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.
Maybe the most interesting complete disappointment I've ever seen. A cinematically outstanding fantasy set in Victorian England, where a mad professor has implanted the body of a suicide with the brain of her still-living fetus and raised her as his child in what seems at first like a very creative spin on "Frankenstein" but by the second act becomes preoccupied with her growing sexual desires and her manipulation by the men in her life, to the exclusion of all else.
For maybe the first half hour I thought it was an undiscovered gem—the cinematography, set design, and even costuming are like everything Terry Gilliam ever dreamed of, truly exceptional and surreal, and for the first half hour it had a plot to match. And then, she discovers masturbation, and suddenly, everything interesting about the plot was immediately dispensed with, and never returned to. The entire rest of the movie…
This entry in the "something's wrong with the children" horror subgenre is demented. It seems in terms of story and production like a scary movie aimed solidly at children, and yet, it's far too scary for any child. And it's strange enough, and likable enough just for so thoroughly being what it is, that I'm reluctant to give away any spoilers.
It gets undeniable points for originality—if nothing else, what's wrong with the children in this one being different from what's wrong with them in any other film like this. I don't know who looked at a children's playground and saw, in their mind, the idea for this movie, but to them I say, bravo for being so weird... weird enough that I don't even want to give away any more details of the conceit than I have.
Truly, the whole endeavor is just a little bizarre, and it's…
One of the worst-written movies I've ever seen. A couple rents a cabin where there is a locked door they've been told not to open. From there, they spend half the movie arguing amidst a completely unexplained growing obsession with what's behind the door, then completely unexplained "scary" tropes occur, then they are found dead by they handyman, end of movie. Some of the worst attempts at dialogue and plotting I've ever seen... it's like these people didn't just have no idea what they were doing, you can't even say they failed, because unlike most bad movies, it seemed like they didn't even any idea how to try. I have no idea what they were shooting for other than "creepy unexplained stuff happens".
Billed as a "horror" take on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, but it's just not. It's more like an episode of Fantasy Island without da plane or Mr Roarke or Tattoo. In fact, that's pretty much exactly what it's like.
But, I dunno, I sorta like that it exists? I mean, who makes a movie like this?
Tough-as-nails US soldiers led by Mickey Rourke encounter witches and supernatural doings in the European woods during WWII. Oscillates between a war flick and a special-effects laden supernatural action extravaganza. Looks like a fun movie from a distance, owing to the big-budget special effects, but it's kind of meh.
More of an action movie than a horror film. Supernatural thrills as two tough-as-nails brothers shoot off a whole lot of guns while trapped at a remote ranch with some sort of tough-as-nails Nazi demon who has trapped a German family and prevented them from aging since WWII. It's a supernatural horror film like "Predator" is a sci-fi film... not really, but, close enough for some people.
It was fun, though. Good special effects at points. It's overwrought in a positive manner reminiscent of some of Clive Barker's more fun films, and production quality was alright, they obviously spent some money on this and hired some talented people to get it done.
Not a great movie, I wouldn't say go out of your way to see it, but I enjoyed it well enough for 90 minutes of escapism. I wouldn't call it watchable for people who aren't up…
Well-shot but otherwise pointless hodgepodge of horror tropes strung together with little explanation, as two women hikers stranded at a legendary "lost" cabin slowly lose their minds and see "scary" things, one after another, for an hour and a half, swing what is obviously a plastic axe at each other, and build up to plot twists that Stevie Wonder could spot from a mile away. Lousy editing, lousy writing, and the acting isn't good enough to pull off a convincing descent into madness.
Almost bad enough to be good, as it got so silly at one point in the middle that I nearly laughed aloud at something that was supposed to be "scary", but it couldn't even maintain that.
It's too bad. I wanted to like it. The cinematography isn't great, but it's slightly above average, which usually is a sign of something better than this.
Somewhat derivative but reasonably watcable sci-fi thriller. In a world that is "The Walking Dead" with an ecological apocalypse instead of a zombie one, the remains of the government live in an artificial underground town somewhere between "Wayward Pines" and "The Truman Show", where everybody just loves crappy '80s Top 40 music.
The first season is a straight government/secret agent whodunnit thriller with a slight spritz of sci-fi, the second is a little more expansive, showing more of the world and the lead-up to the ecological disaster (refreshingly, a fairly well-done global tsunami and weather crisis caused by a volcanic eruption in Antarctica, not the result of human foolishness.) I enjoyed the second season a little bit more, although they're both decent at worst...
...except...
...for the '80s music. It's intrusive, and initially, very annoying, particularly that many episodes end with gratuitous, grating "slowcore", alt-folk, or dreary…
Terrible horror anthology, just total garbage. One or two of the shorts actually have their brief moments but it's not worth sitting through this.
Oddly charming zero-budget amateur folk horror. English film in which locals encounter supernatural occurrences and a horned apparition in the woods. New film but feels like it was filmed on 16mm in 1978. Not sure why I liked it, by all rights I shouldn't have, but sometimes these little zero-budget efforts are, as I said, oddly charming, even if they're really bad.
Well-done time-travel sci-fi based closely on the Heinlein story "All You Zombies". Ethan Hawke as a "Temporal Agent" sent back to the 1970s to foil a bomber. Good enough that I'm not going to reveal my one minor disappointment with it because that involves spoilers. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's one of the greats, but it's well-made and well-acted.
Just terrible, home-made zombie movie, which I found weirdly kind of fun because the people (probably friends of the director) try so damn hard to pull it off, even though they clearly have no hope at all of this being a good movie. They really do try though.
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