Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention

Threads

Truly harrowing story about the buildup to and aftermath of a nuclear strike on Sheffield, England, following the intertwined lives of several people caught in the attack. This unflinchingly grim take on the short, medium, and eventual long-term personal and social toll of a nuclear strike was, incredibly, originally a TV movie. Like "Testament", another movie on a similar theme that I often mention in the same breath, it is absolutely unsparing. It's a very rough watch but an undeniable classic, and order of magnitude better movie than the contrived, soap-operatic pseudo-relevant "The Day After".

I'm writing this quite some time after last having seen it as I've just realized I somehow have never reviewed it. This movie is a pretty big favorite of mine. I'm not sure I can put it up with my very biggest favorites, but it's damn close.

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The Days Ahead

Decent anthology film showing three stories about survivors after a nuclear strike in modern-day England. It ain't "Threads" (an amazing movie I have somehow, incomprehensibly, not reviewed) but it was watchable.

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The Grey

Tough-as-nails Liam Neeson Liam Neesons around, this time around the Alaskan wilderness as the tough-as-nails leader of a band of tough-as-nails Alaskan workers stranded after a plane crash. Hunted by wolves and bears, dealing with cold and exhaustion, and somehow they manage to take one of my favorite genres—the man-against-nature survival flick—and tough-as-nails it into being completely uninteresting.

An attempt at a poetic ending falls flat as it ends with an anticlimax of Neeson about to fight a wolf one-on-one, and reciting Shakespeare: "Once more into the fray"... and, roll credits without showing the fight or how the story ends. What kind of a viewer they think wants to watch a whole movie of Liam Neeson Liam Neesoning, but then would rather see him quote Shakespeare in the end than fight a wolf, is beyond me. Especiale as he'd just gone to the trouble of duct-taping broken airplane liquor…

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Severance (series, season 2)

Quirky conspiracy-style sci-fi thriller about employees of a company who are psychologically "severed" so their lives outside of and at work have no knowledge of each other. The first season of Severance was plotted so nicely, I was surprised when it ended on a cliffhanger to discover it was a series and not a miniseries drawing to an ending in 8 episodes.

The second season unfortunately tries to be grander in scope, by moving much more of the action out of the office and to a wide-ranging variety of other locations, but succeeds only in being flabbier in terms of storytelling, talkier, slower-moving, and harder to follow, seemingly less interested in worldbuilding and than in contrived "intrigue".

They also start to show the first sign of tired storytelling: bringing in romantic relationships for "drama", as, for instance, the company inexplicably lets an "innie" (an employee's at-work personality) meet…

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Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

You, Me and the Apocalypse (series)

Kind of an offbeat British/American comedy about an eclectic assortment of characters who become involved with each other in the days before humanity is due to be wiped out by a comet. Jenne Fischer, Rob Lowe, Diana Rigg. I enjoyed it, it was more clever and entertaining than it should have been, and I was disappointed when the first season ended on a cliffhanger and it wasn't picked up for a second.

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Movie Reviews » watchable

The Fix

Alright sci-fi action thriller about a spectacularly gorgeous model (Grace Van Dien, great-granddaughter of Robert Mitchum) who ingests an experimental drug, intended to protect humanity from the increasingly toxic atmosphere, that causes her to undergo strange mutations. Soon the scientists are after her. There's guys with guns, lots of running and jumping.

Surprisingly not bad. Visually well-done, high production values without going too far over the top, and adequate acting to pull it off. Deserves better than the 4.7 stars it has on IMDB, at any rate.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Life Cycle

A programmer living in isolation invents an artificially intelligent and thoroughly fake-looking but oddly expressive (thanks to some skilled puppetry) head, and charges it to learn to humanize itself. It then spends the movie slowly going insane. Was actually kind of decent for the first half given the conceit, with some decent takes on familiar "What is human, anyway" tropes—the head wakes him up thinking it saw a face in the closet, which he explains is due to its having successfully inherited the human cognitive ability to recognize faces, even when there isn't really one, a neat idea—although by the second half it kind of runs out of steam and feels kind of perfunctory by the conclusion. Ultimately I can't say I liked it it, which is disappointing, because for a while it was definitely heading that way (no pun intended).

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Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Tin Can

Weirdly OK sci fi flick. In pandemic times, a scientist wakes up imprisoned in a life support unit, and spends the movie wandering a medical-facility-cum-military-installation, uncovering the truth about what's happening to her. Little dialogue and almost no plot, but, visually well done enough to be sort of interesting, I guess, and with touches of fairly disturbing body horror. I didn't hate it, and might actually watch it again at some point to pay a little closer attention.

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Movie Reviews » Just, Don't

Hackers

I really wanted to like this movie. This was recommended to me by a few people in Indieweb when it was October '25 movie of the month for their Indieweb Movie Club blog carnival, hosted by the estimable Benji.

So, it is with some degree of disappointment that I found, not being a child of the '90s and having no sentimental attachment to the excesses of that era (I have the '70s for that, thank you, although I generally don't steer unwitting friends of other generations towards it with any promise that the cheese I happen to love is going to hold any reward for them) that I found this to be an vapid and unredeemable pile of glossy Hollywood garbage.

This movie appears to have been written by a screenwriter who read an article about "hacking" in Newsweek…

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I like that it exists

From Beyond

Scientist invents a machine that lets him see extradimensional creatures, and it turns out, let them see him. Another cheezy attempt at Lovecraft, this time with way more '80s fashions than any other I've seen, and the requisite over-the-top latex monster applicances. I always feel affection for these because these low-budget Lovecraft efforts always seem to try harder than anybody else to rise to the material, even if they fail. At least they're aiming high.

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Movie Reviews » Trash

Undateable (series)

As hackneyed and unfunny as a sitcom can be. Chris D'Elia, who, despite whatever else may be said about him, is at least often a funny actor, is absolutely wasted in this. Turned it off during the third episode. I'm not sitting through 9 more episodes of this.

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Movie Reviews » watchable

American Gods (series, season 1)

Gritty fantasy show based on a Nail Gaiman about ancient gods fighting it out in modern-day American with the "new gods" of commercialism and technology. A very strong start to this Bryan Fuller adaptation, including a smattering of topnotch actors and some really well-cast cameos, disappointingly doesn't pan out as the season wears on. Never worse than good, the show nonetheless loses the first few episodes' tight plotting and gritty tone, gets talkier and more meandering, as what I hoped would be a tight miniseries turns out to be an ongoing series and kind of loses momentum. Tubi's run frustratingly only includes season 1 for now, ending on a cliffhanger, and worse, I understand Bryan Fuller left after that season and subsequent seasons aren't as positively reviewed. Color me all around kind of disappointed. It started really strong. If this had been a solid 6 or maybe 8 episodes of…

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Movie Reviews » watchable

Spun

Gritty (for Hollywood) tale of a day in the life of speed freaks. I suppose this movie is alright. Despite being cast full of actors I don't like much (Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Brittany Murphy, Mickey Rourke) it pretty much catches them all at their relative best, doing a pretty good job at bringing full lives to the kind of sketchy characters we've all seen out of the corner of our eyes once in a while, and mostly avoided interacting with. The Hollywood attempt at "gritty" is better than most such. Also, short cameos from the always disturbing Peter Stormare and Debby Harry as a tough-as-nails lesbian liven things up.

I watched this once before, long ago, and recalled liking it, and though it's up and down I came out of it once again thinking I kinda liked it.

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Movie Reviews » watchable

Magellan

Another in a long line of "first contact" films that owe a debt to "2001: A Space Odyssey", but a decent entry in the arena. A lone astronaut on a 10-year-mission to find what's been broadcasting mysterious signals from Neptune. Not bad, it was an alright watch even if conceptually a touch derivative.

Amusingly, "Neptune" appears to have been filmed at Pyramid Lake.

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Mr. Earth

Swing and a miss. A random man is picked to represent Earth before a tribunal of aliens evaluating whether to destroy it. Better-made than I expected, but, the first half hour is just standard divorced-dad-tries-relate-to-his-teen-daughter family drama, which goes on a little too long, until he is finally abducted from a comping trip, after which, literally everything goes on much too long. This is much too talky to be considered sci-fi, but it's not interesting talk. It's just turgid "dramatic" galactic chuffery like a Marvel Comics writer might have written for some cosmic saga, except, without the punchy succinctness. It just goes on, and on, and on, and on... you can't care about anything because nothing ever happens to care about without the characters talking for so long that you lose interest. And then, when the main plot is over, the movie continues another half hour, with him home on…

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Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Jules

Odd, fun little sci-fi/light comedy about an alien landing in an old man's flower garden in Pennsyvania. Ben Kingsley, Jane Curtin, and Harriet Sansom Harris, still a heavy hitter in sci-fi over 30 years after she freaked us out on the X-Files episode "Eve", play a bunch of old coots who nobody listens to, caring for a space visitor who doesn't talk but manages to express some strange things he needs to get his craft off the ground again. Pretty well done, pleasantly quirky, and a fun watch. I liked it.

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Don’t Turn Out The Lights

A bunch of kids on their way to a music festival are trapped when there RV breaks down on a wooded stretch of road, a bunch of random hallucinatory things happen that kill them one by one, and no explanation is ever given. Great.

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The Other

Subpar, but not awful, horror thriller. Mute adopted girl harbors a horrible secret that possesses her mother. It's her psychotic twin who she ingested in the womb. Don't worry, I didn't really ruin anything for you.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

The Unbinding

A talky, overlong mocumentary about a "haunted object" research team that encounters a strange wooden effigy that seems to possess supernatural powers. I feel bad slagging it off, because it's not terrible, but it's a whole "horror" movie of nothing people talking about a scary thing, rather than showing scary things. At 90 minutes, it feels like about 3 hours long.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Transmission (2023)

A montage of late-night channel surfing slowly reveals a story involving aliens, a horror filmmaker's mysterious unfinished film, a haunted videotape, and a local outbreak of violence. Told entirely as clips of flipping though channels in a fairly convincing recreation of flipping through late night broadcast TV channels, but the execution doesn't really work in an engaging way. Felissa Rose is in this, if that tells you anything.

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Shivers

A phallic/fecal-looking parasite that causes uncontrollable, violent sexual urges spreads throughout an exclusive apartment complex. How's that for an opener?

I just can't be objective about early David Cronenberg. I've always had a lot of affection for Cronenberg as a director, and although the low production values and camp story here play like early John Waters directing a gore film, or like George Romero making a movie about horny urbanites instead of zombies... I'm not going to say anything worse than that about it. And, you know, early John Waters has its points, too.

And, I think, to me, even though this isn't the best of Cronenberg's early films (cf. "The Brood", which unfathomably isn't on Tubi), you can still see occasional signs of talent. There's some disturbing imagery to be seen here, and that's what we come to horror movies for, right?

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Movie Reviews » watchable

30 Days Of Night: Dark Days

This unnecessary but not-completely-dreadful sequel keeps a lot of the visual style of "30 Days Of Night"—a movie I'm pretty fond of—so it scores points by me for that. This moves the action first to a gritty, dark Los Angeles, and then onto a gritty, dark vampire-filled ship bound for another hapless small town in Alaska, as the vampires have spread nationwide and a small band of gorgeous, tough-as-nails humans fights a losing battle to kill as many of them as they can.

Whereas the original leaned horror, this is more of an action movie, although with heavy duty supernatural elements. This is basically a "horror movie" in the same way "Predator" is a "science fiction" movie. IE, it's not, it's just dressed up like one, although the costume is pretty good.

But, you know, it's fairly well directed, even if there's not a whole lot to the story…

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Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Sting (2024)

Surprisingly fun horror about a young girl who takes a spider from space as a pet, which causes problems as it grows. Starts off with a "Goonies"-type "kid movie" vibe but actually turned out to be alright horror, slightly above average. Fun, at least. I liked it.

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The Pines Still Whisper

Turgid folk thriller. A paranoid, controlling woman and her daughter live in a remote cabin. Strangers show up with the same tattoo on their necks as the mother. Drama ensues.

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Movie Reviews » Turned it off

Saw II

I thought the first Saw was interesting, not great but good. I lasted maybe 20 minutes of this. It's just violence as entertainment... like, essentially gladiator games, except, it's supposed to be cool because its twisted. Great. Never done it for me.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Masking Threshold

I'm sure this seemed like a cool idea at the time—the inner dialogue of a delusional scientist tormented by sounds only he can hear, as he slowly goes insane and finally, with 10 minutes left in this 95 minute picture, kills a few people and them himself (seems like there's a lot of that going on in indie horror movies).

It's not that badly made, but 95 minutes of someone's inner dialogue about science trivia and "deep" thoughts, with 10 minutes of actual at the end, is not a good feature film, and definitely not a horror movie. This could have been a 20 minute short.

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The Twisted Death Of A Lonely Madman

Overwrought indie pic, filmed in black and white for extra artsiness, about an agoraphobic man who sits around his apartment obsessing over an actress. Of course, he eventually kills someone and then himself that way, or so I gathered from the closing narration, because I'd lost interest long before then.

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