Archives: Movie Reviews

Kind of a fun teen sci-fi thriller about a geeky young JPL scientist who posts a video of an encounter with an extraterrestrial and winds up on the run across North America from a shadowy government agency that has androids that ride motorcycles. Fun enough. Until....

...at the end of the last act, it turns out to all be religious propaganda. Aliens searching for the "origin of the universe" are studying humans for their unique link to all creation, which turns out to be: worship of a particular religious figure.

It would have been "watchable" if not for that, but I can't recommend that kind of smug bullshit.

Millenials trapped in a bunker after the apocalypse predictably go nuts and argue. A lot.

A strange one. This movie about a team of campers beseiged by giant mutant ticks stars a bunch of unlikely comedy and sitcom actors: Seth Green, Alphonse Ribiero, Peter Scolari from "Bosom Buddies", the latter two playing tough against type.

This is about as much of a monster movie as "Gremlins" is, except, in the final act, it gets weirdly intense and violent, although the acting doesn't get any better.

An indie horror film I want very badly to like but just... meh... not quite? Alexandra Essoe stars as a young actress whose chance at a new role starts to eat away at her life and body. Maria Olsen is there, being creepy as a movie casting executive who clearly wants something. Unfortunately it's a little too slow-moving and too little is explained. It's hard, any time I don't like a movie with either Alexandra Essoe or Maria Olsen, I feel like I'm letting them down. But, this one just isn't a best effort from the filmmakers.

Mediocre low-budget indie thriller about a woman whose daughter disappears from her bedroom although they can still hear her calling for help from right nearby, leading to a difficult-to-follow tale about higher dimensions and demon abductions and a physicist who explains that demons inhabit string theory's higher dimensions due to the fall of Lucifer and advising prayer as the safest way to deal with higher-dimensional issues, provoking tremendous, life-threatening yawns from the audience.

What a disappointment. This movie starts off like it's going to be a cut above, with a really unique idea that, for about the first half of it, hold up well: following a car breakdown en route to a remote airport trying to flee the country after a zomview apocalypse, a Las Vegas stripper with nothing but a handbag and a vial of cocaine is trying to cross the desert on foot in platform shoes, relentlessly pursued by a single zombie.

The conceit is wonderful, and not something I've seen before: one person being followed great distances by one zombie, like a post-"The Walking Dead" take on "Duel". There's some predictable sequences but by and large I found it pretty charming. For half the movie.

Unfortunately, the movie loses the thread so completely that I assumed it was an anthology film, or had segments directed by totally different directors. The…

Woman takes a job at a rural hotel where the proprietor imprisons and tortures her to make her a wife for her slow son.

Actually, for a captivity flick, this is not terrible, a little more unpretentious and character-driven than more, more like it was done in the '70s than modern. Which makes it relatively good, within a really bad genre. Actually goes over the top enough in the third act that it could have been a minor classic in the genre, if it had come out in 1975, and, hadn't taken two slow acts to get there.

There should be a genre for "two people in a torture room" thriller. Occasionally you see these movies with the same theme: somewhere betwenen two and a handful of people stuck in a closed room, enduring some sort of experiment or game where they see how they tolerate torture. This is one of those. A woman plays an endurance game that starts with seeing how long she can hold her hand over a candle, proceeds through having to cut the last digits of her own fingers off, and ends with Russian Roulette. In this case, the characters don't even have names. Eh. The woman was good.

Team of ghosthunters accidentally opens a portal to a demonic presence in the basement at a haunte house. Actually has a couple of elements that stand out: a fairly charismatic cast, particularly an ornery driver who listens to Golden Gate Quartet-type Jubilee Jazz, which is kind of a different thing to hear nowadays. But unfortunately kind of dull other than that.

Funny movie. This film certainly crafts its own mythology, while, unfortunately, not being that good.

A group going camping in the woods where a man says they will find one of their missing sisters stumbles into a not-quite-explained series of parallel realms where non-scary actors in ghoul makeup prowl around and cause the friends to hallucinate and want to kill each other.

The film gets a little ambitious in the third act as the man who sent them to the woods turns out to have ulterior motives, but ultimately, it's not enough to save it.

Not total trash, but not good, by any stretch of the imagination.

Movie about a possessed girl. You know what a movie about a possessed girl is like at this point. This is that. Again.