Archives: Movie Reviews

Execrable "horror" TV movie with about as much depth as a Hallmark card, if Hallmark card had token blood splatters to be "scary". A young boy has telekinesis, because I guess that's a thing that happens, and has a demon living in his closet that occasionally kills people, because, movie? Just awful. Think: the worst Steven King adapations bad.

A very talky, uneventful 1971 Giallo flick from Spain. A woman is left home while her husband is away, and seems to go about her life and talk to her neighbors for the first hour, then starts having occasional grotesque dreams, and by the end there's some hint of violence or something but by then I'd lost interest.

Does feature, I have to say, an unusual number of extremely attractive actresses. Must be a Spanish thing. Is everybody there beautiful?

Slightly-above-average-for-a-TV-movie TV movie starring Liana Liberato as the distraught dumpee of an unlikable jackass who follows him to his new home upstate and does the TV movie equivalent of invading his life, which in this case amounts to a couple of coffee dates with his new wife and two argumentative encounters with him when she's not around, which of course ends with her accidentally getting stabbed.

Oddly enough, the one actual thing this movie has to commend it is a rare serious role from rubbery comic actor Richard Kind—trust me, you've seen him, google it—who has a bit part as a corporate boss the husband is trying to impress and does a surprisingly good job in his bit part as the dismissive, irascible executive.

A surprisingly forgettable teen scream which inexplicably stars some familiar and reasonably talented faces: a pre-"Supernatural" Jensen Ackles, Dominique Swain, Shannyn Sossamon. A teen gets lured into a world of satanism and demons by an evil computer game or something, and one by one everyone around him commits grisly murders and then kills themselves. Not terrible, just, forgettable.

The Shining, except with a teacher with a history of domestic violence getting some writing done while working in an empty school over the summer with his students instead of a writer with a history of domestic violence getting some writing done while working in an empty hotel over the winter with his family, and without Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, or Scatman Crothers.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the odds that that would be worth watching.

Blech. Egotistical director recruits a team of young actors to spend the night filming in a hounted house with strapped-on cameras and, basically, nothing happens. They wander around for an hour jumping at shadows, and then there's some sort of yelling and killing, but it's way too late at that point.

+1 star for not being a found footage film.

Pretty much a date movie, but not so much a "I hope the person I'm watching with ends up clinging to me, let's try a horror movie" date movie as a "I already know we're going to spend most of the movie making out, so I need a horror movie we can easily ignore" date movie.

Paranormal investigators in the 1980s get sucked into strange occurrences at a house haunted by a vengeful spirit or something, if that matters.

Sunita Mani got me again.

As with the sci-fi "Save Yourselves", this is a supposed genre flick, horror this time, that's really mostly about people going off into the woods to explore their relationships.

I don't get it. Sunita Mani is ever-appealing, but just from the lead roles she picks, I have a feeling in person she's a really high-maintenance person. She sure seems to have a thing for having relationships, and exploring relationships, and talking about relationships. At any rate, apparently she thinks movies should have people arguing about their relationships, that much I know.

Not my thing as entertainment.

Oh, yeah, there's some murder and people creeping around in this one. Also features a "twist ending" you can see coming about halfway through the picture.

Man goes camping in the woods alone to scatter his friend's ashes when and the friend or something, haunts him. Not bad, I guess, a lot of movies are way worse. I didn't mind it. Had some well-directed scenes, a tense scare or two. But I watched it 2 hours ago and already can't remember how it ended.

Edit: This movie is, again, not bad, but so forgettable that I watched it again a month later and didn't even remember I had watched it until 2/3 of the way through there was finally a scene I realized I'd seen before. Same overall impressions as first time.

A bunch of punk rockers go to... wait for it... a cabin in the woods, where a deranged park ranger starts picking them off while quoting park regulations at them, because, movie.

The lead actress, Chloe Levin, is pretty good, more tough-as-nails than a lot of final girls.

The always oddly likeable Liana Liberato in a creature feature, of sorts, that starts out alright but unfortunately kind of runs out of steam. A vacation at the beach house turns awkward when unknown microbes blow in on the tide and infect everybody. Interesting enough until unfortunately character and narrative get sacrificed about halfway through and it essentially becomes a captivity/pursuit flick, except with fog (and the occasional visually gnarly but otherwise not-well-explained "infected" person) as the villain.

Substantially recycling most of its major points from "Brightwood" this movie improves on it in some ways and falls short of it in others. Promisingly, the couple in this film don't bicker quite as constantly or annoyingly. Other than that, there are such strong similarities, that many of the unexplained plot points, which this movie is particularly full of, I understood easily because they were explained in "Brightwood".

It's the huge number of not-even-subtle-enough-to-be-fridge-logic leaps, as well as the 100% familiar "twists" and conceits, that make this movie a failure as entertainment. It's certainly better-made than "Brightwood" in many ways. But, when you've already seen something that's so similar that you know what's coming before it does, it's hard to enjoy. Really cool ideas, for sure, but poorly executed and totally already done before.

Supernatural "thriller" apparently aimed at like 10 year olds or something. A group of gorgeous girls receive strange voicemail messages apparently from a graveyard, and it turns out one of their boyfriends robbed some graves and gave out the jewelry, resulting in some of the cheapest-looking special effects in cinematic history. Yawn.

A writer has a monster in the upstairs of his house who he feeds people to and it gives him ideas for bestselling books. It was, eh, ok. Not good, not terrible.