After a meet-cute on a bus, immediately before it gets into an accident, a couple wakes up to find the town empty and an ominous storm moving in on the horizon. More of a fantasy/romance than the horror movie it initially appears to be setting up, as they wind up having to explore their pasts. Fairly well-made, it's reasonably watchable, if there's nothing particularly good on.
A home-made video assemblage appearing to consist of old IBM training films, desktop screensavers, and a bunch of apparently whatever other stock film or video footage the director, credited as "Metatron", could get his hands on—much of it clearly in low-res 72dpi. Electronic-sounding, possibly randomly-generated voiceovers talk about quantum computers or science or aliens or something, with "technological"-sounding stock library music playing in the background. Think "How It's Made" but, instead of manufacturing documentary footage, with technology-related stock footage and electronically-processed voices emitting technobabble.
This has no actor or production credits in IMDB, because, there are no actors or production in this, except for "Metatron" and a "writer", who should more properly be called the "assembler". Although, I guess, he did write the voice-over technobabble.
This is the cinematic equivalent of noise music.
In a way, I'm enjoying the nostalgia trip, as this reminds me of something you…
This single-season mystery/thriller series starred Jessica Biel, who sounds like she's been practicing her diction to good effect, as a Public Radio journalist doing a series investigating the disappearance of 300 people from a small town. Conspiracy-theory type stuff. Well-done creepy atmosphere, good performances, and grounded, believable production made this a good, if not great, watch. I liked it.
Paint-by-numbers story about a family moving into a house that was the scene of brutal slayings, and things quickly start going bump in the night. Initially, despite being one long series of clichés, it's well-made enough that it's fairly watchable, but as it goes on it sags more and more into TV Movie-Of-The-Week territory and falls below the basic "Ok to watch if there's nothing else on" standard.
Note to filmmakers: You don't actually have to make the bad guy look like Edward Scissorhands. We can tell he's the bad guy by what he does.
Well, this was a little different, and for the most part kind of entertaining little indie flick. A trio of women from Atlanta take a vacation in the woods during the pandemic, and spend about half the movie kibitzing around, smoking weed and keeping themselves entertained, when they start to feel like there's someone there watching them.
And from there, just when the movie seems like it's just going to be these women kibbitzing around, it gradually gets far weirder than you would ever expect. It's not all entirely well-explained, but it something along the lines of an alien invasion, and things get stranger and stranger, and what had been a down-to-earth flick about three down-to-earth women in a cabin becomes a fairly convoluted low-budget special effects sci-fi spectacle.
I pretty much enjoyed it, for a very low-budget and possible amateur production B-movie it turns pretty ambitious. And the…
Strictly amateur, seems to be full of non-actors, and a nonsensical storyline, as 5 annoying gorgeous woman from LA have apparently been offered thousands of dollars to go to Sedona to do a "spiritual obstacle course" as entirely familiar new-age characters—who seem to be real-life new age characters, they sure aren't actors—get them to confront their anger at their parents and each other, and it's presented as if we're supposed to think it's profound.
Meanwhile, an unexplained teen, who we know is supposed to be a First Nations person because an obvious First Nations person who he calls "Dad" tells him early in the movie "Son, I need you to do the show this week", is commenting on it from afar like a TV show host, and we see hooded figures in space apparently watching it. The movie ends when the "host" inexplicably declares that one is the "winner".…
Good swing and a complete miss. Starts out for at least half of it seeming like that rare decent indie flick, as a couple on a technology-and-sex-fast in the woods have a brutish, shirtless, drunken stranger stumble into the cabin... but then, after that setup, abandons telling a story in favor of a scenes that don't seem related to each other, the stranger telling them "You're already dead", few minutes of "deep" conversation, finally unexplained men in hazmat suits appearing and spraying smoke machines around, and then abruptly ending just when it seems like the second act was about to begin. Plus some sort of "time loop" allusion where everything unexplainedly starts again. But no hint of any explanation at all, for any of it, no plot, nothing. It's like they had a jumble of ideas and didn't think they needed to tie them into any kind of a narrative.…
Technically well-made but incredibly slow and tedious Swedish "horror" art film. Something about a translator and a homeless guy and a lot of grainy video montages over discordant violin sounds. I watched the whole thing and I'm still no more clear on it than that. It looked pretty, though.
This movie required the most suspension of disbelief of any movie I've ever seen. I don't know where to begin.
It's a "workplace horror" about a badly picked-on and bullied young woman, fresh out of college, apparently losing her mind and believing she's being pursued by some sort of tree-person that I couldn't be sure was supposed to be real or imaginary. The thing is, it's as over-the-top as any absurd comedy, but it's not a comedy, it's horror. Picture a workplace that's as much of an exaggerated caricature as "Office Space", but not a comedy. It's that weird and unbelievable. I don't know, maybe it was supposed to be a comedy-horror but they forgot to put the jokes in?
First she just seems badly bullied, so realistically it made the movie hard to watch, and even date raped by her asshole boss whom she's for some reason…
A weirdly sort of entertaining zero-budget flick about a bunch of low-rent people in northern California who, bear with me, play a cassette tape and accidentally free a witch who was trapped in it. Comments supernatural shit, exorcism, etc.
It was so low budget it seemed pretty useless at first, but the variety of people of the sorts you'd find hanging around a junkyard or dive bar were kind of realistic and entertaining, and they really committed to the whole thing. Kinda good for such a piece of crap.
They've got to stop making zero-budget first-person-shooter "found footage" crap about groups of 20-year-olds investigating some bullshit.
This is a low-budget indie movie that should have been way worse than it was. In a dystopian urban future that visually resembles our dystopian urban present, a scientist invents an android duplicate of himself, then gets into a love triangle when the android and he both fall for the same quiet, timid store clerk. The entire movie is narrated by the android from its own point of view.
The acting is abysmal in some places, the story is quiet and slow and honestly nothing special, and I'd go so far to say most people probably wouldn't like it—I suspect my usual post-review check online will reveal a lot of haters—but it definitely had some appeal to me.
But it maintains a certain low-budget dystopian esthetic well, and had a certain low-key cerebral quality to it that I liked. The android, imprinted with its creator's memories, is overarchingly…
This has got to be a student film, and by a not very skilled student filmmaker. Less than an hour long, and utterly aimless, with no production values or acting to speak of.
A hipster couple cat sits an apartment that the synopses and an in-movie intro card say is haunted, but I never saw that. Except for them writhing around in what a title card says is "a ritual to rid the house of remaining evil" near the end, it seems like all they do is sit around and talk for the whole thing.
They should ban movie cameras from the borough of Brooklyn. The big studios can sub other locations, and it would make a lot of hipsters find some other way to spend their time.
An very European art film, wherein people visiting an abandoned asylum talk endlessly about "serious" subjects over discordant music for two hours, occasionally interrupted by silent, admittedly visually gorgeous but incomprehensible experimental montages. Not bad for an art film, I suppose, because the cinematography is really beautiful, looks like it was made by someone who knows how to make a movie, and is one of the few things that reminded me of Tarkovsky that wasn't a hopeless, amateur failure. And the acting seems alright. But too much of a slog for me to sit through. Not for me.
I gave it about 90 minutes of its 1:50 runtime but I just can't do another 20 minutes of this.
Bottom-of-the-barrel amateur-home-movie-level crap, but at least it tries to have a sci-fi angle. Or something. Basically these kids explore the sewer looking for a missing girl and encounter a bunch of really low-budget home-movie special effects.
A new setting for a clichéd setup: a captivity/pursuit flick set in part in the long barges that travel the canals that criss-cross the English countryside. The villains are a family that seems to be comprised of 50/50 small-town English folk and cannibalistic creature-from-the-black-lagoon-type rubber-mask creatures that live under the water. Anyway, they kill and eat people.
Yawn. It's pretty well-made, actually, but that's about the only good thing I have to say about any of it.
I feel like Ti West somehow had something to do with this.
Movies like this exactly are why I created a category "Je nais se quois/Flawed Gems". Definitely not a great movie, but certainly original, after a fashion, and ultimately, I thought, worth a watch, despite the flaws—most particularly for people tired of the clichés of the genre.
This is a solidly B-movie supernatural thriller about—wait for it—a family on vacation in a remote cabin in the Oregon mountains when Bad Things Happen. On top of it, it intentionally starts with some of the most hackneyed cliches out there, and sticks with that for long enough that it could throw you.
As the family settles into their cabin, mysterious hooded figures are seen doing... something... in the woods. People talk on the phone in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Something is Clearly Going On.
In the first hint that things are about to get a little different, a TV is seen…
Have you ever seen the movie "Funny Games"? It might be my least favorite movie of all time: pointless brutality, and nothing more, presented as entertainment, as home invaders torture and kill a family. I eventually learned that the filmmaker was pointedly trying to make a movie that no reasonable person would sit through the length of.
Well, this does that one better, by dispensing with the highbrow artistic morality play of exposing the viewer as complicit in violence-as-entertainment—and substituting, instead, a brief coda explaining "the got him to do it."
A houseguest at a friend's dinner get-together spots a computer in an empty room and an anonymous person chats with him, knows all his secrets, and in a matter of minutes convinces him to "become like God" by torturing, raping, and killing his friends. So he does. Along with, delightfully, their 12 year old daughter, after hitting…
Well, this movie put one over on me. Starts off with a bunch of guys having a reunion for a bachelor party in a fancy rental house, which logically promised lots of agressive dipshit behavior and characters I wasn't going to like at all. My dirty little secret is I'm often multitasking when I watch movies, and the good ones draw my attention, otherwise I wind up missing a lot, and I tucked in with my laptop expecting to miss most of this one. The loutish behavior in the early scenes (set in a strip club, naturally) did nothing to dussuade me that this would be anything more than 90 minutes of shriek-filled audio wallpaper.
But somewhere in the middle, I noticed the appearance of an antagonist who was incredibly well-cast, just seriously creepy. And very soon the disappearance of one of the guys in the middle of the…
Low key thriller about two women and one of their boyfriend on vacation in a cabin when the more high-strung of the two starts getting even more high-strung and having bloody visions. It wasn't terrible.
I guess this is supposed to be some sort of indie neo-noir, because it starts with a robbery, and has people planning other robberies, and has people waving guns around at a few points and some pointless grisly violence that comes out of absolutely nowhere at 1:45 of its 1:50 runtime, but mostly, it's people talking, arguing, or telling endless stories for two hours, capped off by an inexplicably violent ending that features artsy random images and a guy in a dog costume for some reason. I have no idea why this movie was made, or especially why it was labeled a horror movie, except maybe the guy in the dog costume attacking people two minutes from the end. It's boring for 1:45 and then doesn't make sense for 0:08. It's not even bad—it's just not a movie. It's just a bunch of scenes.
Absolute garbage. Has the production values of a terrible zero-budget amateur horror combined with soap operatic melodrama. An engaged couple is lured into a haunted house attraction where the woman is abducted and surgically turned into a man by a jealous former, um, it's not quite clear what he his, but he's former, and he's jealous, and he's somehow magically in control of all their electronics, and, he's now also turned himself into a woman and posed as the man's hot, breathy new therapist to seduce him.
It's even worse than it sounds.
Back in college, living out in the sticks, I used to occasionally listen to the local Christian rock station. Though the subject matter left me cold, I liked how the music was so unabashedly amateur—this was long before Christian rock took off even to the extent that it did, much of it sounded like someone had recorded it at home on a 4-track—and that there was something charmingly unselfconscious about it.
This movie is like that.
These people can't act, they just recite lines. This is home movie quality, it seems like someone got their friends (or more likely their church group) together to make a movie. And boy, do they talk about church and heaven a lot in this, even though it doesn't have an overtly religious message to push.
But, I dunno. Despite nearly turning it off about 15 minutes into it, I stuck it out…
Fairly unremarkable, vaguely Hollywood-y Supernatural Thriller Product. Rebecca Romijn adopts a young girl whose birth mother, deceased, wants her back.
A 9-year-old foster kid is shunted from home to home because she's possessed by some sort of nature spirit bent on cleansing humanity from the world, who causes all kinds of hijinx when she surfaces.
It was alright—sorta seems like they were trying to make a horror movie with the requisite acting, story, and production values for an adult audience. It wasn't "The Omen", but, it was pretty tolerable. I don't think I'd watch it again, but I sort of liked it okay. If there were more horror movies like this and less total crapola I wouldn't complain.
Decent enough horror movie about a foster child whose little sister disappears into the woods and comes back acting in disturbing ways. The town madwoman claims the child is no longer the same person. Guess who's right?
Not that bad for a horror movie starring teenagers. Probably a decent date movie, there's enough tension. I'd put this on the bottom end of reasonably watchable, if there's absolutely nothing else on.
Well, this movie certainly turned out to be something much different, and much better, than I expected. That's not to say it was a *good* movie... it definitely doesn't aspire to higher than campiness... but by the usual low standards of a campy movie, it's in many ways excellent.
First of all, it introduced me to the idea of "mukbanging", an internet trend originating in South Korea where people watch videos of other people eating. (I'd say "kids today", but I didn't understand the shit kids did when I was a kid, so age as nothing to do with it.)
Ok. Second of all: obviously, it's a horror movie with "Cannibal" as the first word in the title, which places certain genre expectations squarely on it. And, it does live up to those expectations... after a fashion.
There's a lot of unflinching gore here, for sure, but not quite…
Porn-movie-level acting, writing and production values. Mother and daughter go to an Oregon lake for some bonding time and, basically, nothing happens. Mom gets headaches, daughter (played by a real life porn actress) shows her boobs so often that I actually wished she'd put some clothes on, poorly-acted cops and creepy neighbors nose around for no reason other than to create "drama". This is also the worst-paced movie I've ever seen... with overlong scenes of monologues that aren't relevant to the plot, and one seemingly never-ending montage of the mother sitting alone looking concerned for no clear reason.
Shot on often-overexposed home video, and replete with the in-camera slomo and filter effects that some people just don't realize aren't "scary". I'm surprised there wasn't a star wipe.
So low-quality that it's one of the very few movies I've ever turned off in the middle. Definitely the only movie…
Boy, you have to give this home-movie-level, bottom-of-the-barrel amateur production credit for trying. They really tried *hard* to make a good movie. They had absolutely no idea how to, and they couldn't find anyone with any acting chops, but they clearly were trying hard.
Plot: People are trapped in a house in the woods by an energy field circling the area. When they die, they wake up wherever they were first killed when they entered the area. The woods are full of human-like creatures, represented by people in costume-shop cloaks and black and white makeup, who either want to eat them, transform themselves into exact duplicates of them, or steal their gasoline, I'm not sure, sometimes crawl instead of walking for some reason, and drool black goo. The occupants of the house are trying to start up a mysterious machine that they believe will lower the barrier, without getting themselves…
A sexually frustrated middle-aged salesman who is obsessed with a coworker patronizes prostitutes and then kills them, all the while complaining to the viewer via his video diary.
Gritty enough to be slightly appealing for this sort of thing, but in a world where we already have "Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer", movies like this are kind of unnecessary. The addition of a needless and too-silly-to-believe "twist ending" doesn't help things.
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