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.
Absolutely execrable, home-movie-quality effort at a woman who is stalked by demon that looks like a man in a cheap rubber mask, which she once made a deal with and then ran from (maybe she thought he couldn't see out of the mask.) Mostly she lives at home with her daughter and they recite lines at each other. Less than nothing to see here, if that's possible.
I liked this movie, it's a fun sort of solidly-second-rate sci-fi-ish thriller about a group of wannabe startup kids who find a mirror in a hidden room in their house that allows travel to parallel dimensions. Soon enough they bringing back advanced technology from the parallel dimensions, copying the art they find and presenting it as their own, and soon they're making money, and of course things get complicated.
It's unassuming enough, not great by a longshot, but as it goes along it comes up with enough twists and turns to be entertaining, as long as you can tolerate the predominant douchebag startup personalities.
Another fatally-flawed horror gem in the finest Canadian tradition, this odd horror/thriller features an ensemble cast trying to survive trapped in a house with dwindling supplies as zombie-like former humans roam the streets, when one of them begins killing off the others.
The odd attempt to merge a zombie movie and a whodunit doesn't quite pan out, as the whodunit side isn't very engaging.
However, the zombie side, such as it is—the zombies are mostly set dressing, the story is about the people inside the house—has some originality to it, which is nice to see in this overdone subgenre.
The writing and acting are not terribly impressive... in fact, it opens with a cartoonish "kill" scene, probably the very worst, USA-Up-All-Nite-iest scene of the entire movie.
But most especially, what really gets me, it has some moments of gorgeous cinematography, always the path to my heart, and…
A germophobe nursing student begins to be inexplicably attacked by people around her wherever she goes.
Don't watch this movie. I mean it. And especially, don't eat while watching this movie.
I have watched thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of horror movies over the years, some pretty intense.
This movie goes places most horror movies never do, and certainly no mainstream horror movie, or movie of any genre that I've seen.
This one is different, that much can be said confidently. It's memorable. For whatever "different" and "memorable" are worth.
I've seen horror movies with tons of blood. Tons of viscera. "The Exorcist" made vomit a cliche in certain subgenres. The overdone zombie genre has certainly showed people being disemboweled in virtually every graphic, disgusting way possible.
Cards on the table: someone involved with making this movie had to be a coprophile. Full stop.
This…
Cheapo movie that tries to conceal being bad behind being weird, about a weird hotel where weird people check in and they and the weird staff harangue each other and say things that make each other uncomfortable. One character who has a Jewish name and spends the movie berating the staff or shouting into a video call on his laptop liberally sprinkles stereotypical Yiddish words into his tirades, in a forced, unnatural, rehearsed-sounding way, such as emphatically describing things at several points as "verkakte" but mispronouncing it. This movie's title, "Country of Hotels", doesn't mean anything, and neither does the movie.
Well, there was literally nowhere to go but up from the original "Evil Dead", one of the very lamest horror movies ever made, the movie that invented the "Ooops, we accidentally made a terrible horror movie—I know, we'll call it 'horror comedy', as if we meant to make it bad on purpose! It's 'camp'! Yeah, that's the ticket!" excuse.
And this does go up from there. This basically tries to remedy all the flaws of the original by giving it a decent budget, nice-enough cinematography and direction, and even tacks on a new third act seemingly to try to fix the most irredeemable feature of the original, the terrible storyline. And in that third act, this movie actually rises all the way to the level of unremarkable hollywood pop-horror product. That's about the peak of it.
Still a thousand times better than the original. Like $10 is…
Canadian-produced TV movie about a pair of outcast girls who find a diary where you can write any wish and it will come true. Being Canadian, it couldn't be as completely bad as it should have been. The cast is mostly TV movie terrible, but the lead actress is oddly really good. It's slightly above average for a TV horror movie. The whole exercise doesn't rise quite to the level of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" but if you're in the mood for that sort of thing it's not too, too, toooooo far off the mark.
Terrible, USA-Up-All-Night-quality supernatural/possession flick about 5 gorgeous supposed delinquent woman at a secluded boarding school where the headmistress is up to satanic shit.
What a disappointment. This starts off with an interesting enough idea and fairly creepy execution. A kid saves a wealthy businessman from a mugging, and is rewarded with a job: watch a door in a remote abandoned building from 8pm to 8am to make sure it never opens, for $100k/year. Just watch the door. "What happens if it opens?" "It won't open, because you're going to watch it."
Needless to see, things aren't quite as uneventful as that... put almost. After a decent enough setup to make me want to see what was going to happen, the kid's friends, out partying, show up to bother him, and of course one drunkenly opens the door when the others aren't looking, so they go in to find her... and then, 2/3 of the movie is just "scared teens wandering around darkened corridors". There's lots of people saying, "Did you hear that? I…
I kinda liked this movie. In this modern-day parable of Frankenstein-meets-Hitchcock, a science research student is study reanimating dead mice—requiring hefty doses of chemicals extracted fatally from other living mice—when the woman he loves falls in a lake and drowns. You can imagine what happens next.
Of all the places that could have gone, this handles it pretty well. I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone going out of their way to watch this movie, and it sure takes a while to get going but once it did, I liked it. Some of the violence, while not particularly bloody, is pretty coldly brutal, but I suppose as the scientist gets colder in his pursuit of reanimating the woman he loves, the one or two moments of truly brutal violence sort of fit the character development.
It's a little predictable at points too, and falls back on cliches at odd moments,…
An ambitious sci-fi flick with a grasp that exceeds its reach. Student steal a machine that allows them to put their consciousness in other people's bodies in a poorly-explained way, which they use to their own benefit, until it causes poorly-explained problems and contention. Good cast, good production, but the plotting just seems to have a lot of holes in it. They obviously wanted this to be an intense mindbender but despite the good idea and some occasional cool scenes it's just kind of lackluster. The ending is cool, too, but again, they don't really explain what happened, you're just left scratching your head. Too bad. It had a lot going for it, but movies need to tell a story first, and this just wasn't the good story it could have been and clearly desperately wanted to be.
Pursuit/captivity flick, Irish style. Decently creepy for what it is—a pursuit flick with about a half-inch of plot—a couple gets lost on the way to a music festival in the Irish countryside, and gets pursued by locals after accidentally knocking over a local's pint during a stop at a pub. Anyone who has ever had an Irish friend will understand the rationale.
Perhaps the most derivative slasher/psycho film I've ever seen. So derivative of Psycho that the bad guy is named "Norman". And the similarities only begin there.
The one slightly memorable thing about this is villain Toby Wynn-Davies doing a remarkable Burgess Meredith impersonation. So if you've ever wanted to see Norman Bates played by an overacting Burgess Meredith in a much worse version of Psycho, this might be the movie for you. Otherwise, skip it.
I don't think I've ever wanted more to like a movie and been unable to.
This movie starts off like a typical stupid teen b-movie slasher pic: a group of teenagers at a remote cabin. It takes it's time before springing the surprise that it's something different... sort of. Time stops, and they discover that they're in a horror movie and have accidentally gone off-script, that understanding helped along by discovering a copy of the script, and seeing where it diverged. They realize that for time to restart and any of them to escape, they must die as the script says they will. Already, by this point in the movie, there are some bad non-diegetic bad signs of what's to come: a few points passing where characters' behavior or responses don't make sense. It passes, at least temporarily, as they get into the whole fourth-wall mindfuck of trying to figure…
Terrible movie. Just terrible. A family goes away to a cabin for the weekend and a mysterious stranger shows up, and an oddly threatening, leering yokel helps them when their car breaks down and never actually turns out to be threatening, just weird. Wannabe tv-movie level acting, which is just sad. Horrible editing and direction, everybody overacts, the editor left in too-long pauses before everybody delivered overacted dialogue, and the script presents the most unrealistic, random depiction of family strife I've ever seen, with everybody's mood and personality apparently changing from minute to minute or even line to line. Finally at the very end, in the last minute, it's revealed to be Christian movie (the dead are back because it's the End Times, but it's not scary, it's "heartwarming" as the family's dead son reappears) and suddenly it all makes sense how it could be so very weirdly bad. They…
I'm leaving this here just so I remember if I run across this again. This movie started slow, and I was having a hard night with other things, so for a while it was just background noise, and by the time it got interesting, I had missed a good part of the story. But it did seem interesting, and definitely had some of the stereotypical flawed-but-kind-of-interesting Canadian horror uniqueness to it. Not even really a horror movie except that zombieish theme, more like a very subdued horror/scifi crossover thriller somehow. Something about a northern Canadian town where people are being sucked into a zombie-like depression and locked away. Will watch it for real if it pops up again.
Very poorly-paced movie about a man slowly having a psychotic breakdown as a new relationship falls apart. Commits the cardinal sin of getting "arsty" maybe 2/3 of the way through, and stops being interesting well before that. Which is too bad because the lead actor is engaging before his character becomes just an aggregation of symptoms and irrationality.
This movie doesn't appear to have a plot. A bulimic jazz singer sings "St. James Infirmary" and has bulimia. And that's it. Another scene, another rendition of "St. James Infirmary". At one point she can't hit the notes and a doctor tells her she has vocal cord scarring from stomach acid and needs to "rest her instrument". In a later scene she says she's "resting her instrument". That's as close to plot as this fairly long movie gets.
For confused first-time visitors and other people still acclimating, here is a description of these little tabs to the left, as well as some other features of the site.
Open "Expert Mode" CLI Navigation - this give you the option to switch your browser's display to an old-fashioned terminal mode where you may browse this site, view pages and images by typing text commands. Just like how we used to browse the web back in 1978!
Open Visual Settings - This gives you controls to customize the visual display of this website to your liking: turn up or down the brightness, contrast, color temperature, hue, saturation, dark mode, and earthquake. Settings are saved per browser tab, so they will be remembered for your whole visit.
Open My Eyes - Have you ever been engrossed in your work, when you suddenly realize someone is staring at your screen, watching everything you do over your shoulder? If not, this simulates the experience.
Open Help - This help popup, silly! You just clicked it! Do you not remember?
New - Draggable elements! Several elements on this website, including these tabs, this popup message, and the "Hire Mike" badge in the lower right, can be dragged around with your mouse, to avoid them blocking content. Positions are remembered per tab, so as you navigate around the site, they will stay in the same place for your whole visit.
Enjoy!
Are you sure you want to switch to viewing this website in the "expert mode" command-line interface?
This will switch to a terminal emulator, load this page, and allow you to browse this website and view its contents by typing text commands.
Plus there might be, y'know, some fun stuff hidden in there. Just for geeks.