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...…
A bunch of kids go on vacation at one of their relatives in the peruvian wilderness, and one of them isn't comfortable around the others, begins to be overtaken by anxiety, flips her shit, and dies. And that's it, that's the entire plot of the movie. They don't even show the consequences of her death. Emily Browning and Michael Cera, who both should been in something more interesting than this.
A man calls a prostitute to a hotel, who overdoses while he's in the shower. Her madam shows up, gets to arguing with him, pulls a knife, and in a minute he's got two bodies in the hotel room. That's the setup.
The rest of the movie? Well, he's got a pimp looking for either the prostitutes or to be paid for them, and two bodies to somehow dispose of.
It's a totally amateurish movie with almost no production values, no cinematography at all, and seemingly no budget, but... no hugely obvious flaws, either. It's a little differenty than most neo-noir pics, as it doesn't really try to have any Hollywood sheen or be "cool", it's just nuts and bolts telling of the story. I liked it for that. It's paced pretty well, too, it never really sags. Probably one of the best c-grade amateur pictures I've ever seen. Not…
Disappointing. Starting off for the first hour of its two-hour runtime, this film follows a beleaguered divorcee as she encounters misfortunate after misfortune after purchasing a red dress. So far, so good: the cinematigraphy is excellent, and the whole thing is produced very well in the style of what might have been a good horror movie in the early 70s... think "Rosemary's Baby" but with a more Giallo, surreal edge. The whole thing is faintly artsy, but in a skilled and knowing way that works enjoyably...
...until it doesn't. About halfway through the movie they abandon any kind of linear narrative, or at least fail to convey the story as well, as the star of the first half of the movie is abruptly killed off and it switches to a sequence of other characters who inherit the dress. It sinks into disjointed artsiness and never recovers, seemingly abandoning plot completely…
What is it about H.P. Lovecraft that inspires so many zero-budget absolutely terrible but obviously spirited 100% amateurish efforts, often starring what appear to be the director's friends or whoever happened to be standing around to ask if they wanted to be in a movie? Somehow I often have affection for these, just because the people so often seem to be having such a good time doing absolute crap emoting and woodenly reciting the script in whatever clothes they happened to be wearing that day, except for the occasional cliché "occultist robe".
A labyrinthine, rococo tale of ghosts and cult activity in the small New England town, with pretty much no acting to speak of, so much as occasional emoting and fake-sounding, put-on voices and accents.
I enjoyed it, for crap. And it is crap, as crap as crap gets. It was kind fun to watch, as a spectacle.
Definitely a strange idea for a movie, as a down-on-his-luck artist rents a studio with some sort of unspecified monster behind a hole in the wall that speaks in a sexy woman's voice and gives him brilliant artistic inspiration in exchange for increasing demands for attention, affection, and finally sex. Yes, with, essentially, a glory hole with teeth. And one that takes credit for the careers of a bunch of great 20th century artists. And as he falls for the gallery owner who falls for him for his new talent, the hole gets jealous, making for a few scenes of minor but visually imaginative gore.
It's a B-movie but the whole thing is so bizarre it's kind of charming. Unfortunately a weak ending keeps it from being recommendable as an oddity... a strong ending would have put it over the line for sure. This is the movie I created…
Tourists' car breaks down in the the Irish countryside and the locals are murderous lunatics trying to free themselves from a curse that has deformed all their kids. Meh.
This entry in the "A group of teens go on vacation in a cabin and..." genre is a sad near-exception to the Canadian horror rule. I say "near" because the antagonist turns out not to be a slasher, zombies, or aliens, and I think they mix it up by ripping off a completely different, unexpected subgenre instead. I say "I think", because, while they show you a lot of weird stuff, they never actually tell you what it is or why it actually happened.
And that's as much good as I can say about this execrable, 100% amateur effort.
Look, it starts with "A group of teens go on vacation in a cabin and...". Apparently even the Canadians can't save that opening.
Several episodes of an only occasionally funny, mostly mediocre failed R-rated single-camera sitcom grafted together into a "movie", complete with title cards still left in every 22 minutes, and suddenly stopping in the middle rather than ending, as failed series do.
A "Dave"-like loveable shlub who things always go wrong for has his latest problem: being stuck in a series that relies on dick and shit jokes. It has a "Dave"-like sense of absurdity but absolutely none of the genius or things besides dick and shit jokes.
The lead guy has everyman likeability and decent comic ability. Hopefully he'll land in something better than this.
Here we have something odd. A ghost story but not a horror movie. Not quite a comedy, but far too lighthearted (and innocently goofy) to ever be meant to be taken seriously. Definitely has a certain charm, which it needs to, because that's the only way a story this dumb could ever fly.
A likeable but goofy guy, first seen on a string of comedically terrible dates, gets a job at a hotel which turns out to have a haunted room. The staff has adapted their routine around it and are matter-of-fact about it. Mr Goof has to see it himself, and, after a few scary encounters, bonds emotionally with the ghost and becomes determined to help find the lover who jilted her and caused her to kill herself in the room and bring him back. Eventually things get even sillier and more unbelievable, but... the whole thing is kind…
Thora Birch stars in "Hostel" except set on a train, right down to the sinister eastern European (in this case Russian) backdrop and the beautiful local woman tricking people into boarding. I can't believe this wasn't directed by Eli Roth.
A family on a remote farm during WWII unearths something sinister from their well in what starts seeming like a moody and well-acted if extremely low-budget horror flick but ends up a run-of-the-mill, overly familiar possession flick. Apparently this is an adaptation of "The Color Out Of Space" by Lovecraft. Truth to tell, it wouldn't necessarily be bad, it's just that I've seen so much of it before, it just doesn't break any new ground at all. And the special effect (yes, singular—there's only one) is super cheap-looking and the several times they use it doesn't help anything at all.
Ridiculous romantic farce about a guy whose penis escapes his body and turns into a douchebag who makes his life miserable. Funny-ish for what it is, kinda.
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