Richard Gantz (Philip Digby) can’t keep a job or finish his film about the Zodiac Killer, yet somehow the Zodiac Killer finds him and convinces him to finish the movie, one that will help him collect new slaves for paradice, as he would scrawl.

Night of the Zodiac seems like an SOV movie from thirty years ago yet it was made now by director and writer Susana Kapostasy somewhere in the wilds of Hazel Park, Michigan. Beyond Mark Polonia showing up as well as Todd Sheets and Tim Ritter getting name dropped, there are so many posters and old VHS boxes that are all over this film, including Tales from the QuadeaD Zone, Splatter Farm and perhaps the best film of that era, The Abomination. There are also tons of kills, including a magician, the entire band doing the soundtrack, a karate battle that ends with a woman being impaled on a sprinkler that shoots literal geysers of blood and an issue of Gore Score read on the toilet.

This cost a grand to make and I assume that the budget went toward sending this backward in time so that it appeared to be made in the same time period as all those movies of the past that I love so much like Boardinghouse, Day of the Reaper and Goblin. You can feel the love for those films while this is able to become its own unique film. It also remembers that an SOV film needs a metal soundtrack and this movie totally gets that right. Beyond worth your time. I want even more of this!

The SRS DVD also has a commentary track,  Blood Cannon Madness, a seance to reach Chas Balun for Gore Score, how the ciphers for the movie were made, a Tim Ritter interview and a trailer. You can buy it from MVD.

In this movie by director and writer Barry Jay, we meet Alex (Jonny Beauchamp), whose teen years of parental sexual abuse have turned him into someone who only finds help at the bottom of the bottle. Yet he is working to fix his life, thanks to his friend Gracie (Ashleigh Murray) and sponsor Veronica (Sherri Shepherd).

He decides that he wants to reconnect with his father, despite everything that happened, and forgive him. Yet when he enters the house, his father has been murdered. He inherits his old house but soon learns that it’s too expensive to keep. That’s when he meets Shane (Mike Manning), a personal trainer who begins to change his body, as well as how he feels about himself and his sexuality. As he starts to open up and realize that he’s gay, he also finds himself pulling away from his AA group and Gracie. Then, the movie asks us — what if Shane was the wrong person for Alex?

I really dug what this movie was going for. It’s nearly a gay version of a Lifetime thriller and I say that with all the best of meanings. There’s so much that feels unexpected here and I really enjoyed it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Jonathan Salemi, this is about what happens to dealers with marijuana becomes legal. Vince (Anthony Molinari) can’t get his license and starts to lose money, so much that he can worries that he’s about to lose anything. He and his friend Bobby (Mister Fitzgerald) decide to make one last deal, but the criminals they’re working with steal all the weed, which leaves them in debt to the Boss (Sala Baker), a man who he borrowed a hundred grand from and also the maniac who demands his money in a week and then kills Bobby.

Based on a true story and shot during the pandemic, The Last Deal is a gritty take on the crime genre. This film literally had a lower budget than most major Hollywood action films spend on a half day of craft services and ends up working. That’s due to how good Molinari is at his role, a normal guy forced into a fight that he has no chance of winning and worrying that he has a baby on the way with his girlfriend Tabitha ((Jeffri Lauren). Now she and his friends are also targeted, so he has to do whatever he can to survive.

You can learn more about The Last Deal at the official website.

Jess Franco already made Eugenie…The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion and How to Seduce a Virgin, which are pretty much the same movie based on the same De Sade story. Those were made in 1970 and 1974, but by 1978, hardcore porn was legal and making money. And Franco had just stopped working with Erwin C. Dietrich. Despite making sixteen movies that did pretty well for the Swedish impresario, Franco was poor. And if it takes sex to make money, well, there you go, and Franco was back working for Marius Lesoeur and Robert de Nesle.

Martine de Bressac (Aida Vargas) and her brother Christian (Mel Rodrigo) have a major thing for Eugenie (Beni Touxa). Martine is able to take the girl thanks to the relationship she has with her father Raymond (Jean Perrat). In case you think that Franco is going to half step here the movie was originally called Le goût de sperm before censors had to get involved. Yes, a title so rough that censors had to stop a hardcore porn movie and change its name. So yeah — the movie has an initiation that involves Eugenie drinking a cocktail made with alcohol and some very Jess Franco bodily fluids.

It’s also a movie that ends with a masked bacchanalia that ends when Eugenie happily realizes that she’s servicing her own father.

It also has a Daniel White and Jess Franco song that has the words, “The taste, the taste, the taste of your sperm.”

Anyways…

Eugenie…The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion is pretty much a classic, when it comes to Franco, and How to Seduce a Virgin is pretty well made. Those movies may have been forever ago compared to this.

Three couples have rooms at the Free Love Hotel: a short man and a tall woman who have met through the personal ads of a porn magazine, a shy man with a domineering wife and a couple on their honeymoon. The ladies are all unfulfilled but the hotel can take care of that with room service, so to speak, but the best help comes from Nina (Lina Romay), an adult star staying in the hotel while practicing a role for a movie.

Directed by Jess Franco and written by Franco, producer Robert de Nesle and Lucette Gaudiot, this movie may seem familiar to you. That’s because Franco remade it as El hotel de los ligues four years later.

Beyond Lina — performing as Candy Coster — there’s also Aida Vargas (who appears in four other Franco movies, Cocktail spécial, Je brûle de partout, Swedish Nympho Slaves and Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun), Susan Hemmingway (Sinfonia Erotica, Two Female Spies With Flowered Panties), Martine Fléty (Blue Rita), Beni Touxa (Cocktail spécial) and Marina Hedman (Satan’s Baby Doll, Erotico 2000, Images In a Convent, Play Motel).

You just have to decide if you want to see the adult version of this story, which would be this movie, or the softer one, which is El hotel de los ligues.

Trisha (Serayah, Empire) and Jamie (Marques Houston) have been best friends since grade school — he saved her from a boy who just wouldn’t leave her alone and then has always been there to rescue her, even through college and into their professional lives in marketing — but have never been anything more than friends. This changes when she starts hanging around one of their potential clients. She isn’t feeling it — the guy seems creepy — but when he dies the day after one of their dates and the cops find out he was poisoned, Trish and Jamie begin to question one another. Is he stalking her? Is she playing him? And how about all the I Heart Radio references in this movie? Did they pay for them?

Director and writer Chris Stokes — who also made the Tubi originals The Assistant, The Stepmother, The Stepmother 2 and Howard High — keeps making these Tubi movies and I keep watching them. The more I watch them, the more I wonder if I should expand giallo into the urban theater? Seriously, this has pretty much all of it — red herrings, fashion, sex, past trauma — and maybe these movies have hip hop instead of Goblin. It’s a theory that I’ve never seen anyone get into before and one worth exploring.

Oh yeah — the antagonist in this is awesome. No spoilers.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Cameron and Scott Hale, Free to a Bad Home is an anthology about a box filled with cursed objects including a ring that gets passed from person to person, starting with Amy (Miranda Nieman) has lost her husband and found a drinking problem. Then it’s found by Ryan (Jake C. Young), who breaks into a house where he finds a safe he can’t open. In the next room, a woman is chained up. She promises to unlock the safe if he lets her loose. Except that, well, she wants to kill the family next door when she gets free. Then it makes its way to his sister Julia (Olivia Dennis) goes to a drug-filled Halloween party that gets much, much worse.

There are some pacing issues in this movie, but for a low budget, it does a lot right. The color and cinematography of the last sequence are great. And obviously the Hale brothers aren’t just trying to make the same streaming horror anthology that everyone else is making. Here’s hoping that the things they have learned in this film allow them to create something even better after this. Also: eyedropper drugs seem horrifying.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Nick (Isaiah Jimenez) has finally been told by his mother (Jana Collette Henry) and it’s taking a toll on this plans to have a weed store with his friend Kyle (Casey Starchak). Nick doesn’t have the money, Kyle doesn’t want to ask his father (Essex O’Brien). That’s when the Goldstein Organisation — operated by, you guessed it, Goldstein (Don Larson) — comes in and their grant programs to small businesses. Except, you know, you have to have gray skin to get one. So cue Soul Man as Nick and Kyle paint their skin and try to pass, which seems doomed to fail as Nick is black and Kyle is white.

Directed and written by Romello Blade, this takes a cute idea, has some interesting makeup as the grays are nearly bright in tone and adds in government intrigue and romance between a grey named Zeka (Michelle Nuñez) and Nick. There’s no way the guys can keep up their makeup-assisted scam for long, right? And are the Goldstein Group’s higher ups Madoff (Dennis Mallen) and Janice (Madi Jarrard) taking all the cash for themselves? And does Zeka know more than she’s letting on?

This could have been just a little bit shorter and been much more effective, but it’s a decent enough film with goofy stoner humor and an anti-racism message.

Has my obsession with Jess Franco gone too far? I’d say yes, seeing as how I just watched a workprint of Jungle of Fear, complete with time code and multiple angles of the same scenes. There’s no dubbing. And who knows where he was going to take Christopher Mitchum, Antonio Mayans, Lina Romay and William Berger in this film?

Yet I have reached that point where I will watch everything that he does because, say it with me, “to see Franco you must see all of Franco.”

There are crystal skulls, gold bugs, an evil Nazi version of Van Helsing, Dr. Quasimodo, Lina being filled with high energy and smiles, an evil woman named Furia who is a dancing dom, Lina hiding behind a JCVD poster, Charlie Chaplin Jr. getting in the shower with Lina, a Franco cameo where he sings opera, an appearance by Fatima Michalczik (who was an editor on the Franco Don Quixote edit of the unfinished Orson Welles movie and oh man, there’s so much to say about that someday soon) and Chaplin walking past a mural of his grandfather and literally mugging the camera.

Instead of all the work that we’re putting into artificial intelligence, can we get someone to dub and edit and make this movie finished? Because it gave me hope in this grim world watching it, despite how ragged it all seems.

You can watch it on YouTube.