Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

Impossible-to-follow movie about a young couple whose marriage is falling apart as the wife becomes obsessed with demonology. Or she's a demon, or, just hallucinating. Or the husband is hallucinating. Or all of the above. Or something. I don't know.

I do know they never leave the house, even once, for the entire movie.

Also, they spend the first half of the movie arguing, and you know, movies that show long scenes of just couples arguing are like my favorite thing.

Totally avoid.

Captivity/pursuit flick in which gay couples visiting a wooded cabin are stalked and imprisoned by homophobes who kill gay people for the entertainment of thousands of rednecks watching on the internet. How many gay couples do they get vacationing all the way out in the woods?

Elisabeth Shue in a movie that is to horror movies what Elisabeth Shue is to actresses. So, basically, a step and a half below a Julianne Moore horror movie.

Anyway, Shue plays a woman trapped in a mansion with a new baby that a mysterious nanny who shows up suggests is stealing her soul. Husband complains that her coming unhinged is hurting his career when she's unable to socialize acceptably at his office gala. Ends up running around the house in her underwear, t-shirt and a blousy blouse with a knife, as you might have guessed.

The house is nice, though.

Gorgeous professional couple adopts a gorgeous child who brings a ghost in tow and standard haunted things happen around their gorgeous home, seen only by the gorgeous child and mother, who standardly struggle to convince the gorgeous standard disbelieving father.

Low-key English movie that desperately wants to be a thriller, and feels a lot like a thriller, but just isn't thrilling. Couple adopts kids who turn out to be weird after their mother overdoses. Absent mom works while dad, a house husband, either goes insane, or the kids are somehow doing something to him, or it's just a movie and doesn't quite make sense.

I have never seen a movie so closely resemble a good movie and yet just bore the living daylights out of me.

Very slickly produced, I'll give it that. Kind of a snappy neo-noir, I guess. Overpretty young hipsters, including the de rigeur millennial lesbians and Pete Davidson, gather for a small party. They play "bodies bodies bodies", apparently some kind of hide and seek game in the dark, and someone gets killed. Soon they kill someone else thinking they're the killer, and everybody is running around yelling and waving guns at each other and I can't figure out WTF is going on.

This ostensible supernatural thriller has exactly one sentence of the supernatural in it and zero thrills. I wanted to like it because the cast was charismatic but it's just tepid, all the way through. A woman moves home to take care of her mother who is ailing with dementia. The mother seems to be talking to ghosts. The woman goes through the typical emotional merrygoround of exhaustion, concern, and frustration you might expect of a young person taking care of a parent who is making less and less sense. And that's basically it, that's the movie.