Co-director/co-writer/actor Michael J. Ahern, co-director/co-writer/actor Brandon Perras-Sanchez and co-director/cinematographer/editor Ryan Miller also made Death Drop Gorgeous, a movie I loved, and they didn’t slow down here, opening the film with a man slicing open his own stomach and pulled out his intestines. You know, start strong.

Caleb (Perras-Sanchez) and Adrian (Ahern) are on holiday in Provincetown, Massachusetts — the setting for Tough Guys Don’t Dance — in the hopes of finding the magic that’s been lost in their love. The truth is that Caleb had a nightmare about his ex Isaac (Tradd Sanderson) and wants to find him in a town where everyone works hard to be a stranger. Well, except for Eric (Matthew Pidge), who ends up hooking up with both, causing a break-up. That’s when Caleb decides to find out the truth for himself. You know what I say: the truth is overrated.

Paced like a 70s slow burn horror film — and I’m not saying that like a cliche, this actually does it — this explores the kind of tourist town that you could never belong to as an outsider. And yet people want to be part of it, to be in a scene and being part of it costs them so much more than may be prepared to pay.

If you loved Death Drop Gorgeous, this is seriously a complete and total tonal shift, but the same crew and a lot of the cast shows up. What this also has going for it are some of the goriest practical effects I’ve seen in some time. They list their budget at just $20,000 on IMDB and — yes, I know, I know, never believe IMDB — but if so, wow.

I hereby nominate Provincetown, by virtue of this great film, as one of those coastal towns that are just a few miles from each other, even if this comes from another part of the country and decades removed from The Fog, Dead and Buried, Messiah of Evil and Night Tide.

Saint Drogo is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

Yes, 1987 had two movies named Scared Stiff.

This is the Lau Kar-wing-directed remix of Dreamscape.

Maybe some Scanners, too.

David Miu Tai-wai (Michael Miu) is a psychiatrist helping street people who is followed around by his friend Halley Tsang Siu-wai (Eric Tsang). For the first part of the movie, they get into wacky guy hijinks like pretending that Halley is a robot so that he can spills water all over a girl so that she’ll take her clothes off. Just when you start to follow that, David gets into a car accident, discovers that he can see inside dreams and has strange adventures like imagining he’s Van Helsing all while a researcher named Alice (Emily Chu) conducts experiments on his brain.

Then the movie turns into a chase, with the men who caused the accident chasing Halley into a parking garage where he finds a dead body and almost knocks out May (Anita Mui). As he recovers, he’s questioned by Inspector Chow (Chow Yun-fat) and another cop (Phillip Ko). Dabid decides to enter Halley’s dreams to learn what happened and discovers that the killer with a knife who murdered the person that Halley found — whew! — was Inspector Chow and he knows that they know that he’s a killer. And now this movie is pretty much a giallo!

What a strange movie that becomes a totally different story every few minutes. I loved it!

You can watch this on iQIYI.

Mr. Ventura (Jaime Fabregas), Ken (Dan Fernandez), Nats (Daniel Pasia) and Desiree (Joanne Quintas) are in the jungle looking for a great treasure, but what they find is a gigantic creature that looks like a Big Daddy Roth character mixed with The Pitt or some other post-McFarland 90s comic book monster with huge teeth.

There are a lot of people who say that this is a Predator clone, but it has more the feel of Without Warning, a movie that has an alien hunter with a throwing star that feels like the movie Predator was stealing from.

Director Maurice Carvajal came from doing special effects, so you just know that the monster is going to look incredible. Some people, however, may have an issue with the cook on the expedition, who dressed in women’s clothes and wear makeup, but is presented as an idiot to be laughed at.

Also: This contains “Scatman’s World” by Scatman John and yes, that was once a thing.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Samuel K. Nkansah — AKA Ninja — 2016 is the kind of movie that doesn’t just bring you xenomorphs and Predators, it also throws in some Terminators. I’m frankly shocked that Chucky didn’t show up.

These xenomorphs are way smarter than any we’ve seen in the Aliens series. They’re here to colonize Earth, starting with Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Mostly that means wandering alleys and killing humans in violent PS1 CGI ways. They want to colonize the Earth by 2016 — that’s the title figured out — and they also fly in the Enterprise, because if you’ve violated this many copyrights, violate all the copyrights. I mean, they also took the story from Independence Day but that movie didn’t go as far as having an alien dropkick a baby.

Most of the good parts are in the trailer. Then again, that’s true for most movies. Most movies don’t have an alien throw a poorly drawn CGI convertible at a screaming woman and turn her into pixilated liquid.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Rocky Soraya, who wrote the film with Riheam Junianti, The Doll starts when Daniel (Denny Sumargo) and his wife Anya (Shandy Aulia) move to a new city thanks to his new job. The first person Anya meets is Niken (Vitta Mariana Barrazza), who believes in the supernatural. She also gets a doll from her husband’s new job after he destroys a sacred tree — I guess that’s some kind of benefit — but said doll is connected to the occult power that Niken feels and wants revenge. Also — both Niken and Daniel have dealt with the doll before, a strange toy that once belonged to a little girl named Uci. She and her family was killed in a robbery and now her spirit is inside her former doll.

There are some not bad CGI crows, some fun gore and sadly, a plot that goes on way too long. But hey, the scene where the doll attacks Anya while she’s trying to take a bath is pretty scary, which is more than you’d get from an American movie trying to be Child’s Play. Or Annabelle.

The Doll had a sequel in 2017 and 2022. It’s a mark of how much I liked this that I wouldn’t mind watching either of those.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Blind Waters wastes no time, having two people swim off a yacht and get devoured by a shark with no explanation. Do I need one? After all, I’m watching a shark movie by The Asylum at one in the morning.

I guess this at least has some shark movie pedigree, as it was directed and written by Anthony C. Ferrante, the same guy who directed every Sharknado movie.

Valentina Armas (Meghan Carrasquillo) and Weston Dern (Noam Sigler) are on a beach vacation when her purse gets stolen while he’s ordering some bad tasting drinks. They kiss under the fireworks and all is forgiven as we wake up to drone footage of the surf at daybreak.

Meanwhile, Chris Burman (Chris Cleveland), his wife Larisa (Becki Hayes) and their daughter Eliza (Patty Cruz) are trying to get a boat for a fishing trip. They’re all warned that there’s a storm coming through. And as the Coast Guard leaves. Gabe (Francisco Angelini)  — the guy they paid for the boat — hotwires it and cranks up some sub-Chili Peppers. Within moments, he throws a bloody knife in the water. That brings out a shark that kills Chris and Larisa before we even get to know them, other than that they bet over things. Well, they both lost.

Valentina and Weston get a boat — from the guy who Chris tried to pay double for the rental — and go out to go SCUBA diving. You know, alone. Because that’s totally safe.

Once the storm kicks up, one of the Coast Guard, Margo (Jhey Castles) decides to go on patrol.

And now, everyone is set up to fight the shark. The first time that Valentine and Weston see the shark, it seems like he’s running from it, leaving her alone. But in truth, he was setting up his proposal but never thought that a shark would ruin his big moment of getting down on one knee in his wetsuit. The shark then cock blocks Weston by repeatedly ramming the boat while he’s trying to propose.

Well, this shark is pretty ruthless. He knocks out Valentina and she goes blind, then it drags Weston under and takes a bite out of his leg while he unheroically screams. They barely escape, despite getting in touch with the Coast Guard, before getting stranded on an island with a strange man who claims that his family was destroyed by the shark. That man ends up being Gabe, who has the dead body of Charlie and wants to use it as bait to escape the devil fish.

But would you be shocked to know that Gabe stole Valentina’s purse? And that she finds the ring Weston wants to give her just as the shark makes a meal of the villain? And no spoilers, but not everyone is getting out of this shark movie alive.

This entire movie reminded me why I will never go on an island or beach vacation. Also: How does Ferrante go from the insane time travel of the last Sharknado to this, perhaps one of the most basic shark movies I’ve seen? Do the bills really need paid that much?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Skylar Reagan (Alicia Ziegler) is having some problems. She failed her last training exercise, one where she was asked to fire nuclear warheads on London after butting heads with her deputy — and one-time lover — Malik Wheeler (Chris Jones). When he commanding officer Kathleen Wolff (Carolyn Hennesy) remarks that she needs people who will follow orders — as most of her soldiers believe in Q-Anon-style conspiracy theories and ask to be paid in crypto — for what’s coming.

The next day, Reagan plans on breaking off her military team with Wheeler and leaving him behind for good. And just minutes after picking up Smith (Brian Gilleece) and Diaz (Matias Ponce), as well as meeting up with security detail Chelsea Lin (Nina Yang), a routine check of a warhead — well, it is a warhead being protested by people open carrying submachine guns — leads to a mysterious attack that may be from another world and which requires Reagan and Wheeler to do what their last training mission proved they couldn’t: launch a nuclear weapon at a friendly target. This one isn’t in London, though. It’s in America.

Directed by Craig Goldstein and written by Mark Keavey, Echo Base was a movie announced several months ago that I’ve been anxiously awaiting on Tubi. This really plays off the uncertainty of our time with no one believing what they are seeing, chemtrails getting discussed, people doing their own research and even other soldiers putting family and religion above duty when they believe that they are in Armageddon.

It also takes from The Outer Limits episode “The Architects Of Fear,” but I bet the filmmakers thought that they were ripping off Watchmen.

There’s plenty of stock footage, some dodgy CGI and nuclear tension the likes of which you haven’t seen since the Cold War. The slick way that this plays with the anxiety in which I now navigate a world in which the conspiracies that I once looked at as fun and now being espoused by people who can’t comprehend a seventy-year-old rich person never caring for them or needing them other than to fuel his need for power, well, that kind of made me really on edge the whole time I watched this. I think someone could watch this and say. “See? They admit it. It is true.” And then someone else shouts, “Disinfo!” And then someone says something super racist. You know how it goes.

Someday soon, someone is going to make a MAGA anti-trans zombies movie with this line: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you, Barbara, and I’m just standing in their way.”

You can watch this on Tubi.