A woman (Laura Dromerick, Camp Blood 8: Revelations, The Haunting of LaLlorona) goes through the moments of her bad day, which somehow involves wearing period blood like face paint, but you know, whatever it takes to get you through, especially the way this country is heading for anyone that isn’t a rich white religious male.
Director Megan Duffy — she was the mom in Meat Friend! — has been all over the place in her career, acting in movies like the remake of Maniac and Holidays, as well as directing, producing, casting, editing and cinematography. You can learn more about her on her official site.
Maddie (Caitlin Gerard, Insidious: The Last Key, who co-wrote this movie) and her twin sister Abigail (also played by Caitlin Gerard) are the only two people to survive meeting The Mechanic (Kane Hodder, forever Jason, forever awesome). As Maddie wakes from a nightmare of their encounter — filled with blood, scrawled pentagrams and terror — she learns that he’s due to die tonight. Her sister won’t answer the phone and she keeps remembering the night The Mechanic towed her mother along with her and her sister away into the night.
As Maddie explains to her therapist what happened in her past, her sister is breaking into the garage of The Mechanic and having visions of him. Before you know it, people start dying and the sisters are suspects, but the way that movie bounces between today and yesterday, reality and fantasy, it’s often hard to figure out exactly what’s going on.
The idea of a tow truck driver who kills the people he’s supposed to help, much less one that uses the occult to bring the victims who escaped him into his mind, is a great one. If you’re hiring someone to play that killer, Kane Hodder is the perfect person. And that’s where the movie runs out of gas, sadly, when it’s where it should get started.
I’ve watched hundreds of giallo movies and if I say something is an incoherent mess, this is coming from someone that usually celebrates incoherent messes.
Director Vanessa Alexander has only made this one movie, which was written by Jesse Mittelstadt (Across the Hall, No Escape Room). There’s something in here, buried deep, and there’s definitely some style in the way that cinematographers Chris Faulisi and Pedja Radenkovic (who also shot Danzig’s Death Rider In the House of Vampires) have filmed this. It just needs to get the flashbacks, well, flashed back and move on to the actual story, in the actual timeline, and get out of its own way.
Beyond directing The Candy Snatchers, Guerdon Trueblood was the king of writing insect movies. Ants!, Terror Out of the Sky, The Savage Bees and this movie, all within two years is how he did it.
Directed by Stuart Hagmann, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo pulls a switch on you as you’ve been led to believe that Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman are the heroes as they fly out of Ecuador with a huge haul of coffee beans that just so happen to be filled with spiders. Yet after they crash in Finleyville, California, the movie shifts to the townspeople battling the furry eight-legged creeps, including Dr. Hodgins (Pat Hingle), Bert Springer (Claude Akins) and Cindy Beck (Deborah Winters).
The town is more concerned about selling oranges than dealing with the spiders until it’s nearly too late. The solution: make the sound of wasps so that the spiders stop moving, then dump them into buckets of alcohol.
Also: these aren’t tarantulas. They’re Brazilian wandering spiders.
That said, I’ll let a silly TV movie play all day long, like a warm blanket when it’s cold outside. It is my joy.
The Kino Lorber blu ray of Tarantulas: The Deady Cargo has a new 2K master, commentary by The Made for TV Mayhem Show podcast hosts Amanda Reyes, Dan Budnik and Nate Johnson, art by Vince Evans and a limited edition slipcase. You can get it from Kino Lorber.
When Billie (Marnie McKendry) — sorry, I mean children — microwaves raw hamburger meat, it needs no old top hat to come to life. Instead, Meat Friend (Steve Johanson, who co-wrote this with director Izzy Lee) is alive and real and wants to teach her some valuable life lessons rooted in hatred and violence, no matter what her mother (Megan Duffy) does.
“More beef! Less cheese!” goes the refrain and the faithful demand the reanimation of the meat homunculus.
This was an absolute blast of strange and exactly what I needed during the fest, something that started odd and didn’t let up.
Izzy Lee has also directed the Lovecraft film Innsmouth, the “For a Good Time, Call…” segment in Shevenge and several shorts like Consider the Titantic, Disco Graveyard and Memento Mori. You can learn more about this movie — the kind of magic that has a pile of sentient 80% lean ground beef do rails of coke — right here.
What would it be like to grow up as the child of one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history? This Tubi original documentary explores what that’s like for the son of Gary Ridgway, the infamous Green River Killer.
Directed by Victoria Duley (who produced several other Tubi exclusives like Famously Haunted: Amityvilleand Scariest Monsters in America) and written by Chip Selby, this film explores the life and murders of Gary Ridgway, who is currently serving 49 consecutive life sentences for the murder of 49 women through the 80s and 90s.
Beyond interviewing Ridgeway, his son Matthew, ex-wife and neighbors, this also features the lead detective on the case Dave Reichert, former commander of the Green River Task Force Frank Adamson, Seattle reporter Olivia LaVoice, former co-worker Diane LaPointe, The Crime Weekly Podcastpodcaster Stephanie Harlowe and forensic psychotherapist Michael Drane. There are also dramatizations to show what it was like to be part of Ridgeway’s life.
While this may not have the budget of a Dateline or other network true crime show, it does have plenty to tell you about the case. Then again, if you’re watching this, chances are you already know all about the Green River Killer and you’ll see this as another generic take on true crime. You certainly have plenty of options of what to watch when it comes to murder porn, right?
Dynamite Entertainment, who published the Red Sonja comic books at the time, collaborated with animation studio Shout! Factory to produce this motion comic, which takes the script of Gail Simone and the original art of Walter Geovani and Jenny Frison, then adds small bits of motion that can kind of, sort of be called a cartoon. It’s kind of like the way Grantray-Lawrence Animation did The Marvel Super Heroes in the 60s with a bit more tech.
If you’ve only seen the live-action Red Sonja, this is closer to the comic book version of the She-Devil with a Sword. Our heroine (Misty Lee, the magician wife of animator Paul Dini) comes back to a kingdom to pay back the blood debt to the king who freed her from the slave pit, but finds herself battling Annisia, a woman who she once considered her sister.
While the animation is rough and this wouldn’t be the story I’d introduce new readers to when it comes to Red Sonja, it’s nice to see this character getting any media mentions after decades of a rumored film.
Spy Smasher: The Man with Seven Lives is Turkish remix remake ripoff of Fawcett Comic superhero Spy Smasher, who was created by Captain Marvel’s creative team of Bill Parker and C. C. Beck in Whiz Comics #2. Alongside the Big Red Cheese, Spy Smasher’s battles with the Mask, the America-Smasher, the Angel and the Blitzys made Whiz Comics incredibly popular. They even had a cross-over in issues 16-18 where the Mask made Spy Smasher evil and the two heroes fought. After the war ended, he became Crime Smasher for one issue and disappeared until DC Comics purchased the remnants of Fawcett. He was part of the Squadron of Justice along with Bulletman, Bulletgirl, Ibis the Invincible, Mister Scarlet and Pinky the Whiz Kid.
The original character — there’s a female version in the DCU now — also appeared in a William Witney-directed serial, Spy Smasher, which was the inspiration for this film. And, if you can’t tell by the title and year it was released, this also has a fair amount of Eurospy influence — which shows up as this movie liberally borrows from the score for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
A sequel to 1968’s Casus Kiran (Spy Smasher), this adventure has foreign delegates coming to Turkey to set up a series of nuclear missile bases. However, someone is killing these important people one after another, so Murat from the Turkish Police seeks out the assistance of Casus Kıran, his just as deadly wife Feri (Feri Cansel) and the Sherlock Holmes cosplayer comic relief Bitik (Ahmet Danyal Topatan) to stop the killing and save Turkey.
The hero is played by Irfan Atasoy, who not only acted in this, but produced and distributed it. After watching so many Turkish remixes of superheroes, I get a bit confused, but the fact that the costume here looks less like Spy Smasher and more like the superhero in Demir Pençe (Korsan Adam) is not helping at all.
It’s amazing to me that while Spy Smasher went from one of the most popular comic book heroes ever to being one of the most obscure in a few decades — Fawcett chose to settle a decades-long lawsuit with DC and went out of business — there were still movies being made on the other side of the world about him.
Captain Invincible helped win World War 2 but couldn’t survive the McCarthy hearings. Angry that his country turned its back on him, he moved to Australia and became a drunk. Thirty years later, Mr. Midnight, his greatest villain, comes back and steals the hypno ray. The U.S. government now needs the Captain back. But is he even interested?
Directed by Philippe Mora (Mad Dog Morgan, The Beast Within, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf), this Australian superhero comedy musical is a lost film. It never played in U.S. theaters due to Jensen Farley Pictures (who also distributed Chained Heat, Curtains, The Boogens and more) going out of business, but it was released on video. It also bombed really badly in Australia, so it’s not a film that anyone thinks about.
It’s a strange bird, a mix of pathos at times (the idea of superheroes being forced to retire because of the McCarthy hearings was first done in 1979’s JSA stories in Adventure Comics and 1985’s America vs. the Justice Society) and musical scenes, featuring three songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show team of Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley,
Starring Alan Arkin as the Captain and Christopher Lee as Mr. Midnight, the film really explores how a superhero would have to relearn his powers after decades of alcohol abuse, as well as how a supervillain would really operate in the modern world. It was written by Andrew Gaty, Peter Smalley (Dead End Drive-In) and Steven de Souza (Commando, Bad Dreams, Die Hard, Hudson Hawk, 48 Hours and many more).
The black and white sequences were my favorite parts of the film, showing how Captain Invincible gave up being a hero and how he got his powers. The music is pretty interesting, particularly Lee’s explanation of how there was evil before there was humanity. Also, I love Mr. Midnight’s sidekick, Julius, who looks like a naked human horse person.
Also of note, there’s a scene where vacuum cleaners attack our hero. The scene made so little sense, the original pick for Captain Invincible, James Coburn (Derek Flint from In Like Flintand Our Man Flint) dropped out of the movie!
Severin has re-released this movie in a special set that has both the theatrical and director’s cut, as well as soundtrack CD. Plus, you also get interviews with producer Andrew Gaty, cinematographer Mike Molloy, actors Kate Fitzpatrick and Chris Haywood, Christopher Lee performing “Name Your Poison” On German TV, an alternate title opening, a trailer, commentary from Mora And Not Quite Hollywood director Mark Hartley, a discussion between Morra and Steven E. de Souza, and Morra speaking with Marc Edward Heuck.
Steve Mackleson (Craig Fairbrass) is twenty years into a life sentence for the double murder of his ex-wife and her lover. He has accepted that he will never see the world again, yet he hopes to protect his new cellmate Marcus (Stephen Odubola), a young black man caught between gangs and his career of dealing drugs, even when in jail.
At the same time, Steve is working with social worker Claire Keats (Zoë Tapper) to get the chance to finally confront his daughter Rebecca (Rosie Sheehy) and try to explain why he murdered her mother.
Directed and written by Ross McCall, who also appears in one scene, this is nearly a single room — a jail cell — film about a hard man remaining that way despite everything jail has put him through. It’s nasty, brutish and unforgiving, much like its lead, who made his name in movies like Villain and Rise of the Footsoldier.
Imagine if someone made The Stepfather but reversed genders and races and hey — we have a Tubi original!
Directed by Chris Stokes (House Party 4, You Got Served) and co-written with Marques Houston, who plays Eddie, The Stepmother finds Zooey (Erica Menda, Love & Hip Hop New York) as the titular black widow stepmother who moves from husband to husband, family to family. She now has not only a new husband, but a new stepson in Scott (Justin Sweat, son of Keith; this movie is filled with R&B people as Stokes once managed B2K).
There’s a scene in the beginning where Scott is sitting with his parents after a graduation party and his mom April (Tanee McCall) yells that it’s time for a dance battle, which she wins, only to have a seizure and die. This should be one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie, but either through bad directing, worse acting or the fact that I am someone who laughs at inappropriate things — perhaps a cocktail of the three? — I laughed like an absolute maniac.
If you love reality TV, Cynthia Bailey from Real Housewives of Atlanta is in this as Vanessa. She was on that show with Sweat’s mother, Lisa Wu.
I wanted to love this movie. Unlike so many of the Tubi originals, it never decides to just go for it and be total trash and that makes it just mediocre and boring.
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