Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.