Honorable Mention

This movie has been an odd favorite of mine for a long time. It could have, should have, been so terrible, but decent direction and strong acting performances absolutely save it.

The plot is so ridiculous it's hard to explain. In a suburban town, growing up in the shadow of an often-seen but never-mentioned nuclear reactor, a religious teen, the kind who wears a purity ring and goes around to schools lecturing to the kids about the evils of sex, learns, through a series of horrific sexually violent encounters with despicable men, that she has teeth inside her, and evolves from being vehemently opposed to premarital sex to, ultimately, using it to get revenge. It's an absurd setup, but handled so thoughtfully, and with such a nuanced, wide-ranging, and realistic performance from the lead actress, that it actually makes for a surprisingly good movie.

This was originally mis-marketed…

A favorite classic of mine, a very unique crime/horror flick with a deserved cult following. Edward Woodward as a Christian police detective called to investigate the disappearancec of a young girl on a remote British isle where an ancient pagan religion is still avidly practiced, on the eve of their biggest festival. Villagers wear animal masks, fornicate in public, and openly teach the school children about a pagan view of sex, as the morally outraged Woodward gets drawn into something big and dark. Command performances from all, especially Christopher Lee as the lord of the isle.

What "Dog Day Afternoon" is to crime dramas, this is to horror films: a little dated, perhaps, very much of its time, but just a very well-told-eng story, and different enough, to be entertaining all the way through.

Playing like a combination of After Hours, Office Space, Altered States, and just a touch of Donnie Darko, this movie has Justin Long in an unusually frenetic variation of his usual nebbishy character, as an amoral and mercenary low-level lawyer for a big insurance firm, who goes to the wrong party, meets the wrong guy, and gets fed a mysterious hallucinogen that abruptly unmoors him in time and space during the most important day of his adult life, sending him careening back and forth across the paths of comically disreputable characters and friends and loved ones who no longer trust him.

It could have gone so wrong, and ultimately fallen apart, relied on contrived strangeness instead of story. But, it doesn't! Even though the film eventually fails to keep from telegraphing where it's going, it manages to balance out what could have turned into self-indulgent weirdness for it's own…

If this isn't a cult favorite, it really should be. Pitch-black, occasionally very gory, but surprisingly fun indie flick about a down-on-their-luck punk rock band who hire a genial homeless guy to roadie for their tour so they can use his van after theirs is repossesed, but he turns out to be a flesh-eating demon.

There's absolutely no reason this movie should be as fun as it is, and yet, somehow, it is. Kind of a low-key standout for me, along the lines of other obscure indie faves like "Otis" and "The Signal" (2007) (which, BTW, the actor who plays the homeless guy/demon was in the art department for, so that's a fun connection.)

Truly harrowing story about the buildup to and aftermath of a nuclear strike on Sheffield, England, following the intertwined lives of several people caught in the attack. This unflinchingly grim take on the short, medium, and eventual long-term personal and social toll of a nuclear strike was, incredibly, originally a TV movie. Like "Testament", another movie on a similar theme that I often mention in the same breath, it is absolutely unsparing. It's a very rough watch but an undeniable classic, and order of magnitude better movie than the contrived, soap-operatic pseudo-relevant "The Day After".

I'm writing this quite some time after last having seen it as I've just realized I somehow have never reviewed it. This movie is a pretty big favorite of mine. I'm not sure I can put it up with my very biggest favorites, but it's damn close.

This was a good one, could be a spooky low-key modern gothic horror classic. Effectively creepy and atmospheric all the way through in the best manner of well-done horror. A man is hired to spend a few days as caretaker for a mentally ill woman sequestered in a remote island home. Upon arriving, he is chained in a harness ostensibly to prevent him from being able to wander into certain parts of the house. The young woman is alternately completely catatonic, and up wandering the house menacingly with a crossbow. There may be something in the walls.

More about mood than scares or gore, although make no mistake, this is genuinely a horror movie, and if you ask me, it's the way horror should be done... creepy and tense enough to be a date movie, but well-made enough to stand as an actual film, not a cheapo genre exercise.…

Les Blank's truly memorable documentary about the making of Werner Herzog's excellent "Fitzcarraldo", a historical adventure drama about an early-20th-century entrepreneur seeking access to rubber trees in the Andes who organizes having a 300 ton steamboat carried over a mountain. As part of making the movie, they actually did carry the steamboat over the mountain, with documentarians along the way collecting footage of the unbelievably nihilist, dour Herzog, the erratic rages of leading man Klaus Kinski, and more. One of those rare times, along with "Hearts of Darkness", that a "making of" documentary stands as a great movie in it's own right.

Contains the famous monologue from Herzog that is often quoted as being particularly illustrative of his character. Standing in the Andean forest, he says to Blank: "Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony…

For the Apocalypse Now fan: the "making of" documentary about the incredibly chaotic process that somehow yielded that masterpiece. And the documentary is nearly as powerful as the film. It's a miracle that movie even got made.

It just struck me that I've never posted a review of this perennial favorite of mine. It took 25 years, until this movie, for Sam Raimi to redeem himself to me for the execrable "Evil Dead", but redeem himself he did.

The story is of a young woman cursed by a gypsy to be, well, dragged to hell.

What works here is the production, the story telling. This is an expertly-made movie: aware of the cheezy conventions of Hollywood horror, and self-aware enough to know it's not "The Exorcist", it knowingly embraces what it is, occasionally using outright fake-looking practical effects... not all that different, I suppose from how David Lynch's fake bird didn't detract too badly from the surreal "Blue Velvet", and in this case even less disturbing since the plot is so fantasy-based already. And then, just to show you that's intentional, Raimi spices it up with enough…

Nothing tooo terribly special, but this is a fun little black comedy about a professor, stressed about trying to qualify for tenure, whose whole life spirals into bad intrigue when he's falsely accused of an affair with a student and then accidentally runs over her boyfriend. Overall, better done than most things like this, despite some moments that strain credulity. It unfolds almost like a Coen Brothers castoff script, but I mean that in a good way. It punches above its weight and largely succeeds at that. I watched "The Hudsucker Proxy" the other day, and while that's obviously a much more polished movie, I enjoyed this one's story and dark comedy more. The cast of unknown actors is well up to snuff, too.

Extremely decent zombie movie, the way they should be done. An American mercenary survives the crash of the last place out of Africa, and must walk across the zombie-infested savannah to safety.

One of the most realistic zombie movies I've ever seen. Almost no dialogue. A little action but not much. Just a soldier, and for a little while a companion he meets, mostly just walking or camping, surviving and outsmarting the roaming zombies as they need to. And, turns you, in a zombie movie, you don't actually need much more than that. No attempts at humor. No attempts to be clever or cool. Just a solid, down-to-earth survival movie, that happens to be set in a zombie acopalypse.

I liked it. I imagine I'll watch this again in the future.

WOW. Here we have something special.

Ok, wait, let me qualify that.

For starters, let me say: my first impression was, most people will hate this movie. Reading up on it afterwards, as is my habit when a movie really interests me, I discovered, yes, sure, enough, everybody hated it. Not just disliked it, I mean REALLY hated it.

I was blown away by it, loved almost every minute of it.

This is a very flawed and totally amateurish movie for sure—but, here's the rub: "Night Of The Living Dead", "Eraserhead", and most of David Cronenberg's classic films were flawed, very amateurish movies. Like them, this to me is the work of an extremely skilled amateur savant, someone with absolutely no understanding of most of the conventions of storytelling, and an absolutely brilliant intuitive feel for the camera and the editing desk.

This is a movie for deep, deep…

I have no idea how this comedy series isn't considered a classic. This road trip family comedy ran for 6 seasons and I'm just totally fond of it, I found it incredibly funny. Every season has a framing device of the family trying to explain their misadventures to some authority figure, and features them getting, well, detoured as they try to get from point A to point B. It's hard to know what to say about it beyond that, but—just watch an episode or two, and if you like it, it stays that funny for four seasons.

The descriptive blurb they use,"A group of five college kids are forced to match wits with unwelcoming residents when they fly to a 'deserted' island for a party weekend"is accurate, but doesn't quite give away what the movie is actually about. Ok, this is TV-movie quality, but it's 1970s TV-movie quality, and while nothing spectacular, it's also nothing I've quite seen before, outside of those '70s"nature has it in for man"sci fi/horror flicks. To say more would spoil it. I thought it was fun. It's not a cheezy monster movie, but somehow it might do if you're in a cheesy monster movie mood. Apparently it scored a 15% on rotten tomatoes, which, ok, I mean, yeah, I get it, it's not by any means scary, and not even really very good by most movie standards. But come on, where's people's sense of fun?

A middling action picture elevated to high entertainment by the sheer genius of casting Bob Odenkirk and Christopher Lloyd as tough-as-nails action heroes, and, the unlikely fact that they actually pull it off. I liked it.

Pamela Adlon out-"Louie"s Louie in this slice-of-life series about three generations of foul-mouthed women trying to get by. A charming, realistic, funny, undiscovered gem. Deserved its five-season run and never got old.

A somehow undiscovered drama/comedy gem with Zach Galifianakis playing both an emotionally complicated rodeo clown and his straight-laced twin brother, with Louie Anderson playing their mother. This was Zach Galifianakis's moment, and nobody knows about it, and I say that pretty much already generally liking everything else he's done.

I like this movie. Well,"like"is a strong word, it's intense and really disturbing but appreciably well-made. Dreama Walker stars in a"based on a true story"very-slow-burn drama, sticking fairly close to the true facts, about a man who called the office of a fast food joint claiming to be law enforcement, and intimidated the manager and several other people into imprisoning, humiliating, and finally sexually abusing an innocent employee for several hours. The entire first two acts of the movie are set mostly in the one room where it happens. It's pretty disturbing and, I thought, admirably well made, considering how tough the subject matter is. Caution: if you research afterwards, as I'm often inclined to, you'll learn that the full story of the actual events is actually a little more disturbing than what was shown in the movie. The whole thing is really upsetting. But the movie is so well made it's hard not to appreciate the filmmaking.

Wow. Real honorable mention here. I found this one on Tubi, and for the most part, it's actual horror cinema, not the TV"horror"-in-quotes writing exemplified by campy shows like"American Horror Story"which use horror tropes with any edges safely blunted off to avoid upsetting anybody. Anthology series where acclaimed directors (Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, John Landis, John Carpenter) each directed a 1-hour horror film. As an anthology, the quality is up and down, but for the most part finds these directors in top form and, in the best episodes, not watering their fare down for TV... this is something fans of actual quality horror movies might actually enjoy. And, happily, it doesn't even lean very often into"horror comedy"or in-jokes, for the most part indulging in those only when it will actually work (I had a chuckle when John Landis's episode has a policeman, speculating a wild animal attack has improbably occurred in his town, mention a wolf attack reported in central London in 1981.) Director Takashi Miike's episode, while not among my favorites, was actually pulled from the original run of the series by Showtime over concerns about the content being too extreme (for cable in 2006!) and, true to form, Dario Argento's episode, characteristically both ridiculous and disturbing, had to be edited for violence in the original run, too. The second season isn't as good, it's more"tv horror", although it still has its moments, and is by and large still often better than most other TV horror. I was somewhat unnerved by the idea, if not entirely the execution, of Joe Dante's season 2"The Screwfly Solution", in which something similar to pest control biotech, designed to reduce insect populations by chemically interfering with mating urges, finds a much broader use. Tobe Hooper also is nice to see back in fine form in season 1, but I'm not going to say any more than that.

Tubi very intelligently put this on on autoplay right after The Thing, and I'd somehow never seen it. Another movie that is very dated and of its time, but, I actually, watching it, assumed it must have from the early to mid '60s, not 1956. It's another one of those films that you kind of have to view through the lens of its era, but I can believe that if I had been a teenager in the 1950s and saw this when it came out, without having seen everything later that it shaped, I would have thought it was incredible. I remember not all that long ago, some kids raised on modern, studio-crafted pop saying they couldn't understand what was so great about the Beatles, and I couldn't help but think of that watching this. It certainly originated a lot of common tropes: first sci-fi film to feature faster-than-light travel, first one to use an electronic soundtrack, first one set entirely on an alien world, not to mention the use of vivid color photography years before the black-and-white era ended, and in terms of its production and many of the tropes it uses it's very easy to see the influence on later shows on up until"Star Trek"and beyond. It's hard to believe it preceded Star Trek by at least 10 years, in that sense it still seems ahead of its time.

I liked this. A definite B-movie, an anthology-type flick about people trying to survive in a town where people''s bodies are being taken over and mutated by a fungal infection. If that premise sounds like anything you could ever enjoy watching, and you can tolerate some occasionally cheesy special effects, then this movie is probably closer to what you hope something like that would be than what something like that usually turns out to be. I thought it was fun, if a little viscerally gory. Fungus... I'm sure you can imagine. It was kinda fun though.

Sometimes I see a flick that should have been a tedious captivity flick but they actually pull it off. This one is one of those. Gang of kids go to rob a blind guy's house, thinking it will be easy.... they're very wrong. Definitely original, with good enough casting, acting, and production to pull it off. Not great by a long shot but for one of these movies to even stand out as not being garbage is impressive. It kind of held my attention, which is incredibly rare for these kinds of exercised. I would say if you're only going to watch one pursuit/captivity flick in your life, this might be a contender. It's got 88% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and while I might not go that far on an absolute basis, it makes some sense, and grading on a curve with most of these kinds of movies, I definitely would give it at least that. (Note: closing credits say produced by Sam Raimi. A-ha. And, hold cow, I didn't even recognize Jane Levy with her hair bleached blonde as the lead.)

What can I say? It's a classic. Modern sci-fi/horror/action movie buffs will probably wonder why people once thought this was so great, and it's probably for me not even on par with"The Blob"(a surprisingly good movie for the era and subject matter) but still, for 1951, I can see the appeal, it was probably pretty unlike anything that had been seen at the time. I enjoyed it for sure.

Hey, look! It's a good old-fashioned horror movie! If this had come out in the 70s, it'd be a minor classic. It even has the old-school analog synth soundtrack. Vacationing couple gets stuck in an island in Mexico where it turns out the night before all the kids suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and killed all the adults. It's kind of the opposite of"Mom & Dad", or"The Birds"but with children instead of birds. In fact, I'd be surprised if"The Birds"wasn't a conscious influence. But the nice thing is, that's as close as it gets to cliches, excepting the title. Very far from a Hollywood horror movie, that's for sure. Light on gore in terms of screentime devoted to it, but extremely gory in the few brief moments it's shown. Not great by a long stretch, but good, in a way that they don't really make horror movies anymore... definitely only for horror fans, though. Gets pretty brutal by the end, seriously doesn't pull its punches, which, when you consider the bad guys are a bunch of children, is even more brutal. Honorable mention, I think. Looks like the kids probably had a mess of fun making it, too. Amusingly, Wikipedia says this film made a total of about $2500 in theaters. Also, turns out, it's an almost shot-for-shot remake of a 1976 Spanish horror film called"Who Can Kill a Child?"which, really, would be a much better title for what it is. It's funny, because something about it reminded me of Long Weekend, another '70s film which I got turned on to by liking a remake that nobody else cared for.