Archives: Movie Reviews

Scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel here. The most amateurish, dreadful slasher movie I've ever seen, with the stupidest killer name,"Crinoline Head". Kids go explore the home of a famous killer, who of course is still there. They spend like an hour kibbitzing and talking about sex before the killer offs them in the stupidest way possible, such as one woman asks the groundskeeper if she can use her restroom, so the groundskeeper tells her to go squat in the woods and accuses her of not being able to, so the woman storms off bragging about how good at squatting she is, then doesn't notice the killer is hiding on the same side of tree that she approached from and sticks out his arm with his knick pointing up near the ground for her to aggressively squat on to show how great she is at it. One of the stupidest, most contrived, poorly-acted, poorly-written films I've ever seen.

Tubi followed Foreclosure (2022) with this terrible 2014 movie of the same name. Michael Imperioli, his son, and his racist dad move into a house where a young Black man was once lynched, lose their minds, start seeing actors on old-tymey costumes and pancake makeup around the house while the ghost of the lynched man looks on. Some of the shakiest, most amateur hand-held camerawork I've seen. Imperioli has been in Goodfellas and The Sopranos. How did he let himself get involved with this?

Having seen the execrable sequel, I let morbid curiosity goas me into watching this. A gorgeous couple moves into a house hoping to see a ghost, and nothing happens, unless you consider wooden acting to be something.

The worst-acted movie I've ever seen. A writer moves into a house and becomes obsessed with a ghost, showing up in a cinematic experience with apparently no lighting, the least-competent handheld camerawork I've ever seen, and a single special effect which consists of lighting rooms with a red lightbulb. What was this the sequel to?

Painfully shy man joins a support group, so they drug him and put a gummy worm in his ear that cures his shyness by turning him into a psychotic killer. Forgettable.

Spanish film in which an incredibly gorgeous woman gets trapped inside a haunted cabin and slowly goes insane while she experiences literally every"haunted house"horror trope ever, plus the Gorn from Star Trek. Plus lots of scenes in fast motion, which, ok, that's new, I've never seen fast motion supposed to be"scary"before.

What a weird movie. By about halfway through, I just was waiting for it to be over so I could write the review"Insufferable YouTube girl buys a cabin to livestream her life from, and some bullshit happens."But then in the third act, it suddenly flip-flops and gets good, suddenly it has real plotting and twists and turns into a real horror movie. It's like the best save I've ever seen. The awful first two acts are bad enough that it's still unwatchable, but, given that I sat through that, I'm glad it kind of redeemed itself a little bit.

one of those movies half the world disappears in the Rapture and the survivors deal with monsters and hail the size of footballs. Not terrible for one of those, I guess. Did have vaguely some cool effects, monsters snatching people up off the street and stuff.

I'll at least give this clearly allegorical film something for ambition, and being somewhat more original than expected. The most unbearable Brooklyn liberal couple since that Sunita Mani pic about the puffballs from space go for a retreat in a cabin and wind up facing a series of surreal ordeals in the woods. Lots of pontificating about gender roles, masculinity and being a"good man", and some sort of take on religion that I didn't quite get ensured that by the time it was halfway over I'd become too disinterested to follow the plot, though. Actually in an odd way reminded me of"YellowBrickRoad"in terms of surrealist sylvan horror, but with hipster exploration of social roles and obvious (if not quite clear) allegory in place of the prior film's slow-burn raw Lovecraftian horror. This movie desperately wants to have something to say; whether it actually does or not will have to be left up to someone who finds it interesting enough to pay attention to all the way through.

A home-movie-quality film about a group of students stuck in their dorm during the pandemic discover that the pandemic was just a ploy to keep people at home while the government tested 5G cell technology, which is a plot to absorb humanity into a"5-Dimensional Internet"by turning them into rubber-faced ghouls with glowing eyes. I'm not kidding. Actually contains the line,"No, you don't understand. I *am* the internet now."If I was 9 years old, I probably would have thought this was an incredibly cool movie. (Which makes me worried if I ever stumble across"Psychomania"again as an adult. I thought that movie was a little too cool as a kid.) Make of that what you will.

Basically"The Blob"set in space or"Alien"without HR Giger's influence, but, really, surprisingly for a big-name Hollywood movie (Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds), really not bad for a space monster movie. If"not bad for a space monster movie"sounds appealing to you, and you're able to constrain your expectations to that, worth a watch. I liked it ok, which is more than I expected.

I had a very hard time following this, but in terms of style, I liked it. Gruff men wander around an apocalyptic urban landscape occasionally towered over by huge arachnoid creatures in the mist, and speak gruffly to each other. Occasionally someone attacks each other or shoots a gun. Not really sure what it was about besides that, but the atmosphere was cool.

In this TV-moviest of TV movies, a young woman discovers she looks exactly like the age-progressed adult version of a missing child on a milk carton. Lots of people running after each other ensues.

Supernatural thriller with 90 minutes of Genevieve Hannelius as the girl next door who moves into a creepy long-abandoned house with her creepy new adoptive dad, and a really good like last 5 minutes, which all together still isn't really enough to redeem it.

woman gets bitten by a strange bug on vacation, holes up in her apartment and slowly devolves into a monster. Now, picture the movie you're imagining from that description, and then, make it cornier and less believable.

I sincerely hope time loop movies don't become a sub-genre. The idea is interesting enough to support maybe 2 or 3 movies, of which 1 or maybe 2 are actually good. And those 1 or maybe 2 have already been made (they're"Triangle"and maybe"Primer", -not even sure on the latter, because it's so confusing nobody has ever figured out if it's actually a good movie or not.) This one is a better-told story than"Lake Artifact", for sure, but that's a pretty low bar to clear, and the fact that the more movies on this theme get made the sloppier and less original they seem to be getting makes me worry it's going to be done to death á la"found footage". Extra poor marks in this for making the characters-there's only two characters in this movie-the sort of bickering, instantly unlikeable couple that some filmmakers, who I assume are themselves in long-term relationships that are less than perfect, seem to think are fascinating to watch carp endlessly at each other, when really they're just tedious and annoying. I wouldn't want to be stuck in a time loop with these people, either, I was tired of them after about 5 minutes. And especially low marks for transparently using the time loop and its variations as a heavy-handed metaphor for the facets of a codependent relationship. Great, director, I'm glad you worked out your relationship issues with 90 minutes of my time. Plus some ideas where just taken directly from"Triangle"(Oh, wait, sorry, here it's earbuds. In"Triangle"it was a necklace, that's a *totally* different idea.) There's a couple of cool scenes and neat ideas here and there, sure, but nothing that wasn't explored much better in, once again,"Triangle", and that film had great plotting, whereas here, a lot of the characters' behavior seems to stem less from any kind of understandable motivation or logic than from the writer saying,"Wouldn't it be cool if they did this?"Like, is there some rule about being in a time loop that says you have to start killing your other selves? Why? Towards the end, a reason does eventually emerge-and to be honest it's a pretty good one, it was the only thing I liked about this movie-but it still doesn't explain at all why they started killing their alternate-timeline selves almost immediately. Strangely, actually, the end of the movie is actually pretty good... in an unusual turn of events, the end kind of redeems an otherwise totally unenjoyable and derivative movie. It's too bad they waited that long, though. The first 2/3 of it is so tedious and predictable that long before it ever got to the belatedly enjoyable denouement, I had already just become annoyed and impatient for it to be over. I actually did like the end enough that I thought for a minute I might eventually watch this movie again-they really pulled off a hail mary pass with the third act-but the truth is, two totally unrelatable, unlikable people bickering at each other just isn't interesting to me, even when you use a time-travel metaphor to make the point"relationships are complicated". The admittedly cool payoff just isn't worth sitting through an hour and fifteen minutes of that again. I checked out the original short,"The Pond". It tells essentially the same story, including pretty much anything and everything that's cool about"Brightwood", but minus the tedious bickering and relationship exploration, in under 17 minutes. That tells you how much of this movie is obsessed with just relationship exploration navel-gazing. And even"The Pond"still, itself, didn't manage to go 16 minutes without ripping off ideas from"Triangle"wholesale.

An old-school Ray Bradbury fan like myself couldn't miss, just from the title and a one-sentence summary, that this is an adaptation of a classic Bradbury short story. This being Hollywood, almost the first 15 minutes are true to the original story. The rest is a vastly different, make-up-the-rules-as-they-go-along Hollywood-blockbuster-y attempt to capture some of those lucrative Jurassic Park moviegoing dollars, by finding an excuse to put overgrowth and dinosaurs in in Manhattan chasing scientists around. I wonder... maybe this was a good movie, but then someone accidentally went into the distant past and... changed something... and we got this instead. Yet another lesson not to mess with the timestream.

Woman gets caught in a haunted house she can't leave, and screams a lot. Some of the least convincing acting I've ever seen.

As the last of humanity dies out due to a biowarfare contagion gone wrong, three couples in various stages of life hash out their relationships. Which is great, because, you know, nothing is more interesting than spending two hours watching couples hashing out their relationships.