Director Philip Barantini is known for the British TV show Boiling Point. Here, he’s made one of the best Tubi originals I’ve seen, a tense thriller that feels like it could be happening right now.

Harri (Chaneil Kular) leaves London to dog-sit the family dog Flynn when his parents go on vacation. He doesn’t pay attention to much — he’s an animator so he devotes his mind to one thing at a time — and is shocked when a friend calls to tell him he nearly missed a bombed on the tube. When a camera image of the suspect who set the bomb goes viral, even Harri’s girlfriend jokes that it looks like him. Even worse, an old school friend posts a message that she feels proves that Harri is the terrorist.

This is how easily this happens. Harri isn’t a foreigner. He’s lived in London his whole life. He just looks different.

And it gets worse.

Harry is a British citizen of South Asian descent, but he’s brown. To anyone watching him — even neighbors of his parents who have known him his whole life — he’s the other, an enemy, someone to fear. The tension builds as every message Harri reads paints him as a criminal. Even calls to the police and visits to a kindly old lady next door become nightmarish mirror sides of real life. Then the vigilantes come for him and invade his parent’s home.

Writers Barnaby Boulton and James Cummings have crafted a fable of how far paranoia and the bubble of doing your own research and “I’m just saying, but…” can go when pointed at a target. Kular is really great in this, an everyman faced with a night of terror that not every man would have to live through.

You can watch this on Tubi.

If there’s one thing that’s been sure this year, it’s that every few weeks I get to watch a new Chris Stokes movie. The director, working again on the script with Marques Houston, is set to deliver another thriller that plays on one of the biggest fears of married women: a husband who has an affair.

Kenneth (Robert Ri’chard) and Skyler (Annie Ilonzeh) have the dream marriage. However, her best friend Camilla (La’Myia Good) has lost the love of her life, Lance, who has started sleeping with his much older boss. Of course she can live with the couple until she gets on her feet, right?

Can you see where this is already going wrong?

There’s also a friend named Kim played by exotic dancer, socialite and social media personality Blac Chyna, who I only knew from Kardashian gossip. My hatred for that show knows no bounds and somehow, my wife has convinced me to watch so many seasons of it that I can discuss the storylines with some level of intelligence. I mean, as much intelligence as that entails.

Seeing how Kenneth treats Skyler, Camilla starts thinking that maybe she could get some of that. When her best friend is felled by kidney stones, she gets in the marriage bed and makes it happen. But this film at least pushes things where Kenneth wants nothing to do with her and honestly feels contrite, but she forces him again and again to make love to her, using the power that she has to destroy him and his marriage.

The character of the woman who goes mental once she makes love to you seemingly will never go away and this is just one more example of a Fatal Attraction movie, albeit one with a smaller budget. That said, it’s entertaining, as all of Chris Stokes’ films are.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Deadly Midwife starts with Lauren (Jessica Lowndes, Adrianna Tate-Duncan from the 2000s version of 90210) meeting with her midwife Julie (Lauren K. Robek), the same woman who helped her mother give birth to her. It’s a sweet scene but there’s a hint of something wrong: Julie needs a door camera and is worried enough about something happening that she gives Lauren the same camera. 

Add that to the flash-forward that we see of Lauren near death and the title Deadly Midwife and you know something bad is about to happen.

Directed by Monika Mitchell and written by Helen Marsh and Carolyn Woolner, this movie wastes no time in letting you in on the fact that something weird is happening. Lauren’s husband Anthony (Matthew MacCaull) is one of those Lifetime — well, Tubi — husbands who starts every day by asking, “Did you take your medication?”

Julie has gone missing. He claims she went back to England to see her ex-husband Harrison and Lauren even gets an email from her, but it all seems suspect. Soon, the new midwife Olivia Wright (Elysia Rotaru, Taiana Venediktov from Arrow and the voice of Black Canary in the Justice Society: World War II cartoon) has taken over. If  I’ve learned anything about having a baby from movies, it’s to never eat or drink anything anyone slightly off ever offers you, like tannis root, red meat or a special smoothie. I mean, Lauren is puking in her kitchen sink and Olivia is pushing this drink on her.

The whole relationship between Lauren and Anthony is weird. After her mother, an art gallery owner, killed herself, he was her therapist and they fell in love which is ethically so not what should happen. Anthony is now a college professor of psychology and — umm, yeah — ethics at Weston College. When she goes to visit him on campus, a young woman named Rachel (Gabrielle Jacinto) is hacking his computer. She claims she’s from the IT department. She also says that Anthony has been fired. He tells Lauren that he was getting around to telling her that.

There are so many things that go wrong here, like Olivia smashing her face into a sink to appear abused and then get to stay in the house, at which point she starts wearing lingerie and eating all the cheese in the fridge, then we learn that Julie has been kidnapped and oh yeah, the cop in charge — Detective Brooks (John Cassini) — is near giallo police in his level of effectiveness. And how does Olivia know the sex of the baby before Lauren?

You can see where this is all going but if you love these movies like I do, you enjoy each twist and turn of ridiculousness. I often yell at the TV during movies like this and I am quite immature, but I feel that we all find our own joy in life.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by James Ford, who also directed Hip Hop Youngstown, and co-written by Art Institute of Pittsburgh graduate Melanie Clarke-Penella, What Happens In the Dark is the story of Trevor Evans (Hakeem Sharif), a real estate businessman who has his fingers in many pies, including the drug game and some of his co-workers, all things unknown to his wife Ava Parker Evans (Adriana Alphonso). She wants to have a baby with him. He’s struggling to stay alive when he borrows too much from the wrong people.

The movie starts with Trevor in a big pine box — I mean, if you’re going to get buried alive, at least this one seems somewhat roomy — and thinking about how he got here. Well, when you take more than you make and think that your street product is always going to be in demand, that may be how. It’d help if he treated anyone well, but Trevor is all for Trevor. When one of his old friends Mook (Demaris Harvey) borrows a ton of money from him and starts ducking him — a fact that Mook’s lady Kiesha (Jayda Jones) calls him out on — he goes into his friend’s bar the Kulture Ultra Lounge (which is a real place in Cleveland Heights, OH) and they struggle over a gun and tragedy happens.

Speaking of Ohio, this is the second Tubi original that I’ve seen shot in Youngstown — the other is The Housekeeper — and it’s so strange to see places where I grew up show up on my Tubi.

As you can imagine, Trevor ruins everyone’s life and is horrible from the start with absolutely nothing redeemable about himself. There’s no hero’s journey, just what happens to a bad person when he meets worse ones. This movie lives up to the line that inspires it: “What’s done in the dark always comes to the light.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Booker T. Mattison is an associate professor in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies at Grady College and the director and writer of this movie, as well as The Gilded Six Bits and The Sound of Christmas.

Marija Juliette Abney (who was one of Black Panther’s personal bodyguards, the Dora Milaje, in the MCU movies) is Yolanda Carver or, as her TV fans refer to her, Dr. Yo. She’s an empiricist and claims that she handles marriages based on what she can see, not her opinions, and that she follows the scientific method.

She may also be — as the title spoils — twisted.

Liam (Pha’rez Lass) and Armeka Jasper (Jennifer Sears) are in the middle of a marriage that isn’t working for either of them. She wants children and he has no idea what he wants, suffering from PTSD from two tours of duty yet unable to communicate with anyone just how emotional he is.

This movie is everything I want in a Tubi original. Seemingly throughout the movie, everyone wants to get with Armeka, including her work friend Ivy (Jackie Dallas), who offers hugs on the regular, and Dr. Yo, who already has a down low relationship with her producer Tonya (Bree Webber).

Meanwhile, she keeps sneaking up on Liam — even when he’s trying to have sex with his wife — and tells everyone that her husband died in Afghanistan, yet Liam discovers a secret ladies only therapy session in which she states that he came home, had PTSD and attacked her. So what is it? And just who was getting stabbed in the beginning when he was getting ridden by another woman?

The scam that Dr. Yo has is amazing. She picks out attractive women in the audience of her show and give them free marriage counseling that gets their husband killed. The wild thing is that Armeka literally looks like she’s going to freak out at any minute, no matter what happens, in every single scene. That’s the kind of acting I appreciate.

But Dr. Yo calling the cops on Liam? And of course, white cops? Man, Twisted Marriage Therapist goes there. Then when Dr. Yo can’t convert Armeka? It’s time for zipties, ground and pound and 50 Shades of Gray red ribbon restraints while Liam is locked up in a co-ed asylum that she runs.

I’m so glad that this set up a sequel. Let’s see one now, Tubi.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Home from Afghanistan, a Spect Ops Marine named Jessica (Jet Jandreau) learns that the suburbs may be just as dangerous as a DMZ when her thirteen-year-old sister Aimee (Jamie M Timmons) is abducted by sex traffickers.

Director Lee Whittaker is better known for his stunt work in more than a hundred movies, such as Sound of Freedom (which this film has a lot in common with), Captain Marvel, The Spy Next Door, The Replacement Killers and he has assistant directed around twenty films. This is his fourth directed effort and he co-wrote the script along with Kara Myers.

That stunt experience comes in handy here as the last ten minutes of this film have several exhilarating hand-to-hand fights, including one between Jessica and a female kidnapper named Carmen (Laur Allen) that goes through multiple rooms and walls.

When the cops can’t do anything to save her sister, Jessica turns to her military training and military friend Dan (Eric Pierce) who creates software that allows her to find out exactly where the traffickers are. The major issue is that the PTSD that ended her military career happens to emerge at the worst times and the film does a strong job of visualizing it.

Whittaker and team have been working on this since before the pandemic and the results are really strong. It’s another good choice for Tubi as one of their original films.

You can watch this on Tubi.