Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

Continuing the tradition of teen scream horror movies about "influencers" being terrible, this terrible teen scream horror movie is about an influencer who takes a tubing trip with a bunch of friends and stereotypical teen scream horror movie things happen to them. It's all here: the scary local creep who is either trying to hurt or help them, the mysterious deaths, the constantly seeing things through the view of a phone screen, the things not quite being explained, the yawns.

A highly mediocre movie that descends into a disjoined mess as the filmmakers apparently changed their minds three or four times about what they wanted it to be.

A team of douchebags stays at an inn in France for high-altitude cycling training when a huge wave of serial killings hits. But wait, it's not serial killings, it's a pandemic. But wait, it's not a pandemic, it's a strange mist that assumes human form and kills people by touching them and turning them funny colors. But wait, it's aliens. One by one everybody dies, disappears, or kills each other until one couple is left. Hooking up in an out-of-place and overly long romance montage, they decide to go for a final swim outside and allow themselves to be taken by the aliens, who finally put in an appearance but decide not to kill them for reasons that are a mystery. A…

English 1988 kid's fantasy film about an girl who connects with a local disabled boy through her fantasies of visiting a creepy, surreal rural house. It was alright, I suppose, but the leading girl is just kind of sullen and charmless, and I wasn't really in the mood for it when I watched.

A disappointing outing from Joe Dante. As a horror movie, it's on the level of his "Gremlins" but without any of the originality and charm. Two teen boys and the de rigeur pretty girl next door find a bottomless pit in the basement of their new home, and clichéd, predictable "scary" things happen: chased by a scary clown doll, transported to a phantasmagoric caricature of their childhood home to fight a monstrous version of their absent father, etc. etc. etc. I dunno, man. Sam Raimi started his career with the execrable sub-bottom-of-the-barrel "The Evil Dead", and even he's made a better horror movie than this.

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.