Reviews

This ultra obscure Tagalog action film seems to have only been released as 'Taking it to the Streets' on vhs by American Video.

The plot involves Jimmy, a former soldier, who gets revenge after his sister Shirley, a prostitute, is raped by a letcherous mob thug. They attack the mob chieftain, who also became their guardian after their father died but forced them into employment for him, but are unsuccessful and Jimmy gets beaten up.

Then two other separate men come with scores to settle, those two make amends and decide to join the mob (are you confused yet?). Meanwhile, a drug deal goes bad, so the mob boss decides to make Shirley become a boxer so the deals can go down in the arena!!?

And this is only the first 35 minutes!

Like many Tagalog films of the 70s and 80s, it's pretty hard to follow the plot. Operation Dragon Force features a couple of good action scenes, but the last 20 minutes are where the bulk of them are.

The meantime is full of Jimmy and Shirley being forced to help the mob while Jimmy falls in love with the chieftains other adopted daughter.

Finally, a battle with the army breaks out featuring many exploding huts, machine guns, exploding helicopter, and a cave battle.

Operation Dragon Force is a decent film, but if you've seen a single other Philippino action film then you've seen this before.

In a sea of abysmal gutter trash Amityville films, Amityville Frankenstein tries very seriously to be at the bottom of the barrel.

Based on a game where two dumb burglars search a warehouse for a watch, they knew they didn't have enough for a film there so they got Shaun C Phillips to record himself rambling on before watching a horror show on tv that is the burglars. Then Frankenstein gets electrocuted for several minutes but does nothing. Then the next show comes on which is literally just a fat dude grunting with a belt on his fingers while some guy drinks coffee and watches for 10 minutes.

Just like the worst film in this 'series', the abysmal Amityville Hex, there was literally zero care or effort put into this. These a holes just wanted enough runtime to put it up on Tubi. The hack director has three more coming out. God help us.

Geovanni Molina loves two things: Bigfoot and stock footage. And not necessarily in that order.

After writing a review for his first feature, a documentary made entirely of stock footage and narrated by ai, I was expecting this to be more of the same and was going to simply rearrange the paragraphs and post the same review as a comment on his filmmaking style, but ol Geovanni proved me wrong. He actually made a narrative fiction piece!

Ok well kind of. It's still largely made of stock footage and three actors against a lot of green screens. One of those actors is Geovanni.

To watch them interact with stock footage of people being counters at airports or see police officers dubbed to say things while the lips say other things is hilarious.

The plot involves two men and the son of one of them who go into the woods to find some gold a criminal buried. They find bigfoot instead.

To say more is pointless. This film is unintentional comedy gold akin to birdemic. If you liked that film, Bigfoot the Monster Within should be right up your alley.

Geovanni Molina loves two things: Bigfoot and stock footage. And not necessarily in that order.

I stumbled upon his short, Bigfoot. Tales of Darkness a few years ago and was amused at how he plundered every stock footage site to make a "documentary" on bigfoot. I saw he had several feature length films in production (among about 25 other shorts all coming out in less than two years) so I added them to my watchlist and waited patiently. 20 minutes was amusing to watch this hackneyed attempt. How would it fare as a feature?

Well, Geovanni hasn't changed a big two years later. There isn't a frame of original content filmed for this hour long expose on the truth of bigfoot.

The narration (presumably done by Geovanni for the first 15ish minutes and then by a British AI generated narrator) recalls old 70s mondo films, where they basically made up stories based on the footage shot with little regard for what actually happened. At best, Geovanni pulled these stories from random Reddit threads, likely he came up with them while sitting in his bedroom in the middle of the night.

The music is some "epic cinematic" stock music that is played constantly over with no leveling so it will drown out the narration at parts.

It's honestly amusing the audacity that this man has to continue pumping out these stock footage messterpieces. If he keeps making them, I'll keep watching them and having a good laugh.

A family is traveling the back roads of Florida for the father's book and decide to stop at a rundown sideshow. When their car breaks down the freaks come out to play, and they want women...

For some reason, I thought this was a Charles Band production so I always put off watching it, assuming it would be a cheap, boring movie filmed inside a dark tent for the whole thing. But thankfully Side Sho is an actual attempt at making a film.

Coming out a year after the Hills Have Eyes remake, it's clear where the inspiration for the film comes from, but it is original enough that it never feels like a ripoff.

There is some surprising gore in the film, and some of the 'freaks' makeup is good, but unfortunately no one in the cast is particularly good. They're all competent but I never really care about them the way you do for the family in Hills. Likewise, you don't get to know much about the freaks either apart from the barker and the young boy. A lot of them are just generic bearded biker type men who boss the more mutated ones around.

What the film needed was a bit more in the first section. We only get to see the family walk through a couple of rooms in the side show but they don't see any of the freaks until the two boys happen to meet each other after. It needed an inciting incident for why the family was targeted.

Still, Side Sho managed to be entertaining throughout and stands out over many other shot on digital early-2000s DTV films.

Despite being an avid slasher fan, I had never heard of Fingerprints until seeing Hysteria Lives review it.

The generic supernatural dvd cover and first 30 minutes are good indicators why it got lost in the shuffle. Based around the popular urban legend of dead children pushing cars off of train tracks where they died (a legend in Texas and Illinois among other places) our first half hour is set up of this ghost story and meeting our main characters. But then a masked killer dressed as a train conductor starts to pick some of the cast off.

Surprisingly, a few familiar faces pop up, most notably Lou Diamond Phillips, who turns in a pretty poor performance, especially compared to some of the then-unknown cast who would go onto appear in higher budgeted horror films.

The film looks like an early 2000s DTV film, but with a decent cast and lots of locations it's clear some money was behind this film. Add to that a great killers costume and some nice kills it's all the more disappointing that the film comes so close to the finish line. If they hadn't tried to make both a supernatural horror film and a slasher but focused more on one of these genres I think we could have gotten a much more tonally coherent film. They also devote a bit too much time to the subplot of our main characters former drug habit and if she is relapsing. If it had been a straight ghost story, that would have fit much better. But when we have a flesh and blood killer it becomes a moot point and time waster.

Still worth a watch to see something a bit different.

The newest in the unending string of DTV movies slapping the Amityville name onto them sees a familiar villain coming from a new county.

8 year old Olivia is grieving the death of her mother as her father takes her to a remote cabin. Leaving her alone for work, she finds a clown stalking her. The rest of the movie consists of a number of sequences of the clown chasing her and her waking up just in time for the next sequence to begin.

With such a thin plot, it would be easy for this entry to become unbearably tedious, but a majority of the (very low budget) stalking scenes are done pretty decently, largely in part to the good costume and the young girls decent job of acting (she's by far the best of the small cast).

Speaking of the cast, before I saw on IMDB it listed as Spain, I was sure half of the actors were Irish while the father and daughter were Russian. They all speak English in the film but some, specifically the dad's boss and their aunt (I think?), had thick accents.

Honestly, unless you have some sick compulsion like me to see every Amityville-titled film, you're not going to like this one. It's essentially a families YouTube horror skit stretched to 74 minutes, but they do a decent job with what little they had and for where we are in the Amityville 'series' this one has been better than most of the recent dreck.

Ties to Amityville: a shot of the Amityville exit from the Long Island Expressway.

After the early 90s, Italian horror and cinema in general has drastically faded so imagine both my surprise and wariness when a trailer for Anthropophagous 2 was released in 2022.

Relatively little was shown and what was didn't look like much but I kept it in my watchlist, being a fan of the original Anthro and its pseudo-sequel, Absurd.

So, was the movie worth the wait?

The plot concerns a group of college girls and their teacher spending a few days locked in an old tunnel system for some sort of thesis or research, we really never know. Naturally they run afoul of a psycho cannibal living down there. That's about it.

Director Dario Germani had previously made a few Italian drama films, but he pulls out a good sense of dread in the first part of this film. While many may dislike in the original that little happens in the first hour apart from buildup, here the first of the group is dispatched around 30 minutes in. The atmosphere is well done and the cinematography makes good use of the dark tunnels. The cast is full of pretty girls who do well enough, essentially being meat for the monster. They are all dubbed which will either delight or annoy, depending if you are a fan of the 70s and 80s Italian horror with its trashy dubbing.

Sadly, rather than the slasher/cannibal route of D'Amato's film, this one goes for a 'torture porn' route, which I generally dislike, though it doesn't ever linger too long on people screaming or crying.

Speaking of the gore, it is all practical and well done in respect to the budget. The titular anthropophagus sadly is nothing compared to George Eastman's hulking beast in the original. Here he is a skinny old man in a dirty wifebeater that feels like he was plucked from Hills Have Eyes or Wrong Turn.

This letdown of the killer was the biggest detractor of Anthropophagous 2, as Eastmans creepy portrayal is what elevates the original and makes it watchable.

Anthropophagous 2 is hardly the second-coming of Italian horror films, but it is a positive step and is functional enough to be worth a watch for both fans of the old Italian movies as well as more modern fans looking for a bit of bloody mayhem.

Released a year after the original Amityville Scarecrow,

We open with over 10 minutes of two people arguing about working at the camp that was in the first film, we get two basically offscreen kills.

Despite a new writer and director, the two estranged sisters and the ones daughter return to the movie. In a pinch for money, they've decided to open the campground that their family members were slaughtered on.

As with the previous film, and most of these low budget UK films from ITN, the next hour consists of very languid conversation scenes with the scarecrow popping up occasionally to bump one of the unlikable cast off.

With the release of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, ITN proved they can deliver something decent when they put a bit more money into things, but dreck like Amityville Scarecrow or Curse of Humpty Dumpty are slogs to get through, with the producers hoping that the ludicrous title and admittedly great cover art will be enough.

Production is per usual acceptable, especially compared to the American Amityville films being released lately such as the horrid Amityville Hex that just consists of people recorded on their webcams. The loud sound floor that was in the first Amityville Scarecrow is still there in the exterior scenes. Gore is still nonexistent, with kills either offscreen or blood splashes. They did include several scenes of nudity this time.

For Gods sake no part 3.

A man walks into a science lab over the credits. Then a woman smokes an entire cigarette. Then she goes for a run. She stops to do stretches. She runs back home to eat a slice of pizza.

That's the first 7 minutes of the movie.

She talks on the phone about a party and going into work at the science lab before taking a long shower when a guy in a rubber monster mask comes and kills her.

We get essentially the same chain of events several more times until the movie ends.

Having seen director Joe Sherlock's other sequel film, Axegrinder 3, it's clear he has an MO very reminiscent to the mail order fetish films by W. A. V. E. in the 90s. Sherlock loves seeing large women get naked and then die.

While this will no doubt put a lot of viewers off, the bigger problem is the absolute ineptitude of the entire thing. Much like Mark Polonia's recent films, it's mostly vignettes of people struggling to speak their lines before dying (splashing blood and a Halloween prop).

There must be a market for his types of films, but it's not average horror fans (at least, the average fans who watch crap like Things 555) and therein lies the problem.

P. S. This bizarre series seems to have split off from the original anthology based on short stories to be pseudo-sequels to the 1989 Canadian movie by the same title.

This movie doesn't deserve a review for the disgusting choice to use actual (mercifully brief) footage of concentration camp victims during its 'flashback' scene giving the backstory to its killer.

If that isn't enough for you to decide to not support these 'filmmakers' then perhaps the fact that there is little plot, horrible acting, and barely any gore may persuade you to not waste your time.

The first 20 minutes are time filler while our main group is introduced then goes to buy drugs, run afoul of some rednecks and meet the hokey sheriff. Then they go to the woods and get killed in unspectacular ways before an extremely lame ending and long-winded explanation who the killer is.

Filmed in 2013 and seemingly unreleased until showing up on Tubi about a decade later.

If they hadn't included footage of actual human suffering passed off as entertainment this film would have gotten a 3/10. As is this should have stayed unreleased. Shame on the filmmakers.

Director Tony Newton dumps these lazy, boring, trash 'films' and documentaries out that all are the same - various YouTubers or random horror fans are recorded on Skype then placed haphazardly together with little care how to even remotely make a cohesive narrative.

This time it involves all these random people reading the "Amityville Hex" then talking nonstop about how they feel bad before they become possessed. This means either drawing '666' in sharpie on your face, the tik tok strobe effect, crying, or poisoning an extremely annoying guy talking in a whiny voice.

Absolutely horrid. There was no care put into this, it was simply made to make a few hundred bucks off people with the same compulsion as me to watch every one of these Amityville abominations.

Ps, Shawn C Phillips really had some demons to exorcise in his rant to his viewers.

Directed by the Head of Business Affairs for quickly tanking studio Blumhouse, Float is just more proof that Hollywood producers are almost universally creatively bankrupt.

Float is a semi-found footage horror film about a group of millennials going on a tubing trip in memory of their friend who died on the river last year (why was he tubing by himself?). Utilizing about every cliché in the genre, someone or something begins to kill them off. (Don't worry, it will never explain what)

The acting is atrocious. The script seems like it was written on a napkin. The attempts to be relevant come as subtle as a hammer to the head. "People thought covid was fake too until it killed them!" "Rosé all day!" as well as a monologue to the dead guys urn they brought along how she "knows he was a good guy and wouldn't be hurting them" all will leave the viewer shocked the director isn't fresh out of high school.

Further proof was the music. There were several points they used the actual stock stinger effects that every YouTube video editor gets for free! I had to look up the composer, he did 2 things back in 2015 and nothing since. Considering a lot of the music is a guitar strumming or some synth pads I can't imagine why.

After a very tiny theatrical run, Float was dumped quietly on Tubi.

I find little to recommend here. There's about 3 kills with some standard gore. No nudity but the cast is in bikinis and swim trunks almost the whole time if that's your thing. Everything else is done so pedestrian that it's unforgivable for someone supposedly with experience.

Oh, and guess what? We get a music video during the end credits! How #kewl.

This boring mix of Ghost Rider and The Crow is the cheapest movie I've seen they asylum release since their early DV Cam output.

No joke, about 40% of the movie takes place on a bike overpass of a road!

The "headless horseman" aspect is as random and pointless as you can get. The devil decides to give our hero a flaming pumpkinhead for no reason. He also gets a single Wolverine hand to shoot green electricity out of.

The boring plot is this: a guy is killed by his fiancé's biker gang drug lord leader (I hate when that happens) and the devil gives him a deal: revenge for his soul. He then rides around and talks to people asking where they've taken his darling before killing them in bland cgi ways.

To make things even more lame, about an hour in he decides to trust the villains will let her go if he leaves so he does and goes to hell early!

They set up for a sequel as if anyone would ever want 4 more minutes of this story.

This movie doesn't deserve a review due to the fact they had the audacity to include an actual news clip from FoxTV of a real life murder right after attempting to make the claim their 'story' was based on true events. Shameful.

To fill the required review length: As another reviewer aptly put: 25 minutes of this film are spent on why our cast of unlikeable characters need to go to the woods. Two have a race.

When they get to the woods a random man murders them in a series of boring kills. Some of them get chained to tables and murdered because.

Then the Trust Fund guy who sent them there checks his phone and goes to the police. Thrilling.

Just like the first Queen of the Trap House film, this film is all talk, no action.

After being killed offscreen, despite ostensibly dying from poison in the last film(?), Tyreek's girlfriend Kionna takes over the drug empire full time.

If for some reason you watched the first film, you'll know exactly what to expect. Director Jeff Profitt films endless scenes of talking while showing absolutely nothing.

Still, at least there's one scene where he has the audacity to rip low-quality audio of a police raid from a TV show and play it like it's actually happening all while showing a shot of Kionna calmly raising her hands at her 'empire' aka a folding table with some twenty's and a bag of flour on it.

With a title like Queen of the Trap House, you'd think this is going to be unintentional comedy gold. Too bad its about as lazy and inept as can be.

The entire movie consists of people talking to each other in various places, at least half of the time on the phone. We have Tyreek sitting behind a piece of plexi glass on the phone telling his girlfriend she needs to take over the business. We have her talking to his lawyer (played by director Jeff Profitt). She talks to his second in command and then her best friend. The lawyer talks to Tyreek.

Notice how nowhere in here has there been any mention of drugs or violence - that's because there is none. The best we get is a pile of money and some fake looking pistols on a table.

Skip watching the movie and just get a laugh at the ridiculous looking poster.

A 90s SOV love letter to old jungle epics and Italian cannibal movies? I was instantly hooked.

Sadly, they just did not have the money to pull off what was needed. The first half of the movie consists of our main character traveling down to Mexico (in reality, Southern California), begging for money and meeting the two others on her expedition.

Next, they walk through the jungle, one of the girls gets naked in a waterfall, and finally at 47 minutes we get the first death.

The acting, audio, and video quality are all bad but are forgivable. The only thing this needed was some lofi gore effects and it would have been a fun time waster.

Instead, we get a tripping into the river and rolling around until death(?), a man hacked to death by machetes off screen, and a liver gets ripped out which turns into a dove and the movie freeze frame ends.

Which is a shame, because the finale at the temple showed some effort was made between the set and costumes. They just didn't extend that to the rest of the movie so viewers are left with a "that was it?" experience.

Why the knockoff Psycho music?

Why can't the Yanni-looking man speak normally?

Why is this claimed as a prequel to the unrelated movie released the same year?

Why did I watch this?

There are no answers in "The Legend Begins: Doll-Face". There are only questions.

A group of young people go to a plantation where a hefty man in a rubber white mask stalks them for almost 50 minutes before picking them off in ungory ways.

Dialogue is shouted over top each other, the 'Psycho Theme' plays multiple times. The kill scenes come off like a group of children playing. Nudity consists of lingerie and a dudes butt. The movie ends on silent stock footage of a road at night and a time-lapse sunset.

Pass.

A group of friends go to camp. A old man approaches and tells them the story of La Llorona, then she comes and kills them.

A Cry In The Night deserves some credit for the 'flashback' scenes, which consist of most of the middle of the film. They shot in a restored old west town with plenty of people dressed in old garb.

The kills have a bit of blood, and there are a few decent kills, in particular a girl sleeping in a tent that fills with water and La Llorona drowns her.

Of course, no one here can really act. Lines are flubbed in almost every scene and kept in. The plot is as predictable as they come.

If you're looking for an actual scary film, look elsewhere, but if you want something to have a beer and some laughs at, A Cry In The Night is one of the better films of this type on Tubi.

The first time I rented Terror Toons from Blockbuster I absolutely HATED it. It's dumb, terrible cgi, poor acting, etc.

But then years later I was thinking about it again and figured I'd give it another watch... to my surprise I actually had some fun!

Now before you continue reading my review, you need to be aware this is bottom of the barrel slasher trash. Even if you enjoy dreck like Last Slumber Party or Houseboat Horror, this may still not be your cup of tea. Do you tolerate recent movies by Mark Polonia? Can you willingly watch a Brain Damage Films 'movie'?

If you answered yes, then you may proceed with caution.

It may be the uncanny-valleyesque animations, the grainy digital video, and the childish backgrounds with goopy adult gore that combine to make for an unsettling experience if you can get past the earlier mentioned flaws.

In particular the hazy glow in the sisters room with the two "terror toons" in the shadows is actually quite creepy when thinking about it.

Maybe my brain has just melted from too much trash (it probably has) and there's likely a bit of video store nostalgia involved but I personally get legitimately unnerved thinking about this movie.

It's a shame that director Joe Castro has constantly proven since he is a childish psycho (read his antics with the Face Off show) and his ever-increasing reliance on kindergarten After Effects edits for his gore that make almost all the rest of his filmography unwatchable. But who knows, maybe after I lose more brain cells I'll enjoy those as well (God help me)

Tubi has been putting out a number of true crime/paranormal documentaries lately such as Americas Most Haunted: Amityville, Fresh Meat: Jeffrey Dahmer and now Americas Scariest Monsters. Having watched them all I can say they keep getting worse.

The current trend in these type of documentaries is a more slow, dreadful approach. Tubi however says forget all that, we're going to edit our documentaries in a style that was popular in the late nineties and early aughts - the hyper-edited, fast paced style.

They also continue to use 'social media influencers' as the majority of their interviews which basically consists of these people just regurgitating what they read off Wikipedia and saying "ooh how spooky".

Just like the other Tubi docs, if you want to actually learn anything, you won't here. 10 cryptid stories across 85 minutes, you do the math.

Put it on only if you want something in the background.

My Biggest Fan has the look and feel of a Lifetime Channel movie made on a quarter of the budget.

Audio is horrendous - frequently changing between shots.

Acting ranges from ok to bad. None of the cast has done much besides a few of similar movies.

Lighting and camerawork may be the best thing My Biggest Fan has going for it and I only mean that in the sense it isn't atrocious. Its adequate.

This isn't a horror movie as its listed. Some people die at the end but theres zero special effects. Its not a thriller either because theres never any tension. Our main girl talks to a guy and starts getting gifts. Then towards the end he sneaks in and kills her cat. In response she meets him and films him for being a weirdo. Naturally he can only respond in one way...

Before he began churning out bottom of the barrel, stock footage snoozefests, Dustin Ferguson came onto the scene with a few low budget 'sequels' to old slasher favorites such as Scalps and Silent Night Bloody Night along with this in-spirit sequel to Cheerleader Camp.

They hall have the production levels of a high schooler with a camera and a group of friends, but this time he was able to grab Young Jason actor Ari Lehman as well as Jennifer Banko, who, as a young girl appeared in FT13 7, TCM 3 and Barb Wire among other things.

Also unlike most of his productions, Cheerleader Camp: To The Death has a decent sized cast and some cheap-but-fun goopy gore. The panda costume the killer has is decent, but barely appears on screen and the movie limps to a mediocre ending.

Make no mistake, this is still very low budget, but if you are curious about watching one of these pseudo-sequels that Ferguson loves to churn out, this is one of the more tolerable ones.