Etheria is a new series of horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, and thriller episodes from women directors. Shudder shared a series of Etheria shorts earlier this year, so you may have seen those stories. Season one is also available on Amazon.

Having these unconnected tales air as a series instead of cramming them into a portmanteau was a good idea, as while they share a similar thread, they all look and feel so different that having them appear as episodes of a show makes much more sense.

The first story, “Sweet Little Unforgettable Thing,” is all about Maddy, a sweet girl who tries to reinvent herself to win over a new boy she’s met at the roller skate rink. However, that handsome stranger ends up being a killer. Look for Sally Kirkland as Maddy’s grandmother! This was written and directed by Chloe Okuno and originally released in 2014. I wish this story had more time to grow — something that you can say for several episodes — but while it lasts, it’s pretty entertaining.

“Sheila Scorned” is the second episode and it’s written and directed by Mara Tasker. Originally released in 2015, it’s all about Sheila, who screws up a drug deal and gets kidnapped from the club that she dances at. However, the men who take her aren’t ready for just how rough she can be. You can learn more about this short at the official site. 

2013’s “Gödel Incomplete” is a romance story that travels through time, uniting Serita Cedric (Elizabeth Debicki, Ayesha from Guardians of the Galaxy 2), a research student working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, with Kurt Godel, who was considered to be amongst the foremost logicians in the history of man. It was written and directed by Martha Goddard, who lends this segment the most sheen and professionalism of all the segments.

2015’s “Shevenge” was directed by Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) from a story by Jessica Sherif and Megan Lee Joy, who appear in this episode as two of the three women (Emme Ryan of General Hospital is the other lead) who dream of either destroying or changing their boyfriends and decide to use the occult to become empowered. The humor really works in this segment and gives it a real difference from the other stories.

“Cowboy Kill Club” is written and directed by Gabrielle Lim and Jean Parsons. It’s about three dancers in Bangkok’s underworld who decide to wipe out a sinister cartel of sex traders. It’s almost too basic and short for anything to really get movie and would have benefitted from more time. This film was originally released as a short in 2015.

Writer/director Mary Russell’s “Carved” also came out in 2015 and is perhaps the best shot of any of these stories for translating well into a longer feature. I’d be interested to see what else Russell does in the future, as this is a solid and assured piece all about the spirit of a murderer infiltrating a Vegas roadtrip. For more information on the creator, you can visit her official website.

“El Gigante” has already been airing on Shudder. This 2014 effort by Gigi Saul Guerrero (who directed the “Día de los Muertos” segment in Barbarous Mexico) and Luke Bramley from a script by Shane McKenzie (who worked with the duo on the series La Quinceañera) is about Armando, whose escape to the United States has brought him right back to Mexico, where a cannibal family puts him into a fight to the death against the rudo known as El Gigante in a wrestling match to the death.

Devyn Dalton, who plays Chango, acted and did stunts for the recent Apes films. She was Cornelia in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Cornelius in War for the Planet of the Apes. This segment was really well-made and honestly could be an entire movie all by itself.

You can learn more about the Luchagore team that made this — as well as grab a comic or t-shirt of the film — at their official site. 

In “Zone 2,” originally a 2015 short by director Anna Elizabeth James and writer Lydia Mulvey, is about a mother and her disabled son trying to survive the end of the world. Again, it’s too short, but a nice showcase. James just completed production on a movie called Deadly Illusions that sounds like the kind of giallo by way of Lifetime films we enjoy around here, helped by the fact that it features Dermot Mulroney and Kristin Davis.

Not to be a broken record, but 2014’s “Witches” feels like a great sketch for a much larger project. It’s entertaining, but six minutes aren’t enough to give it what it deserves. Writer Katie Dodson is good in this as Tamsin and director Michelle Steffes has a good eye for putting together this short piece.

The final episode, “Suddenly One Night (De Noche y de Pronto),” gets the longest screen time at around twenty minutes. This 2012 Spanish short was written and directed by Arantxa Echevarría. During the holidays, Maria is visited by a man who claims to be her upstairs neighbor, a man convinced that his apartment is being torn apart by burglars. This has a great 70’s style and would also be a great springboard for a full-length film. 

Most anthologies are a mixed bag, but Etheria season 2 offers plenty to enjoy from a plethora of female voices. Any time that I want to see more — and not less — from a story is a victory and that happens throughout this series. These bite-sized tales will whet your appetite for more and hopefully you’ll look up these filmmakers and follow them as their careers only go upward from here. 

You can watch all of Etheria season 2 on Amazon Prime and learn more at The Horror Collective’s official site for the show.

This year’s Fantastic Fest at the Alamo Drafthouse is quite different than any before, as folks are virtually watching it. But for a dedicated homebody like me, this has been a great experience, getting to see so many of the movies I usually only read about and find later at the same time as others.

All of this fun should be shared. You can get a free Alamo On-Demand account to watch Fantastic Fest 2020 from home.

Kicking things off was this live event, which is still streaming, in which you can watch a hundred of the best on-screen deaths of all time, mainly concentrating on — if the title didn’t clue you in — heads being ripping clean off bodies.

A glorious assault on the sense, this Zack Carlson-hosted clip fest is filled with both big budget and small ticket films. Here’s a quick burst of the ones I was able to figure out, as well as some blank spots that you might help me fill in.

1. Deadly Friend
2. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky: If you’re looking for the all-time head-smashing champion, this is it. More people have seen the clips of this film than the full movie, which is a shame. Just seeing a few moments of its gore-soaked excess was enough to lift my mind out of the post-debate doldrums.
3. There was an astounding clip of a man begging a woman to kill him, with his head being cut off and then her stabbing him through the head until his brain crawled out and began walking by itself…
4. The Greasy Strangler
5. Hereditary: A big-budget head-ripper.
6. Body parts of kids being dropped into a swimming pool.
7. Dawn of the Dead
8. Day of the Dead
9. The Omen: If you’re going to show a head getting chopped off, you can’t skip this one.
10. Deep Red: One of my favorite deaths in a film, the death by elevator in this scene stands, um, heads and shoulders above many of the other lift kills that were shown.
11. A Bay of Blood: Bava forever!
12. Bad Taste: To be followed by…
13. Braindead: Man, Peter Jackson made some bonkers movies, huh?
14. Evil Dead 2: Always perfect.
15. Total Recall: Probably the most kills I’ve ever seen in a big budget film.
16. Alien: Oh, Bishop.
17. Raiders of the Lost Ark
18. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
19. The Thing
20. Aguirre, The Wrath of God
21. The Godfather: An appearance by an animal — instead of human — cranium being torn off.
22. Silent Night, Deadly Night: To be fair, the sledding head lopping could also come from Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, where it was recycled.
23. Pieces: Again, all it takes is ten seconds of this movie to put a smile on my face.
24. Nightmare
25. Intruder
26. A scene here shows a cop get a piece of wood through the face before he gets decapitated and I have no idea what it’s from, but it’s awesome.
27. Chopping Mall: Pure joy as always.
28. Street Trash
29. Maniac
30. Return of the Living Dead
31. Reanimator
32. An American Werewolf In London
33. Final Destination 2
34. The Prowler
35. Wild at Heart
36. Several Friday the 13th kills, starting with Betsey Palmer losing her head,  Jason taking out paintball camo kids in Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI and the boxing scene from Jason Takes Manhattan and finally the astounding frozen face scene in Jason X
37. A shot on video kill I can’t place
38. A second shot on video kill I can’t figure out
39. A mutant tearing off a man’s head in the woods.
40. A guy in an Aztec outfit killing a woman with a snake and a knife
41. Killing Spree: A man kills a mohawked woman and throws her head at an old man
42. Multiple scenes from Highlander…
43. As well as Highlander 2: The Quickening
44. Speed
45. Tales from the Hood
46. The Mummy
47. Resident Evil
48. Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy (thanks Cinema Strikes!)
49. Rambo 4
50. Predator
51. Robotrix
52. Raiders of Atlantis
53. A man with a cyborg hand killing people
54. Dead Heat: I am so happy that this movie is finally getting some notice!
55. A post-apocalyptic swordfight.
56. The Running Man
57. Conan the Barbarian
58. She: Another movie I’m so excited to have more people get down with!
59. Four movies in a row where motorcycle riders get their heads cut off, starting with a guy on a green bike losing his head…
60. An entire gang losing their heads all at once…
61. A motorcycle hitting a bus, which causes a massive crash
62. An Indian man on a bicycle whose loose head lands on the hood of a fancy car.
63. Death Race 2000
64. Two fancy men in a car with a giant knife that emerges from the door and drops two kids’ heads in a basket.
65. Warriors of the Wasteland
66. Caligula
67. The Lift
68. Tammy and the T-Rex
69. A Rambo ripoff in a POW camp with a decapitation
70. A guy on a raft getting chopped in half by a plane
71. Bone Tomahawk
72. An Aztec sacrifice with a head tumbling down the steps…is this Apocalypto?
73. The Patriot
74. A guy’s head getting cut off by a pane of glass and then hitting a car window while kids watch.
75. A white sports car hits a kid on a bike and backs up over him, then two girls take polaroids of the bloody accident.
76. Multiple men are lifted into a ceiling fan and beheaded.
77. Hobo with a Shotgun
78. Punks killing an old man with a bumper car
79. The Sender
80. Someone cleaning out a tractor when an evil goat mentally shoves him into it. UPDATE: This is from Deadline.
81. Empire of the Dark
82. An Asian film with lots of smoke and a man puking as a flying head attacks.
83. Master of the Flying Guillotine
84. Boxer’s Omen
85. Devil Fetus
86. Infra-Man: Yes!
87. A ninja slicing off the head of a security guard.
88. A white ninja slicing the head off of a black one.
89. An Asian man with a mullet and mustache flipping out on some henchmen before one of them emerges to kill a bandaged man with a katana.
90. Raw Force: I think!
91. Audition
92. Battle Royale
93. Tag
94. An Indian man, a popcorn machine and a carnival ride that kills people.
95. A guy’s head going back and falling off.
96. Bones
97. The Fury: John Cassavetes getting blown up for money.
98. Killer Klowns from Outer Space
99. A monster throwing a man’s head into a bowl of soup.
100. A baseball player’s head getting chopped off.
101. The Hangover 3
102. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
103. UHF
104. Scanners
105. If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

That’s all I can figure out. This was a blast and I’m basically posting this in the hopes that others will help me fill in the blanks and let me know where I was wrong!

Riko lives in Waikato, New Zealand, which is as close to the middle of nowhere as it gets. While nearly every day is the same, things change when two aliens land and become his friends. However, an alientologist has been hunting the extraterrestrials and wants to reveal them to the world.

Alien Addiction was written and directed by Shae Sterling, a veteran of more than 125 music videos for artists like Sheila E and Snoop Dogg, as well as a series of documentaries called High Octane. New Zealand still feels like, well, alien territory for most of us, so seeing how interplanetary visitors fit in there is a pretty fun concept.

Thirty three years after Bad Taste, it seems like aliens are coming back to New Zealand. These ones are more interested in friendship than they are with treating our planet as a galactic drive-thru, so that’s good.

The blue aliens are goofy looking in the best of ways and get high off of poop, so that right there should tell you what kind of movie you’re getting into here. You may have some difficulty understanding the Kiwi accents, so consider watching this with close captioning on.

Alien Addiction is available on demand and on DVD from Gravitas Ventures, who were kind enough to send us a review copy.

While attending a comic con to hype up his comic book Monster Force Zero, Calvin “A.I.” Cashill (Adam Singer, Jurassic Dead) and his cosplaying friends have entered a battle against the evil Destroyers of Destruction cosplay team, but ancient aliens are about to send these wanna-be superheroes on the adventure of their dreams.

Two of the stars of this film have big fandoms who will be ready to seek this out. Garrett Wang, who plays himself here, is familiar to science fiction fans as Ensign Harry Kim from Star Trek Voyager.

The character named The Janitor is played by Pat Tanaka, whose wrestling career has taken him all over the world, including stints in the AWA where he and Paul Diamond were Badd Company, taking that team to the WWE as the Orient Express. He’s also wrestled in WCW (he was El Gato), FMW and New Japan where he was called Goku-Do.

With heroes and villains named Gunns Lazer, Kadabra Couture, Final Boss, Quiplash, Hot-Babe, Squatch (yes, a real sasquatch), Wimpy Vader, Furrious and Ammorama, this film definitely has a fun comic book feel that has its heart in the 80’s. You have to love a mad scientist that is guarded by both a Bigfoot and an evil dinosaur, right?

With a feel that’s part Galaxy Quest and even more The Last Starfighter, this is a feel-good superheroic film that is all about entertaining you. I’d love to see the sequel that the ending seems to promise. And this feels perfect for a tie-in comic, video game and lien of action figures, too!

This is the kind of crazy adventures that comic geeks would draw in class while they should have been paying attention to their teacher. That’s high praise.

You can learn more about Monster Force Zero on the film’s official website and official Facebook page. This film is being distributed by Wild Eye, so look for it on your favorite streaming platform.

Tapio Kauma sent us Lääkekoe (Medicated) back in 2018 and now, he’s back with another strange film that translates as The KingMan. I love the sell copy that they sent me about this movie: “Viewers can see chainsaws, axes and lots of firearms in action & explosions with bloody results. However the movie also investigates the effects of toxic masculinity and what bad might result from a twisted idea of manhood.”

The writer/director also plays Raimo, who enjoys getting to kill the monstrous creatures around the cabin in the woods where he and Osku are supposedly relaxing perhaps a bit too much. Whether it’s all the drinking or the killing, he soon starts to see himself as a king, which leads to his friend accidentally killing another of their pals twice.

I also love that these guys stick to short films versus expanding out to a full-length feature. To me, less is always more and they do what so few movies do for me these days. I actually want to see more of their bloody and hilarious work.

You can watch the entire movie on YouTube and learn more on the official Facebook page.

The new version of Valley Girl sat on the shelf for about two years, supposedly due to the bad publicity surrounding Logan Paul, but his role is so minor, I’m certain that’s not the issue. The sad fact is that this is not a good film. Whereas the beauty of the original film is that it could completely be a cash in on a hit song and it has a heart all its own, this movie depends on 80’s songs to give it any identity outside of a pale shadow of Pitch Perfect.

That said, I really like Jessica Rothe, as she made Happy Death Day worthwhile and she does her best here as Julie Richman, our lead (Alicia Silverstone shows up as the older version). Josh Whitehouse has the hardest job, trying to fill the shoes of Nicolas Cage, which isn’t easy or even possible.

At times, this wants to be a shot for shot remake. Then it wants to remove any of the controversies of the first movie, like Suzi and her stepmother fighting for the same guy. It wants you to remember the past, as E.G. Daily plays heel Mickey’s (Paul) mom and Deborah Foreman shows up in a cameo. But as happy as I am to see Judy Greer and Rob Huebel, they are wasted as Jessica’s parents, whose nuanced characters from the original have been jettisoned. There’s also a very Scott Pilgrim nature to Randy in this film, right down to the lesbian bandmate who is his wingman.

You know how you know it’s bad? Cage turned down a cameo. Yes, we’ve finally found the movie that the California Kinski will not be in.

I’m not so sure I’d be friends with Al Bailey. Or if I was, I wouldn’t let him direct a documentary about my life. Or I’d at least not be a maniac like his airline pilor Christian.

Then again, I’m not an airline pilot constantly criss crossing the globe using Tinder to find new people to sleep with. I’m just a guy who likes to watch Spanish werewolf movies.

Over a year and a half, Al and Christian — a widowed airline pilot — meet up in various cities and countries in the pursuit of love for one night or at least a good buzz. This also puts their friendship to the test, which you’d think will probably not survive the pilot seeing this film.

That’s because while the materials for this film describe at as a quest for love, Christian succumbs — more than once — to the lure of easy sex and gradually becomes someone that the director no longer seems to like all that much. In fact, Al seems like he doesn’t even want to be part of his own film at times.

Things get worse after a trip to San Francisco and beyond the point of no return in Vegas, where Christian buys sex toys and even rubs a used one into the director’s face after drugging him at a club. Honestly, I started to wonder if the film was staged way before this point and I’m honestly not sure that it wasn’t. The punch up at the Denver Airport makes me think that either this is the best real footage ever captured or a really good version of a mockumentary.

I think you should honestly check it out for yourself. It’s not an easy watch, but I feel like no good documentary ever is.

DTF will premiere at LA’s Dances With Films before being able to rent or own on September 15 on Amazon, iTunes, Comcast, Spectrum, Vudu and more. Thanks to its PR company for sending it our way.