Directed by Richard Greenwood, Jr. and written by Leon Langford and Collin Watts, This Land is about a Fourth of July celebration that brings two families — of very different beliefs — to the same cabin. It’s been double booked, which is stressful enough, but when an evil group of masked wearing cultists intrude on their holiday weekend, things get out of hand fast.

This movie doesn’t take any political side. Instead, it has the masked home invaders descending on them both. Whether they families can get past their ingrained differences and fight back together — or die separately — makes up the story of this film. The left side, made up of Ava, her husband and son are still dealing with trauma, as another home invasion cost her child and has made them all fearful. Well, this trip isn’t going to help anyone. The right, the Moss family, probably would like to think they could have stopped that home invasion with their Second Amendment-given rights to bear arms.

The masks are pretty cool, even if we don’t learn much about the cultists. But it’s an interesting idea to have them be the force that makes people — maybe! — realize that their differences can be forgotten, at least until they all survive. Again, maybe!

This Land is now available where you get streaming films from Terror Films.

In the aftermath of an apocalyptic event, Emily (Paige McGarvin, Shark Season) and Cara (Sofia Masson, Girls Getaway Gone Wrong 2) are seemingly the only two survivors of an ocean liner wreck. They wash up on a gorgeous island — the film was made in Belize — and start to build a new life for themselves and even fall in love. But this heaven on earth is changed when Finn (Samuel Braun) shows up, casting their future in doubt. Does he really know where other survivors are? Or does he have bad intentions for both of them?

Directed and written by Ilyssa Goodman, this film actually doesn’t come across as exploitative in its romantic elements and doesn’t even try to set up that Finn can break up Emily and Cara. It allows both women to come across as strong and capable in the face of danger and the unknown, while also allowing love to break through how neither of them has ever been able to make love last before.

Seeing as how Tubi has been making sequels to several of their films, I can definitely see more of their adventures in the future. I have to say that this is one of the more high quality originals that has been on the streaming service.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As much as I love the Japanese movie Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen, the prophecies of Nostradamus have always given my trouble. Back in the days after 9/11, the same HR professional who would repeatedly leave Bibles at my desk with Post-Its telling me about how I was going to hell went on a chain email spree sending notes to everyone at the ad agency about the predictions of Nostradamus.

What she did not realize was that the copywriter who upset her with his book collection and desk full of strange toys and black t-shirts was as close to an expert on the weirdness of this world except he had no degree in it.

In fact, I knew that the the quatrains she’d been sending around about the end of the world weren’t even Nostradamus. They didn’t have his writing style, no matter the translation. This was a horrible time to be in this office. There was one guy who was non-stop watching footage of people jumping from the Twin Towers at full volume. There was the constant uncertainty of anthrax and war and more terrorism. And then there were these emails.

I couldn’t do anything about anything in this world but use how weird I am to make it a slightly better place. I replied all to her email — which went to everyone in our company — about how God was bringing his final judgement and explained how Nostradamus’ 942 poetic quatrains weren’t seen as prophetic — he refused the title of prophet — in his lifetime. I’ve always considered myself if not an admirer of James Randi, who believed that he was actually a really bad fortune teller who got his reputation by using vaguye words. He also believed that people studied his work and mistranslated it for their own ends. In fact, like this HR person, he believed that anyone who supported the idea of Nostradamus as a soothsayer have figured out ways to make things that have happened or will definitely happen match his words. Randi referred to this as retroactive clairvoyance.

My mistake was saying that it was stupidity in my email. In my defense, people were literally falling apart atheir desks. I said that life is chaos, that we have no predetermined paths and that free will is the greatest thing that exists. Conspiracy theory — and Nostradamus — is an attempt to try and make some sense out of a life that has no sense, random inexplicable good and bad events that all happen seemingly at the same time. And it’s when people try to make people worried that it gets stupid.

Yeah, that word.

What happened next, well, was I got brought in a room by the entire HR department and told I would be fired for calling someone stupid in a chain email to the entire company. Never mind that I had been thanked by everyone, including people much higher up than her. But her feelings were hurt, damaged by that same strange longhaired writer who obviously was a knight in Satan’s service.

To keep my job, I had to apologize. And I refused. I was young. I barely had a mortgage. And I figured that my dignity meant more than my career, I guess. Somehow, one of my bosses spoke up and I ended up staying, but I always felt like I sold out staying around.

Anyways.

The whole reason for this movie is a prediction by Nostradamus that gained traction in the even more connected and conspirital world of 2021.

“Few young people: half-dead to give a start. Dead through spite, he will cause the others to shine, And in an exalted place some great evils to occur: Sad concepts will come to harm each one, Temporal dignified, the Mass to succeed. Fathers and mothers dead of infinite sorrows, Women in mourning, the pestilent she-monster: The Great One to be no more, all the world to end.”

It was all over social media. And the big claim was that the CDC already had a zombie guide.

They did.

It was all a joke.

But man, we live in an even weirder and — that word again — stupider world than twenty years ago.

And look, I spent years joking that I was prepping for a zombie apocalypse. But when you do that, you’re really prepping for any end of the world situation, even the dumbest apocalypse that we have all lived through.

This movie is filled with experts on surviving a zombie event. I wonder how this can be, seeing as how so many of them are influencers and, well, zombies like they’re discussing only exist in movies. Sure, there’s some science about how cat feces can become parasitic in the bodies of mice, but we’re not here for science. We’re here for zombies.

So you get a lot of the kind of advice that works for any situation: stick to bladed weapons. Chainsaws don’t work like in the movies. Prep your food. Grow a garden. You should know all these things. You may or may not be entertained by this movie, but you can get even more survival knowlege from watching Dawn of the Dead.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I always say, “This movie has an all star cast” and often I mean, “It has an all star cast for me.” This would be one of those times, but man, look at this cast:

Anitra Ford, forever Laura from Messiah of Evil.

Pam Grier, taking her third trip into WIP hell for New World.

Sid Haig, as always making movies better just by being in them.

You can say the same for Vic Diaz.

And Carol Speed, Abby herself!

Grier and Haig play Blossom and Django, fun loving criminals and radical guerillas who kidnap Terry (Ford) during one of their crime sprees and get her sent up to a jungle prison hell. The kind of jungle prison that has a big dangerous device for processing sugar that keeps claiming the lives — life is cheap in a Jack Hill directed and written movie — of the inmates.

The script gets flipped when Diaz plays a gay guard and Haig has to seduce him to start the big jailbreak. But can Terry forgive Blossom and Django? Or will there be a reckoning once they escape the bamboo bars of the Bird Bird Cage?

Other prisoners include Candice Roman (The Cult, Unholy Rollers) as Carla, who seemingly will bed anyone; Speed is a sex worker; Marissa Delgado is losing her mind; Ted Bracci (The Centerfold Girls, Human Experiments) makes with the jokes and Karen McKevic plays the six foot butch.

Beyond Ford being hung by her hair in this movie — that has to be someone’s fetish — she is dropped off at a cove in the beginning of the film that was also used in Apocalypse Now. As for Hill, he’d follow this movie by making two starring roles for Grier: Coffy and Foxy Brown.

Jonathan Kaplan’s directing career took him from Truck Turner and this movie to Heart Like A Wheel, The Accused and Brokedown Palace. Recommended to Roger Corman by Martin Scorsese, he made one of the many nurses movies that New World Pictures released.

Written by George Armitage and Danny Opatoshu, NIght Call Nurses follows the formula or so it seems, introducing three student nurses: Janis (Alana Stewart, who was also Alana Hamilton, as she was married to both Rod and George once), Sandra (Mittie Lawrence, The New Centurions) and Barbara (Patty Byrne, Fuzz). The script changes early as this starts with a suicidal jumper and has each of the girls deal with the hospital’s inefficiency, racism and sexism as their stories unfold. Sandra falls for a trucker hooked on speed. Barbara breaks a radical named Samson (Stack Pierece) out. And Sandra gets caught up in a free love cult.

Nearly every man in this movie is horrible, from Dick Miller’s sleazy truck driver and Dr. Bramlett (Clint Kimbrough) to Dennis Dugan as a transvestite nurse who is stalking the girls and isn’t afraid to carry a meat cleaver. The free love encounter group also has Lyllah Torena (Fly Me) and Dixie Peabody (Bury Me an Angel) in it.

This was the first film produced by Julie Corman. In Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen and Candy Stripe Nurses – Roger Corman: King of the B Movie, Kaplan said, “I’d never seen a Nurses movie. Corman laid out the formula. I had to find a role for Dick Miller, show a Bulova watch and use a Jensen automobile in the film. And he explained that there would be three nurses: a blonde, a brunette, and a nurse of color; that the nurse of color would be involved in a political subplot, the brunette would be involved in the kinky subplot, and the blonde would be the comedy subplot. The last thing he said was “There will be nudity from the waist up, total nudity from behind, and no pubic hair.” Now get to work!” He soon figured out that all he had to do was “deliver the nudity, the thrills, the kinkiness, and the comedy, that had become Roger’s trademark — and I did.”

I mean, it’s hard to hate a movie with the tagline “It’s always harder at night.”

After Angels Hard As They Come, Joe Viola and Jonathan Demme went to the Philippines to make this women in prison film. This time, nurses Bunny (Andrea Cagan, who went from acting to ghostwriting memoirs for Pam Grier, Grace Slick and Diana Ross), Lynn (Margaret Markov, Run, Angel, Run!), Ellie (Rickey Richardson, Bonnie’s Kids) and Sue (Laurie Rose, The Wizard of Speed and Time) are kidnapped by resistance fighters and asked to teach them medicine. They escape, get taken by the even worse corrupt government the guerrillas are up against and now we have a New World Pictures movie.

Unlike so many other WIP films, there’s not as much assault in this, so it has that going for it. However, it’s more like they tried to sneak in some lessons about politics instead of making an exploitation movie. It’s a noble thought, but when you call your movie The Hot Box and have a poster with a topless woman —  other than bullets covering her — in cutoffs blasting a machine gun, you expect something else.

That something else would be Caged Heat, which Demme would get to direct after Corman saw how well he did on second unit for this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on June 3, 2019. It has be re-released as part of Mill Creek’s retro line with a really cool slipcover that makes it look like an old rental. You can get it from Deep Discount.

James Foley has an interesting IMDB resume, with films from Reckless, At Close Range and Glengarry Glen Ross to Who’s That Girl (he also directed Madonna’s videos for “Live to Tell”, “Papa Don’t Preach”, and “True Blue”), Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. As I’ve always said, there’s a fine line between arthouse and grindhouse. Fear is a movie that despite its bigger budget pedigree and future A-list stars has one foot surely planted in the grime of exploitation. And that’s why I kinda love it.

Nicole Walker (Reese Witherspoon) is sixteen and living in the midst of a turbulent blended family between her father (William Petersen) and new mother (Amy Brenneman). In my strange head, I’ve shipped that Petersen is really his character from Manhunter, starting over again in life as anything but a cop.

That said — Nicole is a wannabe bad girl, sneaking into bars with real bad girl Margo (Alyssa Milano)  when she meets David McCall (Mark Wahlberg). He’s gorgeous and charming and says all the right things. But her dad hates him immediately. There’s an undercurrent of incest in this film — it’s never shoved in your face, but there are hints of it, that Nicole’s father is perfect a bit too protective, a bit too defensive of her when his wife says she looks like a slut.

Keep in mind, every single time you hear The Sundays’ cover of “Wild Horses,” you’re getting a sex scene, including one where David’s hand finds its way between Nicole’s thighs on a rollercoaster. Oh Fear — you understand the movie that you ought to be so well.

Soon, David shows his true nature, keeping Nicole out too late and assaulting one of her friends when he thinks the guy is trying to get with his girl. He even gives Nicole a black eye which, oddly, brings her together with her stepmother, which is a troubling narrative when you start to think about it too much.

Of course, she takes him back and even when her parents demand that she not have visitors when they leave town, she gives him the code to their house so they can make love. Daddy, however, can’t trust the guy — even if the stepmother does, allowing him to help with her gardening — and discovers that his background is full of lies.

Everything has to fall apart. Nicole watches Margo smoke crack at a party and sees David take her off to a bedroom for sex. In my favorite scene in the film, Margo tells Nicole’s little brother that she can’t wait until he grows up so she can ravage him — he’s eight — before the bomb gets dropped that Nicole knows she had sex with her man.

David becomes obsessed with Nicole, tattooing his own chest with the words NICOLE 4 EVA in a scene that should be watched over and over again. He also goes off, choking out Margo, killing that gentleman who dared to hug Nicole and cornering her in a mall bathroom. Then he goes further, destroying her dad’s Mustang with the graffiti “Now I’ve popped both your cherries!”Her dad replies by breaking into David’s house, where he finds a shrine to his daughter.

Once David discovers that dad has been to his house, he responds in the only language he knows: abject violence, turning this movie into a teenage Last House on the Left. It starts with the beloved family dog, Kaiser, being beheaded and only gets worse from there. Sure, things turn out fine, but wow, getting there will necessitate years of therapy for everyone.

Universal Pictures is currently working on a re-imagined version of this film with more of a female perspective. Here’s hoping it isn’t afraid to go too far, like in this movie when a maniacal Mark Wahlberg screamed “Let me in the fucking house!” Seriously, he was never better than he is in this movie, just a vision of complete young love gone wrong.

Directed by Sam Croyle and written by Cate Holahan, this film is all about Zakiya (Samantha Walkes, Orphan: First Kill), a hospitality manager for an exclusive hotel canned The Magnate that begins to suspect that there are shenanigans going on at the high end hotel where she works. Said hijinks include abused women and, eventually, murder. A murder that she gets blamed for.

Ron Brant (Stephen Sparks) and his much younger wife Valeria (Karen Cliche, yes, that’s her name) are at the hotel looking to buy it. Yet during their stay, Ron’s son Astor (Kelly Penner) ends up killing himself — perhaps — and the girl he was staying with, Phoenix (Robyn Gallop), is murdered too. No one catches that the girl is dead, while Zakiya is blamed for Astor’s death.

There’s a missing phone that just may reveal the truth, but even Zakiya’s best work friend Alexis (Chantria Tram) turns against her and, as you can imagine — spoilers after this — Valeria is behind everything. Yes, she was once a famous model, but became an escort boss, using her girls to keep Ron’s son quiet and then eventually murdering him after he chokes out and kills one too many of her ladies. She also has Daniel Denton (Russell Sams) in her employ, using him to off anyone who tries to help Zakiya, like her old friend Harry Belfort (Eugene Clark).

Deadly Estate has the feel of a Lifetime movie, which a lot of the Tubi originals seem to be inspired by. Samantha Walkes is pretty good in it, however, and while it’s not anything you haven’t seen before, it’s still a free movie that can make the last few hours of work at home pass a little easier.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Io Monaca… per tre Carogne e Sette Peccatrici (The Crucified Girls of San Ramon) was an Italian women in prison movie directed by Ernst Ritter von Theumer (Jungle Warriors, Island of the Doomed), who co-wrote it with Sergio Garrone (SS Experiment Camp, The Hand That Feeds the Dead, Django the Bastard).

Roger Corman brought it to the U.S., cut out twenty minutes and renamed it The Big Bust-Out.

A bunch of female prisoners get a work release in a convent and easily overpower their guards and go on the run. To make sure that God stays with them, Sister Maria (Monica Teuber) follows along. This entails them all being sold into white slavery — Gordon Mitchell being the villainous El Kadir who buys them and William Berger being the one who sells them — and saved by Jeff (Tony Kendall), a boat captain.

But El Kadir and his men won’t give up, chasing the women for the entire film. One of his men, a small man with a whip, lashes Vonetta McGee from The Great Silence at one point. It’s certainly wild, but at best you can say it’s all over the place. The North Africa — I believe — shooting locations look great and this movie has the kind of cast and material that makes me think Jess Franco should have been involved.

Oscar Williams wrote and directed Death Drug, Hot Potato and Black Belt Jones — and wrote Truck Turner, which is absolutely incredible — as well as this film, which explores white on black racism and a shootout between a radical black nationalist group — look, it’s the Black Panthers but even Roger Corman wasn’t going to go that far — and the cops. Meanwhile, we learn how the radicalized Johnny (Billy Dee Williams) got that way, as well as how things went off the rails with his white girlfriend Renee (Celia Kaye, who played “woman in tub” in Rattlers and like that movie’s tagline says, “What a horrible way to die!”; she later married John Milius and is in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark) after he meets her racist dad (R.G. Armstrong, who beyond getting to be the Sandman in Metallica’s video for “Enter Sandman,” R.G. also played Pruneface in Dick Tracy, Uncle Lewis on Friday the 13th: The Series, man I could just fill your eyeballs with roles that R.G. played). There’s so much more that takes him into fighting cops, because the hood’s so bad that rats are stealing the dolls of baby girls and Johnny’s mom being forced to work as a maid for white people.

Sooner than later, white cops are having their guts sprayed all over brick walls and Johnny’s not doing to well himself, passing out due to his own wounds. It also has D’Urville Martin, who would go on to direct Dolemite, and a score by Motown arranger/producer Wade Marcus and guitarist Grant Gree. There’s also a post-lovemaking scene where Johnny tells the hippy Renne, “By the time you hit thirty, you’re gonna drop back in, ‘cause you didn’t do nothin but talk that brotherhood, love and peace. You didn’t change nothing.”

Once Billy Dee Williams became a big name in Lady Sings the Blues — and not yet before he’d become Lando — Corman decided to re-release this with some more exciting footage, more D’Urville Martin and more direction from Frank Arthur Wilsonunder the name Blast! Frank Arthur Wilson is really Alan Arkush.

Sure, this is heavy handed, but when you realize that all of the problems that existed in 1972 still exist in 2023, well, maybe it needs to be that way.

You can watch this on Tubi.