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This has got to be a student film, and by a not very skilled student filmmaker. Less than an hour long, and utterly aimless, with no production values or acting to speak of.
A hipster couple cat sits an apartment that the synopses and an in-movie intro card say is haunted, but I never saw that. Except for them writhing around in what a title card says is "a ritual to rid the house of remaining evil" near the end, it seems like all they do is sit around and talk for the whole thing.
They should ban movie cameras from the borough of Brooklyn. The big studios can sub other locations, and it would make a lot of hipsters find some other way to spend their time.
An very European art film, wherein people visiting an abandoned asylum talk endlessly about "serious" subjects over discordant music for two hours, occasionally interrupted by silent, admittedly visually gorgeous but incomprehensible experimental montages. Not bad for an art film, I suppose, because the cinematography is really beautiful, looks like it was made by someone who knows how to make a movie, and is one of the few things that reminded me of Tarkovsky that wasn't a hopeless, amateur failure. And the acting seems alright. But too much of a slog for me to sit through. Not for me.
I gave it about 90 minutes of its 1:50 runtime but I just can't do another 20 minutes of this.
Bottom-of-the-barrel amateur-home-movie-level crap, but at least it tries to have a sci-fi angle. Or something. Basically these kids explore the sewer looking for a missing girl and encounter a bunch of really low-budget home-movie special effects.
A new setting for a clichéd setup: a captivity/pursuit flick set in part in the long barges that travel the canals that criss-cross the English countryside. The villains are a family that seems to be comprised of 50/50 small-town English folk and cannibalistic creature-from-the-black-lagoon-type rubber-mask creatures that live under the water. Anyway, they kill and eat people.
Yawn. It's pretty well-made, actually, but that's about the only good thing I have to say about any of it.
I feel like Ti West somehow had something to do with this.
Movies like this exactly are why I created a category "Je nais se quois/Flawed Gems". Definitely not a great movie, but certainly original, after a fashion, and ultimately, I thought, worth a watch, despite the flaws—most particularly for people tired of the clichés of the genre.
This is a solidly B-movie supernatural thriller about—wait for it—a family on vacation in a remote cabin in the Oregon mountains when Bad Things Happen. On top of it, it intentionally starts with some of the most hackneyed cliches out there, and sticks with that for long enough that it could throw you.
As the family settles into their cabin, mysterious hooded figures are seen doing... something... in the woods. People talk on the phone in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Something is Clearly Going On.
In the first hint that things are about to get a little different, a TV is seen…
Have you ever seen the movie "Funny Games"? It might be my least favorite movie of all time: pointless brutality, and nothing more, presented as entertainment, as home invaders torture and kill a family. I eventually learned that the filmmaker was pointedly trying to make a movie that no reasonable person would sit through the length of.
Well, this does that one better, by dispensing with the highbrow artistic morality play of exposing the viewer as complicit in violence-as-entertainment—and substituting, instead, a brief coda explaining "the got him to do it."
A houseguest at a friend's dinner get-together spots a computer in an empty room and an anonymous person chats with him, knows all his secrets, and in a matter of minutes convinces him to "become like God" by torturing, raping, and killing his friends. So he does. Along with, delightfully, their 12 year old daughter, after hitting…
Well, this movie put one over on me. Starts off with a bunch of guys having a reunion for a bachelor party in a fancy rental house, which logically promised lots of agressive dipshit behavior and characters I wasn't going to like at all. My dirty little secret is I'm often multitasking when I watch movies, and the good ones draw my attention, otherwise I wind up missing a lot, and I tucked in with my laptop expecting to miss most of this one. The loutish behavior in the early scenes (set in a strip club, naturally) did nothing to dussuade me that this would be anything more than 90 minutes of shriek-filled audio wallpaper.
But somewhere in the middle, I noticed the appearance of an antagonist who was incredibly well-cast, just seriously creepy. And very soon the disappearance of one of the guys in the middle of the…
Low key thriller about two women and one of their boyfriend on vacation in a cabin when the more high-strung of the two starts getting even more high-strung and having bloody visions. It wasn't terrible.
I guess this is supposed to be some sort of indie neo-noir, because it starts with a robbery, and has people planning other robberies, and has people waving guns around at a few points and some pointless grisly violence that comes out of absolutely nowhere at 1:45 of its 1:50 runtime, but mostly, it's people talking, arguing, or telling endless stories for two hours, capped off by an inexplicably violent ending that features artsy random images and a guy in a dog costume for some reason. I have no idea why this movie was made, or especially why it was labeled a horror movie, except maybe the guy in the dog costume attacking people two minutes from the end. It's boring for 1:45 and then doesn't make sense for 0:08. It's not even bad—it's just not a movie. It's just a bunch of scenes.
Absolute garbage. Has the production values of a terrible zero-budget amateur horror combined with soap operatic melodrama. An engaged couple is lured into a haunted house attraction where the woman is abducted and surgically turned into a man by a jealous former, um, it's not quite clear what he his, but he's former, and he's jealous, and he's somehow magically in control of all their electronics, and, he's now also turned himself into a woman and posed as the man's hot, breathy new therapist to seduce him.
Back in college, living out in the sticks, I used to occasionally listen to the local Christian rock station. Though the subject matter left me cold, I liked how the music was so unabashedly amateur—this was long before Christian rock took off even to the extent that it did, much of it sounded like someone had recorded it at home on a 4-track—and that there was something charmingly unselfconscious about it.
This movie is like that.
These people can't act, they just recite lines. This is home movie quality, it seems like someone got their friends (or more likely their church group) together to make a movie. And boy, do they talk about church and heaven a lot in this, even though it doesn't have an overtly religious message to push.
But, I dunno. Despite nearly turning it off about 15 minutes into it, I stuck it out…
A 9-year-old foster kid is shunted from home to home because she's possessed by some sort of nature spirit bent on cleansing humanity from the world, who causes all kinds of hijinx when she surfaces.
It was alright—sorta seems like they were trying to make a horror movie with the requisite acting, story, and production values for an adult audience. It wasn't "The Omen", but, it was pretty tolerable. I don't think I'd watch it again, but I sort of liked it okay. If there were more horror movies like this and less total crapola I wouldn't complain.
Decent enough horror movie about a foster child whose little sister disappears into the woods and comes back acting in disturbing ways. The town madwoman claims the child is no longer the same person. Guess who's right?
Not that bad for a horror movie starring teenagers. Probably a decent date movie, there's enough tension. I'd put this on the bottom end of reasonably watchable, if there's absolutely nothing else on.
Well, this movie certainly turned out to be something much different, and much better, than I expected. That's not to say it was a *good* movie... it definitely doesn't aspire to higher than campiness... but by the usual low standards of a campy movie, it's in many ways excellent.
First of all, it introduced me to the idea of "mukbanging", an internet trend originating in South Korea where people watch videos of other people eating. (I'd say "kids today", but I didn't understand the shit kids did when I was a kid, so age as nothing to do with it.)
Ok. Second of all: obviously, it's a horror movie with "Cannibal" as the first word in the title, which places certain genre expectations squarely on it. And, it does live up to those expectations... after a fashion.
There's a lot of unflinching gore here, for sure, but not quite…
Porn-movie-level acting, writing and production values. Mother and daughter go to an Oregon lake for some bonding time and, basically, nothing happens. Mom gets headaches, daughter (played by a real life porn actress) shows her boobs so often that I actually wished she'd put some clothes on, poorly-acted cops and creepy neighbors nose around for no reason other than to create "drama". This is also the worst-paced movie I've ever seen... with overlong scenes of monologues that aren't relevant to the plot, and one seemingly never-ending montage of the mother sitting alone looking concerned for no clear reason.
Shot on often-overexposed home video, and replete with the in-camera slomo and filter effects that some people just don't realize aren't "scary". I'm surprised there wasn't a star wipe.
So low-quality that it's one of the very few movies I've ever turned off in the middle. Definitely the only movie…
Boy, you have to give this home-movie-level, bottom-of-the-barrel amateur production credit for trying. They really tried *hard* to make a good movie. They had absolutely no idea how to, and they couldn't find anyone with any acting chops, but they clearly were trying hard.
Plot: People are trapped in a house in the woods by an energy field circling the area. When they die, they wake up wherever they were first killed when they entered the area. The woods are full of human-like creatures, represented by people in costume-shop cloaks and black and white makeup, who either want to eat them, transform themselves into exact duplicates of them, or steal their gasoline, I'm not sure, sometimes crawl instead of walking for some reason, and drool black goo. The occupants of the house are trying to start up a mysterious machine that they believe will lower the barrier, without getting themselves…
A sexually frustrated middle-aged salesman who is obsessed with a coworker patronizes prostitutes and then kills them, all the while complaining to the viewer via his video diary.
Gritty enough to be slightly appealing for this sort of thing, but in a world where we already have "Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer", movies like this are kind of unnecessary. The addition of a needless and too-silly-to-believe "twist ending" doesn't help things.
Southern supernatural drama/folk horror about a backwoods rural community that survives by making occasional human sacrifices to an alternately mud- and blood-filled pit that keeps them otherwise healthy in return, as a teenage girl discovers she is the next to be sacrificed.
It was alright, watchable for that sort of thing. Not the greatest, but basically at least it's a real movie with horror themes, and an actual plot, not a cheap-shit amateur effort like so much horror.
This might be the most amateurish film I've ever seen. An utterly silly home-video-shot idea—I can't even call it a story, it's just an idea—about a realtor who suddenly gets transported without explanation to an empty house (in Amityville, natch) and keeps getting transported back inside it every time he tries to leave.
The remarkable thing about this is they don't seem to have even tried to find someone who could act. The man playing the realtor seems to have been instructed to wander around the house improvising his responses to the situation. He says aloud everything he would have thought, talk to nobody in particular, and emoting, while double-exposures of "creepy" things (tentacles, a man in a hood) occasionally appear in the frame for a second, without explanation, before disappearing again. Occasionally it cuts to people who can't even pretend to be newscasters trying to act like newscasters,…
I should have been tipped off by the fact that Tubi called this "Drama, Horror". Perhaps the least interesting movie I've ever seen. A young woman who has apparently joined a cult brings an old friend out to the middle of the desert on a dirtbiking trip to see her "new home", a tent in the middle of nowhere. They talk for about an hour of this 70-minute movie. The friend's apparently dead sister appears momentarily outside the tent with a blurry figure far behind her on the horizon, which is never explained, and then they go to bed, and one, waking up hearing the sound of a motor bike in the middle of the night, goes to see what it is and disappears, and the other, finding the motorbike idling alone in the dark, hops on it in search of her. The End. You gotta be fucking kidding me.…
Low-key but slightly difficult-to-follow, slightly sci-fi-ish drama about a young woman in the suburbs playing with a chemistry set to invent some unspecified thing that is meant to help humanity survive some unspecified disaster, but is mostly about young women living in the suburbs. Seemed likeable but slow moving and not much really happens, plus punctuated by just enough bad acting to detract from decent production values. I really wanted to like it, too.
A somewhat artsy take on "Lord Of The Flies" in an isolated house full of eccentric young women, trapped there while attending a birthday party when an earthquake causes it to sink below the surface of the earth. Slowly they become less civil. Adding to the surreal atmosphere are typical "girly" things played for additional strangeness, like their increasingly bizarre makeup, as well as their growing paranoia.
Despite the presence of some of my favorite young actresses, like Maya Hawke and Odessa A'Zion, I didn't exactly like it. Something about young women shreiking at each other quite that much wasn't really to my taste. The artsiness was not as egregious, nor as hamfisted, as a lot of movies, although it did get grating at points, including having an avant-garde Petra Haden/Meredith Monk-type acapella soundtrack, which I might go for as something to listen to but not as the backing track…
Kind of a fun D-grade zero-budget picture about a bunch of punk rockers camping in the woods when they get attacked by giant rubber maggots. Actually was kind of amusing for what it was, has bits of low-key almost Repo-Man-esque cynical dark humor, although the whole schtick wears thin by about halfway through. Still, one of those rare intentionally bad films that I nonetheless enjoyed a little. The characters are kind of funny. A little.
A rather slow southern gothic about a young man with no discernable peronality who moves to woods haunted by the ghosts of people who have hung themselves from a specific tree. Surprisingly uneventful for a movie that sports quite so many people stumbling onto hanging corpses.
I don't know what this movie is about because the first two minutes opened with the most egregious, clichéd first-person-shooter camerawork I've ever seen and I turned it off.
Highly unremarkable supernatural thriller starring Amber Benson as a professor investigating the disappearance of a student with whom she'd been researching a mysterious ancient artifact. Lots of mumbo jumbo leading to entities who you can tell are evil because they talk through a pitch-shifter.
Extremely slow-moving British not-much-of-a-thriller about a woman dealing with the possible onset of dementia and/or some sort of psychotic stalker. The first hour is basically scenes of English country life, occasionally inexplicably interspersed with totally out-of-context, garishly-lit torture porn scenes. The last act, after the first bit of action finally occurs almost an hour into it, is trying to be a bizarre captivity/torture porn flick by it's just not that interesting. Last-minute attempts to introduce a sudden artsy sensibility don't help, either.
This sequence of horror tropes—I can't really call it a movie—is odd in that it definitely is directed well. Individual scenes, if you saw them in isolation, seem creepy. But next to each other in a mishmash, it's just absurd. This is one of the worst-written movies I've ever seen.
The daughter of a young family of parents and kids who appear to be nearly the same age (named in the IMDB credits as "father", "mother", "daughter", and "son") gets an invite on her phone to a music festival that her same-age parents have forbidden her to go to. This invite carries some sort of inexplicable power to infect all the family's electronics, causing them to see an hear things that require a greater suspension of disbelief that I'm capable of: they see videos of each other on their phones doing things they never did, overhear each other having…
Judging from the IMDB reviews I'm in the minority in thinking this (yet another) adaptation of "War Of The Worlds", a British one this time, wasn't all *that* bad. It follows closer to the novel than a lot of adaptations do, and though a lot of the CGI is hopelessly bad, the aliens themselves actually look quite good.
I liked it ok, despite the special effects flubs and the not particularly good acting. And, oh yeah, naming the lead character "Herbert Wells". Come on, man.
But, no, I kind of enjoyed it, weirdly.
I think a lot of reviews want... um... I don't know, I just think they have expectations, or something. This deserves a little better than the 3.2 stars it has on IMDB. I've seen way worse movies get way higher ratings.
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