I kind of love that this movie answers all of my meta needs, from reuniting Dolly Parton with Dabney Coleman and Lily Tomlin to having Buddy Ebsen show up as Barnaby Jones. And I realize that every critic wanted more out of director Penelope Spheeris. But look, I’m a simple man and I like seeing Jim Varney play Uncle Jed and do you have any clue how many hours and hours I’ve watched of the original show?

So yeah, Erika Eleniak is no Donan Douglas, Diedrich Bader can never touch Max Baer Jr. and while I love Cloris Leachman, she’s not anywhere close to Irene Ryan. But isn’t it cool to get one more episode, in fact, multiple episodes? And yeah, Rob Schenider and Lea Thompson are just alright bad guys, but this is a movie silly enough to have Zsa Zsa Gabor show up as herself and not smart enough for Jed to say, “That’s that Oliver Douglas feller’s sister’s wife.”

Seriously, grade school Sam watched Leave It to Beaver, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and The Beverly Hillbillies every single day for hours. If anybody wants to reboot any of those shows, please reach out to me. I’m ready to share my wasted life with the world.

While not strictly a movie made from a TV show, Don’t Worry, We’ll Think of a Title is packed with TV stars either in lead roles or in cameos and that’s always been my jam. In fact, this movie is meta before we even knew what that meant.

Charlie Yuckapuck (Morey Amsterdam) and Annie (Rose Marie) work =at the diner run by Mr. Travis (Richard Deacon), making this nearly a The Dick Van Dyke Show reunion, just as that show was in its last month of first-run episodes. It’s a busy place, so busy that people like Danny Thomas and Forrest Tucker just drop by.

Then, one day, Crumworth Raines (Moe Howard!) comes in to inform waitress Magda Anders (January Jones) that she has inherited a bookstore at Updike University. She hires Charlie and Annie and all manner of hijinks ensue, as Charlie looks just like a defecting cosmonaut named Yasha Nudnik, which brings in spies out of the cold, as it were, such as government agent Jim Holliston (Michael Ford), Comrade Olga (Carmen Phillips) and KEB agents played by Peggy Mondo, Cliff Arquette and Nick Adams.

The bookstore gets even more cameos, including Milton Berle, Steve Allen and Carl Reiner. But perhaps the one that put this on the site was that Irene Ryan plays Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies and is completely in character, giving the protagonists a ride and driving back off to her show. In 1966, movie theaters and movies were battling for audiences, so it’s just crazy to see her show up and literally everyone knows who she is.

Director Harmon Jones made some wild movies like The Beast of Budapest, Gorilla At Large and Bloodhounds of Broadway. Here, he’s working from a script by Amsterdam, John Davis Hart (who wrote the English dialogue for Any Gun Can Play, The Great Silence, Argoman the Fantastic Superman and Kill, Baby…Kill!) and William Marks (War Party, episodes of Bonanza and The Wild Wild West. 

One of my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone is “A Stop at Willoughby,” perhaps because it’s about advertising. Then again, it’s also about nostalgia and the pull of better times, which we all feel as we grow old.

Charles Lattimer (Mark Harmon) is an ad guy facing the gears of the business wearing him down, all while his marriage to Kristen (Catherine Hicks) is nearing its end. Every day, he rides the train and when the conductor (Bill Cobbs) gives him a pocket watch, he’s able to go past the sprawl and into Willoughby in the 1890s. That’s where he finds purpose and discovers that the illustration that he’s based his new campaign around came from his own pen. And oh yes, there’s new love with Laura Brown (Mary McDonnell).

As always, I prefer the much tighter original, as this has too much fluff and too happy an ending. Director Steven Schachter and writer Vivienne Radkoff have mostly made TV movies, but they turn in a fine film here, even if it’s not really necessary.

Based on the book Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway by the band’s lead vocalist Cherie Currie, I thought this movie just wouldn’t work, but it had to age before I watched it. Post-Twilight it felt like sacrilege to have Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, but now it feels right.

Director Floria Sigismondi made the music videos for “The Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson, “Obstacle 1” by Interpol and multiple videos for Bowie and Sigur Ros, so she understands rock and roll. And while this movie moves pretty quick through the history of the band, she succeeded in her goal of making it a coming of age story more than a biography. I really like the look of the film as well, as it moves from a colorful world to darkness by the end with each major moment having a slightly different look that never distracts from the whole of the movie.

Cherie Currie praised Dakota Fanning for her performance in the film, but obviously realized that so much of the book wouldn’t be filmed. She said, “My book is the real story. This is just a lighter kind of flash of what The Runaways were for a specific amount of time. How do you possibly take two and a half years and make it a film that’s an hour and a half, and make it even closely touch what was truly going on?”

As for Joan Jett, she felt that it captured 1970s Los Angeles.

Along with Stella Maeve as Sandy West, Scout Taylor-Compton as Lita Ford and Alia Shawkat as Robin Robins (Jacqueline Fuchs would not allow her name or image to be used in the movie), the girls start the film in the shadow of Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), who sees himself as the creative force behind the band, which may be true at first, but so many of his mental games just end up destroying what he’s started.

It’s not perfect, but if it allows one person to discover the real music, isn’t that a great thing?

Adele (Erin Wilhelmi) is the girl of the title, a lonely teenager caring for her agoraphobic aunt Dora (Susan Kellerman, who played Latka’s mom on Taxi), a woman who won’t even leave her room and only leaves messages slid under her door. However, Adele’s life changes when she meets her exact opposite, Beth (Quinn Shephard), whose behaviors and mannerisms she begins to absorb.

The problem is that Beth convinced Adele to slowly begin buying cheaper versions of her food and eventually her heart medicine, which kills her. Adele takes her green ring and calls for an ambulance. She’s sure that Beth loves her after a moment of brief passion, so she leaves the jewlery for her, but it isn’t taken. Despondent, she starts selling all of her aunt’s belongings and frequenting bars, followed by Beth, who of course is in no way what she appears.

Obviously, this movie’s poster is based on The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and this aims for the same 70s feel. Throw in a flipflopped Vestron logo in the beginning and the mood of films we adore from that era — Brownrigg, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death — and this is what I want more of in today’s horror: an understanding of what has worked and a build toward something new. Sure, the end is a bit abrupt and you can see it coming, but director and writer A.D. Calvo is someone more than worth watching. The lookbook for his next film, Here Comes the Night, proves that he’s absolutely on the right wavelength and I can’t wait.

You can watch this on Shudder and learn more on the official website.

Lady Terminator (the actual title translates as Revenge of the South Sea Queen) and is one of the most incredible movies I’ve ever seen. It takes its structure from Terminator (which is in itself ripped off from two Harlan Ellison stories, “Demon With a Glass Hand” and “Soldier”) and infuses the mythology of Indonesia. While this may not have been the first film in which mankind battled Nyi Roro Kidul, the Queen of the South Sea, it is definitely the only time that she repeatedly shoots men in the penis with an M16.

Director Jalil Jackson is actually H. Tjut Djalil, the same artist who made Mystics In Bali. Thanks to Ed Glaser’s How the World Remade Hollywood, I also discovered that his Batas Impian Ranjan Seytan (Satan’s Bed) takes a cue from Elm Street, so why wouldn’t he bring the magic of his home country into the world of machines versus men without the machines?

Barbara Anne Constable plays Tania Wilson, an anthropologist whose investigation into the tomb of the queen leads to being impregnated by a snake and then possessed by Nyi Roro Kidul herself, who we’ve already met via an opening that shows her repeatedly making love to men and killing them when they can’t satisfy her needs until one man is able to pull the snake from her womb, transform it into a dagger and make her cycle of death end for a hundred years.

The queen has a target, pop singer Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker), who she chases for the entire film before she’s saved by NY cop Max McNeil (Christopher J. Hart), who gets to yell, “Come with me if you want to live.”

Constable was told that this movie would be for Indonesia only, but it’s played all over the world. A dancer whose leg injury led to her arriving in Hong Kong for a career in modeling and fashion reporting — she was also a Pet of the Month for the Australian Penthouse — she performed her own stunts in this film. At one point, her ankle was skewered by a large shard of glass and the filmmakers paid her for an entire month while she relearned how to walk.

There’s a morgue scene in this where numerous men are under sheets with blood all over where their privates are and they discuss if a serial killer is cutting off their wangs. It’s amazing and so much more memorable than any movie I’ll see for the next year. This is the kind of movie I make people watch when they come to my house, a mindblowing assault on the senses, a film where instead of a robot eye the Lady Terminator simply takes out her own, but every other scene is nearly shot for shot taken from the American film but mystic instead of technological, which I can more than get behind.

I want ten sequels to this.

Also known as Chai Lai and Dangerous Flowers, this Thai action film reimagines Charlie’s Angels as a Thai-centric adventure made for 35 million baht instead of the $92 million dollar budget for the Hollywood film.

The five Dangerous Flowers are Kulap(Rose) played by Bongkoj Khongmalai, Bua (Lotus) who is Supaksorn Chaimongkol, Chaba (Hibiscus) acted by Jintara Poonlarp, Pouy-sian (Crown of Thorns) who is Kessarin Ektawatkul and Na-wua (Spadix) played by Bunyawan Pongsuwan. Their job is to protect Miki, the daughter of a professor who knows the location of a hidden treasure known as the Andaman Pearl.

The best joke here is that chai-lai is thai for gorgeous, which makes this a perfect title. There’s literally non-stop action and a surprising amount of blood, as well as scenes that come directly out of the American version, as well as the idea that men always screw over the Angels.

There’s also a bad guy named Dragon, Miki’s evil stepmother Mei Ling and a cross-eyed transgender villain named King Kong who gets shot more times than I can count. Also, seeing as how the women in this wear swimsuits and lingerie for their missions, it’s not always correct, but it is fun. They’re definitely more capable than any of the man they come up against, which is good to see.