The Final Wish
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.
After Effects
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.
Walter
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…
C.L.E.A.N.
Tough to follow the plot of this one but five people arrive at some sort of institute in the Croatian countryside and are tormented in this highly mannered, extremely Europeans film that somehow feels equal parts Giallo and Hammer Horror.
I don't know whether I wasn't paying enough attention or it's tough to follow. I did like the mood of it but I'm not sure what was going on.
Booger
In between interminable references to "The Pina Colada Song" for some reason, a Brooklyn hipster gets bit by a cat (named "Booger"), and behaves like she is turning onto a cat as she spends the movie looking for Booger, who has escaped out a window. Then Booger returns, and she doesn't turn into a cat. So she sings "The Pina Colada Song" in the shower, and the credits roll, to an indie rock cover of "The Pina Colada Song".
And somebody thought this was a good idea for a movie.
Hostile Dimensions
This films is difficult to know what to do with.
By all rights, it should suck. Zero budget, not very good acting, plotting that seems rather arbitrary, and, worst of all, it's needlessly shot "found footage" style, including the usual contrivance such as people filming while they're running and not being able to turn their head back to look at something pursuing them without swinging the camera around too.
The plot is, a grafitti artist disappears into a freestanding door in an abandoned building, and a couple of filmmakers take the door back to their apartment to study it. It turns out to open to a different parallel dimension every time they open it, which leads to a lot of predictably random dangers and dimension-hopping through door after door as people are lost, found, or abducted between dimensions. A few intriguing encounters with other-dimensional selves are shown and then…
Creep Box
Very dull sci fi movie about a box that uses AI to let people talk to simulations of dead people, and scientists who go around using it. If there was any more plot to it than that, I didn't catch it.
Hallucinations (2021)
Originally posted on IMDB.
Note to aspiring filmmakers: there are two things you are not.
The first is David Lynch.
The second, and this needs to be said far less often because most people are smart enough to make the mistake, is Jean Luc Godard.
But whoever decided to make this pretentious, arch, plotless, "artsy" mess of visual and narrative noise apparently needs to be told.
30 minutes into it I was so flummoxed and annoyed by it that I had to check IMDB to see what others said. And, sure enough, only one review, and they said they didn't last 15 minutes. I believe it.
Don't get me wrong, there's some talented-for-a-student production and cinematography—and this has got to be a student film—but that's not enough. And you really can't just say, "I'm afraid I'm not good enough to make a regular movie people will like,…
Quantum Suicide
Hard, very talky sci fi film, something having to do with a quantum mechanics experiement. Tough to follow, very dry, kind of seems to disappear up it's own ass á la "Primer" but without the cool time travel angle.
The Visit
M. Night Shyamalan rarely hits the nail square on the head, and here he doesn't either. His half-hearted venture into annoying "found footage" horror has two kids (and, conveniently, budding documentarians) visiting their estranged grandparents for the first time in rural Pennsylvania—where there's no cell service, natch—and maw-maw and pop-pop gradually start acting kind of odd. They also for some reason have an oven in the kitchen that's so big it requires a 12-year-old girl to crawl all the way into it to clean the back, but can't accommodate a grandmother who appears to be the same height.
Shmamamlon is in some ways a talented filmmaker, visually he's pretty accomplished, but I can't understand why he's been at this nearly 30 years and still seems sort of try-hard, almost experimental, like he's still trying to find his voice. Some of the bit supporting performances in this film are awfully…
A Man Goes On A Killing Spree
Does what it says on the tin.
Or, would, if the title was "A Man Goes On a Killing Spree For No Reason, In Between Much-Too-Long, Scenes Of Wooden Actors Having Interminable, Banal Conversations About Nothing Because The Director Has Apparently Never Heard Of 'Pacing' or 'Editing'".
The Quiet Earth
Kind of an enjoyable New Zealand sci-fi flick which, from 1985, may be the latest example I know of of that slightly campy but good, character-driven 1970s-type movie making. A scientist wakes up to find everyone else in the world gone. He spends half the movie doing what I actually realistically think people would do if they can go unwhere and know nobody will see them: keeping himself entertained in fine style, driving big trucks around, stealing art for fun. Eventually he meets some other people and they just kind of survive and worry about the future. It doesn't sound like much of a plot but, I dunno, it's a pretty good, even if not great, movie. It has a rating of 6.7 in IMDB, which is about right, in my opinion.
I also like that when he meets other people, there's some initial apprehension, but mostly they're happy…
God Of Pain (aka Algea: God Of Pain)
A truly shitty excursion in which wooden actors are shown committing murders, and then appear before a man in a plaster mask who announces himself as "The God Of Pain" and sentences them to eternal pain.
The Overnight
Young couple stranded at a hotel where dead people roam and apparently the owners are trying to kill guests to bring back departed loved ones. If you started with the plot of "The Shining", and played a long enough game of "telephone" with it where people repeat it one to another and it gradually changes as people misunderstand each other, eventually you'd end up with the plot of this movie.
Awoken
Starts as a reasonably creepy tale of strange doings in a medical facility researching sleep disorders, but regrettably descends into a paint-by-numbers demonic possession movie for the third act. Candles, latin chanting, guttural voices, yawn.
Excision
Boy, this movie really makes kind of an impression.
Annalynne McCord, last seen looking like a glamor-model-turned-actress in 90210, plays, in what is only the first of this movie's many bits of stunt casting of famous faces in unlikely roles, a painfully awkward, geeky outcast with bad skin, greasy hair and rings under her eyes. She actually kind of pulls it off with a certain impressive intensity I wouldn't have thought a puffball 90210 actress had in her. She plays socially inept and awkward—and maybe something darker peeking out underneath it—to the hilt and it's actually pretty entertaining to watch. I bet she had to study real geeks to nail it this well.
Along the way, ex-porn star Traci Lords plays her extremely uptight and conservative mom, John Waters plays a priest with a completely straight face, and cameos pop up from Malcolm McDowall, Marlee Matlin, Ariel Winter as…
The Harbinger
This was ok. During the pandemic, a woman goes to visit a friend who has been having intense nightmares, and they turn out to be contagious. It gets into some vaguely supernatural and eventually existential ideas as they learn the cause. It ultimately isn't really that rewarding, but, unlike a lot of horror movies, it's underplayed, which works in its favor. Watchable enough if nothing else is on.
Texas Tall Tales
Don't know the plot because I turned it off less than 20 minutes into it. Porn-movie-quality acting tells me all I need to know. Not interested.
What The Waters Left Behind: Scars
In this contender for most awkwardly-titled movie ever, an anglo-American band takes a wrong turn in a small Latin American village and finds themselves lost in an uninspired torture porn movie.
Incubus: New Beginnings
I notice a lot of truly abysmal, home-movie-level crap comes from this company "ITN". This is more of that. There's an incubus, he looks like the Brawny paper towel man, and a bunch of other shit that I can't even be bothered to summarize, and no acting or filmmaking skill anywhere to be seen.
The Final Scream
Torture porn without much torture. A young actress is lured out to a remote house to be cast in a horror movie. It's not a movie. Yawn.
Chatterbox (2022)
The most clichéd, unimaginative slasher pic I've ever seen. This is like if AI wrote a slasher pic. Six friends but a remote fixer-upper in the English countryside where there is, of course, no cell reception. Soon the local inspector comes around to tell them the history of the house: the last owner came home one day and "for reasons unknown" killed his family with a hunting knife—and he, of course, just escaped from a mental institution. The killer sneaks into the house wearing, of course, a distinctive homemade mask to which he has gone to the trouble of adding a mechanical mouth that opens and closes to produce a chattering visual effect, because, movie, and, of course, stalks them around the house and stabs them one by one, because, movie.
The Frame
This is an interesting one. It takes so long to get where it's going, but is so passably adequate even before it's gotten there, that by the time it does get there in the third act, it feels like the sudden kick into high gear is a complete (and odd) change in the tone of the movie.
A man and a woman discover they can see and speak to each other through their TVs. The catch: each knows the other as a character in a favorite TV show. For two acts, it unfolds along this premise, with the interwoven stories good for some perfectly enjoyable if not particularly memorable escapism. However, in the third act, they don't just break the fourth wall, they bend it into a moebius strip, and the movie turns from an interesting fantasy/crime drama into straight-up David Lynch territory, as more of the movie is…
OMG… We’re In A Horror Movie
This is one of those really bad movies that kind of feels like a group of friends got together and made a movie, but in this case, every single one of them is a huge ham and really into it, so it makes it kind of funny even though it's totally bad.
During a voard game night among a suspiciously diverse group of geeky friends, a guy who violated the superstition of kicking a cat in heat and rolling three sixes on dice throws them all into a horror movie. The rest of the movie is spent doing fourth-wall lampoons of a million different conventions of horror and other genres, much in the manner I imagine "Scream" probably does if I ever had any interest in watching that, except with way worse acting and production.
I don't know if I could ever sit through it for another viewing, but…
The Radleys
Pretty decent English modern-vampire-movie-played-almost-as-drama a lá "The Hamiltons". This was pretty decent though. Modern English vampire family deals with internal politics and trying to survive without being found out in a small town. "The Hamiltons" is a little near and dear to my heart to draw a comparison but I think I still like that better as it's a little leaner.
#Float
Continuing the tradition of teen scream horror movies about "influencers" being terrible, this terrible teen scream horror movie is about an influencer who takes a tubing trip with a bunch of friends and stereotypical teen scream horror movie things happen to them. It's all here: the scary local creep who is either trying to hurt or help them, the mysterious deaths, the constantly seeing things through the view of a phone screen, the things not quite being explained, the yawns.
Alone With You
An indie, hipster version of "1408". Woman trapped alone in her Brooklyn apartment has a bunch of surreal, random "scary" things happen to her, and it's all supposed to mean something, but god only knows what. At least the lead actress (who also directs, probably a warning sign) is better at acting terrified than John Cusack.
Note to filmmakers everywhere: the last director who threw a bunch of random shit at the wall and made it stick was David Lynch, and even he had to eventually bring more to the table than that.
Trapped Inn
A highly mediocre movie that descends into a disjoined mess as the filmmakers apparently changed their minds three or four times about what they wanted it to be.
A team of douchebags stays at an inn in France for high-altitude cycling training when a huge wave of serial killings hits. But wait, it's not serial killings, it's a pandemic. But wait, it's not a pandemic, it's a strange mist that assumes human form and kills people by touching them and turning them funny colors. But wait, it's aliens. One by one everybody dies, disappears, or kills each other until one couple is left. Hooking up in an out-of-place and overly long romance montage, they decide to go for a final swim outside and allow themselves to be taken by the aliens, who finally put in an appearance but decide not to kill them for reasons that are a mystery. A…
Paperhouse
English 1988 kid's fantasy film about an girl who connects with a local disabled boy through her fantasies of visiting a creepy, surreal rural house. It was alright, I suppose, but the leading girl is just kind of sullen and charmless, and I wasn't really in the mood for it when I watched.
The Hole
A disappointing outing from Joe Dante. As a horror movie, it's on the level of his "Gremlins" but without any of the originality and charm. Two teen boys and the de rigeur pretty girl next door find a bottomless pit in the basement of their new home, and clichéd, predictable "scary" things happen: chased by a scary clown doll, transported to a phantasmagoric caricature of their childhood home to fight a monstrous version of their absent father, etc. etc. etc. I dunno, man. Sam Raimi started his career with the execrable sub-bottom-of-the-barrel "The Evil Dead", and even he's made a better horror movie than this.