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.

The title of this movie refers to the last two years of the turbulent life of Jayne Mansfield, as she careens through bad relationships, addictions, lowered career expectations and, perhaps, membership in the Church of Satan.

This movie somehow unites so many of my favorite people, including Kenneth Anger, John Waters, Mary Woronov, Mamie Van Doren, Tippi Hedren, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls star Dolly Read and 1980s pop star Marilyn, all uniting to tell the story of Jayne.

Writing/directing/producing team P. David Ebersole & Todd Hughes couldn’t get their movie The Devil Made Her Do It made, so they went back to the documentary format that they’d used to make Hit So Hard, Room 237 and Dear Mom, Love Cher.

It’s somewhat uneven and the music and dance numbers may get some cringe at times, but this is still a fun film. But get ready for some interpretive dance along the way.

Did Mansfield have a relationship with Lavey? Does it even matter? The legend is always better than the truth.

Lawrence Tierney plays Detective Sergeant Jack Stevens, a lawman so drunk that he doesn’t even remember killing a famous film star. Or maybe he didn’t. Life is imitating art here, as Tierney was a maniac on the order of a Kinski.

Quentin Tarantino referred to him as “a complete lunatic” and an opportunity to play Elaine’s father on Seinfeld ended with him stealing a knife from the set and threatening the life of the show’s creator and star. These are minor anecdotes in a life filled with brawls, battles with the law and brilliant acting.

For example, in June of 1975, Tierney was questioned by the NYPD in connection with the apparent suicide of a 24-year-old woman who had jumped from her high-rise window. He told the police, “I had just gotten there, and she just went out the window.” This would be strange enough, but Tierney also played a character in the movie The Hoodlum who is suspected of driving a woman into jumping to her death.

Jayne Mansfield shows up as Candy Price, an artist’s mistress, and John Carradine plays a tabloid reporter. Kathleen Crowley was the lead; she showed up late one day and claimed that she had been raped, which meant that many of her shots are a double and Mansfield — who was paid $150 for the role and went back to selling popcorn at a movie theater after this — had her part increased.

This noir was directed by character actor Bruno VeSota, who also made The Brain Eaters and Invasion of the Star Creatures.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This 1963 movie — released betweeb the end of the Hays Code and the start of the MPAA rating system — was the first Hollywood motion picture release in decades to feature a mainstream star nude. And that star was Jayne Mansfield, bearing Marilyn Monroe in the buff in 1962’s uncompleted Something’s Got to Give.

In case anyone asks you, the first mainstream star to go fully nude was Annette Kellerman in 1916’s A Daughter of the Gods.

The three nude scenes by Mansfield were scandalous. Even more so was the July 1963 issue of Playboy, which was the only obscenity charge every brought against Hugh Hefner. In that issue a pictorial entitled “The Nudest Jayne Mansfield” showed Mansfield topless alongside T.C. Jones, a hairstylist, actor and one of the most famous female impersonators under his stage name Babette.

All the press made the movie a big deal, despite the horrible reviews. Sadly, Mansfield only got offers for more sex comedies. While you could buy stag loops of her scenes in the 60’s, the same scenes would show up in the posthumous The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield, which also has scenes from Too Hot to Handle, The Loves of Hercules and Primitive Love.

Mansfield was voted one of the top ten box office attractions that year, but Roger Ebert took her to task: “Finally, in Promises, Promises she did what no Hollywood actress ever does except in desperation: she made a nudie. By 1963, that kind of box office appeal was about all she had left.” Of course, this practice is commonplace today.

So what’s it all about? Jayne plays Sandy Brooks, a woman dying to get knocked up yet with a husband played by Tommy Noonan, who produced this and warred with his co-star. In the movie, he’s too stressed out to make love to her, which sounds like a problem no man ever had next to Ms. Mansfield. Meanwhile, after meeting another couple, Claire and King Banner. Claire is played by Marie “The Body” McDonald, who had perhaps an even crazier life than Mansfield, starting as winning the title of The Queen of Coney Island before adding up six marriages, an alleged kidnapping that was never proved to have taken place and a death from an “active drug intoxication due to multiple drugs.” In the aftermath,   her husband and father would commit suicide and her children would be raised by third husband (they were married twice, too) Harry Karl and his wife, Debbie Reynolds, who knew something about infamous divorces. She took over the role from Mamie Van Doren. King is played by Mansfield’s husband at the time, Mickey Hargitay.

The couples end up swapping — this had to be scandalous for 1963 — ends up with both women pregnant and unsure who the daddy (or daddies, I guess) are. In between that, Mansfeld sings two songs, “Lullaby of Love” and “Promise Her Anything.”

This movie wasn’t an adult film. It was a major studio picture, directed by King Donovan (husband of Imogene Coca), who beyond acting in Invasion of the Body Snatchers also directed this movie and four episodes of Grind! and one of That Girl. Vidor shows up in plenty of things, with his last role in the 1984 cult movie Nothing Lasts Forever.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. You won’t get arrested.