Movie Reviews

Okay-enough dubbed-over flick about a kid getting possessed by her witchy grandma in a coma. Didn't hold my attention so well, but well-made, well acted.

Wow, talk about a flawed gem. I really like this neo-noir, which features the two most realistic 10-year-old boys I've ever seen in a movie finding an apparently abandoned cop car and going for a joy ride, attracting the attention of the corrupt sheriff whose car it is and the man he's got in the trunk. Really appealing, set deep in the windswept prairie, kind of a snowless "fargo" at least in terms of setting. The only problem: the too-recognizable-to-suspend-disbelief Kevin Bacon as the sheriff, who is, additionally, repeatedly clever enough to creatively think his way out of jams in a split second, but not clever enough to leave his cop car where two 10 year olds won't find it, or to not leave the keys sitting on the seat in plain view. But overall, despite the flaws, this picture is kind of a fave, I'm glad I caught it.…

About to get engaged to a woman he's only ever met over video chat, a man discovers when she moves in that she's attached to a homicidal conjoined twin. 100% campy, which usually isn't a good thing, but in this case it works. John Waters got famous making movies this bad and really only just barely more fun.

Pale, hoodie-wearing outcast friend-requests Alicia Debnam-Carey, who I really would have hoped had brighter prospects than this, then kills herself, after which gorgeous teens die one by one for the slimmest of reasons. As slick and terrible as you imagine a teen horror movie about Facebook would be, especially once I've told you it contains the line "Unfriend that dead BITCH!" So, you know what you're getting into. (Not to be confused with the similar Unfriended, a prior horror movie about Facebook.)

Self-consciously quirky black-and-white "Indie" film starring huge megastars. Martin Starr actually acts in this. This guy keeps dumping women after 3 months by paying a friend of his to pretend to be his mother and not get along with them, and there's some sort of thing about babies who don't grow up, which must be a metaphor. It was vaguely ok, I guess, at least not cringeworthy like these things usually totally are.

The Blair Witch Project with UFOs. Painful.

I have always found Robert Patrick to be an acquired taste, and I suppose I've acquired it. He does a little more acting than usual in this true crime thriller, which portrays the infamous 1978 Tison Gang jailbreak and murder rampage across the southwest. Definitely a little Hollywooded-up, as I have a hard time believing all the white-trash villains, lawmen, and bystanders of 1970s Arizona were uniformly so gorgeous (see Heather Graham as Tison's deluded prison-groupie wife, as well as Chris Browning playing Billy Bob Thornton playing Tison's fellow escapee, the porcine-in-real-life Randy Greenawalt, as a lean-and-mean, charismatic psychopath), but apparently it's based on a well-though-of true crime book, and the sheer sociopathy of the crimes makes it a least hold interest.

Haunted winery turns out to be something more as gorgeous ghost hunters get picked off. Why did previous owners kill themselves by stabbing themselves in the stomach? Starts out as a standard ghost story and expands to something a little more freaky and maybe even sci-fi.

zombie road picture plays like a missing episode of Walking Dead, from one of the good seasons.

gorgeous English couple buys Scotland farmhouse, so locals put on pig masks and chase them around it with axes, because, obviously, movie.

you know, for a poorly acted, no budget, poorly written, completely amateurish zero budget effort, this winds up being a halfway decent ghost story. The leads are charming and give it their all, as well.

Mexicans crossing illegally into the united states are abducted and subjected to the world's cheeziest brainwashing experiment, and the only one being conducted by Creed from "The Office".

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.

very decent creature design, a few genuine momentary scares, and a focus on my personal phobia of the dark (yep, it's true) were not enough to keep my interest in this tale of a family pursued by a fiend that can only appear in the dark, and I spent the second half of the movie being much more entertained by googling pictures of unbelievably beautiful lead actress Teresa Palmer.

Hallmark Movie Of The Week-quality telling of radium workers suing for workers' rights. A great story reduced to nothing. The '40s fashions are the only good thing about it.

[Posted on IMDB] In this terrifying true life story, two inventive filmmakers make a cursed horror movie which, although pretty decent itself, casts a foul spell that forces every lazy, terrible wannabe horror director who see it in the next 25 years to say "Hey, I could do that too" and copy it with their own inferior, deathly dull, derivative "found footage" horror attempt. Millions of bored viewer hours are wasted not being scared, Netflix is overrun with dreadfully dull "horror" films, and, in the end, the entire horror genre is nearly destroyed. Will the horror genre survive this dreadful curse? Nobody knows the end of the story. Stay tuned.

Teenagers getting picked off in the woods by zombie-type people infected with a disease... but, that said, surprisingly good, fairly original. Felt like an early-80s classic, and an ok one, not a rip-off by someone raised on those movies who loves them a little too much and thinks that's enough, as these sorts of movies often are. A pleasant surprise.

Very decent realist postapocalyptic drama. A couple tries to cope quarantined in their home after dirty bombs are set off in LA. Unfortunately the last 10 minutes or so try for a weak "twist" that proves anticlimactic, but a pretty enjoyable film up until that.

This one was good enough that I didn't realize it was part of Hulu's "Into The Dark" series, although the weak ending betrays it. It was directed by the same guy that did "I'm Just Fucking With You", the only one of the series that I really liked. Grieving father and his daughters go out to the desert in their Airstream to spread his wife's ashes. What starts off seeming like a "locals torment visitors out in the sticks" story turns out to be something much different, and nowhere near as cliche. If they had come up with a satisfactory ending, the whole thing would have really worked.

Joe Dante in "workmanlike mainstream director" mode. A woman with psychic powers is drawn in to a murder trial and followup investigation in this dirtbag rural whodunit. I find it hard to buy a town full of "rednecks" played almost entirely by recognizable A-list celebrities: Keanu Reeves, Hillary Swank, Katie Holmes, Greg Kinnear, Blake Lively, JK Simmons. I could buy maybe one or two of these people as rednecks talking with fake southern accents, but, all of them?

godawful "indie"-flick-starring-major stars I got tricked into watching by Hulu billing it as a "comedy". This movie seems to desperately want to say something, but I have no idea what that is. Kristine Froseth stars as a gorgeous childcare worker, and a virgin who had a medical hysterectomy at 15, who has a crush on the father of the boy she watches, seduces him, has an affair before getting caught, writes a fan letter to a porn star she likes, anonymously fucks a lot of guys, catches an unspecified STD, and at the end gets a video back from the porn star giving her advice to stand up for herself and avoid bad people, end of movie. Except for the "written by Lena Dunham" credit that finally explains why this well-acted-but-otherwise-completely-hollow exercise even exists.

Early Chris Pratt and some other goofy handsome guy with a bunch of minor celebrity cameos. Two guys get stuck in a magic porn booth that transports them to an alternate universe where real life is like a porn film. They actually stretch the joke for an admirably long time, and really nail some of the "porn film" acting and dialogue, including a stereotypical cop who speaks in nothing but cliches. It could have been way worse.

Daniel Radcliffe is as redeeming as possible in this based-on-a-true-story lost-in-the-jungle survival flick. Friends set off, slowly get separated, winds up being protagonist alone walking back through the wilderness towards civilization, encountering every possible obstacle along the way, including quicksand, a snake, hallucinations, you name it, in the slow-moving third act. Was a pretty good movie until it started to sag... one guy grimacing in pain, hallucinating, and talking to animals doesn't really feel like much of a plot. You gotta admit Radcliffe always gives his all to everything he does, though. And also, that aside, he somehow manages to be strikingly handsome-looking when covered with mud, which strikes me as something of an accomplishment, I guess. I couldn't do it.

Ok, no great shakes. Kind of turgid. Strange young man tries to end his own life, keeps bumping into suicidal women and in two cases takes their bodies home for a short while before burying them in his garden and moving on to the next one. Completely unengaging leading man with virtually no personality and not much drama or buildup to the story kind of leadens the whole endeavor. Also not clear why some suicidal women would be so damn chipper and engaging. It does have that woman who played the strange junkyard woman in Walking Dead, who I've always kind of liked for some reason.

Incredibly beautiful lead actress is the only conspicuous feature of this rote, by-the-numbers kids-on-vacation-in-a-haunted-house story. Oh, yeah, also, one cheap scare with what turns out to be the world’s scariest pizza delivery guy. I forgot this movie almost immediately after watching it.