Archives: Movie Reviews

A methed-up pot grower massacres some gorgeous teens camped on his land thinking that they're aliens, except, even less interesting than it sounds. (Note for Culkin-watchers: contains a Culkin.)

Improbably hunky ex-cop guards a building in Bulgaria with a mysterious room in the basement he's not supposed to enter, while he's not hooking up with an improbably gorgeous barista from across the street who's 1/3 his age. Robert Englund chews the scenery as blind old guy who knows what's going on, but still manages to drop the keys in the dark at a critical moment.

what starts out seeming like it's going to be a typical captivity flick set at a hospital grows into an ambitious, if difficult to understand, Clive Barker-type affair with demons, an alternate dimension, and lots of tentacles. Kind of entertaining.

Surprisingly engaging zero-budget haunted house flick in which a middle-aged couple, recovering from the loss of their college-age son, moves into a house with a sordid past and believes they are being contacted by him. Stars middle-aged adults, not kids, for a change, which seems hokey at first but works out to its benefit. The performances are up and down but ultimately work well. Apparently they saved their entire budget for the tiny handful of really well-done special effects, and it was a great choice. Starts off seeming kind of iffy, could easily have gone into "Paranormal Activity"-caliber crap, but by the time it kicks into high gear ends up really effective, with some genuine creepiness along the way.

Kind of like "Weeds", except instead of being the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban pot dealer, it's the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban zombie. Other than that, pretty much the same. Drew Barrymore gets less annoying as she matures, and it's about time that that guy who briefly guested as the only competent sales rep at Dunder Mifflin got a leading role.

Spring Fever: Now, this is more like it. This is to horror movies what “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” was to comedies.This is that rare beast, the platonic ideal that every movie that ever tried to be a good bad horror movie was aspiring to be but failed at. Plus, perhaps the most realistic depiction of high school and high school students I’ve ever seen in any movie. Any fan of great cheapo vintage ’70s horror a la Tobe Hooper or David Cronenberg should like this. Also that rare sequel that far outdoes the first film. I loved it. Many people would not appreciate it, I am sure. (NOTE: According to wikipedia, the director requested to have his name removed from the film, and the final film is more a product of the executives and producers. I am floored. Let’s all be glad, for once, that that happened.) (UPDATE: Turns…

I have always found Robert Patrick to be an acquired taste, and I suppose I've acquired it. He does a little more acting than usual in this true crime thriller, which portrays the infamous 1978 Tison Gang jailbreak and murder rampage across the southwest. Definitely a little Hollywooded-up, as I have a hard time believing all the white-trash villains, lawmen, and bystanders of 1970s Arizona were uniformly so gorgeous (see Heather Graham as Tison's deluded prison-groupie wife, as well as Chris Browning playing Billy Bob Thornton playing Tison's fellow escapee, the porcine-in-real-life Randy Greenawalt, as a lean-and-mean, charismatic psychopath), but apparently it's based on a well-though-of true crime book, and the sheer sociopathy of the crimes makes it a least hold interest.

Not so bad. Small movie with a primary cast of just two people (three if you include the corpse) consisting mostly of an increasingly creepy autopsy in a small-town morgue. Unfortunately, after two acts of nicely increasing creepiness, goes a little too far over the top in the third act. But still an okay view. Very well-executed for what it is.

what looks like it's going to be a survival flick about a gorgeous couple lost in the woods pursued by a psycho slasher turns out to be a survival flick about a gorgeous couple lost in the woods pursued by a rabid bear. Somewhere between "The Long Weekend", except with vacationing backcountry hikers instead of vacationing beach campers and minus the ominous hint of the supernatural, and "Open Water", except with vacationing backcountry hikers instead of vacationing scuba divers and minus the morbidly poetic execution.

What a disappointment. Starts off beautifully, and initially is one of the most cinematically realistic portrayals of ordinary teenagers I think I've seen, up until the point where roughhousing with a sword results in an accidental death. At that point I was still loving it and expecting to love it all the way through. Then what could have been an exploration of the aftermath basically goes nowhere, as the accidental killer starts killing others for no reason, until he gets caught, and the movie just ends. The realism holds up throughout, which is nice, but in terms of plot there's no there there. The body of the first victim is never even discovered, there's no conequences, no development, no reason given, nothing.

Have you ever seen a Stephen King TV adaptation before? This is actually one of the better ones, which isn't saying much, since every King TV adaptation except for the few great outliers is terrible. Harry Anderson with a cheezy mustache, John Ritter with a full beard, Richard Masur's disembodied head talking, that should tell you all you need to know. Oh, also, it's 3 hours long.

DV-shot, slick production values, sitcom quality acting and writing, very faintly entertaining mess about hikers who encounter a UFO or something.

I know this can't be a made-for-TV horror movie aimed at preteens, because of all the tits. Other than that, it seems to be. Execrable, embarrassing film about an incubus. Awfully directed, cheaply made, no effort into making the sfx realistic, worst digital fx ever, even the makeup and costumes are just lousy. Even a c-list actress like Natasha Henstridge should be embarrassed to be involved in this.

Julia Stiles and husband move to South America and encounter some sort of ancient supernatural tradition claptrap surrounding their young daughter. Paced like a political thriller. Political thrillers aren't scary.

Lauren Cohan stars as a gorgeous nanny hired by an elderly english couple in a remote mansion to care for what she thinks is their son but turns out to be a life-sized doll... until things begin to move around the house. Plenty of fridge logic abounds but I didn't notice it until the a few minutes after the credits rolled and Lauren Cohan had left the screen. She is, I should add, a pretty good actress, as these things go... actually, better than this material. But I would probably enjoy a movie of Lauren Cohan just walking around an empty room for 90 minutes. And this was actually even more than that.

Strange, zero-budget gore film with all the gore edited out. A gorgeous woman threatens to blackmail three gorgeous former friends who had her committed, they accidentally push her down a flight of stairs during the ensuing fight, then cut up the body with all the actual cutting offscreen, and distribute the pieces in remote parks and off cliffs, tidily in black plastic bags so you can't see them. And that's pretty much it, that's the whole movie.

Odd sort of, I dunno, drama? Two women at the opposite ends of motherhood deal with life after an astronomical event over Troy, NY. Low-key enough to be unpretentious in a way that arty films like this usually aren't, which makes it watchable, as do the likeable cast and performances. But don't come looking for sense, story, or resolution, there isn't any of any of those. I kind of enjoyed it because of how low-key it was and because it was set in Troy, near old stomping grounds of mine, but the lack of sense ultimately bothered me.

decent indie werewolf flick. Southern boys at a farmhouse, yet somehow also, gangstas there.

A promising tagline: "female intruder accidentally dies in an introvert's house, so he keeps the body around as a friend. Then she starts to decay..." Starts off ok but ends pretty boring, just not much "there" there. However, has that nebbishy little lady from "A Dirty Shame", who I always like.

"Jurassic Park", except with zombies instead of dinosaurs, as things go wrong for a group of gorgeous tourists at a resort where you can go on safari to kill the sole remaining zombies after humanity recovers from an undead pandemic. Likable final girl and decent cinematography and action sequences make it marginally watchable, but still kind of a proof of the rule that the more guns a "horror" movie has the less worth watching it is. By the time there's explosions, you're already well expecting that at some point there are going to be explosions. And, ok, the very ending is good. I'll give them that.

Somewhere in the same fictional Los Angeles as "Psych" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" (and across a fictional continent from the fictional New York of "Ugly Betty") is "Drop Dead Diva" , perhaps the perfect stupid TV program. A gorgeous model dies but refuses to go to heaven and wakes up in the body of an obese lawyer. Every episode features courtroom drama in which gorgeous legal clients pursue only-on-tv type

The Blair Witch Project with UFOs. Painful.

Ok thriller, looks like a horror movie but no monsters or supernatural. Three people go cave diving, mild jealousy and murder ensue. I think it's Danish or something, the audio sounds like overdubs.

Abducted child torture porn. Two girls are girls, then they are abducted, tortured, killed. The end. Notable for 3 scarily realistic, intense, gory shots of first girl (2 alive, one dead), and what must be a laborious 10 minute scene of nothing but watching a shovel dig a shallow grave while a girl pleads offscreen. Does someone actually consider this entertainment?

Picture this: Cloverfield, except, half a world away, Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis are in a romantic comedy, and it turns out that the giant monster is just duplicating their movements. For real. Ok, I give them some credit for the sheet audacity of trying to make romcom monster movie, but not much more than that.

Self-consciously bizarre, surreal, Gilliam-esque bit of fluff about a guy who builds a labyrinth our of a refrigerator box in his living room which is larger on the inside than the outside, takes on a life of its own and is full of peril and monsters. Seems like it is supposed to be a kids movie, but, has cursing and a vagina. Entertaining for what it is, though. (EDIT: Ah! Written and directed by Calvin and Hobbes's creator Bill Watterson. That makes perfect sense.)(EDIT 2: No. It's a different guy named Bill Watterson. Still, would have made perfect sense.)

(TV show) On the one hand, pretty realistic depiction of high school kids... every one of them is detestable. But, why didn't she just leave a note?