Christopher Walken, in his first film role, stars with Ronny Cox in this odd, talky little movie about psychological experiments in which army doctors implant chips into soldiers' pleasure centers to make them docile. Strangely, much less interesting than it sounds. Not much really happens. Overall kind of a low-budget-seeming oddity, despite the big names.
Classic sci-fi/horror about a sentient computer imprisoning a woman in her home with the goal of using her body to become human. Explores existential themes of human existence and personal autonomy in the best classic literary science fiction tradition.
It's hard for me to judge this movie objectively. I first saw this as a kid, and loved it then, and although now the visual style seems slightly cheezy and low-budget to me, and the pacing definitely isn't the punchy pacing modern viewers are used to, the better points of the storytelling and themes hold up for me as an adult. I see this as perhaps the last of the great tradition of small, personal, humanist, character-driven sci-fi and horror movies that started perhaps in the 1950s, which began to be supplanted by a new, more grandiose, almost mythic or archetype-driven storytelling style in 1968 with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and…
What to say about this critical fave? A drug-addicted schizophrenic anarchist hacker takes on the forces of corporatism and global-scale evil in this dark cyberthriller series that never lets the intensity go below 10 for a second. Every scene is intense. Every piece of dialog. People look at each other intensely, or argue and threaten each other intensely. One woman was cast, I'm sure, primarily for her skill at sitting there looking, because it's almost all she does. The show never takes a quiet moment to gather power for the next scene, never lets up. It's just one intense climax to the next, like a Whitney Houston song.
This series reminds me of what took me so long to cotton to "Breaking Bad" for—slow pacing, intensity conveyed with lots of quiet and stillness instead of action. Which, in principle is admirable, and much harder to do well than the…
A couple wakes up to find their house completely surrounded by blackness in which unexplained phantasmagorical visions are sometimes displayed, and spends 2/3 of the movie bickering, 1/6 in "deep" philosophizing, and 1/6 in an incomprehensible arthouse special effects mess.
Seeming like the forced love-child of "Superstore" and quasi-improv post-"The Office" shows like "Parks & Rec", this ensemble show set in a grocery story more closely resembles comedy than any other show I think I've ever not laughed at. The quirky and deeply flawed characters, the hammy performances, the snappy patter, the absurd setups, the ridiculous romantic pairings, it sure does look and feel like comedy. And it's even faintly entertaining. But I don't think I actually laughed once. And the lead, a young manwho inherits his deceased father's grocery store, is just insufferable, without any of the charm that has historically made so many insufferable sitcom leads tolerable.
Imagine a movie described as "National Lampoon's Van Wilder, a frat-house comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid". Now picture that same movie, except more crass than you're imagining.
Gritty, pretty watchable cop show. The acting is good. The first seasons are better and then it never gets bad, but isn't quite as good for the last few. Still fairly watchable though.
Views-obsessed "Influencer" gets possessed by an ancient demon or spirit or something that somehow knows how to use YouTube in this atrocious teen scream horror of the unfortunate modern "let's try to make a horror movie about social media" genre. This movie makes cheezy '90s teen scream horror look good.
Terribly paced, cheaply made splatstick about a bunch of American tourists in Australia who encounter a menacing pack of digitally-generated koalas with glowing eyes and an actor in a very fake-looking "mutant koala" costume.
Cheapo horror flick about a bunch of people holed up in a house during a zombie outbreak. Mostly you don't even see the zombies. So, basically, "Night Of The Living Dead", except, totally uninteresting.
What a weird movie. Bottom-of-the-barrel crapola, with the (lack of) acting and production values of a cheap porn film, and yet... something about it... if this had been a big budget it would have been kinda good. It's about a zombie outbreak in Philadelphia, and a group of survivors trapped in a basement. But it's a lot more about dialogue than zombies eating people. And it has a couple of fanciful animated sequences that totally work as comic relief and look better than anything else in the movie. It's kind of like... this would have been a good movie if they'd spent the kind of budget on actors and production staff that they did on the animation. The writing is, strangely, not really that bad, if you can imagine a skilled director directing skilled actors at it. But the movie looks and feels like a porno but with zombies instead…
Anna Faris in a faintly amusing stoner comedy. Harold and Kumar somehow got away with this sort of thing, but at this point it's kind of been done, and much better than this.
Faintly amusing TV series that plays like a cross between "Dead Like Me" and "Scooby Doo". A touring rock band gets an amulet that lets them see ghosts as they tour from city to city, whom they must help pass on from the earthly plane by helping them fulfill an unfulfilled ambition.
Rhys Darby, whom I ordinarily like a great deal, does his best Tracey Ullman impression, starring as multiple colorful characters in this mockumentary series about a small New Zealand village. It's not terrible, but how Darby, Jemaine Clement, and Stephen Merchant got together and made something this "not that funny" is a mystery for the ages.
Mildly amusing, slightly absurdist single-camera sitcom-leaning dramedy about a divorced dad & daughter from Manhattan settling in a materialistic Westchester suburb. Not bad to fill some time.
A stereotypical atheist-as-imagined-by-Christians wants to kill himself for 90 minutes that feels like 3 hours, while everybody preaches at him that they believe there's an alternative. The corny music and wooden sub-soap-opera-quality attempts at acting are such a solid tipoff that it's a Christian film that by the time you spot the surreptitious crucifixes and churches in the background of way too many shots, all of 5 minutes into it, it's absolutely no surprise.
Sci-fi movie that somehow manages to be both boring and overwrought. Something about a guy recovering from some sort of injury, and his mother is injured or dead, and he hallucinates a lot, or something. I couldn't really follow it.
The classic that originated tropes that have permeated popular culture ever since, and which has been remade or ripped off countless times—and all for good reason.
You already know the story: an alien invasion of "pod people" creates duplicates of human beings and replaces them. But if you haven't seen the 1956 original, what you may not know is how great a movie it is. This extremely dated-looking 1950s film is utterly effective and highly original even today, and still holds up astoundingly well as one of the best sci-fi/horror movies out there. Today's audiences, accustomed to big-budget Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, may not be used to the more human-level drama and real storytelling here, but to me it will always be an impeccable, incredible classic and gripping view from start to finish.
My favorite Hitchcock movie. The birds in a small coastal California town begin inexplicably attacking the human populace, and it begins to look like a losing battle. Only Alfred Hitchcock could take such a thin premise and turn it into a suspense-filled horror masterpiece and major film classic.
Decent slightly-better-than-TV-movie-quality dramatization of a 1970 true story about the efforts to teach a girl who'd been imprisoned without human contact until the age of 14 to learn to speak and socialize.
One of the most difficult honorable mentions I've ever given. This is an unflichingingly violent and in substantial ways misogynistic drama dressed up as a lurid horror film.
A young boy is taken in and imprisoned for many years in the rural home of a serial killer who abducts him and his mother. The violence of several killings and the boy's imprisonment and enslavement by the killer are prominently and unflinchingly shown, but the real story is the development of their relationship and conflicts.
Despite being directed by Jennifer Lynch, critics have called it misogynist and I think they're right. The women in this film are two-dimensional and serve mostly as props to move the story of the mens' relationship along before they meet a grisly end. (Note that Lynch also directed "Boxing Helena" which people had similar complaints of misogyny about.)
At the same time, while…
Decent enough action/horror B-movie in which a small-town sheriff is caught between a military takeover and a plague of homicidal locals after a plane carrying a bioweapon goes down and infects everybody with a virus that turns them into psychopaths.
Remake of a 1973 George Romero flick. I'd really like to see the original. I can't imagine his was this much of an action flick. But this one is decently watchable, if you're in the mood for this kind of thing. Stars Timothy Olyphant.
A woman rents goes on vacation in a woodsy cabin, only to discover that after an initial friendly meeting, the kids camping next door are starting to act a little wierd, either the victims of some sort of monster, drugs in the water, mind control, or a flimsy and never-explained horror movie plot.
By the end whatever happened to them happens to her, but it's never explained what it is, other than that something about drinking bottled water changes people.
It's too bad because the production is good and the atmosphere is creepy. But somebody forgot that stories need an ending. Or at least an explanation.
Four youtube documentarians set out to make an amatueur rip off of "The Blair Witch Project" and fail at even that. This movie contains all the most boring "first-person shooter" found footage horror cliches, and nothing else.
Low-budget attempted thriller about a disgraced journalist who got somebody killed by revealing a source uncovers a mysterious online puzzle that causes people to disappear. Starts promising a la "The Game" but then ends, disappointingly, without ever pulling the pieces together.
The ultimate contrived, formulaic sitcom. However, it has about the steadiest rhythm of any TV show I've ever seen, the dialogue goes bang-bang-bang, making it perfect background noise.
Surprisingly unengaging 1970 Jack Nicholson drama about a rough-hewn, misogynistic classical-pianist-turned-oilfield-worker returning home to his family. Not much of a plot. It seems to be considered a classic but I don't know why you hear about it so often. Maybe this is one of those movies that people who like French New Wave cinema or the like.
If this isn't a cult favorite, it really should be. Pitch-black, occasionally very gory, but surprisingly fun indie flick about a down-on-their-luck punk rock band who hire a genial homeless guy to roadie for their tour so they can use his van after theirs is repossesed, but he turns out to be a flesh-eating demon.
There's absolutely no reason this movie should be as fun as it is, and yet, somehow, it is. Kind of a low-key standout for me, along the lines of other obscure indie faves like "Otis" and "The Signal" (2007) (which, BTW, the actor who plays the homeless guy/demon was in the art department for, so that's a fun connection.)
Stephen King adaptation directed by George Romero. Typical dull Stephen King adaption, only less happens. George Romero really should have hung it up after "Dawn Of The Dead", too.
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