Anna: Scream Queen Killer

Anna: Scream Queen Killer

Scream Queen Killer: A"scream queen"actress auditioning for a role by doing about 15 minutes of 30 secone takes on various situations, because, I guess, if you only saw her"act like there's an invisible presence in the room for 30 seconds...act like you're turning into a vampire for 30 seconds"for 12 or 13 minutes, the point wouldn't have been made. Fellas, there's editing now. You should use it.
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Demented

Demented

Proving that every rule has an exception, this awful sub-"USA Up All nite"stars Felissa Rose, who apparently takes the roles Linnea Quiqley would have once turned down as being beneath her, as a cop investigating some sort of snuff film ring. An attempt to appeal to fans of basic brutality by a director not competent enough even to provide basic brutality.
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LX 2048

LX 2048

Takes a while to get going, but sort of fun future technodystopia where a company sells"insurance"where if a spouse dies, you get a clone within 48 hours... with the ability to request small custom improvements, of course. What could go wrong? (Hint: everything.) Not quite the movie it wants to be, padded out with unnecessary secondary ideas that are explored then just dropped, and so takes a little while to get going ... would have been a very good Black Mirror episode, with tighter plotting. At twice that length feels a little long for the idea, but still, I'd give it a 'B'. Reasonably well done, not great but definitely not crap.
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Alien Weekend

Alien Weekend

Fun little flick. Sci-fi comedy about a couple of 20-something friends who stumble into some intrigue involving a crashed ufo and a missing alien egg. Reminiscent of quirky indie sci-fi comedies like Buckaroo Bonzai, Repo Man, Bill & Ted, that sort of thing, although it doesn't really rise to anywhere near that level—it's still too much of a teen film for that—but nonetheless, a likable cast and fairly consistently successful comic elements make it a fun view. Definitely doesn't suck. Could maybe be a minor cult favorite, I bet, to people who haven't seen this sort of thing before.
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Nyctophobia

Nyctophobia

another dreadful first-person shooter that looks like someone had a spare weekend so they decided to make a movie on their iphone with their friends. Nothing happens for 25 minutes, and then all the lights go out, and it's like an hour and a half of people running around a darkened house shouting at each other. That's it. Monsters are heard outside and never seen. Nonstop nauseatingly shaky cellphone-shot video never sits still long enough to see what's going on. Seems like they made it up as they went along. What Hath The Blair Witch Project Wrought?
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Moth

Moth

Absolutely dreadfully boring first person shooter. Two people spend half the movie driving around doing nothing, then they spend half the movie running through the woods and arguing. And that's really it. They talk and yell and run and nothing else happens. It's not even"found footage horror"any more. They might as well make a found footage movie of paint drying.
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The Call (2022)

The Call (2022)

Teenage bullies drive a woman to suicide, so her husband forces them to take a strange phone call which is her exacting her revenge from the other side. a c-grade horror movie that somehow got Tobin Bell and Lin Shaye to star in it, making it a strange hodgepodge of occasionally creepy and intense, because, Tobin Bell and Lin Shaye, but, mostly boring c-grade horror movie crap.
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Mustang Sally’s Horror House

Mustang Sally’s Horror House

A true aberration, the rare"so bad it's good"movie I enjoyed. This thoroughly"USA Up All Nite"-level fare about a bunch of frat boys who go to a bordello and are killed one-by-one by the ladies is, well, thoroughly"USA Up All Nite"-level fare, from start to finish. It doesn't really try too hard, and plays like something made in about 1972. These movies, you know, they remind me of my shiftless year or two right after college, working a shit admin assistant job by day and smoking weed and watching"USA Up All Nite"every weekend. Hard not to feel a little affection for a movie that evokes that this well. I'd never recommend anybody watch it, but I may again, if there's nothing else on someday. Suprisingly, this is from 2006. I would have given it no later than 1992 at the absolute latest, and probably earlier.
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Room 0

Room 0

the dullest time loop movie ever. One character, a woman in a motel room caught in a time look, supposed to deliver a time looping device to a mafioso who is also caught in the loop with her, talks to people on the phone who sound like voice over artists given lines to read, and tries to figure out how to get out of it. That's the whole movie. Nothing but her talking on the phone to a million different fake-sounding people over and over.
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Ragmork

Ragmork

incomprehensible, ponderous, thoroughly amateurish mishmash filmed in black and white. Note to amateur film makers: if you're tempted to make an"artsy"film, find something else to do with your time. Only David Lynch has ever pulled that off as an amateur, and you're not him.
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Killers [1996]

Killers [1996]

This must be the worst-edited movie ever. A clear child of the Natural Born Killers/Pulp Fiction Era, except, with such poor editing that it's impossible to make sense of the story. Escaped killers pick a random suburban house to hide out, and it slowly becomes apparent that the clean-cut family living there is anything but normal. Picture the"Gimp"sene from pulp fiction stretched to feature length. The husband even calls the wife"Honeybunny"at one point. Criminals give impassioned speeches about their taste in movies, or pause to recite poetry in the middle of action sequences. The wife is suddenly hanging all over one of the murderers and the husband is tied up; suddenly the husband is free, and is wearing makeup, and when the police arrive to rescue him, he kills them with an axe for no apparent reason. Then he's not wearing makeup anymore and his wife is back with him and the murderer. An unexplained deformed brother of the family pops in and out. Then the gorgeous surviving police sergeant, who came to the house in pursuit of the escaped murderer, is running through the dungeon (did I happen to mention this surburban house has a dungeon?) with the murderer, chased by the completely unexplained people down there. The police sergeant are holding hands, and they kiss. The sergeant is shot, and her last words to the main killer are"Kill them all"for some reason. Then the killers stop to put on skull facepaint and shoot rifles that it's never explained how they got into the darkness, to just say"Hey, we're cool", I guess. Along the way it's mentioned casually in passing that the father and daughter are sleeping together. The whole thing would almost be so bad and over-the-top that it's worth seeing for the sheer spectacle, but the complete lack of sense or explanation for anything makes it unwatchable. It's like a director kept thinking of unrelated scenes,"Wouldn't it be cool if this happened now", and nobody knew how to edit it into a movie.
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The Signal (2007) [second viewing]

The Signal (2007) [second viewing]

As described in my last review, compilation of three interwoven short tales, revolving around a broadcast signal driving people insane. I like this one a lot, very well done. (Note: there's another 2014 horror movie called"The Signal"that isn't nearly as good.) I just recently, 10 or 15 years after it had faded to a distant memory of a film Ihad especially enjoyed, popped back up on Tubi (which, among the seemingly thousands of awful horror films it gets, seems to also manage to get these distantly-remembered, hard-to-find favorites.) I remember why I liked it. It's gorier than I remember, and, I don't know, I can't say it's exactly a great movie, but it seriously well done for what it is and the kind of gem I would say non-horror fans shouldn't go out of their way to see, but, every horror fan should see it. As noted elsewhere, the first of the three episodes, directed by the guy who went on to do"The Ritual"and a bunch of better stuff I noted in my review of that film, is the best of the three, very effectively ratcheting up the suspense. The rest is nearly as good though. The second two rely a little bit on camp humor, not my favorite thing, but it's strong enough all the way through to pull off this off-kilter and gory end-of-humanity tale. Also, never realized unti now, the female lead was also one of the leads in"YellowBrickRoad"another favorite deep cut.
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The Darkness Of The Road

The Darkness Of The Road

Swing and a serious miss. Pretty decent lighting and cinematography for what little you can see of this movie (most of it is set on a desolate, deserted road at night) tries to be profound and twisty but succeeds mostly at meaningless"408"-style disjoined"what's another weird scary thing we can have happen?"scenes. Najarra Townsend ("Contaminated", a film I'm fond of) and the nice visuals do little to save this. Reading up on IMDB afterwards, it turns out it does have a cohesive idea behind it and make sense if you know what it's trying to say, but I didn't. Too bad.
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Bug (1975)

Bug (1975)

THIS IS IT! You found it-the one, the only BUG, the single greatest cinematic achievement not just in the admittedly crowded field of mid-20th-century apocalyptic giant insect scifi horror film, nor even just in the scifi or horror film genres, but in human motion picture history writ large, itself. The unrelenting cinematic greatness that this movie doles out in heaping helpings upon your uncomprehending cerebellum-line after line, minute after minute, scene after scene, shrieking burning head explosion after shrieking burning head explosion, without pause, from the opening preacher's sermon to the closing descent into the stygian bowels of the earth itself-simply cannot be adequately conveyed within the constraints of this forum. It must be experienced firsthand. The mere fact that this is one of the very few opportunities in American cinema to see a woman's head get set on fire in the Brady Bunch kitchen would likely be among the chief draws of any more ordinary film it might appear in. But this is no ordinary film, and even something that would obviously be the highlight of most movie-goers' entire seasons is here only the very most trivial, the most trifling beginning to the veritable cavalcade of entertainments bestowed upon the lucky viewer of this inestimable apotheosis of thrilling visual storytelling. To say any more would both unfairly rob the viewer of the opportunity to fully experience the unfolding of this stunning film firsthand, and, necessarily fall short in the effort, because words simply can not suffice. Bug. There is no substitute, no other film experience that can compare. On the rarified mountaintop of cinematic achievement, Bug stands alone. If you disagree with a single word of this review, you should know it was written by my 7-year-old self. And my 7-year-old self knows a BUTTLOAD about movies. You are not likely to convince him he's wrong. As of this writing,"Bug"is, happily, currently streaming on Netflix, and the world feels just that much more right.
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ReSet

ReSet

Ok, so starts, and proceeds through the first half as amusingly terrible take on the Groundhog Day trope. Girl is abducted from a party by an"incel"-stereotype stalker, wakes up in his guest room every time he kills her, after a brief trip to heaven to see her dead grandfather who encourages her along. I'm seriously unsure if this is meant to be a comedy or not. But then, it starts getting into character development, actually spends a little time talking than showing action, finally showing an almost sympathetic side the villain... almost. And the heroine comes off, despite everything she does being justified by everything she's been put through, slightly cruel. All in all, after a really terrible start, I'd almost say this could be chalked up as an"interesting failure"of the kind I might rewatch occasionally. If the first half had been as good as the second half, it would have been.
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Sapien

Sapien

The worst mess of a film I've ever seen. A social media influencer (always a promising start) leaves her fiance, becomes homeless, and goes through two hours of scenes that don't make sense in which apparently she talks to unseen people, apparently kills a family with a machete, talks shit to Jehovah's Witnesses who knock at the front door, becomes homeless, winds up in a hotel, curls up in a tent in a homeless camp with an unexplained mummified corpse and tells it she loves it, gets chased by guys in animal masks, gets kidnapped by human traffickers, is made to fight in a cage death match, and does a dance routine, but it's impossible to know for sure because things just jump around in a disconnected series of images for two hours. I think this is supposed to be an art film, but, nobody involved actually knew how to make a movie? It did actually have one creepy scene, though: she encounters an unseen"wood spirit"that speaks to her around a corner, and the voice keeps changing to different people. That was cool.
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The Mount 2

The Mount 2

Amateurish, pretentious outing where a bunch of kids and some unexplained adults apparently having a Halloween party in an abandoned house in Gibraltar start stabbing each other for some reason. Also apparently some of them are ghosts, because nobody else reacts to them, and they sometimes turn to the camera and brag"I'm a fucking ghost!". Also there's one part where they got bored making a movie because it turns into a badly over-acted music video or musical or something. Note to future directors: throwing one scene of an unexplained theatrical musical number into the middle of your horror movie doesn't really make it that much scarier. Nor does having a murdered, gloating over the murder scene, address the camera,"You wanted blood? Well here's fucking blood!"Am I supposed to feel bad now?
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Soft Liquid Center

Soft Liquid Center

God save us from"arty"indie horror films. A woman moves to a new house, ,probably in Los Angeles, and after about an hour of talking to her friends and 5 minutes of a lingering shot of her scooping out a watermelon, starts to experience boring, cliched"haunted"occurrences and occasionally disappears and appears in a weird forest setting for a few minutes before the movie abruptly ends with no explanation.
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The Whisperer In Darkness

The Whisperer In Darkness

Ok, this one is special, I think we have an honorable mention here. A folklorist investigates tales of strange creatures appearing in Vermont. When I threw this on, I was suprised to discover it was an old horror movie, not a new one, and nearly turned it off, but thankfully I didn't. Within just a few minutes I found myself thinking that I'd forgotten just how visually beautiful some of those old black and white movies are... similar to some of those John Ford westerns. It was quite a ways into it before I realized something was a little too clean—by the end of the movie I realized that certain lighting revealed that there was no film grain. Which makes sense, because the movie was actually made in 2011. But other than that, WOW, the 1930s reproduction is note-perfect, the acting style, the costumes, the special effects, most definitely the lighting... somebody involved with the making of this film had a spectacularly good eye for black-and-white cinematography, it's just beautiful and would probably have stood out as a great example of vintage cinematography if it had actually been vintage. The story is not great but absolutely good, it builds as effectively as some of the great vintage horror, and the plot ticks along, nothing about it sags at any point from start to finish. There's clearly some modern special effects used but for the most part they're effectively disguised to look like 1930s technology, and mostly the whole thing works. The monsters are a little cheezy but by the time you see them I was so into it that I didn't care. This film really caught my attention, there were a few times I had to rewind to see things a second time. Plus, a dark ending, much more Lovecraft than Hollywood, even though only the first two acts are actually from the Lovecraft story this is based on. Very nice work from an indie director. Not quite a great film, but definitely a treat, from where I sit, for sure. Quality entertainment. Incidentally I notice this one gets high marks from a lot of Lovecraft fans in the review section on IMDB.
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The Trip (2023)

The Trip (2023)

Four friends plan a mushroom-fueled weekend at a Pennsylvania farmhouse and are killed by an assortment of totally unexplained suicides, accidents, axe-wielding maniacs, and a bunch of other stuff that just plain doesn't make sense.
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Stupid Games

Stupid Games

A poorly-written, poorly edited, and virtually unpaced 30 minute horror movie with 45 pointless minutes of kids having a dinner party tacked on to the beginning. Kids have a party, eventually the lights go out so they play some sort of supernatural game, the cabinet doors start shaking, they get dragged by something out of the room and into the oven or a closet or something, it was too poorly edited for me to follow any more than that.
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The Screaming Silent

The Screaming Silent

The Blair Witch Project, but in Australia, with the now-de-rigeur-for-found-footage-horror 45 minutes of pointless, non-plot-advancing bullshit tacked on to the beginning. But mostly, the Blair Witch Project. Which is great, because nooooobody's ever made that movie before.
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