Bad but I liked it

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 that series, and, if it had been, would have been one of the better ones. Twisted psycho invites lovers over for dinner, but with a little encouragement from her mad-scientist-type brother, has a hard time telling between "guests" and "toys".

Like "Into The Dark", it's basically bad, but in this case, it's over-the-top and just twisted enough, with committed enough performances from the actors playing the psychos, to keep it entertaining and at least watchable, despite how terrible it is as a movie. I wouldn't ever go out of my way to watch it, but if you're looking for some grody horror fare and the pickings are slim, you could probably do a lot worse than this. It succeeds,…

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 the stories seems to attract people who really commit to it, somehow. They try harder. (In this case, a man awakened from a 10 year coma watches videos of the attempt to summon eldritch horrors that put him there. Does that really matter?) Not the first time I've seen a Lovecraft adaptation that was ca omplete crap movie, and yet, still somehow, oddly, not totally unenjoyable.

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 black smoke entities as they fuck, fight, and try to figure out what's happening to them. At one point, they venture out only to discover that if they wander too far the wind up back at the cabin, and slowly, the walls close in.

And you know what? It's all a little too poorly thought out to be anything like a good movie, but I kind of liked it, vaguely. It was obviously the product of a consistent, if bad, vision. It was relentlessly over-the-top in its reliance on special effects and overacting, plus, at least the plot is original enough not to be overly familiar. I kind of appreciated it on that level, even though it's ridiculous and just…

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 rural community with no phone or cell phone reception. Add in an unfortunate, hamfisted attempt at satirizing nationalism, plus some touches of Tobe Hooper-style over-the-topness, and, eh, not bad for what it is. Still a pretty bad movie, but I liked it ok for what it was.

If you pretend this is the best student film you've ever seen, it's actually not that bad. Definitely more a product of ambition than experience (as evidenced by that 'arty' title that has little to do with the story's subject and even less with its tone). Long-estranged junkie friend turns up at a couple's door insisting the cops are trying to kill him. The problem is the filming conceit: even worse than a 1st-person-shooter, this film shows the action through all the lead characters' first-person viewpoints, often meaning you see the same scene three times in a row, a device that gets old within the first two minutes. Eventually, despite some weak acting performances, it shapes up into an ok enough neo-noir thriller that I don't regret sitting through it, and actually eventually kind of enjoyed that amateurish "let's make a 'great' movie!" energy. I wouldn't watch it again, though.…