Creative Productions, Arrangements and Operations • Art, Technology and Amusements. Software Engineer and certified FileMaker Pro developer and full-stack web developer by day, https//www.kupietz.com
Surprisingly alright creature feature. A young man finds an insect-like creature that bonds with him and begins killing people that stand in his way. I know, that doesn't sound very promising, and I didn't expect anything from it. But it was much better than that setup sounds.
It doesn't spend a lot of time on the creature, it's more character-focused and revolves less around scares or violence than around drama and the effects of the victims' disappearances on him, his friends, and the small community. It's far from great, but it's definitely much better than I expected, and stands up pretty well as a movie.
Middling horror thriller about a band of rock & rollers taking a canoe trip and dropping acid in the woods when they think they spot something following them through the woods. Starts out ok, with a decent slow burn, alright acting and cinematography, and decent barely-seen creature effects all the way through, but unfortunately very little being explained before what feels like an attempt at a twist ending, but doesn't even come close enough to be clearly that, makes the whole thing feel pointless.
Decently ok Kiwi horror film about a neurotic hiker who falls in with a bunch of other hikers in the remove wilderness and starts making everybody crazy with paranoia about them being followed by a dark shape, accusing other hikers of being killers, clumsily losing people's flashlights, and generally being a good bit past annoying and ruining everybody's trip.
It was entertaining, I found it fairly watchable despite mostly annoying characters and ultimately kinda of a silly third act. It's a little bit different.
Extremely decent zombie movie, the way they should be done. An American mercenary survives the crash of the last place out of Africa, and must walk across the zombie-infested savannah to safety.
One of the most realistic zombie movies I've ever seen. Almost no dialogue. A little action but not much. Just a soldier, and for a little while a companion he meets, mostly just walking or camping, surviving and outsmarting the roaming zombies as they need to. And, turns you, in a zombie movie, you don't actually need much more than that. No attempts at humor. No attempts to be clever or cool. Just a solid, down-to-earth survival movie, that happens to be set in a zombie acopalypse.
I liked it. I imagine I'll watch this again in the future.
Putting this here so I remember to watch this one again. This came on via autoplay when something I was watching on Tubi ended and I was so distracted by my laptop I didn't notice it until it was halfway through, so I never caught the plot. But visually it's a low-budget but seriously beautiful, dark, dingy black and white. Something about people underground in some sort of dystopia. But, really visually cool, I found it really unique looking all the way through. I gotta go watch it for real.
A group of friends go out on a boat, wind up adrift, and random "scary" stuff happens which is never explained. Actually I kind of enjoyed it mildly, for a piece of trash. It held up tension kind of nicely. For a piece of trash.
Paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller about a group of friends who rent a secluded cabin and something seems to want them off the land. Weird people appear, voices, you know the drill.
First-person shooter, "aliens chasing people" through the woods subgenera. (Woods where literally every single person who enters them is always filming, apparently.) Yawn.
People are holed up in a suburban house as everyone outside is slowly "changed", taken over by an alien life form or some such—or, as it's described by the people it happens to, "Perfected", as they turn into blissed-out hippies who want nothing more than to "change" everyone else.
So, pretty familiar tropes. And this is a zero-budget film, not very well acted or written. But what I liked about this is it was more about the interaction of characters (even if the characters were a little thin), more about the captivity of the people in the house than anything else. There's certainly almost no action. There's a longer scene of people just sitting around waiting for dawn, when it's been announced the last "unchanged" people will be rounded up and killed, than most movies would include.
I liked it for that. Judging by the IMDB reviews, most people…
A scary box possesses a family who has gathered for the reading of their father's will one-by-one and kills them. Pretty bad despite good production values and a familiar cast from TV shows and such.
Notable for Lance Henriksen, in an odd turn, being the first to die, but then, somehow that's not quite explained, still being there off and on for the rest of the movie, including outliving every other character, but then, not dying at all at the end, perhaps because he's dead already. I dunno. weird. He still does appear in the movie after the last death, so the Kupietz/Henriksen conjecture holds.
Poor-to-middling "Twilight Zone"-esque take of four travelers trapped in Marfa, Texas. Not badly produced by kind of clumsy... odd editing choices, weird occasionally voiceovers out of nowhere, etc. Meh.
It's too bad this movie is so poorly done because, because the writing is ambitious and despite a reliance on a lot of cliches it has a little bit of an original story. A pair of garage scientists open a portal to a parallel universe and become embroiled in interdimensional intrigue as their employers attempt to take over the universe and their counterparts on the other side may or may not be what they seem. "Expulsion" refers to a universal rule that if two of the same person are in the same universe when the portal between them closes, one is "expulsed" which is never clearly explain but it involves disintegrating.
Terribly acted, zero budget, all around not very well made, but as I said, that's kind of a shame. The story itself mildly entertained me, in better hands and better acted this could have been something. I thought…
An "Eating Raoul"-level intentionally bad, trashy, overbroad comedy in which a family gathering consisting entirely of a hodgepodge of overbroad, low-effort stereotypes eats a Thanksgiving turkey that was used in a Santeria ceremony, causing the devil to appear and, apparently, change everybody's personalities for no reason that's ever given. Actually it was so goofy that I found it very faintly entertaining, but nowhere near enough to recommend.
Okay timey-wimey supernatural drama about a woman driving across Texas after her journalist father's death to investigate the "ghost lights" that he investigated a generation ago. It was ok.
A young man's stomach pains turn out to be a portal to Hell opening in his abdomen from which demons periodically emerge, and he and his wife must run from mysterious people pursuing him. Stylistically like a Giallo flick, if that's your sort of thing.
It's different, I'll give it that. I wouldn't say it's particularly good but neither is it particularly bad. It takes until the third act to really get going but when it does, decent acting and creature design really help it along.
For starters, let me say: my first impression was, most people will hate this movie. Reading up on it afterwards, as is my habit when a movie really interests me, I discovered, yes, sure, enough, everybody hated it. Not just disliked it, I mean REALLY hated it.
I was blown away by it, loved almost every minute of it.
This is a very flawed and totally amateurish movie for sure—but, here's the rub: "Night Of The Living Dead", "Eraserhead", and most of David Cronenberg's classic films were flawed, very amateurish movies. Like them, this to me is the work of an extremely skilled amateur savant, someone with absolutely no understanding of most of the conventions of storytelling, and an absolutely brilliant intuitive feel for the camera and the editing desk.
This is a weird movie. It's about father searching for his daughter, who got sucked into a cursed children's show, or something. Weird enough to be a little memorable, if not exactly good. The children's show scenes are suitably creepy for sure. Reminded me of "Dave Made A Maze" in how it just assumes this demented world and expects you to just suspend disbelief, if not quite as successfully as "Dave Made A Maze" pulled it off.
A cliched, bottom-of-the-barrel 1989 Italian sci-fi/action movie about some sort of menace killing scientists in the canals of Venice. Sub-USA-Up-All-Night quality. Garbage.
This low-budget "man in a rubber suit" creature feature is essentially "30 Days Of Night", except with a demon instead of vampires, and you never actually see the demon, and it's bad instead of good. However, they try so hard that I was a little entertained, a little.
This is a truly odd little movie. Low-budget for sure, with only 3 actors, and hard to call it a very good movie, but, it's definitely a little different in terms of story. Los Angeles is under lockdown for unspecified reasons, and a package of seeds arrives with a delivery of food for three housemates, which, planted in the backyard, turn into a hole in the ground filled with some sort of glop, which, smelling good enough to eat, our protagonists do. Soon they're addicted, one roommate injects the glop and gets caught between dimensions, another has sex with the hole, and soon he goes insane, a twisted flower that produces more seeds grows from the hole, an interdimensional portal appears in the ground below it, and things just get weirder from there. The nice thing is, for such a bizarre plot, things are actually played fairly straight. The lead…
Absolutely execrable, bottom-of-the-barrel mess of a horror movie (shot on video, no less, so it looks like a bad TV show) about a couple that accidentally kills a jogger while driving drunk, buries him in the woods by their house where for never-explained reasons "things don't stay dead", and, simultaneously, are visited by a woman possessed by some sort of evil spirit. But, it's so over the top, somehow, I find it entertaining. The terrible actors really try their darnedest to commit, and somehow don't even seem embarrassed to be in this movie. I was mildly entertained by how something this bad even can exist.
Somewhere in the same universe as Repo Man, Harold & Kumar, and Buckaroo Bonzai is this quirky buddy comedy about two slacker friends on a UFO-spotting camping trip in the desert who encounter other enthusiasts out there. I found it slightly above average, although judging from the extremely low-to-mixed reviews on IMDB, not everybody appreciated the humor like I did. And it probably doesn't rise to the level of those others I mentioned. But I liked it, I found it amusing most of the way through, although it dragged on a bit at the end. It's definitely kind of its own thing, for sure.
Absolutely incomprehensible, bottom-of-the-barrel, poorly acted, terribly written attempt at a supernatural thriller about a couple of ghost hunters who go to a murderer's house to try and see the ghost of their daughter, I think. Seems like a zero-budget except they either had a boom, a helicopter, or a drone because there's lots of gorgeous, expensive-looking overhead shots, which is just weird in a movie like this.
It's Hoodman, not Candyman or Bloody Mary, that a young mother believes took her son, rather than him dying in a car crash she can't remember, in this unexciting, paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller with a soundtrack full of conventionally ominous low, metallic drones and skirling violin stabs. Hoodman. Not Candyman.
I kinda would have enjoyed the soundtrack without the movie.
Captivity flick that, if that's not bad enough, goes on about twice as long as it should and tries to turn into an art flick, eventually descending into complete incomprehensibility. A slightly pudgy woman takes out her food issues on her skinny, vapid party-girl roommate. Seems like it wants to be some kind of statement on standards of beauty or the fashion industry but simply alluding to issues isn't a statement about them, no matter how many weird slow-motion shots of people stuffing their faces with cake you put in.
Slightly better-than-average captivity flick, somewhat well made, and with some character development and decent acting, almost like they were trying to make a real movie instead of just brutality as entertainment. But, still a captivity flick. Chef captures and tortures critic who gave him a bad review. Actually much better than that setup sounds, but still, a captivity flick.
An attempt to move a life-giving alien orb to another planet goes awry. Mostly basically "Alien" but with tougher tough guys, cooler guns, and worse acting.
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