Sci-fi-ish action/adventure supposedly starring Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver, but actually, it's Die Antwoord steals "Robocop" and does about what you'd expect with him. No, really, it's actually them, playing themselves. It was kind of fun, better than I expected.
Sort of a fun horror/fantasy/crime thriller about an escaped mental patient with mind control powers on the run from the law among strippers and drug dealers in the seedy underbelly of New Orleans. Stars Craig Robinson as the lead cop, refreshingly actually playing a role, and not just himself. Nice to see that.
Fun magical-realist series about an 18-year-old girl struck down by satellite debris falling from space who joins a team of "reapers", undead people tasked with helping doomed souls depart their bodies painlessly before death. Oh, she also works at a temp agency by day. And the "reapers" hang out at a restaurant called "Der Waffle Haus". It's kinda fun. Created by Bryan Fuller, who also made similar short-lived but fun magical-realist shows "Pushing Daisies" and "Wonderfalls". Plus has Mandy Patinkin, who I always like, as the boss of the reaper team.
Surprisingly solid zombie action thriller about a zombie outbreak in a prison. With this clichéd title and that plot synopsis I expected total crap, but, surprise, it's a well-made, atmospheric, tense, fairly tightly made—if not particularly inventive—little splatterfest, more like "28 Days Later" in tone and production than "Return of The Living Dead". Completely lacks 28DL's epic scope and grand storytelling, but definitely feels like they took some cinematography lessons from Danny Boyle and learned well. Watchable if you're in the mood for this sort of thing. Might be a good date movie, if perhaps a little violent and explicitly gory for some.
Warning: panned badly on IMDB, 4.3 stars. I'm not sure why. It's not great by a long shot but it deserves better than that.
Starts off like "The Blair Witch Project" meets the Dyatlov Pass Incident, before taking a hard sci-fi turn in the last act, after it's too late. Not terrible, but, meh. Also briefly mentions the Philadelphia Experiment, which, eh, not as creative is the writer probably thought it was, two cool conspiracy theories somehow add up to less than just one. Directed by Renny Harlin, known for such B fare as "Nightmare On Elm Street 4: Dream Warriors", "Die Hard 2: Die Harder", and "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane", but who's been at this long enough that he ought to aim higher. Actually probably on the better end of "found footage" stuff in that it's not total crap, but, dunno. Wouldn't go out of my way to see it, for sure.
Unremarkable but reasonably entertaining younger cousin to "Predator" benefits from that little touch of Canadian production quality, which, as usual, means it's ever-so-slightly better than it should have been.
Mostly a one man show, as a host of a survival show gets dropped off for 5 days in the northern Ontario wilderness to survive on his own, filming it for his show, as it becomes apparent he's not alone.
Not a great movie by any stretch, and slightly predictable, but benefits a little bit from what it's not: it's not an annoying first-person shooter, they didn't show the monster too early or for too long. Both good decisions that too many filmmakers wouldn't have made that keep it a little more watchable than it would have been otherwise.
A better movie than you might think considering the best known thing about it is the genre-defining disco soundtrack. John Travolta as a Brooklyn teenager in the '70s who loves going to the disco. More of a character-driven, slice-of-life movie than it gets credit for being. Most strangely, for example, the dancing, featured heavily in the first two acts, doesn't go on to be the film's emotional center, and, refreshingly for the modern viewer, it doesn't end with him winning a big dance contest.
I'm not saying I'd go out of my way to see it, but a lot of critics liked it, and I get that. It's two hours long, and it passes quickly, it's a pretty tight piece of filmmaking.
It probably helps that it's been long enough that we're all thoroughly calloused to how bad disco sucks.
Visually gorgeous but perhaps the slowest, talkiest, least engaging nominal sci-fi I've ever seen. Something about a family whose child's AI companion breaks, so a lot of people talk and talk and talk about a lot of things.
Faintly-better-than-it-should be comedy about two viciously competitive women who ingest an immortality potion, allowing them to do greater and greater damage to each other. Primarily saved by nice film-noir type production and good casting: Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis, all playing against type, please a cameo role from an effectively creepy Isabella Rossellini.
Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner, Mary Tyler Moore, Gabe Kaplan, and a bunch of other people who should have known better in a stereotypically cringeworthy, unfunny '70s variety show. I lasted one episode.
A fictionalization of a real-life 1972 bank robbery and hostage situation in Brooklyn that goes awry almost from the moment it begins. Masterful direction from Sidney Lumet and stellar acting performances from a young Al Pacino from back in the days before he became a ham and an ice-cold John Cazale, as well as a talented supporting cast of colorful characters, ensured this film's place in movie history. Not a picture with a big message, no deep meaning, not a lot of emotional punch, just a goddamn great yarn, incredibly well made. One of my favorites.
100% amateur crap. Some sort of attempt at Lynchian surrealism executed with apparently no knowledge of cinematography, lighting, sound, or acting.
Classic sci-fi/horror about a sentient computer imprisoning a woman in her home with the goal of using her body to become human. Explores existential themes of human existence and personal autonomy in the best classic literary science fiction tradition.
It's hard for me to judge this movie objectively. I first saw this as a kid, and loved it then, and although now the visual style seems slightly cheezy and low-budget to me, and the pacing definitely isn't the punchy pacing modern viewers are used to, the better points of the storytelling and themes hold up for me as an adult. I see this as perhaps the last of the great tradition of small, personal, humanist, character-driven sci-fi and horror movies that started perhaps in the 1950s, which began to be supplanted by a new, more grandiose, almost mythic or archetype-driven storytelling style in 1968 with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and…
What to say about this critical fave? A drug-addicted schizophrenic anarchist hacker takes on the forces of corporatism and global-scale evil in this dark cyberthriller series that never lets the intensity go below 10 for a second. Every scene is intense. Every piece of dialog. People look at each other intensely, or argue and threaten each other intensely. One woman was cast, I'm sure, primarily for her skill at sitting there looking, because it's almost all she does. The show never takes a quiet moment to gather power for the next scene, never lets up. It's just one intense climax to the next, like a Whitney Houston song.
This series reminds me of what took me so long to cotton to "Breaking Bad" for—slow pacing, intensity conveyed with lots of quiet and stillness instead of action. Which, in principle is admirable, and much harder to do well than the…
Imagine a movie described as "National Lampoon's Van Wilder, a frat-house comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid". Now picture that same movie, except more crass than you're imagining.
Gritty, pretty watchable cop show. The acting is good. The first seasons are better and then it never gets bad, but isn't quite as good for the last few. Still fairly watchable though.
Terribly paced, cheaply made splatstick about a bunch of American tourists in Australia who encounter a menacing pack of digitally-generated koalas with glowing eyes and an actor in a very fake-looking "mutant koala" costume.
Cheapo horror flick about a bunch of people holed up in a house during a zombie outbreak. Mostly you don't even see the zombies. So, basically, "Night Of The Living Dead", except, totally uninteresting.
What a weird movie. Bottom-of-the-barrel crapola, with the (lack of) acting and production values of a cheap porn film, and yet... something about it... if this had been a big budget it would have been kinda good. It's about a zombie outbreak in Philadelphia, and a group of survivors trapped in a basement. But it's a lot more about dialogue than zombies eating people. And it has a couple of fanciful animated sequences that totally work as comic relief and look better than anything else in the movie. It's kind of like... this would have been a good movie if they'd spent the kind of budget on actors and production staff that they did on the animation. The writing is, strangely, not really that bad, if you can imagine a skilled director directing skilled actors at it. But the movie looks and feels like a porno but with zombies instead…
A stereotypical atheist-as-imagined-by-Christians wants to kill himself for 90 minutes that feels like 3 hours, while everybody preaches at him that they believe there's an alternative. The corny music and wooden sub-soap-opera-quality attempts at acting are such a solid tipoff that it's a Christian film that by the time you spot the surreptitious crucifixes and churches in the background of way too many shots, all of 5 minutes into it, it's absolutely no surprise.
The classic that originated tropes that have permeated popular culture ever since, and which has been remade or ripped off countless times—and all for good reason.
You already know the story: an alien invasion of "pod people" creates duplicates of human beings and replaces them. But if you haven't seen the 1956 original, what you may not know is how great a movie it is. This extremely dated-looking 1950s film is utterly effective and highly original even today, and still holds up astoundingly well as one of the best sci-fi/horror movies out there. Today's audiences, accustomed to big-budget Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, may not be used to the more human-level drama and real storytelling here, but to me it will always be an impeccable, incredible classic and gripping view from start to finish.
My favorite Hitchcock movie. The birds in a small coastal California town begin inexplicably attacking the human populace, and it begins to look like a losing battle. Only Alfred Hitchcock could take such a thin premise and turn it into a suspense-filled horror masterpiece and major film classic.
Decent slightly-better-than-TV-movie-quality dramatization of a 1970 true story about the efforts to teach a girl who'd been imprisoned without human contact until the age of 14 to learn to speak and socialize.
One of the most difficult honorable mentions I've ever given. This is an unflichingingly violent and in substantial ways misogynistic drama dressed up as a lurid horror film.
A young boy is taken in and imprisoned for many years in the rural home of a serial killer who abducts him and his mother. The violence of several killings and the boy's imprisonment and enslavement by the killer are prominently and unflinchingly shown, but the real story is the development of their relationship and conflicts.
Despite being directed by Jennifer Lynch, critics have called it misogynist and I think they're right. The women in this film are two-dimensional and serve mostly as props to move the story of the mens' relationship along before they meet a grisly end. (Note that Lynch also directed "Boxing Helena" which people had similar complaints of misogyny about.)
At the same time, while…
Decent enough action/horror B-movie in which a small-town sheriff is caught between a military takeover and a plague of homicidal locals after a plane carrying a bioweapon goes down and infects everybody with a virus that turns them into psychopaths.
Remake of a 1973 George Romero flick. I'd really like to see the original. I can't imagine his was this much of an action flick. But this one is decently watchable, if you're in the mood for this kind of thing. Stars Timothy Olyphant.
Four youtube documentarians set out to make an amatueur rip off of "The Blair Witch Project" and fail at even that. This movie contains all the most boring "first-person shooter" found footage horror cliches, and nothing else.
Surprisingly unengaging 1970 Jack Nicholson drama about a rough-hewn, misogynistic classical-pianist-turned-oilfield-worker returning home to his family. Not much of a plot. It seems to be considered a classic but I don't know why you hear about it so often. Maybe this is one of those movies that people who like French New Wave cinema or the like.
If this isn't a cult favorite, it really should be. Pitch-black, occasionally very gory, but surprisingly fun indie flick about a down-on-their-luck punk rock band who hire a genial homeless guy to roadie for their tour so they can use his van after theirs is repossesed, but he turns out to be a flesh-eating demon.
There's absolutely no reason this movie should be as fun as it is, and yet, somehow, it is. Kind of a low-key standout for me, along the lines of other obscure indie faves like "Otis" and "The Signal" (2007) (which, BTW, the actor who plays the homeless guy/demon was in the art department for, so that's a fun connection.)
Stephen King adaptation directed by George Romero. Typical dull Stephen King adaption, only less happens. George Romero really should have hung it up after "Dawn Of The Dead", too.
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