Jackass Forever introduces six new cast members: Jasper Dolphin from Loiter Squad and his ex-convict father Compston “Dark Shark” Wilson; Eric Manaka from Knoxville’s film Action Point; Zach Holmes from Too Stupid to Die; stand-up comedian Rachel Wolfson and Sean “Poopies” McInerney. They take the place of Bam Margera, whose leaving had to be a strange thing I’m certain for the cast to endure, as well dealing with the COVID-19 conditions that they filmed this under.
What emerges is a film that’s filled with the joy of stupidity in the best of ways. It’s a difficult film to review from an objective point of view. You either get it or you don’t. And I get it. I love this stuff and there’s nothing funnier than seeing someone do something completely ill-advised and failing. It makes me nearly pass out with joy, as does the obvious camaraderie of the Jackass crew who truly seem to love one another.
This is a movie that starts as a kaiju film with Chris Pontius’ penis painted to look like a monster and ending with a snapping turtle biting him right in the cock head. Most films would end there. This is where the madness gets started.
They’ve been doing this for two decades. I have no longer how much longer they can keep it up. But I’m here for whatever comes next.
You can get Jackass Forever on digital and blu ray, with the disc edition coming with forty minutes of new stunts that did not appear in the theatrical film:
In the Afghanistan desert, a group of mercenaries and U.S. soldiers are trapped in a Taliban cave after an explosion seals the opening. They have to find out how to work together to make their way through the system of caves and tunnels to find their way to the surface. What doesn’t help matters at all is that they’re not alone.
They’re about to meet Karnoctus.
If you head into this movie hoping for it to be a Danny Trejo film, you’ll be disappointed. He has a cameo role. But if you come in wanting a homage to Predator, good news. You’re going to be pretty happy.
Directors Cire Hensman and Matthew Hensman do a great job of getting their budget on the screen and making the film look way more expensive than the budget. The caves and tunnels make a great dark location. And the effects look great too!
Between Tagger (Nick Chinlund) and his right hand Reid (Kevin Grevioux), two CIA-employed agents who must move some secretive crates, and the frightened men and one woman under the command of Sgt. Griffin (Justin Arnold), the monster has plenty of targets to go after.
There’s also a nice cameo for Adrian Paul from Highlander: The Series.
While I wish this movie wasn’t so blatant about the sequel it sets up, it’s still a blast. Dead bodies everywhere, secretive drug labs, monstrous spiders — there’s something for every horror fan to love here.
The Prey: Legend of Karnoctus opens in Los Angeles June 3, 2022 at the Regency Theatres Van Nuys Plant 16 for a weeklong run. On June 7, it’s available nationwide on all major Cable VOD platforms, including Comcast, Charter, DirecTV, Cox, and Verizon Fios and will be on all digital platforms, including iTunes, Prime Video, Vudu and Google Play, on July 7.
Just like Torn Hearts, Unhuman is a movie from Blumhouse Television that I enjoyed way more than their theatrical releases. Seven misfit students — there’s one for every cliche, but stay tuned — must join forces when their field trip is tested by an Emergency Broadcast System warning of a chemical incident and, you guessed it, the living dead.
Director and co-writer Marcus Dunstan is probably best known for his work on The Collection and The Collector, as well as writing Feast, several Saw movies and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. He’s joined by Patrick Melton, who he wrote those films, as well as Piranha 3DDand the upcoming The Collected with.
Brianne Tju from the remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer is the lead in this, along with Drew Schneid from the modern Halloween movies, Uriah Shelton from Freaky, Benjamin Wadsworth from TV’s Deadly Class, Ali Gallo, Joshua Mikel from The Walking Dead, Peter Giles (who will be The Collector in the upcoming The Collected) and several other young actors to fill out the school bus full of potential victims.
Billed as a “Blumhouse After-School Special,” this movie has a twist that shifts the story midway through, something that some critics haven’t seemed to enjoy. As for me, I approached this movie as not “what can the Saw creative do” and more a fun summer TV movie that I could enjoy without thinking about the world outside my door.
Don’t go in expecting Nightmare Cityor Day of the Dead. Do expect goofy, neon and smoke-filled bubble gum fun. I doubt you’ll learn a lesson, but is that why you watched after-school specials anyway?
Unhuman is now streaming from Blumhouse Television and EPIX.
Tubi is the video store of 2022. And it has a whole shelf of movies that star somewhat recognizable names in action and horror films that are actually pretty decent watches, like Bad Influence.
Lord of the Streets takes a basic story — embattled and down on his luck MMA trainer loses a bet and has to convince his student to throw a fight — and goes wild with it. If this was made thirty years ago, it would have Billy Blanks or Don “The Dragon” Wilson in it. Or maybe Matthias Hues.
Instead, we have Anthony Criss — Treach of Naughty by Nature — as Jason Dyson, a former fighter turned coach haunted by the man he killed in the ring. He’s alienated his wife and daughter and now thrown away the one good thing he had, his relationship with a fighter named Tre.
Anthony is down deep and goes lower, losing a hundred grand card game to the titular lord of the streets, Kane (former MMA fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson) and being forced to get Tre to throw a fight. He refuses and gets killed, Anthony’s daughter gets kidnapped and he must train a convict named Damon Stone (UFC star Khalil “The War Horse” Rountree Jr.) to fight five men in a row all in one night.
Meanwhile, Richard Grieco is Detective Kayes, a cop who wants to take down Kane by any means necessary.
If you like to spot MMA fighters in movies, this is the one for you, with roles for Raja “Da Clone” Jackson, Carrese “One Punch” Archer, Eddie Avakoff and most importantly Anderson “The Spider” Silva, the man who held the UFC Middleweight Championship for nearly seven years. He’s perhaps the best MMA fighter of all time.
Director and writer Jared Cohn also has made Stalker In the House, Shark Season, Swim and many more films. The strangest thing he does in this movie — spoiler warning — is spend time setting up characters as what we assume are the leads of the movie — it starts with how Damon was jailed in the first place — and then writing them off, sometimes even off screen.
Lord of the Streets feels like a Lorenzo Lamas action film enjoyed with pizza, beer and other substances. It’s like Cool Ranch Doritos — you wouldn’t brag it up as the best thing ever, but when you are sitting there, you get a craving and think, “How good are these Doritos? Pretty good.” and then just get on with your life.
Jessie (Julia Brown) is a teenager who wants to become a famous hairstylist just like her mom Valerie (Gail Watson). She has a secret to the unique haircuts that she creates: her invisible partner is Ghillie Dhu (Huck Whittle), a forest elf who loves cutting human hair.
Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, this is a fun family story about an elf seeking a lost childhood friend, a daughter seeking for her mother to care about her and discovering how to transform your art into a career.
Directed by Phillip Todd, who wrote the script with his brother Matthew and Lindsey Stirling, this movie was a nice bit of happiness and cheer in the midst of the usual violence and sleaze that plays in this house.
I think that kids that watch this will enjoy seeing how Jessie stays positive despite rejection and hardship, devoted to making her life better and somehow connect with a mother who seemingly only cares about her own career. I’m sure you’ll figure out who the girl that Ghillie Dhu used to play with that moved to the big city really is, but this is such a fairy tale — literally — that I figure that you won’t mind at all.
While it has a lower budget, the film makes the most of its setting, cast and special effects. And yes, it may be a family film, but it kept me watching.
J.D. Feigelson wrote the screenplay for the TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow more than forty years ago and now, it’s finally time for a sequel. This time, he both directed and wrote the film, whereas the original was directed by Frank De Felitta (the writer of Z.P.G., Audrey Rose, The Entity, Scissors and more, as well as the director of Killer in the Mirror, Trapped and The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan).
Can it measure up to a film that many see as a true classic?
Chris Rhymer (Amber Wedding) and her young son Jeremy (Aiden Shurr) have recently moved to a small town in Stubblefield County. Their very arrival is a mystery to the close-knit town; after all why would someone move from the big city to their little town and be content to work in a country store?
While Chris tries to build a new life, Jeremy grows closer to the older woman who watches him after school every day named Aunt Hildie (Carol Dines) and also begins speaking to an imaginary friend that he refers to as Bubba. Chris is losing track of everything in her life and finds herself confiding in the worn scarecrow in the field, telling it all the secrets of her life while placing a flower in its lapel, a flower that’s returned to her as she sleeps.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Hildie is using Jeremy to reach the spirit hidden within the scarecrow, just as Chris’ past comes back with tragic results, as it turns out that Chris was in witness protection and she’s been found.
Unfortunately, while the movie attempts to remind us of the first film, it in no way can match it or even add to it. Whereas the original only hinted that perhaps something supernatural was happening, the sequel fully invests in the idea that Bubba is inside the scarecrow. I don’t expect that past cast to come back — most of them died in that film and are also sadly no longer with us — but I have such a strong feeling and adoration for the original that this feels like an unwanted hanger-on.
I wanted to love this movie. Sadly, it fell quite far from the mark. It may have had a lower budget than the 1981 TV movie, a move that makes the most of its budget with effective filmmaking and assured direction.
You can get this VCI-released movie from MVD in either blu ray or DVD.
That Tubi exclusive box is like some kind of drug and here I am at 5 AM when the world sleeps soundly and I’m watching a Lifetime-style movie in which former Beverly Hills 90210 star Jennie Garth plays Joan Miller, a mom whose daughter Lily (Devin Cecchetto) is acting up and then that acting up goes too far, far enough to be in one of these movies.
That acting up brings her into the orbit of Violet Lawrence (Kayleigh Shikanai) who lives with maybe her mom but probably not, has a bad girl rep and who also is way into this not NXVIM thought process called Zenith that’s definitely all about screwing over anyone that gets in your way.
This is the first film for director William Corcoran, who worked in visual effects for the movie Hot Pursuit and the series Fargo and Cleverman. It’s not the first time around for writer Adam Rockoff, who was the screenwriter for the 2010 I Spit On Your Grave, as well as movies like The Sinister Surrogate and multiple The Wrong… movies — Friend, Boy Next Door, Cheerleader, Tutor, House Sitter, Wedding Planner, Stepfather, Cheerleader Coach, Real Estate Agent, Fiancé, Prince Charmiong, Cheer Captain — which are pretty much made for cable giallo when you think about it. He also wrote the book Going To Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. He often uses the name Stuart Morse, which is a reference to The Redeemer: Son of Satan and proof that I want to be his friend.
This movie also has a threeway scene that’s made for basic cable where no one gets nude and everyone wakes up with their clothes on, interrupted with Garth continually calling her daughter. Wild stuff happens — teachers get screwed over, kids drink too much, people get branded like they’re playing volleyball with Keith Raniere with a creme brulee mini-torch, cops show up and shoot people in the back with no due process (well…) and you know, if you think your teenage daughter is dealing with a new town and the loss of her dad bad, you know, she totally is. She’s living up a pinky violence movie made for Tubi. This is torn from the headlines, people.
You can watch this on Tubi. I mean obviously. It’s a Tubi exclusive. Where else would you watch it? You know, Netflix is laying people off and demanding you stop giving your password out and Tubi is like, “You want to run five screens on your account? Do it. We have Jess Franco movies and lots of softcore porn in addition to all the stuff that we show in our ads and try and look classy” and I think they’re the evil mom Harper in this movie — but in the best of ways, I love you Tubi — giving you top shelf booze and letting you drink it in your house.
Blumhouse TV’s direct to streaming films end up being enormously entertaining and remind me of the reasons why I love the made for TV movies of the past. For some reason, they feel more focused despite — or perhaps because of — their reduced budgets.
Torn Hearts is a great example of that.
Leigh (Alexxis Lemire) and Jordan (Abby Quinn) are the Torn Hearts, a Nashville duo working hard every day and every night to make it in the country music business. Of the two, Jordan is the one who might be less comfortable on stage and more a music lifer, someone whose closest shot at fame may be someone else singing her song. Leigh is the mover, sweet on the outside but smart enough to get sleep before the studio (and hooking up with the band’s manager played by Joshua Leonard from The Blair Witch Project). As for Jordan? She’s hooking up with country megastar Caleb (Shiloh Fernandez, EvilDead) and already learning that most men in the business are all out for themselves.
So while their fling doesn’t lead to any opportunities, it does open one door. Caleb had been working with the mysterious Harper Dutch, one half of a country duo that the Torn Hearts idolize. Katey Segal owns this movie, emitting Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? vibes while maintaining old country rock and roll edge. She’s pure danger, ready to confess to past sins, drink hard liquor before 9 AM and put the girls through some brutal encounter exercises for the chance to record with her.
Directed by Brea Grant (who was Mya Rockwell in Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2) and written by Rachel Koller Croft (who also wrote the lyrics for the strong songs within the film), Torn Hearts is a real surprise. A country music based horror movie about lost fame, regret and trying to instill lessons in someone who is in your old shoes but not having the language or sanity to achieve your aims. Or maybe Harper just likes tearing things up?
Yaron Levy, who was the cinematographer for Scream: The TV Series, The Purge series and the upcoming Maniac Cop revival makes this film look dark and sinister when needed and sugar sweet when that’s the mood. Editor Hunter M. Via (The Mist, The Walking Dead) really makes the end tense and adds some true surprise with the way shots are revealed.
This film made me reflect on the sadness of country. One needs only look at the recent tragedy of the Judds to see that achieving fame is just part of the story. Life doesn’t get easier when you’re famous. And when family is part of the story, things can be hard. I’ve been thinking through this movie and how it comes together — and it’s dark as it gets coda — since I’ve watched it. You’ll be doing the same when you do.
Torn Hearts is available for digital purchase from Paramount Home Entertainment.
Following her daughter Samantha’s (Jill Young) suicide by gouging her eyes out, Ally (Akasha Villalobos) hasn’t left the house, trapped by agoraphobia. Help may be here, as she meets Jan (Peggy Schott), a therapist who uses a hallucinogenic tea that allows her patients to speak with the dead, which will allow her to see Samantha one more time.
There’s a catch.
Now Ally can see so much more, like a masked man outside, a child with no mouth and a rage-filled Samantha who wants her to suffer the same eye damage — Fulci would love her! — that she died from.
It gets stranger.
Now her husband Michael (Major Dodge) is seeing the same things, yet they’re even more dangerous for him, thanks to The Abuso, an African eye-stealing demon who his daughter had been drawing before her death.
Directed and written by Neil McCay, Trip is a movie that realizes that if your budget is low, your ideas must go high. It’s the first full-length movie that he’s made and it really points to a strong future for his work.
Dark Glasses is Dario Argento’s first film in a decade, since Dracula 3D, and much ink and pixels have been spilled discussing just as much when Argento peaked as the peaks themselves.
To those who don’t have a watchlist of giallo films in the hundreds, a quick reminder that while the genre didn’t start with the Italian director — you can look at them as an Italian mashup of Hitchcock films, the books of Edgar Wallace and Agatha Christie, filtered through the 60s and 70s and indebted to two Mario Bava films, The Girl Who Knew Too Muchand Blood and Black Lace— but his landmark The Bird With the Crystal Plumage was a worldwide success and created a two-year deluge of long-named and often-animal referencing films. Even from his second giallo, The Cat o’ Nine Tails(which he amazingly made a year later, the very same twelve-month period that he also made Four Flies on Grey Velvet) there was talk that Bird was a fluke. Following an attempt at leaving the form with The Five Days ofMilan, Argento created Deep Red, which is an upper-tier giallo with story beats that have been endlessly repeated by lesser hands.
Two years later, he followed that with the supernatural Suspiria, a film that took the colors and tones of Snow White and applied them to a story by Argento’s then-wife Dario Nicolodi and achieved immortality. While the sequel Inferno was not as well-received and was a personally troubled production for an ailing Argento, it features perhaps the wildest visual flourishes and moments of his resume.
The debate comes in as to when Argento lost his way.
Tenebre is, to me, an unassailable film that is the final word on the giallo form. By that, I mean that I will certainly watch any new yellow-poster referencing movie ever made, but it feels like everything that Argento wanted to say to critics and fans. Everything after that was non-supernatural just didn’t seem like it worked as well.
That’s why Phenomena works for me. Sure, it seems like it’s referencing Suspiria at times, but it also has some of the creator’s most personal revelations. I’d probably say that Opera is his last blast at relevance, as it contains some incredible visuals even if the story doesn’t always add up. Then again, if we can all admit it, the story wasn’t always what brought us to Argento’s films. Often, it was the tone, the look, the movements, the strange other worlds he built and plot holes that could be forgiven.
Since then, each film — I’m not counting Two Evil Eyes — has been touted and hoped as a return to form, from the American-sot Trauma and the art malady thriller The Stendhal Syndrome to The Phantom of the Opera, Sleepless (which starts great and then, well), The Card Player, Mother of Tears (which attempted to close off the cycle of Suspiria and Inferno), the poorly regarded Giallo and the even worse received Dracula 3D.
If you’re an Argento fan, you may think this is an oversimplification of his career (yeah, what about the films he helped guide like Dawn of the Dead, Demons, The Sect,The Churchand The Wax Mask?!?) and if you’re not, you probably want me to get to the film, right?
Dark Glasses was originally going to be made years ago, back when Vittorio Cecchi Gori was going to produce it. He went out of business and Argento put the story away until his daughter Asia found it while writing her 2021 autobiography Anatomy of a Wild Heart.
What emerges is a film that is equally a giallo, a rumination on past films and perhaps a final stamp if this is where things end, seeing as how Argento turns 82 in September.
It begins with an eclipse and as we watch everyone protect their eyes from the glare, Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli, They Call Me Jeeg) looks up and slightly damages her eyes, giving the script a moment to quote Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the French moralist who wrote: “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.”
She seems not from our world, but of the night. Intriguingly, while she’s a sex worker, Argento never treats her with anything less than dignity as we see her go through her work. One of her clients even tells her that the reason he hires her is because of her strength and independence. She also handily deals with another by telling him that she doesn’t want the orgasm that he claims that he could give her or even his money. She does this explicitly for herself and for her own reasons.
However, there is violence in her life. A man named Matteo (Andrea Gherpelli) who met her in a chat room comes to her house — her maid continually looks at her with disdain and even claims what happens next is a punishment from God — smelling of the dogs he trains and she asks him to shower, which is met with a series of belittling epithets. And the very same client who promised her all those orgasms attempts to attack her at which point she sprays his eyes with mace (Fulci would have loved all the ocular violence in this movie) and runs into the night.
That’s when Diana comes into conflict with perhaps the most important character in any giallo, the killer. We’ve already seen him garrotte another call girl and leave her bloody body outside the apartment of her last client. And in this moment, we’re reminded of the fact that this is fifty years after Bird as everyone that walks near the crime scene has a phone that instantly connects them to another world. The police now use forensics and science in addition to their deductive skills. And at once, everything feels safer yet perhaps more frightening when it all falls apart.
As Diana calms herself inside her car, a man rushes as her, leading her to wildly drive into the night. It’s that very same killer we saw at the beginning and his white van pursues her past the same plazas and streets we may remember from past giallo films but now covered with scaffolds as Rome strives to rebuild and keep itself together. This pursuit pushes Diana’s car into the path of another car, instantly killing the driver, putting his wife in a coma and effectively orphaning their son Chin (Xinyu Zhang).
When Diana awakes, her life has changed. The accident damaged her Brodmann area — specifically area 17 — the part of the brain that contains the primary visual cortex. This has rendered our heroine blind. She attempts to salvage her life — one client remarks that he always found himself so ugly that her being blind was the only way that he could get up the nerve to even hire her — and is helped by Rita (Asia Argento), who introduces her to the organization, tools and methods of how to survive as a blind person. Whereas Diana was once blissfully not of our world, an independent woman who could even forget there was an eclipse, now her life has become one of dependence on a cane, on Rita and on her new dog Nerea (which means mine and you can see the dog as part of Diana reclaiming her life). She is no longer of our world yet struggles to return to normalcy, focusing on the sounds of traffic to even do something as simple as cross the street.
Meanwhile, she attempts to assuage her guilt over the deaths of Chin’s parents by meeting him. Her gift of a video game means nothing to him yet when she stops him from being bullied, they connect. Obviously, their relationship is one that looks back to Cookie and Lori from The Cat o’ Nine Tails. Despite how simplistic some of the relationships appear, Argento does succeed in not only having strong female characters but also ones that you come to care for. That means that their loss is more deeply felt, something the giallo and its inelegant American cousin the slasher have always struggled with.
The killer hasn’t forgotten Diana and his white van continues to follow her. However, she now lives in a world of darkness, so she can’t even see him coming. Her strength has returned, as she easily rids herself of two cops seeking Chin, cops who live up to the giallo standard of always featuring the most ineffective and stupid of all law enforcement officers (seriously, Chief Inspector Aleard (Mario Pirrello) is more upset about the death of the killer than how he’d endangered Diana and Chin).
As Diana retreats from the killer, losing a friend, possibly her dog and perhaps even Chin, she finds herself alone in the unfamiliar countryside facing a killer who has been planning her death since the film began.
I read a great quote about Argento from Adrian on Letterboxd: “Argento’s movies always have been ridiculous. It’s just more prevalent now that the budgets got lower.” That’s very true of this movie, as at times I felt I was watching a TV movie instead of a film by the auteur who made Suspiria. Then, out of nowhere, a water snake attack makes everything feel just right again, a wild moment in the midst of normalcy.
I kind of love that the film closes with an inversion of the opening of Suspiria as well as a dog attack that reminds one of that movie as much as it does Dickie in Fulci’s The Beyond. And there’s a lot to enjoy here. I totally loved the soundtrack by Arnaud Rebotini as it’s intense, driving and actually does what the music in a giallo should: it makes the movie even better. The kill scenes are perhaps more realistic than past Argento films and less fantastic — no one’s head goes out a window — and are filled with gore.
Yet this is a giallo if only because Argento made it. There’s no mystery who the killer is. That’s not the story. The story is about how Diana survives this ordeal and her tragedy, if only she is left all alone with only a single friend left by the end. This doesn’t have the black hands of the killer in point of view nor the surprising reveal that marked the genius of all of Argento’s best thrillers yet it improves upon his past works, shows reference for the past and hopefully gives him the opportunity to continue to make films.
I liked it — and not in that way that I feel indebted to Argento and have to say things like Sleepless is great up to the train scene — and appreciate that I cared more about its characters than any of his in some time — again recalling my love for the relationships between Cookie and Lori in Cat and Marcus and Gianni in Deep Red. So while I may miss the wild zooms and dizzying colors, I can appreciate that growth and dream of one more chance from the master.
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