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

If you’ve watched any basic cable conspiracy or paranormal shows, you’re going to love this. It breaks down how Santa does everything he does as if it’s discussing the way the pyramids were built or how the Loch Ness Monster gets around.

From a Santa Zoom call with Santas all over the globe to a Mattel designer discussing how the toy company has a secret deal with the North Pole and an appearance by comic book artist Dean Haspiel, this may go on a bit too long, but when it works, it works. If you love Krampus, there’s plenty here about not just how they work together but what great friends they are.

Shout out to the Letterboxd reviewer who said, “So this movie is neoliberal propaganda.” Then, they went into how this movie is trying to normalize that by taking over Santa instead of just making him evil. I’m not sure if they’re kidding.

I watched this in April. That does not seem to be the time to watch anything cute about Christmas, but that’s the kind of writing I put out there, right?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Marcus Harben, this British found footage movie is all about Jonty (Harry Jarvis), who had a very public freakout on the reality show Brats of Belgravia and hasn’t really gotten hismelf all that together. He starts that return to popularity by moving into a home with Zauna (Loreece Harrison), Amber (Erin Austen) Pete (Daniel Cahill) and the ghost of Dawn (Jessica Webber), a 90s rave girl. Supposedly, they’re all college students, a fact ignored by campus therapist Becky Dunbar (Nina Wadia) who really just wants to be an internet star as much as the rest of them.

The thing is, Dawn is dangerous but she also brings tons of followers to each of them. So they keep her around, in spite of the fact that she could kill any or all of them.

I really liked how this kept showing each person’s channel and explained why the camera has to keep rolling — they need the money — as horrifying things happen all around them. While I haven’t been swayed to the need for influencers or found footage movies by Followers, it’s well made and there are several screenes that made me laugh, which is more than most of the progeny of the Blair Witch have ever done.

Followers is now available from Terror Films.

Tomorrow’s Hope is about The Beethoven Project, a school in the middle of the South Side of Chicago and one that tried to — as the title says — give hope to students who otherwise had none. It eventually became a project called Educare and this film is about three students from the first class: Crystal, who is about to go to college with the dream of being a psychiatrist; Jalen, who hopes to be a pediatrician and Jamal, who has a future in music.

Directed by Thomas A. Morgan (Storied Streets, Scrum) and produced by The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation, this movie is just 45 minutes but instills a promise for tomorrow. For a program that began in the largest public housing project in America, this program has found committed teachers and students willing to put in the work to not only transform their lives, but the lives of everyone around them.

Marc (John DiMino) has put off his final paper way too long, so that leads him to a late night in the library and falling asleep, at which point his paper gets stolen and he’s lured deeper into the mysterious world of the demonic Dewey Decimal System.

Directed and written by Abie Sidell, this movie puts Marc up against The Master of the Books (Brandon Burton) and the strange creatures and worlds that live within the stacks.

Where the most we can learn from most horror is to not have sex in the woods or go back home to deal with family business, Cram is unique in that it has a real message that’s worth living up to: don’t leave things until the last minute. Also, maybe don’t go to graduation parties where you don’t know anyone and still take a weed-lace cookie.

There’s a lot going on — copy machines printing endless F grades for Marc, a couple making out that disappears, strange monsters lurking — and the story just kind of ambles around, but I found all of it rather charming. Sidell is pretty talented and this is a great film for a first full length.

Cram is now on Tubi from Terror Films.

Director and writer April Wright visited eleven family-owned drive-ins across the country to see how they keep their dream of playing movies in the open air alive. The pandemic allowed people to come back to this seemingly lost way to see movies — well, for some us, we never stopped going — and now that people can travel freely, the drive-ins still struggle.

Drive-ins include The Wellfleet in Wellfleet, Massachusetts; Quasar in Valley, Nebraska; Field of Dreams Drive-In in Liberty City, Ohio; Brazos Drive-In in Granbury, Texas; Coyote Drive-In in Fort Worth, Texas; Harvest Moon Drive-In in Gibson City, Illinois; Galaxy Drive-In in Ennis, Texas; Transit Drive-In in Lockport, New York; the sadly closed Mission Tiki in Montclair, California and the Bengies Drive-In in Middle River, Maryland. Each has a different size, geography and history, which is both happy and sad. I get wistful every time I leave the drive-in, thinking of all the places in my past — the Blue Sky, Spotlight 88, Super 51, Parkstown Corners — that have been closed and I can never go back to.

This film made me feel the same way, as we know how important these places are to our pop culture and yet as soon as COVID-19 — which really hasn’t gone away — was out of everyone’s brains, people went back to the movies instead of the magic of watching films in their cars.

It’s funny because some reviewers have commented on the too many drone shots of this film and that was my favorite part. I just want to fly over these movie heavens, drink them in, savor each and every part of them while they are still here. This film allows us to do that.

In the Pittsburgh area, we are lucky to have the ever, well, dependable Dependable Drive-In, the Evergreen Drive-In (the cleanest drive-in I’ve ever been to), the three-screen Brownsville Drive-In, the Comet Drive-In, the Starlight in Butler and the magical Riverside Drive-In, the home of all night horror drive-in weekends called the April Ghouls Drive-In Monster Rama and the Super Monster-Rama every April and September.

You should watch this movie and you should attend every one of these drive-ins as often as you can.

Back to the Drive-In is now available from Uncork’d Entertainment.

As much as I love the Japanese movie Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen, the prophecies of Nostradamus have always given my trouble. Back in the days after 9/11, the same HR professional who would repeatedly leave Bibles at my desk with Post-Its telling me about how I was going to hell went on a chain email spree sending notes to everyone at the ad agency about the predictions of Nostradamus.

What she did not realize was that the copywriter who upset her with his book collection and desk full of strange toys and black t-shirts was as close to an expert on the weirdness of this world except he had no degree in it.

In fact, I knew that the the quatrains she’d been sending around about the end of the world weren’t even Nostradamus. They didn’t have his writing style, no matter the translation. This was a horrible time to be in this office. There was one guy who was non-stop watching footage of people jumping from the Twin Towers at full volume. There was the constant uncertainty of anthrax and war and more terrorism. And then there were these emails.

I couldn’t do anything about anything in this world but use how weird I am to make it a slightly better place. I replied all to her email — which went to everyone in our company — about how God was bringing his final judgement and explained how Nostradamus’ 942 poetic quatrains weren’t seen as prophetic — he refused the title of prophet — in his lifetime. I’ve always considered myself if not an admirer of James Randi, who believed that he was actually a really bad fortune teller who got his reputation by using vaguye words. He also believed that people studied his work and mistranslated it for their own ends. In fact, like this HR person, he believed that anyone who supported the idea of Nostradamus as a soothsayer have figured out ways to make things that have happened or will definitely happen match his words. Randi referred to this as retroactive clairvoyance.

My mistake was saying that it was stupidity in my email. In my defense, people were literally falling apart atheir desks. I said that life is chaos, that we have no predetermined paths and that free will is the greatest thing that exists. Conspiracy theory — and Nostradamus — is an attempt to try and make some sense out of a life that has no sense, random inexplicable good and bad events that all happen seemingly at the same time. And it’s when people try to make people worried that it gets stupid.

Yeah, that word.

What happened next, well, was I got brought in a room by the entire HR department and told I would be fired for calling someone stupid in a chain email to the entire company. Never mind that I had been thanked by everyone, including people much higher up than her. But her feelings were hurt, damaged by that same strange longhaired writer who obviously was a knight in Satan’s service.

To keep my job, I had to apologize. And I refused. I was young. I barely had a mortgage. And I figured that my dignity meant more than my career, I guess. Somehow, one of my bosses spoke up and I ended up staying, but I always felt like I sold out staying around.

Anyways.

The whole reason for this movie is a prediction by Nostradamus that gained traction in the even more connected and conspirital world of 2021.

“Few young people: half-dead to give a start. Dead through spite, he will cause the others to shine, And in an exalted place some great evils to occur: Sad concepts will come to harm each one, Temporal dignified, the Mass to succeed. Fathers and mothers dead of infinite sorrows, Women in mourning, the pestilent she-monster: The Great One to be no more, all the world to end.”

It was all over social media. And the big claim was that the CDC already had a zombie guide.

They did.

It was all a joke.

But man, we live in an even weirder and — that word again — stupider world than twenty years ago.

And look, I spent years joking that I was prepping for a zombie apocalypse. But when you do that, you’re really prepping for any end of the world situation, even the dumbest apocalypse that we have all lived through.

This movie is filled with experts on surviving a zombie event. I wonder how this can be, seeing as how so many of them are influencers and, well, zombies like they’re discussing only exist in movies. Sure, there’s some science about how cat feces can become parasitic in the bodies of mice, but we’re not here for science. We’re here for zombies.

So you get a lot of the kind of advice that works for any situation: stick to bladed weapons. Chainsaws don’t work like in the movies. Prep your food. Grow a garden. You should know all these things. You may or may not be entertained by this movie, but you can get even more survival knowlege from watching Dawn of the Dead.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When Molly’s (Faith Kearns) boyfriend Brian (Vernon Taylor) gets a phone call from his estranged brother Keith (Spencer Wetzel), he heads off for an unplanned family reunion at their remote cabin. She goes along for the ride because, well, people always go back home and deal with old trauma in horror movies without thinking twice about it. I guess they do in real life, too. I mean, Brian even tells her that his brother has issues, but she just jumps at the chance to do something.

When they get to the cabin, they learn that Keith has shot Lenny (Aaron Pyle), who may or may not be dead but is definitely inside Keith’s head. More to the point, maybe he should have killed Lenny. Then again, if you’re new to a family, this might not be the way to introduce your brother to your girlfriend.

Director and writer Michael Escalante interned at Roger Corman’s New Horizons Pictures during his last year at UCLA. This is his first full-length film. He’s obviously learned how to use his budget effectively and get the most out of what he has. The cast works together well, the suspense gets tightened up and this small movie succeeds, proving that Escalante is destined for bigger things.

The Burial is available on digital and on demand from Terror Films.

Roe (Roe Dunkley) and Eliza (Camila Rodríguez) are dealing with her PTSD from her military service, which is causing her sleepwalk and be traumatized by basic tasks. She thinks that a weekend away will fix it all. He thinks it’s going to take something else and wonders why she doesn’t just lean on him more.

So when they find the place of tranquil rest run by Dr. Godwin (Vincent De Paul), they find somewhere that look nothing like the photos and has no phone service. And the good — well, not so good — doctor has plans of ridding the world of racism through his strange experiments.

Directed by David Liz, who co-wrote this with Manuel Delgadillo, The Welder lives up to one of its lines: we’re all red inside. It’s a creepy journey that has enough differences from other films to earn your eyes. Just make sure Dr. Godwin doesn’t take anything else.

The Welder is available from Terror Films.

Directed and written by Rodrigo de Oliveira, this movie goes back to 1983 and a young biologist named Suzano (Johnny Massaro) coming home from studying in France and feeling like something is wrong with his body. This is the start of the AIDS crisis and he is amongst the first wave of the epidemic in his native Brazil.

The story of the film comes from his sister Maura (Clara Choveaux) and nephew Muriel (Alex Bonin) who come to terms with his death and discover how he spent his last days documenting his decline with Rose (Renata Carvalho) and cameraman Humberto (Victor Camilo). While that sounds like this is going to be a depressing film — and yes, it has moments of sheer sadness and pain — there is light inside this film.

At this point, AIDS didn’t even have a name. I remember when it was called a gay cancer and worse. This movie brought up those memories and made me thankful that we can talk about it now and that there are ways that people can survive with HIV.