Kate (Bebe Wood) is a romantic high schooler not above wishing that she could have sex immediately. She also has a huge crush on Jason (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), who may not be worth it, and is losing her friendship with her best friend who now has a boyfriend. It’s their last trip before graduating and if you’ve been on one of those bus trips, you know exactly what’s going to happen.

This is a post-American Pie teen movie and doesn’t spare the grossness, with a shocking vomit scene and anally-induced drugs, including someone shotgunning weed smoke into another person’s mouth by farting. So, you know, when you think you’ve seen it all…you haven’t.

The morals of the film are obvious and I liked how Kate reflected on high school closure at the end, just as much as how much I didn’t like the coda that basically had her surrounded by vapid club girls and acting just as dumb as them, showing if anything she regressed from the strength and intelligence that she showed throughout the movie. It feels incredibly hollow.

Director Niki Koss started as an actress and has made this movie and Night Night. This was written by Heidi Lux, who also acts and this was her first full-length movie.

There are some genuine laughs in it and I loved the very brief time that Bailey Stender was in this movie. Outside of my very major issue with the film’s bookend, it’s nice to see teen movies with kids who look like kids and not twentysomething teenagers. There’s a fun heart in this and I look forward to what Koss and Lux do next.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as O9en Up, this was directed by Tyler Lee Allen and written by Michael Ferree. It’s all about Nell (KateLynn E. Newberry), who has just woken up trapped inside of a room with no memory of who she is or even how she got there.

There’s also a man next door to Nell in the same situation. While she doesn’t trust him, their conversations lead to her realizing not only who but what she is.

Also featuring Lanny Joon and David Solomon Abrams, this film is a claustrophobic one, keeping its characters confined for most of the movie. The footage outside the prison looks great as does the cell scenes, which says to me this team got the most out of its budget and delivered a movie that looks way better than what they spent.

Isolated is available on DVD and on demand from Uncork’d Entertainment,

I just read this artice “What Hollywood Needs to Learn from the Creative Disappointment of Jurassic World: Dominion” and this sentence makes me laugh: “While the film earned nearly $150 million at the domestic box office this weekend, reviews weren’t kind and the film currently sits at a dismal 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (the lowest of any film in this trilogy or the previous one).”

It’s an article that bemoans that Crimes of the Future discusses “difficult questions about what happens when humankind exploits technology to change the natural course of evolution” while this Jurassic Park sequel — the sixth — ” is a mess of ridiculous plot twists and cheeky fan service with an overabundance of monster movie CGI.”

I don’t want to be one of those people that says, “What did you expect?” but the original Jurassic Park was a soulless piece of moviemaking livened up with great effects and it really has been all downhill from there, other than, you know, that time a dinosaur was on an airplane.

That article also says, “Dominion frustrates because it arrives at a moment when the global film industry needs every type of movie that contributes to the broader ecosystem to thrive,” and I have no idea what they’re going on about. Of course this movie doesn’t have the themes and nuances that you expect from a movie. It’s a rollercoaster summer blockbuster, not Chauncer.

These are the same critics that demanded the same level of character development and — again — nuance in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as Everything Everywhere All at Once and therefore wrote reviews that were hamfisted with the same thesis statement repeated again and again until they hit the word limit that their corporate masters and SEO overlords demand with none of the nuance — use it three times and an angel gets its wings — they pay lip service to.

So yes, the sixth movie does everything it can to bring together everyone from the past: Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) with everyone from now: Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and their adopted daughter Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). It even has the Barbasol can that Dennis Nedry used to sneak out dinosaur embryos way back all those years ago. It also has BD Wong in it and nothing his character Dr. Henry Wu touches ever works out.

So while the last movie — Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — ended promising us a Dinosaurs Attack! world of humans trying to co-exist in a world where dinosaurs are suddenly everywhere, now horses and dinos live in perfect symbiosis and happiness within the space of a few years. The real problem? BioSyn leader Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) wants the world to only eat his crops, so he’s made gigantic locusts that get out of control. I mean, Locust World is not a title that will get summer audiences, so maybe this is a backdoor pilot for a locust TV series.

There are also two new characters, whistleblower Ramsay Cole (Mamoudou Athie) and rogue pilot who gets redeemed Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise). They both have just about the same journey to make as those on the side of wrong that find their way to helping our heroes.

Honestly, just like how as a kid I was only into kaiju movies for the kaiju, I’m only here for the dinosaurs. It takes two hours — TWO HOURS! — until to get to the island and unleash dinosaurs on humans. That’s also my other problem: why would they build another island? Every single time they build an island of dinosaurs — and BD Wong is involved — it goes bad. Fool me once, fool me four times…

Actually, I want a whole movie about that Mos EIsey dinosaur flea market. People have baby triceratops in cardboard boxes like puppies at Trader Jacks and other dudes are just eating dinosaur meat on a stick like we didn’t have a whole wet markets thing that destroyed the world. And where did Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman) disappear to at the end of that scene? She’s set up to be a major villain and then…nothing.

Look, if anything, filmmakers should learn from the adult video industry and forego the story and just give audiences what they want: non-stop dinosaurs spitting in people’s faces, smashing them into liquid and eating them while they try to ride on Segways. Give us a Jackass style blast of non-stop human decimation if you’re not going to put together a great story. No story — the anti-story — will save us!

This is the third of the series that Colin Trevorrow has co-written (this time with Emily Carmichael, who also wrote Pacific Rim: Uprising). That article I mentioned up above bemoaned the fact that he hasn’t made another movie like Safety Not Guaranteed and has been swallowed by the big film machine. Well, yeah. Some people like to make money instead of good movies. Well, after his Star Wars experience, he came back to direct this one and it’s fine. There are some good moments of fright in the tunnels that connect the new and old casts and everyone gets a laughable line and Sam Neil does that silly train a raptor pose and I thought, “Man, you were in Possession, Sam Neil! How does one get from a movie where you’re cucked by a demonic alien baby to the biggest movie of the summer? Again?!?”

If you don’t have air conditioning, this movie will get you out of the heat for 2 hours and 33 minutes. Put my review on the poster, Hollywood!

Cassie Childs (Holland Roden, MTVs Teen Wolf) has lost her boyfriend Austin (Colton Royce) to fitness guru Summer Ray (Kathryn Kohut, Spare Parts) and instead of just getting over it, she starts stalking her and trying to get involved in her online spin classes at Levitate.

Despite every single person in her life warning her that Cassie is insane, Summer lets her more and more into her life. If things turn out to be Single White Female riding a Peloton, but let’s forgive it, because this movie — like so many Tubi exclusives — goes for it. Like, if Austin has known all along that Cassie is so mentally unbalanced, why would he let her get so close to his girlfriend and even have a threeway with them and oh yeah, I just answered my own question.

Director Stefan Brogen has also directed the new Holly Hobbie show that’s streaming, as well as several Degrassi series, which makes sense because he played Archie “Snake” Simpson on that show. It was written by Jessica Landry and Rowan Wheeler.

Who knew that getting ahead in fitness meant poisoning so many smoothies and killing so many people? I was also going to ask why so many of Tubi’s Lifetime movies had scenes where the heroine and eventually villain have threeways together, but I think that it’s 2022, people miss Cinemax After Dark and yes, I just answered my own question again.

You can watch this on Tubi.

On June 15, 2009, police found the body of Joanne Witt in the bedroom of her home in El Dorado Hills, California. She’d be stabbed at least twenty times by 19-year-old Steven Colver, the boyfriend of her 14-year-old daughter Tylar Witt, who claimed that she “put my hands on my ears, closed my eyes and hummed” while Steven repeatedly knifed her mother, ending the assault with a slash across the throat.

She plea-bargained and testified against her former boyfriend, whose defense team claimed she had three personaities: Tylar,  her angel form of Alex and the demonic Toby.

Why did Joanne have to die? Well, she’d found the diary that detailed the sex life that the two shared and had threatened to go to the police. The two teens had discussed running away to San Francisco and committing suicide on their four-month anniversary, but went with murder as a backup plan.

The world of TV movies has always ripped movies from the headdlines. Now, Tubi is here to do the same with Romeo and Juliet Killers.

Tylar (Leigha Sinnott) and her mother JoAnne (Kelly Sullivan) have never gotten along. After all, Tylar was so wild as a child that JoAnne found herself slapping her and drawing blood, an incident that the young girl holds over her head at all times. JoAnne must be doing ok otherwise — their house is huge, big enough to have a gate that you need buzzed into. But Tylar is wild and all she wants to do is hang out with her friends Graham Cracker (Bradley Hender) and Squishy (Ashlei Foushee) at a Mexican restaurant that strangely only employs gringos.

It’s there that she meets Boston (Zachary Roozen), a waiter at the restaurant that is probably named something like Pan Blanco. He charms her with talks of threeways, drugs and his oh so mysterious name, which is teased and never explained. She never even comes home, leading to JoAnne’s neighbor and annoying best friend Val (Alicia Ziegler) and her cop husband Ron (Darren Dupree Washington) to suggest some tough love, like a tracker on her phone. You know, snitches being snitches.

That’s when Tylar and Boston get a sneaky plan. He claims that he’s just broken up with his lover God (Cooper Devaney), a young gay kid and not the God that churches believe in, in case you wondered, because wow, that would make this a different movie. She thinks Boston is a nice kid with no family and home who balances out her wild child, so she offers him a room in their house. And right under her nose, he starts doing the act of darkness with her little girl. They have some horizontal refresments. Dance the forbidden polka. Go heels to Jesus. Place condensed milk into the waffle. Rough up the suspect. Do the dirty deed. The dipsy doodle. The hibbety-dibbety. The mysterious dance.

I think they make love when she’s at work.

You can see where this is all going but director Lindsay Hartley —  a former Lifetime movie star and soap opera actress, so she knows the story beats — realizes that she’s on Tubi and not basic cable, which means that Boston is bi and there’s a scene where JoAnna catches him in bed with God — again not the Almighty — and he follows her, nude, into the hall and puts her hand on his gland while she cries in agony.

She does not kick him out of the house for this.

There’s also a nude bathtub lovemaking scene and an absolutely deranged moment where our killers knife mom multiple times and then make love in bed next to her, getting blood all over their nubile bodies, then sleep cuddling her dead body.

Writers Peter Hunziker and Cynthia Riddle have credits like Bob the Builder and the RoboCop: Alpha Commando cartoon that may not prepare you for what they’ve created here. They did, however, also write 2014’s The Brittany Murphy Story.

This film is wildly forgiving of its male killer and much less of its female murderer, who seems deranged from the first moment we meet her and therefore the best character in this movie. I appreciate when a simple ripped from the headines film goes for it and leaves good taste at the door.

This one leaves good taste a few towns over after it fingerblasted it.

My favorite character in this is the neighbor cop husband who just wants to be left alone. His wife keeps pushing and snooping and invading privacy and he’s like “Baby, let me sleep.” He also uses the phrase Kama Sutra in his interrogation — while his wife watches from the other side of a two-way mirror in the squad room which I don’t think happens. She also shuts down another cop with her knowledge and her husband says, “I’d just listen to my wife” with an exasperate sigh and you feel his ennui.

Also a movie where bad kids choose to hang out in a Mexican restaurant every single scene we see them. It’s super clean and they’re the only ones in there so their bad ass aura is suspect.

This movie exists in its own stupid universe and I’m here for all of it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Four friends — Fay, Violet, Wendy and Allison — have taken a vacation at a Louisiana resort, a place where one guest has already been devoured by an alligator and toxic waste has ruined the water. And when Fay’s abusive boyfriend shows up, not even a spell to Ezruile, the protector of women, children and the neglected gets answered.

Then, they find a woman lying by the river who changes everything.

Ezruile isn’t the best horror movie you’ll see, but it’s trying something different. It has something to say about the nature of male and female relationships, about friends and the environment without getting preachy. After all, it’s a movie about a mermaid who is conjured by the four women to solve their problems.

It finds its heroines not only dealing with the vengeance of the titular goddess, but attempting to save her from men who would keep her from her divine path.

Director Christine W. Chen — who co-wrote this movie with Camille Gladney — has been building a resume of shorts and television work. You can see some genuine craft and art here. This isn’t just another streaming cheap throwaway, despite its low budget.

Ezruile is available on demand from Kamikaze Dogfight and Gravitas Ventures.You can learn more at the official site.

There aren’t many life events more frightening or emotional than being pregnant. That’s why horror movies have uniquely been able to translate those fears, from Rosemary’s Baby, The Brood and Demon Seed to I Don’t Want to Be Born, It’s Alive, Inside and Beyond the Door.

Now, Tubi exclusive Unborn tells the story of Rachel and Amber, whose wedding was marred by the death of Rachel’s mother. When the dead mother’s face shows up on the ultrasound, I think we all know which way this is going.

Don’t eat any tannis root!

You know when a pregnancy is really rough to deal with? When the obstetrician (Stephan Smith Collins, once Pinhead) stabs himself in the throat and bleeds all over you while yelling warnings about Lilith. I mean, that’s worse than people looking at you strange just because you have a glow.

Director Steven R. Monroe (Teardrop, the remake of I Spit on Your Grave and the sequel) and writer Joe Rechtman realize that they’re making a quick moving thriller that you shouldn’t think too much about. Instead, you should just grab a beer or ten and watch this movie about a cult trying to grow something in someone unsure whether she should allow the baby to be born or stop it before it can destroy our world.

Or you know, you could really into this and wonder, in our hellscape where even Roe vs. Wade can get overturned and women no longer can control their bodies, will organized religion lead to demons taking hold of more wombs?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Vietnam vet Bill Unger (Bruce Dern) is just trying to visit his wife’s grave when he hears Joshua (Billy Zane) and his followers conjure a demon, a fact that no one seems to believe. They better — the coven plans on feeding that demon every single person in town.

The real reason many genre fans will want to watch this Tubi original is the cast:  Courtney Gains (Malachai!), Meg Foster (Evil Lyn!), John Kassir (the Crypt Keeper!), Tony Todd (do I even have to tell you?) and Adrienne Barbeau as a DJ not named Stevie Wayne, the nightlight at KAB.

It’s also a The ‘Burbs reunion and doesn’t miss the opportunity to throw in a line between Dern and Gains.

Director and writer Justin Lee (Apache Junction, Big Legend) has excelled at making movies with monsters in them. This one has a great demon — you barely see it but when you do, it’s quite incredible — and a cult determined to destroy a town that is in no way ready to go down without a fight.

Sure, VFW and The Void did this before and better, but if Tubi is now our video store, this is certainly not a bad film to grab before the store closes and you promised everyone you’d get a horror movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Parasite‘s Woo-sik Choi is rookie cop Choi Min-Jae. He has principles unlike his boss Park Gang-Yoon, the chief of an investigation team who may have an unrivaled arrest record but has no problem using corrupt methods. Can these two cops co-exist and tackle a case that could destroy their entire department?

Based on Japanese novel Blood of the Policeman by Joh Sasaki, this is currently the fourth biggest movie to be released in South Korea this year.

Choi Min-jae is a third generation police officer who dreams of serving the law in the same way that his grandfather and late father did. In order to receive a secret document about his father, he accepts a mission from internal affairs to monitor Park Gang-Yoon.

Par wants to capture Na-young Bin (Kwon Yul), a CEO supplying drugs to the elite and a man whose cash and connections have kept him out of prison three times. To make things worse, he rubs it in Park’s face, who wants to bring him in no matter what.

I’ve never seen a Korean cop film before. I love that the world has brought us closer so that we can experience one another’s cultures and see how we are the same and how we’re also different.

The Policeman’s Lineage is directed by Kyu-maan Lee (Wide Awake) and written by Bae Young-Ik.

You can watch it on digital, VOD and cable from Echelon Studios.

It’s time for another horror anthology. Will this one have anything fun in store?

Three kids (Brooklyn Anne Miller, Tristan Lee Griffin, and Anna Harr) are looking to celebrate the most legendary Halloween night ever. Their trick-or-treat adventure brings them to the home of local town legend Scary Mary(Roslyn Gentle), who seems way nicer than all the stories they’ve heard. What is scary are the six stories that she tells them in the wraparound directed and written by written and directed by Pablo Macho Maysonet IV.

With that, we’re on our way into the six stories and the many, many treats that Scary Mary has cooked up for the children.

Six stories make up Tales from the Other Side:

“Petrified Boy:” Jamaal Burden (Abominable, Elves) directs this story about a 19th century circus that has a petrified boy that escapes. There’s a great last shot in this of the eye of the boy glaring that’s worth the whole story.

“Flicker:” Carter (Brandon Thane Wilson) accepts a job as editor at a cemetery to edit “life videos” for funerals. It’s a high stress job, as the videos are often due in less than a day, but it’ll give him great experience and material for his first horror film. I loved that this segment featured Vernon Wells as the funeral home manager. This story was directed and written by Scotty Baker (The Diary of Anne Frank of the Dead) and it’s way too short. I’d love to see what this could be as a full feature.

Check out our interview with Vernon Wells about the film!

“Crystal Ball:” A couple at odds after infidelity and now looking to spice things up (Chelsea Vale from Damon’s Revenge and Nick Navarro) decide to steal a crystal ball from a carnival fortune teller (Paul Clough). As you can imagine, this does not go well. This was directed by Jacob Cooney and written by James Cullen Bressack, whose father Gordon worked on this movie as well in the next segment.

“Either/Or:” Elijah (a great James Duval) claims he’s hearing the voice of God, a God that told him to kill his wife and child. But when everyone else starts to hear from the Lord too…this segment is the strongest in the movie and was directed by Lucas Heyne and Kern Saxton and written by James Cullen and Gordon Bressack.

“Blood Red” was directed by Frank Merle and written by Gordon Bressack and has Ruby (Cat LaCohie) seducing and then blackmails=ing an artist named Terry (Hunter Johnson) into killing her more famous artist husband (Michael Broderick), hoping she can sell his paintings for more when he’s dead. But it gets even worse than that…

“Krampus vs. Elf” is another story directed and written by Jamaal Burden that has a stop-motion battle between the characters in the title.

While all of the stories don’t work — and some seem way too adult for the doomed children — when this movie does work, it works pretty well. That’s how most modern streaming anthologies work. The good segments are usually really good. As for the rest…

Tales from the Other Side is available on DVD and on digital from Uncork’d Entertainment.