Once, we took our dog Angelo to a dog show and saw several dogs that had been colored every shade of the rainbow as people judged which was the best. It was astounding. I’d never seen anything like it before and as soon as I got home, I did a deep dive into this strange world of dog grooming.

Now, director Rebecca Stern takes the viewer through an entire year in the life of several competitive creative dog groomers, all so that you get the reasons why they do exactly what they do.

From South Carolina to California, New York to Arkansas, this movie follows several contestants to large-scale dog grooming competitions. This movie asks the question, “What is art? And can it be spray painted and cut into the fur of dogs?”

Seriously, if you’ve never seen this kind of thing before, you need to see this movie. It’s really something else.

A shorter 60-minute version of the film debuted on HBO Max last year. Now for the first time since it’s 2019 SXSW premiere, the full-length feature film (88 minutes) will be available to the world on DVD and all major VOD platforms from Passion River Films.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this by its PR agency, which has no impact on our review.

Sabrina thought that she had problems when her play, The Tungsten Dagger, bombs. Then her boyfriend dumps her. And then, someone breaks into her house and it’s Elodie, the main character in the play she just put on that very night. She asks her creator for help, bringing Sabrina into the world that she thought was only in her imagination.

Here’s a cool fact about this movie — the exterior of Sabrina’s apartment is the same one used for the exterior of the hotel in the opening of Psycho.

Daniel Ziegler wrote, directed, produced and edited this movie, which feels incredibly personal. Its definitely something different than the movies that usually get sent to us for review, a mix of black and white film noir with color in the real world, an inverse Oz filled with magical daggers that grant wishes and shady dealings.

It’s closer to an art film than a genre movie — again, I always hold to the rule that what type of movie it is only depends on the theater playing it. Also, unlike so many modern films, the music and sound design truly fits and has a purpose. Well done.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. Thanks to the filmmakers for sending it our way. Want to know more? Check out Black Box Films’ website and Facebook page.

Directed by George Sherman and Giuliano Carnimeo — I’ve been diving deep into his films, including They Call Me Hallelujah, They Call Him Cemetery, his Sartana movies and The Case of the Bloody Iris — Panic Button is an example of the movies that Jayne Mansfield had to hunt down after her 20th Century Fox contract ended.

French entertainer Maurice Chevalier and Mansfield play actors who are picked to be in a new production of Romeo and Juliet. Eleanor “Woman of a Thousand Faces” Parker and Mike “Mannix” Connors also show up.

This tale of mobsters getting involved with Shakespeare was never really successful anywhere that it played. In the U.S., it was on double bills. And hey — it has one total review on Letterboxd other than this one.

Richard E. Cunha didn’t make many movies, but he sure made some insane ones. There’s She Demons with TV Sheena Irish McCalla, fanged women and Nazis taking over an island long after the war. Giant from the Unknown, featuring a monster named Vargas the Giant and effects by Universal’s Jack Pierce. Missile to the Moon, Frankenstein’s Daughter, Girl In Room 13…none of these movies are normal.

He teams with German director Gustav Gavrin, cowboy director Ray Nazarro and Albert Zugsmith (Sappho Darling, Violated!, The Cult) for this movie. That’s because production problems — financing, location and personnel issues — caused filming to stop several times and personnel changed along the way.

What we end up with is a tale of three robbers who steal a million and end up turning on one another. Actually, it soon becomes two, with Lylle Corbett (Cameron Mitchell) killing Dolph and Darlene (Jayne Mansfield) having to deal with it.

They end up on an island where everyone wants their money and everyone is ready to kill for it. You kind of have to love a movie that offs nearly everyone in the cast, closing with Mansfield drowning herself to take the last of the money.

Mansfield called the film: “The best role of my career.” She was four months pregnant with her daughter Mariska Hargitay when she made this. Her voice is dubbed in this by Carolyn De Fonseca, who would one day do Jayne’s voice from beyond the grave for The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.