ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: Paris in the 1930s. Struggling actress Madeleine and her best friend Pauline, an unemployed lawyer, live in debt in a cramped flat. Opportunity knocks after a lascivious theatrical producer who made an inappropriate advance towards Madeleine turns up dead. Adapted from a 1934 play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil and featuring a murder’s row of a supporting cast.

Every so often, a film comes along that truly reminds me of why I love a certain genre of movies, and even film in general. Director François Ozon’s French comedy The Crime Is Mine (Mon Crime) is just such a work, for both cases. 

The dazzling performances! The witty dialogue! The gorgeous costumes! The sumptuous set design! Director/co-writer Ozon, his co-writer Philippe Piazzo (original playwright Georges Berr also receives a credit), and his cast and crew nail virtually every aspect of creating what is to me a near-perfect film. 

Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is a young actress hoping for her big break. A famous producer tries the casting couch approach with her and is found murdered shortly after her visit. Thankfully, her friend and roommate Pauline (Rebecca Marder) is a budding lawyer who takes on Madeleine’s court case when the latter is accused of the killing. Though innocent, Madeleine pleads guilty for the publicity. The trial becomes a public sensation followed closely by tabloids on each side of the accused. Not much has changed since Berr’s and Louis Verneuil’s play premiered in 1934, so the theme of women trying to stand up to men in power is still highly relevant.

Tereszkiewicz and Marder are delightful in their lead roles. The Crime Is Mine boasts subplots aplenty, and the supporting players bringing the many interesting characters to cinematic life are all fantastic, though too numerous to mention everyone here. Isabelle Huppert as scheming actress Odette Chaumette, Danny Boon as a kind supporter of Madeleine’s, and Fabrice Luchini as a bumbling judge are three of the main supporting performers.

The pacing of this fun farce is frenetic, and Ozon works in social themes that linger despite the decades that have passed since the play and screen adaptations on which this film is based. The Crime Is Mine is a blast, a respectful throwback to golden age comedies.

The Crime Is Mine, from Music Box Films, is currently screening on OVID. For more information, visit https://www.ovid.tv/.

Retired pro-wrestler and MMA veteran Jack “Horsepower” Silver (director, writer and star Greg Burridge, who is also a pro wrestler) has been taken to Deathpit, an underground fighting tournament featuring some of the world’s worst criminals and fighters, like Hammerstone (Bryan Larkin) and Kasparnov (Thomas Dawkins). Horsepower has no idea if what’s happening is happening to him at times, as he’s been hit in the head so many times that his ex-wife once threw in the towel in his last match when he was punched once.

I don’t know Progress Wrestling or the UK indy scene all that well, but I do know that the man playing Kasparov is Cara Noir. A lot of the stuntwork is done by wrestlers, so the fights are the main draw here, and they’re wild, including X-ray moments like a video game. Sure, I may have watched tons of underground fighting movies lately, but this stood out because of its high-energy style and willingness to go insane in its matches.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This has the Weekly World News logo on it and coming from the home of Bat Boy, I expected so much more. In fact, I expected more of everyone involved.

Directed by Micah Khan and written by Greg D’Alessandro, this certainly has a good cast. Cheri Oteri, who plays the mother of the groom and — spoiler — gets zombified, is always game for working hard. She’s wasted. Vincent Pastore? Just a name on the poster — or streaming info these days — to get you watching this. Micky Dolenz? A wedding DJ.

Based on an interactive play—I guess Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding isn’t enough when it comes to that genre—this has Weekly World News editor Brick Rivers (Ajay Naidu) sending Elsa (Christine Spang) and Frank (Mu-Shaka Benson) to cover the first human/zombie wedding between Ashley (Deepti Menon) and Zack (David Cheng). They thought being from different races was tough on their parents. Now they’re totally different species.

The zombies retain who they were before, but they just want to eat brains. The movie is mostly played for laughs, and forty minutes of it feels like ten hours. Somehow, this was the movie that broke me and made me give up after years of what I feel are some of the toughest microbudget cinema. Maybe I just want more from my former favorite tabloid.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.