u/No-Chemistry-28

I previously wrote about Sean Baker’s film Tangerine (still on Tubi US), which I enjoyed a great deal. I actually like this movie even more. The film chronicles Hailey (Bria Vinaite, in an incredible performance), a single mother living on welfare in a run-down motel outside of Orlando with her young daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince, who absolutely steals the show, and who was only six years old when this was shot). On the surface, Hailey can be a tough character to sympathize with. She’s abrasive, selfish, and seems to be her own worst enemy. Yet, the more you dig into her and why she is the way she is, you start understanding the nuances of her situation. I know a lot of people like Hailey, and I know why they’re like that. Hailey loves Moonee. She doesn’t want things to be this way. She just doesn’t know how to make it better, and even if she did, it is almost impossible to get ahead in her situation. Baker frequently displays people on the fringes of society, and does so in such a way that we connect with them, even when that can seem difficult. It would be easy to dismiss Hailey as a bad mom, or even Moonee as a bad kid. But when you’re constantly searching for your next meal, and struggle is all you see, you adapt to those sensibilities. This is a rough movie, but an important one. Trailer below.

Mean Girls is one of those movies where it didn’t hit me until years later how good it actually is. Full of iconic pop culture moments and genuinely brilliant performances, the film stars Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron, a 16-year-old girl who begins high school after being exclusively homeschooled all her life. She meets a group of girls dubbed The Plastics (Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried), the quote/unquote “popular” clique, and becomes part of their friend group despite being very unlike them. Things are all good and well until Cady starts falling for Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), the ex of the leader of The Plastics. This movie does something impressive, because it simultaneously feels relatable and authentic while also being completely ridiculous in a way that would never happen. There are also a million great cast members, including Tina Fey (who co-wrote the movie), Amy Poehler, Lizzy Caplan, Tim Meadows, the severely-underrated Ana Gasteyer…it’s just a delight to watch. Trailer below.

[TW: Animal violence]

May just wants a friend. However, to call her “socially awkward” would be like calling the Grand Canyon “big”. Played brilliantly by Angela Bettis, May is a vet assistant who is lonely and strange, but who tries to find a connection with those around her nonetheless. I am not one for body horror, and I am also not at all okay with seeing animal violence, but I do have exceptions, and this movie works so well because it portrays things like obsession and self-loathing so astutely. This isn’t just some horror film about a weird, deranged girl. It’s a film about the way mental illness can manifest slowly, and get to a point where people justify even the craziest things to themselves. I also find it incredibly interesting that Anna Faris did this movie right after Scary Movie 2—it’s just this weird little indie horror, and she was a star at that point. Glad she did though, because her character is integral to the plot. Trailer below.

I finally have a reason to sing the praises of my favorite cinematographer of all time, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki. Some of you might not know this, but I do photography as a hobby/occasional paid gig, and one of the main reasons I started was because I was inspired by the work of Lubezki. I saw his work on Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and never knew images could be that beautiful. Since then, I’ve seen several films he’s shot, and this collaboration with Tim Burton is just a stylistic masterpiece. The film adapts Washington Irving’s classic gothic tale, featuring wonderful performances (including a terrifying Christopher Walken), and is perfect for the fall/spooky season. Trailer below.

[New post because I used the poster for the TV show on my previous one by accident 😳]

This was an absolute must-watch for me every time it came on cable. Remember that era of “we found a creature, can we keep them?” that was a plot device for so long? Let’s bring that back. Here, John Lithgow and his family run into (literally) a hairy Bigfoot-like creature on their way back from a vacation, and, thinking it is dead, they bring it home to try and figure out what to do. Well, as you may have already guessed, it is not dead, so now they have an unplanned houseguest. Antics ensue—you know the drill. This is fun. It’s light, it’s watchable, it’s funny, and it features the late, always great, Melinda Dillon as Mrs. Henderson trailer below.

If you’ve followed my posts for a while, this one is likely going to be a surprising recommendation for a lot of reasons. First, I have not seen this whole series—just a few episodes, in fact. I typically do not post anything I haven’t seen in full or at least in majority, but I’ll get to why I’m making an exception in a minute. Second, I am not at all religious, and have been very critical of religion in past posts. However, this series feels good. I understood what I was in for after the first episode, and I liked it. We have an angel (played by the legendary Michael Landon) who has been sent back to Earth to help people in need of love and compassion. He partners with an ex-cop to go on these missions assigned by his “boss” (yes, it’s the Christian god). If it sounds cheesy, that’s because it is. If it sounds melodramatic, that’s because it is. It can even get pretty ham-fisted and, dare I say, preachy. But in this current world of cynicism, division, and waking up to daily headlines of the craziest shit imaginable, this show is also extremely refreshing and comforting. Speaking from experience, you don’t have to be a religious person to feel the joy from this. It’s just nice to see people being nice. Trailer below for the Season 1 DVD.

You know everyone’s always like, “Man, I wish there were a deeply problematic Easter Bunny slasher movie”? Well, here you go. We were really just doing anything in 2006, huh? This was a very crazy watch. I thought the kid was a young Donald Glover for like a split second, but alas, it was not. In fact, I didn’t know any of these people, likely because they starred in this movie and no one ever wanted to hire them again. If you like the grindhouse style and stuff, you might dig this. Otherwise, maybe skip it. Trailer below, and just a warning that they say the R word a LOT in it (and the movie).

This kind of distinction typically would be negligible, but this movie feels 3-4 years too late to be relevant. Like *maybe* we could follow this plot in 2004, but we had this shit figured out by 08. Not-Zack Morris stars as a very unlikable main character who, along with two other dum-dums, has a cell phone chip implanted into his stupid goddamn head so they can communicate telepathically. They say it’ll be the future of communication because it’ll be completely hands-free. We had Bluetooth at this point, right? Or like…headsets??? Anyway, there are consequences, blah blah blah. This movie is SO STUPID. I cannot articulate how much none of this makes any sense. Every single detail, including the hilariously bad songs that play on the soundtrack, feels like a fifth-grader made it up. It’s very amusing and also infuriating. I couldn’t find a trailer because there’s apparently four hundred movies called Static or Glitch.

I felt like I was having an active panic attack while watching this. The version on Tubi is dubbed, the dubs do not match the subtitles, there is never a moment of silence, and there’s a lot of times people are just on ATVs or wave runners apropos of nothing. It felt less like a movie and more like an extreme sports montage that lasted 100+ minutes. I do not know the plot, nor do I care, because whoever they got to do the dubbing is absolutely from wherever the fuck Tommy Wiseau is from, and they made about as much sense as him, too. I’m stressed out, I had to skip through a lot, and I’m pretty sure I have inadvertently contributed to a pyramid scheme involving supplements and/or cocaine. Trailer below.

While I would love to say that I don’t let scores/reviews influence the things I watch, I have to admit that they do play a pretty significant role. There’s so much media out there, and so many things I want to see that I use ratings and reviews as a first line of defense in weeding out the “bad” from the “good”. At the same time, I fully acknowledge that this is not a foolproof system, and this movie is a perfect example. This is not a 5.4/10 movie, no matter how you look at it. Granted, it is right up my alley story-wise, but even so, there is still much more here than what is ranked as essentially a middle-of-the-road movie. The story is based (in part) on one of my favorite real-world mysteries, the Max Headroom Incident, which I encourage you to look up, but was a set of mysterious broadcast interruptions by a masked figure who hijacked the airwaves back in 1987 with bizarre, creepy videos lasting 17 and 90 seconds, respectively. The perpetrator was never found, and remains a mystery to this day. This film builds on that as a concept, as our main character obsessively investigates a similar intrusion. This is incredibly well-shot, has a very eerie atmosphere, and I personally liked how it played out. The acting and script aren’t perfect, but it did not detract from the overall film for me. It felt almost Lynchian at times, which is always a plus. Give it a shot. Trailer below.

If Tinto Brass, who I’ve definitely never heard of, directed a giallo film, you’d get this movie. I don’t know what’s worse about this one—the score full of little irritating noises, the unlikable characters, or the fact that an NC-17 rating was wasted on such a dumb movie. The plot doesn’t matter at all—it’s just your run-of-the-mill killing and psychosexual behavior—we all deal with that. This is a South African production that was banned in its home country for many years due to its depictions of sexual violence. It’s trashy, colorful, gross, gratuitous, and again, unbelievably dumb. Trailer below, which I could only find on IMDb.

I know some of you here partake in various “substances”, and you’re always on the hunt for new and exciting things to watch while feeling the effects of those substances, so here’s one for you. Enjoy this nice, relaxing, not-at-all nightmarish piece of cinema while you “toke a J” or “shove acid up your butt” or whatever it is you do. (For liability purposes, that is 100% a joke and watching this while high will likely induce vomiting). Trailer below.

This is listed on IMDb as a TV Miniseries, but it’s on Tubi all mashed together into a movie, and since Tubi is never wrong, that’s what I’m calling it. Nobody does trashy cinema quite like Charles Band and Full Moon Features. They’ve really created their own niche vibe of overdramatic, almost soap opera-level horror, with gross monsters, sex and nudity, and bad acting that is shot surprisingly well. This simultaneously felt cheap and also like they paid everyone well to participate in all this crap. Trailer below, which makes this look WAY better than it actually is.

I found this movie oddly comforting. It’s just so….average. Mid/later-90s thriller with competent-enough people (including Tubi darling Eric Roberts, plus David Lynch alums Sherilyn Fenn and Dean Stockwell), a plot that’s just fine…nothing revolutionary, nothing exceptionally bad. There’s a dog in this movie named Anthrax, which is awesome for that year, but maybe a little less cool like five years later. I also thought Sherilyn Fenn was Charlize Theron at first, which means absolutely nothing, but I’m running out of stuff to say. Trailer below.

Holy hell, this was a time capsule of awkwardness. I love pre-9/11 Y2K-era low-budget movies so much. There’s this sweet spot from like late 1998 right up until that fateful morning in September where movies were just so goofy. Computers and video games had so much physical presence, we were all still trying to figure out what science was going to be in the new millennium, and hackers were public enemy number one. In this movie, they hired what I think are humans—hard to say because no person I’ve ever met speaks or acts like that—to play tech company employees who uncover a plot to release a game that will control people’s minds. There is a canine in this movie who looks like Daniel Dog-Lewis compared to the human (allegedly) actors (also allegedly). This one is unbelievably corny. Save it for a bad movie night. Or don’t. I can’t tell you what to do. Trailer below.

This has what may be the most unintentionally hilarious first five minutes I’ve ever seen. Holy shit. That’s how we’re *starting*???? I was also extremely confused when I visited the IMDb page and the first genre listed was “Korean”, because the people in here are very much Americans (except for the gigantic archeologist who stands menacingly behind the bad guy). Everyone in this also looks like a cheaper version of more famous actors—I spotted a Great Value Bruce Campbell, a Dollar Tree Fisher Stevens, a Bargain Bin Linda Cardellini, and a discount Treat Williams. See who you can find. I did not perceive or care to try to follow any sort of plot—some shit about dinosaurs brought to life by scientists messing with fossils, I imagine, which, to their credit, is a completely original idea. There’s some outer space stuff, as well—no idea where that fits in. This was extremely ridiculous. Trailer below.

Now what on Earth was all this about??? Everything about this movie is bizarre, from the clunky, odd dialogue to the director’s IMDb bio. Very early on in the movie, there is a montage with two of the characters, and the guy is holding a monkey, and the monkey punches him in the eye, and you can tell it wasn’t supposed to happen. It made me laugh out loud. Just…I cannot stress enough that every single beat of this movie is weird. Why are they speaking English in Brazil?? Why are there United States dollars being stolen in not-United States??? Why does the director’s IMDb trivia include a bit about a “Madagascar witch doctor” casting a “dreaded curse” on him???? This one was a real doozy. I can’t explain any of it. Trailer below.

This movie is a great example of why you shouldn’t assume things. You think this is about a black hole? No!!! Well, kind of. It’s more about an electricity alien(?) that wreaks havoc on St. Louis, which I learned is in the Midwest and not the South as I had thought. It’s also about a doctor who is afraid of phone calls, and people who think nuclear bombs are the answer to everything. Oh, and the doctor is played by Judd Nelson, who looks like he’s joined the Counting Crows. Jesus Christ. Trailer below.

This movie is solid proof that if you have colorful lighting and a way to contact Danny Trejo (and somehow Tom Sizemore), you can make a vampire movie. What’s that? “I can make a good vampire movie?” No, sweetheart, I didn’t say that. In what must have cost no more than the price of a diarrhea-inducing Crunchwrap Supreme, this film has all the charm and lighting of a pop-up vape shop, as well as the kind of cutting dialogue that can likely be found there. Oh yeah, everyone is also a vampire except for maybe two people. The plot does not matter at all, and I think this is one of the only times I’ve seen actors not act WITH each other, but AT each other. It’s almost like they’re saying their lines to a pillow wearing a Danny Trejo mask. Trailer below.