Archives: Movie Reviews

Single mom with autistic son movies into a house, is terrorized by specters. Quasi-James-Wan-type haunted house movie, but not as good.

Film crew goes out to the woods to interview a ranger who discovered the bodies of a bunch of missing hikers. And hour goes by with nothing but one gratuitous hawt lesbian sex scene, and then, they find a video tape that shows them killing each other or dying in various ways, and then they do. The end. Pointless. When generative AI starts writing horror movies, it will write movies like this. Avoid.

My two favorite things: religious extremism presented as drama, and social media. Great.

This movie asks us to believe the church—not scientists, the Catholic church—has perfected a never-explained technique for resurrecting the dead. Then the resurrected people, also with little explanation, begin organizing to kill as many people as possible so the "righteous"—determined by hiring hackers to review all people's electronic records, phone calls, texts, etc for sin—can be the only ones brought back to life.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the whole movie is told on the screen on a computer that a guy is sitting in front of. Even when he runs from the police, you only see it through conveniently-placed security cameras that it's never explained why we'd be seeing the video from... the important thing is, everything is always seen through a diegetic camera: a phone, a facetime call, a security camera. Apparently…

Despite the presence of the always-welcome Rosa Salazar, this is a painfully less-interesting-than-it-wants-to-be, weird-for-its-own-sake outing in the manner of "Being John Malkovich"—who also happens to play a supporting role in this, in a ridiculous orange-dyed perm—only less inventive. A woman is introduced by two names at a party, and it's explained, "She shares her body with a 56-year-old Englishman", then for the second half of the movie talks in a British accent. Another character floats instead of walking, and when someone asks, "What's his deal?", they're told, "He floats." If these sorts of things, all by themselves, are an adequate substitute for any kind of substance to you, enjoy. Not for me.

Lance Henriksen stars as the devil as a ranch in this fairly solid supernatural drama. Religious themes—some traditional, some made up just for the movie—abound as a workman and his young son, who is prone to "visions" (which I guess plays better in a supernatural drama than "schizophrenia") come to stay for a while and it becomes apparent to them that everything in the entire place is a metaphor for the book of Genesis.

Henriksen is compelling as usual, presuming you like him as an actor. I do. He manages to give his usual understated, low-key burn to the development of a character that many actors probably would have played over-the-top and made unbelievable. I liked it for that. Not really much beyond that to commend it, though.

Captivity/pursuit flick. Hikers in the remote Irish moors get injured and cut across private property trying to get help, only to be imprisoned and tortured by the members of Jethro Tull.

Boring captivity flick. If you enjoy a movie that is nothing but two people being held captive in a basement room and tormented by an unseen captor for 90 minutes, enjoy. (One question, though: why?)

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.