I am of the age — let’s just call it old — where I had no idea who Vanessa Hudgens is. So to those of you reading this wondering the same thing, she debuted in the movie Thirteen before becoming famous as Gabriella Montez in the High School Musical series and recorded two albums in the 00s, V and Identified. She was also in Sucker Punch, Spring Breakers and a Netflix movie series called The Princess Switch. She also dated Zac Effron and Austin Butler. Now, I wish I hadn’t gone too deep into her private life, as I learned she attends the controversial Hillsong Church and at the start of the pandemic, she posted on Instagram that it was inevitable that people would die from the COVID-19 pandemic in a very oh well kind of way. You could say, well, she’s young, but she was 32 when she did that.

Anyways…

Let me go into Dead Hot with an open mind.

You may read the description “After a ghost hunt gone wrong, students of witchcraft Vanessa Hudgens and GG Magree travel to Salem, Massachusetts to seek out proper mentorship from experts in witchcraft” and think you’re about to see perhaps a horror movie. After all, it has the horror category listed on Tubi.

Nope. This is, instead according to the PR for it, “The Craft meets The Simple Life.”

They also say that it’s an “intimate journey into the supernatural realm” and a “coming-of-age story that explores identity, feminine power and sisterhood.”

Um, sure. I guess.

Hudgens is joined by Australian electronic music producer, DJ and singer GG Magree (who I learned from Twitter did get COVID-19 while touring and luckily for her best friend was not one of the people who inevitably died). Her website says that she delivers “a heavy dose of what can only be characterized as relentless club anthems” and the “best way to experience GG Magree is live.” She also said on Twitter, “Words don’t do it justice to how personal the whole filming experience was, capturing some of the deepest darkest elements in my own personal life. I was lucky enough to pop my executive producer cherry &score the movie.”

Um, sure. I guess.

According to Variety, “Hudgens and Magree are both self-taught students of witchcraft who have been experimenting and connecting with the spirit world for most of their lives. During the pandemic, they spent their quarantine together watching shows about the afterlife, and exploring how ghost hunters, mediums and witches engaged with the spiritual world.”

What follows is what seems like episodic TV that didn’t get bought by anyone else and jammed into a Tubi show that people like me will watch because, as you know from this site, I will watch anything the channel plays.

I don’t want to be a gatekeeper that laughs at these girls playing with spirit boards — I mean, far be it from me to make fun of Ouija, seeing as how I’ve watched hundreds of movies with spirit boards for this list I keep adding to — and the other things tourists do when they spend a few days in Salem, as well as say words that mean nothing like “hot,” “magical” and “spiritual.”

As we continue to live in the never-ending Satanic panic — trust me, it never ended, it just switched targets and is now called Q-Anon — it makes me a little happy that people will make shows about stuff like this. I was laughing like an absolute maniac when Vanessa repeatedly asked Siri what electromagnetic frequencies are. and Siri couldn’t come up with an answer and she lost her mind and called her phone a slut. There’s also night vision wine drinking and a long cookie-making scene where you can tell that neither of these girls has ever made cookies without the supervision of much older adult. And oh yeah — GG’s grandmother was choked to death and this has a very gravitas scene where she explains it, as well as a massive freakout later where she feels a spirit touch he and then remembers that Tawny Kitaen nearly died in Witchboard.

They made three of those movies — yes, I have seen Witchboard 2: The Devils Doorway and Witchboard III: The Possession more than twice — and if they made more Dead Hot I would watch every single episode. I really thought that Vanessa and GG were going to realize that their sisterhood meant that they were meant to be together, but Vanessa was just wine drunk and in the morning GG was like, “Oh me too, sister, that’s hot,” but the camera catches one tear slide ever so slowly down her face because she was this close to nirvana, but as well all know from Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, there was a way to hell, even from the gate of heaven.

Also: I only know that quote because it’s in a Danzig video.

You can watch this on Tubi.