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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.
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.
Middling-to-ok near-future sci-fi flick about an experiment to implant people with AI chips, which take over their lives and force them to kill and sit up straight, you're slouching.
I thought it was kind of ok. Unfortunately the plot doesn't explain much, and it's kind of predictable and takes a while to get to where you know it's going. But it was ok, I thought.
Kind of a disappointment here. This anthology film showing stories of people wandering across a postapocalyptic wasteland, really just some hilly rural area, starts with a couple of incredibly cheap-looking shorts that are so artificial it's almost more like watching animation than live action: very high contrast, saturated colors, and animated beasts, mutants, and robots that literally look like they were rendered on a '90s desktop computer, or were clipped out of an old video game.
But, it's so cheap-looking, and so stylized, it almost works. It reminded me in a strange way of watching som strange French animated feature (it's foreign-language, but with so little dialogue I couldn't place the language) or even a low-rent "Yellow Submarine".
The only problem is, after the weirdly charmingly bad first couple of shorts, it goes on for way too long, and gets less interesting. Some of the shorts aren't as…
A woman whose husband mysteriously disappeared, her son, and her new fiancee move back to the fiancee's hometown and become embroiled in supernatural dealings so mediocre and forgettable that I actually sat through 4/5 of this movie a second time before I realized I'd watched it before. Shirley Jones in a supporting role, which if you've seen enough mediocre horror movies tells you about all you need to know.
Absolutely no connection to the first "House Of Darkness", of course.
A young family move into a new home in the country that harbors a dark force which makes the residents live through every horror movie cliche about what happens to a young family who moves into a house that harbors a dark force.
The word "turgid" was invented for this movie. A woman goes to stay in a friend's house and discovers it is inhabited by the trapped souls of people who died in a car crash. Then rather than doing anything interesting with the idea, they spend the next two hours having subdued, "meaningful" conversations with each other. I think I'm gonna die of boredom and get trapped in the house.
Well-produced by terribly written movie about a woman who goes on a yacht to make some sort of a business deal, she's having nightmares, people are getting killed in real life, someone's doublecrossing someone else, and at the end some sort of ghost or demon appears for a minute in a mirror and makes the woman kill herself, and the whole thing just doesn't seem to bother to explain anything.
A couple invites the strange new neighbors over to dinner, where they act strangely enough that anyone who's ever seen a movie can immediately guess that they're aliens in disguise. Then when the host, who has apparently never seen a movie, makes a crack about "I don't know what planet your from" they, and the movie, abruptly turn violent for the rest of the runtime.
It's alright actually, it was kind of watchable, I guess, maybe. Not really much to it: neighbors act weird, then couple tries to survive from neighbors who want to kill them and are superhumanly strong, and that's pretty much the whole movie.
As amateurish as it gets, seems like a couple of friends probably got together and made this jokey English tale about a guy who gets stuck in an underground bunker for 8 years before emerging to an outside world that has become a "Mad Max"-type savage wasteland. Obvious dime-store costumes, terrible miscasting, a complete dearth of acting ability, and a horrible Euro-disco soundtrack make this the kind of movie that couldn't even aspire to "USA Up All Nite" quality.
However, this film is somehow charming despite being absolutely terrible. It's like they know they're making a terrible and 100% derivative movie, and don't care, so they just have fun with it. I'm not saying I'd ever watch it again, but, weirdly, I enjoyed it despite it being one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
The best thing about this movie—literally—is the poster. Look at this! It looks like a…
Unlikeable douchebags gaver at a remote cabin in Vermont—with, get this, no cell service!—and the affable-seeming caretaker turns out to be a psycho and begins picking them off.
Actually, for a movie with that setup, it's slightly better than you'd probably expect. The caretaker is a colorful Dennis Hopper sort and basically makes (what there is of) the movie. And there's a dog, who has been taken on the trip as a farewell before being put down, and basically is the "final girl" of the movie, which is a nice turn. And the way things unfold to murderous is, eh, not as shallow and unbelievable as I've seen, the escalation is somewhat more realistic than just "caretaker is crazy and wants to murder, because, movie" like most films like this do it.
But that's the best I can say for it. It might even almost be watchable if the vacationers…
The setup for this movie is dissuasive: Once a year, an ancient secret society "The Locusts" stages "Night Of The Locusts", where innocent people are set up for home invasions and bloody violence which must be finished within three hours, because, movie. Basically, sounds like a ripoff of "The Purge" crossed with the ubiquitously shitty home invasion horror exploitation subgenre, a subgenre I've hated since "Last House On The Left".
However, having watched it... you know, if only one of these movies was ever to have been made—and only one should have been, that sounds about right to me—this one would be it.
Instead of focusing on the violence, the movie spends a lot of time on tensions between the home invaders. There are long, slow sequences where nothing happens: an intended victim hides below the bed while one of the killers is in the room, and... everybody…
Two women hear mysterious screams at night and try to track them down, leading to involvement with other "scream hunters", many of whom have died suspicious deaths apparently at their own hands, and a mysterious crew of attackers who seem to appear randomly. The women find mysterious objects, they fight, they watch movies together, they run around filming things, and the whole thing was tough for me to follow.
I really want to like this movie, primarily because the leading, umm, players—I can't call them actors, because they can't act—seem really affable, despite acting stiffly and forcedly strange, and not being able to act. And one lead is so irresistably, extraordinarily pretty in this very plain, girl-next-door way that she kind of takes my breath away, visually at least (YMMV. I have my tastes; you have yours.)
Unfortunately the whole thing seems like a couple of kids got…
A couple of kids take an unnamed new drug and freak out in a difficult-to-understand nonlinear narrative. It seems like the director looked at some of the horrible real-life stories about things people have done on bath salts, and decided to invent a tale about how they actually happened. Unfortunately, the execution isn't as interesting as the idea, the whole thing is amateurish and doesn't hold together.
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