A contender for the most boring movie I've ever watched. Religious girl works as a hospice nurse, mostly just wanders around. Sometimes wanders around hallucinating, sometimes wanders around picking up guys. Kills her patient and sets herself on fire. The end.
what seems like it's going to be a thoroughly dull captivity/pursuit pic turns into a pretty good monster movie as a busload of English schoolkids are first lured into a trap and hijacked by an escaped lunatic and then trapped by a monster in a subterranean labyrinth that I could swear I have dreamed about before. No, really, it's better than it sounds. Also, decent '70s style analog synth score.
The kind of movie-Of-The-Week "thriller" fare that is entirely suitable as background noise, this time about a yuppie couple in debt that has their sights set on their foster kids' trust fund after offing their parents. Worth watching only to rest your eyes the incredibly beautiful Diane Lane until she dies about 2/3 through, and an incredible beautiful glass-block-and-steel house, which survives. Leelee Sobiewski plays a pretty effective mopey teen, somehow.
Halfway decent Spanish haunted house flick (with overdubs). Family moves into isolated house, son dies, EVPs, spectral visitations, ghost hunters with electronics, labyrinth discovered in basement. But, actually pretty good for such well-trodden subject matter, at least it's well-made and well-acted all the way through. Probably would be an ok date movie.
Picture, in your mind, a movie about Ashley Greene and her husband moving into a haunted house, which at one point contains the lines "It wants US. It feeds on life. We opened a window into our world, and now it wants to come through." This is exactly the movie you're thinking of... except, this movie's ending makes less sense than the movie you're imagining.
what neo-noir is when made by people who don't realize that neo-noir is about relationships, not just torture porn with some obligatory criminal double-crosses and complications to serve as background for the torture scenes.
Sub-USA-Up-All-Night fare about a farm family that develops boils and goes insane after a meteor lands on their farm. Starring a pre-"Wil" Will Wheaton and a post-"Dukes" John Schneider, unrecognizable in late 80s fashions instead of late 70s.
By all rights, I should hate this movie. One of those sort of "heartfelt" "indie" movies starring major stars (and once again Tim Heidekker in a non-comedy role. Why?) Zoey Deutch, who has somehow raised likability to an art form, plays the manic pixie dream girl this time (hands up, everyone who's ever met a real-life pretty girl who gives impulsive blowjobs to homely guys because she feels like it), but manages not to be too overbearing beyond the basic standards of the type. She hunts for adult men to give blow jobs to, which her friends film and then use to extort money from. When her new stepdad's son gets out of rehab and moves in, she they decide to entrap a teacher he made a molestation claim against a few years earlier. From there, though, despite some predictability, the film manages to avoid cliches and sets out on…
Ken Jeong, Jim Jefferies, Rhys Davies, a totally-unafraid-to-laugh-at-himself David Hasselhoff, and a host of thankfully not-too-overexposed familiar faces in the kind of pretty amusing slapstick movie the Farrelly brothers would make if their movies were a little bit smart instead of a little bit stupid. I laughed a couple of times and never once felt like my intelligence was being insulted.
Vacationing couple is held captive in a high-tech vacation house where a mysterious booming voice forces them to learn etiquette. Vaguely tries to do for gender politics what "Get Out" did for race politics, and fails pretty badly.
Remake of an 80s horror flick I'm sure I saw and would probably remember if it was worth it. Remake was entertaining enough, about as much of a horror movie as "Odd Thomas" was. But a fun-enough supernatural horror/comedy/action movie, with some good special effects, and decent actors like Colin Farrell and David Tennant. Apparently Spielberg helped with the editing, which makes sense, and it probably helped to have Buffy The Vampire Slayer producer Marti Noxon involved too, bringing forward a few things she already knew how to do very well.
surprisingly not-actually-that-bad thriller about a thoroughly unlikeable woman committed against her will in an institution where one of the attendants may be her former stalker... or she may be insane. Decent acting saves a script full of fridge logic. Turns out, this was Steven Soderbergh, slumming it I guess.
Family of trappers living in the wilderness, Dad and daughter are into it, Mom's maybe getting tired of it, when a wolf starts raiding their trap line, and to say any more would spoil it. Rack up one more above-average flick for the Canadians. What starts off seeming like "wilderness family gets threatened by natural or unnatural monster" veers off into becoming a seriously dark backwoods noir that only very slowly builds to where it's going. It's far from perfect—sags in the middle a bit, and feels a little like something was left on the cutting room floor somehow—but, draws on Canada's apparently abundant pool of oddly engaging unknown actors, and manages to develop into something fairly original. Could be a low-key cult classic. By the very end, it tilts full-on into gore, but only at the very end, and by being somewhat demure up until that point—such as only…
That charismatic guy who played Nick in "New Girl" stars pretty much by himself as a guy who has to complete a list of trivial tasks to inherit his mom's cabin (leave a nasty note for her boyfriend, call "the one who got away" and apologize, hike to her favorite spot). Which, if you find Nick from New Girl entertaining, is basically enough to justify a movie. Or, 2/3 of one, apparently, because finally they fall back on a boring, sentimental ending that seems to be there mostly because the movie did have to end at some point.
There's two kinds of horror movies. There's the ones that start with "a kill" and the ones that don't. This one does. That's how you know it ain't literature. That said, I really want to like this movie, not least because so many people do. And, it does have a few things going for it: really good early John Carpenter-like cinematography, a really good 70s analogue synth early John Carpenter-like score, and in Maika Monroe the most likable heroine since Jamie Lee Curtis. I get why people like it. However, it also lacks, er, just about anything else. The "plot" is as thin as it gets, thinner than "Final Destination" which was thinner than an onion skin. Basically, a curse is passed along where if you are a gorgeous teen who has sex with another gorgeous teen who is cursed, you get followed by a creature bent on killing you…
Totally improbable family takes refuge in a bathroom during a thunderstorm and improbably becomes trapped, as more and more improbable things happen. I don't think I've ever seen a movie that wanted more badly to be a great movie, or that required a greater suspension of disbelief. Dad acts like a psycho, because, movie. Son gets bit by a snake, because, movie. Daughter reaches her hand outside bathroom door (somehow blocked by a tree) and is assaulted, manages to grab her assailant's tongue and rip it out with her bare hands, family improbably decides to eat the improbably still-squirming tongue, then does so as if it's no big deal. I don't usually go for camp but this is so perfectly bad, with such hammy overacting, and overwrought, nonsensical reactions and character decisions, that it almost is entertaining to watch. A really spectacular car crash.
[submitted to IMDB] I don't know if I've ever given a movie just a single star before. But this is easily the single worst movie I've ever seen. I wish I could give it the 0 it deserves. Somebody must have bought votes because I cannot believe a film with literally no plot beside people torturing each other got 5.7 stars organically.
For no reason that is ever explained, a millionaire with a very annoying cackle invites financially desperate people over for a "Game" that might solve their financial problems, only to discover the "game" is he gives them choices of two horrible, sadistic things to do to themselves or each other, and they must either pick one and do it, or his butlers kill them. (Apparently there is some sort of employment agency where you can hire an entire household staff who have no problem with killing for…
I gave it a shot because I was feeling braindead and it stars Owen Wilson (who I'm somehow not quite tired of yet) and Jason Sudeikis (who I still like, which we can probably credit to lingering afterglow from "Son Of Zorn"), rather than the usual never-once-have-made-me-laugh suspects (Sandler, etc.) And for maybe the first half of the movie it feel list maybe the Farrelly brothers have maybe matured just a tiny bit, from trying to appeal to 4th graders' sense of humor to maybe even 9th graders'. But by the time the "humor" degenerates to "black men have huge dicks, and, that makes other men uncomfortable" you realize things have gotten worse, if anything, and it's not a matter of maturity, but just plain stupidity. And, I wonder, what audience both: 1.) demands a brainless, cliched redemptive ending; and, also, 2.) thinks a person sneezing so hard they shit…
What lulls you in by pretending it's going to be a raunchy sex comedy featuring a hooker with a heart of gold (and, refreshingly, a brain, played by unbelievably beautiful German actress Bella Dayne, who could be confused with a foul-mouthed Sutton Foster, definitely a good thing in my book) is actually a rom-com featuring a smart girl pretending to be a hooker with a heart of gold. A goddamn rom-com. Beware. I have to admit I liked her much better in the evening dress and talking filth. (Sue me. Look, without much of the promised raunch, I gotta find what I can in this movie to hold my attention.) Does have egg fighting though, and a great score of New Orleans blues, jazz, & funk.
Talk about an interesting failure. Starring Vincent Kartheiser, who has more charisma than Milla Jovovich, in a very slow-paced, low-budget movie where nothing is as it seems, and it's supposed to be "a mindfuck" instead of just "incoherent" and "confusing". Really well made, with some truly interesting ideas, and what would have probably been some excellent twists, if the plot hadn't been full of holes wide enough to drive a truck through and central questions hadn't been left completely unanswered. It's too bad. So close, and yet so very, very, very far. Well, it was much more interesting than "Inception", at any rate, if less sensical in terms of plot.
A group of friends get stranded at a remote cabin and find nobody there, but evidence of people having picked up and left in the middle of activities. One by one, they disappear.
The production values are good, and ratchets up the tensions well enough to be a little engaging. But it's very, very badly flawed—aside from two-dimensional characters, more importantly it basically has only a premise, not an actual plot... it's one idea, and never developed beyond showing you that idea. It never bothers to explain what's going on, and additionally includes a lot of inconsistencies and points that are brought up and then never explained, or sometimes ever even mentioned again. The character motivations are all over the place... for instance, a man who brought his fiancee to ask her to marry him has sex with his ex almost immediately after she suddenly disappears, for no other apparent…
A decent sci fi flick. A lone astronaut on a 10-year space voyage to locate the source of intelligent radio signals from within our solar system. Quiet and somewhat introspective, I enjoyed it.
Brutal, brutal, brutal survival tale of a couple of vapid photographers and models who get stranded when they crash their car in a remote desert.
Woman returns to her hometown where everybody acts creepy, because, movie. Also a demented ice cream man drives around randomly killing people because, movie. Sucked.
almost a Cronenberg film. Not bad for a fairly predictable, piece of shit sci-fi thriller. A "bioprogram" drug that causes you to experience years of virtual reality life goes haywire when the inventor agrees to spent 1 yr in a virtual solitary prison cell for the accidental death of a friend who used it.
Wow. One of the best indie films I've ever seen. An incredibly convincing 1950s small-town switchboard operator and radio host spend most of this film just talking, to themsleves or others, after a strange signal interrupts the radio broadcast. Also, for film geeks, this happens to contain an incredible 1/2-mile long single tracking shot, moving across town, through a high school basketball game in progress, and out to the radio station, in one uninterrupted take. Orson Welles would be proud. Plus a wonderful minimalist soundtrack. Loved it.
Truthfully, might not be for everybody, I don't know how many people share my love of seriously well-done pictures but which are mostly just dialogue and little action, and I hesitated for a second to put it on my "Favorite" list only because of that. But, boy did I love it.
Interesting. Mockumentary segments bookend a simulated but very authentic 1970s amateur home-made horror movie about a kid trying to dig a pit to hell in the woods. Actually, if you ignore the documentary segments, sets its sights so low, and is such a convincing "home movie", that it's kind of entertaining.
Netflix Original. Evil pharma company markets a new antidepressant that just happens to be made from a virus that was bioengineered as a military weapon, but it's ok, because it only turned the test rats into zombies at 20,000 times the suggested dose. What could go wrong? I was actually slightly disappointed because it was cancelled.
Pretty effective thriller. Two couples (including Alison Brie and that weird looking kid from Shameless with the sort of bulbous face that proves there's a "handsome uncanny valley" halfway between normal-looking and The Elephant Man) rent an oceanside airbnb from a vaguely threatening, racist dude. There's an affair going on between two of the couples, and someone finds a camera in a showerhead, and yet somehow it manages to build suspense slowly, and turns out to be be much better and less formulaic than it initially seems like it's going to be. Only problem is it finally turns from a suspense film into a slasher film. But that's only at the end, and until then it's pretty good, and after the carnage it then continues on to a decent ending where a slightly less less ambitious movie would have just stopped. One does wonder, though, if it was necessary to…
This movie is weirder and more artificial than any sci-fi movie I've ever seen. I mean, it's not that I didn't like it, just, like, I'm supposed to want to watch a thing about these unrealistically charismatic, goodlooking "troubled" people, or a world where Jennifer Lawrence introduces herself to the worst bad-news guy by offering him no-strings-attached sex just for eyeballing her for a moment, and insists she hates football and then pulls out a whole season's worth of football stats just when it's needed to win over Robert DeNiro and advance the plot? Hollywood types playing "working class porn", with surprisingly effective grit, obviously meticulously fabricated by hollywood's premier grit fabricators. Totally well executed, well-acted bullshit, set in a world where nobody is just dumb or ugly, where even the background characters look like Julia Stiles. Reminds me of "Love Story" in that way. Does anybody really buy the…
For confused first-time visitors and other people still acclimating, here is a description of these little tabs to the left, as well as some other features of the site.
Open "Expert Mode" CLI Navigation - this give you the option to switch your browser's display to an old-fashioned terminal mode where you may browse this site, view pages and images by typing text commands. Just like how we used to browse the web back in 1978!
Open Visual Settings - This gives you controls to customize the visual display of this website to your liking: turn up or down the brightness, contrast, color temperature, hue, saturation, dark mode, and earthquake. Settings are saved per browser tab, so they will be remembered for your whole visit.
Open My Eyes - Have you ever been engrossed in your work, when you suddenly realize someone is staring at your screen, watching everything you do over your shoulder? If not, this simulates the experience.
Open Help - This help popup, silly! You just clicked it! Do you not remember?
New - Draggable elements! Several elements on this website, including these tabs, this popup message, and the "Hire Mike" badge in the lower right, can be dragged around with your mouse, to avoid them blocking content. Positions are remembered per tab, so as you navigate around the site, they will stay in the same place for your whole visit.
Enjoy!
Are you sure you want to switch to viewing this website in the "expert mode" command-line interface?
This will switch to a terminal emulator, load this page, and allow you to browse this website and view its contents by typing text commands.
Plus there might be, y'know, some fun stuff hidden in there. Just for geeks.