Possessing Piper Rose
Fairly unremarkable, vaguely Hollywood-y Supernatural Thriller Product. Rebecca Romijn adopts a young girl whose birth mother, deceased, wants her back.
June (2015)
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.
The Hollow Child
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.
Cannibal Mukbang
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…
Evil Under The Skin
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…
Night Things
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…
Hosticide
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.
Jug Face
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.
The Amityville Backrooms
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,…
The Buildout
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.…
One Day Like Rain
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.
Ladyworld
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…
Maggots
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.
Last Kind Words
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.
The Nothing
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.
The Nightmare Gallery
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.
Hollow (2021)
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.
Do Not Open
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…
War Of The Worlds: The Attack
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.
Wind Chill
Middling supernatural thriller as Emily Blunt and a friend get stranded on a snowy mountain road and begin to see creepy chacters lurking around in the woods as a ghost story slowly emerges. Not terrible, but not especially good. Almost watchable... almost. But, meh, not quite.
As a bonus, this movie uses the "they snap back to someone they were before and the entire interceding scary episode was just a hallucination" trick not just once, but twice.
Diane (2023)
Absolutely awful pic (indie division). Shot alright, but the plot is incomprehensible... a couple moves into a new building where, after about an hour, it turns out, the building manager is killing people for some reason. Meanwhile, most of that first hour is incomprehensibly spent showing a completely different movie, a cheesy spoof of a '70s blaxploitation flick called "Coffy & Creame" that might as well have been titled "I Dreamed I Gave Tarantino A Hard-On", sometimes showing scenes from that more than once without every fleshing it out into an actual story, before suddenly for the last half hour returning to the unrelated present-day story, which suddenly turns into a jumbled sequence of scenes from an apparent torture flick. Scattered throughout are scenes of a man who was apparently cast for his ability to stare at the camera with a twisted expression on his face, staring at the camera…
Influenza
This movie has all the warning signs—it's described as a "horror comedy", and the synopsis starts with "A group of social media influencers..."—so I knew what I was getting into.
And, I have to say, it took a while for the setup to get going, a movie about social media influencers trapped in a haunted villa shouldn't take like 30 minutes to get them trapped in the haunted villa, the entire longwinded set up is totally disposable. And, even once everything is somewhat explained, the basic reason for just about any of it is, "because, movie."
But: this is a movie made by reasonably capable filmmakers who seemed to know just how silly the whole premise is, and decided to milk it for what they could. They baldfacedly embrace absolute silliness like, "This is the house where the first-ever influencer killed herself, and now all the ghosts of influencers who…
Bonehill Road
This is one of those movies that seems like someone who had never made a movie, or even ever known anything about making a movie, had a camera and just asked a bunch of their friends, "Want to be in a movie?"
And, happens to be friends with Linnea Quigley, who it's at least funny to see again like 35 years after what I hesitate to call her "heyday".
But: here's the thing. I really don't get into the "so bad it's good" thing, most of the time it's just an excuse to not really try. This is a rare case where, for me, it actually is so bad it's good, because, it seems like they *really did try*. They just didn't know how to write anything but one horror movie cliché after another, and didn't know how to act, and didn't know how to make a movie. But…
13th Child: Legend Of The Jersey Devil
What a weird movie. This movie has the fashions—and solid-state screaming guitar soundtrack—of a more recent picture but looks and feels totally like a 1976 made-for-TV monster movie. Some horseshit about the Jersey Devil, the story didn't make much sense. Bizarrely, stars an aging Robert Gillaume as a convict. It totally deserves the about 2.5 stars average it has on IMDB. It's definitely one of the worst movies out there. But... I liked the 1976ness of it? Kind of? Sort of?
Cameron’s Closet
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.
The Glass Ceiling
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?
Hidden Exposure
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.
Devour
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.
Ghosts Of The Void
Hmmmmmm. Tough to know what to do with this one. It might be the most deeply flawed of flawed gems.
A captivity/pursuit flick that doesn't really have any captivity or pursuit until at least 2/3 of the way through its runtime. The director described it as "a home invasion flick without the home" but in truth it barely has the invasion, either. That's a good thing.
A struggling couple, their marriage crumbling and deep anxiety setting in as shown through flashbacks, has been evicted from their home and is spending their night in their car, parked on a darkened street outside a country club in the nice part of town. Slowly, tension builds, and it takes well over half the movie before we see someone is indeed messing with them. Someone leaves a note saying "don't park here" on their windshield... but it may be a nearby homeless…
The Ideal
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.