This low-budget "man in a rubber suit" creature feature is essentially "30 Days Of Night", except with a demon instead of vampires, and you never actually see the demon, and it's bad instead of good. However, they try so hard that I was a little entertained, a little.
This is a truly odd little movie. Low-budget for sure, with only 3 actors, and hard to call it a very good movie, but, it's definitely a little different in terms of story. Los Angeles is under lockdown for unspecified reasons, and a package of seeds arrives with a delivery of food for three housemates, which, planted in the backyard, turn into a hole in the ground filled with some sort of glop, which, smelling good enough to eat, our protagonists do. Soon they're addicted, one roommate injects the glop and gets caught between dimensions, another has sex with the hole, and soon he goes insane, a twisted flower that produces more seeds grows from the hole, an interdimensional portal appears in the ground below it, and things just get weirder from there. The nice thing is, for such a bizarre plot, things are actually played fairly straight. The lead…
A zero-budget feature in which a convict on the run falls into water full of mutant red tide and turns into the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Absolutely execrable, bottom-of-the-barrel mess of a horror movie (shot on video, no less, so it looks like a bad TV show) about a couple that accidentally kills a jogger while driving drunk, buries him in the woods by their house where for never-explained reasons "things don't stay dead", and, simultaneously, are visited by a woman possessed by some sort of evil spirit. But, it's so over the top, somehow, I find it entertaining. The terrible actors really try their darnedest to commit, and somehow don't even seem embarrassed to be in this movie. I was mildly entertained by how something this bad even can exist.
Don't watch it. It's really awful.
Somewhere in the same universe as Repo Man, Harold & Kumar, and Buckaroo Bonzai is this quirky buddy comedy about two slacker friends on a UFO-spotting camping trip in the desert who encounter other enthusiasts out there. I found it slightly above average, although judging from the extremely low-to-mixed reviews on IMDB, not everybody appreciated the humor like I did. And it probably doesn't rise to the level of those others I mentioned. But I liked it, I found it amusing most of the way through, although it dragged on a bit at the end. It's definitely kind of its own thing, for sure.
Absolutely incomprehensible, bottom-of-the-barrel, poorly acted, terribly written attempt at a supernatural thriller about a couple of ghost hunters who go to a murderer's house to try and see the ghost of their daughter, I think. Seems like a zero-budget except they either had a boom, a helicopter, or a drone because there's lots of gorgeous, expensive-looking overhead shots, which is just weird in a movie like this.
A not-bad horror-ish, sci-fi-ish movie that plays like an ok episode of a long-form sci-fi TV show. During a solar storm that knocked out cell reception and causes auroras in the sky, a retired priest takes in an Amish girl fleeing her wedding. The whole movie is them talking or arguing in the darkened house. 70 minutes passed surprisingly quickly. Nothing to really recommend here, but, I don't regret watching it.
Bottom-of-the-barrel thriller with some of the worst acting I've ever seen, and then, one really great plot twist. They got me.
A pair of women rent a house for a few days. The owners act fishy. Someone creeps around outside the house at night. Soon it becomes apparent that the owners, who behaved like the worst actors I've ever seen, weren't really the owners, as they wait in a hotel room and try to plot a way to get the women out of the house. In the background, a newscast, read by an anchor who acts like one of the worst actors I've ever seen, reads a story that local asylums are releasing lunatics early to ease overcrowding [cue ominous music]... a police officer who behaves like one of the worst actors I've ever seen investigates a report that the owner of the house is missing.
But, then…
Definitely... well... not a flawed gem, but a flawed alright thriller in which a cleaner is paid to clean house for an overbearing rich guy. Saved from mediocrity by the villain, who does a standout performance as the stereotypical possibly homicidal rich asshole—think Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho" with the histrionics toned down to realistic levels. I liked it quite a bit, almost enough to recommend it, except that the plot kind of falls apart through too many tough-to-swallow sudden twists and turns at the end, and leaves it unsatisfying. Still maybe worth watching for the simmering, arrogant bad guy, though, if nothing else. He's memorable, and the slow burn of the first two acts are watchable; the end of the movie is niether, which, you know, you really want them to stick the landing and sadly they don't.
Execrable, pretentious wanna-be "avante garde" film from a Berlin filmmaker who obviously thinks "avant garde" means lots of video effects, jumpy edits, stuttering video, and half the movie being just self-indulgent music videos for his terrible music, for no reason that's ever explained.
I assumed this was a student film but it turns out this filmmaker is middle-aged.
Couldn't even tell you what this movie was about. It was listed under horror, and from reading about it apparently in between the music videos there's some sort of story involving a mutation. I did hear a bad actress mention Satan at one point.
Turned it off halfway through.
A young woman has a disjointed bunch of random, weird, episodic encounters with weird people who do random things because it's artsy, I guess. Seems loosely to be a cheaply-produced attempt at a sort of "Alice In Wonderland"-type tale, but with no rhyme, reason, narrative interest or redeeming artistic qualities. Basically a film student's idea of an "art" film, or what a Gaspar Noe film would be like if he lost all his filmmaking talent and only hired people who didn't know how to act. It turns into a music video, then a sitcom spoof, then it's a youtube video including the logo and controls. People's wigs fly off their heads while they're talking, to which they say, "Hair, are you acting up again? Hair!" It has that failed indie film standby, absolutely needless and unexplained video and sound effects inserted at random moments. Things suddenly move in fast or…
Ok, this movie couldn't have seemed less promising: "A woman running from her past is trapped between a zombie outbreak and warring militia groups." Great. But it turns out, this is a more of a flawed gem... deeply flawed in some ways but also very well done in others.
Inside of the first few minutes it became apparent this was a little better than that. The acting and dialog seemed good, somehow. Cliche'd ominous background news reports about a viral outbreak are downplayed and handled well for something we've seen so many times before. The couple goes on a 5-day canoe trip and then quickly fall to arguing, and for a little while, this turns into one of those movies that kills time by having a couple negotiate their relationship onscreen for the viewers—my favorite thing—before the canoe capsizes, one's leg is broken, and they must take to land…
This film set low expectations and then came through kinda better than expected. The synopsis, "Lifelong best friends, Maddy and V, find themselves at a remote ski lodge where a group of mysterious wealthy men throw a celebration century in the making" certainly didn't lead me to expect anything great.
And, it's not great. But it was actually kinda good. But the acting is a slight cut above movies like this usually are, and even the particularly hammy performances are entertaining. Some of the dialog occasionally rings true at points, which is nice. The movie is a very slow burn and takes it's time, maybe longer than it should, to get where it finally goes, but I didn't mind that much. And the ending finally ratchets up the intensity nicely, after a long very gradual simmer. I think if I was 14 I'd have thought this was flat-out great.
I've…
A horror-comedy that actually works, sort of... at least well enough that I was reasonably entertained. In this case, a restauranteur strikes a deal with a demon who lives in the basement. The demon makes the restaurant successful, in exchange for occasionally being fed only the worst of the customers.
The problem with most "horror comedy" is it's really just a bad horror movie trying to be passed off as "comedy" because it's just bad. In this case, it's an actual comedy that happens to be about horror topics.
The acting is terrible, the movie is pretty goofy, but it knows what it is and isn't trying to be anything more. What's more, the cast, though pretty terrible, seem like they enjoyed making it. It's fun and, this works in its favor too, just slightly original—definitely not reminiscent of anything I've seen before. I liked it.
This ambitious indie flick is somewhere in the David Lynch, Guillermo Del Toro, Gaspar Noe triangle of "film is art" highly-stylized productions. A man whose wife and son disappear on a trip to the beach—or is it his mother and his younger self?—leading him to search a desert community for them and become involved with some sort of cult. People turn into lizards, bugs, skeletons, and the entire thing is intentionally dreamlike (and consequently, hard to follow the plot of.)
Nowhere near as good a film as any of the above-mentioned names would have made, and probably not one I can recommend, nonetheless, I admire the ambition, no matter how far short it falls of its lofty goals.
Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmm. Hmmmm.
What starts as a dreadfully slow, very British take on a home invasion/captivity flick a la "Funny Games"—something I'm immediately put off by—turns out, very slowly, to be something a little more... but then, exactly what, is never revealed, which is frustrating.
In 1972, a journalist couple who has been poking around a mysterious military operation our on the moors receives a visit from a very oddly-mannered couple, "Mr. and Mrs. Blair", who want to ask them a few questions, and proceed to brutalize and take them captive.
Honestly, pretty bad movie, and the fact that nothing is explained or resolved makes it doubly frustrting.
But at the same time, the acting is, er, strange enough to be a little engaging. The oddball performances of Mr. & Mrs Blair, as they slowly get stranger and stranger, is somehow a little interesting, especially the actress who…
Some BS about a woman from a monster dimension who crosses over and wants to be human, or something. This movie had some of the worst acting I've ever seen. Seriously, the production values aren't even that bad, but I've never seen so many people who just didn't seem to know how to act. Unwatchable, turned it off.
A father whose daughter killed herself has a coven of witches resurrect her. But the plot of this movie doesn't matter. The whole movie is set apart by being an exercise in creepy mood and cinematography. On that level, I enjoyed it. Stars Chynna Rae Shurts, who seems to star in a lot of these slightly-above-average, slightly-out-of-the-ordinary horror movies lately. Definitely far from a great movie, but, if you want a watchable horror movie and really don't mind a paper-thin-to-the-point-of-almost-nonexistent plot as long as it provides 90 minutes of creepiness, this'll fit the bill nicely. I found it a fun watch, at any rate.
A bunch of social media influencers...
You don't really need to know more about that plot than that, do you? It's another horror movie about social media influencers, which has been categorically proven to be the lamest thing ever to make a horror movie about.
But, to finish.... they go into the woods and play a VR game, that, I dunno, it turns out to be real, or something? The whole thing is for people who were raised thinking watching someone play a video game is entertaining. Not for me.
Starts with the apparently now de rigeur first-person shooter convention of spending like a damn hour showing them goofing around and not advancing the plot in any way.
Perhaps the worst horror anthology film I've ever seen. A horror tour of Hollywood is the pretext for a 4 or 5 zero-budget, "hey guys let's make a movie!" sub-USA-Up-All-Nite horror shorts. I can't believe there are 4 or 5 directors making films this bad.
One of those movies that seems like someone wrote a script in a couple of days, got a video camera and a bunch of their friends together to make a "movie". Porn-movie-level "acting", and overall the zero-budget-crappiest of zero-budget-crap that I ever turned off after less than 20 minutes. Some bullshit about alien conspiracies.
Aw, for the first two-thirds, this movie was fun! For a lot of its runtime, it's a funnier and better-done comedy than I'm used to seeing from a bunch of no-name actors, reminiscent in some ways of a "John Dies At The End" or "Tucker And Dale vs. Evil" type genre spoof. It was based on a comic book and, from the looks of it, a clever one. In a world where non-flesh-eating zombies—correction: the "Life Impaired"—are everywhere just making things difficult, a couple of kids are abducting them to sell for medical experiments, when workers for a competing "retirement service" whose haul they've been eating into takes offense, and things get hectic.
It's a Canadian film, which makes a lot of sense. Except that...
Unfortunately, by the third act they forget it's a very clever, quirky comedy and it becomes more of a conventional, cliche'd action-comedy. It just…
Absolute bottom-of-the-barrel crap from the final fading moments of the "Jason And The Argonauts"/"Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad"/"Clash Of The Titans" epic mythological fantasy era, although I feel bad besmirching the names of those films by associating this with them.
Adam is alone in the Garden Of Eden, so, with unclear theological grounding, he fashions Eve out of sand, they frolic a while to a soundtrack that sounds like The Carpenters, before a snake tempts them to eat the apple that gets them evicted, and from there, the movie spins off into a bizarrely low-fi, shamelessly episodic series of encounters with dinosaurs, cavemen, and various poorly-edited stock footage and stop-motion animated perils. They literally wander on foot, judging by the backgrounds and stock footage used, from southern California to the Grand Canyon to the Amazon to the Arctic, trying to find "the sea", because, "life began in the sea, and we…
Entirely watchable supernatural thriller. Michelle Monaghan moves her family out to the country, where her young son is bit by a sick dog and subsequently develops an overwhelming thirst for blood. It could have gone a lot of different ways, but well-played with low-key intensity as the family goes further and further to try to keep their son alive and satiated as he slowly turns into a monster. Good performance from the young kid, too, playing the son trying to deal with urges he doesn't want but can't fight. And it has maybe two fleetingly short but kind of creepy moments, which is more than the zero you usually get from movies like this.
I'm rating this a little highly by putting it under "je nais se quois", it's not necessarily anything special, but... it's watchable for sure. It's not crap. If there's a lot of crap to choose from…
This stylistically incredibly Canadian sci-fi movie is unfortunately a swing and a miss. Basically, "Primer" but with virtual reality instead of time travel. In some sort of experiment that's too confusing to understand, the story shifts between similar-enough-to-be-confusing realities without much clue which is real and which isn't, resulting in something more disorienting than interesting.
Some very occasional neat visual effects and likeable if basically untalented actors can't save this ambitious but poorly-written exercise. Even being charmingly Canadian couldn't save it, which is disappointing.
But, boy is it Canadian. It's just close enough to a stereotypical low-budget but ingenuous and clever Canadian outing to almost be worth a look. Allllllllllmost.
EDIT: And, it's forgettable enough that I got halfway through it a second time before I remembered seeing one of the scenes before. And spent that half-viewing thinking, "Hunh, this is almost like a very low-budget "Primer", only kind…
This is a charming semi-spoof horror featuring a bunch of '80s horror actors playing themselves (Kane Hodder, cameo from Michael Berryman, plus Bill Moseley in a role obviously intended for Robert Englund, and, strangely for just a moment, John Schneider, who directed) who decide to skip an autograph session at a horror movie convention (where fans thank them for signing autographs by gushing things like, "I'm going to sell it on Ebay!", etc.) to take an assignment "haunting" an RV park for a weekend.
An obvious love letter to the folks who starred in the sequels to "Friday The 13th", "Halloween", etc., and, like a lot of these movies, fun enough to watch these guys play comedic versions of themselves to be entertaining, even though it's basically terrible.
The sole problem is that for some reason, Schneider, whose filmmaking skills are apparently about on par with his political…
If John Waters made a horror movie, this would be it. Which is to say: absolutely terrible, but, if you're in the mood for ridiculously over-the-top camp, fits the bill admirably.
An odd tale of a twisted suburban family that seems normal enough to begin with, except for mom's unfortunate habit of punishing family members' misbehavior by putting their goldfish in the blender or hacking their fingers off unexpectedly with a cleaver and feeding them to them. Also, senile old grandma eats flies and crawls into bed while family members are having sex. Before long, every distasteful thing under the sun is drawn into the story—starting with incest and ending with a meal that turns into the most ridiculous bloodbath ever filmed, culminating, I kid you not, in a dwarf getting shot in the dick, replete with pulsing corn-syrup blood spurts from his pants.
I am shocked John Waters…
This movie is really odd. I will say right off that most people probably won't like it.
This is yet another in the apparently long string of oddly charming, super-low-budget H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. This one, despite being an American production of an American author's story, feels very British, in the way a great deal of it, most of it even, is people sitting in ordinary rooms having mannered conversations, played almost like a very talky, British drama. It's also updated to modern times, but played as an odd hybrid of Victorian-seeming dialog and modern tropes, but again, the whole thing is so mannered, it's only a little strange.
It does eventually go more places than that, but it takes a loooooooong time before it does. But, when it does, it's, well, oddly charming. It has occasional video effects of the kind many low-budget films try, thinking they'll look cool, but…
A fairly dreadful first-person shooter involving all the very worst tropes of the genre: long stretches of people just living their lives, lead characters are inane and annoying social media "influencers", the ever-present people still filming while they run for their lives (of course), and showing "scary" things without even ever bothering so much as an attempt to explain what is actually happening or why.
A young "influencer" couple buys remote land in the south to live off the land. Pretty soon they find bullets buried where they planted their garden, cameras pick up mysterious black-clad figures who prowl around the house and the property, shine floodlights at them, burn photos of them, and chase them into the woods. And that's it. I found myself thinking something I've never thought before: "Why don't they just get a gun?" Trail cameras reveal the figures move with supernatural speed. What are…
Ok, here's another movie that I kind of liked that I'm 100% positive everybody else will hate. In fact, for about the first half, I really liked it, but it kind of blew it.
A young boy, maybe 10 or 12, wants to face his fears and goes camping in the woods where his younger sister disappeared two years earlier. Sitting in his tent, he starts to hear weird things.
And for the first half, that's the whole movie. A kid hiding in a tent with weird noises outside. And, you know what? It was sort of creepy. It built a mood and played effectively off my own fear of the dark. (Have I ever mentioned my phobia? Well, I'm not exactly afraid of the dark, it's a little wierder than that, but close enough.) I have in incredibly hard time being in darkened woods, and I especially…
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