Directed and written by Katherine Barrell (who was on Wyonna Earp and Workin’ Moms) and Melanie Scrofano (who was Wyonna Earp), Clickbait: Unfollowed has a group of influencers all invited to the SoShal Mansion — get it? — a place where they will learn how to gain more followers and become the important people that they have always wanted to become. Except, well, they keep ignoring the voice that gives them commands keeps hinting that they are going to die and the fact that the guardian robots — called Husbands — look like something out of Squid Game. They each must go live to their audience and explain why they should make it — like something out of a reality show mixed with social media — and whoever has the least followers is told, “You still matter, just not enough” before being messily dispatched.

Spoilers below the trailer. You’ve been warned.

Julie (Jessica Stanley) and her son Parker (played by Skylar Ball, voiced by Harry Pentecost) — who make unboxing videos as Parker’s Playhouse and are lying, because he’s fourteen and not ten — are the first influencers to be introduced, sent a special tablet — Willie Wonka-style — that brings them to the mansion, a place that is either curated or looks better on social media because everything looks better on social media.

They soon meet the others:

• Alpha male Ax$el Mega (Charlie Bouguenon) whose online name is @Ax$selErasteWealth and he’s obvious a crypto bro based on Andrew Tate.
• Workout influencer Kyle (Luke Volker), who goes by @PumpitKyleStyle and is the first. to die — spoiler warning after the fact — when he basically is exercised to death.
• White girl philosopher and yoga lover Gaia (Ashleigh van der Hoven) whose screen name is @GuruGaiaNamasteYogi and we first meet pouring her period blood all over a plant.
• Comedian Ami (Shermin Hassan) who goes by @MimiM33tsWorld.
• Peach (Roberto Kyle), who has a makeup social channel and goes by @PrettyInPeachMUA.

They are told that they will get $1 for each follower but only one person can win. What they don’t know is that the mysterious Sofia (Katherine Barrell) who has gathered them together has a past with Gaia, who recognizes her as the first followers start getting murdered. Spoiler again: If you go back and watch the credits again, you realize that we’re watching Sofia’s new face get stapled over her old ruined one.

Soon, everyone is trapped in the house, only given their new tablets with no connection to the outside world other than the new devices they have been given. After Kyle is killed, the next to be taken is Parker, as it is revealed that his mother paid for followers. He is placed in a small coffin and Sofia laughs that she wishes that they had another child to do an unboxing. There’s a coffin for Julie and she’s asked if she’d rather stay and play the game or join her son. She stays.

Gaia recognizes Sofia’s voice and her turtleneck. She asks where her sister Shalin (Melanie Scrofano) is, which shocks Sofia. The lights go out and we see the control center where the two are controlling everything. The sisters created Look Loop and became rich from it. Gaia worked for the ad agency that did their marketing. Sofia did the creative and Shalin programmed, which was perfect. Their platform, like all social media, was supposed to bring people together. Now, they are bitter because the CEOs who took over their company forced them out and made it addictive. And now, people become influencers and are famous and wealthy for nothing. Yet, as Sofia remarks, they aren’t psychos and it’s the audience deciding who lives and dies. She wants to prove that social media ruins lives and her sister Shalin just wants to make the company that stole her work lose money. As always, they are yin and yang.

It’s also revealed that Sofia’s face was destroyed by her sister as she fought security guards with office chairs. So their relationship is…complicated.

While Peach and Gaia try to find the sisters, Ax$el and Julie end up combining their efforts and after taking a little blue pill, consummating their business relationship. But Gaia is caught and tied to a giant circle made up of plants, forced to listen to her cringiest stories as she bleeds out, pleading that “It was an honest white woman’s mistake.” The hubbies continually stab her and she dies listening to the meanest replies that she has ever received on social media.

Finally, everyone must Survivor vote off the next person and Julie uses the sex she had with Ax$el against him, as he’s sodomized and filled with semen until he throws up blood. Yes, this movie goes there. That leaves just Julie and Peach, but what the sisters don’t realize is that they may have taken someone who actually has a sense of right and wrong. And what the final two don’t realize is that not everyone is dead.

I’m not going to spoil any more of this for you because the ending is so good. This movie came out of nowhere and just totally obsessed me. Barrell and Melanie Scrofano have made a movie they should be proud of and I can’t wait to see what they create after this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie — the sixth film in the series and a prequel — has no right to be as good as it is.

Yet here we are.

It starts with Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, so great in The Witch) learning that the Catholic Church is planning to bring the Antichrist to our world to encourage people to come back to the church. An older priest — Father Harris (Charles Dance) — tells him all of this, gives him a photo of a baby with the name Scianna and is then killed when a pipe graphically lands in his head and down his spine — this scene seems so much like how Brennan dies in the first movie — as stained glass rains down.

I was already sold.

As Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free) arrives from America to study at the Tanz Akademie — err, I mean, to become a nun at the Vizzardeli Orphanage — in the middle of the Days of Lead. As protests swell around her, she meets Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), who has been in her life since her birth, along with Father Gabriel (Tawfeek Barhom), Sister Silva (Sônia Braga), a strange nun named Anjelica (Ishtar Currie-Wilson) and her roommate and fellow student Olga — err, again, I mean Luz (Maria Caballero).

Margaret and Luz bond, deciding to go to a disco where the inexperienced American girl dances with Paolo (Andrea Arcangeli). As the rooms begins to spin, she passes out and wakes up back at the orphanage.

She soon becomes concerned about a girl named Carlita (Nicole Sorace) who has been confined by the nuns as she is said to have evil thoughts. At one point, Carlita shows Anjelica a drawing that disturbs her so much that she sets herself on fire, jumps off a ledge, hangs herself and falls through a window.

Brennan (yes, the same character played by Patrick Troughton in the original film, even if he’s said to be a Satanist in that movie) and Margaret believe that Carlita has been picked to be the mother of the Antichrist. When she sees Paolo one night, he tells her to look for the mark just seconds before a truck pins him to a wall. When she tries to hold him, Margaret walks away holding half of his body in an astounding moment.

Soon, she learns that she was impregnated by a demonic jackal — unlike the female one in The Omen — and is rushed to an abortion by two Catholic priests, which is as sacrilegious as it gets. Another car slams into them and she emerges from the car and suddenly she becomes Isabelle Adjani from Possession, seemingly now ready to give birth as she writhes in the filthy street.

Cardinal Lawrence watches over the birth of two children, a girl and a boy — the moment state his sex, the Jerry Goldsmith theme takes over — but Margaret is able to stab the priest and nearly kills her male child, but can’t. Luz stabs her and the conspiracy leaves, sending the entire place up in flames, the jackal burning and screaming. Carlita saves her and we see the two living in the mountains, just as Brennan finds them and says that she will be hunted down and that her son is named Damien and that he has been adopted by Robert Thorn and his wife Katherine.

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, who wrote the script with Tim Smith and Keith Thomas, this film feels like it takes parts of Rosemary’s Baby, Suspiria and the aforementioned Possession while being its own unique film. Stevenson directed the “Butcher’s Block” season of Channel Zero, which is a neglected series that more people need to see. I’m so excited that more people are getting to see her work with this film.

Stevenson understands that the real horror — more and more these days — is that women’s bodies are being taken from them. She told SciFiNow, “Do you remember that scene where Gregory Peck is holding Lee Remick in bed and she says “I think I need you to call me a doctor because I think I’m going crazy.” That is what I remember more than anything. Even as a kid, that terrified me because it first introduced the concept of people dislocating from reality and not knowing what’s real and what’s not real. That scared me as a kid but continues to scare me even now. Especially as a woman. I think a lot of our life is deciphering what’s a threat, and what’s not a threat.”

From the paintings in the orphanage resembling the ones that Bugenhagen finds at Yigael’s Wall to a young Father Spiletto running from the fire, foreshadowing his death in The Omen, this film has something for the fans that love the original but new viewers don’t have the need to see every film in this cycle of movies.

This is such a unique moment, as it’s not just a sequel but a prequel that feels like it adds to the original while being able to have the quality to be judged on its own. I’m still just shocked by it and how much I loved every moment.

Directed by Jimmy Drain, who also appears in this movie and co-wrote it with Robert Bieber and Lewis Leslie, Realm of Shadows is an anthology horror film that boasts appearances by two pretty famous talents in Tony Todd and Vernon Wells, as well as Richard Tyson (Kindgergarten Cop) and Harley Whalen (Ash and Bone).

The connecting story — all horror anthologies need them! — is about a group of priests — Bishop Lucian (Mel Novak) and Brother Charles (Michael S. Rodriguez) — battling a coven of witches led by Nalum (Erika Monet Butters) — there’s even a Ouija board! — over a dagger that was used to stab Jesus in the side. Their battle brings the stories to life, several of which are based on tales that have actually happened.

The stories are:

Mallick’s Dreamlady: A man named Mallick (Drain) is able to pick up his dream girl (Leah Saxon) after help from a bartender (Mike Apple) who may not exist. This story was originally a short film directed by Drain and written by Tim Keller that was made in 2009.

Hike: The same man (Drain) keeps waiting to propose so long than his girlfriend (Morgan Weaver) leaves, which makes him loses his sanity. This is another short that Drain directed and Keller wrote in 20111.

Abashed: Jane and Thomas (Cassie Kelso, Mark Mook) have a bad break-up but when black magic gets involved, it turns out that true love may be the only enemy of evil. This is the short Abashed that was made in 2020.

The Initiation of Professor Kimmer: A new professor named Daniel Kimmer (Drain) is seduced by a student named Starr (Luba Bocian) and could lose his happy world with Jamie (Emily Absher). Starr wants more than just lovemaking. She may want his soul. But perhaps that soul is already owned by Jamie and her coven. This is taken from the 2011 short of the same name, directed by Drain and written by Lewis Leslie.

Cadaver: Peggy (played by Jodi Lynn Thomas, voiced by Ashe Medina) finds one of those witchcraft dancing schools we’ve all seen in movies, this one owned by Beedham (Caustic Scifidelic, who also did the score). It may cost so much more than money.

Meet Michael: Gaylen (Mara Davala) is a five-year-old girl so afraid of monsters that her parents hire an exorcist. This is from the 2017 short of the same name, directed by Brian McCulley and written by Drain.

Finally,Fate Upside Down  has the witches and priests fight it out for the dagger, which brings in Father Dudley (Todd) and his son Robby (Drain). This has animation and werewolves, as well as the characters from the first two stories, plus a last second appearance by Wells soon follows.

Realm of Shadows is a lot better than most streaming anthologies. It seems to have a central idea about love and evil, as well as moments of experimentation, even silent movie elements. It definitely looks way better than its budget would suggest and I’d love to see where Drain takes this in the sequel that is built by the ending.

You can watch this on Tubi.

O.J. Simpson died on April 10 of this year and it made me reflect. This movie asks the viewer to remember where you were when you saw the Bronco being chased by the police. I was in a raucous bar in Beaver, PA which was usually so overwhelming loud and it was super quiet. People suddenly had to realize that they were watching history and one of the first major moments of the 24 hour news cycle. It’s difficult to explain what it was like to live through the years of O.J. being arrested, the trial and what came after to someone who wasn’t alive for it. It was a TV show that we all lived through every night.

In this documentary, we hear from Kato Kaelin, Alan Dershowitz and Christopher Darden — as well as many others — as they talk about what it was like to be in the middle of this trial and the surrounding fervor. Even though we are so many years removed from this time, it still feels so real and like it just happened.

The really interesting part is when one of the people interviewed speaks about how O.J. claimed for years that he was above being black or white and wanted to transcend race, just being known as O.J. Yet when the trial was happening, he quickly embraced his blackness to gather the support of the community. It was also a truly tense time to be in Los Angeles, as after the Rodney King trial and the riots, it felt as if anything could set the whole place on fire.

If you have any interest in this trial and this era, you probably have seen everything there is to see. I mean, we did an entire podcast about the American Crime Story O.J. season. That said, it’s here for you if you need it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

William Brown (Jonah Ray) is stuck. He wants to be a prog musician and that’s not something that’s going to make you rich but it might make you creatively fulfilled, as long as you realize that no one else is going to get the music you play. He’s working at a studio for Scott (Thomas Lennon), engineering a session of druggy Caleb Bang Jansen (Ryan Kattner) and being berated for everything he does. At least he has his old videos of Swig (Jon Daly, a yinzer) to inspire him.

Home isn’t much better. While his wife Emily (Kiran Deol) is supportive, he also has to deal with his landlady (Randee Heller, Alice from Soap and Daniel LaRusso’s mom) making him fix the fuse box, a rampaging Daryl the pig (played by Kosher the pig) and a new neighbor named Vlad (Alex Winter), who won’t stop blasting music, moving furniture and screaming. It’s enough to push him to do something insane.

After failing to make Vlad stop being so horrible — he calls the cops at one point and his wife ends up liking the old man — he tries to talk to him. It ends up in a fistfight and Vlad is accidentally impaled. That’s when William starts hearing the voice of Swig, telling him how to get rid of the body, which ends up being more than one body. It ends up being a lot of bodies.

Yet despite becoming a mass murderer, the good news is that William finally finishes his album and becomes a success. Well, he’s in jail. But you get to see a torso with guts hanging out play drums and some of the craziest prog instruments ever.

Director Josh Forbes comes from music videos and that’s a good thing. He’s working from a fun script by Mike Benner, Jared Logan and Charles A. Pieper and some wild effects by Bill Corso and Ben Gojer. Plus, seeing Alex Winter in a movie makes me so happy and he makes the most out of both of his roles.

This is the kind of movie that doesn’t need overthought and just is out to entertain you. It succeeds beyond expectation.

Also known as Nazi Dawn — because our possessed heroine of sorts is named Dawn (Kristen Casner, using her much more Teutonic full name Kristen Walterscheid Casner) — this is all about a group of sorority girls who take their new pledge Dawn to a country estate and end up awakening the spirit of Dawn’s great-grandfather Van Holly, who was a Nazi butcher. Why do a seance? I mean, do you not know better? Also: one of the girls, Eve (Lora McHugh) is always leading Dawn around on a leash, so should we surprised when the slave becomes the dominatrix with Aryan costuming?

The occult loving Agness (Veronica Ricci), sapphic couple Fiona (Jennifer Van Heeckeren) and Alex (Laura Azevedo), Dee (Ashley Rose) and Alyson (Kelly Erin Decker) were dumb enough to unleash the Nazi spirit, which went into the village idiot, and when they kill him, it goes into Dawn. The Ouija board is saved for the last twenty minutes despite being so highly billed in the title.

Directed by Dennis Devine, this has no less than five writers: Ted Chalmers, Annie T. Conlon, Karianne Davis, Monte Hunter and Veronica Ricci, who in addition to being in the cast also wrote some of the dialogue. Adult stars Missy Martinez and Ryan Keely also appear and this movie in no way shies away from nudity, bondage and gore, which is kind of welcome even if the kills are a bit neutered.

However, it has a great name and poster and quite often, that’s all I need to watch something.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I usually say things like, “This was good for a Tubi Original,” but Killer Body Count is damn good for a slasher, much less one made in 2024.

Cami George (Cassiel Eatock-Winnik) gets caught making out — beyond that, engaging in mutual masturbation, which she initiates — with a boy in the storage room of her church. Her father blames the suicide death of her mother (Kira Wilkerson) for how she acts and Father Tim tells him that they will send her to the Beautiful Savior Treatment Center.

This place used to be a retreat for priests and a sleepaway camp where either mushrooms — or a young priest who went insane and decided to kill young fornicators — wiped out everyone staying there other than brother and sister Eugene (Bjorn Steinbach) and Tawny (Alex McGregor).  They’ve started this camp to help Catholic boys and girls to grow up with less sin in their heart and that means isolating the sexes, locking them in, throwing away their phones and teaching them Jehoga, which gets rid of all that weird Eastern psychology in yoga.

Cami is now pretty much a captive, living along with Chris, Rob (Ethan Sanders), Bree, Ali (Khosi Ngema), Wyatt (Savana Tardieu), Mia (N’kone Mametja), Bree (Jessie Diepeveen), Riley (Atara Leigh) ,Dan — who looks like Jesus if he drank kombucha — and Kevin (Adam Lennox) as they breathe, worship and commit to protecting themselves from their sexual urges.

Except that these are teenagers and they all just want to get laid, so they just keep on doing it, even if whoever orgasms seems to get killed by a devil-masked slasher who lives in the woods. Or a ghost. Or the priest, who has remained there ever since he massacred everyone so long ago.

This is a movie filled with great dialogue, such as “I saw a guy you fucked get murdered by a guy in a devil mask. I’m far from OK.” and “He was crushed to death. How is that an accident? God works in mysterious ways.” It also doesn’t forget that young people today are no longer constrained by heterosexual relationships and never shames them for having urges, even if that’s all that Tawny seems to do, including making Cami kneel on rocks or slicing a crucifix into Wyatt’s hand.

It’s hard to make a slasher in the post-Scream era yet this gets so much right. The kills look incredible, the villains have a great modus operandi even if it’s taken from so many giallo movies (no complaints) and the cast is uniformly attractive.

Director Danishka Esterhazy also made the remake of Slumber Party Massacre and The Banana Splits Movie. I enjoyed both of those, but I loved this. It was written by Jessica Landry, who also wrote the Tubi Original Obsessed to Death.

Slasher fans — don’t miss this one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Donna Fendyr (Jessica Lowndes, the newer version of 90210) wakes up in the hospital after a deadly car crash with amnesia, her husband Scott (Justin Lacey) dead and a baby named Cleo. Her brother Mason (Brad Harder) is helping her to adjust, but could she have kidnapped the child of Leon (Clayton James) and Amira (Zibby Allen)? Or is something even weirder happening?

This movie boasts a great villain in Leon, who switches back and forth from someone who seems to be looking for answers, just like Donna, to someone using her to kill his unfaithful wife.

Directed by Monika Mitchell and writer Helen Marsh also worked on Deadly Midwife and Deadly Invitations together. Here, they pretty much take a mystery — even to its lead — and make her wonder if the child belongs to her husband, making her deal with not just her grief but now anger that he was cheating on her.

So yes, some of this, you can see coming. Other parts of it surprised me. It’s very Lifetime — Tubi feels like the streaming heir to that network, even as I pay for the Lifetime Movie digital channel — but has that ever been something I didn’t want to watch? Lowndes is also quite good as the heroine.

The end of this movie, however, is ridiculous and makes me like it even more. We end up at a party at Donna’s house, the real parents of Cleo have been revealed and everyone is happy. Donna is excited because a man has agreed to fix her car in exchange for dating her and she opens the door to a POV shot, making us the man she has gotten to go along with this deal. Huh?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Cry Wolf, Truth or Dare, Kick-Ass 2, Fantasy Island) , who wrote the script with Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, this is exactly the kind of horror movie that comes out these days: produced by Blumhouse, rated PG-13, so dark that I could barely figure out what was going on in some scenes and all about someone coming back to their childhood home and dealing with past trauma, a plot of nearly every new scary film I watch. But I thought, am I being unfair? Possibly. Maybe I need to actually watch this, as the idea — childhood imaginary friends are angry at being abandoned — is a great one.

Jessica (DeWanda Wise) is a successful author of children’s books who has married a musician named Max (Tom Payne) and is now the stepmother to his daughters Taylor (Taegen Burns) and Alice (Pyper Braun). She hasn’t gotten over her rough upbringing and frequently dreams of her mentally ill father Ben and Simon the spider, who she has made a central character in her work.

Despite these issues, they decide to moves into Jessica’s childhood home. Alice finds Chauncey the teddy bear, who becomes her imaginary friend while Jessica meets someone who claims she babysat her named Gloria (Betty Buckley, who is a bright spot), who tells her stories of her upbringing that she has forgotten.

After meeting with chid therapist Dr. Alana Soto (Verónica Falcón) when Alice shows the same issues Jessica once had, they learn that no one can see the teddy bear except Alice and Jessica. Soto has several patients who have all had similar problems with being unable to see the difference between reality and fantasy.

Then, Alice disappears.

Gloria tells Taylor that Chauncey was also Jessica’s childhood imaginary friend. It turns out that imaginary friends are real spirits that feed off the imagination of young people and are generally friendly but become ill tempered when they are abandoned.

Gloria, Jessica and Taylor must complete a scavenger hunt, which is a ritual that the imaginary friends use, and enter the Never Ever, the place where these metaphysical being reside. The items include “Something that scares you. Something that you would get in BIG trouble for. Something that makes you MAD. Something that HURTS.” This is different from the past, as Jessica was told to bring “Something to paint. Somethin that burns. Something u eat from. Somethin that makes u happee. Some peez of you. Something that makes you mad.”

That’s because at one point, Jessica tried to leave reality for this place but was saved by her father, who was driven insane by what he saw. That’s why he’s been in an institution ever since.

The problem is that Gloria wants to stay, as Chauncey has been in contact with her. He promised her all the power of his home if she trapped the women with him, but in the middle of her explaining the magnificent power of the Never Ever, he appears and tears her apart. Jessica responds by stabbing him in the eye. Even when it seems like everyone has escaped, they remain trapped until Chauncey shows his spider form — Stephen King, call for residuals — and Alice sets him on fire. And yes, like so many movies, they burn their house down to escape.

The women try and get a hotel, but when they see a kid playing with his imaginary friend, they leave.

There are shout outs to  Labyrinth, A Nightmare on Elm Street — they live on Elm Street — Alice In Wonderland and the whole thing is inspired by Poltergeist, which Wadlow cites by saying, “It perfectly strikes the balance between scares and this benign sense of wonder and excitement and emotion that you get when you have a family that you care about.”

My wonder — seeing as how this is all about imagination — is if all of these movies that refer to the past and have similar plots are leading to the well of ideas that the next generation of filmmakers making being further muddied. This is fine, I guess, but when you’re paying so much for a movie — whether going to see it in its short theatrical window or watching it at home for a fee — you want more than fine. Maybe I expect too much from escapist summertime movies, but I want to be inspired and wowed and come away thinking of all the ways a movie can expand.

Instead, I just watched the time and wondered when this was over.

Amelia (Rebecca Liddiard) is an unreliable narrator, if you will. She’s just getting over a bad breakup — maybe — with a man who was wrong for her — perhaps — and is trying to improve her mental health. Or stop taking her pills and ignoring every time her mother calls. She’s found her way to a rougher part of the city, living with a roommate named Melinda (Camille Stopps) who may have even more issues than she does.

And oh yes. Their house might be haunted.

Deadbolt is directed by Mars Horodyski and written by Michael Rinaldi (Meet the Killer Parents). It has a nice glossy look that doesn’t betray its Tubi origins. And it does a great job of making us wonder who is really trying to drive its heroine even madder.

Amelia has to stay on her meds or she starts to hallucinate. This being a potentially haunted house, that’s not a good thing. Nor is the fact that her ex-boyfriend Colin (Joey Belfiore) is continually stalking her, while Melinda’s addict boyfriend Mark (Thomas Duplessie) keeps crashing on their couch and speaking of Melinda, what’s with that rash that’s overtaking her face?

There’s a bright spot. Amelia meets an artist named David (Jamie Spielchuk) who is very protective of her in the face of everything she’s dealing with, like rats in the basement, a fire in the neighborhood and Bruno (Bill MacDonald), a neighbor who seems threatening but is just dealing with dementia.

Sure, this seems like it could be a Lifetime movie, but is that a bad thing?

You can watch this on Tubi.