While the logline for this movie says, “After a moment of total teenage angst, a young punk finds himself at odds with a psychedelic monster of his own creation,” the truth is that this film is a film within a film inside, well, maybe another film.
While the script started as Cop Killer, which followed Officer Pete Chambers as the film’s lead, it changed to be about Dood, a young punk who takes way too many dummy gummies, which has perhaps permanent psychotic effects, sending him into a tailspin of cops on his tail, romantic entanglements and even a monstrous creature that looks like a Boglin crossed with a Frank Henenlotter creature along with plenty of goo and teeth.
Rocko Zevenbergen wrote, directed, edited, produced and probably drove everyone back and forth to the set. This is his vision and with how dark things get, it feels like the act of creation may have taken its toll on him at some point. The film keeps breaking from the main narrative and revealing the pains of the creation of the movie inside the movie.
Just a warning to those with sensitive ears, this movie plays with some drone and whirring tones that may unsettle you. They totally fit the film, but the audio tone of this is incredibly abrasive in parts.
While not a perfect film — what movie is? — this is a great experimental narrative and really deserves to get a bigger audience to see it. Zevenbergen is definitely talented and I’m excited to see what he does next.
I Need You to Die! is now playing Salem Horror Fest. When we have streaming info, we’ll share it in this post. For now, you can follow that link to buy a festival badge and check out several other films during October.
Dastan’s wife is very high maintenance. And very pregnant. So when his friends leave on a fishing trip, he decides to go along, seeing it was one last getaway before becoming a dad. Which would be all well and good, except he and his friends see a mob hit. And then the mob sees them. And then the backwoods maniac sees them all.
Kazakh director Yernar Nurgaliyev takes the expected — think The Hangover — adds in what should be a backwoods slasher like The Hills Have Eyes or Just Before Dawn and then makes it work. In lesser hands, this would be sub-Troma material. Here, things get out of control in the best of ways.
I’ve never seen a slasher where one of the people in danger has to keep holding in their farts so that they don’t alert the killer. That’s something really wonderful. There’s a lot to laugh at and be grossed out by in Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It. Hopefully, Dastan survives and something is left of him to go back to that toxic marriage.
And yes, this movie came from the land of Borat.
Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It is playing Fantastic Fest. When it starts streaming, we will update this post.
Known in Portugal as Um Fio de Baba Escarlate (A Scarlet Little Thread), this 59-minute film has no spoken dialogue and tells the story of a serial killer whose latest kill is interrupted when a woman throws herself off a balcony and lands next to him. As he embraces her, she whispers something to him and he gives her a last kiss before she dies.
That act causes his life to be forever changed, as a crowd complete with smartphones has gathered and view that last kiss as an act of kindness delivered to a lost and dying woman. But what were those last words she said to him? And when several push their way to the truth, how will it change the life of our killer?
Make no mistake, this movie borrows the feel and look of the giallo — if not the need for a procedural investigation — to tell the story of the murderer. Yet it has artistic aims — the same actress, Joana Ribeiro, plays all of the victims — and could pretty much be telling us that serial killers are the new saints. The director, Carlos Conceição, said of his film: “In a contemporary sense, the serial killer is just a convention. My interest is not in his murderous impulses but in the fact that society turned him into a kind of superhero.”
In his only second full-length film (he made Serpentarius in 2019), Conceição is making a major statement here. By removing the voice from the film, he’s asking you to determine what you have heard the killer say. That said, the end symbolism may be a little too easy, but by the time you’ve gone on this ride — what movie makes a post-coital killer catching his breath next to his garotte-killed lover look this gorgeous — you may not mind. Consider it an hour-long music video for you to explore.
Name Above Title is playing Fantastic Fest this week. When it starts streaming, we’ll update this article.
Written and directed by Christopher Dalpe, Brandon Perras (who also played Tony Two Fingers, as well as doing the cinematography and editing) and Michael J. Ahern (who was Detective O’Hara), Death Drop Gorgeous presents a slasher world that we haven’t seen, well, nearly ever in the form: a campy, gay-positive glitter, makeup neon and booze-soaked — not to mention incredibly hilarious — murder saga.
Dwayne (Wayne Gonsalves) has just had a bad breakup, which brings him back home to Rhode Island and a place on the couch in the apartment of his friend Brian (Christopher Dalpe). As he pieces his life back together, he keeps moving somewhat backward, even getting his old bartending gig back, working at The Aut Haus alongside Tragedi (Complete Destruction), Janet Fitness (Matthew Pidge) and, perhaps most importantly, Gloria Hole (Michael McAdam), an aging drag queen who doesn’t draw in the young customers.
Unbeknownst to our hero, several club patrons and employees have already been killed and drained of their blood by a social hookup app using serial killer named The Vampire, with owner Tony Two Fingers paying off the cops to stay open. But when Brian goes missing — last seen getting into a cab driven by Linnea Quigley alongside Gloria — Dwayne starts keeping his eyes open.
I’ve never seen a movie where a man is killed with a meat grinder at a glory hole, directly followed by a scene with someone eating sausages, so this is quite obviously groundbreaking stuff. It’s even more amazing when you consider that most of the cast were non-actors and the movie was filmed almost exclusively in Providence on weekends over the course of a year and a half.
The film wouldn’t work if it was all comedy, so the slasher/giallo parts all work just as well if not better. That’s a testament to the work on screen.
I’ve always believed that determining that if a movie is a giallo or a slasher means answering a few questions: Do we care more about who the killer is than the killings themselves? Is there good music? And is there plenty of fashion? The answer to all of those questions is yes and I find it happily wonderful that the best two giallo-esque movies of the past decade — and the ones not slavishly bound to the conventions of the genre so much that they become pastiche — would be this film and Knife + Heart, two LGBTQ-positive films in a genre best known for gorgeous and fashionable women being killed in, well, gorgeous and fashionable ways.
That’s not to say that this movie is all Bava lighting and dubbed dialogue. It’s a movie onto itself, filled with high energy, hilarious dialogue and a creative team whose lack of experience surprised me, because unlike the majority of direct to streaming films that come to us, this feels like the kind of movie that I’d rush to the theater — well, you know, in any other timeline — to see.
That said, Death Drop Gorgeous will be released in select theatres and is also available on demand from Dark Star Pictures. If you want to know more, check out the official Facebook page.
The sequel to 2018’s Occupation, this movie takes placed two years after an intergalactic invasion of earth. A ragtag group of survivors in Australia are trapped in a desperate ground war despite the help of several aliens sympathetic to their cause and engaging in a pitched battle to keep our planet from being the new home of our alien invaders.
While this doesn’t have the budget of a summer blockbuster, the effects certainly feel like they belong there. I had a blast watching all of the spaceship battles in this. As for the story surrounding it, well…imagine my surprise when Ken Jeong, of all people, showed up as an American agent that has become fast friends with an alien pothead named Steve.
That said, there’s a dependable cast, including the man who was Jango Fett, Temuera Morrison, as well as Lawrence Makoare from the Lord of the Rings movies (he was the Uruk-hai leader Lurtz, the Witch-king of Angmar and the Orc leaders Gothmog and Bolg) and Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter film series) as the aforementioned pothead from another planet.
You can learn more at the official site. Occupation: Rainfall is now available on DVD and blu ray from Lionsgate.
Jeanne is a withdrawn and shy woman who works in an amusement park, yet has not yet come to terms with being an adult. Has she been in love before? Does she have plans of leaving the home of her mother? And why is she so fascinated by lights and carousels?
However, she soon falls in love with a newcomer to her place of work. Spoilers on, but in case you didn’t guess, she falls in love with Jumbo, the new ride at the park.
Remember when that dude wanted to sleep with Airwolf? Yeah, that’s a real thing. Objectophilia is when you go beyond simply enjoying objects and begin to have deep attachments to them. The kind of attachment that makes you want to make love to them. I mean, if you clean a ride and it begins to make sounds and blink, obviously it is returning your affections.
This is one of those movies that asks that you make this narrative leap with the film. Can you accept the love between human and object? If so, then you’ll be rewarded by what follows. And if not, well, maybe a more traditional love story is something you should watch.
Jumbo attempts to explain why Jeanne feels the way she does. But can any of us really explain love? Why does the heart want what the heart wants, even if it’s to lick the oil of our lover off the floor and communicate in beeps and lights? Maybe those noises and colors are a closer tie than most of our inter-human coupling have anyways.
So yeah, when Jeanne’s mom Margarette wants her to find a really nice guy, maybe she didn’t consider that a Tilt-A-Whirl would be that man. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Hope you like food on a stick, I guess.
This is writer/director Zoé Wittock’s first full-length feature. I feel that this has enough ideas to work as a short, but you can’t fault that she went for it. Here’s hoping for more bright lights and beeps in her future.
You can stream Jumbo on the Arrow Player, which offers a 30 day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices , Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc) and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.
Based on the Philippa Gregory novels The Constant Princess and The King’s Curse and the sequel to the miniseries The White Queen and The White Princess, The Spanish Princess is about Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope, Game of Thrones, The Nun), a teenaged Spanish princess — so yes, the title is telling the truth — who will soon become Queen of England after marrying King Henry VIII.
Now, after the first part of the series, during which Catherine travelled to England to meet her husband by proxy, the heir to Henry VII, Arthur the Prince of Wales. As she and her lady in waiting struggled to fit in, she learned that Henry the Duke of York — Arthur’s arrogant brother — has been the one whose letters have romanced her. And when Arthur dies, she keeps the peace by marrying that brother, which brings us to the second part of the story.
The two royals have only gained in popularity and have the most glamorous court, but as Catherine prepares to give birth to an heir, Henry is going to war with France. And as the season progresses from 1511 to 1525, Harry’s eventual madness becomes a danger to our heroine*.
This series takes that history and dynamically brings it to modern life. It doesn’t shy away from the violence of the era, either. There’s an incredibly violent jousting accident in the first episode that may shock many.
Regardless, if you want someone in your life to care more about history, this would be a good show to get them watching.
*Henry VIII had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn and with only a daughter, had no true heir apparent. He sought to annul the marriage, but Pope Clement VII refused the request, which led to Henry proclaiming himself the head of the Church of England and cutting ties with the Catholic Church. Catherine refused to accept this as well as her demotion from queen to princess of Wales and desite being banished, she was still loved by the people.
The Spanish Princess Part 2 is noe available on DVD from Lionsgate.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We reviewed My Best Worst Adventure on November 5, 2020. Written and directed by Joel Soisson (The Prophecy, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, Pulse) and starring Lily Patra, Pan Rugtawatr and Eoin O’Brien, My Best Worst Adventure will be available on digital platforms (Amazon, Comcast, FandangoNow, Vudu, Verizon Cable, Overdrive, Vimeo and more) beginning today from Kaczmarek Digital Media Group.
Following her mother’s death, Jenny’s (Lily Patra) battles with her stepfather have reached the breaking point. That’s what has taken her to rural Thailand, where she is to live with her grandmother. Her unhappiness grows and grows, leading to her lashing out and running into the jungle, where she gets lost. There, she meets a mute peasant named Boonrod, who one of the first people she’s ever connected with.
Seeing as how Jenny has refused to speak to anyone and Boonrod cannot talk, their communication is on a much higher level.
Together, they challenge the elites of the village to a buffalo race, which is kind of like a horse race without the benefit or saddles or any rules. Through this event, they both learn so much about themselves and one another.
This was written and directed by Joel Soisson, whose career has been all the place, but mostly involved in making the kind of movies we usually review here. He directed two of The Prophecy sequels, as well as Pulse 2 and 3, Children of the Corn: Genesis, wrote The Supernaturals, Dracula 2000, Hellraiser: Hellworld and one of my favorite movies ever, Trick or Treat. Beyond that, he was in the art department for the gory and underappreciated Superstition, worked the boom for To All a Goodnight and produced Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence, Piranha 3DD and several more films. He also shot another version of this in 2015 called Buffalo Rider, which you can find on Amazon Prime.
Coming of age movies generally don’t get much watching on our site, but this is the kind of movie that the whole family can enjoy and learn from.
When asked of how HipBeat was inspired, director Samuel Kay Forrest said, “HipBeat is based on true events from my sibling’s experiences as well as myself and friends. It is a fictional narrative scripted film that has moments of realism because we really shot at protests in the film and trains. Everything else in the film was closed set locations except for the protests and train sequences. It was inspired by the films of Jean Luc Goddard, John Cassevetees, Sidney Lumet and very early Martin Scorsese. We wanted to capture the realism in the streets of Berlin. Where they blended real life into their films.”
This is the story of Angus, or Angy, whose life is a mix of violent political activism and a search for love and belonging within Berlin’s queer community. He’s played by Forrest, who also wrote and directed this movie.
Despite falling for Angie — a rich girl from a family that would never accept Angy, not like he would want them to — his time in Berlin is one of experimentation, not only as he rails against the far right, but as he explores his own fluid gender and sexuality. Yet the man who wants equality barely treats his lovers the same way.
HipBeat is now playing select theaters, such as Arena Cinelounge in Los Angeles. It’s an intriguing story that is very of our time.
It was only a matter of time before the groovy retro-folks at Asylum poured the remote “slasher” cabin genre into the endless flood of CGI shark flicks. Now, for most streamers, that fact would be a “nuff said,” and they’d hit the big red streaming button on another film: not me.
The director behind this Cape Fear-inspired sharkster (with actually pretty decent CGI sharks in place of Robert Mitchum, or Robert De Niro, for the remake fans) is the prolific workhorse that is Jared Cohen, already in a 45-films deep career in just over 20 years with titles across the Asylum and Lifetime “damsel” spectrums. I also think Cohn did a fantastic job with the budget-conscious, yet effective, Lynyrd Skynyrd rock biography, Street Survivors. The same applies to his pretty cool, just-released damsel-in-action streamer, Stalker in the House, starring Scout Taylor-Compton (Abducted).
“We’re gonna need a bigger house.”
An additional enticement is my recognizing former ’80s teen actor Andy Lauer in the cast . . . playing a grandfather! Being a huge Highway to Heaven fan, I can tell you, without looking it up, that Andy appeared in the “The Source,” a 1989 episode concerned with high school newspaper intrigue. Since then, he’s worked as a guest star on a wide array of TV series and feature films, as well as directing. Courtesy of our Fred Olin Ray obsessions at B&S, we’ve seen Lauer in the Hallmark X-Mas flick, A Christmas Princess.
On the youthful end: when you can’t get the ubiquitously experienced and always reliable shark thespian Ian Ziering: call-in another former TV child actor in the form of Joey Lawrence, who’s always on-point as the resourceful, put-upon dad for the Asylum and Lifetime shingles (and he was really good as Aaron Wright during the 2017 to 2019 season of TV’s Hawaii Five-O).
Don’t waste your time arguing with kids lining up to be a cold lunch.
“Go upstairs, kids. I’m gonna fuck up a shark!” — Mama Brody ain’t got nuthin’ on Mama Samson
So goes this man vs. nature romp for the Syfy Channel crowd, but, since we’ve got that in-the-moment funny line o’ profanity (nicely played by TV’s General Hospital‘s Jennifer Field), we’re over-the-top content platform exclusive-streaming with Fox’s Tubi channel, where F-bombs can drop.
So, it’s time for the Samson family’s yearly coastal vacation . . . when a freak storm traps Field’s mom with her plucky granddad (Andy Lauer, taking to the water tank like a champ) and her (thankfully, not angst-obnoxious) teens. As the waters rise, the first, then second floor of the beach rental, floods, with a hungry shark — say, instead of a gaggle of Romero zoms — swimming in seige through the house. Meanwhile, Lawrence’s dad is our ersatz Roy Scheider: he planned to meet up with the fam at the house, but now, in the eye of the storm, he fights mother nature to get to his family, as they find themselves trapped on the roof.
The experienced, but largely unknown cast (the young Daniel Grogan as the teen son is good, here) are solid in what looks like a tough, waterlogged shoot. Jared Cohn delivers his usual goods, with everything obviously shot on sound stages and in water tanks — yet it looks like it was shot, Kevin Reynolds Waterworld-style, on location. The computer waters spliced with the real waters are seemless, the shark, is, again, one of the best computer-jaws I’ve seen of late, and the computer blood, for once, has weight (could it have been practical, in camera?). In addition, the nighttime cinematography is sharp (half the film is at night, but not too dark than we can’t see what’s happening), as is the editing.
If you’ve spent any amount of time slopping around the B&S About Movies confluence, you know we love our shark flicks* on this end of the ol’ Allegheny. So, we consider ourselves “experts,” as it were. Maybe my being partial to all things Jared Cohn skews my critical radar . . . but when it comes to low-budget shark retreads, Cohn delivers the goods.
You can stream Swim as a Tubi premiere exclusive**.
Shark Season
Hey, what’s this? Jared Cohn did a shark flick in 2020 with Michael Madsen?
Well, really starring Paige McGarvin, but she wasn’t in a Tarantino flick, was she?
Currently steaming as a pay-per-view on Amazon Prime and You Tube, Shark Season concerns a great white stalking three kayakers trapped on a remote island — in danger of flooding to a freak high tide. So, yeah, like Swim? A little bit, a little bit. (Know your De Niro lines, chum.)
As with the cast in Swim: my hit-the-big-red streaming button enticement is Michael Madsen buoying an unknown cast of buff n’ beach bod twenty-somethings playing younger. The Madsen caveat, however: we’re dealing with an Eric Roberts-name-on-the-box role with Micheal not frolicking in the water kicking Selachimorpha ass: he’s on cellphone at a table at a beach house, talking his daughter through the danger.
Sure, the model here is the survival horror that is 2016’s The Shallows starring Blake Lively, and none of the femme fatales, here, are on that thespian level. Juliana Destefano (of the really fun Asteriod-a-Geddon; we had a ball with Meteor Moon, as well) and Paige McGarvin may be new to the streaming-verse but each come with a half-a-decade experience, so I won’t let the Madsen bait-n-switch ruffle me to the point of dumpin’ the hate on their performances — which seems to be the case in the streaming reviews on Amazon and the IMDb that I read.
Again, Jared Cohn’s in the Asylum against-the-budget verse and, as with Swim, the cinematography and editing is solid, but, uh, the CGI is a little bit weaker this time (a little bit, a little bit). The acting’s just fine in my book, so I am sure we’ll see more of Destefano and McGarvin damseling it up on Lifetime and romancing in the Lifetime X-Mas snows, soon than later. Hey, someone has to be a cheerleader or stalked patient, right? They’re up to the thespin’ challenge.
* In the middle of July, we rolled out a “Shark Weak” of reviews. During the earliest days of the site, we also rolled out a “Bastard Son of Jaws Week” and “Exploring: Ten Jaws Ripoffs” featurette. Yeah, that’s a lot of digital chum to swallow, but you can do it! Click those hyperlinks! Uh, oh. No we didn’t. We just did. Check out our review of Wild Eye Studios’ newly-released Jurassic Shark 2: Aquapocalypse, which gets a stream based on poster and title, alone.
** Beginning in 2024, inspired by Tubi’s expansion in providing original programming, the B&S About Movies staff has taken on the task of watching all of them! You can visit those review under the “Tubi Exclusive” and “Tubi Originals” tags and discover some great watches.
Here’s some more of the films we’ve discovered on the Tubi platform. Enter the titles into the search box to populate those reviews.
Join us for our ongoing, weekly “Ten Tubi Picks” as we descend the digital rabbit hole, discovering films.
Disclaimer: We did not receive a review request or screeners for either of these films. We streamed them ourselves because, well, cataloging all of these fun shark flicks is our jam. And if we didn’t dig these two films, we wouldn’t have reviewed them. Got it? Besides, we dig Jared Cohn’s work. He hasn’t streamed us wrong so far!
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.