Movie Reviews

A girl's car breaks down on a rural backroad, and gets menaced by the locals, who chase her through the woods and hide her car... from there, though, instead of turning into a run-of-the mill pursuit/captivity flick, it turns out to be a very decent backwoods neo-noir thriller, somewhere between "Breaking Bad" and "Ozark". I liked it, much to my surprise, given the setup. I wondered what an apparent "woman gets victmized by the backwoods locals" flick was doing in Netflix's "Hidden Gems" section, but, turns out, even if it's not what I would necessarily call a "must see", it does belong there.

Megan Fox in what starts off looking like a disturbingly brutal captivity pic, as her husband decides to punish her for infidelity by driving her out to their remote lakehouse under pretext of a romantic evening but then handcuffs her to himself and kills himself, turns into actually kind of decent neo noir as he apparently also called hitmen/jewel thieves to come rob the place and kill her.

Here's a twist... A pretty crappy thriller that actually sucks until a pretty good twist ending. Young girl moves into an apartment complex in LA, where the neighbors turn out to be just a little bit possessive & controlling.

Once again Rob Zombie shows that if he could write as well as he can direct, he'd be the horror equivalent of Quentin Tarantino. This movie is visually gorgeous in many places. Just bring a walkman. Basically an excuse to string together a bunch of episodic vignettes of grotesque violence.

Man with a boat goes crazy in a fairly boring way.

Eli Roth, once again showing his ability to waste his more than adequate filmmaking skills on torture porn the sake of nothing but torture porn, technically well-done but with nothing to actually redeem it beyond the extent to which you enjoy obscenely unflinching brutality, and no originality, only novelty in persuit of the same, just a masterful abilty at repeating the exact sort of think he's seen before, tweaked just enough to be a different movie. Even the name is ripped off from a device used in the genuine gore classic "Cannibal Holocaust". Plus, despite showing the most graphic violence imaginable, he studiosly avoids showing so much as a nipple during this films more than an hour of showing "amazonian natives" running wild. I have to imagine there's an x-rated cut of this floating around somewhere, and honestly, I'd respect that more than this. You want to be genuinely transgressive,…

Talk about a disappointment. For about 85% of its running length, this jump-out-and-say-boo ghost story about a young widow mourning her husband's recent suicide in the lake house he built manages to stay better than average by mostly avoiding familiar tropes and plot twists and slowly ratcheting up the weirdness with a minimum of special effects or exposition, or even ever tipping its hand as to whether the haunting is actually happening. Then, in the very final scenes, whatever forces often conspire to take middling horror pictures and ruin them by jettisoning sense and writing in favor of overly familiar tropes, sentimentality, and special effects packs as much of all that into the last few scenes as they normally do into a whole movie, and completely undo everything that was good about it up to that point before concluding with an ending that neither satisfies nor even makes much sense.…

TV-movie-quality throwaway flick about a woman whose daughter gets bit by a rattlesnake out in the desert, and is helped by a strange old woman in a nearby trailer which vanishes afterwards. Later, mysterious strangers tell her she must take a soul for the one that has been saved, otherwise the kid's fatal injury will revert, and she must do it before sunset, because, movie, obviously. Eventually she kills someone and her kid is safe. Who was that old woman? What strange power is behind this ordeal? It doesn't matter, and it'd better not, because we never find out.

You know, this one wasn't bad. Like, you have some time to kill, you wanna watch a horror movie, there's nothing good on, this one is alright. Young "boy in a bubble"'s parents take him to a doctor's creepy old clinic in the woods for a gene therapy cure. Haunted house story with lots of familiar tropes, until you discover they found a fairly original way to put a million familiar pieces together. Don't think I'd watch it a second time, but don't mind having watched it a first. (Oh, I gotta add: It has one special effect that is like my favorite horror special effect I've ever seen. It's very quick, but it's something I genuinely have never seen before. So, no spoilers, but there's one quick thing in there I had to stop the video, roll it back, and watch again.)

It's getting tough to do a fresh take on the zombie outbreak picture, but this Korean film does an alright job. The slightly low, non-Netflix-TV-episode-quality production values are really the only thing marring this tale of people trapped in their apartments during a zombie apocalypse. I liked it.

Movie-of-the-week level thriller about a woman whose protective new boyfriend turns out to be her deranged cousin trying to have her for himself. Oops, gave away the ending. Now you don't have to watch it.

Lance Hendriksen takes his family icefishing, unaware that a "creature from the black lagoon"-type obvious-and-clearly-shown-man-in-a-costume monster lurks below the surface, waiting to kill everyone up to and including Lance Hendriksen, once again proving that outliving LK is the key to survival.

Intolerable YouTube star goes to participate in an Escape Room in Russia. I enjoyed this movie way more than I had any reason to. It had so many of the hallmarks of a terrible movie: overgorgeous cast of hipsters, obsession with social media including perspective of livestream with chat comments and "likes" scrolling by, entirely predictable "twists and turns" obvious derivatives of past movies ("The Game" and pick-your-Eli-Roth-movie.) And yet, it was a way more enjoyable view than it had any right to be. I dunno, the director just knows how to build suspense or something. I actually found it entertaining despite all those flaws.

Picture this: Cloverfield, except, half a world away, Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis are in a romantic comedy, and it turns out that the giant monster is just duplicating their movements. For real. Ok, I give them some credit for the sheet audacity of trying to make romcom monster movie, but not much more than that.

what looks like it's going to be a survival flick about a gorgeous couple lost in the woods pursued by a psycho slasher turns out to be a survival flick about a gorgeous couple lost in the woods pursued by a rabid bear. Somewhere between "The Long Weekend", except with vacationing backcountry hikers instead of vacationing beach campers and minus the ominous hint of the supernatural, and "Open Water", except with vacationing backcountry hikers instead of vacationing scuba divers and minus the morbidly poetic execution.

Darkness descends on the world in the form of an unexplained momentary global black out, during and after which everybody standing in a dark enough area spontaneously disappears from their clothes, rapture style, for unexplained reasons. Random voices are heard in the darkness, fresh batteries randomly start dying in minutes, and the sun stops rising, also for unexplained reason, until a couple of children survive for unexplained reasons until the sun starts coming up again for unexplained reasons. Occasional vaguely creepy SFX as people turn into shadows, darkness assumes vague, half-seen human forms, and random voices, possibly of dead people, echo in the darkness — which are all diminished by the rest of the time, when the creeping darkness and "shadow people" just look totally like fake animation effects. Starts Not Mark Wahlberg (Hayden Christensen) as Mark Wahlberg's character, and Not Halle Berry (the uncharacteristically disappointing, over-histrionic Thandie Newton) as…

gorgeous, square jawed mercenaries be macho, occasionally face-off against zombies. More testosterone than any other zombie flick.

Australian woman survives intrigue and lust on abandoned farm in post-zombie-apocalyptic drama with even fewer zombies than Here Alone. Drama, not a horror film.

This post-Tarantino crime drama-to-zombie alien horror flick-to-crime drama is as amateurish and crappy as it gets, total grade-Z, but miraculously is saved by the raw charisma of pretty much *everybody* in it. It's like they got the most charismatic Z-grade actors in the entire country all together for one shitty film. Surprised Linnea Quigley isn’t in it, if that gives you any idea.

Pretty effective thriller. Two couples (including Alison Brie and that weird looking kid from Shameless with the sort of bulbous face that proves there's a "handsome uncanny valley" halfway between normal-looking and The Elephant Man) rent an oceanside airbnb from a vaguely threatening, racist dude. There's an affair going on between two of the couples, and someone finds a camera in a showerhead, and yet somehow it manages to build suspense slowly, and turns out to be be much better and less formulaic than it initially seems like it's going to be. Only problem is it finally turns from a suspense film into a slasher film. But that's only at the end, and until then it's pretty good, and after the carnage it then continues on to a decent ending where a slightly less less ambitious movie would have just stopped. One does wonder, though, if it was necessary to…

Remake of an 80s horror flick I'm sure I saw and would probably remember if it was worth it. Remake was entertaining enough, about as much of a horror movie as "Odd Thomas" was. But a fun-enough supernatural horror/comedy/action movie, with some good special effects, and decent actors like Colin Farrell and David Tennant. Apparently Spielberg helped with the editing, which makes sense, and it probably helped to have Buffy The Vampire Slayer producer Marti Noxon involved too, bringing forward a few things she already knew how to do very well.

Once you know the movie description starts with "A pregnant couple's car breaks down in the woods so they seek help at a nearby farmhouse" you know what you're in for. All the quaint English charm and gorgeous shots of the rural English countryside in the world can't save this sadistic, wholly unnecessary captivity flick.

Had no idea what this was going into it. Listed as a 'documentary', what starts off seeming like one of the best one-man shows I've ever seen basically turns into a pretty good magic show. Less than the sum of its parts, and leans a little hard on trying to be poetic and hit emotional beats when it's really just magic tricks, but I did enjoy most of those parts a whole lot, and the tricks are definitely somewhere between good and, at their best, great.

Amateurish film somehow turns into kinda decent low key thriller. Over-energetic hipster girl moves in with eccentric sound-recordist and possible pervert, and get involved in the case of a neighborhood girl gone missing. It was alright, in its way.