I have no idea how they got renee zellwger, ian mcshane, and that guy bradley who I guess is good-looking to star in this crap horror thriller about a social worker who adopts a little girl who is evil or demonic or something and kills people because, movie. Maybe they all had a contractual obligation to discharge or something.
Hallmark Movie Of The Week-quality telling of radium workers suing for workers' rights. A great story reduced to nothing. The '40s fashions are the only good thing about it.
Quiet post-apocalyptic zombie drama finds Martin Freeman carrying his baby through an australian wasteland full of carrion and infected people, with an aboriginal girl in tow. Not even really a horror movie or thriller, just a drama. Martin Freeman gives a quiet, intense performance that's a credit to him, having adventures and misadventures trying to find somewhere safe to bring his child. Worked for me. Wikipedia says it's a tribute to The Road and I can see it.
First person shooter, blech. Ray Wise, yea! Overall, enjoyable enough for a bad first person shooter movie, mostly because of Wise, and decent creature design.
A horror director is contacted by a man who claims to have evidence of real monsters, who leads them to film a hole in the woods, with predictable eventual results and a larger-than-average helping of fridge logic, made enjoyable by, again, Ray Wise, and decent creature design.
Also notable because, unlike the overwhelming majority of horror movies, it does contain one really excellent scare.
N.B. I read that they cast the easily recognizable Wise instead of an unknown because they wanted it to be clear from the beginning that it was entertainment, not an attempted hoax. Ok, I dig that.
Had no idea what this was going into it. Listed as a 'documentary', what starts off seeming like one of the best one-man shows I've ever seen basically turns into a pretty good magic show. Less than the sum of its parts, and leans a little hard on trying to be poetic and hit emotional beats when it's really just magic tricks, but I did enjoy most of those parts a whole lot, and the tricks are definitely somewhere between good and, at their best, great.
Megan Fox in what starts off looking like a disturbingly brutal captivity pic, as her husband decides to punish her for infidelity by driving her out to their remote lakehouse under pretext of a romantic evening but then handcuffs her to himself and kills himself, turns into actually kind of decent neo noir as he apparently also called hitmen/jewel thieves to come rob the place and kill her.
1994: Imagine a slasher movie based on a series of popular teen novels. Ok, you've got it. Not bad for what it is, just _is_ what it is.
Seriously funny, geeky series about an alien abduction support group in Beacon, NY disappointingly ends after 2 seasons in a cliffhanger but is nonetheless well worth watching if you're into geeky sci-fi humor. Should be a cult favorite.
Charming pic based on a tale from the Decameron. Medeival nunnery with Aubrey Plaza, that little girl from Garfunkel & Oates, Alison Brie, John C. Reilly all dressed in medieval garb but acting like modern people. Better than hearing about that kind of cliched irony might lead you to believe. Could have gone either way, but, really pretty fun. I liked it.
Oddly reminiscent of "The Wicker Man" in superficial ways, but not in the good ways. Gorgeous vacationing couple in Thailand awakes with no memory of the night before and a video on his camera of him killing and burying her. Descends into unexplained weirdness, then explained with a bunch of unsatisfying exotic paganistic bullshit. Wouldn't watch it again but Maggie Q at least made it entertaining for what it was.
Ok, Netflix's description said only "Biologist, cop hunt deadly creature in museum". I said, ok! And it turned out to be a really enjoyable monster movie in the John Carpenter vein. Like, imagine John Carpenter had directed "The Poseidon Adventure", and instead of trying to escape a ship capsized by a huge wave, they were trying to escape a monster that was terrorizing a museum. Nice to see people still sometimes make good monster movies every once in a while. I liked it.
funny hybrid sci-fi/horror flick about a manly, tough-as-nails paranormal investigator, with a team of gorgeous researchers, who cures possessions by using scientific methods to enter the subconscious of the possessed, who are apparently trapped in a fantasy realm and must only be persuaded to leave voluntarily to cure the possession... by getting them to jump out a window. Very slick, "stylish" Hollywood-style production, full of tropes that seem learned in screenwriter's school, and everybody looks like a model. Seems like maybe it was an attempt to launch a franchise.
I found myself wondering after the first 15 minutes, "Who is this Cronenberg wannabe?" Turned out, it's Cronenberg, in "Crash"/"ExistenZ"-style disappearing-up-his-own-ass mode. It was beautiful but meh. I've been a lifelong Cronenberg fan, but sometimes it seems like he doesn't realize it takes more than a good idea and good cinematography to make a movie. Some sort of high-concept claptrap where in the future people prefer pain to sex and artists mutilate their bodies in front of audiences. I think if ExistenZ had been as well-shot and well-acted as this, people would have realized it's the better of the two movies. Which isn't saying all that much. Apparently this was very well received at Cannes, which makes me begin to suspect that Cannes is just as much of an empty circle jerk as Sundance.
This is kind of a masterpiece of crap television. First off, the cast is stellar, the acting is superb. Beyond that? Garbage. I expected a drama, but this is straight melodrama, just a soap opera. It's like Dynasty meets Glee's hip-hop kid sister. As glossy and expertly produced as it is empty and unbelievable. The Glee-style over-autotuned, overcompressed vocals in the frequent musical numbers sums it all up.
another "thriller" about a psycho stalking/imprisoning, and re-stalking a woman through the woods. This one started off seemng like it was going to be good, with well-done scenes of a woman being stalked on the road by an increasingly threatening other motorist, before he captures he and it becomes much more run-of-the-mill fare. Still probably among the better of these types of movies, with some actually inventive twists and a genuinely creepy and realistic psycho, but, did the world really need another movie about nothing more than a lone woman being captured and/or pursued and victimized by a lone man and then overcoming it? Is that really a story that needed telling yet again?
High-concept picture in which terminally ill people can, in the near future, clone themselves to ease their family's suffering—but, if they turn out not to be terminally ill, must duel their clone to the death. Enter Karen Gillan in that situation, who then spends the first half of the picture watching her clone steal her entire life and the second half training for the duel. Much better than that silly premise makes it sound... not great, but if it had been a Black Mirror episode, it would have been one of the better ones. I'm surprised I liked it but I kinda did. This kind of familiar ground is hard to get right but I could maybe see this become a low-key cult favorite.
Installment #3, which a much bigger special effects budget and largely used well.
Most notable for the inclusion of the bizarre "Parallel Monsters", about a scientist who opens a doorway to a monstrous mirror dimension and agrees to swap places with his parallel self for 15 minutes, probably one of my favorite horror shorts that I've seen.
I actually kind thought this one was consistent and slightly better than the other two, which of course means the critics all panned it hardest of the three. Not sure what's wrong with people.
I still wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but would personally rewatch "Parallel Monsters" every now and again just because it's so damn weird.
It also marks the first-person-shooter style finally jumping the shark completely, as we see footage that could never be found (like a camera eaten by a monster showing…
Assassin takes over other people's bodies to kill her targets. Another small-but-satisfying Canadian sci fi thriller, well-cast with a bunch of no-name actors. David Cronenberg's son, and I called this one as Cronenberg-related without knowing I was right, although I wasn't sure, because this was a little better than Cronenberg Jr's last film. Still self-consciously strange, strangely retro, and with some brief unexpectedly gory scenes this time, but definitely showing some maturity and self-assurance that was missing last time. I liked it, and had one of those rare endings that I actually liked better after I thought about it for a minute... it wasn't a good enough film that a bad ending wouldn't have ruined the whole thing, but it was a good enough film that a good ending redeemed the whole thing. If Cronenberg Jr's next film is as much better than this as this was than his…
Well, I guess if they had called it "American Horror Story season 10: Ratchet" nobody would have watched it, because they would have known to expect this.
Family that films every moment of their lives in POV for no apparent reason, when "scary" things start happening for no apparent reason.
very decent creature design, a few genuine momentary scares, and a focus on my personal phobia of the dark (yep, it's true) were not enough to keep my interest in this tale of a family pursued by a fiend that can only appear in the dark, and I spent the second half of the movie being much more entertained by googling pictures of unbelievably beautiful lead actress Teresa Palmer.
A good film which emphatically does not seem at all like it's going to be a good film. What starts out seeming like a run-of-the-mill b-movie cheap shit thriller about disappearing kids and an urban legend about "the tall man" who abducts children in a Pacific Northwest town turns out to be something quite a bit better than that. I wouldn't give it an A, but it's a solid B+, an actual story with a genuine plot, and definitely winds up original rather than the derivative, cliched rehash it really, really seems initially like it's going to turn out to be. I'm probably a little more enamored with how it fooled me into lowering my expectations than I ought to be, but, I am. It doesn't happen that often.
Once you know the movie description starts with "A pregnant couple's car breaks down in the woods so they seek help at a nearby farmhouse" you know what you're in for. All the quaint English charm and gorgeous shots of the rural English countryside in the world can't save this sadistic, wholly unnecessary captivity flick.
A girl's car breaks down on a rural backroad, and gets menaced by the locals, who chase her through the woods and hide her car... from there, though, instead of turning into a run-of-the mill pursuit/captivity flick, it turns out to be a very decent backwoods neo-noir thriller, somewhere between "Breaking Bad" and "Ozark". I liked it, much to my surprise, given the setup. I wondered what an apparent "woman gets victmized by the backwoods locals" flick was doing in Netflix's "Hidden Gems" section, but, turns out, even if it's not what I would necessarily call a "must see", it does belong there.
Half a very lazy documentary about novelty haunted house attractions, grafted onto half an execrable first-person shooter with every single failing a FPS could have. I guess they didn't have enough to make a full lazy documentary or a full lousy horror movie. Twice. BTW, memo to filmmakers: The Pacific coast is extremely recognizable. You can't shoot Kitsap County for North Carolina. Especially the beaches. Totally different.
I'm halfway through this laughably implausible piece of shit. This movie takes itself sooooo seriously, all somber score and intense acting performances, as if it doesn't realize that a thriller about an evil mastermind high school student who apparently has the whole world cowering in terror before his evil mechinations to get straight A's would be totally absurd even if every scene didn't seem so thoroughly contrived and unrealistic. Like sure, a nice girl would act like a slut and try to come on to her teacher just because she was told by an evil genius classmate that the teacher was into her, and then, when the teacher absolutely rejects her, let the classmate dictate a love letter for her to give him that will change his mind which, just coincidentally, also happens to read exactly like a suicide note. Or, sure, a teachers wife would never, ever question why…
OK, the setup is, a silent cowboy is essentially trapped in a Chuck E Cheese, battling sentient, murderous animatronic characters. Oh, wait, also: the cowboy is Nicholas Cage, which changes everything. This film knows exactly what it is, and remains unapologetically true to itself all the way through. Such a ludicrous idea doesn't need to be excessively overdone, and so it mostly isn't, it's just done and the natural excess of the whole idea is let speak for itself. I really kinda love this movie. Plus, you've got a movie in which Nicholas Cage has to be Nicholas Cage without uttering a single word of dialogue, which, ok, I can take or leave Nicholas Cage, but he's the man for the job in this case.
Wow, sometimes you stumble across an unexpected gem. The setup is a remote pair of forest rangers checking trail cams stumble across a pair of survivalists, initially promising to be a standard backwoods captivity/pursuit flick with no more to commend it than the notably gorgeous digital cinematography (which happily holds up from start to finish). Fortunately it turns out to be something else: a quiet and pretty original creature feature/body horror outing that I bet admirers of both Svenkmayer and Cronenberg would find things to enjoy in, not to mention being consistently well-directed and visually beautiful enough to evoke Lars von Trier's earlier years. One of those horror films that probably pleased a lot of high-minded critics. I have little doubt Roger Ebert would have greatly enjoyed it, and I'm sorry not to be able to read his review of it. I'll remember this one, and watch it again. Also…
Well, I wondered what a horror movie with Jeff Goldblum and Alicia Silverstone might be like. This seems like a TV movie. A near-death experience psychically links Goldblum with teen serial killer played by a young Jeremy Sisto. Silverstone sulks and does not much else. Eventually a supernatural element is introduced involving what probably looked like hella cool CGI effects in 1995, but I'd long lost interest by then.
ok supernatural horror thriller about a wealthy city guy imprisoned in a farmhouse by a elderly farm couple dabbling in the occult when his private plane goes down on their property. Notably primarily because I think this is the first time I've seen a horror movie with a 100% all-black cast where race wasn't a central theme of the plot (or mentioned at all, really). Definitely ok acting, and a couple of good moments, such as a visual of a blind man using voodoo to see by placing goat's eyes on his face.
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