Archives: Movie Reviews

Like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you'll probably like this film. Don't like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you won't. There's some religious or supernatural claptrap it's wrapped in, but it's not important. I wasn't at all suprised to discover this is a remake of a French horror movie, the surest sign of a terrible horror movie. The french culture seems to have an immaculate grasp of so many art forms, and they compensate for it with a complete, total inability to figure out how to write a good horror movie plot.

Teenagers getting picked off in the woods by zombie-type people infected with a disease... but, that said, surprisingly good, fairly original. Felt like an early-80s classic, and an ok one, not a rip-off by someone raised on those movies who loves them a little too much and thinks that's enough, as these sorts of movies often are. A pleasant surprise.

Empty, banal torture/capitivity porn. Male victim this time, english moors this time. Yawn.

I didn't know what drew Katie Asleton or Lake Bell to this very standard captivity/stalking-through-the-woods fare (directed by Aselton) but it's only that casting that makes it slightly watchable.

Here's a twist... A pretty crappy thriller that actually sucks until a pretty good twist ending. Young girl moves into an apartment complex in LA, where the neighbors turn out to be just a little bit possessive & controlling.

Overdubbed polish film with only its slightly odd, foreign tone and charming cast to set it apart from the usual psycho-picks-off-campers-in-the-woods flick.

Strange, seems like a BBC production. Someone described it as "The Goonies meets Silent Hill", which seems about right. Campy and melodramatic, kind of feels like the '70s Dr Who to me, in the ways that it strangely just somehow didn't grab me.

Surprisingly not bad for what it is. Nerdy guys are invited to pledge a frat, the hazing turns into captivity/torture porn. But, on the best end of that. I actually sort of enjoyed it, a real feat for this kind of movie.

What starts off like a cheezy tv movie slowly turns into a very decent hitchcockian thriller. An illegal immigrant maid hired by a family in the Hamptons suspects the son has drunkenly hit-and-run a pedestrian, and it all goes to shit.

I was in the mood for some light fare so I tried this Keanu Reeves thriller. Had I known it was an Eli Roth film I wouldn't have bothered, there's "light" and there's "tissue-paper thin". Typically shallow and pointless Eli Roth torture porn fare, this time without even gore, and even more fridge logic than usual. Basically, the Small Faces to "Funny Games"'s Rolling Stones. Two teen girls take Keanu Reeves hostage in his home, seduce then torture him, for no reason other than it's an Eli Roth movie and someone out there thinks that's entertaining enough that they got name actors to participate. I wish Eli Roth would find another line of work.

Ok, bonus points for inventing a new genre. Instead of the Rom-Com, this is a Rom-Hor (Rom-Zom?). Requiring tremendous suspension of disbelief and chock full of fridge logic and tropes made up for the sole purpose of driving the plot along, this horror-romance has a zombie regaining consciousness for no stated reason, and falling in love with a live human after absorbing memories of her by eating her boyfriend's brain. You know, it's utterly ridiculous, and I kinda enjoyed it, because it commits so hard to being what it is. Somehow they got John Malkovich for this, too, as the hard-nosed general who refuses to believe, until, in the climax, he comes to understand that a zombie can learn to love.

You can virtually hear someone watching "The Hunger Games" and thinking, "There's got to be a way I can come up with a franchise that is this same thing, except I get paid for it."

Couple falls asleep in a car and gets buried when a blizzard snows them in. Another example of the kind of stuck-in-a-hopelessly-remote-location survival film I like so well, although, probably my least favorite of those. Still one of them, though.

Irish film. Crew on a fishing boat battles an infection of seamonster-borne parasites. Not bad, these sorts of things can be done alright, especially if they're done far away from Hollywood.

English film. Girl hired to be caretaker for invalid at dark, scary haunted house runs around dark, scary house being scared of ghosts. Not bad for that.

[Posted on IMDB] In this terrifying true life story, two inventive filmmakers make a cursed horror movie which, although pretty decent itself, casts a foul spell that forces every lazy, terrible wannabe horror director who see it in the next 25 years to say "Hey, I could do that too" and copy it with their own inferior, deathly dull, derivative "found footage" horror attempt. Millions of bored viewer hours are wasted not being scared, Netflix is overrun with dreadfully dull "horror" films, and, in the end, the entire horror genre is nearly destroyed. Will the horror genre survive this dreadful curse? Nobody knows the end of the story. Stay tuned.

(not to be confused with the excellent 2007 horror anthology film of the same name) Boring-as-wallpaper hipsters track a hacker through the desert or something and wind up getting held prisoner and questioned interminably in Area 51. If the this film had been as interesting all the way through as it started to get in its third act, instead of two acts of turgid indie tedium first, and then kept going, I probably would have thought it was pretty good.

Amateurish film somehow turns into kinda decent low key thriller. Over-energetic hipster girl moves in with eccentric sound-recordist and possible pervert, and get involved in the case of a neighborhood girl gone missing. It was alright, in its way.

The USA-Up-All-Night-iest slasher flick ever. The rare movie that is so trashy I kinda liked it for being so bad. That doesn't happen to me much. (edit: apparently this is some sort of cult favorite that I've never heard of because I generally have no interest in trashy movies.)

Surprised to find out this was David Cronenberg. Seemed more like Robert Altman doing one of those "look how horrible film industry people are" films that's primarily entertaining only to film industry people. I did notice it was among the more engrossing of those, but, still. Even the likable cast (Robert Pattinson notwithstanding) couldn't really keep me interested. Julianne Moore won some sort of big award for her performance as a vapid aging star in this. It was almost as weird as seeing her as a porn star in "Boogie Nights", and she basically managed to make even that work somehow, so, ok.

Sort of like what you'd get if you hired David Lynch to do an afterschool special. Seemed like an ordinary teen drama, but got weird and mannered. There's a plot, but it doesn't matter. Also a bunch of musical numbers consisting of dirgelike choral versions of 80s pop crap, which I totally could have done without. "I'll Melt With You" is really totally fine as it is, thanks, you're not going to improve on it. Actually stayed just off-kilter enough for just long enough that it was mildly entertaining, despite seeming so try-hard.

One of those movies that look like someone with no experience and no budget said "Let's make a horror movie", and yet, somehow, they got it onto my streaming feed. One of the very worst-acted, worst-written, worst-paced, worst-edited movies I've ever seen. Basically, everybody who wasn't born on Feb 29 goes psycho, because, movie, and the few sane people have to escape from a hospital.

Another Duplass Brothers production of a passabloy watchable indie film that occasoinally veers into major creeponess and discomfort, imagine that. Family and brother's girlfriend deal with developmentally disabled man with a fixation on Fonzie, action movies, and female bodies, and an a little too much of a willingness to cross boundaries. Does an intresting job of occasoinally showing a realistic warts-and-all view of the ccomplexities of relaitonships, although not consistently and just as often comes across a little pat. But, still, watchable, I suppose.

Guy just released from an insane asylum under house arrest in his parent's mansion starts seeing things. Thriller, not a horror movie. Meh, okay I guess, not bad but didn't grab me.

I was loving this thriller for the first half. They set up one of the most despicable villains ever, and give her the ultimate hubris, as a woman who profits by taking stewardship of hapless old people, stowing them in homes, and selling their belongings, unwittingly takes what she thinks is a helpless victim with no family connections but turns out to be anything but, setting you up to see a real baddie get a delicious comeuppance.

And then, they treat her like a hero for the second half, have her go on to massive success and triumph, and have her undone not by her deeds throughout the movie, but by an almost literal "chekhov's gun" in the last 30 seconds of the movie, in what a third grader would probably think is profound poetic justice. Even the Big Baddie who she pissed off by imprisoning a woman he…

Another exercise in tinseltown omphaloskepsis. This one was ok, I guess. Kevin Spacey as a shrink with worse problems than his patients.