Archives: Movie Reviews

Supernatural thriller with 90 minutes of Genevieve Hannelius as the girl next door who moves into a creepy long-abandoned house with her creepy new adoptive dad, and a really good like last 5 minutes, which all together still isn't really enough to redeem it.

woman gets bitten by a strange bug on vacation, holes up in her apartment and slowly devolves into a monster. Now, picture the movie you're imagining from that description, and then, make it cornier and less believable.

I sincerely hope time loop movies don't become a sub-genre. The idea is interesting enough to support maybe 2 or 3 movies, of which 1 or maybe 2 are actually good. And those 1 or maybe 2 have already been made (they're"Triangle"and maybe"Primer", -not even sure on the latter, because it's so confusing nobody has ever figured out if it's actually a good movie or not.) This one is a better-told story than"Lake Artifact", for sure, but that's a pretty low bar to clear, and the fact that the more movies on this theme get made the sloppier and less original they seem to be getting makes me worry it's going to be done to death á la"found footage". Extra poor marks in this for making the characters-there's only two characters in this movie-the sort of bickering, instantly unlikeable couple that some filmmakers, who I assume are themselves in long-term relationships that are less than perfect, seem to think are fascinating to watch carp endlessly at each other, when really they're just tedious and annoying. I wouldn't want to be stuck in a time loop with these people, either, I was tired of them after about 5 minutes. And especially low marks for transparently using the time loop and its variations as a heavy-handed metaphor for the facets of a codependent relationship. Great, director, I'm glad you worked out your relationship issues with 90 minutes of my time. Plus some ideas where just taken directly from"Triangle"(Oh, wait, sorry, here it's earbuds. In"Triangle"it was a necklace, that's a *totally* different idea.) There's a couple of cool scenes and neat ideas here and there, sure, but nothing that wasn't explored much better in, once again,"Triangle", and that film had great plotting, whereas here, a lot of the characters' behavior seems to stem less from any kind of understandable motivation or logic than from the writer saying,"Wouldn't it be cool if they did this?"Like, is there some rule about being in a time loop that says you have to start killing your other selves? Why? Towards the end, a reason does eventually emerge-and to be honest it's a pretty good one, it was the only thing I liked about this movie-but it still doesn't explain at all why they started killing their alternate-timeline selves almost immediately. Strangely, actually, the end of the movie is actually pretty good... in an unusual turn of events, the end kind of redeems an otherwise totally unenjoyable and derivative movie. It's too bad they waited that long, though. The first 2/3 of it is so tedious and predictable that long before it ever got to the belatedly enjoyable denouement, I had already just become annoyed and impatient for it to be over. I actually did like the end enough that I thought for a minute I might eventually watch this movie again-they really pulled off a hail mary pass with the third act-but the truth is, two totally unrelatable, unlikable people bickering at each other just isn't interesting to me, even when you use a time-travel metaphor to make the point"relationships are complicated". The admittedly cool payoff just isn't worth sitting through an hour and fifteen minutes of that again. I checked out the original short,"The Pond". It tells essentially the same story, including pretty much anything and everything that's cool about"Brightwood", but minus the tedious bickering and relationship exploration, in under 17 minutes. That tells you how much of this movie is obsessed with just relationship exploration navel-gazing. And even"The Pond"still, itself, didn't manage to go 16 minutes without ripping off ideas from"Triangle"wholesale.

Documentary crew filming a woman's decline due to alzheimers discovers supernatural elements and things get worse from there. Soon becomes as tedious to watch as any first-person-shooter, which is a shame, because due to strong acting performances it's a little better than most.

An old-school Ray Bradbury fan like myself couldn't miss, just from the title and a one-sentence summary, that this is an adaptation of a classic Bradbury short story. This being Hollywood, almost the first 15 minutes are true to the original story. The rest is a vastly different, make-up-the-rules-as-they-go-along Hollywood-blockbuster-y attempt to capture some of those lucrative Jurassic Park moviegoing dollars, by finding an excuse to put overgrowth and dinosaurs in in Manhattan chasing scientists around. I wonder... maybe this was a good movie, but then someone accidentally went into the distant past and... changed something... and we got this instead. Yet another lesson not to mess with the timestream.

Woman gets caught in a haunted house she can't leave, and screams a lot. Some of the least convincing acting I've ever seen.

As the last of humanity dies out due to a biowarfare contagion gone wrong, three couples in various stages of life hash out their relationships. Which is great, because, you know, nothing is more interesting than spending two hours watching couples hashing out their relationships.

Hunh. Story is, the very worst sort of stereotypically rapey movie frat boys don't take it kindly when a woman fights back. She fights back harder. They get nastier. It seems like these folks set out to make an '80s-style"video nasty", with a feminist slant. Sort reminiscent of of a modern"I Spit On Your Grave"in that way. None of this is my favorite thing by a long shot, but, they did do what they seem to have set out to do. The social commentary is about an inch deep, and most of the characters are paper-thin, but I get the sense any sort of social awareness is just a justification for the violence, anyway, so I didn't really care. No way I'll be watching this again, nor would I ever recommend this as something to watch.

AVOID. Dreadful first-person shooter spends the from 30 minutes showing girls partying. By 35 minutes they've taken a shortcut through a tunnel and one fell in a hole, but 45 minutes is way too late for the plot to start.

some claptrap about a house out in the arizona desert with a haunted hot tub or something. Porn-level acting and production, EXCEPT for the lead actor's momentary Scwarzenegger impression, which is hilarious. Deserves its 2 stars on IMDB..

Well, this is sure to be polarizing. Notably well directed, creepy, builds tension extremely well, very nice gloomy cinematography, the production values were totally on point... all for purposes of showing 90 minutes of the flimsiest of reasons for a nonstop bloodbath, just cruelty and violence as entertainment. Could gets possessed by... it's never explained what... but it makes their eyes glow occasionally just so you know they're evil, and makes them want to cruelly torture people, and that's the entirety of the plot. Oh, also, the way you get possessed is the possessed people show you a video of a cave or something and then your mouth lights up like a flashlight. The rest is cruelty and violence. I mean, like, on the few occasions when one of the possessed people gets taken out, you briefly see a glowing mist escape their mouths and their eyes turn normal, just so you know they're back and the people who caught them are now killing their actual loved unpossessed ones. And that happens more than once. That kind of cruelty. And with no explanation other than"unexplained lights floating around". Then there's the fact that before the carnage starts, somehow nobody notices the"possessed"people acting like stiff zombies for maybe 20 minutes until it suddenly gets bloody and they snap back to life. Happily, mostly incredibly low reviews on IMDB, restoring my faith in humanity... a story this thin, even the terrific production values didn't fool any but the absolute least discriminating viewers.

This indiest of indie flicks is tediously slow. Billed as a guy being increasingly haunted by his recently-dead ex, what it actually is is about 20 minutes of a guy driving around interspersed among about an hour of two guys talking, and then 5 minutes of"plot twist"and incredibly amateurishly-acted-and-shot"action"at the end. Avoid. Well-meaninged but should have been a 15 minute short, not a feature film, and still wouldn't have been very good.

One of those execrable movies that seems like someone got together all their friends to film a home movie"horror movie". In the first 15 minutes they show a"monster"that's obviously a guy in a yellow hazmat suit wearing a rubber mask. The lead actress is really kinda cute so I left it on in the background and watched youtube videos on my laptop the rest of the time, so I have no idea what else it was about. They show some guys who are supposed to be scientists and stuff at one point.

I will never figure out how Tubi categorizes movies. It shows me strings of films with odd things in common. In this case, it's several movies in a row where they a movie basically has people talking for 45 minutes before it finally tuns into a horror movie. In this case, it's a couple on a date, as boring and ordinary an indie flick as you could ask for, before she suddenly traps him in her boarded-up house, and it turns into a decent captivity flick as he tries to avoid the monster she's trying to feed him to. Still pretty bad and derivative, but compared to the utterly tedious first 45 minutes of just a couple out on a much too long date, the rest actually seems like quality horror entertainment. The acting is alright, at any rate, and the ending is actually totally decent. But, boy. Pacing, people, pacing. No more 45 minutes of unnecessary talk before the movie starts, ok? The would have been a pretty watchable like 30 minute short.

Strange movie. Typical D-grade awful, amateurish horror flick in which a gorgeous actress becomes possessed by the spirit of herself talking with a bad southern accent. But: has moments where the cinematography is really good, which is so completely out of place. There's a couple of isolated moments where there's no dialog or human acting, just other things happening, and I'm like,"Whaaaaa? This movie just got really good for a second."And then, 20 seconds later, back to pure garbage. Funny.

Terrible pursuit flick that proves that any movie that mentions online video sites or"influencers"is still, in 2024, an instant avoid. A couple takes a challenge to film themselves having sex in different places for online prizes, when some murdered chases and kills them because, movie. Weird because it seems like maybe this was a 40 minute long movie, so they padded it out with scenes of a convincingly sleazy youtube host talking about what they're doing, as if he the one running the contest and getting updates from them, when they never actually mention or refer to him in any way. Which, actually, was kind of funny. But not funny enough to make this movie worth watching.

That rarest bird, the"so bad it's good"movie I actually like. Mostly because this is exactly what I imagine we would have gotten if John Waters had watched a bunch of David Cronenberg films and decided to make an anthology horror movie instead of a trashy social satire, but was still John Waters. A dumped-on office worker releases nanobots to make his coworkers like him, which turn them into monsters, because, movie. Plus two other similarly ludicrous segments filled with fake gore that I've already otherwise forgotten.

A truly strange sub-TV-movie with the most intricate plot I've seen. People's faces appear in a polaroid before they die. Some cops investigate, but they may be involved, I don't know, the whole thing has a lot of characters and a lot going on and a lot of twists and turns and it's all really confusing the director was not in any way capable of pulling it off. And the acting is terrible actors giving it an admirable amount of gung-ho.

A stunningly original story in which a young pregnant couple's car breaks down in the countryside where, in an unexpected twist, there's no cell service, so they go to, get this, a nearby farmhouse, which turns out to be inhabited by, you'll never believe this, a crazy family that takes them prisoner and wants to keep the baby. Finally, get this, in the end, only the woman survives to escape. How in the world do they come up with this stuff? I mean, other than maybe watching the 3000 other movies with the same exact plot?

unexpectedly semi-alright crime/revenge thriller. An up-and-coming young executive is framed for embezzling, so she recruits her old friends from the South Central in an elaborate revenge scheme. Very amateurish, but, somehow, so committed to what it wants to be that it gets entertaining at points. Plus, somehow they pulled together the budget for a decent car chase at the end with helicopters and all. Not as good as it wants to be, but not anywhere near as bad sa it should have been.

Disappointing. English horror flick with gritty, almost"Trainspotting"type production values about an electric-chair type contraption found in an abandoned hospital, which either transports the seated person to another dimension, drives them insane, or summons a demon. Actually starts out alright but by halfway through the decent performances and unusually gritty production values can't support the muddled story. Clive Barker could've made this as punchy as it wanted to be, or Danny Boyle could have made it as clever and narratively strong as it wants to be, but neither of them was anywhere near this.

(not to be confused with"Depraved", the very good"Frankenstein"update previously reviewed) Captivity/pursuit flick. Urban explorers in the tunnels below Berlin encounter a seemingly helpful denizen of the depths when one of them is seriously injured in a fall, who turns out, once he's lured them back to his lair, to be bonkers. A slightly unusual last few minutes for this sort of fare (in that it foregoes any redemption or sign of hope at the end; ok, that's actually different), decent performances including from the leering bad guy, and half the dialogue being in German are the only distinguishing qualities this movie has.

A sci-fi alternate history tale about three men stationed in an Arctic outpost during a steampunk version of WWII that gas stretched into the mid-1950s. An enemy mind-control weapon drives them all mad, and has the deadly side effect of turning a really interesting concept into a really dull movie.