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.

Dr. Frank Demonico (Mark C. Fullhardt) was a couples therapist in Amityville who may have killed several of the couples that he was supposedly helping.

So yes, this is a sequel to Amityville Thanksgiving and even has an opening with so many talking heads — and yes, one TV report — where various crowdfunded people get to read lines of exposition.

Directed by Will Collazo Jr. and Julie Anne Prescott, who wrote the script with David Rodriguez, this moves into a director named Rocco (Michael Ruggiere) pitching his latest movie to studio boss Ivy (Erica Dyer). He wants to make a movie called The Amityville Cannibal Thanksgiving about Demonico and make it in Amityville.

Yet as the crew starts to film, they’re killed one by one by a foul — fowl, ugh — mouthed turkey who is working with a groundskeeper named Bram (Dino Castelli). Yes, this is not just a fake Amityville, but it’s also Thankskilling without the budget.

As for the killer turkey, he’s Frank Jr. (Steven Kiseleski) and he’s not above using a chainsaw to murder his victims. I liked him, even if he sounds mid-poop in every line of dialogue that he says.

This is the sixty-first Amityville movie that I’ve watched. That says some horrible things about me, when you think about it, because at an average of 90 minutes each, I have spent 3.91 days of my life on these movies, not even to mention the time that I wrote about them, appeared on podcasts and talked to others about them.

This one attempts to be both a meta behind the scenes of independent filmmaking while also, again, being Thankskilling. There also seems to be lights strobing in almost every bar scenes, as if the cops pulled the entire bar over. Speaking of excrement making, every time Rocco appears on screen, he’s making mid-loaf pinching faces. Even when doing coke, which he leaves on the bar. I’m not telling you how to be a drug addict, Rocco, but take your drugs with you.

I love that indie movies just have so many swear words in them. It makes them seem so realistic, especially when rubber turkeys come to life and chainsaw people to death.

At 42 minutes in, I decided to look at how much time was left, sure that this was nearly over. No, I am not even at the halfway point. I have entered the singularity, the point where matter is theoretically compressed to infinite density. Here, the laws of physics break down as I enter the final destination for everything that survives past the event horizon of a black hole. I feel like I am watching the Star Child from 2001 while at once being the Star Child, aware and not aware of what is happening. Is this movie still a swear-filled ode to making a bad movie or has it become one? Why are some rooms lit as if Mario Bava is coming over for a beer? Why is there a groundskeeper like The Shining? Why does the groundskeeper sound like a mob guy? Can my thoughts escape past the infinitely tiny point I have found myself within, as all known conceptions of time and space completely end?

“Can someone tell me what the fuck is going on around here?” Ivy yells at one point. This is before more of the cast and crew are killed, then Frank Jr. ties a woman up and attempts to have sex with her as she tells him that she can’t feel anything and his father must have never explained to him how to pleasure a woman properly.

The credits? They are over ten minutes long.

You can get this from SRS or watch it on Tubi.

Directed by Natalie Erika James from a screenplay she co-wrote with Christian White and Skylar James, Apartment 7A has the roughest of battles to fight. Do we need a prequel to what may be the most perfect horror movie ever, Rosemary’s Baby? We’ve had a TV movie sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby and a 2014 miniseries remake. What does this have to bring to the table?

In my eyes, a lot.

After their 2010 A Nightmare On Elm Street was a critical failure, Platinum Dunes stopped making remakes and reimaginings for some time, other than restarting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films. Since the success of their A Quiet Place and The Purge movies, they’ve embraced sequels and films set within the universe of their properties.

Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner) was just a short conversation and a death in the original, but here she’s a dancer who will seemingly do anything to be on Broadway, getting to be in Kiss Me, Kate before horribly breaking her ankle, an injury that she deals with via pills and determination. On another failed audition, she follows producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess) home, becomes sick and is helped by Roman (Kevin McNally) and Minnie Castavet (Dianne Wiest). Over the next few days, she has a bad dream and wakes up on bed with Marchand, who tells her she got the part. Another nightmare leads to a neighbor named Lily giving her a salve that fixes her ankle, just days before Lily attacks her with scissors.

The Bramford is, as always, a strange place.

As you’d imagine, she’s soon pregnant and has the Castavets taking a special interest in her. Dr. Sapirstein seems too strange; a back alley abortion leads to the doctor having a seizure, you see where this is all going.

You’ve seen this part before. A party, where 1965 will be year one and God dies; Satan will be born. Except that — spoilers here — Terry dances to “Be My Baby” and sort of like The Pyx — exactly like? — she throws herself out the window, ending the child’s life before it can happen.

There’s a lot of fan service, but I think my wife may be the one person getting it all, like Minnie drinking a vodka blush or the Woodhouses walking through the police tape when the film ends. But after years of Blumhouse remakes angering her with how they play with the culture that she loves, she was wildly pleased with this film. Compared to the recent ‘Salem’s Lot, this feels practically worshipful. Wiest is great in her role.

Yes, we didn’t need a prequel to this film. But as I always say, when done well — or even just OK — films like this give us what we want most of all, more time in the worlds of the movies that we love the most.

Chris Stokes and Marques Houston are the kings of Tubi. Seriously, these guys have a movie a month and it feels like I’m the only one going crazy about their work, but who cares? You can be a weirdo like me and get super jazzed about these movies too and yell at your TV or whatever device you choose to watch Tubi on.

When we last saw Joanna (Cassidey Fralin), she had ruined the lives of her father, real estate millionaire Michael Lawrence (Blue Kimble) and her new stepmother Whitney (Annie Ilonzeh), a self-made cosmetics company owner. To remind you how horrible she is, this starts with flashbacks to her launching her grandmother down the steps, burning a woman’s face with tainted makeup, killing a family friend, throwing a woman off a balcony and so much more. They skipped how she threw Whitney’s mother’s ashes all over the place!

I’m already yelling at the screen and this just got started.

Michael is missing, Joanna is contained in critical condition in a hospital after being shot in the chest and the cops are on the case. Somehow, despite the police knowing where she is, they can’t contact her family. Look, I’m not here to make these movies make sense. I’m here to react like I’m watching old ECW matches.

Despite Joanna nearly being dead, she kills someone and runs off. Did you expect anything to be different? No. Look, we’re here to see people drink fancy drinks in fancy places and interfamily ballistics.

This guy Matt is trying to pick up Ms. Daniels at a bar when Christopher drops in and threatens him, says he’s her husband, then says, “Blessings, king” before calling the guy an asshole.

Two weeks later and Joanna is in Debra’s house, refusing to help cook or clean. She’s only there because they can’t find her father, who you know, we just saw. Joanna follows this up by kicking her Aunt Deb down the steps as her kids lose their minds. She’s good at launching people down the steps.

Now it’s one year later. Christopher is now married to Tessa (Erica Pinkett), who owns Stretch, a non-surgical spandex company. She has a son named Trevor (Keyon Bowman), who is quite the athlete. So Christopher has done pretty well in a short time, finding another gorgeous wife and a great family. They both helped him heal and he’s honored to be in their family.

Joanna shows up on schedule, arriving at a family party, the same as the last movie.

“How did your aunt die?” asks Christopher.

“She fell down the stairs,” replies Joanna.

“Again?” Christopher screams.

“Why is my family so clumsy?” answers Joanna, crying and begging for a place to stay.

While Tessa has some issues, Joanna moves in and starts tutoring her son. She knows what’s going on with her father, who thinks that he’s into another scam. And as for Whitney cuts her wrist on a bottle and screams at her children, saying that she failed and their friend died. She was married to a murderer!

On that same day, she goes to her first day of AA and sees Cedric (Mike Hill), the cop who is on the trail of Joanna and Michael. Whitney is worried because she shot both of them in the heart and they’re still alive. He wants to use her as bait and, you know, they used to date.

Michael has gotten Tessa pregnant, which screws up his plans with his daughter, as now they need to kill everyone to make sure they get the money. Just as he reveals that he knows she is going to be having a baby, Brandon shows up.

Who?

Brandon is Tessa’s ex and Chris takes it about as well as you’d think. He’s Travis’ biological father, not Hank, her husband who died. Chris says, “You need to explain this to me like i’m a child.” Trevor doesn’t even know that his dead is alive and she goes through the story of how she had a baby and yet married another man.

Best of all, Brandon doesn’t know that he has a son.

The world of The Stepdaughter is a pretty complicated one.

Meanwhile, the crazy guy from across the street, Henry — who Travis is afraid of — knows that Joanna is a criminal from watching the news. He keeps trying to get the word out to Tessa, who is all upset about Brandon, who has also upset Chris.

While this is all happening, the family from the last movie is trying to get the cops the help they need, just as Whitney reconnects with Cedric, a fact that doesn’t seem to make her sons happy.

As if enough hasn’t happened, Joanna has killed the old man across the street and tells Travis about his real father. It turns out. that Joanna was the one that informed everyone — Brandon and Travis — about them being father and son. Tessa reacts by trying to asphyxiate Joanna, while Chris tackles her and then Travis hits him. Tessa screams for everyone to get out.

The Stepdaughter 2 lives up to the legacy of Stokes and Houston, perhaps their best movie yet.

Trevor leaves to see his father just in time to see Chris punching him into oblivion. Everyone has run away and Tessa is calling the police, just as Chris grabs her and starts to shake her like a baby. This is soon followed by Joanna taking Travis and knocking Tessa out with a frying pan before telling her father that he made a mistake falling for one of his targets. She calls him his real name, Michael, as the cops start to figure it all out.

As for Joanna, she’s the only child that gets to be happy, as she wants to poison everyone to get revenge for Chris/Michael killing her mother. Now she wants to kill everyone and get everything, which has father and daughter firing guns at one another and stalking through a dark house.

The cops arrive just in time, but come on, you know this can’t end like that. Chris/Michael has escape prison and the police want Joanna/Maggie to help them find her, just as her father shows up at Whitney’s mansion.

The Stepdaughter 3? I can’t wait.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Gabby Revilla Lugo and written by Dana Brawer, this film starts with a book club who are all reading a series of books with the same name as the title of this movie, Secret Life of a Dominatrix. I wonder if they’re all reading the book by Summer Bradford, which I found on Walmart’s web site, that has purple prose like this to sell it: “My name is Sarah Fielder, normal looking University student. However, you may know me by my other persona, Miss Trix. Mistress Trix, Dominatrix.”

May (Mariel Molino) is pretty excited about reading this book, because her sex life with her husband Kurt (Andrew Biernat, who seems to have a fan club on IMDB giving this 10/10 reviews) has grown stale ever since she had a miscarriage and oh yeah, had an affair.

Her friends get all worked up as well, so they decide to go check out a local sex club, which actually ends up being people talking and not just having wall to wall sex, which is pretty realistic one imagines. May becomes friends with Olivia (Jenna Kanell) and Kelly (Marcia Harvey) and several other women, gradually realizing that she is not a submissive but instead dominant.

When she tries to bring that fun home to her husband and be honest — instead of cheating again — he keeps going hot and cold with her. It’s just not for him, so she decides to keep it all held within.

And that would be the movie, except this also wants to be a giallo — well, erotic thriller — and have a Red Light Killer who can’t be anyone other than Kurt. This murderer ends up offing one of the book club members, Dee (Imani Vaughn-Jones), and makes all the ladies decide to stay inside instead of exploring dungeons. Well, except May, who can’t stay away, and soon learns that her husband — again, surprise — also goes to the same club to be a rough — and none well liked — dom.

She springs this knowledge on him in bed, hoping to finally get a bunch of the rough trade she’d be hoping for and even lets loose her dom side, which surprisingly — and by that I mean not at all — does not play well with his. He loses his marbles, shoves her head into a wall and starts to threaten her life, even attacking one of her friends that comes in to save her. Luckily, her skills with a rope — she was a farm girl, so tying people up comes quickly — end up with him dead and her still breathing. I have no idea how anyone would explain this to any officer of the law or court.

None of that matters because this has a twist ending that — do I even need spoilers after that one before? — everyone is alive, the book club are all still friends and May has claimed her sexuality. She’s moved on past Kurt — and didn’t lynch him — and everybody is happy. Wink at the camera.

You can watch this on Tubi.