Different, At Least

A really interesting failure for sure. A cinematically beautiful fantasy/horror film that seems like it's going to successfully hover just barely on the right side of the line between interesting and pretentious indie artsiness, as it follows the lives at several different people between adolescence on young adulthood of a pair of outcasts who are fans of a surreal children's show called "The Pink Opaque", which may or may not be leaving the screen and affecting their lives.

I say "may or may not" not to be mysterious, but because the plot unfortunately falls apart in the third act and just succumbs to overproduced indie pretentiousness, and I really don't know what happens. Which is a shame, because it's pretty well done before that, and visually very nice to watch throughout.

I would really like to put this under "Je Nais Se Quois" because it really seems for…

Super-campy, painfully 80s cult "horror" movie, apparently for kids, about a boy who discovers the popular desert everyone is becoming addicted to is alive and taking over. Honestly kind of amusing for what it is. I wouldn't go so far as to say I liked it, but considering my revulsion for campy, bad horror, it's pretty good. I mean, standing next to crap like "Evil Dead" and all that absolute garbage from that time that so many people like for some reason, it's practically a masterpiece.

I have an odd affection for this atrocious Stephen King adaptation about a strange mist that brings a plague of monsters to a Maine town.

Sadly, King adaptations seem to be more often Hollywoodized bubblegum pap like "1408" than "The Shining". This is the former. Aside from the unfortunately usual cringeworthy standards so many King adaptations seem to have, this one scrapes the bottom of the barrel even worse: unbelievable and clichéd story points obviously contrived to add "drama" but only succeeding in adding cringe, two-dimensional characters, and of course the de riguer overally tv-movie-quality productions which King's stories too often attract.

Roger Ebert called it a "competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People movie", but I think he was being generous. There are moments of true incompetence here, which is surprising, as it was directed by Frank Darabont, who also adapted "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green…

A programmer living in isolation invents an artificially intelligent and thoroughly fake-looking but oddly expressive (thanks to some skilled puppetry) head, and charges it to learn to humanize itself. It then spends the movie slowly going insane. Was actually kind of decent for the first half given the conceit, with some decent takes on familiar "What is human, anyway" tropes—the head wakes him up thinking it saw a face in the closet, which he explains is due to its having successfully inherited the human cognitive ability to recognize faces, even when there isn't really one, a neat idea—although by the second half it kind of runs out of steam and feels kind of perfunctory by the conclusion. Ultimately I can't say I liked it it, which is disappointing, because for a while it was definitely heading that way (no pun intended).

A talky, overlong mocumentary about a "haunted object" research team that encounters a strange wooden effigy that seems to possess supernatural powers. I feel bad slagging it off, because it's not terrible, but it's a whole "horror" movie of nothing people talking about a scary thing, rather than showing scary things. At 90 minutes, it feels like about 3 hours long.

A montage of late-night channel surfing slowly reveals a story involving aliens, a horror filmmaker's mysterious unfinished film, a haunted videotape, and a local outbreak of violence. Told entirely as clips of flipping though channels in a fairly convincing recreation of flipping through late night broadcast TV channels, but the execution doesn't really work in an engaging way. Felissa Rose is in this, if that tells you anything.

I'm sure this seemed like a cool idea at the time—the inner dialogue of a delusional scientist tormented by sounds only he can hear, as he slowly goes insane and finally, with 10 minutes left in this 95 minute picture, kills a few people and them himself (seems like there's a lot of that going on in indie horror movies).

It's not that badly made, but 95 minutes of someone's inner dialogue about science trivia and "deep" thoughts, with 10 minutes of actual at the end, is not a good feature film, and definitely not a horror movie. This could have been a 20 minute short.

Swing and a miss. Somewhat competent extended Twilight Zone episode, basically, in which a man retreats to his apartment after his wife is killed in front of him in a mass shooting, only for time to collapse in on itself, and past and future collide and get to hang out and drink tea.

Could have been ok, but narratively not much happens, it's just kind of trippy for its own sake, and then ends without a resolution or explanation. A strong ending might have made it ok, but it just kind of stops on something that feels like a note of redemption but doesn't actually say anything.

This movie stands out for having the most ridiculous plot twist I've ever seen.

After starting out with an Amityville-inspired prelude saying that an archeological find has revealed that "the real number of the beast is 616", and showing home security camera footage of a young man rising out of bed late at night and killing his family with a rifle, the movie moves on to a paint-by-numbers, clichéd family-moves-into-a-murder-house haunted house flick of the low caliber you might expect from any movie featuring Eric Roberts, who is famous for appearing in any movie that pays his $5000/day fee. A father and his teenage daughters movie into a surprisingly affordable mansion after the death of the mother.

But, then in what had to be a scene entirely written, filmed, and tacked on after production, in just the last 5 minutes, a "plot twist" comes from further out of left field…

A young man who has just declared bankruptcy receives a mysterious charge card and buys a car, and becomes subject to usurious terms he can't afford. Mysterious threating individuals begin stalking him. An extremely contrived, self-consciously quirky, eccentric, clearly David Lynch-inspired exercise, but unlike most movies that could be said about, it actually kind of works on that level. It has some effective cinematography, including later very obviously film noir-influenced scenes that are visually well done, and actually manages to often say just on the entertaining side of being tediously "indie" and "quirky", which is rare, and I give it credit for that much.

Unfortunately, where it falls down is the much-too-slow plotting. It's twice as long as it needs to be, and for the full first half nothing really happens except for contrived self-conscious "weirdness". And the story isn't very good, and requires a little too much suspension…

This movie required the most suspension of disbelief of any movie I've ever seen. I don't know where to begin.

It's a "workplace horror" about a badly picked-on and bullied young woman, fresh out of college, apparently losing her mind and believing she's being pursued by some sort of tree-person that I couldn't be sure was supposed to be real or imaginary. The thing is, it's as over-the-top as any absurd comedy, but it's not a comedy, it's horror. Picture a workplace that's as much of an exaggerated caricature as "Office Space", but not a comedy. It's that weird and unbelievable. I don't know, maybe it was supposed to be a comedy-horror but they forgot to put the jokes in?

First she just seems badly bullied, so realistically it made the movie hard to watch, and even date raped by her asshole boss whom she's for some reason…

A somewhat artsy take on "Lord Of The Flies" in an isolated house full of eccentric young women, trapped there while attending a birthday party when an earthquake causes it to sink below the surface of the earth. Slowly they become less civil. Adding to the surreal atmosphere are typical "girly" things played for additional strangeness, like their increasingly bizarre makeup, as well as their growing paranoia.

Despite the presence of some of my favorite young actresses, like Maya Hawke and Odessa A'Zion, I didn't exactly like it. Something about young women shreiking at each other quite that much wasn't really to my taste. The artsiness was not as egregious, nor as hamfisted, as a lot of movies, although it did get grating at points, including having an avant-garde Petra Haden/Meredith Monk-type acapella soundtrack, which I might go for as something to listen to but not as the backing track…

This movie has all the warning signs—it's described as a "horror comedy", and the synopsis starts with "A group of social media influencers..."—so I knew what I was getting into.

And, I have to say, it took a while for the setup to get going, a movie about social media influencers trapped in a haunted villa shouldn't take like 30 minutes to get them trapped in the haunted villa, the entire longwinded set up is totally disposable. And, even once everything is somewhat explained, the basic reason for just about any of it is, "because, movie."

But: this is a movie made by reasonably capable filmmakers who seemed to know just how silly the whole premise is, and decided to milk it for what they could. They baldfacedly embrace absolute silliness like, "This is the house where the first-ever influencer killed herself, and now all the ghosts of influencers who…

Fanms of Bad Lieutenant and Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer will probably like the psychotic executive protagonist of this film. This is a lower-key variety of psychopath than Christian Bale might once played, not cartoonish so much as perpetually-irritated guy plays the character with a smoldering intensity and nonstop animosity towards everyone and everything he meets.

Unfortunately, this is about all the movie has to offer. Ultimately there's not much plot, there's just waiting for an angry guy to pop off.

It was alright, mostly because of his performance.