I watched Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and didn’t enjoy myself, saying “Am I too old? Did I not grow up on Twitch?”

There were some very interesting comments that I read that explained why it meant something to other people. I went into I Saw the TV Glow with an open mind, as I was hoping I’d find something here that was missing for me.

Happily, I found it.

In 1996, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) feel isolate yet bond over a show called The Pink Opaque, which has Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey “Snail Mail” Jordan) using their psychic powers to save themselves from Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner), who can warp reality.

Owen’s parents are strict and he’s not allowed to stay up late, so he sneaks over to Maddy’s house to watch it. When he can’t, she gives him VHS tapes of it. She confesses that the show is more real to her than life itself.

Two years later, the two decide to run away. Maddy has an abusive stepfather who won’t leave her alone and she gets out. Owen stays behind as people wonder where Maddy went with her mother dying of cancer never seeing her daughter again. The TV show is cancelled. Life moves on.

Ten years later and Owen is still living with his father Frank (Fred Durst) and working in a movie theater. One night, Maddy appears and claims that she’s been living in the show for eight years. She makes Owen rewatch the tape of the last episode, as Mr. Melancholy buries the heroes alive and traps them in the Midnight Realm. He has a nervous breakdown and puts his head through his TV set.

Maddy reveals that she is Tara and that the episodes they watched are the real stories of their lives and reality is the Midnight Realm. She tries to bury Owen alive to show him the truth but he doesn’t go with her again and never sees her again.

Years later, after his father has died of a stroke and he’s moved on to work at an arcade, he watches The Pink Opaque and it isn’t how he remembered. It’s boring and a bit silly, but he has bigger things like being an adult to worry about.

Sixteen years later, Owen is still working in that arcade when he feels like he’s going to die. He makes his way to the bathroom and slices his chest open to reveal a TV playing the show. He staggers back out into the real — is it real? — world, apologizing to everyone.

What would is real? I wonder, Maddy refers to her friend Amanda as a “secret agent sent here to make my life miserable.” Amanda is played by Emma Portner, who is also Mr. Melancholy, Marco and the evil clown. Maybe Maddy is on to something.

If The Pink Opaque came back for a sixth season, its heroines would have climbed out of their own graves, just like Buffy did in season six, episode one of her show.

Katie Pendleton’s (Amanda Jordan) horse sanctuary may be forced to close unless she can convince her grandfather Ben (Stuart Johnson) to show up at a Christmas benefit concert. Yet the one-time bluegrass star has been hiding for years. Why is it closing? Because the Breckenridge family — Jim (Mike Shara) and Grant (David Pinard) — want to race a horse named Chocolate and Katie won’t allow them, so they take all their money away.

Well, Grant actually isn’t all that bad. And he wants to date Katie and learn more about her grandfather because he loves bluegrass. I have no knowledge of this music genre — or horses — so I am the perfect person to review this.

Her grandfather refuses to perform, so he gets country star Claire Crosby (Chelsea Green) to show up. Now this is something I do know. She’s a pro wrestler who used to be Laurel Van Ness in Impact and Reklusa in Lucha Underground, as well as wrestling for Pro WrestlinG Stardom in Japan. Before she came to WWE full-time, she was Daniel Bryan’s physical therapist Megan Miller and in an angle said he cheated on his wife Brie Bella with her.

This has nothing to do with Christmas, horses or bluegrass.

Almost every movie director Marco Deufemia has worked on is a holiday film. Writer Chris Dowling directed and wrote the series Blue Ridge. If you’re looking for a holiday movie that has a concert and horses, well, you came to the right stable.

You can buy this from Mill Creek Entertainment at Deep Discount.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For a more glowing review of this movie, check out Jenn Upton’s review.

This happens every time.

I get excited for a movie, I buy into the hype, I wait for it and it starts so strong.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has just turned fifty, a former movie star and award winner not unlike Jane Fonda all those years ago, now aged past her Hollywood prime. She’s so upset by the way that her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) treats her that she drives right into a car crash, which she walks away unscarred, but meets a nurse who informs her that there’s a way to get what she wants.

For the first quarter of this movie, I was shocked by how each scene seemed to be finely combed and obsessed over by director and writer Coralie Fargeat and cinematographer Benjamin Kračun. Rooms feel too large, angles feel too sharp, colors feel too bright. This excited me, wanting to see what was next, as Sparkle heads out in a yellow overcoat into the filthy end of the world in the 1980s of Los Angeles, finding sans serif type highly designed packages of The Substance.

She learns the rules and we already know they will be broken: She will get the youth that she wants, as a new body will appear out of her back. The two bodies are still one person and must switch consciousness every seven days. The active body must feed the inactive body with a weekly food supply and take daily injections of stabilizer fluid from the original body to keep from rotting. But we know that the young version of Elisabeth, Sue (Margaret Qualley, daughter of fashion model and actress Andie MacDowell, a ballet dancer in her youth that probably already has learned the lessons of this), will become addicted to the fame because how else do you experience being the center of the world?

As the film loses its color and edge, so do the characters move apart, forgetting that no matter what, they are one. Sue delays the switch to make love to a gorgeous boy on a motorcycle, causing Elisabeth’s finger to age. Elisabeth can barely move from the pain in her back — have you ever given birth by having your spinal column slide open? — and spends most of her days staring at the TV and the other times eating everything she can, leaving it lying everywhere, and then hiding out as she makes her way to get new supplies.

This new young life that she wanted isn’t even hers any more.

Instead of killing off her younger form — who has kept her in a coma for 90 days, transforming her into an elderly hunchback that appears more John Merrick than Debbie Sullivan — Elisabeth brings her back from the other side, only to be repeatedly slammed face first into a mirror and then murdered.

This leaves Sue the dream that she wants, being a star on New Year’s Eve, a very 1980s dream that no longer seems to matter.

To keep from rotting away, she loads up on the drug and then goes all Brundlefly in the mirror — don’t worry, the movie still has time to complete ape The Elephant Man and Eraserhead on the way to a close that you can spot from the opening frame — before emerging as Monstro Elisasue, a freakish creature that somehow is able to fool every single person around her by taking a poster and taping it to her face.

I knew this was an allegory at the start, then maybe magical realism. I didn’t let reality in the way when I debated who could survive a back wound like that with home surgery and no antibiotics, but by the end of the movie, it feels like the budget went out the window, as effects go almost chromakey in quality, other than a bloodletting than feels all Sam Raimi and a multiple bodies in one form that wants to shock you but forgets that you already saw Society.

Do I expect too much of the cinema of today? Do I overthink the male gaze in this movie, one created by a woman, that is supposed to make you feel bad for staring at bodies when, you know, it just keeps showing you bodies? I can’t even imagine how different this would be if Ray Liotta had lived and was in this instead of Quaid, who seems like he’s on the best of coke and ready to eat four pounds of shrimp in one scene (yes, I did look that up).

This is a movie that references other films until it becomes a Xerox that others will refer to, the stream backflowing into itself. Effects were called blob and Gollum and Requiem, all other movies and Coralie wanted the sensibility of The Elephant Man, according to the FX guys. Then, this gets so needledrop sledgehammer that it uses “Also sprach Zarathustra” and “The Nightmare And Dawn” from Vertigo and at that point, any pretense toward subtlety is washed away like a ripped off face on a Hollywood star, pretending to be the Lady In the Radiator after we’ve watched a movie that is like Seconds, only sloppy ones.

What are we to learn here? That we should love who we are and embrace aging? Maybe. I don’t know, it’s all buried under transgressive shock that will only be that to audiences who haven’t decided to wallow in the muck of the movies we grew up on. The film also has a major issue — and maybe it’s just me — but the beauty of Moore isn’t in the fact that her ass is tight or that she doesn’t have a wrinkle. She has lived in her body and been a goddess for decades, defying the expectations of how someone should age. The younger version of her feels like a sports car I’d be afraid to get dirt inside, a porcelain doll that you just leave on the shelf instead of risking being a bull.

The level of wit here is to name the sexist oaf Harvey. Hardy har harv.

At one point, I paused this — and the big twist had already happened — and it was 47 minutes before the end of the movie. Brian Yuzna had 96 minutes in Re-Animator. Lynch did Eraserhead in 89. This is 141 minutes long.

You will believe that someone can master home repair first time out to the point that she creates a room inside the bathroom that looks flawless. Who has that much real estate inside their walls? Also: An eye socket poops out a breast and in Hell, Lucio Fulci is like, “And?” Also: How did they keep that bathroom so clean when people are puking all over it, all the time?

This is a film that hates its character when she’s old and sexy, when she’s young and sexy, and then makes fun of her some more when she looks like Ephant Mon meets Castle Freak.

Unlike beauty, the movies that are cannibalized here will live forever.

This, not so much.

Directed by Taylor Martin from a script by Simon Phillips — I just reviewed his movie The Bouncer — this starts with the aftermath of a bank robbery committed by a gang of holiday named criminals, including Father Christmas (Phillips), Prancer (Luke Avoledo), Grinch (Nick Biskupek), Rudolph (Dan Molson) and Snowman (Michael Swatton).

They’ve made it to the Jolly Rancher Hotel, but they don’t know that vampires — Mother (Sayla de Goede), Lucia (Louisa Capulet), Victoria (Kelly Schwartz) and Selene (Sienna Star) — are also there, ready to feed on college girls and initiate their new recruit Genie (Camille Blott). Meanwhile, the hotel’s clerk, Colin (Paul Whitney), is playing everyone against one another.

This is a very Tarantino-influenced movie, right down to the DJ (Chad Ridgely) giving us the story of the robbery that we don’t see, as well as someone who planned the heist that we never see, as well as the shift into horror when this starts as a crime film. It’s well done and makes the most of its budget, as well as giving innovative ways to fight vampires, like silver spoons and flash grenades.

Also: Stay tuned for a vampiric Santa.

You can get the Cleopatra DVD release of this movie from MVD.

I’m a big fan of the films of Philip J. Cook, starting with Invader and Beyond the Rising Moon. Recently, Visual Vengeance put out Despiser, one of his movies that I was lucky to get to record a commentary track for. Since then, he’s made Outerworld, the Malice series of films and web series, Pungo: A Witch’s Tale and now this film, Ghost Planet.

All of Cook’s films share a unique look, as he pushes himself to develop his own special effects, and an interesting take on their stories, which eschew traditional Hollywood narratives.

Max Stone (Joe Mayes), his lawyer sister Julia (Claudia Troy) and their soldier half brother George (Mark Hyde, Despiser) are space rogues and archaeologists, looking for the technology left behind by the Tesserans. The ships that they find are beyond our understanding, but they have found an entire base full of them, just as a solar flare forces them to run.

A year later and things haven’t worked out so well. George has cancer, acquired on one of the many worlds where he was forced to do shadow ops, and the loan that Max took to pay for new body parts can’t be paid back, leading to repo men coming to take them back by force. They’re nearly killed before a mysterious woman named Trudy (Georgia Anastasia) saves them, killing a man and putting them in prison, where Julia is able to get them released.  Soon, they find out why they were able to get away. Trudy is an android owned by John Moesby (Ulysses E. Campbell), who wants them to go back to space and find the Tesseran technology for him.

This brings them to the titular Ghost Planet, a haunted world where the only living person is a young girl named Naiad (Julie Kashmanian), while being hunted by space pirates who want the same tech that they do. However, Naiad gives the Stones the edge they need, as she knows how to communicate with the Tesseran machinery.

I’ve read some reviews that take this movie to task for how it looks and I honestly wish these people had just an ounce of imagination. Cook has created several worlds here from sound stages, green screen, CGI and miniatures. It doesn’t always feel real, but you have to realize that he’s making this movie with the budget of a few days of the catering of a blockbuster. The trade off is that this is rich with ideas and heart.

What you get is a movie that looks and feels like nothing else, other than a Philip J. Cook movie. And that’s exactly what I wanted this to be. I mean, spaceships guided through the galaxy by bubblegum? Incredible.

You can learn more on the official site and watch this on Tubi.

SNL has been a part of my life since I could remember. My parents were the right against for it, as it debuted when my father was 36 and my mother was 26. They’d get us home from shopping just in time to watch it and I remember being so excited to be allowed to stay up, like some child adult and get to watch something no one else in school was allowed to.

As soon as the early 80s, when Newsday columnist Marvin Kittman said that the post-original Not Ready for Prime Time Players was Saturday Night Dead On Arrival, the show has been said to be worse than it was when it started. I’m not sure about that, although the quality has ebbed and flowed with today’s cast being as abysmal as it gets.

I’ve spent most of my life being obsessed with the show, how Lorne Michaels puts together episodes and its history, devouring almost every book published on the subject. I was excited when this movie was announced, but it has the danger of being too worshipful, too fawning over its subjects and probably trying to jam so much in to a short time.

And sure, that happens. It’s also a game of spot the writer or important person.

But for someone who has gone over the most small of details when it comes to this show, it’s also pretty great.

On October 11, 1975, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle, who already pretty much played Steven Spielberg in The Fablemans) has no time left to get the first episode of the show on the air. His boss Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza) tells him that David Tebet (Willem Defoe), a high ranking NBC boss, is here to watch and will possibly just play a repeat of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson instead of allowing the show to play on NBC.

As for Carson, voiced by Jeff Witzke, he calls and lets Michaels know that late night is his place and that he’s fighting with NBC. As soon as he gets what he wants, the show will be off the air.

Despite all the pressures that Michaels is dealing with, he still has to get his cast on the air. Belushi (Matt Wood) is fighting with everyone and refuses to sign a contract; Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) is the brunt of his anger when he isn’t trying to keep Milton Berle (an incredible J.K. Simmons) away from his fiancee Jacqueline (Kaia Gerber). His writers are battling a censor (Catherine Curtin) while his host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) has no interest in even being there.

I don’t really believe that the show was saved at the last minute by Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun, who does great work here as Andy and Jim Henson) and the newly hired Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener), nor do I think anyone rallied around Garrett Morris (played by Lamorne Morris, no relation), despite the fact that they should have. It’s great to see him get such a part of this story, even if he was barely used on the show.

The nerd in me loved seeing how Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), Anne Beats (Leander Suleiman), Al Franken (Taylor Gray), Tom Davis (Mcabe Gregg), Dave Wilson (Robert Wuhl), Paul Shaffer (Paul Rust), Herb Sargent (Tracy Letts) and even Leo Yoshimura (Abraham Hsu) show up in this, but the best lines are saved for Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey). You know, they should be. My biggest comedy nerdom is saved for genuflecting before his anger and caustic tone.

Gilda (Ella Hunt), Danny (Dylan O’Brien), Laraine (Emily Fairn) and Jane (Kim Matula) all appear as well, even if their stories are barely fleshed out. Just like the show, this doesn’t have the time to get into them, although it does have Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) trying to get on the first show and failing.

Naomi McPherson shows up as Janis Ian, Jon Batiste — who also did the soundtrack — as Billy Preston and Brian Welch as Don Pardo, another major part of the feel of SNL to me. It feels like at times it’s just trying to pack things in, as I get the feeling that Jason Reitman, who directed and wrote the script with Gil Kenan, is as much of a super fan as me. That’s why Finn Wolfhard may play an unnamed NBC page, but we don’t see this through his eyes. Instead, we are with Lorne all the way until the end, when the words “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” end the movie and cue the credits, inverting their typical placement.

That said, if you are a big SNL nerd, you know that Belushi didn’t wait 39 seconds on live TV to show up in the first sketch or that Milton Berle didn’t host the show until Season 4. And there was no official host of the first episode. There wasn’t a host until episode 2 when Paul Simon appeared on the show. That’s also kind of like all the discussion if Rosie Shuster will use her husband Lorne’s last name in the credits and she picks her own. In truth, her name was Rosie Michaels on the show’s end titles.

These are all things that only nerds will understand. At best, SNL is something that works 40% of the time, at best, and even the greatest moments of the show are seen through the lens of what era you grew up in. As for the rest of, well, everyone, they’re probably watching this and wondering where Bill Murray was.

Ryan Kruger made Fried Barry and if you like that movie, well, good news. His reimagining of Street Trash, based on the 1987 movie, will probably delight you. Gary Green, who played Fried Barry, plays just about the same role in this.

Produced by Vinegar Syndrome and shot on 35mm, this has the Tenafly Viper booze being replaced by drones that give unhoused people in South Africa a case of the melts. There’s also Sockle, a little gremlin that shows up for some reason, which I have no idea why, as this Cape Town-set future of 2050 is about Ronald (Sean Cameron Michael) and his gang of weirdos — Chef (Joe Vaz), Pap (Shuraigh Meyer), Wors (Lloyd Martinez Newkirk) and 2-Bit (Green) — helping Alex (Donna Cormack-Thomson) adjust to life on the streets.

It’s Street Trash for people who were upset by the first movie and the fact that it didn’t just pretend to be transgressive but was wildly and violently odd. Or, as the review on Comic Book Resources wrote, “While Muro’s original film is notoriously cruel and ugly, Kruger wanted to create likable characters who the audience could root for.”

Or this line: “The original film’s jarring juxtaposition of slapstick comedy and severe misogynistic violence has proven to be too much even for seasoned gorehounds.”

I don’t know, I’m getting sick of the stripmining of my past, as I’m sure all old people get to be at some point. It got to the point that at the end, when they use Buckaroo Banzai’s line “Wherever you go, there you are” I reacted with an exasperated groan.

Anyways, this movie.

Mayor Mostert (Warrick Grier) has learned how to take the body melting results of the New York incident to get rid of undesirable people. He sends his cops into the streets to make it happen, all while people excessively swear at one another and make jokes like, “If two vegetarians get into a fight, is it still called a beef?”

The end of this goes full action movie and at least has some action and the practical effects are fun, even if the rest of the technical parts of the movie — the ADR is rough and it seems like the sound is low in others — lack. You could just watch this to see people melt in different colors and be told the sledgehammer plot and get past it. Or, you know, you could wonder why this movie spends so much time dissecting the pedophilic qualities of other stories instead of applying a critical lens to itself and, you know, actually being a halfway decent movie.

Steven Kostanski and the movies that he’s made with Astron-6 have always entertained me. Whether satirizing giallo with The Editor, making a perfect John Carpenter movie with The Void or creating 80s rental movies out of time like Psycho Goreman and Manborg, the movies that result are always great.

Inspired by the movies that ripped off Gremlins like Ghoulies, The Gate and Critters, Franky Freako takes place at some time in the 1980s, a time in which Conor (Conor Sweeney) is accused by his wife Kristina (Kristy Wordsworth) and boss Mr. Buechler (Adam Brooks) of being boring and way too uptight. As she goes away on a business trip, he decides to call the 1-900 number of Franky Freako (Matthew Kennedy) and gets pulled into the insane party world of the mini monster and his crew of oddballs.

Along with his friends Dottie Dunko and Boink Bardo, Franky brings the party into Conor’s life and by that, I mean he destroys his house and somehow drags him to his world, a place run by Freaklord President Munch that feels a lot like the future where Biff became President in Back to the Future Part II.

I wonder if 1-900-555-FREAKO is a real number. Every movie — well, every horror movie made in the 80s, it seemed — had numbers like that. This is a movie made for people that get the joke that Conor’s boss is named for John Carl Buechler, that wished that they’d make more of the Hobgoblins movies and that hoped for Ghoulies V: Ghoulies Get Jobs. I made that up, but wouldn’t that have been a good one?

For the rest of the world, you may wonder why this spent so much on practical little people partying and not get it. Your life is infinitely boring compared to the rest of us.

After being lost in the forest as a child, Gu Yao is saved by a giant gorilla named Kingkong. Yes, that’s his name, this was made in China and no, lawyers really do have better things to do than get involved. As Gu Yao grows into an adult, he meets an expedition that has Ma Ke and her family, but soon those stupid, horrible want to do what they always want to do with giant apes and that’s either put them in shows or kill them or, well, both.

Gu Yao is pretty much Tarzan. Kingkongis pretty much King Kong.  Youku is pretty much the Chinese asylum, minus getting Eric Roberts to be in their movies. Actually, give it time, because the minute you think his name, a director with a six figure or less budget calls him. It’s just the way our world works.

This is also King Kong as in the latest movies, facial scars and all. If you’re going to screw with IP theft, go hard, you know? Go all the way. The Yooku channel is filled with AI-drawn images of monsters fighting Asian women who are dressed like Tomb Raider and man, it’s as if they are accessing my id and saying, “These movies are only 60 minutes or so.” Yes they are. They’re barely films. I love it.

You can watch this on YouTube.