Eric McCormack in a scene from Hell Motel.Anthony Fascione/ Shaftesbury/Shudder/Supplied
Hell Motel, Hollywood Suite On Demand
On Friday the 13th comes the first episode of this new Canadian horror whodunit from the creators of the anthology series Slasher (Aaron Martin and Ian Carpenter). A group of true-crime influencers attend the opening weekend of a resort built on the site of a diabolic slaughter 30 years earlier, and you’ll be unsurprised to learn that they start to be knocked off one at a time next. Paula Brancati – of Degrassi: The Next Generation and also one of many Slasher alums in the cast – stars as a scream queen aging out of “crying and dying” roles, while Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack hams it up as a TV chef who serves up vegan dishes shaped like severed body parts. Stage greats Yanna McIntosh and Gray Powell play a couple of RV-ing normies who get stranded at the motel during a hurricane. It’s solid self-aware Canadian genre TV that doesn’t pretend to be anything more that a bloody good time. Though it premieres Friday, new episodes stream Tuesdays.
Real estate broker Heather Rovet in a still from ROMCON: Who the F**k is Jason Porter?Prime Video/Supplied
ROMCON: Who the F**k is Jason Porter?, Prime Video
More Canadian horror streaming as of Friday the 13th: This two-part doc follows up on the true-crime tale of a Toronto-area romance scammer some may remember from a 2022 Toronto Life feature (by Jane Gerster, who makes an appearance). The man sometimes known as Jason Porter finally met his match in a real estate broker named Heather – who he moved in with during the pandemic, and who persisted until charges were laid once she figured out his scam. I admire the bravery of the many women who speak out on camera about their experience being love-bombed followed by a disturbing mix of gaslighting, fraud and theft. “You don’t want to be known as the woman who got fooled by a con man,” says one. Director Henry Roosevelt keeps things light-ish in this doc being sold as “the dark side of dating in one of North America’s largest cities,” but in the margins is sad commentary of how police can brush off “domestic” crimes and the glacial pace of the Ontario criminal justice system.
A scene from Bottoms showing, from left, Ayo Edebiri, Rachel Sennott, Zamani Wilder, Summer Joy Campbell, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber and Virginia Tucker.Courtesy of ORION Pictures Inc./The Associated Press
Bottoms, Crave
When this subversive spin on the teen-sex comedy from Toronto-born filmmaker Emma Seligman was released in cinemas in 2023, The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz described it as Fight Club meets But I’m a Cheerleader meets Wet Hot American Summer. After a run-in with the football team, lesbian virgin besties PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) start a feminist self-defence club in order to attract their cheerleader crushes, and the proceedings only get more satirical and surreal from there. “While Bottoms’ final leg dips ever so slightly into genuine emotion – forgetting its detached, ironic cool – Seligman’s concoction is delightfully strange and unabashedly, proudly queer,” wrote Hertz in his Critic’s Pick review. The film lands on Crave on June 13.
Carrie-Anne Moss as Greta Nelso and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Luke Brunner in a scene from the action-comedy series FUBAR.Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix/Supplied
FUBAR, Netflix
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action-comedy series is back for a second season, with creator Nick Santora having upped neither his action nor his comedy game since the show’s first batch of episodes two years ago. The former Governator and Monica Barbaro (seen in the interim as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown) return as father and daughter CIA operatives Luke and Emma Brunner – their cover blown and now living in an overcrowded house in an undisclosed location with family members, exes and fellow spies. Mostly shot in Ontario, FUBAR’s cup runneth over with Canucks from Jay Baruchel to Enrico Colantoni, but only Burnaby, B.C.’s Carrie-Anne Moss, a new addition this season as a former East German spy, manages to elicit so much as a smile from a script crammed with leaden exposition and wan one-liners. So, why am I including it on the list this week, you may ask …
David Lawrence and Paul Spence in a scene from FUBAR (2002).CBC Gem/Supplied
FUBAR, Netflix (and CBC Gem and Crave with Starz)
… because FUBAR the series is just the latest Hollywood product to unconscionably muddy the search results of an earlier, superior Canadian screen classic by using the same title (see: Paul Haggis’s Crash versus David Cronenberg’s; Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom vs. Ken Finkleman’s). It’s my duty as a patriotic watcher then to remind viewers of Michael Dowse’s cult 2002 mockumentary, FUBAR – in which Edmonton metalhead misadventurers Terry (David Lawrence ) and Dean (Paul Spence) have their beer-shotgunning bromance complicated by a diagnosis of testicular cancer. In 2023, Globe film critic Barry Hertz deemed it the eighth best comedy ever produced in this country: “a high-beer mark of Canadian comedy, as committed to its central bit as it is sincere in its love for its ‘just give’r’ heroes.” The film is leaving Netflix on June 30, but both FUBAR and FUBAR 2 (2010) are also on CBC Gem and Crave with Starz. The short-lived TV series FUBAR Age of Computer (2017) is, alas, only available for rent or purchase at the moment as far as I can tell.
