Jennifer Clarke (Jamie Luner, All My Children, Melrose Place) already thinks that she’s finished her Lifetime movie, one in which she went overboard after being gaslit for decades by her horrible husband Richard (Jason-Shane Scott) and turned her life around, becoming an in-demand corporate exec while he’s married to a woman the same age as their daughter Katey (Audrey Whitby) and dealing with diapers. Yet she made the biggest mistake anyone in a movie can make. She grabbed the wrong suitcase, which brings the maniac named Conner (Steven Brand) into her life.

Also called An Accidental Switch and Killer Switch, this movie works because Steven Brand actually feels menacing and gets off some really sinister dialogue that makes this veer toward the weirdness that this needs more of. I realize it’s a Lifetime movie, but that doesn’t mean that a little bit of sleaze can’t come on down.

Next time you’re in the airport and they ask if you’ve had your bag the whole time, make sure you did. You don’t want a killing machine stealing your child and killing your ex-husband who you hate — maybe you might — and making you confess over the phone that you’re a bad girl. Actually, maybe you do want all of that. So you know, set that bag down and see what kind of adventure creeps into your life.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Known as Killer Close-Up in the UK, Witness Unprotected, this Fred Olen Ray film is all about Sam (Daphne Zuniga), a divorced freelance photographer who is doing dangerous detective work to put her daughter Laurie (Gianna DiDonato) through college.

Now, however, the person she’s staking out gets killed and Sam looks like she’s the killer. Arrested by the police and locked up, it turns out that this case has so many more twists and turns than it first appeared.

Most of the reviews for this on IMDB are 1/10 and one of the two positive ones spoiled the main villain in its one-sentence review. That’s what you get for doing research on a movie before you watch it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

That Tubi exclusive box is like some kind of drug and here I am at 5 AM when the world sleeps soundly and I’m watching a Lifetime-style movie in which former Beverly Hills 90210 star Jennie Garth plays Joan Miller, a mom whose daughter Lily (Devin Cecchetto)  is acting up and then that acting up goes too far, far enough to be in one of these movies.

That acting up brings her into the orbit of Violet Lawrence (Kayleigh Shikanai) who lives with maybe her mom but probably not, has a bad girl rep and who also is way into this not NXVIM thought process called Zenith that’s definitely all about screwing over anyone that gets in your way.

This is the first film for director William Corcoran, who worked in visual effects for the movie Hot Pursuit and the series Fargo and Cleverman. It’s not the first time around for writer Adam Rockoff, who was the screenwriter for the 2010 I Spit On Your Grave, as well as movies like The Sinister Surrogate and multiple The Wrong… movies — Friend, Boy Next Door, Cheerleader, Tutor, House Sitter, Wedding Planner, Stepfather, Cheerleader Coach, Real Estate Agent, Fiancé, Prince Charmiong, Cheer Captain — which are pretty much made for cable giallo when you think about it. He also wrote the book Going To Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. He often uses the name Stuart Morse, which is a reference to The Redeemer: Son of Satan and proof that I want to be his friend.

This movie also has a threeway scene that’s made for basic cable where no one gets nude and everyone wakes up with their clothes on, interrupted with Garth continually calling her daughter. Wild stuff happens — teachers get screwed over, kids drink too much, people get branded like they’re playing volleyball with Keith Raniere with a creme brulee mini-torch, cops show up and shoot people in the back with no due process (well…) and you know, if you think your teenage daughter is dealing with a new town and the loss of her dad bad, you know, she totally is. She’s living up a pinky violence movie made for Tubi. This is torn from the headlines, people.

You can watch this on Tubi. I mean obviously. It’s a Tubi exclusive. Where else would you watch it? You know, Netflix is laying people off and demanding you stop giving your password out and Tubi is like, “You want to run five screens on your account? Do it. We have Jess Franco movies and lots of softcore porn in addition to all the stuff that we show in our ads and try and look classy” and I think they’re the evil mom Harper in this movie — but in the best of ways, I love you Tubi — giving you top shelf booze and letting you drink it in your house.

Giulio (Elio Germano) is a film student that frequents a video store and has an apartment filled with movie posters and yearns to discuss film with anyone he meets and no, I’m not triggered, why do you ask?

One day at the store, he notices Federica Lalli (Chiara Conti) and Sasha Zerboni (Elisabetta Rocchetti) both trying to rent Strangers On a Train. The next day, he reads that Sasha’s rich mother has been killed, which he remarks to his girlfriend Arianna (Cristina Brondo) seems way too close to the plot of that Hitchcock film. He now feels like it’s only a matter of time before Federica has to kill someone for Sasha, so he starts watching her. The only problem? She’s watching him too.

While watching Federica and her boss argue over him blackmailing her — just like Marnie –Guilio falls and breaks his ankle, which is an inversion of Rear Window. That night, Arianna comes over only to have to hear about a new theory: Federica is going to have Sasha to kill her boss. She leaves in anger.

The plan is revealed when the video store owner visits our injured hero and tries to drown him. He’s saved by his mother’s new fiancee and the would-be killer runs into traffic before he’s struck by a car. It turns out that Sasha had hired him to kill her mother.

It should all be over but as Guilio and Arianna start to kiss, she’s the one that notices something strange. This story is far from over because there’s still a reference to Vertigo that needs to be made.

Directed by Dario Argento, who co-wrote the script with Franco Ferrini (Phenomena, Opera, Eyes of Crystal, Dark Glasses), Do You Like Hitchcock? is a TV movie that takes a long time to get anywhere yet does have some moments worth watching. I loved the ending and the final but of voyeurism as a woman realizes she’s being watched and just turns her head and attention to the giallo novel she’s reading.

Originally airing on February 3, 1978 on ABC, this movie has quite the cast: Dirk Benedict (who would appear on the network’s Battlestar Galactica the same year), Frank Converse (who was also in 1981’s Rankin-Bass movie, which was distributed by Aquarius Releasing, The Bushido Blade opposite an all-star cast that included Sonny Chiba, James Earl Jones, Mako, Toshiro Mifune and Laura Gemser), John Forsythe (Dynasty), Christopher George (Enter the Ninja), Lynda Day George (Pieces), Lee Meriwether (The Catwoman after Earth Kitt), Ray Milland (X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes), Hugh O’Brian (Ten Little Indians), Stella Stevens (The Manitou), Roger E. Mosley (Magnum P.I.) and Marshall Thompson (First Man Into Space).

It has what you expect on a cruise to terror: a ship brings aboard a sunken Egyptian sarcophagus that contains the son of Satan. Directed by Bruce Kessler and written by Michael Braverman, who created the show Life Goes On, this movie has Milland as an archaeologist who believes the Egyptians discovered America and Forsythe playing a religious man with a wife he’s disengaging from, leaving her all alone as he struggles with his faith.

That said, it’s also a TV movie and has a coffin that breathes, so there’s that. It also has “Dies Irae” on the soundtrack two years before The Shining.

Airing on January 30, 1973 on ABC, A Cold Night’s Death has a great if small cast — Robert Culp, Michael C. Gwynne and Eli Wallach — and a voiceover by Vic Perrin, the Control Voice from The Outer Limits.

Culp is Robert Jones and Wallach is Frank Enari, two scientists who have been assigned to the Tower Mountain Research Station as replacements for Dr. Vogel, who hasn’t been heard from in five days, with his final messages being near manic. Taking along a chimpanzee named Geronimo, the two only find a destroyed research station and no doctor.

As much The Lighthouse as The Thing, A Cold Night’s Death reminds us that in the early 70s, TV movies rivaled drive-ins for frightening films made on a budget.

Director Jerrold Freedman also made Kansas City Bomber and The Boy Who Drank Too Much. The story comes from 20 Million Miles to Earth writer Christopher Knopf.

Written as a series pilot by Steven E. de Sousa (Die Hard, Commando, Bad Dreams, The Running Man, The Return of Captain Invincible, Street Fighter) and directed by Michael Schultz (Cooley High, Car Wash, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, The Last Dragon, Krush Groove, Disorderlies) this was a try at turning the Will Eisner newspaper strip into something viewers could see every week.

This has been released by the Warner Archive, but for years it was on convention tables and a lost film of sorts. It aired at a time when comic books weren’t in movies and on TV all the time. Batman was still years away.

The show looks great! It’s as close as a low budget TV show can get to capturing Eisner. de Sousa told Den of Geek, “We did this three or four years before Dick Tracy, but we made some of the same exact choices — only first! Whenever we designed things like costumes and locations, they would be your basic Crayola box of colors. So there’s one blue, one red, and one green.”

The look of the comic showing up was no accident, as he also related “Will Eisner was one of the first artists to approach comics with a conscious cinematic look, starting with The Spirit. So, wherever it was possible, we totally did panel for panel some famous moments from the comic. When the Spirit first meets Dolan, that sequence was shot almost exactly like the scene in the original Eisner comic.”

Sam J. Jones makes a terrific Spirit and Nana Visitor feels like she is Ellen Dolan stepping out of the comic page. Despite its $2.5 million or less budget, it somehow works better — and is so much more fun — than the Frank Miller The Spirit movie.