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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
Starts seeming like absolute crap but actually ended up not bad for a teenagers-in-a-haunted-house gorefest. It was kind of atmospheric. I wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but it's not as terrible as it starts out, if that counts.
Clichéd, tv-movie-quality haunted house story seemingly assembled out of half-heard descriptions of better horror movies.
Think about the level of imagination required to make a haunted house movie about the Winchester Mystery House. It ain't much.
A movie so made of stitched-together cliches that it shameless opens with a horror trope we've seen a million times, as if they'd thought about it.
In fact, this movie is so clichéd that I kind of liked it. This is like what you'd get if you asked an LLM to write a horror movie for you. Once cliché on top of another, all the way through.
And then in the last 5 minutes, it just goes batshit crazy, which helps.
Not that I'd ever watch it again.
I had to look... 3.1 stars on IMDB... that's about right.
Difficult-to-follow story of a writer who goes to a haunted house with his daughter to try to write a clichéd slasher movie, when the clichéd movie scenes envelop his reality, and the whole movie stops making any kind of sense.
Huge hit when I was a kid. Not entirely sure why now. It's, meh, faintly entertaining, a bit, but pretty corny. Don't expect much, and you won't be disappointed.
Jim Carrey Jim Carreys in this Jim Carrey movie for Jim Carrey fans. Turned it off.
Rewatched this cult classic series that only ran for a season in about 1982. It was alright, I see why we liked it at the time. Fun new wave sensibility. Not sure I'd go out of my way to watch it as an adult, though.
Young couple's housewarming party crashed by a mysterious, very, very, very faintly sinister couple, and proceed to spend 90 minutes talking before restaging "Funny Games" for 10 minutes.
Very talky zero-budget sci-fi about a teen time traveler stuck in a far future where everybody talks and a few of them overact.
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 talking to 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.
Why?
A supposed time traveler from 2492 talks to the camera for 40 minutes about the future, which sounds totally boring.
For confused first-time visitors and other people still acclimating, here is a description of these little tabs to the left, as well as some other features of the site.
Open "Expert Mode" CLI Navigation - this give you the option to switch your browser's display to an old-fashioned terminal mode where you may browse this site, view pages and images by typing text commands. Just like how we used to browse the web back in 1978!
Open Visual Settings - This gives you controls to customize the visual display of this website to your liking: turn up or down the brightness, contrast, color temperature, hue, saturation, dark mode, and earthquake. Settings are saved per browser tab, so they will be remembered for your whole visit.
Open My Eyes - Have you ever been engrossed in your work, when you suddenly realize someone is staring at your screen, watching everything you do over your shoulder? If not, this simulates the experience.
Open Help - This help popup, silly! You just clicked it! Do you not remember?
New - Draggable elements! Several elements on this website, including these tabs, this popup message, and the "Hire Mike" badge in the lower right, can be dragged around with your mouse, to avoid them blocking content. Positions are remembered per tab, so as you navigate around the site, they will stay in the same place for your whole visit.
Enjoy!
Are you sure you want to switch to viewing this website in the "expert mode" command-line interface?
This will switch to a terminal emulator, load this page, and allow you to browse this website and view its contents by typing text commands.
Plus there might be, y'know, some fun stuff hidden in there. Just for geeks.