There is no reason for this movie to exist.

I know, most sequels can claim the same thing, but this enters in Die Hard 2 territory. Except we want to see Bruce Willis get into these situations. Do we really want to see C. Thomas Howell endure the same pain 15 years later?

Jim Halsey (Howell) is now a cop but he’s suspended for excessive force. He has PTSD — have you seen The Hitcher? — and decides to visit the man who helped save his life, Captain Esteridge, deep in the heart of Texas. His girlfriend Maggie (Kari Wuhrer) — who I shit you not has a crop dusting business — comes along and has no idea that her boyfriend once watched a love interest get torn in two by trucks. At least she flies an airplane into his truck.

As they drive, they see an RV with blood all over it. Jim refuses to stop and help anyone, even the man they see hitchhiking away played by Jake Busey. Before you know it, the same movie starts off, but takes the wild step of — spoilers! — killing off Jim halfway through the movie and having the son of Gary face off with the queen of Remote Control. At least she flies at airplane into his truck.

Louis Morneau not only directed Carnosaur 2, but he’d direct another on-the-road sequel, Joy Ride 2. This was written by Eric Red, Molly Meeker and producer Charles R. Meeker.

Thanks to Andrew Chamen for finding a typo.

So…this is either Killerbots or Murderbot and the original name is better, because it’s close to Killbots, which is of course Chopping Mall, which was made by the same director, Jim Wynorski. This doesn’t feel like the sequel/reboot — he’s supposedly working on that with Dustin Ferguson now — but instead is 46 minutes of female Terminator in the desert wiping out teens, including one who has a trumpet that can play the only sound that slows down that walking machine of menace (Melissa Brasselle).

This has everything you expect from a Wynorski movie: a nubile cast, including Becky LeBeau (in the hot tub with Rodney in Back to School), Dare Taylor, Groundling Emma Keifer, August Kyss, Lisa London (yes, Rocky from Savage Beach!), Sarah Noelle and Lauren Parkinson (Avengers Grimm: Time Wars); scientist women in glass and lab coats that belong in a VCA movie; ridiculous effects and a killer that everyone wants to have sex with.

Written with Kent Roudebush, this moves quickly and looks good. Shot at the Diamond V Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita instead of the Ohio base of so many recent Full Moon movies, this knows what it is and gets in and out without much fuss.

Also: This is a Christmas movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Alex Freyer (Robert Chapin, who was born into a family of puppeteers and now does visual effects) is arguably the hero of Ring of Steel, even if you want to hate him throughout the movie. He whines, he cries, he screws up and kills someone in a fencing match, yet he still gets to have a sweaty near-Amityville: It’s About Time sex with nice girl Elena Carter (Darlene Vogel, Spike from Back to the Future Part 2 and also the fourth person to play Angel in  Angel 4: Undercover).

Alex is out of the Olympics and has no idea what to do with his life when he meets the Man In Black (Joe Don Baker) when he pulls a sword cane on some backstreet toughs. He tells Alex that he’s the best and that he wants to bring him together with his trained fighters to be even better.

This movie has everybody in it, and by everybody, I mean people whose name I yelled when they showed up like Carol Alt as the bad guy’s girl Tanya, Don Stark (Bob Pinciotti from That 70s Show) as a cop and, as you knew he would show up, Judo Gene LaBelle as, well, Judo Gene LeBelle.

This was written by Chapin too, working with David Frost (not the famous British TV personality), and it’s pretty much every martial arts movie except with swords. And pirate shirts. Supposedly, Chapin’s original story was way too dark, as Alex would fall into a world of drugs, money, women and bloodsport and not even want to be with Elena anymore. When MCA/Universal picked it up for home video distribution, they lightened it up. And set up a sequel, which I think we could still fund, you know?

The fact that I love this movie more than any that will ever win an Oscar for the rest of time is why I will never be a serious and respected film personality.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I found this movie while looking for Attack of the Killer Refrigerator and man, it’s wild. Steve and Eileen Bateman (Dave Simonds and Julia McNeal) have moved into a new place in New York City and as he works endless hours and she dreams of being on stage, the icebox in their kitchen shows them visions, whether they are future victims in Steve’s case or unborn children in Eileen’s.

Meanwhile, a plumber working on their apartment, Juan (Angel Caban), works on scenes with Eileen and warns her that the appliance is a gateway to Hell.

This took director Nicholas Jacobs — who also worked on The Adventures of Pete and Pete, the original MTV Jon Stewart show and You Wrote It, You Watch It — four years to make. He wrote it with Christopher Oldcorn and Phillip Dolin, who went on to direct B Movie.

It feels like everyone is working out their issues on film, because Eileen isn’t all that great of a wife, complaining about Steve no longer being fun, all while he’s killing himself to make a life for them. But she has her issues too, as her mother used to threaten to kill herself every single day and now that she’s been through therapy, she wants to reconnect with her daughter who can’t find the strength to forgive her.

Maybe it was never about a killer fridge.

Maybe it was about how alone we all truly are.

Bowling Green, Kentucky in 1991. Some may have been drinking all weekend, but Doug Robertson and his crew were making a slasher film, ten years or more after the boom. But that — and the lack of budget — don’t matter. Because HauntedWeen has heart. And intestines. And blood. And, well, you get it.

Back in 1970, Eddie Burber wasn’t old enough to work in his family’s spookhouse. He responded to this by luring a girl into the place and impaling her, which caused the Burber’s to pack up and disappear. Twenty years later and Eddie’s mom, who kept him safe and free from the cops Bad Ronald mothering style has died of a heart attack. And the beloved haunted house is now owned by the Sigma Pi fraterity, who plan on opening it back up.

If you said out loud, “Bad idea,” you know how these movies work.

Sure, there’s nearly an hour of the frat boys and their relationship and financial problems, but you’re a grown up now. You know that you don’t need the orgasmic release of slasher murders immediately and you can pace yourself. Maybe this movie asks you to pace yourself a bit longer, but go with it. Because by the time we get there, little kids are watching college boys die and cheering along, unaware that the death is all real. Movies like this and The Funhouse have made me never want to go to a scare house or haunted dark ride because I know for sure that there are real murderers everywhere. I also avoid Tourist Traps. After all, young people disappear every year.

I’m predisposed toward liking this movie.

Let me tell you why.

1. James Gunn did things the video store way, starting his career at Troma, where he made Tromeo and Juliet. He moved on to writing the Scooby Doo movies and the Dawn of the Dead remake before making Slither. But he’s always had comic book aspirations from early films like The Specials and Super. The adaptions he’s made so far have been smaller affairs, starting with Guardians of the Galaxy.
2. The Guardians are the kind of characters that not that many people were aware of before the movies. The characters come from the kind of books you once found in quarter bins. Starlord was first in Marvel Preview #4 in January 1976 with Rocket Racoon appearing three issues later before not being used again until May 1982’s The Incredible Hulk #271. In the first thirty years of their existence, Starlord rarely appeared and Rocket only was in ten comic books.The Guardians were the same way, first showing up all the way back in the January 1969 Marvel Super-Heroes #16. Roy Thomas said, “Guardians of the Galaxy started out as an idea of mine: about super-guerrillas fighting against Russians and Red Chinese who had taken over and divided the USA. I got a sort of general approval from Stan Lee and gave the idea to Arnold Drake, since I had not time to write and research it. Arnold went in for a conference with Stan, and Stan (maybe Arnold, too) decided to change it to an interplanetary situation. All the characters and situations in Guardians were created by Arnold and/or Stan.”

   They appeared every once every few years but didn’t really take hold until June 1990. That’s when Jim Valentino created the Guardians that I’ve always loved. Few of them are in these movies — Martinex shows up in a cameo, Yondu is a lot different — but that series was one of the true joys of the grim and gritty early 1990s.

   Then, in 2008, following the Annihilation: Conquest series, we got the Guardians team that led to the film series, which wow, was a gamble.

3. The Guardian movies changed the idea of what the Marvel Cinematic Universe was all about. Instead of do gooders, the Guardians were space pirates, the children of world killing final bosses and scarred survivors of worlds destroyed, the last of their kind. And yet, the films had a comedic tone that inspired the Thor movies and gave the Avengers films some comedic lift.

So here we are with Gunn’s last movie before leaving to lead another attempt at DC movies. And throughout the ads for this movie, the hype and even the film itself, it has the feel of Lando in Return of the Jedi, constantly feeling like someone is going to die and you’re going to lose that character forever.

The fact that this movie has those stakes and you have those feelings points to its strength.

I’ve also been thinking about how no one wants to be challenged by art any longer. Now, go with me on this, even if you don’t believe that comic book movies are cinema. I believe they are and that comics are no different than mythology or any heroic myth.

Tonight during The Last Drive-In, the Twitter audience was complaining that one of the two selections, Tigers Are Not Afraid, was too dark and they couldn’t make jokes and fun of the movie. Playing Mystery Science Theater 3000 is not why I watch movies. Nor is needing a support group and being there for one another during troubling movies. Movies should push your emotions.

A lot of criticism directed against Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 lies in its tone. There are children enslaved by the High Evolutionary, who also figures into the origin of Rocket, tearing him apart and rebuilding him into the cybernetic cynical creature that he has become.

And let me tell you, there are moments in that origin that are harrowing and in no way for kids. But the fact that they can push our emotions and make us notice those narratives shifts, well…isn’t that what great movies should do?

This is the kind of movie that can have a spaceship that has been made out of the severed head of a dead space god; a talking Russian cosmodog with mental powers; that has a world called Counter-Earth filled with animal people and all the problems of our world; and also one that finds each of the Guardians with very real issues: Starlord (Chris Pratt) has fallen into a drunken stupor after the double loss — once in death, another as she was reborn as a being that does not remember him — of Gamora (Zoe Saldana ); Nebula (Karen Gillan) making the grand journey from unstoppable amoral killing machine into the person responsible for the lives of the misfits that live inside Knowhere; Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista, as always, growing as an actor) also making growth from killer to father, the role he was always meant for; Mantis (Pom Klementieff) dreaming of a better life; Groot (Vin Diesel) communicating with just three words; even Kraglin (Sean Gunn) trying to assume the mantle of leadership that Yondu left to him.

The movie gets going when Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), the creation of first movie villain Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), blasts into Knowhere and nearly kills Rocket, whose body is made of machine code that doesn’t allow him to be healed. To save their friend, the Guardians make a deal with the devil — Gamora — and track down who created Rocket, even if it means they have to fly into what looks for all intents and purposes to be a space butthole.

Despite being fired — that social story about Gunn was always wrong — Gunn would come back for this last story, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “”In the end, my love for Rocket, Groot, Gamora, Star-Lord, Yondu, Mantis, Drax, and Nebula — and some of the other forthcoming heroes — goes deeper than you guys can possibly imagine, and I feel they have more adventures to go on and things to learn about themselves and the wonderful and sometimes terrifying universe we all inhabit.”

And that’s why I loved this movie.

Yes, it’s dark. Yes, the tone shifts a lot. Yes, it’s overstuffed with ideas.

But why is that a bad thing?

Maybe we need to be challenged.

A few other random things I enjoyed:

The music: I usually make fun of needledrop moments in movies, but that’s often because they’re so obvious. Instead, this movie features some songs I genuinely love in moments that they truly fit: Faith No More’s “We Care a Lot,” Spacehog’s “In the Meantime,” The Replacements’ “I Will Dare,” Alice Cooper’s cover of the vaudeville song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” are all absolutely the right songs at the right time, topped by the Adrian Belew mention in the credits scenes.

The end: I don’t want to give anything away, but after an entire movie of those Lando moments, the feeling as “Dogs Days Are Over” plays are so uplifting that it makes the entire film cathartic. You go through the darkness to find the light.

The deep Marvel characters: Beyond Sylvester Stallone returning as Starhawk, there’s also Martinex (Michael Rosenbaum), Mainframe (Tara Strong instead of Miley Cyrus), Howard the Duck (Seth Green), The Broker (Christopher Fairbank) from the first movie, Bzermikitokolok (Rhett Miller from The Old 97s), Phylla (the daughter of Captain Mar-Vell in the Marvel comics; she’s the young girl fighting alongside the new Guardians in the end credits) and Lem sorcerer Krugarr.

Finally, a bad guy you can hate: Gunn and Chukwudi Iwuji worked to make the High Evolutionary a character with nothing redeeming or sad about him. Instead, he’s near pure evil, a scientist who sees every creation as expendable, but shocked that Rocket, a throwaway creation, was somehow smarter than him.

Also: this has the first f-bomb in MCU history, a “The Legendary Star-Lord will return” credit that reminded me of when they did that at the end of every James Bond movie and a gunfight sequence with Groot and Starlord that felt like John Woo within the MCU.

And finally: When Rocket realizes what the High Evolutionary has done, as he screams in utter despair, only to finally see the sky moments later, wow. Just wow. That’s why I go to the movies.

Directed and written by Justin Lee (Final Kill, Apache Junction, Big Legend, Hellblazers), this movie tells the story of a a bag of stolen money — which started as part of a D.B. Cooper-style leap from a plane — being lost and ex-military types being hired to find the cash before the FBI. The problem? A hunter finds it first and ends up knowing the woods better than they do.

Will Walker (Chris Tamburello) is that hunter, finding himself up against some actual killing machines like Austin (former UFC star Tito Ortiz) out in the woods. There’s gunfire aplenty, including a grenade launcher that lies waste to the environment. It even goes hand to hand for a bit before a group of hunters spots the carnage and says, “Are you guys OK? It sounded like a lot of shots being fired.”

Did they not hear the grenade launcher?

Amazingly, this is the second movie in the last few months that I’ve seen with former Samhain drummer London may in the cast. The other was s Night of the Bastard (2022). Man, what’s next Eerie Von as a fireman? Lyle Presnar as a lawyer?

You know who else is in this? Danny Trejo. You have to respect that he’s in the Donald Pleasence phase of his career where he can just show up for a few minutes and be the top person on the poster. Maybe Kalus Kinski would be a closer comparison?

I liked that this movie came down to two men in the woods trying to kill each other for a bag of money. It got pretty intense and anyone that came between them paid the price.

You can watch this on Tubi.

In a promotional image for Riverbend, one side has Margaret Avery, letting you know that she was in The Color Purple (it omits that she was also in Terror House). On the other side, Steve James, star of American Ninja and Delta Force.

This allows you to know what world you are from.

If you’re like me, any movie with Steve James means so much more than any Oscar-winning cultural force.

Made in the post-Cannon world by Sam Firstenberg — this was for Prism Entertainment Corporation — this movie has a completely ludicrous and therefore awesome conceit: Three rebellious African-American army officers — Maj. Samuel Quentin (James), Sgt. Tony Marks (Julius Tennon) and Lt. Butch Turner (Alex Morris) — refuse to enact a Mai Lei-style massacre and kill innocents. They’re due for a court martial and sent to Georgia. Being black men in the white man’s army, they know that there’s no way things are going to be fair, so they escape.

They end up by total luck in Riverbend, finding a home with sympathetic widow Bell Coleman (Avery).  She says she can only keep them for a few days, but Quentin is a man of justice that realizes that the town is in the grip of racist cops like Sheriff Jake (Tony Frank). Jake drops n bombs as casually as I discuss Jess Franco, which is all the time, and also is the man who shot Bell’s husband in the back in broad daylight when he tried to formally complain about how the cops treat black people in Riverbend. This film also wonders if that’s enough and decides that it has to somehow make a white Southern racist murdering coward cop even worse and has her assault a young girl named Pauline (Vennessa Tate).

Instead of leaving town, the army men are talked into staying around and training the black side of town to take over, which they do, and put every single white person either in jail or in a building with a bomb in it, all to bring the media to Riverbend where they’ll learn of the racism. And oh yeah, why Quentin and his men left Vietnam.

This movie is exactly why — if you’re a Cannon fan especially — that you love both James and Firstenberg. James rarely got the chance to be the lead — this and Street Hunter are about it before his untimely death — and he commands the screen. He gets to do action, drama, some shirtless time for the ladies and even a love scene, which man, the stages of grief in Rivertown are short when the widow Coleman is already sleeping with another man days after her husband gets gunned down. Then again, if I died tragically due to a racist cop and my wife was keeping Steve James in our place, I’d look up from Hell or through the dimensions from Limbo or whatever is in the next world and give my blessing, because look, Steve James is such an upgrade from me it’s the very definition of upgrade.

As for Firstenberg, he’s pre-Tarantino rewriting history with a black town following the “by any means necessary” pledge and taking over their own town by force. Amazingly, it works, as at the end, every black person is not dead but instead meeting their white neighbors in the street and warmly hugging and shaking hands just minutes after releasing them from a kidnapping and bomb threat. One and done scriptwriter Samuel Vance somehow made a science fiction movie here, because in the real world, the National Guard would be dropping bombs on this town.

You also have to adore any movie set in 1966 that has a synth driven basic training montage.

And man, Tony Frank. The guy was in a movie with a huge black cast and is just out there spitting the most coarse racism in their faces. I know sticks and stones, but this feels like the roughest way to get emotion and he’s acting the hell out of his role, somehow becoming worse than every single white Mr. Big in every blacksploitation movie put together.

This movie has Billy Jack and Walking Tall energy and I mean that as the biggest compliment. This totally knocked me out and was so unexpected; I had no clue it existed much less how powerful — and strange — it is.

You can watch this on YouTube.