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.

After the death of his twin brother, Dante (Luis Machín) starts to become fearful of death, unable to deal with the thought of it, which comes up quite often, seeing as how his wife Beatriz (Julieta Cardinali) also dies. That’s when he starts having hallucinations and starts to experience multiple versions of himself. As Dante is a tailor, there are a lot of mannequins as well, which allows this to be painted with the yellow tones of a giallo brush, helped by the masked and gloved killer who keeps murdering everyone around our protagonist.

Director and writer Daniel de la Vega has nearly too many ideas here with multiple duplicates and even time travel and scenes we’ve seen before repeated later and then shown how they impact the film. Sometimes when you shoot for the moon, you explode on the launchpad.

The good parts: the visuals look great, the Claudio Simonetti score helps and the 3D technique is more about depth than throwing things at you. It’s also nice to see a good budget for a horror film from Argentina.

The bad: Near the end — massive spoiler — Dante must choose between sawing off his own hand to escape or dying. He chooses to hack himself to bits except, you know, he’s in a wood chair. I’m all for giallo asking a lot and making you make narrative leaps, but sometimes, a bridge can be too far. Also: Dante has necrophobia, a fear of being around dead bodies. Isn’t nearly everyone?

Directed and written by Stewart Thorndike, this is about Leah (Gaby Hoffman) and her girlfriend June (Ingrid Jungermann) have fallen in love with a New York City apartment building and that love — just like whatever once existed between them — seems to fade after the sudden death of their young daughter Lyle (Eleanor Hopkins). Soon, Leah is nearly left to deal with her rush of paranoid feelings, particularly her belief that the landlady Karen (Rebecca Street) is behind multiple child sacrifices. Karen also pretends to be pregnant, even if she’s much too old for it.

Coming after Rosemary’s Baby but before the Q-Anon and Pizzagate stories of Democrats drinking the blood of babies — even if that came from a long tradition of antisemitic stories — and five years before the occult-rich The Scary of Sixty First, And hey — there’s Michael Che!

This movie is 65 minutes long, a length that all movies should aim for. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t a slow burn that gets agonizing and shows you that Gaby Hoffman is a long way from Uncle Buck.

I have had times in my life where my belief that everyone is out to get me has been proven correct and this movie reminded me of the sheer rush of sweat and terror when people are unmasked.

Is it easier to accept that a Satanic cult is all around you than the fact that your child has died as the result of a whim of fate? Your answer to this question will tell you how much you understand the crutch that conspiracy has become.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The effects for The Evil Dead were created by Tom Sullivan. He’d been friends since college with Sam Raimi,  Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert. This movie tells the story, including Super 8mm film footage, Hi8, VHS and vintage audio tapes and photographs. Beyond all this behind the scenes footage, you also get location visits and interviews with Campbell, Ted Raimi, Josh Becker, Danny Hicks, Hal Delrich, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly and more.

Beyond his work on that movie, Sullivan also worked on the Call of Cthulu games and shows off plenty of his incredible art. The tours — what is left of the original cabin, the cellar, the home where everyone lived and the theater where it premiered — are also really great.

The Synapse blu ray release of this movie also has Other Men’s Careers, which is about Josh Becker, a vintage Tom Savini interview, two of Ryan Meade’s short movies Bong Fly and Cosmos Lovos, extended interviews and new slipcover art by Joel Robinson. You can get it from MVD.

Made in 2014, How to Save Us prefigures the last few years of our reality by being about Brian Everett (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his younger brother Sam (Coy Jandreau) during the middle of a mysterious quarantine. When Sam goes missing in Tasmania, Brian has to travel there to save his brother.

In the world of this movie, Tasmania is filled with the spirits of its many dead souls, so Brian must cover himself in the ashes of the dead to move amongst them. After his sister Molly (Tallay Wickham) asks him to search for their missing sibling, she givcs him Sam’s notebook, which has the title of this movie scrawled on the cover.

There are some big ideas here, with the entities being heard on the radio, Brian dealing with the loss of both of his parents and the fact that electricity can stop the dead, which means that a Nintendo Power Glove can become a weapon. Despite the addition of that nostalgic game gear, this movie has a darker edge than Trost’s The FP series.

When I got the chance to speak with Jason Trost, we discussed the end of the world that we’ve been living through. When discussing the actual pandemic, he said “You sit there and watch it outside and it’s like the laziest zombie apocalypse ever. (laughs) None of these movies really prepare you for it, because it was very tame in comparison to what we’ve watched. I think we’ve all been built up towards something and what we got wasn’t Mad Max.”

I really enjoyed the dark world that this movie shares and how it’s characters only speak through voiceover. It’s a way different film for Jason Trost and I enjoyed its challenges to the viewer.

You can watch this on Tubi.