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.

Elliot Lester directed the Arnold movie Aftermath, which was good, and now he’s adapting this Joe R.  Lansdale Western horror story with writer Chris Kelley. It’s been a passion project of Peter Dinklage, who has been trying to make it for ten years. He plays bounty hunter Reginald Jones, a bounty hunter who hunts criminals with his partner Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe). They’re hired by Jack (Levon Hawke) to save the missing sister, Lula (Esme Creed-Miles), who has been kidnapped by Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis) and her gang.

This has some interesting casting, with Metallica’s James Hetfield playing Simon Deasley, the partner of brother Malachi (Macon Blair), two criminals hired by Bill to take out the bounty hunters. Plus, Jack also saves an imprisoned saloon girl, Jimmie Sue (Leslie Grace). And it all feels very The Great Silence and I mean that as a compliment. I really loved Lewis in this, as her character is covered in scars and has assumed a masculine role to fight back against the men who did her wrong, which has made her the villain.

I also loved how this is at the end of the West, as characters ride motorcycles and you get the idea that the modern world is just about to change everything for everybody. What makes me happy is that Tubi has picked this up and is giving people a chance to see it, as new Westerns — much less good ones — are in short supply these days. It looks gorgeous — cinematographer Guillermo Garza is incredible — and it’s great to see a Lansdale story become a movie. His story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” was used as an episode of Masters of Horror, directed by Don Coscarelli, who also made another Lansdale adaption, Bubba Ho-Tep. Other Lansdale films include Christmas With the Death, Cold In July and the Hap and Leonard TV show.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A passion project of stop-motion master David Allen, it was unfinished due to his cancer death. In 2023, Full Moon and former Allen associate Chris Endicott finished the movie, which is filled with “100% hand-rendered, stop-motion special effects.”

This started as Raiders of the Stone Ring, a movie developed more than sixty years ago by Allen, Dennis Muren and Jim Danforth. That was almost bought by Hammer, as was another film the trio wanted to make, Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyl. Years later, Allen wanted to make this with writer Mark McGee as either The Glacial Empire or Primordium: The Arctic World. Settling on the name The Primevals, it was finally bought by Charles Band after special effects artist Steve Neill shared it during the making of Laserblast.

If you ever saw any Empire Pictures coming soon ads, The Primevals were always in them. Then, when Full Moon started, it got filmed, and the hard work of animation began, even as money woes hurt the studio. In 1999, when he died, Allen left Endicott the film elements, storyboards, stop-motion puppets and all of his equipment.

Luckily, this was finally finished in 2023, and now, after a theatrical run, it’s on DVD.

Deep in the Himalayas, a gigantic creature has been killed,d and Dr. Claire Collier (Juliet Mills) thinks that it is a yeti. Wanting to see one of them alive, she goes on an expedition with Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul) and big-game hunter Rondo Montana (Leon Russom) to get the truth. That said, this has caused so many wild things to happen — Who operated on the brain of the yeti? What technology is hidden in the mountain? Are those lizard people? — that you’ll love it. Trust me. Get over the fact that stop-motion looks jerky in a world of CGI. Shut your brain off, and enjoy something unironically for once.

I’ve wanted to see this movie since it was always in magazines—Cinefantastique had it on the cover! — and now that it’s in my house, in my collection, and I can watch it at any time? Sometimes life isn’t so bad. Man, those lizard men are great. Where are the toys for this movie?

You can get this from MVD.

In the pre-internet, non-binging world of cable and video stores, the erotic thriller — more than even adult videos — was the acceptable dirty secret, whether consumed via Cinemax After Dark, the Playboy Channel or by renting videos out in the open with a piece of tape and a marker written message saying, “Must be 18 to rent.”

Yet today, the erotic thriller is nearly forgotten, replaced by Lifetime movies and more chaste streaming murder mysteries. The 80s and 90s were filled with these movies, and as someone who grew up in that era, I know people would furtively whisper their titles between classes. Night Eyes. Body Chemistry. Red Show Diaries.

This is nearly three hours long, but at no point was I bored. In fact, it could have been twice that length, and I’d have loved it even more. The film moves from film noir into the American films that started the trend of these films, such as Dressed to Kill and Body Heat, as well as Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, all the Hollywood versions of these films that while controversial, had the gloss of being studio production. The joy of this film is it gets into the companies that made the authentic erotic thrillers and the filmmakers and actors who created them. People like Fred Olen Ray, Jim Wynorski and Andrews Stevens, as well as Monique Parent, Amy Lindsay and Nancy O’Brien.

Maybe it’s the fact that this is thirty years past when I’d watch these in between channels or on dubbed VHS tapes that were passed from friend to friend, but I felt like I was meeting old friends again. If you have the slightest interest in the genre, it’s definitely worth a watch. The scene where the multiple titles of the films and how it’s hard to keep track? I felt myself in that moment.

My only quibbles: Yes, noir is where so many of these movies get their start. Certainly Body Double. Yet so much of the erotic thriller genre owes itself to Giallo, mainly because so many of the old guard — Martino especially — returned to make erotic thrillers in the 80s and 90s. While I know this couldn’t be five hours long, if I could lobby for a sequel, the fact that Gregory Dark’s films weren’t mentioned is an oversight that demands to be corrected.

You can buy this from Yellow Veil Pictures on Vinegar Syndrome.

Check out the Letterboxd list of the movies covered in We Kill for Love.

Directed and written by Zac Locke, this starts with Nikki (Kaya Coleman) almost falling asleep when Santa comes down the chimney and nearly murders her. She’s in a coma for almost a year and all of her friends believe that she’s actually tried to kill herself. Now, as the seasons come close to the holidays, everything upsets her, every image of Santa, every carol, every day of Christmas.

Nikki has some horrible friends, a bad boyfriend in Nathan (Trey Anderson) and a worry that when she was drinking and taking sleeping pills that someone was trying to kill her that is close to her. This doesn’t stop her from going to a cabin with Jess (Scarlett Sperduto) and MJ (Cissy Ly), a place that Santa finds quite easily.

Nothing unexpected happens. Of course her boyfriend is having sex with one of her friends. Certainly, the kills start happening. But I wanted to like this because the premise was so good, giving so much to it and not really getting much back. It’s not the worst holiday horror I’ve seen but that speaks more to how bad these movies can be.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Airell Anthony Hayles, this has a great idea. Santa gets bitten by a werewolf and becomes one during the full moon. This is kind of astounding, because a full moon happens on Christmas only once every 18 years and hasn’t happened since 2018.

Monster hunter influencer Lucy (Katherine Rodden), her cameraman Dustin (Charle Preston), conspiracy expert Rupert (Cian Lorcan) and her parents Carol (Emily Booth) and Charlie (Mark Arnold) end up facing off against Werewolf Santa and stopping him before he makes it to the church during midnight mass.

Somehow, this movie was able to get Joe Bob Briggs to read The Night Before Christmas and I wonder if it was done on Cameo. This has no budget to speak of and scene transitions that look really bad, but at least there are a few laughs and, you know, that title is really good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Santa (Pierse Stevens) has had it, so he’s blowing off steam by telling a young boy by the name of Peter (Jude Forsey) four holiday horror stories. Perhaps, just maybe, he’s also a killer. Actually, he’s totally a killer, a former mall Santa who has had enough.

In the first, Toby and Chloe’s Christmas Nightmare,” three killers dressed as an elf, Santa and a snowman — named like a Tarantino gang with pseudonyms like Mr. Red (Tony Fadil), Mr. Green (Sonny Denham) and Mr. White (Jeff Kristian) — pull off a home invasion and murder an entire house before adopting a girl named Chloe (Eloise Henwood) and teacher her how to be a killer.

“The Ventriloquist Who Stole Christmas” has Henry (Mark Beauchamp) and his snowman dummy Mr. White getting over life’s hardships through being a serial killer, just like his father. I mean, you fail an audition, you get beat up and your wife Jade (Bibi Lucille) leaves you, you have to start murdering.

“Merry Krampus” has, you guessed it Krampus coming to Louise (Lucy Pinder) and her son Luke (Rafi Wilder) being visited by Krampus after he blames himself for her latest boyfriend leaving.

“The 12 Kills of Christmas” is about Father McShane (Jeff Kristian), who has dementia, but can barely remember all of his sins like molesting the boys in the choir. As his daughter Maria (Olivia Hespe) takes care of him, a ghost of the past makes sure that he does.

Directed and written by James Crow, this is over two hours long and has no reason to be that way. It feels like the Mr. White segment was going to be a full-length film, as it’s 50-minutes long, but it ended up being part of this. I wish that it all flowed together better, but if you’re looking for something mean spirited and cruel this holiday season, you’ll probably enjoy this and you’re not concerned with being on the nice list.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Angel Falls — not Bedford Falls — is where Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) lives. Over the holidays, her father David (Joel McHale) and his boss, Henry Waters (Justin Long), are trying to get Roger Evans (William B. Davis, the Cigarette Smoking Man!) to sell his home, as he’s the only person standing in the way of progress. Or a shopping mall. Roger wants to give his house to his granddaughter Cara (Hana Huggins), who happens to be Winnie’s best friend.

The Angel, a giallo-looking villain, kills Roger and Cara before narrowly killing Winnie’s brother Jimmy (Aiden Howard). When she unmasks him, it’s Henry.

One year after this and Winnie is depressed. Her boyfriend Robbie has been sleeping with her friend Darla (Zenia Marshall). She misses Cara. And she decides to jump off a bridge, wishing that she had never been born, like some kind of banker who feels like he ruined his hometown. She sees lights in the sky and suddenly finds herself in a world where she never was, a place where The Angel lives and has killed her brother.

The only person who she feels like she can trust is Bernie (Jess McLeod), an outcast she met at a party just before she made her wish to the stars. In this new world, The Angel is killing the teenage children of homeowners whose properties Henry and David’s company wanted to buy. Except it turns out that Winnie’s father is the one under the mask. There’s more to it than that, but perhaps my holiday gift to you is asking you to watch this story for yourself.

Directed by Tyler MacIntyre (Tragedy Girls) and written by Michael Kennedy (Freaky), this movie is set in 1988 and has character names that show the creative team’s love of Scream and Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. In fact, it’s so indebted to Ghostface that The Angel’s costume is based on the original white costume that wasn’t used in that movie.