I love that TMZ is getting paid by Tubi just for having its crew sit on a couch and talk about celebrities. This time, it’s Arianna Grande, who took her four-octave vocal range from Broadway to two Nickedolian series before becoming a huge music star with songs like “Thank U, Next” and “Bang Bang.” Today, she’s in movies like Wicked and is one of the biggest music artists of all time with estimated sales of over 90 million records.

Anyone shocked by her dating history should just listen to one of the songs I mentioned above, “Thank U, Next,” in which she sings “Thought I’d end up with Sean/ But he wasn’t a match/ Wrote some songs about Ricky/ Now I listen and laugh/ Even almost got married/ And for Pete, I’m so thankful/ Wish I could say “Thank you” to Malcolm/ ‘Cause he was an angel,” which references boyfriends Big Sean, Ricky Alvarez, Pete Davidson and Mac Miller.

Grande can’t even get on her TikTok without causing controversy. Just this weekend, she was online with a face mask, and fans started to post that she’s had plastic surgery and was changing her appearance. 

Anyways — I hate everyone at TMZ because I get the feeling they think they’re kingmakers. The way the staff sits around eating snacks while deciding if a celebrity’s marriage is on the rocks feels intentionally designed to make the viewer feel like they’re part of an in-crowd. I guess they should do a special Tubi episode about how Epstein wrote that “Harvey Levin, who runs TMZ, is a good friend.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Brent and Blake Cousins are back. Directed and written by Brett and starring Blake, this takes the guys years forward from Slaughter Day to make a new SOV-inspired film in which a cop uncovers a conspiracy to off the leader of the U.S.A. Well, it was shot in the 90s and finished a few years ago and it goes much deeper than that description, as this liquid can turn normal people into terrorists.

The Cousins have not chilled with age, doing wild stunts and crazy camera angles all over again, while using modern FX, supers and dubbing to make it seem like this all goes together when it totally doesn’t. The Vice President wants the President dead, but like an Andy Sidaris movie, this never leaves Hawaii. Why should it? You have 50 minutes? Then you’re ready for Brent and Blake to take you on another ride.

Because the footage sat in a vault for decades, the movie acts as a bizarre temporal rift. You have the brothers as their younger, stunt-crazy selves, but the post-production feels like it was handled by someone who just discovered every filter in Adobe After Effects. I will always be here for that.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) is a secretary at a home for bad boys, but is mistreated by her fellow workers. At home, it isn’t much better because her father, Jim (Shea Whigham), is a retired cop who beats her every night. At least she can fantasize over Randy (Owen Teague), a guard at the center.

Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway) is the new therapist at the facility, working with Lee (Sam Nivola), who stabbed his father, something Eileen has dreamed of. 

One night, after work, the two women go to a bar together and share a kiss. On Christmas Eve, Rebecca invites Eileen to her home, but then tells her that it’s really Lee’s mother, Anne’s (Marin Ireland) home; she wants to coerce her into confessing to abusing her son and needs Eileen as a witness. While drugged, Anne reveals that she helped her husband to assault her son, as it gets her husband interested in her again.

Eileen and Rebecca dragged Anne into unconsciousness, and Eileen suggested framing Jim for the shooting of his mother. In love with Rebecca, Eileen wants to run away with her. They load Anne into the car, and Rebecca tells her that she will meet her. She doesn’t show up; Eileen takes the woman and leaves her in the car as it fills up with exhaust.

Directed by William Oldroyd and written by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh, who wrote the book it’s based on, Eileen is as much about abuse as it is about being a modern giallo. Would you kill someone for Anne Hathaway? I mean, yeah.

It took me literally five watches to get through Evil Dead Rise. In my past hater days, I would have just said something like, “Well, I already saw Demons 2,” but that’s not very productive. Films deserve to be seen, and my mindset did not jibe with what I was watching.

Maybe I’ve finally reached a point where the fifth Evil Dead movie isn’t all that exciting.

The thought filled my heart with dread. What would 16-year-old me, the one who watched Evil Dead II every single day, that a few years later would be one of two people in the theater for Army of Darkness, think?

Maybe I don’t want to grow up. It’s just too confusing.

Lee Cronin, who directed and wrote this movie, also made The Hole In the Ground. His Evil Dead movie came about after a period of great excitement over the reimagining. Fede Álvarez was making a sequel to that movie, Sam and Ivan Raimi were making Evil Dead 4 or Army of Darkness 2, and after all that, the seventh film would bring together Ash Williams and Mia Allen. Then the TV series came along, and when that was canceled by the fourth season, any talk of new movies ended. Until we got this.

And I wasn’t too excited.

But then it kicked off with some teens at the lake, some possessions and a levitating girl decapitating a boy while an incredible title card rose from the bloody water.

Alright, I was in.

Guitar tech Beth (Lily Sullivan) has learned she’s pregnant and needs to be near her family, which includes her tattoo artist single mother sister, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and her kids, Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). They live in the Monde Apartments, a nearly condemned building in Los Angeles that was rocked by an earthquake that brought a book and three records to the land of the unpossessed. Of course, Danny is a DJ and throws those records on the turntable — Bruce Campbell voiceover cameo alert — and they reveal that a priest was able to bring the Deadites to our world with the Naturom Demonto.

He gets blood all over the book, which we all know isn’t good, as the aftershocks and power outages continue to assault their home. Ellie is soon possessed and tries to kill everyone, but before she dies, she makes Beth promise to protect her children. And then she’s back from the dead and doing anything but.

What follows is a blood-spraying, gore-filled battle between the Deadite-possessed humans — most of the family becomes an intertwined creature — and the survivors, Beth and Kassie. Is there a shotgun? Is there a chainsaw? And is there a wood chipper, too?

Yet this has the same issue every reimagining has. It has the blood, the book, all those elements, but it forgets the anarchy. What’s missing is the weird mix of goofiness and kids in the woods making something with no archetype or rules. We know what will happen every moment, as if it is predestined, with nothing shocking outside of the things engineered to be as such. Much like how the streaming Hellraiser forgot the sex and the streaming Texas Chainsaw Massacre forgot to be frightening, this has a menu of everything that would be on the model kit of an Evil Dead movie, but it’s missing the intangible. There’s no feeling of getting behind the protagonists. Sure, a cheese grater gets used as a weapon, but this film should have the DNA of a film series that spent forty minutes with a man’s own hand punching himself in the face. It should do something that makes us feel something. The absence of this anarchy is a disappointment that’s hard to ignore.

There’s some to like, but I want to love. I want to revel in the lunacy of what this film could be, instead of settling for what it is. This had 1,720 gallons of blood, but not as many ounces of magic as I wanted it to have. Honestly, they could have skipped the records and book, which would have been another possession film.

But would anyone have gone to the theater—yes, this even got out of streaming and into the big time—to see that?

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of this movie has audio commentary with director Lee Cronin and actors Alyssa Sullivan and Lily Sullivan; interviews with Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Anna-Maree Thomas, special make-up effects designer Luke Polti, editor Bryan Shaw, sound designer Peter Albrechtsen, composer Stephen McKeon and Cronin and Albrechtsen by Glenn Kiser, director of the Dolby Institute. There are featurettes, a short directed by Cronin, behind-the-scenes video clips and still gallery, concept artwork gallery, storyboard gallery, a trailer and TV commercials, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Waldemar Witt, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Waldemar Witt and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michael Gingold. You can order this from MVD.

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote it with Erik Jendresen, this is the sequel to Mission: Impossible – Fallout and the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible film series. I have no real affinity or knowledge of these, so I went in cold.

A rogue AI known as The Entity has destroyed the Russian stealth submarine where it was housed, the Sevastopol, in the hope that it can be released into the world. IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team have been called in to retrieve it for the U.S., as any government that uses this AI will be ahead. Or so they think, as it is already self-aware. After all, it can manipulate cyberspace itself to control global defense intelligence and financial networks. 

This brings Ethan into the orbit of rogue MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who has a price on her head thanks to CIA director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny). The battle to destroy the AI takes the team all over the world, as they chase Grace (Hayley Atwell), an agent who has already stolen the part Ethan had, while disarming nuclear bombs in airports. That means that you get Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Beni Dunn (Simon Pegg) as Ethan’s fellow agents, as they also go to war with the CIA, who want to arrest them, and the soldiers who work for The Entity, like Gabriel (Esai Morales) and Paris (Pom Klementieff).

The start of Cruise’s last films in this series is the kind of high-action epic that delivers on all fronts. It feels like this series has taken the ball from Bond and run with it, pushing the stunts beyond the Bourne movies and turning them into roller coasters all their own. Even without knowing the characters and their backstories, the car chase in Italy and the airport scenes are so full of twists and turns that I found this an entertaining watch, liking it way more than I thought I would.

Directed by Stewart Spark, who wrote the script with Paul Butler, this begins with the end of a movie: Jamie Lancaster (Lyndsey Craine) is the sole survivor of a monster attack in a cabin in the woods. Claiming that her friends were killed by these creatures, she is arrested by the local cops and locked up for a crime she didn’t commit. Before too much running time, the police station is ripped from our reality and thrown into a nightmarish dimension of elder gods who want to return to ours and taste human flesh.  

Within this squad house, there’s Inspector Landry (Andrina Carroll), who is getting too old for this shit and is ready to retire. There are two cops who don’t get along, Dennis (Arron Dennis) and Melvin (Daniel Thrace). And an entire jail cell of criminals and those arrested for getting out of control, like soon-to-be-wed Blair (Fenfen Huang) and her bridesmaids Ruth (Juné Tiamatakorn), Chelsea (Michaela Longden) and Crystal (Louella Gaskell). They’ll all have to confront the Lovecraftian horrors at the center of this fun comedy horror hybrid. Nicholas Vince, who was the Chatterer Cenobite, even has a small role.

This is a party movie, one best enjoyed with an entire room of friends and a bunch of beer. Sure, there are plenty of twists and turns at the end, but this is also full of gore and even has a chainsaw attack. I had a blast with it and am looking forward to whatever Spark and Butler do next.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Something is causing the rattlesnakes in Southern California to mutate to enormous sizes, and it’s up to Dr. Kaye (Mercedes Peterson) to stop their growth before they destroy Los Angeles. And yes, Dustin Ferguson already made Rattlers 2, but sure, he’ll make it again.

Most of the cast of the Ferguson movies show up. Dawna Lee Heising and Shawn C. Phillips are killed during a 4th of July party, and Brinke Stevens gets into a bathtub full of snakes, which soon kill her. 46 minutes or so of snake mayhem follows, including a big snake, and then ends with nature footage. And no real ending. You expect that by this point. But did you expect nearly ten minutes of nature footage?

Take a look at the box art. You’re about to make fun of it. Well, you’re not the person that this movie is for. Judge accordingly.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Immortal Species is an OK title.

Jurassic Croc sells.

Nava is a botany student looking for a plant called a chalawan. He and his friends travel through the jungle to find it and you guessed it, most of them get masitcated by a man-eating crocodile.

Look at this IMDB trivia and marvel that someone wastes as much time as I do on movies like this: “The plant they are looking for in the film is called “Chalawan”. Well, Chalawan is an extinct genus of folidosaurid mesoeucrocodilid folidosaurid known from the Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous Phu Kradung Formation of Nong Bua Lamphu province, northeastern Thailand. It contains a single species, Chalawan thailandicus, with Chalawan shartegensis as a possible second species.”

This movie could use less high school romance and more people eating. I think that’s true for almost every film I have ever watched.

You can watch this on Tubi.