FBI Agent Harper Winslow (Denyce Lawton) and Detective Carly Lopez (Teresa Castillo) are working together over the holidays to catch an art thief who dresses like Santa, giving this movie its name. Harper has also felt sparks with a man named Chris North (Donnell Turner) who — surprise, it’s a Tubi Original — is also the thief. How does this all work out?
Harper and Carly have to get over their initial distrust of one another and find the art, which leads them to Quinn Carlyle (Kate Watson) and Alex Sykes (Brian Ames). Now, the weird thing is that our FBI protagonist so quickly doesn’t care at all that she’s dating the very same man that she’s been tracking for a year. I guess North is so good looking that you end up forgiving, I guess. Maybe because it’s Christmas?
Director Kristin Fairweather and writers Kathryn Dow and John Forgetta have made a movie that honestly won’t offend anyone and has a little bit of detective procedural mixed with romance and some holiday spirit. They also used plenty of soap opera actors who are quite adept and getting into their roles and being likeable.
If you’ve been watching these movies, you know that the clone of Van Helsing lives in space with Bigfoot, Dr. Jekyll and Princess Kali. After Bigfoot vs. Megalodon, the Illuminati has been destroyed. Now, another race of aliens, the Atlantians, has called for help as they are being destroyed by a single fighter who ends up being Krampus.
Haven’t seen any of these movies? They’re directed and written by BC Fourteen and look a lot like cut scenes from video games, yet have a very interesting sense of humor and enough dirty words to keep this from being something for young children. They’re around an hour each and the story continues in each movie.
The attack of Krampus brings Aleister Crawley, General Stalin and the Illuminati out of wherever they’ve been hiding and attacking the allied forces. For some reason, Krampus looks like Immortan Joe and you know, the look is an improvement.
I also kind of adore that this movie randomly uses stock footage because you know Bruno Mattei had 5G, he’d have done the same thing.
And then Jack Pumpkinhead — yes, pretty much Jack Skellington — shows up. A Terminator, too. This movie just keeps adding characters and you know, I’m in the mood for all of it and more. This feels like the kind of movie kids really good at editing wrestlers on WWE 2k24 would make. Hell soon has an entire army of monsters and by the end, Krampus and Lucifer have united to destroy what’s left of humanity with only Bigfoot left.
I am left with so many metaphysical questions that I can only hope are answered by the next movie in this series.
The translated title for this movie is Look at Me. It’s a Mexican horror film — yes, you will need to read some subtitles — that just debuted on Tubi.
Lalo (Axel Alpuche) is having issues with the death of his father. His mother has already packed away all of his dad’s possessions and shipped him off to Mexico to live with his grandmother Elena (Leticia Huijara). The only thing he has left of his father is his wristwatch and he has to adjust to a new school where he becomes the bullied outsider.
If only the real world was all he had to deal with, as Lalo finds that the watch is showing time backward and he also begins to see the ghost of a young girl everywhere he goes. He starts to worry that she wants to take him into the realm of the dead but he feels like he can’t escape her.
While he gains a friend named Rana (Regina Reynoso), he worries about telling her what he’s seeing. When he learns that a girl from their school has also gone missing, he starts to search for her, which brings him closer to not only solving the mystery but potentially being the next victim.
Lake Xochimilco, which was once part of five lakes that were drained to prevent flooding, features into this story. Today, it is mainly used as part of large urban parks in Mexico City, with beautifully decorated rafts called trajineras carrying people through the canals. It presents an otherworldly look that is so different from movies made in the U.S. Xochimilco is also home to La Llorona and Isla de las Muñecas, an island made from thousands of broken dolls, created by Don Julián Santana Barrera, who found a drowned girl there and for fifty years, he would pay respect to her ghost by decorating the island.
Mirame is directed by Pavel Cantu, who started his career as a storyboard artist, and who wrote this with Veronica Angeles Franco and Ernesto Murguía. It has a great look but I wish that it went deeper into the legends of the area instead of just using them for scenery. That said, for an early effort — he has mainly done recreations for documentaries like TV documentaries and a short — this feels quite confident. I’d love to see what happens next for him.
This movie begins with the words, “Facing the unknown can be terrifying, but you cannot live it any other way.” This could speak to the occult or it could also be about dealing with loss. It seems like we can’t live through the loss of people and while we are changed, we must go through it in order to grow. We have no other choice.
I’ve been into this series since Bigfoot vs. the Illuminati and how can you not love movies with titles like Bigfoot vs. Krampus, Van Helsing, Xterminator and the AI Apocalypse, Bigfoot Goes to Hell and the upcoming Bigfoot vs. Megalodon 2? I nearly forgot Trump vs. the Illuminati!
As the last survivors of the human race try to rebuild society, they have to face off with Megalodon, which has been genetically engineered by the Third Reich, and as always, Aleister Crowley and his army of Archons.
On the good side, we have Van Helsing, Princess Kali, Dr. Jekyll and Bigfoot. Kali and Van Helsing — a clone of the original — have become something of a couple and debate recreating the human race if they ever stop fighting. Meanwhile, Crowley wants to lure Bigfoot to his side and sacrifice him to Satan.
Oh man. I just learned that there’s another movie in this series, Tickles the Clown.
Just a warning. You might see this and thing it looks like your kid’s favorite video game and think you can sit them in front of it. Unless you want your child to ask you some very strange questions about sexual slang, maybe you should find something else. Or I don’t know, let them watch it and learn all about future Nazis and space princesses that like to rough sex. I’m not the parent. I’m just some guy who likes CGI Bigfoot swearing at people.
The third film of Shinpei Hayashiya’s “Deep Sea Monster Series,” this is the sequel to 2009’s Raiga: God of the Monsters.
Raiga returns, rising in Atami Harbor and attacking the city as another monster, Ohga appears to attack him. As the city is destroyed, the defense force launches a new KAMIKAZE as well as a drill tank named Gokumei. As always, the real issue might be the government, who looks at the destruction of the city as a way to make room for a new casino.
It takes so many weapons to take out these two monsters, including pulse weapons, a Gatling Robot, tanks, planes, helicopters, a NI-26 Amphibious Combat Vehicle and a Plasma Photon Bomb that won’t just take out the creatures but anyone near it. Spoiler warning: It also creates a whole new monster, Kuga, which makes its way to Hawaii and a battle with the volcano-generated Dias.
There are moments here where your brain may just give up with all the strobing and colors on screen. There are even scenes where action figures take the place of human beings. This also has dumb government officials — like a comedy version of Shin Godzilla — working with CIA agents that may as well be Ellwood and Jake Blues.
You can watch this on Tubi. You can also buy the blu ray from SRS.
Based on the Native American myth and inspired by Suitmation kaiju movies, Uktena is eighty feet tall and 200 tons thick. He’s an ancient Cherokee monster that has awakened because of the modern world’s greed.
Made by father and son Dan and David Treanor, this pits the titular monster up against Sheriff Poncho Bravo (Marc Bilker), Doc Collins (Kyle Borthick), Colonel Tuttle (Norman Hughes), Dr. Geco (Kayla Rose) and Jerome Greywolf (Jerry Roys). You should not expect a movie that looks like a high budget epic. But you can be assured that the monster against little people scenes are a lot of fun. There’s a lot of green screen and I know that some people can’t get past that. I get the feeling that the filmmakers had a lot of heart and wanted to make the best monster suit movie they could.
This also has a lot of blues music, talk about the blues and Dan’s friends playing the blues. Kaiju blues. I feel like rewriting “Talk About the Blues” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion just for this:
That’s right I’m talkin’ ’bout the kaiju I said it looks so huge baby Uh I’m talkin’ ’bout the kaiju G-FAN magazine On the telephone, baby Talk about the kaiju Right now Uh Look out Yeah
This Japanese stop-motion animated science fiction film was directed and written by Takehide Hori. It has 140,000 stop-motion shots and Hori did it all — voices, sculpting puppets, lighting, camera operating, editing and the music — by himself.
In the future, man can live forever but can longer create life. As they go into decline, Parton goes underground to visit the Magarins, who provide the power that the humans need. Unlike their elite masters, they can keep making new versions of themselves. An explosion kills Parton, but his mind goes into a series of robot bodies which makes him see more of the side of the workers than those benefitting from them.
If you love strange films, science fiction or handmade animation, you need to watch Junk Head.
You can get Junk Head from MVD. It also has The Making Of Junk Head which is really great.
Normally, I would skip right past a movie with the poster and description — “A group of college friends receives the surprise of their lives when they discover there is an actual killer on the scene of a local haunted trail.” — but then I noticed that Haunted Trail was directed by Robin Givens.
Yes, the Robin Givens who pretty much knocked out Mike Tyson.
The first thing you may notice is that the killer looks like the black version of Michael Myers, which is another reason that I watched this. And the direction by Givens is actually fine. But the script by Raven Magwood — who is in the film as Portia — and Paul Lindsay doesn’t give her much to work with. It’s the much-told story of a haunted house — it was filmed at Madworld Haunted Attractions in Piedmont, South Carolina — having a real killer inside it and there aren’t many twists or turns, other than the cast being almost all black and having one token white friend, which is a nice inversion from the traditional slasher.
There was one part that made me laugh and that’s when one character went back for her earring. I’ve seen dumber things in slashers but I don’t know when. Desi Banks and Marquise C. Brown seem to be the biggest names in the cast but were new to me; they’re fine in their roles. The most entertaining thing about this movie? The IMDB reviews that are either 10 out of 10, proclaiming that this is a classic, or 1 out of 10 and taking incredible shots at this movie.
If you have even a passing interest in the world of folk horror, Kier-La Janisse’s exhaustive exploration — which clocks in at 3 hours and 14 minutes and could have been a thousand more if I had my way — is the film of a lifetime. The ‘unholy trinity’ that launched this trend on to screens — Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man — are not just names, but significant milestones in the history of folk horror. This movie is quite literally the last word in what folk horror is, what it means and how it’s still part of the world of cinema today, perhaps more than ever before.
With more than fifty significant names in the world of horror and horror writing — everyone from Amanda Reyes, Piers Haggard, Adam Scovell, Jeremy Dyson Samm Deighan, Kat Ellinger, Robert Eggars, Ian Oglivy, Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer and around forty more voices appear with great insights — there’s never been a more well-rounded approach to tackling a movie genre within a genre. This feels like the kind of film that I’ll be coming back to again and again.
Beyond the expected anchors of the genre, I was so excited to see lesser-known films get their due, like Alison’s Birthday (which is on the gigantic All the Haunts Be Ours box set that Severin is releasing), beDevil, Dark August, Eyes of Fire (also being released by Severin), Grim Prarie Tales, Lemora (which seemingly has footage from the mysterious blu ray of the film that never materialized) and Zeder.
This is the kind of material you want to pause, write down, make notes on, and keep updating your Letterboxd while watching it. This isn’t just a movie about films. This is a true celebration of the magical wonder hidden within the flickering image, an exploration of a genre of all the dark old things and a journey through how each country documents the unknown through their media.
There aren’t enough stars in the firmament out of ten to rate this one. You can preorder this film from Severin now or watch it on Shudder. You can also visit the film’s official site.
June 29: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
No matter what you or I think or believe, Glenn Danzig is making exactly the kind of movies that he wants to make.
Following Verotika, he decided that the next film he’d make would not just be a Western, but a Spaghetti vampire Western and the minute I read that, I realized that Danzig is making the movies that I want to see as well.
Despite saying that he’s watched a lot of Bava and Fulci, it feels like Danzig has made the kind of movie an Italian director that not many people discuss in the U.S. would have made. The closest comparison I can think of is the work of Alvaro Passeri, who is somehow at once sub-Bruno Mattei level in directorial skill but has ideas and a lack of anyone telling him no, which leads to absolutely aberrant cinema like The Mummy Theme Park and Plankton.
More likely, I think that Danzig wanted to hang out with his friends and a bunch of adult stars while cosplaying as both vampires and characters straight out of a Giulio Questi or Tonino Valerii while someone filmed the lost weekend. After spending a few million, his account called and said, “Glenn, I know you want my skull, but seriously, we need to recoup some investment. Can you call Cleopatra Records? I mean, yes, they used to release weird cover tribute CDs that had Electric Hellfire Club played KISS songs, but now they’re releasing movies.” And then Glenn howled and said, “Yea.”
The Death Rider (Devon Sawa) has just arrived at the Vampire Sanctuary (there is no irony in the cinematic universe of Danzig, things are named what they are) and has the admission fee: one naked virgin (Tasha Reign). He asks for sanctuary — yes, from the Vampire Sanctuary, I get it — from its owner, Count Holiday (Julian Sands, R.I.P.).
The Vampire Sanctuary (I swear, I am not getting paid every time I use those two words) is more like a saloon from an old cowboy movie, filled with working girls like Carmilla Joe (Pittsburgh native Kim Director, who was on The Deuce and in Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows) and her assistant Mina Belle (Ashley Wisdom, Verotika) and gunslingers like Kid Vlad (Victor DiMattia, Timmy Timmons from The Sandlot), Drac Cassidy (Eli Roth, yes, that Eli Roth), and Bad Bathory (Danzig himself and when his name flashed up on scream I cheered even if I was home alone).
So yes, Danzig wears a cowboy hat in this, but he really wears all the hats: director, writer, producer, composer, cinematographer and editor. The choices are, well, big choices. The kind of choices that only could have been made by Glenn Danzig.
If takes as long to get to the Vampire Sanctuary (cha-ching!) and past the opening credits as it does for Jan-Mikl Thor to drive a van to a suburban house in Rock ‘n Roll Nightmare, that was the vision of Glenn Allen Anzalone.
If Danny Trejo is going to show up as Bela Latigo, well, that’s 100% from the brains and balls of Lodi’s favorite son.
And if there’s no real plot other than random gunfights, naken women, vampires biting naked women and gunfights around naked women with vampires shooting silver bullets at one another, then you guessed it. This is all the vision of the man who wrote, “devil on the left / angel on the right / there’s no mistake / who’ll I be with tonight.”
But how many movies are going to just throw Lee Ving at you as a bartender service Sean Waltman a drink while the Soska sisters look on and the camera zooms more often than three Italian movies and two jess Franco films all added up?
Actually, I think that Danzig has had the same Saturday late nights as me, watching three Franco movies in a row until all the endless scenes of dialogue just pound your brain into a druggy haze. He delivers this same drone goodness as we spend what seems like days watching Death Rider do what he’s been named for: ride. Ride that horse over that Danzig-sung theme song! Ride into the night! Ride past the villains that survive!
Ride into our hearts.
I hate that anyone would call this so bad it’s good or even watch it in any way other than with sheer joy. These are kinds of movies that get inside my heart and make me so protective.
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