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Beautifully shot but impossible to follow and perhaps overly artsy sci-fi/horror film. A young woman apparently alone in a town and facing an alien monster has a bunch of hallucinatory episodes, including that bellwether of pretensiousness, an animated sequence.
Well-made enough that it can be forgiven for it's experimentalism, which it pulls off way better than some of these types of movies do, and really is more visually skilled than pretentious. And it certainly looks like a good movie, for most of it. But I honestly can't say. I'm not even sure what it's about.
A lone hiker pursued by a monster from a crashed UFO.
You know, I kind of liked this movie. First of all, there's virtually no dialog, maybe three or four words spoken in the whole movie. The lead actress has to convey a lot with just her facial expressions, and mostly, pulls it off well enough to somehow be a little more engaging than you'd expect from such a high-concept bit of fluff.
Unfortunately the "monster" spends most of the movie in human form, played by a miscast hipster-looking dude.
I dunno. It's not great, and might have worked better as a short film than a feature, but, I did like it ok. It was a little different, and a little entertaining, even if the monster was more annoying than scary.
What to make of this movie? This is a first-person shooter and participates of the unfortunate recent trend of "science fiction" that consists entirely of one character talkingto a camera for a whole movie, in this case a repeat abductee who, conveniently for the overused conceit, has found a way to keep a camera on his body filming at all time.
But...
Half this movie is near-silent shots of the interior of UFOs, of the aliens and a few other abductees. And, I have to say, these are about the best movie aliens I've ever seen. That half of the movie is beautiful, creepy, truly alien. And I have no idea how they did the aliens, they're very realistic looking, I haven't really seen anything like it. It's like someone got a hold of a 40-minute dialogueless sci-fi movie made by a modern Tarkovsky... and then…
Surprisingly good indie horror about the remaining survivors trying to make it out of a small town in Ohio which has been taken over by mind control parasites. Way better than you think it is from that description. Not great, but definitely very good, and with some amusingly original tropes. I'm kinda impressed. It's a pretty solid watch.
Be warned, though—it's still a horror flick, and not for the sqeamish, for sure. There are a lot of worms in this movie.
After writing the above, I had to look, and this somehow averaged 4 stars on IMDB. That, I do not understand at all. Either a lot of people hated this movie, it was marketed to the wrong audience, or somebody paid a lot of money to have this thing panned. I dunno.
It does have a lot of long stretches that are straight drama, not horror.…
Folk horror. Probably the best horror outing ever made about leprechauns, which, ok, isn't saying much. But it's decently atmospheric, and well made and acted, except for the parts in the third act where the director forgot it's better to keep the horror offscreen and let the audience use their imaginations than to actually show dawrves dressed in elf costumes fighting people for, seriously, about 15 minutes longer than it should have gone on for.
But, seriously, no, it's actually a better movie than that makes it sound. But, still a shame they didn't play those parts down a little bit.
A young professional woman gets a magic necklace that forces her to star in a 3rd-rate ripoff of "Liar Liar".
A third-rate production, the kind of amateur-hour trash you usually see in the horror genre, not comedy, excepting raunchy sex comedies, which this isn't. The pacing is way too slow, the acting is mostly wooden, just slightly above porno movie quality. The big star in the movie is a two-minute cameo from the actor who played the "Soup Nazi" on Seinfeld. How the mighty have fallen.
But, at the same time... they really tried, so hard that it's kind of charming. The jokes aren't entirely over-broad, almost as if they thought about them for a minute. And the "actors" (amateurs at best) are weirdly likable, the leads seeem like genuinely nice people. And, I mean, they ripped off the conceit of "Liar Liar" so blatantly they actually mention it…
Classic Hitchcock film noir in which two men meet on a train trip, and part ways with one of them believing they've agreed to each murder someone the other wished to be rid of.
Not one of Hitchcock's stronger pictures, if you're just starting out with Hitchcock I wouldn't watch it before, say, "North By Northwest", "Rear Window", "The Birds", even "Rope", maybe even "The 39 Steps"... it's not one of the greats, but even the worst Hitchcock is always going to be reliably above a certain quality. To date, if there's a rotten egg in his catalogue, I haven't found it.
This one is a bit more of a slow starter than many of his, and the setup is a bit contrived, but, this one does build to the kind of climax you can rely on from the Master. Definitely has its moments.
Talk about jumping the shark. Apparently the mediocre-at-best found footage anthology horror series has abandoned the found footage technique for conventional narrative, abandoned the anthology format for a feature film, abandoned horror for action, even abandoned the English language for Spanish.
Somewhat interesting documentary about "Michelle Remembers", the book that kicked off the "Satanic Panic" and "recovered memory of abuse" trend of the '80s.
Bullhit series about supposed investigations of UFO phenomena at a desolate southwestern range. Kind of on par with those "paranormal investigation" shows where people run around darkened houses freaking themselves out over weird noises and claiming "cold spots" or creepy feelings prove something. Like people feel sick when they approach a certain spot... that's supposed to be some sort of proof of alien phenomena, or something. I might have liked it when I was 8.
Short (40 min) film of an interview with a man supposedly from the year 3036. The man's voice is soothing, but that's about all the good I have to say about it.
Documentary about the modern Church of Satan and its origins in the 1960s. You know, it's funny, the Church of Satan has always had some good ideas (and, before anybody assumes anything, the first of them is that the devil isn't real.) But, damn, what a bunch of pretentious hipsters. Cripes, it's exactly what you'd expect from a religion founded in San Francisco by a former carnival showman, if you'd lived in San Francisco as long as I have... lots of counterconformity, lots of fashion sense, lots of showmanship and people who dress and act like Hollywood's idea of a satanist, lots of tattooed and pierced people, and of course a burlesque revue in there too, because all those people are into burlesque. Still.
Maybe a couple of sincere people in there here and there also. But mostly, ugh.
Execrable "documentary" in which a filmmaker asks various witchy people to put a curse on him. And then... he starts having bad dreams! OoooOOOooOOOOh! He goes mountain biking and takes a spill and hurts his knee... and then remembers, one of the witchy people mentioned his knees! OoooOOOooOOOooOOh! Cue "creepy strings" background music.
This is about as much a documentary as "Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch" or any bullshit "haunted house investigation" tv series I've seen. Awful. Just garbage.
Ponderous early '70s Austrialian film which apparently all the critics at Cannes loved. I don't get it.
Billed as a "thriller", a schoolteacher gets stranded at an outback mining town, gambles, gets drunk, shoots kangaroos, and fights. And that's about it.
Other than the ambient menace that always seems to suffuse any movie featuring rural Australian locals, I don't know why this is a thriller. I don't even know if it's a story.
Fairly watchable Canadian sci-fi series about a time traveling cop from the future trying to prevent a terrorist attack in her day. Watched it a while ago, don't remember it clearly but I recall liking it well enough, just jotting it down here for completeness.
What should have been a crappy thriller is actually saved by unexpectedly solid acting. This is the kind of film a younger Jodie Foster might have been in, in between her more prominent roles. It's not "The Accused", it's not even "Panic Room", but it might be "Red Eye".
A young woman working late on Christmas Eve has car trouble and winds up trapped in her building's underground garage with the increasingly unhinged attendant. That's it, that's the entire plot.
Where this movie breaks away from the pack is the slow and deliberate way the villain slowly metamorphosizes from a bumbling nice-seeming guy to an absolute psycho, and the performances, which require a surprising amount of range and depth for a film like this. Both characters somehow manage to convey some depth and variety of emotion; when the villain tells her, "I like you. I would never hurt…
Here we have an oddity. A low-budget Italian late '70s exploitation flick that throws everything but the kitchen sink: gritty NYC cop flick (including wah-wah guitars and bongoes, '70s cop show music); a jungle cult obviously intended to cash in on interest in Jim Jones and the Guyana Peoples' Temple; more boobs than even I want to see, which is really saying something; and graphic cannibalism. It feels like an attempt to merge every '70s exploitation flick, most prominently the notorious (and also Italian; the Italian filmmakers had a way about them) cannibal flick "Cannibal Holocaust", which is interesting, as this seems like an attempt to cash in on that specifically, but was actually filmed before that was released.
The overally production is so cheezy that it very nearly succeeds at that rarely achieved "so bad it's good" context. It's the '70s, so there's lots of unabashed nudity, and of…
Ok, google "Hostel". And the,n think of any movie you've ever seen whose title ends in "III". Now you know.
Truth to tell, it's actually probably a hair more fun than the original, it's got a ridiculous, cartoonish element to it and doesn't dwell on the torture quite as much, there's a passing nod to actual relationship dynamics between the characters, however shallow, as opposed to the original, which was just "these guys are traveling together, they get tortured".
Pointless torture porn in the guise of a true crime mockumentary about a serial killer who videotapes all his killings, conveniently for the filmmaker, who now doesn't need to hire a cameraman or cinematographer. Actually not the worst one of these I've ever seen, but that's a very low bar.
Slow-starting but ultimately decent hard sci-fi mockumentary about the discovery of a near-earth wormhole, and the transhumanist effort to transplant scientists into artificial bodies for the voyage through. Not that well acted at points, and overall nothing to write home about, but decently watchable.
Billed as a horror, mentions Mayans in the title, and has a UFO in the poster image. Movie is 60 minutes of talk followed by 30 minutes of mild action, but unfortunately I'd already lost interest.
During a solitary long-distance voyage to Europa, a space ship's crew speaks in ominous tones and with intense facial expressions. The earth blows up, causing them to add raised voices, ratching up the drama.
Actually not terrible, for run-of-the-mill sci-fi. The production is good, if a little clichéd.
This movie has been an odd favorite of mine for a long time. It could have, should have, been so terrible, but decent direction and strong acting performances absolutely save it.
The plot is so ridiculous it's hard to explain. In a suburban town, growing up in the shadow of an often-seen but never-mentioned nuclear reactor, a religious teen, the kind who wears a purity ring and goes around to schools lecturing to the kids about the evils of sex, learns, through a series of horrific sexually violent encounters with despicable men, that she has teeth inside her, and evolves from being vehemently opposed to premarital sex to, ultimately, using it to get revenge. It's an absurd setup, but handled so thoughtfully, and with such a nuanced, wide-ranging, and realistic performance from the lead actress, that it actually makes for a surprisingly good movie.
Sub-student-film-quality 45 minute "movie" with actors who can't act, about a woman who discovers she loves eating oysters, which for some reason makes her take men out and kill them.
I love this movie. It's a unique and moving tragicomedy about a writer who fronts for blacklisted writers during the Red Scare. Set in the 50s but done with (at the time) up-to-date '70s fashions. Stars a long pre-scandal Woody Allen, and conducted throughout with his usual nebbishy-but-insouciant tone—but, unusually, not written or directed by him—and also features Zero Mostel in an unforgettable role as a blacklisted entertainer being brutally taken advantage of by uncaring, predatory show biz people.
I really don't have the words to explain what's so great about this movie. It's an incredibly well-written, funny, pointed, sympathetic, stirring, and at moments downright painful look at innocent lives bleakly destroyed by a political frenzy, with a unbelievably strong message. It has one of my favorite closing scenes of any movie ever—although you have to watch all the way through the credits to understand what's so very powerful…
Ok, this movie is vexing. It starts out as a very tedious pursuit flick: a former soldier biking through rural Europe pisses off asshole locals in a bar by rescuing a woman they're harassing, so the locals chase him and the woman through the woods. Suddenly, the movie changes completely, as a creepy figure who for some reason has apparently built a huge Gothic torture complex in the middle of nowhere captures all of them and spends most of the rest of the movie silently torturing them horribly and graphically, with the kind of creative degeneracy you'd find in the worst torture porn.
I will give it one thing: the cinematography has a couple of exceptional moments. The gaunt torturer has shots worthy of "Nosferatu", and as the movie suddenly shifts into increasing (and totally unexplained) phantasmagoria, there are a couple of eerily beautiful shots here and there.
A favorite classic of mine, a very unique crime/horror flick with a deserved cult following. Edward Woodward as a Christian police detective called to investigate the disappearancec of a young girl on a remote British isle where an ancient pagan religion is still avidly practiced, on the eve of their biggest festival. Villagers wear animal masks, fornicate in public, and openly teach the school children about a pagan view of sex, as the morally outraged Woodward gets drawn into something big and dark. Command performances from all, especially Christopher Lee as the lord of the isle.
What "Dog Day Afternoon" is to crime dramas, this is to horror films: a little dated, perhaps, very much of its time, but just a very well-told-eng story, and different enough, to be entertaining all the way through.
A well-made and engrossing but slightly narratively flawed sci-fi/horror mindbender, with video montages that would make Ken Russell proud. It's not perfect but well-enough done to be satisfying for me, despite the occasional cinematic excess or tough-to-swallow narrative turn.
A tourist couple and some friends visiting a foreign nation break the rules and leave the compound, drunkenly killing a local. From there it gets into some trippy territory that's just unexpected enough that I don't want to give away any more than that.
It's not great but it was good enough that it held my attention. The plot was definitely original, if a little too weird to completely suspend disbelief. I did like the way some outlandish ideas were handled, at least at first, with some gritty, matter-of-fact realism.
By the end it goes a little over-the-top but not far enough to ruin my overall enjoyment of…
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