A group of friends set off into the Scottish Highlands in search of the cabin that Rhona’s (Lauren Lyle, Outlander) father has left for her. Yet the further they get from civilization, the worse things get. That’s because a series of bad decisions puts the group up against Carla (Nicolette McKeown), a veteran whose skills at survival — and outright murder — may be too much for even several of them to handle.

Directed by Ryan Hendrick, who co-wrote the script with Meliá Grasska, this film has a shocking moment where a fight between two of the men — Scott (James Watterson) and Andy (Eoin Sweeney) — get in a fistfight. Scott knocks Andy down with a punch and a branch goes directly through his leg, severing an artery. As they are far from help with no way of getting a phone signal, Carla does what her training taught her. She kills the man to put him out of his misery because the only other way is a slow and agonizing death. 

That said — you can imagine how the rest of the group feels at seeing one of their friends get his throat slashed ad him spraying blood.

Yet by the end of the film, you realize that this isn’t necessarily a mercy killing, Not when she sneaks up behind Heather (Layla Kirk) and lynches her, leaving her body for the rest to find.

Once they find their way to the cabin — and a cave nearby — Rhona and Scott decide to set a trap for Carla. Yet she’s trained and they’re just normal civilians. Yet by this point, Rhona seems like she’s gone into full survivor mode and that freaks out Scott’s male instincts.

Mercy Falls is a movie that has incredibly strong female characters and gorgeous scenery, places that we haven’t seen before in America, and builds a real sense of tension by the end of the film. There are real stakes here between the two women at the heart of the story.

I think it’s hilarious when in slasher movies — well, this isn’t fully a slasher but has elements — when the final people decide to pause and make sweet love when death is so close. Then again, people do have sex directly after funerals a lot, so maybe it’s a way of staring death in the face and proclaiming that you’re alive. I do love that the camera slides from a fireside lovemaking moment to Carla outside, cutting an apple with a knife and smiling.

The gore in this is more than effective. It feels like something you don’t want to dwell in, moments of hearts pumping blood as people die. The violence in this has consequences and it’s not just a simple stalk and slash.

The beauty of Tubi is that it opens up new worlds for us as viewers. We now reside in a world that allows us to instantly bring the vision of a Scottish indie filmmaker into our living room and watch how they would tell this story, see the world that they see every day and be entertained by it. That’s something to celebrate.

You can watch this on Tubi.

OK, so confession time. Back in the early 1990s, I often would call a talk line to meet people. It’s how I met my first wife. And it was for the same reason why one of the characters in this movie says he started to use Nightalk. I worked 90 hours a week, I hated going to bars and I was too shy to meet people. When it was just my voice and my mind, I could be as charming as I wanted to be.

Imagine my surprise when this Tubi original was released and it’s not about internet dating but instead, phone lines. What is this, a remake of Party Line? For the record, I am very much in favor of this.

Brenda (Ashley Bryant, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) is a cop with a troubled past: a short marriage that wasn’t sexually or emotionally fulfilling; a mother who died tragically; a brother who killed himself even more tragically when he couldn’t live up to the expectations of their cop dad; a dad who can’t forgive his dead son or properly grieve for his dead wife. She throws herself into a career as a cop, leaving behind her choice of art history, and we’re a decade into her cop life and the first case she’s in charge of.

Working with her partner Jimmy (Ted Hallett), they investigate the death of a woman who has been erotically asphyxiated. They start to look into her life and learn that she was a user of Nightalk, the same service that Brenda’s best friend Dixie (Emily Andrews).

Brenda’s big cop brainstorm: use the service to find out who the killer is. But along the way — as she related to her therapist (Rena Polley) — she ends up falling for Tom (Al Mukadam), who regales her with dominant — well, not really, more on that in a bit — fantasies while she jills off as Madame Butterfly plays in the background.

But what if Tom is the killer? What if you’d never seen a single 80s erotic thriller and thought, “This is sexy” and Cinemax is a distant memory and you missed out, my friend. That said, this movie made me laugh throughout and even more so when I learned that its director Donald Shebib is in his mid-80s and hasn’t made a movie in a decade. And yes, we’re all getting older by the day, but there’s a difference between getting old and not understanding what you’re making. But who am I to doubt someone who once directed episodes of T and T, My Secret Identity and Street Justice?

I mean, it’s competently made — I could go without the flashes as transitions — but we’re past the time of phone dating, not to mention when you have a smartphone, there’s no need to print everything out nor does anyone stare at their home screen while talking on the phone. This also has the kind of dialogue an old man may write for a young girl to say and for that, we can thank Claude Herz, who is two years older than Shebib. The talk of sexual choking comes off so clinical — yes, I get they’re cops — and so robotic that I’m certain that no human being has ever talked like this.

As for Tom’s fantasies, they are as vanilla as they get. An old fashioned on a subway train while you’re both in shorts? A handyman watching you take a shower? It’s as if no one has ever had an erotic moment in their lives and at the end, when — spoiler — Brenda finally tells Tom that she wants him to be the dominant man of their phone sex, he just gets on top and tells her he loves her and they climax together before going to look at a botanical garden which is…well, kind of far from kink.

What tops that is that these two have been talking on the phone for what seems like a few weeks and when she interrogates him at the station, he doesn’t recognize her voice. Is she that good of a cop? Well, seeing as how she had no idea that she was so close to the killer — is this a giallo? I say that because the least likely person is the murderer and yes, the police are fumbling in the dark — I don’t think she’s all that great of a detective.

But hey, Art Hindle is in it, so I was going to watch it just because I love when he’s in movies. Even though I’m not Canadian, I feel some surge of pride when I see him in films and make sure to have back bacon, a toque and a bottle of maple syrup on hand to properly celebrate him (for better Art Hindle movies, turn to Black Christmas, The Brood, Winter Comes Early, The Octagon and Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

I also loved how when Tom said cock in his fantasy phone sex, it was like he was looking around to see if it was alright for him to say it. For a movie where the lead is supposed to — to paraphrase Trent — find happiness in slavery, the release she actually gets is so non-kinky that it could air on prime time TV. This is the unsexiest movie about sex that I have ever seen and I’ve seen all of the Cannon sex comedies like Hot Chili (and Hot Resort) and made it through multiple viewings of Bolero, so I must be some kind of masochist myself and will now need a Nightalk voice mailbox so I can have people tease me with viewings of even worse and less sexy sexy movies.

Also: This is not ageist. Gregory Dark is 65 and if he wanted to make a new erotic thriller, I would pay thosands of dollars to his Kickstarter.

You can watch this on Tubi.

AJ (Keli Price, the writer of this movie) keeps dreaming of the night his parents died. When his psychiatrist, Dr. Avery (Tobin Bell) recommends that he go to where they were killed — look, this is just bad advice and if the truly terrifying Tobin Bell is your therapist, something is very off — with his brother Max (David Lipper, the director).

But come on. We all know that nothing good comes from looking into the mysterious past of your parents. Leave it be. Stay alive. Or, you know, go to Wolf Mountain.

If you saw a wolf-masked man kill your parents twenty years ago, would you go back to the scene of the horrific crime and bring along your pregnant wife*? Would you let your brother bring his wife**? Her sister***? Her sister’s boyfriend****? Your cousin*****?

No. You would not. You would be smarter than that.

But where is Danny Trejo, you may wonder. Well, he’s a crook named Eddie who has come to Wolf Mountain with his friend Joe (Kenny Yates) to bury some money.

At this point, you might expect this to be a film that has Bell and Trejo have a scene together.

No. It is not.

It is a slasher and it’s not that good and I say that as someone who has watched some of the most bottom of the barrel from the slasher boom years. I know this is a complaint that could go for so many movies, but why are things so dark and hard to see?

I was disappointed because this started with good ideas and I like the look of the killer. Here’s hoping. the next movie that Lipper and Price make is an improvement.

The Curse of Wolf Mountain is available from Uncork’d Entertainment.

*Samantha (Karissa Lee Staples)

**Lexi (Fernanda Romero)

***Emma (Malu Trevejo)

****James (Matt Rife)

*****Ric (Eddie McClintock)

Tubi is opening the world to you with this film, which comes from New Zealand director Tearepa Kahi. It’s based on the 2007 New Zealand police raids, a series of armed police raids in response to alleged paramilitary training camps in the Urewera mountain range. More than three hundred police officers went on these raids, which led to them seizing four guns and 230 rounds of ammunition and arresting eighteen people. At a cost of $8 million dollars in New Zealand money, only four of those people to trial and hundreds of people protested the waste and police militarization that led to this two-day raid. Years later, politicians admitted that innocent people “were unnecessarily frightened and intimidated” and seven years later, the police commissioner formally apologized to the Ruatoki community for police actions during the raid.

In this film, the Maori community and the armed forces come into conflict when the Maori are believed to be domestic terrorists. One of the police in the region, Taffy (Cliff Curtis), has just come back home hoping for a quieter life. He’s caught between the law and what’s right.

As the raids start to happen, activists like Tame Iti (beyond being an actor, he was a member of the protest group Ngā Tamatoa in 1970s Auckland and is a key figure of the Māori protest movement) have been training their people to use weapons and fight. Who can blame them, seeing how they’ve been treated historically? Iti was actually one of the men jailed in the 2007 raids and spent nine months in prison before being released.

This is a tense thriller and shows that no matter you go in the world, you will find universal issues with those in authority overstepping and hurting marginalized people. I’m excited that in addition to Lifetime and BET style films that Tubi’s originals are seeking out movies like this and Riding With Sugar.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Amanda Kramer’s (Ladyworld) new film takes place in 1950s Manhattan — maybe not our version of that time and place, but a neon world of music and dance — where Arthur (Harry Melling) and Suze (Andrea Riseborough) — he’s a clarinetist, she’s a housewife — witness a murder committed by a gang of rough trade greasers in leather known as the Young Gents. That act of violence sparks previously unknown emotions and feelings of sexuality in both of them.

“Everyone wants to be Stanley Kowalski,” Suze says at one point. This movie lives up to that promise, creating a world where the gang movies of the 1950s are real-life, complete with more fashion and queer content than any movie of that era would dare (well, sometimes in subtext).

A film festival referred to this movie as “A Streetcar Named Desire by way of John Waters.”

That’s a high mark to rise to but this movie goes for it.

Kenneth Anger might be pleased to see that his influence continues, while certainly jealous of the budget. And oh wow — Demi Moore in a pantsuit, animal print coat and silver high heels, living in a blue fantasy world apartment as a kept woman?

Watch this and prepare to swoon.

You can get the Music Box Selects blu ray of Please Baby Please from Vinegar Syndrome. It has new commentary by director Amanda Kramer and actors Alisa Torres and Matt D’Elia; a cast and crew Q&A from the LA premiere, deleted scenes, outtakes, short films by Amanda Kramer, a new video essay by Chris O’Neill, an Alamo Drafthouse No Talking PSA, the moodboards, the isolated score and sound design, a trailer and character teasers.

A feature-length adaptation of “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” from V/H/S/2, this finds kids Gary (Dominic Mariche), Jack (Asher Grayson) and Miles (Ben Tector) being bullied by teens Billy (Calem MacDonald), Dallas (Isaiah Fortune) and Trish (Emma Vickers) with Gary’s sister Sam (Phoebe Rex) caught in the middle. You see, the kids love backyard wrestling and making home movies, but Sam is growing up, and it’s time for her to decide if she wants a boyfriend. That said, Billy might not be the best pick.

It’s all a moot point because on the night of a party gone wrong, the bad kids force Sam to throw, aliens attack and all extraterrestrial hell breaks loose.

Directed by Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun), who wrote the film with John Davies, this is a movie that’s gorier, weirder and more profane than its title would suggest. Other than Sam (Phoebe Rex), it also has characters that are cookie-cutter at best and annoying at worst. It feels like a mean-spirited cliche of Spielberg-esque alien movies, and while it looks great and has terrific practical effects, I kept asking if there was more. The end feels so abrupt that you feel cheated; it doesn’t have to have a happy ending, but it just feels like the filmmakers ran out of ideas and time.