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A writer, trying to cope with the death of her husband, rents a remote house, where she talks to herself for 90 minutes and slowly loses her marbles. This is punctuated frequently by unexplained cuts to her sitting on a stool on what appears to be a comedy nightclub stage, narrating what was going through her head. Unexplainied, mildly "spooky" things happen towards the end, like the lights going out or the doors locking themselves so she can't leave. And that's the whole movie.
A man holed up in a trailer in the woods, apparently trying to do some sort of alchemy that looks remarkably similar to cooking up meth, talks to himself for an hour and a half, and slowly loses his marbles. And that's it.
What we have here is basically two movies. For the first two-thirds, it's a narratively not particularly interesting but absolutely beautifully shot gothic piece about a murderous family of carnival performers traveling iin the 1930s. This film is gorgeous—every frame looks like an excellent cinematographer put thought into it and if it carried on all the way through to the end I would have liked it quite a bit just for that. I mean, it's seriously beautiful, enough to carry it.
It has some strange stylistic touches, such as carnival freaks in the 1930s who are obviously influenced by having seen Marilyn Manson at some point. I'm pretty sure they didn't have goths yet them. Nonetheless, it held my interest and stood above the pack just for being so cinematically beautiful to watch. It had a dreamlike quality, but wasn't pretentious enough to qualify as an arthouse film. It's…
An unmistakably glam 1975 exploitation outing, like "Rocky Horror" trying to play it straight as a horror film, with none of the fun, ideas, or budget. A glam rocker, apparently played by Eric Burdon trying to play "Alex" from Clockwork Orange, goes on vacation to a mansion where they're performing experiments on humans. 100% exploitation garbage, if you're into that sort of thing.
Notable for being the oldest movie I've ever seen that opens with a "kill" scene (I always wondered when that idea began) and the fakest-looking.
Donald Pleasence is a mad scientist who eperiments on his students and then sells them to a freak show in this unapologetic '70s exploitation ripoff of "Freaks". If you're into the kind of bad movie Donald Pleasence might star in, and like the whole 1970sness of it, you might enjoy. Otherwise, avoid.
Two men ice fishing on a lake in the midwest pull up a huge fake rubber leech that attaches itself to bad actors' foreheads and causes them to stagger around like zombies and kill people.
So consistently terrible, cheap-looking, and over-the-top, yet so obviously committed to by some of Michigan's worst actors, that I bet it could be a cult favorite among "so bad it's good" fans.
Realtors or psychics or somebody lure people to a house so they can be harangued with bad special effects from people with rubbery "demon" appliances stuck to their faces. Bottom-rung garbage.
A bunch of gorgeous people wake up in a remote cabin in the middle of a barren wasteland and realize they have died. They're terrorized by numerous digital effects and black smoke entities as they fuck, fight, and try to figure out what's happening to them. At one point, they venture out only to discover that if they wander too far the wind up back at the cabin, and slowly, the walls close in.
And you know what? It's all a little too poorly thought out to be anything like a good movie, but I kind of liked it, vaguely. It was obviously the product of a consistent, if bad, vision. It was relentlessly over-the-top in its reliance on special effects and overacting, plus, at least the plot is original enough not to be overly familiar. I kind of appreciated it on that level, even though it's ridiculous and just…
Actually not *that* bad for a captivity/pursuit flick. Eastern european woman in this country illegally with her daughter is given a job caring for a religious man in a remote rural community with no phone or cell phone reception. Add in an unfortunate, hamfisted attempt at satirizing nationalism, plus some touches of Tobe Hooper-style over-the-topness, and, eh, not bad for what it is. Still a pretty bad movie, but I liked it ok for what it was.
So, this is a little different for a teen scream... this uninteresting-sounding tale is about a meme email that spreads around and forces you to be killed by your deepest fear if you don't click the link (yes, it's another horror movie about the internet, usually a bad sign.) It starts weak, but ends up being just a slight cut above, just barely, due to good acting and unusual casting of actual realistically geeky characters as geeks, and then giving them respectable roles. Turns out it's a Canadian film, so, ok. It also had a lot of funny little snappy patter, it sounded like the way wiseass kids really talk. Pretty much bottom of the barrel for Canadian horror but still, that means a cut above bottom of the barrel compared to most. It's sort of slightly-better-than-total-crap in that "Final Destination", actually-kind-of-decent-teen-scream way, which works even better for me because…
Kind of like "Mean Girls" but as a monster movie. And Mean Girls was kinda good, and, this is kinda good.
Seriously, this is a funny one, because in some ways it's as dumb as a teen scream horror can get—picture Adam Brody, the world's least believable devil-worshipping bad guy, singing "867-5309" as he sacrifices someone to the devil, and you have a pretty good picture of where this goes in places. But, the thing is, it's really well-directed, and the cinematography is at times great... like when Anita (Amanda Seyfried) is having awkward teenage sex with her boyfriend at the same time as Jennifer (Megan Fox) is killing a boy in an abandoned house, Anita senses it through the apparent psychic rapport they share as old friends—which could be a horribly mishandled conceit, but fortunately it's so underplayed that it works—and she looks up to see a vision of…
In this absolute bottom-of-the-barrel waste of time, a puppet turkey that for some reason talks with a fake Brooklyn accent kills what I assume must be the director's friends and family, because they clearly aren't actors.
This is a little different. This is a terrible, half-baked movie for sure. More black comedy than horror, and completely amateurish at that. A pair of bumbling filmmakers decide to kidnap an unwitting actress because they want to make a fake snuff film but aren't convinced she can pull it off as an actress unless she really thinks she's being abducted and threatened. Needless to say, things don't go as expected.
There reason this isn't 100% complete garbage, though, is that the actress is so full of charisma and so much fun to watch that she basically carries the movie. The filmmakers are bumbling enough to be amiable, too, but Bree Williamson as the actress really chews the scenery as entertainingly as possible all the way through it.
For that, I'm going to stick this under films that have a certain "je nais se quois"... it's easily the…
Here we have something interesting. A horror "mockumentary" that's done so realistically I was unconvinced as to whether it was fake or not for much of the runtime. It's totally fiction, but boy does it look like a real documentary. It's effectively creepy; but then, as things get debunked, reveals them straightforwardly, as a real documentary wood. The performances are 100% realistic.
The story is, an Australian family's daughter drowns, and they believe they are beginning to see her ghost around the house. A medium gets involved, it goes through the kind of complex twists and turns any interesting real life documentary involving a true crime might go through, and it once never gets far enough from believable to break the spell. It's extremely sparing about creepy stuff so when it arrives, it's effective. The photo & video "evidence" for the haunting is sufficiently understated to be legitimately spooky... not…
The kind of movie that you have wonder how it even got made.
Only "Schizopolis" ever got away with substituting mannered weirdness for meaning, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from trying. This muddled mess of characters with no motivation, depth, or even consistent personality traits features a woman trapped in a world that is changing for no reason ever given, with people behaving in bizarre ways, a wall growing over the horizon and slowly expanding to cover a sky that now, again for no reason ever explained (and which most characters change the subject whenever she points it out), has two moons. A war is declared for no reason, everyone under 32 must report for the draft, and there's hamfisted attempts at some sort of social commentay about blaming the poor for their poverty, or about war, or about news media being government propaganda, or some…
This is not a very good movie. A young girl, whose twin sister drowned while they were playing as a child and she hallucinated Udo Kier beckoning her towards a strange portal while her parents wailed, comes back as a young woman to party with her friends and visit the house. Halfway through, she switches to a fantasy world where she learns her sister may still be trapped, and encounters phantasmagorical visions of people she knows as she wanders a desert and tries to free her.
It's visually well-made, reminiscent of if Guillermo Del Toro tried to retell "Alice In Wonderland" as the sort of disturbingly off-kilter film Udo Kier might star in. It uses a very classic, '40s or '50s style orchestral score, and once it gets going—which takes a long time—there's a lot of really beautiful costumes, masked characters, etc. In fact, on that…
A bunch of women having a bachelorette party in a remote cabin when the fiancee and his friends, who appear to basically be Lynyrd Skynyrd, show up. One of the girls—the slutty one, of course, who bounds to first answer the unexpected knock at the cabin door by saying, "the sexy one never gets killed first"—agrees to take off hunting with them for a few hours in a move so stupid you want to shout at the screen, and once they've got her alone, they turn out not to be such nice guys. And in an admittedly neat twist, it turns on NOT to be a captivity pic with deranged country bumpkins menacing the women, but makes a nice pivot in a different direction. Think "30 Days Of Night", set in the south, and with Lynyrd Skynyrd instead of feral, animalistic…
This one was a pleasant surprise. A truly stupid setup: a strange wealthy family forces a bride-to-be, about to marry one of their sons, to play a game of hide-and-seek before the wedding, during which they try to kill her, because of some claptrap where a family curse says they have to. Ok, pretty stupid setup.
Well: turns out, if you can forgive the stupid story, for the millionth cinematic variation of "The Most Dangerous Game"... this is a pretty good movie, for what it is. Definitely a strong cut above what I expected it to be. The cast helps: Samara Weaving (in probably the best performance I've seen her give, by the end she's downright feral), Adam Brody, Andie MacDowall, Melanie Scrofano, plus a bunch of unfamiliar actors, all hamming it up enough to make the eccentric, homicidal rich characters entertaining without going so far over the top…
I threw this on to have some background noise while working—any horror movie about a ventriloqist dummy is almost certainly going to be a dud, it's too easy a macguffin—but I was quickly surprised to see the magic words in the credits: "Directed by James Wan". Wan has a real talent for horror direction. I'm not actually a big fan of "Saw", the movie that made him, and it wasn't until the one after this one, "Insidious", that he really won me over, but still, like all his movies, this one has its isolated moments, including an appropriately gory and basically totally unexpected denouement. Probably Wan's worst movie, not even really worth a re-watch except for the occasional odd Wan touches, which this movie probably has fewer of than any of his others, but, nonetheless, at this point I'm resigned to likely watch every one of his movies at some…
Tough-as-nails psychic ghost hunters are employed by the FBI to solve some fucking thing or other in this execrable procedural-disguised-as-a-horror-movie that waits until halfway through to start suddenly laying on a whole bunch of Jesus stuff. Thanks, not entertained. Turned it off.
Ambitious but ultimately unfulfilling sci-fi flavored flick both spends too long just being an ordinary captivity/pursuit flick and gets too baroque at the same time. A pair of scientists looking for a researcher's camp in the woods during a pandemic are attacked by unseen assailants, then rescued by a hermit who turns out to be trying to hold them prisoner at his camp to subject to some sort of magickal ritual. After much too long they escape, and find his ex-wife at her nearby camp, who is doing some sort of science experiments trying to communicate with some sort of forest entity through lights and sound. There's a psychedelic mushroom spore fog and attacks from the hermit, punctuated by a long montage of "Altered States"-style video effects before the whole thing abruptly ends. Meh.
Likeable enough, forgettable comedy, along the lines of past likeable-enough-but-forgettable comedies like"So Fine"or"Used Cars". Jason Bateman owns a flavoring extract company and is thinking of selling. Con artist Mila Kunis rolls through when his employee is injured on the job and stands to make a fortune in the lawsuit. Kristen Wiig is the wife sleeping with the pool boy. JK Simmons forgets people's names. David Koechner is the neighbor who collars him in his driveway every day when he comes home and can't read social cues that he's not liked.
The descriptive blurb they use,"A group of five college kids are forced to match wits with unwelcoming residents when they fly to a 'deserted' island for a party weekend"is accurate, but doesn't quite give away what the movie is actually about. Ok, this is TV-movie quality, but it's 1970s TV-movie quality, and while nothing spectacular, it's also nothing I've quite seen before, outside of those '70s"nature has it in for man"sci fi/horror flicks. To say more would spoil it. I thought it was fun. It's not a cheezy monster movie, but somehow it might do if you're in a cheesy monster movie mood. Apparently it scored a 15% on rotten tomatoes, which, ok, I mean, yeah, I get it, it's not by any means scary, and not even really very good by most movie standards. But come on, where's people's sense of fun?
Mishmash of ideas plays like an"Outer Limits"episode. Basically a guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster story. A train hosting a Halloween"murder mystery"party goes off the tracks, leaving the survivors to contend with, basically, the Creature From The Black Lagoon.
Poor-to-middling horror picture about a guy who picks up a case of never-quite-explained demonic, er, something from a one-night-stand that causes his body to decay and eventually leads hungry demons to him. Saved from complete and utter forgettability by, strangely, a kind of intense performance from Frankie Muniz in the lead, playing well upon the ordinary strangeness that is simply Frankie Muniz as an adult.
Antonio Banderas stars as an insurance investigator for a robotics company in a vaguely watchable post-"Blade Runner", post-"I, Robot"movie about domestic robots coming to life, or something. I didn't pay that much attention, but the cinematography was good and the robots were cool.
Absolutely horrifying true story, which I probably wouldn't have watched if I had known that, as at this point I don't think the true crime trend should be encouraged any more, it's getting exploitative. In the mid-60s, a single mother in Indiana took in a neighbor's daughters for a few months, then with the help of her kids and their friends imprisoned and tortured the older one to death. Considered one of the worst crimes in Indiana history. Most of the people involved either wound up in jail for a long time or came to a bad end at very young ages, it's a dreadful story all around, and although I suppose technically it's a good movie, done more as a biopic than as exploitation and starring Catherine Keener and E. Page, I can't honestly recommend it as entertainment.
A documentary about the"wow signal", a strong and unexplained radio signal picked up by SETI in 1977. I like this kind of stuff, so, worth watching. Pretty canny, features mostly actual scientists, and does offer natural explanations for the signal, plus goes a little bit into the infrastructure and personalities behind our big radio telescopes.
Somehow I'd never seen this all the way through until now. I see why it left an impression on kids of my generation. For anyone who slept through the 70s and 80s, Kurt Russell is airdropped into Manhattan, which has been converted into a walled prison island, to rescue the President, whose plane has crashed there, and must fight The Warriors to get out.
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