According to Glowstream, “Forty percent of all missing persons are people of color, according to the Black and Missing Foundation. However, only 13 percent of the US population is African American. The stark contrast between the amount of people of color missing in the US and the population number is why the state of California created the Ebony Alert system, a resource available to law enforcement to alert the public about suspicious and unexplained disappearances of Black people.”

This movie opened my eyes about this.

This documentary focuses on Brittany Clardy, Shamari Brantley and Krystal Anderson, three Black women who were killed after their status as being missing was botched. Often, police believe that women of color have just run off with their boyfriend and make excuses, while white women become national news stories.

Hearing the pain of the family members is hard, but knowing that they’re doing something is inspiring. The family of Clardy has been working with Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and New Jersey representative Bonnie Watson Coleman to establish an Office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls within the Department of Justice.

Black women are murdered at a 300% higher rate than white women and make up 40% of missing persons cases, “a disproportionately high number relative to population size,” according to Teen Vogue.

I’d never heard of White Girl Missing Syndrome until this, and again, this entire doc by Jan Hendrik Hinzel, Alexis Johnson and Arlissa Norman is so informative. I’m glad it’s on a free streaming service like Tubi, as I feel it must be seen.

You can watch this on Tubi.

What if there were two — well, for now — Mickey Mouse public domain slashers both set in arcades?

Once called Mickey’s Mouse Trap, the film was announced on January 1, 2024, the same day Mickey’s Steamboat Willie version went into the public domain.

Rebecca (Mackenzie Mills) is the only survivor of a mouse massacre. She starts to tell her story to some cops in the framing device and we learn that her boss Tim Collins (Simon Phillips) got possessed by watching Steamboat Willie and killed all of her friends, including Alex (Sophie McIntosh), who gets a surprise birthday party in the arcade where she works. Let me tell you, workplace birthday parties are the worst, because you spend your whole life there anyway and suddenly, a place that gives you trauma is supposed to be a source of fun.

This was filmed in Funhaven in Ottawa, which has Ottawa’s only roller coaster.

For some reason, the evil Mickey can teleport and is afraid of light. A lot of this movie feels like it was barely edited together and they keep going back to the police station scenes to cover things, which kills the slasher vibe. If you expected nothing, The Mouse Trap is ready to award you with abundance.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Why do I do this to myself?

Once called The Mouse Experiment, this even has a dumb logline: “The film follows a group of friends stuck at a fairground amusement park hunted down by a mutated rat – Steamboat Willie.”

Yes, Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, so we will get stuff like this instead of making Amityville movies. And Screamboat. And The Mouse Trap. And Mouseboat Massacre. And The Mouse Trap: Welcome to The Mickeyverse.

I swear I will not watch all of these movies, like Amityville and Ouija, and keep posting them.

I’m lying and hate myself because I’ve already watched two of these.

Directed by Brendan Petrizzo and written by Harry Boxley (Popeye’s Revenge) and Marc Gottlieb (Snow White and the Seven Samurai), this has Dr. Rupert (Chris Lines) creating killers like the well-named The Killer (Lewis Santer), who looks like a Spirit Store version of Mickey by way of Hot Topic. There’s also The Bear (Stephen Staley), wearing the same mask as the killer from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and the two have to compete to see who can get the most body parts.

Is Pooh in the same universe as Mickey now? How many Mickey universes will there be? For all the people watching it, how many other than me picked it because Michelle Bauer and Geretta Geretta have voice cameos? Why is this set in a video game place (Knightly’s Fun Park Towyn, North Wales’ premier holiday entertainment complex)- other than it’s trying to be Five Nights at Freddy’s too while it’s stealing so much- when it has nothing to do with the plot? And murderous jellyfish? And somewhat good gore? Why did Mickey act like Art the Clown? Why would Dr. Rupert be using women’s bodies to make a bride for each of his murderers?

The ending makes no sense, and the sound quality is as good as a second wave of black metal record. I’m being kind to the sound design as that makes it seem lood. But hey- a killer mouse who is public domain. When do we get Amityville Mickey? Am I going to have to film it?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Aisha Osagie (Letitia Wright, Black Panther) is a Nigerian girl seeking asylum in Ireland. As you can imagine, she’s not treated well by anyone and is seen as less than nothing. Luckily, she has a good lawyer in Peter Flood (Loran Cranitch) and starts a friendship with Conor Healy (Josh O’Connor, Challengers).

Aisha may have a sad existence, but it’s better than the violence that she’s left behind, as her father and brother were both killed, and her mom has gone into hiding. She, much like so many of the asylum seekers that she befriends, can be taken away at any time, which means their lives start to feel almost meaningless.

Director and writer Frank Berry has put together a good movie that has flown under the radar and ended up on Tubi. It has so much to say about the world- the country, if you’re in the U.S.- that we’re living in today. It ends in a totally anticlimactic way, but even that makes so much sense, and it seems like it has to be that way.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Doesn’t Lionsgate feel above making cash in Amityville movies?

No?

Let’s look at the logline: “When Heather West, a paranormal investigator, receives a call from a terrified woman who claims her house is inhabited by a ghost, she discovers the building has a horrifying history. After a presence from beyond our world reaches out to her, Heather begins to feel a pull to the other side of the spirit plane. Can this hunter of specters deliver an innocent soul to a place of peace and discover an eternal truth in time to save her own life?”

Notice that Amityville is nowhere to be named. At least the Echo is the student news site of Amityville Memorial High School.

This was made as The Girl from the Other Side, and like all Amityville movies, it has nothing to do with the house or the place. It’s about paranormal investigator Heather West (Saran McDonald) and her need to learn what happened to Maryanne and her killer, Ronny Bushik (director and writer Carlos Araya). The owner of the house where it happened allows her to come in and explore, but as you can imagine, things get bad once the Tarot cards get dealt.

However, much of the movie is about Heather watching a TV show called Hauntings of the South and House On Haunted Hill. There’s a lot of voiceover, supers on the screen, and unconnected dialogue, making me think this was a foreign movie re-edited for American streaming. This movie wasn’t well-made, or there was something in between. That said, even as bad as it is, it’s still heads, shoulders, and bloody walls above most Amityville movies, but that bar is so low that you can’t limbo under it.

I have no idea why this was divided into chapters, why some scenes looked all gauzy, or why there were so many slow-motion moments. It’s trying to be arty, stumbling and then getting up and running full-speed into being arty all over again, but it never gets steady, so it runs right into a wall and kind of pauses a bit before it falls down.

How did this end up on Peacock? I could see Tubi, but people are actually paying to watch this!