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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
gorgeous English couple buys Scotland farmhouse, so locals put on pig masks and chase them around it with axes, because, obviously, movie.
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.
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.)
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…
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 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.
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,…
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
Alright. Petulant Kiwi teen under house arrest, ankle monitor and all, with her crazy family in big old house. Things go bump in the walls, as what looks like a setup for supernatural horror turns into a pretty decent non-supernatural thriller.
Oh, my beloved "The Babadook". It could so not work, but it really does. So well-directed. A genuinely scary movie. Mother and young son deal with the pain of losing dad, and a monster which may or may not be the manifestation of that loss.
I consider this one a classic, full stop.
I've had friends say they found it disappointing. And I can understand that, I suppose, considering how some viewers may have grown used to being spoonfed by modern horror. This film has actual plot and character development that you have to sit through. A lot of this film's runtime is just the psychological dynamics of a deteriorating mother/son relationship (and possibly also the deteriorating mental health of one or both) with the scenes of traditional scares only coming as brief emotional punctuation marks.
Consider, on the other hand, that this also has a 98%…
Inventive anthology. Lots of creepy unexplained shit, and Maria Olsen playing it straight for once. Fun, pretty original, I liked it.
A not-bad entry in the psycho-picking-off-teenagers-in-a-remote-location genre. but snow fields instead of woods this time, which is refreshing. Set in the norwegian outback, in an abandoned lodge. Goes on a bit long, but if you're gonna watch something in this genre, this is a decently creepy, non-annoying one.
zombie road picture plays like a missing episode of Walking Dead, from one of the good seasons.
Execrable. Seems like a probable attempt to invent a "mythology" that could be spun off into 14 sequels, but nobody is that stupid.
She's a ghost. She wanders around a house. Doesn't sound like much but actually kind of a pretty cool movie. Kind of leans towards being an arthouse flick, but in a good way, without overbearing pretense. Poetic, slightly dreamy, original and self-assured. A spirit goes through the motions of her life before being contacted with by a medium trying to help release her spirit.
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