A not-bad horror-ish, sci-fi-ish movie that plays like an ok episode of a long-form sci-fi TV show. During a solar storm that knocked out cell reception and causes auroras in the sky, a retired priest takes in an Amish girl fleeing her wedding. The whole movie is them talking or arguing in the darkened house. 70 minutes passed surprisingly quickly. Nothing to really recommend here, but, I don't regret watching it.
A derivative James Wan-style supernatural/otherworldly-entity-in-a-house thriller made by someone much less talented than James Wan. A woman who suffers from sleep paralysis has her brother move in following abuse from their father. But then halfway through she calls psychic and says she's been seeing her dead brother. Then she hangs out with him again. Then the psychic shows up and clichéd sub-James-Wan antics ensue. Blech. Nope.
Bottom-of-the-barrel thriller with some of the worst acting I've ever seen, and then, one really great plot twist. They got me.
A pair of women rent a house for a few days. The owners act fishy. Someone creeps around outside the house at night. Soon it becomes apparent that the owners, who behaved like the worst actors I've ever seen, weren't really the owners, as they wait in a hotel room and try to plot a way to get the women out of the house. In the background, a newscast, read by an anchor who acts like one of the worst actors I've ever seen, reads a story that local asylums are releasing lunatics early to ease overcrowding [cue ominous music]... a police officer who behaves like one of the worst actors I've ever seen investigates a report that the owner of the house is missing.
But, then…
The cadaverously beautiful Georgia Evers in what should have been an overbearingly indie surreal thriller but actually is ok, owing to fairly skilled filmmaking. Pretty visually pretentious flick (lots of saturated colors, black and white, sudden shift to silent movie sequences, etc., much of which is actually cinematically beautiful) about a woman and her daughter and the hallucinatory strange and threatening people the meet around her town. It was ok. I wouldn't go out of my way to see it but it was better than a movie this artsy should have been.
Definitely... well... not a flawed gem, but a flawed alright thriller in which a cleaner is paid to clean house for an overbearing rich guy. Saved from mediocrity by the villain, who does a standout performance as the stereotypical possibly homicidal rich asshole—think Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho" with the histrionics toned down to realistic levels. I liked it quite a bit, almost enough to recommend it, except that the plot kind of falls apart through too many tough-to-swallow sudden twists and turns at the end, and leaves it unsatisfying. Still maybe worth watching for the simmering, arrogant bad guy, though, if nothing else. He's memorable, and the slow burn of the first two acts are watchable; the end of the movie is niether, which, you know, you really want them to stick the landing and sadly they don't.
An ok horror movie for about 2/3 of its runtime goes unfortunately far over the top and histrionic for the third act. A pioneer family in a covered wagon takes a wrong turn and gets lost in the woods. Soon another lost traveler stumbles out of the woods, miracles happen like the blind son regains his sight, and they hear a booming sound they assume to be God. It's not. Slightly better for a lot of it than that sounds, mostly because of pretty good acting, but again, unfortunately it doesn't hold up, as their attempts to ratchet up the tension just turn to religious hysteria and screaming and it just, paradoxically, loses all interest. Sometimes filmmakers forget the value of quiet.
Execrable, pretentious wanna-be "avante garde" film from a Berlin filmmaker who obviously thinks "avant garde" means lots of video effects, jumpy edits, stuttering video, and half the movie being just self-indulgent music videos for his terrible music, for no reason that's ever explained.
I assumed this was a student film but it turns out this filmmaker is middle-aged.
Couldn't even tell you what this movie was about. It was listed under horror, and from reading about it apparently in between the music videos there's some sort of story involving a mutation. I did hear a bad actress mention Satan at one point.
Turned it off halfway through.
A young woman has a disjointed bunch of random, weird, episodic encounters with weird people who do random things because it's artsy, I guess. Seems loosely to be a cheaply-produced attempt at a sort of "Alice In Wonderland"-type tale, but with no rhyme, reason, narrative interest or redeeming artistic qualities. Basically a film student's idea of an "art" film, or what a Gaspar Noe film would be like if he lost all his filmmaking talent and only hired people who didn't know how to act. It turns into a music video, then a sitcom spoof, then it's a youtube video including the logo and controls. People's wigs fly off their heads while they're talking, to which they say, "Hair, are you acting up again? Hair!" It has that failed indie film standby, absolutely needless and unexplained video and sound effects inserted at random moments. Things suddenly move in fast or…
Ok, this movie couldn't have seemed less promising: "A woman running from her past is trapped between a zombie outbreak and warring militia groups." Great. But it turns out, this is a more of a flawed gem... deeply flawed in some ways but also very well done in others.
Inside of the first few minutes it became apparent this was a little better than that. The acting and dialog seemed good, somehow. Cliche'd ominous background news reports about a viral outbreak are downplayed and handled well for something we've seen so many times before. The couple goes on a 5-day canoe trip and then quickly fall to arguing, and for a little while, this turns into one of those movies that kills time by having a couple negotiate their relationship onscreen for the viewers—my favorite thing—before the canoe capsizes, one's leg is broken, and they must take to land…
This film set low expectations and then came through kinda better than expected. The synopsis, "Lifelong best friends, Maddy and V, find themselves at a remote ski lodge where a group of mysterious wealthy men throw a celebration century in the making" certainly didn't lead me to expect anything great.
And, it's not great. But it was actually kinda good. But the acting is a slight cut above movies like this usually are, and even the particularly hammy performances are entertaining. Some of the dialog occasionally rings true at points, which is nice. The movie is a very slow burn and takes it's time, maybe longer than it should, to get where it finally goes, but I didn't mind that much. And the ending finally ratchets up the intensity nicely, after a long very gradual simmer. I think if I was 14 I'd have thought this was flat-out great.
I've…
A horror-comedy that actually works, sort of... at least well enough that I was reasonably entertained. In this case, a restauranteur strikes a deal with a demon who lives in the basement. The demon makes the restaurant successful, in exchange for occasionally being fed only the worst of the customers.
The problem with most "horror comedy" is it's really just a bad horror movie trying to be passed off as "comedy" because it's just bad. In this case, it's an actual comedy that happens to be about horror topics.
The acting is terrible, the movie is pretty goofy, but it knows what it is and isn't trying to be anything more. What's more, the cast, though pretty terrible, seem like they enjoyed making it. It's fun and, this works in its favor too, just slightly original—definitely not reminiscent of anything I've seen before. I liked it.
Appraiser visits wealthy old man's estate to appraise it and supernatural shit happens ("weird creepy visions and specters from the past" variety.) Meh.
A couple of archeologists and their young daughter move to an abandoned penal camp for boys to search for a buried body, and supernatural shit happens (possession-and-talking-with-creepy-voices variety.) Pretty much slid off my brain immediately after watching it.
This movie opens with a card that says, "This footage was found in a camera that washed up on a beach on Long Island".
And that's all I know, because that's literally all it takes to get me to turn a movie off nowadays.
Middling British suspense flick about a man bringing his new fiancee to meet the kids. The kids are acting strange, mom is nowhere to be seen, eventually things turn violent and although the suspenseful mood is done well not much is explained. In the end it turns out mom is in the cellar, it's implied she's dead, but why? Movie ends without saying.
Reasonably entertaining horror-comedy (a genre I usually don't like) from New Zealand, in which the set of a zombie movie is attacked by real zombies. Sort of over-the-top and hammy, but, it works, it's clear from the get-go that that's what they set out to do. I wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but, it's watchable enough.
This ambitious indie flick is somewhere in the David Lynch, Guillermo Del Toro, Gaspar Noe triangle of "film is art" highly-stylized productions. A man whose wife and son disappear on a trip to the beach—or is it his mother and his younger self?—leading him to search a desert community for them and become involved with some sort of cult. People turn into lizards, bugs, skeletons, and the entire thing is intentionally dreamlike (and consequently, hard to follow the plot of.)
Nowhere near as good a film as any of the above-mentioned names would have made, and probably not one I can recommend, nonetheless, I admire the ambition, no matter how far short it falls of its lofty goals.
Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmm. Hmmmm.
What starts as a dreadfully slow, very British take on a home invasion/captivity flick a la "Funny Games"—something I'm immediately put off by—turns out, very slowly, to be something a little more... but then, exactly what, is never revealed, which is frustrating.
In 1972, a journalist couple who has been poking around a mysterious military operation our on the moors receives a visit from a very oddly-mannered couple, "Mr. and Mrs. Blair", who want to ask them a few questions, and proceed to brutalize and take them captive.
Honestly, pretty bad movie, and the fact that nothing is explained or resolved makes it doubly frustrting.
But at the same time, the acting is, er, strange enough to be a little engaging. The oddball performances of Mr. & Mrs Blair, as they slowly get stranger and stranger, is somehow a little interesting, especially the actress who…
Some BS about a woman from a monster dimension who crosses over and wants to be human, or something. This movie had some of the worst acting I've ever seen. Seriously, the production values aren't even that bad, but I've never seen so many people who just didn't seem to know how to act. Unwatchable, turned it off.
During the pandemic, a man takes over as property manager of a haunted Los Angeles building, which we know is haunted because people talk about it being haunted. There are noises from the garage, which we know because people talk about them, and people have disappeared mysteriously, which we know because people talk about it. And as I write this, I'm an hour into this 90 minute movie, and still waiting for something to happen.
Title checks out.
A father whose daughter killed herself has a coven of witches resurrect her. But the plot of this movie doesn't matter. The whole movie is set apart by being an exercise in creepy mood and cinematography. On that level, I enjoyed it. Stars Chynna Rae Shurts, who seems to star in a lot of these slightly-above-average, slightly-out-of-the-ordinary horror movies lately. Definitely far from a great movie, but, if you want a watchable horror movie and really don't mind a paper-thin-to-the-point-of-almost-nonexistent plot as long as it provides 90 minutes of creepiness, this'll fit the bill nicely. I found it a fun watch, at any rate.
A bunch of social media influencers...
You don't really need to know more about that plot than that, do you? It's another horror movie about social media influencers, which has been categorically proven to be the lamest thing ever to make a horror movie about.
But, to finish.... they go into the woods and play a VR game, that, I dunno, it turns out to be real, or something? The whole thing is for people who were raised thinking watching someone play a video game is entertaining. Not for me.
Starts with the apparently now de rigeur first-person shooter convention of spending like a damn hour showing them goofing around and not advancing the plot in any way.
A passably moment-by-moment entertaining but ultimately totally unrewarding 1408-style exercise in, "Ooh! I thought of another 'scary' thing we can have happen!" for 90 minutes. In this case, Robert Englund chews the scenery admirably—perhaps the movie's only real redeeming point—as a demon who must impregnate a woman every 100 years to reincarnate, and, for reasons not clearly explained, also chooses to use his last night before reincarnating to visit an old police station on the last night before it closes down to exact revenge on a tough-as-nails former police sergeant adversary and his entire former department by going through the station doing whatever "scary" thing the writers can think of to kill the tough-as-nails officers one-by-one in "scary" ways, or manipulate them into killing each other, using his demonic powers, which are, apparently, whatever the writers need them to be in that moment. Also somewhat amusing for the spectacle of…
Hoooooooooooooooo. A european woman traveling in—not sure, Scotland?—is taken prisoner, tattooed, and subjected to extreme body modification in this captivity flick. Which, for the first half, is every bit as dull as it sounds, because: captivity, torture porn, not interesting.
But, you know what? This is a pretty well-made movie. The characters are paper-thin but the acting and casting are above average and that slides the shallowness of it by better than usual. It takes its time getting where it's going, but over the second half, ratchets up the dramatic tension.
Basically the whole thing is played like an extremely, EXTREMELY and somewhat gory dark suspense pic or crime thriller, not a horror movie. There are certainly no scares here, and it's more about the cops circling in on him than torture-as-entertainment, as these films usually are.
Plus, as I said, it's notably well-made for this sort of movie. If…
Woman's boyfriend goes turns evil and starts infecting people around him into acting violent after being possessed by some sort of giant penis monster. David Cronenberg did it better.
Perhaps the worst horror anthology film I've ever seen. A horror tour of Hollywood is the pretext for a 4 or 5 zero-budget, "hey guys let's make a movie!" sub-USA-Up-All-Nite horror shorts. I can't believe there are 4 or 5 directors making films this bad.
One of those movies that seems like someone wrote a script in a couple of days, got a video camera and a bunch of their friends together to make a "movie". Porn-movie-level "acting", and overall the zero-budget-crappiest of zero-budget-crap that I ever turned off after less than 20 minutes. Some bullshit about alien conspiracies.
Fairly amusing indie flick in which a discontented slacker woman finds out (along with everyone else) that reality is a simulation and will end in a week.
Reminded me of that movie with Zoe Lister-Jones and Cailee Spaeny about the woman wandering around LA before the world ends, although this was better than that one. Same sort of "clever, but not quite as clever as it thinks it is" high-concept. But, in this case, it was entertaining enough. Eventually it sort of peters out, but if it had kept up the entertainment all the way through, it would have been pretty good.
Aw, for the first two-thirds, this movie was fun! For a lot of its runtime, it's a funnier and better-done comedy than I'm used to seeing from a bunch of no-name actors, reminiscent in some ways of a "John Dies At The End" or "Tucker And Dale vs. Evil" type genre spoof. It was based on a comic book and, from the looks of it, a clever one. In a world where non-flesh-eating zombies—correction: the "Life Impaired"—are everywhere just making things difficult, a couple of kids are abducting them to sell for medical experiments, when workers for a competing "retirement service" whose haul they've been eating into takes offense, and things get hectic.
It's a Canadian film, which makes a lot of sense. Except that...
Unfortunately, by the third act they forget it's a very clever, quirky comedy and it becomes more of a conventional, cliche'd action-comedy. It just…
Absolute bottom-of-the-barrel crap from the final fading moments of the "Jason And The Argonauts"/"Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad"/"Clash Of The Titans" epic mythological fantasy era, although I feel bad besmirching the names of those films by associating this with them.
Adam is alone in the Garden Of Eden, so, with unclear theological grounding, he fashions Eve out of sand, they frolic a while to a soundtrack that sounds like The Carpenters, before a snake tempts them to eat the apple that gets them evicted, and from there, the movie spins off into a bizarrely low-fi, shamelessly episodic series of encounters with dinosaurs, cavemen, and various poorly-edited stock footage and stop-motion animated perils. They literally wander on foot, judging by the backgrounds and stock footage used, from southern California to the Grand Canyon to the Amazon to the Arctic, trying to find "the sea", because, "life began in the sea, and we…
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