Je nais se quois

Ok, this is truly weird. A sea captain, rescued after 100 years of being possessed by"the Old Ones", encounters magicians and monsters trying to get back to his own time, who he mostly seems to find junkyards and abandoned industrial sites around town. This is zero-budget, sub-"Creature From The Black Lagoon"rubber-mask monsters, to tell a story with as much ambition, weirdness and imagination as a Clive Barker film. Terribly miscast macho he-men who look like extras from a"Dirty Harry"police station scene—the actor playing the captain has almost 300 IMDB credits to his name including"Donnie Brasco"and"Fast and Furious"—run around spouting scenery-chewing Lovecraftian dialogue at each other, like"I have to go. Things are hunting me. Hideous things that dissolve and devour..."or"My pets. You see them? The creatures that fill what men call the pure air and the blue sky", as cheesy, obviously papier-mache bugs and creatures float and skitter around. Meanwhile, out of place humor pops up periodically, like bringing a magician the heart of a demon in a styrofoam takeout container, and when they tell him,"We have brought you a tribute", he says,"What, leftovers?", before opening up a demonic portal in his torso, a giant, hideous gaping maw full of very obviously fake rubber and foam fangs*; or, at another point, a waitress character for some reason played, completely straight and with no explanation or anything to suggest it's meant to be humorous, by a hipster-looking male actor with a goatee and mustache. This seems like a movie made by a very imaginative person who hadn't seen a movie since they were a young child and had only vague memories of what movies are supposed to be like, and a special effects budget limited to whatever they could spend in an hour at the craft store. I generally don't get into"so bad it's good", but this is so over-the-top, and they try so hard, despite having no budget and no talent, I can't help but be entertained by the effort. I might even give it an"honorable mention"... which, in this case, should not be confused with saying it's in any way good. Rather, it's so pyrotechnically, impressively bad, so ambitious without having anything even remotely resembling talent involved anywhere in the production, that I have definitely never seen quite anything like it. I can say that much for sure. (*C'mon. How cool is this, just for being so unrepentantly awful: https://www.voicesfromthebalcony.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/H.P.-Lovecrafts-The-Old-Ones-1.jpg)

Fun little flick. Sci-fi comedy about a couple of 20-something friends who stumble into some intrigue involving a crashed ufo and a missing alien egg. Reminiscent of quirky indie sci-fi comedies like Buckaroo Bonzai, Repo Man, Bill & Ted, that sort of thing, although it doesn't really rise to anywhere near that level—it's still too much of a teen film for that—but nonetheless, a likable cast and fairly consistently successful comic elements make it a fun view. Definitely doesn't suck. Could maybe be a minor cult favorite, I bet, to people who haven't seen this sort of thing before.

THIS IS IT! You found it-the one, the only BUG, the single greatest cinematic achievement not just in the admittedly crowded field of mid-20th-century apocalyptic giant insect scifi horror film, nor even just in the scifi or horror film genres, but in human motion picture history writ large, itself. The unrelenting cinematic greatness that this movie doles out in heaping helpings upon your uncomprehending cerebellum-line after line, minute after minute, scene after scene, shrieking burning head explosion after shrieking burning head explosion, without pause, from the opening preacher's sermon to the closing descent into the stygian bowels of the earth itself-simply cannot be adequately conveyed within the constraints of this forum. It must be experienced firsthand. The mere fact that this is one of the very few opportunities in American cinema to see a woman's head get set on fire in the Brady Bunch kitchen would likely be among the chief draws of any more ordinary film it might appear in. But this is no ordinary film, and even something that would obviously be the highlight of most movie-goers' entire seasons is here only the very most trivial, the most trifling beginning to the veritable cavalcade of entertainments bestowed upon the lucky viewer of this inestimable apotheosis of thrilling visual storytelling. To say any more would both unfairly rob the viewer of the opportunity to fully experience the unfolding of this stunning film firsthand, and, necessarily fall short in the effort, because words simply can not suffice. Bug. There is no substitute, no other film experience that can compare. On the rarified mountaintop of cinematic achievement, Bug stands alone. If you disagree with a single word of this review, you should know it was written by my 7-year-old self. And my 7-year-old self knows a BUTTLOAD about movies. You are not likely to convince him he's wrong. As of this writing,"Bug"is, happily, currently streaming on Netflix, and the world feels just that much more right.

Starts off like it's going to be an unbearably annoying first-person shooter, but if you forward past the first 5 minutes it's not. Kids wake up hungover after a beach…