ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: Paris in the 1930s. Struggling actress Madeleine and her best friend Pauline, an unemployed lawyer, live in debt in a cramped flat. Opportunity knocks after a lascivious theatrical producer who made an inappropriate advance towards Madeleine turns up dead. Adapted from a 1934 play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil and featuring a murder’s row of a supporting cast.

Every so often, a film comes along that truly reminds me of why I love a certain genre of movies, and even film in general. Director François Ozon’s French comedy The Crime Is Mine (Mon Crime) is just such a work, for both cases. 

The dazzling performances! The witty dialogue! The gorgeous costumes! The sumptuous set design! Director/co-writer Ozon, his co-writer Philippe Piazzo (original playwright Georges Berr also receives a credit), and his cast and crew nail virtually every aspect of creating what is to me a near-perfect film. 

Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is a young actress hoping for her big break. A famous producer tries the casting couch approach with her and is found murdered shortly after her visit. Thankfully, her friend and roommate Pauline (Rebecca Marder) is a budding lawyer who takes on Madeleine’s court case when the latter is accused of the killing. Though innocent, Madeleine pleads guilty for the publicity. The trial becomes a public sensation followed closely by tabloids on each side of the accused. Not much has changed since Berr’s and Louis Verneuil’s play premiered in 1934, so the theme of women trying to stand up to men in power is still highly relevant.

Tereszkiewicz and Marder are delightful in their lead roles. The Crime Is Mine boasts subplots aplenty, and the supporting players bringing the many interesting characters to cinematic life are all fantastic, though too numerous to mention everyone here. Isabelle Huppert as scheming actress Odette Chaumette, Danny Boon as a kind supporter of Madeleine’s, and Fabrice Luchini as a bumbling judge are three of the main supporting performers.

The pacing of this fun farce is frenetic, and Ozon works in social themes that linger despite the decades that have passed since the play and screen adaptations on which this film is based. The Crime Is Mine is a blast, a respectful throwback to golden age comedies.

The Crime Is Mine, from Music Box Films, is currently screening on OVID. For more information, visit https://www.ovid.tv/.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: Freshly tossed into a private Catholic high school by his devout mother, John (Jake Ryan) falls head over heels for a devious classmate ready to push his faith (and morals) to the brink with a series of increasingly uncomfortable actions, all in the name of love. 

You don’t have to have attended Catholic high school to fully appreciate writer/director Chris Merola’s terrific debut feature dramedy Lemonade Blessing. Its awkward, cringe-inducing, heartbreaking, and triumphant themes and scenes are relatable to everyone who has been a teenager or is currently going through those difficult years. 

Jake Ryan is marvelous as John, a freshman at a Catholic high school who lives under the strict rules of his strongly religious mother, Mary (Jeanine Serralles). The poor fella can’t even have a few moments of self-gratification in the tub without his mom hanging outside the door, haranguing him. 

Socially awkward John befriends some male classmates whose ideas of how relationships with girls should be handled come from watching porn videos. He soon falls for Lilith (Skye Alissa Friedman) — you’ll notice a pattern in certain character names — a girl with issues of her own, and whose strong personality John is no match for. She gives him increasingly unnerving tasks to perform to continue dating her, which leads the boy to question his faith, his behavior, and his place in the world.

Merola superbly balances the dramatic elements of John’s existential and philosophical journey with comical sequences — both of which are calculated to make viewers squirm and wince, from awkward makeout scenes filmed close up to blasphemies galore. 

Ryan and Friedman are outstanding as the teen couple navigating their first attempts at romance, and Serralles also shines as John’s struggling mother. The supporting players all give top-notch performances, as well.

Along with all of Lemonade Blessing’s awkwardness and discomfiture, the film boasts a big heart. It’s a truly remarkable coming of age story for today, but one that is highly relatable no matter a viewer’s age.

Lemonade Blessing screens as part of the 2025 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 4–15 in New York City. For more information, visit https://www.tribecafilm.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, voice-over artist, and sometime actor and stand-up comedian, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has made multiple appearances on Making Tarantino: The Podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine, the B & S About Movies Podcast, and the Horror and Sons website. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

One of my favorite obscure film genres is “films with comedy redubbing,” where filmmakers take existing footage and add a new, comedic soundtrack. Most folks-in-the-know would probably consider What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), as the first of its kind, a film where Woody Allen took a Japanese spy film and redubbed it to hilarious effect. But Jay Ward, the creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle, was there before Allen with his syndicated TV show Fractured Flickers (1963). Ward and his voice-actor cohorts, like Paul Frees, Bill Scott, and June Foray, used footage from silent films and turned Lon Chaney, Sr.’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame into Dinky Dunstan, Boy Cheerleader and Rin Tin Tin into Foam, King of the Mad Dogs. The beloved Ward was a genius, and his show was way ahead of its time. It could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best skits from SNL today. 

Over the years, there have been a few more of these Frankenstein-like creations: J-Men Forever (1979), created by The Firesign Theater, which used old Republic film serials and was a staple of the classic USA Network show Night Flight; Revenge of the Sun Demon, a/k/a What’s Up, Hideous Sun Demon (1983), a riff on The Hideous Sun Demon (1958), with a young Jay Leno voicing the title character; Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection (1985), a syndicated TV series created from public-domain features; and Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002), where comedian Steve Oedekerk, redubbed all the characters and injected himself into a Jimmy Wang Yu movie.* Los Angeles film archivist Mike Davis and his company Stag Films have done Sex Galaxy (2008), with footage from Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), and President Wolfman (2012), based on The Werewolf of Washington (1973). I recently saw Dead, White & Blue (2025), Davis’s latest film, at the wonderful Babylon Fest at the Babylon Kino in Columbia, South Carolina.

To create the “green movie,” so named because it uses recycled footage, Davis poured over more than 300 public domains films—mostly training and educational films from the U.S. government, military, and law enforcement—to create a zany tale about the KKK’s using a shrink ray (like in The Fantastic Voyage (1966)) in an attempt to retrieve an incriminating bullet from the body of a dead black man who was killed by a racist cop. And that’s just for starters, as the main plot takes various turns and digressions before ending with a hilariously over-the-top “Go Murica” image from some forgotten training film.

The festival audience got a kick out of Dead, White & Blue, as did I, even though it didn’t play in its optimal setting as a midnight movie. (And I’m pretty sure that for many of us in attendance, the ingested substances hadn’t even kicked in.) I can’t imagine how much work it took to find the footage, put it together into a cohesive narrative, and then retcon a funny dub track. (One thing in Davis’s favor was that his “lead actor” was in multiple films.) I suspect that you could make a dozen indie films in the time it took to create this small wonder. Many jokes, both broad and obscure, hit the mark. (I was the only one who laughed at this sly exchange between two characters: “What’s happening now?” “I liked the original better!”) My only quibble with Davis’s stellar editing and joke writing is that, at 87 minutes, the movie is about 15 minutes too long. Some judicious editing of the sluggish sections would put this film in a league with J-Men Forever, the platinum standard for this tiny genre.

Dead, White & Blue is currently on the festival circuit. Check it out. I’m going to seek out the two earlier films by Mike Davis. He’s an amazingly talented guy.

*I’m excluding films like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) with Steve Martin and Allen’s Zelig (1983), where actors interact with old footage without a completely new dub track.

I was starting to get worried. There hadn’t been a new Chris Stokes movie on Tubi for a long time and I wondered, has the well gone dry? I am happy to tell you that The Killing Cove is here and it’s his best one to date. It has the Tubi Movie Recommendations & Reviews Facebook group all over the place- angry, confused, fired up, loving it- and such a mess of emotions.

Sisters Sarah (Precious Way) and Kristen Donald (Madison Epps) have just moved to town with their college professor father, Charles (Tremayne Norris). The first night there, a college party gets out of hand, one of them gets roofied by a jock named Jeffrey  (Bishop Freeman) and now, they want to find out how to get justice. Or revenge. But soon, clouds of smoke start to appear on campus, sending their friends to their deaths, like something out of a krimi movie. Or a giallo! Yes, this is more Black Giallo from Stokes! I’m loving it!

Who could it be with all these red herrings? Friendly guy, lab-loving Wayne (Aaron Bryce Sheats)? Charles trying to get revenge on the girls for their outing him and his date raping ways? Or is it much, much deeper?

This is my 25th Chris Stokes movie, and man, his Tubi work keeps getting better. It’s as if someone who only saw I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream made giallo and krimi without knowing that those essences are inside the DNA of those films, the beating hearts that flow the blood through those filones. They don’t need to know where they come from; they only need to know that they are. Films that have moments where women ingest green gas that makes them bang their heads into walls until they’re dead, allowing a masked villain to get away with no trace. It’s no different than an Edgar Wallace novel, even if it has no idea who that is. The magic of film and of Tubi is that it can unite cultures that would never speak to one another to make something that entertains us.

You can watch this on Tubi.