In the future of 2097,  Earth’s kaiju all live on Godzilla Island, living under constant watch from the G-Guard. Godzilla, Godzilla Junior, Rodan, Kumasogami, Jigora, American Godzilla, Dogora — who was never even in a Godzilla movie before — Fire Rodan, King Ghidorah, Mecha-King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, Mothra, Mothra Leo, Anguirus, Gigan, Hedorah, Destoroyah, Baragon, King Caesar, Moguera, Megalon, Battra, SpaceGodzilla, Gorosaurus, Kamacuras and several versions of Jet Jaguar all reside there.

This show is pretty wild, as it was filmed with Bandai’s Godzilla Island toys with effects much like Robot Chicken to make them seem alive. The stories are crazy too, all told in three-minute episodes with overarching themes.

I mean, a Godzilla show that has The Edge from U2 doing music? It’s pretty out there.

The 22 stories of the show start with the Xiliens bringing Space Godzilla to Godzilla Island before battles ensue with Mecha-King Ghidorah, Godzilla being hypnotized by Space Godzilla, a Neo-Hedorah showing up and a Fire Fighter and Medic Jet Jaguar making appearances.

If you like Gigan, good news. He becomes a good guy over this series. And there’s a new monster named Gororin who is basically a cactus.

While this has never been released in the U.S. and Toho often pulls down any links, some brave folks have made an English dub and posted it on the Internet Archive. It’s silly, but a lot of fun, obviously made by people with a great love for all things kaiju.

Fred Savage was an ebullient teen, someone who seemingly could never do wrong until in this film, he becomes a high school wrestler who gets on the gas and goes bonkers on Candace Cameron. Yes, there comes a time in every actor’s life to do a made-for-TV ripped from the headlines movie. This one is based on the August 23, 1991 murder of Amy Carnevale by her high school boyfriend Jamie Fuller.

There’s also a Lifetime remake that came out in 2018, but we’re dealing with the original.

Man, there’s really nothing like seeing Kevin Arnold tear into D.J. Tanner with full force roid rage, is there? I realize I’m making light of a real problem — women now know to respect themselves and show ape-like men the door — but I’m also in awe of movies where actors just go for it. More often than not, this action happens in TV movies about very important issues.

Everyone just wants to be popular and not rock the boat. Their indifference — one could say that No One Would Tell — leads to Cameron’s character getting treated to a Laura Palmer funeral. I mean, even when these kids get on the stand in a trial, they speak up for the boy, saying that he wouldn’t have had to beat her if she just listened.

Reginald VelJohnson turned down the role of a cop in this movie. IMDB wants me to say that it was because he had scheduling conflicts with Family Matters, but I think VelJohnson was just sick of constantly having to play a cop, a role he did in Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Turner & Hooch, Ghostbusters and Plain Clothes*.

You may wonder, “Why is this movie so scummy?” I’d blame director Noel Nosseck, who made drive-in fare before this like Best Friends and Las Vegas Lady before moving to TV movies.

Also: I absolutely love the fake Guns ‘n Roses playing in the first scene.

*This reminds me of a convention I was at where Michael Dorn was speaking. Someone asked, “Why is Worf your favorite role?” He replied that he was tired of always playing police officers after CHiPs and it was great to be in a role that let him do something different. The person who asked the question then said, “But as a corrections officer, isn’t Worf a cop?” Dorn looked out at the audience, crestfallen, then just slowly walked off the stage early and went back to his room alone.

You can watch this on Tubi.

More power to David DeCoteau for making movies still after decades of directing. Most of his latest output has been a series of The Wrong… movies starring Vivica Fox like The Wrong Valentine, The Wrong Mr. Right, The Wrong Real Estate Agant, The Wrong Stepfather, The Wrong Teacher and so many more.

In this installment, Vivica is Coach Flynn, but the main story is all about one of her cheerleaders named Becky (Cristine Prosperi, who is also in Bring It On: Worldwide and The Wrong Neighbor and The Wrong Prince Charming), who falls for a boy named Rob who ends up trying to possess every moment of her existence.

How did I know that this, of all the movies on the set came from DeCoteau? Because for all the cheerleading girls, the majority of the action is focused on male abs. Hey — the dude knows what he likes and keeps making movies. More power to him.

Want more cheerleader movies? Then grab Lifetime’s new Cheer! Rally! Kill! 5-Film Collection, which features this movie and four others on DVD.

Autumn is a new student in a new school that…yes, has daddy issues and yes…is somehow talented enough to become a top cheerleader with little to no effort. However, she’s also working undercover, as the cheer team needs taken down a peg and the high school newspaper feels like the folk to do the job.

It turns out that all of the cheerleaders take laxatives to stay skinny and then there’s also a mystery maniac stalking all of them. So while the nod to the slasher made me happy, I really wanted more out of this. But hey — it’s a cheerleader movie made in 2019, not something playing a drive-in in 1975.

Could Autumn’s new boyfriend be a killer? Why are girls so mean to one another? And how does dance translate so well to cheering? I have so many questions, which means that I have to keep watching movies like this to increase my knowledge base.

Want more cheerleader movies? Then grab Lifetime’s new Cheer! Rally! Kill! 5-Film Collection, which features this movie and four others on DVD.

This is closer to what I wanted out of a cheerleader movie from this set. Again, a new girl, a new school, an instant admission to a cheerleading team and then, the new girl can no longer afford to go to college, so she gets into a prostitution ring that’s run by her coach and a bunch of alumni who she trusts until its too late.

I kind of love that this movie is shot in around three locations with a minimal budget to the point that the basketball game looks like the least athletic sporting event you’ve ever seen. Big points for the giallo like scene and killing off one of the cheerleaders by shooting her up with drugs, as well as the main girl deluding herself into thinking that the scummiest man you’ve ever seen could possibly love her and even the other guy more age appropriate to her also has a girlfriend and she still keeps giving him signals like she wants him. Everyone in this movie is either a moron or a horrible person except for the roommate who never ever leaves her room and seemingly only exists to be a sounding board and the only sign of ethnicity in this entire movie.

This movie also has more Canadian accents than an 80’s slasher. 

You can get this as part of Lifetime’s new Cheer! Rally! Kill! 5-Film Collection, which features four other cheerleader movies on DVD.

Every cheerleader movie I’ve watched so far has this set-up: trouble young girl with daddy issues moves to a new school, decides to be a cheerleader despite never doing it before yet because she’s a dancer, she’s amazing at it, then someone who should be her new best friend screws her life up and someone either dies or comes real close to it. Resolve and credits.

This is coming from the guy who has watched 542 slashers.

Ava lost her dad, got into trouble — she did Adderall! — and then went to a new school and her mom Denise Richards is convinced that she’s going to go back to being a bad girl. Homecoming queen and cheer captain Katrina doesn’t want any new girl getting in her way and she has an arsenal of evil tricks and initiations to take out our heroine.

Director Peter Sullivan’s IMDB page goes between horror, Lifetime movies and Christmas films, which is pretty much the only movies that make money. This one is decent, but I was really hoping for even more insanity. Then again, the majority of my watching is devoted to giallo and regional films, so I’m pretty desensitized.

It’s part of Lifetime’s new Cheer! Rally! Kill! 5-Film Collection, which features four other movies with cheerleaders in trouble that’s now available on DVD.

During her senior year of high school, Vicky (Maiara Walsh, Zombieland) had to drop out and over the next decade, she’s worked her way to rock bottom. Now, she wants to make her mother proud by stealing a teenager’s identity and having the best senior year of her life, even if she has to take out anyone who gets in her way.

Writer Barbara Kymlicka was behind plenty of David DeCoteau films. This movie fits right into his made for TV look and it’s directed by Christie Will Wolf.

It’s part of Lifetime’s new Cheer! Rally! Kill! 5-Film Collection, which features four other movies with cheerleaders in trouble that we’ll be watching all this week. It’s now available on DVD. This one doesn’t follow the format of the other movies on this set. It doesn’t have a young dancer in a new school with an old trauma and geeky friends who must make a hero’s journey. But nearly all the other ones totally have those tropes in force.

When I was a kid, before this whole internet, we all had dial-up modems and called into BBS systems. I remember the first time I went to a meet-up and everyone just had their code names on professionally made name tags. I might have been the youngest kid there, as everyone I had been talking to online ended up being old guys obsessed with making their own computers and getting inside the phone system. They taught me how to call people without paying for it and how to make the phone ring inside my own house and call my family.

So the adventures of these guys will always blow my mind.

John Draper, Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick are the main characters in this, but it hits nearly everyone. The computer that I am typing on right now is the result of the work these guys did. Mitnick’s story is pretty astounding and a lot of it ended up inspiring Ed Piskor’s genius comic Wizzywig.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The wonderful folks at White Slaves of Chinatown are responsible for so many of the movies that we watched during this week of weird docs and educational films. This one may be the strangest they’ve shared, which is saying so much.

It’s all about the 19th-century automaton collection of Jack Donovan set to strange synth music — created by Yardbirds member Paul Samwell-Smith — for about forty-five minutes. Forty-five hellish minutes of images of murderous dolls, acrobats, music playing figures and smoking monkeys dressing like Napoleon.

You know how every movie that has a cursed videotape always looks like The Ring? No. Not at all. That possessed footage should look exactly like this film. After all, Anton LaVey didn’t just decide that “development and production of artificial human companions” would be part of the “Pentagonal Revisionism: A Five-Point Program” for the Church of Satan by accident.

You can watch this on YouTube.