The Exam
Overwrought high-concept single-room "thriller" á la "Circle" where a mysteriously diverse group of one-dimensional job applicants are put into a room to take an exam they don't understand, and everything turns histrionic.
Strawberry Mansion
Over-surreal, rough-around-the-edges fantasy plays like Terry Gilliam had an orgy with Wes Anderson and David Lynch and made a mess. Something about a "dream auditor" and a woman fighting the government trying to tax people on their dreams. The movie seems to be a collection of scenes made up as they went along, and is a truly strange mix of looking zero-budget one minute, big-budget the next. It actually was kind of charming at first, despite being over done, but turns into some sort of love story that is as treacly as it is impossible to follow.
Fight for Life — The Neil Moss Story
The best documentary I've seen on the Neil Moss incident, a horrible caving tragedy that occurred about 2/3 of a mile into the earth under Derbyshire, England in 1959, and the heroic but futile rescue effort. As is my habit with caving accident documentaries, which tend to describe particularly awful and affecting occurrences, I prefer not to go into further detail here.
The Moss incident spurred a worldwide reconsideration of the dangers of caving and the role of caving rescue workers. This reknowned short (1 hr) but intense documentary reconstructs the timeline, from before the accident through the aftermath, by interviewing still-living people who were members of the caving party and rescue efforts. It's really kind of a paragon of documentarian filmmaking: non-sensationalistic, non-judgmental, thoroughly investigative and complete, thoughtful about its subject, and seeming more than anything to want to simply inform—more journalism than filmmaking.
Documentarian and conservationist…
She Was Here
Reasonably good documentary about the life and death of Poltergeist child actor Heather O'Rourke.
Tesla’s Medicine—The Universal Field
A documentary that starts with an actor depicting Nikola Tesla saying, "All things have a frequency and a vibration. If we want to understand medicine, we must look in our hearts, and in the universe." It then said Tesla was a "specialist in magnetism" who "generated it with his Tesla coil" and "used it to cure disease", and "the tesla coil becomes a magnet when you introduce electricity to it. It can then transmit electricity to another nearby coil. This is called induction." I don't know anything about the doc beyond that because I immediately turned that bullshit off.
Source: I may not know much for sure, but I do hold a degree in physics, motherfucker. (Also, I've owned a tesla coil since I was 7.)
BoobsSlumber Party Massacre
Fans of boobs and complete exploitative garbage will appreciate this movie about boobs. Also there's some sort of slumber party, and a massacre.
Chopping Mall
'80s pop sci-fi/action of the type that "Robocop" was the best of and this is the worst. Unbelievably heavily-armed security robots go apeshit on teens spending a night in an empty shopping mall.
Still, you know, campy fun. For a terrible movie, I enjoyed it.
The Family I Had
Sad documentary about a woman whose adolescent son killed her infant daughter and the devastating effect it had on the family. Contains unfortunate extensive use of one of my pet peeves: gratuitous use of digital effects to falsely animate artifacts in a documentary. C'mon, guys.
Where She Lies
Documentary about a senior citizen in Tennessee who believes the infant daughter she thought she buried decades earlier might still be alive, and her efforts to learn the true. Didn't do much for me but wasn't terrible either.
Filling In The Blanks
Nice enough documentary about a man discovering that his parents never told him he is the product of a sperm donation and forming relationships with his large number of half-siblings from the same donor. Strangely, when they finally track down Dad, he turns out to be a really nice guy and everyone gets along great in the end.
David Not Coming Back
Documentary about a diving tragedy, as a deep cave diver organizes a plan to retrieve remains he has discovered, on a world-record-setting dive in a submerged sinkhole, of a diver who perished there 10 years earlier.
A bit of a slow start, but a pretty engrossing documentary and a very sad story, told by firsthand footage and interviews with the people who were there.
Three Identical Strangers
Engrossing, well-done documentary about a set of identical triplets, adopted separately at birth and never informed they had twins, finding each other at 20, and discovering later that they were the unfortunate victims of an unpleasant plan.
The Last Descent (2016)
Lightly fictionalized account of a caving accident so horrible I won't talk about the details here. I'm a sucker for a based-on-a-true-story wilderness adventure—I loved "Touching The Void", devoured Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" in both the original magazine article and book form, eagerly read everything I could about the Shackleton expedition and the Dyatlov Pass incident—not to mention regularly watching unspeakably harrowing horror movies without being affected—but this story is too much for me. I had read about the real incident before watching the movie, and the movie actually softens the details just a bit, and adds some fictionalized sentimentality and as redemptive as ending as possible under the circumstances, but I can't judge it objectively. The truth is way too sad. I can't even say whether or not it's a good movie. This is truly one of the most horrible tales I've ever heard.
Heretic
Very well-made, cerebral, and fairly original horror thriller that unfortunately disappears up it's own bellybutton in the third act. Hugh Grant does a good job of playing against type as an increasingly creepy man who invites two young Mormon missionaries into his home to proselytize to him in what turns into just as much a Hitchockian-cum-"Name Of The Rose"-type twisty mystery thriller as a horror flick. Interesting because the first full half of the film is pretty much just a conversation between the three lead characters, with the creepiness slowly ratcheting up as it continues.
If it hadn't become kind of contrived, overwrought, and familiar during the third act, I might have recommended it. It got off to a very good start and is consistently well-made throughout. Probably a good date movie, as the dread consistently increases from start to finish.
Monster House
Neighborhood kids vs the empty house—or is it?—of a mean old neighbor. Billed as "horror" on Tubi, this is actually an animated feature aimed at kids, although it's probably a little too scary for some kids. It's decent for a kids' film, though, good enough for this adult to sit through and be a little amused by.
Slender Man (2018)
Not-as-bad-as-you-would-expect teen scream about a group of callow teen girls who wind up haunted by copypasta. No, actually, I was surprised, mostly it was atmospheric enough to be a little creepy, very surprising considering the source material is a meme. Can't recommend it, but, actually don't mind having watched it, which is better than I expected to be saying about it.
Talk To Me (2022)
Whoa, I seem to have struck a vein of watchable horror movies on Tubi.
This Australian teen scream is actually pretty creepy for the lightweight genre, and in terms of story it veers a few degrees off the normal path for a teens-messing-with-the-supernatural flick.
A group of Australian teens conduct a ritual using a corpse's hand and find it possesses them. So what do they do? They party and have fun with it, laughing as each in turn's eyes go wide and they start gibbering and lashing out, until things start to turn a little too scary. From there on in it handles reasonably standard group-of-kids-dogged-by-a-supernatural-force tropes with decent enough atmosphere and acting to make it stand out a little from the crowd, and be more watchable than you'd expect.
MaXXXine
Third film in the X trilogy (the second being Pearl: An X-Traordinary Origin Story). Not really a horror movie, more of a vaguely Tarantinoesque thriller (and also Tarantinoesque love-letter to filmmaking), although it definitely has a few moments moments of over-the-top graohic horror movie gore. Like 'X', this movie kind of punches above it's weight, and a decent cast of B and B+ actors (Giancarlo Esposito, Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin Bacon in an aunusually greasy role). A porn actress trying to break into mainstream acting is stalked by someone with a beef against her.
I'll give it to director Ti West. I harbor a long-time grudge against him for the underserved popularity of the boring, execrably derivative, and insubstantial all-style-no-substance throwback film "House Of The Devil" (which I see I've disliked since even before I started writing movie reviews, as I've never…
Girl In The Refrigerator
Strictly amateur hour. Condo-dwelling shnook who accidentally kills his girlfriend by accidentally turning on a circular saw while they're cuddling on t—yes, that's the caliber of movie we're talking about here—and tries to figure out how to dispose of the body, all while courting the girl up the hall, goes from meh to worse as it seems to run out of the few ideas it has and tries to get 'artsy' in the second half.
The Ice Cream Truck
In a Burtonesque hyperreal suburb full of one-dimensional suburban stereotypes, a new resident waiting for her husband to arrive with the kids has a brief and ill-conceived affair with her neighbor's teenage son while a stereotypically creepy ice cream man slowly kills off people who must not be very important, as few seem to notice or care that they're gone, or, in one case, that they're back after the movie showed them being murdered. Meanwhile an inexplicably sinister mover hovers around for no apparent reason.
The Farm
Couple gets stranded at a "farm" where humans are kept captive, killed, and eaten by mysterious men in masks for no stated reason, and are kept captive, killed, and eaten by mysterious men in masks for no stated reason.
I suppose if you're going to watch a post-"Chainsaw" captivity flick, it might as well be this one. It's not total crap, it's reasonably good for that kind of unrewarding fare, and mostly suffers from a lack of ambition to be anything more than a post-"Chainsaw" captivity flick.
Hippopotamus
Very slightly better-than-average captivity flick about a young woman with amnesia who wakes up in a basement cell, held captive by a man who says he will release her when she falls in love with him. Honestly it turns out just marginally better than that setup might lead you to expect, until a baffling attempt at a twist ending just undermines the entire story and leaves the outcome totally confused.
John And The Hole
Well-made but much too slow-moving thriller that you can tell without knowing was a short story blown up to feature length. A disturbed 13-year-old imprisons his family in an unfinished bunker in the woods, then lets them go after a while. Also, there's a strange couple of scenes which indicate the movie's main action is a bedtime story being told to a young girl whose mother then inexplicably announces she is abandoning her with enough money for a year's expenses.
Well-shot in a low-key DOgme95 style, lots of natural light. And the acting is alright. But it really seems like it probably worked much better as a short story.
Vivarium
Jesse Eisenberg stars as his usual bland Michael-Cera-esque-awkward-everyman-without-Michael-Cera's-humor in this single weird idea—without even an explanation, just weirdness—padded out to feature length with a lot of repetition and pointlessness, like a dull episode of one of the much later, unimpressive attempts to reboot "The Twilight Zone".
A couple goes to look at a house in a neighborhood where all the houses are eerily identical, when the estate agent disappears, leaving them there, unable to find a way out of the neighborhood. Food deliveries inexplicably show up, followed by a baby which grows within days to a young boy who inexplicably speaks in an incredibly annoying overdubbed voice of a grown man trying to imitate a young boy, when he's not inexplicably shrieking continuously at the top of his lungs to get what he wants. And frankly there's a lot more totally unexplained weirdness of that nature on this movie's way…
Like Me
A girl in a mask robs a Dairy Barn and films it for YouTube, and then the file descends into "artsy" video effects and a bunch of hackneyed YouTube tropes. I lasted about 10 minutes. Yeah, lemme guess, this is going to be some sort of critique of social media culture or whatever. I'm out.
Capture
Woman runs around a darkened haunted house she inherited with a video camera to very tense background music. Someone is living in the attic. There, saved you 90 minutes.
Sliders (TV series)
Vaguely likeable cast of characters gets sucked through wormholes to parallel Earths, generally once per episode, where they encounter intrigue arising from the differences with their home Earth. Later seasons attempted to build more continuity and a mythology, including an ongoing villain in the form of an Earth-hopping race determined to take over the multiverse and eat everybody's eyeballs, and suffers a little for it, but overall, I liked it enough to sit through five season's worth before bedtime over the course of a couple of weeks.
The Perfect Lover (aka Personhood)
This Australian indie flick appears to have seriously polarized viewers, which I suppose is understandable, given the minimal amount of either action or character development. Nonetheless, it held its own for me as a cerebral, humanist sci-fi—almost a pee-wee cousin to "Ex Machina"—and for its best parts, which were a substantial portion of its runtime, made it a much better movie than it deserved to be.
A nebbishy and perhaps socially maladapted outcast, with (we finally see halfway through the movie) an obvious physical deformity, buys a stereotypically gorgeous, Barbie-doll-like sex robot, played by an Danish actress of the type only Scandinavia seems to produce. Half the movie is a quiet exploration of his uneasy relationship with her, and for me, this is the best part. Eventually his ne'er-do-well hypermasculine brother shows up for an unannounced visit, and initially doesn't realize she's a robot, and sexual tension builds, despite…
Aquarium Of The Dead
Utterly silly action/monster movie in which a bunch of aquarium employees who look like actors run around an aquarium getting attacked by "undead" computer-animated octopi, crabs, and starfish. So silly, there's no way these people thought they were making a good movie. But, for that, they play it up, and it's faintly entertaining for utter garbage, because it doesn't try to be more than that.
Fall
Holy cow. I think we have another movie that nobody but me will ever like, but holy cow. This might be the most intense movie I've ever seen. I watch a lot of movies that could be described as intense, but this one had me shaken before it was 1/2 over, and left me that way after it ended.
Basically, an open-air counterpart to "Open Water", as two freeclimbers tackle a 2,000 foot decomissioned television broadcast antenna with the intention of scattering the ashes of one's husband—who died in front of them in a climbing accident from the top—and Things Go Wrong.
It doesn't have the quiet poetry of "Open Water", and unfortunately it has more than its share of overly contrived, difficult-to-believe, or predictable moments, but what it does right, it does incredibly right. It makes up for the handful of sore-thumb contrived moments with some stirring visual and…