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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Neighbors (1981)

Tough call here. I have a hard time viewing this movie objectively due to the affection I feel for having seen it in the theaters as a kid.

It's not great, definitely far from it, and deeply flawed. Mostly it coasts on the chemistry of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi both playing against type as unlikely neighbors thrust together at the end of a remote cul-de-sac... Aykroyd as a wild man and Belushi as a conservative, but both with the comic chops to pull off what otherwise might have been a disaster on the order of casting Steve Martin as the straight man in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles".

The writing is terrible though. I like the film in spite of it, but, the writing is pretty terrible.

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Misfit

An obese high school girl who is mercilessly picked on is taken in by a serial killer, shown the ropes, and coached to torture her tormentors.

I throw around the phrase "home movie" quite a bit to describe the lowest of low budget flicks, but it has never fit better than hear.

This really looks like someone had a super-8 camera and an idea... and no talent. You can see the "actors"... I'm guessing friends and family of the director... reading cue cards at points. (No joke, two of the actors have the same last name as the director/writer/producer.)

That said, though... funny thing, this is SO bad it's almost hard to dislike. It's like if your friends made a movie... of course it;s going to be bad... but you're going to like it. This is like that.

Only problem, and the thing that keeps me from…

Movie Reviews » watchable

The Domestic

Decent enough African supernatural thriller about a couple who hire the daughter of their deceased housekeeper who makes weird traditional foods and practices whatever the old tribal religion is, and she begins to exert weird control over the household.

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Death On Scenic Drive

Serious swing and a miss here. Beautiful cinematography, and a nice analog synth soundtrack—overall reminischent of "Beyond The Black Rainbow" in those ways, including with lots of saturated lighting ond strong geometric shapes, and lots of long, quiet parts with little dialogue. Visually and sonically, it leans rather poetic.

And: TERRIBLE writing, just the worst excuse for writing I've ever seen.

Basically, a woman goes to housesit a big rural house, and just starts acting weird and turns into a killer for no apparent reason. First she kills the dog, then she kills the neighbor, then she hides and kills the family whose house it is when they return home. Also a weird, satanic-looking man appears and stands in the house late at night when she's asleep, which I guess is supposed to mean something. Oh, yeah, aksi, in the beginning of the movie, when she arrives at the house…

Movie Reviews » watchable

Swallowed

Odd movie starts like a horror flick and becomes a neo-noir crime thriller with minor horror elements. Gay couple agree to ferry drugs by swallowing them wrapped in condoms to get them across a border, unaware it's not exactly a drug.... When one ruptures in one guy's stomach due to a punch in the stomach from a homophobe in a bathroom, they much go to the drug kingpin's house in the woods to try and get the rest out.

Not for the squeamish. Some wrigging stuff, and kind of an anal fixation. But it's not bad, if you are up for the horror elements. It's ok. Probably on the low end of adequately watchable.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Octogames

Absolutely execrable zero-budget home movie ripoff of "Squid Games". A YouTuber decides he wants to give away his channel, so, he has a competition where people play childrens games to win it, and the losers are all shot, because, movie. If we're lucky, nobody involved with this so-called "film" will work in movies again.

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

The Battery

Hmmmm. HMMMMMMM. Hmmmm. Here we have a seriously flawed gem.

This is a "slice of life" zombie movie. Two ex-ballplayers wander around New England trying to survive after a zombie apocalyse. Like a lot of these sorts of movies, this falls within the long shadow cast by "The Walking Dead" but among those movies it's top of the heap. Had it been an episode of the show, it would have been a cult favorite.

It's probably the most realistic of this sort of movie that I've seen. The characters are basically assholes, totally realistic. The movie follows them around and lingers on prosaic details... very long, several-minute-long shots of just them brushing their teeth, stuff like that. But it works.

It does have a narrative arc of sorts, but as a slice of life, it doesn't really come to the satisfying ending I wanted, which makes it…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Aquaslash

I knew going into this it was going to be bad—as if a horror movie about someone putting razor blades in a waterslide at an amusement park could be anything but—but I was fully unprepared for how bad. For the first 50 minutes of this movie, teenagers at a waterpark bicker and argue and pick on each other. Then, an unknown person puts what are apparently the world's sharpest blades in an 'X' halfway down one of the slides with nobody noticing, and we get 20 minutes of so-bad-its-hilarious scenes of people being cut neatly into pie slices as they slide down the slide, and the crowd panicking at the disproportionately immense amount of gore this causes to come rushing out of the bottom. Oh, and, one guy, covered in blood, climbing all the way to the top to tell people to stop going down—because apparently the sound of dozens…

Movie Reviews » Trash

No Solicitors (aka “No Visitors”)

Eric Roberts leads the cast of this Felissa Rose-produced outing, which should be enough to tell you everything. A family of cannibals traps door-to-door salesmen in their basements, harvests their organs for sale, and eats whatever's left over.

Self-consciously bad and relentlessly campy, almost like if John Waters directed a "horror comedy" gore flick. Picture "Serial Mom" with more gore and much worse acting. At least it's trying to be a horror comedy, though, and not just a bad horror movie they're calling a "horror comedy" because they're embarrassed at what a bad horror movie it is. That actually makes it, well, slightly inoffensive, at least to my skewed sensibilities. (Yes: a movie about cannibals imprisoning people to harvest their organs in a basement lab is one thing; but make a bad horror movie and try to pass it off as a comedy out of embarrassment, and I am outraged!)

Movie Reviews » Trash

Get Gone

It's a tale as old as time: a rural family is being ordered off their land by the government and aren't taking kindly to it, and they're all pale mutants due to the water being poisoned or something, and one of them always wears a creepy smiley face mask, and they kill every random group of twentysomething who camps anywhere in the woods nearby.

Practically ripped from the headlines!

Stars Lin Shaye as the mariarch of the murderous, pale, mask-wearing clan, who does really well when this movie makes the mistake so many like it do and in the third act finally gets alright (for what it is, which is to say, something that would have been much better if it was from 1975 than 2019... something about sweet-looking little Lin Shaye cutting off a sheriff's fingers and hissing at him "That's not all I'm going to cut off"…

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Blood River

This southern gothic attempted tale of vampires in a small town is sub-USA-Up-All-Nite level amateur hogwash, the kind of thing you figure someone threw together with a home movie camera and a lot of ambition, and literally nothing else. Right down to the obvious papier-mache corpses and other didn't-even-have-the-budget-to-try totally unspecial effects. And of course nobody in this movie can act at all, all anyone does is stiffly recite lines... where do they find these people?

But, here's the thing, and I always like this: it just doesn't know when to stop. It's ambitious, and obviously the product of someone with a lot of passion. A lot of passion, and absolutely zero talent for filmmaking whatsoever, but a lot of passion. And it just goes on and on and on, long enough to kind of suck you into its weird world of stilted editing and stiffly-recited-from-a-cue-card lines. I ultimately…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Devil’s Domain

This is insultingly bad. It's stupid and broad enough that it seems for all the world like a children's movie, with rubber costume demons, the thinnest possible plot, paper-thin overplayed characters, and basically an overall impression of having been put together by high school students—but it has explicit (if very cheap-looking) gore and heavy sexuality (if all heavy, panting lesbian frottage and not so much as a nipple), and a honest-to-god rape scene.

Girl gets bullied, and the devil, in the form of a woman in an evening gown who occasionally wears a rubber devil mask, decides she likes her, and kills them all in ways that are stupidly broad. Like, one of the popular girls picks on her in school, and a moment later, at her locker, is pushed by a rubber demon hand into a never-explained "Satan-y" place of some sort—which looks like a teenager with a…

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

All Girls Weekend

This is a bad movie. Let's get that out of the way.

First off, this film commits one of my least favorite filmmaking sins: spends half its time on just showing unlikeable people basically just hanging out. It's not even bad pacing; there is no pace.

The acting is, of course, terrible.

In terms of plot, this plays like the mentally challenged cousin of "The Long Weekend". Five high school friends, who don't appear to like each other at all, reunite years later for a camping trip. They get lost in the woods and, one by one, suffer inexplicable deaths by misadventure, often from injuries that would seem to require a bandaid but in this film's world are fatal: a woman stumbles and accidentally pierces her thigh with a branch, which turns out in a under a day to be a mortal wound; a few minutes of another woman sticking…

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Torture Chamber

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…

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Salvage (2009)

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…

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Exeter (2015)

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…

Movie Reviews » Canadian

Death Trip (2021)

Among the worst of the worst and apparently the glaring exception that proves the rule about Canadian horror movies.

Four friends go on a trip to a cabin where, for 80 minutes of its 100 minute runtime, they sit around and talk over each other or party with the townies with absolutely nothing of interest happening, or anything that even faintly resembles a plot. I would have thought this was literally just a video someone shot of a bunch of their friends hanging out for a weekend, except that the acting wasn't that good, and that, in the last 20 minutes, one guy starts to try to kill the others with a hammer for no reason that's ever explained, and they spend the end of the movie thwacking each other in the head with hammers and croquet mallets. I'm not exaggerating. Four friends talk for 80 minutes and then…

Movie Reviews » Trash

They Come Knocking

Cabin in the woods. Teenagers. Not particularly scary normal guy in clown makeup trying to talk in a gruff voice. The most perfunctory, paint-by-numbers pursuit/captivity flick ever.

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

The Final

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…

Movie Reviews » watchable

Isolation (2005)

Irish monster movie about people trapped on a farm with the monstrous results of a genetic experiment to make cows breed grow. Takes a while to get going but actually pretty watchable for what it is, if you're in the mood for this sort of thing.

Movie Reviews » watchable

6 Souls

Julianne Moore in the sort of supernatural/horror thriller that Julianne Moore occasionally stars in, about a "split personality" case that seems to be manifesting the personalities of dead people. If you're going for an actual horror movie, you don't cast Julianne Moore, but at the same time, she's a pretty good actor, and they usually cast other pretty good actors around here. In this case, the guy who plays the lead, who has to shift believably through maybe 10 different characters over the course of the film. Does pretty well. The whole thing would have been terrible with less of a cast but squeaks barely into "watchable" as it is.

Movie Reviews » Trash

The Forest Hills

Dreadful indie horror had potential but it's too much of an incoherent mess and worships too much at the altar of bad '80s "Sleepaway Camp"-caliber horror. A man returns to his old home in the remote Catskills to take care of his terminally ill mother, and apparently the mess that follows is him losing his mind or something.

A weird array of cameos for a crap picture: Edward Furlong, the mother is Shelley Duvall in her last role, plus bad-horror-movie avatars Felissa Rose and Dee Wallace, along with lots of the sort of, er, "acting" you see in movies you see the latter two in. Also a couple of weird scenes where the Latino leading man meets some actors very, very, VERY hamfistedly playing two-dimensional racist rednecks out in the woods, who do things like stomp his head while shoulding "RESPECT OUR FLAG!" for hearing him singing to himself in…

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Insanitarium

A mad doctor's experiments cause an outbreak of of cannibalism at an insane asylum.

It does take a very long while to get going, but once it does, how appealing you find that one-sentence synopsis will pretty much tell you how much you will like the movie.

I will say, within the range of what movies that could be summarized as "a mad doctor's experiments cause an outbreak of of cannibalism at an insane asylum" could possibly be, this is pretty much near the top. The doctor is played by Peter Stormare, if that tells you anything.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Maya

A bunch of people wandering in the woods have hallucinatory episodes surrounding a strange untalented actress they encounter out there. Seems like someone shot this on home video with a bunch of stiff, untalented local dinner theater actors or something and props they got at a Halloween store. You can tell someone involved really wanted to make a good movie but the production is unredeemably amateur. For the last time, people: obvious video effects are never scary.

Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

Black Daruma

This piece of video—I have a hard time calling it a movie—lowers the low-effort first person shooter "found footage" conceit to a lower depth than I've seen before, by not only discarding the "found" aspect that explains why we're even seeing the film, but discarding the "filmed" found-footage idea entirely.

This series of events—I have a hard time calling it a story—center around a man who has bought a "daruma", a Japanese good luck doll, and the entire movie is filmed, through an annoying fish-eye lens the entire time, from the doll's perspective. Diegetically, the doll doesn't contain a camera, nor is it possessed, nor alive in any way, but for some reason the entire movie is filmed from the doll's perspective. This results in a few annoying conceits, such as the doll always needing to be turned to face anything the filmmaker wants us to see, as well as…

Movie Reviews » watchable

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Pretty charming action comedy buddy picture starring Nic Cage as a not-entirely-flattering version of himself, sucked into working for the CIA while staying as the houseguest of a rich guy in Spain who may be the head of a crime syndicate, but definitely turns out to be an over-the-top huge Nic Cage fan. Lands somewhere near the high end of the range of what that could possibly be, I enjoyed it.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Scarred

Worst of the worst. This appears to be a porn movie, except, despite all the talk about boobs, and women walking around with hyperinflated boobs, and women squishing their boobs, and women taking off their shirts to show their boobs, and weird mentions of Playboy and Ron Jeremy inserted into conversations, and incredibly greasy and amateurish male actors, there's no sex.

Instead, it's an unbelievably cliched, zero-effort attempt at a slasher flick.

There's no acting or editing, either.

Movie Reviews » watchable

Meet The Blacks

A pretty amusing entry in the "Purge" movies. A Black family moves to Beverly Hills on purge night, unaware that the father who seems to have struck it rich has left a trail of unpaid bills and pissed off people, every one of whom has decided to settle the score on the "Purge", a night when all laws are suspended for 12 hours. Heavily steeped in Black American culture—funny cameos from Snoop Dogg, Paul Mooney, and Mike Tyson as the vengeful owner of a bouncy castle party rental who's been stiffed on his bill—and almost nonstop rapid-fire riffing make what could have been a pedestrian enterprise amusing enough to sit through.

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Sweatshop

Like Charles Bukoswki made a horror movie. A bunch of punk rockers break into a warehouse or something to throw an underground rave. And have all kinds of sleazy sex with each other. And, weirdly, occasionally breakdance. And an unexplained guy in a welder's mask tortures and kills them all in ridiculously over-the-top ways, because, movie.

This movie is fuckin' TERRIBLE. But it doesn't try to be anything more than it is. It's not trying to be good. It's totally committed to being nothing but what it is: a terrible movie of nothing a bunch of sleazy people dancing, fucking, and being gruesomely killed for no apparent reason. Which, I kind of oddly admire... in concept.