In 1998, the Disney Channel Original Movie Halloweentown was filmed in St. Helens, Oregon. Since then, it has seen 50,000 visitors every October, even 25 years later. Yet, just like the town in the series of Disney films—Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge, Halloweentown High and Return to Halloweentown—the locals believe that there are real hauntings. And beyond that, like any small town, there’s plenty of gossip to listen to.

Directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, this film feels like a real-life Waiting for Guffman. A zombie dance is choreographed by a girl who had to drop out of dance and wants to reconnect with her father. A newcomer to the town has bought a favorite restaurant, the Klondike Tavern, and his social media mistake causes his entire staff to mutiny. A woman claims to the town council that she is being attacked in her dreams and that the town is becoming possessed by demons. A team of paranormal investigators is also investigating the hauntings they claim are real.

This film never makes fun of its subjects, instead allowing them to tell their stories. I absolutely loved this and have been raving about it to everyone I can, as it’s a perfect non-spooky way to get yourself ready for the Halloween season. Here’s hoping it finds a streaming home soon so more people can enjoy this fun hangout in a town that has embraced its history as a spooky location.

The 2025 Overlook Film Festival takes place April 3 to 6. To learn more, click here.

The Grinch (Otis “Money Bag Mafia” Mcintosh) and Santa (Navv Greene) have issues, so the Grinch goes from stealing toys to taking the man’s wife (Christianne “Chrissy Cindy” Jones), and she actually enjoys being with a new man. Or whatever a Grinch is, look, my life has reached the level where my only enjoyment and escape is watching this movie and trying to figure out who it’s for and why anyone other than me would watch it.

Whenever I started to worry that this had no plot, I was rewarded with montage sequences of the Grinch throwing money and women twerking. No notes on that.

I love that this came up as a recommended movie on Tubi, who knows me so well. It’s a minute of plot thrown into a film that feels like several months long and filled with people shouting their dialogue. It also debuted in March, which seems to be the perfect time for a movie set during the holidays, but who am I to question the decisions of the filmmakers? That’s really the least of this movie’s faults. Let’s instead celebrate its best parts, which are almost all curvy black women celebrating the freedom of dance and just taking off their clothes. I wish the Grinch wasn’t a misogynist, but this isn’t the movie where he will learn his lesson. I doubt anyone would want to see that. We should all hope he does better next time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This is a feature-length documentary on the historic Dallas, TX (2424 Swiss Avenue) goth club The Church, one of the longest-running clubs of its kind in the U.S. You’ll meet those who run the place, musicians, local bands, patrons and other people who explain why this place is just so important, as well as its motto of “Enter Without Prejudice.”

There’s a storyline in here with DJ Joe Virus, who went from a local to a national artist, as well as how the club would eventually close after the times of COVID-19, as a big company bought the entire block. Seeing the people whose lives were made by the space come back for one last time is quite emotional.

I always dreamed of places like this, as Pittsburgh had some minor spots — and I got here after The Decade and the Electric Banana were closing up — but nothing like this. If your town has a place with a history and a scene, celebrate it. You won’t know what you have until you lose it.

You can get this from MVD and learn more at the official site.

Man, I really liked WolfCop, which was also directed and written by Lowell Dean, but this movie did not work for me at all.

The indy group SAW is running shows in small towns in Canada, but to performers like Miss Behave (Ayisha Issa) and Kate the Great (Sara Canning), it’s the big time. Joe Lean (Steven Ogg) is fooling around with Miss Behave and may want more; they all have to deal with a show in the middle of nowhere for a cult that’s run by The Prophet (Chris Jericho), a wrestler that Lean had to retire as well as Kate’s father.

All of the wrestlers are forced into matches that reflect earth, air, fire and water to raise Satan from Hell. By all rights, as someone who spent most of his life in indy wrestling and loves horror movies, I should be into this. I liked the masked wrestler Enigma Jones (Mo Adan) and the needledrop music, but this felt like it was knocking at the door of being an interesting movie but never kicked it in and took it by the throat as it should have.

There are so many plotholes — is SAW the biggest thing in wrestling or an indy that’s barely holding on? — and an ending that is so relentlessly dumb that it almost changed this review into a rave that I can barely recommend this and that makes me kind of sad.

Jericho is fine in this, even if the whole time you just think, “Oh, that’s Chris Jericho.” Think Green Room with devil worship and you get the idea. It’s technically OK, but there could have been a version of this that went wild with its ideas and pushed everyone to be over the top, going from just being there to a grindhouse-style epic that mixes horror and pro wrestling the way — read the Mat Monsters articles I’ve written for better executions — they deserve to be. As it is, 2 stars out of 5, but Dave Meltzer would probably give it 7 stars.

“TMZ explores the many, stunning security failures that lead to the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally.”

Like short people and women, according to one person in this.

We live in a time and place where incidents like the one in this documentary have already been forgotten, questions have gone unasked and we just move on because we are so overwhelmed, left and right, by the news and its endless cycle, which beats us into the rocks like we’re a bloated dead body bobbing in the salty sea, lashed to the coral, unfeeling as our forms are obliterated by nature and time and shock and awe. I am exhausted. I have so little left, and I can’t doomscroll any more just as much as I can’t place my head in the sand. Quite frankly, I have no idea what to do.

Also, I grew up close to Butler and drove past these fairgrounds all the time, and no, I am not surprised that this would happen there.

You can watch this on Tubi.

It is yet another movie I watched on an airplane, which is the best place to watch as you’re going to be happy you lived through the flight and not concentrating on how you wasted your life watching this. Yes, it’s another M. Night Shyamalan movie. Still, this time, it’s a vanity project because his daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan plays Lady Raven, the Taylor Swift of his universe, a singer beloved by young ladies who draws Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) to her concert. The problem? Cooper is a serial killer known as The Butcher, and this is all a trap — get it? — to arrest him.

He’s been hunted by Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), an FBI profiler who has enacted her own parent trap — ugh, get it? — to arrest him.

The review from Benjamin Lee in The Guardian sums up so much of how I feel about Shyamalan’s work: “Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it’s fiendishly smart. Maybe if it had been more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun.”

Each successive film from him — Old is nearly unwatchable and Knock at the Cabin was infuriating —  is dumber to the point that no human being acts like a real person, as if it was made by an alien who has just come to Earth with the kind of budget that allows him to keep making shitty movies no matter what. The Happening and The Last Airbender would end most careers, but here we are, almost two decades later, and we get a new Shyamalan movie nearly every year. And each time, I walk in saying, “This is it. This is the one.” And again, like burning my hand on the stove and never remembering that open flames can set my hand ablaze and how much it hurts, I watch his movies and wonder why my fingers are singed.

Here’s the pitch: “What if Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” I hate that today’s movies keep using that superior film as a reference point and can’t come close to it. This was shot on 35mm and had a huge budget, but it had all the ideas of the lowest-budget streamer.

This feels six hours long with multiple end points that just end up being the next part of the movie, the best example of a movie where I look at how much time is left and being shocked that 35 minutes have passed and I am only a third of the way through. By the end, which has a surprise- he is ready to escape again- I was praying this was the movie’s end. It was, but then the post-credits sequence made me worried that this would have even more.

Look, I know I love some terrible filmmakers. Mattei, Franco, you name it. But yet, their movies speak to me, despite their ineptitude at times, because they are made by someone who seems to love making movies while making money. And I guess that M. Night loves movies too, but he should really embrace his inner scumbag. If his films had any edge or felt dangerous or scuzzy, I’d probably be one of his most prominent apologists. Instead, I’m covering my burned hand with creams and salves, wondering how I got into this situation all over again.

“This is the first release of Stubios, a fan-fueled studio for aspiring filmmakers and their fans. In addition to welcoming creatives from varied backgrounds into Hollywood, Stubios puts the power to greenlight content in the hands of the viewer. This program is an evolution of an expansive content strategy that is built on viewer-driven trends underpinning the need to build new pathways for creatives to find success in Hollywood and for fans to find more stories they can see themselves in.”

You can learn more about Stubios here.

This is the first original comedy special for Tubi, with 15-minute sets from up-and-coming comics Cris Sosa, Danielle Mora and Grant Moore. All three have really strong material and I really enjoyed this; I’ve been loving stand-up on cable since the early HBO specials and Evening at the Improv. I’m excited that Tubi is doing this and I hope that there is more stand-up on the way. I’d recommend following all three of these comedians and checking out their acts, as I laughed more than once, which is good for modern stand-up.

You can watch this on Tubi.