Alex (Manuel Melluso) works and pretty much lives in a room full of monitors which show the lives of many other people. He’s getting over the loss of his partner Alice (Alba Barbullushi) who has just left him, so in order to escape his despair, he creates a social network he calls the Denkraum. But instead of posting cute animal photos, memes and political diatribes, this online  meet-up is all about confronting what people fear.

The language of this film is distortion, both in audio and visual forms, as well as chat bubbles that drive the narrative. It’s a disorienting narrative that doesn’t look like any other movie that I’ve seen, which is a definite plus. This is definitely not a film that everyone will enjoy, as it pushes itself toward a surreal look and feel, but for those willing to get into it, it has some gorgeous visuals and vignettes as Alex looks into the world around him through those screens as the Denkraum seems to evolve into a self-aware network.

There’s also a religious cult that the movie gives glimpses of before letting them take over the story by the end, as well as end of the world conspiracies, murder and plenty of sexualized violence. It kind of feels like doomscrolling after the drugs kick in and finding yourself unable to stop.

Director and writer Luca Paris also made two shorts, The Stain and Vampires – They Never Sleep at Night. This is his first full-length movie.

Directed by Daniel Benedict (Bunni), who co-wrote the script with Casi Clark (they also worked on a short called Fall of Grayskull), The Bloody Man is an attempt to bring back the warm and gushy feelings of 80s horror. It stars Tuesday Knight (Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master) and Lisa Wilcox (Alice Johnson in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child) to help you make that connection.

After the death of his mother, Sam (David Daniel) is having issues with his family, his friends, the bullies at his school, and most of all, the horrific Bloody Man, the comic book character that sustains him through bullying. In fact, his mother (Wilcox) gave him a Bloody Man action figure the very day she died in a car accident.

He also has to deal with Kim (Knight), his new stepmother, who he believes is slowly becoming possessed by his comic book antihero, an event that brings together his fractured family.

Between lengthy comic book animatics and plotting that keeps reminding us that Sam is being bullied at home and in school more than several times, the film drags at times. The closing — where the Bloody Man begins to imitate others — has some good tension, but it takes around two hours (!) to get there. That said, it’s fun seeing all the 80s toys and AEW/ROH wrestler Brian Cage as a copyright skirting He-Man character in a brief cameo (probably pulled from the aforementioned Fall of Grayskull short).

The Hold Steady may have sung, “I’ve survived the 80’s one time already and I don’t recall it all that fondly,” but it seems that so many films want to live in the past — trust me, I get it, slashers after 1983 are really hard for me to hold in any regard — versus moving toward the future. And the more you make a teen horror film with synth and blue/red gel lighting — well, at least on the poster — the more you’re going to get compared to Stranger Things than The Monster Squad.

That said — I did like The Lost Boys reference by calling the brothers Sam and Michael. With some pruning toward how much is in here, this would be a fine feature. As it is now, it’s not bad, but it does drag a bit before redeeming itself with a fun conclusion.

The Bloody Man is available on digital and VOD platforms now with a DVD release coming later in the year from Wild Eye.

Roland Bennett (Douglas Epps) is like an unholy combination of Howard Stern and Art Bell, known for unleashing his venom on callers and staying up all night long which brings out the paranormal nuts. Before his show even goes on the air, his soon-to-be ex-wife Claire (Jane Plumberg) tries to get him to sign divorce papers, the big boss is listening in due to complaints and numerous calls from The Outsider (Jack McCord) sound like real murders live on the air.

It’s going to be one weird night.

Directed and written by Todd Sheets (Dreaming Purple Neon, Clownado, Sorority Babes in the Dance-a-Thon of Death), Final Caller wastes little to no time as Roland, his producer Jessica (Rachel Lagen) and engineer Jason (Alexander Brotherton) discover that The Outsider isn’t just some prank talking about eight people every eight years on the eighth day of the eighth month. He’s really doing it and isn’t far away, either. After having his way with the detective (Antwoine Steele) the police send and the security guard (Dilynn Fawn Harvey) at the station, he makes his way to the studio.

There’s a lot of talking in this — Roland and The Outsider are nearly the same person, just one eviscerates callers on the air and the other kills women — and tons of up close and personal stabbing, slashing and bloodletting. Once the film moves into a stalk and slash within the radio station, it gets really intense and I honestly had no idea what would happen next, much less a real turn by one of the leads.

Nearly 40 years of making movies on a budget means that Sheets knows how to turn a three figure budget into a movie that looks much more expensive than that. This movie also has more gross-out gore than anything you’ll see for the rest of the year, delivering in a way that an old fashioned slasher should make you feel: it’s aberrant, mean spirited and makes you feel like you need to lie in the shower for some time afterward, unsure of what to do next. Or you know, watch it again.

Final Caller is available on digital and on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing.

A young rhinoceros named Riki has his horn stolen and to get it back, he and Beni the duck must unite with several animals, learn new skills and avoid the poachers who don’t just want to steal the animals, but destroy their homes.

I enjoyed that even though Beni is the kind of duck who would make merch of his best friend and sell it to other animals, he’s still willing to lose all of his feathers to make a new horn for Riki.

Sumatran rhinos aren’t just the smallest of rhinoceroses, they’re the only Asian rhino with two horns and they’re also covered in fur. According to the World Wildlife Foundation, “While surviving in possibly greater numbers than the Javan rhino, Sumatran rhinos are more threatened due to habitat loss and fragmentation. The remaining animals survive in small, fragmented non-viable populations, and with limited possibilities to find each other to breed, its population decline continues. Just two captive females have reproduced in the last 15 years.”

This would be a good film for the young zoologist or conservationist in your family. The animation may not be as great as a Hollywood film, but it had so much heart even I enjoyed it.

Riki the Rhino was originally produced in South East Asia in the Indonesian language. For the UK release, Jennifer Castle and Paul Reynolds voiced Riki and Beni, with the script adapted by BAFTA-nominated Tim Clague and Danny Stack.

Riki the Rhino is available on DVD and digital platforms from Uncork’d Entertainment.

You can’t copyright a thunder god, so while this isn’t a Marvel movie, it is a Thor movie and it puts the son of Odin (Max Aria) against Loki (Mike Milian). If you say, “That sounds a lot like 2015’s God of Thunder,” that’s because they’re the same movie.

Loki is in San Diego taking over people’s minds while Thor loses his memory and must remember why he’s on Earth and also how he showed up in a movie with a $1.5 million dollar budget.

This was directed and written by Thomas Shapiro and there was a review on IMDB that said, “Don’t trust the Shapiro family” that sounds pretty ominous.

There are also a lot of reviews calling this the worst movie ever and really just dunking all over the fake Odinson. Trust me, it’s not the nadir of film, but you can see it from there.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie is like one of those places where no cell phone works. There’s no IMDB entry for the movie, one review on Letterboxd and neither he nor actress Danielle Brocklebank* have an IMDB page. Yet somehow, this sixty-minute long movie — which has nothing to do with va-va-Venom, the 1971 movie or 1981 film — is on Tubi where you can discover it and wonder, “What the actual fuck?”

An investigative journalist is trying to learn more about an evil doctor/drug dealer in a Ben Cooper mask who uses venomous snakes as coke mules, letting them eat and eat and eat and then sending them to England. He wipes out everyone wo tries to get the story out — I mean, they’re all narcs so other than him being a murderous scientist with a steampunk looking visor I’m on his side — but then he decides to kill our heroine and her boyfriend by letting a snake loose in her flat.

To escape, the two must use a bunch of paper cups and a string — shout out to Pepsi Max getting some free publicity, I’ve been drinking that stuff so much for so long most of my body is made from it to communicate like kids in a treehouse. It was at this point that I just gave in and watched this, amazed that it was ever made, that it made it to Tubi and that it was now be watched an ocean and years away in my basement.

We’ve made an incredible world and it’s so trivial.

*He has a modeling page and she has an Instagram though!

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, The Howling, Re-Animator, From Beyond, Tourist Trap, Don’t Go Near the Park. Beyond the villains and stars of these films, they’re memorable for the scenes they take place in, the look of menace within each. That’s all due to Robert A. Burns, the man who taxidermied an armadillo and built the bone furniture with the Sawyer home, that made Mr. Slausen’s home so frighteningly strange, that created the adult shop that Dee Wallace finds a werewolf in and even plays a customer that runs past her.

Beyond the films and art pieces that Burns created, he was obsessed with Rondo Hatton, a man who turned his acromegaly into three films for Universal before dying way too young. The disease caused Rondo’s face, hands and feet to grow monstrously larger than the rest of his body, which caused him to hide from the world until his second wife Mae gave him the support that he needed.

The image of The Creeper, Hatton’s horror film character, would become a symbol of Burns’ lifelong belief in his inner ugliness. It’s this idea that director and writer Joe O’Connell (Danger God) explores in this combination documentary and narrative film on two lives.

With appearances by Fred Olen Ray, Daniel Pearl, Edwin Neal, Joe Bob Briggs, Stuart Gordon, Dee Wallace and more, the film also steps away from being a straight documentary to dramatize the life of Hatton (Joseph Middleton) and Mae (Kelsey Pribilski). She later meets Burns (Ryan Williams), who we see meet Tobe Hooper, become friends with Gunnar Hansen and be on the front lines of the day Charles Whitman opened fire on the University of Texas.

This is a messy movie that doesn’t always perfectly work, but that’s actually to its benefit. It’s like drinking at a party and someone trying to explain just how amazing their friend was, why you would have loved them and all the wild, strange, dumb and sad things that their friend did. And now their friend is gone and you can only experience them through the art and tall tales that they left behind.

And yes, the Deep Throat pinball machine shows up.

Rondo and Bob is available on digital platforms from Electric Entertainment. You can learn more at the official site.

There’s a fine line between watching a movie inspired by the pandemic and your own experiences during it. Therefore, if being reminded of the last two years would make you overthink the last two years and shudder, well…don’t say you weren’t warned.

Machination is 62 minutes of Maria (Steffi Thake) losing her sanity during the time of the coronavirus. She never left that first stage that we were all in, disinfecting herself and everything that comes into her home, avoiding everyone she can. Becca has photos of my first trip out of the house to get groceries and I look like I’m about to escape the Bronx or enter Bartertown.

Shot for around six grand and in ten days in Malta, the film stays on Maria for most of the film as she deals with calls from her boss, her landlord, her boyfriend and a family member whose abuse is at the root of her germaphobia and agoraphobia in the first place.

But is Maria insane for overreacting to COVID-19? I mean, am I, the only person who wears a mask in public these days dumb for how I feel? Is it a critique on those that did take care of others? Is it exploitation as it concentrates so intently on numerous shower scenes? Is it some strange fetish video of watching someone prep during a pandemic? Who can say?

You can watch Machination on digital from Nexus Production Group.