Archives: Movie Reviews

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 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.

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…

The cloyingly overcute Rebecca Rittenhouse, far less effective playing a nice character than she was playing an intimidating gorgeous snob in The Mindy Project, as a convoluted, forced sitcom idea of a "psychic" who has to constantly deal (and force her friends to constantly deal) with "visions" which seem less like glimpses of the future and more like plot devices to drive dramatic developments. Never has such a good cast (Kerri Kenney Silver, Chris Elliot, Nichole Sakura nee Bloom) been so wasted on vacuous rom-com piffle.

Fairly mediocre woodlands pursuit pic. Bachelor party on a camping trip in the woods when someone starts shooting at them. They run. The shooter keeps shooting. For another 90 minutes.

An orthodox Jew who's left the strict denomination is asked to sit vigil overnight in the Brooklyn home of a deceased congregant, in keeping with orthodox tradition. There's a demon in the house and/or he may be hallucinating badly. Quiet and moody enough to be engaging for the first half, especially some of the vague shots of maybe-there's-something-there-and-maybe-there-isn't in the dark, but it wears thin, feels like something I've ultimately seen before. Interesting to see a horror movie that's half in Yiddish, though. Also, decent lo-fi minimal synth score.

Finally! A movie in which masked psychos pursue and and kill a family out in the sticks (this time in a trailer park) for no given reason, until finally only the daughter, who one might perhaps term the "final girl", escapes! It's about time! No, seriously, this movie is exactly what you'd expect, but, for what it is, it's not actually that tedious. It goes over the top enough to be entertaining and a little surreal, such as a kill in a pool lit only by garish neon palm trees while "Total Eclipse Of THe Heart" plays over the loudspeaker just because rural masked psychos apparently enjoy imparting a sense of cinematography to their kills, plus an over-the-top final villain who keeps coming after having his truck blown up with him sitting in it, chasing the final girl across a conveniently placed rustic bridge in a flaming pickup truck, collapsing…

Another one of those fun-enough Mark Duplass pics. This time, full of all those charismatic actors who basically always play themselves: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, that guy Nick from New Girl, cameos from Kristen Bell and Jeff Garlin. Journalists in Seattle follow a story about a guy who placed an ad looking for time travel companions. Lots of fridge logic in this one, but if you like movies like this, you probably don't care.

In this movie, Eric Andre plays Sacha Baron Cohen in "Borat". Probably the least funny thing Eric Andre has ever done, which means, still a little funny. I did laugh out loud like twice, so, funnier than not watching anything at all, and in fact funnier than many things I have watched. Still, there's plenty of better things to get your Eric Andre fix from. Although having the outtakes and reveals where they tip off the unwitting victims under the closing credits is a nice idea.

God save us from hipsters making indie movies about themselves. You see a movie has Aubrey Plaza and Sarah Gadon, you're gonna think, "What's not to like?" Well, plenty. Another painfully "indie" movie that seems to be in love with itself, and what's worse, a movie nominally about hipsters making an indie movie, which, being a painfully indie hipster movie, is mostly a setting for them to do nothing but argue with each other and be dysfunctional, because apparently that's some sort of statement or supposed to be entertaining. The only way this movie could be less interesting is if they cut out all the irritating characters, which would leave us with a shot of an empty cabin for 90 minutes. (NB it was long after this that I discovered Plaza's also catastrophically pretentious and irritating "A Night With Beverly Luff-Linn", and began to realize she may be a warning…

Ted Demme as Martin Scorsese directs Johnny Depp as Ray Liotta, in "Blow" as "Goodfellas", with cocaine distribution as the Lufthansa heist.

One of those pictures that keeps latter-day John Cusack working. A post-AI-apocalype adventure aimed at the pre-Hunger Games set, as well as probably a paltry stab at a franchise or TV pilor, featuring a gorgeous heroine and a robot who thinks he's human trying to reach a promised human utopia. Good special effects but that's about it. So, a computer thought wiping out humanity was the solution to the worlds problems? Revolutionary! How in the world did they come up with that?