Who was still making erotic thrillers after the internet was in everyone’s home?

Fred Olen Ray, that’s who.

Also known as After Midnight, this has Constance (Catherine Annette) learning her exotic dancing twin sister has been killed, which means she has to become a dancer herself to learn whodunnit. She gets the job easily, as Rikki (Tawny Kitaen) sees how hot she is and makes it happen. Rikki didn’t know, however, that Constance has been taken over by the personality of her dead sister and is getting revenge on the mean dancers and scummy men who ruined said sister’s life; only Dr. Sam (Richard Grieco) can figure this all out.

This is of the genre within a genre of erotic thrillers: strippers in danger. This is different than sex workers in peril.

The bar the girls dance at is called the Candy Cat. There’s a supernatural twist. Every woman in the case is naked except for Kitaen. If you expect anything other than straight-to-streaming — by way of straight-to-video — softcore, your expectations are beyond high. If you want to be entertained, it will do that. As for me, I would love for more of these movies to be made, so I have to support it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, this has a wild concept: Helen (Rosalie Lowe) has been hired to sit in a home and watch CCTV footage of the forest of Maine to ensure that no fires happen. Yet, she can tell when economic shifts will occur when she shifts her focus. She brings in her friend Charlie (Annabelle Lemieux) to reconnect. Still, they have issues when Charlie wonders why so many of the monetary elite keep calling and visiting and demanding that Helen explain to them what the stock market’s future will bring.

Why are there frames in the forest? What’s the deal with the lighthouse keeper Herbert (Tom Lloyd)? Is it way too arty by having so much of Kobo Abe’s The Ark Sakura in it? Is there a ghost in the house? Is one of the girls dating the ex-boyfriend of the other? How about that soundtrack by Keiichi Suzuki?

This is either something you will hate with all of your heart or love in equal opposition. It’s a slow-moving, shot-in Super 16mm movie that has me obsessed. I know exactly who would love this, and I’ll tell them about it, and who will hate it, so I’ll make sure to not inform them. As for me, I’ll probably end up watching it at least two more times. What a strange concept and an even odder way of bringing it to life. There’s a review on IMDB that says, “This is terrible, you should watch it!” I wouldn’t go that far, but you should challenge yourself with it.

You can buy this from Vinegar Syndrome and watch it on Tubi.

Directed and written by Carol Morley, this stars Maisie Williams and Florence Pugh in early roles as Lydia Lamont and Abbie Mortimer, classmates at a British girl school in the late 60s. Lydia is fixated on Abbie, who is already pregnant by one boy and attempts to abort it by making love to another, Lydia’s brother Kenneth (Joe Cole).

While in detention together, Abbie has a fainting spell, goes into convulsions and dies while Lydia watches. Soon, these fainting spells spread through the school, and even one young teacher has one. No one will investigate the reasons until a mass spell at an assembly closes the school. Abbie is expelled,d and soon, her mother (Maxine Peake) learns that her daughter and son are having an incestuous romance. Well, they’re only half-brother and sister, as the reasons why the mother is agoraphobic are revealed: Abbie is the child of rape.

Running through the night, the mother finally leaves the house, only to watch her daughter nearly die as she falls from a tree into a lake. It takes that to bring her back to reality, to show emotion.

According to Lancet Psychiatry, this movie is “a remarkably accurate adaption of an authentic paper, published in 1973 in the newly formed Psychological Medicine, describing an epidemic of fainting in a north London girls’ school.” That would be Hilda’s Girls’ School in Blackburn, England, in 1965.

I love how author Simon Wessley described the movie: “In the end, the film leaves no room for ambiguity that the phenomena described must reflect powerful psychological and social forces, but considerable ambiguity as to why these events unfolded as they did.”

This has echoes of Picnic at Hanging Rock, If… and The Crucible, yet it is very much its own movie. It’s filled with ideas, and I hope Morley makes something else this intense.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

Official press release synopsis: “Girl power” takes on a new meaning in Girl’s Blood, the erotic action drama based on a light novel by award-winning writer Sakuraba Kazuki (My Man). Set in the seedy underbelly of Tokyo, the film by director-former action choreographer Sakamoto Koichi follows the lives of four women who join an underground MMA fight club in an abandoned elementary school in Roppongi. Every night, the women escape their mundane lives and troubled pasts — Satsuki (Yuria Haga) suffers from a gender identity disorder, Chinatsu (Asami Tada) ran away from an abusive husband, Miko (Ayame Misaki) is an S&M queen, and Mayu (Rina Koike) has a Lolita face — by stepping into the ring under unique personas and take on brutal fights in front of a spectacle-hungry audience. However, the women face a real enemy when two of the fighters fall in love.

If you’ve been hankering for a live action film combining Dead or Alive-style fighting action with both softcore scenes and drama addressing social issues, director Kôichi Sakamoto has you covered with Girl’s Blood (AKA Aka x Pinku). If you’re averse to fetishism and fan service cliches, this is not the movie for you.

The drama involving gender identity, psychological and physical childhood abuse, and domestic abuse is actually quite good, and though the fights involve a sometimes bewildering mix of MMA fighting with joshi professional wrestling costumes and gimmicks, these sequences are impressively staged and choreographed — although the mud wrestling scenes are on the lurid side of matters.

The pacing is questionable at times as the proceedings flow from fights to drama to sapphic softcore, but for the most part Sakamoto juggles things quite well. Girl’s Blood seems to be a film that wants to appeal to almost everyone by trying many different approaches. It means to entertain, and it does just that, though it will do so for different reasons depending on what the viewer likes — in other words, mileage will vary greatly.

From January 31, Girl’s Blood will be available on FILM MOVEMENT PLUS, which can be found on its own site at filmmovementplus.com or via Amazon Prime Video.

Open Windows is a screen-life movie, a found-footage film that takes place mainly on a computer’s desktop and various screens, including surveillance cameras and phones.

Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood) is a superfan of actress Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey, who is a sex-positive model, writer, musician, DJ and, yes, former adult star; she’s closer to a multimedia artist than just that last item on her resume) and has won a dinner date with her. As he waits in his hotel room, he watches a press conference – at Fantastic Fest — for her newest horror movie; her manager, Chord (Neil Maskell), interrupts to tell him the date has been canceled.

Soon, Chord is teaching him how to spy on her through her laptop and phone and attack her manager—and secret partner—Tony (Iván González). He keeps stringing Nick, also called Nevada, by three shadow figures.

Chord is an anarchist hacker who plans on streaming Jill’s murder online unless people close the window and refuse to watch. Hardly anyone does, as she’s such a public figure. He fakes her death, only to learn — spoilers after this — that Nick has been Nevada all along and that he’s here to bring Chord into the open and stop him permanently.

Director and writer Nacho Vigalondo also made Los Cronocrímenes, a movie I adore. This isn’t as good, and it’s because it feels slavish to the way that it was filmed. He’s also made Colossal, a kaiju film with a human at the center. Even when his movies don’t totally work, like this one, they have something to say and remain well-made.

Both Wood and Grey are excellent in this as well. Wood plays the worried webmaster well and later becomes the more confident super hacker. As for Grey, she would have been a perfect Giallo queen if this was sixty years ago. As it is, we’ll have to be happy with her being in a movie influenced by the genre.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Jay Oliva and written by Heath Corson, the nineteenth film of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies and the second film in the DC Animated Movie Universe is based on the New 52 Justice League series by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee.

This is the original of the Justice League — Superman (Alan Tudyk), Batman (Jason O’Mara), Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan), Flash (Christopher Gorham), Green Lantern (Justin Kirk), Cyborg (Shemar Moore) and Shazam (Sean Astin and Zach Callison) — as they battle the forces of Darkseid (Steve Blum). These are new and younger heroes than you may be used to with Batman seemingly the lone adult teaching them how to work together and use their powers.

The New 52 may be gone but this cartoon formed the start of the new DC Animated Universe, followed by Son of Batman and Justice League: Throne of Atlantis. The kid in me is happy to see so much of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World in animated form, including Desaad and the Parademons.

You can watch this on Tubi.