Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.