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 garbage.
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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 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…
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 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.
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 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…
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 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…
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 family, because they clearly aren't actors.
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 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…
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 a whole bunch of Jesus stuff. Thanks, not entertained. Turned it off.
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.
Brockmire [tv series]
I always knew Hank Azaria was going to do something I was going to love. I waited and waited and it didn't happen, until"Brockmire". Absolutely a favorite show of mine, following the ups and downs of Azaria as a down-on-his-luck alcoholic baseball announcer. Everyone I've recommended it to has loved it too. Seriously, all you have to do is watch the first episode, and if you don't love it by the end of that first half hour, you can skip it. I actually had one friend call me before the first episode was even over to rave about how much he loved it. It's that good. Trigger warning: It does get a pretty dark in the second season, he hits some pretty low depths. Still, a bona fide gem and I will never understand why you never hear anybody mention right alongside the best shows of all time.
Better Things [tv series]
Pamela Adlon out-"Louie"s Louie in this slice-of-life series about three generations of foul-mouthed women trying to get by. A charming, realistic, funny, undiscovered gem. Deserved its five-season run and never got old.
Baskets [tv series]
A somehow undiscovered drama/comedy gem with Zach Galifianakis playing both an emotionally complicated rodeo clown and his straight-laced twin brother, with Louie Anderson playing their mother. This was Zach Galifianakis's moment, and nobody knows about it, and I say that pretty much already generally liking everything else he's done.
Atlanta [tv series]
What can I say about Atlanta that hasn't been said? This show started good and only got better. An incredibly well-acted, often poetic, well-written depiction of life of an up-and-coming rapper and his crew. Lots of very realistic, three-dimensional character study, peppered with frequent surrealism and deadpan comedy, unusual takes on race issues not often seen in mainstream media, an absolute refusal to be bound by TV or genre conventions, and occasional usually-successful experimental episodes that depart partially or entirely from the main characters and plot of the series. In my mind, one of the consistently best TV series ever made. When a new season comes out, I actually save this one until I'm ready to sit and take it in.
Compliance
I like this movie. Well,"like"is a strong word, it's intense and really disturbing but appreciably well-made. Dreama Walker stars in a"based on a true story"very-slow-burn drama, sticking fairly close to the true facts, about a man who called the office of a fast food joint claiming to be law enforcement, and intimidated the manager and several other people into imprisoning, humiliating, and finally sexually abusing an innocent employee for several hours. The entire first two acts of the movie are set mostly in the one room where it happens. It's pretty disturbing and, I thought, admirably well made, considering how tough the subject matter is. Caution: if you research afterwards, as I'm often inclined to, you'll learn that the full story of the actual events is actually a little more disturbing than what was shown in the movie. The whole thing is really upsetting. But the movie is so well made it's hard not to appreciate the filmmaking.
I Am Legend
Has anybody not seen this yet? Reasonably entertaining calculatedly blockbuster-y scifi/action, the latest of many remakes and reinterpretations of one of the most prominently and repeatedly remade sci-fi stories, and the only one that retains the name, if departing completely from many of the key themes and details, of Richard Matheson's original novel (even if it will never replace any of the other adaptations under different names, particularly my favorite Vincent Price vehicle"The Last Man On Earth"and its spiritual descendant, if only extremely indirect remake,"Night Of The Living Dead", in my heart.) Will Smith's likability keeps it watchable, even occasionally rewatchable, despite some over-the-top moments, tough suspensions of disbelief, and fridge logic. The many scenes of an unpopulated and overgrown Manhattan are a treat—and only improved by Wikipedia's recounting of Will Smith saying the Manhattan street closures necessary to do them resulted in"the most middle fingers I've ever gotten in my career"—and the slow development of the action is well done. The rubbery"monsters", slightly less so, but they do serve their purpose. Still, best to wait a very long time after seeing"28 Days Later"before you watch it. (Note: according to Wikipedia, the DVD included an alternate ending that kept superficially closer to Matheson's novel, and also would have provided an explanation for some of what in the final release was fridge logic; it didn't do well with test audiences, who were perhaps unaccustomed to the subtlety of the writing of someone who went on to write The Twilight Zone's"Nightmare At 20,000 Feet"and Star Trek's"The Enemy Within", and was completely rewritten at the last minute. WP also says Ridley Scott was at one point slated to direct—now that's a movie I'd really like to have seen,I look forward to the day I can tell an AI,"Show me 'I Am Legend', but directed by Ridley Scott"—as were Guillermo Del Toro and Michael Bay.) Also, the monsters' guttural screams and grunts were recorded by Faith No More's Mike Patton, adding another entry to the list of things I think Mike Patton overdid. Incidentally there's a pretty decent review focusing on the differences between the several adaptations of"I Am Legend", specifically contrasting this"conservative"one with the themes of the more morally ambiguous original novel, in an academic"Journal of Religion & Film"of all things: .
Masters Of Horror (series)
Wow. Real honorable mention here. I found this one on Tubi, and for the most part, it's actual horror cinema, not the TV"horror"-in-quotes writing exemplified by campy shows like"American Horror Story"which use horror tropes with any edges safely blunted off to avoid upsetting anybody. Anthology series where acclaimed directors (Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, John Landis, John Carpenter) each directed a 1-hour horror film. As an anthology, the quality is up and down, but for the most part finds these directors in top form and, in the best episodes, not watering their fare down for TV... this is something fans of actual quality horror movies might actually enjoy. And, happily, it doesn't even lean very often into"horror comedy"or in-jokes, for the most part indulging in those only when it will actually work (I had a chuckle when John Landis's episode has a policeman, speculating a wild animal attack has improbably occurred in his town, mention a wolf attack reported in central London in 1981.) Director Takashi Miike's episode, while not among my favorites, was actually pulled from the original run of the series by Showtime over concerns about the content being too extreme (for cable in 2006!) and, true to form, Dario Argento's episode, characteristically both ridiculous and disturbing, had to be edited for violence in the original run, too. The second season isn't as good, it's more"tv horror", although it still has its moments, and is by and large still often better than most other TV horror. I was somewhat unnerved by the idea, if not entirely the execution, of Joe Dante's season 2"The Screwfly Solution", in which something similar to pest control biotech, designed to reduce insect populations by chemically interfering with mating urges, finds a much broader use. Tobe Hooper also is nice to see back in fine form in season 1, but I'm not going to say any more than that.
Knuckleball
decent cinematography, especially shots making grate use of wintry rural Canadian farmland, is the sole redeeming feature of this unremarkable captivity/pursuit flick in which a young boy is sent by his gorgeous parents to spend the winter on an isolated farm with his grandfather, and things go wrong. Not terrible, it has some typical hallmarks of the many well-made little Canadian indie horror movies that I like so much, but in terms of the plot and whole idea that someone made this movie at all—aim higher, people. I guess there must still be an audience for this stuff, but I myself can't see why people even still make these movies.
The Possession Of Michael King
another very-slightly-better-than-average first person shooter. Widower bent on proving the supernatural doesn't exist invites in a demon to show that it doesn't work. Spoiler: turns out to be a mistake. Pretty intense performance by the lead actor showing his gradual decline into violent lunacy, but would have been better without the conceit. Don't we have enough of these movies already? The trick just isn't that good, especially by the time you realize a demon probably wouldn't have had such sustained interest in continuing to film himself, and from multiple angles, no less.
Forbidden Planet
Tubi very intelligently put this on on autoplay right after The Thing, and I'd somehow never seen it. Another movie that is very dated and of its time, but, I actually, watching it, assumed it must have from the early to mid '60s, not 1956. It's another one of those films that you kind of have to view through the lens of its era, but I can believe that if I had been a teenager in the 1950s and saw this when it came out, without having seen everything later that it shaped, I would have thought it was incredible. I remember not all that long ago, some kids raised on modern, studio-crafted pop saying they couldn't understand what was so great about the Beatles, and I couldn't help but think of that watching this. It certainly originated a lot of common tropes: first sci-fi film to feature faster-than-light travel, first one to use an electronic soundtrack, first one set entirely on an alien world, not to mention the use of vivid color photography years before the black-and-white era ended, and in terms of its production and many of the tropes it uses it's very easy to see the influence on later shows on up until"Star Trek"and beyond. It's hard to believe it preceded Star Trek by at least 10 years, in that sense it still seems ahead of its time.