Killer alligator have emerged from the sewers — the title does not lie — to attack a small Louisiana town that only has their sheriff, an alligator expert and an old gator hunter to protect them from the vilest of scaly critters.

The synopsis of this movie claims that alligators “are coming out of the sewers, they are coming for you, they are coming for your children, they are coming for your grandmother.” You have to appreciate that level of honesty.

Director and writer Paul Dale, who has also made the movies Chosen, Silent but Deadly (a mime slasher) and Fast Food & Cigarettes, has about an hour to tell this story, as well as appear in the cast. Perhaps the best known actor in this is Manon Pages, who has been in The Purge TV series, Puragtory Road and several of Dale’s other films.

This film certainly doesn’t take itself seriously and boasts not only CGI gators, but a gator autopsy that’s a small scale version of the scene in Jaws. It’s not the best gator movie you’ve ever seen, but it might be the best one I’ve seen in 2022.

Sewer Gators is available on VOD, DVD, Blu-Ray and collectible VHS on June 3 from the official BY THE HORNS site.

TV historian and archivist Stu Shostak, the subject of this doc, started in Hollywood by handing out tickets to Norman Lear sitcom tapings to people in Hollywood and then started doing the audience warm-ups for All In The Family, Silver Spoons and One Day At A Time.

After learning that entertainment legend Lucille Ball was hosting question and answer classes at a college nearby, Stu transformed his encyclopedic knowledge of her career into becoming an essential part of her small inner circle, acting as her archivist and as an assistant to her husband Gary Morton.

After Ball passed away, Shostak pioneered what we know now as podcasting. His internet shows — all about the classic years of TV — became a success, as did a series of I Love Lucy conventions. It was at one of these conventions that Stu would meet the love of his life, Jeanine Kasun, a music teacher and fellow Lucy super-fan.

That’s where the story of Stu’s life takes a turn, as he must navigate the health care system to keep Jeanine alive after she suffers a brain aneurysm.

With appearances by Tony Dow (Leave it to Beaver), Michael Cole (The Mod Squad), Ed Asner (Lou Grant), Butch Patrick (The Munsters), Margaret O’Brien, Geri Jewell, Beverly Washburn, Wink Martindale and many more stars of television, this movie invites you into Stu’s life, in good times and bad, to give you a full picture of what it’s like to be someone that has gone from fan to friend of so many Hollywood stars.

Director C.J. Wallis also made another TV culture doc, Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much, and does a great job of layering footage, interviews and real life moments to create an intriguing narrative.

Stu’s Show is available on all major media platforms from Upstream Flix.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Emily Fear is a librarian in Western PA. You can hear her weekly on the women’s wrestling podcast Grit & Glitter, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major platforms.

A lonely twenty-something in the Pacific Northwest is exhausted with modern dating when she meets a promising man the old fashioned way – in the produce section of her local grocery store. He’s cute, charmingly awkward and forward in that polite, self-deprecating way that puts others at ease. Their meet cute turns into a date turns into sex turns into something more, then he suggests a weekend away. That’s when things go… awry.

Fresh isn’t the first film to tackle the horrors of modern dating in a literal sense, but it comes at the idea from a novel worst case scenario: What if the too-good-to-be-true romantic interest was, in fact, a cannibal surgeon who makes a fortune off a slow, meticulous harvesting of female flesh? Instead of shacked up on a weekend away, you’re shackled in the barebones basement of his mid-century abode, left communicating through the wall with his other supply sources, the women he has previously lured into this trap. 

Remarkably assured for a debut film, Mimi Cave pulls a fun trick on her audience, playing up the fizzy, fun romance in the film’s first half hour. Only when Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) goes face first onto the carpet after being drugged by “Steve” (Sebastian Stan) does the title of the film appear, an ominous echo of the produce section where these two met cute only twenty minutes earlier. 

But instead of a complete tonal shift, Fresh finds an interesting mid-space between romantic-comedy and captive horror, releasing tension through dryly funny conversations between Noa and her fellow captive, Penny, the occasional needle-drop montage of Steve preparing his human meats, even the investigations of Mollie, who suspects something is amiss when her best friend disappears. Then one quick twist and the tension is mounting all over again.

The film is anchored by strong performances by Edgar-Jones and Stan, both of whom add tremendous layers to their characters. Stan especially seems right at home in his portrayal of an amoral murderer who is also a hopeless romantic and supreme nerd. He’s almost charismatic enough to remain so even in light of his odious nature. Almost.

Fresh is smart enough not to veer too far in humanizing its villain, preferring instead to emphasize the wit and wiles of its hero and her fellow women in peril. While this film has a lot of sardonic points to make about modern dating, its most earnest note is the bond between the women at the mercy of powerful, violent forces beyond their control. Maybe you can’t trust the guy you met in the grocery store, but your best friend is going to be there for you, come hell or high water or a cannibalistic conspiracy of the rich.

A ruthless serial killer is murdering male prostitutes and Marco (Tomas Arana, Body Puzzle) is the journalist trying to figure out the case, investigating — some may say Cruising as this movie is the giallo remake remix ripoff of that film — the gay bars and dealing with his worries about all the male attention he’s getting. Luckily he’s married to a stewardess named Adria (Gioia Scola, who is in another late 80s/early 90s giallo that needs more people talking about it, Obsession: A Taste for Fear) just in case you think he’s going to get converted, which would make this a much more interesting movie — even if one of the suspects, Andrea (Lorenzo Flaherty) makes him feel rather funny.

You have to admit that a 1993 movie that uses an internet chat room for men to find men is years ahead of the curve, much less a film in which there’s no judgment for the male characters finding the sex they dare not speak in the straight world. That’s a big leap for the giallo genre, which in the past has only had gay characters appear as red herrings or used as comedy.

Plus, I’m always happy to see Natasha Hovey (Cheryl from Demons) in a movie, as well as Alida Valli (Suspiria, Eyes Without a Face, The Killer Nun, Fatal Frames). Directed and written by Pierfrancesco Campanella, who also made the 2003 giallo Bad Inclination and the shorts La goccia maledetta, L’idea malvagia and L’amante perfetta.

The end of this movie — spoiler mode — is incredible because Gioia Scola dresses up like a boy and allows her husband to pick her up.

An Italian/Spanish co-production directed by León Klimovsky and written by Ricardo Muñoz Suay and Paul Naschy, who also stars as Inspector Paolo Scaporall, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse is about a killer taking out the junkies and sex workers of Milan and leaving behind a dragonfly sculpture on each body living up to the title of the movie.

Where most giallo films have five murders or so, this one goes wild with 15 murders, several of which are done with an umbrella knife. Scaporalla and his high fashion wife Silvana (Erika Blanc) follow this vigilante killer — who the police debate may be doing their job for them — and she gets so focused on the case that she studies crime scene photos in bed. Naked.

God bless giallo.

Alley brawls with Nazi bikers, chasing transvestite suspects through Luna Park (the site of a major part of Naked Girl Killed In the Park and an endearing relationship between Naschy and Blanc — I dream that they made several sequels of them as a Thin Man series of psychosexual whodunnits — pushes this movie toward the top of the list of giallo, even if it isn’t made in Italy or even played there. It’s also committed to sleaze, at least in the non-Spanish version. As the country was still super restrictive, Klimovsky shot a version that has every nude scene clothed.  As someone that hates censorship, I have to exclaim how horrible the morals that keep Erika Blanc clothed are.

PS: Your ears do not deceive you. This movie takes liberally from the soundtracks of Bava’s A Bay of Blood and Blood and Black Lace.

After another in a series of fights with her lover Maurizio (Nino Segurini, Beyond the Door, Amuck), Manuela (Eva Green in her only movie) leaves him for the island where her friend Eleonora (Catherine Diamant, Devil In the Flesh) lives alone. Seeing as how this is a giallo, their friendship soon flowers into a relationship much deeper.

Maurizio follows her with the hope of winning her back. And when she chooses him, things get violent.

Directed by Silvio Amadio (Amuck, Smile Before Death), who wrote the script with Gino Mordini (The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine) and Roberto Natale (Bloody Pit of Horror), this film makes the most of its location, its small cast and cinematography by Joe D’Amato.

Also known as Island of the Swedes, Twisted Girls, No Man’s Island and Island of the Swedish Girls, it has a great body painting scene and an ending that takes from The Most Dangerous Game just as much as Franco did for Countess Perverse, but it comes as a natural outgrowth over the frustrated passions within the characters.

Very few of Amadio’s films are available in great quality, which is distressing, and I’d love to see a box ray set of this, Amuck, So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… and Smile Before Death.

Someone Is Bleeding is also known in France as Les seins de glace or Icy Breasts, the name that is streaming under. It’s a French/Italian giallo directed and written by Georges Lautner, who based it on the book by Richard Matheson.

Peggy (Mireille Darc, Goddard’s Weekend) can’t get away from François Rollin (Claude Brasseur, Godard’s Bande à part), who pursues her in a way that may have been romantic in 1974 but is illegal in 2022. Eventually, he wears her down and she reveals that she’s divorced, yet the truth is much more complicated: her husband died under very strange circumstances and her lawyer Marc (Alain Delon, whose life was literally a giallo, as his bodyguard Stevan Marković was found murdered covered in a garbage pile near Paris. The ensuing investigation revealed secret sex parties involving celebrities and government officials, including future French Prime Minister Georges Pompidou) got her released due to temporary insanity.

For someone normal and not in a giallo, this would be the time to run. But even after learning about her past and her drug addiction, he keeps wanting her even more, which is pretty much me in my twenties, always being handed red flags, throwing them over my shoulder and getting in deeper.

Everybody loves Peggy, but everybody is blinded by her. Only Marc solves things, taking a page out of Of Mice and Men, which I had never thought would end up being in a giallo yet here we are.

You can watch this on Tubi.