Featuring Grammy award winner Bobby Rush, Grammy nominee Shemekia Copeland, award-winner Castro Coleman and plenty more acclaimed musicians, this movie was filmed entirely in the blues clubs of Memphis’ Beale Street during the 36th International Blues Challenge.

232 winners of local contests came to this competition to compete for medals, recognition and perhaps even record contracts by performing in the clubs along Beale Street, the most celebrated blues location in the world.

Director Larry Lancit produced and directed Reading Rainbow in past, but he and Cecily Lancit, who wrote and executive produced this film, have turned out a movie that feels very much of today. I loved seeing the different bands from all over the world bring their love of the blues to one of the bastions of the genre and get to play their hearts and souls out on what could be the biggest stage of their careers.

You can watch Blues On Beale on Tubi. You can learn more on the official site.

Garçon chiffon is directed and written by — as well as starring — Nicolas Maury, who I only knew from Knife+Heart. He plays Jérémie, an actor whose career and love setbacks cause him to move back home to live with his mother Bernadette (Nathalie Baye).

You know how Lucio Fulci hated actors? Well, he wasn’t wrong.

I kid, I kid.

Meyer goes from losing that film role and getting thrown out of his boyfriend’s apartment — well, the guy may have been cheating on him — and back home, where he attends the funeral of his father, who has just committed suicide by shotgun. Perhaps having a multiple gun salute was not the best of ideas for the funeral, huh?

Can our hero win back his lover? Or will he just flirt with other men? The one thing that I can agree with this movie is that a dog can definitely make your life better.

I understand that a French art film that has a lot to stay about depression may not be in my wheelhouse, which is usually films in which clergy members turn into possessed beings, but if this is more your speed, you’ll like this. Maybe this is a blind spot for me.

As of February 25, this is playing on video on demand from Altered Innocence, as well as the following theaters:

Directors John Bernardo and Steven E. Mallorca said of this film, “Sexually abused at 12 years old by a priest in his New Jersey parish, Dave Ohlmuller set out on a sprawling solo bicycle ride from Chicago to New York to inspire other survivors to come forward and tell their own stories, as well as educate the masses (and himself) on the impacts of this scourge. Along this 700-mile journey, Dave meets other survivors abused by coaches, teachers, family members, and like Dave himself, Catholic priests. Through these interactions and common stories, Dave tries to find a way to connect and heal, mile by mile, as he heads back east towards his childhood home.

A ”peloton” is a cycling term that simply means a group of riders. But Dave Ohlmuller started his journey as a peloton of one. Like so many sexual abuse victims, he believed he was alone in his despair. At the end of this journey, he realized he is now part of a much greater whole, a true Peleton of One, dedicated to helping the millions of survivors of childhood sexual abuse in this country and across the globe.”

On his two-week and nearly three-hundred-mile journey, Dave seeks to meet others while seeking to find some answers for himself. As he connects with activists, politicians and others who have been through the same issues that he’s faced, Dave continues to make his own path through life, no matter how painful it is.

This movie inspired me and showed that even if someone faces major trauma, they can still work toward finding a better path in their lives as well as enlightening the lives of others. It’s not an easy watch, but an essential one.

A Peloton of One is playing virtual theaters and will be available on demand and on VOD March 11 from Global Digital Releasing.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally wrote about this movie on November 2, 2021 when it was offered on the Arrow Player. Now that Arrow Video is releasing it on blu ray, we’re sharing it again. 

The new Arrow blu ray release of Sleep features an audio commentary by film critic and historian Kim Newman with author Sean Hogan, visual essays by film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and film critic Anton Bitel, an interview with anthropologist, dream researcher, and filmmaker Louise S. Milne, a conversation with director Michael Venus and star Gro Swantje Kohlhof, a compilation of film festival introductions created during lockdown by director Michael Venus and the cast, behind the scenes footage and deleted scenes, a trailer, an image gallery and even a feature called Marlene’s Sketches, which allows you to explore the many obsessive dream journal sketches that are briefly shown in the movie. You can order Sleep now from MVD.

Tormented by recurring nightmares of a place she has never been, Marlene becomes tormented by the idea that this place could be real, so she has a breakdown. Her daughter Mona follows the same path her mother was on and ends up in Stainback, a small village with a big secret and a population as obsessed as her mother.

The Sonnenhugel Hotel leads to ultra-vivid dreams for both mother and daughter, dreams of the suicides of multiple men and visions of strangulation. Meanwhile, the kindly hotel owner Otto actually dreams of bringing Germany’s power back in ways that are frightening in today’s political climate.

Michael Venus has only made shorts before this, but this is a confident blast to the brain filled with murder, strobing lights and abrasive metal when it isn’t about long and languid dreams of death.

A renowned health supplement company is abducting young women as part of an experiment to impregnate them and then bio-hacking their embryo’s DNA to reverse the aging process. Mia investigates, but soon she finds herself trapped, branded and tortured in a grim underground facility. Trust me — things get dark.

Dr. Isabel Ruben is able to bring men back to youth, but is driven to continue her research in the hopes that she can also erase her age. She’s doing her science in an unhygenic concentration camp lorded over by two men — the Dog and the Pig — who are in it merely to abuse women.

She’s also blackmailing Thomas, whose faciities she is using and whose wife is Mia, who is soon branded — and man, this movie has a lot of urine in it, as the burning mark is soon pissed on — and although there are hints that she enjoys BDSM, she is definitely not enjoying the hell that she soon goes through.

Director Jens Dahl co-wrote Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher, so that should tell you what you’re getting into. Writer Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen has mainly done shorts and while this film could use a slight bit of trimming to its running time, the ending catharis is wild and filled with moments that completely shocked me.

Trust me — there are some moments in here that are rough. Real rough. But it also surprised me with its quality and storytelling.

Breeder is available on digital from Uncork’d.

Lorenzo Lepori made the fumetti film Catcomba which made me take notice of him. And man, Flesh Contagium is another great movie from his twisted mind. Made during Italy’s early lockdown — man, remember those days — this movie shows us that in 2029, after a virus has devastated humanity, left the global health infrastructure in ruins and created thousands of mutants.

Now, Executors have been appointed with hunting and killing not only these casualties but every single survivor. Two of those left behind, Helmut (Lepori, who co-wrote, co-produced and directed this too) and Ornella are running from the gas-masked shocktroopers before she alone survives, only. to be taken in by a mad scientist who keeps assaulting her, experimenting on her and pining for his diseased wife.

Sure, there are some emotions and comments on our present condition, but there’s also so much gore. I’d like to believe that Bruno Mattei is still alive or a brain in a jar or an unearthly specter who has come to the makers of this film in a dream and said, “Show them the beauty of grime and gore and do it in the Italian way.”

And they did.

And it was good.

You can get this from Massacre Video.

If you find a weird movie on Tubi that sounds like another movie, chances are that BC Fourteen wrote and directed it. Fast and the Furry. Pets. Trolling. Avenger Dogs Christmas. Trump vs. the Illuminati. I’d like to think that he is an active artificial intelligence making these things based on slips of paper fed into him by an army of small children trained at birth to know what trends will be hot. Also, he’s from Pittsburgh, which makes me wonder so many more questions.

Most of those questions are about this movie, which has a clone of Van Helsing and Bigfoot being brought in to defend the Earth from the Illuminati, who have recruited Aleister Crowley in the body of an alien. And it’s all computer animated. I honestly can’t believe this thing exists and wonder if it was made specifically for me to find.

Also Dr. Jekyll is one of the good guys fighting the lizard aliens. And Stalin is in it. Plus Egyptian God of the Dead Anubis.And everyone human looks like Master Chief.

There’s also Bigfoot vs. Megalodon which has the furry guy against a robot Nazi shark.

More of these movies now.

You can watch this on Tubi.

If you want to get my attention, you make a movie in Italy and title it Beyond the Omega, just this close to a Joe D’Amato title, and I’ll spend hours of my life hunting your movie down online.

Also known as Il Tio Sepolcro…La Nostra Alcova (Your Sepulcher…Our Alcove, which also references another D’Amato title slightly, L’alcova), this is the tale of Aris (Lorenzo Lepori, who directed Catacomba and Flesh Contagium), whose bride-to-be Iris is murdered, an event that sends him on a death plunge that he may never escape.

The killer (Pio Bisanti) keeps on killing while Aris takes to the woods with a love doll named Persephone (Benedetta Rossi) who just so happens to be able to come to life. Of course, the more she’s alive, the more she looks like she’s dead and the more Aris seems to want her. Seeing as how he never got to make love to the virginal Iris, now he’s using that doll for everything he wanted his wife for. And perhaps more.

I mean, am I reading too much into the lead character’s name — Aristodemus — being so close to the real name of D’Amato, Aristide Massaccesi?

Director and writer Mattia De Pascali (McBetter) told the site Il Gabinetto Del Dott Trash (The Cabinet of Dr. Trash) “It was never my intention to make a remake of Buio Omega. D’Amato’s film inspired me to rework an old idea on a theme, that of the doll that comes to life, which has nothing to do with the 1979 classic. We treaded a bit in promoting Beyond The Omega as a tribute to Beyond The Darkness (aka Buio Omega) more to attract the attention of the public than for my real artistic need.”

This is one weird and quite frankly disturbing trip. Hail to Italy for remembering that it has roots in movies devoted to disturbing audiences!

In my town, there were urban legends of the Green Man — which were true, he was burned by either a fallen power line or lightning strike and his face was destroyed — and every town has similar tales. This movie has the Pigman, which a couple soon discovers is an absoutely true and very deadly story.

This movie seems engineered for optimum murderdrone, but I’m not sure that’s a thing you can just make up. It’s like trying to give yourself your own nickname. But the slow motion snow-based murders that are stuttered and cross-cut and smashed together and the multiple storylines all happening at once are all going to try.

That said, Holland Road in Angola, NYis really called Pigman Road because of an urban legend. Turns out that there may have been — but probably wasn’t — a deranged butcher that would put pigs’ heads on stakes outside his shop before one time that he shot a man and hung him outside for cars driving past to see. There was also a major train accident in the 1860s.

Director and writer Emir Skalonj is behind this one. There are some ideas at play here, the killer looks pretty good and it has a budget of what you spent on Christmas gifts this year. You can learn more on the official Facebook page.

When overworked nurse Romina (Lora Burke) gets back home from another way too long shift, she learns that a bloody stranger (Nick Smyth) has attacked her landlord (Colin Paradine) in her kitchen. Chris wants to kill him for assaulting his daughter. Coincidentally, Romina just treated said daughter in the hospital. Then, three masked men show up and want to kill everyone.

Co-directors and writers Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen then change things up by putting the three characters we’ve already met against the three maniac masked bikers and everything gets quite messy and eyes pay the price for all the sin they’ve seen.

Sure, there are plenty of home invasion movies, but this is 80 tight minutes and has some real moments of drama from Lora Burke, who plays Romina. There’s also a great moment in the beginning as she starts taping up the bloody landlord all while trying to calm her son down on the phone, showing not only her mothering instinct, but just how she can control a situation. It’s a skill she’ll need if she wants to survive this night.

For the Sake of Vicious is now streaming on Shudder. You can learn more at the official website and Facebook page.