Blood River
This southern gothic attempted tale of vampires in a small town is sub-USA-Up-All-Nite level amateur hogwash, the kind of thing you figure someone threw together with a home movie camera…
Latest "Bad but I liked it" files
Blood River
All Girls Weekend
This is a bad movie. Let's get that out of the way. First off, this film commits one of my least favorite filmmaking sins: spends half its time on just…
Insanitarium
A mad doctor's experiments cause an outbreak of of cannibalism at an insane asylum. It does take a very long while to get going, but once it does, how appealing…
Chemical Peel
Tensions escalate (to say the least) among group of women gathered at a remote cabin for a bachelorette party when a nearby train accident releases a cloud of caustic chemicals…
Beware
Boy, if I was only going to watch one slasher flick in my life—and one is probably about my lifetime appetite for slasher flicks—this one might be it. Kids on…
Don’t Break The Rules
This movie starts with a man slumped at the front gate of a cabin. An older man stands in front of him, watching him impassively, as he pleads, "I didn't…
Haunted Boat
A group of friends go out on a boat, wind up adrift, and random "scary" stuff happens which is never explained. Actually I kind of enjoyed it mildly, for a…
The Changed
People are holed up in a suburban house as everyone outside is slowly "changed", taken over by an alien life form or some such—or, as it's described by the people…
In Its Wake
This low-budget "man in a rubber suit" creature feature is essentially "30 Days Of Night", except with a demon instead of vampires, and you never actually see the demon, and…
Cold Blows The Wind
Absolutely execrable, bottom-of-the-barrel mess of a horror movie (shot on video, no less, so it looks like a bad TV show) about a couple that accidentally kills a jogger while…
The Devil’s Restaurant
A horror-comedy that actually works, sort of... at least well enough that I was reasonably entertained. In this case, a restauranteur strikes a deal with a demon who lives in…
Adam & Eve (1983)
Absolute bottom-of-the-barrel crap from the final fading moments of the "Jason And The Argonauts"/"Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad"/"Clash Of The Titans" epic mythological fantasy era, although I feel bad besmirching the…
Smothered
This is a charming semi-spoof horror featuring a bunch of '80s horror actors playing themselves (Kane Hodder, cameo from Michael Berryman, plus Bill Moseley in a role obviously intended for…
A Halloween Feast
If John Waters made a horror movie, this would be it. Which is to say: absolutely terrible, but, if you're in the mood for ridiculously over-the-top camp, fits the bill…
Interlaced
Ok, here's another movie that I kind of liked that I'm 100% positive everybody else will hate. In fact, for about the first half, I really liked it, but it…
Attack Of The Unknown
In Los Angeles, a bunch of tough-as-nails cops, soldiers, and criminals who look like actors and models shoot guns at rubbery aliens with CGI tentacles, while CGI spaceships appear in…
Larva
Very decent paint-by-numbers monster/nature-run-amok movie, for a paint-by-numbers monster/nature-run-amok movie. New veterinarian comes to a small town where all the farmers have an arrangement to buy futuristic new feed from…
Killing at Outpost Zeta
Clearly post-Battlestar-Galactica 1980 low-budget sci fi outing in which space travelers travel to a faraway planet, charming for its post-Battlestar-Galactica 1980ness. If that sounds appealing to you, sure, give it…
End Of Days, Inc
People working at a mysterious inventory company are being laid off as the company is closing, but promised a million dollar bonus if they can finish one last round of…
Human Resources
I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this, so the IMDB blurb will do: "After starting a job at an eerie hardware store, an anxious young…
Sick For Toys
Somebody picked up the ball from Hulu's "Into The Dark" series and ran with it. This tale of a christmas dinner visit gone horribly wrong could be lifted straight from…
Site 13
I'm noticing a trend. These tiny, low-budget indie filmmakers trying to do Lovecraft stories seem to often somehow be entertaining despite being total garbage. Something about the subject matter or…
Afterdeath
A bunch of gorgeous people wake up in a remote cabin in the middle of a barren wasteland and realize they have died. They're terrorized by numerous digital effects and…
Silence Of The Prey
Actually not *that* bad for a captivity/pursuit flick. Eastern european woman in this country illegally with her daughter is given a job caring for a religious man in a remote…
Halloween Party
So, this is a little different for a teen scream... this uninteresting-sounding tale is about a meme email that spreads around and forces you to be killed by your deepest…
The Old Ones
Ok, this is truly weird. A sea captain, rescued after 100 years of being possessed by"the Old Ones", encounters magicians and monsters trying to get back to his own time, who he mostly seems to find junkyards and abandoned industrial sites around town. This is zero-budget, sub-"Creature From The Black Lagoon"rubber-mask monsters, to tell a story with as much ambition, weirdness and imagination as a Clive Barker film. Terribly miscast macho he-men who look like extras from a"Dirty Harry"police station scene—the actor playing the captain has almost 300 IMDB credits to his name including"Donnie Brasco"and"Fast and Furious"—run around spouting scenery-chewing Lovecraftian dialogue at each other, like"I have to go. Things are hunting me. Hideous things that dissolve and devour..."or"My pets. You see them? The creatures that fill what men call the pure air and the blue sky", as cheesy, obviously papier-mache bugs and creatures float and skitter around. Meanwhile, out of place humor pops up periodically, like bringing a magician the heart of a demon in a styrofoam takeout container, and when they tell him,"We have brought you a tribute", he says,"What, leftovers?", before opening up a demonic portal in his torso, a giant, hideous gaping maw full of very obviously fake rubber and foam fangs*; or, at another point, a waitress character for some reason played, completely straight and with no explanation or anything to suggest it's meant to be humorous, by a hipster-looking male actor with a goatee and mustache. This seems like a movie made by a very imaginative person who hadn't seen a movie since they were a young child and had only vague memories of what movies are supposed to be like, and a special effects budget limited to whatever they could spend in an hour at the craft store. I generally don't get into"so bad it's good", but this is so over-the-top, and they try so hard, despite having no budget and no talent, I can't help but be entertained by the effort. I might even give it an"honorable mention"... which, in this case, should not be confused with saying it's in any way good. Rather, it's so pyrotechnically, impressively bad, so ambitious without having anything even remotely resembling talent involved anywhere in the production, that I have definitely never seen quite anything like it. I can say that much for sure. (*C'mon. How cool is this, just for being so unrepentantly awful: https://www.voicesfromthebalcony.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/H.P.-Lovecrafts-The-Old-Ones-1.jpg)
The Last Amityville Movie
I call this the"Reuben Sandwich"of movies. I was at a deli once, and I looked at a Reuben Sandwich. It was corned beef, sauer kraut, russian dressing, and swiss cheese, on pumpernickel. I was like,"Oh my god, it's everything I hate in one sandwich. I must try this."And I liked it! This movie is like that. Found footage, perhaps the lowest budget movie I've ever seen—seriously I'd be surprised if they spent $150 on this, it seems like a guy shot out an email to a bunch of his friends saying,"You want to be in a movie? Here's your lines. You can do it from home, I'll just film us all on a zoom call", it's a"horror comedy"starring hipsters, no lighting design to speak of, features social media, looks like it was shot on a phone. Everything I hate in one movie! And you know what? I enjoyed it! It's sincere. It's like if"Paranormal Activity"wasn't so pretentious and had the good sense to just be a little silly and have some fun. Guy sits around the house, things go bump in the night, and the day. His friends explode during a zoom call. A ghost that looks like his wife in stage makeup makeup tries to lure him into a closet, which he deals with matter-of-factly:"I know you're not my wife, I just talked to her on the phone. And I wouldn't let my real wife lure me into a closet. Wait, yeah, I probably would. But that's besides the point."There's an unexplained monster. But, along the way, he has one good idea: what if there's a sinister reason why horror movies,"Amityville"in particular, spin off into endless ridiculous franchises? And: can he put a stop to it? I enjoyed this the way I'd enjoy a friend's jokey home movie if I was in on the joke. Don't expect any better than that, though.
Mystery Spot
What a weird movie. A motel with the ruins of a burned-down"Mystery Spot"tourist trap out back draws strange clientele: A man rents a room and spends all afternoon auditioning actors, asking them strange and probing questions. A writer, mourning her husbamd, checks into the next room. A policeman apparently lives in the parking lot, watching the filmmaker to try to figure out what he's doing. Now, make no mistake: this is a bad movie. It's poorly written. It's mostly poorly acted. It's a bad indie film. But, for that: it's pretty good. Most importantly, the leads, the filmmaker and the writer, are really good actors, far better than you usually see in this sort of thing. About halfway through the movie, they get a long scene just talking, getting to know each other—pure character development and, it seems to me the sort of thing two skilled actors might have asked the director to put in the movie and let them ad lib, just to give them some real acting to do. And, it kinda works, it elevates the film just a little bit. Plus, although it's really badly written, it's also not particularly derivative or anything I've seen before... maybe it reminds me a tiny bid of"The Lost Room", but it's not even terribly close to that. So: I kinda liked it! It's bad, for sure. But I liked it. If I had seen this on"Chiller Theater"when I was a kid, I probably would have remembered it fondly for decades.
Alien Code
Hah! I liked this. Thoroughly amateurish time thriller about a hipster playing a very improbably cryptographer who decodes a message for the NSA and begins to see giant Men In Black. Basically bad, strictly amateur hour, but somehow kind of fun, for being that. They really gave it the old college try.
The Belko Experiment
In this cinematic anti-masterpiece, a corporate headquarters goes on lockdown, and it turns out all the employees have remotely-triggered explosives implanted in their heads, when a voice comes over the loudspeaker and gives them challenges that require them to kill each other or be killed themselves, apparently because, movie. An exceptionally violent, bloody, pointless movie, just violence as entertainment, but, for one of those, actually kind of good cheezy fun. John C. McGinley plays a slightly different character than he usually does, which is fun.