Nekrotronik
As "Buckaroo Bonzai" was to goofy sci-fi and interdimensional travel, so is Nekrotronik to the supernatural, ghosts and demons. Fun. And, it's Australian.
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Maggie (series)
The cloyingly overcute Rebecca Rittenhouse, far less effective playing a nice character than she was playing an intimidating gorgeous snob in The Mindy Project, as a convoluted, forced sitcom idea of a "psychic" who has to constantly deal (and force her friends to constantly deal) with "visions" which seem less like glimpses of the future and more like plot devices to drive dramatic developments. Never has such a good cast (Kerri Kenney Silver, Chris Elliot, Nichole Sakura nee Bloom) been so wasted on vacuous rom-com piffle.
Ride The Eagle
That charismatic guy who played Nick in "New Girl" stars pretty much by himself as a guy who has to complete a list of trivial tasks to inherit his mom's cabin (leave a nasty note for her boyfriend, call "the one who got away" and apologize, hike to her favorite spot). Which, if you find Nick from New Girl entertaining, is basically enough to justify a movie. Or, 2/3 of one, apparently, because finally they fall back on a boring, sentimental ending that seems to be there mostly because the movie did have to end at some point.
Dismissed
I'm halfway through this laughably implausible piece of shit. This movie takes itself sooooo seriously, all somber score and intense acting performances, as if it doesn't realize that a thriller about an evil mastermind high school student who apparently has the whole world cowering in terror before his evil mechinations to get straight A's would be totally absurd even if every scene didn't seem so thoroughly contrived and unrealistic. Like sure, a nice girl would act like a slut and try to come on to her teacher just because she was told by an evil genius classmate that the teacher was into her, and then, when the teacher absolutely rejects her, let the classmate dictate a love letter for her to give him that will change his mind which, just coincidentally, also happens to read exactly like a suicide note. Or, sure, a teachers wife would never, ever question why…
Fear Street, Part 1
1994: Imagine a slasher movie based on a series of popular teen novels. Ok, you've got it. Not bad for what it is, just _is_ what it is.
Sleepaway Camp
The USA-Up-All-Night-iest slasher flick ever. The rare movie that is so trashy I kinda liked it for being so bad. That doesn't happen to me much. (edit: apparently this is some sort of cult favorite that I've never heard of because I generally have no interest in trashy movies.)
Pyewacket
Another successful zero-budget Canadian horror outing of the kind that should, by all rights, have sucked, except that Canadians seems somehow good at making these little horror movies pretty effective. A disaffected teen living out in the woods with her mom summons a demon, chaos ensues. Decent acting from no-name cast. I liked it. Will watch again.
The Fourth Kind
Milla Jovovich, who must be Hollywood's least charismatic leading lady, fronts a correspondingly leaden take on ufo abductions or some such nonsense, made worse by half the movie being pretend "documentary" footage, followed or often even split-screened with "dramatic recreations" of the same scene for no adequately explained reason.
Depraved
Unfortunate title aside, this little gem is "Frankenstein" retold as a modern hipster indie film, in the best possible way, without the least bit of irony, as a brilliant medic returns from the Iraq war with the medical secret to bringing the dead back to life, partnered with the amoral scion of a pharmaceutical fortune looking to market the dream drug, if he can just find a brain for his experiment...
If I had to forgot every single indie film I've ever seen except one, this might be the one to keep. A little campy, but for this story, it kinda has to be.
I don't know where they found the guy who played the monster, he was perfectly cast, in what should probably be remembered as one of the great monster movie performances, if only because he does a perfect job of what so few movie monsters…
American Carnage
Ridiculous, hamfisted, but a charismatic cast kind of save this ridiculous attempt at making a "Get Out" for Latinos. An emergency order results in the arrest of all children of illegal immigrants, with an offer to drop all charges if they help out for three months at a creepy senior center. It only gets more ridiculous and unbelievable from there.
I Am Mother
Robot "Mother" raises human "Daughter", the supposed last human, bred to repopulate the world following an unspecified apocalypse, until Hillary Swank stumbles in from outside. I give them credit for being able to maintain interest with a cast of just 3 characters, one of whom is a robot, but there was some fridge logic. It was enjoyable, and definitely big-budget and well-made. Still, nowhere near as good as "Ex Machina", although it seemed to want to be.
The One I Love
Give it points for originality... the Duplass brothers have managed to put out another unique film. A couple heads to a rural estate for what seems like it's going to be an excruciating (for the viewer) weekend of relationship dynamics, until they discover that, each time one of them enters the backyard guesthouse, they find it occupied by an idealized doppelganger of the other, and things continue to get pleasantly weird from there. Some unfortunate fridge logic and a few predictable turns and narrative lapses don't ruin it from being somewhat entertaining, and it certainly goes a few new places. I've got a thing for clone stories, having dated a few myslf, which probably helped give this one a leg up for me.
A.M.I.
Ripped from today's headlines! A virtual assistant begins acting like a (non-diegetically) weird-looking girl's mother, soon convincing to kill everyone who's done her wrong. Basically, this is like an after-school movie, except with lower production values, and a bloodier ending.
The Gate
Kind of suprised this isn't considered a "kids horror movie" classic, a la Goonies. 1980s kids horror movie, starts off sucking pretty bad for a good bit of its length but eventually goes so far over the top it lands in "so bad it's good" country. The special effects and creature are noticeably good for claymation.
Most Horrible Things (“Love Hurts”)
Terribly edited movie in which a dead ringer for Prince invites a bunch of gorgeous 20somethings to his mansion to smugly torture them psychologically into killing each other with his investigative knowledge of their pasts and incredible insight into their character flaws, driving them to murder, interspliced with clips of Prince's ensuing interrogation by gorgeous police detectives.
Cadaver
effective cinematography and performances save what could have been pretty middling. A norwegian film with voiceovers that manage not to be as distrating as overdubs usually are, in which a postapocalyptic millionnaire invites the starving public to his hotel for a show where layer upon layer of deception unfold. Could have gone either way, but I liked it.
In The Flesh
Holy cow. Highly original and typically British take on the zombie genre — but played as completely as a drama, not horror or action. Takes place after a cure has been found, as the first to be cured try to reintegrate into their families in a small English village. Very well done. Leave it to the BBC to find a way to bend the tropes of the zombie genre into a completely serious, adult, well-acted drama. If anything at all about that sentence sounds interesting to you, it's worth checking out.
Super Dark Times
What a disappointment. Starts off beautifully, and initially is one of the most cinematically realistic portrayals of ordinary teenagers I think I've seen, up until the point where roughhousing with a sword results in an accidental death. At that point I was still loving it and expecting to love it all the way through. Then what could have been an exploration of the aftermath basically goes nowhere, as the accidental killer starts killing others for no reason, until he gets caught, and the movie just ends. The realism holds up throughout, which is nice, but in terms of plot there's no there there. The body of the first victim is never even discovered, there's no conequences, no development, no reason given, nothing.
Contracted
A small film, but one I like. Woman contracts strange degenerative disease that causes her body to decay. One of those ones you can't say too much about without giving it away, but takes an unusual spin on some things. Doesn't feel like much as you're watching it, but satisfyingly adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
John Dies At The End
A critic called this "a very interesting failure", and that's about right. This time- and dimension-hopping adventure wants really badly to be a cult classic somewhere between "Donnie Darko" and "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure", and doesn't quite rise to that level, but, almost. It's pretty entertaining. I like it, have watched it a few times, and will probably watch it again.
A Vanishing On 7th St.
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…
Zombie Massacre
gorgeous, square jawed mercenaries be macho, occasionally face-off against zombies. More testosterone than any other zombie flick.
Plague
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.
Overtime
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.
Hunter Hunter
Family of trappers living in the wilderness, Dad and daughter are into it, Mom's maybe getting tired of it, when a wolf starts raiding their trap line, and to say any more would spoil it. Rack up one more above-average flick for the Canadians. What starts off seeming like "wilderness family gets threatened by natural or unnatural monster" veers off into becoming a seriously dark backwoods noir that only very slowly builds to where it's going. It's far from perfect—sags in the middle a bit, and feels a little like something was left on the cutting room floor somehow—but, draws on Canada's apparently abundant pool of oddly engaging unknown actors, and manages to develop into something fairly original. Could be a low-key cult classic. By the very end, it tilts full-on into gore, but only at the very end, and by being somewhat demure up until that point—such as only…
The Dark Tapes
As a horror movie fan, you have to learn to stomach bad movies and look for the good in them, because there are a lot of bad horror movies out there. You wind up sitting through anthology films (gack) or identically-tedious found-footage films (retch). Even so, rarely do I just turn a movie off halfway through because I just can't believe sitting through any more of it would be less boring than virtually anything else I could think of to do with my time.
I turned this one off halfway through.
The two worst conceits amateur horror directors rely on, anthologies and "found footage" tripe, exacerbated by truly lame stories, stilted acting, and the most amateurish (lack of) production values I've ever seen. Ok, your video editing software has a "video camera messing up" preset. Ok. We've seen it now. Move on.
Seriously. There's just nothing in this movie…
Silver Linings Playbook
This movie is weirder and more artificial than any sci-fi movie I've ever seen. I mean, it's not that I didn't like it, just, like, I'm supposed to want to watch a thing about these unrealistically charismatic, goodlooking "troubled" people, or a world where Jennifer Lawrence introduces herself to the worst bad-news guy by offering him no-strings-attached sex just for eyeballing her for a moment, and insists she hates football and then pulls out a whole season's worth of football stats just when it's needed to win over Robert DeNiro and advance the plot? Hollywood types playing "working class porn", with surprisingly effective grit, obviously meticulously fabricated by hollywood's premier grit fabricators. Totally well executed, well-acted bullshit, set in a world where nobody is just dumb or ugly, where even the background characters look like Julia Stiles. Reminds me of "Love Story" in that way. Does anybody really buy the…
Unsane
surprisingly not-actually-that-bad thriller about a thoroughly unlikeable woman committed against her will in an institution where one of the attendants may be her former stalker... or she may be insane. Decent acting saves a script full of fridge logic. Turns out, this was Steven Soderbergh, slumming it I guess.
Rust Creek
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.