Julie (Dominique Toney) is an artist married to Rick (Sterling Sulieman). They’ve been together for a while. Things seem to be at a lull in the bedroom, and when Lottie (Samantha Neyland Trumbo) comes into their lives, it adds some excitement. Yes, before too long, she becomes their unicorn and what should just be for one night ends up turning into a regular thing, even when Rick wants to break things off. She even shows up at Julie’s art class, posing nude, tempting her into getting even more involved.
Get ready for the most all-over-the-place twisty Tubi Original.
Directed by Lindsay Hartley (Romeo and Juliet Killers) and written by Maggie Mock (Fit for Murder), this ends up being more about getting to own a childhood home than destroying a couple and all the friends in their social circle. That means it happens along the way, but everyone is collateral damage.
Yet another movie that says this about three ways: once men have the fantasy, they’re cool with it and seemingly have checked it off their list, while for women, it unlocks a bottomless sapphic need to throw away their lives with psychotic killing machines. Maybe people should be more honest about their open marriages, you know? That’s how you get into being stalked, at least in the world of Tubi Original erotic thrillers.
Mike Sheppard (Jibre Hordges) is a brilliant college student with a bright future ahead of him, but he’s also running out of money. That’s why he serves as an escort for rich black women who use an app to hire him, a fact that upsets his new girlfriend, Gia (Liyah Chante Thompson). However, when he starts to serve Veronica King (Latarsha Rose), he learns that he never has to have sex with her. Instead, she makes him a room in her house, provides for his health care app and introduces him to famous doctors like Greg (Joseph Curtis Callender). Seems reasonable, right?
Well, it is until she starts treating him like her missing son, wanting to read him to sleep and watch him all night.
If you loved Lifetime movies but wanted them to have even wilder twists, may I recommend you start watching Tubi?
Directed by Bobby Yan and written by Briana Cole (who has written the Tubi Originals Toxic Harmony, Played and Betrayedand The Marriage Pass), this totally leads you to think that you’re about to see a rich and powerful black woman get her groove back by taking advantage of a young black man with so much more to offer than sex. But no, it goes off to such a weird and wild place that I can’t help but sit back and smile. Well done, as always, Tubi Originals. You never seem to let me down.
I know nothing about Young Thug, but in this Tubi Original, produced by Law & Crime, I learned that his real name is Jeffery Lamar Williams and because of his lyrics, he’s been accused of leading a street gang, all thanks to his lyrics.
According to Law & Crime, “In 2022, Young Thug was arrested on a sprawling racketeering indictment spearheaded by Fulton County DA Fani Willis, which many have since criticized as a legal overreach. Young Thug took a guilty plea in October but was released on probation, wrapping up the longest-running trial in Georgia’s history made even more controversial by the prosecution’s use of the defendant’s lyrics and music videos as evidence against him.”
One of the standout aspects of the documentary was the interview with defense attorney Keith Adams, who provided detailed insights into the trial. Ultimately, the rapper pled guilty to charges related to gang involvement, drug offenses, and gun possession, despite discrepancies between the timelines of when he created his music and when he faced accusations.
Young Thug’s original two-decade RICO sentence was commuted to time served, followed by fifteen years of probation. As of now, he has been released from custody after serving five years of his sentence.
The documentary raises thought-provoking questions about the relationship between wealth, fame and the law. Even if you’re rich and famous, you can be above the law. Or the law can be above you.
As always, Chris Stokes remains the undisputed king of the Tubi Original.
When Faith Parker (La’Myia Good in the present, Kalani Jules in the past) was young, three boys were out to scare her, tying her up and making it seem like they were going to kill her. To each of these men, as they grow up, she becomes the perfect woman, whether her name is Diana, Summer or Samantha. Then, she kills them.
I don’t know if Chris Stokes has ever seen a Giallo, but darn it if he doesn’t keep making them. Nearly every month, he has a new movie that shows up on Tubi, filled with love, lust, twists, turns and murder. I get beyond excited when I see his name in the credits, as if he’s a modern-day Umberto Lenzi.
The crux of the matter is whether Faith’s revenge is justified. Has she gone too far in her elaborate schemes? Is she sacrificing her own happiness in her quest to destroy these men? These moral questions keep us engaged, making us ponder over the complexities of her actions. But then again, without these dilemmas, we wouldn’t have this movie.
Directed by Sam Coyle (The Marriage Pass, Meet the Killer Parents) and written by Mary Risk (Killer Nurses), this is everything that a Tubi Original movie should be.
Ariel (Sofia Masson, who was in another fun Tubi film, Castaways) is a photographer who has only sold one of her photos, the only one her agent feels shows her edge. It has her on a chain and is called “Daddy Issues.” She soon meets Derek (Stephen Huszar), and their first date becomes a relationship. She lives in his summer house, where he sets up a state-of-the-art photo study to explore her creativity when she isn’t horizontally dancing with him in every room and fulfilling his need to be called daddy.
However, she soon learns that Derek really is Daddy—stepdad—to Chloe (Jasmine Vega), who surprisingly shows up for breakfast one morning.
If you’ve seen enough Giallo, you may wonder, “How long until we learn that Derek and Chloe are a couple?” Fatal Exposure ups the odds by having the girls take Molly together and end up in bed with each other, which is filmed by all of the security cameras in the house, as well as Derek joining them, which is at once hot and very gross. Still, like Italian psychosexual movies, boundaries are only there to be stomped on like grapes.
I’ve often bemoaned the lack of erotic thrillers, having grown up on them in the 90s, and here we are with one that would totally fit in and actually be better than most of them. This is the third of Coyle’s movies I’ve noticed and found to be way better than expectations. This has an ending that is made for our era, instead of the Giallo of the 70s or erotic films of the 90s, and leads with no real sense of morality, which is what I demand from movies like this. If only this had Bruno Nicolai, Nora Orlandi or Morricone doing the soundtrack!
Toni (Tristan Cunningham) is being abused by her husband Marcus (Tarek Zohdy), and to find out how to get away, she sneaks away and attends Destiny’s (Meyon Jacobs) “Take It Back” empowerment seminar. After all, if Destiny could heal herself and fight back after a sexual assault, maybe she could teach Toni how to survive.
The problem for Destiny is that she’s not in all that great of a marriage either. Kendall (Leah Pipes), her wife, wants her to go corporate instead of helping women. These ladies could benefit from a Strangers On a Train-style path out of their bad relationships, which is exactly what happens. The problem is when Toni fulfills her end, and Destiny doesn’t exactly live up to her end of the deal.
Destiny also has a sister named Faith (Paigion Walker) who plans on marrying Senator James Hawthorne (Matt Marshall), while Kendall has eyes for Destiny’s assistant, Sufe (Emily Morales-Cabrera). When Toni learns that Destiny’s entire empire is based on her not exactly telling the truth, she decides that if her husband isn’t going to die, Destiny’s reputation will.
Directed by Dylan Vox (who also made Deadly DILF for Tubi) and written by Jeremy M. Inman (who wrote Sinister Squad and Avengers Grimm: Time Wars, as well as Hustlers Take All for Vox), this isn’t as good as even Throw Mama from the Train, but let’s hear it for it having a same-sex couple and gender swapping the story. The first part has the crazy energy I wanted this entire movie to have. I just wish it could have kept up the wildness.
I got the notice for this movie in my email and my curiosity instantly was alerted: “Before the End transcends “rock doc” in the same sense that Jim Morrison was more than a rock star. Featuring unprecedented content, from shocking corroboration about Morrison’s early life to harrowing revelations about his stardom and fresh evidence that contradicts his professed death, Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is proudly unauthorized because it “seeks the unvarnished truth.””
Jeff Finn has spent nearly forty years seeking out what the true story of Jim Morrison is, beyond the expected — the Oliver Stone movie that everyone saw in the 90s, Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive that was part of the burnout starter pack in my hometown — and has gone more profound than, well, just about anyone else. He’s conducted more than a thousand interviews, more than a hundred on video, as he’s tried to figure out not just who we know who Jim Morrison is, but who he really was, from people who actually knew whoever he was at a specific moment of time, whether that’s family, high school friends, college roommates or film school classmates, Lovers, band mates, just about anyone who had a moment that they connected with Morrison, Finn has met them and learned something from them.
Where so many are content to move forward from Morrison’s birth — like how we never know what happened to Jesus from childhood to when he was an adult, a fact that has to delight Morrison, wherever he is, to no end — to the sex, drugs, rock and roll, public indecency and leather-clad Lizard Kill era of Morrison fronting The Doors. Yet Finn knows this is just part of the story and just one destination on a long midnight drive.
This doc came into my life at the right time, as I consider that I have aged past when I needed rock to tell my truth, or so adults would like me to believe. I worry for today’s youth that they will have no mysterious superstars to become obsessed about like I did in my teen years, devouring pre-internet conspiracy books about Morrison. Did he really die? Why did he use codenames like Mr. Mojo Rising? How many bands got some fame just by playing with the notion that Jim Morrison didn’t fade away? Those stories will take you down some excellent rabbit holes — Jim still has a photo ID on record at the Bank of America, he was a military MK Ultra experiment, and even he was a clone. Some of these stories strain your grasp of reality, but when the actual story is that he went to Paris and died, with no one seeing the body, how can you not expect mythology to fill in the gaps when reality is so sloppily constructed?
Told in three parts, each a little over an hour, Finn’s film has a strange impact on you. The more you listen to his deep voice, the longer you watch the interviews, and you start to follow him through the journeys down, as he says, the rabbit holes and the deeper warrens beyond those rabbit holes. By the time he introduces you to a source named “Mr. X,” who may or may not be Morrison — I don’t even know if the filmmaker is sure — you’ll be hooked. You may not become a true believer, but even if you walk away from this questioning the story about who Jim Morrison is — or was — he’s achieved his goal. It’s just as much reinventing the Jim that you believe you know and getting a more richly realized portrait of him as a human being, not just an artist. Someone who may have gone through childhood abuse, someone who moved often, someone who may have even been neurodivergent when we didn’t have the words yet to explain what that meant.
This has led me to consider who we all are. We all have a different story for each person we meet. The goal of any documentary is to inform you of a point of view, but it’s also to get you to think more critically. Before the End succeeds because it made me think of the idea that each person is only who every other person experiences them as. The difference here is that Morrison remains well-known years after his death. Supposed death, right? Each person here knew a moment in his life, and Finn knows all of their stories and the research he’s done for decades. What emerges is one of the richest pictures of Morrison I’ve seen in any media.
Before the End is streaming in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia on Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play and YouTube TV. You can learn more at the official Facebook page.
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