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Movie Reviews

Triangle

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…

Movie Reviews

YellowBrickRoad

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…

Movie Reviews » Canadian

What Keeps You Alive

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.]

Movie Reviews » WAY too indie

Horse Girl

Alison Brie as a young woman falling over the edge into complete psychotic breakdown in a painfully indie film that even Alison Brie as a young woman falling over the edge into complete psychotic breakdown can't make interesting. Duplass Brothers project, meaning it's not totally uninteresting, but in this case they save it all for the third act and by that time I'd lost interest.

Movie Reviews

Antrum

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.

Movie Reviews

Killing Hasselhoff

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.

Movie Reviews

Lights Out

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.

Movie Reviews

The Blair Witch Project

[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.

Movie Reviews

Feral

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.

Movie Reviews

Right At Your Door

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.

Movie Reviews

Into The Dark “They Come Knocking”

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.

Movie Reviews

The Gift (2000)

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?

Movie Reviews

Sharp Stick

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.

Movie Reviews

Flight 7500

Decent enough haunted plane movie. Takes forever to get going. Guy dies mysteriously on a plane, and haunted hell brakes loose. Lots of fridge logic but creepy enough in the moment. Last 2 minutes make no sense at all but fortunatly it's pretty much wrapped up by then. Amy Smart and Leslie Bibb.

Movie Reviews

Cop Car

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.…

Movie Reviews

Conjoined

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.

Movie Reviews

Friend Request

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.)

Movie Reviews

Infinity Babies

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.

Movie Reviews

The Last Rampage

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.

Movie Reviews

Altergeist

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.

Movie Reviews

The Poltergeist of Borley Forest

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.

Movie Reviews

Howl

Captivity werewolf flick, but sort of a cut above, a little. People trapped on a derailed train in the English countryside in a new take on the werewolf tale from the creator of The Descent.

As might be suggested by that last bit, good direction makes it overall slightly better than it might have been... Actually very decent for what it is, fairly well-done and original for a monster movie, I liked it.

Not an A, definitely a 'B' picture, but kind of a 'B+' one. Pretty grisly, but a movie like this kind of needs to be.

Movie Reviews

Into The Dark “Culture Shock”

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".

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

The Sand

Starts off like it's going to be an unbearably annoying first-person shooter, but if you forward past the first 5 minutes it's not. Kids wake up hungover after a beach party to discover the sand has turned carnivorous... basically, "The Raft" from "Creepshow 2", with a beach instead of a lake. That rare actual "good bad movie". I liked it well enough to actually watch it again after a few months.

Don't get me wrong. It's a bad "teen scream" monster movie. But I like it.

Plus they got Jamie Kennedy to do what he does best: play a brief cameo as some random asshole who appears out of nowhere.