Movie Reviews

Guy just released from an insane asylum under house arrest in his parent's mansion starts seeing things. Thriller, not a horror movie. Meh, okay I guess, not bad but didn't grab me.

I was in the mood for some light fare so I tried this Keanu Reeves thriller. Had I known it was an Eli Roth film I wouldn't have bothered, there's "light" and there's "tissue-paper thin". Typically shallow and pointless Eli Roth torture porn fare, this time without even gore, and even more fridge logic than usual. Basically, the Small Faces to "Funny Games"'s Rolling Stones. Two teen girls take Keanu Reeves hostage in his home, seduce then torture him, for no reason other than it's an Eli Roth movie and someone out there thinks that's entertaining enough that they got name actors to participate. I wish Eli Roth would find another line of work.

David Caruso is the manly, tough-as-nails head of a manly, tough-as-nails asbestos abatement crew, hired to clean up the asbestos from an abandoned asylum, when intense things start happening. One guy starts listening to intense tapes of old therapy sessions that he's found, people look at each other intensely, make intense accusations, possibly supernatural or psychopathic things do or do not happen, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the hell was going on.

In the genre of "family moves into a home without knowing there's someone living inside the walls" thrillers, this one is easily forgettable. The problem isn't that it's bad, but that it's thoroughly mediocre.

"Superbad" as a TV movie with girls instead of guys. The two leads are genuinely likable and have real chemistry, and the humor is good, but the try-hard over-quirkiness, contrived situations, and inclusion of too many familiar teen movie tropes and stereotypes wears a little bit thin.

Paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller about a gorgeous young woman besieged by monstrous forces, this time about sleep paralysis and a demon.

well-made but incredibly cliched and derivative flim starring Gillian Jacobs and an autistic kid who might as well have been Danny from "The Shining", who is haunted by a mysterious and poorly-explained monster that lives in electronic devices (including the goofily misguided device of showing a "creature's-eye view" from behind the screens while the kid uses them) and wants to abduct the kid to be his friend, because he comes from a world where all the monsters are lost in the iPads and don't talk anymore, or something.

The definition of "torture porn". Literally no plot except for: a bunch of people are held prisoner and promised to be released if they torture each other, so they do. 90 minutes of people inflicting pain on each other, bookended by Maria Olsen telling them she needs to collect a chemical produced by their brains during pain, and literally nothing else.

captivity/torture porn. A couple of kids in london break into an empty building to squat, find themselves trapped and tortured, dismembered, and in what I guess is supposed to be a twist ending, eaten, one by one. That's it. That's the whole plot of this brilliant fucking movie.

[Not to be confused with Amelie] A decent distraction that ends kind of unsatisfyingly by giving too much away. A thriller about a gorgeous babysitter who turns out to be very disturbed, mounting some fairly distressing psychological horror in the first half by way of her increasingly disturbing treatment of the children she's supposed to be caring for, but as is sometimes the case, ratching things up too high, and shifting from a sort of dogme 95 realism to just physical violence and a theatrically darkened house breaks the tension, rather than heightening it. Decent performances, though.

Campers find a baby and wind up pursued by psycho rednecks in the woods. But Australian, so with no American over-the-topness, just sick realism, preceded a dreadfully slow 45 minute buildup in which nothing happens. Pure brutality-as-supposed-entertainment, nothing redeeming about this one at all. One of the easiest Netflix thumbs-downs I've ever given to a film that was technically well made.

Ok, now we're talking. There's something distinctly Kubrickian about this quiet, low-budget indie flick about three people who sneak into a penthouse apartment only to become trapped over the winter and descend into a grisly struggle to survive. Supernatural forces may or may not be at work. I liked this one pretty well, in a quiet, low-budget indie flick kind of way. The incredible, apparently universal hatred for this film is the sort of thing that makes me feel like I was born on the wrong planet.

Lauren Cohan stars as a gorgeous nanny hired by an elderly english couple in a remote mansion to care for what she thinks is their son but turns out to be a life-sized doll... until things begin to move around the house. Plenty of fridge logic abounds but I didn't notice it until the a few minutes after the credits rolled and Lauren Cohan had left the screen. She is, I should add, a pretty good actress, as these things go... actually, better than this material. But I would probably enjoy a movie of Lauren Cohan just walking around an empty room for 90 minutes. And this was actually even more than that.

Brooklyn guy takes in old friend who turns out to be a raving lunatic who thinks humans are turning into demons, thinks his girlfriend is giving him orders over the phone, etc. Not much actually happens, though.

Promising but ultimately disappointing future dystopian black comedy with a slight Clockwork Orange artifice and sterility to the production. Single people are sent to a hotel to either hook up or be transformed into animals and set loose in the woods. One man escapes and joins the "loners", who forbid romance, in the woods — at which point the movie completely runs out of steam, and spends the remaining half its length going absolutely nowhere.

Decent supernatural thriller with Mr. No-Nonsense, Art La Fleur. Two families are lured to look at a house out in the woods, arrive to nearly hit a young girl in the road with her tongue cut out, and soon discover they can’t leave the property. Every attempt to drive or walk back to the road just puts them back at the house. 7 cans of beef stew keep reappearing in the pantry every day. Months pass. Everybody goes a little insane, dead relatives appear, etc.

ravers chased through the woods by satanists. Acrually surprisingly good, like how some episodes of 90210 were good.

"Escape From New York" with less charisma.

Another one of those fun-enough Mark Duplass pics. This time, full of all those charismatic actors who basically always play themselves: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, that guy Nick from New Girl, cameos from Kristen Bell and Jeff Garlin. Journalists in Seattle follow a story about a guy who placed an ad looking for time travel companions. Lots of fridge logic in this one, but if you like movies like this, you probably don't care.

I gave it a shot because I was feeling braindead and it stars Owen Wilson (who I'm somehow not quite tired of yet) and Jason Sudeikis (who I still like, which we can probably credit to lingering afterglow from "Son Of Zorn"), rather than the usual never-once-have-made-me-laugh suspects (Sandler, etc.) And for maybe the first half of the movie it feel list maybe the Farrelly brothers have maybe matured just a tiny bit, from trying to appeal to 4th graders' sense of humor to maybe even 9th graders'. But by the time the "humor" degenerates to "black men have huge dicks, and, that makes other men uncomfortable" you realize things have gotten worse, if anything, and it's not a matter of maturity, but just plain stupidity. And, I wonder, what audience both: 1.) demands a brainless, cliched redemptive ending; and, also, 2.) thinks a person sneezing so hard they shit…

A contender for the most boring movie I've ever watched. Religious girl works as a hospice nurse, mostly just wanders around. Sometimes wanders around hallucinating, sometimes wanders around picking up guys. Kills her patient and sets herself on fire. The end.

Ok, Netflix's description said only "Biologist, cop hunt deadly creature in museum". I said, ok! And it turned out to be a really enjoyable monster movie in the John Carpenter vein. Like, imagine John Carpenter had directed "The Poseidon Adventure", and instead of trying to escape a ship capsized by a huge wave, they were trying to escape a monster that was terrorizing a museum. Nice to see people still sometimes make good monster movies every once in a while. I liked it.

Another Duplass Brothers production of a passabloy watchable indie film that occasoinally veers into major creeponess and discomfort, imagine that. Family and brother's girlfriend deal with developmentally disabled man with a fixation on Fonzie, action movies, and female bodies, and an a little too much of a willingness to cross boundaries. Does an intresting job of occasoinally showing a realistic warts-and-all view of the ccomplexities of relaitonships, although not consistently and just as often comes across a little pat. But, still, watchable, I suppose.

What starts off like a cheezy tv movie slowly turns into a very decent hitchcockian thriller. An illegal immigrant maid hired by a family in the Hamptons suspects the son has drunkenly hit-and-run a pedestrian, and it all goes to shit.

couple sailing across the pacific wind up adrift for a month and a half. Considering how much I usually like these kinds of survival stories, meh. Somehow this one didn't speak to me.