Arch Stanton is Jim Wynorski and Bill Carson is Fred Olen Ray and we have entered the place where their at times very similar movies cross into the nexus point between their work. Yes, Scream Queen Hot Tub Party is at once a padded out clip fest — look for Sorority House Massacre, Slumber Party Massacre, Emanuelle 5, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Hard to Die, Nightmare Sisters and Evil Toons — and an opportunity for Brinke Stevens, Monique Gabrielle, Kelli Maroney, Michelle Bauer and Roxanne Keronhan to play themselves and, well, get naked.

Ray plays a stalker who keeps trying to kill the girls while Wynorski is a monster in the basement. Somehow, Linnea Quigley only shows up in clip form. At least there’s an Ouija board, which is used before the hot tub, which makes sense in the world of 90s VHS movies that didn’t worry about how up front exploitation could be before the internet.

There are a lot of IMDB reviews that state how upset they were with the quality of this film.

I ask what they expected.

I’m a fan of Giant Drag and Annie Hardy, the band’s lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter. She’s known for the explicit lyrics in her songs and battling hecklers on stage, which really ties into how she acts in Dashcam, a movie that has her on-screen and livestreaming for most of the movie. As she deals with the coronavirus pandemic, she’s been riding around downtown Los Angeles and singing and rapping on her stream. She decides to go to London to visit her old bandmate Stretch and instantly enrages his girlfriend and makes his food delivery job a nightmare.

Then she steals his car and phone.

That’s when she meets Angela, an old woman followed by someone trying to kill her who offers plenty of money to get her out of town.

That’s when things go wrong.

Directed by Rob Savage (Host), who co-wrote the script with Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd (who wrote Host), this is based on Hardy’s real life, as Band Car was a show that she did where she improvised songs while she drove based on what those in the chat room sent.

So while I’m a fan of Hardy’s music, I am not a fan of her in this movie, which finds her playing a MAGA anti-vaxxer in the broadest way possible when she isn’t freestyle rapping about shoving things into orifices. It feels either too easy or — if earnest — too insipid and too uninspired — the simplest form of shock comedy that has nuance in a burst and is absolutely and utterly grating at 77 minutes ending with a cute idea of her rapping the credits making this feel like it will never end. I’m worried that I’m going to wake up in a Jacob’s Ladder situation and it’ll still be halfway done.

I will never get the idea of doing found footage or streaming movies in the place of a traditional narrative but I lost that battle long ago.

Dashcam is available in select theaters and VOD from Blumhouse and Momentum Pictures.

J.D. Feigelson wrote the screenplay for the TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow more than forty years ago and now, it’s finally time for a sequel. This time, he both directed and wrote the film, whereas the original was directed by Frank De Felitta (the writer of Z.P.G., Audrey Rose, The Entity, Scissors and more, as well as the director of Killer in the Mirror, Trapped and The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan).

Can it measure up to a film that many see as a true classic?

Chris Rhymer (Amber Wedding) and her young son Jeremy (Aiden Shurr) have recently moved to a small town in Stubblefield County. Their very arrival is a mystery to the close-knit town; after all why would someone move from the big city to their little town and be content to work in a country store?

While Chris tries to build a new life, Jeremy grows closer to the older woman who watches him after school every day named Aunt Hildie (Carol Dines) and also begins speaking to an imaginary friend that he refers to as Bubba. Chris is losing track of everything in her life and finds herself confiding in the worn scarecrow in the field, telling it all the secrets of her life while placing a flower in its lapel, a flower that’s returned to her as she sleeps.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Hildie is using Jeremy to reach the spirit hidden within the scarecrow, just as Chris’ past comes back with tragic results, as it turns out that Chris was in witness protection and she’s been found.

Unfortunately, while the movie attempts to remind us of the first film, it in no way can match it or even add to it. Whereas the original only hinted that perhaps something supernatural was happening, the sequel fully invests in the idea that Bubba is inside the scarecrow. I don’t expect that past cast to come back — most of them died in that film and are also sadly no longer with us — but I have such a strong feeling and adoration for the original that this feels like an unwanted hanger-on.

I wanted to love this movie. Sadly, it fell quite far from the mark. It may have had a lower budget than the 1981 TV movie, a move that makes the most of its budget with effective filmmaking and assured direction.

You can get this VCI-released movie from MVD in either blu ray or DVD.

Welcome to the meta world of Fred Olen Ray, as Bad Girls from Mars is about a movie called Bad Girls from Mars and all of the many things that go wrong during filming, including actresses being killed off by a masked killer, which as always pleases the Italian side of my DNA.

Even though the producers are making a killing — wokka wokka — from insurance payoffs, they keep making the movie and bring in Emanuelle (Edy Williams, the one-time wife of Russ Meyer) from Europe to be the lead. She’s out of control the moment she lands in Los Angeles and the killings just keep on happening.

Ray used the sets left over from Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death to make Wizards of the Demon Sword. Before the sets were taken down — a second time — he wrote (with Equinox screenwriter Mark Thomas McGee) and shot Bad Girls from Mars in the day and $19,000 that he had left.

Corman would have been double proud.

Inspired by Hollywood Boulevard, there are references to Batgirls from Mars and bat symbols throughout the film. That’s because Ray was going to hire Adam West and Burt Ward, but they were busy that day.

Literally, that day.

Anyways, it’s a movie where Edy Wiliams says, “The smell of garbage turns me into a wild woman!” and Brinke Stevens plays a woman who’ll do anything to be a star. I may be projecting a bit, but I always think of Brinke as being the sweetest person, even when she’s being the evilest villain in a film. Like I just want to play with her hair, ask how her day was and make sure she’s feeling alright. Let other men obsess over sleeping with scream queens. I just want to be supportive.

You know, Gary Graver worked with Orson Welles and Fred Olen Ray. The difference — among many — was that Welles worked for decades to complete a film and Ray would knock off a few a month. You determine your success by your own values.

This is also called Emmanuelle Goes to Hollywood because that title sells.

Billy Frank (Jordan Lamoureux) is a very distant relative of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Bloodstone (Peter Spellos) dreams of bringing that mad scientist’s greatest creation back to life. He invites Billy and his family to move into their ancestral castle hoping that he can help him say, “It’s alive!” all over again.

Constable Frogg (John Maynard) has a different ancestry. The Froggs are known for stopping the Frankenstein Monster. He’s been hired by Otto (Vernon Wells!) and Fraulein von Sloane (Griffin Drew) to frighten the Franks into selling, all so he can build a mall.

Directed by Fred Olen Ray and written by his wife at the time Kimberly, this is a family-friendly horror movie for kids who are afraid of monsters. Former Disney and American-International Pictures star Tommy Kirk shows up as a monk, so that’s kind of neat.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as Friend of the Family II, this Fred Olen Ray film was written by Henry Krinkle, who also wrote Night Eyes 4, which seems like decent training for this movie.

And no, this has nothing to do with the first one other than its antagonist being played by the same actress.

Alex (Paul Michael Robinson) decided to have an affair with Linda (Penthouse Pet of the Month January 1992 Shauna O’Brien) while he’s on business in New Orleans. Somehow, she had a better flight than him, because when he gets back home, she’s already been hired as his family’s new nanny.

Nicholas Medina is, of course, Fred Olen Ray. He’s making his own Hand the Rocks the Cradle here, but that movie had more days to shoot, more of a budget and you know, more actual thought than this. It did not, however, have Shauna O’Brien or an ending where Alex’s wife yells, “Oh my God! Where’s the baby?”

I can hear you asking, “But did Gary Graver do the cinematography?”

Of course he did.

You can watch this on Tubi.