Director Jerry Ciccoritti started his career with Psycho Girls and Graveyard Shift AKA Central Park Drifter, so how wild is it that he just made this viral movie? Written by Russell Hainline, this has Kathy Barrett (Lacey Chabert) runs a diner in Hope Springs, New York, but everything is falling apart after the death of her husband. To cheer her up, her friends  Theo (Dan Lett) and Mel (Sherry Miller) buy her a red scarf. Later, she takes that scarf and puts it on a muscular ice sculpture and, well, have you seen or heard Frosty the Snowman?

Jack Snowman (Dustin Milligan) comes into her life and ends up enchanting everyone in town except for conspiracy obsessed Sheriff Nathaniel Hunter (Craig Robinson). This succeeds through its casting, as it also has Lauren Holly, Katy Mixon Greer from Eastbound & Down and Joe Lo Truglio from The State, all talents that elevate anything that they appear in.

I love this term: “born sexy yesterday” which comes from Pop Culture Detective. How can Kathy find anything sexually interesting in a baby in human form, even if he has nice abs? Is he a project, a blank slate, like a snowman, that one can project their dreams on as easily as insert a carrot for a nose?

Why am I thinking so hard about this movie?

That said, Hainline is on Letterboxd and seems to have a sense of humor, saying “in 2021, I started pitching to my friends, in my best Norm Macdonald-esque delivery, “what if, when Frosty the Snowman came to life… he was a super-hot dude?” then I’d hit them with “it’s called HOT FROSTY.” and it always got a laugh… but over time, it also burrowed under my skin. for whatever reason, I couldn’t let this idea go. I had to write this movie.”

Look, someone has to fuck that snowman. It may as well be one of the Mean Girls. At least this has some fun callbacks to other Netflix holiday movies and her past acting roles. If it was a female snow woman, however, I feel like people would get angry.

Between 1978-1993, more than a million people attended movies at the Scala Cinema in London, whether they were coming to see arthouse or grindhouse, kung fu or groundbreaking LGBTQ+ films. Out of that era, many members of those audiences became today’s filmmakers, musicians, writers, actors, activists and artists.

This documentary, directed and written by Ali Catterall and Jane Giles, this features John Waters, Mary Harron, Graham Humphreys, Alan Jones, Kim Newman Ben Wheatley, Ralph Brown, Beeban Kidron and so many more, all united in their memories of the theater and the life-changing films and moments they enjoyed there.

Whether people came to see movies like Thundercrack or Eraserhead, the movies of Russ Meyer or John Waters, Laurel and Hardy or Sam Raimi, they knew that the Scala was where they would get to have their minds blown.

Based on Giles’ 2018 book Scala Cinema 1978-1993, this is a movie for movie lovers, plain and simple. The Scala got around so many issues because it was a members only club — the Severin set comes with a membership card of your own, as well as a poster — yet despite all of the drug use in the theaters, at least two reported deaths and showing tons of movies that couldn’t have been shown in England, Scala was closed because they showed A Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick had ordered the film to not be shown in the UK. This led to a lawsuit by Warner Brothers and the theater ended.

The memories, however, could not go away. I’ve never had the opportunity to have a theater like the Scala but I wish that I had. I can live through this. This is a documentary and a set for those that live through movies, that dream of them, that want them to mean as much to others as they do to us.

All this week, we’ll go through the many extras that are in the Severin set as well as several of the movies that screened at Scala, which you can find on this Letterboxd list.

Here’s a list of the extras you get with this release: audio commentary with Jane Giles And Ali Catterall; an introduction from the UK premiere; the documentary Scala by Michael Clifford with commentary, a short Scala Cinema; featurettes on the theater and programs; Davey Jones’ cartoons; outtakes of the interviews and a trailer.

The second disc has several shorts that played at Scala, such as Divide and Rule — Never!, Dead Cat, The Mark of Lilith, Relax, Boobs A Lot, Kama Sutra Rides Again, Coping With Cupid and On Guard.

The third disc has the Kier-La Janisse documentary The Art of the Calendar; Splatterfest Exhumed, which is all about the seminal horror festival at Scala; Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie, the Buddy Giovinazzo-directed proof of concept for the sequel that never happened, as well as commentary by Giovinazzo; Horrorshow with commentary by director Paul Hart-Wilden; Josh Becker’s Cleveland Smith: Bounty Hunter, which stars Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, as well as a commentary by Scott Spiegel; Mongolitos with commentary by director Stéphane Ambiel and a featurette on H.G. Lewis coming to Scala in 1989.

You can buy this from Severin.

Max Allan Collins took over Dick Tracy for Chester Gould in 1977 and stayed on it for 15 years while also writing the Nathan Heller books — he won the Best Novel Shamus award for Stolen Away — as well as the graphic novel Road to Perdition (which became a movie), the comic books Ms. Tree and Wild Dog, and has directed four movies: Mommy, Mommy 2: Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. If that isn’t enough, he’s a two-time member of the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and has written several movie novelizations, including the last two G.I. Joe movies and books based on CSI, Criminal Minds and Bones.

This story came along at a bad time for its creator. “The day before Thanksgiving 1992, I was notified by mail in a letter from a particularly odious editor at Tribune Media Services that my services as writer of the Dick Tracy strip were no longer required. I had done the writing of the strip, taking over for creator Chester Gould, since late 1977 – a fifteen-year run plus a few months.”

The same day, he lost his contract with Bantam books.

It was this story that broke his writer’s block after all that happened.

On Christmas Eve 1942, private eye Richard Stone (Rob Merritt) is celebrating. He’s gotten out of the draft with a bribe, which may cost him his secretary and girl Katie Crockett, whose brother is oversees fighting the war. His employee Joey (Tommy Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt) is getting sick of spying on cheating husbands and wives. And then there’s his partner Marley (Chris Causey), who was killed a year ago, a crime that he didn’t even try to solve.

That night, Stone is visited by Jake Marley, on leave from Purgatory so that he can convince Stone to solve his death. He brings three ghosts with him: the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Bonnie Parker, played by Alisabeth Von Presley), Present (a recently killed soldier, Hank Ross, played by Keith Porter) and Future (The King, who isn’t even old enough to be Elvis Presley yet, but ghosts don’t conform to the space time continuum; he’s played by Scot Gehret).

Sure, you know the story A Christmas Carol, but you’ve never seen it as a film noir. This is a really interesting movie and it’s awesome to see it come to life, knowing that Collins has been wanting to get back to making movies for several years. Go in knowing it had a small budget, but be wowed because it has big ideas at its heart. I’m definitely adding this to my annual holiday film rotation.

This VCI Pictures blu ray has extras including commentary by Collins and Producer/Editor Chad T. Bishop, Q & A highlights from advanced theatrical screenings and a documentary featuring Collins. You can get it from MVD.

Directed by Justin Knodel, who wrote it with Chris Levine (who stars as Nick) and Christopher McGahan, Saint Nick is about Diane (Rachel Alig), who has a business trip over the holidays. Her son Trevor’s (Alex Lizzul) father can’t pick him up, so she’s forced to ask her brother Nick to watch him.

Nick spends all of his time in a bar and is the last person you’d want to watch your kid. But as you’ll learn, spending a week together over the holidays is probably the best thing that could happen to the two of these characters.

Everyone goes above and beyond in this indie comedy to make it way better than you’d expect. It makes fun of the schmaltz of Hallmark holiday movies without falling into the same problems. I had fun with it and if you’re looking something new over the holidays, this might be it.

You can learn more at the official site.

You can watch it on Amazon.

This film promises “An AI generated “Al Gore” exposes the climate scare as a political tool to undermine capitalism and impose big government socialist ideals upon voters.”

Except that the AI for it is from Eleven Labs, the same site I use to create voiceovers for my podcast. It’s AI as much as it’s a program that does voices but it isn’t a program that can take on the mind of another human being and answer questions as them.

Director Joel Gilbert, who worked for Gore when he was a Senator, has learned that Harvard professor Roger Revelle was the source of Gore’s climate alarmism, in spite of Revelle supposedly rejecting those theories.

You may watch this and start to believe that, but there’s also the 2014 movie Merchants of Doubt, in which its explained that alate in his life, Revelle agreed to coauthor a paper with Austrian-born American physicist and emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia Fred Singer.

Soon after he agreed to write it, Revelle had a near-fatal heart attack. Singer then wrote most of the paper, including several sections arguing that climate change wasn’t the threat everyone says that it is nor is it understood enough for the government to be involved.

After Revelle’s death, Singer began telling people that Revelle shared his views on climate change. Revelle’s family and graduate student Justin Lancaster claim that Revelle regretted working with Singer and saw global warming as a serious issue up until his death.

Singer sued Lancaster over his claims, but some believe that these lawsuits were to undermine scientific evidence and prevent the public from distinguishing between legitimate and sham research.

Alright, two claims down.

But anyways…

Let me give Joel Gilbert a break and keep on explaining this movie.

Gilbert learned that the real origin of Al Gore’s climate apocalypse came from his time at Vanderbilt Divinity School and also explains how Gore plagiarized a radical environmental book from the 1940s to produce his 1992 manifesto, Earth in the Balance.

Most of this movie is Gilbert confronting what they refer to a an AI generated ‘Al Gore about his entire life story, such as his struggle to fulfill the political ambitions laid out for him by his parents.

Again, if you look at the credits, the AI is used to simulate the voice of Gore. Perhaps it was used to write some of the script, but almost every word feels inserted into the former Vice President’s mouth. There’s also a credit for the lip animation, which is why the “AI” Al Gore looks like he’s saying the words.

By the end of this movie, Gilbert believes that he has exposed “the climate scare as nothing more than a political tool used by groups who wish to undermine free-market capitalism and impose big government socialist ideals upon unsuspecting voters.”

Gilbert is also from Pittsburgh, just like me, so we need to get a beer and talk about the movies he’s made that I’m more interested in, like Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison and Elvis Found Alive. In no way to I want to talk about The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America or Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War For Islamic Revival And Obama’s Politics of Defeat. He’s also made several — many, many — Bob Dylan movies.

I mean, maybe I don’t want that beer. Look at this, from Wikipedia: “In 2019, George Zimmerman, represented by Larry Klayman, filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Trayvon Martin’s parents (Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin) as well as Attorney Ben Crump, who had represented the family. Zimmerman’s lawsuit was based on the allegations made in Gilbert’s book.” He also made Dreams from My Real Father, in which he claimed that President Obama’s “real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a communist from Chicago, and that Obama’s mother posed for nude photography.”

He’s also classified his Paul and Elvis movies as mockumentaries before going into political films.

Are we now in a world where we can interview people we always wanted to even if they don’t want to be interviewed, all so they can say exactly what we want them to say?

Seems like it. Ugh.

You can get this from MVD.

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.