2023 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 23: The Night (2020)

23. VACANCY: Road weary are we? Pull over for one that’s set at a hotel or a motel. Goodnight?

A few years ago, I worked at the kind of ad agency that was too cheap to pay for creative directors to go on shoots. Well, when I got the chance to get a script developed by a food social media site for one of my clients, I couldn’t wait to get to be part of the production. And someone had to be there with the client, right? Well, I had to pay for everything out of pocket. Flight and hotel. So I stayed at the Hotel Normandie, which somehow had rooms for less than a hundred a night and was in the middle of Los Angeles’ Koreatown, the kind of place that has all night buffet dinners, so when I wanted dakgangjeong at 4:17 a.m., well…I was covered. It was also blocks from The Prince, the bar where Jake Gittes meets Evelyn in Chinatown, where Gene Wilder and Golda Radner went on a date in The Woman In Red and the bar where magicians hang out in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Other movies that filmed there include Midnight RunCrankBody and Soul and shows like New Girl and Mad Men also were lensed there.

So yeah, the agency was cheap but I had a great time.

I was surprised to see the Hotel Normandie show up as the setting for this movie, but when I think about how every room had the look of a hard boiled detective’s office from the 1930s, it all kind of makes sense.

Babak Naderi (Shahab Hosseini) and his wife Neda (Niousha Noor), along with their daughter Shabnam (Leah Oganyan), get lost in Los Angeles and decide to stay for the night. There is only one room left and they’re told that they will be locked in for the night. Soon, both are seeing strange people who aren’t always there and are confronted by the odder front desk clerk (George Maguire). It turns out that the relationship between our protagonists is not strong at all and their secrets are what is keeping them trapped within the hotel.

Director Kourosh Ahari has a good eye for this kind of movie and it’s an interesting watch.

My stay was much better than this one. Originally built in 1925, the Hotel Normandie was selected as the official hotel for Stanford University alumni, as well as the University of Southern California and the University of California Los Angeles. It’s been fully restored and it looks gorgeous inside. I’d definitely recommend staying there if you’re ever in town.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: Maniac Driver (2020)

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Japan

I haven’t seen any of Kurando Mitsutake’s movies before this and, well, now I’m looking for more.

The director of Samurai Avenger: The Blind WolfLion-Girl and Gun Woman, in Maniac Driver he’s loudly proclaiming that this is a Japanese giallo.

A taxi driver (Tomoki Kimura) is usually quite normal and even mild until gorgeous women get into his vehicle. Then he loses his mind and is driven to the kind of murderous impulses that get your movie named after animals and filled with black gloves, wearing a motorcycle helmet like the murderer in Strip Nude for Your Killer.

While there are moments of Argento in this and definite tones of Maniac — the poster tagline is “I warned you not to take a taxi tonight” and The New York Ripper — this also draws on the pinky violence genre of its native country.

With a cast of Japanese AV stars (Saryû Usui, Ayumi Kimito, Iori Kogawa, Ai Sayama), a metal soundtrack by the band Aim Higher that makes this feel like the 80s wave of giallo and neon lighting, Maniac Driver is unafraid and unashamed to go there. Is it a giallo? Well, it has the feel of the genre, even if it gives away the killer right away and his reasons — his wife was killed while he was unable to protect her — aren’t discovered by someone else or the police blundering in the dark.

It’s closer to a slasher or Taxi Hunter. That said, I could care less what bucket it has to fit into. It’s fast running time is filled with non-stop violence and sex, a movie that’s ready to be lurid and cheap. And I mean that as a good thing.

ETs Among Us 5: Binary Code, Secret Messages From the Cosmo With Linda Moulton Howe (2020)

While this ETs Among Us film is only twenty minutes, Linda Moulton Howe and narrator/director Cybela Clare analyze parallel binary code warnings from UFOs 35 years apart.

In 1980, a military officer in Bentwaters Air Force base (Britain) witnessed a landed spacecraft and was later mentally bombarded with binary code. This is better known as the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident and is considered by some to be “Britain’s Roswell.”

On December 26, 1980, U.S. military personnel spotted strange lights above Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Air Force officer John Burroughs was one of the men who investigated the event — which Nick Pope has claimed was an actual landing — and said “The woods lit up and you could hear the farm animals making a lot of noises. You could see the lights down by a farmer’s house. We climbed over the fence and started walking toward the red and blue lights and they just disappeared.”

Fellow office Jim Penniston said, “I estimated it to be about three meters tall and about three meters wide at the base. No landing gear was apparent, but it seemed like she was on fixed legs. I moved a little closer… I walked around the craft, and finally, I walked right up to the craft. I noticed the fabric of the shell was more like a smooth, opaque, black glass.”

Both men have PTSD from the incident and Penniston even claims that he was “bombarded with binary code.” Others say it was just a meteor or the SAS pulling a prank on the U.S. Air Force.

According to this movie, binary code was transmitted to another military man in 2015 in the USA. What do you think? Have you ever been bombarded by binary code?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Space Vampire (2020)

Taking its title — possibly — from Lifeforce and some ideas from Under the Skin. Chris Alexander’s Space Vampire has Ali Chappell (she’s been in nearly all of his projects, including Necropolis: Legion, Scream of the Blind DeadIt Knows You’re AloneGirl With a Straight Razor and Parasite Lady) dressed in leather and stalking a victim (Cheryl Singleton) when she isn’t simply filling the frame while low end beats pulse and wave. Alternatively, she’s showering off the blood or puking it in the bathtub.

Also known as 

So many reviews of this movie absolutely hate it. I love that it exists on Tubi and someone could be looking for a vampire movie and come across this droning film, one that takes so long and yet is so short to tell whatever nonstory it has. And that’s a compliment. It feels like something that should be confronting you in a museum and yet here it is, next to episodes of old sitcoms and whatever else a free streaming service has to unleash upon the unsuspecting.

If you have no patience, this will test you. If you want to watch a woman in a vinyl catsuit deal with the pain of vampirism while noises whirl under her when she isn’t somewhere outside of Toronto making bloodsucking footprints in the snow, I really have no idea what movie will satisfy that particular craving except for this one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ETs Among Us 4: The Reality of ET/Human Hybrids (2020)

Renowned psychotherapist Barbara Lamb — who wrote this film — has proof of ET/human hybrids. What are these hybrid species? What are their abilities? Why are they here on Earth? Not only does Lamb have these answers, she also has had several long-term relationships with several hybrid species.

Now, that knowledge can be yours.

According to her website, Barbara Lamb is a “UFOlogy Researcher – Experiencer and Past Life Therapist – Crop Circle Educator.” It goes deeper to explain that “Barbara Lamb offers personalized regression therapy sessions, books, workshops and interviews. She is a world-renowned experiencer therapist, Ufologist, crop circle expert and past life therapist.” She’s also “a longtime psychotherapist, having been licensed in 1976, and a highly trained hypnotherapist and regression therapist since 1984. She had five years of training in regression therapy by the International Association for Regression Research and Therapies.  She became a trainer for that organization as well as for the Professional Institute of Regression Therapy and the International Board of Regression Therapists.  In 1991 she began regressing people to the details of their extraterrestrial encounters, and has regressed well over 2000 people   (in over 4000 regressions) to those and to other paranormal experiences.  This work and her past life therapy and her soul guidance work continues, with sessions in person in San Diego, California and on Skype or Zoom.”

You can check out her YouTube channel here.

There are four 1 star reviews on IMDB and two 10 star reviews. They are as opposite as you can get, the lower end decrying the lack of evidence and the well-reviewed ones enthralled and sure that everything in this movie is gospel. I find myself somewhere in the middle of all of this, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t entertained by this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Bird’s Eye View – An ET’s Solution for Humanity (2020)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on . As I’ll be exploring the films of Cybela Clare this week, this movie has been reposted with some added new material.

I have to thank Bradley Steele Harding for recommending that I watch this while also realizing that his suggestion that I watch this film is like something out of Japanese horror. I’m now obsessed by Cybela Clare and not only want to watch all of her movies, I want to know where she came from, where she’s going and if she wants me to mix her some drinks.

Her Instagram is a mix of images from the film and selfies, telling me not much. According to a 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer piece, she’s from the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia and paints her as an outsider artist.

But let me tell you, you don’t make this kind of movie without being a believer. And this isn’t a “so bad it’s good” laugh off — I don’t believe in that “so bad” term — but more an exploration of exactly what this movie is all about.

The other info I’ve found comes from IMDB: Cybela is fluent in six languages, an Ivy League graduate and former Drama Tutor at Harvard University. She’s also a member of the Explorers Club and has traveled the world documenting international wildlife rescues, which have been incorporated in several of her films.

Starting with a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that the phenomenal world was the product of a blind noumenal will, this movie already sets itself up to be anything like the millions of conspiracy docs that litter Tubi: “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

So alright. Let’s move past making fun, let’s not argue and let’s accept this movie. Good? Great.

Man, I have so many questions, so consider this my attempt to reach out across reality and ask Cybela to answer them:

  • Why is this movie a documentary sometimes and a narrative other times?
  • Why exactly are aliens coming to our planet?
  • If people want to cover this up, how have you been making movies for over a decade and been able to post them to Tubi and Amazon Prime?
  • Have you ever seen Tribulation 99?
  • Did you pay for this movie all by yourself?
  • Did this play in a theater?
  • What are your filmmaking influences?
  • How many birds do you have?
  • Did this movie really cost $2 million?
  • How do you stay so happy-go-lucky in the face of danger?
  • Is Baby Rainbow still around?

If you ever listened to Coast to Coast when it mattered, you’ll recognize people like Jim Marrs (who wrote Crossfire, one of the sources for Oliver Stone’s J.F.K.), Nick Pope (who ran the UK Ministry of Defence’s UFO desk), UFO researcher Robert Salas, abductee Carrie Boyer, Richard C. Hoagland, Canadian politician Paul Hellyer, Lt. Col. USAF Donald Ware, Linda Moulton Howe, George Filer, original Roswell investigator Stanton Friedman, Clifford E. Stone and more. They all appear in this to add their thoughts as the story moves from narrative to documentary. There’s also a p

Yanni Posnakoff is also a real person who sees angels and is devoted to painting 10,000 of them in his lifetime. So is he real? Or is he part of the story? Are any of us real?

There’s also a flashback to when Cybela was abducted as a child and lost her bird Spooky, as well as plenty of moments where we learn the connection to her bird Baby, who is played by her bird Baby Rainbow. It also becomes a spy adventure as well as a real-life version of Footprints on the Moon with no Klaus Kinski to abuse our heroine.

I’m sure by now that you’ve heard of my theory of movies that feel like they were beamed to us from another dimension, a place where they think they’re making a movie about humans but obviously have no clue how humanity acts. This movie goes beyond those men in black-made films to somehow become an auteur absolute film that we cannot hope to understand if we’re not its creator, perhaps even more baffling than a movie like The Astrologer. This feels like it was made for no one other than the bird-loving heroine at its heart and yet she has decided to bestow this gift upon us.

I don’t want to understand this movie better. I want it to baffle me for the rest of my life.

According to the PR for this movie, “Writer / Director Cybela Clare has spent over fifteen years researching various facets of the mysterious phenomena of UFOs and alien abductions. Clare has compared these abductions of humans by a technologically advanced species, to our inhumane use and abuse of less advanced species (animals) on our own planet.”

This last part blows my mind.

“Cybela Clare is the pseudonym for a screen writer/ director, who has already received credit for a well known major motion picture. Because of the sensitive nature of the documentary portion of Bird’s Eye View (which exposes a real government cover-up), Ms. Clare wishes to keep her identity and background anonymous for her own safety and security.”

Please watch this on Tubi or Amazon Prime and help me figure it out.

ETs Among Us 6: My Cosmic Journey – Revelations of a Psychic CEO (2020)

Canadian CEO/entrepreneur Sebastien Martin is the subject of this 30-minute video in which he explains how he’s had prophetic visions since he was young, even if he tried to ignore it for most of his young adult  years. Then he had a rememberance of his alien past after meeting an Annunaki who told him that he was his brother. So began his self-discovery and in this video, he has an urgent message to give to humanity.

I never heard of the phrase starseed before and this movie opened my mind up to what it means. A starseed is someone like Sebastien, aliens who have been reawakened from another planet to be born here, an idea that some think originated in the 1976 book  Gods of Aquarius. In that book, Brad Steiger somehow went outside of our time to meet with Egyptian goddess Sekmet and learn about the real power in this world.

Starseeds believe that they have special powers, like being able to see ahead in time or heal people, and often travel to other realities and galaxies.

I’ve worked for CEOs that only worked in the middle of the night and who would call you to make you change ads and CEOs that attacked women in elevators when they thought no one was watching, but I have yet to work for a CEO that is a grey, a Nord or a skyfish.

I will not give up hope, however.

This was directed by Cybela Clare, who has made some of the most interesting films that you’re likely to find.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Junesploitation: Monster Seafood Wars (2020)

June 2: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Monsters! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Yuta once worked at the Institute for Super Physics and Chemistry but lost his job as he was working on a team that was making a way to enlarge living things. Now, he works at his parents’ sushi restaurant at the Tsukiji Fish Market. One day, he accidentally dumps his food into the Sumida River and a kaiju mutant squid arises followed by an octopus. As always, the Japan Self-Defense Forces can’t stop the monster, so they must call upon the SMAT (Seafood Monster Attack Team). But when a giant crab comes out of the water, perhaps mankind is for dinner.

This is the twenty-seventh movie for Minoru Kawasaki, who also made Executive KoalaThe Calamari WrestlerMonster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (a sequel to The X from Outer Space), The World Sinks Except Japan (a comedy take on Nihon Chinbotsu/Japan Sinks) and Super Legend God Hikoza. He has created a movie where rice vinegar cannons blast monsters, where sliced off pieces of kaiju create entirely new foods for food lovers and a giant chef robot with a knife is able to battle for Tokyo’s survival.

In Japan, this movie’s title translates as Three Giant Monster Gourmet.

This doesn’t have the effects of even the old Toho movies, but it’s a lot of fun and has some big ideas inside it. However, Monster Seafood Wars does get one thing right. All kaiju and the robots fighting them should use pro wrestling moves.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You can also buy this on blu ray from SRS.

You can also check out the official site.

APRIL MOVIE THON 2: New Mutants (2020)

April 29: Drop A Bomb — Please share your favorite critical and financial flop with us!

The thirteenth and final X-Men movie before Disney took over the franchise, New Mutants feels like an orphan, a movie that had no chance and that kept coming up against a corporate buyout, COVID-19, three years of off and on production and reshoots.

For what it’s worth, Disney claimed they never saw any box office in this movie, a film that TheFaulty In Our Stars director Josh Boone and writer Knate Lee called “Stephen King meets John Hughes-style horror.” To be fair, Boone was a big fan of the original comics, remixing his own comic book using panels from the Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz era of New Mutants as a proof of concept for what a film trilogy could be. He even sent a copy to Sienkiewicz, who said that the director had it figured out and wasn’t just ripping off his work.

Boone also saw the film’s Demon Bear villain as one he had real emotional ties to, as he was Evangelical Southern Baptist parents: “…they believed in the rapture; they believed the devil was real; they believed in demons.” Another influence that made me laugh was A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors because if anything, that movie completely rips off the feel of the New Mutants comics, which came out four years before Craven’s movie.

The New Mutants who show up are Danielle Moonstar / Mirage, who is played by Blu Hunt and the film’s lead; Anya Taylor-Joy is Illyana Rasputin / Magik, the daughter of X-Man Colossus, yet the comic connections are downplayed; Maisie Williams  (Arya Stark from Game of Thrones) is Rahne Sinclair / Wolfsbane; Henry Zaga is Roberto da Costa / Sunspot and Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers from Stranger Things) is Sam Guthrie / Cannonball. They’re guided by Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga) yet trapped in a facility that they believe is provided by Professor X. The truth is much more sinister. Literally, as she’s working for the Essex Corporation, which is probably X-Men villain Mr. Sinister.

It feels like this movie had no chance, but I really liked it. I mean, Lockheed the dragon shows up, Magik’s Soulsword looks great and the horror story works. I wish the sequels — Warlock would be played by Sascha Baron Cohen and the Inferno storyline would be the third movie — had been made, but as Disney took over the property, no one seemed interested in the success of this movie.

APRIL MOVIE THON 2: Tubi Original: Riding With Sugar (2020)

April 24: Do You Like Tubi Originals? — I do. You should find one and write about it. Here’s a list to help.

Directed and written by Sunu Gonera, this is the story of Joshua (Charles Mnene) who dreams of a better life and tries to get there through BMX racing until his knee is destroyed. For some time, he lives in a shelter run by Mambo (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) before learning that it’s all a very Oliver Twist situation. He also falls for Olivia (Simona Brown), a dancer from a world of wealth that he has never known.

Made in Cape Town, South Africa, Riding With Sugar looks beautiful and has a story with plenty of heart, too. The idea that even a fellow refugee and a man who was once a professor in their home country of Zimbabwe could use Joshua makes this quite emotional. I really loved seeing a part of the world that is not well-represented in film and the use of color in this brings even more drama and power to an already strongly written and realized movie. It seems like it’s going to just be a crime movie from the way that it looks from the poster and description, but this film is about more than that.

You can watch this on Tubi.