Je nais se quois

Kind of like "Mean Girls" but as a monster movie. And Mean Girls was kinda good, and, this is kinda good.

Seriously, this is a funny one, because in some ways it's as dumb as a teen scream horror can get—picture Adam Brody, the world's least believable devil-worshipping bad guy, singing "867-5309" as he sacrifices someone to the devil, and you have a pretty good picture of where this goes in places. But, the thing is, it's really well-directed, and the cinematography is at times great... like when Anita (Amanda Seyfried) is having awkward teenage sex with her boyfriend at the same time as Jennifer (Megan Fox) is killing a boy in an abandoned house, Anita senses it through the apparent psychic rapport they share as old friends—which could be a horribly mishandled conceit, but fortunately it's so underplayed that it works—and she looks up to see a vision of…

This is a little different. This is a terrible, half-baked movie for sure. More black comedy than horror, and completely amateurish at that. A pair of bumbling filmmakers decide to kidnap an unwitting actress because they want to make a fake snuff film but aren't convinced she can pull it off as an actress unless she really thinks she's being abducted and threatened. Needless to say, things don't go as expected.

There reason this isn't 100% complete garbage, though, is that the actress is so full of charisma and so much fun to watch that she basically carries the movie. The filmmakers are bumbling enough to be amiable, too, but Bree Williamson as the actress really chews the scenery as entertainingly as possible all the way through it.

For that, I'm going to stick this under films that have a certain "je nais se quois"... it's easily the…

Here we have something interesting. A horror "mockumentary" that's done so realistically I was unconvinced as to whether it was fake or not for much of the runtime. It's totally fiction, but boy does it look like a real documentary. It's effectively creepy; but then, as things get debunked, reveals them straightforwardly, as a real documentary wood. The performances are 100% realistic.

The story is, an Australian family's daughter drowns, and they believe they are beginning to see her ghost around the house. A medium gets involved, it goes through the kind of complex twists and turns any interesting real life documentary involving a true crime might go through, and it once never gets far enough from believable to break the spell. It's extremely sparing about creepy stuff so when it arrives, it's effective. The photo & video "evidence" for the haunting is sufficiently understated to be legitimately spooky... not…

This one was a pleasant surprise. A truly stupid setup: a strange wealthy family forces a bride-to-be, about to marry one of their sons, to play a game of hide-and-seek before the wedding, during which they try to kill her, because of some claptrap where a family curse says they have to. Ok, pretty stupid setup.

Well: turns out, if you can forgive the stupid story, for the millionth cinematic variation of "The Most Dangerous Game"... this is a pretty good movie, for what it is. Definitely a strong cut above what I expected it to be. The cast helps: Samara Weaving (in probably the best performance I've seen her give, by the end she's downright feral), Adam Brody, Andie MacDowall, Melanie Scrofano, plus a bunch of unfamiliar actors, all hamming it up enough to make the eccentric, homicidal rich characters entertaining without going so far over the top…

Much less lighthearted than it initially appears, ultimately a very dark and realist tragicomedy about the kind of psychopath who might try to become a real-life superhero, and what really might happen. Ultimately kind of flawed, but it's hard to dislike Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page no matter what kind of craziness they get up to.

As "Buckaroo Bonzai" was to goofy sci-fi and interdimensional travel, so is Nekrotronik to the supernatural, ghosts and demons. Fun. And, it's Australian.