Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Ready Or Not

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…

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Dead Silence

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…

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Movie Reviews » Turned it off

Red Letters

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.

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In The Earth

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.

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Extract

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.
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Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention

The Breed

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?
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D-Railed

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.
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The Black String

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.
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Automata

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.
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An American Crime

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.
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Wow Signal

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.
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Escape From New York

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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The 4th Floor

Surprisingly ok Hitchcockian thriller about Juliette Lewis inheriting an apartment and being menaced by a neighbor who leaves threatening notes. William Hurt, Tobin Bell, Shelley Duvall, and Austin Pendleton, who is this nebbishy guy you've seen in a zillion things but never got his name.
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Treehouse

slow-starting horror/suspense that is actually sort of decent by the end, if kind of grisly. Two teens setting off fireworks in the woods stumble upon a missing girl trapped in a treehouse by unknown creatures. One leaves for help, the other becomes trapped with her. Movie takes a sharp turn in the middle as they escape, becomes a"pursued by the psycho locals"flick, but as those things go, not too terrible.
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TwoTwo

thoroughly amateurish, stiffly-acted sci fi film that desperately wants to be interesting and quirky but succeeds only in making no sense. I watched the whole thing and have no idea what it was about. Something about a schlubby guy running across people who are getting tested and given some sort of"charge"that other people want to take away from them.
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Hansel And Gretel Get Baked

Stoner splatstick, which I guess is at least sort of original. The animated plastic remains of Lara Flynn-Boyle play a witch who lures stoners into her house with weed and eats them. Meh. Entertaining, I guess, sort of, a little, maybe.
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Entity

Decades ago, in the Russian woods near an abandoned asylum, four bodies were found. Now, a documentary crew goes in to explore. Blue-toned video, night vision, and people screaming during video glitch effects ensue. You know the drill by now.
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Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

The Final Project

These people take the"no cameraman"ethic of"found footage"films even further, to"no editor". This appears to be a group of banal college students with no acting experience at all who went to an empty house and improvised a horror movie (albeit one without any horror), then taped all the footage they shot together and called it done. There are interminable, pointless passages of them talking to their professors in class, sitting in the car playing"Never Have I Ever", uneventfully exploring the house and grounds, all shot with a total lack of any kind of cinematic or even sound recording quality that makes the previous recordholder for"worst first-person shooter"I'd ever seen look like Citizen Kane in comparison. No plot, no attempt to build tension, until finally, over an hour into the movie, people's cameras suddenly do the deaddrop one by one for no explained reason and everybody starts running through the house and woods yelling each other's names. Basically, it's like a bunch of students saw"The Blair Witch Project"and said,"Hey, we could do that!", but they couldn't.
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The Companion

Low-rated, but I liked it. Postapocalyptic supernatural western with tough-as-nails survivors facing off against strange spectral apparations instead of zombies. Not great but I kind enjoyed it.
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Stir Of Echoes

Reminiscent of The Sixth Sense, although it was in production simultaneously and based on a Richard Matheson novel from 1958. Kevin Bacon is hypnotized into being able to see ghosts, does his best Jack Torrance as he tears up his house and backyard at the behest of the ghost of a murdered neighborhood child without explaining to his wife why.
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Backwoods

The capsule description for this"psycho yokels"movie starts,"A group of friends embark on a camping trip for a ten-year high school reunion."That's all you need to know. Whatever you're imagining comes next is as imaginative as what actually does.
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Humanoids From The Deep

Hilariously bad, phenomenally dated 1980 exploitation monster movie, from right before everything became either a slasher picture or"Hellraiser". Basically Jaws but with many sharks instead of just one, and the Creature From The Black Lagoon instead of sharks, and a whole lot more jiggling boobs. Lots of cool pyrotechnics, too.
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The Fearway

A gorgeous couple is chased by a menacing black car being driven by Prince down a desert highway, forcing them to take refuge in an odd roadside diner where the locals seem to be hiding a secret. A more entertaining failure than many. Plays something like an episode of one of the less successful horror anthology TV shows, indulges in a lot of familiar plot devices, and telegraphs its punches very badly, but succeeds in being somewhat watchable, on those terms, mostly because of a likable cast. Don't go in expecting more than that and you might find it a passable way to kill 80 minutes.
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