Lance Hendriksen takes his family icefishing, unaware that a "creature from the black lagoon"-type obvious-and-clearly-shown-man-in-a-costume monster lurks below the surface, waiting to kill everyone up to and including Lance Hendriksen, once again proving that outliving LK is the key to survival.
Terribly edited movie in which a dead ringer for Prince invites a bunch of gorgeous 20somethings to his mansion to smugly torture them psychologically into killing each other with his investigative knowledge of their pasts and incredible insight into their character flaws, driving them to murder, interspliced with clips of Prince's ensuing interrogation by gorgeous police detectives.
Pedestrian, entirely forgettable police procedural/haunted house flick as the story of a film crew (natch) filming inside a haunted house was murdered is told in flashbacks as Maria Bello interviews the lone survivor.
Gorgeous single mother wakes up in a remote abandoned medical facility with no memory of how she got there or how she became pregnant. Monsters a la "The Descent" menace her and the other survivors. With that, and the skinny Canadian actor who played Death in "Supernatural", you should have some idea what you're in for.
Three douchebags sneak into a closed state park to go hunting, where they are terrorized and hunted down by what turns out to be a couple of suburban kids who are in a closed state park terrorizing and hunting down people because, without them doing that, there wouldn't be any movie, now, would there.
Swedish TV series, with English overdubs. The Walking Dead, but with a rain that kills you instead of zombies. Pretty good, actually.
First person shooter. Zero budget, almost a home movie, except for the last 10 minutes, which they apparently spent the whole budget on. Kids running for their lives from people possessed by alien bugs for no particular reason.
Comedy based on real-life armored car heist caper. Zack Galiafinakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Jason Sudeikis, Sharon Jones, Joe Lo Truglio, and many more. With that many big comedy names in one movie, how could it be funny? Answer: it can't. It's mildly amusing, yeah. At moments. But that's the best I can say for it.
[Not to be confused with Amelie] A decent distraction that ends kind of unsatisfyingly by giving too much away. A thriller about a gorgeous babysitter who turns out to be very disturbed, mounting some fairly distressing psychological horror in the first half by way of her increasingly disturbing treatment of the children she's supposed to be caring for, but as is sometimes the case, ratching things up too high and shifting from a sort of dogme 95 realism to physical violence and a darkened house breaks the tension rather than heightening it. Decent performances, though.
Kind of a Merchant-Ivory take on a horror story, supposedly, but by about the two-thirds point, there wasn't any horror, and in fact hardly more than a few minutes worth of plot, and I turned it off. They live outside of town, they're accused of being witches the townspeople hate them, but nothing seems to really happen beyond them getting nasty looks. Taissa Farmiga is better than this. Crispin Glover, however, is not, and it's nice to see him take on a character that requires quietness and dignity for once... he makes a surprisingly good dad of the estate.
Captivity/pursuit flick. Mother and son pursued through the woods by a silent, murderous Dave Grohl for no reason. I'd run too.
Incredibly handsome English guys go off-trail and get lost in the woods (England? Sweden? I missed it). Vacation gone wrong. stalked through the woods, captivity, scary house in the woods, besieged by rednecks, but also a monster movie (only partially-seen creature until the end), which is cool. Much more decent than it could have been. Also pretty inventive in its handling of flashback sequences. Well-acted and well made, and pretty cool monster. Ultimately kind of a bit of fluff, but slightly more original fluff than the enormously cliched setup would lead you to expect. I think somebody involved with this has watched some Svenkmayer films. (Turns out, this director has been responsible for shorts I've liked much more... from https://www.avclub.com/the-ritual-is-a-chore-1822765612 "Technically, The Signal (2007), his first effort, constitutes a single narrative; three different directors were in charge of the film’s three “transmissions” (read: acts), though, and it’s all downhill after…
Ok, I like this one. What starts out as a very slow, almost dreadfully British film somewhere along very roughly the lines of "Coherence"—turn a normal gathering (in this case a family of unpleasant almost dreadfully British people) in a house into an increasingly desperate situation (in this case the house exits all being sealed from outside and the television issuing increasingly strange commands) and see what happens—gives absolutely no clue for the first two acts as to how far over-the-top it's going to go by the end.
How ridiculous it is, and how uninspired the storytelling and one-dimensional the characters are, is compensated for by the fact that it's not really much like anything I've seen before.
Really, you've got to admire its fidelity to itself. In some ways, it's a decent throwback to '50s monster movies. It decides where it's going to go, and sticks to…
Despite a little predictability, this Irish tale of a young mother who moves out to the woods and begins to suspect that her son has been replaced by an impostor is a decent enough view. The acting is decent, the score is creepy, it's well-made enough, if not exactly exciting. I don't regret the time spent watching it.
Death as entertainment. Dee Wallace in what looks like an interesting, quirky setup — a family full of characters gathers in a rural house for Christmas when the monstrous son they didn't know the mother tried to abort 20 years ago, and she didn't know survived, shows up — devolves into a fairly by the numbers captivity/everybody-gets-killed-one-by-one-and-hardly-any-plot-besides-that splatterfest. A woman gets cut in half vertically down the center with a single axe swing, another gets an umbrella run clean through her head and then opened, if those give you any idea. Is Dee Wallace this hurting for work?
Incredibly beautiful lead actress is the only conspicuous feature of this rote, by-the-numbers kids-on-vacation-in-a-haunted-house story. Oh, yeah, also, one cheap scare with what turns out to be the world’s scariest pizza delivery guy. I forgot this movie almost immediately after watching it.
About to get engaged to a woman he's only ever met over video chat, a man discovers when she moves in that she's attached to a homicidal conjoined twin. 100% campy, which usually isn't a good thing, but in this case it works. John Waters got famous making movies this bad and really only just barely more fun.
Emma Roberts and Kiernan Shipka in a movie so slow and boring that it slid right past my brain. Something about a girl stuck in a boarding school over recess and another hitching a ride, and they stab people at the end. Guys, it takes more than a creepy score all by itself to sustain a movie. Reading a review, it turns out both actresses are supposed to be the same character. Kind of emblematic of how this movie doesn't accomplish anything at all. (LOL, only after writing this did I discover that this is the same director as "I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House", another other movie that I once wrote I couldn't remember soon after seeing it.)
About 2/3 of the way through this one as I write this and about ready to turn it off. So far the movie consists of Tilda Swinton looking like she's barely keeping together while being taunted first by random strangers, and then by a young son with a Hannibal Lecter-like ability to devise cruel ways to psychologically torture her. No sign of a plot yet, though. [Sat through it all. Kid to a teenager, gets more cruel and violent. This movie has nothing to say, it's more an impressionist piece, but so unpleasant that that doesn't redeem it. Spotted Steven Soderbergh's name in the closing producing credits, not surprised at all. I don't think I've ever liked one of his movies.]
Movie-of-the-week level thriller about a woman whose protective new boyfriend turns out to be her deranged cousin trying to have her for himself. Oops, gave away the ending. Now you don't have to watch it.
Kind of suprised this isn't considered a "kids horror movie" classic, a la Goonies. 1980s kids horror movie, starts off sucking pretty bad for a good bit of its length but eventually goes so far over the top it lands in "so bad it's good" country. The special effects and creature are noticeably good for claymation.
You know, I kind of liked this movie. What should have been a standard C-grade teens-getting-picked-off-in-a-remote-location horror movie packs some genuine creepiness in there, as teens in the deserve inadvertently summon a... well, it never explains exactly what the "Hisji" evil entity really is, but it can fuck with electricity and confuse the hell out of its victims before offing them. More about building mood than jump scares or gore, and while it isn't a great film, or even a very good one, it definitely has that going for it, and I liked it for that. Way less crappy that, say, "Candyman". In fact, not really crappy at all, just kind of... only-moderately-unambitious, at worst. The AV club has a pretty good review at https://film.avclub.com/one-of-the-biggest-horror-movie-scares-of-the-year-happ-1835452053, saying all the scares happen in well-lit scenes, and that this is not "don't go in the basement" horror, which is a good way of…
This unbearably self-consciously "quirky" movie about a nondescript mattress salesman seems to lie somewhere on the line between "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Slackers". It desperately wants to be a "cult favorite". "Quirky" characters speak in non-sequiturs, give overwrought philosophical answers to questions like "how does your day look?", and name-drop obscure celebrities in conversations that go absolutely nowhere. And that's just the first 20 minutes, because after that I assumed the title was honest and gave the rest of the movie a miss. I bet it was filmed in Austin.
Family of metalheads buys a remote house in the country, is menaced by the psychopathic former resident who becomes fixated on the 14-year-old metalhead daughter. An all-around appealing, charismatic cast, as well as pretty fair avoidance of obvious cliches and a truly heartfelt portrayal of Mom, Dad, and Daughter Metalhead as a normal, loving family, saves what would otherwise have been a 100% unremarkable terrorized-by-a-psycho picture.
Boy, what to say about this. Father says he wants a divorce, mom blows her brains out, six months later father brings kids & new fiance up to his remove fishing lodge and leaves them there in the dead of winter. Two acts of sheer, drawn-out boredom as the kids and new fiance first fail to get along, then come to believe they've died and are stuck in the house, lead into one of the most emotionally cold, cruel, brutal third acts I've ever seen. Can't exactly say it's a bad movie, but can't imagine who would ever find this entertaining. Not many movies have made me actually feel bad, but this one did.
captivity/torture porn. A couple of kids in london break into an empty building to squat, find themselves trapped and tortured, dismembered, and in what I guess is supposed to be a twist ending, eaten, one by one. That's it. That's the whole plot of this brilliant fucking movie.
Zero-budget camcorder-shot amateur garbage. Why is this kind of stuff on Amazon Prime? Apparently somebody's home movie about society-wide cannibalism after a nuclear apocalypse, if that matters. Even worse, it tries to be artsy occasionally... urg.
The Blair Witch Project, but with Bigfoot, and less. BONUS TROPES! "No cell reception", unfriendly locals trying to run them off for unknown reasons, clueless city slickers lost in the woods, "Who messed with our campsite?", camera conspicuously running when it doens't need to be, "That's the same tree, we went in a circle!", all the cliches. Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, who apparently somehow, amazingly, didn't know better. Oh, also, the protagonists waste too much time talking about their relationship, which is always great cinematic entertainment. No, seriously, this is the worst-paced movie I've ever seen. Ok, they hear something outside in the woods, outside the tent. Does that require seeing them sit there listening in the dark for literally 20 straight minutes?
Bob Odenkirk redeems himself for "Melvin Goes To Dinner". Magical realist series about a young woman who suffers injuries in a car crash, only to discover that either insanity or time travel runs in her family. Rotoscoped animation seemed for the first episode like I was going to quickly get sick of it, but soon proves to be an incredibly smart production choice. Season 1 sags slightly in the middle, and the whole thing might have made a great movie instead of a very good series, but it's a very good series nonetheless, and highly original. Season 1 ends on a serious cliffhanger though. A conclusive ending would have been far more satisfying.
OMG. Ok. I kinda like these teen-oriented "horror" movies that seem like they were made from preteen novels, if they have a couple of fun ideas and creepy enough moments, and am willing to forgive a lot. Case in point would be "Plus 1", which this movie shares a lot in common with, beginning with the setup, which is "teenage protagonists at a party where reality suddenly changes on them in some unexplainable way and they have to find a way to cope". This film really pushes the limits of that forgiveness, though. Unlike "Plus 1", which at least tossed in a passing meteor as an attempt at some kind of macguffin to give some reason for the otherworldly things that occur, this film doesn't bother... kids go to a party, go into a closet to play "Seven Minutes In Heaven" and emerge in a world where everything is the…
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