Vicky White was a respected jail guard just getting ready to retire, a widow with no children, who found herself in a special relationship with one of her prisoners, Casey White. This went from extra food on his tray and special privileges to her selling her house for cash and going on the run with him for eleven days before he was caught and she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Directed by Jodi Binstock and written by Guy Nicolucci (Tubi’s Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial), this stars Nicholle Tom (Maggie Sheffield from The Nanny, Ryce from Beethoven) as Vicky — to be fair, she’s way more attractive than the real thing but isn’t that the point of a made for TV or Tubi movie? — and Adam Mayfield as Casey.

It’s a strange film because while so much is based on life, there are also moments of off humor, like Vicky leaving town while all the rest of the guards are trying to throw her a sad retirement party with a grocery store cake that was probably thrown together in moments despite her having a 17-year-career at the jail and being a four-time employee of the month. Or how obsessed she is with tanning. Or how Casey keeps calling her Taylor Swift. Or when she finally gets to fulfill all of her fantasies with him, he’d rather fold a pizza in half and eat it all by himself.

This happened on April 29, 2022 and somehow, Tubi was able to get a movie on the air before the end of the year. That’s the kind of scummy filmmaking that old made for TV movies and cash-in exploitation films can only dream of. Maybe we should be forgiving of the fact that this depicts Evansville, IN as having a Piggly Wiggly and palm trees. I mean, I always thought Haddonfield, IL had at least one of those.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Director and co-writer — with Nathan Faudree — Travis Stevens (Jakob’s Wife, Girl on the Third Floor) combines the slasher, giallo, Greek mythology, art, romance and even comedy all into one strange little movie, one where the antagonist is forced to become the protagonist; one that makes us sympathize with a female character early only to DePalma — and Hitchcock — rug pull and make us realize this is a different film.

Bruce (Josh Ruben) and Meredith (Sarah Lind) seem like they’re on the verge of a connection when he asks her to visit his cabin in the woods. Sure, it’d seem good if we hadn’t already watched him kill someone to get his bloody hands on The Wrath of the Erinyes, a sculpture of the Three Furies.

By the end of the movie, Meredith has caught on and Tisiphone, Alecto and Megaera in the form of his past victims (Sarah Linda, Malin Barr and Katie Kuang) have become alive, seeking to inflict on him the pain he has on so many others, all while he comes to terms with The Owl, a creature that is the darkest side of his mind. It’s kind of amazing that the statue that starts all of this ends up being alive at the close.

This movie also gets its soundtrack right, from Cigarettes After Sex’s haunting “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” to The Tammys’ “His Actions Speak Louder Than Words,” Manfred Mann’s “L.S.D.” and Massage’s “At Your Door.”

I always fret about when a movie starts strong and has such a dramatic turn, especially one that suddenly becomes surreal — spoiler warning — and the world changes quickly, but this totally gets the tone right, even when it’s changing and most importantly, has a strong ending that gets it right.

When Royal Air Force pilot Captain Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk) is shot down during her final mission, she somehow discovers an abandoned bunker where Russian scientists once spliced human and alien DNA to make a weapon. A weapon that is now awake.

A strong woman finding monsters in a cave. You know who directed a good movie about that? Neil Marshall. The Descent. Guess what? He’s the director and co-writer — with Kirk — of this movie. He also made Dog Soldiers, so I’m going to give him a free pass and watch anything he does.

The good news is that this is a step up from the last movie I watched from him, Hellboy. It’s not going to be the best thing you’ve watched but you won’t feel like you wasted any time.

It ends up with Kate teaming up with the soldiers that save her — one-eyed top kick Major Roy Finch (Jamie Bamber), SAS soldier Sgt. Oswald Jones (Leon Ockenden), secret pickpocket Corp. Jade Lafayette (Tanji Kibong), battle hardened Corp. Jade Lafayette (Jonathan Howard), combat medic Corp. Kip Wilks (Mark Strepan), big tough Dave Bromhead (Troy Alexander) and Kabir Abdul Rahimia, a local who is sick of all the invaders, including the aliens — to battle monsters who love to eat human flesh.

This feels like a direct to video movie from the video rental past and you know, that’s always good thing. It has goopy monsters, plenty of grisly demises and some incredibly hilarious choices for accents. If this had a video box, it’d say “The maker of The Descent and Dog Soldiers is back!” and, you know, it wouldn’t lie.

Emily Hagins made Pathogen when she was just 12 and I’m so excited that she’s kept making movies. She directed and wrote this possession film, which has heartbroken Will (John Michael Simpson) move into a big house all by himself when he gets dumped by Amy (Paige Adams). It’s too good to be true and that’s because the family who was there before made a deal with a demon named Demonous to save their daughter’s soul. Now, Will is dead meat. Or is her?

Will’s friend Patrick (Jeff McQuilty) wants him to move on and tries to fix him up with Aimee (Olivia Ducayen), who as fate would have it used to cast ghosts from homes to pay for college. Of course, Demonous is a much bigger problem than just an everyday specter.

The big problem happens when Amy ends up coming over and romance rears its head, leading to a night of pasta and passion. Yet when our hero wakes up, well, it’s not to his lover. It’s to — you knew it — the demon.

I had a lot of fun with this movie. There are too many cakes, too many jobs for Will, too much danger and it all works. It’s a movie that doesn’t seek to destroy and humiliate its characters and by the end, you enjoy every single one of them. I’m even happier that Hagins didn’t lose her love of horror or her ability to transform the expected into something so much more.

Small Town Monsters has been all over the country looking for monsters of all types but now, they’re on the way to Alaska to meet the locals and study the indigenous peoples who first called our 49th state home.

You think you know sasquatch?

Do you know Alaskan sasquatch?

On the Trail of Bigfoot: Last Frontier was shot over several months in the Alaskan wilderness, at the same time as two other Small Town Monsters projects, Land of the Missing and Bigfoot: Beyond the Trail: Alaskan Coastal Sasquatch.

One of the most frightening things about the bigfoot of Alaska is that it used the sounds of a crying baby to lure its victims into the cold snow and their unforgiving paws.

Beyond the gorgeous look at the sparseness of the cold and snowy world of a state many of us never see, this also is more concerned with gaining the oral history of its people and less with capturing a creature. Seth Breedlove and his team keep making really interesting paranormal and cryptozoological movies and I keep enjoying each and every one.

On the Trail of Bigfoot: Last Frontier is available on iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu and FandangoNOW.

I’m so excited that director Joe Badon sent me this, as I am in love with his short Blood of the Dinosaurs and am so pleased to write that this next effort doesn’t let up on the sheer strangeness of that one.

Badon describes this project as one in which Purity (Kali Russell) is dealing with her car breaks down on a dark empty street in the middle of the night when she has a chance encounter with a mysterious party host (Jeff Pearson) and hisstrange guests, which leaves her with an existential dilemma: break free of her meaningless existence or simply just succumb to it’s meaninglessness.

It’s also his love letter to not only the classic Choose Your Own Adventure novels of the 80’s, but also Starcrash, The Color of Pomegranates, The Twilight Zone and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

You got me again, Joe.

Purity may also be Marge Corn and she may be locked in starship battles with Doctor Universe or maybe she’s just talking to ger grandmother or perhaps she’s being chased through a horror movie by her evil twin dressed like Santa. Or is it all a movie? Because there’s Joe, directing Marge as she sits on the set of a science fiction movie.

If you’re not paying attention, this is not the movie for you.

While this is just the first part of this four part miniseries, I’m already along for the ride. This is beyond well made and is strange not for the sake of it and without some bigger plan, but feels like being taken on a ride with no idea where you’re going to end up or even who you’re going to be when you get there. It may not be the journey everyone is ready to take, but I say unbuckle that seatbelt and get weird.

Bill Zebub has made some movies with wild titles, like The Worst Horror Movie Ever Made (the playing card cover tormented me when I used to see this at the sadly departed Kennywood West Coast Video),  Dickless Zombies and Loving a Vegetable.

Well, this has a great title and the minute the screener was opened — not by me, by my wife — I was in trouble. “Glad they sent you this for your expert review,” she said, shoving the cover with half nude bloody women in my face.

I mean, I really have done something with my life.

A bunch of Yankees decide that they want the real Texas Chainsaw Massacre experience, so they head down there, their car breaks down and the prejudices of the north and the south come to a bloody head that hardly anyone will survive.

There are long stretches where a man gives the middle finger to God, one assumes, as metal plays over any noise he may make. There is also a man with a pig head who seems like the only person equipped to survive.

Well, I made it. I got through this film and I did so on a day my wife wasn’t home, because inevitably this is the kind of movie she’d walk in on while a man in a pig mask gets blood all over someone’s bosom and I’d like to be able to get off the couch and back into that warm bed someday soon.

You can get the DVD of this movie, which also has a new cut of Dirtbags with a cameo by Peter Steele from Type O Negative, from MVD.

The first feature film from director and writer Kyle Edward Ball — he’s also made a proof of concept for this movie named Heck and the video for Craig Moreau’s “It Aint Nuthin'” — Skinamarink finds its origins in Bitesized Nightmares, a YouTube channel started by Ball that visualized nightmares contributed by commenters.

Shot in the Edmonton, Alberta home that Ball grew up in for $15,000, this has all the buzz of a major debut. And that fine, as it has a definite feel for the weirdness that is within the darkness and long hallways and how terrifying it is to be a child. But then it just goes on and on, with arty shots of Lego blocks and upside down rooms and people with no faces played over cartoon soundtracks and hiss and static.

There’s no narrative here and the idea that keeps getting pushed — “Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.” — would not be easy to find unless you knew it going in.

It’s the kind of film that would wow your film school professor at ten minutes but at 100 minutes, this is the kind of movie that has one frightening thing: looking to see how much time is left throughout the film and feeling like more time keeps getting added and you must push yourself like some kind of marathon runner just to endure its endless repetitive layer images and noise-filled audio.

This is a movie filled with jump cuts for people above jump cuts but who can proclaim it as cinema.

This is a movie for people to feel good about themselves for liking it and being ahead of people who “just don’t get it” (see We’re All Going to the World’s Fair).

This is a movie where people will tweet about how it changed them and they can’t shake its darkness but it’s all just words like fever dream, slow burn and takes chances which are just Film Twitter words that really are sound and fury signifying nothing.

Just imagine: You put a whole bunch of quiet scenes together, then turn on the lights and get loud. Of course everyone screams.

Much like the worst of elevated horror, it all goes back to bad parenting. I mean, those Legos aren’t going to clean themselves up. “Somewhere in Dreamland” is a cartoon from the past which is very hit the nail on the head in this. And I really dislike the fake grain and pops added to this, like something out of that fake grindhouse trend a few years ago.

The real terror within this movie is just like how Host won’t stop replicating as inferior Zoom horror movies, I’ll be sent so many movies next year that just stare at an old toy for an hour while someone plays an xylophone in the background and makes coffee, but shot on an old PXL2000 camera and a Casio soundtrack. Get ready for so many press releases that start with “Influenced by Skinamarink.”

I think that Ball has something in him as this movie sets up some interesting things and then never delivers on them. It’s just waiting for the next scare, almost like a deconstructed horror film that’s above simple scares yet uses them repeatedly. He said about this movie, “Shooting a movie in the house you grew up in about two characters that are more or less you and your sister, I didn’t have to try to make it more personal—it just sort of happened. And then an added benefit was my mom had saved a bunch of childhood toys that we used in the movie, so it got even more personal.”

I’d like to see that movie, because I have no idea if any of that came into the film, so this feels more made for the artist than the audience. And then the audience wants to feel like an artist and champion it and feel superior. But it’s truly a slog, a long death march where I felt like I had to finish it and make it through and when the end credits came up, it really did feel like 572 days long.

I mean, if this was made with a camcorder and a $300 budget in 1984 and released on Tempe Video, I’d probably feel differently about it. I’d also defend this if it were directed by Bruno Mattei and stole most of its soundtrack from Phantasm.

I feel like this was my Jacob’s Ladder and I’m still stuck watching it.

What do I know?

Whenever I eat haute cuisine, I’m always starving afterward and have to stop at a gas station and get several hot dogs off the roller.

You can learn more on the official site for the movie.

Director and writer Steve Balderson has created quite a story here. Aging artist Oliver (Xander Berkeley) wakes up next to his wife Evelyn (Sarah Clarke), who has died in her sleep, and refuses tot live a life without her. He keeps her body in the bathtub, filled with ice, trying to keep her looking as she did in life. At the same time, her spirit continues speaking with him for just five days before passing to whatever comes after our world. Oh yes — he’s also been given the greatest art commission of his life by his agent Alex (Mink Stole, wow!) and must continue to create art while going through the greatest change of his life.

A film of magical realism that plays with time, sound, light and color to attempt to share an emotion and mental space that is unshareable, Alchemy of the Spirit was a rough watch — I mean this in a good way — as I try to navigate the loss of my father. Life is unlike it ever was and while the common and rote moments of it never stop, the joys of it seem muted somehow, the colors much more simplistic. I hope this can change soon and that I can take these moments of art and use them to grow and change. You’ll always miss someone. But can you honor them by creating in their missing space?

Alchemy of the Spirit is now available on Prime Video and will soon launch on a number of Cable and digital platforms across North America.