Shout out to Ator Moonbeam. He realized that I was missing this Jess Franco movie and sent me his DVD in the mail. Now, it closes out the second Jess Franctuary.

Maria Beltran (Rachel Sheppard) has become famous for writing Desperate Letters, a book that exposed her corrupt Caribbean homeland of San Hermoso. For some reason, she thinks that it would be a good idea to come home for a book tour despite getting death threats. While there, she meets up with several old lovers, including Beatriz Arenas (Tatiana Cohen), who she has a sapphic encounter with while a hidden camera records things, which the secret police use to blackmail her into doing assassinations for her, in-between Tora (Lina Romay) threatening her with sodomy with a curling iron and showing her the eyeball of her female lover.

Luckily, she has an ex-CIA ex-boyfriend named Leonardo Radek (Roger Pavlovich) who shows up and does capoeira and ninja stuff, killing people primarily by breaking their necks. Was I sad when he breaks Lina’s neck? You know it.

This film also led to Antena Criminal: Making a Jess Franco Movie, which showed what it takes to go to a hotel near the beach and allow Jess Franco to make a political thriller with surf rock, extended travelogue footage, zooms, extraneous lesbian scenes that are essential to the plot because they’re in a Jess Franco movie, dubbing which barely qualifies as the word, more zooms, Lina Romay being deranged and Linnea Quigley showing up just long enough to be top credited on the cover of the DVD yet meaning nothing to the actual film.

This was Franco’s 176th movie and I assume that when the hotel staff was on lunch break, he snuck into a conference room and pushed his zoom lens as far as it would go, filming several women with glitter all over their pubes.

This has some of the wildest—and by that, I mean borderline inept—action scenes in a Franco film, but it is missing things like diamonds, Dr. Orloff and Lina being more featured. In my dreams, this movie was mostly her and Linnea Quigley in a hotel room for three hours, smoking cigarettes while they discuss politics and Jess just goes wild with his camera. I don’t want AI to make movies, but I will accept my computer overlords if it can make that for me.

We live in a world that hasn’t seen a Friday the 13th movie since 2009, but films like Terrifier 3 have become big box office. People are hungry for slashers — they always have been — and if they’re not getting Jason Vorhees, they’re going to look for something new. Maybe Heart Eyes will be the answer.

Directed by Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within) and written by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon (Disturbia, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones) and Michael Kennedy (Freaky, It’s a Wonderful Knife), this is about a serial killer who shows up in a random town every Valentine’s Day and starts to kill couples. Whoever it is, Heart Eyes is now in Seattle, starting his murders at a spa and a winery. These murders end up nearly costing ad exec Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt) her job, as her new ad is all about couples dying. Her boss Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins) brings in Jay Simmons (Mason Gooding, Cuba’s son) to try to develop a new ad quickly; meanwhile, Heart Eyes is killing through Jet City and doesn’t realize that Ally and Jay aren’t an item.

What if Jay was in the same towns at the same time as Heart Eyes? What if a ring with his initials shows up at a crime scene? What if he gets arrested by detectives Zeke Hobbs (Devon Sawa) and Jeanine Shaw (Jordana Brewster), then handcuffed in the police station when Heart Eyes pays a visit? And what if this mixed a romantic comedy with a slasher that wasn’t afraid to get gory?

Heart Eyes reminds me of post-Scream 90s slashers like Valentine and Urban Legend. I say that as a positive. The killer’s look —designed by Tony Gardner, who also made the masks for Freaky, Happy Death Day and Totally Killer—feels giallo. I wish they lit the neon eyes more because that’s such an interesting image.

No slasher today can equal the glory years of 1978-1981, but Heart Eyes makes an effort. It feels like the candy you eat on the holiday, a whole Whitman’s Sampler that may not fill you up, but you don’t dislike the experience. It certainly has the actual stalk and slash moments that many modern films miss and a couple you want to see survive. That’s way better than we’ve been getting.

Madame (Sean Young) has left Darling (Lauren Ashley Carter) alone in a vast New York City building where she’ll be the caretaker. As you expect with possession movies, she’s told to never enter one closed room. She also finds an upside-down cross, and the last girl in her position threw herself off the balcony as if she were Holly flinging herself into the void at a birthday party.

Soon, Darling is seeing visions and crawls out onto the balcony herself, where she finds the words “Abyssus abyssum invocat,” which means “the deep calls to the deep.” A man Darling saw earlier, who recognized her as he picked up her new necklace, follows her home and explains how a ritual in the house once conjured a demon. She stabs him, claiming that Henry Sullivan must be punished.

By the end, Darling has confessed to Madame, “I think I’ll become one of your ghost stories now.” She also jumps off the balcony and the cycle repeats.

Shot in monochromatic grays, this feels like Polanski — Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Repulsion — yet never feels like a slave to those inspirations. That said, I’ve been reading lots of reviews that hated this. It hit right for me, all black mascara and freakouts, a perfect thing to watch in the middle of a gray and rainy Pittsburgh day.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Noah Hazard (Dimitri “Vegas” Thivaios) may love his girlfriend Lea (Jennifer Heylen) and their daughter Zita (Mila Rooms), but the true love of his life is his gold Lexus. However, he soon puts everyone in danger by helping his cousin Carlos (Jeroen Perceval) pick up Kludde (Frank Lammers) from prison and immediately go on a run to steal drugs.

Somehow this leads to a man having sex with Noah’s car, a criminal kidnapping his daughter, crazy stunts through the streets of Antwerp, this never leaves the inside of the car, which you would think limits the film, but thanks to animation and just plain strangeness, you never feel trapped.

Directed by Jonas Govaerts (Cub) and written by Trent Haaga (68 Kill), this is an example of a Tubi Original that moves to the top of the heap. If this is what it takes to get experimental foreign films to America, so be it, because I have no idea where else Hazard would fit in. It’s well-shot, the soundtrack is amazing — Thivaois is a DJ — and even has a strong message by the close. It’s in a world that is our own but not quite; it’s like a video game come to life.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Why is this Amityville movie better than almost all of the other cash-in films? SRS has put out so many of these, but not one directed by Matt Jaissle, the director of The Necro Files. So while this has all of the things you expect from an Amityville movie — scenes shot on camera phones and edited in to appear that actors are all in the same place, lots of Zoom calls, people screaming at the screen — it’s also strange enough that it keeps you engaged.

Stuart Birdsall (William Childress) has moved into a new house in Amityville, which he feels is the perfect place to experiment with VIC 3000, an AI program he invented.  I have to share the sell copy for this, because I love the capitalized parts: “The only problem is that the house is possessed, and now so is his PROGRAM. What began as a technology designed to make our lives easier has transformed into a SATANIC FORCE Hell-bent on making our deaths GHASTLIER.”

Have you ever wondered, “How do those people appear disconnected from the movie and seem to be in it?” That’s an IndieGoGo perk. When will I pay the money to be in one of these? Do you think Becca would stay with me if I spent money on that?

This has a possessed sex bot (Laura Reyes), a chubby longhaired and bearded hero — am I triggered? — who can do a roll under a garage door and has an attractive wife (Laura Schubring) yet all he does is yell on Zoom calls. I mean, did they film me down here in my horror basement? This also ends abruptly because there’s a sequel, Amityville VR. Yes, I will watch that.

If you haven’t watched 62 Amityville movies like I have—check out the Letterboxd list—you may watch this and think it’s horrible. But for those who have been through microbudget horror and keep watching these Amityville films, you will see the magic that this has and the others lack. I do wish the flying baby from The Necro Files was in it. That said, I want to say that it was in every movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Julian Pölsler and based on Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, this follows a woman (Martina Gedeck) who goes to the Austrian Alps hunting lodge of her friends Hugo and Luise. Somehow, she is cut off from all human contact when an invisible wall suddenly appears. She adopts her friend’s dog, Lynx, and learns just how strong she is when all alone in the world.

By the end of the film, she feels born again and just when you think that there’s a message in this, a man appears and kills one of her cows and — spoiler warning but I hated this — her dog. She shoots him, throws him off a cliff and buries Lynx. Why?

I wanted to like this more than I did. I love the slow-moving story and the way that it was shot. And yes, I understand the circle of life and that animals must die (a cat also dies in a windstorm). But the ending feels unnecessarily cruel. Maybe that’s the story, and this has no moral. Everything is left up to you, even the idea of the wall and what happens next. Maybe I’m an idealist, and I’d like to remember the woman, her cow, her cat and the dog making their yearly trip in spring to live on a mountain in happiness rather than the gory and nonsensical close.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I get why this documentary is made, but you have to ask yourself, “Is a TMZ documentary about how rough it is for child stars made by the very people who make it tough to be a young celebrity so difficult, not a snake eating its own tail?”

This is an hour long, but it feels like hundreds of years as we hear the same thing repeatedly, as public domain and TMZ footage is used as we hear the same story we’ve heard since, well, forever, just with different people. The public demands new stars, and then we also require the ritual where they are destroyed for our pleasure. At the same time, we furtively read about it online while preparing to pay too much for groceries and sneak a read of the tabloids that still exist in our rapidly non-print world. Or we watch it on TMZ, which seems to sicken me every time I hear one of its hosts and hear I am perpetuating this bullshit by even writing about it because I have OCD and feel the pull of having to write about every Tubi Original.

You should watch this, I guess.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I want to love this movie, but I don’t.

It has everything I should love.

It’s an auteur project by Anna Biller, who directed, wrote, edited, produced, scored and designed the clothes.

It’s shot on 35mm film.

It’s about a woman discovering herself through witchcraft.

So what gives?

Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson) is a widow returning to the dating scene. But nearly every man she gets with becomes too clingy, either having to disappear or die. Her apartment is great, her clothes and makeup are perfect, but nothing seems to work out for her.

I get what this movie is going for, but it feels so mannered and even meandering that it comes off as more like an artistic exercise than something with blood in its heart and loins. Say what you will about Eurotrash movies, but at least they got excited. This feels like it constantly tells you its references, points out where it got its color palette from, and reminds you how long it took to make all the costumes. But what about the actual movie? Do people just like this because it’s on the right side of sexual politics? Because, well, good for the movie, but that doesn’t instantly make a movie good.

There’s a time to have something important to say and not sledgehammer it home over a running time that feels like a Warhol stunt film instead of The Velvet Vampire, which this is indebted to. I could film my Letterboxd list, too, and it’d probably just as boring. But hey—this movie sure is pretty, right?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before Adopted even has its credits, ten-year-old Dylan (Jayden Aguirre) has already killed his foster family, a fact that no one believes except for Detective Dante Miller (co-writer Marques Houston). The story that he tells about a killer biker who came into their home seems a bit too wild. Yet, who can not believe a child? Indeed, all kids are innocent.

Nope. Get ready for a Chris Stokes take on The Bad Seed, but instead of killing another child over a handwriting contest, people of all ages get killed.

Carrie (Drew Sidora) and James (Daniel J. Johnson) have always wanted a family but can’t. Luckily — well, you know — they are able to adopt Dylan immediately and never learn that his past family died. He’s the perfect kid and even calls them mom and dad on his first day in the house. But in just minutes, Dylan and Ryan (Jahlil Muhammad) — the nephew of next-door neighbor Diane (Shalet Monique) — are playing with a real gun and faking deaths. He also gets way too into Melissa (Victoria Nuckles), who is much older than him, but Dylan is already coming on to her, and when she tells him that she has a boyfriend, he shoots both her and her mother, Diane.

Somehow, Carrie and Jamescano adopt a second child, Bella (Livy Neachell), days after Ryan kills himself mysteriously. Bella might be just as bad as Dylan, but he’s all for killing her before we find out by drowning her in a pool.

Dylan is my favorite Tubi villain now because he’s risen above being verbally abused by his mother and physically attacked by his father — his legs have been scarred and burned from being doused with boiling water — to turn the tables on everyone else, shifting from being a good little boy to suddenly questioning his parents’ abilities ranging from being able to raise him to even calling Carrie’s cooking out by telling her that he’s never had chicken this dry before. It’s incredible how good he is at being the worst child ever.

The end of this movie is something. I’m not going to spoil it for you—Tubi has already teased a sequel—but I didn’t see it coming. Moms will be thrown down the steps, fathers will be attacked, and police will be called. It’s really got the most “woah” cut to credits I’ve seen in some time, as well as a square-up reel PSA before the credits.

This may be the best Chris Stokes movie ever.

You can watch this on Tubi.

My brother has a significant sneaker collection. As I am to Joe D’Amato, he is to Nike. When I watched this movie, I recognized so many people who live for the next drop. But is it any different than collecting physical media, toys or comic books? Well, you can probably make more money investing in shoes.

I liked that this goes back to Chuck Taylor shoes and the world of athletic equipment, which all looked the same, as well as the athletes and brands that changed how we see shoes and sports. Beyond that, it goes into celebrities and shoe customizers, so if you have no idea what shoe collecting is about, this is a good introduction.

My brother could find a lot wrong with it, but he’s an expert. As someone naive to the scene, I thought it was a good hour to watch.

Directed by Sia Savvy (Gone Before His Time: Kobe Bryant) and written by Christine Nusbaum (Famously Haunted: Hollywood), this doesn’t shy away from some of the issues with shoes, from gangs wearing their colors to people being attacked and killed for their shoes, as well as the difficulty of even getting some Nikes.

You can watch this on Tubi.