Somehow, someway, Iraqi commandos once broke into a secret American government lab and released the genetically modified rattlesnakes which go under the ground and wait ten years before they emerged in a small town and start biting everyone, which creates a pandemic and man, did I want to watch a pandemic movie when I thought I was watching a snake movie to forget about the pandemic? No, I sure did not.

Santa Mira again gets used in a Fred Old Ray movie and man, this town gets really decimated here and nearly nuked off the face of the Earth so that the government spooks can keep their disease snakes a secret. I can totally see that happening.

Treat Williams and Mary Page Keller play the doctors struggling to stop the disease, all while Marc McClure and Andrew Stevens get cameos.

Give Fred Olen Ray credit. It was once science fiction that the government would totally screw up its response to a pandemic and now it’s science fact.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Researching this movie — yes, I am home alone on a Sunday obsessively writing about Fred Olen Ray movies while you live your life — I discovered a website called The Chucks Connections which documents every appearance of Chuck Taylor All-Star shoes in movies.

If you liked Disney live action movies of the 70s but perhaps wanted some weirdness under the skin, then you’ll find something here, a movie in which a dad makes an invisibility serum, the son wants to drink it to get back at a bully and the mom (Dee Wallace!) drinks it. And hijnks, as always say and will say all week when writing about Ray’s movies, ensues.

This is a movie that not only has its child hero watching Beast of the Yellow Night on TV but also has that movie’s star John Ashley show up as a henpecked neighbor. It’s also nice that producer Andrew Stevens got some work for his mother Stella here.

I also endorse Russ Tamblyn getting acting gigs anywhere and anyway that he can. Same as Gary Graver, who shows up in a small role here, and is the only man who could convince Orson Welles to edit a scene in an adult movie.

The tagline for this film is “Not seeing is believing,” which kind of is hurting my brain right now and putting it into loops and making me think about gnostic dualism.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Nina and Jan (Sabine Timoteo and Mark Washcke) own an ad agency together and trust me, that brings nothing but stress, particularly with the politically active client they just got hired by.  To escape getting burned out, they take their kids Max and Emma (Wanja Valentin Kube and Jule Hermann) to their seaside vacation retreat, a place that usually offers relaxation but a home invasion makes things way worse and they may not get better.

Beyond just seeing the incident once, we see it from every member of the family, as well as discover the tensions behind the client that Jan didn’t tell Nina about. Max may only be concerned with his pet rat Zorro, but his sister Emma is devastated by the event, which may not have impacted other members of this not-so-tight family unit in the same way.

Director and writer Ronny Trocker has created an interesting movie here that forces you to examine a very simple moment through its very complicated characters. It’s definitely worth your time to track this down.

Human Factors is available on digital from Dark Star Pictures.

Deidre (Vanessa Greyshock) is a teenage sorceress in training who has one test left from her master (Robert Quarry): she must help Richard (Ted Monte) deal with his life, which is mostly living under the naysaying gaze of his wife Kristin (Michele Bauer) who keeps pushing him but is really working with his friend Greg (Steve Scionti) to get the promotion instead of her husband so they can both make money off the mob.

And right now I realize, if this was a Fred Olen Ray softcore movie, this is where Michele Bauer would be naked, but this is a Fred Olen Ray kids’ movie but it’s the same story except we have a supernatural child and cameos from Tommy Kirk and Russ Tamblyn.

At one point, this movie had a talking head of Robert Quarry like an alien intelligence speaking to a young girl about magic and I saw my life from the outside, sitting in a movie-overflowing basement and trying to find meaning and joy in a world that I rapidly see as getting worse and it was all just so funny to me. I laughed like a madman to the point that my wife came down to the basement to check on me and I was trying to explain why I would not only watch this movie but multiple Ray movies all in a few days and she just looked at me with that mix of “Why did I get married?” and “I love that affable moron” and went back to doing something good and needed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Santa Mira has dealt with body snatchers and latex masks that make kids’ faces explode into worms and bugs, but now it has a dire wolf problem. Actually, it has half a dire wolf problem, because a research facility has combined a human being with a dire wolf — where did they get a dire wolf in the first place? — and it has, of course, escaped to kill people.

When you have a gigantic wolf who gets blood and gore everywhere, it helps to have an OCD sheriff played by Maxwell Caulfield and Gil Gerard as a military man on the case. This was also known as Dinowolf, which may be a better title, but it’s not like I wouldn’t watch it if it had a worse one. I’m in full Fred Olen Ray overwatch mode.

There’s also a deputy pining over his ex but I’ll be honest, I watched this movie as I would have when I was a little kid: I was only here for werewolf-based slaughter of human beings. Good news: I got everything that I wanted.

Bonus points for ripping off the ending of the original The Thing to kill the practical effect werewolf, which looks ridiculous in all the best of ways.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as Dirty Blondes from Beyond, this Fred Olen Ray science fiction movie starts when Princess Farra (Brandin Rackley) dealing with Vulvian Empress Krella (Christine Nguyen), who responds to an offer to combine their efforts to deal with cosmic thunderstorms by invading Farra’s planet, sending her and her attendant Vema (Jazy Berlin) to Earth, where they struggle to fix their shop and avoid the Men In Black (Voodoo and Jenna Presley) and hide in the house of Jock (Evan Stone).

There are actually some nice special effects in this — the spaceships are pretty cool — but the rest of the movie just looks antiseptic and way too clean. Maybe it’s the Full Moon Tubi re-edit of this movie, which seemingly cuts the film in half by cutting out most of the sex scenes. You know that stupid Twitter debate about whether or not movies should have sex in them any more? Let’s have some of those #filmtwitter geeks stop watching the latest A24 movie and wallow in the world of Cinemax After Dark and let me know how good these movies are deprived of simulated scissoring. I defy you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

If you’re a prehistoric cave girl accidentally transported to the future — like Tahra (Jezebelle Bond), our heroine — the first thing you’d probably do is have a threeway with some archaeologists named Richard (Alexandre Boisvert) and Sharon (Kennedy Johnston). I guess, right? Aren’t we all in the Fred Olen Ray cinematic universe?

I leave it to you to decide how a cavegirl got tattoos.

Also known as Teenage Cavegirls, this movie has a sex scene every 12 minutes or so — the Tubi version is somewhat edited — and footage taken from Planet of the Dinosaurs. The only person who doesn’t have sex is Professor James Matthews (John Henry Richardson, a Ray regular).

Those that do have wild cave sex include Lezley Zen, Nicole Sheridan, Voodoo, Danielle Petty and Evan Stone, who I have been in awe of since I saw him in Pirates and he somehow lived through a vigorous scene with Belladonna and Sasha Grey. I can only imagine he’s some kind of demigod or cyborg.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’m sure you’ve seen Attack of the 50 Foot Woman but this has ten more feet on that.

Inga (Raelyn Saalman), Betty (Tammy Parks) and Angel Grace (J. J. North) are the three finalists for Plaything’s Centerfold of the Year, which finds Angel heading to Dr. Lindstrom (John LaZar) to continue beauty treatments which he’s already told her could be dangerous. But when the first new dose makes her breasts grow, why would she stop?

After sleeping with the magazine’s photographer, Angel forgets to take a dose and sees wrinkles, so she starts taking beyond her prescription. This causes her to grow, as you can expect, into the titular 60 foot centerfold.

With a cast that includes Tommy Kirk, Michele Bauer, Ross Hagen, George Stover, Stanley Livingston and Russ Tamblyn, this movie gets in what you expect: two centerfolds brawling in the middle of Los Angeles, but giant ones, and then a doctor gets speared with a giant needle which is kind of what you really really wanted.

The urge to be beautiful is strong. When left unchecked, you end up really tall. There’s a moral somewhere.

Segal and Van Dam — together for the first time.

Steven Seagal and…Rob Van Dam weed-loving pro wrestler.

Also this is not a Sniper sequel despite the story of Master Gunnery Sergeant Tom Beckett taking place over eight movies.

Seagal is Sergeant Jake Chandler, an expert sniper, one so good that he’s rarely — if ever — in the same shot with his co-stars, shot like Jamie Lee Curtis in an Activia commercial.

The rest of the team — Van Dam, Tim Abell, Jason Shane-Scott — have been given the goal of rescuing a U.S. Congressman who has been kidnapped by the Taliban.

While I’d love to believe the IMDB fact “In preparation for this role Steven Seagal at fast food for a year straight while living with a family in Wisconsin,” I do appreciate the silent warrior who has been watching Fred Olen Ray movies and posting their military inaccuracies on the site, such as  “The sniper rifle makes the “phew” sound typical for suppressed gunfire in movies. High-powered long-range rifles are impossible to fully suppress because the bullets travel at over twice the speed of sound and make a loud sonic “crack” as they travel downrange. Although the suppressed muzzle blast makes it difficult to ascertain the position of the shooter, combatants in the target area will still hear the rifle fire and realize they are being fired upon.”

That’s the kind of obsessive movie writing that I adore. If that’s you, please write for this site.

Segal is in this movie for ten minutes. You can understand him for about three of those minutes.

At the end of this movie, the NATO reporter (Charlene Amoia) along with the crew takes photos of each of the soldiers.

RVD does his pose as if a crowd of dissidents would soon shout “Whole F-N Show!”

I laughed for about forty minutes.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Colonel John Sykes and his men were sent to save hostages, but when everyone is dead, they go wild and massacre an entire village. They return home to be court-martialed but refuse to go quietly when General Harlan Prescott (Alex Cord, Airwolf) throws the literal book at them. Sykes and his men respond by taking a flight with Prescott hostage.

Who can save them? Matt Marshall (Ice-T) for one. And air hostess Kelly Young (Kimberly Oja). But when Matt gets hurt, anything can happen.

Like you know, Gil Gerard showing up.

Imagine if Executive Decision was made with stock footage.

Imagine a movie where Ice-T shows up nearly forty minutes in and is presumed dead at least twice if not ten times.

Imagine a poster that is so close to Turbulence that I might be watching Turbulence.

Imagine watching this on Tubi.