All the cringeworthy, painful embarrassment* of 90210 and sheer greasy self-involved repugnance of Sex And The City. Halfway through the first episode I was gripped by a paralyzing fear that outside my life and your life, the world actually is really like this. (*until you add Chris O'Dowd. And then it actually exceeds the cringeworthy, painful embarrassment of 90210.)
Not a bad one. That guy who was one of the McPoyle Brothers who's everywhere now goes to his country home and gets tormented for past crimes by a cover of witches. It's still "Into The Dark", but it's an ok one, with exceptional costume design.
Another vaguely quasi-entertaining "V/H/S" film. I will say that save for Blair Witch this may be the only first-person-shooter where it didn't grate on me within the first 15 minutes. A couple of mildly effective shorts in here, directed at least well enough for some jump scares: a film crew does a documentary of a cult on a day when they happen to be committing mass suicide and summoning the devil, a house full of kids has some extraterrestrial visitors, and, bonus points for the creative idea of a pretty stock zombie short, but with the main zombie being a cyclist who died with a running GoPro on his helmet, so the entire zombie attack is seen from a zombie's-eye-view.
Netflix Original. Evil pharma company markets a new antidepressant that just happens to be made from a virus that was bioengineered as a military weapon, but it's ok, because it only turned the test rats into zombies at 20,000 times the suggested dose. What could go wrong? I was actually slightly disappointed because it was cancelled.
Vacationing couple is held captive in a high-tech vacation house where a mysterious booming voice forces them to learn etiquette. Vaguely tries to do for gender politics what "Get Out" did for race politics, and fails pretty badly.
A good film which emphatically does not seem at all like it's going to be a good film. What starts out seeming like a run-of-the-mill b-movie cheap shit thriller about disappearing kids and an urban legend about "the tall man" who abducts children in a Pacific Northwest town turns out to be something quite a bit better than that. I wouldn't give it an A, but it's a solid B+, an actual story with a genuine plot, and definitely winds up original rather than the derivative, cliched rehash it really, really seems initially like it's going to turn out to be. I'm probably a little more enamored with how it fooled me into lowering my expectations than I ought to be, but, I am. It doesn't happen that often.
Quiet post-apocalyptic zombie drama finds Martin Freeman carrying his baby through an australian wasteland full of carrion and infected people, with an aboriginal girl in tow. Not even really a horror movie or thriller, just a drama. Martin Freeman gives a quiet, intense performance that's a credit to him, having adventures and misadventures trying to find somewhere safe to bring his child. Worked for me. Wikipedia says it's a tribute to The Road and I can see it.
(not to be confused with the excellent 2007 horror anthology film of the same name) Boring-as-wallpaper hipsters track a hacker through the desert or something and wind up getting held prisoner and questioned interminably in Area 51. If the this film had been as interesting all the way through as it started to get in its third act, instead of two acts of turgid indie tedium first, and then kept going, I probably would have thought it was pretty good.
Empty, banal torture/capitivity porn. Male victim this time, english moors this time. Yawn.
Turgid pacing in the first half nearly kills this sci-fi outing. An acceptable second half, with truly beautiful visuals, is still not quite strong enough to be worth waiting for. An alcoholic who resembles my long-lost friend Greg Van Ness is selected by a scientist to save the world from an incoming gamma ray burst by first having mind control devices implanted into him, and goading him (much too slowly) into an accident that gives him god-like powers. I googled afterwards, turns out this is the first directorial outing from a guy who did visual effects on a bunch of big, cosmic superhero movies. Makes sense. The VFX are great. He should do music videos.
As Kat Dennings's likeability is to Jay Baruchel's, and Los Angeles is to Vancouver, so is Dollface to Man Seeking Woman. Which is to say, it's pretty good, entertaining enough.
Had opportunity to re-watch this, and you know, I like this movie. Not sure what I can say that hasn't already been said. Meryl Streep in an iconic performance she modeled partly on Clint Eastwood's ability to command attention by speaking softly, plus Anne Hathaway, who to me has always been an entertaining-enough sort of "everyperson" actress, one of very few prominent stars you see regularly who isn't annoyingly Hollywood-y. A refreshing example of how you can make movies with female casts that are emphatically not chick-flicks, and pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, all without preaching, moralizing or ever forgetting that the main objective is just to be a good movie. Now if they could just make these about something besides the fashion industry.
Chris Pine and Piper Perabo in an alright post-viral-apocalyptic road pic where everybody who's not in hazmat suits is gorgeous, if you like post-viral-apocalyptic road pics or Chris Pine or Piper Perabo or films where everybody who's not in hazmat suits is gorgeous.
Basically, "Open Water" but on the ocean floor instead of the surface, and without Open Water's hints of artistry, but it's still well done enough to pass muster if this sort of thing is your cup of tea, which it is mine. If you enjoy these kinds of bare-bones survival thrillers, you'll enjoy this alright. I did.
First-time director Bob Odenkirk loads this calculatedly "relatable" movie with shaky, out-of-focus handheld camerawork; "artistic" effects like illustrating a character telling an anecdote with a flashback consisting only of still photos or shot a different film stock; and, star cameos in every bit part—all with the end goal of recreating the experience of a bunch of unbearable people making overly earnest, "revealing" conversation much too loudly at the next restaurant table, right in the comfort of your own living room. By the time some sort "plot twists" revealing the surprise illicit relationships between the characters came around, I had long since stopped caring. I like Bob Odenkirk, hopefully he's gotten this out of his system and will get back to something entertaining.
Emma Roberts and Kiernan Shipka in a movie so slow and boring that it slid right past my brain. Something about a girl stuck in a boarding school over recess and another hitching a ride, and they stab people at the end. Guys, it takes more than a creepy score all by itself to sustain a movie. Reading a review, it turns out both actresses are supposed to be the same character. Kind of emblematic of how this movie doesn't accomplish anything at all. (LOL, only after writing this did I discover that this is the same director as "I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House", another other movie that I once wrote I couldn't remember soon after seeing it.)
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.]
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.
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