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…
Ok. Hmmmmmm.
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.
Supernatural drama about a young woman into witchcraft returning to her childhood home to reunite with her former witchcraft partner and cast spells and stuff, and deal with past tragedies. Nice enough, I suppose, but not particularly engaging to me.
A horror-themed variant of those sub-"Airplane!" movies that are intentionally stupid, play to overly broad stereotypes, etc., such as the "joke" of having a child played by a full-grown dwarf, or two nuns who, becoming possessed tear off their habits and begin having sex. Hilarious!
Anyway, plane full of passengers become "possessed" one by one.
Except, weirdly, this cheap-shit movie somehow has cameos from known names—Lance Henriksen (who does not die last, because this is a comedy, not a horror movie), Bai Ling, even Adrienne Barbeau is in there. And, also, weirdly, it's a little bit.... funny? Maybe? Kind of? Maybe I kind of actually found it entertaining? Sort of?
A visually beautiful film made by someone who obviously studied at the feet of Blue Velvet-era David Lynch in terms of cinematography, and succeeds well on that level, but is otherwise absolutely terrible, and, most especially, is truly horribly cast. The actors are uniformly much too young, don't seem confident, for their roles, and mostly can't act. It's an odd and jarring discerpancy in such a slickly visually designed and shot film.
A pair of 1950s rookie detectives, who look like teen models, investigate a murder or something, through a series of pointless, surreal vignettes that are basically random. By the time the male detective is confronting an image of himself in drag, who then goes on to vamp a launge tune, I had long past lost interest.
Disappointingly, Ray Wise has a cameo as one detective's father... the first time Ray Wise has ever led me astray. Oh,…
Dreadfully uneventful British "horror" movie with a lot of talk and almost no story. A girl finds a cursed necklace and her personality changes. Fast forward years and she and her brother, apparently having been split up after the never-shown death of their parents, reunite and uninteresting bits of their childhood are shown in flashback. Finally, for unclear reasons, an hour and twenty minutes into this hour and twenty-three minute movie, he abducts her, ties her up, brings her out on his boat, and suddenly, a demon who has apparently been inhabiting the necklace all these years appears, and she cuts her brother's throat. Then another little girl is shown finding the necklace on a beach, with no explanation what happened or how it got there. End of extremely dull movie.
An interesting indie exercise, more artsy than I often like, but in this case it's effective—think more Tarkovsky than "Brooklyn hipster with a video recorder". There are a lot of long, slow shots and moments without any dialogue, but it all works naturalistically.
The entire movie is essentially a series of monologues from three generations of solitary Mars colonists (and the only three characters in the movie): a member of the first wave of colonists, a son of his who is the only survivor of an expedition back to a ruined, desolate earth, and his granddaughter, back on Mars. I unfortunately was distracted with some work for the first part of the movie before I realized there was something kind of interesting happening on my TV, but the somber first person accounts of a future history were engaging and the stark cinematography was beautiful in an amateur, indie kind…
Ken Jeong stars in this fictionalized version of his life, which apparently consists of a lot of overly broad characterizations, tired sitcom tropes, and middle-aged people talking in awkward, exaggerated attempts at hip-hop cliches in lieu of jokes. Even a huge surfeit of familiar faces can't save this, including a couple of people who were actually funny in "Community", and Dave Foley, who was actually funny in just about everything ever except this, but is thoroughly wasted here as a Phil Hartman wannabe, if you can imagine that that actually exists.
Slightly overwrought single-parent-and-child-move-into-a-new-house-and-parent-must-confront-their-own-past-demons-to-save-child-from-malevolent-entity movie. You know the drill.
Ok nature/animal attack thriller. Kaya Scodelario and her father are trapped in the crawlspace of a house in Florida as particularly ferocious but oddly slow-moving alligators swarm in the rising floodwaters of a Florida hurrican, finding their way into every crevice and attacking everything that moves at the most dramatically opportune moment. Not bad for that.
Some fleeting ok cinematography and occasional well-done action sequences are nice touches. There's a thing with some looters at the convenience store across the street that I liked. Anybody in a movie like this who's first shown stealing an ATM in a flood is obviously going to meet a bad end, but the way they're dispatched is gratifyingly to-the-point.
Decent enough b-movie monster movie, if you're in the mood for a b-movie monster movie. A mechanic is stuck pinned under a car in a garage while giant poisonous nematodes from below the surface of the earth roam and attack people. Somewhere among the better end of what a movie that could be described by that sentence could be.
A self-consciously "weird" movie (never a good thing in my book) movie which suffers primarily from self-consciously "quirky" characters obviously invented by a Wes Anderson fan: a family with a strong, domineering patriarch and a mess of brothers and sisters each of which is a distinct "character", and each with more personality than four real life people would collectively have.
Anyway, this quirky family's patriarch, a distiller, has discovered a cache of 117 year old whiskey from the Shackleford expedition in Antarctica. Oh, because the movie is "weird", one of the casks contains a mummified but somehow not-quite-dead expedition member who somehow got the power to live forever and blast other people with radioactive beams from his face, and is apparently waiting on some sort of extraterrestrial connection, and is pretty soon stumbling around—drunk from being in a whiskey cask for 177 years, isn't that quirky?—shooting rays and flying…
Very decent, tense thriller. Halle Berry is a 911 operater on a live call with a girl who's been abducted and is in the trunk of a car speeding down the highway. Nothing spectacular but good direction make it watchable, if you're in the mood for a law enforcement action thriller.
Unfortunately the third act sacrifices the moderately successful formula, is less "intense pursuit thriller" and more "Silence Of The Lambs"-derivative stalk-the-killer-around-a-darkened-house, victim-gets-delicious-revenge-in-the-end sort of typical Hollywood stuff. Still, you know, it's alright. I think everything I've ever seen Halle Berry in has been alright, so, it fits.
Moderately entertaining if almost too quirky sci-fi comedy along the lines of, but happily much more restrained than, something like "Being John Malkovich". Paul Giamatti plays himself, so tormented by a gruelling dramatic role that he has his soul scientifically extracted for two weeks so he get play the role. Unfortunately he doesn't realize there is an international trade in extracted souls and his is, er, "misplaced".
The funny thing is he, and other serious actors, like Emily Mortimer, play this absurd idea so straight that it works. They never do reveal exactly what the difference between having a soul and not having a soul is, as everybody who undergoes the process seems to basically still be themselves, although several times people are heard wanting their souls back, and Giamatti is distressed enough to find he can't reclaim his to go through some intrigue trying to get it back.…
Fairly mediocre but passably enjoyable B-movie supernatural thriller. A woman, remarried but missing her late husband, receives a cursed medallion that allows her to bring him back from the dead for one night. Turns out, he doesn't want to leave again. Also, he has a supernatural thirst for revenge. Uh-oh.
This little oddity has a story that isn't really relevant to it, but it's amusing: Roger Corman bought the rights to a Russian early '60s sci-fi film, had Peter Bogdanovich shoot some scenes of blond woman cavorting on a rocky, storm-tossed Los Angeles beach because the studo demanded "girls" to release the film, they added voice-over narration to make a story out of it, and Bob's yer uncle, they had a movie.
Not only that, but this was the second time Corman did this... with the same Russian film. Same footage and everything.
Anyway, this Russian flick apparently had all the ambition and none of the budget. If you want to see fun early '60s footage of astronauts and mermaids cavorting around rocky landscapes that are supposed through smoke machines running at full blast, I dunno, it's actually kind of fun, for a movie that never, ever shoots…
It's hard to do anything new with a zombie movie nowadays, but this movie kind of does. Bill Moseley takes a star turn in a convincing performance of a mildly unlikeable radio shock jock stuck in the studio while a bioengineered zombie outbreak overtakes his city. It has its share of action, and of course zombies, but a lot of it is handled as a drama or thriller, not as a horror movie, and focuses heavily on the survivors in the studio, not on the zombies, except as they affect the survivors. Plus they manage to have a couple of scenes of things I haven't seen before and a few moments that kept me on the edge of my seat. Directed by Corbin Bernsen, who I've never known as a director, but obviously had a couple of ideas, and handled them well enough to make a pretty good and somewhat…
Okay-ish supernatural thriller about a guy who inherits a box inhabited by a demon that makes every wish come true in the most horrible way possible. Supposedly from someone who was behind "Final Destination". It was okay-ish.
Mediocre horror thriller about students signing up for what they think is a medical study but turns out to be a government bioweapon development program to turn people into either killers or puddles of goo, judging from the effects. Pretty much degenerates into people chasing each other down hallways and attacking each other in the goriest ways possible, and from there into guys with gas masks and guns, and one of the Baldwin brothers on the phone saying, "Mr. Vice President, the test was a success. We're ready for live launch." Meh. It was ok, I guess, if you're in the mood for that sort of thing and seriously, seriously, seriously set your expectations absolutely no higher than I just described.
Starts out a cute, quirky-but-not-unbearably-so comedy about a geeky small-town movie theater ticket taker who may or may not be the son of God and have the ability to decide whether people will go to heaven or hell after death. Has a couple of unlikely star cameos, like William H. Macy as his therapist, Justin Kirk plays his usual charater as an earthbound ghost who wants to know his permanent fate, and Neve Campbell, improbably, as Kirk's daughter (I guess he had an active sex life at the age of 4) and Milo Ventimiglia in an amusing and out-of-character turn as a womanizing, fast-talking fellow theater employee.
Entertaining enough until it descends from comedy to sentimentality as the subject turns from his obsession with the concession girl and his responsibilities deciding peoples' ultimate fate into him dealing with his complicated feelings about his father's death. I guess the writers forgot…
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