Staunton Hill
A Black Crowes album to Texas Chainsaw's "Exile On Main St." Not "Amorica", either, although perhaps their second best one.
Don’t Look Back
dear Hollywood, at certain point we figured out that if the bad guy doesn't talk to anybody but the protagonist for the entire movie, they're going to turn out to be either the protagonist's other personality, or someone's already dead. Neither are very surprising twist anymore. This one is the split personality one.
The Poltergeist of Borley Forest
you know, for a poorly acted, no budget, poorly written, completely amateurish zero budget effort, this winds up being a halfway decent ghost story. The leads are charming and give it their all, as well.
Triangle
Melissa George stars in a pretty original, intense and well-done fantasy/speculative fiction thriller that tackles some familiar themes with enough original twists, turns, and surprises to be consistently entertaining despite some occasional obvious logical flaws, and, to leave the viewer with things to think about.
I don't know if it's for everyone, but to me, this is an movie that starts ok, and just gets better and better and better over its runtime, finally tying things up in the kind of satisfying and intelligent bow that a lot of movies that aspire to be "mind-bending" strive for but few actually succeed at. It's one of those small handful of movies I go out of my way to re-watch every so often and never regret doing so.
It's hard to discuss the plot in any way without giving away spoilers, and I like this movie a little too much…
The Vanguard
English future dystopian zombie flick. Either the best home movie ever, or the lowest budget BBC production ever. Nothing but intense (seemingly shakespearian??) actors being intense in the woods or narrating intensely. Impressive, in that solid, low key BBC drama sort oF way- more dialogue and character than action.
Zombie Massacre
gorgeous, square jawed mercenaries be macho, occasionally face-off against zombies. More testosterone than any other zombie flick.
The Descent
If you're reading this list and haven't seen "The Descent", just go see it. A classic in my book. A bunch of women on a caving expedition when things get scary. Not a classic horror story, but a classic horror film and, I think, a rewarding movie-viewing experience. Very well-made by a director who understood that horror movies should be movies first and horror second. It does eventually lean a little more towards action/adventure/survival than towards plot/storytelling, which is often not my preference, but this is well-done enough to rise above my usual complaints about the category. (UPDATE: I have heard from some friends that they don't like this movie. I don't understand that.)
Pod
A brother and sister go to check up on their increasingly unhinged army vet brother, living up at their lakehouse, to find him having sealed himself inside, acting irrational and claiming he has a killed "pod" trapped in the basement. Increasing creepiness is negated by a sort of insensible final act.
Coherence
Interesting sci-fi entry about a dinner party suddenly caught in a vortex of parallel universes. It's so embarrassing when you can't tell if your dinner guests are still the same people from your own dimension that you invited.
Low-key but thought-provoking enough to be a fun view. Nobody will ever call this a great movie, but the story is pretty different, and it's kind of a low-key personal favorite of mine, for sure.
Some Kind Of Hate
Starts off pretty cool, as a gorgeous bullied kid attacks his gorgeous bully and then the title appears suddenly over a freeze-frame, then degenerates to some sort of silly nonsense about a ghost haunting the rural troubled youth camp where she was bullied to death, which can for some reason cause any injury to her to be reflected onto someone else.
After Midnight
Set in a strange alternate reality where remote southern swamps are entirely populated by Brooklyn hipsters with trilby hats and bicep tattoos, this short's-worth-of-plot-stretched-to-feature-length shows a hipster couple living in a big old house in a remote southern swamp, when she suddenly disappears and he begins being visited nightly by an unexplained monster. After she returns, the monster disappears, causing him to be mocked by all their friends until the unexplained monster unexplainedly appears inside the house and attacks him in front of all of them at a dinner party, and he finally kills it, after which he proposes to her, all of which I guess is supposed to mean something, maybe. To stretch this to feature length, we're treated by very lengthy passages of what hipsters find most entertaining: long conversations working through their hipster relationship, and bantering at their hipster dinner party. I do give them credit for…
Open Water
I will always love this movie. Most people hate it. Almost no plot: Annoying yuppie couple get accidentally left behind out on the open ocean while on a scuba diving excursion, float in shark-infested waters for a few days. And that's it. That's all that happens. In my opinion, expertly made—it's about mood, not story, and the cinematography and amazing soundtrack, a compilation of indigenous folk music from cultures around the world, carry it for me. Most people probably think it's boring. I will always re-watch it.
The Beast Of Xmoor
pretty original serial killer flick. A gorgeous investigator goes to the deep woods of England in sreach of a cryptid, only to discover she's been led there to film the attempted capture of a serial killer at his remote backwoods dumping ground. A fair handfful of really original elements to this as well as a super intense and dramatic third act. Very british in the way it concerns itself withg telling a story rather than just falling back on convention. I always dig that.
30 Days Of Night
Strong action/horror/thriller that got inexplicably mixed reviews. A classic, in my book. Roger Ebert called this movie "better than it needed to be" and he's right about that. Northernmost town in Alaska is besieged by creatures of the night during the 30 days that the sun doesn't rise. I always watch this one when it pops back up. Stars Melissa George, who always seems to appear in good movies.
Burying The Ex
Joe Dante, more comedy than horror... a guy's overly clingy girlfriend, an initially painfully gorgeous Ashley Greene, returns from the dead to mess up his new relationship, while his slovenly friend improbably fucks every gorgeous woman in Los Angeles, two at a time.
Last Shift
this entry in the already crowded “gorgeous lone female cop works the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good" genre features a gorgeous lone female cop working the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good. Random "scary" stuff happens which eventually turns out to be related to the on-site suicides of a poorly-explained, poorly-acted Manson Family type cult. Essentially, "1408" in a police station.
The Lazarus Effect
after a team of gorgeous researchers discovered a cure for death, one of them is killed and resurrected, and gains random psychic powers, randomly turns evil, and kills her gorgeous teammates one by one for no reason.
Blood Lands
gorgeous English couple buys Scotland farmhouse, so locals put on pig masks and chase them around it with axes, because, obviously, movie.
The Monster Of Mangatiti
Hoooooo. Rough one. Thought it was a "based on a true story" horror movie, but it was closer to a documentary, with the real-life victim of a horrific 23-week captivity in 1985 on a remote farm in the Australian backcountry narrating a fairly intense dramatization of her true story. Mostly psychological torture, but also menial and sexual slavery, impregnation and subsequent termination by a physical beating, constant threats and manipulation, etc. Upsetting shit.
28 Days Later
You've read this far into this list, and you haven't seen 28 Days Later? Are you kidding me? Stop reading and go watch it. Now. (Avoid the sequels.)
A Vanishing On 7th St.
Darkness descends on the world in the form of an unexplained momentary global black out, during and after which everybody standing in a dark enough area spontaneously disappears from their clothes, rapture style, for unexplained reasons. Random voices are heard in the darkness, fresh batteries randomly start dying in minutes, and the sun stops rising, also for unexplained reason, until a couple of children survive for unexplained reasons until the sun starts coming up again for unexplained reasons. Occasional vaguely creepy SFX as people turn into shadows, darkness assumes vague, half-seen human forms, and random voices, possibly of dead people, echo in the darkness — which are all diminished by the rest of the time, when the creeping darkness and "shadow people" just look totally like fake animation effects. Starts Not Mark Wahlberg (Hayden Christensen) as Mark Wahlberg's character, and Not Halle Berry (the uncharacteristically disappointing, over-histrionic Thandie Newton) as…
13 Cameras
Middling thriller about a young couple who rents a house from a landlord who has cameras all over it and a soundproof cell in the basement.
Ghost Of Goodnight Lane
Ghost of a little girl holds the gorgeous members of a film production company captive in their office and kills them one by one in cartoonishly horrible ways. sub-mediocre, formulaic with occasional bits of humor. A charismatically bloviating Billy Zane as the director. Probably not quite "USA Up All Night" quality.
The Hamiltons
A personal favorite. I'm really surprised by the low audience score for this film. It's definitely not your usual horror movie, and if you're in it for scares, gore, or action (of which there is little, little, and almost none, respectively), you're going to be disappointed. This ain't "Saw". It's just as much a coming-of-age family drama as it is a horror film, and it's got as much heart as an afterschool special. In theory, that could go either way, but in this case, it's so well put-together, and ticks along so smoothly, that it adds up to as very satisfying and rather unique, if homespun and small-scale, film. It doesn't aspire to be more than it is, it just tells a good and original story with near-complete economy and a skill that belies its overall amateurish production values. If a horror classic such as "The Shining" is a banquet,…
Landmine Goes Click
Torture porn. Kid gets stuck standing on a landline in a foreign country, local tortures his girl in front of him. Just when you think it’s over, it kicks into overdrive as the kid gets his revenge in even more brutal fashion. Actually pretty well made for what it is, the acting is solid, but especially brutal, keeps outdoing itself. That's not a good thing. I don't know why some people enjoy brutality enough that people make these kinds of movies.
Curve
as close to being a good movie as captivity/torture porn ever gets. Women menaced by hitchhiker drives car of edge of highway, becomes trapped inside for days as he periodically returns to torture her, mostly psychologically.
House Hunting
Decent supernatural thriller with Mr. No-Nonsense, Art La Fleur. Two families are lured to look at a house out in the woods, arrive to nearly hit a young girl in the road with her tongue cut out, and soon discover they can’t leave the property. Every attempt to drive or walk back to the road just puts them back at the house. 7 cans of beef stew keep reappearing in the pantry every day. Months pass. Everybody goes a little insane, dead relatives appear, etc.
The Cabin In The Woods
Leave it to Joss Whedon to take a horror movie, with the standard tropes, in a direction nobody ever has before. Ultimately it's a Joss Whedon movie first, ie a fantasy like everything he does, and a horror movie second. Fun and deserves its status as a classic. (Except for the Sigourney Weaver cameo, which totally breaks suspension of disbelief, because the movie is, like, 80% over, and suddenly you're like, "Hey, that's Sigourney Weaver.") The attention to detail in this movie is unparalleled, there's a lot here for pop culture geeks to scrutinize at extreme length, and if you type the movie's name into a search engine, you'll find they have.
Also, I believe, it has the most monsters in it of any movie: in one of many examples of aforementioned geekery, Screen Rant has listed 81 of them. Not to be outgeeked, the
The Last Winter
One of those small but special films I really like. Horror meets wilderness survival flick. Well done, solid, understated, original, starkly beautiful horror/suspense film set at oil drilling office in the remote arctic. Ron Perelman. Things slowly go wrong, climate change is implicated but no more is said than absolutely needs to be. Gorgeous, stark cinematography benefits the film in the same manner as "Open Water".