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Few cult studios embodied the DIY ethos of the VHS era quite like Full Moon Features. Nowhere is that clearer than in THE DOLLMAN TOYBOX: DOLLMAN X DEMONIC TOYS COLLECTION, a five-disc, eight-film set from 101 Films’ Black Label line. For the first time, the complete run of crossover madness — from Tim Thomerson’s tiny space cop to Baby Oopsie’s foul-mouthed reign of terror — has been gathered in one package. The result is less about perfection and more about persistence: a living archive of what happens when imagination refuses to die, even under the tightest budgets.

PEARLS wastes no time in plunging the viewer into a story that feels equal parts absurd, unsettling, and disturbingly relatable. With only fifteen minutes to make its mark, Alastair Train’s short film approaches the horrors of fertility struggles through a lens of body horror, distorted imagery, and the kind of creeping discomfort that stays long after the credits fade. It’s not a film that politely asks for attention—it forces it, much like the invasive presence of the oysters at its core.

This documentary manages to take something as familiar as baseball and remind us how much weight it can carry beyond the confines of a field. DIAMOND DIPLOMACY is one of those rare films that doesn’t just tell the story of a sport, but instead reshapes how we understand its place in the world. In under ninety minutes, it captures more than 150 years of history between the United States and Japan, demonstrating how the game became a vessel for unity, resilience, and repair.

MONSTERS WITHIN wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a character-driven drama with thriller elements about a veteran, Luke Wolf, who returns home and discovers that the hardest battles aren’t fought overseas, but inside the mind and within the relationships he’s neglected. The film’s core is the bond between Luke and his sister, Elle—played by writer-director-star Devin Montgomery and his real-life sister, Daniella Montgomery—which lends the story an authenticity that is palpable in the quiet moments. That choice grounds the film’s broader themes and keeps the focus where it belongs: on care, responsibility, and the complex path from avoidance to accountability.

MAIGRET opens with a promise: a character defined by patience and empathy dropped into a present-day Paris that rarely slows down. That recalibrating is the series’ thesis. Rather than treating modernization as a gimmick, it utilizes the contemporary setting to test what actually makes Jules Maigret distinctive—the way he listens, the space he creates for people to reveal themselves, and the stubborn insistence that justice must fit the human contours of a case, not just the letter of the law. The result is a character-driven crime drama that prioritizes quiet moments and builds its momentum through observation rather than shock.

DOGTOOTH remains one of the most startling debuts in modern cinema, the film that first presented Yorgos Lanthimos as a director unafraid of discomfort, ambiguity, and provocation. Now restored and released in 4K by Kino Lorber with director-supervised grading and remastered audio, it arrives with sharper edges than ever. Though released in 2009, its disturbing questions about control and manufactured truth still feel contemporary.

SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE arrives as one of the most unusual films that I’ve seen lately, and that’s saying something. This feature resists easy categorization and pushes firmly into the terrain of the Greek “weirdwave.” Directed by Yannis Veslemes, the film fuses grief, science fiction, surreal horror, and an undercurrent of bleak comedy into a deliberately confounding story of three brothers attempting to undo the permanent. What begins as a strange family drama quickly morphs into something far less stable — a feverish meditation on memory and mourning where logic crumbles as easily as the flowers that line its title.

Dan Curtis’ influence on horror television in the 1970s can’t be overstated. Having already carved a space for Gothic melodrama with DARK SHADOWS and expanded into cult TV films like THE NIGHT STALKER, he continued to explore eerie stories through ABC’s Wide World Mystery. The Kino Lorber collection LATE-NIGHT MYSTERIES rescues four of those productions—SHADOW OF FEAR, THE INVASION OF CAROL ENDERS, COME DIE WITH ME, and NIGHTMARE AT 43 HILLCREST—and brings them into HD for the first time. What emerges is a window into a lost era, when horror was filtered through the constraints of broadcast television, yet often found inventive ways to unsettle the audience.

KILLING FAITH takes the bones of a classic western and stitches them together with something far more haunting: a sense that the land itself has been cursed. Set in the Arizona territory of 1849, the film drops us into a plague-scarred desert where superstition and science are at war. On one side, a grieving doctor numbed by ether, clinging to what little logic he has left; on the other, a mother convinced her daughter’s strange affliction is nothing less than demonic. Between them lies the question the movie keeps circling: is the evil real, or are we simply desperate to believe in it?

FREAKED is the kind of movie that shouldn’t work—and somehow it does. It’s a gleefully obnoxious corporate satire wrapped in a carnival of latex, clay, and rubber, where every frame is crammed with jokes that flow from absurd wordplay and blink-and-you-miss-it visual gags. What gives it staying power isn’t just the noise; it’s the unity of its attitude. This thing is committed. The film’s whole ethos is “too much,” and that maximalism becomes the point.

Few horror films from the early 1980s blur the line between fantasy, industry satire, and straight-up slasher excess quite like THE LAST HORROR FILM. Directed by David Winters, it reunites Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro, who had already left a mark together in MANIAC, but here the dynamic takes on a different tone. Rather than the oppressive grimness, this one turns Cannes itself into a stage for obsession, paranoia, and guerrilla-style filmmaking that still feels chaotic decades later.

THE ICE TOWER doesn’t open with chaos. Instead, it settles into a quiet, unsettling rhythm that seeps under the skin. Set in the 1970s, the story follows Jeanne, a runaway orphan who stumbles into a film studio. There, she discovers a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ in progress and falls under the spell of Cristina, the star playing the role. What begins as fascination quickly deepens into something more dangerous, with Jeanne caught in a web of glamour, authority, and quiet menace.

Stelvio Massi’s THE .44 SPECIALIST (originally released in Italy as Mark colpisce ancora, or Mark Strikes Again) lands in the heart of the Eurocrime boom of the 1970s, when gritty realism and relentless violence defined a whole generation of Italian cop thrillers. As the third entry in the “Mark” trilogy, it brings back Franco Gasparri’s Inspector Mark Patti for another dive into the murky intersection of crime, politics, and undercover policing. Kino Lorber’s 2025 Blu-ray release resurrects the film for a new audience, reminding us why these poliziotteschi films still pulse with raw energy decades later.

ALMOST HOME opens with an intensity that doesn’t come from gunfire or explosions but from the silence of a man’s haunted mind. At just 20 minutes, this short film confronts a reality that persists with you: the wars many veterans fight don’t end on foreign soil. Director Menhaj Huda and writer-performer Kamal Khan craft a deeply personal story that tackles identity, trauma, and community in ways that feel both universal and yet also specific.

V/H/S/HALLOWEEN understands the job. Eight films in, this series knows that the most valuable thing it can offer isn’t lore, world-building, or IP maintenance; it’s a grab bag with teeth. The seasonal angle finally gives the franchise a backbone it has flirted with in previous installments but never fully embraced: jack-o’-lanterns, neighborhood rituals, home hauntings, gritty camcorders, and urban legends traded over sugar and fear. What’s different here is focus. Instead of a scattershot mix where one great short has to drag three middling ones up the hill, this entry aims for a baseline of “good” with multiple spikes into “nasty, memorable, and maybe great.”