Don’t Trick-Or-Treat Alone! is written and directed by Dustin Ferguson and is made to look like it’s taped from WXIP-TV Channel 6. So if you saw WNUF Halloween Special, you’re getting something similar if on a much lower budget (or Late Night With the Devil, which was made after both).

The main movie within this forty-minute film is Don’t Trick-or-Treat Alone, an after school special warning kids not to make the mistakes that Cindy (Isabella Alexandra Russo) and her father Henry (Erik Anthony Russo) have made, as when she — you get it — tricks and treats alone, she ends up getting kidnapped by a Satanic gang of cannibals led by Lilith (Brinke Stevens).

There was also a release called WXIP – TV Channel 6 After School Triple Feature, which had Wrong Side of the Tracks, Runway Nightmare and Asylum of the Devil. Plus, I found evidence of a remake of House On Haunted Hill that says, “On October 31st, 1978, the WXIP-TV Channel 6 Team investigated the infamous “Hill House” on Live Television, with dire results. The broadcast was banned and never seen again, until now.”

Throughout the story, it keeps getting interrupted by commercials and news. It begins with the end of an Amityville special, a nice touch, before an ads for a news special called The Satanic Agenda, Dinosaur Park, 1-900-PSY-CHIC, an anti-drug PSA and Bigfoot bananas at WinLo’s Grocers. 

The filter on this makes it look very 1990 even if everything in it feels mid 2020s. That said, the story is fun and Stevens and the young Russo are great in it. There are a ton of commercials, which isn’t a bad thing until they start to repeat. Here’s a breakdown of the ads:

Second block of commercials: Castle of Creeps, Jack’s Pumpkin Patch, 1-900-PSY-CHIC, Breast of the Bird (a place I would certainly eat at), a news report on razors in apples and a commercial for Dr. Lobotomy’s Lunatic Theater playing Rise of the Undead. 

Third block: Ghoul Line 1-900-666-GHOUL, news of a missing child named Becky, Good Buddies mask ad, the same ad for The Satanic Agenda and a movie of the week by the name of Flash Force.

Fourth block: News about a mysterious van and ads for Breast of the Bird, Riverside County Flea Market, 1-900-PSY-CHIC, Mom’s Against Drug Abuse and Bigfoot’s bananas at WinLo’s Grocers.

Fifth block: News on Halloween candy and a weather report, as well as the ads for The Satanic Agenda, Prehistoric Park, Jack’s Pumpkin Patch, Castle of Creeps and Ghoul Line. 

Sixth block are a PSA from Eric and Isabella Russo, Riverside County Flea Market,Bigfoot’s bananas at WinLo’s Grocers, Breast of the Bird, Good Buddies, Flash Force, the Satanic news special, a news report on razor blades, Castle of Creeps, Riverside County Flea Market, Good Buddies, Jack’s Pumpkin Patch and a Halloween message.

Then, the film starts into Dr. Lobotomy’s Lunatic Theater but is cut off.

The commercials are funny, but when they repeat three times in under forty minutes and cut up a film that’s around ten, you wonder why they didn’t just make almost all new commercials for every block. Ferguson is definitely talented — and prolific — enough to do it, even if trailers for his other movies were turned into movie ads.

I didn’t mind my time with this and if you like micro budget horror that is looking to the past, you may enjoy it.

You can order this film from SCS.

I usually make fun of the TMZ crew but this episode of their Tubi specials gets into how they fight for the First Amendment. Sure, it’s over the Mel Gibson drunk driving case, but the idea that the LAPD would get a search warrant for all of their phone records to out the source who told TMZ about four pages deleted from the arrest report is insane. It’s even legal to do that now after the Patriot Act.

This time, Hollywood’s biggest lies — yes, it’s right there in the title — are exposed. Like did Kim Kardashian and her mother engineer her sex tape? What happened when Jussie Smollett claimed that he was attacked in a hate crime? Did Milli Vanilli really lipsync their songs? And yes, what really happened with Mel Gibson?

It’s really incredible how much of this cuts through things that are accepted and shows us what really lies beneath Hollywood. Sure, these stories are all rather innocuous when it comes to lies, but the Gibson one, as I mentioned earlier, goes much deeper than I thought it would.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Gui Yu has been searching for Tian Guinong and the evil martial artists who killed his father and his father’s greatest rival to steal a treasure. They have been looking for the iron box that holds it for a decade, long enough for Gui Yu to get old enough to start tracking them all down.

Also known as The Hidden Fox, this was directed by Lei Qiao and he has a real eye for some amazing fight scenes.

The only negative I can say about this movie is that there are so many flashbacks that it gets kind of hard to figure out things, but when the action is this ferocious, you can forgive that. I mean, it’s almost a superhero movie with some of the battles. It’s yet another release by WELL GO USA that brings a movie I’ve never heard of to me and ends up being way better than I thought when I started it.

You can get this blu ray from WELL GO USA. To learn more, here’s the official site.

Ke Tong (Aarif Rahman) is a physician who has just joined a private mercenary team who is trying to find out what happened to his father. Well, he’s basically kidnapped into it and he may disagree throughout with the team’s leader Lao Guan (Max Zhang) before he learns that they give their money to charity and that their cause is pure.

That said, if you don’t worry about the story and just go into it to appreciate the action, you’ll be doing so much better. There are some great gun battles, martial arts, vehicle stunts and all sorts of weaponry. Maybe leave politics out of it too. Maybe just watch it and try and have fun.

By the end, it got me cheering and made me excited that at least somewhere in the world, people are still making action movies like this.

You can learn more about this WELL GO USA release at the official site.

For 20 years, conceptual artist David Greg Harth had a Bible that he carried with himself every single day, seeking signatures from the most culturally significant people in the world.

In this movie, director Pierre Guillet follows Harth as he finishes this project, standing in line to meet people, sometimes having conversations, often only getting an autograph, sometimes even getting interviews with people like Noam Chomsky to Kevin Smith.

Harth feels like this project has cost him some of his life. It certainly has been a quest, as his sweat and hands have warped the Bible and made it into a work of art transformed by the artist. What does it all mean? Does it mean anything? This feels like twenty years of creating something made of hours of standing and waiting and nerves as you approach famous people, so many of whom have no idea they are part of a piece of art.

You can learn more at the official site.

The MVD DVD release of The Book of Harth has commentary by Harth and Guillet, plus deleted scenes with Harth getting signatures from Bruce Springsteen, John Williams, O.J. Simpson, Andrew Cuomo, Stevie Wonder, Michael J. Fox and Julian Assange. You can get it from MVD.

This TMZ documentary is directed by David Thies and tells what happened to Prince on April 21, 2016 as he died from a drug overdose. He had been dealing with the flu but may have overdosed another time a week before.

His loss was a major shift to the world, a loss that I never thought would happen. Prince always just was a force in my life since I was young and always someone that I knew would be releasing music and making contributions to culture. His loss changed the world for me.

What I didn’t like about this documentary is how they sensationalized his drug use. He was in pain most of his life from performing. Aren’t rock stars supposed to do drugs? No one at TMZ has ever had an addiction? It all comes off as very wrong to me.

I think it’s so weird that the pills that ended Prince’s life came from Walgreens. It seems so normal and generic and not a rock and roll thing. I guess it proves that anyone can have an addiction and it can be something as simple as you pick up at your pharmacy.

When I was young, Prince — unlike every other performer — scared people. Who was this small black man singing in a high pitch and combining sex and religion? I loved his edge and how he seemed to cultivate a secret world around himself. I wish he was still here.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The voyage of the RMS Titanic only lasted five days and over a century later interest in the disaster still exists. This documentary takes viewers into the depths of the ocean and shows what happened to the 1,500 people who died in the ship that was said to be unsinkable.

They found descendents of passengers to be in this and also people who are still blaming Captain Edward Smith 110 years later. In the same way I debate Italian movies, I bet there are people obsessed with the Titanic that are screaming during this.

I once had to do ads for a charity that was a married couple who built their entire house to look like the dining hall of the Titanic and would have charity events that served the last meal on the ship. Every idea we showed them, they grew upset and said, “Why are you making the Titanic into a joke?” I’m not the one that lived in the Titanic 24/7 so maybe I wasn’t so understanding. I also worked on a Titanic sequel in Pittsburgh that had the sinking filmed in a wave pool and I was told that their CGI was going to make it look great. My response? “Is your CGI better than James Cameron?”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Selena all died way too young. Why?

Aaliyah, an R&B singer and star of Romeo Must Die and Queen of the Damned was killed in an airplane accident in the Bahamas along when the overloaded aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff. The pilot had drugs and alcohol in his blood and was not qualified to fly the aircraft.

Amy Winehouse released one of the best-selling albums in UK chart history, Back to Black. She struggled with substance abuse, mental illness, bulimia and addiction, dying of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27. After her death, her album became the UK’s best-selling album of the 21st century.

Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes was a member of TLC along with Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas. She was infamous for setting Andre Rison’s home on fire before she died in a car crash in Roma, Jutiapa, Honduras, while volunteering at a children’s development center. Days before, her assistant had accidentally killed a young boy, Bayron Isaul Fuentes Lopez, and she believed that a spirit that followed her choose him instead of her.

Selena was the Queen of Tejano Music and becoming a crossover star in America. She is still one of the most influential Latin artists of all time even after she was shot and killed in 1995 by Yolanda Saldívar, her friend and the former manager of her Selena Etc. boutiques.

This documentary takes you through the lives, the successes and challenges of these women, as well as what happened to all of them. Each of their lives ended way before they could have done more and is a tragedy in its own way.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Victoria Duley and written by Shelby Clip, this goes back to one of the first true crime cases that were debated in real time, Lyle and Eric Menendez murdering their parents José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menéndez.

The brothers would reveal that for years their father abused them mentally, physically and sexually. Tried alone, both of their investigations led to a mistrial but when they were in court together, they were deemed guilty and sentenced to sentenced to life without parole.

A reason why you can see why that they are in jail is the remorseless nature of the murders.

On August 20, 1989,Lyle and Erik entered their parents’ home carrying shotguns. They shot José six times, including the fatal shot in the back of the head, and Kitty ten times, including a shotgun blast to her cheek while she was crawling away from them. Lyle even went to his car to get more bullets so he could shoot her in the face.

The brothers have been in jail for over 27 years now and yet there is still interest in the case, as this show proves. If you’re new to true crime, start here.

You can watch this on Tubi.