In this doicumentary on Gunnar Hansen, you get to hear from some real luminaries: Bruce Campbell, Danielle Harris, Barbara Crampton, Gunnar Hansen, Edwin Neal, R.A. Mihailoff, Kane Hodder, Dave Sheridan, Felissa Rose, Michelle Bauer, Tiffany Shepis, Brian O’Halloran, Debbie Rochon, Fred Olen Ray, Brett Wagner, Betsy Baker, Allen Danziger, Kim Henkel, Daniel Pearl, Joe R. Lansdale, Jeff Burr, Tony Timpone, Michael Sonye, Del Howison and Bret McCormick, all discussing how they not only worked with the actor, but got to know him.

This isn’t just a list of credits. Instead, it feels like a collection of people who genuinely loved the man. They move past the surface-level trivia to discuss what it was like to share a meal or a long conversation with Hansen, proving he was the kind of person you’d want to have dinner with rather than an unapproachable celebrity.

You also get to see clips and hear stories about the films Hansen was in beyond his role as Leatherface, including Mosquito, Repligator, Hatred of a Minute, Witchunter, Rachel’s Attic, The Business, The Deepening, Swarm of the Snakehead, Brutal Massacre: A Comedy, and Gimme Skelter.

While many horror retrospectives feel like dry, insular vanity projects, this documentary breaks the mold by focusing on the man, not just the mask. It paints a portrait of Gunnar Hansen not as a scream king icon, but as a poet, author, and deeply kind soul who just happened to wield one of cinema’s most terrifying weapons.

In so many of these docs, it feels so insular and even pretentious. This film isn’t. It presents a man that you would like to meet and have dinner with, not an unapproachable actor who would look down on you. That means it’s a winner.

Extras include an audio commentary with director and writer Michael Kallio and editor John Wagner; extended interviews with Jeff Burr and Michael Feisener; a chat with Danielle Harris; a trailer and a featurette on more stories of the actor that didn’t make it into the final edit. You can get it from MVD on Blu-ray or DVD.

There are three things you need to know: A coven of witches is aiding and abetting wives as they murder their husbands. A slacker has transformed a pizzeria into a video rental shop, years after it would have been a good business decision. A lonely soul ends up in a doomed romance with a serial killer. You have 97 minutes to figure all that out, but along the way, there will be metal shows, tons of dudes rocking Samhain shirts, Iron City beer, women who will kill you in your sleep and no shortage of noise, both musically and all over the picture.

Sure, this looks like 90s SOV, but unlike so many people who steal that style, this feels earned and lived in. 

In this blackened world, we meet Vi (Morrigan Milam), who is in a doomed relationship but has also fallen hard for Clover (Zoe Angeli), who works in an occult store and may be part of the coven. Vi is desperate to save her connection to her lover, but Clover gives her a potion that addresses that problem in a grimy, vomit-inducing way. Soon, she’s swept in, taken Vi off her feet and brought her into her world. Vi and Clover feel like people you’d actually see at a mid-week metal show, not caricatures.

I really think that this was made for me. Did I get so high one night that those rituals I do in my basement really worked out and I got a film with an Acid Witch cameo and Tina Krause walking into the frame? Why is her hair so perfect forever? How can a movie straddle being exploitation yet have lesbians in it that feel like anything but a fake exploitation male gaze BS disaster? Throw in some dick mutilation, gloomy girls in Misfits leather jackets haunting cemeteries, and people who don’t just know what W.A.V.E. Productions is but bought the t-shirt, and you have something beyond.

I would 200% make mixtapes for everyone in the cast and crew, but I think we have all the same albums.

Movies like this give me hope. This wasn’t made. It was summoned.

The Blu-ray release of Coven of the Black Cube includes behind-the-scenes clips, outtakes, and a commentary track with writers Brewce Longo, Zoe Angeli, Josh Schafer, and DP Michael DiFrancesc. You can get it from MVD.

TMZ is always there, ready for celebrities to screw up and then have the video for their site and TV show. In this special, they’re taking that content all over again to re-embarass people and make even more money.

Starting with Michael Richards at The Laugh Factory, this goes through the what and why of some of Hollywood’s wildest moments that were captured on video. Remember Jay-Z, Beyonce and her sister Solange fighting in an elevator? Or a German Shepherd in distress while filming a scene for A Dog’s Purpose? 

Then we have Justin Bieber pissing in a bucket, getting upset about not getting a model helicopter and all the things he did when he was being a teenager. Reese Witherspoon is getting busted for a DUI. Britney Spears getting bumped by a basketball player.

This, like all the Tubi TMZ specials, is just people sitting on a couch and talking down on the very people who they get paid to be the parasites of. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

Justin Bieber was in a talent contest and posted a series of clips from a local competition in Stratford, Ontario. Scooter Braun actually clicked on one by accident while looking for a different singer. The viral aspect worked because it felt intimate, like you were discovering a talented younger brother before the industry polished him up.

Viral videos have changed the world of celebrities, and hey, here’s TMZ to tell us more.

This TMZ show goes into Danielle Bregoli (Bad Babie), who was on The Dr. Phil Show, as well as Doja Cat, who dressed as a cow and danced to a novelty song called “Mooo!,” which was the definition of a calculated viral moment. She made it in a day as a joke, but the absurdist humor of stuffing fries in her nose while dressed as a cow proved she understood internet culture better than most PR firms. It turned her from an underground rapper into a household name.

Kate Upton doing the dougie at a Clippers game took her from a model to a big name. Like Bieber, The Weeknd is a Canadian music star who rose to prominence online and went on to have the biggest-selling single ever. To be fair, he took a much darker, more mysterious route. In 2010, he uploaded tracks to YouTube under the name The Weeknd, without any photos of himself. The anonymity created a massive underground buzz that forced the mainstream to pay attention. and Rebecca Black, who sang “Friday,” in which I learned the words “partying, partying.”

In the Classic Hollywood era, studios like MGM or Warner Bros. literally owned their stars. They picked their clothes, their dates, and their names. Today, the audience acts as the studio. We vote for stars with likes and shares. The watercooler moment is dead because everyone has a different watercooler, whether that’s TikTok, YouTube or Twitch. We no longer wait for a scout to find talent. We wait for the algorithm to serve it to us.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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: Set in the late 90’s, Paying for It follows the trials and travails of Chester (Dan Beirne), a cartoonist and Sonny (Emily Lê), a TV host, who are in a long-term, committed, romantic relationship. When Sonny introduces the idea of opening up their relationship, Chester begins sleeping with sex workers, forcing him to face his issues with intimacy and romance in the process. Based on the best-selling graphic novel by acclaimed alternative-cartoonist Chester Brown.

Celebrating the vibrant underground comic and zine era through the experiences of cartoonist Brown, Paying for It connects the past with the present by bringing together emerging comic actors, performance artists, authors, activists, and multimedia creators in front of and behind the camera, and it has resonated for festival audiences and critics alike.

Canadian dramedy Paying for It may be one of the most honest narrative films released this year. Director Sook-Yin Lee brings to the screen a semiautobiographical account of her longtime relationship with alt-cartoonist Chester Brown, first as a couple and then as friends. The pair is portrayed here by Emily Lê as Lee’s cinematic counterpart Sonny and Dan Beirne as Brown.

Lee, who cowrote the screenplay with Brown and Joanne Sarazen, balances the characters wonderfully, making neither one more “right or wrong” than the other, and portraying them as real people making unusual decisions in their lives. Beirne and Lê are both fantastic in their roles, and they lead a sizable supporting cast that includes a wonderful performance by Andrea Werhun as Yulissa, who together with Brown strikes up a highly intriguing intimate relationship.

The tone of the film never falls into straight comedy, with the humor being more of the smile-inducing type rather than going for belly laughs. Nor does the drama become too heavy or didactic. Paying for It simply offers up two people’s unique views on nontraditional relationships and the ways that their behavior affects those around them, giving viewers plenty to chew on long after watching. 

Paying for It opens in theaters on January 30, 2026. 

Directed by Mike Stasko, who wrote the script with Jakob Skrzypa and Alex Forman, this has appearances by Night of the Living Dead‘s Judith O’Dea, Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, Tim & Eric’s David Liebe Hart and Saw VI’s Simon Reynolds.

Dracula (Craig Gloster) is from space — he has a son, Dylan (Robert Kemeny), too! — and they’ve come back to Earth to kill everyone — all in black and white. He had once attacked the family of Roy MacDowell (Erik Helle) and killed most of them, making the entire town think that Roy is a killer. When Roy’s daughter Susan (Charlotte Bondy) is killed, everyone blames him, but his daughter Mary (Jessica Antovski) is ready to convince Police Chief Ed Clarke (Andrew Bee) that there really are aliens. She joins with Officer James Wallace (Rashaun Baldeo) and local tough guy Wayne (Oliver Georgiou) to save her town.

With an evil council of vampire aliens that includes Coppola’s Dracula (Martin Ouellette), Vampira (O’Dea) and Nosferatu (David Liebe Hart), a store called Ed’s Wood & Hardware, a public jerk off bandit played by Kaufman, tons of gore and a heart that beats right because it’s making fun with, not at, old movies, this is one to find and love.

You can order this on Blu-ray and DVD from MVD.

Directed and written by Brian Krainson (whose career goes from water safety on film sets to stunts and acting), Fear Cabin finds six friends staying in the woods around no one else on the last night of summer. Are there a bunch of devil worshippers in those woods? Are there demons? Why would anyone go to a cabin in the woods?

The good? Practical effects and an attempt at fun. That makes up for how many cabin movies this takes things from. But hey! Jeremy London from Mallrats is the owner of that cabin. There’s also a feeling that everyone involved wanted to make something halfway decent and not just streaming slop. 

Krainson did just about everything he could to make this movie, taking on so many roles. And yeah, it wasn’t for me, but I applaud anyone who makes their own horror film, especially someone smart enough to keep it around 70 minutes. I wish it had a story as original as the camerawork, but perhaps the next film he makes will break the mold. There’s talent there.

You get the trailer and behind-the-scenes stuff on the Cleopatra DVD release. You can get it from MVD.

Best Christmas Movies Ever! is a movie I’m shocked hasn’t been created before: a talking head doc all about Christmas movies like Home Alone, Elf, The Santa Clause, Miracle on 34th Street, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, It’s a Wonderful Life and many more with experts like Denise Crosby, Steven de Souza, Shawn Edwards, Mitch Glazer, Mick Foley and Terry Farrell.

Directed by Mark A. Altman, this even features Jeremiah S. Chechik, who directed National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, talking about holiday films, as well as Ms. Moviefone Grae Drake, Torn Hearts director Brea Grant, and Kury Fuller.

There’s also a section on whether or not films like Die Hard are Christmas movies.

If you love the holidays and movies — or know someone who does — this is perfect.

Extras include a director commentary, deleted and extended scenes, a convention panel, a trailer, a collectible mini-poster and a slipcover. You can get it from MVD.