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A woman rents goes on vacation in a woodsy cabin, only to discover that after an initial friendly meeting, the kids camping next door are starting to act a little wierd, either the victims of some sort of monster, drugs in the water, mind control, or a flimsy and never-explained horror movie plot.
By the end whatever happened to them happens to her, but it's never explained what it is, other than that something about drinking bottled water changes people.
It's too bad because the production is good and the atmosphere is creepy. But somebody forgot that stories need an ending. Or at least an explanation.
Four youtube documentarians set out to make an amatueur rip off of "The Blair Witch Project" and fail at even that. This movie contains all the most boring "first-person shooter" found footage horror cliches, and nothing else.
Low-budget attempted thriller about a disgraced journalist who got somebody killed by revealing a source uncovers a mysterious online puzzle that causes people to disappear. Starts promising a la "The Game" but then ends, disappointingly, without ever pulling the pieces together.
The ultimate contrived, formulaic sitcom. However, it has about the steadiest rhythm of any TV show I've ever seen, the dialogue goes bang-bang-bang, making it perfect background noise.
Surprisingly unengaging 1970 Jack Nicholson drama about a rough-hewn, misogynistic classical-pianist-turned-oilfield-worker returning home to his family. Not much of a plot. It seems to be considered a classic but I don't know why you hear about it so often. Maybe this is one of those movies that people who like French New Wave cinema or the like.
If this isn't a cult favorite, it really should be. Pitch-black, occasionally very gory, but surprisingly fun indie flick about a down-on-their-luck punk rock band who hire a genial homeless guy to roadie for their tour so they can use his van after theirs is repossesed, but he turns out to be a flesh-eating demon.
There's absolutely no reason this movie should be as fun as it is, and yet, somehow, it is. Kind of a low-key standout for me, along the lines of other obscure indie faves like "Otis" and "The Signal" (2007) (which, BTW, the actor who plays the homeless guy/demon was in the art department for, so that's a fun connection.)
Stephen King adaptation directed by George Romero. Typical dull Stephen King adaption, only less happens. George Romero really should have hung it up after "Dawn Of The Dead", too.
Having just seen "X" and surprisingly enjoyed it, I checked out this prequel, which finds writer/director Ti West back to his usual unrelatable characters and well-made but uninteresting and stylistically overfamiliar, derivative tricks. In this case, he does the Coen Brothers meets The Wizard Of Oz, showing the elderly lead villain from "X" as a young psychotic farm girl, killing people mostly because, movie.
I'm actually kind of relieved. After "X" I was afraid I might have to start liking his movies. No worries here. Not terrible, well-made enough to almost label it as "watchable", not just painfully uninteresting like "House Of The Devil", but as with so much of his stuff, the cinematic equivalent of a Fluffernutter sandwich: fun, but totally unsatisfying fluff.
Slightly uneven but admirably well-done tribute to 1970s cinematic gore á la "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Someone knew where they were doing here and really wanted to make a quality genre picture, not just an exploitative, derivative rip-off "tribute".
In 1979 a porn production crew rents a remote farm to make make a porn that would also be a "real movie" (clearly a fourth-wall nod there; this production tries, and to a respectable extent succeeds, to rise above its genre.) Unfortunately, the old couple they rent from are at first odd and menacing and then it gets worse.
The story and motivations don't quite hold up—the reason the old couple act the murderous way they do is never even hinted at, a classic case of "because, movie"—but, like a lot of '70s horror, this goes further into character and decent moviemaking than modern audiences are probably used to. It explores…
Matthew McUumellmahaye stars as a Florida fishing charter captain in a neo-noir crime thriller with a sci-fi twist that plays like a modern episode of The Twilight Zone. A little corny, definitely not great, but not bad, the acting kind of saves it.
Let me save you the trouble: The Shining was Kubrick trying to send a coded message full of symbols to tell us that the MK Ultra project was being used to mind control American citizens by creating the Laurel Canyon 1960's rock scene after Jim Morrison was hired to play a rock star because his dad sprayed aerosolized LSD that had something to do with Charles Manson, and Hitler, and Sirhan Sirhan, and the Freemasons, which John Lennon secretly said in an interview that he didn't want to be in anymore shortly before being killed by a guy who liked the book Catcher In The Rye, which is a mind control device by a military intelligence officer, and, uh, I literally cannot make up bullshit that is as ludicrous as this conspiracy theory "documentary". Does contain the memorable line, "I do believe Bob Marley may have been what he appeared…
A mildly interesting 4-hour-long (!) documentary on 80s horror. Mostly for the kind of people who think "Evil Dead" was a good movie, or that "Toxic Avenger" and "Gremlins" were horror movies... basically, people who think horror should be fun, not scary. But it was alright. At that length, it did manage to cover everything, including some good ones (including obscure favorites like "Night Of The Comet", for instance), and had interviews with basically everybody who was anybody in any '80s horror movie you ever heard of. And it managed to hold my attention for the whole time.
Super-campy, painfully 80s cult "horror" movie, apparently for kids, about a boy who discovers the popular desert everyone is becoming addicted to is alive and taking over. Honestly kind of amusing for what it is. I wouldn't go so far as to say I liked it, but considering my revulsion for campy, bad horror, it's pretty good. I mean, standing next to crap like "Evil Dead" and all that absolute garbage from that time that so many people like for some reason, it's practically a masterpiece.
An apparent home movie where two girls who clearly aren't actresses walk into an empty house and begin writhing and emoting. I lasted about 15 minutes.
Tediously campy horror/sci-fi movie in which two tough-as-nails thieves are abducted by a tough-as-nails mad doctor and subjected to experiements meant to allow travel across the barrier between life and death, which basically consists of him killing them, them seeing dead loved ones, and him reviving them again, over and over again.
New nurse goes to take care of cantankerous old woman in what looks like a mediocre ghost story but turns out to be a mediocre whodunit. Notable only for having the single longest "detective explains to the crook how he did it" scene that I've ever seen.
Here's something that's never happened before: a movie so disappointing it made me angry.
A man goes to spend the night in the woods after catching a hazy apparition on film the had been reported as walking along the edge of the trees near the road every night at sunset.
Basically, it's "The Blair Witch Project", except it's one guy instead of a group, and he sits at a campfire for a few hours instead of wandering for three days, and nothing happens.
Started off decent because the guy is actually kind of convincing. But, I mean, nothing happens. He makes camp, finds a bone, hears some noises, sits getting nervous, calls his wife to pick him up and leaves. And that's the plot. That's 90 minutes of movie.
A disparate group of people follow a Bigfoot researcher into the wilderness, and eventually find themselves trapped in a tedious captivity/pursuit flick.
Cheapo flick about a man who acts like a bad actor who inherits a farm on an island in Washington populated by other people who act like bad actors (except one, see below), only to discover tunnels on the property with zombified creatures dwelling in them. An entirely amateur effort that manages to distinguish itself by being just a scintalla more clever than the usual bottom-of-the-barrel amateur horror movie fare, plus some oddly somewhat-adequate cinematography and orchestral score, both also just a scintilla better than these kind of awful movies usual are, plus one mid-movie soliloquy from a crusty old guy who, strikingly, can actually act, recounting the genesis of the monsters with all the gravity of Brando in Apocalypse Now.
It was funny, in the first seconds of the movie, the strings kick in on the score, and I was like, "That's kind of good background music for a…
Jospeh Gordon-Levitt utterly fails to stop being Joseph Gordon-Levitt and disappear into a role as an uncouth dirtbag type who insinuates himself into the life of a young boy who just lost his mother and his working-class father and grandmother. He ain't Brad Pitt in "Kalifornia", that's for sure. Well-made and gritty, and with a good cast (Rainn Wilson, Natalie Portman) but, a little too sentimental and overlong, and failed to engage me.
Decent documentary on Roger Ebert and "At The Movies", by a friend of his. I've always liked Ebert as a critic, this sheds some light on him as a person. Has interviews with his family members, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, plus you get to see an outtake where Gene Siskel calls him an asshole, which, you always knew must've happened behind the scenes, but never thought you'd see it.
A woman returns to her rural home and winds up crossing the dimensional barrier to be with her dead parents, or some nonsense. I believe this is the pilot for a miniseries or something. Not terribly interesting, very TV-sci-fi-like.
Godawful home-movie-quality "mockumentary" about a bunch of cringily inane college students in 2007 who decide to make a YouTube video, as if that's some sort of event, with not a single laugh to be had anywhere in it.
This appears to be the work of some sort of improv comedy troupe whose primary distinguishing attribute is that one of them owned a movie camera, and thought that entertaining themselves would be entertaining to an audience.
Weirdly, some of the voice work in this apparent home movie is from cast members of Parks & Rec and Reno 911, and it's executive produced by one of the producers behind Portlandia. Why would successful TV comedy people do this to themselves? Was there blackmail involved?
This odd little sci-fi/not-very-funny black comedy has a certain appeal until it eventually collapses under its own weight. In the near future when all drugs have been made legal, a douchey biochemist tests his latest concotions on his douchey friends. The movie is mostly scenes of people getting fucked up or being hung over in imaginative and increasingly gross ways, yet manages somehow to be slightly entertaining and not anywhere near as bad as that sounds... not surprising, because it's Canadian, and seems to have that typical Canadian entertainment "slightly better than it should have been" thing.
Unfortunately, though, by the end, it sort of gives up the ghost, disappearing into an inscrutable and unsatisfying montage of psychedelic visuals instead of tying up the story. It's too bad.
I have an odd affection for this atrocious Stephen King adaptation about a strange mist that brings a plague of monsters to a Maine town.
Sadly, King adaptations seem to be more often Hollywoodized bubblegum pap like "1408" than "The Shining". This is the former. Aside from the unfortunately usual cringeworthy standards so many King adaptations seem to have, this one scrapes the bottom of the barrel even worse: unbelievable and clichéd story points obviously contrived to add "drama" but only succeeding in adding cringe, two-dimensional characters, and of course the de riguer overally tv-movie-quality productions which King's stories too often attract.
Roger Ebert called it a "competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People movie", but I think he was being generous. There are moments of true incompetence here, which is surprising, as it was directed by Frank Darabont, who also adapted "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green…
"Fatal Attraction" lite. TV-movie-quality thriller about sexually fluid LA hipsters taken in by a psycho pretending to be an old love. Worse than it sounds.
Just putting here because I forgot to review it and it's a touchstone for a certain variety of film that I find so worthless I can't imagine why they were made. See my review of "Visioneers" for a description.
At one point there seemed to be this new school of thought where you can make a movie by taking one or two high concept self-consciously "weird" ideas which may or may not be worth a whole movie, and wrapping it in stiffly-mannered, self-consciously "weird" acting and direction, with lots of random weirdness thrown in which is supposed to seem meaningful somehow, I suppose. This actually kind of worked in "Schizopolis" (haven't reviewed, google it) but hit its nadir with a small handful of films—still too many—like "An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn" (which I see I have not reviewed, but did sit through).
I'm sorry to see Zach Galiafinakis get involved in one, though. ZG plays in emotionless man (everyone in these movies is either totally overemotional or way over-the-top emotional) working in a workplace which seems to be an uninspired second-rate version of Lumon Corp from "
Wow. The ultimate "A+ for effort" horror/fantasy flick. Fails, but what an effort!
In terms of plot, if it matters, a temporary resident of a mental institution falls for the comatose girl up the hall, who it turns out... nah, I'm not going to spoil it. It's not exactly "different", but it steals so brazenly from films that are, that it is.
This "teen scream"-quality film shamelessly steals from Silence Of The Lambs, Saw, Mirrormask (actually stealing from that one shows impressive discernment) and I'm sure a million others on its way to a far more phantasmagoric second half than anyone could possibly see coming. It goes so far, and commits so hard to what it's trying to do, that it's actually impressive. And it's not even "so bad it's good"... it's not bad bad bad, it's just... aggressively mediocre, in so many ways, yet tries so hard…
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