Pete Vinal made a vanity project: a movie he directed, wrote, produced, and stars in as Pete Weaver, once the most excellent break dancer in the world. But now, he needs to get his daughter an expensive medical treatment, or she’ll die, and he just lost his dad, who has finally invented something amazing, but then bled to death after a heart attack just before they were about to go get ice cream.

It’s time to dance.

Also, to compound all of this, Pete gets fired from his job because a corrupt coworker steals his invention — not the new administrative assistant, whom he keeps yelling at for smoking — and claims it as his own. To make things worse, he then claims Pete stole it from him.

This movie doesn’t understand how patents work: Pete did patent his invention, the Drink Genie, but instead of speaking up, he just gets fired. If you’re wondering, did the real Pete Vinal invent a genuine Drink Genie? You get it. 

Meanwhile, instead of getting a job, he reunites his old dance crew. He doesn’t tell his wife — “because you know how women are” his words, not mine) — and she thinks she’s cheating. When she worries, she calls a friend who basically tells her she’s wrong and that, because Pete goes to church — although he later claims to be lapsed, yet he prays throughout the movie — there’s no way he could ever cheat on her.

Of course, Pete is vindicated. He isn’t cheating on his wife. His invention belongs to him, and he’s been rehired, but his enemy has just been demoted, which is weird because now he and Pete have to work together. And then his crew has a twenty-minute-long dance competition with Ice Man and his crew. Ice Man may be younger and, reasonably, black, so one would assume he’d defeat Pete. And then he does, except that he donates his prize money to Pete’s family, but then a charity organization pays for all of Pete’s daughter’s hospital bills, so none of this mattered. Pete could have done nothing, and we’d be back here.

However, the end of this movie is horrifying.

We discover that it’s all been a painting that we saw someone starting in the park at the beginning of the story. Yes, every life, every soul, it’s all erased when it’s painted over. And look at Pete’s face. He knows. The cosmic erasure of this is a fate worse than death.

Pete went through a Jobian nightmare of death, disease, dancing and despair, only to be erased, as if he and everyone he loved were never born.

According to Dove.com, “Through it all, Pete never gives up hope or loses his faith. Prayer and reverence for God are both frequent elements. However, there are several sexual innuendoes in the film, as well as 19 inappropriate uses of God and Oh God. If these references were removed, the remaining proper references to God will uplift the human spirit.”

A religious movie with a hero everyone wants to have sex with for his ability to breakdance, dressed like The Nutty Professor. I am so glad this found its way to me.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Midnight Cabaret (1990): Directed and co-written by Pece Dingo, this movie has the kind of cast that I look for, which includes former member of Detective and MacGyver enemy Michael Des Barres and Thom Mathews (Tommy Jarvis!).

This is a musical, strange theatrical play, a Satanic movie, an erotic thriller and a giallo-adjacent — you know, the Italian movies where you have no idea what else to call them, so you say that they’re giallo — film all thrown into a shaker with ice, then covered with bongwater and grain alcohol.

It’s Euro-trash but made at home; like how tariffs will someday soon cause the finest in Euroscum movies to cost too much, except we can never make them at home this good. That said, this tries and often looks like an old music video while it’s throwing vampires with straight razors, a cult that wants to impregnate an actress with the Antichrist and moments that feel sexually ambiguous. It’s something. Whether that something is good is up to you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Midnight Cabaret (2012): As I was looking for the former movie, I discovered this on YouTube and was so far into it before I realized it was a different movie that I just went with things.

Directed by Donna R. Clark, who wrote it with Peter C. Foster, this is the story of Adam (Brad Hilton), a young man struggling to find acceptance and definitely not getting help in his hometown, where he remembers being bullied at home and at school, his mother killing herself and his brother Todd (Jason Mac) going to prison. Now, he becomes inspired by a drag queen named Eve (Elexius Kelly) and becomes a performer at the Midnight Cabaret, finding a world of drugs, crime and who he is inside.

There’s something in this, a movie that feels trapped in digital video but wanting to break free. I don’t know who it’s for, as there are so many gay slurs that it may turn off those it needs to reach most. But otherwise, it wasn’t an unwelcome watch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) is a salesman for The Lucas Clinic, a company that takes infections from celebrities and sells them to their fans. Yes, it’s possible to get sick from your obsessions or even eat meat harvested from their cells.

Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) is the company’s most famous celebrity, and her pathogens remain big sellers as her health falters. When her exclusive procurer, Derek Lessing (Reid Morgan), is fired, Syd takes over. Yet, he’s already in over his head as he’s been using his own body to carry a variety of illnesses, including one that he’s injected from Hannah that causes a series of hallucinations. He intends to sell the sickness to Arvid (Jon Pingue), whose butcher company, Astral Bodies, sells meat from human cells. But when he loses his laptop and Hannah dies from the same illness in his bloodstream, he must find out who has created a new sickness that no one can classify.

Malcolm McDowell is Dr. Abendroth, Hannah’s personal doctor and a man who has grafted her skin onto his body. There’s also the rival company Vole & Tesser, which is fighting The Lucas Clinic to be the leader in celebrity contagion.

While I wasn’t a fan of the young Cronenberg films, I enjoyed this. It has such a great concept and feels like the closest we’ve had to an ancient future movie in some time, such as the ’90s and ’00s weirdness of movies like Freejack and Paycheck, but much better. It’s a world that I wish there were more movies inside, a strange and downbeat yet weirdly hopeful slice of biomechanical celebrity worship.

The Severin release of Antiviral is scanned in 4K from the 35mm protection internegative, supervised by Brandon Cronenberg and cinematographer Karim Hussain, with 3 hours of new and archival special features including commentary by Cronenberg and Hussain; Broken Tulips, a short film by Cronenberg; a making of feature; a discussion of the restoration process; deleted scenes; an interview with production designer Arvinder Greywal; an electronic press kit; the Cannes cut of the film with an introduction by Cronenberg and a thermal camera test. You can get this from Severin. 

Directed and written by Julian Pölsler and based on Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, this follows a woman (Martina Gedeck) who goes to the Austrian Alps hunting lodge of her friends Hugo and Luise. Somehow, she is cut off from all human contact when an invisible wall suddenly appears. She adopts her friend’s dog, Lynx, and learns just how strong she is when all alone in the world.

By the end of the film, she feels born again and just when you think that there’s a message in this, a man appears and kills one of her cows and — spoiler warning but I hated this — her dog. She shoots him, throws him off a cliff and buries Lynx. Why?

I wanted to like this more than I did. I love the slow-moving story and the way that it was shot. And yes, I understand the circle of life and that animals must die (a cat also dies in a windstorm). But the ending feels unnecessarily cruel. Maybe that’s the story, and this has no moral. Everything is left up to you, even the idea of the wall and what happens next. Maybe I’m an idealist, and I’d like to remember the woman, her cow, her cat and the dog making their yearly trip in spring to live on a mountain in happiness rather than the gory and nonsensical close.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Xan Cassavetes, the daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Kiss of the Vampire is a simple story told beyond well. Djuna (Josephine de La Baume) is a vampire who translates for a living and only drinks animal blood. She tries to stay away from humans, but movie writer Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia) falls for her when he sees her in a video store. He can’t stay away, no matter how much she pushes him away, so when she reveals her vampire side to him, he quickly is turned and becomes part of her world.

The bad news? Her world includes her sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida), who quickly ruins the vampiric high society led by actress Xenia (Anna Mouglalis) as she murders humans without a thought and seducing both Paolo with her body and Xenia by offering her a fan of hers (Riley Keough).

The good news? Vampire familiars always take care of things. In this case, Irene (Ching Valdes-Aran) watches Mimi explode in the sunlight and lights a cigarette from her.

I liked how this movie presents a world where vampires are part of society. Most of all, I loved that this is closer to 70s Eurohorror — if this had a grandfather clock or a scene on a foggy beach with a pirate ship, I’d think it was a Jean Rollin movie — than anything Hollywood has to say about the living dead. Sure, it’s arty and even overly full of itself, but it has a hot redhead vampire who watches movies by Bunuel and De Sica, not to mention a great soundtrack. I’m sure that so many people watched this for artistic reasons, but if you watch it because it’s actually sleazy, filled with pretty people and has so much sex in it, I won’t be upset.

As always, the line between the arthouse and grindhouse is thin.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I can hear you thinking—if you even care about Jess Franco’s very late period shot on digital video in a hotel room era—”Didn’t you already talk about La cripta de las condenadas?” Yes, I did. Yes, I referred to The Crypt of the Damned as “Jess Franco in one or two rooms watching women writhe around and zoom in and out of their curves for 90 minutes or so.”

This has the same cast: writer and cinematographer Fata Morgana (she also made Montes de Venus with Franco), Carmen Montes from Snakewoman, Eva Palmer from Jess Franco’s Perversion and actresses whose careers were in these two movies: Marta Simoes, Olivia Deveraux and María Traven.

This is supposed to be a hundred years after the first movie, but it’s the same idea other than images of a cemetery. Was Jess learning from 1990s VCA who would take one movie — Party Doll-A-Go-Go, for example — and break it down into two parts, even though it didn’t need to be?

There’s music by Daniel J. White, alongside Bach and Ravel. This is basically Jess getting to film nude women and then crawling all over his apartment, then selling it,t probably based on his name. But who are we to deny him the ability to see and film women, much less get the most out of the zoom feature? Are we to do as we always do and add to the blank slate that is a Jess Franco movie and find some meaning, some profound lesson here? I don’t think this is for getting off. It’s too slow, too moody, too strange. But hey, whatever gets you there, I guess. Some old people make home movies of their grandchildren, Jess Franco studies labias. Such is life. Is it a bad time to watch women kiss? If that’s boring to you, perhaps Franco’s entire work — point to the sign: you must watch every Franco movie to understand Franco — is not for you.

Based on “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?” from Action Comics #775, this cartoon was written by Joe Kelly, who also wrote the original comic, which was pencilled by Doug Mahnke and Lee Bermejo, and inked by Tom Nguyen, Dexter Vines, Jim Royal, Jose Marzan, Wade Von Grawbadger and Wayne Faucher.

When the Atomic Skull (Dee Bradley Baker) destroys much of Metropolis and kills several people, Superman (George Newbern) is asked why he doesn’t kill his enemies to protect humanity. A new group of heroes, The Elite — British psychic Manchester Black (Robin Atkin Downes), electricity controlling Coldcast (Catero Colbert), the demonic Menagerie (Melissa Disney) and the magician The Hat (Andrew Kishino) — responds by killing the Atomic Skull and winning over people, saying that they are willing to do what Superman won’t.

Kelly said, “The story tackles themes that go way beyond a typical superhero story…politics, the price of power and America’s place as a force in the world are all viewed through the lens of the DC Universe. Even if fans aren’t paying close attention to these issues, they’re all over the media. You can’t escape them. So with the state of affairs being what it is, I can’t think of a better time to see Superman confront these themes…I’m a big fan of taking real world issues and working them out through our “superhero” stories—but this one goes beyond strict allegory. Like the original comic story, the film is thought provoking without being preachy and really delivers a punch.”

By the end of this, Superman proves while he is still needed, even if he has to trick The Elite into believing. that he’s as ruthless as them.

The Elite are the same as The Authority, superheroes that became popular for their debauchery and willingness to end problems with violence and murder. They would show up again with new members, including cyborg Vera Black, a second Menagerie and Bunny. This team would eventually form the Justice League Elite, led by Black as Sister Superior and team members Coldcast, Menagerie II, Manitou Raven, his wife Dawn, Green Arrow, Flash, Kasumi (Batgirl in disguise), Major Disaster and Naif al-Sheikh.

In the fourth season of Supergirl, The Elite appeared with members Manchester Black, Menagerie, the Hat and a Morae responding to Agent Liberty and the Children of Liberty’s bigotry toward aliens, as well as the Department of Extranormal Operations’ ineffectiveness against people who kill aliens.

You can watch this on Tubi.