If anyone other than André Øvredal directed this, I wouldn’t give it the time of day and wonder, “Why do we need a Dracula movie about things we already know about?” Yet the director of Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Umma generally gets a pass from me.

This was an adaptation of “The Captain’s Log,” a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was in development for twenty years. In most Dracula movies, we never see what happened to the Demeter other than it washes ashore in England, empty or occasionally filled with dead bodies.

Here, we get the story of new ship doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins), Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham), his grandson Toby (Woody Norman) and the crew of the ship, which includes David Dastmalchian as the quartermaster. Of course, Dracula (Javier Botet) and one of his slaves, Anna (Aisling Franciosi), are on board, lying inside a dragon-etched coffin.

What follows is Dracula systematically using the crew to bring him back to youth before he makes it to England, starting with the animals on board and moving up to the young child while feeding Anna. It’s a dark film—not just in how it was shot—with children and women bursting into flames, Dracula killing everyone in his path and even an ending that suggests a way for the story of Clemens and Dracula to continue.

Writer Bragi F. Schut came up with the idea for this movie while working in a Hollywood model shop where he saw the miniature of the Demeter used in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He and Øvredal have referred to it as Alien on a ship, which is a great way to explain the film. I enjoyed this way more than I expected and suggest you look at it.

Augustina Villeblanche (Lina Romay) runs a brothel where her primary duties are spending the days and nights in bed with her assistant (Rachel Sheppard). Two new girls (Carmen Montes and Fata Morgana) have come to work there, which mainly means whipping a man and shaving one another before they decide to eat the man. Such is a day in the late career world of Jess Franco.

Based on Marquis de Sade’s Augustine de Ville Blanche, ou le stratagem de l’amour, this is shot on video in an apartment — maybe the same place where Jess and Lina spent lived — that goes from black and white to color to video effects. Long, languid takes of nothingness; women touching themselves and one another, but presented in such a droning and near robotripping way that the only people who are going to care are those that made it and the devotees of Franco — hey, this is only the 182nd of his movies that I watched, so until I see them all, I am still a dilettante — who will write long and hard about it. So, yes, I guess — me.

I love that when Jess won the Honorary Goya Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009 for his contributions to Spanish cinema, all these photos were taken of him holding his award. In one of them, surrounded by the greatest examples of Spanish cinema, he stares directly at Penélope Cruz’s chest.

This is the man who summed up his work as “Blood… Tits!… fantastic!”

Flying into Texas, looking for a movie to watch, I saw this description: “The story of a group of teenagers in small-town Texas who unleash a deadly force after playing the famous game in an abandoned house where a grisly massacre once took place.”

I never played Spin the Bottle as a teenager because I was building the database in my brain that enables me to write for you every day, dear reader, giving you the facts that you didn’t need about nudie cuties and foreign ripoffs. I didn’t have seven minutes in heaven, but I can also tell you about Mamie Van Doren and Mickey Hargitay.

Somehow, this movie was two hours and four minutes, which is about an hour too long.

Cole Randell (Tanner Stine) has just moved to Houston, a place where his mentally ill mother Maura (Ali Larter) lives. Back in 1978, in his family home, there was a massacre, so of course, that’s where he’s going to live. Being a popular high schooler, he’s also going to get another kissing part– not a rainbow party; do you remember when people were worried about that? — going and another demon is going to kill everyone because, yes, that’s what I signed up for while my life was in the hands of the cockpit on this flight.

Cole makes the football team, and despite his mother telling him Don’t Look In the Basement — a much better Texas horror movie — he’s soon down there making kissy faces with Kasey (Kaylee Kaneshiro), Milla (Ryan Whitney) and Sophie (Angela Halili) despite the fact that horrific events once happened there. Maybe he likes having a fear boner?

Justin Long shows up as the sheriff, who is also the father of Kasey and worried about this new boy in town, while Tony Amendola plays the priest, who has ties to the last massacre and exists only to give us exposition.

This feels like the 2000s PG-13 horror cycle, when movies existed for only a week ann disappeared mercifully, forever. Chop it in half, show some of the killings and make it weird, not dull. I realize that’s easy for me to say, not having made it and going through all the work, but I don’t know how anyone would be pleased with what this ended up being.

I love watching movies on airplanes. Yes, part of it is sad that a creator makes a movie with hundreds of people, and I experience it on a small screen with minimal audio, but on the other hand, I concentrate more on the films that I watch while high in the clouds than I do those on the ground. I had a plethora of choices, and I decided, “Hey, Blumhouse.”

Chris Weitz may be better known for About a Boy and American Pie than horror movies. He also made The Golden Compass and The Twilight Saga: New Moon and wrote Star Wars: Rogue One.

As this begins, we meet Maude (Riki Lindhome from Garfunkle and Oates), Henry (Greg Hill) and their daughter Aimee, who have started using an AI house program, AIA. Their daughter goes missing, and Maude is attacked after the AI stops listening to them.

We don’t hear of AIA again until her creators — Melody (Havana Rose Liu), Lightning (David Dastmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans) — come to meet him at the ad agency where Curtis (John Cho) works. They want to get people over their fear of AI and prove it’s harmless. He’s given his own AIA unit to use with his family — wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston), daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) and song Cal (Isaac Bae) — to see how it changes their lives.

For the most part, it’s positive. It diagnoses that Cal has atrial fibrillation and helps Iris get out of trouble when her boyfriend posts a deepfake sex video of her. Yet it starts to feel like AIA is taking over their lives, especially when it recreates Meredith’s deceased father (Keith Carradine, totally playing a John Carradine role) in virtual spirit form. The problem? They can’t turn off AIA any longer, and she begins to activate the real people she now controls, like Melody and two videoscreen-faced killers who live in a van that end up being Maude and Henry from the beginning, convinced that Curtis’ family is some Pizzagate child slavery group.

This was a $12 million low-budget film that made $13 million, so it was exactly what it should have been: a profitable little movie that ended up being better than it should be due to its cast. Dastmalchian adds something to every role he plays, and Cho and Waterson are great as the couple trapped in their own lives by an unseen intelligence. The end is pretty ridiculous but also prescient, if that makes sense. In short, it was a success; it helped a West to-East flight pass quickly.

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 press release synopsis: “Girl power” takes on a new meaning in Girl’s Blood, the erotic action drama based on a light novel by award-winning writer Sakuraba Kazuki (My Man). Set in the seedy underbelly of Tokyo, the film by director-former action choreographer Sakamoto Koichi follows the lives of four women who join an underground MMA fight club in an abandoned elementary school in Roppongi. Every night, the women escape their mundane lives and troubled pasts — Satsuki (Yuria Haga) suffers from a gender identity disorder, Chinatsu (Asami Tada) ran away from an abusive husband, Miko (Ayame Misaki) is an S&M queen, and Mayu (Rina Koike) has a Lolita face — by stepping into the ring under unique personas and take on brutal fights in front of a spectacle-hungry audience. However, the women face a real enemy when two of the fighters fall in love.

If you’ve been hankering for a live action film combining Dead or Alive-style fighting action with both softcore scenes and drama addressing social issues, director Kôichi Sakamoto has you covered with Girl’s Blood (AKA Aka x Pinku). If you’re averse to fetishism and fan service cliches, this is not the movie for you.

The drama involving gender identity, psychological and physical childhood abuse, and domestic abuse is actually quite good, and though the fights involve a sometimes bewildering mix of MMA fighting with joshi professional wrestling costumes and gimmicks, these sequences are impressively staged and choreographed — although the mud wrestling scenes are on the lurid side of matters.

The pacing is questionable at times as the proceedings flow from fights to drama to sapphic softcore, but for the most part Sakamoto juggles things quite well. Girl’s Blood seems to be a film that wants to appeal to almost everyone by trying many different approaches. It means to entertain, and it does just that, though it will do so for different reasons depending on what the viewer likes — in other words, mileage will vary greatly.

From January 31, Girl’s Blood will be available on FILM MOVEMENT PLUS, which can be found on its own site at filmmovementplus.com or via Amazon Prime Video.

After a shipwreck, two Spanish sisters (Helen Garret and Flavia Mayans) and their teacher, Miss Muro (Lina Romay), find themselves alone on an island. Or they thought they were, as an old man was also there, living in a cave filled with the gold of the many ships that had wrecked into this place.

Based on 1945’s Los últimos de Filipinas, Jess Franco iso making his Blue Lagoon, except there’s a chimpanzee, and the girls’ clothes get stolen pretty early on. That means while this feels as close as Franco ever gets to a Disney TV adventure movie, it also has nudity from characters who are supposed to be in their early teens.

There’s also a talking parrot and Franco’s voice, as usual.

What a strange and fascinating movie, one that makes us consider what if Franco had never learned how to zoom into vaginas and instead madelow-stakess family adventure films that also have young girls becoming women and falling in love with fishermen, while the old man in the cave becomes the teacher’s husband and they swear their vows on a book by Kant. His movies fascinate me because they just can’t be expected; even if you give Jess a creative brief, you’ll get precisely whatever he wants to make, along with an opening that’s stock footage and fog.

Directed by Brian Taylor (who made Crank, Gamer and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance with Mark Neveldine and also directed the comic book adaption Happy! and Mom and Dad) and written by Taylor, Christopher Golden and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, this is the second reboot of the franchise and one I was wondering if we even needed. And then I watched it and was hooked — this may not have the budget of the originals, yet it’s the closest movies have come to capturing the wild zeal of the comic book.

B.P.R.D. agents Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) — a new character not from the comics — are riding a train, taking a supernatural spider back to headquarters for study when it escapes, causing the train to wreck and leaving them stranded in the Appalachian Mountains. The spider went wild because they’re surrounded by great evil, something that Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) has returned home to stop.

Years ago, thanks to Effie Kolb (Leah McNamara), he messed with magic and left behind his true love, Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), when the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale) came after him. He was left with a lucky bone that has allowed him to survive for years, but now he must put the supernatural menace in the grave forever with the help of Hellboy, who learns more about his origins and who his mother was.

This story is based on issues 33-35 of the comic book series. Even the ending, with the witch wearing the bridle that turns her into a horse, comes from the story. This gets the folk horror aspect of Hellboy right, something that didn’t really get to be part of Hellboy, Hellboy II: The Golden Army or the 2019 Hellboy. There are moments when characters explain the deep occult stories behind things or how witchballs are made, moments that could break the film for some but made it for me. I went in expecting to hate this movie and loved even a second, wanting more of how it tells its story.

Don’t be like I was and dismiss this because it doesn’t feel like the big-budget original films. Allow it to be a weird $20 million direct-to-streaming blast of weirdness, a film that has more in common with The Legend of Hillbilly John than a Marvel blockbuster.

When I was a kid, my dad told me, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” It’s always stuck with me, and no, I wouldn’t jump, too. However, viral challenges often come close to that idea, asking people to eat a spoonful of cinnamon or have ice water dumped on them. Those are the simple and safer ones. But as we go further, we get into more dangerous challenges, like the hot chip challenges or reckless stunts like falling off milk crates, and that’s when people start getting hurt.

Enter TMZ, which has made a documentary that warns us about the dangers of these viral challenges, even though their entire channel revolves around viral content. It feels like pearl-clutching, filled with “think of the children” panic, as if social media platforms should be responsible for policing foolish behavior instead of letting natural consequences take their course. Seeing people climbing milk crates like they’re mountains or allowing friends to choke them out is baffling. Meanwhile, you have Harvey Levin expressing concern while profiting off the chaos he condemns. TMZ is a site built on the spectacle of people behaving poorly for the entertainment of the masses.

Let’s not overlook the more significant issues, like rights being stripped away or how some people can express extreme racist views openly now. Meanwhile, someone else is simply eating cinnamon and getting a stomachache!

I ended up watching the whole thing, of course.

You can watch this on Tubi.