ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

As I logged another film in my Letterboxd list, a list that is now approaching 5,000 films, I paused a moment to reflect. I’ve been a film buff all my life, well over 50 years, and I appreciate how difficult it is to make a film on a small budget. Back in the day, even as a pre-teen, I recognized that Hammer Film’s The Gorgon, with my childhood heroes Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, was a good horror film, despite some shaky sets and special effects (hey, look at the wobbly sets and the phony snakes in the Gorgon’s hair!). Unlike haughty film snobs, I’ve always tried to temper my expectations and not dismiss a film simply because the filmmakers had limited resources. With the advent of affordable technology, now anyone can make a film. Most efforts, however, turn out as you’d expect: unwatchable amateur hours, filled with boneheaded dialogue, sub-community-theater acting, badly composed shots with terrible lighting, mismatched edits, and poorly recorded sound. I’ve spent many soul-crushing hours with my eyes glazing over watching things where the only positive comments I could make were that “it’s a film,” though just barely, and congratulate the filmmakers for a successful sale to some streaming service. But once in a while, when folks with brains, talent, and big hearts make a micro-budget film, you get something special. This brings us to Left One Alive, the new film from Columbia, South Carolina filmmaker David Axe. And special it is.

Left One Alive ponders the implications of what happens when horror movies end, particularly those horror movies where the final girl vanquishes the monsters and walks out of the woods into the sunlight just before the final credits roll. Axe’s intelligent screenplay tells us what’s next. Sarah (Cailyn Sam) is the final girl. She has survived after having witnessed the mass slaughter of all her camping friends by weird forest creatures. Until that horrific event, she’d led a normal, mundane life living with her sister in some part of small-town America. We don’t explicitly learn a lot about what that life was like, but economical writing allows us to connect the dots. Then her life changes forever. If you thought for a minute how it would, you’d ask yourself: Will there be post-traumatic stress disorder? Of course. Survivor’s guilt? Yep. A film based on her tragic experience? Sure. The scenes depicting the ridiculous Hollywood version of what happened are hilarious and reminded me of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, a wonderful small film also about some serious existential issues, though with a substantially bigger budget, indie great John Sayles and special-effects legend Douglas Trumball as executive producers, and Sam Elliott in a career-best performance.

These are things that you won’t find in your mine-run horror film, and I was delighted by where this film took me. It doesn’t have a lot of violence, there’s no nudity, and I think I could count on one hand the number of obscenities spoken. It’s a slow, steadily paced, always engaging film, which straddles the line between exploitation and art film, though leaning hard toward the art-film side. While it’s a small film, it’s ambitious. Acting is serviceable or better, with star Cailyn Sam giving a particularly nice performance. Writer/producer/director Axe, abetted by producer/cinematographer/editor Sarah Massey, accomplished what most micro-budget filmmakers only dream of achieving: a film with good cinematography, some modest—yet effective—sound design, and an on-point score. Or as Variety used to say when I read it as a teenager, “Tech credits are pro.” There’s one amazing aerial shot of the forest that was not done with a drone. I’d thought the production, like Herschell Gordon Lewis for 2000 Maniacs over 60 years ago, had secured the use of a bucket truck for a day. That was until I saw behind-the-scenes photos of the plucky Massey in a sling being hoisted high into the air. This can-do spirit forms the film’s DNA and demonstrates what’s possible, even on a budget of $50,000. 

At the end of Left One Alive, the forest creatures referred to in winking fashion by the name of a popular, albeit weird, children’s TV show return to complete Sarah’s character arc. They’re hokey, yet charming, which made me love the film even more. So when the end credits came up, featuring shots from the film done in a style that would feel at home in a $200 million Marvel film, I was left to ponder what happens next. And that, my friends, leads me to tell Axe and company what I hope happens next: they make more films.

Left One Alive is currently streaming on several platforms. 

A young nurse (Kotone Furukawa) goes to visit her grandparents (Masashi Arifuku and Yoshiko Inuyama), who live in the countryside that surrounds the more urban places in Japan, and learns the hard way how they have stayed so jovial into their old age.

Director Yûta Shimotsu’s first movie — this is based on his short film Dreaming to Accept Reality and was produced by Takashi Shimizu (Tomie: Re-birth) — it has sell copy that promises that this “unsettling debut draws from classics like Audition and The Wicker Man to create a wholly unique vision.”

Take this advice anywhere you live: Never go back home. Nothing good happens there. The place where you grew up is much more sinister than how you remember it. Now it is a place of random violence, people asking you to save them and you’ll be trapped in either a ghost story or a J-horror film. Stay where you are. The world is a big enough nightmare without you messing around. You don’t need to find your grandparents oinking like pigs and touching their eyeballs or need to meet the strange beings that are staying inside their home.

I’m used to Japan influencing Western movies, not looking to make Midsommar up north.

The 2025 Overlook Film Festival takes place April 3 to 6. To learn more, click here.

This took me way too long to see, and wow- it’s perfect.

Kevin (Kevin Martin) runs Video Blaster, a rental store whose clientele is slowly dying off. One of his best customers, in fact, has just died, and his daughter Nyla (Yaayaa Adams) has come to drop off his last rentals and find out exactly what the strange black and red glowing VHS her father had is all about.

Then things get crazy.

Directed by Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford (who wrote the script with Joshua Roach), this has that cursed tape—The Videonomicon—reanimating the rentals of Nyla’s father: a movie starring action hero Jackson Viper (Josh Lenner), one of the many Castor Creeley (Leland Tilden) Beaver Lake Massacre slasher sequels and an early 90s CGI Predator rip-off. Now, the store is as deadly as so many of the movies inside it and cut off from the outside world.

Steven Kostanski from Astron-6 did the effects. Martin used to run an actual video store, and this starts with a fake Italian movie that I wish I could watch. It is based on The Lobby DVD Shop in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. There are movies with titles like Preystalker and Warpgate in this, and yes, I would watch both of those, too.

At one point, Kevin says, “I used to get paid to talk about movies with people, but then they stopped coming.” Anyone who regularly visits this site will feel so much of this movie. If you can name more than ten Empire Pictures movies, they pretty much made this movie for you.

The Arrow Video blu ray release of this film has extras including commentary by film critics Matt Donato and Meagan Navarro; a new visual essay by film critic Heather Wixson co-author of In Search of Darkness; a new visual essay by film critic Martyn Pedlar; several short films by Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford; clips from the first attempt at making this, behind-the-scenes videos; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critics Anton Bitel and Alexandra West; a reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by John Pearson and a double-sided fold-out poster featuring newly commissioned artwork by John Pearson.

You can buy it from MVD.

I get why this documentary is made, but you have to ask yourself, “Is a TMZ documentary about how rough it is for child stars made by the very people who make it tough to be a young celebrity so difficult, not a snake eating its own tail?”

This is an hour long, but it feels like hundreds of years as we hear the same thing repeatedly, as public domain and TMZ footage is used as we hear the same story we’ve heard since, well, forever, just with different people. The public demands new stars, and then we also require the ritual where they are destroyed for our pleasure. At the same time, we furtively read about it online while preparing to pay too much for groceries and sneak a read of the tabloids that still exist in our rapidly non-print world. Or we watch it on TMZ, which seems to sicken me every time I hear one of its hosts and hear I am perpetuating this bullshit by even writing about it because I have OCD and feel the pull of having to write about every Tubi Original.

You should watch this, I guess.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This Vice documentary, directed by Adam Desiderio and Ben C. Solomon, has “exclusive access to Ukrainian officials, soldiers and civilians, explore the human cost and strategic decisions made to save their most key city in an endless war with Russia.”

For ten months in the city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces used everything they had to fight off Russian invaders. Today, our President would say that this was a stupid war and “I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that, so at least we don’t feel stupid. Otherwise, we’re stupid. I said to them, we have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money.”

Have people forgotten this war? I wonder. I’m of two minds about it, as there’s a major Nazism to some of the defending forces, but it’s also that there’s nobody good in it. Actually, there’s nobody good in the world these days. I remain despondent and yet I keep watching these Tubi Original docs instead of putting my head in the sand because I feel like that would be even worse. I worry about what to do and don’t know the answers. Maybe I’m just meant to write about inconsequential things, but I wish that my words at least made people feel better or brought about understanding.

You can watch this on Tubi.

In yet another example of Tubi teaching me about culture, this is a documentary about Nipsey Hussle, a rapper who went from making mixtapes to becoming a major celebrity in the genre and the owner of the Marathon Clothing store and All Money In label.

Unlike many rappers, Hussle wanted to invest in and provide opportunities in his hometown of Crenshaw and beyond. While speaking frankly about his past with gangs, he denounced guns in the material he created and sought to inspire others.

That was until March 31, 2019, when he was shot at least 10 times in the parking lot of his store and then kicked in the head. Why did Eric Holder do it? Supposedly, the two men fought over a rumor that Holder had cooperated with law enforcement.

Hussle was well-known enough that President Obama said, “While most folks look at the Crenshaw neighborhood where he grew up and see only gangs, bullets, and despair, Nipsey saw potential.”

His 25.5 mile-long funeral parade inspired the gangs of Los Angeles to have a cease-fire, as a cross-section of gangs marched together at a memorial for Hussle.

The main emotion I gathered from this was sadness. It’s a shame that someone who wanted to unite people is gone.

You can watch this on Tubi.

If you listened to the first season of Serial, you already know everything there is to know about this case, but Tubi is counting on you to watch this anyway. And if you haven’t, it’s the tale of Adnan Syed, who spent 22 years in prison for a murder he claims he didn’t commit and how he may return to prison yet again.

Despite his conviction for the murder of Hae Min Lee, Syed claimed that there were inconsistencies in the case — Serial really explained these — and that’s led to this case getting so much publicity.

This month, Adnan Syed will appear in court for a hearing on his motion for a reduced sentence. He was freed in 2022 due to issues with the evidence. However, in 2024, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld an appellate court’s ruling to reinstate the conviction. This story is not over; this documentary is just one of the many you can watch to learn more about it. I’ve heard it plays a little fast with the truth, so as always, watch several of these and form your own theory.

I mean, you can get the story on Dateline, 48 Hours, 20/20 and all of those other shows that play in this house all through the day and night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I use movies to escape reality, and here I am, watching something that I don’t want to because my OCD demands that I watch every Tubi Original and fuck me; if I don’t cross this one off my list, I won’t sleep well and feel like something terrible is about to happen.

“From Tesla to Twitter, Elon Musk has become the most influential businessman ever, but it required the masses to support his seemingly unreachable visions — the cult behind the man.”

This is about the people that worship Elon Musk more than who he is. It also immediately feels dated because as of February 2025, every day is ten years, like we’re living in the Catholic idea of Hell, where each second is 10,000 years. We are in shock and awe, a world where someone can seig heil a crowd twice. Everyone has an excuse and tells us not to look too much into it, but everything is being dismantled. An efficiency group named after a dog meme and Bitcoin have ruined the careers of numerous people, but yeah, an overwhelming part of the country — 50% is pretty close, right? What are you, a mathematician? — voted for this.

It’s hard for me to write about this without revealing what an utter cynic and unbeliever I am. I hate when people make articles about movies about them instead of the film they watched, so I should probably close out here.

This is a documentary about people gushing over the fact that they’ve had a minute-long chat with Musk or that he retweeted them. Parasocial relationships lead to an oligarchy. Watch it at 11 or whenever you choose to watch the news.

You can watch this on Tubi.

If anyone other than André Øvredal directed this, I wouldn’t give it the time of day and wonder, “Why do we need a Dracula movie about things we already know about?” Yet the director of Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Umma generally gets a pass from me.

This was an adaptation of “The Captain’s Log,” a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was in development for twenty years. In most Dracula movies, we never see what happened to the Demeter other than it washes ashore in England, empty or occasionally filled with dead bodies.

Here, we get the story of new ship doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins), Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham), his grandson Toby (Woody Norman) and the crew of the ship, which includes David Dastmalchian as the quartermaster. Of course, Dracula (Javier Botet) and one of his slaves, Anna (Aisling Franciosi), are on board, lying inside a dragon-etched coffin.

What follows is Dracula systematically using the crew to bring him back to youth before he makes it to England, starting with the animals on board and moving up to the young child while feeding Anna. It’s a dark film—not just in how it was shot—with children and women bursting into flames, Dracula killing everyone in his path and even an ending that suggests a way for the story of Clemens and Dracula to continue.

Writer Bragi F. Schut came up with the idea for this movie while working in a Hollywood model shop where he saw the miniature of the Demeter used in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He and Øvredal have referred to it as Alien on a ship, which is a great way to explain the film. I enjoyed this way more than I expected and suggest you look at it.

When I was a kid, my dad told me, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” It’s always stuck with me, and no, I wouldn’t jump, too. However, viral challenges often come close to that idea, asking people to eat a spoonful of cinnamon or have ice water dumped on them. Those are the simple and safer ones. But as we go further, we get into more dangerous challenges, like the hot chip challenges or reckless stunts like falling off milk crates, and that’s when people start getting hurt.

Enter TMZ, which has made a documentary that warns us about the dangers of these viral challenges, even though their entire channel revolves around viral content. It feels like pearl-clutching, filled with “think of the children” panic, as if social media platforms should be responsible for policing foolish behavior instead of letting natural consequences take their course. Seeing people climbing milk crates like they’re mountains or allowing friends to choke them out is baffling. Meanwhile, you have Harvey Levin expressing concern while profiting off the chaos he condemns. TMZ is a site built on the spectacle of people behaving poorly for the entertainment of the masses.

Let’s not overlook the more significant issues, like rights being stripped away or how some people can express extreme racist views openly now. Meanwhile, someone else is simply eating cinnamon and getting a stomachache!

I ended up watching the whole thing, of course.

You can watch this on Tubi.