Archives: Movie Reviews

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…

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.

Couple stuck in a cabin surrounded by a zombie hoard. Gritty, intense production, which is nice, but other than that fairly run-of-the-mill.

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.

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?

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.

The first 42 minutes of this ostensible sci-fi movie are a high-concept voiceover intro about aliens needing to test AI to mine gold on earth, and then people individually waking up in an abandoned futuristic medical facility and wandering around it and encountering occasional jumps scares from a cat.

That's it.

I don't know if there's any more than that because I turned it off then. There was still an hour left to the movie. I didn't want to see it.

Indie flick. Billed as sci-fi but I didn't see that. Drug addicts or something. I couldn't follow it.

Nicely shot but very pretentious and tediously slow movie about a family falling apart. Oh, yeah, maybe the last 30 minutes are a horror movie.