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…
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.
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