Favorite

A personal favorite. I'm really surprised by the low audience score for this film. It's definitely not your usual horror movie, and if you're in it for scares, gore, or action (of which there is little, little, and almost none, respectively), you're going to be disappointed. This ain't "Saw". It's just as much a coming-of-age family drama as it is a horror film, and it's got as much heart as an afterschool special. In theory, that could go either way, but in this case, it's so well put-together, and ticks along so smoothly, that it adds up to as very satisfying and rather unique, if homespun and small-scale, film. It doesn't aspire to be more than it is, it just tells a good and original story with near-complete economy and a skill that belies its overall amateurish production values. If a horror classic such as "The Shining" is a banquet,…

You've read this far into this list, and you haven't seen 28 Days Later? Are you kidding me? Stop reading and go watch it. Now. (Avoid the sequels.)

Strong action/horror/thriller that got inexplicably mixed reviews. A classic, in my book. Roger Ebert called this movie "better than it needed to be" and he's right about that. Northernmost town in Alaska is besieged by creatures of the night during the 30 days that the sun doesn't rise. I always watch this one when it pops back up. Stars Melissa George, who always seems to appear in good movies.

I will always love this movie. Most people hate it. Almost no plot: Annoying yuppie couple get accidentally left behind out on the open ocean while on a scuba diving excursion, float in shark-infested waters for a few days. And that's it. That's all that happens. In my opinion, expertly made—it's about mood, not story, and the cinematography and amazing soundtrack, a compilation of indigenous folk music from cultures around the world, carry it for me. Most people probably think it's boring. I will always re-watch it.

If you're reading this list and haven't seen "The Descent", just go see it. A classic in my book. A bunch of women on a caving expedition when things get scary. Not a classic horror story, but a classic horror film and, I think, a rewarding movie-viewing experience. Very well-made by a director who understood that horror movies should be movies first and horror second. It does eventually lean a little more towards action/adventure/survival than towards plot/storytelling, which is often not my preference, but this is well-done enough to rise above my usual complaints about the category. (UPDATE: I have heard from some friends that they don't like this movie. I don't understand that.)

Melissa George stars in a pretty original, intense and well-done fantasy/speculative fiction thriller that tackles some familiar themes with enough original twists, turns, and surprises to be consistently entertaining despite some occasional obvious logical flaws, and, to leave the viewer with things to think about.

I don't know if it's for everyone, but to me, this is an movie that starts ok, and just gets better and better and better over its runtime, finally tying things up in the kind of satisfying and intelligent bow that a lot of movies that aspire to be "mind-bending" strive for but few actually succeed at. It's one of those small handful of movies I go out of my way to re-watch every so often and never regret doing so.

It's hard to discuss the plot in any way without giving away spoilers, and I like this movie a little too much…

Humanity's survivors speed around a frozen globe in a train, get lost in class warfare and survival issues. Distinctive, quality, underrated, memorable sci-fi. An instant classic in my book.

This film got under my skin.

It's an American Gothic about researchers trying to retrace the steps of a NH community that walked off en masse into the wilderness in the 1940s, and slowly losing their minds in the woods themselves. And that's really about it.

It's a flawed gem, original, and really disturbed me, despite an unsatisfyingly, almost Lynchian-cryptic (in a bad way; think "Mulholland Drive", not "Eraserhead") ending. It has a low rating but extremely polarized reviews on IMDB, a lot of people either really hated or really loved it. I'd watch it again for sure, and years after having seen it, I can still vividly recall a lot of it, because so much of it just plain really got to me. We go to horror movies to be disturbed, and somehow this odd film disturbed me viscerally, in a way that films with a much…

A personal favorite. How are more people not talking about this? Sensitive, well-written, and dryly absurd magical realist character study of the lives of a couple of kids and the people they know on an Oklahoma Indian reservation. Ordinary and extremely believable comings and goings of life on the rez are interspersed with visits from the cloven-hoofed Deer Lady or visions of awkwardly stereotypical Hollywood Indian spirit guides giving advice between war whoops. I love, love, love this show.

Here we have a rare beast: for Long Weekend, both the 1978 original and the 2008 remake starring Jim Cavaziel (distributed in America with the title "Nature's Grave") are both worth seeing. They're good in different ways. I might prefer the original but thanks to capable horror direction the remake has some memorably chilling moments.

Anyway, the story is the same in both: a crass suburban couple goes camping on a remote beach in Australia, and things just go wrong. To say more would spoil it. A big favorite of mine and a pretty one-of-a-kind film, in both versions.

I've since gotten the sense that the 1978 original of this isn't revered as a minor classic, but I'm not sure why. We live in a world where everybody has heard of "Last House On The Left" and "I Spit On Your Grave", both of which came out in the…

Wow. One of the best indie films I've ever seen. An incredibly convincing 1950s small-town switchboard operator and radio host spend most of this film just talking, to themsleves or others, after a strange signal interrupts the radio broadcast. Also, for film geeks, this happens to contain an incredible 1/2-mile long single tracking shot, moving across town, through a high school basketball game in progress, and out to the radio station, in one uninterrupted take. Orson Welles would be proud. Plus a wonderful minimalist soundtrack. Loved it.

Truthfully, might not be for everybody, I don't know how many people share my love of seriously well-done pictures but which are mostly just dialogue and little action, and I hesitated for a second to put it on my "Favorite" list only because of that. But, boy did I love it.

Oh my god, it's a genuinely good indie movie.

This slow-to-start but original and ultimately entertaining mindfuck is a slow-burn, low-key gem in the same way as (and bearing some superficial similarities to, in terms of setting and tone, and how gradually and realistically it brings on the total weirdness) Yellowbrickroad, another rare zero-budget favorite of mine.

The Rotten Tomatoes summary probably summarizes it better than I could: "Two brothers receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn't as young men, they're forced to reconsider the cult's beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult."

That is about the…

Ok, I love this show. I think this is a comedy central thing, they're like 10 or 15 minute videos, but they present a version of hell as a cubicle farm where the vending machines never work, the break room is a small box full of whirring blades, and the boss literally tears you a new asshole ("Where's yours? Mine's in my armpit. I'd show you, but it's got the runs right now.") So ridiculous and weird that I could not possibly do it justice.

Ooh, this one is SPECIAL. A *huge* personal favorite. A horror movie that plays like a comedy, this movie occupies the strange spot in my cinematic pantheon where I think most people put "The Big Lebowski" in theirs, and not just because both movies involve bowling alleys.

Schizophrenic guy (played by a youngish Ryan Reynolds, who I didn't know at the time, and happily was still an actual actor and had not yet gone full-tilt into ironic Manic Pixie Dream Guy persona) hallucinates and goes off the deep end. The twist is, most of the movie is shown from his point of view, to the extent that we see his filth-strewn apartment as clean and tidy, the pink forklifts at his factory job perform ballet, his animals talk to him as a matter of course, and as his victims pile up, their severed heads remain lifelike, cheery, and friendly to…