The Occupant
Another zero-budget apparent home movie someone made with their friends. Estranged children come home to inherit their deceased mother's house, some lady says the mother wanted to give the house…
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Latest "Movie Reviews" files
Messenger Of Wrath
A strangely ambitious story for a movie that appears to be a zero-budget amateur movie starring the director's never-acted-before friends. What starts home invasion captivity flick gets longer and more…
Human Resources
I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this, so the IMDB blurb will do: "After starting a job at an eerie hardware store, an anxious young…
Sick For Toys
Somebody picked up the ball from Hulu's "Into The Dark" series and ran with it. This tale of a christmas dinner visit gone horribly wrong could be lifted straight from…
Site 13
I'm noticing a trend. These tiny, low-budget indie filmmakers trying to do Lovecraft stories seem to often somehow be entertaining despite being total garbage. Something about the subject matter or…
Faye (2021)
A writer, trying to cope with the death of her husband, rents a remote house, where she talks to herself for 90 minutes and slowly loses her marbles. This is…
The Alchemist’s Cookbook
A man holed up in a trailer in the woods, apparently trying to do some sort of alchemy that looks remarkably similar to cooking up meth, talks to himself for…
Where The Devil Roams
What we have here is basically two movies. For the first two-thirds, it's a narratively not particularly interesting but absolutely beautifully shot gothic piece about a murderous family of carnival…
Horror Hospital
An unmistakably glam 1975 exploitation outing, like "Rocky Horror" trying to play it straight as a horror film, with none of the fun, ideas, or budget. A glam rocker, apparently…
Mind Leech
Two men ice fishing on a lake in the midwest pull up a huge fake rubber leech that attaches itself to bad actors' foreheads and causes them to stagger around…
Devil’s Void
Realtors or psychics or somebody lure people to a house so they can be harangued with bad special effects from people with rubbery "demon" appliances stuck to their faces. Bottom-rung…
Afterdeath
A bunch of gorgeous people wake up in a remote cabin in the middle of a barren wasteland and realize they have died. They're terrorized by numerous digital effects and…
Silence Of The Prey
Actually not *that* bad for a captivity/pursuit flick. Eastern european woman in this country illegally with her daughter is given a job caring for a religious man in a remote…
Halloween Party
So, this is a little different for a teen scream... this uninteresting-sounding tale is about a meme email that spreads around and forces you to be killed by your deepest…
Jennifer’s Body
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…
Amityville Turkey Day
In this absolute bottom-of-the-barrel waste of time, a puppet turkey that for some reason talks with a fake Brooklyn accent kills what I assume must be the director's friends and…
A Beginner’s Guide To Snuff
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…
Lake Mungo
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…
South Of Hope Street
The kind of movie that you have wonder how it even got made. Only "Schizopolis" ever got away with substituting mannered weirdness for meaning, but that hasn't stopped a lot…
Bury The Bride
Talk about a serious swing and a miss. A bunch of women having a bachelorette party in a remote cabin when the fiancee and his friends, who appear to basically…
Ready Or 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…
Red Letters
Tough-as-nails psychic ghost hunters are employed by the FBI to solve some fucking thing or other in this execrable procedural-disguised-as-a-horror-movie that waits until halfway through to start suddenly laying on…
The Breed
The descriptive blurb they use,"A group of five college kids are forced to match wits with unwelcoming residents when they fly to a 'deserted' island for a party weekend"is accurate, but doesn't quite give away what the movie is actually about. Ok, this is TV-movie quality, but it's 1970s TV-movie quality, and while nothing spectacular, it's also nothing I've quite seen before, outside of those '70s"nature has it in for man"sci fi/horror flicks. To say more would spoil it. I thought it was fun. It's not a cheezy monster movie, but somehow it might do if you're in a cheesy monster movie mood. Apparently it scored a 15% on rotten tomatoes, which, ok, I mean, yeah, I get it, it's not by any means scary, and not even really very good by most movie standards. But come on, where's people's sense of fun?
The Final Project
These people take the"no cameraman"ethic of"found footage"films even further, to"no editor". This appears to be a group of banal college students with no acting experience at all who went to an empty house and improvised a horror movie (albeit one without any horror), then taped all the footage they shot together and called it done. There are interminable, pointless passages of them talking to their professors in class, sitting in the car playing"Never Have I Ever", uneventfully exploring the house and grounds, all shot with a total lack of any kind of cinematic or even sound recording quality that makes the previous recordholder for"worst first-person shooter"I'd ever seen look like Citizen Kane in comparison. No plot, no attempt to build tension, until finally, over an hour into the movie, people's cameras suddenly do the deaddrop one by one for no explained reason and everybody starts running through the house and woods yelling each other's names. Basically, it's like a bunch of students saw"The Blair Witch Project"and said,"Hey, we could do that!", but they couldn't.
JeruZalem
Google Glass™️ commercial disguised as a first-person shooter, as two students on vacation in Jerusalem run from the beginning of the apocalypse, which apparently consists entirely of zombies attacking, and living people turning into winged demons. I guess the filmmakers were concerned that people are so addicted to pop-up notifications, they wouldn't sit through a whole movie unless it contained them. Maybe this appeals to the sort of people who think that if you're running from zombies and your Google Glass™️ starts unexpectedly blasting music into your ears, the thing to do is spend the next five minutes yelling"Glass™️, music off! Glass™️, music off!"over and over, instead of just /taking the damn glasses off/.
C.A.M. (Contagious Aggressive Mutations)
Supposedly a first-person shooter about the spread of a new pandemic that turns people into zombies (I know, where do they come up with such original ideas?) but I think it might actually just be a 90 minute recording of a video game.
Tales From The Loop [tv series]
Holy cow. Up there with the best of"Black Mirror"-quality writing, but less like the Twilight Zone and more like finding a trove of lost Ray Bradbury stories... Small-town life above a mysterious underground research facility. Old folks gather in barns and play fiddle beneath strange technological ruins. Kids wander through the autumn woods and find derelict robots and mysterious artifacts. The stories are humanist and character-driven, not technology-driven, and as well-written as any sci-fi I've seen.
The Old Ones
Ok, this is truly weird. A sea captain, rescued after 100 years of being possessed by"the Old Ones", encounters magicians and monsters trying to get back to his own time, who he mostly seems to find junkyards and abandoned industrial sites around town. This is zero-budget, sub-"Creature From The Black Lagoon"rubber-mask monsters, to tell a story with as much ambition, weirdness and imagination as a Clive Barker film. Terribly miscast macho he-men who look like extras from a"Dirty Harry"police station scene—the actor playing the captain has almost 300 IMDB credits to his name including"Donnie Brasco"and"Fast and Furious"—run around spouting scenery-chewing Lovecraftian dialogue at each other, like"I have to go. Things are hunting me. Hideous things that dissolve and devour..."or"My pets. You see them? The creatures that fill what men call the pure air and the blue sky", as cheesy, obviously papier-mache bugs and creatures float and skitter around. Meanwhile, out of place humor pops up periodically, like bringing a magician the heart of a demon in a styrofoam takeout container, and when they tell him,"We have brought you a tribute", he says,"What, leftovers?", before opening up a demonic portal in his torso, a giant, hideous gaping maw full of very obviously fake rubber and foam fangs*; or, at another point, a waitress character for some reason played, completely straight and with no explanation or anything to suggest it's meant to be humorous, by a hipster-looking male actor with a goatee and mustache. This seems like a movie made by a very imaginative person who hadn't seen a movie since they were a young child and had only vague memories of what movies are supposed to be like, and a special effects budget limited to whatever they could spend in an hour at the craft store. I generally don't get into"so bad it's good", but this is so over-the-top, and they try so hard, despite having no budget and no talent, I can't help but be entertained by the effort. I might even give it an"honorable mention"... which, in this case, should not be confused with saying it's in any way good. Rather, it's so pyrotechnically, impressively bad, so ambitious without having anything even remotely resembling talent involved anywhere in the production, that I have definitely never seen quite anything like it. I can say that much for sure. (*C'mon. How cool is this, just for being so unrepentantly awful: https://www.voicesfromthebalcony.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/H.P.-Lovecrafts-The-Old-Ones-1.jpg)
Nobody
A middling action picture elevated to high entertainment by the sheer genius of casting Bob Odenkirk and Christopher Lloyd as tough-as-nails action heroes, and, the unlikely fact that they actually pull it off. I liked it.
The Larry Sanders Show [tv series]
Originally aired in the '90s, this might be my favorite comedy series of all time, and close to my favorite TV show of any kind, ever. Garry Shandling is a funny guy,"It's Garry Shandling's Show"was cute and very entertaining, but I think he's generally regarded as a second-stringer of his era behind guys like Seinfeld, and doesn't get the credit he deserves for his excellent writing and work behind the scenes in a lot of things (for instance, ending Judd Apatow's"The 40 Year Old Virgin"with an absurd musical number was Shandling's idea.) The Larry Sanders Show is his crowning achievement, and to me one of television's crowning achievements, full stop. An amazing show-within-a-show focusing on the production of a talk show hosted by a fragile, selfish narcissist (Shandling playing completely against type), his craven and insecure cohost (played in another stellar turn by the doesn't-seem-like-an-actor-who-has-star-turns Jeffrey Tambor), their gregarious but mean-when-drunk veteran TV exec producer played with absolute comic genius by Rip Torn, and a host of other faces who are still around (Janeane Garofalo, Jeremy Piven, Wallace Langham, Mary Lynn Rajskub) as the beleaguered writers and office staff supporting them, plus a bunch of celebrity cameos who are more than happy to play embarrassing versions of themselves (a la"Extras", another great tv-behind-the-scenes series.) I think this show ran for six seasons and was incredibly smart and funny the whole way through. An absolutely must-watch.