TUBI ORIGINAL: No BS: Hollywood Brawlers (2024)

The funniest part of this video is watching Melvin Townsend III act like a maniac to fellow passengers while drunk on a JetBlue trip from San Francisco to Florida. He followed this by harassing Mike Tyson, who responded as he should, by repeatedly punching the man in the face. Look — if you’re on a JetBlue flight and want to act like a loser, don’t do it when one of the most dangerous fighters ever is within striking distance.

This special would have been better if several people with boxing abilities were let loose to repeatedly smack, punch and smack the TMZ crew as they loudly speak and laugh. It would have added some meta content to the whole thing instead of watching iPhone videos of rap celebrities slap boxing in the streets.

I call BS on this whole thing, because where is the best celebrity beatdown ever, when Bjork realizes that reporter Julie Kaufman has followed her to Bangkok and responds to “Welcome to Bangkok!” by delivering the kind of critical beat down that you would never expect from her singing voice.

You can watch this on Tubi.

TUBI ORIGINAL: TMZ Presents: Famous & Naked (2024)

Famous people are no longer suing Celebrity Skin or upset about sex tapes leaking. Now, thanks to OnlyFans, they’re doing it themselves. But is this a good thing for them or bad? Is the money worth it?

Of course and yes.

This TMZ documentary features some folks you may know — Sopranos star Drea de Matteo, Danity Kane singer Aubrey O’Day and Bella Thorne — with other you may not, like former UFC fighter Paige VanZant, creator of INSANITY Shaun T, Wizards of Waverly Place actor Dan Benson, Ultimate Queer Love reality star Lexi Goldberg, model Carlotta Champagne, former national champion amateur wrestler Georgio Poullas, tall woman Marie Temara, “Cash me outside” Bhad Bhabie and model Belle Delphine.

You’ll discover their reasons for doing this, the good and bad, and why they keep doing it. It’s refreshing that this doc is so sex positive and doesn’t shame anyone involved.

You can watch this on Tubi.

TUBI ORIGINAL: VICE News Presents: Searching for Masculinity (2024)

What makes a man? Is it physical strength? Success? Money? This VICE special tries to get to the bottom of that, from seminars that are meant to help men harness their true nature to infamous cases where masculinity goes too far.

One of them is Andrew Tate, former professional kickboxer and social media personality. The king of toxic masculinity has nearly 10 million followers on Twitter and is well-known for his misogynistic views. He’s made his money with webcam models and online courses. Things fell to pieces at the end of 2022, as Tate and his brother were arrested in Romania as part of an investigation that started with rape, human trafficking and sexually exploiting women and has expanded to charges of trafficking minors, sex with a minor, money laundering and attempting to influence witnesses.

This is a strange trip into the manosphere, a place of alpha masculinity, misogyny and anti-feminism. From incels and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) to pick-up artists (PUA) and fathers’ rights groups, these groups are all about pushing back against what they see as feminists and their hatred of men.

According to journalist Caitlin Dewey, you can reduce the complexities of the manosphere to these two simple truths: They believe that “the corruption of modern society by feminism, in violation of inherent sex differences between men and women and the ability of men to save society or achieve sexual prowess by adopting a hyper-masculine role and forcing women to submit to them.”

This is, at times, a rough watch. To me, there is no strength in this type of mindset. Watch it and make up your mind yourself.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Long Jeanne Silver (1977)

Dragon Art Theatre Week (September 8 – 14) Pssst. Hey…buddy… you wanna see some naked movies with your mom in em? This stuff here is premium split tail in action, my friend, straight from the vaults at Something Weird Video. It’s all the HARD X stuff on the SWV site that I could find on Letterboxd and let me tell you, when I say HARD X I mean it! These movies show it all baby, whatever sort of freaky shit you’re into, these movies have got it. Nipple clamps, ice cubes on the balls, lesbos, homos, cumshots, whips, leather, you name it! Plus we got air conditioning and the cleanest bathrooms on the deuce. Just step inside … and if you need some luudes or a lid talk to my man Shifty over at the popcorn counter. Tell him Klon sent you.

Jeanne Silver was born in Tempe, Arizona with a missing fibula in one leg , which meant that the bottom half of it had to be amputated. After running away to New York City at the age of 16, she danced in clubs — she had already started that back home at 15 after being busted several times for burglary — before posing for adult magazines and performing in adult films.

Directed by Alex De Renzy, this is a collection of scenes with Jeanne that doesn’t shy away from showing off her leg. It begins with her looking at her own centerfold in Cheri before looking right at you, the viewer, and saying, “My name is Long Jeanne Silver and I’m handicapped and horny! Due to a quirk of nature I was born with a bigger dick than John Holmes, and baby, you better believe I know how to use it!”

When this played Hollywood sin palaces after Mike Weldon bought it, people kept walking out and what seemed like a sure-fire sensation wasn’t drawing. That’s because the scene where Jean takes a young man’s backside offended people. Go figure. Johnny Legend, the future director of My Breakfast With Blassie, had the job of figuring that out and then going from theater to theater to trim that moment of onscreen gomorrahy.

Today, Silver is alive and well in Arizona. She even showed up in Clownado a few years back. Her kindness is something to take notice of, as she routinely keeps in contact with her fellow actors and even handles funeral arrangements for them. She never forgets a birthday, either.

As for this film, you may be offended by it, but it shows that everyone has a right to sexual expression. If anything, Jeanne’s birth defect didn’t handicap her. Instead, it just opened her world to some wild adventures.

CANNON MONTH 3: Night Creature (1978)

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

If you want to see what Donald Pleasence movies I’ve seen, here’s the Letterboxd list. I love him because he was a working actor. Like John Carradine, he was there when you needed him. And at times, he’d show just how good he was. But he’s a workmanlike — in a good way — presence in so many movies.

Directed by Lee Madden (The Night God Screamed, the Alan Smithee who made Ghost Fever) and written by Hugh Smith (second unit director of Abby, writer of The Glove), Night Creature has Pleasence as Axel MacGregor, a writer and big game hunter who has unleashed a deadly black panther and doomed everyone around him which is a real problem as his daughters Leslie (Nancy Kwan, Wonder Women) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes) have just come to town along with Ross (Ross Hagen, who also produced this movie), a guide who seems pretty sleazy.

All this movie should be about is Pleasence hunting this animal that has already hurt him and he’s brought it to his turf for one last battle. You have the great thespian monologuing and trying to imitate the big beast and man, his eyes bugging out and him snarling and that’s the best.

At times, I’m given to just yelling out Pleasence line reads, like “The evil is gone” and “I shot him six times.” I celebrate him eating at a salad bar in 90s giallo. I’ve read that he drank through this entire movie and I in no way want to judge him for that. My memories of the actor are always wonderful and he lives again every time someone watches one of his films, whether he’s playing a President, the devil or a preacher who turns into a warthog.

This was released by Dimension Pictures and rereleased by 21st Century.

CANNON MONTH 3: The Forest (1982)

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

The Forest is unlike any other slasher you’ve ever seen. Sure, it has murders in the woods, campers and stalking scenes. But it gets weirder than almost any other slasher would dare, pushing itself to the edge of absurdity while subverting anything you’d expect.

The killer — John — is played by Gary Kent, a stuntman whose work extends from his debut in Battle Flame through the films of Al Adamson and Roger Corman, emerging as the inspiration for Cliff Booth in Once…Upon A Time In Hollywood and the subject of the documentary Danger God. He’s not just a killer in this. He’s not just a cannibal. He’s a killer cannibal haunted by the wife and children that he murdered in a fit of rage.

Two couples — Steve and Sharon plus Charlie and Teddi — have decided to go into the woods for a vacation. The girls meet the ghosts the first evening, as they first meet the kids and then are confronted by their mother. If a ghost can be insane, hers definitely is.

When they were all still alive, the woman slept around on her husband to the point that he killed her, took off for the woods with his kids and watched them commit suicide, which was finally made him lose his mind and became the hermit human flesheater we meet in this film, the kind of maniac who’d feed a man his girlfriend.

The craziest thing about this movie is that Sharon ends up being the real hero — not just a final girl — and the two men are shown to be, at best, victims and at worst, total morons. Only she is capable, strong and able to survive, perhaps because she has connected to the dead children of the killer.

Even stranger, she was played by Tomi Barrett, who was the wife of Kent.

Shot in 13 days, this movie doesn’t get mentioned enough. Don Jones, the writer and director, would also Who Killed Cock Robin?The Love Butcher, Schoolgirls In Chains and Sweater Girls — all quality films.

21st Century rereleased this as Terror In the Forest.

CANNON MONTH 3: Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976)

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

American-International Pictures’ Blacula was a big success. Its director, William Crain, and AIP wanted to make more black films that were classic stories retold for a new audience. What’s interesting here that while adapting Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the evil side of Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey) appears to be a mix of King Kong, Frankenstein’s Monster and an evil white man.

Pride may be a celebrated and wealthy African American medical doctor, but as he fails to discover a cure for cirrhosis of the liver — along with his colleague Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash) — he begins to experiment on himself and others. Coming just a few years after the way our government treated the Tuskegee airmen with their syphilis experiments, this feels like not only a crime against nature, but a black man attacking his very race.

By the end, he’s killing sex workers and their pimps, leading the police to Watts Towers, where he climbs upward — again, like King Kong — before being shot and falling to his death.

This also had the working titles The Watts MonsterHydeSerum and Decision for Doom. Along with the aforementioned BlaculaScream Blacula ScreamSugar HillBlackensteinJD’s RevengeAbbyGanja and Hess and Petey Wheatstraw, there are some other black-themed horror films from this era but not enough. Later films in the genre that I would recommend are BonesDef by Temptation and Tales from the Hood.

How incredible is it that the South Korean VHS release of this had the Iron Maiden artwork from Killers on its back cover?

21st Century rereleased this as The Watts Monster.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CANNON MONTH 3: The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973)

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Supposedly, The Devil’s Wedding Night (AKA Full Moon of the Virgins) was all Mark Damon’s idea. After being in House of Usher, Damon had moved to Italy and appeared in movies like Black Sabbath and Johnny Yuma.

Perhaps this idea was the start of his producing career, which was more successful than his acting job. Damon was planning on selling the movie an American production company. Luigi Batzella (Nude for SatanThe Beast In Heat) was picked to direct, but most people believe that Joe D’Amato stepped in and finished the film.

I’m a firm believer in this theory because there’s a moment near the end of this movie where an otherworldly Countess Dolingen De Vries rises from a bathtub of blood and fog and writhes near nude on the screen and somehow going beyond the confines of the screen to destroy my mind. I generally try my best not to turn reviews of movies with atrractive women into male gaze spectacles, but Rosalba Neri is absoutely iconic in this moment, a perfect scene that is never discussed nearly enough.

There’s also a magic vampire ring of the Nibelungen, which is gigantic costume jewelery and therefore better than any Hollywood baubles, village girls with sacred amulets of Pazuzu (yes, really), five virgins getting sacrificed all at once in an express line of bloodletting magic, three different twist endings in a row, tripped out Dr. Who looking tunnel moments, D’Amato billing himself as Michael Holloway and going absolutely wlld capturing every inch of womanly curves and an incredible setting, the Castello Piccolomini Balsorano, the same place Lady FrankensteinBloody Pit of HorrorCrypt of the VampireThe Lickerish Quartet, The Blade MasterSister EmanuelleThe Bloodsucker Leads the DanceThe Reincarnation of Isabel, Farfallon, Pensiero d’amoreLady Barbara7 Golden Women Against Two 07: Treasure HuntC’è un fantasma nel mio lettoBaby Love and Put Your Devil Into My Hell were all shot at.

Plus, Xiro Papas, the monster of Frankenstein 80, plays a vampiric giant.

If you’re a fan of the harder side of Hammer, then allow this female vampire to obsess you as well.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: I Hate My Body (1974)

Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!

All hail León Klimovsky, who directed this absolutely deranged movie and co-wrote it with Solly Wolodarsky. “The brain of a man… the body of a woman… the sexual horror story of our time!” That isn’t all of it. Man, this starts wild and gets even stranger.

An engineer named Ernesto (Manuel de Blas) is out on the town with his friend and some ladies when he gets injured in a car accident. He wakes up in a hospital room where former Nazi doctor Adolfo Berger (Narciso Ibáñez Menta) takes his brain and places it into the body of Leda (Alexandra Bastedo, The Blood Spattered Bride), a gorgeous woman. The doctor wants to keep him/her prisoner in a hospital room so that he can prove that he’s the first person to perfect this surgery.

What’s wild about this movie is that while Leda gets to live out some of the fantasies of Ernesto — yes, there is a lesbian scene, there’s also a scene where he whips Adolfo’s wife and nurse Lydia (Gemma Cuervo) and she likes it — but the truth is that this sets itself up as sleaze and then, just as you’re savoring the sin, it reminds you of the male gaze, how women are mistreated in the world a half century after this movie and that most people are no closer to understanding gender change now.

Ernesto also wakes up to a world where his wife Mary (Maria Silva) has already moved on to marry his best friend weeks after he has disappeared. There are also moments that when Leda is being pushed around by men, we see her as her male self. It’s a really intriguing way to frame what’s happening inside her, even if she’s a murderous maniac at times who sets a hospital on fire to kill the doctor who put her in this state.

Actually, I have lost track of the pronouns and apologize.

In Italy, this was known as Super Sexy Vamp, a title doesn’t really match what we are watching. That said, Leda quickly learns how to become a femme fatale. She engages in an insurance scam that Mary was planning and even picks up her former dead body, which has to be weird and yet she wants money and that worry never even is discussed. She’s already spent most of the movie learning that she can have the same qualifications as a woman that she did as a man and only find work as a secretary or in manual labor. If she can use the body she’s been given to get ahead, she has no issue.

Then, because this was 1974, this has to end with a downbeat ending. Or maybe evil in any sex needs to be punished. Or sometimes shock endings just are demanded.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Honeymoon of Terror (1961)

Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!

In around an hour, Frank (Doug Leith) and Marion (Dwan Marlow) get married, go to Vegas on their honeymoon, take in a Tex Ritter show, then head off to an island where a maniac with a club foot (Anton von Stralen) stalks her and waits until he leaves. Then, he unleashes his fury on the newlywed bride while her husband goes to get supplies.

Also known as Ecstasy On Lovers’ Island, it has Frank coming back only to get choked out and his wife having to stab the man whose feet we see for most of the movie — over and over — to survive. Maybe that strange man was just upset that Marion had an internal monologue saying things like “God really knew what he was doing when he made the sun!” and was hoping this was a nudie cutie and she wouldn’t disrobe.

The “Directed By Perri” is Peter Perry Jr. He also made Kiss Me Quick!My Tale Is HotMondo ModThe Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet and the seventh Taboo. He also edited Blood of Dracula’s Castle and Horror of the Blood Monsters. He has a Joe D’Amato level amount of other names, including .J. Gaylord,

You can watch this on Tubi.