Midnight Cabaret (1990): Directed and co-written by Pece Dingo, this movie has the kind of cast that I look for, which includes former member of Detective and MacGyver enemy Michael Des Barres and Thom Mathews (Tommy Jarvis!).

This is a musical, strange theatrical play, a Satanic movie, an erotic thriller and a giallo-adjacent — you know, the Italian movies where you have no idea what else to call them, so you say that they’re giallo — film all thrown into a shaker with ice, then covered with bongwater and grain alcohol.

It’s Euro-trash but made at home; like how tariffs will someday soon cause the finest in Euroscum movies to cost too much, except we can never make them at home this good. That said, this tries and often looks like an old music video while it’s throwing vampires with straight razors, a cult that wants to impregnate an actress with the Antichrist and moments that feel sexually ambiguous. It’s something. Whether that something is good is up to you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Midnight Cabaret (2012): As I was looking for the former movie, I discovered this on YouTube and was so far into it before I realized it was a different movie that I just went with things.

Directed by Donna R. Clark, who wrote it with Peter C. Foster, this is the story of Adam (Brad Hilton), a young man struggling to find acceptance and definitely not getting help in his hometown, where he remembers being bullied at home and at school, his mother killing herself and his brother Todd (Jason Mac) going to prison. Now, he becomes inspired by a drag queen named Eve (Elexius Kelly) and becomes a performer at the Midnight Cabaret, finding a world of drugs, crime and who he is inside.

There’s something in this, a movie that feels trapped in digital video but wanting to break free. I don’t know who it’s for, as there are so many gay slurs that it may turn off those it needs to reach most. But otherwise, it wasn’t an unwelcome watch.

You can watch this on YouTube.