WP Error: Empty Term.
Lethal Virus

Lethal Virus

Dawn Of The Dead. But in the woods instead of a mall. Because, cheaper, I guess. Also, with worse acting. Plus a weird international mish-mosh of accents including, grotesquely, what seems to be an Englishman trying to affect the accent of a southern redneck soldier in the English woods for some reason. Also the zombie actors appear to have been told to do some sort of jig as they run.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9963  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
The Folks

The Folks

They did it to me again! By halfway through, I was waiting for it to end so I could write the review"Four words: creepy rural German grandparents."But then, in act III, it changed completely. Into a wholly forgettable supernatural thriller. Ah, well. The best laid plans, etc.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9962  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
The Landlord (2024)

The Landlord (2024)

Kind a a cute low-key indie thriller. Strictly amateurish but the cast is kind of fun. Woman moves into a house and the strange woman who owns it has fixations. Like, she always only wears yellow, for starters. But there's more... Also some interesting nu-R&B on the soundtrack in places. it's cute. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone else but I sort of liked it.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9960  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
The Lurking Fear

The Lurking Fear

Ok, couldn't have sounded less promising."When a TV crew shoots a reality show at an abandoned mental institution, they encounter a horde of demons, leading to a bloody fight for survival". But, then, I see Michael Madsen is in it. He has a glorified cameo as a smalltown sheriff for 15-20 minutes at the beginning. But, then, I notice something: for a movie that is basically what you'd expect from people wandering around a darkened abandoned building being attacked by actors in pancake makeup... it was actually alright. I don't really go for gore flicks, and it was super cheezy, but it was kind of good within those constraints. And then, instead of ending where most movies would, when the final girl escapes the asylum, it keeps going, and lets Michael Madsen come back to chew the scenery for a pretty brutal final act, elevating it to actually an alright Giallo-type flick. It's kind of weird and extreme and absolutely not subtle in any way, very much whatever the opposite of subtle is. I'm not a huge fan of Giallo, I mostly like it ok but don't love it, but if you're a Giallo fan, I might even say if you can put up with how long this takes to rise just a hair above the crowd, it might actually be worth seeking it out. I see it has a 2.5 out of 10 stars on IMDB, which makes sense, but, still. I might even watch it again someday, which is more than I can say for most of the crap horror films on Tubi.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9959  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Snow Valley

Snow Valley

A mess that goes nowhere and then ends. A couple goes out the celebrate their engagement at his family's ski chalet. Soon friends turn up, and they warn about another friend who"has bugs in his operating system"having invited himself. Eventually that friend appears, dressed like a pimp and strapping heat, and turns out to be a bit of an ass but otherwise charming and charismatic. A weird groundskeeper one appears and turns out to have been staying there. Soon it turns out her illegitimate son with the the man's father is living there too, prowling around and somehow having gotten hold of the gun. Men from an ancient mining photograph appear on the grounds as handymen. An ancient tragedy in which orphans were left to die in a collapsing mine right under the house is mentioned; it turns out it's the anniversary if the tragedy, and then it's never mentioned again. There's some sort of hooey about psychic children and the illegitimate kid brother turns out to be one. The groundskeeper woman decides the fiancee woman is there to take her son away and goes after her with a pickaxe. For a little while it's as hammy and over-the-top as a Hammer horror film, which I assume is a good thing, but it soon abandons even that as quickly as it picked it up. The whole thing is simultaneously a plotless mess, but also, nothing really happens. It's like it was improvised or written in a game of Exquisite Corpse where every line was written by a different person who knew only the preceding line.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9958  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
A Stranger In The Woods

A Stranger In The Woods

A first person shooter that falls into the common 1PS trap of way too much exposition before anything interesting happens, and stretches it out so that takes up 4/5 of the movie, as a film student goes out to interview a reclusive old man at his remote house, with long over-the-shoulder shots of the tediously uninteresting interview scenes in which nothing happens and the student's words are barely audible, and then, spends the last 1/5 just plain not making any sense at all.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9957  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
The Razing

The Razing

A bunch of intense people sit around in very dimly-lit rooms and have muffled conversations in front of a wide-angle lens that never stops moving. This movie is dark, as in, the most poorly lit—or poorly un-lit—movie I can recall seeing. One of the actors could have walked into the room while I was watching it, and I wouldn't have recognized them, because you can't see their faces. Amusingly, on IMDB, a bunch of the actors' profile photos are also too dark to see their faces, because, this is the only movie they've ever been in.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9956  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Thanatomorphosis

Thanatomorphosis

Following the same plot as a short in some recently-watched horror anthology (The Seven Darks, maybe?) a girl's body slowly begins to decay after a night of sex because, movie. Which, if you think about it, is not a lot to happen in an hour and 40 minutes, but that's really all there is, she hangs around her apartment and decays. Also every half hour or so the guy drops in for more sex. Looking every bit like a student film with artistic aspirations, right down to seeming to have been shot on 8mm, frequently out-of-focus, the occasional interludes of a minute or two of nothing but noise and jumpy processed film effects, and the skirling, droning viola soundtrack, it seems at first like, even despite the home movie production values, it might succeed as a Cronenberg-type body horror flick. But then the leaden pacing kills it. Actually, calling it"pacing"at all makes it sound too lively. They take up what must be like 4 minutes of this film with a single shot of a man's face as he gets oral sex, followed by another about 4 minutes of her doing nothing laying on the floor appearing to regret it.This should have been a short film, like... oh, yeah, the short film I first saw this story in. The fx makeup is really good though. She really looks like a well-done steak by the end. The funny thing is, I knd of like that this film exists, even though I didn't enjoy it and wouldn't watch it again. Something about the idea that someone made a movie that is nothing but 100 minute movie of someone turning to jelly is kind of interesting. I bet someone out there somewhere loves this movie.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9955  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Invited

Invited

So, ok, weird. Young woman disappears, then suddenly invites her family to a zoom call of her wedding with her creepy new fiancee. But: First off, this entire movie is a zoom call. The acting is terrible. Major developments are telegraphed and predictable. So, overall all the ingredients of a terrible horror movie. But: the pacing is good. Somehow, despite the terrible acting and the utter lack of motion as the entire movie is a screenshot, tension is built kind of effectively. That, and only that, elevates it very slightly above what it looks like it's going to be. I still wouldn't, say, recommend it, but apparently found-footage horror fans (a phenomenon I don't understand; to me"found footage fan"is an oxymoron) really like this one, and I get it. Plus it's not really found footage. (Note: on subsequent research, this is a Canadian film. Ok, pretty poor showing for indie Canadian fare, it explains why it's a tiny above bottom of the barrel instead of wallowing at the very bottom.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9954  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Dollface (movie, 2014)

Dollface (movie, 2014)

Scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel here. The most amateurish, dreadful slasher movie I've ever seen, with the stupidest killer name,"Crinoline Head". Kids go explore the home of a famous killer, who of course is still there. They spend like an hour kibbitzing and talking about sex before the killer offs them in the stupidest way possible, such as one woman asks the groundskeeper if she can use her restroom, so the groundskeeper tells her to go squat in the woods and accuses her of not being able to, so the woman storms off bragging about how good at squatting she is, then doesn't notice the killer is hiding on the same side of tree that she approached from and sticks out his arm with his knick pointing up near the ground for her to aggressively squat on to show how great she is at it. One of the stupidest, most contrived, poorly-acted, poorly-written films I've ever seen.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9953  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Foreclosure (2014)

Foreclosure (2014)

Tubi followed Foreclosure (2022) with this terrible 2014 movie of the same name. Michael Imperioli, his son, and his racist dad move into a house where a young Black man was once lynched, lose their minds, start seeing actors on old-tymey costumes and pancake makeup around the house while the ghost of the lynched man looks on. Some of the shakiest, most amateur hand-held camerawork I've seen. Imperioli has been in Goodfellas and The Sopranos. How did he let himself get involved with this?
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9952  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Foreclosure (2022)

Foreclosure (2022)

Having seen the execrable sequel, I let morbid curiosity goas me into watching this. A gorgeous couple moves into a house hoping to see a ghost, and nothing happens, unless you consider wooden acting to be something.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9951  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Foreclosure 2

Foreclosure 2

The worst-acted movie I've ever seen. A writer moves into a house and becomes obsessed with a ghost, showing up in a cinematic experience with apparently no lighting, the least-competent handheld camerawork I've ever seen, and a single special effect which consists of lighting rooms with a red lightbulb. What was this the sequel to?
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9950  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
Urge

Urge

Ha. Ha ha. Danny Masterson produced and starred in this, well, not exactly teen-scream flick, but mid-20s-scream flick? A group of gorgeous rich, callow friends get together on a luxury resort island and are introduced to a drug that removes all inhibitions, with the admonition"You can only do it once. In your life."From these predictable beginnings grows a film that actually has it's moments, in a cheap, Hollywood way... it reminded me of"Disturbing Behavior"in that way of basically being bad and predictable but was elevated by being rather consistent and having a few moments that went above and beyond what they needed to. It rises to some moments of surprising brutality for a flick full of Hollywood b-listers (Ashley Greene as the female lead, too.) The ending strives for some sort of greater significance and falls flat, but overall, again like"Disturbing Behavior", if you're going to watch a shitty movie, they come far shittier and slightly less clever than this. I could see watching it again sometime when I'm bored a few years from now if it comes up.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9949  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
The Tangle

The Tangle

A pleasant surprise. This nominal speculative sci-fi indie is set in the near future when the internet has evolved into"the tangle", a global swarm of nanobots keeping everybody's brains connected all the time, as well as infecting their bodies to prevent them from being able to commit violence. But the pleasant surprise comes from a few solid acting performances, cinematography, and direction, and the fact this it's a fake-out: it's a solid updating of '40s-style film noir stle that only uses sci-fi as a plot device, and even has nods to '40s fashions along with the film noir cinematography. I wouldn't say it's great, not sure I'd watch it again, but it was way better most unknown Tubi fare. Definitely an interesting enough way to occupy 90 minutes. Perhaps even worth remembering.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9948  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Shadows Side

Shadows Side

Spanish film in which an incredibly gorgeous woman gets trapped inside a haunted cabin and slowly goes insane while she experiences literally every"haunted house"horror trope ever, plus the Gorn from Star Trek. Plus lots of scenes in fast motion, which, ok, that's new, I've never seen fast motion supposed to be"scary"before.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9946  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Cabin Girl

Cabin Girl

What a weird movie. By about halfway through, I just was waiting for it to be over so I could write the review"Insufferable YouTube girl buys a cabin to livestream her life from, and some bullshit happens."But then in the third act, it suddenly flip-flops and gets good, suddenly it has real plotting and twists and turns into a real horror movie. It's like the best save I've ever seen. The awful first two acts are bad enough that it's still unwatchable, but, given that I sat through that, I'm glad it kind of redeemed itself a little bit.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9945  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
Mystery Spot

Mystery Spot

What a weird movie. A motel with the ruins of a burned-down"Mystery Spot"tourist trap out back draws strange clientele: A man rents a room and spends all afternoon auditioning actors, asking them strange and probing questions. A writer, mourning her husbamd, checks into the next room. A policeman apparently lives in the parking lot, watching the filmmaker to try to figure out what he's doing. Now, make no mistake: this is a bad movie. It's poorly written. It's mostly poorly acted. It's a bad indie film. But, for that: it's pretty good. Most importantly, the leads, the filmmaker and the writer, are really good actors, far better than you usually see in this sort of thing. About halfway through the movie, they get a long scene just talking, getting to know each other—pure character development and, it seems to me the sort of thing two skilled actors might have asked the director to put in the movie and let them ad lib, just to give them some real acting to do. And, it kinda works, it elevates the film just a little bit. Plus, although it's really badly written, it's also not particularly derivative or anything I've seen before... maybe it reminds me a tiny bid of"The Lost Room", but it's not even terribly close to that. So: I kinda liked it! It's bad, for sure. But I liked it. If I had seen this on"Chiller Theater"when I was a kid, I probably would have remembered it fondly for decades.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9944  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
Enter Nowhere

Enter Nowhere

You know, I kind of liked this movie. It sort of plays, not like a great movie, but like, I dunno, a great episode of"The Outer Limits"(or a very long second- or third-tier episode of"The Twilight Zone".) Three strangers wind up coincidentally stuck at a cabin in the remote woods, and things from there go in a completely different direction than you expect. Basically a drama with fantastic elements as they figure out what's going on—far more"Outer Limits"than"Last House On The Left".
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9943  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
Yellowbrickroad [second viewing]

Yellowbrickroad [second viewing]

This is a movie that has lived on in my heart, and vividly the corners of my mind, ever since I first saw it—so much so that I had a little bit of trepidation about watching it again. Would it live up to my recollections? The answer: yes, absolutely. This is one of those movies I'm not sure I'd ever recommend to anyone else, but it plucks my strings just right... made with zero budget and very little by way of plot, in terms of story this entire movie is nothing but a group of hikers losing their grip on reality. And the ending is straight-up terrible, no way around it. But the journey there, just the walk in the woods slowly going incomprehensibly wrong, not even for any reason that's ever given, I find just gripping and disturbing. Worth noting, I usually multitask when I'm watching movies, and even on this second viewing this one sucked me in and distracted me from my laptop. Possibly the most disturbing horror movie set mostly in daytime. It's really a movie about losing control, to me a much scarier thing than any monster. This is one of those movies that, while nobody will ever call it a masterpiece—make no mistake, it's a low-budget indie flick from start to finish—but I find (and a lot of reviewers seem to agree with me) something about it is very affecting; it sticks in your mind. It's a quietly-building grotesquerie. I bet Lars von Trier likes it, or would. And I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's review of von Trier's"Antichrist", which essentially says,"I can't say I liked it; but I can't stop thinking about it."This one is the low-budget indie version of that. (EDIT: Googling around, I found this page of extremely polarized comments on Reddit that sum it up nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/xq7okl/yellowbrickroad/ )
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9942  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
Alien Code

Alien Code

Hah! I liked this. Thoroughly amateurish time thriller about a hipster playing a very improbably cryptographer who decodes a message for the NSA and begins to see giant Men In Black. Basically bad, strictly amateur hour, but somehow kind of fun, for being that. They really gave it the old college try.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9941  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
Doors

Doors

I liked this movie, I bet a lot of people won't though. It's an anthology film, although it doesn't play that way, a few stories around the theme of the sentient black CGI portals appearing around the world. People can enter and leave them but staying too long drives them insane. The portals speak telepathically sometimes. The CGI was actually kind of good for CGI black goo, and the cinematography was really nice, someone is an avid and skilled Kubrick fan.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9940  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
The Remaining

The Remaining

one of those movies half the world disappears in the Rapture and the survivors deal with monsters and hail the size of footballs. Not terrible for one of those, I guess. Did have vaguely some cool effects, monsters snatching people up off the street and stuff.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9939  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
The Woods Are Real

The Woods Are Real

I'll at least give this clearly allegorical film something for ambition, and being somewhat more original than expected. The most unbearable Brooklyn liberal couple since that Sunita Mani pic about the puffballs from space go for a retreat in a cabin and wind up facing a series of surreal ordeals in the woods. Lots of pontificating about gender roles, masculinity and being a"good man", and some sort of take on religion that I didn't quite get ensured that by the time it was halfway over I'd become too disinterested to follow the plot, though. Actually in an odd way reminded me of"YellowBrickRoad"in terms of surrealist sylvan horror, but with hipster exploration of social roles and obvious (if not quite clear) allegory in place of the prior film's slow-burn raw Lovecraftian horror. This movie desperately wants to have something to say; whether it actually does or not will have to be left up to someone who finds it interesting enough to pay attention to all the way through.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9938  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
5G: The Reckoning

5G: The Reckoning

A home-movie-quality film about a group of students stuck in their dorm during the pandemic discover that the pandemic was just a ploy to keep people at home while the government tested 5G cell technology, which is a plot to absorb humanity into a"5-Dimensional Internet"by turning them into rubber-faced ghouls with glowing eyes. I'm not kidding. Actually contains the line,"No, you don't understand. I *am* the internet now."If I was 9 years old, I probably would have thought this was an incredibly cool movie. (Which makes me worried if I ever stumble across"Psychomania"again as an adult. I thought that movie was a little too cool as a kid.) Make of that what you will.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9937  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Life

Life

Basically"The Blob"set in space or"Alien"without HR Giger's influence, but, really, surprisingly for a big-name Hollywood movie (Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds), really not bad for a space monster movie. If"not bad for a space monster movie"sounds appealing to you, and you're able to constrain your expectations to that, worth a watch. I liked it ok, which is more than I expected.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9936  |  Share this page  |  Embed link
WP Error: Empty Term.
Into The Abyss (English Language version)

Into The Abyss (English Language version)

I had a very hard time following this, but in terms of style, I liked it. Gruff men wander around an apocalyptic urban landscape occasionally towered over by huge arachnoid creatures in the mist, and speak gruffly to each other. Occasionally someone attacks each other or shoots a gun. Not really sure what it was about besides that, but the atmosphere was cool.
|  Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=9935  |  Share this page  |  Embed link