Honorable Mention

Nothing tooo terribly special, but this is a fun little black comedy about a professor, stressed about trying to qualify for tenure, whose whole life spirals into bad intrigue when…

Extremely decent zombie movie, the way they should be done. An American mercenary survives the crash of the last place out of Africa, and must walk across the zombie-infested savannah…

WOW. Here we have something special. Ok, wait, let me qualify that. For starters, let me say: my first impression was, most people will hate this movie. Reading up on…

I have no idea how this comedy series isn't considered a classic. This road trip family comedy ran for 6 seasons and I'm just totally fond of it, I found…

The descriptive blurb they use,"A group of five college kids are forced to match wits with unwelcoming residents when they fly to a 'deserted' island for a party weekend"is accurate, but doesn't quite give away what the movie is actually about. Ok, this is TV-movie quality, but it's 1970s TV-movie quality, and while nothing spectacular, it's also nothing I've quite seen before, outside of those '70s"nature has it in for man"sci fi/horror flicks. To say more would spoil it. I thought it was fun. It's not a cheezy monster movie, but somehow it might do if you're in a cheesy monster movie mood. Apparently it scored a 15% on rotten tomatoes, which, ok, I mean, yeah, I get it, it's not by any means scary, and not even really very good by most movie standards. But come on, where's people's sense of fun?

A middling action picture elevated to high entertainment by the sheer genius of casting Bob Odenkirk and Christopher Lloyd as tough-as-nails action heroes, and, the unlikely fact that they actually pull it off. I liked it.

Pamela Adlon out-"Louie"s Louie in this slice-of-life series about three generations of foul-mouthed women trying to get by. A charming, realistic, funny, undiscovered gem. Deserved its five-season run and never got old.

A somehow undiscovered drama/comedy gem with Zach Galifianakis playing both an emotionally complicated rodeo clown and his straight-laced twin brother, with Louie Anderson playing their mother. This was Zach Galifianakis's moment, and nobody knows about it, and I say that pretty much already generally liking everything else he's done.

I like this movie. Well,"like"is a strong word, it's intense and really disturbing but appreciably well-made. Dreama Walker stars in a"based on a true story"very-slow-burn drama, sticking fairly close to the true facts, about a man who called the office of a fast food joint claiming to be law enforcement, and intimidated the manager and several other people into imprisoning, humiliating, and finally sexually abusing an innocent employee for several hours. The entire first two acts of the movie are set mostly in the one room where it happens. It's pretty disturbing and, I thought, admirably well made, considering how tough the subject matter is. Caution: if you research afterwards, as I'm often inclined to, you'll learn that the full story of the actual events is actually a little more disturbing than what was shown in the movie. The whole thing is really upsetting. But the movie is so well made it's hard not to appreciate the filmmaking.

Wow. Real honorable mention here. I found this one on Tubi, and for the most part, it's actual horror cinema, not the TV"horror"-in-quotes writing exemplified by campy shows like"American Horror Story"which use horror tropes with any edges safely blunted off to avoid upsetting anybody. Anthology series where acclaimed directors (Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, John Landis, John Carpenter) each directed a 1-hour horror film. As an anthology, the quality is up and down, but for the most part finds these directors in top form and, in the best episodes, not watering their fare down for TV... this is something fans of actual quality horror movies might actually enjoy. And, happily, it doesn't even lean very often into"horror comedy"or in-jokes, for the most part indulging in those only when it will actually work (I had a chuckle when John Landis's episode has a policeman, speculating a wild animal attack has improbably occurred in his town, mention a wolf attack reported in central London in 1981.) Director Takashi Miike's episode, while not among my favorites, was actually pulled from the original run of the series by Showtime over concerns about the content being too extreme (for cable in 2006!) and, true to form, Dario Argento's episode, characteristically both ridiculous and disturbing, had to be edited for violence in the original run, too. The second season isn't as good, it's more"tv horror", although it still has its moments, and is by and large still often better than most other TV horror. I was somewhat unnerved by the idea, if not entirely the execution, of Joe Dante's season 2"The Screwfly Solution", in which something similar to pest control biotech, designed to reduce insect populations by chemically interfering with mating urges, finds a much broader use. Tobe Hooper also is nice to see back in fine form in season 1, but I'm not going to say any more than that.

Tubi very intelligently put this on on autoplay right after The Thing, and I'd somehow never seen it. Another movie that is very dated and of its time, but, I actually, watching it, assumed it must have from the early to mid '60s, not 1956. It's another one of those films that you kind of have to view through the lens of its era, but I can believe that if I had been a teenager in the 1950s and saw this when it came out, without having seen everything later that it shaped, I would have thought it was incredible. I remember not all that long ago, some kids raised on modern, studio-crafted pop saying they couldn't understand what was so great about the Beatles, and I couldn't help but think of that watching this. It certainly originated a lot of common tropes: first sci-fi film to feature faster-than-light travel, first one to use an electronic soundtrack, first one set entirely on an alien world, not to mention the use of vivid color photography years before the black-and-white era ended, and in terms of its production and many of the tropes it uses it's very easy to see the influence on later shows on up until"Star Trek"and beyond. It's hard to believe it preceded Star Trek by at least 10 years, in that sense it still seems ahead of its time.

I liked this. A definite B-movie, an anthology-type flick about people trying to survive in a town where people''s bodies are being taken over and mutated by a fungal infection. If that premise sounds like anything you could ever enjoy watching, and you can tolerate some occasionally cheesy special effects, then this movie is probably closer to what you hope something like that would be than what something like that usually turns out to be. I thought it was fun, if a little viscerally gory. Fungus... I'm sure you can imagine. It was kinda fun though.

Sometimes I see a flick that should have been a tedious captivity flick but they actually pull it off. This one is one of those. Gang of kids go to rob a blind guy's house, thinking it will be easy.... they're very wrong. Definitely original, with good enough casting, acting, and production to pull it off. Not great by a long shot but for one of these movies to even stand out as not being garbage is impressive. It kind of held my attention, which is incredibly rare for these kinds of exercised. I would say if you're only going to watch one pursuit/captivity flick in your life, this might be a contender. It's got 88% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and while I might not go that far on an absolute basis, it makes some sense, and grading on a curve with most of these kinds of movies, I definitely would give it at least that. (Note: closing credits say produced by Sam Raimi. A-ha. And, hold cow, I didn't even recognize Jane Levy with her hair bleached blonde as the lead.)

What can I say? It's a classic. Modern sci-fi/horror/action movie buffs will probably wonder why people once thought this was so great, and it's probably for me not even on par with"The Blob"(a surprisingly good movie for the era and subject matter) but still, for 1951, I can see the appeal, it was probably pretty unlike anything that had been seen at the time. I enjoyed it for sure.

Hey, look! It's a good old-fashioned horror movie! If this had come out in the 70s, it'd be a minor classic. It even has the old-school analog synth soundtrack. Vacationing couple gets stuck in an island in Mexico where it turns out the night before all the kids suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and killed all the adults. It's kind of the opposite of"Mom & Dad", or"The Birds"but with children instead of birds. In fact, I'd be surprised if"The Birds"wasn't a conscious influence. But the nice thing is, that's as close as it gets to cliches, excepting the title. Very far from a Hollywood horror movie, that's for sure. Light on gore in terms of screentime devoted to it, but extremely gory in the few brief moments it's shown. Not great by a long stretch, but good, in a way that they don't really make horror movies anymore... definitely only for horror fans, though. Gets pretty brutal by the end, seriously doesn't pull its punches, which, when you consider the bad guys are a bunch of children, is even more brutal. Honorable mention, I think. Looks like the kids probably had a mess of fun making it, too. Amusingly, Wikipedia says this film made a total of about $2500 in theaters. Also, turns out, it's an almost shot-for-shot remake of a 1976 Spanish horror film called"Who Can Kill a Child?"which, really, would be a much better title for what it is. It's funny, because something about it reminded me of Long Weekend, another '70s film which I got turned on to by liking a remake that nobody else cared for.

A houseful of twentysomethings discovers that their recently deceased neighbor across the street was a scientist who invented a camera that takes polaroids of 24 hours into the future. I've always been fond of this movie. I can't say it's a great movie but it's an ok movie, would have been kind of the sci-fi equivalent of a"teen scream"horror movie, but—despite some serious flaws, such as some flabbiness to the plot involving a bad guy whose performance just screams"miscast hipster actor trying hard to play bad guy"—it's saved by mostly above-average clever ideas and execution, most especially some careful and creative plotting right when it's needed, which gets better as the movie goes on... kind of the reverse of the usual"started good but ran out of steam"problem. I spent the first half of a much later second viewing saying,"This is good, but I'm not sure it's really much better than average"but by the time it was done, it was like, oh, yeah, I did like this for a reason.

As described in my last review, compilation of three interwoven short tales, revolving around a broadcast signal driving people insane. I like this one a lot, very well done. (Note: there's another 2014 horror movie called"The Signal"that isn't nearly as good.) I just recently, 10 or 15 years after it had faded to a distant memory of a film Ihad especially enjoyed, popped back up on Tubi (which, among the seemingly thousands of awful horror films it gets, seems to also manage to get these distantly-remembered, hard-to-find favorites.) I remember why I liked it. It's gorier than I remember, and, I don't know, I can't say it's exactly a great movie, but it seriously well done for what it is and the kind of gem I would say non-horror fans shouldn't go out of their way to see, but, every horror fan should see it. As noted elsewhere, the first of the three episodes, directed by the guy who went on to do"The Ritual"and a bunch of better stuff I noted in my review of that film, is the best of the three, very effectively ratcheting up the suspense. The rest is nearly as good though. The second two rely a little bit on camp humor, not my favorite thing, but it's strong enough all the way through to pull off this off-kilter and gory end-of-humanity tale. Also, never realized unti now, the female lead was also one of the leads in"YellowBrickRoad"another favorite deep cut.

Ok, this one is special, I think we have an honorable mention here. A folklorist investigates tales of strange creatures appearing in Vermont. When I threw this on, I was suprised to discover it was an old horror movie, not a new one, and nearly turned it off, but thankfully I didn't. Within just a few minutes I found myself thinking that I'd forgotten just how visually beautiful some of those old black and white movies are... similar to some of those John Ford westerns. It was quite a ways into it before I realized something was a little too clean—by the end of the movie I realized that certain lighting revealed that there was no film grain. Which makes sense, because the movie was actually made in 2011. But other than that, WOW, the 1930s reproduction is note-perfect, the acting style, the costumes, the special effects, most definitely the lighting... somebody involved with the making of this film had a spectacularly good eye for black-and-white cinematography, it's just beautiful and would probably have stood out as a great example of vintage cinematography if it had actually been vintage. The story is not great but absolutely good, it builds as effectively as some of the great vintage horror, and the plot ticks along, nothing about it sags at any point from start to finish. There's clearly some modern special effects used but for the most part they're effectively disguised to look like 1930s technology, and mostly the whole thing works. The monsters are a little cheezy but by the time you see them I was so into it that I didn't care. This film really caught my attention, there were a few times I had to rewind to see things a second time. Plus, a dark ending, much more Lovecraft than Hollywood, even though only the first two acts are actually from the Lovecraft story this is based on. Very nice work from an indie director. Not quite a great film, but definitely a treat, from where I sit, for sure. Quality entertainment. Incidentally I notice this one gets high marks from a lot of Lovecraft fans in the review section on IMDB.

Score one for AI. This small indie film has haunted me for years, as I forgot to review it when I watched it, until tonight I typed one image I…