Detours was written and produced by Mara Lesemann and directed by Robert McCaskill. The movie is a drama about a recently single woman and her widowed father as they drive from New York City to Saint Petersburg, Florida. You can check out our full spotlight on Detours here and you can watch the movie for free on Tubi.

Detours stars Tara Westwood, Carlo Fiorletta, Paul Sorvino, Michael Cerveris, Deirdre O’Connell, Debargo Sanyal, Vanessa Aspilla, and Richard Kind.

Last February we interviewed producer/actor Jeff Kirkendall about his movie Return to Splatter Farm, an independent horror movie that he made with his long time collaborator Mark Polonia at Polonia Brothers Entertainment. Known as PBE for short, the production company has impressively produced & released dozens of movies, including last year’s viral hit Amityville in Space. We asked Jeff to recommend five movies from Polonia Brothers Entertainment that every indie film fan should check out.

Here are his recommendations (from oldest to newest, with watch links & more details):

Hallucinations (1986)
Director: Todd Michael Smith, Mark Polonia, John Polonia
Starring: Todd Michael Smith, Mark Polonia, John Polonia
Description: When three brothers are home alone one day they encounter a series of violent hallucinations and nightmares with seemingly no escape. (Source: Tubi)
Click here to watch on Tubi TV

Feeders (1996)
Directors: Jon McBride & John Polonia
Starring: Todd Carpenter, Jon McBride, John Polonia, Melissa Torpy
Description: A town that’s been taken on as a feeding ground and outpost of death by human-eating aliens gets discovered by two buddies on a road trip. (Source: Tubi)
Click here to watch on Tubi TV

HalloweeNight (2009)
Director: Mark Polonia
Starring: Todd Carpenter, Cindy Wheeler, Danielle Donahue
Description: A bullied student exacts his revenge on those who wronged him during a college party on Halloween Night. (Source: Amazon)
Available to Rent on Amazon

Jurassic Prey (2015)
Director: Mark Polonia
Starring: Steve Diasparra, Danielle Donahue, Ken Van Sant, Jeff Kirkendall
Description: After a botched bank robbery, a group of thieves and the ensuing police must band together to fight an unearthed T-Rex at a remote lake cabin. (Source: Tubi)
Click here to watch on Tubi TV

House Squatch (2022)
Director: Anthony Polonia, Mark Polonia
Starring: Ken Van Sant, Jeff Kirkendall, Tim Hatch, Titus Himmelberger, Yolie Canales
Description: The small town of Shadyville finds itself plagued by a hairy creature and pressures its local sheriff to deal with this sasquatch. (Source: Tubi)
Click here to watch on Tubi TV

Are you a fan of Polonia Brothers Entertainment? What are your favorite PBE movies?

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Today lets take a look at the trailer for the indie heist thriller Solid Rock Trust from writer/director Rick Ives. The movie stars Koko Marshall as Maddie, a hacker who is “armed with only a collection of cell phones and a unique talent” that “orchestrates an elaborate bank heist from an abandoned building.” As these things go, the situation spins out of control. Will she be able to keep things together? The indie film co-stars Alexander Hearth, Willie Davis IV, Tay Jones, and Mikaela Moore, and was released by Indie Rights Movies.

Solid Rock Trust is available to watch on Tubi here.

The MCU has been very popular for a number of reasons, but one of the things that really worked in Phase One was a handful of characters that appeared in multiple movies in smaller roles at first and helped to bring the bigger world together. Marvel owes a lot to Phil Coulson and Nick Fury. With James Gunn and Peter Safran leading the new (and hopefully improved) DCU, what characters should they bring in to tie the various movies together? We have a few ideas.

JIMMY OLSEN

Who would be better than Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen? He is a beloved character that has been around for more than 80 years. He could give the audience a very human perspective to this larger than life world of superheroes, over the top villains, and fictional cities. His job as a photojournalist could let him travel city to city photographing superheroes for the Daily Planet- and it gives him a unique chance to network with the various heroes (he is Superman’s best friend if you have not heard). I can also picture a docu series with Jimmy talking about different cities, the superheroes in them, and the already established rogues. The DCEU wasted Olsen’s potential, lets hope the DCU doesn’t repeat this mistake!

PHANTOM STRANGER

Okay, maybe a human is not strong enough to hold the DCU together through various movies, how about an omniscience being who already ties together DC Comic’s supernatural, cosmic, and earthbound heroes together? Heck, he even helped usher DC’s crossover with Marvel in the nineties. The Phantom Stranger is the perfect character to lurk in the background, moving heroes and villains around like chess pieces, and preparing for something big and multiverse shattering. And look at that fedora, is there a more stylist immortal character for James Gunn to choose?

VANDAL SAVAGE

Who says we need a good guy to tie together the various movies of the DCU? Thanos became the connective tissue of the MCU movies after Coulson/Fury and the first Avengers movie. And we keep sitting at thej edge of our seats for the mad titan’s next appearance. While I love Lex Luthor and the Joker, both have been kinda overused in past movies and TV shows. Enter Vandal Savage, a 50 thousand year old villain who has faced off with both the Justice Society and the Justice League. He is a master manipulator who can also hold his own against most of the heroes of the DCU. He can tie different time periods of the DCU together (Jonah Hex, Golden Age Heroes, Swamp Thing, Icon),and just maybe, his plan has been boiling for thousands of years…

What characters would you love to see tie the DCU together? Do you want to see movies tie together right away, or wait a while to crossover?

We are back with more movies that you can Watch Online for Free! A few weeks ago we connected and sent some questions over to Pablo Chehebar, the co-director/co-writer of Beavers: Patagonia Invaders. The movie is a documentary about an extraordinary incident in Argentina that began in 1946 that has had a lasting impact to present day.

“Argentina wanted to enrich its southern fauna, because it seemed to it that it did not have the attractiveness of the northern forests,” Pablo told us. “For this it decides to import 20 beavers, introduce them and thus develop a fur industry. 70 years later fur is no longer used to make coats and the beaver has become an unstoppable plague that is destroying the Patagonian forests. What to do with them? Kill them all? Eat them? Return them to Canada? Solutions that are still being sought, while the beaver continues to live in Patagonia, without fully understanding how it got there in the first place.”

I can barely wrap my head around the fact that 20 beavers were released in Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost island of Patagonia, and turned into more than 150,000 beavers. That is madness. Pablo went into why they turned this story into a documentary, “Because we believe that the worst weapon humanity has is ignorance. Deep down, the beaver is a problem of ignorance about the so-called “invasive species” and what to do with them.”

Beavers: Patagonia Invaders was co-directed by Pablo Chehebar and Nicolás Iacouzzi and features Christopher Anderson, Claudio Bertonatti, and Mariela Borgnia. You can watch for free on Tubi TV and The Roku Channel.

And you can find out more info on the movie and watch the trailer here.

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Finding Ophelia is a supernatural mystery and follows Advertising Executive William Edgar who “inhabits a strange dream-like reality. His obsession with a mysterious woman leads down a bizarre, dark path of signs and wonders. Sometimes finding the girl of your dreams can be a nightmare.” The movie was directed by Stephen Rutterford and stars Jimmy Levar, Christina Chu-Ryan, Ira Grossman, Alexandra Lyon, Alexandria Isola, and J.J. Crowne.

You can watch Finding Ophelia for free on Tubi here.

What is Wherewolves about?
Bullies, jocks, and geeks. A teacher. The woods. An unspeakable horror. A fresh take on an old theme where nothing is what it seems. What is out there? Can it really be werewolves?

Using a fun, explosive style, full of new slang and fresh dialogue, Wherewolves is the story of a group of high school seniors, most “military brats”, who are headed for an army-type survival weekend. The underdogs, Jeffrey and Doris, do not want to go as they fear for their safety among the disdain and cruelty of the popular students. Sergeant Tim O’Sullivan, their teacher, as well as their dysfunctional parents pressure them into going, but it is an unforgivable act by their peers that propels the pair to go. Likewise, Elie, a student resented because of his Arab roots, is even more determined to prove himself this weekend. In the background, a news report cautions of a wanted couple with alleged super-human strength supposedly brought on by a new drug on the streets.

In the woods, the students hike, hunt, camp, and soon act in unity as the forest brings them closer together. But does it? O’Sullivan leaves them alone for the night. The students bond, chant, tell campfire tales, and quickly lose their fears and inhibitions. HOO-AH! Though sexual tensions are high, it soon turns to violence and everything quickly turns sour. When the kids start disappearing one after the other, the remaining begin to unwittingly “act like the natives” carving spears, ready to face whatever is out there. What has gotten into them?

Amid blood-curdling growls and gruesome deaths, the story’s underlying layers are revealed. We see how misconceptions, prejudice, greed, fear, and hatred bring out the worst and best in us. What is out there? Can it really be werewolves?

What inspired Wherewolves?
Our love for horror films and George Romero’s body of work – which always includes an underlying social commentary – and particularly Martin (1976).

Tell us a little about you both, who are John Vamvas and Olga Montes?
John Vamvas and Olga Montes started as an acting team in 1992. They soon began to write their own scripts for lack of finding two-person plays they could tour across North America. They’ve written and toured four full-length critically acclaimed plays to packed houses across Canada and the United States, including Bad Boy, which they were invited to perform Off-Off-Broadway at New York’s Creative Place Theatre in the heart of Times Square.

In 2001, they were approached to star in and rewrite the dialogue for the short film, Things Never Said in Playa Perdida. Playa won the audience award at the New York Short Film Festival in 2002 and tied first place at the Festivalisimo festival in Montreal.

John and Olga wrote Wherewolves, a horror screenplay in 2010. It was quickly optioned but the project subsequently fell through. They then adapted WHEREWOLVES into a novel, edited by award-winning Canadian writer Shelley A. Leedahl.

The couple has now turned to indie film production, with Scarpedicemente, a play they wrote and toured in 1996, as their first feature. Scarpedicemente is currently on the Film Festival circuit and to date has garnered 51 Awards and 6 Nominations (watch the trailer for Scarpedicemente here!).

John has extensive experience directing for the stage, including A Hatful of Rain at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, where he met Olga in 1992. He has as well directed two plays at NY’s Creative Space Theatre, including Frederick Stroppel’s The Mamet Women.

When not acting, Olga works as a freelance translator and simultaneous interpreter, working with high-profile clients, such as the United Nations.

How can we read Wherewolves?
You can find Wherewolves online at Amazon and you can find out more about John and Olga at their website.