The Maddening
Made-for-TV-movie-quality '90s direct-to-video. Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson ham it up as a deranged older couple who kidnap and imprison a young woman and hr daughter in their rural house because, movie.
Stephen King’s Riding The Bullet
Hint: good horror movies don't need to start their title with "Stephen King's".
Porno (2019)
Some horror movies are scary, some are just fun. Both are equally hard to pull off. This one is totally fun.
It plays like a comedy-horror but really is just straight horror. A group of christian teens in a small-town movie theater discover a porno flick in a walled-off lair in the basement that sets loose a succubus. And as silly as that sounds, it's hard to the good end of what such a silly conceit could have turned out to be.
No, it's good! Really! It doesn't aim any higher than it needs to—nobody will ever accuse this of being a great movie—but it aims to be a good, if slightly silly one, and succeeds far better than it has a right to. Good production values and acting, as well as a few deft touches and moments of well-done tension, save it from being a relentlessly silly endeavor. It…
Noise In The Middle
Rather scattered supernatural tale about a father dealing with his severely autistic daughter, who is apparently channeling his dead wife, or something.
Being Erica (TV series)
Reasonably watchable Canadian fantasy/drama series, probably aimed at teens or young adults. A young woman encounters a mysterious "therapist" who sends her back in time every episode to reconcile regrets from her life. It's fun enough, nothing great, but a little different and the cast is likeable, even when the later series tend towards the "we've run out of ideas" phase of making every story about relationships, who loves who, who's marrying who, who's having a baby, etc.
One nice thing, the series ended after 4 seasons, not because it was cancelled, but because they were at a good stopping point and felt the story had been told. That's the kind of slightly-above-average judgment that made it a slightly-above-average series.
They Whisper
Vaguely watchable southern gothic. Strange events surround two kids after they are rescued from playing in an abandoned mineshaft. Just on the good side of mediocre.
Marionette
Decent if somewhat slow British supernatural drama about a doctor who becomes convinced a young boy she is treating can control reality.
Cursed Encounters
Anthology of mostly British horror shorts. One terrible, a few alright, none great.
The Conspiracy
"Eyes Wide Shut" filmed as "The Blair Witch Project", except less.
Not the worst first-person shooter I've ever seen, not absolutely execrable like many, but without much more justification for existing than most of those movies.
ZEF: The Story Of Die Antwoord
Pretty decent documentary about a rap band I've always found visually compelling and musically and personally detestable. If you've ever felt compelled to sit through their videos despite entirely disliking the songs, this is pretty watchable. Also, there's some bits where they actually drop the whole pretense and just talk about things like normal human beings, in odd moments here and there. Pretty good exploration of their background and what they're trying to do, not just fan service, although there's plenty of that too. Came away feeling like they're actually pretty decent showmen and visual artists, or at least, visual stylists, and personally maybe a hair less vacantly pretentious than I thought.
The Girl Who Got Away
Reasonably well made but overlong and very slowly paced suspense thriller, something of a throwback to "When A Stranger Calls" or "The Serpent And The Rainbow"—two older, surprisingly talky ostensible 'horror' films that were marketed as being much more exciting than they actually were. And "When A Stranger Calls" had better character study, although this one tries.
I wouldn't mind movies like this if they didn't try to present them as horror films. Even so, this kind of moves along at a snail's pace, much more talk than plot.
Bucky Larsen: Born To Be A Star
Typically stupid, over-broad Adam Sandler/Farrelly Brothers-type fare for people who find dick jokes, fart jokes, and people getting hit with semen funny, with unredeeming cameos from such comedy non-phenomenons as Kevin Nealon and Pauly Shore. If you think the idea of Nick Swardson as a adult-who-acts-like-a-child getting an Adult Video Awards award for "best taint" is hilarious, you are this movie's target audience. Just keep me out of it.
Christina Ricci is appealing in it, though. She can play a sunny disposition surprisingly well.
The Wave (2019)
Playing like a combination of After Hours, Office Space, Altered States, and just a touch of Donnie Darko, this movie has Justin Long in an unusually frenetic variation of his usual nebbishy character, as an amoral and mercenary low-level lawyer for a big insurance firm, who goes to the wrong party, meets the wrong guy, and gets fed a mysterious hallucinogen that abruptly unmoors him in time and space during the most important day of his adult life, sending him careening back and forth across the paths of comically disreputable characters and friends and loved ones who no longer trust him.
It could have gone so wrong, and ultimately fallen apart, relied on contrived strangeness instead of story. But, it doesn't! Even though the film eventually fails to keep from telegraphing where it's going, it manages to balance out what could have turned into self-indulgent weirdness for it's own…
I Saw The TV Glow
A really interesting failure for sure. A cinematically beautiful fantasy/horror film that seems like it's going to successfully hover just barely on the right side of the line between interesting and pretentious indie artsiness, as it follows the lives at several different people between adolescence on young adulthood of a pair of outcasts who are fans of a surreal children's show called "The Pink Opaque", which may or may not be leaving the screen and affecting their lives.
I say "may or may not" not to be mysterious, but because the plot unfortunately falls apart in the third act and just succumbs to overproduced indie pretentiousness, and I really don't know what happens. Which is a shame, because it's pretty well done before that, and visually very nice to watch throughout.
I would really like to put this under "Je Nais Se Quois" because it really seems for…
Gut
I couldn't follow it. Amateur movie. Some guy who seems like he's from Brooklyn has grisly nightmares, not much happens.
In Furs
Incomprehensible home-movie-quality attempt at some sort of horror. Guy does drugs and freaks out or hallucinates or something. No acting, lighting, or talent to be found anywhere near this endeavor. Thankfully only an hour long.
Sunset On The River Styx
Morose slackers in LA morosely slack around, until somewhere in the middle of a bunch of jump cuts and editing effects it turns out to be about a suicide cult or alternate realities or vampires or something?
Let’s Dream
Nicely atmospheric but pretentious and dreadfully slow film. I can't even tell you what it's about. It opens with a man saying he hasn't slept since he was 7 years old, but after that... so slow, I couldn't focus on it. I think maybe it's supposed to be artistic?
I lasted about an hour before I felt like watching a movie.
Coming To America
Moderately amusing 1988 Eddie Murphy vehicle in which he plays an African prince who comes to America. He wins the girl in the end.
Spree
My favorite thing: a "horror movie" about a social media "influencer", shown entirely through phone screen views and security cameras. Psychotic influencer and rideshare driver (another thing we never need another horror movie about) kills passengers in hopes of views.
Weird one, though: a lot of famous faces, including that likeable guy from "Stranger Things" with the rectangular face, Mischa Barton, SNL's Sasheer Zamata and Mikey Day. Decently well-made for what it is. And rectangular-face-guy, as the psycho, does such a convincing job of being a shallow, annoying "influencer" that he's totally believable. The annoyingness is real!
This is like Hollywood's idea of "twisted enough to be cool"—hits all the numbers and hits them well, yet, is fake and shallow enough to fail to satisfy, and doesn't go far enough to actually be shocking. It's like the whole movie is in ironic scare quotes. Which may be the point.…
11th Hour Cleaning
Almost-watchable but very cliche'd haunted house flick about a crime scene cleaning crew trapped in a hallucinatory haunted house by a vengeful Norse demon or something. "Oculus" did it the hallucinatory haunted house thing better.
The Dead Guy
Weirdly charming zero-budget amateur "horror" in which an FBI agent with the power to talk to the dead spends the whole movie talking to the dead and literally doing nothing else. Seems like a likeable guy, though.
The Dark Tower
I have a certain odd affection for this widely-panned cosmic fantasy riff on Stephen King's "The Dark Tower"... or, parts of it, anyway. It's got decent acting, with Idriss Elba and Matthew McConnaughey as the good and (very) bad guys, and a couple of passing scenes are decently well done. It sort of loses its way en route to wanting to be the beginning of a hugh, cosmic fantasy/action franchise, and the story gets a bit flabby, but still, it's got its moments. I don't understand why it was panned quite as badly as it was. McConnaughey doesn't play bad guys very often and he pulls it off here.
Chappie
Sci-fi-ish action/adventure supposedly starring Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver, but actually, it's Die Antwoord steals "Robocop" and does about what you'd expect with him. No, really, it's actually them, playing themselves. It was kind of fun, better than I expected.
Mona Lisa And The Blood Moon
Sort of a fun horror/fantasy/crime thriller about an escaped mental patient with mind control powers on the run from the law among strippers and drug dealers in the seedy underbelly of New Orleans. Stars Craig Robinson as the lead cop, refreshingly actually playing a role, and not just himself. Nice to see that.
Dead Like Me (TV series)
Fun magical-realist series about an 18-year-old girl struck down by satellite debris falling from space who joins a team of "reapers", undead people tasked with helping doomed souls depart their bodies painlessly before death. Oh, she also works at a temp agency by day. And the "reapers" hang out at a restaurant called "Der Waffle Haus". It's kinda fun. Created by Bryan Fuller, who also made similar short-lived but fun magical-realist shows "Pushing Daisies" and "Wonderfalls". Plus has Mandy Patinkin, who I always like, as the boss of the reaper team.
Latency
Slickly-produced but not terribly interesting sci-fi in which a gorgeous agoraphobic gamer gets a headset that allows her to control the computer with her mind and it turns her reality inside out, or something.
Rejuvenation
Slightly-better-than-TV-movie-quality sci-fi thriller about a college athlete sent to recover from drug addiction at a facility where the doctors are performing evil deeds on the patients. A likeable cast keeps it somewhat watchable but other than that, meh.
Envision
Zero-budget, zero-production-values indie supposedly sci-fi flick about a guy who gets some sort of visual implants that cause him to see things, which results in him and his friends spending an entire movie sitting around talking.