Jessie (Julia Brown) is a teenager who wants to become a famous hairstylist just like her mom Valerie (Gail Watson). She has a secret to the unique haircuts that she creates: her invisible partner is Ghillie Dhu (Huck Whittle), a forest elf who loves cutting human hair.

Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, this is a fun family story about an elf seeking a lost childhood friend, a daughter seeking for her mother to care about her and discovering how to transform your art into a career.

Directed by Phillip Todd, who wrote the script with his brother Matthew and Lindsey Stirling, this movie was a nice bit of happiness and cheer in the midst of the usual violence and sleaze that plays in this house.

I think that kids that watch this will enjoy seeing how Jessie stays positive despite rejection and hardship, devoted to making her life better and somehow connect with a mother who seemingly only cares about her own career. I’m sure you’ll figure out who the girl that Ghillie Dhu used to play with that moved to the big city really is, but this is such a fairy tale — literally — that I figure that you won’t mind at all.

While it has a lower budget, the film makes the most of its setting, cast and special effects. And yes, it may be a family film, but it kept me watching.

You can watch this movie here:

Amazon (DVD): https://www.amazon.com/Jessie-and-the-Elf-Boy/dp/B09VZQT92H/

Apple TV: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/jessie-and-the-elf-boy/umc.cmc.7ezjmdoctvz238nyg0761etmx

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/Jessie_and_the_Elf_Boy?id=uJ9UDG4kpaY.P&hl iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/jessie-and-the-elf-boy/id1610064926

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwF7B6VunX0

Jarrid Maddox (Don “The Dragon” Wilson) was experimented on as a child and mutated to gain the power to see into the future. He’s been selected to kill five terrorists who end up being five other people just like him who were experimented on by the CIA.

Also known as The Capitol Conspiracy, the main reason I was excited to see this was that Barbara Steele shows up. I mean, Barbara Steel in a Don “The Dragon” movie. Plus Robert Quarry? Come on, Fred Olen Ray. You’re giving me too much.

The best part of this movie for me was Maddox’s partner Vicki Taylor (Alexander Keith, who also used the name Wendy Scumacher in movies like Scorned 2, Animal Instincts III, Star Hunter, Fugitive Rage and The Escort II). She has a very butch ass kicker look going on in this and while her turn on our hero can be figured out without mental powers, you won’t mind. She’s also the recipient of the heavy petting that the Dragon gives out at least once a movie.

Such are the ways of direct to video.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Howard Hansen (Ted Prior, the brother of director David) has just had a Gremlins moment where he purchased a pickled punk in a Chinatown curiosity shop. Now, he can write faster than ever before and has more sexual energy than he’s had in years, which shocks his wife Peggy (Sandahl Bergman and if he has an issue finding her attractive, this movie may be science fiction) and worries her, as he’s just hired a new secretary named Carol McKay (Shannon Tweed).

I don’t have to give this advice but I will. Ladies, if your husband has Shannon Tweed as his secretary and you have any trust issues, you or your husband and maybe everyone you know is going to die.

Whatever is inside that glass jar now has possessed Carol, who is turning husband and wife against one another and she’s also conspiring to steal Howard’s new script with his agent Murray Dunlap (Frank Sivero, Frankie from Goodfellas), because that guy owes money to Henry Silva and his henchman Chad McQueen.

Of all the Ray movies I’ve watched this week, this one might be my favorite just because it’s so deranged — Tweed forces Prior and Bergman to have sex while holding a gun on them; everyone is possessed by a cyclopedian fetus; just how good is Hansen’s script if people are ruining lives over it — and ends with nearly the entire cast ends up in a gun battle that nihilistically wipes out most of them. Way to go on the script, Mark Thomas McGee.

This movie got released on video by Columbia Tri-Star. Let that make your brain explode.

Jesse James (George Stults) and his brother Frank (Tim Abell) have emerged from a robbery gone wrong and Jesse is healing up with the help of Carrie (Siri Baruc) and Mary (Lauren Eckstrom). They don’t know that Marhsall Kane (Peter Fonda, who started his career making low budget Roger Corman films and fits in just fine here) is coming after them as well as his men making a play for the money and leaving the brothers in the cold.

How do you feel about day for night? Do you love it? Would you be happy just to have Jeffrey Combs show up for a little bit? Will you watch every western there is? Are you a fan of Fred Olen Ray or perhaps writing an entire week of a web site about his movies?

There’s still someone on IMDB that’s calling out the historical and weapon accuracy of Ray’s movies, such as how the movie is set in the 1860s and civilians are carrying Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army revolvers — which weren’t available to the general population until 1875 or later — and none of the guns recoil when they’re shot. I appreciate the writer’s attention to detail and invite them to write for the site.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Shane Newman (Brent Huff, Cop Game, The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak) has moved from Los Angeles to Hawaii which I don’t think is a police transfer that works in the real world, but we’re in the Fred Olen Ray universe now.

There’s a reunion in town and some of the Omega Kappa Omega girls have been invited to shoot nude photos — yes, I get that this doesn’t happen in most class reunions but again, we are in Ray’s world — by Derek Simmons, the editor of the Cavalier Magazine. One of them, Terri Walker, is soon found strangled with a final examination certificate next to her body.

It’s up to Newman and his new partner Julie Seska (Kari Wuhrer) to solve the case — cases, because women keep on taking their clothes off and dying — which has ties back to the suicide of Rachel Kincaid, a member of the class of students meeting in Hawaii.

This is a nice mix of erotic thriller, giallo and slasher with some familiar Ray stars like Debbie Rochon and Amy Lindsay. Sean O’Bannon, who wrote plenty of films for Ray (Mom’s Outta Sight, Invisible Mom II, Inferno) and Fred’s wife at the time Kimberly were on the script. It’s exactly the kind of movie you’re looking for after three in the morning, which is a positive note.

I’m all for any movies that Kari Wuhrer makes, especially if she’s a sarcastic cop.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Mark Lindsay Chapman sounds like the name of the man programmed to kill John Lennon, Mark David Chapman, which kept him from playing the man who put a tampon on his head and yelled “I love May Pang” in John and Yoko: A Love Story, a biographical NBC made-for-Tv movie that had involvement from Yoko Ono, who liked his audition but felt it was bad karma and Mark McGann got the role instead. Chapman did end up playing Lennon in Chapter 27 and got killed by real life cult leader Jared Leto who played Chapman.

Chapman — the actor, not the MK Ultra killer carrying a marked-up copy of Catcher in the Rye — is the voice of the invisible dog Albert in this movie.

As for the movie, imagine Home Alone with an invisible dog who is not above dragging its hero whenever he screws up — which is often — and burglars trying to get a secret hidden in a birthday gift.

Common Sense Media said that this movie was the “familiar tale of a boy and his dog running from wacky criminals who are trying to get back a secret formula.” Have we as a movie-making society become so cynical to film that there is more than one canine espionage movie? I mean, Abner is an English sheepdog, which explains his accent and sometimes that’s enough for me. Throw in David DeLuise and David Chokachi from Baywatch working from a story by Andrew Stevens and how can you watch any more, Common Sense Media? You warned parents that this movie has scenes in which “elderly folks are the butt of numerous jokes; there are farts aplenty and some mild sexual innuendo” and to me, you’re describing pretty much the movies that I wish were being discussed by Film Twitter’s most tight assed and unhumorous critics in the same way they point their magic fingers at a film no one has cared about ever and made it something worthy of pedestal raising. I implore you, do the same for Abner the Invisible Dog!

It has to be better than how Common Sense Media summed up this Fred Olen Ray movie: ” A time waster for all but those kids who think it’s hysterical to hear dogs fart and watch brainless grown-ups trip on banana peels, smash their fingers in doors, and react to stink bombs.”

For shame.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Michael Atherton — look, I watched this not because we’re doing a week of Fred Olen Ray movies, but because Michael Dudikoff is in this — finally stands up to the rich family that runs the town of Kingston. Led by Jerry Krants (William Smith and why would you ever want to mess with this man), they treat his heroic dreams like a joke and beat him into oblivion. I mean, that’s what you get when you kill William Smith’s son for beating up and whipping Wendy (Valerie Wildman). Instead of just killing Atherton, Krants and his gang break his hands and crucify him like he’s Franco Nero in the Italian deserts of the 60s before Wendy pulls him down and nurses him back to health.

Meanwhile, Kyle Tapert (Randy Travis) comes into town and he has a grudge with Atherton, too.

Ray assembled a fun cast here which includes Robert Quarry, Andrew Stevens and Kane Hodder. The sets and locations look really great and you know that Gary Graver is on camera, as always in this era of Ray’s films.

This is the kind of movie my grandfather would get in a twenty pack of VHS westerns and call to tell me about, which is pretty much what you want it to be.

Who knew Randy Travis could pull off a role like this?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Laura Griffin (Dee Wallace) is back as the invisible (foster) mom but let’s be honest: I watched this movie because it dares to team up Mary Woronov and Mickey Dolenz as brother and sister family killing evildoers and this delighted my brain on so many levels. Also: Robert Quarry.

Barry Livingston is back as the dad, Trenton Knight is back as the son and so is about six or seven minutes of the first movie because why reshoot what you already shot?

Invisible Mom retains the powers she lost at the end of the last movie but then again she rarely uses them in the film. That’s better than the film’s cover art, in which a leotard and headband-wearing mom works up a sweat that we can’t see while a young voyeuristic child watches in astonishment from a window. I want that movie if only because I will watch any child movie that Fred Olen Ray makes. Or softcore porn that he directs. And somehow, they have the exact same aesthetics which is at once pleasing and somewhat distressing.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A spin-off from 1996’s Invisible Mom, Fred Olen Ray’s Invisible Dad gets me to watch his films as his films always do: I say, “Well, Karen Black is in it.”

Or “Gary Graver is in it acting.”

Or that the religious Common Sense Media said that it was a “highly improbable, groan-worthy, low-budget movie,” which sounds like high praise.

Doug Bailey is our hero and he’s very Johnny Quest in that he has no mom and travels all the time, so he really has no friends what with being the new kid in town all the time, which is a very 80s and 90s movie kid thing to be and probably points to the developmental mental trauma of screenwriters more than actual issues.

His dad Andrews (Daran Norris) has a weird machine in the garage — how often do they have to move this thing around? — that allows Doug to wish his dad would disappear, he turns invisible and hijinks ensue.

Now, take a look at that cover art. There’s a manchild at a carnival with what we can assume is an invisible dad at the carnival and he’s mindblown that dad is not visually appearing. If you liked this image and said, “I’d like to see a movie on the boardwalk with an invisible dad and his twentysomething son shouting,” too bad. These aren’t the same actors as in the movie and this scene never appears.

You do, however, get a scene where Invisible Dad wonders why he can no longer see his penis. In a kid’s movie.

Never change Fred Olen Ray.

You can watch this on Tubi.