In Los Angeles, a bunch of tough-as-nails cops, soldiers, and criminals who look like actors and models shoot guns at rubbery aliens with CGI tentacles, while CGI spaceships appear in the sky and suck rooftops into the air. And, ok, of the movies that that could possibly describe, this is one of the best possible ones. It has a certain USA-Up-All-Night-iness that entertained me very well.
Very decent paint-by-numbers monster/nature-run-amok movie, for a paint-by-numbers monster/nature-run-amok movie. New veterinarian comes to a small town where all the farmers have an arrangement to buy futuristic new feed from a big sciencey company, which it turns out causes ordinary microscopic parasites to turn into giant, bloodthirsty monsters that destroy people and animals from the inside.
It's got big rubbery monsters chasing women in their bra and panties, it's got tough-as-nails farmers shooting shotguns at big rubbery monsters, it's got rubbery chest-bursters bursting out of people's torsos, it's got an innocent, wide-eyed tow-headed boy for pathos who (awesomely) gets eaten by a big rubbery monster. What do you want from a monster movie? It's not "Citizen Kane".
I liked it, I was totally entertained.
This is weird. This was actually a pretty ok sci-fi movie, if a little teen-oriented, set in the near future when there are humanoid AIs in daily use but otherwise very much like today, about a young woman who discovers she's an AI, spends most of the movie trying to escape corporate masters who want her captured, her creators/"parents" who keep wiping her memory every time she discovers she's artificial, etc. Don Cheadle and Emily Mortimer star as the parents, which should tell you something... It was pretty good, probably deserving a callout for being above average.
Until... an hour and a half into it, it just stops. It ends in the middle of the story.
There are references online to this being both a series and a movie, I don't know if what I saw was a pilot episode or something. If they'd wrapped it up like a…
The world's most boring video game makes the world's most boring "horror" movie. A screencast of a video game livestreamer histrionically reacting to a not-scary, non-action-packed "horror" video game that looks like it was written in 1988 which tells him his viewers are being killed as they leave the chat one by one, which he for some reason believes. That's the movie. This guy playing a "scary" video game, shouting at the screen, and over-emoting at the deaths that he has no reason to actually believe have occurred while he plays.
Who sent him this game? Who made it? They never say. That's the level this movie operates on.
Picture this: you get together your funniest friends to make a movie with "Airplane"-style goofy humor. Now picture your funniest friends aren't available, so you get just a bunch of your not-quite-as-funny friends, plus that one weird neighbor from down the street, and they gamely try to save this intentionally ridiculous tale about shrinking a shark down to enter a kid's body to eat a disease, and mostly fail.
Sample dialog:
Soldier (who looks nothing like a soldier, but we're told she's a soldier): "Shark attack at 1 o'clock, sir"
General: "One o'clock? That's a long time from now. Are you psychic?"
Soldier: "No, I mean [pointing] thereabouts."
General: "So why didn't you just say 'thereabouts'?"
Soldier: "It didn't seem soldier-y."
Now picture that dialog being delivered people who just have nothing like the comic timing or sensibility that might have allowed Leslie Nielsen to…
Clearly post-Battlestar-Galactica 1980 low-budget sci fi outing in which space travelers travel to a faraway planet, charming for its post-Battlestar-Galactica 1980ness. If that sounds appealing to you, sure, give it a shot. Be aware it has nothing else going for it, though.
Another flippin' home movie made it onto Tubi. Kids in a house being stalked by a slasher... how did an incompetent filmmaker come up with such an original idea? Every stock "I don't know how to make a movie" trope: weird, random "artsy" jump cuts and needless video effects between scenes, abysmal acting, no lighting or sound design to speak of, and possibly no script. 100% garbage. One of the very rare times I've turned a movie off.
People working at a mysterious inventory company are being laid off as the company is closing, but promised a million dollar bonus if they can finish one last round of inventory before the night is up. Turns out, if they finish it, the world will end. Self-consciously quirky, stylized little comedy that is not as good as it wants to be, characterizations are one-dimensional and it doesn't really justify a lot of its plot points, but, cast is likeable if not exactly good actors, and it kind of had its moments here and there. Canadian, apparently, which explains that.
I have no idea how this comedy series isn't considered a classic. This road trip family comedy ran for 6 seasons and I'm just totally fond of it, I found it incredibly funny. Every season has a framing device of the family trying to explain their misadventures to some authority figure, and features them getting, well, detoured as they try to get from point A to point B. It's hard to know what to say about it beyond that, but—just watch an episode or two, and if you like it, it stays that funny for four seasons.
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 to her, everybody emotes, meanwhile somehow it's interspersed with scenes of a cheesy dramatization of the same thing. I honestly wasn't interested enough to figure out what was going on.
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 complex than I can follow, as the masked home invader bad guys apparently are then picked off by a mysterious further, way-more-badass masked bad guy, who starts off seeming like some sort of supernatural force but is apparently watching out for the daughter of one of the home invaders who turns out to be sympathetic even though she's a home invader? I don't know, couldn't follow it, but at 2 hours and 5 minutes, man did it go on. It did have strangely well-done background music, almost like they spent more money on that than on the rest of the movie combined. They certainly didn't spend anything on sound, lights, or special effects. Or actors. Absolute garbage, but I almost…
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 man uncovers a shocking mystery that leads to a fight against terrifying forces that lurk just behind the walls."
You know what? It's a bad movie, sure. But... I liked it. It doesn't take itself too seriously. A likeable, if perpetually worried-seeming, med student gets a part time job and a big hardware store where things gradually seem just a little bit off. The pacing is awful, but the third act is at least ambitious, more so than the first two acts leave you prepared for.
It's a pretty badly flawed movie. Plot points are never wrapped up, and the pacing isn't great, but... it does have a plot. And it's an amusing one, at least. And, by the…
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 that series, and, if it had been, would have been one of the better ones. Twisted psycho invites lovers over for dinner, but with a little encouragement from her mad-scientist-type brother, has a hard time telling between "guests" and "toys".
Like "Into The Dark", it's basically bad, but in this case, it's over-the-top and just twisted enough, with committed enough performances from the actors playing the psychos, to keep it entertaining and at least watchable, despite how terrible it is as a movie. I wouldn't ever go out of my way to watch it, but if you're looking for some grody horror fare and the pickings are slim, you could probably do a lot worse than this. It succeeds,…
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 the stories seems to attract people who really commit to it, somehow. They try harder. (In this case, a man awakened from a 10 year coma watches videos of the attempt to summon eldritch horrors that put him there. Does that really matter?) Not the first time I've seen a Lovecraft adaptation that was ca omplete crap movie, and yet, still somehow, oddly, not totally unenjoyable.
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 punctuated frequently by unexplained cuts to her sitting on a stool on what appears to be a comedy nightclub stage, narrating what was going through her head. Unexplainied, mildly "spooky" things happen towards the end, like the lights going out or the doors locking themselves so she can't leave. And that's the whole movie.
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 an hour and a half, and slowly loses his marbles. And that's it.
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 performers traveling iin the 1930s. This film is gorgeous—every frame looks like an excellent cinematographer put thought into it and if it carried on all the way through to the end I would have liked it quite a bit just for that. I mean, it's seriously beautiful, enough to carry it.
It has some strange stylistic touches, such as carnival freaks in the 1930s who are obviously influenced by having seen Marilyn Manson at some point. I'm pretty sure they didn't have goths yet them. Nonetheless, it held my interest and stood above the pack just for being so cinematically beautiful to watch. It had a dreamlike quality, but wasn't pretentious enough to qualify as an arthouse film. It's…
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 played by Eric Burdon trying to play "Alex" from Clockwork Orange, goes on vacation to a mansion where they're performing experiments on humans. 100% exploitation garbage, if you're into that sort of thing.
Notable for being the oldest movie I've ever seen that opens with a "kill" scene (I always wondered when that idea began) and the fakest-looking.
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 like zombies and kill people.
So consistently terrible, cheap-looking, and over-the-top, yet so obviously committed to by some of Michigan's worst actors, that I bet it could be a cult favorite among "so bad it's good" fans.
I'm not one of those, though.
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 garbage.
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 black smoke entities as they fuck, fight, and try to figure out what's happening to them. At one point, they venture out only to discover that if they wander too far the wind up back at the cabin, and slowly, the walls close in.
And you know what? It's all a little too poorly thought out to be anything like a good movie, but I kind of liked it, vaguely. It was obviously the product of a consistent, if bad, vision. It was relentlessly over-the-top in its reliance on special effects and overacting, plus, at least the plot is original enough not to be overly familiar. I kind of appreciated it on that level, even though it's ridiculous and just…
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 rural community with no phone or cell phone reception. Add in an unfortunate, hamfisted attempt at satirizing nationalism, plus some touches of Tobe Hooper-style over-the-topness, and, eh, not bad for what it is. Still a pretty bad movie, but I liked it ok for what it was.
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 fear if you don't click the link (yes, it's another horror movie about the internet, usually a bad sign.) It starts weak, but ends up being just a slight cut above, just barely, due to good acting and unusual casting of actual realistically geeky characters as geeks, and then giving them respectable roles. Turns out it's a Canadian film, so, ok. It also had a lot of funny little snappy patter, it sounded like the way wiseass kids really talk. Pretty much bottom of the barrel for Canadian horror but still, that means a cut above bottom of the barrel compared to most. It's sort of slightly-better-than-total-crap in that "Final Destination", actually-kind-of-decent-teen-scream way, which works even better for me because…
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 ways it's as dumb as a teen scream horror can get—picture Adam Brody, the world's least believable devil-worshipping bad guy, singing "867-5309" as he sacrifices someone to the devil, and you have a pretty good picture of where this goes in places. But, the thing is, it's really well-directed, and the cinematography is at times great... like when Anita (Amanda Seyfried) is having awkward teenage sex with her boyfriend at the same time as Jennifer (Megan Fox) is killing a boy in an abandoned house, Anita senses it through the apparent psychic rapport they share as old friends—which could be a horribly mishandled conceit, but fortunately it's so underplayed that it works—and she looks up to see a vision of…
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 family, because they clearly aren't actors.
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 kidnap an unwitting actress because they want to make a fake snuff film but aren't convinced she can pull it off as an actress unless she really thinks she's being abducted and threatened. Needless to say, things don't go as expected.
There reason this isn't 100% complete garbage, though, is that the actress is so full of charisma and so much fun to watch that she basically carries the movie. The filmmakers are bumbling enough to be amiable, too, but Bree Williamson as the actress really chews the scenery as entertainingly as possible all the way through it.
For that, I'm going to stick this under films that have a certain "je nais se quois"... it's easily the…
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 fiction, but boy does it look like a real documentary. It's effectively creepy; but then, as things get debunked, reveals them straightforwardly, as a real documentary wood. The performances are 100% realistic.
The story is, an Australian family's daughter drowns, and they believe they are beginning to see her ghost around the house. A medium gets involved, it goes through the kind of complex twists and turns any interesting real life documentary involving a true crime might go through, and it once never gets far enough from believable to break the spell. It's extremely sparing about creepy stuff so when it arrives, it's effective. The photo & video "evidence" for the haunting is sufficiently understated to be legitimately spooky... not…
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 of people from trying. This muddled mess of characters with no motivation, depth, or even consistent personality traits features a woman trapped in a world that is changing for no reason ever given, with people behaving in bizarre ways, a wall growing over the horizon and slowly expanding to cover a sky that now, again for no reason ever explained (and which most characters change the subject whenever she points it out), has two moons. A war is declared for no reason, everyone under 32 must report for the draft, and there's hamfisted attempts at some sort of social commentay about blaming the poor for their poverty, or about war, or about news media being government propaganda, or some…
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 be Lynyrd Skynyrd, show up. One of the girls—the slutty one, of course, who bounds to first answer the unexpected knock at the cabin door by saying, "the sexy one never gets killed first"—agrees to take off hunting with them for a few hours in a move so stupid you want to shout at the screen, and once they've got her alone, they turn out not to be such nice guys. And in an admittedly neat twist, it turns on NOT to be a captivity pic with deranged country bumpkins menacing the women, but makes a nice pivot in a different direction. Think "30 Days Of Night", set in the south, and with Lynyrd Skynyrd instead of feral, animalistic…
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 before the wedding, during which they try to kill her, because of some claptrap where a family curse says they have to. Ok, pretty stupid setup.
Well: turns out, if you can forgive the stupid story, for the millionth cinematic variation of "The Most Dangerous Game"... this is a pretty good movie, for what it is. Definitely a strong cut above what I expected it to be. The cast helps: Samara Weaving (in probably the best performance I've seen her give, by the end she's downright feral), Adam Brody, Andie MacDowall, Melanie Scrofano, plus a bunch of unfamiliar actors, all hamming it up enough to make the eccentric, homicidal rich characters entertaining without going so far over the top…
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