Different, At Least

Ok, this movie is vexing. It starts out as a very tedious pursuit flick: a former soldier biking through rural Europe pisses off asshole locals in a bar by rescuing a woman they're harassing, so the locals chase him and the woman through the woods. Suddenly, the movie changes completely, as a creepy figure who for some reason has apparently built a huge Gothic torture complex in the middle of nowhere captures all of them and spends most of the rest of the movie silently torturing them horribly and graphically, with the kind of creative degeneracy you'd find in the worst torture porn.

I will give it one thing: the cinematography has a couple of exceptional moments. The gaunt torturer has shots worthy of "Nosferatu", and as the movie suddenly shifts into increasing (and totally unexplained) phantasmagoria, there are a couple of eerily beautiful shots here and there.

A grave disappointment that tackles a somewhat familiar theme very well until it suddenly doesn't.

A shy, socially awkward man unexplainedly wakes up in Sydney, Australia to find the rest of humanity has vanished. Over time he finds a few other "survivors", and both his story and their interactions are mostly handled intelligently and with realism, and the many scenes of a totally empty Sydney are effective... until the cliches start showing up, and finally, the movie abruptly ends with an totally unsatisfying "resolution" that tries to sound profound but just comes off inarticulate and never explains most of the narrative loose ends that have accumulated.

It's a shame, because for the first 1/2-2/3, the movie fell unexpectedly enjoyably into the watchable category. But disintegrating in the third act into a mass of never-explained "creepy" plot points and contrived conflicts and then ending with basically a shrug that…

Reasonably well-made but tediously derivative and narratively meandering "tribute" to Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, set in a desert ghost town instead of a Texas farm. Has a touch of The Wicker Man thrown in for good measure. Cool masks, I'll give it that, but that's just about all it's got. Although, one interesting point: it passes the Bechdel test, and in fact it has two named female BIPOC characters who have a conversation about something other than men, as both the last victim and the lead villain of this large ensemble cast are both women—they have a several-minute conversation about war and social issues, at the phantasmagorical climax of the film no less. So, I guess it's got that, too. I suppose that catapults it into "at least it's different" territory, despite how entirely derivative most of it is—albeit just barely.

I kinda feel like Rob…

An odd, slightly above-average slasher flick with a ridiculous premise (and a terrible name). A college student moves into a house full of women where they are always on camera for a porn site, until one unhappy fan discovers the location of the house and massacres them.

I will say this. This movie opens with a well-enough done scene, setting the stage for the later carnage, that I noticed it... it was a little intense and well-made, and unusually dark and disturbing in its violence, for what I expected to be a run-of-the-mill third-rate slasher pic (as most slasher pics are, and the name of this one certainly could lead one to believe it would be.)

This movie continued in that fashion... just a hair better than these movies usually are. There was a little more character development that they usually bother with, and the violence was, at…

A strange and oddly intense little film I just don't know what to make of. A hyperintense psychiatrist comes in to a "wayward girls" school to break down the girls there, and spends 68 minutes getting real close and talking to them in intense tones until their defenses are broken down.

But that's it. You think it's going to be some sort of exploitation flick but it's not. The acting is weird, and it seems like a few times they repeat lines to get multiple takes but just left all the takes in as one take, and everybody is super-arch and intense. They seem to be playing with some fourth-wall stuff, and the shrink (who is also the director) even breaks character and mugs directly for the camera at the end. And there's no plot, really, just intense, getting-in-each-other's-faces talking.

Strange.

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…