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Little Nicky

Adam Sandler—get this—talks in a stupid affected voice! Hilarious, right?

Actually, if not for him, and the fortunately mostly very short cameos of every single painfully unfunny person from about 15 years of SNL from Dana Carvey to Jon Lovitz to Kevin Nealon to Rob Schneider to even a namecheck for Chris Farley, this was cute enough, not as absolutely stupid as most things he's been involved with. And, I mean, it's got Harvey Keitel hamming it up as the devil, which is fun. Probably the best Adam Sandler movie I've seen, although that's an abysmally low bar. If not for the stupid voice, it actually would be almost watchable. (But if he couldn't do a stupid voice, I guess he'd have had to act.)

This came on as autoplay after a Will Ferrell movie, and right after this Tubi tried to autoplay a David Spade movie, and I drew…

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Holmes & Watson

The still-inexplicably-famous Will Ferrell does his usual job of unfunnily hamming it up, in this case sucking the talent out of a pretty star-studded cast of extras in this period farce.

Movie Reviews » watchable

Spread (2024)

Reasonably agreeable redemptive comedy about a progressive woman who gets a job turning around a porn magazine. Lots of charismatic actors. I've spent worse 90 minute stretches in front of Tubi.

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Oh, God

A very '70s movie that I remember from my childhood as a comedy—c'mon, it has George Burns as God, appearing to John Denver as a man picked to be his modern Moses—and yet, upon review, it has no actual jokes.

It does have Paul Sorvino cast, in a turn that seems unlikely nowadays, as a southern baptist preacher, so if you'd like to see him pay something other than a mafioso, it has that.

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Rain Man

Other than Dustin Hoffman's tic-filled, fairly convincing performance as an autistic savant, there's really not as much here as I expected. The constant tics get old fast, and Tom Cruise's performance as his sleazy, materialistic brother gets old almost before it starts, and there isn't much narrative to it. Definitely more of a Tom Cruise movie than a Dustin Hoffman movie.

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But I’m A Cheerleader

Cute coming-of-age LGBT comedy about a Christian girl, improbably played by a young Natasha Lyonne, being set to conversion therapy. Some stunt casting, with LGBT icons like Mink Stole and RuPaul cast as conservative parents and teacher.

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10/31

Pretty cheezy horror anthology film that looks like it was made in the 80s, complete with tediously familiar eurodisco synth soundtrack. Witches, slashers, an obvious Elvira ripoff, etc. Kind of bottom-of-the-barrel. You're not missing anything.

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Fear Itself (series)

Strangely boring horror anthology series. Well-made, and some of it started off seeming like it was going to be interesting, but, while it wasn't terrible, somehow it had a bit too much shrieking, a few too many guns, and some overly familiar storylines.

Movie Reviews » Canadian

Night Visions (series)

Fairly watchable Canadian early 2000s Twilight Zone-type anthology. Lots of recognizable faces & reasonably respectable actors involved (David Paymer, Miguel Ferrera, Mare Winningham, a million more. That sort of caliber.) Quality is uneven but some of the stories are pretty watchable and they occasionally pull off a good ending.

Strangely, hosted in the Rod Serling-type narrator role by Henry Rollins. No effort is made to have him seem anything like Henry Rollins, suggesting what the Twilight Zone intros might have been like if Rod Serling seemed less like he was looking forward to a martini and more like he was thinking about beating the shit out of you.

Movie Reviews » WAY too indie

The Deeper You Dig

Take a fairly boring tale of a mother of a missing girl, the man who accidentally killed her, and the girl's ghost all being mildly annoying to each other in a snowy rural woodland, and then make it worse by adding "artsy" blurred camera work, smash cuts between disconnected scenes and what appear to be actor improv sessions, and a dissonant synth soundtrack.

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Men (2022)

English folk horror. Very well directed but ultimately gives up narrative in favor of phantasmagoria, for an ultimately unsatisfying watch.

I firmly enjoyed this movie for about 2/3 of its runtime. A woman recovering from her husband's suicide rents an English countryside house, and before long she's stalked by a strange naked man from the woods, and the other villagers—all men except for a lone female police officer and the only sympathetic villager, and all played by the same actor with a great deal of well-done makeup and digital distortion—because less sympathetic and first dismissive, then hostile. In the last third it abandons the mounting drama/thriller effort, which I was enjoying, in favor of folk horror, laden with admittedly very well-done special effects, but more just a spectable and not the narrative denouement I was hoping for. Ultimately what was mostly an atmospheric and tight if low-key thriller just gives…

Uncategorized

Panic Button (2011)

High-concept, sub-par execution thriller is basically "Saw" on an airplane with a social media morality play spin. Four people are put on a private jet, ostensibly because they won a contest on social media, but really because they treated others horribly online online, and forced to play a "game" which consists of an unseen voice who seems to know every detail of their lives exposing their darkest secrets, then making them torture and kill each other under threat of their loved ones being killed as they watch by remote feed.

The production values were actually not terrible, but the story is just stupid and 100% unbelievable. I don't know how anybody thought this screenplay would make a good movie. "Saw" was much, much better.

Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

The McPherson Tape (aka “Alien Abduction”)

Despite my hatred for "found footage" horror films, my interest was piqued by see that this was a "found footage" film from 1989—predating ostensible genre inventor "The Blair Witch Project" by several years. It's sort of like discovering a heavy metal band from 1963.

Interestingly, this film about a family birthday party interrupted by the appearance of aliens shows that the "found footage" genre emerged fully failed from the beginning.

This earliest known example contains everything that sucks about the genre: little plot, a complete disregard for pacing in favor of dwelling for too long on irrelevant conversation between uninteresting characters (do we, as viewers, really need to spend 5 minutes watching the family say their goodbyes to each other after dinner?), difficult-to-watch low-quality camerawork with zero cinematography, muddy sound, and an all-around lack of any qualities that might make it worth spending the time to watch.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Banshee Chapter

I have no idea how they got Katia Winter and Ted Levine (who, by the way, once personally scared the shit out of me in a real life encounter) for this movie that is visually somewhat competent, at best, but feels in every other way like an absolutely amateur mess.

This story manages in the first half hour to mention MK-Ultra, psychedelics, numbers stations, the Black Rock Desert, H.P. Lovecraft, and a character who couldn't have been more closely based on Hunter S Thompson if he'd had his ashes shot out of a cannon after he blows his brains out near the end. And, nothing original at all, other than throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the first 30 minutes of one movie. It's just a hodgepodge of trite conspiracy theory shit tied together with jump scares, as the film finds reason after reason for the lights to go…

Movie Reviews » Just, Don't

Janus (2024)

Bottom-of-the-barrel zero-budget indie sci-fi about a mad scientist who kidnaps people to clone them for some reason. Notable only for having a twist ending I saw coming about 30 minutes into the movie. (The good guy escapes, and it turns out he was cloned and the clone sets off after him.)

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Match (2025)

A pretty pleasant surprise—a thoroughly derivative captivity/pursuit movie of the "trapped in an insane psycho's house" variety, about a young woman who is tricked into meeting someone via a dating app who is not who the profile says, but which slowly picks up about a third of the way through and then, surprisingly, just gets better and better.

This is entirely derivative in terms of its themes, indebted deeply to movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but slowly they began to introduce elements that had me thinking, "Well, this is actually alright for what it is, I bet younger horror fans will think it's great... although I'm just not sure it's necessary when we have The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And then, slowly, they just kind added enough novel elements, and truthfully the whole thing is well-made enough all the way through, that I actually wound up enjoying it quite…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Alien Legacy: Terror on Luxor Ridge

I'm 40 minutes into this completely amateur pile of shit and I have no idea what it's about. It appears to be a bunch of scenes of various English people hamming up the daily lives of English people. And, geez, it's 2:07 long. There's another 90 minutes of this crap! Turned it off.

And here I thought America had a lock on movies this bad.

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

All The Devil’s Aliens (“Devils in the Darkness”)

Let me say first that virtually any reasonable person will hate this movie. I can't decide if I like it myself. For a good part of it, I sure didn't.

This is sort of like "outsider art" of sci-fi horror. Absolutely terrible by most conventional standards: paced like a slog through a swamp, fairly poorly acting, and a difficult-to-make sense of story.

The story, for what it's worth, is a medical student gets a night job as a caregiver for a cantankerous, agoraphobic old man, who is never seen, but rather only heard perpetually cursing over a baby monitor from his room, as the primary nurse does all the actual attending to him. Strange shadows occasionally dart about and startle him, without explanation. And that's the first half of the movie. And it's, strange, there was actually something about it I kind of liked somehow, but I couldn't…

Movie Reviews » Just, Don't

The Scopia Effect

A disjointed, stylized "artsy" film which seems to be about a woman who is experiencing the deaths of a bunch of people from different places and points in history, but is just a bunch of scenes with no clear narrative. Well-shot but I just couldn't follow what was supposed to be happening.

Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Theta States

Sleepless man falls under the influence of a demon posing as a doctor who runs a sleep clinic. I have never seen a movie try harder to be a supernatural epic, and fall so far short because they had no budget and no talent. But, wow, they really wanted this amateurish piece of garbage to be an epic. I kind of admire trying to punch so incredibly far above your weight.

Movie Reviews » watchable

Moon

Decent enough sci-fi, well-made, despite the too-obvious influences of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Solaris". A lone worker on a moon base prepares to wrap up his 3-year stint there when he discovers unexpected company. Sam Rockwell does a decent job carrying 99% of the dialog, and all the action, in several different roles.

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Bottle Monster

Alcohol single mother and young son movie into a new house and there are... things there.

What a weird movie. Definitely an execrable, bottom-rung, amateur, poorly (really, not at all) acted, zero-budget movie. But, I dunno. The lead actress really commits, even though she can't act. And the special effects are so corny, but used so sparingly, that they're kind of charming. Plus, weirdly, there's a last-minute cameo from Bob Clendenin, who you will definitely recognize as one of those slightly funny-looking, "Hey, it's that guy" second-string character actors who's been in a million commercials and shows and things but whose names you never get.

Rated 2.5 stars on IMDB and that's about right. But, still, somehow, once it finally got going—which took a while—I liked it, for a terrible movie.

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Downhill

Mountain bikers go on a trip to Chile, and spend half the movie just being douchebags, then encounter the local criminal element and get victimized and pursued through the woods for the next 1/3 of the movie, before the last half of the third act when they finally start the action and the cool monsters and supernatural stuff. Captivity/pursuit flick, the kind of movie where a lot of the audio is just people screaming or whimpering, and would be kind of a good one if they hadn't waited until the last 15 minutes of the movie to get interesting. Had kind of "Cannibal Holocaust" exploitation-flick-in-the-jungle feel once it finally got going, but the 85% of the movie where you're waiting for that was just tedious. Filmmakers gotta learn, you can't just pile on a bunch of cool shit at the very end.

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Malignant

Just-slightly-better-than-mediocre horror thriller about a man who comes under the control of a mad scientist who tries to "help" him control his drinking by taking over his body and forcing him to kill people every time he gets drunk.

Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Before I’m Dead

Swing and a miss. Somewhat competent extended Twilight Zone episode, basically, in which a man retreats to his apartment after his wife is killed in front of him in a mass shooting, only for time to collapse in on itself, and past and future collide and get to hang out and drink tea.

Could have been ok, but narratively not much happens, it's just kind of trippy for its own sake, and then ends without a resolution or explanation. A strong ending might have made it ok, but it just kind of stops on something that feels like a note of redemption but doesn't actually say anything.

Movie Reviews » watchable

Mundane

Low-key but kind of charming indie sci-fi (barely), about a humanoid cyborg trying quietly to fit in in human society. Quirky without being annoyingly so. Has a wonderful avant-garde-leaning soundtrack with tropicalia music and Meredith Monk-type whoops.

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Halloween (2018)

Ok, so, the big final blowout between Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Myers. It had to be BIG. And obviously they tried to make it good. It's a well-made movie, for sure.

But, it's Halloween. It's still a slasher flick. The world's best slasher flick is still just a slasher flick. And after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who needs another slasher flick?

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Candlewood

Nicely-shot but tough-to-believe thriller about a gorgeous city family moving to rural New England, having problems with the crusty locals and maybe hallucinating a little bit. Kind of a stinker. Seemingly venomously panned in reviews, but I didn't think it was *that* bad, it just wasn't very good.

Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

616 Wilford Lane

This movie stands out for having the most ridiculous plot twist I've ever seen.

After starting out with an Amityville-inspired prelude saying that an archeological find has revealed that "the real number of the beast is 616", and showing home security camera footage of a young man rising out of bed late at night and killing his family with a rifle, the movie moves on to a paint-by-numbers, clichéd family-moves-into-a-murder-house haunted house flick of the low caliber you might expect from any movie featuring Eric Roberts, who is famous for appearing in any movie that pays his $5000/day fee. A father and his teenage daughters movie into a surprisingly affordable mansion after the death of the mother.

But, then in what had to be a scene entirely written, filmed, and tacked on after production, in just the last 5 minutes, a "plot twist" comes from further out of left field…