Sort of a fun horror/fantasy/crime thriller about an escaped mental patient with mind control powers on the run from the law among strippers and drug dealers in the seedy underbelly of New Orleans. Stars Craig Robinson as the lead cop, refreshingly actually playing a role, and not just himself. Nice to see that.
Fun magical-realist series about an 18-year-old girl struck down by satellite debris falling from space who joins a team of "reapers", undead people tasked with helping doomed souls depart their bodies painlessly before death. Oh, she also works at a temp agency by day. And the "reapers" hang out at a restaurant called "Der Waffle Haus". It's kinda fun. Created by Bryan Fuller, who also made similar short-lived but fun magical-realist shows "Pushing Daisies" and "Wonderfalls". Plus has Mandy Patinkin, who I always like, as the boss of the reaper team.
Surprisingly solid zombie action thriller about a zombie outbreak in a prison. With this clichéd title and that plot synopsis I expected total crap, but, surprise, it's a well-made, atmospheric, tense, fairly tightly made—if not particularly inventive—little splatterfest, more like "28 Days Later" in tone and production than "Return of The Living Dead". Completely lacks 28DL's epic scope and grand storytelling, but definitely feels like they took some cinematography lessons from Danny Boyle and learned well. Watchable if you're in the mood for this sort of thing. Might be a good date movie, if perhaps a little violent and explicitly gory for some.
Warning: panned badly on IMDB, 4.3 stars. I'm not sure why. It's not great by a long shot but it deserves better than that.
What to say about this critical fave? A drug-addicted schizophrenic anarchist hacker takes on the forces of corporatism and global-scale evil in this dark cyberthriller series that never lets the intensity go below 10 for a second. Every scene is intense. Every piece of dialog. People look at each other intensely, or argue and threaten each other intensely. One woman was cast, I'm sure, primarily for her skill at sitting there looking, because it's almost all she does. The show never takes a quiet moment to gather power for the next scene, never lets up. It's just one intense climax to the next, like a Whitney Houston song.
This series reminds me of what took me so long to cotton to "Breaking Bad" for—slow pacing, intensity conveyed with lots of quiet and stillness instead of action. Which, in principle is admirable, and much harder to do well than the…
What a weird movie. Bottom-of-the-barrel crapola, with the (lack of) acting and production values of a cheap porn film, and yet... something about it... if this had been a big budget it would have been kinda good. It's about a zombie outbreak in Philadelphia, and a group of survivors trapped in a basement. But it's a lot more about dialogue than zombies eating people. And it has a couple of fanciful animated sequences that totally work as comic relief and look better than anything else in the movie. It's kind of like... this would have been a good movie if they'd spent the kind of budget on actors and production staff that they did on the animation. The writing is, strangely, not really that bad, if you can imagine a skilled director directing skilled actors at it. But the movie looks and feels like a porno but with zombies instead…
Slightly uneven but admirably well-done tribute to 1970s cinematic gore á la "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Someone knew where they were doing here and really wanted to make a quality genre picture, not just an exploitative, derivative rip-off "tribute".
In 1979 a porn production crew rents a remote farm to make make a porn that would also be a "real movie" (clearly a fourth-wall nod there; this production tries, and to a respectable extent succeeds, to rise above its genre.) Unfortunately, the old couple they rent from are at first odd and menacing and then it gets worse.
The story and motivations don't quite hold up—the reason the old couple act the murderous way they do is never even hinted at, a classic case of "because, movie"—but, like a lot of '70s horror, this goes further into character and decent moviemaking than modern audiences are probably used to. It explores…
Wow. The ultimate "A+ for effort" horror/fantasy flick. Fails, but what an effort!
In terms of plot, if it matters, a temporary resident of a mental institution falls for the comatose girl up the hall, who it turns out... nah, I'm not going to spoil it. It's not exactly "different", but it steals so brazenly from films that are, that it is.
This "teen scream"-quality film shamelessly steals from Silence Of The Lambs, Saw, Mirrormask (actually stealing from that one shows impressive discernment) and I'm sure a million others on its way to a far more phantasmagoric second half than anyone could possibly see coming. It goes so far, and commits so hard to what it's trying to do, that it's actually impressive. And it's not even "so bad it's good"... it's not bad bad bad, it's just... aggressively mediocre, in so many ways, yet tries so hard…
I've never been more torn as to whether I liked or hated a film.
This plays like the evil twin of "Being There"—a cheaply-made film in which a deranged man-child, kept imprisoned in squalor and sexually abused by his mother for his entire life, escapes into urban Adelaide, and in a highly episodic series of events is taken, "Chance the gardener"-like, into various people's company, eventually fronting a rock band, and getting laid way more often than a babbling, homeless-looking person who can only repeat things he's heard said to him really ought to be, before ultimately stumbling into true love, all without being able to string together a single coherent sentence.
First off, this film has a lot of taboos—incest and animal cruelty, for starters, as he has sex with his mother and senselessly asphyxiates first his cat and then his parents with plastic wrap.
Then, the…
A slow-to-get-going, very quiet but beautifully shot rural folk horror that I'm sure most people will hate but I found very satisfying, once it got going, to the extent that it ever does. A researcher out at a rural pond for not-clearly-specified reasons encounters mounting hallucinations and increasingly hostile locals, with a heavy dose of pagan mythology. Picture a much quieter, almost arthouse "The Wicker Man" or "Midsommar" vibe, but fortunately restrained enough not to be distractingly pretentious.
This was very badly panned by a lot of people on IMDB, but a few seemed to appreciate it as I did, and film buffs might find it to stand out from the pack. Despite being bored for the first part, I did, and by the end I found it very good.
The cinematography stood out, and even a lot of reviewers who hated the film acknowledged that—very reminiscent of Lars…
Now, this is a uniquely weird movie. A bizarre and gory tale of unseen forces manipulating humans to commit acts of extreme violence is told entirely with human-sized puppets, which are detailed enough to go straight down the uncanny valley: they blink, they appear to have nearly-real-looking human skin with stray hairs and razor stubble, although the facial expressions are largely unchanging. It helps that it's filmed in real locations.
At first it seems like someone knew they had a fair-to-middling-at-best horror sci-fi on their hands so they decided to make the best of it and elevate it into something truly strange, making suspension of disbelief much easier with the puppet-only production. But, boy, the trick kinda worked.
One critic said, "too damn strange to completely ignore", and I agree with that.
To give an idea of what's going on here, turns out some of the characters are…
Kind of an offbeat British/American comedy about an eclectic assortment of characters who become involved with each other in the days before humanity is due to be wiped out by a comet. Jenne Fischer, Rob Lowe, Diana Rigg. I enjoyed it, it was more clever and entertaining than it should have been, and I was disappointed when the first season ended on a cliffhanger and it wasn't picked up for a second.
Weirdly OK sci fi flick. In pandemic times, a scientist wakes up imprisoned in a life support unit, and spends the movie wandering a medical-facility-cum-military-installation, uncovering the truth about what's happening to her. Little dialogue and almost no plot, but, visually well done enough to be sort of interesting, I guess, and with touches of fairly disturbing body horror. I didn't hate it, and might actually watch it again at some point to pay a little closer attention.
Odd, fun little sci-fi/light comedy about an alien landing in an old man's flower garden in Pennsyvania. Ben Kingsley, Jane Curtin, and Harriet Sansom Harris, still a heavy hitter in sci-fi over 30 years after she freaked us out on the X-Files episode "Eve", play a bunch of old coots who nobody listens to, caring for a space visitor who doesn't talk but manages to express some strange things he needs to get his craft off the ground again. Pretty well done, pleasantly quirky, and a fun watch. I liked it.
A phallic/fecal-looking parasite that causes uncontrollable, violent sexual urges spreads throughout an exclusive apartment complex. How's that for an opener?
I just can't be objective about early David Cronenberg. I've always had a lot of affection for Cronenberg as a director, and although the low production values and camp story here play like early John Waters directing a gore film, or like George Romero making a movie about horny urbanites instead of zombies... I'm not going to say anything worse than that about it. And, you know, early John Waters has its points, too.
And, I think, to me, even though this isn't the best of Cronenberg's early films (cf. "The Brood", which unfathomably isn't on Tubi), you can still see occasional signs of talent. There's some disturbing imagery to be seen here, and that's what we come to horror movies for, right?
Surprisingly fun horror about a young girl who takes a spider from space as a pet, which causes problems as it grows. Starts off with a "Goonies"-type "kid movie" vibe but actually turned out to be alright horror, slightly above average. Fun, at least. I liked it.
A pretty pleasant surprise—a thoroughly derivative captivity/pursuit movie of the "trapped in an insane psycho's house" variety, about a young woman who is tricked into meeting someone via a dating app who is not who the profile says, but which slowly picks up about a third of the way through and then, surprisingly, just gets better and better.
This is entirely derivative in terms of its themes, indebted deeply to movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but slowly they began to introduce elements that had me thinking, "Well, this is actually alright for what it is, I bet younger horror fans will think it's great... although I'm just not sure it's necessary when we have The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And then, slowly, they just kind added enough novel elements, and truthfully the whole thing is well-made enough all the way through, that I actually wound up enjoying it quite…
Let me say first that virtually any reasonable person will hate this movie. I can't decide if I like it myself. For a good part of it, I sure didn't.
This is sort of like "outsider art" of sci-fi horror. Absolutely terrible by most conventional standards: paced like a slog through a swamp, fairly poorly acting, and a difficult-to-make sense of story.
The story, for what it's worth, is a medical student gets a night job as a caregiver for a cantankerous, agoraphobic old man, who is never seen, but rather only heard perpetually cursing over a baby monitor from his room, as the primary nurse does all the actual attending to him. Strange shadows occasionally dart about and startle him, without explanation. And that's the first half of the movie. And it's, strange, there was actually something about it I kind of liked somehow, but I couldn't…
This movie is truly an odd bird. I believe the weaknesses outnumber the strengths, a flawed gem that's more flaw than gem, but I can't say it has absolutely nothing at all going for it.
Three people get trapped in a high-rise holiday flat, and as the food and water run out they begin to lose their minds. Eventually it comes to appear they may be victims of something larger than a simple mishap.
It's well-made and well-acted by indie film standards. Also, it had some nice production touches... some of the camerawork, the way they handle the apartment, was reminiscent of how the hotel sets were used in "The Shining", but not in a deliberately derivative way, just in seeming to have picked up some nice moves from it.
But the narrative is pretty weak and disjointed, and the first probably two thirds of the movie are…
What starts out as a really excellent pitch-black comedy about a production of "Julius Caesar" gone murderously wrong loses the thread about halfway through.
For the first half it was incredibly well made and cruising to be a particular favorite, but about halfway through the tight plotting suddenly gets very, very flabby, and instead of exploring the consequences of a murder they fall back on the "comedy" of the bodies piling up as many more happen.
It's a true shame. The production is excellent, whole thing is surprisingly strong, and even the acting holds up all the way through, with the exception of the appearance halfway through as Malcolm McDowell, playing his usual role of Malcolm-McDowell-in-costume-as-someone-else. The actors seemed incredibly true-to-life, based solely my meager experience with theater actors. I'm guessing this really is aimed as a satire at people who've been involved in the theater, but it was…
This is sure to be a polarizing film. More a montage than a story, with plenty of very long, unhurried (and beautifully shot) nature shots, this film depicts a version of humanity that hibernates through the winter, and is just slightly more a part of the natural world. People are still people, they don't act like animals, they have dinners around dinner tables and go to concerts. But there's no line between "civilization" and "nature"... goats and raccoons wander through the houses, roosters leap on the dining room table to pick what's left of a massive pre-hibernation feast, and people describe whatever group of people they happen to cohabit with as families, as parents and siblings. "Once when we woke up I had a new older sister", someone relates. "We had no idea where she came from." Cows appear to be the dominant species, and are often seen wandering by.…
Sometimes I stumble onto a treat.
A company invents VR technology to allow rich people to experience life from the viewpoint of someone more disadvantages. To say more about the plot would require spoilers.
This indie sci-fi is filmed in black and white, which seemed pretentious at first, but made sense as the movie rolled on, because, it's sci-fi, yes—but mostly it's actually film noir, and while nobody would accuse it of being one of the greats, it's a pretty well-done one for a little indie flick. As the story gets more involved the choice to film in black and white as an homage to vintage film noir makes sense.
It started out seeming pretentious and not very effective, not to mention not particularly well-acted, but only got better as it went along, building, happily, to a very effective ending noir ending. Though it takes a while…
This is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen... to a point.
This movie about a suicidal man driving around in a car looking for an opportunity to kill himself when the ghost of a young girl appears in his passenger seat starts as an execrably "indie", pretentious, artsy, low-budget enterprise of the sort I usually hate. And for maybe the first very long half hour, that's what you get. I looked at the clock at the 30 minute mark and questioned whether I could do another 90 minutes of it. Lots of film effects, not much else happening.
But, first off, I noticed something strange: this low-budget pretentious crap movie about a guy driving around in a car had a full-on orchestral score more appropriate for "Raiders Of The Lost Ark". So I began to pay attention. And after the dreadfully long first act... it actually got…
Truly strange—this is a very talky, amateurish, artsy and extremely pretentious zero-budget indie flick with little plot, dislikeable characters and not much acting to speak of... and yet, somehow, it works. It's like the exception that proves the rule.
A young couple goes on vacation at a cottage she grew up vacationing at, only to be visited by a pretentious masked figure who is either some sort of forest spirit or her childhood imaginary friend. She spends the rest of the movie walking through the woods talking with him, to her boyfriend's growing annoyance.
It's hard to explain why it works. It's very much like a fable, there almost nothing to it, and somehow manages to weave the pretentious elements into something of an engaging tapestry. I don't know. It's weird. It should be an awful, awful movie. Virtually every identifiable element of it, looked at on its own, is…
Strange. This is a bottom-of-the-barrel, amateur, zero-budget, home-movie level attempt at sci-fi, as a couple of non-actors playing "scientists" examine ancient artifacts found Antarctica, which turn out to release something sinister.
But, you know what? I don't know why, but this is like the best bottom-of-the-barrel, amateur, zero-budget, home-movie level attempt at sci-fi I've ever seen. There's something kind of good about it. Maybe it had a really good editor, or something? Bizarre. It's like a bunch of non-filmmakers and non-actors got together to make a bad movie, but somehow accidentally included someone in the mix who knew what they were doing. I actually kind of liked it, which is totally weird, because, I mean, it's terrible.
This is a low-budget indie movie that should have been way worse than it was. In a dystopian urban future that visually resembles our dystopian urban present, a scientist invents an android duplicate of himself, then gets into a love triangle when the android and he both fall for the same quiet, timid store clerk. The entire movie is narrated by the android from its own point of view.
The acting is abysmal in some places, the story is quiet and slow and honestly nothing special, and I'd go so far to say most people probably wouldn't like it—I suspect my usual post-review check online will reveal a lot of haters—but it definitely had some appeal to me.
But it maintains a certain low-budget dystopian esthetic well, and had a certain low-key cerebral quality to it that I liked. The android, imprinted with its creator's memories, is overarchingly…
Movies like this exactly are why I created a category "Je nais se quois/Flawed Gems". Definitely not a great movie, but certainly original, after a fashion, and ultimately, I thought, worth a watch, despite the flaws—most particularly for people tired of the clichés of the genre.
This is a solidly B-movie supernatural thriller about—wait for it—a family on vacation in a remote cabin in the Oregon mountains when Bad Things Happen. On top of it, it intentionally starts with some of the most hackneyed cliches out there, and sticks with that for long enough that it could throw you.
As the family settles into their cabin, mysterious hooded figures are seen doing... something... in the woods. People talk on the phone in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Something is Clearly Going On.
In the first hint that things are about to get a little different, a TV is seen…
Well, this movie put one over on me. Starts off with a bunch of guys having a reunion for a bachelor party in a fancy rental house, which logically promised lots of agressive dipshit behavior and characters I wasn't going to like at all. My dirty little secret is I'm often multitasking when I watch movies, and the good ones draw my attention, otherwise I wind up missing a lot, and I tucked in with my laptop expecting to miss most of this one. The loutish behavior in the early scenes (set in a strip club, naturally) did nothing to dussuade me that this would be anything more than 90 minutes of shriek-filled audio wallpaper.
But somewhere in the middle, I noticed the appearance of an antagonist who was incredibly well-cast, just seriously creepy. And very soon the disappearance of one of the guys in the middle of the…
Well, this movie certainly turned out to be something much different, and much better, than I expected. That's not to say it was a *good* movie... it definitely doesn't aspire to higher than campiness... but by the usual low standards of a campy movie, it's in many ways excellent.
First of all, it introduced me to the idea of "mukbanging", an internet trend originating in South Korea where people watch videos of other people eating. (I'd say "kids today", but I didn't understand the shit kids did when I was a kid, so age as nothing to do with it.)
Ok. Second of all: obviously, it's a horror movie with "Cannibal" as the first word in the title, which places certain genre expectations squarely on it. And, it does live up to those expectations... after a fashion.
There's a lot of unflinching gore here, for sure, but not quite…
This is one of those movies that seems like someone who had never made a movie, or even ever known anything about making a movie, had a camera and just asked a bunch of their friends, "Want to be in a movie?"
And, happens to be friends with Linnea Quigley, who it's at least funny to see again like 35 years after what I hesitate to call her "heyday".
But: here's the thing. I really don't get into the "so bad it's good" thing, most of the time it's just an excuse to not really try. This is a rare case where, for me, it actually is so bad it's good, because, it seems like they *really did try*. They just didn't know how to write anything but one horror movie cliché after another, and didn't know how to act, and didn't know how to make a movie. But…
Talk about a guilty pleasure.
Cartoonishly evil frat guys lure a few women to a remote cabin for a party, only to drug them, rape them, and release them to hunt them down for sport. Things don't do as planned, though, when one of them reaches a road and flags down a car... which happens to have an incredibly realistically nerdy couple—I could swear I sat next to these two in the computer center in college—who turn out to, uh, not be people you want to fuck with.
What follows is tough to categorize. Torture porn? Revenge fantasy? The darkest pitch-black comedy I've ever seen? It's basically all of these.
It helps that it has some good moments that redeem it, so you know it isn't just an exploitation flick. The stereotypically weak characters—the female intended victims, and the geeks—turn out to be overpoweringly strong, but with…
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