Je nais se quois

An interesting indie exercise, more artsy than I often like, but in this case it's effective—think more Tarkovsky than "Brooklyn hipster with a video recorder". There are a lot of long, slow shots and moments without any dialogue, but it all works naturalistically.

The entire movie is essentially a series of monologues from three generations of solitary Mars colonists (and the only three characters in the movie): a member of the first wave of colonists, a son of his who is the only survivor of an expedition back to a ruined, desolate earth, and his granddaughter, back on Mars. I unfortunately was distracted with some work for the first part of the movie before I realized there was something kind of interesting happening on my TV, but the somber first person accounts of a future history were engaging and the stark cinematography was beautiful in an amateur, indie kind…

It's hard to do anything new with a zombie movie nowadays, but this movie kind of does. Bill Moseley takes a star turn in a convincing performance of a mildly unlikeable radio shock jock stuck in the studio while a bioengineered zombie outbreak overtakes his city. It has its share of action, and of course zombies, but a lot of it is handled as a drama or thriller, not as a horror movie, and focuses heavily on the survivors in the studio, not on the zombies, except as they affect the survivors. Plus they manage to have a couple of scenes of things I haven't seen before and a few moments that kept me on the edge of my seat. Directed by Corbin Bernsen, who I've never known as a director, but obviously had a couple of ideas, and handled them well enough to make a pretty good and somewhat…

Boy, this movie really makes kind of an impression.

Annalynne McCord, last seen looking like a glamor-model-turned-actress in 90210, plays, in what is only the first of this movie's many bits of stunt casting of famous faces in unlikely roles, a painfully awkward, geeky outcast with bad skin, greasy hair and rings under her eyes. She actually kind of pulls it off with a certain impressive intensity I wouldn't have thought a puffball 90210 actress had in her. She plays socially inept and awkward—and maybe something darker peeking out underneath it—to the hilt and it's actually pretty entertaining to watch. I bet she had to study real geeks to nail it this well.

Along the way, ex-porn star Traci Lords plays her extremely uptight and conservative mom, John Waters plays a priest with a completely straight face, and cameos pop up from Malcolm McDowall, Marlee Matlin, Ariel Winter as…

I think I might be the only person who thinks this is a good movie.

This very Giallo-esque outing is about a severely scarred, burned kid with psychic powers who breaks out of a mental institution and returns to his hometown to torture everybody, where he brainwashes all the towns kids to help him not. Not that he needs the help, though, since he can make things burst into flame just by looking at them.

But the plot doesn't matter all that much. Neither does the often bad, hammy acting (including the odd casting of Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore from The Sopranos as a histrionic psychiatrist.) What matters is that this thing has this sort of outsider-art cinematographic beauty to it, much like the old Giallo films. It's just a cool-looking, atmospheric film.

It's so Giallo-esque that I checked to see if it was made in Italy. It…

The army descends on a cul-de-sac in suburban England and warns everybody to stay indoors for what initially seems to be a terrorist attack but turns out to be something far more ghastly. One mother must battle her way to find her daughter, who has fled to a house across the street after arriving for a reluctant Christmas Eve visit to find mum in bed with a one-night stand. Along the way neighbors accidentally get killed, people shoot at each other, and it's basically a huge violent mess.

You know, I liked this. There's not a lot of story here, mostly action. But Scottish actress Neve McIntosh is appealing, the guy who played the nasty rec center manager in "Misfits" does well as her one-night stand who winds up having to stay at her place long after he really probably should have left, and somehow this is the sort…

Slightly above-average "teen scream" flick that I just can't tell if it's supposed to be funny or it's just that over the top. They get into the action quickly as during the cleanup after a party in an abandoned asylum they do the worst possible thing you can ever do in a horror movie: play a children's game, in this case "Stiff As A Board, Light As A Feather", the very worst horror movie childrens' game, and therefore very deservedly spend the rest of the movie with a demonic presence hopping from one of them to the other, trying to kill them off. An attempt to call in a priest for an exorcism ends very, very quickly with the priest wandering into the road and getting hit by their car—this is what I mean by not knowing whether this is supposed to be funny or it's just that over the…

This bears a disclaimer. If I categorize a film as "je nais se quois", that doesn't necessarily constitute a recommendation that it should be watched. In this case, I absolutely don't recommend this film, but I just can't deny... it's a little different.

This is an incredibly psychologically cruel torture porn. I say "psychologically" because in terms of graphic violence or gore, this movie actually extremely mild by the torture-porn-type horror movie conventions. What little graphic violence there is mostly occurs out of frame. I'm hard-pressed to say there's any visible blood in this movie at all.

Interestingly, they make some unusual character choices. There's slight moral ambiguity, one or two characters show various shades to their personalities, and the final girl convention is totally out the window here. The movie definitely goes in its own direction, in a small way.

The very big problem is the basic thrust…

Surprisingly decent zero-budget indie drama that starts like it's going to be a crap thriller but slowly and smoothly transitions to something quieter and more thoughtful. Three friends' relationships with each other and their respective loved ones fall apart after someone dumps a body in their car's trunk while camped in the backcountry and they decide they can't call the police because the car's owner is an ex-con.

It's a small, relatively quiet movie, and it does have a glaring logical flaw and admittedly tough suspensions of disbelieve (how long can you keep a body around in Los Angeles without anybody noticing a smell?), but, it's a hair different, not really something I've seen before, and though some of the acting is bad it's a serious effort that doesn't reach for more than it can accomplish and only seems to get stronger as it goes on, which is a…

Caught this on Tubi about 40 years after having last seen it in the theaters and not remembering a thing about it (In fact, I'm not even sure I saw it in the theaters... I believe I did.) I expected it to be a much-too-1980s corndog, and it was; however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that as the film went on, they put some effort into some odd aspects of it here and there, and in the middle of all the cheese there are a couple of passing images or short scenes that are surprisingly effective.

It reminds me, in a way, of how Tobe Hooper would occasionally take on cheesy projects (Think "Mars Attacks") but, then, because he's Tobe Hooper, would occasionally inject genuinely scary moments in them when you didn't expect them. This was a bit like that.

The plot is that a very 80s kid…

This is a fun movie, in its way. I actually watched it twice because I forgot to review it the first time, but once I realized I recognized it, I kept watching it anyway because I recally kind of liking it, and I kind of liked it again.

An annoying millenial podcaster gets an offer of $25,000 to come interview a charismatically crotchety, dour old farmer, in memory of his late wife, who was a fan. The farmer says a huge many-eyed monster lives in the woods behind his house, and turns out to be wildly paranoid, and has loaded up his property with security cameras and mechanical death traps.

And, refreshingly, it's mostly a character study. This is a horror movie, sure enough, but a whole lot of it is two guys talking—or, more often, the podcaster trying to get an interview, and the farmer telling him he wishes…