At the end of War of the Worlds: Annihilation, General Skuller (William Baldwin) is taking spaceships into space to colonize — attack — other planets after the planet Earth — destroyed by years of pollution — comes after the planet Emios. He sends Alice (April Mae Davis) through the wormhole that connects the two planets and has her use the Terra Modus to destroy our homeworld by creating a series of natural disasters.

Earth’s defenses are led by General Alfaro (Michael Paré), who coincidentally has an ex-wife named Sybil (Kate Hodge) and a daughter named Jill (Jessy Holtermann) who are studying that very same device. Yes, it’s the battle we’ve always wanted: Baldwin vs. Paré! Where does Eric Roberts stand in all of this?

Directed by Christopher Ray (Fred Olen Ray’s son; he also directed Mercenaries, Almighty Thor and Mega Shark vs. Kolossus) and written by Marc Gottlieb ( Time Pirates) — and produced by The Asylum — this really makes you wonder who the heroes and who the villains are. Maybe there aren’t any when it comes to war? Maybe we have no real choice over who are leader is going to be because both options are the worst possible? Is The Asylum making a deep point for us to consider? No, of course not. They just want to use disasters footage from other movies and have another series of movies to make money from. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what exploitation is all about.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro said that this was “a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story. I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback.”

He succeeded as this feels so close to the gothic Italian films I love, as well as parts of Hammer along the way, as heiress and author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) continually is visited by spirits who carry warnings of Crimson Peak, even in her childhood.

As she becomes an adult, she falls in love with English baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an inventor who is trying to revive the fortunes of his family’s clay mine. Her father thinks something is wrong with Thomas and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), so he pays them to leave the country, but not before Mr. Cushing is murdered. Sharpe takes her to England and his home, located above the clay mines, a place where the red dirt and snow combine to make a bloody canvas for a foreboding home. Meanwhile, Edith leaves behind Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who follows her to England to save her from the Sharpes.

Working with writers Matthew Robbins and an uncredited Lucinda Coxon, del Toro aims for a big movie here and succeeds. I watch this at least twice a year and am always so pleased with its scope and substance. The story of doomed romance and a deranged family is one that I return to for comfort, marveling at the colors and tones of this, wishing that more filmmakers would find inspiration in films like The Haunting. Nothing compares to seeing this on a real movie screen, just sitting in the dark savoring each moment yet I try to recapture that feeling with each watch.

Crimson Peak is a movie that I have been waiting for a company to make a UHD release of and I’m so excited that Arrow Video did it. As always, you get an incredible package that goes beyond just a stunning looking version of the movie, but also a massive amount of extras. They include audio commentary by co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro; The House is Alive: Constructing Crimson Peak, a feature-length documentary with cast and crew interviews and extensive behind the scenes footage; a Spanish language interview with del Toro; four featurettes exploring different aspects of Allerdale Hall; A Primer on Gothic Romance, a featurette with the director and stars talk about the key traits of Gothic romance; The Light and Dark of Crimson Peak, featuring the cast and crew discussing the use of color in this movie; Hand Tailored Gothic, a featurette on the film’s striking costumes; A Living Thing, a look at the design, modeling and construction of the Allerdale Hall sets; Beware of Crimson Peak, which has Tom Hiddleston giving a walking tour around Allerdale Hall; Crimson Phantoms, a featurette on the film’s amazing ghosts; Kim Newman on Crimson Peak and the Tradition of Gothic Romance and Violence and Beauty in Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic Fairy Tale Films by Kat Ellinger. There are also deleted scenes, an image gallery, and original trailers and TV spots.

It all comes inside limited edition packaging designed by Crimson Peak concept artist Guy Davis, which includes a double-sided, fold-out poster, four double-sided postcards and a limited edition 80-page, hard-bound book featuring writing by David Jenkins and Simon Abrams, an archival interview with Guillermo del Toro and original conceptual design illustrations by artists Guy Davis and Oscar Chichoni.

Crimson Peak is one of the films that I can point to as being one of the best movies made this century. I’m beyond overjoyed to have this fabulous release in my collection to celebrate it.

You can get the limited 4K UHD on the Arrow site and the blu ray release from MVD.

Directed by David Chung and written by Kan-Cheung Tsang, the second film in the In the Line of Duty series finds officer Michelle Yip (Michelle Yeoh) coming back to Hong Kong from a trip to Japan. Highjackers attempt to take the plane, but she stops them along with a security guard named Michael Wong (Michael Wong) and Interpol agent Peter Yamamoto (Hiroyuki Sanada). The bad news? Well, now they’re being targeted by the other members of the same mob family for revenge.

This movie blows away any action movie made yesterday or today, featuring an incredible nightclub assault, so much glass being broken I was wondering if it was sponsored by PPG, Michael’s family being wiped out by a car bomb, chase scenes that make you retroactively worry for the safety of everyone involved and an ending where Yip drives a futuristic tank into a trap laid by the big bad with him holding the body of her boyfriend on a crane.

In the Line of Duty 2 is filled with non-stop mayhem and violence, a downbeat tone and Yeoh embracing the opportunity to be the lead.

This was originally released by 88 Films in their In the Line of Duty box set, along with 1985’s Yes, Madam!, 1988’s In the Line of Duty 3 and 1989’s In the Line of Duty 4.

Now you can get the individual release. Extras include the audio being available in Cantonese and two different English versions. There are also new subtitles, commentary by Hong Kong film expert Frank Djeng, missing inserts, trailers and English trailers. You can get it from MVD.

Directed and written by Katherine Barrell (who was on Wyonna Earp and Workin’ Moms) and Melanie Scrofano (who was Wyonna Earp), Clickbait: Unfollowed has a group of influencers all invited to the SoShal Mansion — get it? — a place where they will learn how to gain more followers and become the important people that they have always wanted to become. Except, well, they keep ignoring the voice that gives them commands keeps hinting that they are going to die and the fact that the guardian robots — called Husbands — look like something out of Squid Game. They each must go live to their audience and explain why they should make it — like something out of a reality show mixed with social media — and whoever has the least followers is told, “You still matter, just not enough” before being messily dispatched.

Spoilers below the trailer. You’ve been warned.

Julie (Jessica Stanley) and her son Parker (played by Skylar Ball, voiced by Harry Pentecost) — who make unboxing videos as Parker’s Playhouse and are lying, because he’s fourteen and not ten — are the first influencers to be introduced, sent a special tablet — Willie Wonka-style — that brings them to the mansion, a place that is either curated or looks better on social media because everything looks better on social media.

They soon meet the others:

• Alpha male Ax$el Mega (Charlie Bouguenon) whose online name is @Ax$selErasteWealth and he’s obvious a crypto bro based on Andrew Tate.
• Workout influencer Kyle (Luke Volker), who goes by @PumpitKyleStyle and is the first. to die — spoiler warning after the fact — when he basically is exercised to death.
• White girl philosopher and yoga lover Gaia (Ashleigh van der Hoven) whose screen name is @GuruGaiaNamasteYogi and we first meet pouring her period blood all over a plant.
• Comedian Ami (Shermin Hassan) who goes by @MimiM33tsWorld.
• Peach (Roberto Kyle), who has a makeup social channel and goes by @PrettyInPeachMUA.

They are told that they will get $1 for each follower but only one person can win. What they don’t know is that the mysterious Sofia (Katherine Barrell) who has gathered them together has a past with Gaia, who recognizes her as the first followers start getting murdered. Spoiler again: If you go back and watch the credits again, you realize that we’re watching Sofia’s new face get stapled over her old ruined one.

Soon, everyone is trapped in the house, only given their new tablets with no connection to the outside world other than the new devices they have been given. After Kyle is killed, the next to be taken is Parker, as it is revealed that his mother paid for followers. He is placed in a small coffin and Sofia laughs that she wishes that they had another child to do an unboxing. There’s a coffin for Julie and she’s asked if she’d rather stay and play the game or join her son. She stays.

Gaia recognizes Sofia’s voice and her turtleneck. She asks where her sister Shalin (Melanie Scrofano) is, which shocks Sofia. The lights go out and we see the control center where the two are controlling everything. The sisters created Look Loop and became rich from it. Gaia worked for the ad agency that did their marketing. Sofia did the creative and Shalin programmed, which was perfect. Their platform, like all social media, was supposed to bring people together. Now, they are bitter because the CEOs who took over their company forced them out and made it addictive. And now, people become influencers and are famous and wealthy for nothing. Yet, as Sofia remarks, they aren’t psychos and it’s the audience deciding who lives and dies. She wants to prove that social media ruins lives and her sister Shalin just wants to make the company that stole her work lose money. As always, they are yin and yang.

It’s also revealed that Sofia’s face was destroyed by her sister as she fought security guards with office chairs. So their relationship is…complicated.

While Peach and Gaia try to find the sisters, Ax$el and Julie end up combining their efforts and after taking a little blue pill, consummating their business relationship. But Gaia is caught and tied to a giant circle made up of plants, forced to listen to her cringiest stories as she bleeds out, pleading that “It was an honest white woman’s mistake.” The hubbies continually stab her and she dies listening to the meanest replies that she has ever received on social media.

Finally, everyone must Survivor vote off the next person and Julie uses the sex she had with Ax$el against him, as he’s sodomized and filled with semen until he throws up blood. Yes, this movie goes there. That leaves just Julie and Peach, but what the sisters don’t realize is that they may have taken someone who actually has a sense of right and wrong. And what the final two don’t realize is that not everyone is dead.

I’m not going to spoil any more of this for you because the ending is so good. This movie came out of nowhere and just totally obsessed me. Barrell and Melanie Scrofano have made a movie they should be proud of and I can’t wait to see what they create after this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

You have to give Bruno Mattei credit for sheer force of will. At a time when most filmmakers retire — he was 76 when making it and died the very same year — he was hitting. the Philippines and making a zombie movie on digital video when the rest of his Italian exploitation filmmaking contemporaries were dead, retired or no longer relevant.

Dr. Sharon Dimao (Yvette Yzon, who was also put through the Mattei ringer in the first film in Mattei’s zombie saga, Island of the Living Dead, as well as The Jail: The Women’s Hell; she’ll return to play this role again in Dustin Ferguson’s Hell of the Screaming Undead) has already survived one zombie attack and spent years recuperating in Buddhist temple, hiding from the bosses that fired her from the Tyler Corporation.

Oh, you didn’t realize that Mattei was going to turn a zombie movie into Aliens? Let me remind you that this is the very same man who turned an Aliens movie into Terminator 2 with Shocking Dark.

Somehow, a member of the company named Paul Barker convinces her to head back to the island, along with a team of mercenaries who get to use Goldberg’s entrance music when they fight the walking undead. Somehow, there are also zombie little people, which thrilled me to no end, along with a plot stolen from Resident Evil and actual footage lifted from Crimson Tide. As if that wasn’t enough, the poster is an exact Xerox of Fulci’s City of the Living Dead.

Sadly, this was Bruno’s last movie. Everyone has to die some time, but if anyone could have lived forever, making scumtastic movies that cashed in on the latest trend, I wish that it could have been Vincent Dawn.

Many people have been credited with saying “Talent borrows, genius steals.”

They were talking about Bruno.

This movie — the sixth film in the series and a prequel — has no right to be as good as it is.

Yet here we are.

It starts with Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, so great in The Witch) learning that the Catholic Church is planning to bring the Antichrist to our world to encourage people to come back to the church. An older priest — Father Harris (Charles Dance) — tells him all of this, gives him a photo of a baby with the name Scianna and is then killed when a pipe graphically lands in his head and down his spine — this scene seems so much like how Brennan dies in the first movie — as stained glass rains down.

I was already sold.

As Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free) arrives from America to study at the Tanz Akademie — err, I mean, to become a nun at the Vizzardeli Orphanage — in the middle of the Days of Lead. As protests swell around her, she meets Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), who has been in her life since her birth, along with Father Gabriel (Tawfeek Barhom), Sister Silva (Sônia Braga), a strange nun named Anjelica (Ishtar Currie-Wilson) and her roommate and fellow student Olga — err, again, I mean Luz (Maria Caballero).

Margaret and Luz bond, deciding to go to a disco where the inexperienced American girl dances with Paolo (Andrea Arcangeli). As the rooms begins to spin, she passes out and wakes up back at the orphanage.

She soon becomes concerned about a girl named Carlita (Nicole Sorace) who has been confined by the nuns as she is said to have evil thoughts. At one point, Carlita shows Anjelica a drawing that disturbs her so much that she sets herself on fire, jumps off a ledge, hangs herself and falls through a window.

Brennan (yes, the same character played by Patrick Troughton in the original film, even if he’s said to be a Satanist in that movie) and Margaret believe that Carlita has been picked to be the mother of the Antichrist. When she sees Paolo one night, he tells her to look for the mark just seconds before a truck pins him to a wall. When she tries to hold him, Margaret walks away holding half of his body in an astounding moment.

Soon, she learns that she was impregnated by a demonic jackal — unlike the female one in The Omen — and is rushed to an abortion by two Catholic priests, which is as sacrilegious as it gets. Another car slams into them and she emerges from the car and suddenly she becomes Isabelle Adjani from Possession, seemingly now ready to give birth as she writhes in the filthy street.

Cardinal Lawrence watches over the birth of two children, a girl and a boy — the moment state his sex, the Jerry Goldsmith theme takes over — but Margaret is able to stab the priest and nearly kills her male child, but can’t. Luz stabs her and the conspiracy leaves, sending the entire place up in flames, the jackal burning and screaming. Carlita saves her and we see the two living in the mountains, just as Brennan finds them and says that she will be hunted down and that her son is named Damien and that he has been adopted by Robert Thorn and his wife Katherine.

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, who wrote the script with Tim Smith and Keith Thomas, this film feels like it takes parts of Rosemary’s Baby, Suspiria and the aforementioned Possession while being its own unique film. Stevenson directed the “Butcher’s Block” season of Channel Zero, which is a neglected series that more people need to see. I’m so excited that more people are getting to see her work with this film.

Stevenson understands that the real horror — more and more these days — is that women’s bodies are being taken from them. She told SciFiNow, “Do you remember that scene where Gregory Peck is holding Lee Remick in bed and she says “I think I need you to call me a doctor because I think I’m going crazy.” That is what I remember more than anything. Even as a kid, that terrified me because it first introduced the concept of people dislocating from reality and not knowing what’s real and what’s not real. That scared me as a kid but continues to scare me even now. Especially as a woman. I think a lot of our life is deciphering what’s a threat, and what’s not a threat.”

From the paintings in the orphanage resembling the ones that Bugenhagen finds at Yigael’s Wall to a young Father Spiletto running from the fire, foreshadowing his death in The Omen, this film has something for the fans that love the original but new viewers don’t have the need to see every film in this cycle of movies.

This is such a unique moment, as it’s not just a sequel but a prequel that feels like it adds to the original while being able to have the quality to be judged on its own. I’m still just shocked by it and how much I loved every moment.