For a shitty, poorly-written, poorly-acted "to-dimensional he-man hunters besieged by rednecks and/or monsters at a cabin in the remote woods" flick, actually, not that bad. It's paced and shot like a 70s slasher flick, it kind of seems like maybe a lousy writer and actors somehow got a good director to try to fix things. So, a terrible movie, but, has its moments.
Charming, amusing northern Irish neo-noir comedy about two laddish 15 year old bike thieves chasing after a rumored lost bale of cocaine and the odd cops, robbers, and local characters they're surrounded by. Quirky and fun... Trainspotting-type humor with much less degeneracy.
Ok thriller, looks like a horror movie but no monsters or supernatural. Three people go cave diving, mild jealousy and murder ensue. I think it's Danish or something, the audio sounds like overdubs.
Somewhere in the great purgatory of "also-rans" and "very near misses", "Mom And Dad" surely occupies a place of honor. A somewhat spectacular role-reversal play on how kids become strangers to their parents as they grow up, as an unexplained epidemic of madness (biological warfare is name-dropped as a possibility, but it never gets clearer than that) drives parents to begin trying to murder their kids. One observation that speaks well of this film is that the lack of a reason for the events it depicts almost immediately ceases to matter. The explanation isn't missed, a la "Night Of The Living Dead".
This, I must say, is my kind of movie: just things going *awry*, to the most perverse extreme, yet without stretching credulity so far past the point of believability that you can't empathize. Numerous passing notes provide depth, such as a briefly-seen news interview clip showing a parent…
Pretty decent entry in the "man realizes he's not alone in the remote woods" category. No more cliched than the story requires, which is nice, and especially refreshingly centers on a man who videos himself at all times (outdoor survival reality show star in this case), without using shaky first-person camera perspective.
Execrable. Seems like a probable attempt to invent a "mythology" that could be spun off into 14 sequels, but nobody is that stupid.
Hoooooo. Rough one. Thought it was a "based on a true story" horror movie, but it was closer to a documentary, with the real-life victim of a horrific 23-week captivity in 1985 on a remote farm in the Australian backcountry narrating a fairly intense dramatization of her true story. Mostly psychological torture, but also menial and sexual slavery, impregnation and subsequent termination by a physical beating, constant threats and manipulation, etc. Upsetting shit.
Melissa George stars in a pretty original, intense and well-done fantasy/speculative fiction thriller that tackles some familiar themes with enough original twists, turns, and surprises to be consistently entertaining despite some occasional obvious logical flaws, and, to leave the viewer with things to think about.
I don't know if it's for everyone, but to me, this is an movie that starts ok, and just gets better and better and better over its runtime, finally tying things up in the kind of satisfying and intelligent bow that a lot of movies that aspire to be "mind-bending" strive for but few actually succeed at. It's one of those small handful of movies I go out of my way to re-watch every so often and never regret doing so.
It's hard to discuss the plot in any way without giving away spoilers, and I like this movie a little too much…
This film got under my skin.
It's an American Gothic about researchers trying to retrace the steps of a NH community that walked off en masse into the wilderness in the 1940s, and slowly losing their minds in the woods themselves. And that's really about it.
It's a flawed gem, original, and really disturbed me, despite an unsatisfyingly, almost Lynchian-cryptic (in a bad way; think "Mulholland Drive", not "Eraserhead") ending. It has a low rating but extremely polarized reviews on IMDB, a lot of people either really hated or really loved it. I'd watch it again for sure, and years after having seen it, I can still vividly recall a lot of it, because so much of it just plain really got to me. We go to horror movies to be disturbed, and somehow this odd film disturbed me viscerally, in a way that films with a much…
anthology seemingly aimed at 12-year-olds. A babysitter is held captive by a creepy doll and forced to watch terrible horror vingettes.
Ok, slightly better than your average captivity/stalking in the back woods movie, but I don't know how much of that to chalk up to quality (usually totally lacking in this sort of movie) and how much to me being personally suckered by having a the psycho captor/stalker be a hot lesbian instead of a grungy redneck. Still, the acting is decent, the minimal cast (4 characters in the whole movie, two of whom are only seen for a few minutes) is good. It's Canadian, surprise. Also, at one point, one of the characters plays a strangely good single-note blues song. I've really got to look it up and see if it's a real song, or just written for the movie, or what. [Edit: Found it. Bloodlet by Munroe.]
Listen, horror movie directors: people wandering around the woods at night getting freaked out by sounds (or, worse, by thinking they hear sounds, which you don't even hear) is A.) not a plot, and, B.) it's been done. Blair Witch did it, they did it better than you, it can't be repeated. Stop it.
Another dreadful, zero budget first-person shooter where so little happens that it seems like they retroactively decided to film some non-first-person footage of police reviewing the "found footage" to see what happened to instersperse the non-action with, which still doesn't save the complete absence of plot.
Kids camp out at a remote cabin, see someone camping nearby who they hit & run earlier, and decided to go to his campsite in the middle of the night to apologize. Except, even more boring than that sounds.
Mostly just kids walking through the woods at…
Half a very lazy documentary about novelty haunted house attractions, grafted onto half an execrable first-person shooter with every single failing a FPS could have. I guess they didn't have enough to make a full lazy documentary or a full lousy horror movie. Twice. BTW, memo to filmmakers: The Pacific coast is extremely recognizable. You can't shoot Kitsap County for North Carolina. Especially the beaches. Totally different.
Interesting. Mockumentary segments bookend a simulated but very authentic 1970s amateur home-made horror movie about a kid trying to dig a pit to hell in the woods. Actually, if you ignore the documentary segments, sets its sights so low, and is such a convincing "home movie", that it's kind of entertaining.
Ken Jeong, Jim Jefferies, Rhys Davies, a totally-unafraid-to-laugh-at-himself David Hasselhoff, and a host of thankfully not-too-overexposed familiar faces in the kind of pretty amusing slapstick movie the Farrelly brothers would make if their movies were a little bit smart instead of a little bit stupid. I laughed a couple of times and never once felt like my intelligence was being insulted.
very decent creature design, a few genuine momentary scares, and a focus on my personal phobia of the dark (yep, it's true) were not enough to keep my interest in this tale of a family pursued by a fiend that can only appear in the dark, and I spent the second half of the movie being much more entertained by googling pictures of unbelievably beautiful lead actress Teresa Palmer.
Hallmark Movie Of The Week-quality telling of radium workers suing for workers' rights. A great story reduced to nothing. The '40s fashions are the only good thing about it.
[Posted on IMDB] In this terrifying true life story, two inventive filmmakers make a cursed horror movie which, although pretty decent itself, casts a foul spell that forces every lazy, terrible wannabe horror director who see it in the next 25 years to say "Hey, I could do that too" and copy it with their own inferior, deathly dull, derivative "found footage" horror attempt. Millions of bored viewer hours are wasted not being scared, Netflix is overrun with dreadfully dull "horror" films, and, in the end, the entire horror genre is nearly destroyed. Will the horror genre survive this dreadful curse? Nobody knows the end of the story. Stay tuned.
Teenagers getting picked off in the woods by zombie-type people infected with a disease... but, that said, surprisingly good, fairly original. Felt like an early-80s classic, and an ok one, not a rip-off by someone raised on those movies who loves them a little too much and thinks that's enough, as these sorts of movies often are. A pleasant surprise.
Very decent realist postapocalyptic drama. A couple tries to cope quarantined in their home after dirty bombs are set off in LA. Unfortunately the last 10 minutes or so try for a weak "twist" that proves anticlimactic, but a pretty enjoyable film up until that.
This one was good enough that I didn't realize it was part of Hulu's "Into The Dark" series, although the weak ending betrays it. It was directed by the same guy that did "I'm Just Fucking With You", the only one of the series that I really liked. Grieving father and his daughters go out to the desert in their Airstream to spread his wife's ashes. What starts off seeming like a "locals torment visitors out in the sticks" story turns out to be something much different, and nowhere near as cliche. If they had come up with a satisfactory ending, the whole thing would have really worked.
Joe Dante in "workmanlike mainstream director" mode. A woman with psychic powers is drawn in to a murder trial and followup investigation in this dirtbag rural whodunit. I find it hard to buy a town full of "rednecks" played almost entirely by recognizable A-list celebrities: Keanu Reeves, Hillary Swank, Katie Holmes, Greg Kinnear, Blake Lively, JK Simmons. I could buy maybe one or two of these people as rednecks talking with fake southern accents, but, all of them?
godawful "indie"-flick-starring-major stars I got tricked into watching by Hulu billing it as a "comedy". This movie seems to desperately want to say something, but I have no idea what that is. Kristine Froseth stars as a gorgeous childcare worker, and a virgin who had a medical hysterectomy at 15, who has a crush on the father of the boy she watches, seduces him, has an affair before getting caught, writes a fan letter to a porn star she likes, anonymously fucks a lot of guys, catches an unspecified STD, and at the end gets a video back from the porn star giving her advice to stand up for herself and avoid bad people, end of movie. Except for the "written by Lena Dunham" credit that finally explains why this well-acted-but-otherwise-completely-hollow exercise even exists.
Decent enough haunted plane movie. Takes forever to get going. Guy dies mysteriously on a plane, and haunted hell brakes loose. Lots of fridge logic but creepy enough in the moment. Last 2 minutes make no sense at all but fortunatly it's pretty much wrapped up by then. Amy Smart and Leslie Bibb.
Okay-enough dubbed-over flick about a kid getting possessed by her witchy grandma in a coma. Didn't hold my attention so well, but well-made, well acted.
Wow, talk about a flawed gem. I really like this neo-noir, which features the two most realistic 10-year-old boys I've ever seen in a movie finding an apparently abandoned cop car and going for a joy ride, attracting the attention of the corrupt sheriff whose car it is and the man he's got in the trunk. Really appealing, set deep in the windswept prairie, kind of a snowless "fargo" at least in terms of setting. The only problem: the too-recognizable-to-suspend-disbelief Kevin Bacon as the sheriff, who is, additionally, repeatedly clever enough to creatively think his way out of jams in a split second, but not clever enough to leave his cop car where two 10 year olds won't find it, or to not leave the keys sitting on the seat in plain view. But overall, despite the flaws, this picture is kind of a fave, I'm glad I caught it.…
About to get engaged to a woman he's only ever met over video chat, a man discovers when she moves in that she's attached to a homicidal conjoined twin. 100% campy, which usually isn't a good thing, but in this case it works. John Waters got famous making movies this bad and really only just barely more fun.
Pale, hoodie-wearing outcast friend-requests Alicia Debnam-Carey, who I really would have hoped had brighter prospects than this, then kills herself, after which gorgeous teens die one by one for the slimmest of reasons. As slick and terrible as you imagine a teen horror movie about Facebook would be, especially once I've told you it contains the line "Unfriend that dead BITCH!" So, you know what you're getting into. (Not to be confused with the similar Unfriended, a prior horror movie about Facebook.)
Self-consciously quirky black-and-white "Indie" film starring huge megastars. Martin Starr actually acts in this. This guy keeps dumping women after 3 months by paying a friend of his to pretend to be his mother and not get along with them, and there's some sort of thing about babies who don't grow up, which must be a metaphor. It was vaguely ok, I guess, at least not cringeworthy like these things usually totally are.
The Blair Witch Project with UFOs. Painful.
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