I watched Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and didn’t enjoy myself, saying “Am I too old? Did I not grow up on Twitch?”

There were some very interesting comments that I read that explained why it meant something to other people. I went into I Saw the TV Glow with an open mind, as I was hoping I’d find something here that was missing for me.

Happily, I found it.

In 1996, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) feel isolate yet bond over a show called The Pink Opaque, which has Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey “Snail Mail” Jordan) using their psychic powers to save themselves from Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner), who can warp reality.

Owen’s parents are strict and he’s not allowed to stay up late, so he sneaks over to Maddy’s house to watch it. When he can’t, she gives him VHS tapes of it. She confesses that the show is more real to her than life itself.

Two years later, the two decide to run away. Maddy has an abusive stepfather who won’t leave her alone and she gets out. Owen stays behind as people wonder where Maddy went with her mother dying of cancer never seeing her daughter again. The TV show is cancelled. Life moves on.

Ten years later and Owen is still living with his father Frank (Fred Durst) and working in a movie theater. One night, Maddy appears and claims that she’s been living in the show for eight years. She makes Owen rewatch the tape of the last episode, as Mr. Melancholy buries the heroes alive and traps them in the Midnight Realm. He has a nervous breakdown and puts his head through his TV set.

Maddy reveals that she is Tara and that the episodes they watched are the real stories of their lives and reality is the Midnight Realm. She tries to bury Owen alive to show him the truth but he doesn’t go with her again and never sees her again.

Years later, after his father has died of a stroke and he’s moved on to work at an arcade, he watches The Pink Opaque and it isn’t how he remembered. It’s boring and a bit silly, but he has bigger things like being an adult to worry about.

Sixteen years later, Owen is still working in that arcade when he feels like he’s going to die. He makes his way to the bathroom and slices his chest open to reveal a TV playing the show. He staggers back out into the real — is it real? — world, apologizing to everyone.

What would is real? I wonder, Maddy refers to her friend Amanda as a “secret agent sent here to make my life miserable.” Amanda is played by Emma Portner, who is also Mr. Melancholy, Marco and the evil clown. Maybe Maddy is on to something.

If The Pink Opaque came back for a sixth season, its heroines would have climbed out of their own graves, just like Buffy did in season six, episode one of her show.

Katie Pendleton’s (Amanda Jordan) horse sanctuary may be forced to close unless she can convince her grandfather Ben (Stuart Johnson) to show up at a Christmas benefit concert. Yet the one-time bluegrass star has been hiding for years. Why is it closing? Because the Breckenridge family — Jim (Mike Shara) and Grant (David Pinard) — want to race a horse named Chocolate and Katie won’t allow them, so they take all their money away.

Well, Grant actually isn’t all that bad. And he wants to date Katie and learn more about her grandfather because he loves bluegrass. I have no knowledge of this music genre — or horses — so I am the perfect person to review this.

Her grandfather refuses to perform, so he gets country star Claire Crosby (Chelsea Green) to show up. Now this is something I do know. She’s a pro wrestler who used to be Laurel Van Ness in Impact and Reklusa in Lucha Underground, as well as wrestling for Pro WrestlinG Stardom in Japan. Before she came to WWE full-time, she was Daniel Bryan’s physical therapist Megan Miller and in an angle said he cheated on his wife Brie Bella with her.

This has nothing to do with Christmas, horses or bluegrass.

Almost every movie director Marco Deufemia has worked on is a holiday film. Writer Chris Dowling directed and wrote the series Blue Ridge. If you’re looking for a holiday movie that has a concert and horses, well, you came to the right stable.

You can buy this from Mill Creek Entertainment at Deep Discount.

Directed by Jesse Palangio and written by Rossa McPhillips and Simon Phillips, Blood and Snow is going to invite critical comparisons to The Thing, as its about a meteor landing near an oil well in Canada and a woman named Marie (Anne-Carolyne Binette) who is infected by it. She’s taken back to the base by Sebastian (Michael Swatton) and Luke (Simon Phillips) and — as you probably guessed by now — something isn’t right.

It’s always nice to see Vernon Wells in a movie. Here, he’s The Professor, one of the few scientists who might be able to figure this out. As for Marie, she wants to spread the virus inside her, starting with the rescue team that is coming to save everyone.

This obviously has nowhere near the budget that it needs to have, nor does the way too quick ending close things up the right way. But for what it cost — and tempered expectations — it’s a fine cold weather alien movie. There’s hardly any gore, either. Movies don’t need it, but when you’re expecting something based on what this is cribbing notes from, a little guts would be lovely.

The Cleopatra Entertainment blu ray of this movie has a trailer and slide show. You can buy it from MVD.

You can also watch it on Tubi.

Starting as a YouTube series, Infinite Santa 8000 starts at the end of all things, as humanity has been destroyed. Somehow, some way, Santa Claus (Duane Bruce) and his cyborg wife Martha (Tara Henry) have survived. Instead of getting the rest he deserves, mutants and robots keep attacking, as they hate what Christmas means.

When Dr. Shackleton steals Martha, Santa must get in his sleigh, power up his robotic reindeer and make his way through whatever is left on our planet, battling monsters and even the Easter Bunny.

Created by Greg Ansin and Michael Neen, this Director’s Cut has new scenes, re-animated and retouched shots, and has been recut to match the original script. It’s not for kids — unless your children want to see a robot-eyed Santa blow away mecha bats and kill for food — but for the older amongst you, this will make a fine holiday special. It has a death count of 854 and a rough and dynamic animation style that constantly has a fight happening almost every single moment.

The Synapse blu ray features commentary with creators Ansin and Neel, the complete original 13-part web series, multiple interviews with cast and crew, original promotional trailers and two music videos.

You can learn more on the official website and buy the movie from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For a more glowing review of this movie, check out Jenn Upton’s review.

This happens every time.

I get excited for a movie, I buy into the hype, I wait for it and it starts so strong.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has just turned fifty, a former movie star and award winner not unlike Jane Fonda all those years ago, now aged past her Hollywood prime. She’s so upset by the way that her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) treats her that she drives right into a car crash, which she walks away unscarred, but meets a nurse who informs her that there’s a way to get what she wants.

For the first quarter of this movie, I was shocked by how each scene seemed to be finely combed and obsessed over by director and writer Coralie Fargeat and cinematographer Benjamin Kračun. Rooms feel too large, angles feel too sharp, colors feel too bright. This excited me, wanting to see what was next, as Sparkle heads out in a yellow overcoat into the filthy end of the world in the 1980s of Los Angeles, finding sans serif type highly designed packages of The Substance.

She learns the rules and we already know they will be broken: She will get the youth that she wants, as a new body will appear out of her back. The two bodies are still one person and must switch consciousness every seven days. The active body must feed the inactive body with a weekly food supply and take daily injections of stabilizer fluid from the original body to keep from rotting. But we know that the young version of Elisabeth, Sue (Margaret Qualley, daughter of fashion model and actress Andie MacDowell, a ballet dancer in her youth that probably already has learned the lessons of this), will become addicted to the fame because how else do you experience being the center of the world?

As the film loses its color and edge, so do the characters move apart, forgetting that no matter what, they are one. Sue delays the switch to make love to a gorgeous boy on a motorcycle, causing Elisabeth’s finger to age. Elisabeth can barely move from the pain in her back — have you ever given birth by having your spinal column slide open? — and spends most of her days staring at the TV and the other times eating everything she can, leaving it lying everywhere, and then hiding out as she makes her way to get new supplies.

This new young life that she wanted isn’t even hers any more.

Instead of killing off her younger form — who has kept her in a coma for 90 days, transforming her into an elderly hunchback that appears more John Merrick than Debbie Sullivan — Elisabeth brings her back from the other side, only to be repeatedly slammed face first into a mirror and then murdered.

This leaves Sue the dream that she wants, being a star on New Year’s Eve, a very 1980s dream that no longer seems to matter.

To keep from rotting away, she loads up on the drug and then goes all Brundlefly in the mirror — don’t worry, the movie still has time to complete ape The Elephant Man and Eraserhead on the way to a close that you can spot from the opening frame — before emerging as Monstro Elisasue, a freakish creature that somehow is able to fool every single person around her by taking a poster and taping it to her face.

I knew this was an allegory at the start, then maybe magical realism. I didn’t let reality in the way when I debated who could survive a back wound like that with home surgery and no antibiotics, but by the end of the movie, it feels like the budget went out the window, as effects go almost chromakey in quality, other than a bloodletting than feels all Sam Raimi and a multiple bodies in one form that wants to shock you but forgets that you already saw Society.

Do I expect too much of the cinema of today? Do I overthink the male gaze in this movie, one created by a woman, that is supposed to make you feel bad for staring at bodies when, you know, it just keeps showing you bodies? I can’t even imagine how different this would be if Ray Liotta had lived and was in this instead of Quaid, who seems like he’s on the best of coke and ready to eat four pounds of shrimp in one scene (yes, I did look that up).

This is a movie that references other films until it becomes a Xerox that others will refer to, the stream backflowing into itself. Effects were called blob and Gollum and Requiem, all other movies and Coralie wanted the sensibility of The Elephant Man, according to the FX guys. Then, this gets so needledrop sledgehammer that it uses “Also sprach Zarathustra” and “The Nightmare And Dawn” from Vertigo and at that point, any pretense toward subtlety is washed away like a ripped off face on a Hollywood star, pretending to be the Lady In the Radiator after we’ve watched a movie that is like Seconds, only sloppy ones.

What are we to learn here? That we should love who we are and embrace aging? Maybe. I don’t know, it’s all buried under transgressive shock that will only be that to audiences who haven’t decided to wallow in the muck of the movies we grew up on. The film also has a major issue — and maybe it’s just me — but the beauty of Moore isn’t in the fact that her ass is tight or that she doesn’t have a wrinkle. She has lived in her body and been a goddess for decades, defying the expectations of how someone should age. The younger version of her feels like a sports car I’d be afraid to get dirt inside, a porcelain doll that you just leave on the shelf instead of risking being a bull.

The level of wit here is to name the sexist oaf Harvey. Hardy har harv.

At one point, I paused this — and the big twist had already happened — and it was 47 minutes before the end of the movie. Brian Yuzna had 96 minutes in Re-Animator. Lynch did Eraserhead in 89. This is 141 minutes long.

You will believe that someone can master home repair first time out to the point that she creates a room inside the bathroom that looks flawless. Who has that much real estate inside their walls? Also: An eye socket poops out a breast and in Hell, Lucio Fulci is like, “And?” Also: How did they keep that bathroom so clean when people are puking all over it, all the time?

This is a film that hates its character when she’s old and sexy, when she’s young and sexy, and then makes fun of her some more when she looks like Ephant Mon meets Castle Freak.

Unlike beauty, the movies that are cannibalized here will live forever.

This, not so much.

Released in Italy as Trasgredire, Cheeky! finds Tinto Brass — joined by a writing team that included his wife Carla Cipriani, Nicolaj Pennestri, Silvia Rossi and Massimiliano Zanin — for another trip into his erotic world, a place where the rear end can be viewed as the window to the soul.

Seriously, if you think Andy Sidaris fully realized his world of gorgeous women in a world of spy games, it’s time to watch a Tinto Brass film. This time, he centers his gaze on Carla Burin (Yuliya Mayarchuk), a young woman from Venice who has come to England to be with her boyfriend, Matteo (Jarno Berardi). The only one not happy about that is Matteo, who is continually jealous of her. Perhaps he should be, as nearly everyone wants to be with Carla, including Moira (Francesca Nunzi), the real estate agent who rented her a flat, and her French ex-boyfriend Bernard (Mauro Lorenz).

After making movies like Caligula and Salon Kitty, Brass went in the direction of trying to craft worlds that revolved around young women who almost constantly are nude, like a Milo Manara comic book brought to life.

Brass said his intent with Cheeky! was to advance the cause of feminism through the character of Carla. “She’s a modern woman who is fully aware of her sexuality and sensuality, and of her right to enjoy it without subduing herself to a chauvinist mentality. It’s an old habit, a fixation of mine, a belief that in order to discover women’s lies, all you just have to do is look at their ass. Because, as opposed to the face, which is a hypocrite mask capable of faking and lies, the ass doesn’t lie.”

Only Tinto Brass would make this movie, a film that pretty much is the male gaze 200% of the time and believe that it’s a feminist film. Well, it is a joyous one, as love wins out by the end. Mayarchuk, who Brass discovered working in a pizza shop, is shot in every frame like a goddess, but also a conflicted woman who wants the pleasures of the flesh yet doesn’t want to lose the man she loves.

I never watch one of Brass’ later films and feel gross about it. It feels like a celebration of beauty and young lust. Meanwhile, he’s a dirty old man puffing along on a cigar, shooting this all with his wife by his side.

Cult Epics presents the 4K UHD world premiere of the Uncut and Uncensored version of Cheeky. It has commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nathaniel Thompson, trailers in 4K, an interview with Massimo Di Venanzo, an isolated score by Pino Donaggio, Backstage with Tinto Brass, trailers, a photo gallery, a double-sided sleeve with original uncensored Italian poster art, a 20-page illustrated booklet with liner notes by Eugenio Ercolani and Domenico Monetti and a slipcase. You can order it from MVD.