From Fly Girl on In Living Color to being a diva whose name got shortened because it is so iconic, J. Lo has been a major force in entertainment since the 90s. Her first starring roles in Selena, Anaconda, Out of Sight and The Cell showed that she had a good eye for picking movies and yes, perhaps her career suffered after Gigli, but she’s always found a way to come back, whether its in music, television or films, as 2019’s Hustlers showed that she still was a solid actress.

If you’re a fan, you’ll know all this TMZ show has to tell you about her. But that’s what these Tubi TMZ shows are for, an overview on a star and their life. J. Lo has so much to get into, from her career to her many loves and how she’s owned herself throughout every twist. Even someone like me who barely watches popular movies can point several of her movies that I’ve seen. I mean, I have watched Enough so many times alone. If I even mention her to my wife, that means that I will have to watch it again. Some say she’s the Elizabeth Taylor of our era. Watch this and decide for yourself.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Embracing the socially conscious — yet still exploitative — black humor and tongue in cheek style of the Brazilian Mouth of Garbage Cinema (Boca do Lixo), the man known as Coffin Joe — José Mojica Marins — directed co-wrote (with Rubens Francisco Luchetti) and stars in this story of a man named Finis Hominis who rises naked from the ocean and walks through the streets of the city, changing the world.

After helping a woman in a wheelchair to walk, protecting a woman and her child from a gang and then being given the finest in clothing, he walks to a church where he drinks Holy Water and is proclaimed Finis Hominis, the end of man. He brings the dead back to life, gathers followers and upsets the leaders of the world until he announces that he must return home. And that is an insane asylum. And this has happened before.

A messiah and an insane person may be the same. That seems like what Marins is saying in a film that avoids his traditional horror look, feel and main character and instead, trips out.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection for Coffin Joe is perfect. The End of Man has commentary with Marins, Paulo Duarte and Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles. You can get this set from MVD.

In the middle of a fire, the online world of the Citizen App spills into Los Angeles, which has been ignited in more ways than one as the calls on the app turn into a vigilante mob looking for someone who may not even be a suspect.

Directed by Paula Neudorf, who worked on the series Cyberwar, this VICE News show has someone who worked at the company saying, “If your app protects the world, you know, and you hurt one person, maybe it’s not the biggest deal.”

Using leaked Slack chats, company information and interviews with sources, this is all about how Citizen’s CEO Andrew Frame put a $30,000 bounty on information that would lead to the capture of an arsonist who started a fire in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood. While police were looking for the same individual, they were innocent. Another person was arrested. A Citizen spokesperson called the incident “a mistake we are taking very seriously.”

Founded in 2016, Citizen is the first app to combine location information with 911 intelligence to keep you and your loved ones safe. The app was originally Vigilante and released in New York City. The ads for the app encouraged user vigilantism, as well as racial profiling and harassment. It was pulled from the Apple App Store within 2 days.

Citizen also released the subscription security feature Protect, the first paid feature. USA Today says that this feature “lets users contact virtual agents for help if they feel they’re in danger.” As of January 26, 2022, Protect had over 100,000 subscribers.

The idea of America becoming even more of a police state where people gain money because of turning each other in is yet another nightmare in this rapidly declining state that we live in. If this doesn’t scare you, you aren’t paying attention.

You can watch this on Tubi.

José Mojica Marins directed movies for six years before making At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, the first appearance of Brazil’s national boogeyman, Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe.

Joe is a man with no morals but a devotion to Nietzschian philosophies and absolute hatred for religion with the goal of achieving immortality through the birth of a perfect son. And while he does not believe in the supernatural, he often finds himself walking through visions of the otherworld.

Coffin Joe came to Marins — the man who would often be referred to as the character interchangeably — in a very magic way. “In a dream saw a figure dragging me to a cemetery. Soon he left me in front of a headstone, there were two dates of my birth and my death. People at home were very frightened, called a priest because they thought I was possessed. I woke up screaming, and at that time decided to do a movie unlike anything I had done. He was born at that moment the character would become a legend: Coffin Joe. The character began to take shape in my mind and in my life. The cemetery gave me the name, completed the costume of Joe the cover of voodoo and black hat, which was the symbol of a classic brand of cigarettes. He would be a mortician.”

Awakening of the Beast begins in black and white, as a series of vignettes of the ways that drug users debase themselves are shown in lurid, sweaty detail. A TV panel debates the idea that sexual perversion is caused by the use of illegal drugs, with more stories that illustrate this point. The TV show needs an expert on depravity, so they ask Marins to appear on the show.

Afterward, the doctor who conducted the experiment doses four volunteers and asks for them to stare at a poster of The Strange World of Coffin Joe. Supposedly Marins didn’t know much about using drugs, but he intended this movie to speak against the fact that the uses of drugs are treated worse than the suppliers and that the Brazilian film industry saw him as no better than a long-nailed drug dealer.

The acid trip that follows is highlighted by Coffin Joe, ranting against anyone and everyone. Of course, this film was banned by the very establishment it rails against. So basically, Coffin Joe is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the maniac attacking belief structures created by an artist who only believes in the power of film.

“My world is strange, but it’s worthy to all those who want to accept it, and never corrupt as some want to portray it. Because it’s made up, my friend, of strange people, though none are stranger than you!”

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe will own your soul. Awakening of the Beast has commentary with Marins, Paulo Duarte and Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles. There’s also a new interview with Guy Adams on Marins’ esoteric aspects, a new video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on the gender politics of Marins’ films and alternate opening titles. You can get this set from MVD.

On August 13, 1988, a pregnant Shannan Watts disappeared along with her two daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Celeste. Her husband Christopher Watts went on television to plead for their safe return knowing that he had already murdered his wife and dumped her in a shallow grave and jammed his children into an oil tank in the hopes that he could start a new life with his girlfriend.

Written by Vince Sherry, this brings in friends, family, reporters and experts to discuss the case. At this point, if you’re watching this, you’ve probably already seen this story on several shows and watched American Murder: The Family Next Door on Netflix. I know I’ve seen this before and I just listen to these shows while I work on the site because my wife runs the TV and I just try and think about a world not filled with family annihilators. But that said, if you can’t get enough true crime, here is this show for you to watch and learn how a family fell apart, how Shanann kept using social media to present a perfect family and how her husband found a really attractive new girl and took her sand surfing.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Fresh Meat: Jeffrey Dahmer (2021): Directed by Kevin Barry. this Tubi original documentary has drawn some ire online for featuring podcasters in the place of actual experts as well as several inaccuracies, including it claiming that Dahmer lived in the Oxford Apartments in 1988 when he didn’t move in until May 1990; that he accidentally took Halcion when he killed Steven Tuomi in 1987, but this actually happened in May of 1990 as well. They also are three years off on the Konerak Sinthasimphone incident which happened on May 27, 1991, not September 26, 1988. Thanks to IMDB user corbettc-23259 for pointing this out.

It also talks as much about other cannibals and killers like Ed Gein and Luka Magnotta when most are watching this to learn more about Dahmer. Then again, if you are watching this, you probably have already seen so many other documentaries all about him and will be upset by how little this gets into his homelife and reasons for killing, much less how much it gets wrong. Like how  Ed Gein is from Plainfield, WI. Not Plainville. This is a simple editing issue that should have been caught and yet, like so much of this documentary, so much is just plain incorrect.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Fresh Meat: Killing Dahmer (2023): This was directed by Victoria Duley, who directed or produced several Tubi Originals like Scariest Places In the World, Scariest Monsters In the World, Queen of Crypto, Scariest Places In America, Love You to Death: Gabby Petito, Defying Death: Surviving Jaws, Evil Among Us: The Golden State Killer, Queen of Cocaine, Gone Before Her Time: Brittany Murphy, Mystery Unsolved: The Adnan Syed Story, Love You to Death: The Jodi Arias Story, Evil Among Us: Ted Bundy, Suburban Nightmare: JonBenet Ramsey, Lights, Camera, Murder: Scream, Battle of the Beasts: Bigfoot vs. Yeti, Killing Diana, Suburban Nightmare: The Menendez Brothers, Sins of the Father: The Green River Killer, Scariest Monsters In America, Mysteries from the Grave: Titanic, Gone Before Her Time, Pass the Mic, Suburban Nightmare: Chris Watts, Zombies! Preparing for the Apocalypse, Celebrity Exorcism, Famously Haunted: Amityville and The Secrets of Christmas Revealed! It was written by Chip Selby, who wrote a few of those.

Unlike the first Fresh Meat on Dahmer and how he was arrested, this is more about how he became a victim himself within the walls of Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin when he was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver. Through interviews — you know, as always in these Tubi docs, podcast experts but I guess that’s where journalism is — and dramatized re-enactments, this tries to get to the bottom and tell the truth of just how the most famous killer could be murdered when he should have been guarded.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Raul Lopez Echeverria, this is — as the title tells us — the story of Domingo (Eduardo Covarrubias), who lives in a poor neighborhood in Guadalajara. He has lost his wife to divorce and only has work in his life until he learns that his passion for announcing soccer matches can change his entire neighborhood.

While soccer may not be as popular here in America — it’s making strides and the World Cup is a big deal here no as well — you can substitute any sport for what Domingo loves. The idea that he sits on the sidelines of a barely complete pitch and is as passionate about the games as anyone commenting on the biggest matches in the world is why everyone loves him.

I like that Tubi is getting these foreign movies and giving people in our country a chance to see what the rest of the world is like. I may not be a soccer fan but I can feel the passion within this movie and the joy that the characters feel.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The original Thanksgiving trailer that played during Grindhouse was so memorable that for years, people have asked when a real one was coming. After all, Machete and Hobo With a Shotgun — which won a competition of fake trailers and actually played with the movie in Canada — got made.

Director Eli Roth said of the trailer, “My friend Jeff (Rendell), who plays the killer Pilgrim — we grew up in Massachusetts, we were huge slasher-movie fans and every November we were waiting for the Thanksgiving slasher movie. We had the whole movie worked out: A kid who’s in love with a turkey, and then his father killed it, and then he killed his family and went away to a mental institution and came back and took revenge on the town. I called Jeff and said, “Dude, guess what, we don’t have to make the movie, we can just shoot the best parts.” Shooting the trailer was so much fun because every shot is a money shot. Every shot is decapitation or nudity. It’s so ridiculous, it’s absurd. It’s just so wrong and sick that it’s right.”

Directed by Roth and written by Rendell, it took 16 years to make it to screens. Could it ever live up to the trailer?

Yes. It totally does.

As people line up for Black Friday at the RightMart in Plymouth, it’s obvious that something bad is going to happen. Should Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) even open the store and be greedy? Shouldn’t there be more than two security guards? Should Jessica (Nell Verlaque) have let her friends Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), Gabby (Addison Rae), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and Yulia (Jenna Warren) into the store early, which causes people in the crowd to see them and push through the doors, killing one of the two guards? Could anything have calmed these lunatics and kept them from killing manager Mitch Collins’s (Ty Olsson) wife Amanda (Gina Gershon) and several others? How can the town ever fix things?

A year later, they have tried. Jessica is now dating Ryan (Milo Manheim), as Bobby left everyone when his baseball arm was broken in the tragedy. As Right Mart gets ready for another Black Friday, images of the teens are shared on social media by John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth Colony and one of the people credited with the first Thanksgiving, as well as video of the riot itself. Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) works with Jessica but people are killed left and right, like the other security guard Manny (Tim Dillon), students Amy (Shailyn Griffin) and Lonnie (Mika Amosen), and waitress Lizzie (Amanda Barker), all people involved in the evening.

That’s pretty much all you need to know. This is a film closer to Happy Birthday to Me than the most crass of the slashers, as the killer means more than the kills. That said, this is a movie that does not shy away from some incredible moments of gore and explosive violence, perhaps the most that’s been in a slasher since the end of the classic era in 1981.

There haven’t been many Thanksgiving horror movies — Blood Rage, Home Sweet Home, The Boneyard, Amityville: A New Generation, The Granny, Intensity, Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, the 2005 Boogeyman, Seance, ThanksKilling, Kristy, Escape Room, Blood Harvest, Fractured, The Last Thanksgiving, Happy Horror Days, Thankskilling 3,  Deadly Friend, Derelicts and Blood Freak — so this is probably the best one there is by default. However, I have to say that this is the closest to an actual slasher I’ve seen in decades. It gets things right because it’s made by someone who actually loves slashers. It feels authentic and true.

It’s the best movie I’ve seen Roth make, way beyond his Knock Knock, Death Wish and can we all just admit he was the Makinov that made Come Out and Play? Instead of remaking something, he’s making something new taken from what has worked in the past. The stalking, the slashing, the idea that so many people could have been the killer are all perfect. It’s something that every praised slasher of the past few years — the revived Scream and Halloween movies, I’m staring a bloody hole through you — should learn from. By this point, just give Roth the Halloween franchise. It can’t get worse after the last five movies.

My favorite actor in this movie is Tonic, one of the cats from the remake of Pet Sematary. That whole scene is incredible, as John Carver kills a man and still feeds his cat.

A movie that has scenes from Krull and Death Wish 3, a rant about Dio in Black Sabbath, songs from Sorcery and Sammy Hagar’s “Three Lock Box” on the soundtrack, multiple heads exploding, a turkey timer stabbed into someone, an opening that references Halloween, The Car‘s horn during the parade…I am so happy with this movie.

When do we get Don’t and Werewolf Women of the SS?

Sure, Coffin Joe was dragged into a pond by the skeletons of his victims and had accepted God, but now he’s back and seemingly as filled with hate for the human race as ever before. Instead of his search for the perfect woman, he’s here to tell you three stories, as if he’s an EC Comics character. Well, a year after this movie, he would have his own comic book series with the same title. It was also the name of his much later TV talk show.

In “The Doll Maker,” a man and his four gorgeous daughters make the most realistic and sought after dolls. Criminals rob them when they learn that they don’t keep their money in the bank. After the doll maker faints, the robbers assault the daughters, who actually start to accept and encourage their advances after remarking about their eyes. And soon enough, we learn how the dolls have such human-looking eyeballs.

“Obsession” is about a poor balloon seller with a foot fetish and a love for a beautiful woman well above his station. After her wedding, which he watches from afar, he learns that she has been murdered. Too poor to attend her funeral, he comes to her body in the mausoleum where, well, he makes love to her and her feet before returning the shoes he saw her lose when she was still alive.

Finally, “Theory” has Professor Oãxiac Odéz (José Mojica Marins, also Coffin Joe and this film’s creator) bring a rival professor and his wife to his home. Soon, he has imprisoned them and forces them to go through a series of sadistic experiments to prove if instinct can overcome reason and love.

So yes, Coffin Joe is in this for about three minutes. But his fingerprints — and long fingernails — are all over every frame.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is haunting my shelves and I can see Zé do Caixão in the shadows of my basement. The Strange World of Coffin Joe has commentary with Marins, Paulo Duarte and Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles. There’s also an alternative ending with commentary by Marins. You can get this set from MVD.

Four years later, Coffin Joe has returned from the end of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and has recovered from shock, blindness and being accused of a series of murders. Now it’s time to get back to finding his perfect woman and continue his blood.

Together with a hunchbacked assistant named Brono, he kidnaps six gorgeous women and puts them all through a horrific series of tasks to determine who will bear his child. Only Marcia doesn’t scream in the face of the madness Coffin Joe puts them through, so only she can be the one. Yet even though he takes her to his bed — and kills the other five with snakes — she refuses him. He releases her, claiming he knows that she will never tell anyone what she has seen.

That’s when he meets the Colonel’s daughter, Laura, who actually returns his affection. The military man and his son try to break off their union, but Coffin Joe acts as only as he can to such an offense: he has Bruno kill Laura’s brother and blames the colonel’s henchman Truncador.

Yet now comes the dark night for the man who has no soul, as he goes to Hell after learning that one of his six brides was pregnant when he killed her. Dooming her child, he wanders the technicolor nightmare that is the abyss and comes upon Satan himself, who is also Coffin Joe. Our world’s version renounces his ways in light of this revelation.

Coffin Joe resists all the killers the colonel and his men send after him and finally impregnates Laura, just as Marcia kills herself by drinking arsenic. Yet before she dies, she tells the townsfolk of Coffin Joe’s crimes and they form a lynch mob just as he must decide who will survive, his bride or the baby, as the pregnancy has complications. Together they agree that the child must live, but fate is cruel and both Laura and Joe’s scion die. Destroyed by this, he is no match for the lynch mob that arrives, shooting him in the cemetery where he drowns in the same pond where he drowned so many of his victims.

At the point of death, a priest offers to hear Joe’s confession. He accepts God as his Savior and drowns as the skeletons of his victims claim him.

Brazilian censors forced filmmaker — and the human avatar of Coffin Joe — Jose Mojica Marins to recut and redub the end of this movie. That’s why the strange ending of salvation is in here. It enraged Jose Mojica Marins and put a curse on his career, or so he felt, to the point that he could never finish his planned trilogy of three Coffin Joe movies. It took until 2005 and filmmakers who grew up as his fans before Embodiment of Evil closed out the story and showed how Coffin Joe survived.

In The Wizard of Oz, a better world is in color instead of black and white. In This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, Hell itself is the only place to get the full color gel Mario Bava treatment and that says something about the nihilistic worldview of its creator and his creation. I grew up in a small town too, Coffin Joe, but I wasn’t brave enough to grow out my fingernail to absurd lengths, go on and on about my superiority and make out with a woman while throwing snakes at others. I can only watch you and see how it could have been.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is everything. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse has commentary with Marins, Paulo Duarte and Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles. There’s also a new interview with Stephen Thrower on Marins’ influences and a new video essay by Miranda Corcoran about Coffin Joe as a horror host. You can get this set from MVD.