Archives: Movie Reviews

Appraiser visits wealthy old man's estate to appraise it and supernatural shit happens ("weird creepy visions and specters from the past" variety.) Meh.

A couple of archeologists and their young daughter move to an abandoned penal camp for boys to search for a buried body, and supernatural shit happens (possession-and-talking-with-creepy-voices variety.) Pretty much slid off my brain immediately after watching it.

This movie opens with a card that says, "This footage was found in a camera that washed up on a beach on Long Island".

And that's all I know, because that's literally all it takes to get me to turn a movie off nowadays.

Middling British suspense flick about a man bringing his new fiancee to meet the kids. The kids are acting strange, mom is nowhere to be seen, eventually things turn violent and although the suspenseful mood is done well not much is explained. In the end it turns out mom is in the cellar, it's implied she's dead, but why? Movie ends without saying.

Reasonably entertaining horror-comedy (a genre I usually don't like) from New Zealand, in which the set of a zombie movie is attacked by real zombies. Sort of over-the-top and hammy, but, it works, it's clear from the get-go that that's what they set out to do. I wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but, it's watchable enough.

During the pandemic, a man takes over as property manager of a haunted Los Angeles building, which we know is haunted because people talk about it being haunted. There are noises from the garage, which we know because people talk about them, and people have disappeared mysteriously, which we know because people talk about it. And as I write this, I'm an hour into this 90 minute movie, and still waiting for something to happen.

Title checks out.

A passably moment-by-moment entertaining but ultimately totally unrewarding 1408-style exercise in, "Ooh! I thought of another 'scary' thing we can have happen!" for 90 minutes. In this case, Robert Englund chews the scenery admirably—perhaps the movie's only real redeeming point—as a demon who must impregnate a woman every 100 years to reincarnate, and, for reasons not clearly explained, also chooses to use his last night before reincarnating to visit an old police station on the last night before it closes down to exact revenge on a tough-as-nails former police sergeant adversary and his entire former department by going through the station doing whatever "scary" thing the writers can think of to kill the tough-as-nails officers one-by-one in "scary" ways, or manipulate them into killing each other, using his demonic powers, which are, apparently, whatever the writers need them to be in that moment. Also somewhat amusing for the spectacle of…

Hoooooooooooooooo. A european woman traveling in—not sure, Scotland?—is taken prisoner, tattooed, and subjected to extreme body modification in this captivity flick. Which, for the first half, is every bit as dull as it sounds, because: captivity, torture porn, not interesting.

But, you know what? This is a pretty well-made movie. The characters are paper-thin but the acting and casting are above average and that slides the shallowness of it by better than usual. It takes its time getting where it's going, but over the second half, ratchets up the dramatic tension.

Basically the whole thing is played like an extremely, EXTREMELY and somewhat gory dark suspense pic or crime thriller, not a horror movie. There are certainly no scares here, and it's more about the cops circling in on him than torture-as-entertainment, as these films usually are.

Plus, as I said, it's notably well-made for this sort of movie. If…

Woman's boyfriend goes turns evil and starts infecting people around him into acting violent after being possessed by some sort of giant penis monster. David Cronenberg did it better.

Fairly amusing indie flick in which a discontented slacker woman finds out (along with everyone else) that reality is a simulation and will end in a week.

Reminded me of that movie with Zoe Lister-Jones and Cailee Spaeny about the woman wandering around LA before the world ends, although this was better than that one. Same sort of "clever, but not quite as clever as it thinks it is" high-concept. But, in this case, it was entertaining enough. Eventually it sort of peters out, but if it had kept up the entertainment all the way through, it would have been pretty good.

A very boring survivor in a very boring post-pandemic world takes refugre with a father and her daughter at their rural home and nothing happens.

Kind of an interesting low-key sci-fi-adjacent thriller. A man who specializes in salvaging crashed UFO parts and selling them gets caught up in intrigue when a shadowy corporation wants one of his parts. Interesting because I noticed halfway through that he's the only actor in it... every single other character is heard over the phone, radios, even in virtual reality. It sounds silly but the actor is gritty enough to pull it off. I can't quite recommend it, but I kind of liked it.