Mama Sue Flay (Trinity The Tuck), Robin Banks (Heidi N Closet), Bella Da Boys (Crystal Methyd), and Olive Wood (Cara Melle) are four drag queens on tour that planned on playing at a famous club, The Bold Tuck, but have accidentally been booked at The Bold Buck, a biker club in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a mistake that any of us could make, right?

They try to make the most of it, as the bartender Dusty (Neil Sandilands) pays them anyway and at least two people show up, probably the only other two LGBTQ+ people for miles, Jax (Donia Kash) and Steven (Gabriel Harry Meltz). As they start their act, Travis (Daniel Janks) starts screaming at them to get off the stage and in all the confusion, another local, Marv (Gustav Rossouw) starts to bite people. Yes, we’re in Bat Country and the film seems like Slither, Feast, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, VFW and From Dusk till Dawn having a few drinks with To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

In no way is that a bad thing, as this movie has style, great lighting, fun special effects and plenty of surprises to dish out.

It’s a movie aware of vampire movie history as well as one that doesn’t make the locals all into bigots and even gives Travis a redemption arc that he never would have had unless he met our heroines and fought vampires with them. The ladies also struggle against in-fighting and realize the love they have for one another.

Also: garlic bread and a sprinkler system make for some amazing weapons. You don’t have to dress like Blade — to call out a great discussion in this film — to be a bad ass vampire killer.

I had a blast watching this. It feels like it needs a bigger audience than just a Tubi Original — not a bad thing, I love these movies after all — and it feels good to see drag queens unite a town and disrupt both vampires and those that are close minded. If only the real world could be the same.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Chris Stokes and Marques Houston have combined to make almost a movie a month on Tubi. From You’re Not Alone, in which the hero watches a masked and gloved killer murder his wife and then come back for his daughter to the mancrush gone bad in The Ex Obsession and three of The Stepmother films, they’ve laid claim to being the most prolific — if not the best — team making Tubi Originals.

Angela (Veronika Bozeman, who was in another Stokes film Still Here) is a CIA agent who loses her husband Jason (Chris Moss) to what she thinks is a heart attack. As she raises her son Jason Jr. (Jered Cheatham at age 12, King Cheatham at age 7) with the platonic support of her agency partner Byron (Lance Gross, the Sleepy Hollow TV show), she finally decides to leave the life behind. That is, until one of her toughest cases comes back and Dmitri Merciano (Charlie Weber), the man who actually killed her husband, many of her fellow agents and nearly murdered her when he discovered that she had been working undercover to get him.

Like so many Tubi Originals, this starts in the middle of the a story (in media res as a better reviewer would tell you) with Bob’s Coffee Shop blowing up real good and nearly killing Angela. There are several big explosions in this, way bigger than you’d expect for the usual budget Stokes and Houston receive.

That explosion would be the second time the main bad guy kills someone she loves, as a bomb wipes out Byron the very day he decides to tell Angela how much he loves her. The bad guys also kill her mother Carolyn (Janet Hubert, the first Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) but not before she goes old lady Arnold on several of them before being killed by a female assassin with a katana.

That said — this movie is pretty fun and it’s nice to see people of color and women represented throughout as total bad asses, good and bad characters included. There’s also a lot of camaraderie between the agents, like a retiring agent named Lisette (Zulay Henao) and Vivian (Annie Ilonzeh), one of Angela’s best friends in the agency who gets caught up in the war between our heroine and her arch enemy. Plus, Malik Yoba from New York Undercover is the leader of the good guys, Director Walker.

There’s also a date scene inside a Bob’s Big Boy and man, I wish we still had those out here. And Stokes shows up at the end as Barry the mailman!

Another victory for this team.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Director Christopher Wilcha’s fast-paced documentary Flipside should hit home with anyone who has ever been involved in any type of creative work, from filmmaking to writing to any other type of art. In Flipside, he takes into stock a wide variety of projects that meant a lot to him that he never had the chance to finish, for a variety of reasons.

A film about Wilcha’s personal life as much as his professional one(s), Flipside takes viewers on a journey from the director’s subversive first full-time job working for Columbia House, during which he made his first documentary, the well-received The Target Shoots First (2000). Although it seemed like a career in documentary filmmaking was in the offing, life, as it does, got in the way, including a marriage and children leading to needing steady payment. Wilcha once again found himself working in advertising, filming commercials when not working on projects that never seemed to get finished.

A main focus of Flipside is Wilcha’s second attempt at trying to help Flipside Record Store in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey — where he worked as a high-schooler — survive in a world that has passed the shop and its owner Dan Dondiego by. Refusing to take Flipside online in any form nor to organize the cluttered business — along with facing new competition from a tightly run store nearby — Dondiego’s plight causes Wilcha to reassess his own inability to let go of the past.

Flipside incorporates footage from some of Wilcha’s unfinished projects, including a profile of the late jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who knew he was dying at the time, and a document of Starlee Kine’s attempt to get over writer’s block to work on a book. Coeditors Claire Ave’Lallemant and Joe Beshenkovsky work some serious magic as they take Flipside viewers on a brisk, back-and-forth ride through Wilcha’s life.

There’s much more to Wilcha’s story, and I’ll leave that for viewers to experience for themselves. It’s a highly relatable one to me, and I’m sure to many others, as well. Flipside will put a few lumps in your throat, some smiles on your face, and some existential questions about your own life in your mind. 

Flipside screens as part of the 2024 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 18–28. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.

When a popular influencer named Sasha Joy (Bukola Ayoka) is kidnapped by two criminals — Elyse (Nicolette Pearse) and Quinn (Craig Arnold), she becomes a big story when it turns out that she’s helping the very people who took her — Stockholm Syndrome is real — to steal money from some hige mansions.

But is she doing it of her own free will? Or is she now an influencer thief?

Directed by Stefan Brogren (A Chance for Christmas) and written by Andrea Shawcross, this lets us know early on that Sasha really is taking all of her fancy dresses and makeup from June Bentley rich woman who her her mother Trina works for as a maid. She uses her status online to get invited to an opening for model/actress Chloe Clifton (Eden Cupid), which gets her kidnapped by Quinn (Craig Arnold), Elyse (Nicolette Pearse) and Nathan (Oren Williamson) and used online to get money for their robberies and scams.

Have you ever noticed how many Tubi Originals use the narrative structure that starts with a moment at the point of seemingly no return just before the end of the movie and then rewinds to show the viewer how the characters got there? I think nearly every single one starts like this and I’ve come to expect it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

*This Review Contains Spoilers

What it is: 

A competently written and directed, well-acted, but overly long derivative prequel to the original Omen trilogy. An American girl, raised in a Catholic orphanage, travels to Rome to become a full nun. She works in an all-girls orphanage/home for unwed mothers. There, she uncovers the conspiracy to birth Damian from the original 1976 film. Along the way, she discovers that she is one of many chosen mothers. 

The film slides quite nicely into the events of the original film while setting up a parallel storyline we never knew existed. One in which Damian’s twin sister has been hidden away on Alderaan to keep her safe from the Empire. Um, I mean the evil Catholics trying to assassinate her. 

Director Arkasha Stevenson certainly did her homework, which I appreciated. The little musical cues evoking Morricone’s giallo work made me smile. But at times the film feels like an academic essay littered with extended passages from other, better source material. 

It’s a movie meal that plucked all its ingredients from a list of high-quality horror and sci-fi films including The Omen, Deep Red, The Devils, Rosemary’s Baby, Possession, Flavia the Heretic, Return of the Jedi, To the Devil A Daughter, Inseminoid, Suspiria, and yes…even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

With a meal like this, you know exactly what you’re getting. The consequences of eating a meal like this are twofold: 

1. You’re not hungry anymore. The food fills you up. Job done. 
2. You drive home thinking about that really great meal you had at that awesome restaurant on your birthday 10 years earlier. 

The key ingredient missing is the “extraordinary events happening in an ordinary world” approach taken in the original film. There was almost no supernatural hoo-ha in the original Omen. To an outsider in that world, everything that happens could be viewed as simple coincidence or tragedy. This film is loaded with overt supernatural stuff going down and for the most part, it works. 

What it isn’t: 

• A nunsploitation film. There are no gratuitous repressed nun sexy shenanigans. The first act teases that it might go there, but it never does.  
• Alucarda

What I liked: 

• The performances are top-notch. Kudos to Nell Tiger Free for carrying the picture admirably. 
• The camera work and music are excellent. 
• The concept of organized religion deliberately doing evil things to pump up their membership numbers was accurate. This was the most disturbing idea in the film.
• The birthing scenes.
• The files containing the photos of the failed, deformed antichrist babies. 
• ‘60s-style music needle drops

What I disliked: 

• Too many jump scares in the first half. 
• Too much time spent settling Margaret into her new job at the orphanage. 
• An all-too predictable plot twist for Margaret. 
• Entire sequences lifted from other films. 
• An all-too predictable set-up for a trilogy that will likely end with a teenage Satanic Leia blowing up a bunch of stuff with her newly discovered powers. 

Who is this movie for? 

• Younger horror fans who dug The Nun and other recent jump-scare heavy films will like this a lot more than older viewers who have likely seen all its influences more than once on multiple formats with and without commentary. 
• Disney, who appear hell-bent on resurrecting every good 20th Century Fox franchise from the 1970s.  
• Younger film critics who don’t know that women have dominated the horror genre for 50+ years. 

Summary: 

It’s a worthy effort considering that most franchise reboots aren’t stellar. It wouldn’t be very fair if I said I love a movie like Paul Naschy’s Exorcismo, which is a blatant rip-off of The Exorcist and then slate this film for doing something similar with a bigger budget. It’s a good film when viewed from that perspective. I liked it better than Omen III: The Final Conflict, but not as much as the 1976 original or Damian: Omen II.  It’s a well-made, entertaining film with nothing new to say. A meal that fills you up on a Friday night with your fellow horror fiends. 

Remember Jen and Sylvia Soska? Well, they just made a sequel — kinda, sorta — to Night of the Living Dead and its on Tubi. Yes, the very same Soska sisters who made the remake of Rabid and American Mary.

Now, is that a good thing? Was the remake of Rabid a good idea? Have we gotten so many sequels to Romero’s work both from him — good (Dawn, Day) and bad (everything not Dawn and Day) — and from the other creators of the original, good (Return of the Living Dead) and, well, weird (Flesheater) and just plain abysmal (Children of the Living Dead). Then again, isn’t everything after Romero influenced or outright stolen (Zombi) from his work?

Ash (Ashley Moore) and her brother Luke (Shiloh O’Reilly) are the grandchildren of Ben from Night of the Living Dead and even have the gun he used to kill zombies. Their parents have gone away on Ash’s birthday and her friend Iris (Camren Bicondova) offers to watch her brother so that she can go to the Festival of the Living Dead, a concert that is on the same ground where the walking dead first appeared in 1968, with her boyfriend Kevin (Gage Marsh), his brother Ty (Andre Anthony) and sisters Destini (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and Lindsey (Maia Jae Bastidas).

Yes, kind of like Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave. The less said of that, the better.

Written by Miriam Lyapin and Helen Marsh (who also wrote the Tubi Original Deadly Midwife), this kicks up a notch when the concert goers all get in a car accident hitting a zombie and go to the concert to get help. Iris hears that her friend is in danger, so she gets her friend Blaze (Christian Rose) to drive her and Luke to save everyone. Yes, she takes a diabetic child into the heart of the undead.

For some reason, the festival has a giant man to be burned, like Burning Man. Or The Wicker Man. Or Midsommar. None of this has anything to do with the movie you are going to watch and maybe twenty people came to this concert, which feels more like the Gathering of the Juggalos than a concert that is a tribute to people who died. The bands all feel like Warped Tour instead of anything, as if this movie was made in the 2000s for SyFy and was filmed in Eastern Europe just like, yes there it is again, Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.

I grew up minutes from Evans City and this weird field is not the weird fields in Evans City. Instead, it’s all cash in cheap quick artifice and yeah, I should know better, but I never do. Moore and Bicondova are good actors and do what they can, but they there isn’t much to save.

Also: How did they get Ben’s gun and know he was a hero when he died in a basement and got burned as a zombie? Did we forget, you know, the shocking ending of the movie that started modern horror?

If this movie was just a zombies at a concert film, I’d be fine with it. But by associating itself — literally inserting itself — into the trinity of zombie movies, it commits an unforgivable sin. It’s boring. There’s a great idea in here of a world where the undead have become commonplace and celebrated as tragedies like how 9/11 is a few years away from being another sale day like President’s Day. Instead, it’s content to be a movie with some decent fight scenes, alright gore and nothing else to add to a genre that’s overflowing with movies that added less than nothing.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Keith (Matthew MacCaull) and Kathleen (Elyse Levesque) are taking their kids Jeffrey (Josh Zaharia) and Amy (Amanda Fix) on an RV vacation across the country. While the family eats breakfast, Amy goes off to smoke and two backwoods types appear and are vaguely threatening. You’ve seen it before in, well, nearly every RV horror and rednecks against normal folks movies.

Except this one has a twist.

And I don’t want to reveal it because even though I assumed it was coming, the way it plays out was pretty great.

Directed by Tesh Guttikonda (the writer of Influencer) and Mitch Oliver and written by Al Kaplan (Zombeavers), this places the RV family into the home of Vern (Richard Harmon), Billy (Ben Sullivan), Big Mac (Dayleigh Nelson), Savannah (Brenna Llewellyn) and Juli Ann (Cassandra Sawtell). Their home is isolated far from the closest down and the law, which is Deputy White (Alexander Calvert).

Again, without giving much away, this does a great job of pitting the civilized — a family that barely gets along and use drugs to get by — against who they perceive as the hopeless uncivilized country folk who carry guns everywhere they go. The film also places your sympathy with some characters and then pulls your feet out from under you when the reveals — there are more than one — happen. Toss in some solid comedy that doesn’t diffuse the tension and some grisly gore — look out for that eyeball scene — and you have a slasher that’s way better than what we’ve come to expect from the genre lately.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When a young Army sergeant is murdered, the police can’t find any answers until they learn that the killer could be as close as the dead man’s backyard. By the end of it all, Jeremy Cuellar admitted to working with Kemia Hassel to kill her husband Sgt. Tyrone Hassel III on New Year’s Eve 2018. Cuellar and Kemia were lovers and all three were soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart in Georgia. The killers had planned to collect Army death benefits and life insurance money.

They had started their affair when they were stationed at Camp Casey Korea as part of the 3rd Infantry Division, 1st Combat Brigade. They communicated on Snapchat as they thought that their messages couldn’t be found or traced. The case was broken when an anonymous tip was given to Officer Eric Wolff that revealed “investigators need to look at the victim’s wife … and a boyfriend who serves in her platoon.”

Cuellar told another soldier that he and Kemia wanted to be together and were planning to murder Tyrone while the married couple was on leave. That soldier went to Criminal Investigation Division and told them that he believed Cuellar was the murderer. He killed Tyrone in the driveway of his father’s house while his year-old-son slept inside. He thought he was bringing home a plate of food for his wife and was walking into a trap that she set up.

This Tubi Original tells you the entire story and has family members share their loss. It’s a hard watch, seeing their pain, but does a good job of sharing out this tragedy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

An engaging documentary focused on the remarkable life of maverick theater owner Chelly Wilson in the heyday of cinematic porn as well as a valentine to the era of grindhouses on New York City’s 42nd Street, director Valerie Kontakos’s Queen of the Deuce is a fascinating watch.

There’s no question that Wilson lived a life, and Kontakos explores it wonderfully, from Wilson’s childhood in Greece to her move to America with only $5 to her name, to becoming the the owner of several highly profitable gay porno theaters in the 1970s and a highly respected center of attention to those who knew her. Believe me, there are so many details in this documentary, from heartbreaking to hilarious, about Wilson — an openly gay woman who married men, a Jewish woman who enjoyed celebrating Christmas, a wealthy woman who chose to live above one of her theaters rather than in a more expensive abode — that there aren’t room for in this review.  

Archival audio and video footage of Wilson shares screen time with interviews with some of her relatives and colleagues, all of whom have remarkable stories about her. Speaking of archival footage, scenes of 42nd Street from the seventies should bring lumps to the throats of many a grindhouse theater fan.

Queen of the Deuce is a superb documentary about Chelly Wilson’s jaw-dropping life story, not only in breaking the glass ceiling in the adult film industry but as a younger, free-spirited woman in Greece, and the many fully lived years in between and after. Kontakos’s terrific film comes highly recommended to anyone who enjoys an unusual life story of someone battling the odds and coming out on top.

Queen of the Deuce screened as part of the 2024 edition of Make Believe Seattle, which runs March 21–26. For more information, visit https://www.makebelieveseattle.com/.

Mykah Jones (Sheila Leason) is a wife and mother, as well as a hit woman. None of these things are working out together, because her husband thinks that she’s cheating on her, probably because her cover story of being a photographer keeps getting all messed up when she does things like forget her camera. Instead, she’s out acting like an escort and strangling strange men and getting all sorts of injuries that she can’t explain.

Once she takes on her last assignment, she learns just how important her family is and that goes beyond the marriage counseling that she’s been struggling through with her husband Jamieson (Kevin Blake Chandler). Little does she know that most of her life has been a lie and that she was turned into a killer by her father’s former partner Lady (Cheryl Frazier) who is trying to do the same with her daughter Malia (Anmalya Delva).

Directed by Christian Sesma and written by Karen R. Hardin, this has hints of Kill Bill but from the side that hired killers are good people and do it all for noble reasons. So will Mykah kill her target Dyson (Dontelle Jackson), as she’s being blackmailed by Chauntell (Kyle Kankonde), who has photos of her seducing a target that she plans to send to Jamieson? Being a hired killing machine seems difficult, if this movie is based on reality.

I enjoyed Kiss of Death. It has a few twists that make it different and sure, it’s very similar to True Lies, but that’s not a bad thing.

You can watch this on Tubi.