Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

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.

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.