Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Blech. Egotistical director recruits a team of young actors to spend the night filming in a hounted house with strapped-on cameras and, basically, nothing happens. They wander around for an hour jumping at shadows, and then there's some sort of yelling and killing, but it's way too late at that point.

+1 star for not being a found footage film.

Pretty much a date movie, but not so much a "I hope the person I'm watching with ends up clinging to me, let's try a horror movie" date movie as a "I already know we're going to spend most of the movie making out, so I need a horror movie we can easily ignore" date movie.

Paranormal investigators in the 1980s get sucked into strange occurrences at a house haunted by a vengeful spirit or something, if that matters.

Sunita Mani got me again.

As with the sci-fi "Save Yourselves", this is a supposed genre flick, horror this time, that's really mostly about people going off into the woods to explore their relationships.

I don't get it. Sunita Mani is ever-appealing, but just from the lead roles she picks, I have a feeling in person she's a really high-maintenance person. She sure seems to have a thing for having relationships, and exploring relationships, and talking about relationships. At any rate, apparently she thinks movies should have people arguing about their relationships, that much I know.

Not my thing as entertainment.

Oh, yeah, there's some murder and people creeping around in this one. Also features a "twist ending" you can see coming about halfway through the picture.

Man goes camping in the woods alone to scatter his friend's ashes when and the friend or something, haunts him. Not bad, I guess, a lot of movies are way worse. I didn't mind it. Had some well-directed scenes, a tense scare or two. But I watched it 2 hours ago and already can't remember how it ended.

Edit: This movie is, again, not bad, but so forgettable that I watched it again a month later and didn't even remember I had watched it until 2/3 of the way through there was finally a scene I realized I'd seen before. Same overall impressions as first time.