Archives: Movie Reviews

Nothing happens for literally the first hour of this hour-and-twenty-minutes monster movie. Two sisters have a car break down on a deserted road (how do they think of these ideas?) and slowly get more creeped out. Then after interminable sitting around talking and getting creeped out, one wakes up from falling asleep and the other is gone, leading to 25 minutes of wandering through the woods with a cell phone calling her sister's name. Finally, after an hour, she finds a man in a rubber monster suit who has kidnapped her sister and two other people whose car has broken down nearby. More running through the woods ensues.

Mildly interesting flick about a team of filmmakers and a crusty, tough-as-nails australian dude being menaced by a giant humanoid bat in the outback. Australian enough to be somwhat entertaining, and they make you wait for the whole movie for the creature FX but they're really cool when they finally show up.

Well-made but rather disappointing quasi-"thriller" (because it's not thrilling) coasts along like it's going to be interesting, and never gets there. Survivors of an unspecified apocalyptic event cower in the basement of a hospital while unspecified creatures roam above. And, that's pretty much it. Slight nods to drama happen—one person gets shot early, another walks outside of their own will, a third disappears behind a closed door and appears to be meet an unspecified painful fate by unspecified monsters—but that's it. Nothing really happens.

Plus, it has a soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten. Which, I mean, what could do a better job of saying, "this should be interesting"?

Eventually, and I only know this because it was pointed out in a single IMDB review, there's a single image near the end that briefly explains what it's all supposed to be about, and kind of redeems it all a little bit. But…

Psycho hillbilly farm family pursues, tortures, and kills their city-slicker guests in extremely graphically gory ways. George Romero's son obviously learned a few things from his father, and this movie is alright for what it is—although editing is not among them, the editing is notably terrible in places.

But Texas Chainsaw Massacre pretty much obviated the need for anyone to make this movie, 50 years ago. This doesn't succeed in any way that that movie didn't, and doesn't in some ways that it did.

Native American horror flick about a house party in a house built on top of a burial ground, which ends up stalked by vengeful Native American spirits or somesuch because of a magic ring or something. Bit of a mess, skips around a lot stylistically... lots of woo-woo, suddenly people giving the standard lecture about the curse of a humbled "once-proud people", then weird scenes of torture porn of someone in a mask torturing captive topless women for reasons I'm not clear on, then shifts to a neo-noir crime thriller vibe with the heroine going after the guy who gave the "once-proud people" speech earlier with a gun. Michael Madsen as the speech-giving villain, which nowadays tells you something, plus he plays a Native American in this, which is just kinda weird. Cool vintage-type analog synth score at points, though.

Promising but ultimately disappointing thriller on the "pursuit" end of the captivity/pursuit flick spectrum. Annoying mountaineer drags a woman he just met onto a grueling hike up Mr Whitney, where they are menaced by southern-accented mountain men who seem to be able to hike faster than them and appear wherever they are despite having no visible camp, climbing equipment, food, water, or snow gear. Reasonably scary villains and a likeable heroine sustain it for a while even through the leading man's endless lecturing about how to hike and that what is essentially mountaineering, not hiking, isn't too bad, but it just declines, turns into a cliche'd captivity/pursuit flick and runs out of any ideas at all maybe 2/3 of the way through before finally descending into total cliche.

Why didn't she just stay off the trail and go down the mountain?

Five kids run out of gas in a snorwstorm and take shelter in an empty building, and things fall apart after one turns up dead. Thriller plays like a horror movie before veering off into a procedural; an unfortunate move, because it was a mediocre horror movie, and then a passable thriller, but the break in momentum in what had been a horror movie with much too long of forward-flashing from the action in the school to police interviews with the survivors kills it. Eventually it gets interesting as what actually happens is revealed, but halfway through the third act is way too late for a movie to start to get interesting.

Gorgeous couple wanders through an apocalyptic landscape full of viral outbreak zombies, encountering other gorgeous survivors of questionable intentions in, essentially, a "Walking Dead" episode. Lead actress Jamie Bernadette, who pops up in these kinds of things, put in a pretty strong performance though, lots of range. Vaguely watchable, although I can't say much more than that about it. Watch for cameos from Dominique Swain and weird scream queen Maria Olsen.

Talk about a disappointing swing and a miss. This 2/3-interesting... family drama? Sci-fi thriller? I'm not sure... about a young couple whose son is murdered, and then see a chance for redemption when he can be cloned, works well for the first two acts, when it suddenly becomes as confusing as "Primer". Too many skips back and forth in time, zero clarity about who got cloned and when, things talked about in the past earlier in the movie and then first happening later on... it turns from a mildly engrossing, passable watch into a confusing mess late enough in the game to be a disappointment.

The cinematography is really good, though.

Captivity flick. A couple camping at remote campsite in the Australian woods are unexpectedly joined by a van full of fairly typical Australian women and have what I imagine to be a fairly ordinary Australian weekend camping experience.

One of those movies where a non-"blockbuster" movies manages to get a bunch of big stars—Emma Watson, Glenne Headley, Tom Hanks, Fielding Mellish, er, Patton Oswalt, Karen Gillan—and it really doesn't help, because they're too busy being recognizable-actors-acting-recognizably to actually sell it, and this movie isn't really a "star-studded vehicle" sort of movie.

It's ambitious, in a hamfisted way. Emma Watson, doing a pretty passable American accent, gets a job at a company that appears to be the Ur-Tech-Company: social media company, hardware company, lifestyle brand, this company appears to be everything, run by Tom Hanks playing the second coming of Steve Jobs and Fielding Mellish, er, Patton Oswalt as his creepily disingenuous second-in-command. The movie traces the development of their rationalizations for gradually stripping away all privacy from all people, with results that don't really surprise very much as the movie goes on.

At least it doesn't end…

Anne Hathaway in a middle-of-the-road lost-twentysomething-returns-to-her-hometown-to-find-herself-and-gets-involved-with-old-friends-but-things-are-different-picture, except, this hometown happens to have a magic playground where anybody who is in it at a certain time of day has a gigantic monster appear in Seoul, Korea that duplicates whatever motions they make.

I shit you not.

It's got some chutzpah, I'll give it that.

Bottom-of-the-barrel mockumentary about people who have been driven insane after disappearing in the woods for a while. I'd say the acting is the worst acting I've ever seen but that makes it sounds like there's acting, which is giving it too much credit. The whole movie seems to be non-actors reading lines off cue cards, filmed on a home VHS camera.