Daniela (Tamara Almeida) and her husband Jaime (Jason Diaz) have seen better days. He was once a star athlete but got hurt, so now all he does is play video games and get more depressed while his wife cooks, cleans and makes all the money. He resents her, because she reminds him of the great past that he once had. She wants out so that she can have a future.

While talking with his friend Miguel (Milton Torres Lara), the conversation gets around to what Jaime should do now that it looks like he’s heading for a divorce. His wife has a $500,000 life insurance policy, but when Miguel suggests they kill her, Jaime reminds him how much he loves his wife.

However, one of her fellow nurses and her best friend Rosie (Erica Deutschman) has a crush on Jaime and takes a photo of Dani consoling a cop named Noah (Brett Geddes)who saved her from a homeless man who was attacking people inside the hospital. It isn’t even a romance yet, but it’s already upset Dr. Will (Connor McMahon), who has an infatuation with Dani, and when Miguel sees the photo, he decides that yes, his wife must die.

Miguel decides to pull the job but he gets nervous and struggles with Dani, whose hand is on the gun when it goes off. She has no idea what to do, so she hides the body and calls Noah instead of 911. He reacts so much unlike how she expected, telling her that she’s going to hurt his career. That said, he does help her hide out until she figures out what to do next. As she waits in a trailer, she’s using her house’s cameras to watch what Jaime is doing.

Antonio (David Chinchilla), Miguel’s brother, wants revenge a lot more than Jaime. He decides that he’s going to be the one to kill Dani and get the money. Noah, who falls for women in trouble, wants to help her. Jaime has no idea what he wants. Dani, however, is the kind of heroine who will do whatever she has to do to get away from all of these men and the various things they need from her.

Directed by Lisa Soper (the production designer on Peacemaker, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and The Blackcoat’s Daughter) and written by Huelah Lander (Twisted Neighbor), this film has a wild color palette that feels like people live inside a Mario Bava film, as well as some great character work. Rosie is one of the most horrible, self-centered and awesome villains I’ve seen in a movie in some time. And Dani ends up being stronger than anyone else, making unexpected decisions and pulling herself out of the mess her life has become.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The first time I heard about Sean “Puffy” Combs was in 1991 when he promoted an AIDS fundraiser at the City College of New York following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold and in a rush to get to the stage, nine people died.

From my outside the rap knowledge world — I mean, I love Public Enemy, Black Sheep and random songs — I always some him as a pretender, as someone who tagged along with the superior Notorious B.I.G. and then used his death to get ahead.

The last couple of months have been really wild, to say the least.

This whole thing started in 20017 when Cindy Ruela, a former personal chef for Diddy, filed a lawsuit against in L.A. County Superior Court claiming that the artist sexual harassed her. Then a few years later, his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura accused him of rape, sex trafficking and physical abuse, as well as blowing up her boyfriend Kid Cudi’s car. These suits were paid off, but then there were more cases, including some claiming revenge porn was used as Diddy filmed women and used it as blackmail.

By February of this year, Combs had five lawsuits, including one by Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, a producer who claimed that he was raped by Diddy and forced to have sex with sex workers while others watched and filmed him.

It all led to the March 25 raid of Combs’ homes in Los Angeles, New York and Miami y the Department of Homeland Security. In response, Macy’s pulled all of his clothing and soon, others would follow suit.

As this is written, nothing has been decided in court and much of the charges in this are rumors. But man, when there’s smoke, there’s often fire. If you need caught up on a situation in pop culture fast, these TMZ Tubi Originals will do it for you.

Now where’s the Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake breakdown for us old white people?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Ted Campbell (Final Heist), who co-wrote the script with Richard Pierce, This Never Happened is all about Emily (María José De La Cruz) who is the next in her family’s history of being able to see the dead. After all, her grandmother could as well and that’s why she lived out her days alone in a mental hospital.

Emily goes with her boyfriend Matteo (Javier Dulzaides) to his father’s funeral in Mexico City. Afterward, his mother Melora (Andrea Noli) tells him that the house will be sold in a few days. Matteo’s friends — Olivia (Conny Cambambia), Ale (Juana Serrano) and Nica (Gonzalo Zulueta) — decide that one weekend in their old house would give them closure.

You know what happens next.

I mean, Matteo even says to Emily, “You forgot to take your pills.”

Here are a few words of advice for the characters in this movie but well, they’re all dead so it’s hard to say, right? Don’t go back home with your boyfriend. If his friends all seem like drug addicts and may have put drugs in your drink, don’t trust them. If you can see the dead, maybe leave instead of dealing with that big toothed monster in the swimming pool. And if you buy Tarot cards, make sure they’re not razor sharp, no matter how good the scene is, because you’re going to die.

I think that Less Than Zero properly prepared me for a life of hating rich people. This movie is much the same, as they the thing that never happened is — spoiler warning — a girl being drugged and assaulted by several of them at a party in this same house. Now, her spirit wants revenge and is swimming in the pool, activated by those magic crystals that got thrown into the water. That’s more advice. If you have magic objects, don’t be throwing them into the pool.

Then again, I am all for rich kid comeuppance and this movie delivers on that. Tubi horror has been getting better and I’m hoping that a year from now, we’ll all be amazed at hust how far they’ve grown. Until then, this has a nice budget, an attractive cast and a scene where a blender leaks blood everywhere. Can you really ask more from free?

You can watch this on Tubi.

The TMZ crew all gets together and yells at one another about the dumbest celebrity decisions, like how T.I. wanted to be there for his daughter’s gynecologist visits and to be sure she was still a virgin. According to Global News, his daughter said that T.I. had been going with her to these doctor visits since she was 14 or 15 and she “couldn’t have said no” to her dad when he asked to join for the appointments. She also revealed on Instagram that she has harmed herself in the past to deal with her emotions.

Want even dumber? There’s Justin Bieber saying that Anne Frank would have been a “Belieber,” “Live for Now” the Kim Kardashian Pepsi commercial where she solves a protest and police unrest by giving a cop a soda — created by a team of white people and which caused Pepsi to have to write “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are removing the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position.” — as well as the celebrity “Imagine” video during the COVID-19 era and Adam Levine cheating with a woman and using his band’s Instagram account to send messages.

Of all of these decisions, the fact that I watch multiple Tubi TMZ shows in a row to write about them on this site may be among the silliest.

That said, this is just like lying on my grandmother’s bed with a stack of National Enquirer, Star, National Examiner and Globe newspapers and tearing through them, learning about Liz Taylor’s sad last days and who was on drugs, who was on the watermelon diet, who was a friend of Dorothy and who was a cheat. Those are some of the best days of my childhood.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Quinn Walker (Susan Ateh) has just returned to detective work after the death of her police officer husband, a man who everyone loved and who she knew as an abuser. She’s kept that a secret from everyone but most essentially from her son Liam, who idolized his dad. She’s become even more of the mean mom that he forced her to be, keeping her son from his interest in detective work and using true crime websites to help others solve crimes.

On the first day back on the job, she nearly shoots a suspect who ends up being an actor in the middle of a scene. It gets her noticed and while some of the press is bad, many see her as a hero for the way she tried to save someone, even if it was on a movie set.

She’s also just been assigned a new partner, Carter (Jay Rincon), a London detective who has come to America to — as we learn later — find the murderer of his father. They don’t get along and she doesn’t trust him, but her son sees him as someone worth knowing.

In the middle of all this drama, there are also murders.

Mia Bailey is the hottest actress in Hollywood and she’s about to star in a movie based on her friend Anna’s (Roisin Browne) script, Blind Items. At the same time, there’s a blind items website that reveals who will die next, from Mia in the place where her career started to her business manager Jason Cohen (Luis Donegan-Brown) and almost everyone connected to Mia and Anna, who came to the city of dreams together, living with a circle of friends, all of whom are either dying or suspects, like Ozzie, a former military veteran and now spiritual healer.

As Quinn tries to deal with her grief, her new partner and being a mother, she starts to depend on her son, who is able to find clues that she never saw and use the internet way better than she ever would be able to. However, this puts him in danger.

I really liked Quinn’s boss, Captain Ellis (Doña Croll), who has a really great scene with Quinn where she explains that she knew that she always had a hard time being the wife of someone that everyone saw as a much better person than he really was.

The strange thing is deciding to have a London detective in the U.S. When does this ever happen? It’s kind of strange, but not enough to put me off the movie.

Director and co-writer — with Daniel Mahler Landman — Nanea Miyata also directed A Party To Die For, another Tubi Original. I liked how whoever is behind the murders goes through some twists and turns, using Quinn’s recent incident in the news against her. And by the end, there’s a moment that makes who the killer is up in the air, as the messages haven’t stopped on the site.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin, in her debut, Lisa Frankenstein was written by Diablo Cody, who claims that it takes place in the same universe as Jennifer’s Body, It’s set in 1989 and really feels like a movie made for those who may not have been alive at that time and want to feel a cinematic version of it rather than those who lived through it and saw films that inspired this movie, like Weird Science.

Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton, who was in Big Little Lies, Blockers and Freaky), besides being saddled with that name, has lost her mother to an axe murderer and now has a horrible stepmother Janet (Carla Gugino), who has pretty much taken her father (Joe Chrest) from her. The positive things in her life include her somewhat goofy stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano) and best friend Lori (Jenna Davis, the voice of M3GAN). And oh yes, the cemetery where she sits near an unnamed musician (Cole Sprouse, who was Cody on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody) who had fallen in love with a woman before she left him for another man and he was struck by lightning.

After a boy named Doug (Bryce Romero) tries to assault her at a party, Lisa ends up back at the grave, wishing she could be together in death with the musician. Lightning hits his grave and he comes back from the dead as a zombie who follows her. He’s missing body parts, ones that he soon gains by killing anyone who has wronged Lisa, who uses a tanning bed to fuse their parts with his body before the police start to figure out that everyone dead has a connection to Lisa.

I realize that this film may not be for me as a target audience, but I liked its look and soundtrack. Cody’s dialogue is an acquired taste, as hardly anyone speaks like that in real life, but hey, we’re watching a movie. The leads are charming and if this came out in 1989, when I was 17 and the audience for it, I probably would have loved it way more than I did in 2024 when I am 51.

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.