Rental Family

Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) is an American actor working in Japan but struggling to find roles outside cheesy token characters and commercials.

One day he rushes to a very confusing booking where he's playing a funeral guest and the "deceased" is very much alive.

It turns out he's been subcontracted by a "Rental family" company that hires out actors to play parts in a range of situations that exist on a kind of continuity through LARP to therapy, social work, fetish and in some cases victimless deception.

The company owner Shinji (Takehiro Hira) offers Phillip more work and after some initial hesitancy he begins to take on longer term roles.

CW: anybody who's ever done any kind of safeguarding training will want to scream at the screen about how unethical and risky this all is under the cover of "Japan being quirky"

Skinamarink

Siblings Kevin and Kaylee wake in the night and find themselves alone in the house. They look for their father but can't find him.

It's dark and unsettling so they go downstairs, build a pillow/blanket fort and watch old Merry Melodies cartoons on VHS.

Things are not right. Fundamental things like doors and then the toilet simply disappear. There are whispers in the dark.

CW: children in peril, constant flickering lights

Deathstalker (2025)

Battlefield scavenger Deathstalker (Daniel Bernhardt) travels a land ravaged by war between the kingdom of Asterian and the Dreadites controlled by the evil sorcerer Necronemnon (Nicholas Rice).

Unknowingly he takes an ancient amulet of power from a dying Prince and is bound to it and the ongoing battle.

Trying to rid himself of this burden he picks up, literally, the goblin wizard Doodad (Laurie Field/Patton Oswalt) and thief Brisbayne (Christina Orjalo) on the way but can't shake his destiny.

CW: so much cheese it could kill the lactose intolerant