Archives: Movie Reviews

What a weird movie. Basically seems like a very long soap opera or TV episode with a lot of twists and turns, which is odd, since it's mostly just two guys talking, and sometimes fighting or chasing each other. Something very British, almost, about the way it's all talking and at least tries to get by on strong plotting and dialogue rather than action... not that it succeeds. Two friends go out for a night of ice fishing on a cabin on a Minnesota lake, and one or both of them have ulterior motives. An impressive number of plot twist for two guys stuck in a cabin, and especially since it keeps going when it should end, into a whole other part of the story. However, that's as much good as I'll say about it it: it's dreadfully overwrought, hammily-acted, with actually too many plot twists, and primarily impressive for just going way to far over the top in pretty much every way except entertainment value. Like I said: kind of like a soap opera. Shot on 30fps video instead of film, too, to add to that feeling.

Talk about a swing and a miss. Very strong performances fail to save a sci-fi flick that the director just wasn't up to handling the central relationship complexities and slightly twisty plot that he himself wrote. A couple is offered $50,000 to stay in a house for a month as part of an ostensible relationship study that turns out to be something darker. The palpable chemistry between the lead actors (the woman of whom was actually the writer/director's wife) gets this off to a very strong start, but the obviously contrived and sometimes difficult-to-follow way in which the"drama"develops breaks the spell and as the action gets harder to believe and the plot gets more confusing the film simply never recovers. Disappointing, it started out looking like it was really going to be good. Picture a"Black Mirror"episode directed by someone who just wasn't adept at handling plot twists.

Couple buys a new vacation house, and lots of stilted, boring dialogue and terrible acting happens,"creepy"characters show up and say"dramatic"and"spooky"things, as the man descends into the worst imitation of Jack Nicholson's performance in"The Shining"ever committed to 16mm film. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Stiff, wooden overacting, terrible writing, stilted and unbelievable dialogue, lighting that looks like a high school drama production, jumbled story that flips between time periods without every explaining what's going on... how do these movies get made? Did nobody anywhere in this production stop and say,"Wait a minute, this really sucks, we should fix this or maybe just not do it"?

Talk about disappointing. Started in the sort of quiet, unambitious, but tense way some of my favorite little indie horror films do—reminded me in a strange way of"Yellowbrickroad", a flawed masterpiece in my eyes that takes a lot of chances and ultimately comes down on the right side of them, especially in how it made good use of daylit woods for tension, increasingly rare to find these days as a wooded setting has become such an overused horror movie trope. But then, it descends into the a hackneyed use of just throwing together a bunch of nonsensical hallucinatory scenes of surreal, unexplained"scary"things happening, one after another, with no real explanation why, in lieu of a plot. By the time it was over I couldn't figure out what the story even was, besides"Woman gets a job as a park ranger in the backcountry, hallucinates a lot of weird stuff from her past, then is a park ranger again."Eventually I looked it up on wikipedia, which explained it, and actually the fundamental idea, like the quietly spooky first act, wasn't bad. But the execution was just disjointed.

In a stunningly original plot, vacationers at their cabin are menaced and killed one-by-one by the locals. Actually, for one of those movies, this was an entertaining one, for the non-stereotypical casting and a couple of actually original spins on it.

The unease of"Eraserhead"combined with the eerie farmhouse atmosphere of"Texas Chainsaw Massacre"without being as weird or memorable as either. Arthouse pretensions slightly detract from what is just derivative enough, and just original enough, that they people who made it probably were thinking about how it would have played in 1976, and it might have been a minor classic if it had been made back then, but it's not 1976 anymore, and they should have made something that was going to play well today in front of audiences who've seen a lot of variations at this point on what succeeded in 1976. Annoying couple camping on what turns out to be private land are told to leave, and wouldn't you know it, their battery is dead... but walking up the road, there's a farmhouse... and here, I know what you're thinking. No, picture less violence, more of a slow-burner. The pacing, which a lot of gore fans complained about in IMDB, is actually alright, I like a movie that doesn't show its cards all at once. But this isn't a slow-burner that eventually ignites like dynamite, more like a firecracker. It doesn't leave you with as much as it wants to.

What a weird movie. An English woman is trapped in her apartment by a demon from some sort of archaeological dig, menaced by floating knives and an eye peering in her vents. It's a really bad movie, uninteresting story and characters, ludicrous plot and unbelievable"scares", but, it's shot really well, and individual scenes, though ridiculous, are somehow really well done, and some of them are individually creepy.

A dreadfully BBC-esque supernatural drama. Filmed on videotape for good measure. The blurb said"Peril awaits a group of six friends as they enter an abandoned theater in the woods, where they encounter a devil and a beast."Nor horror, not terror... peril. That's about the size of it. Having watched half of it before turning it off, I can confirm, yes, they're in peril. Quite so.

Not bad for a soooort of rural-vacation-goes-wrong captivity/pursuit flick. Londoners rent a boat for an evening trip, get lost out in the reeds where some creepy, menacing local kids are partying. Not the best-told story, for sure, kind of a sloppy hand with introducing the more supernatural-ish elements. Was alright stylistically alright, I suppose, for what it is, in that it was a bit restrained.

Ok, with that title, I had some idea what I was getting into. Weirdly slow-moving adult-xxx-film quality starring, apparently, washed-up adult film stars. These aren't even actors, at first I thought the guy just got a bunch of his friends to be in it. Written, directed, and produced by one guy, starring his wife. Plus lots of weird long sequences of people just looking at each other. This is what you get when you cut the sex out of porn and replace it with sci-fi and aliens eating people's brains. I mean it! It's a porn. But with sci-fi instead of sex. Which, you know, I don't like the whole"so bad it's good"thing, but, boy, in this case, they really committed to doing what they were going to do. One of the lowest-rated films I've seen on IMDB, 1.6 out of 10 with over 130 ratings, and that is exactly right. In an abstract way, I admire it. Er, perhaps that's putting it strongly. I find its existence amusing. (EDIT: No doubt about it, these actually are porn actors, the lead actress once won an AVN award.)

Perfectly passable"When A Stranger Calls"-style thriller about a phone helpline worker terrorized by a stalker known for attacking pregnant women in their homes. Pleasant for having a much stronger-than-usual heroine.

Cillian Murphy stars in the sort of movie Cillian Murphy stars in, this time in which a couple living in a cottage on a remote British island lose radio contact with the outside world, when a solitary soldier shows up claiming to be the only survivor of a deadly worldwide pandemic.

Kind of a decent b-grade medical/sci-fi thriller. A pre-"Schitt's Creek"Emily Hampshire (who knew she'd been in movies since she was a kid?) plays a doctor whose husband is one of"the returned", people saved from a deadly zombie virus by a course of medication which is now getting scarce. Played fairly realistically, more for drama than shock, it was slightly better than I expected.

I sort of liked this movie. The last sane people are holed up in a warehouse while the Infected—we don't even need them to be zombies anymore, in fact in this case it's a chemical spill, although that's added as an irrelevant afterthought—wander the countryside randomly attacking anyone they find, and of course trying to get in. And that's really it. Doesn't bother much with plot, there's a little tiny bit of backstory, mostly just people looking intense and trying to survive. (And if it sounds a little familiar, yes, there's one shot that's clearly a tribute to"Dawn Of The Dead".) But, it does the most important thing a movie like this can do: it didn't suck. So, when you've seen every post-zombie-apocalypse movie, and want to find one that doesn't suck, this fits the bill adequately.

An impossible-to-understand movie, basically The Shining set in a small cabin, as a writer, his wife, and young son move to a cabin and their relationship falls apart and inexplicable things seem to happen, except, without making any narrative sense. The writer maybe kills a guy. The wife decides to cut the son's tongue out for no clear reason. People approach the writer like they know him. However, the cinematography is consistently gorgeous enough that it kept me engaged.

as"survivors trying to escape the Infected roaming the countryside"movies go, this one isn't bad. Brother and sister in the woods in England come across a crusty old farmer who lets them stay at his place when she is injured by one of the traps he set around the woods.

Dawn Of The Dead. But in the woods instead of a mall. Because, cheaper, I guess. Also, with worse acting. Plus a weird international mish-mosh of accents including, grotesquely, what seems to be an Englishman trying to affect the accent of a southern redneck soldier in the English woods for some reason. Also the zombie actors appear to have been told to do some sort of jig as they run.

They did it to me again! By halfway through, I was waiting for it to end so I could write the review"Four words: creepy rural German grandparents."But then, in act III, it changed completely. Into a wholly forgettable supernatural thriller. Ah, well. The best laid plans, etc.

In a world ravaged by a deadly pandemic, on a remote ranch, actors shoot guns at each other.

Kind a a cute low-key indie thriller. Strictly amateurish but the cast is kind of fun. Woman moves into a house and the strange woman who owns it has fixations. Like, she always only wears yellow, for starters. But there's more... Also some interesting nu-R&B on the soundtrack in places. it's cute. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone else but I sort of liked it.

A mess that goes nowhere and then ends. A couple goes out the celebrate their engagement at his family's ski chalet. Soon friends turn up, and they warn about another friend who"has bugs in his operating system"having invited himself. Eventually that friend appears, dressed like a pimp and strapping heat, and turns out to be a bit of an ass but otherwise charming and charismatic. A weird groundskeeper one appears and turns out to have been staying there. Soon it turns out her illegitimate son with the the man's father is living there too, prowling around and somehow having gotten hold of the gun. Men from an ancient mining photograph appear on the grounds as handymen. An ancient tragedy in which orphans were left to die in a collapsing mine right under the house is mentioned; it turns out it's the anniversary if the tragedy, and then it's never mentioned again. There's some sort of hooey about psychic children and the illegitimate kid brother turns out to be one. The groundskeeper woman decides the fiancee woman is there to take her son away and goes after her with a pickaxe. For a little while it's as hammy and over-the-top as a Hammer horror film, which I assume is a good thing, but it soon abandons even that as quickly as it picked it up. The whole thing is simultaneously a plotless mess, but also, nothing really happens. It's like it was improvised or written in a game of Exquisite Corpse where every line was written by a different person who knew only the preceding line.

A bunch of intense people sit around in very dimly-lit rooms and have muffled conversations in front of a wide-angle lens that never stops moving. This movie is dark, as in, the most poorly lit—or poorly un-lit—movie I can recall seeing. One of the actors could have walked into the room while I was watching it, and I wouldn't have recognized them, because you can't see their faces. Amusingly, on IMDB, a bunch of the actors' profile photos are also too dark to see their faces, because, this is the only movie they've ever been in.

Following the same plot as a short in some recently-watched horror anthology (The Seven Darks, maybe?) a girl's body slowly begins to decay after a night of sex because, movie. Which, if you think about it, is not a lot to happen in an hour and 40 minutes, but that's really all there is, she hangs around her apartment and decays. Also every half hour or so the guy drops in for more sex. Looking every bit like a student film with artistic aspirations, right down to seeming to have been shot on 8mm, frequently out-of-focus, the occasional interludes of a minute or two of nothing but noise and jumpy processed film effects, and the skirling, droning viola soundtrack, it seems at first like, even despite the home movie production values, it might succeed as a Cronenberg-type body horror flick. But then the leaden pacing kills it. Actually, calling it"pacing"at all makes it sound too lively. They take up what must be like 4 minutes of this film with a single shot of a man's face as he gets oral sex, followed by another about 4 minutes of her doing nothing laying on the floor appearing to regret it.This should have been a short film, like... oh, yeah, the short film I first saw this story in. The fx makeup is really good though. She really looks like a well-done steak by the end. The funny thing is, I knd of like that this film exists, even though I didn't enjoy it and wouldn't watch it again. Something about the idea that someone made a movie that is nothing but 100 minute movie of someone turning to jelly is kind of interesting. I bet someone out there somewhere loves this movie.