While this was directed and written by Brian De Palma, this is an English-language remake of Alain Corneau’s 2010 thriller film Love Crime with a different ending. It’s an erotic thriller but you know, it’s also very much a thriller. Or a giallo. Or what De Palma does best, you know?

Christine Stanford (Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls) is an American advertising exec in Germany, working on a smartphone campaign with her Isabelle (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisabeth Sanders in the original Dragon Tattoo movies). Christine ends up taking the credit for their idea, which is well-received, but she never apologizes. Instead, she confides how her twin sister — oh man, De Palma hitting all his notes — died. But that’s when Isabelle’s assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth) convinces her to upload her own version of the ad which soon goes viral.

Christine drops a bomb on her former protege by leaking a sex tape of Isabelle having an affair with her husband Dirk (Paul Anderson), which causes her to have a nervous breakdown, crash her car, go into a depression and start abusing drugs. She doesn’t stop, as she tries to get both Dani and Isabelle fired using blackmail from a threatening letter written on Isabelle’s computer.

So when Christine dies, is it any surprise that the police jail Isabelle? She confessed while high, plus there’s that revenge letter and evidence of a scarf’s fibers on the dead body. But how could that happen when Isabelle was at the ballet? Maybe it was really Dirk, who has the actual bloody scarf in his car.

The end of this movie is like having an entire chum bucket of red herrings and twist endings all dumped on you at the same time and I love every minute of it. It’s ridiculous but also you can nearly hear De Palma laughing as he puts up on the screen.

Rapace and Adams arrived in Berlin a week before shooting started to rehearse the screenplay and had a lot of suggestions for the relationship of the characters, including making the lesbian subtext actual text. De Palma was a bit overwhelmed with changing the screenplay and also prepping the shooting, so Natalie Carter, who co-wrote Love Crime, came in to work with the actresses to add their new scenes.

This is the seventh movie that Pino Donaggio did with De Palma. The others are Carrie, Home Movies, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Blow Out, Raising Cain and Domino.

Malice began as a web series created by Philip J. Cook. Desperate for a fresh start after Nate Turner’s (Mark Hyde, who shows up in nearly all of Cook’s films) return from active duty in Afghanistan, the Turner family retreats to their late grandmother’s house in rural Virginia.

However, mother Jessie (Leanna Chamish) and their daughters Abbey (Rebekkah Johnson) and Alice (Brittany Martz) — who becomes the hero of this series — barely have time to unpack before all sorts of horrors show up, as the house is the gateway to another dimension.

Tensions start to ramp up as family members one at a time start to disappear. It’s up to Alice – the youngest and the one with the richest imagination — to solve the mysteries of her family’s plight and survive.

Basically, imagine Alice In Wonderland but made by someone in love with the idea of making everything a digital world, much less one that has a mushroom god living under a house and a father who bonds with his daughters by sharing a beer and shooting the heads off statues in a graveyard with an M16. Like everything. Cook has made, this is very much his own vision of what a movie should be and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The world has too many people willing to make movies that have the edges all sanded off that fit together in artificially perfect ways. When I seek out a movie made by Cook, I know that perhaps some things may not look real, but they end up being better than that, because they’re exactly what he wanted them to be.

I just wish I had been watching these episode by episode on the internet and waiting for the next episode as if it were a modern movie serial.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Remember a few weeks ago when I watched La cripta de las condenadas? This is supposed to be a hundred years later. Fata Morgana is still in control of these women — Carmen Montes from Snakewoman, Eva Palmer from Jess Franco’s Perversion and actresses who only appeared in this film and its sequel: Marta Simoes, Olivia Deveraux and María Traven — who are trapped in what should be a crypt but is really Jess Franco’s apartment and man, what was it with the seventies, sex and wicker? And this is thirty-some-odd years later?

I’m putting to the test that theory that you’ve never seen a Franco movie until you’ve seen them all. Somehow, he convinced these women to writhe all over his big shaggy carpet and in bed and, yes, on that wicker and made it seem like the angel of death was coming for them through some words pasted in parts if you could remain awake to read them, that is.

That said, if you can get a career doing what you love — and we have to imagine that like Sisyphus had to love the rock, Franco loved zooming in tight on pubic mounds — then you’re a success. Jess made money from this and succeeded from beyond the grave by having people like me watch movies like this.

The poster for this movie? Gorgeous.

The description? “A group of women is locked in a cemetery crypt, convicted of an old curse. This kind of succubi, lewd and wicked, indulging years pass all kinds of sexual pleasures.”

The actual movie? Jess Franco in one or two rooms watching women writhe around and zoom in and out of their curves for 90 minutes or so.

Also, that’s no crypt. It’s someone’s apartment and may as well be Franco’s.

Crypt of the Condemned is all shot in an orange haze, all soft focus as women writhe on a white carpet that seems a lot like the one Joan Collins got blood all over in Tales from the Crypt. How do you keep a carpet like that so white an clean? Why would you have sex all over an impossible-to-clean and maintain shag?

The ladies on hand include 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 who only appeared in this film and its sequel: Marta Simoes, Olivia Deveraux and María Traven.

Let’s dispense with questions like, “Should you watch that?” Jess Franco’s normal films are an acquired taste, much less his late-career digital video efforts, which are just him being a creepy fly on the wall while women pose and occasionally touch one another and classic music plays. An Exterminating Angel is on the way, and I guess if I knew that, I’d be doing the same as them.

EDITOR: This was on the site for the first time on December 22, 2019.

What if David DeCoteau — yes, the director of A Talking Cat!?!, Prey of the Jaguar, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and the utterly baffling Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper directed a family-friendly holiday movie? Alright, I have no idea what that’d be like, but sure. Let’s do that.

What if Chris Mitchum played Santa? Yes, Chris Mitchum from Aftershock, The Day That Time Ended, Faceless, Bigfoot and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tusk. I see you starting to get a bit weirded out, but let’s press on.

So who do we get for Mrs. Claus? Well, Cynthia Rothrock, of course. Yes, the hard fighting star of China O’Brien, Honor and Glory, Rage and Honor and plenty more straight to video karate epics.

Honestly, what the fuck am I about to watch?

Let’s go one better. This movie was made in the exact same house as A Talking Cat!?!

They may have also shared the same budget, which was probably catering. Which was probably Jack in the Box.

Yeah, Mary Crawford may be the name in the credits, but this Santa movie is all the work of David DeCoteau. It feels the most porn holiday film I’ve ever seen without actual penetration. I mean, that wouldn’t do for this, a movie that’s trying to be kid friendly and feels holiday destroying.

And is that Gary Daniels I spy? Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star? In a Christmas movie? Wait! Martial artist Daniel Bernhardt, who was Alex Cardo in the second and third Bloodsport films? Surely we’re going to see fisticuffs and people go mano y mano, right?

Nope. They’re going to play croquet.

This is a Christmas movie not set at Christmas, replete with public domain holiday songs and Lucas-like wipes that use Google Images clip art. It’s as if it were edited in iMovie — I know it surely isn’t, it couldn’t be — but almost as if a family made this movie and sent it my way to drive me insane before the holidays and seasonal depression have their way with me in a threeway so rough that it had to be shot by Max Hardcore.

Gary (Daniels) is a workaholic married to another workaholic named Sadie, who is played by another world class asskicker, five-time would kickboxing champion Kathy Long. I mean, she’s known as The Punisher and the Queen of Mean. She played Fros-T in the aforementioned Rage and Honor. And why are she and her husband and their kids getting in a van and driving through some magical fog on their way to discover Santa’s Summer House?

Then there’s a caterer named Constance — what is it with DeCoteau and catering characters!?! — who bullies an orphan named Molly into giving up being a photographer.

Somehow, Robert Mitchum, the man who made The Night of the Hunter, one of my all-time favorite films, gave birth to the man who would play Santa here. Santa, who sits in a hot tub and just drops hints about what he does and none of the martial artists can pick up the sledgehammer obvious clues because they’re all too busy playing a game of croquet that may still be going on now, nearly eight years after this movie supposedly stopped filming.

As for Santa, all he wants to do is chill. He has like a month he works a year and it’s so much effort that he spends eleven months watching TV and just schvitzing in the hot tub. Chill, out Santa. Run, run Rudolph. And hey — for all the cookies Mrs. Claus cooks, she seems to be keeping in pretty decent shape. Must be all the times she kicks dudes in the head.

Every holiday season, I discover one movie that makes me at once fall in love and desperately hate the holiday. This year, Santa’s Summer House is that movie. Watch it at your own peril, because trust me, this one will fucking own you.

DeCoteau also directed Christmas Spirit and The Great Halloween Puppy Adventure, two more holiday films. If you don’t think I’m going to hunt those down right now, you may have never been to our site before. I mean, Eric Roberts and a Halloween puppy? Come on. I’m not made of stone.

True story #1: I once had the wild idea of writing a Dukes of Hazzard script where Japanese businessmen try to buy out Hazzard County from Boss Hogg, who of course gets swindled himself. Ninjas would get involved — of course — and Cynthia Rothrock would play a new Duke cousin who was in the army and had learned how to fight overseas. Obviously, I went to art school. Anyways, imagine my surprise when Ms. Rothrock showed up in 1997’s The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! The moral: Sometimes, the universe listens to you.

True story #2: Cynthia used to be married to her kung fu instructor Ernest Rothrock. The guy owns schools all over Pittsburgh, including one I drive past every single day. When I was a kid, I dreamed that Cynthia was really at these schools and would teach me the ass kicking powers I needed to decimate the bullies who made my life hell. The moral: Instead of dreaming, I turned to Satan and got my revenge Trick or Treat style. Thanks, Sammi Curr!

You can watch this — with help from Rifftrax — on Tubi.

If you love A Christmas Story, avoid this movie.

Six years later, fifteen-year-old Ralphie Parker (Braeden Lemasters) wants a 1939 Mercury Eight convertible, not a Red Ryder BB gun, but he crashes the car when he goes to look at it. That means that he, Flick (David W. Thompson) and Schwartz (David Buehrle) must get jobs including working at Higbee’s.

Directed by Brian Levant (who made the sequels Problem Child 2, Problem Child 3, Beethoven’s Big Break and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas — to be fair, he also made the first Beethoven and The Flintstones — and written by Nat Mauldin who had the sheer balls to pull a Jean Shepherd and narrate this, A Christmas Story 2 is everything the original movie is not, a film that just plays up moments like rememberberries and cheapens them.

Daniel Stern plays the Old Man, which is kind of funny because his narration on The Wonder Years was directly ripped off from Shepherd’s voice over in A Christmas Story while Stacey Travis plays mom and Valin Shinyei plays Randy, who dresses like Buck Rogers for most of the running time. It also says that “The Genuine, Authentic, 100% American Christmas is Back” and this was filmed in British Columbia. It takes every genuine moment of the first film and fan fictions it so that everything happens again, all looking horrible and not warm and well-made like Bob Clark and Jean Shepherd once gave us. Everyone involved with this should get coal for the rest of their life.

I own this movie and hate that it is in my house.