Based on The New York Times bestseller of the same name by J. Randy Taraborrelli, this movie proves that sometimes, Lifetime will actually put money into their movies. Or mini-series. You know what I mean. This is about as A-list as this channel is ever going to get, but of course, it’s not to be afraid to be totally scummy to, which is exactly as you like it.

Kelli Garner is Marilyn as we take the journey of her life from Norma Jean to the most famous actress in the world, along with the trials, tribulations, loves and hates. Sadly for those Anton LaVey fans out there, we never see him show up — if so, I would have thrown my Roku remote in the air and danced under it like a majorette — but all of her most important lovers show up.

Somehow, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the trivia answer to who played Joe DiMaggio and Negan from The Walking Dead. Maybe he’s good with baseball bats.  Another Grey’s Anatomy star, Giacomo Gianniotti, plays Marilyn’s first wife, Jimmy Dougherty. And then there’s Stephen Bogaert as Arthur Miller, Marilyn’s third husband.

Susan Sarandon is great as Gladys Monroe Mortenson, Marilyn’s mother, who owns big chunks of this movie with her certified insanity. And Emily Watson is really good as Grace McKee, Marilyn’s foster mother, who didn’t take any medicine due to her religion and still killed herself with a drug overdose.

It’s all held together by a therapist leading Marilyn through the journey of her life on the last day she’s alive. If you know the story of Marilyn well enough, you’re not going to be surprised by anything. Joe DiMaggio definitely comes off horribly in this one. Nearly everyone does.

Do you have like four hours in your life to watch this? Then check it out on the Lifetime Movie Club. Part one is here and part two is here.

I’ve been in shark crazed waters for awhile, so sometimes it’s good when someone offers you a life preserver. Paul Andolina also likes these movies and even though I can’t usually deal with today’s overly silly shark films, he still finds the good in them. I’m so glad here’s here to tell you all about another one. If you like his stuff, check out his site Wrestling with Film. 

I discovered Avalanche Sharks two years ago during a summer full of madness and anxiety. Honestly, it couldn’t have come at better time. It was just what I needed.

Avalanche Sharks centers around a ski resort during spring break and a strange ghostly shark that is swimming through the snow and eating the spring breakers. It’s an utterly bonkers premise and I didn’t think it was going to work. An evil spirit named Skookum is disturbed by an avalanche which awakes him. His chosen form is a ghostly shark that eats people. That’s the basic elements of the film and although it feels like just an excuse for shark mayhem in the snow, it also has a decent plot about a soldier whose brother and his friend go missing on the slopes. He spends the movie harassing the search and rescue guy, a former Olympian who is a real jack ass, because he just won’t look for the missing folks. There’s a sheriff and his wife, a marine biologist, who had an encounter with Skookum as a child but she doesn’t remember much about the incident. A harbinger of doom is also present, a kooky old guy, who rides around the mountain on his dog driven sled. Now I have to bring up that there are actually two cuts of this film, the cut that is on DVD is an extended version with some scenes of a kid in a hospital, having hallucinations of a scantily clad nurse who he tells the tale of the sharks to, there are also scenes explaining the story of extraterrestrial sharks that character tells his friends, as well as a sequence of sharks on Mars. I feel they aren’t entirely necessary and the cut I watched on Netflix two years ago feels a bit more tight and neat. I’ve watched the DVD a few times as well and these scenes don’t bother me as much anymore but I really wish it had both cuts on it. Also the end credits feature the song Ymlaen by the Welsh band Clinigol. I think the song is about equal marriage but I’m not really certain. All I know is that it is catchy as heck. The unextended cut is available to watch for free with ads on Vudu and is honestly the way to go if you want to watch the film. I hope this gets at least one person to check out the madness that is Avalanche Sharks. 

A lot of this review won’t make sense if you aren’t from Western Pennsylvania.

Becca was born near Detroit, so she doesn’t always get a lot of Pittsburgh. There’s the yinzer accent. The strange customs. And when we were in line at Kennywood to ride the Thunderbolt the other night, she didn’t get the palpable excitement that everyone else felt when Donnie Iris’ “Love is Like a Rock” blared over the speakers.

Sure, this song may have only reached #37 on Billboard’s Hot 100 way back in 1981 (and was covered by Slade too!), but here in Pittsburgh, it’s probably in the top three songs of all time. We may have a strange love for the Styx’s “Renegade,” despite them being from Chicago.

I’m telling you all this because Bigfoot: The Movie opens with a bunch of guys screaming out the lyrics to “Love Is Like a Rock” while cruising down the two-lane blacktop of my hometown, Ellwood City, PA. Yep. Bigfoot is on the loose and he’s haunting the bars that I used to sneak into underage.

Seriously, most of this movie is set in bars like the Hazel Manor, The Shelby and The Oak Grove Inn. This may mean nothing to the folks streaming this movie on Amazon Prime, but it’s incredibly strange for me to see the place I sang my first time in public or the 7-11 I used to skateboard to show up in a horror movie.

Another fact that non-Pittsburgh folks may miss out on is that this movie stars Curt Wooton, who is better known here as the viral star of Pittsburgh Dad. It’s hard to describe our mishmash non-word language of Yinzer to those that are outside our mountainous walls, but Wooton has made a career of this character. Here, he plays Chuck, one of the guys who wants revenge on Bigfoot.

Turns out that the Mayor has one under wraps and it keeps getting out to kill people, like the best friend of Chuck, Burl and Dale. This is as much as drinking buddy film as it is a Bigfoot movie as it is a homage to Jaws.

You also get cameos by Pittsburgh comedians Jim Krenn, Terry Jones, Bill Crawford and Aaron Kleiber, as well as other Burgh celebs like news anchor Darieth Chisolm and actresses Brenna Lee Roth and America’s Next Top Model contender Joanie Dodds as the lead girl Kate, who proves that she can drink and shoot as well as the boys. And director Jared Show grew up and went to school in Ellwood City, so you pretty much will get an unvarnished look at the siding covered houses filled with nic nacs and country looking streets of where I spent my formative years.

Back to how this all began — if you aren’t from here, much of the humor may fall flat. If you are, you’re probably going to love it. After all, it has Donny’s music in it n’at.

You can watch the film on Amazon Prime or check out the official site.

Anne (Barbara Crampton, Chopping Mall) and Paul are getting over the death of their son Bobby, so they decide to move to quiet, rural New England. But the moment they enter their new house, Anne claims that Bobby is there and Cat, their neighbor, tells them to leave.

Turns out that their house was once a funeral home, where the Dagmar family sold corpses and buried empty caskets before being chased out of town.

Anne invites two spiritualist friends, May (Lisa Marie, The Lords of Salem) and Jacob, who hope to help her contact Bobby. Their son is due to arrive later, but as soon as he gets there, he and his girlfriend are killed by whatever is inside the house. The couples are at dinner, where everyone in town treats them with suspicion. That’s because the house needs to be fed every thirty years or the evil inside it will seek out fresh souls and destroy the town.

A seance leads to all hell breaking loose, with the spirit of the father of the Dagar clan possessing Jacob and revealing that the villagers used his family as a sacrifice. The other townspeople come to the house to kill everyone inside, only to be murdered by the vengeful ghosts of the Dagmar family before leaving the house, finally having found revenge.

Anne and Paul walk into the cursed basement, then smile at the camera as they greet their son.

We Are Still Here announced the arrival of writer/director Ted Geoghegan as a name to watch in horror films. And his influences are obvious — many of the characters in this film are inspired by Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery. I didn’t expect much of this film and was pleasantly surprised by how fast it moves and how intense the gore gets. It’s as close to a Fulci film as it seems we’ll get these days.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

We love portmanteau movies. Tales from the Crypt, Asylum, Tales that Witness Madness, really anything that Amicus ever did? Yep. However, modern versions tend to be seriously lacking, substituting gore and shock for storytelling and proper use of the form.

LIke A Christmas Horror Story. It skirts the very thing that makes the anthology film tick — it has a framing device, but instead of using it to start the story, every single installment seems like it’s happening at the same time. The better way to do this is for each story to have its moment in the sun, as narratively this film feels like cut jump city.

The main thread of the film is Dangerous Dan (William Shatner, The Devil’s Rain!), who is doing his annual holiday marathon radio show. Meanwhile, all holiday hell is breaking loose:

STORY ONE: Three high school kids break into their school — which was once a convent — to investigate the murders that happened in the basement last year. One of their friends was supposed to go, but she had to go out of town with her parents. We’ll get back to her later. Anyhow, everyone ends up locked in the basement, one of them gets possessed and tries to have sex with everyone. Turns out that the ghost is a pregnant teenager who had a virgin conception that nuns killed when they tried to take it out of her body. The ghost just wants her child to be born, so it gets the girl knocked up, kills the boy and lets her go.

STORY TWO: A police officer illegally chops down a Christmas tree for his family, but his son disappears for a while. When they find him, he’s never the same again. The owner of the woods calls the wife and tells her that he is a changeling and that they need to return him. Of course, the kid kills the dad and decorates him like a tree before the mom brings it back, kills the master of the woods and gets her child back.

STORY THREE: Remember that girl who didn’t get to go along with her friends? Well, she’s heading to visit aunt Etta, who scares everyone with her tales of Krampus. On the way home from the disastrous family holiday, they crash their car and are chased by Krampus. Turns out that this is the worst family ever, filled with sins. Luckily, the oldest daughter is able to kill Krampus before transforming into the beast and killing her aunt.

STORY FOUR: Santa Claus has issues — everyone in his life has become a zombie. He fights a horde of his loved ones to the death before battling Krampus, but it turns out that he is really Dangerous Dan’s weatherman and he’s had a nervous breakdown. He’s really been killing people in the mall and the police arrive and gun him down.

This film all takes place in the town of Bailey Downs, where both Ginger Snaps and Orphan Black originate. That’s because they share the same directorial team — Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban, and Brett Sullivan.

I will say that the special effects are really nice for the budget. But sadly, the film feels rote. There are few moments of surprise or wonder that things happen the way that they do. Some of it feels made for the Hot Topic hipsters of the world, those that scoff at Christmas while celebrating Krampus because it makes them feel cool and edgy to do so. And yet there are a few cool moments and it’s not like I wasn’t entertained. But I wanted more. I wanted a narrative thread I could follow, I wanted a reason for these things to be happening versus them just happening.

Maybe I expect too much. Maybe Amicus spoiled me. But I felt like I had just eaten several handfuls of Christmas cookies and was left with a stomach ache.

If you want to watch it, it’s on Netflix and Shudder.