Janie (Sarah Hagan, Millie from Freaks and Geeks) isn’t sure of her past. Did she have a traumatic incident? Were her parents something out of a fairy tale? Why have they left her in the care of the brutal Irma (Barbara Crampton), who keeps her on a strict diet and treats her as if she were a prisoner? Why does Irma use a tuning fork on her? And just what is wrong with Janie, who has regular seizures and violent outbursts?

Perhaps Irma was right to treat Janie this way after we see how she stalks Savannah (Sara Malakul Lane) and her boyfriend Connor (Riley Litman). That may be true when Janie snarls that she’s just the housekeeper. But Irma promised Janie’s mother in death that she would take care of her, and Janie’s father is gone. So she remains in this stark home, making her nutrition shakes, doing yoga with he,r and even putting her into a shock collar to keep her from leaving the house.

Except that Janie learns to love the pain and overcomes it.

Soon, she’s using the same abusive treatment on Savannah — spoiler warning: after bashing her lover’s brains in a mid-sex act — and forcing her to wear the shock collar. Directed and written by Ben Cresciman, this seems like an art film, yet it has the exploitation that makes it seem like a film that would play at a less reputable movie theater. Barbara Crampton is always the best part of this, but Hagan is also immensely talented.

I can see why some people reviewed this and hated it; it’s slow-moving, it’s confrontational in its gore, and it has a lesbian lead who is going mental for the entire running time and her obsession with a woman is presented as another part of her mental illness. But hey, I got this from Gregory Joseph’s Movies Jean Rollin and Jess Franco Might Like, If They Were Still Alive Letterboxd list, which fits right into their movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell), this film explores the lifelong relationship between Catherine Hewitt (Elisabeth Moss) and Virginia Lowell (Katherine Waterston). Last year, Virginia was going through a bad time, and Catherine tried to help her; this year, Catherine is dealing with the suicide of her father, a man to who she gave everything, and her boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) leaving her.

Last year, James took away from their relationship and this year, the man who gets in the way is Virginia’s neighbor Rich (Patrick Fugit). We quickly discover that Catherine’s issues are way worse than anyone believed; Virginia says she has nothing and is no one, as the only two men she put her life into have left her.

This happens when two people who say they know each other so well soon learn that they have no clue at all about each other. This leads to dialogue like “What’s it like, having all the answers all the time to everything?” and a feeling that a hagsploitation breakdown is about to happen at any moment, but what is sadder is that instead of being served a dead bird or shoved down the steps, these women inflict greater misery upon one another by the breaking of whatever supposed connection they once had.

At one point, Catherine takes all of her rage and explodes at Rich, saying, “You fucking animal. You unrepentant piece of shit. You click your tongue, and you revel in the affairs of others. You are worthless. You don’t know anything about me. You show up to fuck my best friend, and you pry into the lives of others to conceal how worthless and boring your own life is. I don’t deserve this. I just want to be left alone. I want to be left alone with the few people who are left in this world who are decent. You are weak and greedy and selfish, and you are the root of every problem. You are why people betray one another. You are why there is nowhere safe or happy anymore. You are why depression exists. You are why there is no escape from indecency and gossip and lies. You, Rich, you are why my father had to die. Because he couldn’t live in a world like this.”

Yeah, it’s not a fun vacation.

This has tones of Rosemary’s Baby (that party nightmare), Repulsion, Persona, Images, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Sisters and Interiors while having some Let’s Scare Jessica To Death without getting into the supernatural. It feels even more frightening like you’re trapped in the house with these people, waiting for their reality to implode.

Also: Elisabeth Moss being unhinged in this has only increased my crush. I can admit that.

1963: During the Cold War, CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) teams with KGB officer Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) to thwart a criminal organization. They must find Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), daughter of nuclear scientist Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel) and defeat Nazis who want to bring about the Fourth Reich.

Based on the TV series, this is an OK action movie, but it makes a mistake similar to so many remakes: Do we want the origin story? Or do we want to see Solo and Kuryakin already working together as part of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement? It’s cool when Hugh Grant shows up as Alexander Waverly, but for those who love the original show, will they love this? And for those who don’t know it, is this a spy film that is different enough?

I didn’t dislike what I watched, but the original show was a phenomenon. Yet, for a movie that took over a decade to happen, does it mean anything to anyone other than its small fanbase that’s still left, who may not enjoy the changes? Maybe I should stop worrying and enjoy watching Richie’s work, as this all looks nice.

The Arrow Video release of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has plenty of extras, including new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry; new interviews with co-writer/producer Lionel Wigram and Luca Calvani; Legacy of U.N.C.L.E., a new featurette celebrating the original 1960s TV series and its influence on the 2015 movie, featuring Helen McCarthy, David Flint and Vic Pratt; a featurette on Guy Ritchie’s films; archival features on the making of the movie; a trailer; an image gallery; a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Barry Forshaw and a reprinted article from CODEX Magazine on the film’s cinematography and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative. You can order it from MVD in 4K UHD or Blu-ray.

Directed and written by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, this finds Holly (Helen Rogers), Cali (Alexandra Turshen) and Mel (Lauren Molina) — girls home from college for the holidays but also representations of Freud’s id, ego and superego — going to party at Cali’s uncle’s house.

It’s only after they’re there for some time that the girls realize that she lied and that she has no idea who owns the house. That’s when Arthur (Larry Fessenden), the groundskeeper, arrives and tries to kick them out. He falls down the stairs and appears to die, so the girls decide to tell the cops that he showed up and attacked Holly, but fell down the stairs. They make up evidence by Cali ripping out some of Holly’s hair and Holly scratching herself with the man’s fingernails. That’s when they find out that he’s not dead but paralyzed.

The girls also learn that Cali is probably mental, as she smothers Arthur with a pillow and tries to kill Holly, thereby eliminating the person that Arthur attacked and allowing her to get away with the crime. I won’t ruin the end of this, but this is certainly one brutal holiday film.

Berk and Olsen have since made another movie about a burglary gone wrong, Villains, and Significant Other.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Piotr (Itay Tiran) and Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska) met over the web and are about to be married. He barely speaks Polish, having lived in England for several years. As he comes back to the country for their wedding, he moves into an old home that was owned by her grandfather. However, as he works in the yard, he unearths a skeleton and starts to have visions of a dead bride, Hana, who slowly possesses him during the reception.

As Żaneta is from a rich family, they want to hide this from their friends, so they ply them with food and drink as a doctor and a priest examine Piotr. Only a teacher (Wlodzimierz Press), who is the last surviving Jewish person in the town, recognizes that the possessed man is speaking Yiddish and has the voice of Hana.

Directed by Marcin Wrona, who wrote the story with Pawel Maslona which was based on Piotr Rowicki’s play Adherence, Demon is a new way of looking at the Dybbuk myth but infused through marriage. In the act of being wed, we move past our previous selves and become someone new, someone united not only with a new person, but an entirely different family. Żaneta’s relatives may have profited from World War II and the extermination of the Jewish people, so their sins have come to infect the person who is joining them.

As the guests drunkenly become debauched and the winds and rain howl with fury outside, the groom is in the basement losing his sanity.

Sadly, Wrona committed suicide in his hotel room during the Gdynia Polish Film Festival where this movie was being shown. Beyond this tragic loss of life, this act ends the art that could have been created. What a loss.

Demon is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction by Slavic horror scholar Dr. Agnieszka Jeżyk, commentary with film historian Daniel Bird and film critic/actress Manuela Lazić, a video essay by Peter Bebergal, author Oo Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story Of The Technological Quest For The Supernatural and filmmaker Stephen Broomer, a trailer and the short film Dibbuk.

You can order this set from Severin.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Look, if you can’t have a house in Amityville, have a theater. And if you can’t shoot in Amityville, shoot your movie in Canada and the UK. After evil monkeys, lamps, lumber and furniture, what else can become part of the dark side and get possessed, you know?

Spencer Banks, who plays Reverend Simon Randall, played a character named Simon Randall on the British 1970 children’s series Timeslip. His co-star on that show, Cheryl Burfield, is his wife in this movie and Lesley Scoble, who plays Karen, was Alpha 17 on that very same programme. Yes, I did spell it the British way.

Following the death of her parents, Fawn Harriman inherits a theatre in Amityville. She takes three victims — I mean friends — to spend the weekend there to check the place out. A homeless girl shows up, as does one of her high school teachers, who wants to warn her of the evil inside the playhouse. You know, every playhouse I’ve ever been in has been said to be haunted.

Director John R. Walker will show up in the upcoming Amityville: Evil Never Dies, which is pretty meta. Even more meta, he’ll be playing the Peter Sommers character he’s also played in Ghoul, Meathook Massacre 4 and another movie he’s directed that has a great title, Ouijageist.

This isn’t the worst Amityville movie I’ve seen. It’s pretty competently made, which is a major step above and beyond a lot of these films. I don’t know if that’s a good review or I have desert island syndrome, where everything looks better than some of these movies.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Mark Polonia also made Empire of the Apes, so it stands to wonder why he waited so long to make a cash-in on the Amityville series. I mean, this is the man who also made Sharkenstein, Bigfoot vs. Zombies and multiple Camp Blood movies. Just so you know what you’re getting into — these are shot on video films intended for DVD distribution to maniacs like me in Walmart (or today, on Amazon Prime).

For the eleventh overall Amityville movie, a young woman and her friends — on their way back from helping with hurricane relief efforts in Florida, keeping it topical — stop in the town of Amityville to check in on a sick grandmother.

That’s when they run into an ancient witch and her spells, which turn one of them into a spider. This is more about a curse on the townsfolk than 112 Ocean Avenue. But hey — Eric Roberts turns up as The Dark Lord. What does Roberts do, show up in rural Pennsylvania and put out a beacon to tell directors that he’s available for work?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro said that this was “a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story. I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback.”

He succeeded as this feels so close to the gothic Italian films I love, as well as parts of Hammer along the way, as heiress and author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) continually is visited by spirits who carry warnings of Crimson Peak, even in her childhood.

As she becomes an adult, she falls in love with English baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an inventor who is trying to revive the fortunes of his family’s clay mine. Her father thinks something is wrong with Thomas and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), so he pays them to leave the country, but not before Mr. Cushing is murdered. Sharpe takes her to England and his home, located above the clay mines, a place where the red dirt and snow combine to make a bloody canvas for a foreboding home. Meanwhile, Edith leaves behind Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who follows her to England to save her from the Sharpes.

Working with writers Matthew Robbins and an uncredited Lucinda Coxon, del Toro aims for a big movie here and succeeds. I watch this at least twice a year and am always so pleased with its scope and substance. The story of doomed romance and a deranged family is one that I return to for comfort, marveling at the colors and tones of this, wishing that more filmmakers would find inspiration in films like The Haunting. Nothing compares to seeing this on a real movie screen, just sitting in the dark savoring each moment yet I try to recapture that feeling with each watch.

Crimson Peak is a movie that I have been waiting for a company to make a UHD release of and I’m so excited that Arrow Video did it. As always, you get an incredible package that goes beyond just a stunning looking version of the movie, but also a massive amount of extras. They include audio commentary by co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro; The House is Alive: Constructing Crimson Peak, a feature-length documentary with cast and crew interviews and extensive behind the scenes footage; a Spanish language interview with del Toro; four featurettes exploring different aspects of Allerdale Hall; A Primer on Gothic Romance, a featurette with the director and stars talk about the key traits of Gothic romance; The Light and Dark of Crimson Peak, featuring the cast and crew discussing the use of color in this movie; Hand Tailored Gothic, a featurette on the film’s striking costumes; A Living Thing, a look at the design, modeling and construction of the Allerdale Hall sets; Beware of Crimson Peak, which has Tom Hiddleston giving a walking tour around Allerdale Hall; Crimson Phantoms, a featurette on the film’s amazing ghosts; Kim Newman on Crimson Peak and the Tradition of Gothic Romance and Violence and Beauty in Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic Fairy Tale Films by Kat Ellinger. There are also deleted scenes, an image gallery, and original trailers and TV spots.

It all comes inside limited edition packaging designed by Crimson Peak concept artist Guy Davis, which includes a double-sided, fold-out poster, four double-sided postcards and a limited edition 80-page, hard-bound book featuring writing by David Jenkins and Simon Abrams, an archival interview with Guillermo del Toro and original conceptual design illustrations by artists Guy Davis and Oscar Chichoni.

Crimson Peak is one of the films that I can point to as being one of the best movies made this century. I’m beyond overjoyed to have this fabulous release in my collection to celebrate it.

You can get the limited 4K UHD on the Arrow site and the blu ray release from MVD.

Directed by Sean Baker, who wrote the movie with Chris Bergoch, this film was shot with three iPhone 5S smartphones. And from the beginning, I was sure I was going to hate it, as I was having issues with the look and feel and then, not just a few minutes in, I was swept into the world of Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, who did not act again after this movie) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), two trans sex workers out to find Sin-Dee’s pimp and lover Chester (James Ransone) for cheating on her with Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan).

Alexandra has a performance — one she paid for — in an empty bar while their lives also become mixed up with Armenian cab driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian) who has kept his love of prostitutes from his wife Yeva (Louisa Nersisyan) but not this night, Christmas night, when everything all falls apart inside a doughnut store.

Beyond the basic iPhones, the filmmakers used FiLMIC Pro, an app that fixes focus, aperture, and color temperature, as well as captures video clips at higher bit rates. They also had a Moondog Labs anamorphic adapter to shoot widescreen — Baked said, “It would let us shoot the way Sergio Leone would shoot westerns.” — and Tiffen’s Steadicam Smoothee that turns the iPhone into a fake StediCam.

The end of this film, when the two women are sitting inside a laundromat, one cleaning the other and finally gives her her wig to replace her ruined one is so raw. This whole movie is, an intimate exploration of lives lived a day at a time and a family about to be destroyed. The tree lights illuminate a man falling to pieces, which is one thing I wasn’t expecting in a Christmas movie.