Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

Dreadfully uneventful British "horror" movie with a lot of talk and almost no story. A girl finds a cursed necklace and her personality changes. Fast forward years and she and her brother, apparently having been split up after the never-shown death of their parents, reunite and uninteresting bits of their childhood are shown in flashback. Finally, for unclear reasons, an hour and twenty minutes into this hour and twenty-three minute movie, he abducts her, ties her up, brings her out on his boat, and suddenly, a demon who has apparently been inhabiting the necklace all these years appears, and she cuts her brother's throat. Then another little girl is shown finding the necklace on a beach, with no explanation what happened or how it got there. End of extremely dull movie.

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…