You have to love the description that was in the PR email for this movie: “Brothers Johnny and Luke hold this year’s haunted hot girl challenge in an abandoned prison facility deep in the forest on acid. It’s a good trip until the devil shows up.”

Devil’s Acid was written and directed by first-time talent Garrett Kruithof. It’s all about the rich and abusive Johnny throwing a party in an abandoned building complete with LSD and a gun. Of course, the devil shows up — or the acid kicks in — but at the same time, it could all be a story being told by a man named Dale who is hanging out with two young kids while he gets smashed.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. You can learn more on the film’s official site and Facebook page.

DISCLAIMER: We were given this movie by its PR company. That has nothing to do with our review.

Years after the events of The FP, JTRO (Jason Trost) and KCDC (Art Hsu), former members of the 248 gang, must travel through the Wastes to save the FP all over again in a Beats of Rage tournament. This time, the enemy is AK-47, the leaders of the Wastes, and he may finally be the man who will 187 JTRO.

This is the first of many planned sequels to The FP, despite Trost and none of the film’s investors making any money from that film. He said that it was a challenge “to figure out a way to get people to fund a sequel to a movie that recouped zero dollars.” The inspiration for this one is Escape from L.A. while the next film will be like Rocky Balboa (which makes sense, as the line about girls taking away your legs appears here word for word from Rocky).

Much like The FP, you’ll enjoy this if your early years on this Earth were primarily spent playing side-scrolling beat ’em ups like Double Dragon and watching post-apocalyptic movies — like I’ve been writing about all month long, along with the Nadir to my Scorpion, the Parsifal to my Big Ape, R. D Francis.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Kate Stone (Taylor Schilling, Orange Is the New Black) is career-focused. That’s it. Nothing else. But she’s become an outcast and lost from what’s left of her family. When she’s asked to babysit her niece Maddie, her life quite literally must change. Family isn’t the expected family comedy/drama and that’s probably why we enjoyed it so much.

Laura Steinel is a writer, actress and director who brought this film together. It’s the only coming of age Juggalo film that I can think of. However, it treats that subject with way more respect than you’d think.

This film is helped by a great supporting cast, including Brian Tyree Henry as a sensei, Bryn Vale as young Maddie, Matt Walsh (one of those character actors who brings up every comedy he’s in) as a co-worker, Kate McKinnon as a neighbor, Natasha Lyonne under heavy makeup as an Insane Clown Posse fan and Peter Horton as Kate’s father.

We usually end up watching a lot of these family growth films and this one felt real. That’s more than I can say for most of them. Also, as someone who perhaps has been sprayed with Faygo before, I kind of loved the scene where ICP stopped their show and tenderly searched for a missing girl.

I’ve often discussed the difference between grindhouse and arthouse. That line is quite easy to cross and hard to define at the same time. The films of Peter Strickland are great examples of movies that live between that division. From the revenge film Katalin Varga and the giallo-exploring Berberian Sound Studio to the Jess Franco homage The Duke of Burgundy, he’s taken movie forms that would normally be video nasties in his nome country and made them palatable to a more refined mindset.

Sheila Woodchapel (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, TV’s Without A Trace) is a recently divorced woman whose life is bleak to say the very least. Her son still takes his father’s side and has a new femme fatale girlfriend (Gwendoline Christine, who played Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones and Captain Phasma in the recent Star Wars movies) who has taken over their home. At work, her bosses Stash (Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh) and Clive constantly asks her to document all her time, how she shakes hands and even how she speaks to her boss’s mistress. And her attempts at finding love are boring at best.

That all changes when she visits Dentley and Soper’s to buy a dress from Miss Luckmoore. Of course, that dress soon begins to make her life even worse, giving her a rash and nearly tearing off her hand when she attempts to wash it. Every time the dress is nearly destroyed, it repairs itself. And then it tries to kill Gwen as she has sex. Finally, as Sheila tries to bring the dress to a charity shop, she’s killed when a mannequin appears in the middle of the road, causing her to crash.

The dress finds its way to washing machine repairman Reg Speaks, who is forced to wear it by his friends. His life is also a nightmare, as he’s in a loveless engagement with Babs and his boss delights in abusing him. Also — for some reason — people love to hear him drone on about washing machine issues, as it makes them go into trances.

It all ends with Reg being fired and then hypnotized by ads for the store’s sale and suffocating from a gas leak. At the very same time, Babs tries to get another dress and realizes that the store is where her dream of getting thinner and dying occurred. The dress catches fire as the store turns into a riot of shoppers.

Land and a mannequin escape into a dumbwaiter, where a dead model, Sheila, Reg, and Babs are all shown sewing their own dresses from their blood, a hell of their own making, while other spaces are shown for more souls. Above this all, a fireman walks through the ruined store only to find the dress has emerged unscathed.

This film feels inspired by the post-giallo supernatural horrors of Argento. But while those strange Italian horrors seem to be able to exist within the absolute film excuse that nothing has to make sense, the shift between story one and two here is so abrupt that it feels as if we’re watching two different films with the same story.

My wife had been anxiously awaiting this film and to say that she was disappointed is an understatement. I’m much more forgiving of movies that want to be important art with something to say while she wants more narrative cohesion. She must love me, because she sat through all of El Topo in a theater, an act which she has later complained of numerous times.

Back to how this all opened. If you go into this hoping for art, you’re going to have to wallow in the miasma of exploitation. And if you want a thrill, you’ll find yourself dealing with an examination of London consumerism in the mid-70’s. I don’t know if this movie can truly sastisfy either audience properly. But hey — it’s another example of A24 knowing exactly how to cut a trailer that makes people want to see a movie that they otherwise probably would have never watched in the first place.

After a night of debauchery and depravity gets out of control, Marcus has retreated back to his family home. His solitude is disturbed when his brother asks him to look after his estranged nephew and niece.

Soon, he feels as if a dark force is in the home and that he either has a monster inside him or inside the house waiting to destroy him. As he remains haunted by his deepest fears, Marcus struggles to protect his niece Lily form the beast that lies in wait.

Trevor Long from Ozark stars as Marcus and his brother Owen wrote and directed this film. Andrea Chen, who plays Lily, is fantastic, abe to be both a young girl and a tempting young adult, sometimes in the same scene. If that makes you uncomfortable, that’s the whole point of this film.

You can either see this as an arthouse examination on a man’s mental illness and a taboo relationship that should not be. Or you can see it as a lolita-esque male fantasy that makes those yearnings safe because some Lovecraftian insectoid creature is controlling it all.

Interestingly, Lily makes the most of the moves on her uncle, which again plays into the male fantasy of this film, as we never see a moment from her point of view or from her voice. It’s all certainly interesting — think the way that Possession used horror to show the end of a relationship — but it’s just as troublesome when you realize that if this is all in the untrustworthy narrator’s head.

Seeds is available on DVD and streaming on demand on September 24.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team and that has no bearing on our review.

Writer-directors Justin Hewitt-Drakulic and Alex Lee Williams created this film about the sleepy village of Hellmington, a place that Detective Samantha Woodhouse (Nicola Correia-Damude, The Strain) thought she left behind ten years ago. That said — as much as you can never go home again, you probably shouldn’t.

All those years back, troubled high school senior Katie Owens mysteriously vanished. That ties into why Samantha is back, beyond the fact that she’s dealing with the death of her estranged daughter. She’s also dealing with the death of her daughter, an event that has destroyed her marriage and career.

Soon, she learns that her father’s death is one of many that ties into Katie Owens. There’s also the matter of her insomnia, hallucinations, self-doubt and a centuries-old cult that runs the town.

This film was the winner of the 2015 Cinecoup Film Accelerator Challenge, which granted them a million dollars in financing. The original version of the film was a documentary that only focused on the Katie Owens disappearance, but the final film ended up becoming a narrative story.

The filmmakers spent their money the right way, getting great actors like Correia-Damude, who they’ve said was the reason the film was able to finish on time (she supposedly nailed 9-12 pages of script a day, an amazing feat) and Michael Ironside (Starship Troopers), who was the selling point to get me to watch this.

Between the arty shots and the soundtrack by Cults, this film aspires more to the arthouse than grindhouse. If you’re a fan of True Detective, you’ll see its influence all over the film. That said, for young filmmakers making a film that’s pretty much going direct to streaming, it’s head and shoulders above the competition.

HELLmington is available now on DVD and streaming on demand.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team but that has no bearing on our review.

We still call football soccer in the US and much like the metric system, most folks don’t even think about it after they get out of grade school. Yet for some that love it, it becomes a way of life.

Based on the autobiographical novel by Dave Roberts, this movie recounts the author’s teen years as he supported the worst football club in the country.

Brenock O’Connor (OIly from Game of Thrones) plays young David, who forgoes school and even a normal social life to follow his ailing soccer team across the country. He soon becomes part of the crew with the team’s much older supporters — think the guys in the stands cheering on the Cleveland Indians in Major League — while falling for the team manager Charlie’s daughter, Ruby.

While my love of soccer can be questioned, my love of a coming of age film can’t. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before in here, but it’s well-made and cute in parts. I must admit to having a set of Subbuteo soccer figures as a kid, so seeing those on Dave’s desk made me smile.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team. That has no impact on our review.

Executive produced by Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick, The Night Sitter has plenty of style and neon color on display. Its trailer is incredibly effective, so I’d been waiting to see this for some time.

Amber (Elyse Dufour, Frankie from The Walking Dead) is a con artist posing as a babysitter to steal from a wealthy occult lover. However, she finds herself growing closet to his son Kevin, who has become a recluse after the death of his mother.

Speaking of mothers, this movie’s villains are known as the Three Mothers, an obvious homage to Argento. This film takes that one step further and emulates Suspiria‘s neon colors. Other reviews are claiming this movie is a tribute to giallo, but let’s be honest. This is closer to Evil Dead than that genre. It’s just lazy reviewing, because you can debate if Argento’s Three Mothers films are even giallo and are instead horror (you can also take me to task for not using gialli as the plural form if you want to take it even further).

The Night Sitter is now available on DVD and on demand.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company. That has no impact on our review.

Five years after the original Escape Plan, this sequel was released, bringing back Sylvester Stallone and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson to reprise their roles and Dave Bautista, Huang Xiaoming, Jaime King, Jesse Metcalfe, Titus Welliver and Wes Chatham in as new cast members. While in the U.S. this was a straight-to-DVD release, it came out in theaters in Russia and China. Despite not having a greart box office, it still inspired another sequel, 2019’s Escape Plan: The Extractors.

Stallone, never one to mince words, said on Instagram that this movie was the “most horribly produced film I have ever had the misfortune to be in.”

Ray Breslin (Stallone)  continues to operate his security company with senior members Hush (Jackson) and Abigail (Jamie King), along with Shu Ren (Chinese star Xiaoming), Jasper Kimbral (Chatham, who was in The Hunger Games films) and Luke Graves (Metcalfe, who was on Desperate Housewives).

During a hostage rescue mission, Kimbral goes off mission, which leads to a hostage getting killed and Breslin firing him. This leads to him joining the enemy and becoming part of the Hades prison, wher ehe soon imprisons Shu and his cousin Yusheng. He’s now forced to battle other prisoners in a fight club and meeting the warden, Gregor “Zookeeper” Faust (Titus Welliver, who was on Lost), who wants Yusheng’s communications patents in exhange for their release.

Breslin learns that Hades is funded by the same mysterious organization who funded the Tomb — from the first movie — and seeks help from an ex-employee, Trent DeRosa (Dave Bautista). And then Luke is caught and sent to Hades, a place where the layout changes every single night. Of course, Breslin allows himself to be arrested and taken to Hades and our heroes win the day.

This movie was frankly intolerable. Speaking of intolerable, Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy is in this, too. And Stallone is only in this for about fifteen minutes. Really.

Director Steven C. Miller has been part of several Lionsgate films, such as Extraction, Marauders, Arsenal and First Kill. He also directed a remake of Silent Night, Deadly NIght and almost brought a new version of Motel Hell to the screen.

The funniest part of this movie is this revelation from IMDB, which blows the central conceit of the movie out of the water: “Part of the plot revolves forcing someone to reveal a patent as if it was a secret. Patents are not secret, the point being to make something public to secure protection for commercial use. If something was supposed to be kept secret, then it would be called a secret.”

Twenty years after a botched robbery, three grifters kidnap an amnesia patient to jog his memory and find the long-lost money. It’s directed by Brian A. Miller, who has also been behind several direct to video Bruce Willis vehicles like Vice, The Prince and Reprisal.

After suffering a brain injury from that aforementioned heist, MacDonald (Matthew Modine) has spent seven years suffering from amnesia in a prison psychiatric ward. Then, a fellow inmate and the prison doctor (Ryan Guzman, Rio from the abortive Jem and the Holograms movie and Meadow Williams, Apollo 13) break him out and inject him with a drug that gives him back his old mind. Now, in order to get back the money, MacDonald must escape Detective Sykes (Sylvester Stallone in a glorified cameo), FBI agent Franks (Christopher McDonald, who I always refer to as Shooter McGavin) and the side effects of the drug.

If you’re heading into this expecting a Stallone cop thriller, perhaps you should just watch Cobra or Nighthawks. Actually, that’s totally what you should do. Or be brave like me and watch this on Hulu.