Canadian

"The Omen" cast a long shadow, and this well-made but somewhat derivative tale sits squarely enough within it that some of the scares are unfortunately predictable. Holly Palance cheerily throwing herself off the roof in 1976 was genuinely chilling; when the overly gregarious neighbore for some reason is oddly assertive about wanting to clear the house's walk in this movie and the camera lingers a little too long on the blower's spinning blades, you already know what he's going to do with a big smile on his face.

The plot is actually somewhat different than the sources a lot of the tropes come from—an elderly grieving Satanist couple kidnaps a pregnant woman to sacrifice her in order to bring their grandson back from the dead.

On the upside, it's pretty well-made and acted—it's Canadian, after all—and has Julian Richings, the creepy skinny actor who played the devil IIRC…

I'm leaving this here just so I remember if I run across this again. This movie started slow, and I was having a hard night with other things, so for a while it was just background noise, and by the time it got interesting, I had missed a good part of the story. But it did seem interesting, and definitely had some of the stereotypical flawed-but-kind-of-interesting Canadian horror uniqueness to it. Not even really a horror movie except that zombieish theme, more like a very subdued horror/scifi crossover thriller somehow. Something about a northern Canadian town where people are being sucked into a zombie-like depression and locked away. Will watch it for real if it pops up again.

Aw, for the first two-thirds, this movie was fun! For a lot of its runtime, it's a funnier and better-done comedy than I'm used to seeing from a bunch of no-name actors, reminiscent in some ways of a "John Dies At The End" or "Tucker And Dale vs. Evil" type genre spoof. It was based on a comic book and, from the looks of it, a clever one. In a world where non-flesh-eating zombies—correction: the "Life Impaired"—are everywhere just making things difficult, a couple of kids are abducting them to sell for medical experiments, when workers for a competing "retirement service" whose haul they've been eating into takes offense, and things get hectic.

It's a Canadian film, which makes a lot of sense. Except that...

Unfortunately, by the third act they forget it's a very clever, quirky comedy and it becomes more of a conventional, cliche'd action-comedy. It just…

This stylistically incredibly Canadian sci-fi movie is unfortunately a swing and a miss. Basically, "Primer" but with virtual reality instead of time travel. In some sort of experiment that's too confusing to understand, the story shifts between similar-enough-to-be-confusing realities without much clue which is real and which isn't, resulting in something more disorienting than interesting.

Some very occasional neat visual effects and likeable if basically untalented actors can't save this ambitious but poorly-written exercise. Even being charmingly Canadian couldn't save it, which is disappointing.

But, boy is it Canadian. It's just close enough to a stereotypical low-budget but ingenuous and clever Canadian outing to almost be worth a look. Allllllllllmost.

EDIT: And, it's forgettable enough that I got halfway through it a second time before I remembered seeing one of the scenes before. And spent that half-viewing thinking, "Hunh, this is almost like a very low-budget "Primer", only kind…

Another thoughtful Canadian thriller that starts off looking like it's going to be torture porn but in fact turns out to be low-key and, after some initial grisliness, largely nonviolent, more talk than action, and that's in a good way. A lunatic abducts a judge and subjects him to a trial for a bad verdict, in front of a jury of the entire internet. Plays like one of the better (if not necessarily one of the best) episodes of Black Mirror, with its examination of the role of technology and the media in justice and morality. Plus, Donald Sutherland as the staid judge, and an intense performance from an unrecognizable Vincent Kartheiser to boot, just to elevate things that much more. Those Canadians, I don't know how they do it. (Looked online afterwards and this movie seems to have been pretty broadly panned. I'm not sure why.)