Movie Reviews

English film. Girl hired to be caretaker for invalid at dark, scary haunted house runs around dark, scary house being scared of ghosts. Not bad for that.

Madeline Brewer (OITNB, Handmaid's Tale, Cam) seems to only pick somehow above-average, if not great, projects. This movie about a hiker stumbling on a couple of rednecks living in the wilds off the Appalachian trail was much more decent than I expected. Rather than being a run-of-the-mill thriller, it actually had a story to tell. Not a great story, but a good one, and more of one than a lot of movies nowadays.

Surprisingly alright buddy road trip pick that isn't really the stupid slapstick comedy it looks like it's going to be. Episodic slice of life as pair of travelers are thrown together, and get in and out of various trouble on their way actoss the southwest. Jason Mantouzakis does his usual thing, but somehow manages not to be overbearing.

Jake Gyllenhaal as a guy who discovers an actor who looks just like him. They seduce each other's partners, then one of the women turns into a giant spider. Not sure how something this arch and pretentious could simultaneously be this boring and uneventful. It's like nothing happens in this movie. Memo to all directors aside from David Lynch and David Cronenberg: You can't be David Lynch or David Cronenberg. You just can't.

Kyle McLachlan actually turns in a kind of intense performance in the most contrived drama I've ever seen. In a town where everybody is apparently always as big a dick as possible to everybody they meet — apparently solely as a means to create dramatic tension — society cinematically falls completely apart when there's an ordinary blackout, as gun store owners raise prices 300%, people start looting, threatening, and shooting at each other. Strong performances make this enjoyable despite the ridiculous premise (and strange saturated color palette for what wants desperately to be a very bleak drama.)

This starts with a premise that could go either way: a group of teens go to find a teacher who disappeared into a cave, to discover time flows differently inside the cave than out. In this case, it goes the right way, and instead of becoming a predictable thriller, it keeps bringing in new ideas, ending up unexpectedly far afield from where it started, and in an enjoyable & engaging way. Worked for me. Would watch again, eventually.

Decent drama/thriller starring Bradley Cooper as a down-on-his-luck writer who gets access to a drug that allows him to use 100% of his brain capacity, and his subsequent business and political ascent. Between him and De Niro in a supporting role, pretty watchable.

Death as entertainment. Dee Wallace in what looks like an interesting, quirky setup — a family full of characters gathers in a rural house for Christmas when the monstrous son they didn't know the mother tried to abort 20 years ago, and she didn't know survived, shows up — devolves into a fairly by the numbers captivity/everybody-gets-killed-one-by-one-and-hardly-any-plot-besides-that splatterfest. A woman gets cut in half vertically down the center with a single axe swing, another gets an umbrella run clean through her head and then opened, if those give you any idea. Is Dee Wallace this hurting for work?

Surprisingly entertaining spoof retelling of Watergate scandal, based around the supposition that "Deep Throat" was two 15-year-old girls.

okay Aussie haunted house tale. Three researchers in an empty house tape recording things that go bump in the night. Pretty slow to get where it's going, doesn't aim high, but ultimately it's alright.

"Jurassic Park", except with zombies instead of dinosaurs, as things go wrong for a group of gorgeous tourists at a resort where you can go on safari to kill the sole remaining zombies after humanity recovers from an undead pandemic. Likable final girl and decent cinematography and action sequences make it marginally watchable, but still kind of a proof of the rule that the more guns a "horror" movie has the less worth watching it is. By the time there's explosions, you're already well expecting that at some point there are going to be explosions. And, ok, the very ending is good. I'll give them that.

Kind of like "Weeds", except instead of being the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban pot dealer, it's the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban zombie. Other than that, pretty much the same. Drew Barrymore gets less annoying as she matures, and it's about time that that guy who briefly guested as the only competent sales rep at Dunder Mifflin got a leading role.

Adequate direction saves this overwrought, poorly-thought out, nonsensical attempt at a thriller from being a complete crapfest. Instead it's just mostly a crapfest. Jim Carrey is actually alright at keeping a (mostly) straight face but the movie still seems to somehow have a touch of his usual mania in the way it tries to contort and surprise but instead just ends up confusing.

Inventive anthology. Lots of creepy unexplained shit, and Maria Olsen playing it straight for once. Fun, pretty original, I liked it.

this entry in the already crowded “gorgeous lone female cop works the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good" genre features a gorgeous lone female cop working the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good. Random "scary" stuff happens which eventually turns out to be related to the on-site suicides of a poorly-explained, poorly-acted Manson Family type cult. Essentially, "1408" in a police station.

A Black Crowes album to Texas Chainsaw's "Exile On Main St." Not "Amorica", either, although perhaps their second best one.

Saw this movie a few days ago and I have already forgotten it.

Of course the lone hick has tunnels and a torture dungeon under his junkyard trailer. Kids planning the next columbine cross paths with him to a post-punk soundtrack. Stylish enough, I suppose, with a few inventive elements for what it is.

One of those pictures that keeps latter-day John Cusack working. A post-AI-apocalype adventure aimed at the pre-Hunger Games set, as well as probably a paltry stab at a franchise or TV pilor, featuring a gorgeous heroine and a robot who thinks he's human trying to reach a promised human utopia. Good special effects but that's about it. So, a computer thought wiping out humanity was the solution to the worlds problems? Revolutionary! How in the world did they come up with that?

Woman returns to her hometown where everybody acts creepy, because, movie. Also a demented ice cream man drives around randomly killing people because, movie. Sucked.

what neo-noir is when made by people who don't realize that neo-noir is about relationships, not just torture porn with some obligatory criminal double-crosses and complications to serve as background for the torture scenes.

High-concept picture in which terminally ill people can, in the near future, clone themselves to ease their family's suffering—but, if they turn out not to be terminally ill, must duel their clone to the death. Enter Karen Gillan in that situation, who then spends the first half of the picture watching her clone steal her entire life and the second half training for the duel. Much better than that silly premise makes it sound... not great, but if it had been a Black Mirror episode, it would have been one of the better ones. I'm surprised I liked it but I kinda did. This kind of familiar ground is hard to get right but I could maybe see this become a low-key cult favorite.

Less-charismatic Ed Helms stand-in Nat Faxon and my former celebrity crush Judy Greer make marriage look absolutely unbearable and totally unrewarding, plus cure me of my celebrity crush on Judy Greer.

Irish film. Crew on a fishing boat battles an infection of seamonster-borne parasites. Not bad, these sorts of things can be done alright, especially if they're done far away from Hollywood.

Anyone who has ever worked a dreadfully dull, bottom-rung office Admin Assistant job for uncaring, disrespectful employers will already be familiar with this movie, and ask themselves why they relived it, and nothing more than that, by watching this. How they got that great actress who played Ruth on Ozark to sign on to this plotless tedium is beyond me.

sometimes it's a fine line between great and terrible, and this remake (of a 1964 film I haven't scene) does the rare job of staying on the right side of it by remaining consistently over-the-top enough to be enjoyably terrible instead of just terribly terrible. The cliched opening, douchebags on their way to Daytona for spring break get lost and wind up in a small backwoods town full of bizarre murderous locals, made it seem like it was bound to be terrible, and I can't say it wasn't, but I nonetheless enjoyed it for what it was. Somebody really loved and understood vintage terrible horror movies and did an admirable job recreating their terribleness, and managed to keep it cliched without making it tediously derivative. Robert Englund chews the scenery, which is about what you want him there to do, I guess.

Continuing the tradition of pretty good thrillers set in elevators, two young professionals are the last to leave the building before a long weekend when the elevator breaks down. Alright, entertaning enough... starts slow but builds pretty effectively. Plays out well as a drama, and some unexpected poetic moments in the third act. ... Ok, wow, turns out this, too, is part of "Into The Dark". Definitely the best one of the series, by far. Much better activing, production values, pacing, everything. Like a real movie. (Edit: in a recurring theme for things I think are slightly better installments of ongoing franchises, turns out this was widely panned. I have no idea why.)