“This is the first release of Stubios, a fan-fueled studio for aspiring filmmakers and their fans. In addition to welcoming creatives from varied backgrounds into Hollywood, Stubios puts the power to greenlight content in the hands of the viewer. This program is an evolution of an expansive content strategy that is built on viewer-driven trends underpinning the need to build new pathways for creatives to find success in Hollywood and for fans to find more stories they can see themselves in.”

You can learn more about Stubios here.

This is the first original comedy special for Tubi, with 15-minute sets from up-and-coming comics Cris Sosa, Danielle Mora and Grant Moore. All three have really strong material and I really enjoyed this; I’ve been loving stand-up on cable since the early HBO specials and Evening at the Improv. I’m excited that Tubi is doing this and I hope that there is more stand-up on the way. I’d recommend following all three of these comedians and checking out their acts, as I laughed more than once, which is good for modern stand-up.

You can watch this on Tubi.

According to Glowstream, “Forty percent of all missing persons are people of color, according to the Black and Missing Foundation. However, only 13 percent of the US population is African American. The stark contrast between the amount of people of color missing in the US and the population number is why the state of California created the Ebony Alert system, a resource available to law enforcement to alert the public about suspicious and unexplained disappearances of Black people.”

This movie opened my eyes about this.

This documentary focuses on Brittany Clardy, Shamari Brantley and Krystal Anderson, three Black women who were killed after their status as being missing was botched. Often, police believe that women of color have just run off with their boyfriend and make excuses, while white women become national news stories.

Hearing the pain of the family members is hard, but knowing that they’re doing something is inspiring. The family of Clardy has been working with Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and New Jersey representative Bonnie Watson Coleman to establish an Office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls within the Department of Justice.

Black women are murdered at a 300% higher rate than white women and make up 40% of missing persons cases, “a disproportionately high number relative to population size,” according to Teen Vogue.

I’d never heard of White Girl Missing Syndrome until this, and again, this entire doc by Jan Hendrik Hinzel, Alexis Johnson and Arlissa Norman is so informative. I’m glad it’s on a free streaming service like Tubi, as I feel it must be seen.

You can watch this on Tubi.

What if there were two — well, for now — Mickey Mouse public domain slashers both set in arcades?

Once called Mickey’s Mouse Trap, the film was announced on January 1, 2024, the same day Mickey’s Steamboat Willie version went into the public domain.

Rebecca (Mackenzie Mills) is the only survivor of a mouse massacre. She starts to tell her story to some cops in the framing device and we learn that her boss Tim Collins (Simon Phillips) got possessed by watching Steamboat Willie and killed all of her friends, including Alex (Sophie McIntosh), who gets a surprise birthday party in the arcade where she works. Let me tell you, workplace birthday parties are the worst, because you spend your whole life there anyway and suddenly, a place that gives you trauma is supposed to be a source of fun.

This was filmed in Funhaven in Ottawa, which has Ottawa’s only roller coaster.

For some reason, the evil Mickey can teleport and is afraid of light. A lot of this movie feels like it was barely edited together and they keep going back to the police station scenes to cover things, which kills the slasher vibe. If you expected nothing, The Mouse Trap is ready to award you with abundance.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Why do I do this to myself?

Once called The Mouse Experiment, this even has a dumb logline: “The film follows a group of friends stuck at a fairground amusement park hunted down by a mutated rat – Steamboat Willie.”

Yes, Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, so we will get stuff like this instead of making Amityville movies. And Screamboat. And The Mouse Trap. And Mouseboat Massacre. And The Mouse Trap: Welcome to The Mickeyverse.

I swear I will not watch all of these movies, like Amityville and Ouija, and keep posting them.

I’m lying and hate myself because I’ve already watched two of these.

Directed by Brendan Petrizzo and written by Harry Boxley (Popeye’s Revenge) and Marc Gottlieb (Snow White and the Seven Samurai), this has Dr. Rupert (Chris Lines) creating killers like the well-named The Killer (Lewis Santer), who looks like a Spirit Store version of Mickey by way of Hot Topic. There’s also The Bear (Stephen Staley), wearing the same mask as the killer from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and the two have to compete to see who can get the most body parts.

Is Pooh in the same universe as Mickey now? How many Mickey universes will there be? For all the people watching it, how many other than me picked it because Michelle Bauer and Geretta Geretta have voice cameos? Why is this set in a video game place (Knightly’s Fun Park Towyn, North Wales’ premier holiday entertainment complex)- other than it’s trying to be Five Nights at Freddy’s too while it’s stealing so much- when it has nothing to do with the plot? And murderous jellyfish? And somewhat good gore? Why did Mickey act like Art the Clown? Why would Dr. Rupert be using women’s bodies to make a bride for each of his murderers?

The ending makes no sense, and the sound quality is as good as a second wave of black metal record. I’m being kind to the sound design as that makes it seem lood. But hey- a killer mouse who is public domain. When do we get Amityville Mickey? Am I going to have to film it?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Aisha Osagie (Letitia Wright, Black Panther) is a Nigerian girl seeking asylum in Ireland. As you can imagine, she’s not treated well by anyone and is seen as less than nothing. Luckily, she has a good lawyer in Peter Flood (Loran Cranitch) and starts a friendship with Conor Healy (Josh O’Connor, Challengers).

Aisha may have a sad existence, but it’s better than the violence that she’s left behind, as her father and brother were both killed, and her mom has gone into hiding. She, much like so many of the asylum seekers that she befriends, can be taken away at any time, which means their lives start to feel almost meaningless.

Director and writer Frank Berry has put together a good movie that has flown under the radar and ended up on Tubi. It has so much to say about the world- the country, if you’re in the U.S.- that we’re living in today. It ends in a totally anticlimactic way, but even that makes so much sense, and it seems like it has to be that way.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Doesn’t Lionsgate feel above making cash in Amityville movies?

No?

Let’s look at the logline: “When Heather West, a paranormal investigator, receives a call from a terrified woman who claims her house is inhabited by a ghost, she discovers the building has a horrifying history. After a presence from beyond our world reaches out to her, Heather begins to feel a pull to the other side of the spirit plane. Can this hunter of specters deliver an innocent soul to a place of peace and discover an eternal truth in time to save her own life?”

Notice that Amityville is nowhere to be named. At least the Echo is the student news site of Amityville Memorial High School.

This was made as The Girl from the Other Side, and like all Amityville movies, it has nothing to do with the house or the place. It’s about paranormal investigator Heather West (Saran McDonald) and her need to learn what happened to Maryanne and her killer, Ronny Bushik (director and writer Carlos Araya). The owner of the house where it happened allows her to come in and explore, but as you can imagine, things get bad once the Tarot cards get dealt.

However, much of the movie is about Heather watching a TV show called Hauntings of the South and House On Haunted Hill. There’s a lot of voiceover, supers on the screen, and unconnected dialogue, making me think this was a foreign movie re-edited for American streaming. This movie wasn’t well-made, or there was something in between. That said, even as bad as it is, it’s still heads, shoulders, and bloody walls above most Amityville movies, but that bar is so low that you can’t limbo under it.

I have no idea why this was divided into chapters, why some scenes looked all gauzy, or why there were so many slow-motion moments. It’s trying to be arty, stumbling and then getting up and running full-speed into being arty all over again, but it never gets steady, so it runs right into a wall and kind of pauses a bit before it falls down.

How did this end up on Peacock? I could see Tubi, but people are actually paying to watch this!

Watching The Projectionist last week and then this, I felt like I was seeing the open and close of director and writer Harry Hurwitz. Now I have to go back and watch his Harry Tampa movies and Safari 3000.

Hosted by Tony Randall, this is a fake doc about the life and films of Max Roeebling (James Coco). It’s very ZAZ in that it keeps throwing jokes at you and unless you’re as obsessed by the history of bad movies as I am, you just might hate this.

But for those of you who want to take the ride…

Adequate Studios has been around since the 1930s and just copies what everyone else is doing. Hollywood epics (but dirty). Shakespeare (in animal costumes). A more violent Three Stooges. And somehow, Bruce Willis, Robert Downey Jr., Stiller and Meara, Sinbad and Robert Townsend show up and we get to see the career of Baby Elroy and Young Hitler (which stars Robert Vaughn!,) which is just Hitler in George Washington’s story.

Not Necessarily the News fans will be happy to see Anne Bloom and Stuart Pankin, Brother Theodore and Professor Irwin Corey appear and Susan Dey sings a folk song and then goes down on someone.

Not all the jokes land. Most people who will review this on Letterboxd will hate it, because they didn’t grow up in a time when all movies weren’t instantly available and you could find this weird late 80’s movie in a video store and wonder, “How can all of these people be in the same movie?” I don’t care how many of the jokes work, I laughed at the We Are the World comedian part and Bob Elroy Meets Frankenstein. If a movie can make you giggle a few times, I say it’s a success.

I mean, Joe Franklin is all over this. That’s worth at least three stars alone.

You can watch this on YouTube.

With that VHS art, I wanted to love this. I thought it was going to be an under the city horror movie, but no, it’s action. John Willis (Doc Dougherty) is a cop that has lost his public standing thanks to an article by reporter Kim Knowles (B.J. Geordan AKA Forbes Riley; Splatter University). Then, they have to find a way to work together to stop attacks on New Yorkers led by the recently escaped mental patient Boris (Lennie Loftin).

Also released as Underground and Juez, Jurado y Ejecutor, this was directed by James McCalmont, whose only other director credit is for Escape from Safehaven. He did shoot American Tickler, The Satisfiers of Alpha Blue, The Rejuvenator and Voodoo Dawn, while also working as a gaffer on Let My Puppets Come, Gums, My Demon Lover and director of photography on Evolver, Fist of the North Star and The Silence of the Hams. That’s what I call a career.

The writer, Brian O’Hara, also wrote Rock ‘n’ Roll Frankenstein.

I wish I could tell you that this was some big find or worth the time to track it down. But it isn’t. If only I could report otherwise.

Look, when a movie has two martial artists named Joey (Tien-Chi Cheng) and Gary (Lu Feng), well, that’s all I need. Except that this movie is really as wild as it can get, a low budget film from Chang Cheh who decides that if he can’t get enough money to make a movie, he’s going to make the film version of some drug that hasn’t been invented yet.

Joey and Gary’s parents — Master Gan (Chang Peng) and Supervisor Zuo (Wong Tak-Sang) — are killed by some poison and palace intrigue. When Joey runs, he somehow ends up in Hell, where Satan Chris (Lee Kin-Sang) offers him the ability to come back upstairs and have the powers of nine demons, as long as the demons are given blood to drink and Joey knows that someday soon, he will also become a demon.

These demons are eight children who dance around and their mother (Wong Gwan), who starts so much of the blood raving. They live as skulls that Joey carries, but he can call on their power whenever he needs it. You know how the martial world works, however, as even when Joey gets revenge, the battles don’t stop and he starts to become the monsters he has been always destined to become.

Three of the Venoms — Chiang Sheng, Lu Feng and Ricky Cheng — are in this, but the reason to watch this is that it’s non-stop fog, neon lights, in-camera magic tricks and the kind of outfits that Chang Cheh likes to see men in: glam rock, but somehow more feminine, with heavy makeup. Also: there’s an ice skating fight and a Buddhist master saves the day with some spells.

I know of no other movie where the fights are called Joey and Gary. It really is something.

You can watch this on Tubi.