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.

Alex (Natalie Brown) and her problem child daughter Nicole (Lola Flanery) have moved to a new town to get over the death of Alex’s husband (and Nicole’s father). Nicole is also — was also? — a famous social media influencer who ended up with a bad drug habit in the wake of that tragedy and needs to be watched like a hawk by her mother.

Then, as you can tell by the images of the poster, this turns Spirit store Eyes Wide Shut and a bit giallo as there’s a secret party in this town that determines who will be rich and famous. Everyone’s dying to get in, everyone wears masks and somehow, it all ties to the real reason that Alex has moved here: the bridge that cost her husband his life that keeps claiming innocent people with the reason supposedly being that everyone who dies there is a suicide.

It all looks much nicer than its budget suggests and yes, everyone acts like a moron and gets in way over their heads, but isn’t that what movies like this are made for?

Directed by Monika Mitchell (Deadly Midwife) and written by Miriam Lyapin and Helen Marsh (who wrote Festival of the Living Dead as a team), this is certainly much better than Lyapin and Marsh’s zombie failure. I’m all for more of Mitchell’s films, as they have no issue with being absurd and I use that word with the best possible feelings.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Jem Gerrard, who also made Slay for Tubi, this starts with Kay (Khosi Ngema) and her friend Riley (Matthew Vey) sneaking into the home of pharma king Pierce Patton (Francis Chouler) and his girlfriend Jessica (Alex McGregor). Much like Parasite, they seemingly live in the spaces where rich people leave behind during the day, remaining hidden and enjoying the comforts of life that their jobs could never afford.

Except there’s some way strange things going on in this house.

You can tell that Pierce is insane right from the beginning, as when he sees a photo that a journalist (Grant Ross) has used for his cover story, he instantly reacts like it’s the biggest slight ever. It takes Jessica to calm his nerves and make him settle down at his party.

Spoilers from here on out…

When you buy an entire mountain so no one else can be near you, you’re probably the kind of maniac that is conducting secret body horror experiments in your basement. That said, I was surprised several times by this movie, as characters aren’t what they seem and the lure of power, money or medical innovation start to be more important than being a human being. Only Kay emerges as someone who just wants to escape and tell the world about what she has seen. There’s a good chance that no one is going to allow her to be so altruistic.

This is the second movie by Gerrard that I have enjoyed and I hope that Tubi keeps them coming.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The TMZ crew gathers yet again — these people love to get together and yell at one another — to discuss drugs in Hollywood, like ayahuasca retreats and ketamine therapy.

I wouldn’t know what ayahuasca was if it wasn’t for Howard Stern and I’m fascinated by a drug that basically makes you shit your pants. This doc even meets the Soul Quest, an Ayahuasca church located in Orlando, Florida, and explains how this drug has followers including  Lindsay Lohan, Jim Carrey, Aaron Rodgers, Jada and Will Smith, Sting, Mike Tyson and Andre 3000.

In case you don’t know what it is, it’s a South American psychoactive drink that came from the Amazon and Orinoco basins and is traditionally part of spiritual ceremonies, divination and healing.

But yeah, it can make you go in your pants.

Drugs have always been a big deal in the tabloids so it’s wild to see one so supportive of drug use, but we also live in a world where marijuana is nearly legal, which I never believed would happen. I mean, I get microdosing ads on Instagram all the time.

Ready to learn how the A list trips balls? Harvey Levin is ready to let you in on all the behind the scenes substances.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Made by The Asylum, this was directed by Brian Nowak (Jurassic Domination) and written by C.M. Dowling (Super Volcano) and M.L. Miller (Shark Waters). This takes place in The Armada Hotel, which is under construction when an earthquake shakes the city. It traps Brian (Matthew Gademske) and his girlfriend Amy (Angela Cole). While he knows that she’s diabetic and worries about her condition, he doesn’t know that she’s pregnant. Along with the architects Deb (Jenny Tran) and Joe (Pakob Jarernpone) and the person in charge of the construction, Reese (Houston Rhines) and several other future victims, they must try to get out of the building or die trying.

Most of them die, no spoiler needed.

A whole bunch of attractive people get killed by everything from malfunctioning elevators to flooding and even a helicopter bisecting them. The first part has nearly no effects and instead uses the building — which has fallen into the underground — to good effect. Then they get to the surface and that’s when The Asylum remembers that they have to have lots of CGI, some bad, some not as bad, and there’s even a great moment where the survivors try to escape a flood by driving through a parking garage before smashing into a wall because of bad driving.

I love 70s disaster movies so much and always hope that modern movies can get close to them. This has the spirit, if not the cast of famous people, but is missing the budget. That said, if you just want to chill out, stop thinking and enjoy what citywide destruction looks like on a low budget, who am I to hold you back? I just wish that there were sharks in the water when it flooded or that this went crazier, but as it is, it moves fast and won’t bore you.

You can watch this on Tubi.