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Psycho hillbilly farm family pursues, tortures, and kills their city-slicker guests in extremely graphically gory ways. George Romero's son obviously learned a few things from his father, and this movie is alright for what it is—although editing is not among them, the editing is notably terrible in places.
But Texas Chainsaw Massacre pretty much obviated the need for anyone to make this movie, 50 years ago. This doesn't succeed in any way that that movie didn't, and doesn't in some ways that it did.
Native American horror flick about a house party in a house built on top of a burial ground, which ends up stalked by vengeful Native American spirits or somesuch because of a magic ring or something. Bit of a mess, skips around a lot stylistically... lots of woo-woo, suddenly people giving the standard lecture about the curse of a humbled "once-proud people", then weird scenes of torture porn of someone in a mask torturing captive topless women for reasons I'm not clear on, then shifts to a neo-noir crime thriller vibe with the heroine going after the guy who gave the "once-proud people" speech earlier with a gun. Michael Madsen as the speech-giving villain, which nowadays tells you something, plus he plays a Native American in this, which is just kinda weird. Cool vintage-type analog synth score at points, though.
A bad actor from Los Angeles inherits an island in Washington, with the restriction that he must operate a horse riding camp on it. There he and the other bad actors who work there dodge an irrelevant subplot about developers conniving to sell the land, and discover a subterranean bunker infested with some sort of unseen zombie virus bullshit that causes any ostensible movie it's in to turn into a badly-lit version of the video game "Doom".
Promising but ultimately disappointing thriller on the "pursuit" end of the captivity/pursuit flick spectrum. Annoying mountaineer drags a woman he just met onto a grueling hike up Mr Whitney, where they are menaced by southern-accented mountain men who seem to be able to hike faster than them and appear wherever they are despite having no visible camp, climbing equipment, food, water, or snow gear. Reasonably scary villains and a likeable heroine sustain it for a while even through the leading man's endless lecturing about how to hike and that what is essentially mountaineering, not hiking, isn't too bad, but it just declines, turns into a cliche'd captivity/pursuit flick and runs out of any ideas at all maybe 2/3 of the way through before finally descending into total cliche.
Why didn't she just stay off the trail and go down the mountain?
Surprisingly decent zero-budget indie drama that starts like it's going to be a crap thriller but slowly and smoothly transitions to something quieter and more thoughtful. Three friends' relationships with each other and their respective loved ones fall apart after someone dumps a body in their car's trunk while camped in the backcountry and they decide they can't call the police because the car's owner is an ex-con.
It's a small, relatively quiet movie, and it does have a glaring logical flaw and admittedly tough suspensions of disbelieve (how long can you keep a body around in Los Angeles without anybody noticing a smell?), but, it's a hair different, not really something I've seen before, and though some of the acting is bad it's a serious effort that doesn't reach for more than it can accomplish and only seems to get stronger as it goes on, which is a…
Five kids run out of gas in a snorwstorm and take shelter in an empty building, and things fall apart after one turns up dead. Thriller plays like a horror movie before veering off into a procedural; an unfortunate move, because it was a mediocre horror movie, and then a passable thriller, but the break in momentum in what had been a horror movie with much too long of forward-flashing from the action in the school to police interviews with the survivors kills it. Eventually it gets interesting as what actually happens is revealed, but halfway through the third act is way too late for a movie to start to get interesting.
If I tell you five college students shelter from a hurricane in an abandoned junkyard and are hunted down by the most thinly-drawn villain in all of horror movie history in an incredibly slow-moving captivity flick, it would be true, but unfortunately, it makes this terribly-written mess of a movie sound much more interesting than it is.
Aside from spending an entire hour going absolutely nowhere, this schizophrenic film can't decide what it wants to be... it starts as a first-person shooter, becomes an ordinary horror movie, interspersed with a procedural as later media interviews about the crime are randomly cut in, then tries to morph into a neo-noir crime thriller of some sort, as late in the movie some sort of plot twist involving some sort of dark web media show or some fucking thing is suddenly introduced in a tedious expository scene of two new characters people…
An alright thriller. A gorgeous couple leaves the city to await the destruction of the earth by an asteroid in a remote Tennessee backwoods campsite. Things get complicated as other gorgeous refugees start to show up.
Gorgeous couple wanders through an apocalyptic landscape full of viral outbreak zombies, encountering other gorgeous survivors of questionable intentions in, essentially, a "Walking Dead" episode. Lead actress Jamie Bernadette, who pops up in these kinds of things, put in a pretty strong performance though, lots of range. Vaguely watchable, although I can't say much more than that about it. Watch for cameos from Dominique Swain and weird scream queen Maria Olsen.
In one of a million movies named "Prey", a young man on a survival retreat on a deserted island funs afoul of mysterious georgeous women apparently living there nad some sort of supernatural beast. Kristine Froseth, if it matters.
Kids get lost in the Alaskan woods looking for a pot patch and run afoul of... a Native American psychopath? A Native American spirit? Unsure, but it's Native American, and in a way that's mildly racist, or at least orientalist... there's really nothing to the Native American element except in-scare-quotes-"exoticism".
Plus, plot holes galore. Things come and go, like a mute character that joins the movie for a few minutes, that are just never explained, people are apparently gravely injured multiple times yet keep on keeping on, and even the fate of some of the main characters isn't clear. The antagonist appears to be some sort of spirit originally, appearing to fade in and out, but later stops doing that and is apparently just a crazy guy (with a *lot* of bodies laying around his campsite.)
That's the bad. And all in all, make no mistake: I don't…
Caught this on Tubi about 40 years after having last seen it in the theaters and not remembering a thing about it (In fact, I'm not even sure I saw it in the theaters... I believe I did.) I expected it to be a much-too-1980s corndog, and it was; however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that as the film went on, they put some effort into some odd aspects of it here and there, and in the middle of all the cheese there are a couple of passing images or short scenes that are surprisingly effective.
It reminds me, in a way, of how Tobe Hooper would occasionally take on cheesy projects (Think "Mars Attacks") but, then, because he's Tobe Hooper, would occasionally inject genuinely scary moments in them when you didn't expect them. This was a bit like that.
This movie starts with a man slumped at the front gate of a cabin. An older man stands in front of him, watching him impassively, as he pleads, "I didn't mean to break the rules." The older man calmly grabs his head, and, with one hand, pulls it off his shoulders.
So that's where we're at.
Sometimes you see a movie that is so low-budget, so obviously just someone had a camera and decided to try to throw a movie together, that somehow, improbably, it has enough heart to actually watch.
This movie is sub-bottom-of-the-barrel. According to the credits, it was written, directed, edited, and everything else by one guy. It stars like 4 people, has virtually no special effects, the acting is "local theater" quality at best, if these people are even actually actors.
The plot is, father and son go on a hunting retreat to a…
The lame, derivative captivity flick id Rob Zombie's debut feature, and the only things worse than a piece of garbage: a piece of garbage that tries to make up for being a piece of garbage by being highly stylized garbage. Needles video effects, split screens like it's a music video, etc. Plus "artsy" effects like weird interstitials of characters, some of whom otherwise aren't even in the movie, overacting and doing "scary" improv, preaching about the end of the world or talking about killing people for sport, all sorts of hammy horseshit designed to compensate for really not knowing how to make a movie. It's all style, no substance, and the style really isn't very good. Like, when the heroine finds the operating theater and discovers her boyfriend being lobotomized by a corpselike surgeon in an exoskeleton, a good director wouldn't really need to shift to solarized video to underscore…
Talk about a disappointing swing and a miss. This 2/3-interesting... family drama? Sci-fi thriller? I'm not sure... about a young couple whose son is murdered, and then see a chance for redemption when he can be cloned, works well for the first two acts, when it suddenly becomes as confusing as "Primer". Too many skips back and forth in time, zero clarity about who got cloned and when, things talked about in the past earlier in the movie and then first happening later on... it turns from a mildly engrossing, passable watch into a confusing mess late enough in the game to be a disappointment.
A young Liana Liberato punches way above her weight in a heavy but decent family drama about the emotional fallout on her family from her abuse by a predator. Probably better than just watchable if you like that sort of thing.
Captivity flick. A couple camping at remote campsite in the Australian woods are unexpectedly joined by a van full of fairly typical Australian women and have what I imagine to be a fairly ordinary Australian weekend camping experience.
One of those movies where a non-"blockbuster" movies manages to get a bunch of big stars—Emma Watson, Glenne Headley, Tom Hanks, Fielding Mellish, er, Patton Oswalt, Karen Gillan—and it really doesn't help, because they're too busy being recognizable-actors-acting-recognizably to actually sell it, and this movie isn't really a "star-studded vehicle" sort of movie.
It's ambitious, in a hamfisted way. Emma Watson, doing a pretty passable American accent, gets a job at a company that appears to be the Ur-Tech-Company: social media company, hardware company, lifestyle brand, this company appears to be everything, run by Tom Hanks playing the second coming of Steve Jobs and Fielding Mellish, er, Patton Oswalt as his creepily disingenuous second-in-command. The movie traces the development of their rationalizations for gradually stripping away all privacy from all people, with results that don't really surprise very much as the movie goes on.
Anne Hathaway in a middle-of-the-road lost-twentysomething-returns-to-her-hometown-to-find-herself-and-gets-involved-with-old-friends-but-things-are-different-picture, except, this hometown happens to have a magic playground where anybody who is in it at a certain time of day has a gigantic monster appear in Seoul, Korea that duplicates whatever motions they make.
Strictly sub-"USA Up All Nite"-quality garbage splatstick "horror comedy" garbage about an assortment of cardboard-cutout cliche characters stuck in a cabin while an amoeba from space infects people outside, turning them into zombies. Includes such low-lights as a zombie tearing a man's head evenly in two halves, or punching straight through a woman's head, leaving her staggering around with a giant hole that you can see all the way through where her face should be. Imagine a film that aspires to be Peter Jackson's worst early movies, and fails even at that. Avoid.
This is a flawed but not bad movie. What starts seeming like a horror movie becomes more of a small-scale postapocalyptic, but not at all scary or supernatural, survival drama.
Residents of a small town find themselves unable to sleep. Slowly people start acting erratically and gradually Things Fall Apart.
So far, so good. But halfway through it switches gears from a horror flick to an ecological message story, as it turns out the local tapwater has become contaminated with methamphetamine, and soon all the bottled water has run out, and people look for where they can congregate where there may be some clean water, leading to struggles.
Despite the weird change halfway through, it's not bad. It's anchored by a couple of alright performances. If it had been consistent in terms of theme and mood, it might have qualified as something even a little memorable. Still, either way, not…
This is a fun movie, in its way. I actually watched it twice because I forgot to review it the first time, but once I realized I recognized it, I kept watching it anyway because I recally kind of liking it, and I kind of liked it again.
An annoying millenial podcaster gets an offer of $25,000 to come interview a charismatically crotchety, dour old farmer, in memory of his late wife, who was a fan. The farmer says a huge many-eyed monster lives in the woods behind his house, and turns out to be wildly paranoid, and has loaded up his property with security cameras and mechanical death traps.
And, refreshingly, it's mostly a character study. This is a horror movie, sure enough, but a whole lot of it is two guys talking—or, more often, the podcaster trying to get an interview, and the farmer telling him he wishes…
Bottom-of-the-barrel mockumentary about people who have been driven insane after disappearing in the woods for a while. I'd say the acting is the worst acting I've ever seen but that makes it sounds like there's acting, which is giving it too much credit. The whole movie seems to be non-actors reading lines off cue cards, filmed on a home VHS camera.
Surprisingly alright creature feature. A young man finds an insect-like creature that bonds with him and begins killing people that stand in his way. I know, that doesn't sound very promising, and I didn't expect anything from it. But it was much better than that setup sounds.
It doesn't spend a lot of time on the creature, it's more character-focused and revolves less around scares or violence than around drama and the effects of the victims' disappearances on him, his friends, and the small community. It's far from great, but it's definitely much better than I expected, and stands up pretty well as a movie.
Middling horror thriller about a band of rock & rollers taking a canoe trip and dropping acid in the woods when they think they spot something following them through the woods. Starts out ok, with a decent slow burn, alright acting and cinematography, and decent barely-seen creature effects all the way through, but unfortunately very little being explained before what feels like an attempt at a twist ending, but doesn't even come close enough to be clearly that, makes the whole thing feel pointless.
Decently ok Kiwi horror film about a neurotic hiker who falls in with a bunch of other hikers in the remove wilderness and starts making everybody crazy with paranoia about them being followed by a dark shape, accusing other hikers of being killers, clumsily losing people's flashlights, and generally being a good bit past annoying and ruining everybody's trip.
It was entertaining, I found it fairly watchable despite mostly annoying characters and ultimately kinda of a silly third act. It's a little bit different.
Extremely decent zombie movie, the way they should be done. An American mercenary survives the crash of the last place out of Africa, and must walk across the zombie-infested savannah to safety.
One of the most realistic zombie movies I've ever seen. Almost no dialogue. A little action but not much. Just a soldier, and for a little while a companion he meets, mostly just walking or camping, surviving and outsmarting the roaming zombies as they need to. And, turns you, in a zombie movie, you don't actually need much more than that. No attempts at humor. No attempts to be clever or cool. Just a solid, down-to-earth survival movie, that happens to be set in a zombie acopalypse.
I liked it. I imagine I'll watch this again in the future.
Putting this here so I remember to watch this one again. This came on via autoplay when something I was watching on Tubi ended and I was so distracted by my laptop I didn't notice it until it was halfway through, so I never caught the plot. But visually it's a low-budget but seriously beautiful, dark, dingy black and white. Something about people underground in some sort of dystopia. But, really visually cool, I found it really unique looking all the way through. I gotta go watch it for real.
A group of friends go out on a boat, wind up adrift, and random "scary" stuff happens which is never explained. Actually I kind of enjoyed it mildly, for a piece of trash. It held up tension kind of nicely. For a piece of trash.
Paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller about a group of friends who rent a secluded cabin and something seems to want them off the land. Weird people appear, voices, you know the drill.
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