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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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tensions escalate (to say the least) among group of women gathered at a remote cabin for a bachelorette party when a nearby train accident releases a cloud of caustic chemicals into the air.
Oh, my, does this want to be a great movie. It tries SO hard. And, it's not the very worst movie I've ever seen. Some (only some) of the actors and production values aren't bottom-of-the-barrel. But, it's extremely deeply flawed, at very best. They just didn't think some things through, or something. Lots of fridge logic and unbelievable behavior that I'm sure seemed cool when they thought of it but didn't quite work in practice. And the characters are pretty much 100% unlikeable.
But... it's kinda weirdly fun for the trying. If the characters had only been 75% unlikeable, or quite so many of the characters hadn't quite so unrealistically lost it, it might not…
Lousy. Gorgeous couples move out to the country, decide to go ghost hunting at what's supposed to be a burned out prison but looks nothing like a prison, locals are in some sort of cult and chase them through it attack them, there's a ghostly demonic preacher who looks like Rob Zombie fading in and out, kids have crescent moon birthmarks that are never explained, the whole thing is just kind of a mess.
Tediously unoriginal and predictable captivity/pursuit flick: kids on a road trip, flat tire, remote farmhouse, psycho local family, you know the drill. Why would anybody bother to make this movie again? The production values and direction are decent, but who cares?
Boy, if I was only going to watch one slasher flick in my life—and one is probably about my lifetime appetite for slasher flicks—this one might be it.
Kids on their way to a music festival run out of gas and have to stay in a small town that's famous for a possibly apocryphal killer living in the woods. Surprise: he's not apocryphal.
But, somehow, I liked this movie. It's stupid in the exact ways that these movies need to be stupid, but also had the slightest hair more plot than most, and some very slightly different twists and turns than they usually take. It also had, I think, more blood than any movie I've ever seen before. Boy, is there a LOT of blood in this movie.
It's tough to put my finger on. But I actually sort of enjoyed it. It didn't exactly suck. Weird.
A bad actor from Los Angeles inherits an island in Washington, with the restriction that he must operate a horse riding camp on it. There he and the other bad actors who work there dodge an irrelevant subplot about developers conniving to sell the land, and discover a subterranean bunker infested with some sort of unseen zombie virus bullshit that causes any ostensible movie it's in to turn into a badly-lit version of the video game "Doom".
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…
If I tell you five college students shelter from a hurricane in an abandoned junkyard and are hunted down by the most thinly-drawn villain in all of horror movie history in an incredibly slow-moving captivity flick, it would be true, but unfortunately, it makes this terribly-written mess of a movie sound much more interesting than it is.
Aside from spending an entire hour going absolutely nowhere, this schizophrenic film can't decide what it wants to be... it starts as a first-person shooter, becomes an ordinary horror movie, interspersed with a procedural as later media interviews about the crime are randomly cut in, then tries to morph into a neo-noir crime thriller of some sort, as late in the movie some sort of plot twist involving some sort of dark web media show or some fucking thing is suddenly introduced in a tedious expository scene of two new characters people…
An alright thriller. A gorgeous couple leaves the city to await the destruction of the earth by an asteroid in a remote Tennessee backwoods campsite. Things get complicated as other gorgeous refugees start to show up.
Kids get lost in the Alaskan woods looking for a pot patch and run afoul of... a Native American psychopath? A Native American spirit? Unsure, but it's Native American, and in a way that's mildly racist, or at least orientalist... there's really nothing to the Native American element except in-scare-quotes-"exoticism".
Plus, plot holes galore. Things come and go, like a mute character that joins the movie for a few minutes, that are just never explained, people are apparently gravely injured multiple times yet keep on keeping on, and even the fate of some of the main characters isn't clear. The antagonist appears to be some sort of spirit originally, appearing to fade in and out, but later stops doing that and is apparently just a crazy guy (with a *lot* of bodies laying around his campsite.)
That's the bad. And all in all, make no mistake: I don't…
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.
This movie starts with a man slumped at the front gate of a cabin. An older man stands in front of him, watching him impassively, as he pleads, "I didn't mean to break the rules." The older man calmly grabs his head, and, with one hand, pulls it off his shoulders.
So that's where we're at.
Sometimes you see a movie that is so low-budget, so obviously just someone had a camera and decided to try to throw a movie together, that somehow, improbably, it has enough heart to actually watch.
This movie is sub-bottom-of-the-barrel. According to the credits, it was written, directed, edited, and everything else by one guy. It stars like 4 people, has virtually no special effects, the acting is "local theater" quality at best, if these people are even actually actors.
The plot is, father and son go on a hunting retreat to a…
The lame, derivative captivity flick id Rob Zombie's debut feature, and the only things worse than a piece of garbage: a piece of garbage that tries to make up for being a piece of garbage by being highly stylized garbage. Needles video effects, split screens like it's a music video, etc. Plus "artsy" effects like weird interstitials of characters, some of whom otherwise aren't even in the movie, overacting and doing "scary" improv, preaching about the end of the world or talking about killing people for sport, all sorts of hammy horseshit designed to compensate for really not knowing how to make a movie. It's all style, no substance, and the style really isn't very good. Like, when the heroine finds the operating theater and discovers her boyfriend being lobotomized by a corpselike surgeon in an exoskeleton, a good director wouldn't really need to shift to solarized video to underscore…
A young Liana Liberato punches way above her weight in a heavy but decent family drama about the emotional fallout on her family from her abuse by a predator. Probably better than just watchable if you like that sort of thing.
Strictly sub-"USA Up All Nite"-quality garbage splatstick "horror comedy" garbage about an assortment of cardboard-cutout cliche characters stuck in a cabin while an amoeba from space infects people outside, turning them into zombies. Includes such low-lights as a zombie tearing a man's head evenly in two halves, or punching straight through a woman's head, leaving her staggering around with a giant hole that you can see all the way through where her face should be. Imagine a film that aspires to be Peter Jackson's worst early movies, and fails even at that. Avoid.
This is a flawed but not bad movie. What starts seeming like a horror movie becomes more of a small-scale postapocalyptic, but not at all scary or supernatural, survival drama.
Residents of a small town find themselves unable to sleep. Slowly people start acting erratically and gradually Things Fall Apart.
So far, so good. But halfway through it switches gears from a horror flick to an ecological message story, as it turns out the local tapwater has become contaminated with methamphetamine, and soon all the bottled water has run out, and people look for where they can congregate where there may be some clean water, leading to struggles.
Despite the weird change halfway through, it's not bad. It's anchored by a couple of alright performances. If it had been consistent in terms of theme and mood, it might have qualified as something even a little memorable. Still, either way, not…
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…
Surprisingly alright creature feature. A young man finds an insect-like creature that bonds with him and begins killing people that stand in his way. I know, that doesn't sound very promising, and I didn't expect anything from it. But it was much better than that setup sounds.
It doesn't spend a lot of time on the creature, it's more character-focused and revolves less around scares or violence than around drama and the effects of the victims' disappearances on him, his friends, and the small community. It's far from great, but it's definitely much better than I expected, and stands up pretty well as a movie.
Decently ok Kiwi horror film about a neurotic hiker who falls in with a bunch of other hikers in the remove wilderness and starts making everybody crazy with paranoia about them being followed by a dark shape, accusing other hikers of being killers, clumsily losing people's flashlights, and generally being a good bit past annoying and ruining everybody's trip.
It was entertaining, I found it fairly watchable despite mostly annoying characters and ultimately kinda of a silly third act. It's a little bit different.
Extremely decent zombie movie, the way they should be done. An American mercenary survives the crash of the last place out of Africa, and must walk across the zombie-infested savannah to safety.
One of the most realistic zombie movies I've ever seen. Almost no dialogue. A little action but not much. Just a soldier, and for a little while a companion he meets, mostly just walking or camping, surviving and outsmarting the roaming zombies as they need to. And, turns you, in a zombie movie, you don't actually need much more than that. No attempts at humor. No attempts to be clever or cool. Just a solid, down-to-earth survival movie, that happens to be set in a zombie acopalypse.
I liked it. I imagine I'll watch this again in the future.
Putting this here so I remember to watch this one again. This came on via autoplay when something I was watching on Tubi ended and I was so distracted by my laptop I didn't notice it until it was halfway through, so I never caught the plot. But visually it's a low-budget but seriously beautiful, dark, dingy black and white. Something about people underground in some sort of dystopia. But, really visually cool, I found it really unique looking all the way through. I gotta go watch it for real.
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