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I checked this one out because while you often see monsters described as "terrifying" or "deadly" in horror movie blurbs, I've never before seen one described before as "noxious". That made me curious.
Sure enough, this is a teen scream in which a group of kids are picked off by a bad smell that has a rotary saw attachment. I'm not kidding.
It actually started with such an over-the-top gore scene that I was rather impressed. Unfortunately they pretty much shot their whole wad on that opening scene. Nothing else in the movie compares to it.
Hollywood-ized action film in which a team of gorgeous cave explorers encounters prehistoric creatures deep in a cave and somehow this results in a lot of things blowing up.
Deeply flawed but still somehow entertaining sci-fi mindbender as a group of people gather for a university experiment in seeing if they can change reality, and wind up getting more than they bargained for. Plays more like an entertaining pilot for a sci-fi anthology show than anything else, and unfortunately doesn't sustain it's most interesting ideas for long enough, occasionally falling back on trite universe-hopping tropes for way too long a stretch (how many different realities are there where weird characters want to kill you just for existing in their reality?) But somehow, despite its many flaws, I found it appealing, perhaps because of the likeable cast. Guaranteed you'll stop the flick and rewind more than once to try and catch all the little details that change between "realities".
As twisty mindbenders go, it's towards the bottom of the scale, just not consistent enough and a little predictable, not to…
This was actually fun! Look, it's "The Blob". You know what you're getting into. And being the late '80s, it does turn into an action movie in the end. But, seriously, it could have been so much worse. If you're in the mood for monster movie fare, you know, it's a little better than you might expect.
Very good late 80s deep-sea spin on "Alien" tropes. Kind of gritty for a big-budget (or what passed for it in the late '80s) sci-fi action thriller. I liked it.
P.S. look out for the weird cameo from Chris Elliot, who appears to be in the totally wrong movie for about 15 seconds.
Pretty much the high-water mark of the "teen scream" genre, this flick punches a fair bit above its weight, thanks to Robert Rodriguez directing and an all-star cast—seriously, there must be 25 recognizable name actors in this large ensemble cast—as a group of teenagers that begins to suspect people at their high school have been taken over by an alien force. I've watched it more than once, and probably will again, in a few years. It's kinda fun and well-executed enough for me to suspend disbelief even through some incredibly cheesy ideas.
Over-surreal, rough-around-the-edges fantasy plays like Terry Gilliam had an orgy with Wes Anderson and David Lynch and made a mess. Something about a "dream auditor" and a woman fighting the government trying to tax people on their dreams. The movie seems to be a collection of scenes made up as they went along, and is a truly strange mix of looking zero-budget one minute, big-budget the next. It actually was kind of charming at first, despite being over done, but turns into some sort of love story that is as treacly as it is impossible to follow.
The best documentary I've seen on the Neil Moss incident, a horrible caving tragedy that occurred about 2/3 of a mile into the earth under Derbyshire, England in 1959, and the heroic but futile rescue effort. As is my habit with caving accident documentaries, which tend to describe particularly awful and affecting occurrences, I prefer not to go into further detail here.
The Moss incident spurred a worldwide reconsideration of the dangers of caving and the role of caving rescue workers. This reknowned short (1 hr) but intense documentary reconstructs the timeline, from before the accident through the aftermath, by interviewing still-living people who were members of the caving party and rescue efforts. It's really kind of a paragon of documentarian filmmaking: non-sensationalistic, non-judgmental, thoroughly investigative and complete, thoughtful about its subject, and seeming more than anything to want to simply inform—more journalism than filmmaking.
A documentary that starts with an actor depicting Nikola Tesla saying, "All things have a frequency and a vibration. If we want to understand medicine, we must look in our hearts, and in the universe." It then said Tesla was a "specialist in magnetism" who "generated it with his Tesla coil" and "used it to cure disease", and "the tesla coil becomes a magnet when you introduce electricity to it. It can then transmit electricity to another nearby coil. This is called induction." I don't know anything about the doc beyond that because I immediately turned that bullshit off.
Source: I may not know much for sure, but I do hold a degree in physics, motherfucker. (Also, I've owned a tesla coil since I was 7.)
'80s pop sci-fi/action of the type that "Robocop" was the best of and this is the worst. Unbelievably heavily-armed security robots go apeshit on teens spending a night in an empty shopping mall.
Still, you know, campy fun. For a terrible movie, I enjoyed it.
Engrossing, well-done documentary about a set of identical triplets, adopted separately at birth and never informed they had twins, finding each other at 20, and discovering later that they were the unfortunate victims of an unpleasant plan.
Neighborhood kids vs the empty house—or is it?—of a mean old neighbor. Billed as "horror" on Tubi, this is actually an animated feature aimed at kids, although it's probably a little too scary for some kids. It's decent for a kids' film, though, good enough for this adult to sit through and be a little amused by.
Whoa, I seem to have struck a vein of watchable horror movies on Tubi.
This Australian teen scream is actually pretty creepy for the lightweight genre, and in terms of story it veers a few degrees off the normal path for a teens-messing-with-the-supernatural flick.
A group of Australian teens conduct a ritual using a corpse's hand and find it possesses them. So what do they do? They party and have fun with it, laughing as each in turn's eyes go wide and they start gibbering and lashing out, until things start to turn a little too scary. From there on in it handles reasonably standard group-of-kids-dogged-by-a-supernatural-force tropes with decent enough atmosphere and acting to make it stand out a little from the crowd, and be more watchable than you'd expect.
Third film in the X trilogy (the second being Pearl: An X-Traordinary Origin Story). Not really a horror movie, more of a vaguely Tarantinoesque thriller (and also Tarantinoesque love-letter to filmmaking), although it definitely has a few moments moments of over-the-top graohic horror movie gore. Like 'X', this movie kind of punches above it's weight, and a decent cast of B and B+ actors (Giancarlo Esposito, Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin Bacon in an aunusually greasy role). A porn actress trying to break into mainstream acting is stalked by someone with a beef against her.
I'll give it to director Ti West. I harbor a long-time grudge against him for the underserved popularity of the boring, execrably derivative, and insubstantial all-style-no-substance throwback film "House Of The Devil" (which I see I've disliked since even before I started writing movie reviews, as I've never…
Strictly amateur hour. Condo-dwelling shnook who accidentally kills his girlfriend by accidentally turning on a circular saw while they're cuddling on t—yes, that's the caliber of movie we're talking about here—and tries to figure out how to dispose of the body, all while courting the girl up the hall, goes from meh to worse as it seems to run out of the few ideas it has and tries to get 'artsy' in the second half.
In a Burtonesque hyperreal suburb full of one-dimensional suburban stereotypes, a new resident waiting for her husband to arrive with the kids has a brief and ill-conceived affair with her neighbor's teenage son while a stereotypically creepy ice cream man slowly kills off people who must not be very important, as few seem to notice or care that they're gone, or, in one case, that they're back after the movie showed them being murdered. Meanwhile an inexplicably sinister mover hovers around for no apparent reason.
Jesse Eisenberg stars as his usual bland Michael-Cera-esque-awkward-everyman-without-Michael-Cera's-humor in this single weird idea—without even an explanation, just weirdness—padded out to feature length with a lot of repetition and pointlessness, like a dull episode of one of the much later, unimpressive attempts to reboot "The Twilight Zone".
A couple goes to look at a house in a neighborhood where all the houses are eerily identical, when the estate agent disappears, leaving them there, unable to find a way out of the neighborhood. Food deliveries inexplicably show up, followed by a baby which grows within days to a young boy who inexplicably speaks in an incredibly annoying overdubbed voice of a grown man trying to imitate a young boy, when he's not inexplicably shrieking continuously at the top of his lungs to get what he wants. And frankly there's a lot more totally unexplained weirdness of that nature on this movie's way…
A girl in a mask robs a Dairy Barn and films it for YouTube, and then the file descends into "artsy" video effects and a bunch of hackneyed YouTube tropes. I lasted about 10 minutes. Yeah, lemme guess, this is going to be some sort of critique of social media culture or whatever. I'm out.
This Australian indie flick appears to have seriously polarized viewers, which I suppose is understandable, given the minimal amount of either action or character development. Nonetheless, it held its own for me as a cerebral, humanist sci-fi—almost a pee-wee cousin to "Ex Machina"—and for its best parts, which were a substantial portion of its runtime, made it a much better movie than it deserved to be.
A nebbishy and perhaps socially maladapted outcast, with (we finally see halfway through the movie) an obvious physical deformity, buys a stereotypically gorgeous, Barbie-doll-like sex robot, played by an Danish actress of the type only Scandinavia seems to produce. Half the movie is a quiet exploration of his uneasy relationship with her, and for me, this is the best part. Eventually his ne'er-do-well hypermasculine brother shows up for an unannounced visit, and initially doesn't realize she's a robot, and sexual tension builds, despite…
Utterly silly action/monster movie in which a bunch of aquarium employees who look like actors run around an aquarium getting attacked by "undead" computer-animated octopi, crabs, and starfish. So silly, there's no way these people thought they were making a good movie. But, for that, they play it up, and it's faintly entertaining for utter garbage, because it doesn't try to be more than that.
Holy cow. I think we have another movie that nobody but me will ever like, but holy cow. This might be the most intense movie I've ever seen. I watch a lot of movies that could be described as intense, but this one had me shaken before it was 1/2 over, and left me that way after it ended.
Basically, an open-air counterpart to "Open Water", as two freeclimbers tackle a 2,000 foot decomissioned television broadcast antenna with the intention of scattering the ashes of one's husband—who died in front of them in a climbing accident from the top—and Things Go Wrong.
It doesn't have the quiet poetry of "Open Water", and unfortunately it has more than its share of overly contrived, difficult-to-believe, or predictable moments, but what it does right, it does incredibly right. It makes up for the handful of sore-thumb contrived moments with some stirring visual and…
A movie so made of stitched-together cliches that it shameless opens with a horror trope we've seen a million times, as if they'd thought about it.
In fact, this movie is so clichéd that I kind of liked it. This is like what you'd get if you asked an LLM to write a horror movie for you. Once cliché on top of another, all the way through.
And then in the last 5 minutes, it just goes batshit crazy, which helps.
Not that I'd ever watch it again.
I had to look... 3.1 stars on IMDB... that's about right.
Beautifully shot but impossible to follow and perhaps overly artsy sci-fi/horror film. A young woman apparently alone in a town and facing an alien monster has a bunch of hallucinatory episodes, including that bellwether of pretensiousness, an animated sequence.
Well-made enough that it can be forgiven for its experimentalism, which it pulls off way better than some of these types of movies do, and really is more visually skilled than pretentious. And it certainly looks like a good movie, for most of it. But I honestly can't say. I'm not even sure what it's about.
A lone hiker pursued by a monster from a crashed UFO.
You know, I kind of liked this movie. First of all, there's virtually no dialog, maybe three or four words spoken in the whole movie. The lead actress has to convey a lot with just her facial expressions, and mostly, pulls it off well enough to somehow be a little more engaging than you'd expect from such a high-concept bit of fluff.
Unfortunately the "monster" spends most of the movie in human form, played by a miscast hipster-looking dude.
I dunno. It's not great, and might have worked better as a short film than a feature, but, I did like it ok. It was a little different, and a little entertaining, even if the monster was more annoying than scary.
What to make of this movie? This is a first-person shooter and participates of the unfortunate recent trend of "science fiction" that consists entirely of one character talkingto a camera for a whole movie, in this case a repeat abductee who, conveniently for the overused conceit, has found a way to keep a camera on his body filming at all time.
But...
Half this movie is near-silent shots of the interior of UFOs, of the aliens and a few other abductees. And, I have to say, these are about the best movie aliens I've ever seen. That half of the movie is beautiful, creepy, truly alien. And I have no idea how they did the aliens, they're very realistic looking, I haven't really seen anything like it. It's like someone got a hold of a 40-minute dialogueless sci-fi movie made by a modern Tarkovsky... and then…
Surprisingly good indie horror about the remaining survivors trying to make it out of a small town in Ohio which has been taken over by mind control parasites. Way better than you think it is from that description. Not great, but definitely very good, and with some amusingly original tropes. I'm kinda impressed. It's a pretty solid watch.
Be warned, though—it's still a horror flick, and not for the sqeamish, for sure. There are a lot of worms in this movie.
After writing the above, I had to look, and this somehow averaged 4 stars on IMDB. That, I do not understand at all. Either a lot of people hated this movie, it was marketed to the wrong audience, or somebody paid a lot of money to have this thing panned. I dunno.
It does have a lot of long stretches that are straight drama, not horror.…
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