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.
Straight-up USA Up All Nite fare, and not the best of that, although not the worst of that either, with the understanding that that's not saying much. A 1986 movie about American tourists in Spain when the local villages are taken over by aliens, with all the poor production value, acting and production quality you'd expect. That said, if the '80sness or USA-Up-All-Nite-y-ness of it are enough to ironically entertain you... well, like I said, it's not the absolute worst of that. Close, though.
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.
This is one of those movies so bad I wrote this review before it was even halfway finished. It's kind of a foregone conclusion.
Wooden acting, over-obvious symbolism (the lead actress talks about a bee becoming the hive's new queen as "Cinderella" in the beginning; not five minutes later we see her getting mistreated by her stepmother and scrubbing bedsheets in the house while wearing a Queen t-shirt), and improbable, logic-defying behavior star in this weirdly tough-to-follow story about a bullied high school outcast and beekeeping hobbyist who is picked for an unlikely friendship by an improbable substitute teacher who seems to leap from protecting her from bullies to taking her out for dinner to inviting her along to egg houses to having her move in with her improbable family at her remote farm in the space of about 2 days.
Strangely, the cinematography is competent and looks like…
This slightly-better-than-it-should-be Lovecraftian horror mockumentary is about a filmmaker investigating his brother's suicide after months of raving about a secret government mind control project, "MKHEXE". The runtime is almost two hours and somehow it manages to hold up, and the ordinarily annoying first-person-shooter horror trope is dialed down far enough that I didn't even really notice it until about 2/3 of the way through. That, the long run time, and an egregious number of video effects (why do so many supernatural phenomena resemble VHS glitching?) are all the hallmarks of movies I dislike, and yet, it kind of held my interest all the way through.
Interesting, it's one of those movies that goes on longer than it should, blowing past several points where most movies would have, maybe unfulfillingly, ended. In this case it's a good choice. It sees the story through.
Not that I'd recommend it. I wouldn't…
Four hipsters take a camping trip in the desert to try to make "YellowBrickRoad" and aren't good enough filmmakers to pull it off. They make up for lack of an explanation for anything with lots of fourth-wall cleverness, "artsy" video effect interstitials, choppy editing, and some of the cheapest-looking "horror" costumes & makeup I think I've ever seen.
"What if we're in a horror movie? What if I didn't even exist before you pulled up to my house to pick me up?" By the time they're literally pushing and pulling at the edges of the film frame, it all starts to look very familiar, only lower-budget.
I hate to rag on it because I want to like these kids. Obviously someone went to film school, so, what were they supposed to do?
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.
"The Omen" cast a long shadow, and this well-made but somewhat derivative tale sits squarely enough within it that some of the scares are unfortunately predictable. Holly Palance cheerily throwing herself off the roof in 1976 was genuinely chilling; when the overly gregarious neighbore for some reason is oddly assertive about wanting to clear the house's walk in this movie and the camera lingers a little too long on the blower's spinning blades, you already know what he's going to do with a big smile on his face.
The plot is actually somewhat different than the sources a lot of the tropes come from—an elderly grieving Satanist couple kidnaps a pregnant woman to sacrifice her in order to bring their grandson back from the dead.
On the upside, it's pretty well-made and acted—it's Canadian, after all—and has Julian Richings, the creepy skinny actor who played the devil IIRC…
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.
Amateur hour, starring people who just can't even act. A bunch of vapid LA kids have a party and a weird girl shows up and tells them she's going to have to take their souls to "the other side" unless they find people to take their places, because, movie.
Fanms of Bad Lieutenant and Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer will probably like the psychotic executive protagonist of this film. This is a lower-key variety of psychopath than Christian Bale might once played, not cartoonish so much as perpetually-irritated guy plays the character with a smoldering intensity and nonstop animosity towards everyone and everything he meets.
Unfortunately, this is about all the movie has to offer. Ultimately there's not much plot, there's just waiting for an angry guy to pop off.
It was alright, mostly because of his performance.
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.
"What About Bob" with Brett Gelman instead of Bill Murray and a slacker instead of Richard Dreyfus's character. It was ok.
A young couple go on vacation in the woods and get driven crazy by an annoying noise. That's it, that's the whole movie. And there's an annoying noise playing through the whole thing, so you share their suffering.
Why don't they just leave?
Stars Annabella Rich, who appears to be the anti-Madeline Brewer. Everything she stars in is some kind of tedious.
A guy has dreams that he kills and eats people, and I don't know anything more than that because it was so terrible I just turned it off after 20 minutes.
Sort of a peculiar, charmingly British movie about two affably irresponsible lads who are mysteriously given $10,000 by a stranger, and after some affable goofing around find themselves being questioned by the police. Started off a bit slow for me as I wasn't in the mood for British charm qua British charm, but, strangely, as it goes on, it gradually mutates from a low-rent comedy about a couple of drifters to sort of a twisted psychodrama. I kinda liked it for where it got to, even though it took a while to get there.
An insufferable hipster artist flees to Iceland after the death of his fiancee, where a one night stand with a woman who makes him get a sigil tattooed on his chest and then steals from him leads to him getting embroiled in the slowest-moving, talkiest not-very-well-explained supernatural circumstances ever, leading to him going on a vision quest until he encounters his fiancee returned temporarily from the dead for a climactic 30 minutes of talking about their relationship, my absolute favorite thing to sit through in a movie.
This was really bad, but I liked it. It's a low-budget monster movie that appears to have spent its entire budget on the monster... and it's a good one.
The plot, if it matters, is that a shapeshifting monster prowls the woods, kills people, and makes people's heads explode with its banshee wail. Local cops and loadies get together to try to kill it and mostly get picked off.
But, I don't know. Something about this one is fun. The acting is corny but maybe a touch better than it usually is in movies this cheap, and everyone seems really committed, and the action kind of doesn't let up and isn't all bad, despite the incredibly silly scenes of people's heads exploding or being ripped off like a piece of paper being torn.
The monster, not the cheesy video clichéd video distortion effects that indicate when someone…
Nothing tooo terribly special, but this is a fun little black comedy about a professor, stressed about trying to qualify for tenure, whose whole life spirals into bad intrigue when he's falsely accused of an affair with a student and then accidentally runs over her boyfriend. Overall, better done than most things like this, despite some moments that strain credulity. It unfolds almost like a Coen Brothers castoff script, but I mean that in a good way. It punches above its weight and largely succeeds at that. I watched "The Hudsucker Proxy" the other day, and while that's obviously a much more polished movie, I enjoyed this one's story and dark comedy more. The cast of unknown actors is well up to snuff, too.
Ponderously dull sci-fi movie of the sort indie filmmakers sometimes seem inclined to make, the kind where an opening credit lets you know it's "A Film By" and not a "movie". A couple's young daughter gets abducted. A year later, they're still suffering from it, and they get moved out to a remote but high-tech home in the woods where he discovers extraterrestrial shortwave transmissions that also somehow cause her to hallucinate and think she's seeing her daughter. Lots of attempts at artsy cinematography and
...oh, sorry, I think I dozed off there.
Consistently amusing workplace comedy about a man who discovers, separately, that several of his office workers are alien invaders, and a failed short relationship with one of them puts Earth in the middle of an interplanetary battle. Fun enough, plus good players like Samm Levine, Angela Bettis, and several other inoffensively familiar comedy faces make it slightly more entertaining than it otherwise might have been. Not a great comedy but not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. Could easily have been stupid but instead manages to be charming.
A single-note idea where a pair of frustrated hipsters who I bet live in Austin wish they were alone in the world, so they wake up alone, and spend the rest of the movie ruminating on their relationship, "deep" thoughts, and mostly doing what look like acting workshop exercises. The movie tries to redeem itself with "artsy" sequences where something they're talking about is occasionally shown in a cutaway animated, rotoscoped, or black-and-white fantasy sequence... for instance, they're lost in the woods, and he says "I should have been a boyscout", cue the 'clever' cutaway of him in a scout uniform, standing next to a puptent, giving the scout salute for 15 needless seconds, in black and white, of course. Ends without a resolution. The whole thing seems like it came from some sort of workshop. I bet it did well in some festivals. Waste of time.
Awful anthology film. Seems like some people sat around thinking of "scary" vingettes, mostly with no explanation, and filmed them as shorts—for example, a woman gets a mysterious rash, and then gets the idea to attack her boyfriend and it goes away when she drinks his blood, and then you see her walk out and she's fine, and that's it, that's the whole story. Or, a guy misses his dead wife, and has let his apartment fill with trash, and then the trash bags get up and talk to him and it's her ghost, and that's it, that's the whole story. It's loosely framed by a poorly-explained story in which a woman is hopping between universes trying to find one where her dead sister is alive, and apparently her hopping is causing the scary stuff, because movie.
Talk about a guilty pleasure.
Cartoonishly evil frat guys lure a few women to a remote cabin for a party, only to drug them, rape them, and release them to hunt them down for sport. Things don't do as planned, though, when one of them reaches a road and flags down a car... which happens to have an incredibly realistically nerdy couple—I could swear I sat next to these two in the computer center in college—who turn out to, uh, not be people you want to fuck with.
What follows is tough to categorize. Torture porn? Revenge fantasy? The darkest pitch-black comedy I've ever seen? It's basically all of these.
It helps that it has some good moments that redeem it, so you know it isn't just an exploitation flick. The stereotypically weak characters—the female intended victims, and the geeks—turn out to be overpoweringly strong, but with…
A goofy slasher film in the tradition of (and even name-checks) "Hood of Horror". A gang initiation goes wrong when they break into a serial killer's house, and he's got all sorts of deadly games set up, because, movie. Expect lots of sass. I enjoyed it for what it was.
It's easy to see why this film is considered a thoroughbred classic; at the same time I found it to be solidly made in some ways, but uneven in others. The influence of French New Wave is apparent—and I've never liked the artifice of French New Wave very much, personally. I suppose I'm glad Godard didn't direct it, as they were in talks for, apparently.
Anything else... well, this is one of the most written-about films out there, and my personal opinion doesn't matter much. Google it and you'll find out whatever you need to know.
It's weird to me to label such a classic and beloved film as no more than "watchable"—especially given the stellar cast and its groundbreaking status—but while I appreciate why many people love it, I can't see, despite its very obvious merits, that it's a personal favorite, or even one I'd necessarily go out of…
Never mentioned among the best Coen brothers movies, and for a reason. Which is to say, it's merely a very good movie with a few touches of greatness. Set in the 1950s, and highly styled with everybody talking like Edward G. Robinson (including Jennifer Jason Leigh, which is strange at first), Tom Robbins plays a hapless mail room clerk promoted to the CEO of a major corporation in an effort to tank the stock so the board can buy a controlling share.
It plays into some of the cinematic stereotypes the Coens thankfully learned quickly to avoid, and the story is entertaining but not novel in the way so many of their movies are—until the ending, which is vintage Coen Brothers and really kind of redeems everything. But you wait through a long B+ movie waiting for an A- ending.
Sam Raimi shares a writing credit, which makes sense...…
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