Reviews

Directed and written by Airell Anthony Hayles, this has a great idea. Santa gets bitten by a werewolf and becomes one during the full moon. This is kind of astounding, because a full moon happens on Christmas only once every 18 years and hasn't happened since 2018.

Monster hunter influencer Lucy (Katherine Rodden), her cameraman Dustin (Charle Preston), conspiracy expert Rupert (Cian Lorcan) and her parents Carol (Emily Booth) and Charlie (Mark Arnold) end up facing off against Werewolf Santa and stopping him before he makes it to the church during midnight mass.

Somehow, this movie was able to get Joe Bob Briggs to read The Night Before Christmas and I wonder if it was done on Cameo. This has no budget to speak of and scene transitions that look really bad, but at least there are a few laughs and, you know, that title is really good.

I can honestly say that this movie changed my life and the way that I experience film. I found it at Something Weird Video, a Pittsburgh store that had many movies that did the same for many people. My brother and I must have watched this every night for months, obsessing over the gunplay and the honor-bound Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat), who must do one last kill to save the sight of a woman he blinded, Jennie (Sally Yeh). It was unlike anything we'd ever seen, nearly an Italian Western in Hong Kong, a place where cops like Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) can discover that he has as much in common with a criminal than his fellow police officers.

In The Killer, man's laws don't matter. What does is the brotherhood that can be built between two men. What matters is the fact that you are responsible for your mistakes, that a child's life is worth nearly being killed or arrested, that you can show people mercy even after they've tried to have you murdered. Movies would change after this, as Hong Kong started making more ballet-like gun violence films, a style that made its way here before director John Woo followed, starting with the JCVD movie Hard Target before making blockbusters like Mission: Impossible 2.

The first time I saw a church filled with broken plaster and bullet casings and doves flying all around, I had one of those moments where I knew that I would never have this experience again. It was like trying a drug for the first time, the rush of a first kiss, holding someone's hand. My heart started to race and I knew that I had to keep chasing this feeling.

Producer Tsui Hark was extremely unhappy with this film and planned on recutting it, making Li Ying the hero instead of Ah Jong. The schedule to make this was tight and Woo and editor David Wu never were going to make these cuts. Hark didn't have time and it was such a big success that it enraged Hark, who is said to have starting tossing things out of his office window when he found out.

Woo had a higher aim than most Hong Kong action movies, which are often content to rip off American movies. This was dedicated to Martin Scorsese and inspired by Mean Streets. There's also a lot of Leone and the movie Le Samouraï in The Killer.

Yet when this first played in the U. S., it was badly subtitled and sold as an action comedy.

Wilhelm Reich was one of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud. His concept of muscular armour is part of body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy; he came up with the phrase "the sexual revolution." He also created Faraday cages that built up orgone energy, the energy of life and orgasms, that he claimed could cure cancer. The U. S. food and Drug Administration made them illegal and later burned six tons of his books, sending him to jail where he would die within a year. Freud said of his work, "We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis."

Reich also built cloudbusters that he said could make it rain and chased UFOs. Soon before he was to be released from jail, he died. He left instructions that there was to be no religious funeral, but that a record should be played of Schubert's "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson. His granite headstone reads "Wilhelm Reich, Born March 24, 1897, Died ..."

I discovered him by way of the Tim Vigil comic book EO.

W. R.: Mysteries of the Organism, directed by Dusan Makavejev (Sweet Movie) was banned in Yugoslavia for sixteen years and when Makavejev spoke up about it, he was indicted on charges of derision toward the state, its agencies and representatives.

This feels like a cut and paste technique film. Documentary footage and clips from The Vow share the screen with Tuli Kupferberg of the band The Fugs singing "Kill for Peace" and "I'm Gonna Kill Myself Over Your Dead Body," Betty Dodson drawing people masturbating, the Plaster Casters casting Jim Buckley of Screw magazine, scream therapy and a story where Milena (Milena Dravic) turns down the sexual advances of the worker class to obsess over Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidovic), an ice skater who is s symbol of Western corruption. After they finally make love, he beheads her.

Meanwhile, the scientists of 1971 are continuing the work of Reich.

Makavejev rails against Communism, American psychiatry, the buttoned up lack of sexuality in the world and anything that's offensive, he finds it and shows it. Sweet Movie would take this even further. This is more than a half century old and still feels like a firebomb being set off in public.

Directed by Bette Gordon and written by Kathy Acker, Variety is the story of Christine (Sandy McLeod), a woman in the city looking for work and ending up in the ticket booth of the Variety, a job that her boyfriend Mark (Will Patton) hates. None of the men that she encounters turn her on, even though a co-worker named Jose (Luis Guzmán) tries. Then she meets Louie (Richard M. Davidson), an older wealthy man who takes her to a baseball game before disappearing. She becomes obsessed with him and her sexuality is awakened by this man and a series of prank phone calls (Spalding Gray is the voice).

According to Downtown Express, "The film is a sort of Who's Who of downtown street cred: music by John Lurie, cinematography by frequent Jarmusch collaborator Tom de Cillo, script by former sex worker and Pushcart Prize-winning feminist novelist Kathy Acker, and roles played by Spalding Gray, Luis Guzmán, Mark Boone Junior and photographer Nan Goldin, who also took production stills." Despite that, the theater isn't really in Times Square. It's the Variety Photoplays, which was located on Third Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets in the East Village, the same theater as Taxi Driver where Jodie Foster jumps into the cab to escape her pimp.

As a feminist filmmaker, Gordon got criticism and praise for making a film about pornography. Yet I loved Christine's character, someone fascinated and also upset by the sex that she spends so much of her time around, but it's not real sex, it's created for the male gaze. However, it inspires her, even as she reads her sexually frank writing to a boyfriend who doesn't seem to care, is surrounded by men who just see her as the law of the invisible sex object and the strange man who keeps ghosting her. This movie has stuck with me since I watched it and I wonder, did Louie come back to meet her in that alley?

Directed by Paul Abascal, who started as a makeup artist, and written by Scott Nimerfro, who wrote eleven episode of this show, this episode starts with the Tales from the Crypt pinball machine.

"Tonight's tale concerns a man with 3 balls. What do you know? Par for the corpse! 10 killion points! Is this fun or what? Oh, hello, kiddies. Don't mind me if I'm carrion on, but I've really groan to love this game. I could goo all night! Which brings to mind tonight's terror tale. It's about a couple of game players who are about to find out what happens when you don't slay by the rules. I call it "Oil's Well That Ends Well.""

I've been wanting to share these pictures for a long time. They come from Hollywood Candy in Omaha, Nebraska, a movie-themed candy and variety store.

Carl (Lou Diamond Phillips) - or maybe his name is Jerry - and his girlfriend Gina (Priscilla Presley) just pulled off multiple scams, starting with convincing her husband Larry (John Kassir, The Cryptkeeper) to fake his death, then killing him, then convincing a bunch of Southern millionaires (Noble Willingham, Alan Ruck, Rory Calhoun and Steve Kahan) to buy a cemetery because there's oil underground. But that's not enough and the quest for oil ends up wiping out nearly everyone.

This is based on "Oil's Well That Ends Well!" from Tales from the Crypt #37. It was written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by George Evans.

Santa (Pierse Stevens) has had it, so he's blowing off steam by telling a young boy by the name of Peter (Jude Forsey) four holiday horror stories. Perhaps, just maybe, he's also a killer. Actually, he's totally a killer, a former mall Santa who has had enough.

In the first, Toby and Chloe's Christmas Nightmare," three killers dressed as an elf, Santa and a snowman - named like a Tarantino gang with pseudonyms like Mr. Red (Tony Fadil), Mr. Green (Sonny Denham) and Mr. White (Jeff Kristian) - pull off a home invasion and murder an entire house before adopting a girl named Chloe (Eloise Henwood) and teacher her how to be a killer.

"The Ventriloquist Who Stole Christmas" has Henry (Mark Beauchamp) and his snowman dummy Mr. White getting over life's hardships through being a serial killer, just like his father. I mean, you fail an audition, you get beat up and your wife Jade (Bibi Lucille) leaves you, you have to start murdering.

"Merry Krampus" has, you guessed it Krampus coming to Louise (Lucy Pinder) and her son Luke (Rafi Wilder) being visited by Krampus after he blames himself for her latest boyfriend leaving.

"The 12 Kills of Christmas" is about Father McShane (Jeff Kristian), who has dementia, but can barely remember all of his sins like molesting the boys in the choir. As his daughter Maria (Olivia Hespe) takes care of him, a ghost of the past makes sure that he does.

Directed and written by James Crow, this is over two hours long and has no reason to be that way. It feels like the Mr. White segment was going to be a full-length film, as it's 50-minutes long, but it ended up being part of this. I wish that it all flowed together better, but if you're looking for something mean spirited and cruel this holiday season, you'll probably enjoy this and you're not concerned with being on the nice list.

Before he made gigantic budgeted movies, Peter Jackson directed, wrote, shot, produced and co-starred in this movie that sees aliens using our planet for fast food.

After the New Zealand town of Kaihoro disappears, Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) agents Derek (Peter Jackson), Frank (Mike Minett), Ozzy (Terry Potter) and Barry (Pete O'Herne) are assigned to see what happened, finding aliens that love to eat humans. A battle breaks out and Derek falls off a cliff, but survives with his brain leaking out, covered by a hat.

An insurance adjuster named Giles Copeland (Craig Smith) is taken by the aliens and put in a bathtub stew before being saved by the men. What follows is non-stop violence, as Derek's brain keeps pouring out of the hole in his head, leading to him grabbing a chainsaw and killing the space monsters, including boarding their ship to home, replacing his brains with an alien one and sawing their leader Lord Crumb (Doug Wren in the suit, Dean Lawrie as the double and Peter Vere-Jones as the voice, as Wren died during the four years this took to make) to bits as he flies directly at the alien homeworld, ready for war.

Using a 25-year-old 16mm Bolex camera, inspired by Tom Savini and wild enough to shoot a scene where he fights himself in two different roles, Jackson went wild on this, even baking the alien masks in his mother's oven. He'd follow this with Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead, two more movies that are out of control compared to the rest of his movies. He wouldn't have to invent his own steadicam for the movies that followed after this.

When this came out, it was a hard to find film and you know, it still is - at least in the U. S. - today. While there's almost no budget, this movie is incredibly inventive and still worth watching today, so long after it was originally made. These aliens don't have a glowing finger, as the movie says, but in the U. S., the VHS box came with an extra finger sticker so that people wouldn't be upset that the alien was flipping them off.

Sydney: Four women - Diana (Jan Cornall), Amelia (Liddy Clark), Adrienne (Kerry Dwyer) and Georgia (Mystery Carnage) - juggle their lives, careers and even families to destroy the research of the company Utero, who are creating new ways of reproductive engineering. Or, as the sales material says, "Not only are the protagonists politically active women, but the frank depiction of their sexual and emotional lives and the complexity of their domestic responsibilities add new dimensions to the thriller format. The film also raises as a central issue the ethical debate over biotechnology as a potential threat to women and their rights to self-determination."

One of the women loses the diary that has all of the information on their mission, which leads to everyone getting tense over what they're about to do. Directed by Susan Lambert, who wrote it with Sarah Gibson, this allows the women to be heroes and not someone to be saved. I like that the advertising promised that this was "A Girls' Own Adventure" and a heist film, hiding the fact that it has plenty of big ideas inside it.

Today, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is an accepted way of having children, yet here, it's presented as something that will take away one of the primary roles of women. Juxtapose that with IVF being one of the women-centric voting topics of the last U. S. election.

Directed and co-written by former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, this finds three blonde alien women - played by Yolande Brener, Fiona Dennison and Melissa Milo - who have come to Earth to learn what love is, under the command of Captain Trulove (the voice of Lorelei King). They meet a man named Peter (Sean Pertwee), who hasn't found anyone, as well as interview people on the street to try and learn exactly how one person can become enamored of another.

Richard Jobson from Skids and Don Letts from Big Audio Dynamite appear, as does feminist sexologist Shere Hite, at least on a TV set. I love that the three aliens are the ideal of male perfection yet they are lonely, trying to figure out what it takes to make the heart beat. It's kind of like so many other films that I adore where space women try to understand men, a genre that really needs a better title. See Cat-Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon, Queen of Outer Space, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Amazon Women On the Moon, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, El Planeta De Las Mujeres Invasoras and Uçan Daireler Istanbulda.

D couple looking to keep their love life interesting, so they have been trying out new positions. Things start somewhat simple, but by the end, Ethel is being dropped through trap doors and out of an airplane onto her husband. A trapeze love making attempt ends in injury, leading Ethel to chase Stanley while all wrapped up.

Stanley Kubrick personally selected this film to play before A Clockwork Orange in theaters in the UK. I wonder if this played at Scala before the screening that shut down the theater. More than just a dirty cartoon, this was nominated for an Oscar. Despite being about lovemaking, it's all rather innocent and remains funny years after it was made.

Directed by Aggy Read, this is quite simple: many shots of female breasts, all set to The Fugs' song of the same name. Banned in Australia, this has around three thousand sets of mammaries all in three minutes, the male gaze presented over and over and, yes, over again until it goes past just being sophomoric and becomes mesmerizing in the way that breasts are when you're starting puberty. I'm ascribing artistic meaning to this but really, at the end of the day, it's just a lot of sweater meat. Fun bags. Cans, dirty pillows, babylons, what have you. My wife is always amazed at how many dumb names I can come up with for anatomy and I blame years of John Waters and reading Hustler as a kid and yeah, I'm not as proud of the latter than the former. That said, there are a lot of headlights in this one.

Steve (Philip Rosch) lives with his lover Ned (Grant Oatley), but as he starts to engage in a more domestic relationship, he starts to worry about all of the partners he's had. After all, the AIDS crisis is happening and he's never been tested. Ned tells him to relax, but there's no way that he can.

The wait for the test is just five days but it may as well be forever. This also makes a tie between sex and death, as Steve strips for both Ned and his doctor. And in the middle of this endless period of limbo, he dreams of death and fights with Ned, who just smiles and keeps telling him to relax. But how could anyone during the time of AIDS?

I remember my first blood test and the doctor lecturing me after he gave it, telling me that I should have been a virgin until I married and whatever happened, I brought it on myself. The funny thing was, I had been a virgin, I thought I was getting married and I had no knowledge that my fiance was unfaithful to a level you only see in films. That night, my parents came to visit, leaving their small town to come to the big city and my mother asked, "What is that bandage on your arm?" I could have lied, but I told her it was for a blood test, and I dealt with yet someone else upset with me. My problems were miniscule in the face of the recriminations that gay people had to deal with, a time of Silence=Death, a place seemingly forgotten today other than by the ones who fought the war.

Directed and written by Chris Newby, this is a stark reminder of that time.

Directed by Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin and Zachary Nataf as a project at The London College of Printing, this is all about Zena (Pamela Lofton), who is researching monstrous women. She meets Lillia (Susan Franklyn) a vampire, at a horror movie and the two start a relationship.

Liliana, trapped with an abusive male partner by the name of Luke (Jeremy Peters) who is what vampires probably would be, scavengers who feed on the weak, dreams of movies in which she is the victim of just such a vampire. She's often fed on human beings, but has been careful not to be caught or make a mess, unlike her partner. As for Zena, she's been studying how female gods were once worshipped but now only appear in horror fiction as monstrous creatures.

So much of this movie is as right on now as when it was made, like the speech that Zena gives when Liliana tracks her down: "Have you noticed that horror can be the most progressive popular genre? It brings up everything that our society represses, how the oppressed are turned into a source of fear and anxiety. The horror genre dramatizes the repressed as "the other" in the figure of the monster and normal life is threatened by the monster, by the return of the repressed consciously perceived as ugly, terrible, obscene."

Her argument is that we can subvert the very notions of horror, making the monsters into heroes that destroy the rules that hold us down.

However, this being a student film, it's very overly earnest and instead of working these ideas into the narrative as subtext, they take over the entire movie. If you're willing to overlook this, it's a pretty fascinating effort.

Directed and written by Davis Lewis, this has Genesis P-Orridge in the cast and a soundtrack by Psychic TV, which has been released as Kondole/Dead Cat.

A boy (Nick Patrick) has a cat that dies and his grief deposits him into a psychosexual nightmare, including a medicine man (Derek Jarman) and several unhoused people (P-Orridge, Andrew Tiernan).

This was shown at only a few theaters the year it was release - including Scala Cinema - before fading away and almost being lost before Lewis found it. In the program for this film, Scala said "The torture that occurs at the transition of sexuality." If you liked videos for bands liek Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, this feels like the inspiration.

Directed and written by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, this finds Holly (Helen Rogers), Cali (Alexandra Turshen) and Mel (Lauren Molina) - girls home from college for the holidays but also representations of Freud's id, ego and superego - going to party at Cali's uncle's house.

It's only after they're there for some time that the girls realize that she lied and that she has no idea who owns the house. That's when Arthur (Larry Fessenden), the groundskeeper, arrives and tries to kick them out. He falls down the stairs and appears to die, so the girls decide to tell the cops that he showed up and attacked Holly, but fell down the stairs. They make up evidence by Cali ripping out some of Holly's hair and Holly scratching herself with the man's fingernails. That's when they find out that he's not dead but paralyzed.

The girls also learn that Cali is probably mental, as she smothers Arthur with a pillow and tries to kill Holly, thereby eliminating the person that Arthur attacked and allowing her to get away with the crime. I won't ruin the end of this, but this is certainly one brutal holiday film.

Berk and Olsen have since made another movie about a burglary gone wrong, Villains, and Significant Other.

This was written in two and a half days by Werner Herzog, who was inspired by a book his friend gave him and what he read about Lope de Aguirre. He was on a trip with a football team at the time and someone got so drunk on the bus that they puked all over the script.

Herzog knew who he wanted to be Aguirre: Klaus Kinski. Years ago, as a child, he met the actor when he rented a room in Herzog's family apartment and proceeded to destroy it in three months, reducing a sink and toilet to dust. He sent the script to the actor and a few days later, at four in the morning, Kinski called him screaming.

Kinski wanted to play Aguirre as a madman. Herzog wanted him to be a quiet menace. So he would enrage Kinski before each shot and wait for the actor's anger to work itself out and then yell for the camera to roll. This may have backfired, as Kinski was so upset at the noise extras were making while playing cards that he shot a man's fingertip off, which was soon followed by Kinski trying to leave the set, only for Herzog to claim he would murder-suicide to stop that from happening.

Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) sends Don Pedro de Ursúa (Roy Guerra), Don Lope de Aguirre (Kinski), nobleman Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling), Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro), Ursúa's mistress Doña Inés (Helena Rojo) and Aguirre's teenage daughter Flores (Cecilia Rivera) along with forty slaves down the river to find El Dorado, the city of gold. Of course, things don't work out that way, leaving us with Aguirre starting a mutiny that ends with him clutching a monkey and yelling, "Who else is with me?" but everyone is dead.

I wish someone had filmed the making of this movie, as Herzog chopped down a tree and was attacked by hundreds of fire ants, Kinski nearly killed an extra by hitting them in the head with a sword, Herzog filming with a camera that he stole from the Munich Film School, the monkeys biting Herzog fifty times and Kinski a few times as well and no regard for history, only the movie that Herzog wanted to make.

Look, we live in a world where there's a Werner Herzog action figure. Also: Just seeing Kinski's insane face, brooding on a raft that everyone was really in danger riding, all in the literal heart of darkness making a movie that Herzog almost lost the film for makes me realizing that magic can be real.

Directed and written by Jan Svankmajer, this dark take on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland looks like nothing else. This was Svankmajer's first full-length movie after twenty years of making shorts.

Instead of writing the entire plot out, let me explain as best as I can what I remember of this: the White Rabbit coming back to life, shaking off its taxidermy and being a real animal again, breaking through the glass of his case, leading Alice on a journey that takes her past doors and on elevators to another world. Alice drinks ink and becomes a doll, then emerges from that same doll as a human again. Alice's tears being so plentiful that she fills a room with them and swims away. A mechanical tea party, a pig dressed in baby clothes and so many other images that it goes into overload.

You know that people got really stoned or dropped acid and watched this. I'd like you to know that this could be one of the most dangerous movies to watch on substances. This is pure movie drugs, a film ready to take you on a bad trip all on its own. 10/10, no notes.

Director Stéphane Ambiel made this short that the Scala ad copy claimed "Taking ten minutes to do what John Waters achieved in ten years." This is great for selling the movie, but it's nowhere in Waters league. That said, it has something to offend everyone, including shooting up with toilet water, puking up a turd, pushing a transgender woman's head into the bowl while taking her from behind while a nun teams up on her and then everyone eating feces with crackers. I can only imagine that some people will be horribly upset by this, but it's made so goofily that you can't help but laugh at it. Somewhere, staunchly British people are also upset that the French are doing a Monty Python sketch with poo eating.

Directed by Josh Becker, who wrote it with Scott Spiegel, this is a little-watched short that has many of the players of the Evil Dead series, including Bruce Campbell as the hero, Sam Raimi as a Nazi and Robert Tapert as a native.

As you can tell, Cleveland Smith is pretty much Indiana Jones, down to being chased by a bolder, but he also gets caught in quicksand and is nearly killed by a dinosaur. He has a whip, just like Dr. Jones, but he also has a ventriloquist dummy and a special pair of pants known as the Waders of the Lost Park.

This is totally politically incorrect and as dumb as it gets. I mean that in the best of ways.

Director and writer Paul Hart-Wilden wrote the script for the little-seen - and great - movie Skinner. He also wrote Living Doll, but Dick Randall gave it to George Dugdale and Peter Mackenzie Litten to direct.

It's got a simple story - a man tries to stay in a room only to learn that it's still possessed by a demon that has already killed one person - but it has plenty of gore to make it stand out. Its creator is obviously a big horror fan and his commentary on working on this is quite interesting. Hart-Wilden is still working, directing the TV series 31 Days of Halloween.

This is on the Scala blu ray from Severin.

A proof of concept for a sequel to Maniac that never happened, this was directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock) and written by Joe Cirillo and its star Joe Spinell.

Shot in a bar that Spinell frequented and filled with his friends, this was a concept featuring Spinell as Mr. Robbie, a drunken kid show host who is dealing with letter after letter from abused children. The only way that he knows to deal with them is murder. What's strange is that this is the same plot - and nearly the same name for its protagonist - as An Eye for an Eye/The Psychopath, a movie that finds Mr. Rabbey attacking parents who beat their children.

You only get a few minutes of what may have been, but when I see the craggy face of Joe Spinell, I feel like life could be OK. In some other world, I've bought this several times and just got the UHD release of it, having to explain to my wife why I keep buying the same film so many times.

I adore that Giovinazzo did a commentary for this, explaining how it happened and some of the sleazier things that he learned about the cast and where this was filmed.

Director Jerry Ciccoritti started his career with Psycho Girls and Graveyard Shift AKA Central Park Drifter, so how wild is it that he just made this viral movie? Written by Russell Hainline, this has Kathy Barrett (Lacey Chabert) runs a diner in Hope Springs, New York, but everything is falling apart after the death of her husband. To cheer her up, her friends Theo (Dan Lett) and Mel (Sherry Miller) buy her a red scarf. Later, she takes that scarf and puts it on a muscular ice sculpture and, well, have you seen or heard Frosty the Snowman?

Jack Snowman (Dustin Milligan) comes into her life and ends up enchanting everyone in town except for conspiracy obsessed Sheriff Nathaniel Hunter (Craig Robinson). This succeeds through its casting, as it also has Lauren Holly, Katy Mixon Greer from Eastbound & Down and Joe Lo Truglio from The State, all talents that elevate anything that they appear in.

I love this term: "born sexy yesterday" which comes from Pop Culture Detective. How can Kathy find anything sexually interesting in a baby in human form, even if he has nice abs? Is he a project, a blank slate, like a snowman, that one can project their dreams on as easily as insert a carrot for a nose?

Why am I thinking so hard about this movie?

That said, Hainline is on Letterboxd and seems to have a sense of humor, saying "in 2021, I started pitching to my friends, in my best Norm Macdonald-esque delivery, "what if, when Frosty the Snowman came to life... he was a super-hot dude?" then I'd hit them with "it's called HOT FROSTY." and it always got a laugh... but over time, it also burrowed under my skin. For whatever reason, I couldn't let this idea go. I had to write this movie."

Look, someone has to **** that snowman. It may as well be one of the Mean Girls. At least this has some fun callbacks to other Netflix holiday movies and her past acting roles. If it was a female snow woman, however, I feel like people would get angry.

Max Allan Collins took over Dick Tracy for Chester Gould in 1977 and stayed on it for 15 years while also writing the Nathan Heller books - he won the Best Novel Shamus award for Stolen Away - as well as the graphic novel Road to Perdition (which became a movie), the comic books Ms. Tree and Wild Dog, and has directed four movies: Mommy, Mommy 2: Mommy's Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. If that isn't enough, he's a two-time member of the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and has written several movie novelizations, including the last two G. I. Joe movies and books based on CSI, Criminal Minds and Bones.

This story came along at a bad time for its creator. "The day before Thanksgiving 1992, I was notified by mail in a letter from a particularly odious editor at Tribune Media Services that my services as writer of the Dick Tracy strip were no longer required. I had done the writing of the strip, taking over for creator Chester Gould, since late 1977 - a fifteen-year run plus a few months."

The same day, he lost his contract with Bantam books.

It was this story that broke his writer's block after all that happened.

On Christmas Eve 1942, private eye Richard Stone (Rob Merritt) is celebrating. He's gotten out of the draft with a bribe, which may cost him his secretary and girl Katie Crockett, whose brother is oversees fighting the war. His employee Joey (Tommy Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt) is getting sick of spying on cheating husbands and wives. And then there's his partner Marley (Chris Causey), who was killed a year ago, a crime that he didn't even try to solve.

That night, Stone is visited by Jake Marley, on leave from Purgatory so that he can convince Stone to solve his death. He brings three ghosts with him: the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Bonnie Parker, played by Alisabeth Von Presley), Present (a recently killed soldier, Hank Ross, played by Keith Porter) and Future (The King, who isn't even old enough to be Elvis Presley yet, but ghosts don't conform to the space time continuum; he's played by Scot Gehret).

Sure, you know the story A Christmas Carol, but you've never seen it as a film noir. This is a really interesting movie and it's awesome to see it come to life, knowing that Collins has been wanting to get back to making movies for several years. Go in knowing it had a small budget, but be wowed because it has big ideas at its heart. I'm definitely adding this to my annual holiday film rotation.

Directed by Jesse Palangio and written by Rossa McPhillips and Simon Phillips, Blood and Snow is going to invite critical comparisons to The Thing, as it's about a meteor landing near an oil well in Canada and a woman named Marie (Anne-Carolyne Binette) who is infected by it. She's taken back to the base by Sebastian (Michael Swatton) and Luke (Simon Phillips) and - as you probably guessed by now - something isn't right.

It's always nice to see Vernon Wells in a movie. Here, he's The Professor, one of the few scientists who might be able to figure this out. As for Marie, she wants to spread the virus inside her, starting with the rescue team that is coming to save everyone.

This obviously has nowhere near the budget that it needs to have, nor does the way too quick ending close things up the right way. But for what it cost - and tempered expectations - it's a fine cold weather alien movie. There's hardly any gore, either. Movies don't need it, but when you're expecting something based on what this is cribbing notes from, a little guts would be lovely.

Norma (Brooke Shields) is stuck with a broken down truck when she's picked up by Roger (Perry King), who is on his way to his cabin in the woods. Roger is a dream man, a lover of fine food, opera and antiques. However, he tells her that he hopes to get back with Joanna, who just so happens to get back sooner than our thieving woman - oh yes, Norma may not even be her real name - expected.

"Good evening, creeps. And welcome aboard Tales from the Crypt Scare-lines Flight 666, offering direct service from your living room straight to Hell. As we will be experiencing some tur-boo-lence, we recommend that you keep your seat belts fastened and your vomit bags handy. So slip on your dead-set and get ready for tonight's in-fright entertainment. It's a nasty tale about my favorite kind of ghouls: dread-heads. I call it: "Came the Dawn.""

Norma may be a killer who murdered her husband and his lover. Yet she's come up against someone - maybe more than just a single person - instead of getting to steal everything in the house. Michael J. Pollard also shows up and Valerie Wildman appears as the first victim. This has a big twist that I will let you find out for yourself.

This episode was directed by Uli Edel, who made Christiane F. How insane that he made his way to America - where he also directed Last Exit to Brooklyn and Body of Evidence - before working on TV shows like Twin Peaks, Oz and this episode. He also did The Little Vampire! What a strange career! Ron Finley, who wrote this, made five scripts for the series.

This is based on the story "Came the Dawn" from Shock SuspenStories #9, which was written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Wally Wood. The description of that story is a little different: "A man thinks that the girl he has met in the woods may be a dangerous escaped lunatic because she matches the description, but his girlfriend ends up meeting a grim fate as the latest victim of the true escapee."