Having just seen "X" and surprisingly enjoyed it, I checked out this prequel, which finds writer/director Ti West back to his usual unrelatable characters and well-made but uninteresting and stylistically overfamiliar, derivative tricks. In this case, he does the Coen Brothers meets The Wizard Of Oz, showing the elderly lead villain from "X" as a young psychotic farm girl, killing people mostly because, movie.

I'm actually kind of relieved. After "X" I was afraid I might have to start liking his movies. No worries here. Not terrible, well-made enough to almost label it as "watchable", not just painfully uninteresting like "House Of The Devil", but as with so much of his stuff, the cinematic equivalent of a Fluffernutter sandwich: fun, but totally unsatisfying fluff.

A mildly interesting 4-hour-long (!) documentary on 80s horror. Mostly for the kind of people who think "Evil Dead" was a good movie, or that "Toxic Avenger" and "Gremlins" were horror movies... basically, people who think horror should be fun, not scary. But it was alright. At that length, it did manage to cover everything, including some good ones (including obscure favorites like "Night Of The Comet", for instance), and had interviews with basically everybody who was anybody in any '80s horror movie you ever heard of. And it managed to hold my attention for the whole time.

Tediously campy horror/sci-fi movie in which two tough-as-nails thieves are abducted by a tough-as-nails mad doctor and subjected to experiements meant to allow travel across the barrier between life and death, which basically consists of him killing them, them seeing dead loved ones, and him reviving them again, over and over again.

New nurse goes to take care of cantankerous old woman in what looks like a mediocre ghost story but turns out to be a mediocre whodunit. Notable only for having the single longest "detective explains to the crook how he did it" scene that I've ever seen.

A disparate group of people follow a Bigfoot researcher into the wilderness, and eventually find themselves trapped in a tedious captivity/pursuit flick.

Jospeh Gordon-Levitt utterly fails to stop being Joseph Gordon-Levitt and disappear into a role as an uncouth dirtbag type who insinuates himself into the life of a young boy who just lost his mother and his working-class father and grandmother. He ain't Brad Pitt in "Kalifornia", that's for sure. Well-made and gritty, and with a good cast (Rainn Wilson, Natalie Portman) but, a little too sentimental and overlong, and failed to engage me.

A woman returns to her rural home and winds up crossing the dimensional barrier to be with her dead parents, or some nonsense. I believe this is the pilot for a miniseries or something. Not terribly interesting, very TV-sci-fi-like.

Unfunny Canadian sketch comedy show that only lasted a season, thankfully. I guess sometimes even Canada has an off day.

"Fatal Attraction" lite. TV-movie-quality thriller about sexually fluid LA hipsters taken in by a psycho pretending to be an old love. Worse than it sounds.

At one point there seemed to be this new school of thought where you can make a movie by taking one or two high concept self-consciously "weird" ideas which may or may not be worth a whole movie, and wrapping it in stiffly-mannered, self-consciously "weird" acting and direction, with lots of random weirdness thrown in which is supposed to seem meaningful somehow, I suppose. This actually kind of worked in "Schizopolis" (haven't reviewed, google it) but hit its nadir with a small handful of films—still too many—like "An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn" (which I see I have not reviewed, but did sit through).

I'm sorry to see Zach Galiafinakis get involved in one, though. ZG plays in emotionless man (everyone in these movies is either totally overemotional or way over-the-top emotional) working in a workplace which seems to be an uninspired second-rate version of Lumon Corp from "

James Franco leads a a broad selection of modern comedy actors on a tour up Hollywood's ass.

It's extremely well-directed, with fantastic production values, and a cast with more plusses than minuses, and yet, that can't save it. Franco plays a dyspeptic Hollywood Forrest Gump, finding himself coincidentally involved with a series of the most important directors and film productions between 1970-1982, plus catching Patti Smith at CBGBs, in an aimless and episodic romance revolving around an actress played by Megan Fox, of all people. Arthouse pretensions sink the whole endeavor, and occasional touches of Charlie Kaufman-like throwaway unjustified weirdness, such as Franco philosophizing about "...a secret movie, hidden in every other movie ever made. Who made it? Who put it there?" just make it worse.

Too bad because the production and direction a great. I guess they forgot that if you're going to make a love love…

Zero budget but still somewhat entertaining slice-of-life about a crack-addicted photographer just getting by in LA. Not much plot, and some of the acting is flat-out terrible, but actually kind of manages somehow to be just gritty enough that it wasn't totally terrible. Which, for this kind of movie, is actually kind of an accomplishment. For this kind of movie.

Not terribly thrilling captivity thriller. Weird high-concept background that doesn't really come into play, as children are being put into camps for carrying a zombie cannibal virus, and a group of teens trying to make it to the border stop by Michelle Dockery's rural house, where she poisons and imprisons them. Meh.

Barbie and Ken travel back and forth between Barbie land and the real world, with fairly predictable results, in a feminist spoof on the toy dolls and their immense world of merchandising. I'd been curious to see it because it was very well-reviewed, but ultimately my curiosity wasn't justified.

It starts off cute enough, with a fair bit of sly wit and fourth-wall humor, but eventually settles into just-slightly-above-average, too-saccharine Hollywood fare. Lots of positive messages here for girls, which is hard to argue with, and a fair dose of mild misandry, also hard to argue with as it's absolutely no worse than women regularly get treated with in mass media (which may be the point), but also wore a little thin on me personally, because I need more than that in a movie. A plot as clever as the passing jokes would have saved it.