Originally conceived as a two-part TV pilot, The Scarface Mob would go on to become one of TV’s most famous shows, The Untouchables. It takes place in 1929 Chicago, as Al Capone’s (Neville Brand) gang runs the city and is making money selling booze despite it being illegal. They pay off anyone they can but Federal Investigator Eliot Ness (Robert Stack) plans on brings together a team of men from across the country who he feels can’t be bought.

Desi Arnaz had optioned the rights to Eliot Ness’ book about fighting Al Capone and decided to turn it into a two-part episode of his show, the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, under the title of The Untouchables. Westinghouse paid $200,000 for the two shows, but Arnaz put up his own money to get a better looking product and to hire Stack and Brand. He sold the rights to the film in Europe to make up the difference.

Brand would return for two episodes of the show, which were also released as a movie, Alcatraz Express. There’s also another two episodes that become a third film, The Guns of Zangara.

Stack, who was most famous for this show until Airplane and Unsolved Mysteries, based Ness on the three bravest men he had met: Audie Murphy, his former roommate and war hero Buck Mazza and stuntman Carey Loftin. He said of the men, “All three had one thing in common. Tthey were the best in their fields and they never boasted!”

Director Phil Karlson was a film noir director and he fits this story, which was written by Paul Monash, who created Peyton Place and wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the Salem’s Lot TV miniseries.

According to the Italian-American Herald, “Italian-American actors and publishers who expose and perpetuate the stereotype image of Italians as mobsters, wife abusers, hitmen and cheats as it has since the debut of The Untouchables in 1959.” This is where, as always, I remind you that there is no such thing as the Mafia, but I’m Italian. I am legally bound to write this.

That said, everything about The Untouchables — good and bad — starts here. If anything, you can enjoy just how off the rails Neville Brand is.

The Arrow Video blu ray of The Scarface Mob has great extras, such as a video essay on the film and the career of director Phil Karlson by film critic David Cairns; another essay by Philip Kemp on the career of Eliot Ness and his depictions on film; a trailer and a gallery of original posters, lobby cards and publicity photos provided by The Scarface Mob and The Untouchables archivist Kelly Lynch.

It’s all inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jennifer Dionisio and also comes with six postcard-sized lobby card reproductions, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jennifer Dionisio and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and liner notes on The Untouchables by Dan Lynch and Kelly Lynch.

You can get it from MVD.

Made by The Asylum, this was directed by Brian Nowak (Jurassic Domination) and written by C.M. Dowling (Super Volcano) and M.L. Miller (Shark Waters). This takes place in The Armada Hotel, which is under construction when an earthquake shakes the city. It traps Brian (Matthew Gademske) and his girlfriend Amy (Angela Cole). While he knows that she’s diabetic and worries about her condition, he doesn’t know that she’s pregnant. Along with the architects Deb (Jenny Tran) and Joe (Pakob Jarernpone) and the person in charge of the construction, Reese (Houston Rhines) and several other future victims, they must try to get out of the building or die trying.

Most of them die, no spoiler needed.

A whole bunch of attractive people get killed by everything from malfunctioning elevators to flooding and even a helicopter bisecting them. The first part has nearly no effects and instead uses the building — which has fallen into the underground — to good effect. Then they get to the surface and that’s when The Asylum remembers that they have to have lots of CGI, some bad, some not as bad, and there’s even a great moment where the survivors try to escape a flood by driving through a parking garage before smashing into a wall because of bad driving.

I love 70s disaster movies so much and always hope that modern movies can get close to them. This has the spirit, if not the cast of famous people, but is missing the budget. That said, if you just want to chill out, stop thinking and enjoy what citywide destruction looks like on a low budget, who am I to hold you back? I just wish that there were sharks in the water when it flooded or that this went crazier, but as it is, it moves fast and won’t bore you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Frank Henenlotter is an instrumental figure in grindhouse and exploitation film lore. In addition to rescuing many low-budget sexploitation and exploitation films from being destroyed, he made three Basket Case movies and Brain Damage. This is one of the few movies that upsets Becca so much that she refuses to watch it.

Duane Bradley arrives in the grimiest and scummiest New York City with a locked wire basket that contains his formerly conjoined twin, Belial. They were separated against their will and Belial has always resented it, pushing his brother to get revenge on the doctor who cut them apart.

Our hero — well, such as it is — falls in love with a nurse named Sharon, but Belial tries to rape her, can’t perform and kills her instead. Is it any more frightening if I tell you that Belial is basically a rubber glove on Henelotter’s hand? Duane attacks his brother and they fall out of the apartment to their death.

Don’t worry — the brothers survived to make it to the sequel, as well as another film after that where Belial got a powered exo-skeleton. The brothers also show up in the subway in Henenlotter’s Brain Damage.

Critic Rex Reed’s was quoted on the poster for this movie, saying “This is the sickest movie ever made!” He had heard how gross the film was and sought it out. As he left the theater, someone asked him what he thought. He didn’t realize that that person was Henenlotter and as a result, he was furious that he was being used to promote this movie.

The bar scenes were shot in The Hellfire Club, an S&M bar in Manhattan. The crew had to hide all the sex toys and swing, but left behind the buzz saw that killed the boys’ father as a gift. That very same crew was so offended by Sharon’s death scene that they all walked out rather than continue filming it.

The Arrow Video 4K blu ray release of Basket Case has so many extras that I can’t even get my head around it. There’s a 4K restoration from the original 16mm negative by MoMA along with two audio commentaries (writer/director Frank Henenlotter and star Kevin Van Hentenryck and a second with Henenlotter, producer Edgar Ievins, actor Beverly Bonner and filmmaker Scooter McRae).

There’s also a short film, Basket Case 3-1/2: An Interview with Duane Bradley, interviews with Van Hentenryck, Henenlotter, Beverly Bonner, Florence and Maryellen Schultz, producer Ievins, casting person/actor Ilze Balodis, associate producer/special effects artist Ugis Nigals and Belial performer Kika Nigals and even Joe Bob Briggs.

There’s also a feature-length documentary on the entire series, a location feature, a video essay on conjoined twins by Travis Crawford and Slash of the Knife, a Henenlotter short that has much of the same case.

Want more? There are trailers, TV and radio ads and Belial’s Dream, an animated short by Robert Morgan. All inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck with a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck and a collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Michael Gingold and a Basket Case comic strip by artist Martin Trafford.

You can get it from MVD.

Daniela (Tamara Almeida) and her husband Jaime (Jason Diaz) have seen better days. He was once a star athlete but got hurt, so now all he does is play video games and get more depressed while his wife cooks, cleans and makes all the money. He resents her, because she reminds him of the great past that he once had. She wants out so that she can have a future.

While talking with his friend Miguel (Milton Torres Lara), the conversation gets around to what Jaime should do now that it looks like he’s heading for a divorce. His wife has a $500,000 life insurance policy, but when Miguel suggests they kill her, Jaime reminds him how much he loves his wife.

However, one of her fellow nurses and her best friend Rosie (Erica Deutschman) has a crush on Jaime and takes a photo of Dani consoling a cop named Noah (Brett Geddes)who saved her from a homeless man who was attacking people inside the hospital. It isn’t even a romance yet, but it’s already upset Dr. Will (Connor McMahon), who has an infatuation with Dani, and when Miguel sees the photo, he decides that yes, his wife must die.

Miguel decides to pull the job but he gets nervous and struggles with Dani, whose hand is on the gun when it goes off. She has no idea what to do, so she hides the body and calls Noah instead of 911. He reacts so much unlike how she expected, telling her that she’s going to hurt his career. That said, he does help her hide out until she figures out what to do next. As she waits in a trailer, she’s using her house’s cameras to watch what Jaime is doing.

Antonio (David Chinchilla), Miguel’s brother, wants revenge a lot more than Jaime. He decides that he’s going to be the one to kill Dani and get the money. Noah, who falls for women in trouble, wants to help her. Jaime has no idea what he wants. Dani, however, is the kind of heroine who will do whatever she has to do to get away from all of these men and the various things they need from her.

Directed by Lisa Soper (the production designer on Peacemaker, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and The Blackcoat’s Daughter) and written by Huelah Lander (Twisted Neighbor), this film has a wild color palette that feels like people live inside a Mario Bava film, as well as some great character work. Rosie is one of the most horrible, self-centered and awesome villains I’ve seen in a movie in some time. And Dani ends up being stronger than anyone else, making unexpected decisions and pulling herself out of the mess her life has become.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The first time I heard about Sean “Puffy” Combs was in 1991 when he promoted an AIDS fundraiser at the City College of New York following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold and in a rush to get to the stage, nine people died.

From my outside the rap knowledge world — I mean, I love Public Enemy, Black Sheep and random songs — I always some him as a pretender, as someone who tagged along with the superior Notorious B.I.G. and then used his death to get ahead.

The last couple of months have been really wild, to say the least.

This whole thing started in 20017 when Cindy Ruela, a former personal chef for Diddy, filed a lawsuit against in L.A. County Superior Court claiming that the artist sexual harassed her. Then a few years later, his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura accused him of rape, sex trafficking and physical abuse, as well as blowing up her boyfriend Kid Cudi’s car. These suits were paid off, but then there were more cases, including some claiming revenge porn was used as Diddy filmed women and used it as blackmail.

By February of this year, Combs had five lawsuits, including one by Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, a producer who claimed that he was raped by Diddy and forced to have sex with sex workers while others watched and filmed him.

It all led to the March 25 raid of Combs’ homes in Los Angeles, New York and Miami y the Department of Homeland Security. In response, Macy’s pulled all of his clothing and soon, others would follow suit.

As this is written, nothing has been decided in court and much of the charges in this are rumors. But man, when there’s smoke, there’s often fire. If you need caught up on a situation in pop culture fast, these TMZ Tubi Originals will do it for you.

Now where’s the Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake breakdown for us old white people?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Ted Campbell (Final Heist), who co-wrote the script with Richard Pierce, This Never Happened is all about Emily (María José De La Cruz) who is the next in her family’s history of being able to see the dead. After all, her grandmother could as well and that’s why she lived out her days alone in a mental hospital.

Emily goes with her boyfriend Matteo (Javier Dulzaides) to his father’s funeral in Mexico City. Afterward, his mother Melora (Andrea Noli) tells him that the house will be sold in a few days. Matteo’s friends — Olivia (Conny Cambambia), Ale (Juana Serrano) and Nica (Gonzalo Zulueta) — decide that one weekend in their old house would give them closure.

You know what happens next.

I mean, Matteo even says to Emily, “You forgot to take your pills.”

Here are a few words of advice for the characters in this movie but well, they’re all dead so it’s hard to say, right? Don’t go back home with your boyfriend. If his friends all seem like drug addicts and may have put drugs in your drink, don’t trust them. If you can see the dead, maybe leave instead of dealing with that big toothed monster in the swimming pool. And if you buy Tarot cards, make sure they’re not razor sharp, no matter how good the scene is, because you’re going to die.

I think that Less Than Zero properly prepared me for a life of hating rich people. This movie is much the same, as they the thing that never happened is — spoiler warning — a girl being drugged and assaulted by several of them at a party in this same house. Now, her spirit wants revenge and is swimming in the pool, activated by those magic crystals that got thrown into the water. That’s more advice. If you have magic objects, don’t be throwing them into the pool.

Then again, I am all for rich kid comeuppance and this movie delivers on that. Tubi horror has been getting better and I’m hoping that a year from now, we’ll all be amazed at hust how far they’ve grown. Until then, this has a nice budget, an attractive cast and a scene where a blender leaks blood everywhere. Can you really ask more from free?

You can watch this on Tubi.

I usually make fun of the TMZ crew but this episode of their Tubi specials gets into how they fight for the First Amendment. Sure, it’s over the Mel Gibson drunk driving case, but the idea that the LAPD would get a search warrant for all of their phone records to out the source who told TMZ about four pages deleted from the arrest report is insane. It’s even legal to do that now after the Patriot Act.

This time, Hollywood’s biggest lies — yes, it’s right there in the title — are exposed. Like did Kim Kardashian and her mother engineer her sex tape? What happened when Jussie Smollett claimed that he was attacked in a hate crime? Did Milli Vanilli really lipsync their songs? And yes, what really happened with Mel Gibson?

It’s really incredible how much of this cuts through things that are accepted and shows us what really lies beneath Hollywood. Sure, these stories are all rather innocuous when it comes to lies, but the Gibson one, as I mentioned earlier, goes much deeper than I thought it would.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The TMZ crew all gets together and yells at one another about the dumbest celebrity decisions, like how T.I. wanted to be there for his daughter’s gynecologist visits and to be sure she was still a virgin. According to Global News, his daughter said that T.I. had been going with her to these doctor visits since she was 14 or 15 and she “couldn’t have said no” to her dad when he asked to join for the appointments. She also revealed on Instagram that she has harmed herself in the past to deal with her emotions.

Want even dumber? There’s Justin Bieber saying that Anne Frank would have been a “Belieber,” “Live for Now” the Kim Kardashian Pepsi commercial where she solves a protest and police unrest by giving a cop a soda — created by a team of white people and which caused Pepsi to have to write “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are removing the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position.” — as well as the celebrity “Imagine” video during the COVID-19 era and Adam Levine cheating with a woman and using his band’s Instagram account to send messages.

Of all of these decisions, the fact that I watch multiple Tubi TMZ shows in a row to write about them on this site may be among the silliest.

That said, this is just like lying on my grandmother’s bed with a stack of National Enquirer, Star, National Examiner and Globe newspapers and tearing through them, learning about Liz Taylor’s sad last days and who was on drugs, who was on the watermelon diet, who was a friend of Dorothy and who was a cheat. Those are some of the best days of my childhood.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Quinn Walker (Susan Ateh) has just returned to detective work after the death of her police officer husband, a man who everyone loved and who she knew as an abuser. She’s kept that a secret from everyone but most essentially from her son Liam, who idolized his dad. She’s become even more of the mean mom that he forced her to be, keeping her son from his interest in detective work and using true crime websites to help others solve crimes.

On the first day back on the job, she nearly shoots a suspect who ends up being an actor in the middle of a scene. It gets her noticed and while some of the press is bad, many see her as a hero for the way she tried to save someone, even if it was on a movie set.

She’s also just been assigned a new partner, Carter (Jay Rincon), a London detective who has come to America to — as we learn later — find the murderer of his father. They don’t get along and she doesn’t trust him, but her son sees him as someone worth knowing.

In the middle of all this drama, there are also murders.

Mia Bailey is the hottest actress in Hollywood and she’s about to star in a movie based on her friend Anna’s (Roisin Browne) script, Blind Items. At the same time, there’s a blind items website that reveals who will die next, from Mia in the place where her career started to her business manager Jason Cohen (Luis Donegan-Brown) and almost everyone connected to Mia and Anna, who came to the city of dreams together, living with a circle of friends, all of whom are either dying or suspects, like Ozzie, a former military veteran and now spiritual healer.

As Quinn tries to deal with her grief, her new partner and being a mother, she starts to depend on her son, who is able to find clues that she never saw and use the internet way better than she ever would be able to. However, this puts him in danger.

I really liked Quinn’s boss, Captain Ellis (Doña Croll), who has a really great scene with Quinn where she explains that she knew that she always had a hard time being the wife of someone that everyone saw as a much better person than he really was.

The strange thing is deciding to have a London detective in the U.S. When does this ever happen? It’s kind of strange, but not enough to put me off the movie.

Director and co-writer — with Daniel Mahler Landman — Nanea Miyata also directed A Party To Die For, another Tubi Original. I liked how whoever is behind the murders goes through some twists and turns, using Quinn’s recent incident in the news against her. And by the end, there’s a moment that makes who the killer is up in the air, as the messages haven’t stopped on the site.

You can watch this on Tubi.