vocal appearances in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Bloody Iris, Torso, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Emanuelle in America, Inferno and so many more. Her voice comes out of Sybil Danning’s mouth in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red and Phenomena, Barbara Magnolfi in Suspiria, Tisa Farrow in Antropophagus, Dagmar Lassander in The House by the Cemetery, Laura Gemser in Ator the Fighting Eagle, Sabrina Siani in Throne of Fire and Corinne Clery in Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.

That’s why I write about movies. I would have never known otherwise that one person was the sound that I heard in so many movies that I count amongst my favorites, much less a mondo all about Jayne Mansfield.

With breathy narration, Mansfield visits nudist colonies, strip clubs, a gay bar and a massage parlor because this was the mid-60’s and people were losing their minds over the sexual revolution. She also judges a transvestite beauty pageant, meets the topless girl band The Ladybirds and does the Twist to a song by Rocky Roberts & The Airedales.

You also get shots of Mansfield in Playboy — the equivalent of someone filming a magazine — as well as nude scenes from her in Promises! Promises! and moments with her husband Mickey Hargitay in the movies Primitive Love and The Loves of Hercules.

With Mansfield dying before the movie could be complete, you just knew that news footage of her car accident scene would show up in this. There’s also a tour of her home, the Pink Palace, by Hargitay. He was a plumber and carpenter before becoming a star, so he made her the heart-shaped swimming pool at the center of the all-pink landmark.

In the 1980 TV movie, The Jayne Mansfield Story, Arnold Schwarzenegger played Hargitay, who pretty much demystified and popularized bodybuilding for young athletes. He and Mansfield’s daughter Mariska can be seen pretty much 24 hours a day now on the Law and Order TV shows.

One of the directors of this movie, Joel Holt, is also the narrator in Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls. Yes, that’s the kind of movie you’re about to revel in. Enjoy it. Wade in it. Experience it.

This was released on blu ray release from Severin along with Wild, Weird, Wonderful Italians. You can also watch this on Amazon Prime.

Playing in theaters — the COVID-19 pandemic has helped many movies get seen more than they’d expect otherwise — this science fiction film concerns Naomi, a young woman who awakens to a life that is not her own. As she starts to learn the truth, she wonders if she’s sane. The rest of the time she;s worried that nightmares and a black void will take her.

Writer/director/producer Michael Bachochin has put together a story here that takes a while to get to its conclusion. It looks nice, there’s a good idea, but this is a movie that demands patience.

Parallax is in theaters only for now, but will be available soon from October Coast, who were nice enough to send us a copy of the film.

Two college students find evidence connecting a story they are investigating for film class — all about possessed fruit — to a series of deaths. Things begin to spiral out of control when an unknown force watching them becomes angry in this found footage film.

I’m not really the correct audience for this genre, but this movie didn’t really bother me, which is more than I can say for most found footage films. I’ve never seen a movie before where fruit turns people evil, so I can now safely say that I have checked that off my bucket list.

The Last Five Days available now on demand and DVD from Wild Eye Releasing.

Frank Tashlin made the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons and you know, that’s pretty much what this movie is. It’s a cartoon come beautiful and wonderfully to life. He’d work with Jerry Lewis on six of his solo films (Rock-A-Bye Baby, The Geisha Boy, Cinderfella, It’s Only Money, Who’s Minding the Store? and The Disorderly Orderly) and then work with Jayne Mansfield again on the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He also wrote the Don Knotts film The Shakiest Gun in the West.

I knew I would love this movie in the first few seconds, when Tom Ewell introduces the film by showing how CinemaScope and the colors by DeLuxe work. It’s an astounding moment that breaks the fourth wall before it has even been built.

A mobster who runs the slots, Marty “Fats” Murdock (Edmond O’Brien), has one dream. He wants his girl, Jerri Jordan (Mansfield), to be a singer. She has no talent, but he knows that press agent Tom Miller (Ewell, who is best known for The Seven Year Itch and whose last movie was Rodney Dangerfield’s Easy Money) can get the job done. Even better, he never hits on his clients.

Murdock is obsessed with a song he wrote, “Rock Around the Rock Pile,” and Miller has to go to enemy territory and sell the song to another mobster, Wheeler (John Emery, Kronos), who rules the jukeboxes.

There’s all manner of romantic confusion and a gang war over jukeboxes, which was actually a thing once. All ends well, with Jerri confessing that she really can sing and Murdock letting her know that he doesn’t want to marry her, so she can go off and be with Tom, the man she loves. The wedding dress that Mansfield wears here was loaned to her for her wedding to Mickey Hargitay.

Oh yeah — and Juanita Moore, from Imitation of Life, is in this. That’s what normal folks know her from. Me, I recognized her as Momma from Abby right away.

The real reason to watch this — beyond the rainbow of colors ready to bathe your eyes in perfect beauty and majesty — are the performances by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, The Platters, Gene Vincent, Eddie Fontaine and more.

In The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney discusses how John Lennon learned how to play guitar from watching Cochran in this movie. It meant so much to them that they cut the recording of “Birthday” at Abbey Road Studios short to watch its 1968 British TV debut. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck also claimed that this movie was a big influence.

Speaking of influence, some feel that Elvis was directly inspired by the dancing for “Rock Around the Rockpile,” which was somewhat of an imitation of him anyway, and may have used the look of this scene when he made Jailhouse Rock. The makers of The Girl Can’t Help It wanted Elvis for this film, but dealing with Colonel Tom Parker proved to be too much to deal with, as his asking price for one Elvis song was too expensive.

Want to love this movie even more? Listen to John Waters discuss it on the British DVD release. He would also tell the Directors Guild of America Quarterly, “This wasn’t a movie that my boy classmates wanted to see or cared about. They weren’t interested in discussing Jayne Mansfield’s complete lack of roots. I really had no one that I could be enthusiastic with about it. So it was a private secret of mine, this movie.”

Waters based so much of the character of Divine — she would even come on stage to the song “The Girl Can’t Help It” — from Mansfield. He also points out that Little Richard’s mustache in this movie had such an impact on him that he’s had it for his entire life.

This film is pure greatness on a level that very few movies ever hope to reach. You can watch it on YouTube.