Oliver (José Llamas) and Mary (Karin Dior) just wanted to go on a honeymoon. Still, their guides, Mark (José Miguel García) and Marco (Diego Porta) lead them to the lizard god-worshipping Tobonga tribe, who also eat people. Conchita gets lashed to a sacrificial altar just in time for this story to end, and we find a trio of martial arts students led by Lina Romay. I never knew how badly I needed to see Candy Coster in a karate gi. They decide to visit the Tobongas and steal their diamonds, in case you were wondering whether or not this was a Jess Franco movie. Finally, the karate instructors kill Sylvia, the wife of the jungle guide (Mabel Escaño); Lina Romay joins forces with Oliver to rescue his wife.

That parrot that talks? That’s Jess Franco.

This movie makes no logical sense, despite what I tried to figure out above. Why is Lina with the evil drug pusher karate instructors? Is she an undercover cop? Why does she decide to help Oliver? How did Jess Franco make a movie with nearly no sex? Was he trying to make an Indiana Jones movie infused with this love of pulp? Santiago Moncada wrote this ten years before, and one day, did Jess just think, “Sure, I can make that.”

Look, I know this objectively isn’t good, but I feel better watching these movies. They make me happy, something that’s in short supply in this world. Yes, what makes me feel good is ultra-low-budget movies that make no sense, but just look at Lina dressed for karate action and tell me if you’re not moved.

Directed by Justin Wu and written by Crystal Ferreiro, Mary Gulino and Tay Marley, this story comes from Wattpad, where amateur writers share their stories and potentially sell them as books and movies. That story? The QB Bad Boy and Me by Tay Marley.

Dallas (Siena Agudong) is a dancer who just moved to town. Drayton (Noah Beck) is a star football player with surprising depth. Dallas’ dad, Nathan (Drew Ray Tanner), is the new coach. Texas is the place where they meet, a place where football is the most essential thing every Friday night.

I enjoyed the fact that James Van Der Beek plays Drayton’s father, 25 years after Varsity Blues. The same problems of people wondering if they want a life in football are coming up in movies. At least this feels a bit more authentic than most teen romance movies. Sure, it still has the same issues as most teen movies — the guy is a ladies’ man, will he or won’t he change while the girl is always good — and the main reason they fall for each other is looks rather than character, but maybe I’m looking too deeply into this movie because I’m AARP age.

Everyone has secret grief, and once they share it, their relationship starts to mean more. What do I know? I got all my life lessons in romance from movies that led to most guys my age being incels and having strange notions of what courtship is.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When Skye (Dominique Madison) finally has enough of getting knocked around, she wants to finally get out from under the shadow of her abusive pro-athlete husband, Sandino Washington (Emanuel Alexander), while protecting her sons, Justice (Darian J. Barnes), Kareem (Alonte Williams) and Jordan (Mario Golden). That’s easier said than done.

Despite the beautiful home, expensive cars and unlimited bank account, Skye can’t be a punching bag anymore. But running away from the marriage and everything that comes with it, much less setting up new identities for her and her sons—who don’t all agree with leaving Sandino—is difficult. And he’s always out there, looking for her.

Directed by Emily Skye and written by Jamal Hill and Tressa Azarel Smallwood, this makes me wonder if ESPN even looks at athletes in this universe. Supposedly, Sandino is the most prominent athlete there, yet no one knows that his wife and kids are gone. Wouldn’t that be a bigger story? The ending is also pretty wild, as — spoiler warning — the protagonist shoots her husband and we cut to her playing football with the kids. The last thing these survivors of abuse and a dead football-playing dad would want seems to be more football. Is that why it’s America’s game?

There are better Tubi Originals. Trust me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

La chica de las bragas transparentes (The Girl In the Transparent Panties) is also known as Pick-Up Girls. It’s yet another detective tale for director and writer Jess Franco as private eye Al Crosby (Antonio Mayans) has been hired by a wealthy man named Harry Feldman to take his place at a meeting with a crime figure named Emilio (Miguel Ángel Aristu).

Nothing goes right. He’s drugged and photographed with two sex workers, Suzy (Lina Romay) and Bijou (Doris Regina), then nearly murdered by his client’s wife, all before he’s beaten up by even more women and ends up getting his rich patron killed. Maybe Mrs. Carla Feldman (Rosa Valenty) isn’t all that innocent. That means that Al will team up with the dead man’s mistress, Coco (Mari Carmen Segura), and Suzy and Bijou, who have been sent to prison, to get them out of the way to learn the truth.

So many questions. Is Al Crosby another name for Al Pereira? Why are there no diamonds being taken in this, like in every other Jess Franco plot? With their spy experience, are Suzy and Bijuo related to the Red Lips? And how many detectives find out that they’re looking for the missing penis of their actual client?

As always, I feel the urge to look deeper into a Jess Franco movie than anything else. Why does he do that to us? Was it intended? Or are we compelled to find something where there may be nothing?

Elliot Lester directed the Arnold movie Aftermath, which was good, and now he’s adapting this Joe R.  Lansdale Western horror story with writer Chris Kelley. It’s been a passion project of Peter Dinklage, who has been trying to make it for ten years. He plays bounty hunter Reginald Jones, a bounty hunter who hunts criminals with his partner Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe). They’re hired by Jack (Levon Hawke) to save the missing sister, Lula (Esme Creed-Miles), who has been kidnapped by Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis) and her gang.

This has some interesting casting, with Metallica’s James Hetfield playing Simon Deasley, the partner of brother Malachi (Macon Blair), two criminals hired by Bill to take out the bounty hunters. Plus, Jack also saves an imprisoned saloon girl, Jimmie Sue (Leslie Grace). And it all feels very The Great Silence and I mean that as a compliment. I really loved Lewis in this, as her character is covered in scars and has assumed a masculine role to fight back against the men who did her wrong, which has made her the villain.

I also loved how this is at the end of the West, as characters ride motorcycles and you get the idea that the modern world is just about to change everything for everybody. What makes me happy is that Tubi has picked this up and is giving people a chance to see it, as new Westerns — much less good ones — are in short supply these days. It looks gorgeous — cinematographer Guillermo Garza is incredible — and it’s great to see a Lansdale story become a movie. His story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” was used as an episode of Masters of Horror, directed by Don Coscarelli, who also made another Lansdale adaption, Bubba Ho-Tep. Other Lansdale films include Christmas With the Death, Cold In July and the Hap and Leonard TV show.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Toni (Tristan Cunningham) is being abused by her husband Marcus (Tarek Zohdy), and to find out how to get away, she sneaks away and attends Destiny’s (Meyon Jacobs) “Take It Back” empowerment seminar. After all, if Destiny could heal herself and fight back after a sexual assault, maybe she could teach Toni how to survive.

The problem for Destiny is that she’s not in all that great of a marriage either. Kendall (Leah Pipes), her wife, wants her to go corporate instead of helping women. These ladies could benefit from a Strangers On a Train-style path out of their bad relationships, which is exactly what happens. The problem is when Toni fulfills her end, and Destiny doesn’t exactly live up to her end of the deal.

Destiny also has a sister named Faith (Paigion Walker) who plans on marrying Senator James Hawthorne (Matt Marshall), while Kendall has eyes for Destiny’s assistant, Sufe (Emily Morales-Cabrera). When Toni learns that Destiny’s entire empire is based on her not exactly telling the truth, she decides that if her husband isn’t going to die, Destiny’s reputation will.

Directed by Dylan Vox (who also made Deadly DILF for Tubi) and written by Jeremy M. Inman (who wrote Sinister Squad and Avengers Grimm: Time Wars, as well as Hustlers Take All for Vox), this isn’t as good as even Throw Mama from the Train, but let’s hear it for it having a same-sex couple and gender swapping the story. The first part has the crazy energy I wanted this entire movie to have. I just wish it could have kept up the wildness.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Loulou (Lina Romay), Fifi (Brigitte Monnin), Gigi (Anna Gladysek), Mimi (Maria Mancini), Simone (Monica Swinn) and Coco (Pamela Stanford) — an all-star team of Jess Franco’s actresses — work at a brothel where they protect the rebels and their leader Carlos Ribas (Fred Williams). But when the government comes back into power, they arrest these women and plan on using them as a joy division for their troops until they escape and live in a convent.

As you can imagine, these ladies of loose morals get into some shenanigans. I wrote that sentence as if it were a one-line review in the TV Guide.

There’s a statement in this about government authoritarianism, but really, Line Romay, Pamela Stanford and Monica Swinn were all I needed to read to make me watch it. Also, if you looked at Maria Mancini’s name and wondered if she’s Carla’s sister, I want to thank you for making me not feel alone in my complete nerdiness. She’s also in Giallo in Venice and Seven Women for Satan.

No nuns in my childhood looked like Lina Romay, but I don’t think that ever existed outside of this movie.

A Roger Ebert “Dog of the Week” also known as The Great American Girl Robbery, Bus 17 Is Missing and Cheerleaders’ Naughty Weekend, Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend finds a bus filled with twentysomething teenagers — three teams of cheerleaders, including Kristine DeBell (Alice from the adult Alice In Wonderland and a former Ford model; she’s in so many movies that it’s hard to just pick a few, but let’s say The Big Brawl and Tag: The Assassination Game), Wally Ann Wharton (who has plenty of non-sex adult roles and is also in Last Resort), Leslie King (who would go on to write 1988’s To Die For), Lachelle Chamberlain (whose IMDB roles include Miss Teenage U.S.A., a young girl and pretty girl), Marilyn Joi (Cleopatra Schwartz!) and Lenka Novak (one of the Catholic High School Girls In Trouble) — getting kidnapped by the National American Army of Freedom, who are made up of ex-football players and one butch woman. They call their demands into DJ Joyful Jerome (Leon Isaac Kennedy) while Jason Williams from Flesh Gordon and Robert Houston from The Hills Have Eyes attempt to save them.

This is a scummy movie, but at least one of the sexual assault scenes was so dark it didn’t end up in the movie. When you look at the poster art, you’ll say, “This looks like a sex comedy.” But no. No, it’s kind of like if the SLA kidnapped the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Look at how dark this IMDB trivia is: “A brunette actress broke her left arm during production, and they avoided filming her left side through the remainder of the film.” We don’t even know her name.

When you see Bill Osco and Chuck Russell’s names on this, you know what you’re getting into.

It was directed by Jeff Werner and written by D.W. Gilbert and Williams, who conveniently wrote himself into the good guy role and got the girl at the end. These guys also made a movie in which women use striptease to keep their captives from killing them. But hey, you know the movies I like. This fits right in.

The MVD Rewind Collection release of this movie — what a great release for such a scuzzy movie and I applaud them for that! — has extras like two commentary tracks, one by director Jeff Werner, actress Marilyn Joi and editor Gregory McClatchy and the other with Kristine DeBell; interviews with DeBell. Joi, Jason Williams and Leon Isaac Kennedy; a photo gallery; an alternate title card; a trailer and a collectible mini-poster. You can get this from MVD.

1963: During the Cold War, CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) teams with KGB officer Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) to thwart a criminal organization. They must find Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), daughter of nuclear scientist Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel) and defeat Nazis who want to bring about the Fourth Reich.

Based on the TV series, this is an OK action movie, but it makes a mistake similar to so many remakes: Do we want the origin story? Or do we want to see Solo and Kuryakin already working together as part of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement? It’s cool when Hugh Grant shows up as Alexander Waverly, but for those who love the original show, will they love this? And for those who don’t know it, is this a spy film that is different enough?

I didn’t dislike what I watched, but the original show was a phenomenon. Yet, for a movie that took over a decade to happen, does it mean anything to anyone other than its small fanbase that’s still left, who may not enjoy the changes? Maybe I should stop worrying and enjoy watching Richie’s work, as this all looks nice.

The Arrow Video release of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has plenty of extras, including new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry; new interviews with co-writer/producer Lionel Wigram and Luca Calvani; Legacy of U.N.C.L.E., a new featurette celebrating the original 1960s TV series and its influence on the 2015 movie, featuring Helen McCarthy, David Flint and Vic Pratt; a featurette on Guy Ritchie’s films; archival features on the making of the movie; a trailer; an image gallery; a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Barry Forshaw and a reprinted article from CODEX Magazine on the film’s cinematography and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative. You can order it from MVD in 4K UHD or Blu-ray.