Directed by Sophia Takal (Black Christmas) and written by Lawrence Michael Levine — they’re a couple, in case you wondered — this film follows two actresses, Beth (Caitlin FitzGerald) and Anna (Mackenzie Davis), who decide to take a vacation away from Los Angeles to Big Sur.

Beth has had career success based more on her body than acting; Anna is the better thespian but is less known. Beth is almost embarrassed that she’s been featured in a “Young Hollywood” magazine, while Anna is dealing with issues with her boyfriend and boss outside of the worries of being an actress.

Beth, the more recognized actress, is often the center of attention, while Anna, the more talented actress, works behind the scenes to prepare her for new roles. However, when Beth fails to inform Anna about a director’s interest in casting her, it leads to a confrontation that escalates into a physical altercation. This conflict highlights the power dynamics and jealousy that exist in their relationship, as well as the competitive nature of the entertainment industry. 

After the confrontation, Anna, in a state of confusion and desperation, begins to emulate Beth’s appearance and behavior. She even manages to attract the bartender’s attention, who previously showed no interest in her. However, as she continues to impersonate Beth, she starts to lose her sense of self. This sequence of events is not a depiction of reality but rather a metaphor for Anna’s struggle to come to terms with her actions and identity in the aftermath of the confrontation.

Of course, this is a dark film, yet it’s got great talent in it — Colleen Camp! — and I loved the way it looks. 

Starring YouTube star Jesse the Jack Russell Terrier — who would go on to be in two sequel, A Doggone Hollywood and A Doggone Adventure — this is the holiday story of Murphy, a telepathic dog that has been taken by the CIA. Yes, the government is ready to liquidate these children in order to get back their secret weapon, a small dog who is so cute when he’s sleeping.

Now, you may ask, Sam, why did you choose this movie for your Christmas challenge?

Two words: Jim Wynorski.

Even with the assignment of make a cute dog movie for the holidays, Jim goes above and beyond and casts Dominique Swain — yes, Lolita — as a researcher, Gail Thackray (Hard to Die) as a woman on a train and Lauren Parkinson (Snow White from Avengers Grimm: Time Wars and you know I watched the fuck out of that, Merry Christmas) as an agent dressed in skintight leather for the entire movie.

Wynorski understands the idea of something for daddy.

This is the man that made Chopping Mall and here he is, still working, making films for kids to be babysat by via streaming services while they’re on Christmas break. He just made Murderbot last year, so he’s still out there. During the most merry time of the year, let him into your home. If it’s cold outside for you, it’s cold outside for Jim Wynorski.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

Did this poster just put one of those horrifying wind-up monkeys in the windows of the house at 112 Ocean Avenue? Well, that’s just not fair. If this movie came out when I was seven, I would have defecated in my pants to such a level that you would be about to smell it, even nearly four decades into a thankfully feces-smell free future.

Yes, a cursed monkey is purchased from the DeFeo garage sale and makes its way across the country to Nebraska, where it wreaks havoc. If this sounds like the plot of the mid-90’s Amityville films like It’s About Time, A New Generation and Amityville Dollhouse, the filmmakers are very aware of those films and specifically pay tribute to them.

According to the film’s official Facebook page, this movie has been acquired by Wild Eye Releasing and will soon have a new Amityville-related title, as well as a sequel called Amityville: Evil Never Dies. Is Mumm-Ra in that one? I’m not sure, but do you know who is? Mark Patton, who played Jesse in the criminally underrated second A Nightmare on Elm Street film.

This was directed by Dustin Ferguson, who also made Nemesis 5: The New Model, Silent Night, Bloody Night 2: Revival, a remake of Die, Sister, Die! and is now working on a remake of Umberto Lenzi’s Ghosthouse. The sheer chutzpah of that last move either makes me love this guy or despise him. Don’t screw that one up.

Somehow — well, Ferguson has worked on their music videos — this movie has “Spooky Tricks” by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult on its soundtrack. That’s more than I can say for most Amityville movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Danny Perez, this film is about Lou (Natasha Lyonne) waking up after a party and feeling the same way she did when she was pregnant, more than a year ago, a horrific experience that ended with her losing her baby in a nightclub toilet. Sadie (Chloë Sevigny) believes that she is knocked up again and hiding the fact. But life goes on and so does work. as Lou cleans a motel, a place where she runs into strange people like Lorna (Meg Tilly).

There’s also Gabriel (Mark Webber), Sadie’s boyfriend, a drug dealer who doesn’t just sell weed and pills. He gets experimental mind-altering substances that will give you the promise of Screamers for real — they will turn your skin inside out.

Lorna comes to Lou after she has an episode where some beings from Funzone, an arcade, experiment on her pregnancy and leave her with a festering blister on her foot. Claiming to be a clairvoyant, Lorna says that she was visited by similar creatures when she was in the military. Lou has a worse origin story — she was traded to a mysterious man named Isaac (Neville Edwards) in return for drugs and Gabriel had used her as a test subject for an experimental hormone for women that he’s selling as a street drug.

Lorna tries to remove Lou’s child with a cesarian section but she still gives birth to a head. A SWAT team arrives, as do Gabriel and Issac. Lorna is killed and Isaac reveals that he has been to space and this experiment is to make children that can survive toxins — like all the drugs inside Lorna’s body — and asks for her help in creating the perfect new being. She refuses as she gives birth to the body of the creature, which causes her to deflate. Whatever that thing is, it kills everyone in the trailer, and at the end, more SWAT arrive to find it holding its head in its hands.

This movie finds its protagonist finding that the party has ended and that now, you get high just to escape. What was once fun has become work, as you live in a small town where everyone is constantly either getting messed up or stuck in a permanent bad trip. Why should a week-long pregnancy change anything? This movie feels like where I came from.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie by Felipe M. Guerra has bad audio, is kind of dark and feels thrown together. And you know, that’s kind of perfect for Luigi Cozzi, who has made some of my favorite movies on the same budget that most movies spend on paper towels.

Cozzi started as a fan, writing to authors and becoming the Italian correspondent for Famous Monsters of Filmland. After becoming friends with Dario Argento — he’s still the man who runs the director’s Profundo Rosso store — he went on to help write Four Flies on Grey Velvet and The Five Days and direct The Killer Must Kill Again, Starcrash, Contamination, Cannon movies Hercules, Adventures of Hercules and Sinbad of the Seven Seas, Paganini Horror, The Black Cat and Blood on Méliès’ Moon.

I’m a huge fan of Cozzi. He seems like someone who genuinely loves chatting about his movies and what it was like to make them. Starcrash was one of the first Italian movies that I ever saw. My very young eyes saw it and was amazed and forever since, Italian exploitation has just spoken to me on a higher level. It’s so amazing to hear how these films were created by the source. If you love movies, despite the flaws of the production, you’ll love this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I know that I am old as this is the 31st Godzilla movie and the third reboot. Actually, there are two reboots going on, the Legendary Pictures movies that started in 2014 with Godzilla and this series, which stars the Reiwa era.

Directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi with a script by Anno, this is the highest grossing and best received Godzilla movie of all time at least until Godzilla Minus One comes out.

Much like all of the first Godzilla films, a boat is found with no one on it. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi believes that something living caused it and soon, news reports show a tail coming out of the ocean. Soon, whatever it is crawls through Tokyo, destroying anything it can before overheating and going back under the water.

Whatever it is, it’s powered by nuclear fission. Kayoco Anne Patterson, sent by the U.S., believes that anti-nuclear zoology expert Goro Maki predicted this, which seems to be true as the abandoned boat was his. He’d been censored and his reputation ruined. It turns out that he was right.

The creature, now known as Godzilla, destroys even more of Tokyo as it continues to change form. It even wipes out most of the Japanese government before using up all of its energy and going into a sleep stage. The governments of the world decide to drop nukes on Tokyo but before they can do that, the Japanese Defense Force is able to freeze the creature.

Godzilla was once the nuclear fears of Japan seen as a giant creature. In Shin Godzilla it has become a way of trying to deal with the ecological issues and disasters that Japan faced starting with the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. It also shows that a government not ready to adapt and be flexible when these major events happen are just as frightening as a kaiju.

It’s weird to me that Toho’s contract with Legendary Entertainment keeps them from releasing their Godzilla films in the same year as Legendary’s Godzilla films. While there hasn’t been a sequel, there have been several other movies set in the Shin universe, such as Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

If the world was a better place — and it’s not, trust me — we’d have had more than one adventure of Jackson Healy and Holland March. Director and co-writer Shane Black said, “I think it’s a little premature to consider a sequel. I don’t believe in jinxes necessarily, but we really need people to see this one before we can even talk about that. We’re up against some stiff superhero competition and we just need people to, you know, maybe see Captain America six times, but not the seventh and see us instead.” Later, he’d say that the movie didn’t make enough but he’d love to make another one.

March (Ryan Gosling) is a private eye who is hired by adult film starlet Misty Mountains’ (Murielle Telio) aunt Mrs. Glenn (Lois Smith). Misty’s dead, but she’s seen her alive, which leads his case to Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley), someone associated with Misty who has hired Healey (Russell Crowe) to scare off the detective. After they’re attacked, they learn that Amelia, her now-dead boyfriend Dean and Misty were working on a movie that combined pornography and investigative journalism. They’re soon hired by Amelia’s mother, a Justice Department official named Judith (Kim Basinger) and that’s when the twists and turns you expect of the noir kick in.

An attempt to bring back the era of Vanishing Point, co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi said that the name The Nice Guys aimed to be ironic and non-descriptive, as the two main characters were “literally the two worst people that we could think of and then trying to make that fun.” That said, “one breaks arms for a living and the other cons old ladies out of money.”

This movie is so 70s that they hired former Playboy centerfold photographer Arny Freytag to shoot the Misty Mountains photos. He shoots with a huge camera — an 8″ x 10″ view — which needs up to fifty flash heads. Instead of a digital shot with smaller flashes, this means that each light must be specially placed and targeted to illuminate a small area of the photo. He says that he uses each light as one of his brush strokes, illuminating each area as he incrementally builds the final image.

Speaking of sequels, you could see this as one for Russell Crowe. He’s always said that he wanted to play Bud White from L.A. Confidential again. In both movies, he’s a dumb brute who protects women and has to deal with the intelligence of Kim Basinger. They’re both set in L.A. and this is twenty years later, so it could be a spiritual sequel. He’s also said he’d love to make a sequel to The Nice Guys. I mean, they did get those business cards.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Nice Guys here.

“Artificial Intelligence from far into the future arrives to immediately CLEANSE the human species of millions of humans who are harmful to other humans. A VISIONARY, REVOLUTIONARY FILM which pushes the human species to the limits of controversial, thought-provoking actions.”

As the film begins, Breen’s character lies dying in the Las Vegas desert, the victim of a group of drug smugglers and human traffickers. In his last moments, he is overtaken by a future messiah of artificial intelligence that plans on walking our world and then killing at least 300,000,000 evil people along with the help of a tiger named Vlad.

This same AI — Thigl — will also fulfill the storylines which are demanded of every Neil Breen film: he will come to the rescue of a young woman — Amanda (Kathy Corpus) and her niece Kim (Chaize Macklin), who are on the run from those human traffickers — as well as befriend a young person — two child astronomers (Abraham Rodriguez and Taylor Sydney) — and also come to grips with the forgotten people of our nation — the dying professor who is teaching those precocious astronomers (James D. Smith)  and a veteran with PTSD (Jason James).

He also finds the time to attend the cocktail parties of the rich, famous and ultracorrupt so that he can learn exactly who must die and also walks the desert to explain to us that the laws of nature mean more than the laws of man. He ends all of this by wiping out the news anchors that we have listened to throughout the movie as well as blowing up the mansion that said party was in, because why wouldn’t you nuke big pharma if you had space god AI powers?

That’s the point, I think I’ve arrived at, after five Neil Breen movies in a day. We must all become the beings that we have the potential to be and if his movies are the sand in the shell that creates the oyster, that is his role. I’ve loudly bemoaned the fact that with cameras in everyone’s phone, no one has seized the democratic nature that now exists within film, taking advantage of the opportunity that regional and shot on video filmmakers struggled so hard to attain. Yet Neil Breen does with every movie and while so many laugh or throw away insults that may them feel superior like so bad it’s good — and what does that even mean? — he’s one of the lone voices out there in the desert — the philosophical and artistic one, not the body-riddled one outside of Las Vegas — that is saying something no matter how many people decide to watch and how much even fewer deign to listen.

Neil Breen gives me hope.

Directed by Samuel K. Nkansah — AKA Ninja — 2016 is the kind of movie that doesn’t just bring you xenomorphs and Predators, it also throws in some Terminators. I’m frankly shocked that Chucky didn’t show up.

These xenomorphs are way smarter than any we’ve seen in the Aliens series. They’re here to colonize Earth, starting with Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Mostly that means wandering alleys and killing humans in violent PS1 CGI ways. They want to colonize the Earth by 2016 — that’s the title figured out — and they also fly in the Enterprise, because if you’ve violated this many copyrights, violate all the copyrights. I mean, they also took the story from Independence Day but that movie didn’t go as far as having an alien dropkick a baby.

Most of the good parts are in the trailer. Then again, that’s true for most movies. Most movies don’t have an alien throw a poorly drawn CGI convertible at a screaming woman and turn her into pixilated liquid.

You can watch this on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbkI0vlg-Uc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHBkFNp9jb8