Movie Reviews

It's too bad this movie is so poorly done because, because the writing is ambitious and despite a reliance on a lot of cliches it has a little bit of an original story. A pair of garage scientists open a portal to a parallel universe and become embroiled in interdimensional intrigue as their employers attempt to take over the universe and their counterparts on the other side may or may not be what they seem. "Expulsion" refers to a universal rule that if two of the same person are in the same universe when the portal between them closes, one is "expulsed" which is never clearly explain but it involves disintegrating.

Terribly acted, zero budget, all around not very well made, but as I said, that's kind of a shame. The story itself mildly entertained me, in better hands and better acted this could have been something. I thought…

A young man's stomach pains turn out to be a portal to Hell opening in his abdomen from which demons periodically emerge, and he and his wife must run from mysterious people pursuing him. Stylistically like a Giallo flick, if that's your sort of thing.

It's different, I'll give it that. I wouldn't say it's particularly good but neither is it particularly bad. It takes until the third act to really get going but when it does, decent acting and creature design really help it along.

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…

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.

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.

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…

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.