Movie Reviews

like The Mothman Prophesies, except with the Jersey Devil.

Monster found in an iceberg slowly picks off crew of Bering Sea ship. Once again proves that if you find yourself in a horror movie scenario, the key to survival is outliving Lance Hendriksen.

you knew somebody was eventually going to make a movie that justified the use of the first person camera perspective. This is the one. Evil kids destroy their family, As seen through the family's home movies. Not exactly what I'd call a "serious" horror film, but entertaining.

God save us from hipsters making indie movies about themselves. You see a movie has Aubrey Plaza and Sarah Gadon, you're gonna think, "What's not to like?" Well, plenty. Another painfully "indie" movie that seems to be in love with itself, and what's worse, a movie nominally about hipsters making an indie movie, which, being a painfully indie hipster movie, is mostly a setting for them to do nothing but argue with each other and be dysfunctional, because apparently that's some sort of statement or supposed to be entertaining. The only way this movie could be less interesting is if they cut out all the irritating characters, which would leave us with a shot of an empty cabin for 90 minutes. (NB it was long after this that I discovered Plaza's also catastrophically pretentious and irritating "A Night With Beverly Luff-Linn", and began to realize she may be a warning…

Talk about an interesting failure. Starring Vincent Kartheiser, who has more charisma than Milla Jovovich, in a very slow-paced, low-budget movie where nothing is as it seems, and it's supposed to be "a mindfuck" instead of just "incoherent" and "confusing". Really well made, with some truly interesting ideas, and what would have probably been some excellent twists, if the plot hadn't been full of holes wide enough to drive a truck through and central questions hadn't been left completely unanswered. It's too bad. So close, and yet so very, very, very far. Well, it was much more interesting than "Inception", at any rate, if less sensical in terms of plot.

The kind of movie-Of-The-Week "thriller" fare that is entirely suitable as background noise, this time about a yuppie couple in debt that has their sights set on their foster kids' trust fund after offing their parents. Worth watching only to rest your eyes the incredibly beautiful Diane Lane until she dies about 2/3 through, and an incredible beautiful glass-block-and-steel house, which survives. Leelee Sobiewski plays a pretty effective mopey teen, somehow.

I found myself wondering after the first 15 minutes, "Who is this Cronenberg wannabe?" Turned out, it's Cronenberg, in "Crash"/"ExistenZ"-style disappearing-up-his-own-ass mode. It was beautiful but meh. I've been a lifelong Cronenberg fan, but sometimes it seems like he doesn't realize it takes more than a good idea and good cinematography to make a movie. Some sort of high-concept claptrap where in the future people prefer pain to sex and artists mutilate their bodies in front of audiences. I think if ExistenZ had been as well-shot and well-acted as this, people would have realized it's the better of the two movies. Which isn't saying all that much. Apparently this was very well received at Cannes, which makes me begin to suspect that Cannes is just as much of an empty circle jerk as Sundance.

I was loving this thriller for the first half. They set up one of the most despicable villains ever, and give her the ultimate hubris, as a woman who profits by taking stewardship of hapless old people, stowing them in homes, and selling their belongings, unwittingly takes what she thinks is a helpless victim with no family connections but turns out to be anything but, setting you up to see a real baddie get a delicious comeuppance.

And then, they treat her like a hero for the second half, have her go on to massive success and triumph, and have her undone not by her deeds throughout the movie, but by an almost literal "chekhov's gun" in the last 30 seconds of the movie, in what a third grader would probably think is profound poetic justice. Even the Big Baddie who she pissed off by imprisoning a woman he…

Ok, bonus points for inventing a new genre. Instead of the Rom-Com, this is a Rom-Hor (Rom-Zom?). Requiring tremendous suspension of disbelief and chock full of fridge logic and tropes made up for the sole purpose of driving the plot along, this horror-romance has a zombie regaining consciousness for no stated reason, and falling in love with a live human after absorbing memories of her by eating her boyfriend's brain. You know, it's utterly ridiculous, and I kinda enjoyed it, because it commits so hard to being what it is. Somehow they got John Malkovich for this, too, as the hard-nosed general who refuses to believe, until, in the climax, he comes to understand that a zombie can learn to love.

I spent the first half of this movie convinced that Lars von Trier had finally descended into sheer pointless brutality. And, granted, even after it drastically changes character into a completely different film by the end, and has spent a lot of time on digressions about the meaning of art, I'm still not sure "Human Centipede 2" would have been any different, if it had had the scantest of art-house pretensions and a couple of philosophical digressions. But, damn, LvT is still an incredibly talented director, and by the end, Matt Dillon's repulsive, unsympathetic performance starts to look like the role of his career. Leave it to LvT to once again, as he did with the totally unenjoyable masterpiece Antichrist, show that cinematic greatness and entertainment are not necessarily related even in passing. I just hope he'll stop trying to prove that morality isn't necessarily related either—I feel like the…

Talk about a pleasant surprise. After all this time M Night Shaymalan actually kinda pulls one off again... he seemed like a guy who thought of a good twist ending or two when he was young, then spent the entire rest of his career trying to reproduce that success, mostly without coming close. This one comes close. Not great, but certainly not bad given his many failures, better than your average crap horror movie for sure. I enjoyed it. Vacationers in tropical paradise suddenly start aging at an incredible rate. A couple of neat twists and turns worthy of any horror movie, and among his better endings. Also, unlike, say "The Sixth Sense", doesn't telegraph its punches, which is a nice change for him.

Terrible horror movie. Like a teen scream, except stars adults. A doctor sees a deranged patient kill herself in front of her, inherits a curse that makes random jump scares happen to you for no clear reason before making you kill yourself in front of someone else to pass the curse along.

I am really surprised I liked this movie, it has all the hallmarks of things I don't like, being a single-camera handheld exploration of middle-class sexual mores. But, typical of seemingly anything the name "Duplass" appears in conjnunction with, it was at least interesting. It presents a realistic scenario in which two straight friends wind up deciding to do a gay porn film together, and avoids a lot of the cliches and self-absorption that make these kinds of films often hard to tolerate. (Note: same director as the series "Little Fires Everywhere", FWIW.)

Ok, bear with me... Small-town police and citizens in the autralian outback deal with an infection of alien parasites that turn the locals homicidal, in this hybrid of "30 Days Of Night" and "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers". Now, that could go a lot of ways, most of them not so good. But, this film wisely goes the low-key, low-special effects, acting-driven route that I tend to like so well. In the third act, it does begin to pile on the special effects and devolve into an action thriller, but, hey, it sustained my interest for long enough to count as likable, and it still manages to seem fresh in some ways straight through to the end.

Review of first 90%: It's a movie called "Pooka!". What do you expect? (If you are thinking something along the lines of an Outer Limits episode, you've set your expectations right.) The lead actor does a decently frenetic job, though. appropriately cartoonish to the silly premise of an improbably popular and murderous kid's toy taking over his life, and directed far better than it deserves, which actually makes it kind of moment-by-moment gripping despite how silly the entire affair is. Review of last 10%: This movie just doesn't make any sense.

Captivity/pursuit flick. Mother and son pursued through the woods by a silent, murderous Dave Grohl for no reason. I'd run too.

Hardbitten ex-cons out of Quentin Tarantino, the kind of guy Michael Madsen is never quite convincing playing, get stuck in a hotel in backwoods Romania with a bunch of maneating, machete-weilding savages. Tough guys, guns, monsters. Now you know. Not bad, if you don't go in with any expectations, although after the chase scene stretches into its second half hour it becomes a bit tedious.

Dark Side Of The Moon: All-too-obviously-shot-on-DV B-grade sci/fi horror with too many guns that never lives up to its ultra-groovy space-rock sound track. Pointless nonsense about a gorgeous secret agent investigating a fallen satellite and a portal between a farm in serbia and the moon. I don't know who did that soundtrack, but I bet they're the most popular band in the province. Recurrent cross imagery that I guess is supposed to mean something. I hear Eastern Europeans really like the song "The Final Countdown", too.

Strange, zero-budget gore film with all the gore edited out. A gorgeous woman threatens to blackmail three gorgeous former friends who had her committed, they accidentally push her down a flight of stairs during the ensuing fight, then cut up the body with all the actual cutting offscreen, and distribute the pieces in remote parks and off cliffs, tidily in black plastic bags so you can't see them. And that's pretty much it, that's the whole movie.

A methed-up pot grower massacres some gorgeous teens camped on his land thinking that they're aliens, except, even less interesting than it sounds. (Note for Culkin-watchers: contains a Culkin.)

boring as hell drama about an unlikeable gorgeous couple doing nothing interesting in Iceland after everyone else in the world inexplicably disappears.

pretty original serial killer flick. A gorgeous investigator goes to the deep woods of England in sreach of a cryptid, only to discover she's been led there to film the attempted capture of a serial killer at his remote backwoods dumping ground. A fair handfful of really original elements to this as well as a super intense and dramatic third act. Very british in the way it concerns itself withg telling a story rather than just falling back on convention. I always dig that.