This is the only movie Bruce Marchiano has directed, and man, he hit it out of the park the first time out.

Alison (Chanel Marriott) is trying to get an abortion, but as fate would have it, Jesus (also Marchiano) is the janitor who alternates between being chill and just breaking down in tears. Only she can see him, but so can other people who each get their own version of the Son of God.

This is a film that counters pro-choice arguments at every stage. And then there’s Ricky, who pressures Alison into this. Jesus even tells him to be a man at one point, but Ricky may be the greatest of all monsters. There’s an abortionist who refers to her child as a growing lump of tissue and a nurse who only cares about her three cats. She’s just celebrated her abortion 5,000; one wonders if you get a loyalty card.

There’s a fantastic moment when Alison gets to interview Jesus, whose favorite song is “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” and whose favorite movie is Ben-Hur. No matter what, mankind will never make anything better than the chariot race. We should just give up.

You can watch this on Tubi.

IMDB says: “Basically the Christian version of Rocky.

Also according to that movie site, Chip Rossetti “has dedicated his career to making movies ONLY in the Christian, Faith-Based and Family genres, and has written, directed and/or produced over 70 feature films and TV shows in these genres.”

Jake Taylor (Tommy Lee Thomas) was once a boxer, but he screwed up and left the sport of kings. Now he sells furniture, and it’s not going well. His wife is ready to leave him, and her mother is basically paying for her to stay away. 

Arnold’s best friend, Franco Columbu, is in this. So are T.C. Stallings (also in War Room), Jeremy London (how did I see two movies with him in them in the same day?), and Donald James Parker, CEO of Sword of the Spirit Publishing and Gramps from Gramps Goes to College.

If you have ever seen a single boxing movie, you know what happens in this. Also: If you pray hard enough, God gives you the power to demolish weaker people with your fists.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I watched this and had no idea that Pastor Dan was Anakin Skywalker. 

Dan barely lived through a car crash, and while people thought he was dead, he was really visiting Heaven.

This was directed by Michael Polish, who usually works with his twin brother Mark. 

Anyways.

“Pastor Don Piper died January 18, 1989, when a semi-tractor truck crushed his car. Declared dead by the first rescue workers to arrive on the scene, Don’s body lay under a tarp for the next 90 minutes. Don’s soul, meanwhile, was experiencing love, joy, and life like he’d never known before. Don was in Heaven.”

That’s what they say, and who are we to tell them any differently?

He may have spent 90 minutes in the afterlife, but this movie is two hours long.

Kate Bosworth is in this, too. She’s the director’s wife.

What’s wild is that Common Sense Media gave this two stars out of five. I love this quote: “…he’s diagnosed with double pneumonia, a seeming death sentence. As the audience hangs on what may come next, neither the breathing nor the pneumonia are ever mentioned again.”

This was produced by Family Christian Entertainment, founded by Rick Jackson, owner of Family Christian Stores, the largest Christian retail chain in the United States.

This is one of my favorite IMDB notes ever: The song “I Hope You Dance” was performed and released by Lee Ann Womack in the year 2000; the movie takes place in 1989.

This doesn’t cross over into the everyday Christian film moments where the world is against believers and non-Christians are played by total idiots. There’s a great scene where Dan tells a teenager in a wheelchair that he understands, so if that’s what this movie gave me, good. However, so many characters just show up, something important happens, and we never hear about them — or the moment — again.

You can watch this on Tubi.

After a career in stage musicals (West Side Story) and choreography, David Winters directed Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare, The Last Horror Film and Thrashin’ before directing, producing and distributing movies for Action International Pictures, the folks who unleashed Space Mutiny and Blood On the Badge. He also dated Linda Lovelace for some time. 

But of all those things, Dancin’: It’s On! may have brought me the most happiness.

Wendi Carson comes from the reality shows So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars, where she was the partner of Cody Simpson, season 19 winner Alfonso Ribero, Chris Soules, Carlos PenaVega, Von Miller, Vanilla Ice, Chris Kattan, Frankie Munoz, Chris Mazdzer, Mile Manheim, Kel Mitchell, The Miz, Wayne Brady, Danny Amendola and season 34 winner Robert Irwin. Here, she’s a college student, Jennifer Gabriella August, getting to spend the summer at the Hit Parade Hotel with her estranged father, Jerry (Gary Daniels, yes, the martial arts star of Fist of the North Star). He runs a fanciful hotel that seems to feature cosplayers in scenes from movies and lots of dancing. Jennifer has no interest in seeing her dad again, but her mother (August 1986 Playboy Playmate of the Month Ava Fabian) tells her this could be good for her.

She meets a young man named Ken (Chehon Wespi-Tschopp, also from So You Think You Can Dance), an orphan who works as a dishwasher at her father’s hotel. Of course, her father hates him because he’s of a lower caste, which is a lot like Dirty Dancing, as is the dance competition at the end. Her dad would rather she date Danny (Matt Marr, who was on So You Think You Can Dance Canada), a rich kid who belittles Ken, calling him an orphan in dialogue that feels like Charles Dickens, but if Charles Dickens were really David Prior, of all people, who co-wrote this.

Man, this is a weird place. It’s run, sort of, by The Captain (Russell Ferguson, winner of So You Think You Can Dance season 6). You get picked up at the airport by a mime, which is more terrifying than being picked up in a rainstorm on the way to the Tanz Akademie. 

The Hit Parade Hotel has a website, made just for this movie and looking very 1995, much less 2015. It says, “Everyone who works at our resorts and at our restaurants is an entertainer. Our waiters are great but they are also great singers and dancers. Our bartender can mix great drinks but they can do magic while juggling the bottles and the mixers. When our chef cooks your crapes or your jumbo shrimp both vegetarian and not, they fly through the air, spinning and surrounded by rings of fire. The food is delicious and we encourage you to play with your food. Our bellhops, the concierges, the receptionists, the porters and even our cleaning and security staff all provide great services but they also go out of their way to entertain you and to make your stay pleasant, enjoyable and exciting. Your kids will love it and you will feel like a kid again, as you are serviced by staff dressed in costumes and acting out scenes from your favorite movies. We also provide ample opportunity for you to participate in the fun and to appear in one of our television programs, music videos and films that we are producing on premises almost every day.” 

Ken is in love with Jennifer in like, a second, so he forgets all about his dance partner Shotsy (Jordan Clark, the winner of So You Think You Can Dance Canada season 4 and if you’re like me and prefer redheads, well…you’ll be debating Ken’s life choices), who he’s supposed to dance with in the Florida Statewide Dance Contest. Jennifer is jealous that Shotsy dances with Ken, so she decides to dance with Danny, but Hal Sanders (Winters) is a vet who has late-night flashbacks of helicopters exploding and oh yeah, he also used to be a dancer. He decides that Ken and Jennifer should be a dancing couple and choreographs their routine.

This movie has moments like Ken breaking out into an angry dance that goes on seemingly for hours, as well as Jennifer’s sad walk through the tourist town of Panama City, surrounded by giant penguins and SUVs that pull up and start instant salsa dance parties. She’s also crying in public, and the mime shows up and cries too. Wow. I don’t think I’ve genuinely laughed this hard in decades.

We also get a Panama City travelogue moment, and I think more movies should do this. There’s even a song about the city, which made me think they might have gotten a discount for shooting there. In fact, that’s probably exactly what happened.

The dialogue is all looped; Ken yells things like, “You wouldn’t know the first thing about dancing!” and Winters looks like Butcher Vachon, which makes his dancing even more lovely. And why does the dad open all of his daughter’s gifts instead of letting her? Is he that much of a control freak? Did the dance contest move so many people that Dad likes Ken, Mom gets back together with Dad, and even Danny becomes a nice person? Can dance do all of that?

Or how about the song, “Proud To Know I Love Ya?” It may have lyrics like this: “I know you’ve had a history of lovers / I hear it’s turned you off all the others / But I’m the one you’ve been waiting for / I see you scream at people all the time / When you get mad it makes me hot inside / Don’t make me sleep outside your door! / Cuz baby I know, you know, you’re scared to be alone / I’d run five hundred miles to prove I love ya! / I’d hold you in my arms till my final day / I’d kiss your lips all the time to prove I love ya! / I would give up my life / If it’s the last thing I do / Just to prove, Just to prove I love ya!” but Ray Isaac accidentally gave the film the demo version, in which the lyric “I would even try being a lesbian” is sung. This is a family film about the power of dance.

Best of all, this was almost called East Side Story. This is from the man who named his company West Side Studios.

More movies need angry dance scenes where dudes throw chairs into the pool.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I was searching for kaiju films on Tubi and ended up finding this film, featuring Zeckencommando, ‘Lower Saxony’s most hardcore punk band,’ as they stumble into occult rituals involving Cthulu.

Kalle (director and writer Lars Henriks), Xena (Lea Ostrovskiy), Flash (Niklas Bähnk) and Titus (Phillip Spreen) mostly sit around, take drugs and occasionally play their instruments. Henriks claimed on Letterboxd that this film, “has the silliness of a Scooby-Gang-type gang of misfits stumbling into a huge adventure.”

The band learns that their landlady is selling their rehearsal space to an investor with no interest in preserving musical culture. That investor does have a lot to do with the occult roots of the Third Reich and getting Cthulu back to life. Hopefully, the band can stay together and address all their interpersonal dynamics.

Don’t expect anything other than a hangout movie, and you’ll be fine.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Madame (Sean Young) has left Darling (Lauren Ashley Carter) alone in a vast New York City building where she’ll be the caretaker. As you expect with possession movies, she’s told to never enter one closed room. She also finds an upside-down cross, and the last girl in her position threw herself off the balcony as if she were Holly flinging herself into the void at a birthday party.

Soon, Darling is seeing visions and crawls out onto the balcony herself, where she finds the words “Abyssus abyssum invocat,” which means “the deep calls to the deep.” A man Darling saw earlier, who recognized her as he picked up her new necklace, follows her home and explains how a ritual in the house once conjured a demon. She stabs him, claiming that Henry Sullivan must be punished.

By the end, Darling has confessed to Madame, “I think I’ll become one of your ghost stories now.” She also jumps off the balcony and the cycle repeats.

Shot in monochromatic grays, this feels like Polanski — Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Repulsion — yet never feels like a slave to those inspirations. That said, I’ve been reading lots of reviews that hated this. It hit right for me, all black mascara and freakouts, a perfect thing to watch in the middle of a gray and rainy Pittsburgh day.

You can watch this on Tubi.