Movie Reviews

What a disappointment. This starts off with an interesting enough idea and fairly creepy execution. A kid saves a wealthy businessman from a mugging, and is rewarded with a job: watch a door in a remote abandoned building from 8pm to 8am to make sure it never opens, for $100k/year. Just watch the door. "What happens if it opens?" "It won't open, because you're going to watch it."

Needless to see, things aren't quite as uneventful as that... put almost. After a decent enough setup to make me want to see what was going to happen, the kid's friends, out partying, show up to bother him, and of course one drunkenly opens the door when the others aren't looking, so they go in to find her... and then, 2/3 of the movie is just "scared teens wandering around darkened corridors". There's lots of people saying, "Did you hear that? I…

Middling-to-ok near-future sci-fi flick about an experiment to implant people with AI chips, which take over their lives and force them to kill and sit up straight, you're slouching.

I thought it was kind of ok. Unfortunately the plot doesn't explain much, and it's kind of predictable and takes a while to get to where you know it's going. But it was ok, I thought.

Kind of a disappointment here. This anthology film showing stories of people wandering across a postapocalyptic wasteland, really just some hilly rural area, starts with a couple of incredibly cheap-looking shorts that are so artificial it's almost more like watching animation than live action: very high contrast, saturated colors, and animated beasts, mutants, and robots that literally look like they were rendered on a '90s desktop computer, or were clipped out of an old video game.

But, it's so cheap-looking, and so stylized, it almost works. It reminded me in a strange way of watching som strange French animated feature (it's foreign-language, but with so little dialogue I couldn't place the language) or even a low-rent "Yellow Submarine".

The only problem is, after the weirdly charmingly bad first couple of shorts, it goes on for way too long, and gets less interesting. Some of the shorts aren't as…

A horror-themed variant of those sub-"Airplane!" movies that are intentionally stupid, play to overly broad stereotypes, etc., such as the "joke" of having a child played by a full-grown dwarf, or two nuns who, becoming possessed tear off their habits and begin having sex. Hilarious!

Anyway, plane full of passengers become "possessed" one by one.

Except, weirdly, this cheap-shit movie somehow has cameos from known names—Lance Henriksen (who does not die last, because this is a comedy, not a horror movie), Bai Ling, even Adrienne Barbeau is in there. And, also, weirdly, it's a little bit.... funny? Maybe? Kind of? Maybe I kind of actually found it entertaining? Sort of?

This little oddity has a story that isn't really relevant to it, but it's amusing: Roger Corman bought the rights to a Russian early '60s sci-fi film, had Peter Bogdanovich shoot some scenes of blond woman cavorting on a rocky, storm-tossed Los Angeles beach because the studo demanded "girls" to release the film, they added voice-over narration to make a story out of it, and Bob's yer uncle, they had a movie.

Not only that, but this was the second time Corman did this... with the same Russian film. Same footage and everything.

Anyway, this Russian flick apparently had all the ambition and none of the budget. If you want to see fun early '60s footage of astronauts and mermaids cavorting around rocky landscapes that are supposed through smoke machines running at full blast, I dunno, it's actually kind of fun, for a movie that never, ever shoots…