Movie Reviews » watchable

Expiry

British near-future dystopian sci-fi romance. A couple in a society where relationships are tightly regulated by electronic bracelets that control whether they can touch each other or not is informed that their relationship has expired and they must move on, and they're not happy about it. Could have been worse, sometimes the British have a way of making movies not be absolute crap. On the less interesting end of watchable, but, basically watchable, for an indie flick.

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Tear Us Apart

Rather violent but somewhat OK captivity/pursuit thriller. A couple goes to their marriage counselor's remote cabin in the woods to work through their grief at their young daughter's disappearance, but all is not as it seems. Vaguely watchable, in that nothing about it sucks too terribly badly, if you for some reason find this kind of plotline appealing. Nothing memorable about it, either.

Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention

Caveat

This was a good one, could be a spooky low-key modern gothic horror classic. Effectively creepy and atmospheric all the way through in the best manner of well-done horror. A man is hired to spend a few days as caretaker for a mentally ill woman sequestered in a remote island home. Upon arriving, he is chained in a harness ostensibly to prevent him from being able to wander into certain parts of the house. The young woman is alternately completely catatonic, and up wandering the house menacingly with a crossbow. There may be something in the walls.

More about mood than scares or gore, although make no mistake, this is genuinely a horror movie, and if you ask me, it's the way horror should be done... creepy and tense enough to be a date movie, but well-made enough to stand as an actual film, not a cheapo genre exercise.…

Movie Reviews » Turned it off

Holistay

An AirBnB in San Diego is accidentally double-booked by an Irish couple and a couple from New York who are actually criminals on the run. Billed as a supernatural thriller, by an hour into this 90-minute zero-budget amateur movie it had consisted entirely of the couples hanging out around the house (apparently they booked an AirBnB all the way around the world and across the country, respectively, to sit around the house), bickering amongst themselves, plus two fleeting shots of figures in costume-shop satanic robes lurking outside the house. And that's it. I turned it off.

Movie Reviews » Turned it off

The God Inside My Ear

Painfully indie, poorly acted movie that I bet was filmed in Brooklyn. A girl... I don't know. She bleeds from the ears, she goes on blind dates with the worst men ever, she goes to the doctor, she deals with customers at the department store she works at who demand her help in choosing between perfumes that they say smell like spoiled bananas and rancid meat.

Weirdly, the visual production values are pretty professional and well-done, while the attempted acting—really, just people clearly reciting lines and trying ineptly to seem ingenuous about it—is just absolutely awful, incredibly bad. Like, porn-movie-bad. The contradiction between that and decent productions values is jarring.

And the weird pastiche of video production effects, jumpy visual montages to jazz drumming, and special-effects interludes in "artsy" styles don't help at all.

I turned it off halfway though.

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Et tu

What starts out as a really excellent pitch-black comedy about a production of "Julius Caesar" gone murderously wrong loses the thread about halfway through.

For the first half it was incredibly well made and cruising to be a particular favorite, but about halfway through the tight plotting suddenly gets very, very flabby, and instead of exploring the consequences of a murder they fall back on the "comedy" of the bodies piling up as many more happen.

It's a true shame. The production is excellent, whole thing is surprisingly strong, and even the acting holds up all the way through, with the exception of the appearance halfway through as Malcolm McDowell, playing his usual role of Malcolm-McDowell-in-costume-as-someone-else. The actors seemed incredibly true-to-life, based solely my meager experience with theater actors. I'm guessing this really is aimed as a satire at people who've been involved in the theater, but it was…

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Infestation

I wish I could like this movie. A zero-budget indie tries hard to be a paranoid UFO invasion/conspiracy thriller, and as the movie goes on and they give her some room to act, the lead actress proves to be better than you often see in these. But it just isn't what it wants to be, and can't escape the obvious influence of some very obvious sci-fi influences. It suffers from a typically amateurish zero-budget heavy-handedness with plodding writing and a lot of overly familiar tropes.

Also, at least the first part of the movie appears to be all studio-overdubbed dialogue, which is jarring.

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Poltergeist (2015 remake)

A not terrible but mostly forgettable updating and downgrading of the original, to include smartphones and LCD TV (which somehow still have horizontal scan lines and white noise static—the TVs and cell phones both) and which is a downgrade primarily due to the idea that the original didn't benefit very strongly from the involvement of both Spielberg (who I find among the least consistent of the greats, but Poltergeist was one of his better moments) and heavy-hitter Tobe Hooper.

I can see what they were trying to do, and in some ways they succeeded—they came up with new and interesting visuals, and a number of new ideas for things to put the family through, and many of the visual effects are pretty good, something the original occasionally lapsed in. It even had some isolated moments and individual shots that were quite good: In this one, when the souls of…

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Door In The Woods

Paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller. Family brings home a haunted artifact, in this case a door they found in the woods, and must call in a psychic to rescue their young son when it abducts him into an unspecified other realm.

Movie Reviews » Just, Don't

The Playground

Amateurish, zero-budget attempt at a thriller. I can't even really follow the plot, this guy gets broken out of jail, now he owes someone some money, this little girl is being read to on the playground by someone nobody else can see. Two freaking hours and 35 minutes long. No thanks.

Movie Reviews » Turned it off

Let’s Dream

Everybody ... stares ... looking ... concerned. And ... talks ... very ... slowly. What ... are ... they ... saying? I ... don't ... know ... because ... this ... movie ... has ... the ... most ... muffled ... and ... indistinct ... sound ... recording ... I've ... ever ... heard. Turned it off halfway through, which was long after it got annoying.

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Our Neighbors Shadow

Actually fairly well-acted for a zero-budget thriller, but too talky and contrived for what story there is to really work. A young husband and expectant father does drugs and passes out at a neighbors party, and wakes up to have his life fall into convoluted chaos, including lots of talking and talking and talking. Pacing, people. Come on.

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Adalynn

Gorgeous young mother suffering from postpartum depression left alone to watch the baby for a few days while husband is on a business trip hallucinates that Every Bad Thing thing happens to the baby, which mostly somehow adds up to a nonevent. By the end you don't care what's real and what's not. Production values are ok and gorgeous lead actress gives it her best, but nothing can save this poorly written non-thriller. Skip it.

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

The Cobbler’s Wife

This feels like a pilot episode of an anthology sci-fi show that wasn't picked up, and at 1 hr 1 minute long, it probably is. A lonely shoemaker builds a robot wife, his girlfriend finds out and is creeped out. It's kinda cute, in that there's-nothing-on-and-I-bored-so-I'll-watch-one-of-these-episodes-of-the-new-run-of-The-Outer-Limits kind of way.

Movie Reviews » watchable

After She Wakes

Actually not bad supernatural thriller about woman who experiences night terrors, and possibly a visit from a demon, after accidentally killing her infant son in a car accident.

Not great by any stretch, and the very end is a little clichéd, but certainly above average for this kind of movie, with no egregious failings.

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Bleeding

Horror/crime thriller. People are addicted to an opiate made from the blood of infected humans, which turns overdose victims into zombies, when a kid winds up deep in debt to his dealer. Despite the absurd premise—and the loads of violence—plays more like a down-to-earth crime thriller than you'd expect, which, while it's still not that good movie, isn't as bad as you might expect, for what it is. Can't really recommend it, per se, because, well, it's about people getting high off each others' blood, but, it's more watchable than you'd expect from that description.

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Abaddon’s Pit

Supernatural flick starts pretty interesting and then totally loses the thread. A man who feels responsible for the car crash that kills his wife discovers a triangular and apparently bottomless pit that the locals have been throwing their trash into for decades. He decides to explore, sending down, over the course of the first half of the movie, just a rope, then a block of ice, a dead fish, and a live pig, with increasingly bizarre results each time.

It's just interesting enough to command some attention. The prominent presence of local religious fanatics, played as typical over-the-top movie religious fanatics, is a bad sign, and none of the things that happen, while cool enough on their own, add up to much of a story, or even make much sense. There's a lot of fridge logic here.

But then, when it really goes wrong is when he goes…

Movie Reviews » Just, Don't

Superterranean

One of the most boring "thrillers" I've ever seen.

An injured climber in Scotland wakes up in a mountain shelter. He tends to his injuries, and in a few minutes another climber shows up, and they talk.

And talk.

And talk.

And that's literally all they do.

About 80 minutes into this 110 minute movie, they finally start talking about some horror or drama element—supposedly some beast is roving outside and wants the climber. Why did it take 80 minutes to get to this? Finally, in the last 20 minutes, they get into some supernatural elements.

I get the sense this was a 15-minute short that the director/writer/star narcissistically thought deserved to be a 2 hour movie. It didn't. Might have been a cool 12-15 minute short, if they'd gotten to the ending.

But, I mean, literally 80 minutes of two guys in a room talking before the…

Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention

The Human Hibernation

This is sure to be a polarizing film. More a montage than a story, with plenty of very long, unhurried (and beautifully shot) nature shots, this film depicts a version of humanity that hibernates through the winter, and is just slightly more a part of the natural world. People are still people, they don't act like animals, they have dinners around dinner tables and go to concerts. But there's no line between "civilization" and "nature"... goats and raccoons wander through the houses, roosters leap on the dining room table to pick what's left of a massive pre-hibernation feast, and people describe whatever group of people they happen to cohabit with as families, as parents and siblings. "Once when we woke up I had a new older sister", someone relates. "We had no idea where she came from." Cows appear to be the dominant species, and are often seen wandering by.…

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Empathy, Inc.

Sometimes I stumble onto a treat.

A company invents VR technology to allow rich people to experience life from the viewpoint of someone more disadvantages. To say more about the plot would require spoilers.

This indie sci-fi is filmed in black and white, which seemed pretentious at first, but made sense as the movie rolled on, because, it's sci-fi, yes—but mostly it's actually film noir, and while nobody would accuse it of being one of the greats, it's a pretty well-done one for a little indie flick. As the story gets more involved the choice to film in black and white as an homage to vintage film noir makes sense.

It started out seeming pretentious and not very effective, not to mention not particularly well-acted, but only got better as it went along, building, happily, to a very effective ending noir ending. Though it takes a while…

Movie Reviews » watchable

Among Us

Not absolutely terrible haunted house movie. Couple recovering from the death of their son is haunted by... it's not clear, but something. Also, seems to be set in basically a trailer, instead of a house. So, a haunted trailer movie. Not so terrible for a B movie, though, so, basically watchable if you're in the mood for this sort of thing, although don't expect much more than that.

They hire a medium/exorcist who is down-to-earth and underplayed, for once... think about Zelda Rubenstein in "Poltergeist", then imagine her polar opposite.

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Body Keepers

Subpar teen scream. Two little kids disappear when their mom isn't looking, then bunch of teenagers go to get a wheelbarrow from a shed where a body is being kept in liquid nitrogren storage, and all have nightmares or something. I don't get it.

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Trickster (2018)

Well-made but difficult-to-follow story about a drifter who rolls through a small southwestern town, gets involved with a local woman and has some sort of intrigue involving people disappearing and lucid dreams becoming real. It felt like a good movie, and yet, I couldn't tell you the story if my life depended on it, even though I just watched it a second ago. The preview blurb said it had something to do with other dimensions, but I didn't notice anything like that.

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Obsidian (2020)

Patients at a medical clinic trial an experimental drug that cures their permanent injuries... at first.

Sub-USA-Up-All-Nite bottom-of-the-barrel zero-budget amateur-made flick turns out to be, weirdly, not a 100% terrible creature feature. There's like, one or two good actors in it, or something. They tried pretty hard, that's for sure. I mean, it's absolute garbage, for sure, and yet—I kind of liked it. I've seen way less watchable absolute garbage. Weird.

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Red River Road

This movie proves skilled direction and acting can save a movie from ludicrous writing... until they don't.

This movie starts with a family having moved to a rural home to avoid a pandemic. Slowly hints are dropped that it's worse than the pandemic we actually had: "when they turned off the internet" is mentioned in passing.

For the beginning, we just see slice-of-life scenes of family life holed up in this house, and excellent direction and believable acting both keep it engaging and slowly build a not-yet-explained unease—in fact, they keep it engaging and believable enough that when the ludicrous idea of the movie is finally revealed, the production has built up enough credibility to suspend disbelief enough to actually, bettern than might be imagined, pull off the reveal: the "pandemic" is an epidemic of insanity that spreads by using the internet.

Ok, so far, so good. If they had…

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True Dark

Totally amateur, exceptionally long, very-poorly-acted sci-fi story about a man in a hawaiian shirt, not at all believable as a researcher but more likely just whoever they could cast, who does mind control experiments on a group of friends, causing them to act in random ways as they sit around what must be one of the actors' real-life living rooms. Actually probably among the upper echelon of totally amateur, extremely long, very-poorly-acted movies, though, as it gets faintly interesting as they backtrack in the middle and re-tell the story from the experimenter's point of view. So, points for that, it's close to bottom-of-the-barrel but probably sitting on top of the sludge at the bottom of the barrel, not underneath it. But, MAN is the acting bad. Strictly local-theater type.

Uncategorized

The Capture (2017)

Disappointing sci-fi aims for the bleachers and then bunts. Scientists find a way to bring a person back from the afterlife, spend the entire movie arguing about ethics because the process requires euthanizing terminally ill patients and prevents the newly dead from leaving the earthly plane, and then the movie ends in the middle of the story, without a resolution.

Movie Reviews » Canadian

In April

This is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen... to a point.

This movie about a suicidal man driving around in a car looking for an opportunity to kill himself when the ghost of a young girl appears in his passenger seat starts as an execrably "indie", pretentious, artsy, low-budget enterprise of the sort I usually hate. And for maybe the first very long half hour, that's what you get. I looked at the clock at the 30 minute mark and questioned whether I could do another 90 minutes of it. Lots of film effects, not much else happening.

But, first off, I noticed something strange: this low-budget pretentious crap movie about a guy driving around in a car had a full-on orchestral score more appropriate for "Raiders Of The Lost Ark". So I began to pay attention. And after the dreadfully long first act... it actually got…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Indiscretions

This "thriller" is in every way like a porn flick without any sex. These people are obviously not actors, and are as stiff as if they're reading lines off cue cards. It's shot on VHS, not even always in focus. I lasted about 20 minutes. Seriously: why would anybody watch something like this if there's no sex?