This starts with a premise that could go either way: a group of teens go to find a teacher who disappeared into a cave, to discover time flows differently inside the cave than out. In this case, it goes the right way, and instead of becoming a predictable thriller, it keeps bringing in new ideas, ending up unexpectedly far afield from where it started, and in an enjoyable & engaging way. Worked for me. Would watch again, eventually.
Decent drama/thriller starring Bradley Cooper as a down-on-his-luck writer who gets access to a drug that allows him to use 100% of his brain capacity, and his subsequent business and political ascent. Between him and De Niro in a supporting role, pretty watchable.
Death as entertainment. Dee Wallace in what looks like an interesting, quirky setup — a family full of characters gathers in a rural house for Christmas when the monstrous son they didn't know the mother tried to abort 20 years ago, and she didn't know survived, shows up — devolves into a fairly by the numbers captivity/everybody-gets-killed-one-by-one-and-hardly-any-plot-besides-that splatterfest. A woman gets cut in half vertically down the center with a single axe swing, another gets an umbrella run clean through her head and then opened, if those give you any idea. Is Dee Wallace this hurting for work?
Surprisingly entertaining spoof retelling of Watergate scandal, based around the supposition that "Deep Throat" was two 15-year-old girls.
okay Aussie haunted house tale. Three researchers in an empty house tape recording things that go bump in the night. Pretty slow to get where it's going, doesn't aim high, but ultimately it's alright.
"Jurassic Park", except with zombies instead of dinosaurs, as things go wrong for a group of gorgeous tourists at a resort where you can go on safari to kill the sole remaining zombies after humanity recovers from an undead pandemic. Likable final girl and decent cinematography and action sequences make it marginally watchable, but still kind of a proof of the rule that the more guns a "horror" movie has the less worth watching it is. By the time there's explosions, you're already well expecting that at some point there are going to be explosions. And, ok, the very ending is good. I'll give them that.
Kind of like "Weeds", except instead of being the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban pot dealer, it's the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban zombie. Other than that, pretty much the same. Drew Barrymore gets less annoying as she matures, and it's about time that that guy who briefly guested as the only competent sales rep at Dunder Mifflin got a leading role.
Adequate direction saves this overwrought, poorly-thought out, nonsensical attempt at a thriller from being a complete crapfest. Instead it's just mostly a crapfest. Jim Carrey is actually alright at keeping a (mostly) straight face but the movie still seems to somehow have a touch of his usual mania in the way it tries to contort and surprise but instead just ends up confusing.
Inventive anthology. Lots of creepy unexplained shit, and Maria Olsen playing it straight for once. Fun, pretty original, I liked it.
this entry in the already crowded “gorgeous lone female cop works the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good" genre features a gorgeous lone female cop working the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good. Random "scary" stuff happens which eventually turns out to be related to the on-site suicides of a poorly-explained, poorly-acted Manson Family type cult. Essentially, "1408" in a police station.
A Black Crowes album to Texas Chainsaw's "Exile On Main St." Not "Amorica", either, although perhaps their second best one.
Saw this movie a few days ago and I have already forgotten it.
Of course the lone hick has tunnels and a torture dungeon under his junkyard trailer. Kids planning the next columbine cross paths with him to a post-punk soundtrack. Stylish enough, I suppose, with a few inventive elements for what it is.
Archaeologist looks for the Philosopher's Stone in forbidden parts of the Paris catacombs, finds something much worse than expected, in this rare non-execrable "found footage" film.. 10% Raiders Or The Lost Ark, 5% The Descent, 50% Blair Witch Project, but about 35% its own thing, which is pretty good for a movie like this. This had all the makings of a bad movie, first off by being a first-person shooter, but it's someone somewhere along the way knew a little too much about how to actually make a movie, and managed to fill it with enough cool style to make up for the thin substance... might be a good date movie. For a piece of trifle with almost no plot they actually managed to make it fairly gripping. Ending is sort of an anticlimax though... they go through their travails, then when the movie is long enough, the travails come…
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…
One of those pictures that keeps latter-day John Cusack working. A post-AI-apocalype adventure aimed at the pre-Hunger Games set, as well as probably a paltry stab at a franchise or TV pilor, featuring a gorgeous heroine and a robot who thinks he's human trying to reach a promised human utopia. Good special effects but that's about it. So, a computer thought wiping out humanity was the solution to the worlds problems? Revolutionary! How in the world did they come up with that?
Woman returns to her hometown where everybody acts creepy, because, movie. Also a demented ice cream man drives around randomly killing people because, movie. Sucked.
what neo-noir is when made by people who don't realize that neo-noir is about relationships, not just torture porn with some obligatory criminal double-crosses and complications to serve as background for the torture scenes.
High-concept picture in which terminally ill people can, in the near future, clone themselves to ease their family's suffering—but, if they turn out not to be terminally ill, must duel their clone to the death. Enter Karen Gillan in that situation, who then spends the first half of the picture watching her clone steal her entire life and the second half training for the duel. Much better than that silly premise makes it sound... not great, but if it had been a Black Mirror episode, it would have been one of the better ones. I'm surprised I liked it but I kinda did. This kind of familiar ground is hard to get right but I could maybe see this become a low-key cult favorite.
Less-charismatic Ed Helms stand-in Nat Faxon and my former celebrity crush Judy Greer make marriage look absolutely unbearable and totally unrewarding, plus cure me of my celebrity crush on Judy Greer.
Irish film. Crew on a fishing boat battles an infection of seamonster-borne parasites. Not bad, these sorts of things can be done alright, especially if they're done far away from Hollywood.
Anyone who has ever worked a dreadfully dull, bottom-rung office Admin Assistant job for uncaring, disrespectful employers will already be familiar with this movie, and ask themselves why they relived it, and nothing more than that, by watching this. How they got that great actress who played Ruth on Ozark to sign on to this plotless tedium is beyond me.
sometimes it's a fine line between great and terrible, and this remake (of a 1964 film I haven't scene) does the rare job of staying on the right side of it by remaining consistently over-the-top enough to be enjoyably terrible instead of just terribly terrible. The cliched opening, douchebags on their way to Daytona for spring break get lost and wind up in a small backwoods town full of bizarre murderous locals, made it seem like it was bound to be terrible, and I can't say it wasn't, but I nonetheless enjoyed it for what it was. Somebody really loved and understood vintage terrible horror movies and did an admirable job recreating their terribleness, and managed to keep it cliched without making it tediously derivative. Robert Englund chews the scenery, which is about what you want him there to do, I guess.
Continuing the tradition of pretty good thrillers set in elevators, two young professionals are the last to leave the building before a long weekend when the elevator breaks down. Alright, entertaning enough... starts slow but builds pretty effectively. Plays out well as a drama, and some unexpected poetic moments in the third act. ... Ok, wow, turns out this, too, is part of "Into The Dark". Definitely the best one of the series, by far. Much better activing, production values, pacing, everything. Like a real movie. (Edit: in a recurring theme for things I think are slightly better installments of ongoing franchises, turns out this was widely panned. I have no idea why.)
So, I'm watching this movie, which stars Robert Pattinson's teeny, tiny nose as the nose of a billionaire riding around New York taking meetings and having sex in his limo all day, and I'm a little put off by how strange, stiff, and mannered the performances are, and how overall pretentious it seems. And as it wears on, I have to admit, there's something well done about it. By the end, which features a soliloquy by a madman of a lengthy that would have been incredibly tedious if anyone but Paul Giamatti had attempted it, but instead works incredibly well and is one of his shining moments as an actor as well as an all-around cinematically impressive scene, I had to admit I liked it in spite of myself. And then the credits roll, and: directed by David Cronenberg. A-ha! That's my boy, sneaking one past me by creating what…
Any horror movie starring Katie Holmes is only going to be so good. This one has very decent creature effects, though. Guy Pearce (who appears to be completely featureless other than his tiny little nose, sorta like a male Milla Jovovich) and his tiny little nose are utterly wasted in this. Also notable for (spoiler) basically being a horror movie about the Tooth Fairy. If you're the kind of person who's amused by catching goof details like the scullery maid in the beginning trying to see what's in the dark basement by holding the candle right in front of her eyes, this movie is full of that stuff.
Ok... college kids in bikinis, weekend waterskiing vacation at the lake, mean redneck locals, sharks. That's all you need to know, except that it distinguishes itself by incorporating the nuttiest revenge plan ever, and also, by netting Donal Logue to play the sheriff. He must've liked the script. The digital sharks are pretty well-done, too, that sort of thing is getting better.
Well-made but very cliched "The Lady Vanishes" plot-twisty thriller. Gorgeous man takes gorgeous wife and injured daughter to hospital during a road trip, returns to pick them up later and is told he was there alone earlier. Predictable all the way through, and with hefty doses of before-you-even-get-to-the-fridge logic. But, mildly entertaining, on the better end of mediocre.
OMG. Ok. I kinda like these teen-oriented "horror" movies that seem like they were made from preteen novels, if they have a couple of fun ideas and creepy enough moments, and am willing to forgive a lot. Case in point would be "Plus 1", which this movie shares a lot in common with, beginning with the setup, which is "teenage protagonists at a party where reality suddenly changes on them in some unexplainable way and they have to find a way to cope". This film really pushes the limits of that forgiveness, though. Unlike "Plus 1", which at least tossed in a passing meteor as an attempt at some kind of macguffin to give some reason for the otherworldly things that occur, this film doesn't bother... kids go to a party, go into a closet to play "Seven Minutes In Heaven" and emerge in a world where everything is the…
Despite a little predictability, this Irish tale of a young mother who moves out to the woods and begins to suspect that her son has been replaced by an impostor is a decent enough view. The acting is decent, the score is creepy, it's well-made enough, if not exactly exciting. I don't regret the time spent watching it.
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