Tilly Monterey (Tammin Sursok) is the Compliance and Outreach Manager for The Animal Discovery Institute and she finally gets to be in charge of her own project, helping The Crystal Bay Penguin Sanctuary in Australia get itself out of a financial mess. She takes her sister Gemma (Madeleine West) with her and you know it, soon falls for head zoologist, the hunky Fletcher Grant (Jason Wilder). But will all that be enough to save this place in just a week?

Director Christine Luby seems to specialize in these kinds of oceanic stories with The Curious Case of Dolphin Bay and the Netflix series Dive Club in her IMDB resume. This was written by Annelies Kavan.

I have to say, this movie promises love and penguins and delivers both. You’re not going to get much conflict and you’re going to get some cute penguins waddling about. In a world of darkness and cruelty, I see that as a winning proposition.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Journalism student Tasha Brooks (Keeya King) is trying to get on the staff of the student newspaper, but Clancy (Keara Graves), the editor, says that she needs a major story to make it. Here’s an idea: the Tau Theta Nu sorority had a death last year during rush week, so she decides to be a pledge. This involves getting challenges via an app and live streaming what happens. It starts so simply but gets dangerous and as you can imagine, the sorority has some pretty dark secrets.

Clancy tries to talk Tasha out of this, as she was part of the pledges in the past when Sophia Mathis died. She knows just how wrong things can go and doesn’t want Tasha to be part of it. Tasha thinks she can handle it. Yet when another of the pledges, Jayda (Mary Ditta) dies from a cocaine overdose, it seems like Clancy might be right.

Or, you know, if you know these college frat or sorority movies, Tasha is being set up. If you’ve seen The Skulls, you can imagine what happens.

Directed by Alpha Nicky Mulowa and written by Jackie Logsted, who started her career as a writer in elementary school creating The Sisters 8 series with her mother and father. She also wrote two books with her mother for Penguin Random House — The Great Gatz and Joint Custody — and sold this script while she was still in college.

You can watch this on Tubi.

With all the balloons being shot down this week and the secrecy around those, this seemed like the right week to watch a documentary that asks the big questions, like “What does our government really know about UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena)?” annd “Am I going to get the same information from this documentary that I get from every single other alien doc that I’ve watched since I was a kid?”

You’re not going to learn anything new on Roswell and what happened there that you haven’t learned from nearly every other basic cable alien show except, you know, if you’ve never watched one of these before and you’re about to have your mind blown.

At some point, they run out of Roswell stuff and decide to just talk about all of the many people who have been abducted, like Barney and Betty Hill. It is kind of interesting to hear from these folks and how hard it is for them to tell their friends and family what has happened to them.

Depending on what side of the argument you’re on, you’re also either going to find this all laughable or fascinating. I’d rather have an open mind about these kinds of things.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Eric (Mark Huberman) is a TV director who has come to film a show all about the Hotel Gula, which had a hundred people die of rat poisoning in the 90s and yeah, it’s been built on a burial ground dedicated to one of the Edler Gods so nothing good can come out of this for any of this movie’s characters, as this goes from The Shining to The Haunting of Hill House to Lovecraft, along with a giallo-esque series of murders.

Director Francesco Cinquemani, who co-wrote this with Andy Edwards, Mark Thompson-Ashworth (who worked on Joe D’Amato’s The Hyena and I predatori delle Antille) and Barry Keating from a story by Loris Curci, does a decent job of showing us what the Italian exploitation industry would be making today if it never died out in the mid 80s with a pastiche of Argento-inspired murder scenes.

I liked the idea that the host of the show, Bruce (Julian Sands), wants fake ghosts put in the movie and yet doesn’t even realize that the weird old couple he drinks with every night (Anthony Skordi and Maria Ioannou) are probably spirits. Add in Eric’s ex-wife — and Bruce’s daughter — Sofia (Marianna Rosset) suddenly acting strange and an ancient goddess trapped in the hotel and an end of the world element that I didn’t see coming and this all ends up being rather fun.

You can get the Cleopatra Records release of The Ghosts of Monday from MVD.

Even with all the DNA technology, a ton of cops and no small army of experts, no one has ever figured out who killed JonBenét Ramsey and no one ever will. This will not stop shows being made from now until the end of time to try and figure that out, even if they won’t.

This hits all the moments of this case and trust me, I live with a true crime wife who dreams of solving a case. There’s the Santa Claus, falsely accused. All those people walking all over the crime scene. Patsy, John — who shows up to speak on his own behalf — and creepy Burke Ramsay. The note which still makes no sense. The strange mentally ill man who kept calling them. Cops worse than a giallo except, you know, in real life. The 24 hour news cycle run insane as it attempts to put it all together and throwing even more conjecture than anyone could imagine is possible.

I mean, just this week, an unearthed DNA test from 1997 proved that DNA recovered under the murdered girl’s fingernails and her clothes was not a match for any members of her family is in the news. The case is still open. Three hours before I wrote this, John told several reporters that police rushed to conclusions and withheld the DNA evidence that would exonerate him and his wife.

It’s never going away.

You can watch this though, but if you’re interested, I assume that you already think you know who killed her and have your own theories about the pineapple in her stomach.

You can watch this on Tubi.

What an incredible idea for a film. Matthew Bauer, who directed this and co-wrote it with Rene van Pannevis, went around the world to learn what it’s like to actually have the name James Bond. The title for this movie comes from George Lazenby’s line in his lone appearance as 007: “This never happened to the other fellow.”

James Bonds appear — from an inmate to a theater director, a man who runs a Bond museum in Sweden to even a woman who took the name to keep a violent ex-lover from finding where she’s gone — and even the story of how Ian Fleming took the name from the ornithology author who wrote the definitive book on the birds of West Indies is told in this exploration of what’s in a name, particularly when that name is so famous.

Is it a blessing or a curse to be named after — or have the same name — as MI6’s top agent? That’s what this film gets to the bottom of, yet Bauer does it in an exciting way that lets you know the people behind the names, several of whom have stories that rival anything Fleming wrote.

It also tells how Mary Bond, the wife of the namesake of Bond, wrote to Fleming regarding the use of her husband’s name. The author wrote back saying, “I must confess that your husband has every reason to sue me. In return, I can only offer your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purpose he may think fit. Perhaps one day your husband will discover a particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion by calling it Ian Fleming.” She replied by writing the books How 007 Got His Name and To James Bond With Love, both of which feature very spy action-looking covers.

Perhaps the wildest story in this is about Gunnar Schaefer, who changed his name in 2007 to Gunnar James Bond Schäfer. After having a childhood with a father who escaped Germany at the end of World War II, he found a new father figure in Ian Fleming and his creation. Today, he runs a museum out of his auto parts store that houses many Bond props.

Bauer spent a decade on this and had the goal that none of these people would just be the name Bond, but instead you would see them as individuals. He has succeeded beyond measure.

Also: If you have a problem with a black James Bond, there already is one in this. Get over it.

This year began for me with the deepest of dives into all things Rollin, so when this movie was announced, I was quite excited. Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger have been working for some time to make this film which attempts to get the world to recognize him as “one of genre cinema’s most singular poets.”

The film does a fine job of explaining how the artist was misunderstood and dealt with bad luck, continually having to return to making adult films just to survive and then barely knowing that he was a recognzied cult director before his death. It also adds a lot of depth to his childhood, his relationship with his mother and how he was inspired to make films.

Yet there are moments where — outside of heartfelt words by Brigitte Lahaie and Françoise Pascal, as well as no small amount of tear-inducing emotion over the loss of Rollin from this world — it seems that everyone is so academic in their appreciation that someone who has never seen one of his films may get the idea that they’re just as well-mannered. And the truth is, they’re anything but. Rollin’s films exist somewhere between childhood memory and adult waking nightmare, filled with surrealistic imagery of vampire emerging from clocks, bats affixing themselves between women’s legs and always a beach being wandered or a cemetery to be trapped within.

I realize that Rollin doesn’t need hyperbole to sell his work, but perhaps a bit more passion would go somewhere. That said, it’s obvious that this film’s creators have a worthy mission and that’s to elevate Rollin above more than simple Eurosleaze. Even in his native France, he was not well-considered and that’s a shame. So I’m pleased that this exists and hope that if someone watches it, they immediately go out and start to explore his movies for themselves and get high off the finest strain of movie drugs.

The true shame of it all is that Rollin is not around to know that today he is synonymous with a style of filmmaking that is uniquely his. I was most struck by a quote by Jean Cocteau in this film that sums up who Rollin was and why he remained devoted to making films that are uniquely what he wanted them to be and not producers or even audiences: “What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

You can stream this movie on the Arrow player. Visit ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

After two teenage brothers manage to escape their abusive father, they embark on a journey in the hope of finding their estranged mother who has joined a sadistic cult deep in the woods of Northwestern Pennsylvania. Like Erie, maybe?

Directed and written by Kevin Ignatius (a Pitt grad) and Nick Psinakis, this story of Henry (Carter O’Donnell) and Jacob (Brady O’Donnell) finally getting to find their mother and perhaps going from frying pan at home to fire in the outside world. The performances feel very amateur in places, yet the visuals are strong with gorgeous forest scenery and solid cinematography. I wish everything else was as well-done as that, as the story both seems too fast and too slow at the same time. This is a roundabout way of saying that the pacing is off.

That said, if you’d like some wandering around in the occult-filled woods, The Long Dark Trail can lead you to that. I’d like to see what Ignatius and Psinakis keep doing as there’s definitely some talent here, even if I didn’t enjoy all of this. The effects are always pretty nice, so there are definitely moments worth watching here, despite some of the things I’ve called out.

The Cleopatra blu ray looks gorgeous and has a slide show and trailer. You can get it from MVD.

The Full Moon Features Deadly Ten series has brought us Necropolis: Legion, Weedies! Halloweed Night, Blade: The Iron Cross and will also include Subspecies V: Blood Rise, Bride of the Head of the Family, The Hourglass, Femalien: Cosmic Crush, Shadowheart Crush and The Grim Rapper.

Brinke Stevens, who was Taffy in the original Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, is behind the camera, with a script by Kent Roudebush, who has written several films for Full Moon including several of the Evil Bong films. I say written but so much of this is little copy and paste from the first movie, except for two great ideas; Kelli Maroney is the matron for the sorority, Auntie Snake, and is the sister of Linnea Quigley’s Spider (who shows up in the Todd Sheets* film Clownado) and Stevens and Michelle Bauer’s Taffy and Lisa characters show up as ghosts when the imp (Derek Jeremiah Reid) pops up out of the bowling trophy.

David DeCoteau left over creative differences — one wonders if it wasn’t “Hey, you’re just making the same movie all over again” — and there’s no Linnea, but you know, I was charmed when Brinke and Bauer showed up and I’m equally happy that Brinke was given a chance to direct this. It’s a little over an hour long, which I can appreciate, and while none of it will be as memorable to me as the original, I did like Bitsy (Glory Rodriguez), the tough girl with a spider patch on her leather vest and who fulfills the same role as Quigley, the only female not dumb enough to make a wish.

The one big difference I can think of from the past as when one of the frat guys makes out with one of the sorority sisters, he realizes that her pleasure is important, so he lifts her onto a ball-polishing machine that vibrates.

Now that Stevens has her first movie done, I’d like to see her grow as a director and try something else, something bigger and grow to make a movie that goes beyond the past. I know she can do it.

*Sheets must love the original because he also made Sorority Babes in the Dance-a-Thon of Death.

You can watch this on Tubi.