Ishani (Megha Sandhu), Taijah (Alicia Richardson) and Mei-Ling (Erika Prevost) used to be a girl group until a talent show goes wrong. They stop being friends and life just starts to feel darker. Santa (Steven Vlahos) sends them back in time — that’s all the holiday this movie has, because it’s really about the girls getting to experience the 00s again even if they look as old as they are now, so the Hot Tub Time Machine influence is apparent beyond just the name of this. Why else would Taijah’s cousin Caleb (Gabriel Davenport), someone unconnected to their era, go back, just like that movie having the younger friend being involved? Ah, it’s Christmas. I will cut a Tubi Original a break.
While she’s back in time, the thirtysomething teenager — I know that’s what I always say about teen comedies but this is really true — Mei-Ling hooks up with the most popular boy in school so that she can get past the trauma of not being popular. So she uses a young hot boy to get what she wants. Hmm. Should I keep being nice to this movie now?
Everyone in the past says. “Prime directive?” and uses what they know of the future which is their past to start changing the present to change this past which is now their present and the paradoxes! The parallel realities they are creative! The buttery on a wheel! Or whatever! Look, I’m no scientist.
Also, shout out to jamesmcnabb on Letterboxd who rightly points out that this band has no drummer, no guitarist, three vocalists and one that plays bass and the other keyboards, but just knows how to start the presets like that old Casio bossa nova demo. Are they reinventing the way we see rock? Or whatever music this is? Is the future not just female, as Ishani graffitis on a brick wall, but also just bass and keyboards and three women singing?
What has this movie taught us about the spirit of Christmas?
At least they didn’t steal rock music from black people, which is another time travel thing that I’ve never got over. Like I want to make a movie with Body Count where they go back in time and knock out McFly and then Ice T gets with her mom and says stuff like, “Damn, dick” while Ernie C shreds and the Hill Valley High School dweebs just stare and T snarls, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it. Yo Beatmaster V, take these mother fucking bitches back to South Central.” I mean, I would watch that movie.
Madison Jacobs (Kathryn Davis) is a department store executive at the Chester + Wade department store. As she prepares an out of the box menswear fashion show for sponsor Paul Grant (oh man, that’s Scott Thompson, who is doing a show at a winery near me and I kind of want to go but also wish he was playing bigger stages so maybe it makes me sad). Instead of worrying why everyone just goes to Amazon instead of her store — has to hire the perfect Santa, a young one with a sense of style. She hired her best friend Ethan Davis (Franco Lo Presti) to be the dream Santa, who gets a walking through the store intro scene where it is made known that every single person wants to have Santa slide down their chimney and eat all their cookies.
The secret is that Ethan hasn’t told Madison that he’s playing his fake cousin Rafe Hollifield and is trying to win her over after a lifetime of just being friends. And yes, this is the same department store from Christmas On the Slopes.
Directed by Amy Force, who also directed Country Hearts Christmas, We’re Scrooged, Christmas Lucky Charm, Christmas In Rockwell, Christmas On 5th Avenue, Christmas In the Rockies and Dashing Home for Christmas, and written by Paula Tiberius, who wrote Christmas In Big Sky Country, Christmas On the Slops, Country Roads Christmas and Snowbound for Christmas.
Can Santa be hot? Watch this and learn for yourself.
My wife has started doing craft shows selling dog bandanas. Check her work on Instagram. Over the last few months, we’ve been doing a lot of Christmas craft fairs. Other than the demons, I can say from a first-person perspective that Christmas Craft Fair Massacre is the most realistic and truthful movie about craft fairs ever committed to film. Or digital video.
Max Raven and Bando Glutz, well, in the words of Judith Priest, I can neither confirm nor deny that they are also Bret McCormick.
Houston’s Central High School was built on a Native American burial ground — I live next to the second largest one in the eastern part of the country — which means it has lured devil worshippers there, like Principal Mortimer Shade (Tytus Berry), to find the one pure soul — Julie Purebred (Rebecca Bills) — with the help of the mask-wearing Ned (Max Raven). He’s also struggling against the lady who runs the mall, Megara Pendragon (Victoria Chaney), who wants her soul as well.
So yes, this movie may feel like it’s been shot on phones and has long talking sequences that were edited together to make it seem like everyone was in the same room. Who cares? It also has a priest, a shaman, someone who may be the director as well and a nice lady all work together to drop a telekinetic nuke on the craft fair, saving the world and our souls.
I have sat in these fairs and stared at the clock for what seems like days upon days and only ten minutes has moved and maybe I don’t want to be there, but I really love my wife and will do anything for her. But if I could drop a mind bomb on the Monongahela Y before sitting there again for eight hours while someone next to me super hard sells fiberfill pillows and I’ve heard their lines hundreds of times, man, I would drop a bomb that would give Oppenheimer a boner from beyond the grave.
Every review that doesn’t understand this movie was written a person without any holiday spirit.
Directed and written by Alejandro Rojas and Juan Sebastián Vásquez, this is the story of Diego (Alberto Ammann) and Elena (Bruna Cusí) as they attempt to enter the United States. Their trip stops in New York City, where they had hoped to see Diego’s brother before moving to Miami. But as they are lost inside customs, they may never go anywhere.
The frightening thing about Upon Entry is how realistic it is while how much it also feels like something out of Kafka. They get no answers, no food, no water and instead question after question about everything in their lives, which slowly become more intrusive and therefore painful to attempt to answer.
We learn nothing of the situation and these characters other than from the answers that Diego and Elena give to the man and woman (Ben Temple and Laura Gómez) interrogating them. As we wish to learn who they are and why they are being kept, we become complicit in the way they are mistreated.
There are moments throughout this film that disarmed me and then would worry me, as I was caught up in the same questioning techniques, feeling trapped in the same small room as this film’s heroes. Is this what it’s like to come to the land of opportunity? And yet some will see them and their foreign origins as reasons to see them as less than human beings. This movie frightens me the more I consider it.
Directed and written by Bingjia Yang, this is the story of blind swordsman and bounty hunter Cheng the Ghostkiller (Xie Miao). With each kill, he gets closer to being able to pay for an operation to give him sight. Yet he also wants justice to exist and he helps Ni Yan (Gao Weiman), a bride accused of murdering her own brother after being assaulted at her wedding, for personal reasons.
Obviously borrowing from the Zatoichi series — which also inspired Blind Fury — this movie looks gorgeous and has some great visual style when it comes to the fight scenes. You may wonder if a blind swordsman should look so good when he’s slicing the competition into ribbons, but these are not the things you should think about. You should sit back and enjoy the seventy-seven minutes of fast action and a plot that actually is pretty decent.
This movie was successful enough that there’s already a sequel.
A giant sea serpent — much like the Loch Ness Monster — called Willatuk has been in the waters of Seattle for a long time. Well, at least as far back as 2012, when director O.W. Tuthill made Seattle’s Loch Ness: The Lake Washington Sea Monster.
Now, he’s showing how the residents of Seattle deal with the monster, like Chief Clamintile of the Wonkatilla Tribe, whose people worship it as the God of Ocean, or the hunter (Dan Schwert) who has been brought up by his father to kill the beast.
It’s all narrated by Graham Greene and the director/writer is better known for his music work, so that sounds good. I’m kind of astounded by this because a movie that has a horrific monster poster ends up being about interfamily strife and how we deal with the world. Of course, some of the actors are better than others, but this is an oddball movie that just worked for me, as it has a vision and didn’t get notes from anyone. It’s very much it’s own movie.
Punk rocker Kat Oden (Liv Roush) doesn’t do much, other than get high with her lover Nick (John Enick). Then one night, a masked man (James Parks) takes her, chains her to a bad and prepares to do…something. Detective Charles Dobson (Ralph Garman) is trying to find her but she may end up loving being kidnapped a little better than real life.
Directed and written by Josh Roush, who has made several films about Kevin Smith, this was made for almost no money and yet has a solid cast — Daniel Roebuck, David Koechner, Harley Quinn Smith, Donita Sparks from L7, Vernon Wells and Smith — who are all really fun in their roles.
Wrong Reasons has deleted Scenes, outtakes, a Q & A, commentary by director Josh Roush, co-producer Matt Rowbottom, composer Cam Mosavian and star Liv Roush as well as another commentary with Roush and executive producer Kevin Smith, an introduction by Smith, a trailer and more. You can get it from MVD.
7. “META” MILITIA: Be on the lookout for any one of an enemy squadron of self aware films operating in your area. Report if seen…
This film takes the 2018 short film of the same name by the comedy troupe 3Peat and makes an entire horror film around a Juneteenth weekend spent at a cabin in the woods. Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh) arrive first and find an old board game from the racist past that challenges them to trivia to the death. She’s shot with an arrow and he’s captured before the credits.
Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), Allison (Grace Byers) and Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins) are the next to arrive, followed by King (Melvin Gregg), Lisa’s ex Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler). And just like every 80s slasher, the town is full of dread, scarred up convenience store clerks and authority figures like Ranger White (Diedrich Bader) who get in the way of drugs and sex in the woods.
By the time the substances start working, the board game — The Blackening — is back on the table. The voice of the game’s mascot tells them that he has Morgan and if they want to see him alive, they must answer black pop culture questions. One about the black guest stars of Friends — Aisha Tyler, Gabrielle Union and Janet Hubert would be good answers — leads to Morgan being beaten.
Now, the game changes and claims that whoever is the least black will be killed. Well, Clifton did vote for Trump.
Directed by Tim Story and written by Parker and Tracy Oliver, I laughed out loud at a few moments in this movie and was pleased that it remains an actual slasher despite referencing how much its characters know about horror movies. I mean, the tagline is “We can’t all die first.”
From the cabin being referenced as looking a lot like the Sawyer house to the killers making the ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah noises like Jason, there’s even a scene where Morgan goes on and on about an episode of Dateline where a brother and sister kept their incest-bred kids under the stairs. Of course, that’s The People Under the Stairs. And if you love Scream, much less Scream 2, the killer asking if Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps survived is beyond movie geek referential.
I had the opportunity to watch some of the SLASH Filmfestival 2023 shorts and here’s what I think:
From the FANTASTIC SHORTS COMPETITION – CHAPTER I
Hole (2023): Directed and written by Hwang Hyein, JeongMi (Lim ChaeYoung) is a child services worker in South Korea who comes to check on Jun-seo (Kwak SooHyeon) and Jun-hui (Son JiYu). They’ve been missing from school and no one can find their parents. The secret soon comes out, as a manhole opening has appeared inside their bedroom.
A dark and strange movie from the very first moment. This feels like a movie that should be a full feature and I hope that happens.
Magdalena (2022): Czechoslovakia, 1971. A Slovakian woman (Susan Angelo) is trapped by her past as it seeks to destroy the new life that she has worked so hard to build for her family.
Director Michael Lazovsky, who wrote the story with Max Hersh, based this story on his Jewish grandmother’s experiences growing up in communist Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Storyboarded on an iPhone, shot in Los Angeles but yet looking like the sterile world of a Communist country and made by someone whose family lived these lives, Magdalena is a very rough watch yet a film that looks completely gorgeous. What a perfect short!
Demon Box (2023): After festival rejections pile up, director Sean Wainsteim revises his intensely personal short film about trauma, suicide and the Holocaust. After ten years of painful work, it has become a dissection of the movie he wanted to make and may end up being more of a film than he intended.
This film is almost too honest and I mean that as a compliment. It made me feel uncomfortable, reminding myself of how I feel about the stories I heard growing up and how I joke about the continual negative darkness that came out of them, how it feels like everyone always has cancer and everyone is always dying.
If you feel like putting yourself through that journey, as well as Wainsteim’s, watch this.
The Old Young Crow (2023): Liam LoPinto has created this movie — which has some animation and some live action — about an Iranian boy befriending an old Japanese woman at a graveyard in Tokyo.
We hear the story told by Mehrdad (Naoto Shibata as a young one, Hassan Shahbazi in his older age) who remembers the Japanese woman and how he learned about grief and loss. It’s an incredible mix of media that creates this film, a joy to watch and experience. As I always say, I cannot and will not live these lives, so the chance to do so through film is so important.
From the FANTASTIC FUTURES:
Remove Hind Legs Before Consumption (2023): Even in a hopeless insect food farm — where millions of crickets are being bred, frozen, packaged and fried — one cricket survives and escapes.
Leslie Herzig, Finn Meisner and Lukas Wind have come together to create a violent and yet heartwarming film that teaches us that yes, even a cricket can do something important.
Also not that I was planning on eating tons of friend crickets but this movie has convinced me not to do so because they have souls. I feel bad for all of the one that I have chewed on before I watched this.
Chef Gustav (2023): This movie is simple but a lesson worth learning: never ever mess with a cat in the kitchen. You will be murdered.
This looks like near stop motion but I’m certain it has to be computers. However it was made, I love that orange cat and believe that it is innocent of all of this bloodshed, even if I saw it with my own eyes.
The Law Of The Jungle Gym (2023):Somehow, lunch and tag on the school yard gets transformed into the end of the world. This is some of the finest animation I’ve seen in some time and I was struck by both how realistic and unreal it is. I have no idea where this ideas came from, but Yoon Hei Cho, who seemingly did all of this themselves, is beyond a talent. Mindblowing.
On the 8th Day (2023): A gorgeous blast of color and fabric, an apocalyptic 3D short that drew me in with its cuteness before destroying every moment of it, then sending its purple people lilting upward into space. I can’t describe it more but it made me emotional.
Perfect City: The Bravest Kid (2023): In the second part of the Perfect City series, a paper boy has a horrific dream in which a gigantic iron knife hand and a series of other sharp objects are chasing him all the way to his bed. The even worse realization? His parents are not paper, but also knives. I can’t even imagine seeing this when I was a kid, as I would have been awake all night.
Director Shengwei Zhou also made Perfect City: The Mother which is just as strange as this, which is a compliment. This is the type of stop motion animation that I haven’t seen since the days of Liquid TV, which is much missed.
The Third Ear (2023): Sammy (Devin Burnam) has an issue. In his job as an art model, he often likes to look at the work that artists create from his body. But what if they draw him incorrectly? Does he really have an ear in the back of his head?
Director and writer Nathan Ginter has created something really intriguing here, a quick and fun tale of a man’s fight for his own self-image.
The Hand That Feeds (2023): Irina (Anca Cipariu) is a single mother who moves in with her former mother-in-law Trudi (Inge Maux), who constantly cooks meals and gives her gifts. Yet something feels wrong.
Directed and written by Helen Hideko, this makes you feel the unease that Irina feels as she attempts to create her own life within the one that Trudi has. This leads to visions of absolute terror that begin to tear at her and she feels a rage that she can’t explain.
I get the feeling that if I were a mother, this movie would totally trigger me.
The Taster (2023): Sometime in the future, in Romania, Ozana (Silvana Mihai) is chosen to work as the new taster girl for the occupying forces. On her first day, she breaks the most important rule. And that’s to never look the leader in the eye. Soon she finds herself alone and face to face with the man destroying her country.
Director and writer Sophia Bierend has created a future movie that is based in reality, such as the idea that the world’s ecology is destroying and the Danube is one of the few places that can produce food for the powerful.
Into this horrible world, Ozana is cast, made to taste each of the meals for the leader. If she dies, he will know that someone is trying to kill him. She must not make any friends. Just sit and eat. She hasn’t even had a solid morsel for two years, as she lives on a nutrient formula. So this position allows her to be part of the world of the elite, even if all she’s doing is possibly dying for their dining enjoyment.
SHORTS BEFORE FEATURES:
La Vedova Nera (2023):While cycling through the streets of Marseille, Alfredo (Siro Pedrozzi) crashes his bike. He goes into a porn cinema for help and finds an old giallo playing that creates the scene for a predator who either wants him for his body or murder or, well, both.
Directed and written by Fiume and Julian McKinnon, this film looks absolutely astounding. The title means The Black Widow, which easily feels like a callback to the animal-themed post-Argento giallo of the early 70s. Beyond just being a homage, this feels like a creative team that intimately understands the genre and uses it to tell their own movie. There are hints of the past intricately woven with today.
I can’t say enough about this short. More work from these filmmakers now!
Chomp It! (2023): In a society founded on social hierarchy and privilege, two crocodile men ople are trying to cool down at a swimming pool. One of them is seemingly of a different and special kind; the other is unable to control his desire.
Shot on 16mm and directed by Mark Chua and Li Shuen Lam, I think that this would mean so much more to me if I understood the weirdness of life in Singapore. As it is, the colors and look of the film — I mean, a child’s riding machine powered by a heart? — are incredible.
Every House Is Haunted (2023): The realtor told them the house was haunted but as the title tells you, every house is haunted in its own way. Maya (Kate Cobb) and Danny (Kevin Bigley) move in anyhow, because to find a house like this, in this market, well…
And she’s used to not even knowing what she wants any longer.
Director and writer Bryce McGuire shows us that not every ghost is evil and not every living person is alive, if that makes sense. I really enjoyed the effects in this, as well as the way that Maya found a way to bond with the spirits that live in her home.
Content: The Lo-Fi Man(2023):Brian Lonano, who co-directed this short with Blake Myers and wrote it, just wants to tell you about Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Yet he’s been replaced by the new and improved Brian Lonano (Clarke Williams) who is now a streaming content aggregator and influencer, asking you to smash that like button and ring the bell so you get the updates. Breaking free from the mouse-eared androids that have him locked up, he battles the Content Seeker by, well, kind of becoming Tetsuo and joining up with film revolutionaries Kino, B-Roll and Wild Track.
We live in a strange place now, a reality where you can get almost every movie you want but may not have the time to watch it. Or maybe you do and when you want to break it down and discuss it, you get lost in the machine of likes and shares. I try to keep my mind open to both sides, as sure, it’s nice to have the most perfect quality home media ever, as well as streaming materials and everyone deserves the opportunity to find and appreciate pop culture in their own way. But man, if I see another listicle or YouTube video that posits theories like “maybe all the shot in the Eastern Bloc SyFy sequels in the 90s were high art” or ten slashers you never saw before and #3 is The Burning, well…
Directed and written by Pakphum Wongjinda and Chalit Krileadmongkon, this Thai horror film had moments that almost made me nauseated, which I feel is the best feeling I can get from a scary movie.
Inspired by the story of Battambang from the reign of King Rama V, Creepy Crawly — originally The 100 —
A travel influencer is kept quarantined in a hotel that has seen better days. Beyond just dealing with COVID shutdowns, she also has a rare blood disorder that she’s kept a secret from everyone. Along with her brother Fiew and a martial arts master named Leo — as well as his sister and their deaf father — all of them must come together when the centipedes that live in the hotel get smart and decide that the time to destroy humans is now.
Not only are these centipedes out to kill just about everything — a rat attack earlier is stomach decimating — they also are all led by a monstrous one-legged killing machine that can possess people.
I’m usually one of those people that prefers real effects to CGI, but I really liked the effects in this. I mean, centipedes that overtake people and become part of them? Incredible.
I had so much fun with this movie. Even thinking about it now as I write this, I kind of want to watch it again.
You can get more data on this movie from the official Well Go USA site.
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