With all the balloons being shot down this week and the secrecy around those, this seemed like the right week to watch a documentary that asks the big questions, like “What does our government really know about UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena)?” annd “Am I going to get the same information from this documentary that I get from every single other alien doc that I’ve watched since I was a kid?”

You’re not going to learn anything new on Roswell and what happened there that you haven’t learned from nearly every other basic cable alien show except, you know, if you’ve never watched one of these before and you’re about to have your mind blown.

At some point, they run out of Roswell stuff and decide to just talk about all of the many people who have been abducted, like Barney and Betty Hill. It is kind of interesting to hear from these folks and how hard it is for them to tell their friends and family what has happened to them.

Depending on what side of the argument you’re on, you’re also either going to find this all laughable or fascinating. I’d rather have an open mind about these kinds of things.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The American adult film industry isn’t the only one that made parodies of popular pop culture. Even Jess Franco was on hand to do this, making Phalo Crest and this film which places Lina Romay as Jean Collins — get it, this is Dynasty — and yes, this was shot at the same time and on the same sets but this at least has the look of the TV show and, most importantly, the shoulder pads-heavy fashion.

Franco used the name Betty Carter for this, taken from a jazz vocalist with a scat singing style. You can understand why Jess took this name as Carter was known for doing everything in her “…bold, inimitable way — regardless of the commercial consequences — to the passionate delight of her fans and the occasional exasperation of record-company executives and club owners,” according to her San Francisco Chronicle obituary. Franco would use the name Lennie Hayden for Phalo Crest, in case you wondered.*

He also used the name Chuck Evans for his screenwriter credit.

Franco actor Antonio Mayans turned down this film but acted as its agent as he sold it. In an interview, he mentioned that he had no issue when Jess would use the same set for mainstream and an adult film, as it saved money and could even make a profit, but to make movies specifically to be adult and no other art coming out of it wasn’t something he thought Jess should do.

*For a breakdown of all of Franco’s jazz-related alternate names, this Tom Clark article is incredible.

Dr. Orloff (as usual played by Howard Vernon) is a central villain in the Jess Franco Cinematic Universe. Here, he’s given up on resurrecting his daughter Melissa (Rocío Freixas), who lies frozen in time in the basement. Her son Alfred (Antonio Mayans) has not stopped and is doing things in the Orloff way, which means using his assistant Andros (Rafael Cayetano) to kill sex workers until they can find the one soul that can be reincarnated inside Melissa. He’s also being tracked by Inspector Tanner (Antonio Rebollo) who wants to finally catch an Orloff and end this cycle of death. Also, this being a Jess Franco movie, both Orloff’s either want to own or make love to Melissa.

What works here is that Franco decides to follow Maniac and have the younger Orloff obsessed with the women who walk the streets and sin while his sainted mother lies in state.

If you’ve watched The Awful Dr. Orloff, The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll, The Diabolical Dr. Z and The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff — and the Orloff film that follows this Faceless — as well as other Vernon-acted non-Franco Orloff films like The Invisible Dead and Only A Coffin, you’ll be surprised that Vernon’s character has started to realize that perhaps all this murdering has led to a life of horror instead one of scientific experimentation. That isn’t going to stop him from being a monster but he’s gradually starting to undergo some character growth if only his son wasn’t whipping women and trying to put their souls into his mother so he could cuck his father through an act of infernal incesticide.

Man, Jess Franco will lead you down some wild paths, right?

Sonja (Chelsea Gilligan) and her husband Jason (Steven Good) are going through some rough times, so she’s been sexting and getting close to her boss Robert (Austen Jaye). When that man is found dead in a hotel room — where he was waiting for her — Sonja decides to go back to their marriage.

Mia (Sydney Cole Alexander) was Robert’s wife and she’s just learned that he was having an affair. She smells another woman’s perfume in the room where he died — of autoerotic asphyxiation during phone sex! — and recognizes it when she passes by Mia in Robert’s office.

As for Sonja and Jason, they decide to move to a remote cabin and reconnect, even if that’s been difficult since the death of their child. A neighbor named Clare soon introduces herself to Jason and if you haven’t guessed that she’s Mia, well, you’ve never watched a Lifetime movie before.

Directed and written by Rainy Kerwin, this hits all the expected spots of the erotic thriller, even if most of the erotic is in the beginning with Mia’s husband sending some pretty racy — even for Tubi — texts to his new lover. Spoiler warning but these Tubi movies love having the villain get away with their plans, unless this is a set up for A Neighbor’s Vendetta 2 and you know, I think that’s totally what’s about to happen.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tubi excels at finding movies that would have once been cable or even network made for TV movies and presenting them to you whenever you want to watch them. Like Frankie Meets Jack, which has Frankie (Samantha Cope) giving up guys and becoming a dog mom for Tucker when she meets veterinarian Jack and his dog Dakota. They keep running into one another, like Jack becoming her vet and her writing his wedding announcement. But you know, with a title like Frankie Meets Jack, they’re going to end up together.

Directed by Andrew Lawrence — yes, Joey’s brother — from a script by Cope, Joey and Groundling Jen Bashian, this is also the final film of Anne Heche even if she’s in it so briefly that you may not spot her. This led my to wonder, are Cope and Joey married? Yes. The answer is yes. And you know, that’s cool, as they’re making movies together and Tubi is paying for the innocuous and cute results. It’s predictable, but some people on Letterboxd  and IMDB reviewed this as if it beat up their elderly mother and it’s just a romcom on a free streaming service. At least the dogs are cute.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Eric (Mark Huberman) is a TV director who has come to film a show all about the Hotel Gula, which had a hundred people die of rat poisoning in the 90s and yeah, it’s been built on a burial ground dedicated to one of the Edler Gods so nothing good can come out of this for any of this movie’s characters, as this goes from The Shining to The Haunting of Hill House to Lovecraft, along with a giallo-esque series of murders.

Director Francesco Cinquemani, who co-wrote this with Andy Edwards, Mark Thompson-Ashworth (who worked on Joe D’Amato’s The Hyena and I predatori delle Antille) and Barry Keating from a story by Loris Curci, does a decent job of showing us what the Italian exploitation industry would be making today if it never died out in the mid 80s with a pastiche of Argento-inspired murder scenes.

I liked the idea that the host of the show, Bruce (Julian Sands), wants fake ghosts put in the movie and yet doesn’t even realize that the weird old couple he drinks with every night (Anthony Skordi and Maria Ioannou) are probably spirits. Add in Eric’s ex-wife — and Bruce’s daughter — Sofia (Marianna Rosset) suddenly acting strange and an ancient goddess trapped in the hotel and an end of the world element that I didn’t see coming and this all ends up being rather fun.

You can get the Cleopatra Records release of The Ghosts of Monday from MVD.

Based on the Michael Loggan novel Leyton et les Chatelaines, Jess Franco directed and wrote this movie about American secret agent Dan Leyton (Eddie Constantine) being sent to Istanbul to investigate a spy ring operating out of a boardinghouse for women. His girlfriend Marion (Anita Hoffer) is also there working undercover, which complicates things when Janet Spokane (Diana Lorys), the wife of the man in charge of all of this evil spy planning, tries to seduce him.

It fits squarely into the Eurospy world but at least has some of Franco’s love of jazz in there, even if none of the astoundingly strange things he would soon bring to cinema. That said, Lorys is, as always, gorgeous. She’d also appear in Franco’s The Bloody Judge as well as the oddball Westerns Get Mean and Blindman, as well as Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll.

I love looking at reviews of this: Eurospy fans say its boring and Franco fans are excited by how good of a setting Turkey could be for the film.

This is not Maciste contre la reine des Amazones even though they have most of the same cast and crew. It is kind of a sequel or a spiritual one or inspired by or however you want to tie these together, as  well as to the overall larger Jess Franco Cinematic Universe as Howard Vernon appears as Cagliostro (from La maldición de Frankenstein and also that same movie was repeated as cut and paste footage for Dr. Wong’s Virtual Hell) and Wal Davis also is Maciste again.

The women of this are from Atlantis and they’re led by Alice Arno (Eugénie de Sade) and have Pamela Stanford (Convoi de filles) and, of course, Lina Romay amongst their number. They’re threatened by a blind witch named Parka (Kali Hansa, The Night of the Sorcerers) who has brought along Caronte (Robert Woods) to help her.

It really feels like three different movies are at work here and that’s because it seems like there were three different shooting sequences, all united through later editing. The most basic is Maciste’s adventures on the post-Atlantis island and his love affairs and battles. Then there’s Arno dreaming of being an Atlantean queen. And further still would be the Howard Vernon footage. The last two of these were shot nearly six months later, so if nothing adds up, well, you’re probably so far into Jess Franco’s world by now that you won’t notice, although you may wonder if someone cut these movie drugs with a little Jean Rollin, what with all the beach footage and scenes of women staring out into the ether.

What is it about Franco that makes his devotees study and attempt to make sense of his output? There are so many poor direct to streaming films and directors who also had similar output, yet here I remain in my second month of nearly being obsessed with his movies and trying to make connections between them and I find the greatest satisfaction in doing so.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I can’t tell you how excited I am to have the 4K UHD of this movie in my collection. It’s absolutely packed with materials, including new 4K restorations of all three versions of Phenomena, including the original Italian version (116 minutes), the International cut (110 minutes) and the U.S. Creepers version (83 minutes).  Plus, there are Italian, international and U.S. trailers, a U.S. radio spot and several commentary tracks. The Italian version has commentary by Troy Howarth and the international version has Argento scholar and author Derek Botelho and film historian, journalist and radio/television commentator David Del Valle. There’s also Of Flies and Maggots, a feature-length 2017 documentary produced by Arrow Films with interviews from co-writer/producer/director Dario Argento, actors Fiore Argento, Davide Marotta, Daria Nicolodi and Fiorenza Tessari, as well as co-writer Franco Ferrini, cinematographer Romano Albani, production manager Angelo Iacono, special optical effects artist Luigi Cozzi, special makeup effects artist Sergio Stivaletti, makeup artist Pier Antonio Mecacci, underwater camera operator Gianlorenzo Battaglia, and composers Claudio Simonetti and Simon Boswell. There’s also a visual essay by Arrow Films producer Michael Mackenzie comparing the different cuts of Phenomena, the “Jennifer” music video directed by Argento, a slipcover with artwork by Nick Charge and a reversible cover with the original Italian Phenomena art.

You can get it from MVD and Synapse. There’s also a limited edition box set from Synapse that has limited edition slipcase packaging designed by artist Wes Benscoter, reversible sleeve artwork, a fold-out double-sized poster, postcard-sized lobby card reproduction artcards and a collector’s booklet featuring liner notes from Mikel J. Koven, Rachael Nisbet and Leonard Jacobs.

A monkey. A girl who can talk to bugs. Donald Pleasence. All directed by Dario Argento. If you don’t immediately say to yourself, “I’m in,” you’re reading the wrong website.

Within the movie’s first two minutes, you realize you’re watching an Argento film. A tourist misses her bus somewhere in the Swiss countryside before she is attacked by an unseen person and then beheaded.

Fast forward a bit, and we catch Jennifer (Jennifer Connelly, Labyrinth, The Rocketeer) arriving at the Richard Wagner Academy for Girls — did I tell you this is an Argento movie? The head of the school, Frau Brückner (Dario Nicolodi, Argento’s wife (at the time) and mother to his daughter Aria, who also co-wrote Suspiria and appeared in Deep Red, Inferno, Tenebre and Opera, amongst other films), already sets up an air of menace. Even her roommate offers no relief, telling Jennifer how much she wishes she could have sex with the heroine’s famous actor father. At this point, Jennifer relates a horrifying story about how her mother left her — it’s a moment of pure pain in a film that hasn’t led you to expect it. That’s because it’s a true story. The true story of how Dario Argento’s mother left his family.

Jennifer tends to sleepwalk, which leads her through the school and up to the roof, where she watches a student get murdered. She wakes up, falls and runs from the murderer, ending up in the woods where she’s rescued by Inga the chimp — again, did I mention this is an Argento film? Inga works for forensic entomologist John McGregor (Pleasence). Argento was inspired by the fact that insects are often used in crime investigations to learn how old a body is and worked that into this film. McGregor knows that Jennifer can talk to the bugs.

After returning to the school, things go from bad to worse. Jennifer’s roommate is murdered, and a firefly leads our sleepwalking protagonist to a glove covered by Great Sarcophagus flies, which eat decaying human flesh, which can only mean that the killer is keeping his body — again, Argento.

At this point, Phenomena pays tribute to Carrie, with the other students making fun of her regarding her love of bugs. She calls a swarm of flies into the building, and it collapses, which leads to Frau Brückner recommending her to a home for the criminally insane. Luckily, Jennifer runs to McGregor, who gives her a bug in a glass case that she can use to track the murderer. Again, you know who. The bug leads Jennifer to the same house we saw at the film’s beginning.

Meanwhile, McGregor is killed after Inga is locked outside. True fact: the chimpanzee who played Inga, Tanga, sounds like she was uncontrollable. She ran away for an entire evening of the shoot and nearly bit off one of Jennifer Connelly’s fingers.

Let me see if I can sum up the craziness that ensues: Jennifer calls her father’s lawyer for help, who ends up bringing Frau Brückner back into this mess, who tries to poison Jennifer and then knocks her out with a piece of wood. She then KOs a cop before Jennifer escapes, going through a dungeon and a basement until she falls into a pool that is packed with maggot-ridden corpses. This is the point in the film where you may want to stop eating because it gets rather intense from here on out. As Jennifer escapes that watery tomb, she hears someone crying. That someone is Frau’s son, who was born from a rape. Jennifer asks him why she thinks he’s a monster, to which he turns to face her and scares the fucking shit out of her. Seriously, it’s jolting — the kid has Patau Syndrome, a real chromosomal abnormality (it’s makeup in the film, but looks quite true to life). He then chases Jennifer into a motorboat, but at the last second, she calls a swarm of flies to attack him. He falls into the water, and the boat explodes, and he dies, and…whew.

I know this film is 32 years old, but I will leave some spoiler space here because what happens next is crazy.

Jennifer reaches the shore just as her father’s lawyer arrives. All well, all good and then, out of nowhere, Frau cuts the dude’s head clean off. Plus, she’s already killed the cop, and she goes absolutely shithouse.

“He was diseased, but he was my son! And you have… Why didn’t I kill you before? I killed that no-good inspector and your professor friend to protect him! And now… I’m gonna KILL YOU TO AVENGE HIM! Why don’t you call your INSECTS! GO ON! CALL! CALL!”

At this point, Inga, the chimpanzee, comes out of nowhere and kills Frau with a razor. Keep in mind that this is not just one cut. This is a simian who knows how to get the murder business done.

Jennifer and Inga hug. Roll the credits.

Phenomena was the last Argento movie to get significant distribution in the U.S., thanks (or no thanks) to New Line Cinema, which played it here as Creepers. This version is 33 minutes shorter than the original and has so many scenes shuffled that it makes little or no sense. Also, unlike other Argento films, Goblin only has two songs in this, as modern bands like Iron Maiden and Motörhead are featured.

I love this movie. It makes little sense, but you don’t walk into an Italian horror film expecting narrative structure. You hope to see some crazy gore, some interesting death scenes and maggots — all things that this film more than delivers. I’m not the only fan of this flick — the Japanese video game Clock Tower is an homage to this film, even featuring a heroine named Jennifer.

BONUS: We did a podcast all about this movie, and you can hear it here:

BONUS BONUS: Here’s a drink recipe.

Inga and Jennifer

• 1/2 oz. 99 Bananas
• 3 oz. half and half
• 1/2 oz. coconut rum
• 1 1/2 oz. orange juice
• 1/2 tsp. grenadine

1. Pour all of the ingredients in a shaker and do your thing.
2. Pour into a glass and enjoy.

Even with all the DNA technology, a ton of cops and no small army of experts, no one has ever figured out who killed JonBenét Ramsey and no one ever will. This will not stop shows being made from now until the end of time to try and figure that out, even if they won’t.

This hits all the moments of this case and trust me, I live with a true crime wife who dreams of solving a case. There’s the Santa Claus, falsely accused. All those people walking all over the crime scene. Patsy, John — who shows up to speak on his own behalf — and creepy Burke Ramsay. The note which still makes no sense. The strange mentally ill man who kept calling them. Cops worse than a giallo except, you know, in real life. The 24 hour news cycle run insane as it attempts to put it all together and throwing even more conjecture than anyone could imagine is possible.

I mean, just this week, an unearthed DNA test from 1997 proved that DNA recovered under the murdered girl’s fingernails and her clothes was not a match for any members of her family is in the news. The case is still open. Three hours before I wrote this, John told several reporters that police rushed to conclusions and withheld the DNA evidence that would exonerate him and his wife.

It’s never going away.

You can watch this though, but if you’re interested, I assume that you already think you know who killed her and have your own theories about the pineapple in her stomach.

You can watch this on Tubi.