Directed by Abel Ferrara and written by Nicholas St. John, who worked on nine movies with Ferrara, this black-and-white film has Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor) get bitten by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and become a vampire, an addict, or both.

Ferrara made this as a metaphor for drug addiction as he had been on heroin for years and has Kathleen, after hitting bottom at an orgy of death and blood drinking, accepting that she is powerless and needs God as she’s reborn and visits her own grave.

Taylor is incredible and the visuals are so bleak. As always, New York City feels like the end of the world in a Ferrara movie. It also has Christopher Walken, Edie Falco, Jamel Simmonz from the Flatlinerz, Fredro Starr from Onyx and Michael Imperioli in the cast. While some may see it as an arty film filled with pretense, I’d remind them that Ferrera comes from the grindhouse and knows how to use horror to tell a story about something real.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of The Addiction has a brand new 4K restoration from the original camera negative by Arrow Films. There are also extras that include a commentary by director Abel Ferrara, moderated by critic and biographer Brad Stevens; Talking with the Vampires, a 2018 documentary about the film featuring actors Christopher Walken and Lili Taylor, composer Joe Delia, cinematographer Ken Kelsch and Ferrara himself; interviews with Ferrara and Stevens; a feature on the editing; a trailer; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Peter Strain and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by critic Michael Ewins and an interview with Ferrara by Paul Duane.

You can buy it from MVD on 4K UHD or Blu-ray.

Known in Italy as Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture Paperino, because Paperino is what they call Donald Duck) and La Longue Nuit de L’Exorcisme (The Long Night of Exorcism) in France,  this was what Fulci considered his best work, despite it being controversial for its day because it criticized the Catholic Church. This led to a limited run in Europe and its unreleased release in the US until 2000.

In the south of Italy, specifically the tiny village of Accendura, Bruno, Michele, and Tonino are engaged in mischief and other activities. They do all the things you expect little Italian boys to do — smoke cigarettes, watch prostitutes have sex, abuse a pepping tom — earning the ire of La Magiara (Florinda Bolkan, also the star of Fulci’s giallo A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), a witch who digs up the bones of an infant before conducting a ritual where she creates voodoo style dolls of the three boys, stabbing them with needles and chanting over them.

Bruno is the first to go missing, inciting a media frenzy as reporters from all over Italy make it the story of the week. Andrea Martelli (Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Fulci’s The Four of the Apocalypse) is one of them, yet more intelligent than the rest. Sneaking into the police investigation, he wonders aloud why the kidnappers, who have called in a ransom, have asked for a small sum. The peeping tom is arrested once it comes out that he buried the boy’s body- but he claims that he only did so to try and get the ransom. While he is held for questioning, the second boy, Tonino, is found dead, proving the innocence of the pervert.

Meanwhile, the final boy, Michele, meets a rich girl gone bad, Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet from The Red Queen Kills Seven Times), who sunbathes in the nude and has no problem letting the kid watch. Someone calls Michele during a rainstorm the following evening, and he becomes the third victim.

This gives the reporter the chance to meet and get close to Patrizia. Turns out she’s hiding out in her wealthy father’s modern house after a drug scandal- MARIJUANA!!! — and the villages have already condemned her as a slut due to how she dresses. The reporter also meets the young village priest, Don Alberto Avallone, who lives with his strange mother and deaf, dumb and mentally deficient little sister.

Don Alberto is deeply affected by the boys’ deaths, as they were all pupils at his school, and he attempted to keep them off the streets and playing soccer. He’s so well connected — both in town and with the Catholic Church — that he censors even the magazines on the newsstand. He remarks that he wishes that he could censor Patrizia.

One thing you’ll notice about Giallo is that the more you watch them, the more you realize that they introduce you to character after character after character just to have characters, unlike the traditional British or American detective story, where everything happens for a reason.

That means it’s time to meet someone new. Francesco, an old man who lives in a cave, practices black magic and considers Magiara his student. He refuses to cooperate with the police, so they hunt Magiara down and interrogate her. She begins to convulse, scream and froth at the mouth, happily admitting that she killed the boys because they disturbed her son’s grave. And oh yeah — that child was the son of the devil.

Even though she was nowhere near the murder scene, the villagers are convinced that she’s the killer. The police can do nothing but release her, a release that leads to her doom, as a walk through a cemetery leads to her being beaten with chains by a gang of men (several of the grieving fathers are in their number). This is where Fulci lets loose with the gore, with each hit bringing shards of flesh and bone and blood to the fore, ending with Magiara crawling up a cliff, begging for help as cars just pass her by.

To the shock of the villagers, the murders don’t stop. But at the latest one, Martelli has found a Donald Duck head. This makes Patrizia realize that she bought that doll for Don Albeto’s sister after she saw her walking with another headless doll.

Their theory — that the little girl is imitating her mother by pulling the heads off the dolls — is decent. But they’re wrong. The killer is revealed spectacularly, with a dummy drop that, today in 2025, is astounding for just how little it resembles a living human being and is just as shocking as it was in 1972, as it falls into several rocks, emitting showers of blood.

While filled with blood and horror, this is one of Fulci’s finest movies, one that puts a lie to the idea that all he could do was make movies filled with gore. It moves away from Rome, the expected Giallo location, to the hills outside of civilization, to a place tied to the old ways and ancient beliefs that doom nearly everyone.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of this film has a brand new 4K restoration from the original 2-perf Techniscope camera negative by Arrow Films; audio commentary by Troy Howarth, author of So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films; Giallo a la Campagna, a video discussion with Mikel J. Koven, author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film; Hell is Already in Us, a video essay by critic Kat Ellinger; Lucio Fulci Remembers, a rare 1988 audio interview with the filmmaker; interviews with actresses Barbara Bouchet and Florinda Bolkan, cinematographer Sergio D’Offizi, editor Bruno Micheli and makeup artist Maurizio Trani; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and Howard Hughes. You can get it from MVD.

Man, I really liked WolfCop, which was also directed and written by Lowell Dean, but this movie did not work for me at all.

The indy group SAW is running shows in small towns in Canada, but to performers like Miss Behave (Ayisha Issa) and Kate the Great (Sara Canning), it’s the big time. Joe Lean (Steven Ogg) is fooling around with Miss Behave and may want more; they all have to deal with a show in the middle of nowhere for a cult that’s run by The Prophet (Chris Jericho), a wrestler that Lean had to retire as well as Kate’s father.

All of the wrestlers are forced into matches that reflect earth, air, fire and water to raise Satan from Hell. By all rights, as someone who spent most of his life in indy wrestling and loves horror movies, I should be into this. I liked the masked wrestler Enigma Jones (Mo Adan) and the needledrop music, but this felt like it was knocking at the door of being an interesting movie but never kicked it in and took it by the throat as it should have.

There are so many plotholes — is SAW the biggest thing in wrestling or an indy that’s barely holding on? — and an ending that is so relentlessly dumb that it almost changed this review into a rave that I can barely recommend this and that makes me kind of sad.

Jericho is fine in this, even if the whole time you just think, “Oh, that’s Chris Jericho.” Think Green Room with devil worship and you get the idea. It’s technically OK, but there could have been a version of this that went wild with its ideas and pushed everyone to be over the top, going from just being there to a grindhouse-style epic that mixes horror and pro wrestling the way — read the Mat Monsters articles I’ve written for better executions — they deserve to be. As it is, 2 stars out of 5, but Dave Meltzer would probably give it 7 stars.

“TMZ explores the many, stunning security failures that lead to the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally.”

Like short people and women, according to one person in this.

We live in a time and place where incidents like the one in this documentary have already been forgotten, questions have gone unasked and we just move on because we are so overwhelmed, left and right, by the news and its endless cycle, which beats us into the rocks like we’re a bloated dead body bobbing in the salty sea, lashed to the coral, unfeeling as our forms are obliterated by nature and time and shock and awe. I am exhausted. I have so little left, and I can’t doomscroll any more just as much as I can’t place my head in the sand. Quite frankly, I have no idea what to do.

Also, I grew up close to Butler and drove past these fairgrounds all the time, and no, I am not surprised that this would happen there.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tubi is more than America’s video store. Now it’s our supermarket checkout lane, as TMZ and The New York Post have made exclusive documentaries on Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO killer Brian Thompson.

I get the need to race to a headline and a story here, but there’s so much to unpack, perhaps way more than a tabloid take can give us. The New York Post version gives us a breakdown by reporters who were there and a deeper take on why the public has started to romanticize Mangione.

Interestingly, the New York Times refers to him as “an Ivy League-educated tech whiz,” and TMZ calls him “a privileged man.” Over the next few years, if the free press survives the next four years, we’ll look back on this time as when ordinary people looked at murder as a crime that was forgivable, which is something that seemed inconceivable years ago. And yet, while there are issues with the health care system, this was still someone with children. And yet, does Mangione have a point, and was this the only way? — of getting across how bad it has been?

I can’t comment either way. I just watch these documentaries and try to understand a world that seems to be falling apart daily.

You can watch both of these movies on Tubi:

TMZ Investigates: Luigi Mangione: The Mind of a Killer

New York Post Presents: Luigi Mangione Monster or Martyr?

Is TMZ helping celebrities or taking advantage of them? I think this time they’re doing the right thing, as Wendy Williams has been confined to a New York City assisted living facility, living like a prisoner, despite her claiming there is nothing wrong with her mental ability.

Harvey Levin, who has known her for decades, even claims she’s herself again. Yet no one is allowed to visit or call her. She can make calls out, which she does in this, with a long-range camera capturing her as she pushes her face against a window. It’s frankly kind of terrifying.

According to TMZ, “Wendy is permanently disabled as a result of Frontotemporal Dementia … problem is, the condition never gets better. Wendy was in bad shape a few years ago when she was drinking heavily, but she’s sober now and her mental state has radically improved … many say back to normal, yet she’s still under an incredibly restrictive guardianship.”

I think this is the absolute highest level of all Tubi TMZ docs, one that has cameramen on the sidewalk shooting up to a window where a manic Wendy Williams rants on the telephone while TMZ people speak to her on the speakerphone, kind of like how my wife and I talk to my mom but you know, this is a documentary that millions of people can watch on Tubi and not my nightly “how are you?” phone call. This is peak junk TV, the equivalent of when the Enquirer had Elvis’s body in the coffin on their cover. Still, under the guise — and maybe TMZ’s heart is in the correct place here — of saving Wendy, just like the title, except that yes, we can all watch her flip out inside an assisted living place and the art for it has her dressed up, full face of makeup, crying in abject despair. So…this is entertainment?

You can watch this on Tubi.

“Conventional wisdom says Diddy’s guilty, but his legal team is mounting a strong defense. TMZ breaks down the case that could get him off the hook.”

Yes, I have watched four of these Diddy docs and this one has someone claiming that the bottles of baby oil were for necromancy.

I had to look that up and learned that TikTok gossip claimed that one of Diddy’s lawyers, Anthony Ricco, quit due to an alleged necromancy charge. Except that it isn’t illegal.

As Diddy is in jail waiting for his trial on three federal charges of transportation for prostitution, sex trafficking and racketeering with conspiracy — charge that he and his team deny — TMZ keeps making these shows and for some reason, my need to watch every Tubi Original means that I will keep watching them.

They even get together a mock jury and try Diddy in this, something that doesn’t seem all that ethical as it could convince people in the real trial.

But anyways, freak offs get mentioned, your favorite TMZ people are snarky and there will be at least ten more of these. Of course, I will be watching and reporting back to you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

It is yet another movie I watched on an airplane, which is the best place to watch as you’re going to be happy you lived through the flight and not concentrating on how you wasted your life watching this. Yes, it’s another M. Night Shyamalan movie. Still, this time, it’s a vanity project because his daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan plays Lady Raven, the Taylor Swift of his universe, a singer beloved by young ladies who draws Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) to her concert. The problem? Cooper is a serial killer known as The Butcher, and this is all a trap — get it? — to arrest him.

He’s been hunted by Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), an FBI profiler who has enacted her own parent trap — ugh, get it? — to arrest him.

The review from Benjamin Lee in The Guardian sums up so much of how I feel about Shyamalan’s work: “Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it’s fiendishly smart. Maybe if it had been more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun.”

Each successive film from him — Old is nearly unwatchable and Knock at the Cabin was infuriating —  is dumber to the point that no human being acts like a real person, as if it was made by an alien who has just come to Earth with the kind of budget that allows him to keep making shitty movies no matter what. The Happening and The Last Airbender would end most careers, but here we are, almost two decades later, and we get a new Shyamalan movie nearly every year. And each time, I walk in saying, “This is it. This is the one.” And again, like burning my hand on the stove and never remembering that open flames can set my hand ablaze and how much it hurts, I watch his movies and wonder why my fingers are singed.

Here’s the pitch: “What if Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” I hate that today’s movies keep using that superior film as a reference point and can’t come close to it. This was shot on 35mm and had a huge budget, but it had all the ideas of the lowest-budget streamer.

This feels six hours long with multiple end points that just end up being the next part of the movie, the best example of a movie where I look at how much time is left and being shocked that 35 minutes have passed and I am only a third of the way through. By the end, which has a surprise- he is ready to escape again- I was praying this was the movie’s end. It was, but then the post-credits sequence made me worried that this would have even more.

Look, I know I love some terrible filmmakers. Mattei, Franco, you name it. But yet, their movies speak to me, despite their ineptitude at times, because they are made by someone who seems to love making movies while making money. And I guess that M. Night loves movies too, but he should really embrace his inner scumbag. If his films had any edge or felt dangerous or scuzzy, I’d probably be one of his most prominent apologists. Instead, I’m covering my burned hand with creams and salves, wondering how I got into this situation all over again.

During the dizzy spells of COVID-19, I sought something to zone out to. All I needed to know was that this is a sexy all-Italiana Commedia with Joan Collins—already 41 and too old for Hollywood and yet not at her full sex symbol status yet—as a woman tempting a married soccer referee. Could a movie be more ready for me to watch?

Carmelo Lo Cascio (Lando Buzzanca) is based on famous soccer — football, right? — ref Concetto Lo Bello, but here he’s a ref in small town games who has the fantastic opportunity to be in charge of one of the biggest games in the sport. Along the way — and set to a score by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis, who we know as Oliver Onions, as well as the song “(I’m) Football Crazy” sung by soccer player Giorgio Chinaglia, we see how driven this man is, even putting his marriage to Laura (Gabriella Pallotta) off to the side, giving everything to the game, ruining his heart by taking amphetamines.

But you know, it’s a comedy.

That means that sportswriter Elena Sperani (Collins) is all over him, yet the man tries to remain chaste. A short-haired, super-stylish 1970s Joan Collins? A man is only as pure as his options, you know? What could keep him even carrying about anything other than this creature of carnal perfection?

Also appearing: Elisabeth Turner (Beyond the Door, Cannibals In the Streets), Marisa Solinas and, you knew it, Carla Mancini. Director Luigi Filippo D’Amico also wrote the script.

Thanks to White Slaves of Chinatown for posting this.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) is a salesman for The Lucas Clinic, a company that takes infections from celebrities and sells them to their fans. Yes, it’s possible to get sick from your obsessions or even eat meat harvested from their cells.

Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) is the company’s most famous celebrity, and her pathogens remain big sellers as her health falters. When her exclusive procurer, Derek Lessing (Reid Morgan), is fired, Syd takes over. Yet, he’s already in over his head as he’s been using his own body to carry a variety of illnesses, including one that he’s injected from Hannah that causes a series of hallucinations. He intends to sell the sickness to Arvid (Jon Pingue), whose butcher company, Astral Bodies, sells meat from human cells. But when he loses his laptop and Hannah dies from the same illness in his bloodstream, he must find out who has created a new sickness that no one can classify.

Malcolm McDowell is Dr. Abendroth, Hannah’s personal doctor and a man who has grafted her skin onto his body. There’s also the rival company Vole & Tesser, which is fighting The Lucas Clinic to be the leader in celebrity contagion.

While I wasn’t a fan of the young Cronenberg films, I enjoyed this. It has such a great concept and feels like the closest we’ve had to an ancient future movie in some time, such as the ’90s and ’00s weirdness of movies like Freejack and Paycheck, but much better. It’s a world that I wish there were more movies inside, a strange and downbeat yet weirdly hopeful slice of biomechanical celebrity worship.

The Severin release of Antiviral is scanned in 4K from the 35mm protection internegative, supervised by Brandon Cronenberg and cinematographer Karim Hussain, with 3 hours of new and archival special features including commentary by Cronenberg and Hussain; Broken Tulips, a short film by Cronenberg; a making of feature; a discussion of the restoration process; deleted scenes; an interview with production designer Arvinder Greywal; an electronic press kit; the Cannes cut of the film with an introduction by Cronenberg and a thermal camera test. You can get this from Severin.