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Training Day (series)

Training Day (series)

A show that bears only the name in common with the movie it's supposedly a"reimagining"of. Bill Paxton as a tough-as-nails, willing-to-break-the-law-to-do-what's-right detective paired with a young do-gooder partner in this cartoonish half-video-game/half-post-Tarantino-crime-thriller cop show. Paxton kinda redeems the proceedings, he's pretty watchable.
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The Black Thread

The Black Thread

sub-mediocre supernatural thriller about a guy whose life is ruined by a curse he picked up by sleeping with a woman he met through a 1-900 chatline, improbably redeemed only by an increasingly unhinged and actually kind of intense performance from Frankie Munoz of all people.
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The Dark Red

The Dark Red

Interesting. A schizophrenic woman who may or may not actually be a mindreader is held in a psychiatric facility and insists her former boyfriend's family abducted her baby to gain the powers that run in her bloodline. Sometimes I find a movie that I particularly enjoy because it shoots only to be what it is—doesn't overreach or try to be something it's not, but does what it's trying to do effectively enough. I'm reminded a little bit, though this is a totally different genre and type of movie, of"Beyond The Black Rainbow", in that this film, like that one, just is what it is... shot and paced just a little differently than most films are. It probably helps that the acting is decent and the lead actress is fairly charismatic.The plot sags a tiny bit at the end into a conventional denouement, unfortunately, but, this one, despite not being a great movie by any stretch of the imagination or even a particularly good one, and not one I'd recommend to anyone else, nonetheless is oddly memorable, and I liked it . I could see watching it again sometime.
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Replace

Replace

Kind of a strange, highly stylized film about a young woman with a degenerative skin condition who uses other people's to replace it. Equal parts Cronenberg and Argento. Slickly produced but I had a bit of a tough time following it, but I might have been distracted. Not overly gory but has sort of grand guignol special effects that could be a tough watch for the squeamish.
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The Conjuring

The Conjuring

Fortunate casting (Lili Taylor, Vera Farmiga) and above-average direction, including some good spooky tension-building during scenes of things going bump in the night, elevate what could have been a very tedious haunting/exorcism tale (based on real life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who figured in incidents such as the Amityville haunting and the Enfield poltergeist) to pleasantly above average, and well into decent date movie realm. Hands *will* be clutched. EDIT: Surprise! Found out afterwards it's directed by James Wan, who was involved with Saw and, notably, Insidious, a particular favorite of mine, and another movie that in the wrong hands (IE most commercial horror directors) easily could have been hopelessly mediocre, but fortunately for horror audiences ended up in the right ones. The Conjuring doesn't quite rise to Insidious's level of ingenuity with notably well-done scenes offering genuine scares, but it makes sense that it's from the same director. Guy evidently knows how to direct a ghost story.
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Columbo [tv series]

Columbo [tv series]

Yep, I got sucked into watching all 16 seasons of this. Kind of a misnomer, though, as—I never knew this—"Columbo"wasn't a TV series, but a series of TV movies shown in occasional rotation with a few other ongoing detective movie series, and so never had full"seasons". I totally get why this was a fan favorite in the day. Aside from the very likable lead performance, it broke a lot of conventions—it rarely if ever showed violence, had no chase scenes, there was never wisecracking partner or ongoing romantic interest, no procedural scenes inside the police station, or, in fact, regularly seen coworkers for Columbo of any sort, other than frequent appearances of his basset hound. Generally the character of Columbo didn't even appear until 20 minutes or so into the story, frumpily tying to solve a crime that the viewer had already fully seen committed and knew who the guilty party was. Peter Falk managed to imbue that character with a lot of affectations that might have been annoying in the hands of the wrong actor, and, in fact, is said to have so often improvised, such as suddenly shifting focus and fixating in the middle of dialogue on some inconsequential detail of the set, that the annoyance with him expressed by the suspects he was interrogating was often genuine on the part of the actors. I couldn't binge the whole thing, but I did like it enough to watch it all in about 3 mini-binges with breaks in between for other stuff. ("'Columbo'?", my sister asked me."I thought that was like 'Murder, She Wrote' or 'Matlock'."No, it's good!)
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Masters of Sci Fi (series)

Masters of Sci Fi (series)

Fairly unmemorable one-season anthology series, from the producers of"Masters of Horror", which follows the same format of letting prominent (in this case, less prominent) genre directors and writers an hour of TV time to do their thing. Talky mostly more about dialogue than action, which is actually how I tend to like my sci-fi, and by and large pretty well-done, although a day after bingeing it I find myself struggling to remember any of the plotlines. Notably good acting in the first episode, getting Judy Davis and Sam Waterston locked in a room together to act out a sci-fi drama was a good idea.
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Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention
Masters Of Horror (series)

Masters Of Horror (series)

Wow. Real honorable mention here. I found this one on Tubi, and for the most part, it's actual horror cinema, not the TV"horror"-in-quotes writing exemplified by campy shows like"American Horror Story"which use horror tropes with any edges safely blunted off to avoid upsetting anybody. Anthology series where acclaimed directors (Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, John Landis, John Carpenter) each directed a 1-hour horror film. As an anthology, the quality is up and down, but for the most part finds these directors in top form and, in the best episodes, not watering their fare down for TV... this is something fans of actual quality horror movies might actually enjoy. And, happily, it doesn't even lean very often into"horror comedy"or in-jokes, for the most part indulging in those only when it will actually work (I had a chuckle when John Landis's episode has a policeman, speculating a wild animal attack has improbably occurred in his town, mention a wolf attack reported in central London in 1981.) Director Takashi Miike's episode, while not among my favorites, was actually pulled from the original run of the series by Showtime over concerns about the content being too extreme (for cable in 2006!) and, true to form, Dario Argento's episode, characteristically both ridiculous and disturbing, had to be edited for violence in the original run, too. The second season isn't as good, it's more"tv horror", although it still has its moments, and is by and large still often better than most other TV horror. I was somewhat unnerved by the idea, if not entirely the execution, of Joe Dante's season 2"The Screwfly Solution", in which something similar to pest control biotech, designed to reduce insect populations by chemically interfering with mating urges, finds a much broader use. Tobe Hooper also is nice to see back in fine form in season 1, but I'm not going to say any more than that.
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Movie Reviews » Canadian
Knuckleball

Knuckleball

decent cinematography, especially shots making grate use of wintry rural Canadian farmland, is the sole redeeming feature of this unremarkable captivity/pursuit flick in which a young boy is sent by his gorgeous parents to spend the winter on an isolated farm with his grandfather, and things go wrong. Not terrible, it has some typical hallmarks of the many well-made little Canadian indie horror movies that I like so much, but in terms of the plot and whole idea that someone made this movie at all—aim higher, people. I guess there must still be an audience for this stuff, but I myself can't see why people even still make these movies.
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Rosemary’s Baby (2014)

Rosemary’s Baby (2014)

Completely needless miniseries remake of the Polanski's seminal horror film, padded out with slickly-executed but familiar horror movie tropes to fill two two-hour episodes. Someday you will be able to generate this by telling an AI,"Give me Rosemary's Baby, but in the style of The Omen, four hours long, and set in Paris."Good enough if you still for some reason want to watch it, but I don't see why you would. Maybe if you thought the original was good but needed a few more supernatural deaths or something. Well, at least they didn't try to remake"The Sentinel".
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A Star Is Born (Lady Gaga remix)

A Star Is Born (Lady Gaga remix)

A Bradley Cooper film. Those too young to remember"Love Story"might not be aware of the hallowed tradition of"blockbuster"contrived tearjerker love story crapola, but Cooper seems to specialize in them. This should be put in a double feature with"Silver Linings Playbook", and then both of them tied together and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Lady Gaga sings very well though. I actually am kind of a fan of Gaga, except for her awful music. She seems to have enormous talent and artistic integrity in most everything she does, except as a songwriter. I still would like to know how that powerful voice comes out of a 5'1"person.
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The Lair

The Lair

Gorgeous and/or tough-as-nails Army people in afghanistan shoot at each other until they accidentally discover stumble on genetically-bred sleestak in an old Russian bunker, then shoot guns at each other and sleestak for the rest of the movie. No, really, that's it.
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Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap
The Possession Of Michael King

The Possession Of Michael King

another very-slightly-better-than-average first person shooter. Widower bent on proving the supernatural doesn't exist invites in a demon to show that it doesn't work. Spoiler: turns out to be a mistake. Pretty intense performance by the lead actor showing his gradual decline into violent lunacy, but would have been better without the conceit. Don't we have enough of these movies already? The trick just isn't that good, especially by the time you realize a demon probably wouldn't have had such sustained interest in continuing to film himself, and from multiple angles, no less.
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Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention
Forbidden Planet

Forbidden Planet

Tubi very intelligently put this on on autoplay right after The Thing, and I'd somehow never seen it. Another movie that is very dated and of its time, but, I actually, watching it, assumed it must have from the early to mid '60s, not 1956. It's another one of those films that you kind of have to view through the lens of its era, but I can believe that if I had been a teenager in the 1950s and saw this when it came out, without having seen everything later that it shaped, I would have thought it was incredible. I remember not all that long ago, some kids raised on modern, studio-crafted pop saying they couldn't understand what was so great about the Beatles, and I couldn't help but think of that watching this. It certainly originated a lot of common tropes: first sci-fi film to feature faster-than-light travel, first one to use an electronic soundtrack, first one set entirely on an alien world, not to mention the use of vivid color photography years before the black-and-white era ended, and in terms of its production and many of the tropes it uses it's very easy to see the influence on later shows on up until"Star Trek"and beyond. It's hard to believe it preceded Star Trek by at least 10 years, in that sense it still seems ahead of its time.
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Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention
The Spore

The Spore

I liked this. A definite B-movie, an anthology-type flick about people trying to survive in a town where people''s bodies are being taken over and mutated by a fungal infection. If that premise sounds like anything you could ever enjoy watching, and you can tolerate some occasionally cheesy special effects, then this movie is probably closer to what you hope something like that would be than what something like that usually turns out to be. I thought it was fun, if a little viscerally gory. Fungus... I'm sure you can imagine. It was kinda fun though.
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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it
The Last Amityville Movie

The Last Amityville Movie

I call this the"Reuben Sandwich"of movies. I was at a deli once, and I looked at a Reuben Sandwich. It was corned beef, sauer kraut, russian dressing, and swiss cheese, on pumpernickel. I was like,"Oh my god, it's everything I hate in one sandwich. I must try this."And I liked it! This movie is like that. Found footage, perhaps the lowest budget movie I've ever seen—seriously I'd be surprised if they spent $150 on this, it seems like a guy shot out an email to a bunch of his friends saying,"You want to be in a movie? Here's your lines. You can do it from home, I'll just film us all on a zoom call", it's a"horror comedy"starring hipsters, no lighting design to speak of, features social media, looks like it was shot on a phone. Everything I hate in one movie! And you know what? I enjoyed it! It's sincere. It's like if"Paranormal Activity"wasn't so pretentious and had the good sense to just be a little silly and have some fun. Guy sits around the house, things go bump in the night, and the day. His friends explode during a zoom call. A ghost that looks like his wife in stage makeup makeup tries to lure him into a closet, which he deals with matter-of-factly:"I know you're not my wife, I just talked to her on the phone. And I wouldn't let my real wife lure me into a closet. Wait, yeah, I probably would. But that's besides the point."There's an unexplained monster. But, along the way, he has one good idea: what if there's a sinister reason why horror movies,"Amityville"in particular, spin off into endless ridiculous franchises? And: can he put a stop to it? I enjoyed this the way I'd enjoy a friend's jokey home movie if I was in on the joke. Don't expect any better than that, though.
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House of Screaming Glass

House of Screaming Glass

As tediously pretentious, and unqualified to be so, as it gets. A woman inherits a empty schoolhouse from a grandmother she's never met. She wanders around, giving a pretentious voiceover. She plays the"moonlight sonata"for five long minutes, and nothing else happens during that time, while an out-of-focus ghostly figure stands behind her. She wanders around the grounds. She hears a noise upstairs, grabs a knife, and takes, I shit you not, what feels like 5 minutes to ascend the stairs to the next floor. Hands reach out of the darkness and cover her mouth as she screams, then we suddenly cut to a camera pointed upwards towards the front facade of the building that slowly moves closer, then further away, then closer, then further away again, with the scene fading in and out and in again, over and over, because, it's artistic, I suppose, before we then see her again, digging through old trunks, apparently totally fine, no clue what the hands were. Over an hour into the movie, she intones the first line of actual dialogue: she flatly says,"I feel... I am not alone... in the house... and yet... I am.... alone... in the house..."and then stares for several minutes, occasionally taking a sip from a bottle in as close as this movie gets to excitement. Then we're treated to extreme close ups of her squeezing blood blisters and goo-covered skin growths. Eventually, a weird creature makes an appearance and gives her an orgasm, but by then it's much too late. Then, they cut to her staring at the camera with an intense expression on her face and tinkling random notes on the piano, for five minutes. Then another scene of her just staring for several minutes. Somebody should be punished for making this movie.
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Lake Artifact

Lake Artifact

You ever have that thing where you go to a remote cabin with a bunch of your friends, and wind up caught in a time loop movie? This is like that. You'd think by now filmmakers would have learned that you have to work really hard to do these kinds of stories in a way that keeps the narrative straight—to my knowledge, only"Triangle"has ever pulled it off—or at least be weird, cool, and cerebral enough, as the makers of"Primer"figured out, that nobody cares it's impossible to follow. If you can't go to one of those two paths, you're going to have a mess on your hands, all the more regrettable when for big parts of it it seems like you were almost going to pull it off."Triangle"was well-told enough that you could follow it."Primer"was interesting enough that you wanted to figure it out. This came close, but ultimately, was neither. It cuts back and forth between narratives, or between timelines, with no apparent connection or reason why. It shows things that look like they're going to be explained later, but they're never mentioned again. Weird photographs nobody can remember taking appear, which seem like you'll see them taken later on, but they never are. Plus, the story is repeatedly interspersed with interview segments that seem somehow related but it's never made clear how, or if it was, I missed it.
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Mirrors

Mirrors

Big-budget supernatural thriller. Kiefer Sutherland and essentially a glorified cameo from Amy Smart. It's hard to go wrong with a supernatural thriller (I refuse to call this a horror movie; a little too much gunfire) about mirrors. Even the worst ones (Poltergeist 3) have their moments, because, mirrors are creepy. That shot of someone walking away from a mirror but their reflection staying there and gazing at them is always going to work. So, take that, and add Kiefer Sutherland as a gorgeous disgraced-cop-turned-night-security-guard-for-an-abandoned-department-store shooting his gun at a demon in the sewer, and some obligatory scenes of his gorgeous ex-wife and cute kids at home being creepily menaced by every reflective surface in the house, and, meh. Definitely will appeal to, I don't know, the kind of people who thought"Inception"was an intellectual movie. For me, faintly entertaining, since I had a good idea what I was getting into (Kiefer Sutherland is kind of a tipoff.) Y'know, Hollywood. It's not total crap like something you'd see John Cusack in, but not somehow cool, like a movie Lance Hendriksen would appear in, either.
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Alien v. Predator

Alien v. Predator

Dude. It's Alien versus Predator. You know what it's going to be. It's cool, on the higher end of the expected, predictable range of possibilities. Note: Lance Hendriksen is not the last to die in this, proving that it is not a horror movie.
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Movie Reviews » Trash
The Devil’s Work

The Devil’s Work

A couple is in a house and the woman's sister shows up soaked in blood and carrying a hammer, and walks around outside the house looking creepy. There might be more, but 50 minutes into it that's all that had happened so far, and I got bored and turned it off.
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Movie Reviews » Canadian
Deadbolt

Deadbolt

alright indie thriller. Young woman escaping a bad relationship moves into a supposedly haunted house in a bad neighborhood with an overly clingy roommate, and things get weird. Could have been terrible but a couple of above-average performances put it just a touch above complete mediocrity. Canadian, not so Canadian (in the usual good way) that I'd have guessed, but it does make sense. Kind of succeeds by not overreaching for more than it can accomplish, sometimes you have to admire something just for managing not to be bad, which this does manage. Better writing would have helped even more.
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Invasive (2024)

Invasive (2024)

Squatters take a job with a catering company so they can scope out millionnaires' homes to squat in while they're away. This time, the millionnaire comes home early and finds them there. Guess which one is the real bad guy? What should have been a thoroughly mediocre exercise, with a distinctly familiar overall captivity/pursuit storyline, is redeemed by a few things: the pacing is well done and very slowly ratchets up the intensity at a consistent pace without it ever being noticeable, and the actors are decent, especially the guy playing the villain, who just plain chews the scenery—he's a real movie baddie, and plays it to the hilt, all leering and supremely overconfident douchebaggery. I, uh, I kinda liked it.
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Cause Of My Death

Cause Of My Death

a landmark film in that takes every poor convention of"found footage"films —truly lousy improv"acting", 25 minutes of plotless footage showing nothing but two intensely boring people going about their day, digital effects we've seen a million times before (a guy is"scary"because one eye suddenly rolls up separately from the other, a woman has some sort of bug zipping around under her skin), cameras running in scenes when nobody would ever bother filming, like when they're running from a demon, but somehow not capturing when characters are unconscious or have memory lapses, and of course stilted justifications for"always filming"—and somehow manages to make them worse than ever before: includes dream sequences and apparent flashbacks somehow captured by the camera, senseless nonlinear narrative and jump cuts between scenes with no explanation or reason. It seems like"found footage"has finally just gone from"here's an idea where this filmed evidence gets left over"to nothing more than"We don't want to pay a cameraman for our lousy movie, we'll just have the actors hold the camera."
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Digging To Death

Digging To Death

This is one of those movies I wouldn't recommend to anyone else, but I found it kind of entertaining. Bachelor buys a new house, and digging a hole for a septic tank, he finds a box with two million dollars in cash and a dead body in it. He slowly goes insane, and the body may or may not be climbing out of the box to terrorize him. This is one of those movies that benefits by not aiming that high, and while the story is no great shakes and enough of the acting is wooden that it is never going to be confused for a good movie, it does a couple of things right: casting an anonymous everyman who manages to slowly ratchet up the insanity without there being any one point where it goes too far too fast, and, while most movies break the spell when they show something like an old man in clear corpse makeup, this one actually pulls it off but finding some actor, I don't know who this guy is, but who just manages to put in a creepy enough performance that they can show him in broad daylight and it's just a little bit creepy instead of 100% silly. I wouldn't go out of my way to see this, but it was actually kind of fun.
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