Archives: Movie Reviews

Ok, bear with me... Small-town police and citizens in the autralian outback deal with an infection of alien parasites that turn the locals homicidal, in this hybrid of "30 Days Of Night" and "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers". Now, that could go a lot of ways, most of them not so good. But, this film wisely goes the low-key, low-special effects, acting-driven route that I tend to like so well. In the third act, it does begin to pile on the special effects and devolve into an action thriller, but, hey, it sustained my interest for long enough to count as likable, and it still manages to seem fresh in some ways straight through to the end.

Surprisingly not terrible thriller about a gorgeous autistic kid who secretly films gorgeous guests in the hotel he works at in order to learn to mimic ordinary social cues, when he witnesses a murder. Better, and better-done, than that setup suggested to me, although somehow the entire cast looks like they've had botched plastic surgery, which bothered me from start to finish.

"The Prophecy", or some similar horseshit. Plot, just so I remember not to watch this again, is: God decides to wipe out mankind and sends the heavenly host to wipe out the Messiah, currently gestating in the belly of a waitress in a greasy spoon in the Arizona desert. Actually the first half or so wasn't bad, kind of similar to a less-cheezy "From Dusk Till Dawn" kind of aesthetic. But then you get buff dudes with wings swordfighting or some shit, and I get bored. You know, you'd expect an epic supernatural battle over the fate of mankind to involve something less mundane than fists, bullets, and teeth.

Ok... college kids in bikinis, weekend waterskiing vacation at the lake, mean redneck locals, sharks. That's all you need to know, except that it distinguishes itself by incorporating the nuttiest revenge plan ever, and also, by netting Donal Logue to play the sheriff. He must've liked the script. The digital sharks are pretty well-done, too, that sort of thing is getting better.

Kyle McLachlan actually turns in a kind of intense performance in the most contrived drama I've ever seen. In a town where everybody is apparently always as big a dick as possible to everybody they meet — apparently solely as a means to create dramatic tension — society cinematically falls completely apart when there's an ordinary blackout, as gun store owners raise prices 300%, people start looting, threatening, and shooting at each other. Strong performances make this enjoyable despite the ridiculous premise (and strange saturated color palette for what wants desperately to be a very bleak drama.)

Early Chris Pratt and some other goofy handsome guy with a bunch of minor celebrity cameos. Two guys get stuck in a magic porn booth that transports them to an alternate universe where real life is like a porn film. They actually stretch the joke for an admirably long time, and really nail some of the "porn film" acting and dialogue, including a stereotypical cop who speaks in nothing but cliches. It could have been way worse.

Decent enough haunted plane movie. Takes forever to get going. Guy dies mysteriously on a plane, and haunted hell brakes loose. Lots of fridge logic but creepy enough in the moment. Last 2 minutes make no sense at all but fortunatly it's pretty much wrapped up by then. Amy Smart and Leslie Bibb.

Chris Pine and Piper Perabo in an alright post-viral-apocalyptic road pic where everybody who's not in hazmat suits is gorgeous, if you like post-viral-apocalyptic road pics or Chris Pine or Piper Perabo or films where everybody who's not in hazmat suits is gorgeous.

Maybe the stupidest movie I've ever seen. A truly terrible, derivative slasher movie about a gorgeous cam girl staying at a cabin who keeps getting startled by unexpected gorgeous neighbors and handyman, spliced together for no reason at all except maybe to lengthen this to feature length with a fake reality show starring an unfortunately real Paris Hilton about a bunch of reality show dbags living in a house together. Then the end it suddenly tries to get meta, tying both stories together in the stupidest and least believable way imaginable, followed by a rap song about "hoes at the party". Also guest stars one of those plastic, hyperinflated '80s bimbettes as an ostensibly gorgeous sheriff.

TV-movie-quality throwaway flick about a woman whose daughter gets bit by a rattlesnake out in the desert, and is helped by a strange old woman in a nearby trailer which vanishes afterwards. Later, mysterious strangers tell her she must take a soul for the one that has been saved, otherwise the kid's fatal injury will revert, and she must do it before sunset, because, movie, obviously. Eventually she kills someone and her kid is safe. Who was that old woman? What strange power is behind this ordeal? It doesn't matter, and it'd better not, because we never find out.

Robot "Mother" raises human "Daughter", the supposed last human, bred to repopulate the world following an unspecified apocalypse, until Hillary Swank stumbles in from outside. I give them credit for being able to maintain interest with a cast of just 3 characters, one of whom is a robot, but there was some fridge logic. It was enjoyable, and definitely big-budget and well-made. Still, nowhere near as good as "Ex Machina", although it seemed to want to be.

Fridge logic abounds as a sheepish yuppie gets convinced by a suddenly-reappeared-after-years old friend to spend a weekend at a mysterious self-improvement program in this rip off of "The Game" x "Fight Club". Mediocre film that might have worked if you have never seen those is ruined further by a nonsensical coda at the end.

Imagine a supernatural thriller starring Julianne Moore as a psychiatrist, and a single mother with a young daughter, investigating a strange case. This is exactly the movie you're imagining.

A group of teenagers are victimized in an "extreme haunt" amusement. Couldn't sound worse, right? Surprise! This film doesn't aim very high, and thereby it succeeds where few do, by actually being scary. It's pretty much the best case scenario for stupid, trite "teen scream" horror, and one of the best date horror movies I've ever seen. Rob Zombie has tried several times to make this movie and failed more often than he succeeded.

WTF is this? It was billed as a horror movie, and 13 minutes into it, we've had he-men with huge biceps and crewcuts running around shooting guns, getting into a barfight, drinking shots of whiskey, and having a sex scene with a woman who looks like a bleached, hyperinflated, airbrushed playboy centerfold, and some of the all-around worst USA-Up-All-Night-quality acting I've ever seen. In the first 13 minutes. I give this flick about 2 more minutes and then I'm done. (Ok, right after typing that some sort of apocalyptic alarms started going off and a monster appeared outside his door and now he's freaking out. Ok, I'll give it a little while.)
Ok, very shortly I'm glad I stayed with it. Thi smight be one of those rare "so bad it's good" movies that really is so bad it's good. He spends the rest of the time trapped in…

Paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller about a gorgeous young woman besieged by monstrous forces, this time about sleep paralysis and a demon.

I am really surprised I liked this movie, it has all the hallmarks of things I don't like, being a single-camera handheld exploration of middle-class sexual mores. But, typical of seemingly anything the name "Duplass" appears in conjnunction with, it was at least interesting. It presents a realistic scenario in which two straight friends wind up deciding to do a gay porn film together, and avoids a lot of the cliches and self-absorption that make these kinds of films often hard to tolerate. (Note: same director as the series "Little Fires Everywhere", FWIW.)

What a weird movie. A pretty run-of-the-mill bad horror movie that aims far higher than it reaches, about a gorgeous young woman returning to her mother's island home after receiving a call that her mother's grave has been vandalized shortly before the close of the season, only to be stalked and trapped by some kind of supernatural claptrap. However, it looks like it was shot by Jonathan Demme, which elevates it somehow to almost Giallo-like atmospherics. If only the story made sense.

Two things I can't stand: 1.) unbearably twee, self-consciously "quirky" comedies; and 2.) Tom Arnold being cast as anything other than the one white guy on the Soul Plane. I lasted like 20 minutes on this movie.

Any horror movie starring Katie Holmes is only going to be so good. This one has very decent creature effects, though. Guy Pearce (who appears to be completely featureless other than his tiny little nose, sorta like a male Milla Jovovich) and his tiny little nose are utterly wasted in this. Also notable for (spoiler) basically being a horror movie about the Tooth Fairy. If you're the kind of person who's amused by catching goof details like the scullery maid in the beginning trying to see what's in the dark basement by holding the candle right in front of her eyes, this movie is full of that stuff.

Jake Gyllenhaal as a guy who discovers an actor who looks just like him. They seduce each other's partners, then one of the women turns into a giant spider. Not sure how something this arch and pretentious could simultaneously be this boring and uneventful. It's like nothing happens in this movie. Memo to all directors aside from David Lynch and David Cronenberg: You can't be David Lynch or David Cronenberg. You just can't.

Did we really need another movie like this? Uncomfortable dinner in the English countryside between two young couples with an obvious uncomfortable history gets increasingly uncomfortable until, in a stunningly original piece of plotting, masked guys unexpectedly break in and start brutalizing them. Iwan Rheon is better than this. The tables turn repeatedly as the victims and the intruders repeatedly manage to overpower one another, the movie ends as soon as the violence does just in case you though anything besides the violence was the point, and the whole thing is rendered terribly English by pretentious title cards dividing it up needlessly into "chapters" and saving the title card for the end of the movie with a sudden "bam" sound to underscore that it's supposed to have some sort of impact. I suppose if you've never seen a gratiutous bloodbath before it might, but really, what moviegoer hasn't at this…

godawful "indie"-flick-starring-major stars I got tricked into watching by Hulu billing it as a "comedy". This movie seems to desperately want to say something, but I have no idea what that is. Kristine Froseth stars as a gorgeous childcare worker, and a virgin who had a medical hysterectomy at 15, who has a crush on the father of the boy she watches, seduces him, has an affair before getting caught, writes a fan letter to a porn star she likes, anonymously fucks a lot of guys, catches an unspecified STD, and at the end gets a video back from the porn star giving her advice to stand up for herself and avoid bad people, end of movie. Except for the "written by Lena Dunham" credit that finally explains why this well-acted-but-otherwise-completely-hollow exercise even exists.

Had opportunity to re-watch this, and you know, I like this movie. Not sure what I can say that hasn't already been said. Meryl Streep in an iconic performance she modeled partly on Clint Eastwood's ability to command attention by speaking softly, plus Anne Hathaway, who to me has always been an entertaining-enough sort of "everyperson" actress, one of very few prominent stars you see regularly who isn't annoyingly Hollywood-y. A refreshing example of how you can make movies with female casts that are emphatically not chick-flicks, and pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, all without preaching, moralizing or ever forgetting that the main objective is just to be a good movie. Now if they could just make these about something besides the fashion industry.

Eh, this is all getting a bit Harry Potter for me. The first season was cool. By season 4, they actually do a decent job of retconning an overarching narrative for everything they've ever should (helped along by a disturbing digitally age-regressed heroine for new scenes of "her" as she looked as an 11 year old in season 1). I mean, it wasn't bad, I don't regret watching it, but there's a lot of good stuff on Netflix nowadays, and a lot of very grandiose high-concept fare, and I dunno, this isn't bad but it's comparably nothing to write home about, either, like it was 5 years ago. Also, as an IT guy then and now, I'm a little annoyed at the presence of laptop computers and the use of IP geolocation as a plot device in a show set in 1986.

Talk about a disappointment. For about 85% of its running length, this jump-out-and-say-boo ghost story about a young widow mourning her husband's recent suicide in the lake house he built manages to stay better than average by mostly avoiding familiar tropes and plot twists and slowly ratcheting up the weirdness with a minimum of special effects or exposition, or even ever tipping its hand as to whether the haunting is actually happening. Then, in the very final scenes, whatever forces often conspire to take middling horror pictures and ruin them by jettisoning sense and writing in favor of overly familiar tropes, sentimentality, and special effects packs as much of all that into the last few scenes as they normally do into a whole movie, and completely undo everything that was good about it up to that point before concluding with an ending that neither satisfies nor even makes much sense.…

Ridiculous, hamfisted, but a charismatic cast kind of save this ridiculous attempt at making a "Get Out" for Latinos. An emergency order results in the arrest of all children of illegal immigrants, with an offer to drop all charges if they help out for three months at a creepy senior center. It only gets more ridiculous and unbelievable from there.