I use movies to escape reality, and here I am, watching something that I don’t want to because my OCD demands that I watch every Tubi Original and fuck me; if I don’t cross this one off my list, I won’t sleep well and feel like something terrible is about to happen.

“From Tesla to Twitter, Elon Musk has become the most influential businessman ever, but it required the masses to support his seemingly unreachable visions — the cult behind the man.”

This is about the people that worship Elon Musk more than who he is. It also immediately feels dated because as of February 2025, every day is ten years, like we’re living in the Catholic idea of Hell, where each second is 10,000 years. We are in shock and awe, a world where someone can seig heil a crowd twice. Everyone has an excuse and tells us not to look too much into it, but everything is being dismantled. An efficiency group named after a dog meme and Bitcoin have ruined the careers of numerous people, but yeah, an overwhelming part of the country — 50% is pretty close, right? What are you, a mathematician? — voted for this.

It’s hard for me to write about this without revealing what an utter cynic and unbeliever I am. I hate when people make articles about movies about them instead of the film they watched, so I should probably close out here.

This is a documentary about people gushing over the fact that they’ve had a minute-long chat with Musk or that he retweeted them. Parasocial relationships lead to an oligarchy. Watch it at 11 or whenever you choose to watch the news.

You can watch this on Tubi.

El fontanero, su mujer, y otras cosas de meter… (The plumber, his wife, and other things to mess with…) is not a Jess Franco-directed movie, but it does feature his muse, Lina Romay and was directed and written by Carlos Aured, the director of Horror Rises from the Tomb, The Mummy’s Revenge and Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll. If you watch Euro horror, sooner or later, the same actors and filmmakers that you enjoy will inevitably do adult films. You should not be offended and be happy they could keep making films and money from them).

Mario (Ricardo Díaz) is a plumber continually offered favors by every woman he works for. He loves his wife (Montserrat Prous, Un silencio de tumba, Demon Witch Child), so he turns them all down. Then, he catches her in bed with his best friend and decides to start taking what is offered. And when one of the ladies is his best friend’s wife (Lina), this seems like the best way to get back at those who did him wrong.

Imagine an Italian sex comedy, only with Lina wearing a man out so completely that she has to use a toilet plunger to get off.

Aured also made Apocalipsis sexual with Sergio Bergonzelli (Blood Delirium), which was shot in both explicit and R-rated versions. Aured discovered that the Spanish porn industry had not yet learned the secrets of staying performer ready and rigid; these days, Viagra solves this.

Let me suggest that if you’re flying to Texas, take the time to watch as many movies on the plane as you can. I’d wanted to see Reagan for some time and figured there was no better way to watch it than on an iPhone screen while trapped thousands of miles above the Earth, wedged between two people at 6:10 AM, while all I had to eat was packages of Biscoff cookies delivered by air hostesses.

Based on Paul Kengor’s 2006 book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, this starts as Russian politician Andrei Novikov (Alex Sparrow) arrives at the home of former KGB agent Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight) to learn why America defeated Communism. But did we? Oh well — let’s just go with it, right?

Ronald Reagan (Dennis Quaid; also Tommy Ragen and David Henrie when he was a kid) is the son of a mean drunk and a saint (Jennifer O’Neill!) who becomes a born-again Christian, lifeguard, radio announcer and, eventually, movie star. Despite losing his status as a leading man, he becomes the President of the Screen Actor’s Guild and battles the commies as they try to take over Hollywood. Horrible people like Dalton Trumbo (Sean Hankinson) and union bosses. This costs him his marriage to Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari), but he soon rebounds into the arms of Nancy (Penelope Ann Miller) and begins his political career.

Along the way, we get cameos from all sorts of Hollywood stars, as if this were The Greatest Story Ever Told 2K24, but instead about Reagan. Robert Davi? You’re Leonid Brezhnev. Olek Krupa, the bad guy from Eraser and Home Alone 3? Gorbachev. Dan Lauria is Tip O’Neill. Lesley-Anne Down is Margaret Thatcher. C. Thomas Howell as Caspar Weinberger. Pastor George K. Otis, who foresaw that Reagan would become President if he “walked uprightly” before God? It’s Pat Boone, in a scene with Chris Massoglia playing Pat Boone, that threatens the space-time continuum. Darci Lynn, who has been credited with the revival of ventriloquism, is a drowning girl. Kevin Sorbo is a holy man! Scott Stapp from Creed is Old Blue Eyes! What? Yes!

John G. Avildsen died before he could make this. The director of Joe, Rocky and A Night in Heaven? You have no idea how much I wish that had happened. Instead, Sean McNamara, the man who made Bratz, came in.

The first cut of this was 3 hours and 40 minutes, and yes, I always complain about long movies, but I want that version. Give us The Gipper cut. My favorite part of this, however, is the people being mean to Reagan montage, as people hold up Silence=Death si, guns and see most of the Genesis video for “Land of Confusion.”

Regan was shot in Oklahoma due to a state tax rebate launched in 2020, as well as lighter COVID-19 restrictions. For some reason, there was a COVID-19 outbreak amongst the crew during the shooting, which used the Temple of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry as The White House. Nothing to see there.

The soundtrack to this is something else. There’s contemporary Christian artist — and Youngstown, OH native and member of Glass Harp — Phil Keaggy playing “Sweet Child O’ Mine;” Bob Dylan covering Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In;” Robert Davi singing Lee Hazelwood’s “This Town” and “Nancy With the Laughing Face;” a Clint Black take on “Take Me Home, Country Roads;” Scott Stapp’s “Swinging on a Star” and Gene Simmons performing “Stormy Weather.”

Kitty Kelly’s sexual revelations about Nancy Reagan never come up. And Scott Baio isn’t in this. Otherwise, 200 stars out of 5.

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.