Archives: Movie Reviews

As tediously pretentious, and unqualified to be so, as it gets. A woman inherits a empty schoolhouse from a grandmother she's never met. She wanders around, giving a pretentious voiceover. She plays the"moonlight sonata"for five long minutes, and nothing else happens during that time, while an out-of-focus ghostly figure stands behind her. She wanders around the grounds. She hears a noise upstairs, grabs a knife, and takes, I shit you not, what feels like 5 minutes to ascend the stairs to the next floor. Hands reach out of the darkness and cover her mouth as she screams, then we suddenly cut to a camera pointed upwards towards the front facade of the building that slowly moves closer, then further away, then closer, then further away again, with the scene fading in and out and in again, over and over, because, it's artistic, I suppose, before we then see her again, digging through old trunks, apparently totally fine, no clue what the hands were. Over an hour into the movie, she intones the first line of actual dialogue: she flatly says,"I feel... I am not alone... in the house... and yet... I am.... alone... in the house..."and then stares for several minutes, occasionally taking a sip from a bottle in as close as this movie gets to excitement. Then we're treated to extreme close ups of her squeezing blood blisters and goo-covered skin growths. Eventually, a weird creature makes an appearance and gives her an orgasm, but by then it's much too late. Then, they cut to her staring at the camera with an intense expression on her face and tinkling random notes on the piano, for five minutes. Then another scene of her just staring for several minutes. Somebody should be punished for making this movie.

You ever have that thing where you go to a remote cabin with a bunch of your friends, and wind up caught in a time loop movie? This is like that. You'd think by now filmmakers would have learned that you have to work really hard to do these kinds of stories in a way that keeps the narrative straight—to my knowledge, only"Triangle"has ever pulled it off—or at least be weird, cool, and cerebral enough, as the makers of"Primer"figured out, that nobody cares it's impossible to follow. If you can't go to one of those two paths, you're going to have a mess on your hands, all the more regrettable when for big parts of it it seems like you were almost going to pull it off."Triangle"was well-told enough that you could follow it."Primer"was interesting enough that you wanted to figure it out. This came close, but ultimately, was neither. It cuts back and forth between narratives, or between timelines, with no apparent connection or reason why. It shows things that look like they're going to be explained later, but they're never mentioned again. Weird photographs nobody can remember taking appear, which seem like you'll see them taken later on, but they never are. Plus, the story is repeatedly interspersed with interview segments that seem somehow related but it's never made clear how, or if it was, I missed it.

Big-budget supernatural thriller. Kiefer Sutherland and essentially a glorified cameo from Amy Smart. It's hard to go wrong with a supernatural thriller (I refuse to call this a horror movie; a little too much gunfire) about mirrors. Even the worst ones (Poltergeist 3) have their moments, because, mirrors are creepy. That shot of someone walking away from a mirror but their reflection staying there and gazing at them is always going to work. So, take that, and add Kiefer Sutherland as a gorgeous disgraced-cop-turned-night-security-guard-for-an-abandoned-department-store shooting his gun at a demon in the sewer, and some obligatory scenes of his gorgeous ex-wife and cute kids at home being creepily menaced by every reflective surface in the house, and, meh. Definitely will appeal to, I don't know, the kind of people who thought"Inception"was an intellectual movie. For me, faintly entertaining, since I had a good idea what I was getting into (Kiefer Sutherland is kind of a tipoff.) Y'know, Hollywood. It's not total crap like something you'd see John Cusack in, but not somehow cool, like a movie Lance Hendriksen would appear in, either.

Dude. It's Alien versus Predator. You know what it's going to be. It's cool, on the higher end of the expected, predictable range of possibilities. Note: Lance Hendriksen is not the last to die in this, proving that it is not a horror movie.

family goes to their house in the woods, and some fucking nonsense or other happens.

"Australian for torture/captivity flick".

Squatters take a job with a catering company so they can scope out millionnaires' homes to squat in while they're away. This time, the millionnaire comes home early and finds them there. Guess which one is the real bad guy? What should have been a thoroughly mediocre exercise, with a distinctly familiar overall captivity/pursuit storyline, is redeemed by a few things: the pacing is well done and very slowly ratchets up the intensity at a consistent pace without it ever being noticeable, and the actors are decent, especially the guy playing the villain, who just plain chews the scenery—he's a real movie baddie, and plays it to the hilt, all leering and supremely overconfident douchebaggery. I, uh, I kinda liked it.

a landmark film in that takes every poor convention of"found footage"films —truly lousy improv"acting", 25 minutes of plotless footage showing nothing but two intensely boring people going about their day, digital effects we've seen a million times before (a guy is"scary"because one eye suddenly rolls up separately from the other, a woman has some sort of bug zipping around under her skin), cameras running in scenes when nobody would ever bother filming, like when they're running from a demon, but somehow not capturing when characters are unconscious or have memory lapses, and of course stilted justifications for"always filming"—and somehow manages to make them worse than ever before: includes dream sequences and apparent flashbacks somehow captured by the camera, senseless nonlinear narrative and jump cuts between scenes with no explanation or reason. It seems like"found footage"has finally just gone from"here's an idea where this filmed evidence gets left over"to nothing more than"We don't want to pay a cameraman for our lousy movie, we'll just have the actors hold the camera."

"Cube", but with less explanation behind it. A woman finds is picked up hitchhiking, then wakes up in a series of tunnels filled with traps and monsters. She escapes. That's it, that's the whole plot.

This is one of those movies I wouldn't recommend to anyone else, but I found it kind of entertaining. Bachelor buys a new house, and digging a hole for a septic tank, he finds a box with two million dollars in cash and a dead body in it. He slowly goes insane, and the body may or may not be climbing out of the box to terrorize him. This is one of those movies that benefits by not aiming that high, and while the story is no great shakes and enough of the acting is wooden that it is never going to be confused for a good movie, it does a couple of things right: casting an anonymous everyman who manages to slowly ratchet up the insanity without there being any one point where it goes too far too fast, and, while most movies break the spell when they show something like an old man in clear corpse makeup, this one actually pulls it off but finding some actor, I don't know who this guy is, but who just manages to put in a creepy enough performance that they can show him in broad daylight and it's just a little bit creepy instead of 100% silly. I wouldn't go out of my way to see this, but it was actually kind of fun.

What a weird movie. Basically seems like a very long soap opera or TV episode with a lot of twists and turns, which is odd, since it's mostly just two guys talking, and sometimes fighting or chasing each other. Something very British, almost, about the way it's all talking and at least tries to get by on strong plotting and dialogue rather than action... not that it succeeds. Two friends go out for a night of ice fishing on a cabin on a Minnesota lake, and one or both of them have ulterior motives. An impressive number of plot twist for two guys stuck in a cabin, and especially since it keeps going when it should end, into a whole other part of the story. However, that's as much good as I'll say about it it: it's dreadfully overwrought, hammily-acted, with actually too many plot twists, and primarily impressive for just going way to far over the top in pretty much every way except entertainment value. Like I said: kind of like a soap opera. Shot on 30fps video instead of film, too, to add to that feeling.

Talk about a swing and a miss. Very strong performances fail to save a sci-fi flick that the director just wasn't up to handling the central relationship complexities and slightly twisty plot that he himself wrote. A couple is offered $50,000 to stay in a house for a month as part of an ostensible relationship study that turns out to be something darker. The palpable chemistry between the lead actors (the woman of whom was actually the writer/director's wife) gets this off to a very strong start, but the obviously contrived and sometimes difficult-to-follow way in which the"drama"develops breaks the spell and as the action gets harder to believe and the plot gets more confusing the film simply never recovers. Disappointing, it started out looking like it was really going to be good. Picture a"Black Mirror"episode directed by someone who just wasn't adept at handling plot twists.

Couple buys a new vacation house, and lots of stilted, boring dialogue and terrible acting happens,"creepy"characters show up and say"dramatic"and"spooky"things, as the man descends into the worst imitation of Jack Nicholson's performance in"The Shining"ever committed to 16mm film. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Stiff, wooden overacting, terrible writing, stilted and unbelievable dialogue, lighting that looks like a high school drama production, jumbled story that flips between time periods without every explaining what's going on... how do these movies get made? Did nobody anywhere in this production stop and say,"Wait a minute, this really sucks, we should fix this or maybe just not do it"?

Talk about disappointing. Started in the sort of quiet, unambitious, but tense way some of my favorite little indie horror films do—reminded me in a strange way of"Yellowbrickroad", a flawed masterpiece in my eyes that takes a lot of chances and ultimately comes down on the right side of them, especially in how it made good use of daylit woods for tension, increasingly rare to find these days as a wooded setting has become such an overused horror movie trope. But then, it descends into the a hackneyed use of just throwing together a bunch of nonsensical hallucinatory scenes of surreal, unexplained"scary"things happening, one after another, with no real explanation why, in lieu of a plot. By the time it was over I couldn't figure out what the story even was, besides"Woman gets a job as a park ranger in the backcountry, hallucinates a lot of weird stuff from her past, then is a park ranger again."Eventually I looked it up on wikipedia, which explained it, and actually the fundamental idea, like the quietly spooky first act, wasn't bad. But the execution was just disjointed.

In a stunningly original plot, vacationers at their cabin are menaced and killed one-by-one by the locals. Actually, for one of those movies, this was an entertaining one, for the non-stereotypical casting and a couple of actually original spins on it.

The unease of"Eraserhead"combined with the eerie farmhouse atmosphere of"Texas Chainsaw Massacre"without being as weird or memorable as either. Arthouse pretensions slightly detract from what is just derivative enough, and just original enough, that they people who made it probably were thinking about how it would have played in 1976, and it might have been a minor classic if it had been made back then, but it's not 1976 anymore, and they should have made something that was going to play well today in front of audiences who've seen a lot of variations at this point on what succeeded in 1976. Annoying couple camping on what turns out to be private land are told to leave, and wouldn't you know it, their battery is dead... but walking up the road, there's a farmhouse... and here, I know what you're thinking. No, picture less violence, more of a slow-burner. The pacing, which a lot of gore fans complained about in IMDB, is actually alright, I like a movie that doesn't show its cards all at once. But this isn't a slow-burner that eventually ignites like dynamite, more like a firecracker. It doesn't leave you with as much as it wants to.

What a weird movie. An English woman is trapped in her apartment by a demon from some sort of archaeological dig, menaced by floating knives and an eye peering in her vents. It's a really bad movie, uninteresting story and characters, ludicrous plot and unbelievable"scares", but, it's shot really well, and individual scenes, though ridiculous, are somehow really well done, and some of them are individually creepy.

A dreadfully BBC-esque supernatural drama. Filmed on videotape for good measure. The blurb said"Peril awaits a group of six friends as they enter an abandoned theater in the woods, where they encounter a devil and a beast."Nor horror, not terror... peril. That's about the size of it. Having watched half of it before turning it off, I can confirm, yes, they're in peril. Quite so.

Not bad for a soooort of rural-vacation-goes-wrong captivity/pursuit flick. Londoners rent a boat for an evening trip, get lost out in the reeds where some creepy, menacing local kids are partying. Not the best-told story, for sure, kind of a sloppy hand with introducing the more supernatural-ish elements. Was alright stylistically alright, I suppose, for what it is, in that it was a bit restrained.

Ok, with that title, I had some idea what I was getting into. Weirdly slow-moving adult-xxx-film quality starring, apparently, washed-up adult film stars. These aren't even actors, at first I thought the guy just got a bunch of his friends to be in it. Written, directed, and produced by one guy, starring his wife. Plus lots of weird long sequences of people just looking at each other. This is what you get when you cut the sex out of porn and replace it with sci-fi and aliens eating people's brains. I mean it! It's a porn. But with sci-fi instead of sex. Which, you know, I don't like the whole"so bad it's good"thing, but, boy, in this case, they really committed to doing what they were going to do. One of the lowest-rated films I've seen on IMDB, 1.6 out of 10 with over 130 ratings, and that is exactly right. In an abstract way, I admire it. Er, perhaps that's putting it strongly. I find its existence amusing. (EDIT: No doubt about it, these actually are porn actors, the lead actress once won an AVN award.)

Perfectly passable"When A Stranger Calls"-style thriller about a phone helpline worker terrorized by a stalker known for attacking pregnant women in their homes. Pleasant for having a much stronger-than-usual heroine.

Cillian Murphy stars in the sort of movie Cillian Murphy stars in, this time in which a couple living in a cottage on a remote British island lose radio contact with the outside world, when a solitary soldier shows up claiming to be the only survivor of a deadly worldwide pandemic.

Kind of a decent b-grade medical/sci-fi thriller. A pre-"Schitt's Creek"Emily Hampshire (who knew she'd been in movies since she was a kid?) plays a doctor whose husband is one of"the returned", people saved from a deadly zombie virus by a course of medication which is now getting scarce. Played fairly realistically, more for drama than shock, it was slightly better than I expected.