Postapocalyptic tribal violence, like Mad Max set in the deep woods of Britain instead of the highways of the outback. No dialogue at all, just action, which is interesting, and the cinematography is good and gritty, but, while it seems well-made, didn't really hold my attention.
A grave disappointment that tackles a somewhat familiar theme very well until it suddenly doesn't.
A shy, socially awkward man unexplainedly wakes up in Sydney, Australia to find the rest of humanity has vanished. Over time he finds a few other "survivors", and both his story and their interactions are mostly handled intelligently and with realism, and the many scenes of a totally empty Sydney are effective... until the cliches start showing up, and finally, the movie abruptly ends with an totally unsatisfying "resolution" that tries to sound profound but just comes off inarticulate and never explains most of the narrative loose ends that have accumulated.
It's a shame, because for the first 1/2-2/3, the movie fell unexpectedly enjoyably into the watchable category. But disintegrating in the third act into a mass of never-explained "creepy" plot points and contrived conflicts and then ending with basically a shrug that…
A bunch of terrible, clichéd supposed horror shorts all set on the day of the apocalypse. Whether it's a zombie apocalypse, a nuclear apocalypse, some sort of pandemic of violence, or something else, it can't seem to decide, and a few of them don't even seem related to the theme. Totally amateurish, and terrible even by horror anthology standards. I think this might be just a bunch of youtube shorts collected together into a "movie". Although that may not be fair, as I've seen much better youtube horror shorts than these.
Ugh. Sub-TV-movie-level acting and production, a disjoined opening scene of small town people hunting down and brutally killing people in clown makeup, then 20 minutes of nothing happening as a carful of unrealistic kids discover an abandoned carnival in the desert, I'm not sitting through 90 minutes of this.
Not to be confused with Clown (2014), which I saw a long time ago but haven't reviewed yet, and was bad but reasonably amusing.
Reasonably well-made but tediously derivative and narratively meandering "tribute" to Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, set in a desert ghost town instead of a Texas farm. Has a touch of The Wicker Man thrown in for good measure. Cool masks, I'll give it that, but that's just about all it's got. Although, one interesting point: it passes the Bechdel test, and in fact it has two named female BIPOC characters who have a conversation about something other than men, as both the last victim and the lead villain of this large ensemble cast are both women—they have a several-minute conversation about war and social issues, at the phantasmagorical climax of the film no less. So, I guess it's got that, too. I suppose that catapults it into "at least it's different" territory, despite how entirely derivative most of it is—albeit just barely.
I kinda feel like Rob…
Empty torture porn that makes "Funny Games" seem like Dostoevsky. "Based on a true story" slasher pic is just repeated scenes of an improbably handsome "cannibal necrophile psychopath" luring improbably gorgeous "homeless people" to his home and doing about what you'd expect, except sicker. Boring. I gave up about halfway through. Notable primarily for how much every single person in it seems like an actor, and for being oddly well-shot for such a piece of completely unwarranted garbage.
I bet Eli Roth loves this.
Well-acted but poorly written, badly disjoined thriller about a couple who take a mysterious woman into their home during a pandemic in which martial law has been declared. This thing skips around like Jacob's Ladder with ADHD, introduces very late-in-the-game supernatural elements and ultimately is totally unsatisfying.
Very talky "Boy invents android, boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, android gets jealous, Rainn Wilson shows up with a twist ending" story. Meh.
I don't know what this is. 20 minutes in, seems like a TV movie-of-the-week. It was labeled "comedy". Turned it off.
A one-note story that seems like a '90s horror anthology TV series episode expanded out to over 100 minutes. A disturbed hairstylist cuts the scalps off her customers and wears them around the house because, I dunno, movie, I guess.
Thriller about a family living in a remote cabin who may be being beseiged by a supernatural entity the eldest daughter is writing a book about. They're not, it's a thriller, not a horror movie. Fairly well-made, not terrible, and lead actress Danika Golombek is appealing, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see this, either. More like a movie for if there's nothing else on.
You gotta give 'em points for trying. This is a pretty bad movie, but entertaining for being somewhat imaginative. Set in rural America, a father whose daughter was abducted by an otherworldly force is repeatedly attacked by hallucinatory visualization of himself, his daughter, his dead wife, and rubber suit monsters who reset time and memories every time he makes progress against them. Crossing paths with others who have experienced similar things results in a lot of shotguns being fired at people in rubber monster suits.
An incomprehensible, and incomprehensibly amateurish, Southern Gothic with abysmally lousy acting and editing, every single consumer video editing app special effect except for a star wipe, and, weirdly, noticeably slick visual composition and lighting. Odd.
An entertaining zombie comedy that plays something like "Pleasantville" if it was directed by Tim Burton, or "Lassie" if it was written by George Romero, or just the most twisted Disney picture ever. Small-town politics and "boys life"-type adventures play out in an alternate 1950s where a zombie apocalypse has been overcome with technology that prevents them from wanting to eat living people, resulting in them becoming docile and being adopted as servants or pets. And we all know how reliable technology is...
It's fun, pretty well done, the usual Canadian slight cut above average, and keeps just enough of both the stock zombie film tropes and stock wholesome, saccharine '50s family picture tropes to create amusing irony while it charts its own path.
"Paranormal Activity", except, even less happens.
I didn't think that was possible.
I finally turned it off after an hour.
So-so gothic haunted house story based on the legend of the Winchester Mystery House. Not terrible, not especially good. Gets kind of special-effecty near the end, which is a shame and shatters the until that point low-key mood.
Very mildly entertaining teen scream sequel to "Night Of The Living Dead", which supposes that 50 years after a zombie outbreak, ravers would be throwing a music festival in the woods to commemorate the zombie attack—at which things go wrong in a by now all-too-familiar way.
Truthfully, though, it leans slightly towards the fun side for this kind of super-trite, 100% formulaic genre exercise, and given the abysmal track record of virtually all the direct NOTLD sequels except for "Dawn of The Dead", it's certainly better than even some of the later ones George Romero himself was involved with. That's not a very high bar to clear, though.
Still, it was a somewhat ok teen scream action/horror flick for staying kind of fun to watch, not absolute trash. I've sat through worse.
Edit: turns out this was directed by the Soska sisters, who also made "American Mary" and the…
An odd, slightly above-average slasher flick with a ridiculous premise (and a terrible name). A college student moves into a house full of women where they are always on camera for a porn site, until one unhappy fan discovers the location of the house and massacres them.
I will say this. This movie opens with a well-enough done scene, setting the stage for the later carnage, that I noticed it... it was a little intense and well-made, and unusually dark and disturbing in its violence, for what I expected to be a run-of-the-mill third-rate slasher pic (as most slasher pics are, and the name of this one certainly could lead one to believe it would be.)
This movie continued in that fashion... just a hair better than these movies usually are. There was a little more character development that they usually bother with, and the violence was, at…
A strange and oddly intense little film I just don't know what to make of. A hyperintense psychiatrist comes in to a "wayward girls" school to break down the girls there, and spends 68 minutes getting real close and talking to them in intense tones until their defenses are broken down.
But that's it. You think it's going to be some sort of exploitation flick but it's not. The acting is weird, and it seems like a few times they repeat lines to get multiple takes but just left all the takes in as one take, and everybody is super-arch and intense. They seem to be playing with some fourth-wall stuff, and the shrink (who is also the director) even breaks character and mugs directly for the camera at the end. And there's no plot, really, just intense, getting-in-each-other's-faces talking.
Strange.
The USA-Up-All-Nite-iest movie of all time. Basically a softcore porn, minus the sex scenes, the entire plot of which is: a lonely guy gets an incredibly gorgeous robot maid that he's told will cost "no more or less than you can afford", wears the tiniest french maid outfit ever invented—when she's not peeling it off and just walking around completely naked—and has been programmed to "feel everything a woman does", except, apparently, shame, because as she very obligingly demonstrates whenever she can how capable she is of love and orgasms, it's always accompanied be her falling all over herself to fawningly thank him for how wonderful every little thing he does is. 100% nerdy male fantasy fulfillment. (Until, I guess, the part where it goes haywire and kills him in the end, but I guess they realized they had to include *some* sort of conventional cinematic…
This is one of the worst movies I've ever liked. A group of 20-somethings go on a trip to a cabin in the woods by a lake which is occupied by a monster that makes them want to have sex with each other and then with it. This movie feels like it was written by someone on a drunken bender and then made a bunch of lousy special effects out of papier-mache, and got together a bunch of friends who couldn't act together to film them doing this with a home movie camera.
And yet... there's flashes of talent here. I almost feel like this is the sort of thing where you go back and look at the terrible first amateur movie from a director who went on to great things, and say, "Yeah, you could kind of see the potential, even in this." It reminds me of very…
Straight-up softcore porn. Some bullshit about a woman watching AI-generated porn, when a sleazy male figure appears in them, staring at her, which makes her want to have sex. I have no idea what this was doing on Tubi.
This is a top-notch coming-of-age road trip drama disguised as a horror movie about cannibals. Yep. I don't even know where to begin.
Talk about punching above your weight. This incredibly thoughtful, well-made movie is original, leans poetic, and is much more about character and human interactions than blood and guts, although it has its share of that... it is about cannibals, after all.
The direction, the acting, even the editing, everything about this production is the cut above (no pun intended) that it needed to be in order to pull off a movie on this topic and make it excellent instead of lurid.
I feel like the coming-of-age narrative is not necessarily revelatory, it didn't grip me, which is generally what it takes to make me want to watch something again soon, but that's probably the only flaw that keeps me from putting this in my "honorable…
Slightly-better-than-it-should be tale of a mother and daughter breaking down on a lonely road and stalked by a monster. There's nothing here the experienced horror fan hasn't seen before—yet, for an assemblage of vaguely familiar horror tropes, it's a skillful assemblage, and the direction makes it stand out beyond what it might have been. Not a great movie by a long shot, but much better than it should be, but it's got a touch slower pacing and a few more character-driven elements than a b-grade horror movie usually does, both always a plus to me. And, pleasantly, it gets better as it goes along—the third act reflects back positively on the first two, as it goes for a slightly more quiet, thoughtful climax than the loud one many other movies of this sort would have gone for, even if it still never strays far from genre cliches.
And even…
Cocaine-era David Bowie as an alien on earth to bring back water to his parched home planet. Sadly, much less interesting than that sounds. Oddly also starring Buck Henry and Rip Torn. This movie owes a hair too much debt to the post-French-New-Wave sort of filmmaking aesthetic that also made movies like Bonnie & Clyde much less watchable to me. Maybe it's just me. Some people love it, and I get that, but it wasn't really for me.
Captivity/pursuit flick, heavy on the pursuit, in which a family of hikers in Britain is pursued by a supernatural entity, and pursued by a supernatural entity, and pursued by a supernatural entity. Yawn.
A surprisingly more-watchable-than-you'd-think teen scream. A busload of jocks stuck in the desert are attacked by the creature from the first Jeepers Creepers. But, by teen scream standards, it's not bad. The confinement to the bus for most of the movie works as a conceit and ads a certain paranoia. Unfortunately, towards the end, it devolves into an action movie—there are lots of guns in this—but for most of it it's better than I expected, and overall, I kind of enjoyed it... for a teen scream.
Should be said, his cameo is so short I actually missed it entirely, but has a brief appearance by Ray Wise, which somehow makes sense. The guy's never been in anything that wasn't in some minor way interesting, except for "The Blue Rose".
Not really a teen scream, more like a preteen scream, and yet, not so bad for that. A brother and sister find a rural town being terrorized by some kind of creature. No more, no less. Definitely slightly better than the awful name would have you think.
Beloved late '60 kids TV show characters licensed and made into a horror movie, with the conceit that their show is still in production and they're played by robots, which of course go haywire and start killing people, because, movie.
Surprisingly, it's not completely, completely terrible. Before people started realizing some people would watch these just for the irony alone—see "Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey" (which I've seen but apparently didn't review, I should have, to warn people away)—so they didn't have to aim any higher, I guess this, being the first of these, they must've thought they might have to put a little effort into it. So, actually, while it's basically trash, it's not as bad as you might imagine, it's faintly entertaining. In a couple of scenes it seemed almost like they might actually be trying to make a good movie.
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