APRIL MOVIE THON 3: Ghosts (1996)

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April 23: Get Out! — A haunted house movie is today’s pick.

Ghosts began production in 1993 under the title Is It Scary? with the director Mick Garris and was supposed to play before Addams Family Values. For a time, it was the longest music video ever — Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” is longer now — and is still the most expensive at $15 million. That’s because it was all paid for by its star, Michael Jackson.

A lot of that money is because Jackson backed out of the original plan. Garris went to film The Shining miniseries and Stan Winston, who did the makeup and special effects, took over.

Unlike Thriller and Captain EO, two of Jackson’s long and expensive videos that were seen by millions and can still be watched in some places today, Ghosts has disappeared after playing before Thinner.

In a small town, The Maestro (Michael Jackson) loves to scare kids — Mos Def is one of them — and perform magic tricks. The town’s mayor comes to kick him out of town, saying, “He’s a weirdo. There’s no place in this town for weirdoes.” If this feels like how the public was treated Michael Jackson in 1996, it’s no accident.

Also: the mayor — as well as the ghoul version of the mayor and two other characters, Superghoul and a skeleton — is played by Jackson.

The Maestro challenges the mayor to a scaring contest and the first to show fear must leave town. He brings his entire family of ghosts to dance with him, then possesses the mayor. After that, the Maestro says that he will leave town, but falls to dust and then rises as the Superghoul. This makes the mayor so upset that he dives out a window, allowing the Maestro to remain.

I do have to say, a thing lost about Jackson after all his life’s controversies is just how good his music is. This features several I hadn’t heard before–“2 Bad,” “Is It Scary” and “Ghosts” from HIStory and Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix — and they’re really amazing. The dancing is great, too, as are the effects, if somewhat dated.

Of course, this was made after the first time that Jackson escaped child molestation charges and this feels like, well, that trial. Except it gets supernatural.

Written by Jackson, Garris, Winston and Stephen King, this has one jaw dropping moment, when Jackson becomes a dancing skeleton and escapes his mortal form. I’ve always wondered if he wished that he could do that in reality.

Nathan Rabin explained the end of this way better than I can and his words prove why he inspired me to write about movies: “Ghosts has a happy ending: The common folk and especially their adorable children welcome Maestro back into the fold and embrace him for being a showman and an eccentric with a straight line to the spirit world. In the real world, alas, Michael Jackson wasn’t as lucky. He had to die young and mysteriously to rehabilitate his terminally tattered image.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama 2024 Primer: Deathdream (1974)

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April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 26 and 27, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 26 are The Return of the Living Dead, the new Blue Underground 4K print of Deathdream, Messiah of Evil and The Children.

Saturday, April 27 has Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Escape from New York, Starcrash and Galaxy of Terror.

Sure, Bob Clark did A Christmas Story. And he did Porky’s. But man, did he make some dark films along the way, like Black Christmas and this one, which totally grabbed me by the throat and kept me thrilled from start to finish.

Andy Brooks has been killed by a sniper in Vietnam. Yet as he dies, he hears his mother’s voice say, “Andy, you’ll come back. You’ve got to. You promised.”

While Andy’s father Charles (John Marley, who woke up to a horse’s head in his bed in The Godfather and starred alongside his wife in this film, Lynn Carlin, in John Cassavetes’ Faces) and sister Cathy go through the five stages of grief, his mother is stuck in denial.

Yet her unwillingness to accept the truth is rewarded when Andy comes back to their home unharmed.

Andy isn’t Andy any longer though. He’s withdrawn and rarely speaks, spending his days sitting motionless inside the house. Stranger still, the police are looking for a hitchhiking soldier who killed a trucker and drained his blood.

Andy’s death and rebirth rip open long-festering wounds between husband and wife — Charles never gave his son love, only authority. Christine made him too sensitive. And what of Andy? Oh, he’s just attacking a neighborhood kid and killing a dog during the day, then becoming more alive at night, when he goes to the cemetery.

Meanwhile, Dr. Phillip, a family friend, tells Charles that he’s suspicious of the similarities between Andy’s return and the murder of the truck driver. Andy visits the doctor late and night and demands a checkup before killing the doctor and injecting his blood into his body.

Christine sets Andy up on a double date with Joanne, his high school girlfriend. In a harrowing scene, she explains how she wrote to Andy but felt like he was gone before he even died, that Vietnam had taken him. As she speaks to him, he starts to decay before her eyes before killing the girl and her friend, then running over someone else as he escapes from the drive-in.

Returning home, Christine protects her son from his father’s wrath. The man gives up and kills himself as his mother helps him escape the police. Finally, as the police corner them in the graveyard that Andy spends his evenings haunting, they discover his decayed corpse in a shallow grave, his tombstone carved by his undead hand as his mother throws dirt to cover her son.

The film takes many of its beats from the W.W. Jacobs story The Monkey’s Paw, yet shows the struggles of PTSD at a time that few were able to articulate how the Vietnam War would impact not only soldiers but their families. And thanks to the acting chops of Marley and Carlin, as well as Richard Backus, who played Andy, the film feels incredibly real, despite the unreality of its premise. And it also includes the very first FX work by Tom Savini, a Vietnam vet himself.

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama 2024 Primer: The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

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April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 26 and 27, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 26 are The Return of the Living Dead, the new Blue Underground 4K print of Deathdream, Messiah of Evil and The Children.

Saturday, April 27 has Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Escape from New York, Starcrash and Galaxy of Terror.

Return of the Living Dead (1985): If you ever wondered where the fact that zombies like brains come from, look no further. This is the film that did it.

July 3, 1984. Louisville, Kentucky. The Uneeda Medical Supply company. Frank (James Karen, Poltergeist) is showing off all of the strangeness within the warehouse to new employee Freddy (Thom Mathews, Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI). There are all manner of body parts, skeletons from an Indian skeleton farm, half dogs and drums containing the leftovers of a military experiment gone wrong, the kind of horrifying thing that they would make a movie about. A movie like, say, Night of the Living Dead. The problem is, Frank accidentally releases the gas in one of the tanks and reanimates corpses and bodies and half dogs throughout the warehouse.

A quick call to the owner, Burt (Clu Gulager, The Initiation) provides only minor help. Trying to figure out how to control the situation and keep his business out of trouble, the three men hack a walking corpse to bits. But it just won’t die — the movies lie! Even a shot to the brain can’t stop the living dead. They turn to Ernie (Don Calfa, Weekend at Bernie’s), a mortician friend, to burn the bodies — which releases the reanimation process into the open air and the graveyard next door.

I never realized in all the times I’ve watched his that Ernie is supposed to be a Nazi in hiding. Now that I see the clues (he listens to the German Afrika Corps march song “Panzer rollen in Afrika vor” on his Walkman while embalming bodies, he carries a German Walther P38, has a photo of Eva Braun and refers to the rain coming down like “Ein Betrunken Soldat” (German for “a drunken soldier”), it makes a lot of sense. Director and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon confirms this theory on the DVD commentary.

Meanwhile, Freddy’s friends learn about his new job from Tina, his girlfriend. There’s Spider, Scuz, Suicide (Mark Venturini, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), Casey (Jewel Shepard, Raw Force), Chuck and, most importantly, Trash (Linnea Quigley in the role of her career). The scene where she announces that the worst way to die would be for “a bunch of old men to get around me and start biting and eating me alive. First, they would tear off my clothes…” is one of the silliest and goofiest excuses to have nudity in a movie, but it works.

As her friends blast 45 Grave and watch Tina disrobe on top of the grave of Archibald Leach (Cary Grant’s real name), Tina looks for Freddy. However, she’s been found by Tarman, the half-melted corpse in the barrel that started this whole mess. And it doesn’t get any better, with zombies calling in paramedics to die (“Send more brains!”) and even the police getting destroyed by the undead. And if you think the military is going to do anything other than nuke the town to hide the truth, then you’ve never seen a zombie film before.

This is a movie unafraid to feature shocks and laughs in the same frame. It comes from the writing team of John Russo and Russell Streiner, two of the names behind the original Night of the Living Dead. When Russo and George Romero went their separate ways, Russo got the rights to the name “Living Dead” while Romero would be allowed to make sequels. The original plan was for Tobe Hooper to direct this movie, but he would go on to make Lifeforce. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, Lifeforce, Total Recall and the Alejandro Jodorowsky chose to supervise special effects when he tried to make Dune) agreed to direct, but only if he could rewrite the movie so that it wasn’t seen as a ripoff of Romero’s film.

This is a film packed with in-jokes, like how Freddy’s jacket says FUCK YOU on the back of it and has a totally different jacket for the edited version that says TELEVISION VERSION on it. And there are even more little MAD Magazine-style bits throughout, like the hidden message on the eye test poster in Burt’s office.

I can’t hide how much I love this movie. From the production designs to William Stout to the special effects work (including puppeteer Allan Trautman as Tarman), this movie moves fast, takes no prisoners and continues to surprise me. I always find something new with every viewing.

APRIL MOVIE THON 3: 2012 (2009)

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April 22: Earth Day Ends Here — Instead of celebrating a holiday created by a murderer, share an end of the world disaster movie with us. But seriously, treat the planet right!

Director and writer Roland Emmerich said, “I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook. I first read about the Earth’s crust displacement theory in Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods.”

In that book, Hancock states that a civilization near Antarctica left “fingerprints” in Ancient Egypt and other civilizations, such as the Olmec,s Aztecs and Mayans. Hancock believed that in 10,450 BC, a major pole shift took place that brought Antarctica closer to the South Pole, causing global destruction and sinking Atlantis. This is based on the Charles Hapgood’s theory of Earth Crustal Displacement, which has no geological experts supporting it, as the model that they follow is plate tectonics. There’s also a strange — well, isn’t there always — strange racist bent, as there is no way — according to the author — that “jungle-dwelling Indians” could not possibly come up with a sophisticated calendar and it had to be an master white race who taught them.

That same book also inspired Emerich’s 10,000 B.C.

This starts in 2009, as geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and astrophysicist Satnam Tsurutani (Jimi Mistry) determine that a new type of neutrino from a solar flare is heating the Earth’s core. Adrian alerts White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) and President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover), who start a plan to save humanity without warning them and causing a panic.

By the next year, forty-six nations are building nine arks in the highest point of the world, in the Himalayas, to be able to survive a new flood. Any major artifacts are stored in secure locations while the people in the mountains start to work on the arks, like Tenzin (Chin Han), the brother of Buddhist monk Nima (Osric Chau). The money comes from rich people, like Yuri Karpov (Zlatko Burić), a rich Russian who plans on saving his girlfriend Tamara Jikan (Beatrice Rosen) and his twin sons Alec and Oleg (Alexandre Haussmann and Philippe Haussmann).

Former science fiction writer Jackson Curtis (Jon Cusack) works for Yuri as his chauffeur.  The call to board the arks comes in, just as Jackson returns from a vacation with his kids Noah and Lilly (Liam James and Morgan Lily), getting them back to his ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and her new husband, Gordon (Tom McCarthy). Having met conspiracy radio talk show host Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) on the vacation — as well as Adrian, who has read his book — Jackson starts to believe that the Earth is doomed, a fact that is told to him by the Russian twins.

Jackson gets to his family with no time to spare as all of California falls to an earthquake as he races to the airport and Gordon gets the plane off the ground as the runway cracks and falls. Trying to get Charlie to find out where the arks are, he decides to stay and watch Yellowstone’s supervolcano, which kills him.

Nearly all of the rest of the world has died other than Carl, Adrian, First Daughter Laura (Thadiwe Newton), the Russians and Jackson and family, who all make it to the Himalayans and only Yuri and his boys have tickets, stranding Tamara, who is taken in by Jackson and family, who meet Nima, and all of their families try to break into one of the arks.

Nearly everyone after everyone died dies — I have a major problem with Tamara dying as she’s treated as an afterthought throughout the whole movie and her sacrifice is treated as nothing, with no one sad — and Jackson and his ex-wife reconcile and Adrian and Laura get together as the arks make it safely away from the flood.

There’s an alternate ending where Adrian’s father Harry (Blu Mankuma) and his jazz singer partner Tony Delgado (George Segal) survive. It’s pretty much a return to 70s disaster movies and I like that.

How it was marketed was controversial. There was a website for the Institute for Human Continuity, along with Jackson’s  book Farewell Atlantis and radio broadcasts from Charlie Frost, as well as his site This Is the End. Visitors could also register to get a ticket on the arks. NASA’s David Morrison was upset by this, as he got a thousand or more letters from worried people thinking the site was real. He said, “I’ve even had cases of teenagers writing to me saying they are contemplating suicide because they don’t want to see the world end. I think when you lie on the internet and scare children to make a buck, that is ethically wrong.”

It also had a new commercial placement that had never been done before. Called a roadblock campaign, it showed the thrilling two-minute escape from the earthquake scene — it’s the best part of the movie — on 450 American commercial television networks, local English-language and Spanish-language stations and 89 cable outlets at some point between 10:50 and 11:00 P.M. 90% of all households watching ad-supported TV — 110 million viewers — saw the commercial.

The whole idea of 2012 being the end of the world is supposed to have come from the Mayan calendar. But nope. They found a series of astronomical alignments that would happen in 2012, which only happened every 640,000 years, as the sun would line up with the center of the Milky Way on the day it would be lowest on the horizon. Versions of this alignment happen every December, to be honest. And while the Mayan Calendar ended in 2012, they didn’t see it as the end of the world.

Emmerich claimed, “I said to myself that I’ll do one more disaster movie, but it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in.” Then he made Independence Day: Resurgence and Moonfall.

APRIL MOVIE THON 3: The Kiss (1988)

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April 21: Fashion Day — A movie all about fashion that you will critique.

Pen Densham had a cool path to directing. He left school at fifteen to be a photographer and shoot The Rolling Stones, then moved from England to Canada to direct commercials and documentaries with Marshall McLuhan. He then formed found Insight Productions with John Watson and earned 70 international award for their movies, including two Oscar nominations. One of the movies they made, If Wishes Were Horses, was called “The best film of any length shown on Canadian TV.”

It brought him to the attention of Norman Jewison who got him to Hollywood. He and Watson started  Trilogy Entertainment Group, serving as creative consultants on movies like Footloose and Rocky II before becoming big successes with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. They also produced the new versions of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, as well as Poltergeist: The Legacy in the 1990s and 2000s.

He also directed two movies, The Zoo Gang and what we’re here to talk about today, The Kiss.

Felice Dunbar (former model Joanna Pacula) and her sister Hillary (Pamela Collyer) are totally living the start of The Parent Trap. Felice is to live with her aunt (Céline Lomez) and Hillary with her father. As they take a train away from the Belgian Congo, her aunt — wearing a serpent medallion — attacks the young girl. The lights go out as she kisses her, blood coming from her mouth, and when they come back on, the aunt is a lifeless deformed body and the little girl is alone but has the talisman.

Years later, Hillary lives in America with her husband Jack (Nicholas Kilbertus) and her daughter Amy (Meredith Salenger). Her sister calls her in the hopes of meeting her family, but she refuses. She goes to a gun shop and while looking in the window, a car smashes her into the store, killing her.

Five months later, Felice — who works as a model — shows up in town and moves in. Next door neighbor Brenda Carson (Mimi Kuzyk) reacts to her as if she is a cat and becoming allergic. Amy hates her aunt immediately and after making fun of her with her friend Heather (Sabrina Boudot), her BFF is almost murdered when her necklace gets stuck in an escalator. This is absolutely my childhood trauma, so I’m glad I didn’t see this until now.

Felice starts making moves on her sister’s widower, while Amy confides to her boyfriend Terry O’Connell (Shawn Levy, who directed the Night at the Museum movies) about finding her friend’s bloody sunglasses inside her aunt’s room, as well as a serpent talisman. Terry follows her aunt to a hotel room where he watches her in the midst of a ritual. She transforms into a cat and nearly kills him. He barely gets away, only to be run over and his death made to look like a suicide. Amy then tells a priest who remembers Hillary telling him about her sister and how evil she was. He tries to run when she shows up and spontaneously combusts. How many powers does this werecat have? And how wild it is that when they do a DNA test on her, it shows that she is already dead?

Felice reveals that she must continue living — inside the blood — of Amy, trying to transform her into what she is. It takes Brenda the neighbor, Amy and her father — as well as garden shears, a propane tank and a swimming pool — to stop her.

This was written by Stephen Volk, who also was the writer of Gothic, The Guardian— that makes sense — and Ghostwatch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CALGARY UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL 2024: Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story (2023)

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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.

Confession time: I never listened to rock band Redd Kross until watching director Andrew Reich’s documentary Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story. After watching it, I’m partially baffled as to why, because they are right up my musical alley, and founding-members brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald share similar tastes with me in 1970s pop culture (from Kiss to The Partridge Family to Linda Blair’s Born Innocent tv movie, for example) and crunchy, catchy guitar-driven rock and roll. It must have been a simple case of “So many bands, so little time.” We pretty much all have examples of that. In short, I’m thankful I found Redd Kross through this high-energy documentary.   

From the brothers McDonald’s days growing up in Hawthorne, California — where their band debuted as school kids when they talked Black Flag into playing with them at a private party — through their early punk days to their most popular phases to their still-going-strong present while being married and raising kids, Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story shows that the siblings have lived lives. Reich doesn’t shy away from asking big questions, either, as he brings tough emotions to the McDonald parents regarding Steve’s disappearance as a young teenager, and does the same with the brothers regarding their past drug abuse. Sibling rivalry is on full display, too.

Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story isn’t a mere warts-and-all tell-all, though — far from it. It’s a grand celebration of two brothers and their band — including their revolving door of bandmates — who fought against big record labels before being signed by one, who love 1970s kitsch and went against the norms of what fellow musicians and music lovers expected, helmed wonderfully by a longtime fan. 

The talking heads include a who’s who of musicians from acts whose heyday was in the eighties and nineties, former bandmates, friends and relatives, record label folks, and more. Plus, we get trips down 1970s memory lane with clips from The Brady Bunch, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and much more, along with loads of clips from Redd Kross performances, backstage videos, and interviews throughout the years.

Reich’s Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story does exactly what a great documentary should do: make viewers new to the subject want to learn more about it, and give people familiar with the subject information they hadn’t previously known. Thanks to this film, I’m aiming to make up for lost time by cranking Redd Kross albums.   

Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story screens as part of the 2024 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 18–28. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Vampire Time Travelers (1998)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

I’ve never seen any of the movies that director and writer Les Sekely has made like Night of the Living Date, The Not-So-Grim Reaper and The Alien Conspiracy: Grey Skies, but I have seen this and I totally am hunting for the rest.

This movie feels less like a narrative movie and more like someone made a Dark Brothers or Rinse Dream adult movie mainstream, giving it constant blasts of words and images and a ghost man in a closet and vampires who can move through the timestream and random muscicvideo sequences where people are encouraged to “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Most of the other reviews I’ve read for this film are either beyond angry that they endured it, wondering whether or not the humor was intentional or not, or nearly shut it off but stuck with it and still aren’t sure what they have seen.

As you can imagine, these are the movies that obsess me.

Natalie is a vampire who was killed by Buffy — yes, this is intended to be a reference — which has her call to her sister Lorelei (Jillien Weisz) from beyond the grave and demand revenge by killing Buffy’s sister Sue Anne Marie (J.J. Rodgers) and her fellow pledges to the Alpha Omega sorority. One of them is a talented guitar player — she can play “Eruption” seemingly without fingertapping and sleeps with her axe — who has The Man Who Never Calls Back (the director!) on speed dial, hoping to sign to his label and escape college. Another is a nerdy girl named Jenna (Micky Levy). There’s also another who is impossibly tall.

There’s also a Hooded Man who gets some kids to go to the Old Crenshaw Place, where Lorelei has been trapped in a coffin for five years. They’re promised porn magazines and instead of looking in the woods like every other kid in the 80s and 90s did, they find a coffin and a vampire who comes back but isn’t strong enough to bite necks any longer so she must “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Like I said, some folks are going to watch this and see the budget and that it doesn’t look like movies do today — come on, people — and dismiss it. For others, they will savor moments like when a vampire goes up in flames and says the last line from Ms. 45. “Sister!”

I found an interview with Sekely online about this movie and it notes that he also composed the movie for this and considered it his baby. Of the film, he said, “Vampire Time Travelers, in one word, is … fun. A little scary, mostly campy, and even slightly sexy … fun. (We didn’t have the budget to be serious). It’s Woody Allen meets Stephen King … meets MTV. To sum it up … You know when you have a dream, it’s a bunch of strange scenes and events, one after another, that are not connected. Well, Vampire Time Travelers is a lot like that … except the events are connected. Basically … go with it!”

You can watch this on Tubi.

TUBI ORIGINAL: Slay (2024)

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Mama Sue Flay (Trinity The Tuck), Robin Banks (Heidi N Closet), Bella Da Boys (Crystal Methyd), and Olive Wood (Cara Melle) are four drag queens on tour that planned on playing at a famous club, The Bold Tuck, but have accidentally been booked at The Bold Buck, a biker club in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a mistake that any of us could make, right?

They try to make the most of it, as the bartender Dusty (Neil Sandilands) pays them anyway and at least two people show up, probably the only other two LGBTQ+ people for miles, Jax (Donia Kash) and Steven (Gabriel Harry Meltz). As they start their act, Travis (Daniel Janks) starts screaming at them to get off the stage and in all the confusion, another local, Marv (Gustav Rossouw) starts to bite people. Yes, we’re in Bat Country and the film seems like Slither, Feast, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, VFW and From Dusk till Dawn having a few drinks with To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

In no way is that a bad thing, as this movie has style, great lighting, fun special effects and plenty of surprises to dish out.

It’s a movie aware of vampire movie history as well as one that doesn’t make the locals all into bigots and even gives Travis a redemption arc that he never would have had unless he met our heroines and fought vampires with them. The ladies also struggle against in-fighting and realize the love they have for one another.

Also: garlic bread and a sprinkler system make for some amazing weapons. You don’t have to dress like Blade — to call out a great discussion in this film — to be a bad ass vampire killer.

I had a blast watching this. It feels like it needs a bigger audience than just a Tubi Original — not a bad thing, I love these movies after all — and it feels good to see drag queens unite a town and disrupt both vampires and those that are close minded. If only the real world could be the same.

You can watch this on Tubi.

TUBI ORIGINAL: Snatched (2024)

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Chris Stokes and Marques Houston have combined to make almost a movie a month on Tubi. From You’re Not Alone, in which the hero watches a masked and gloved killer murder his wife and then come back for his daughter to the mancrush gone bad in The Ex Obsession and three of The Stepmother films, they’ve laid claim to being the most prolific — if not the best — team making Tubi Originals.

Angela (Veronika Bozeman, who was in another Stokes film Still Here) is a CIA agent who loses her husband Jason (Chris Moss) to what she thinks is a heart attack. As she raises her son Jason Jr. (Jered Cheatham at age 12, King Cheatham at age 7) with the platonic support of her agency partner Byron (Lance Gross, the Sleepy Hollow TV show), she finally decides to leave the life behind. That is, until one of her toughest cases comes back and Dmitri Merciano (Charlie Weber), the man who actually killed her husband, many of her fellow agents and nearly murdered her when he discovered that she had been working undercover to get him.

Like so many Tubi Originals, this starts in the middle of the a story (in media res as a better reviewer would tell you) with Bob’s Coffee Shop blowing up real good and nearly killing Angela. There are several big explosions in this, way bigger than you’d expect for the usual budget Stokes and Houston receive.

That explosion would be the second time the main bad guy kills someone she loves, as a bomb wipes out Byron the very day he decides to tell Angela how much he loves her. The bad guys also kill her mother Carolyn (Janet Hubert, the first Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) but not before she goes old lady Arnold on several of them before being killed by a female assassin with a katana.

That said — this movie is pretty fun and it’s nice to see people of color and women represented throughout as total bad asses, good and bad characters included. There’s also a lot of camaraderie between the agents, like a retiring agent named Lisette (Zulay Henao) and Vivian (Annie Ilonzeh), one of Angela’s best friends in the agency who gets caught up in the war between our heroine and her arch enemy. Plus, Malik Yoba from New York Undercover is the leader of the good guys, Director Walker.

There’s also a date scene inside a Bob’s Big Boy and man, I wish we still had those out here. And Stokes shows up at the end as Barry the mailman!

Another victory for this team.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Torment (2008)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

Once available on the Catacomb of Creepshow fifty DVD set — along with a few other Visual Vengeance releases — Torment was directed by Steve Sessions, who also had Aberrations and Contagio released on Tubi by the label.

Laura (Suzi Lorraine) has just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital and her husband Ray (Tom Stedham) plans on taking her to their cottage to relax. She has problems, some of them unreal such as seeing dead bodies inside every garbage bag, and some real, which may include a killer clown who goes by the name of Dissecto (Lucien Eisenach).

Ray has stopped believing anything his wife says or sees, so when she claims that a sheriff (Ted Alderman) has stopped by looking for two missing Mormon missionaries (Jade Michael LaFont, Luc Bernier), he thinks it’s all in her psychotic head. But oh no. A killer clown has both those men and we watch as he slowly kills them.

I wish that this movie had more of the is she crazy or being gaslit vibe, as it’s given away way too soon that the clown is a real person. Yet Lorraine is so good in this that she transcends this issue and brings the film up, including some stalking scenes that are incredibly suspenseful in spite of the budget and how it makes the clown’s costume look like it came from the Spirit store.

How weird is it that there are two killer clown movies with the same title? There’s also a 2017 movie.