Movie Reviews

Anthology horror. Not that well written, mostly just stories leading up to an often predictable "gotcha" or "surprise" twist and not plot-driven enough to bother follow the narrative any further than that to explore what happens, but surprisingly alright, mostly due to a reliance on character instead of gore and a pretty good cast turning in strong performances. Dylan Baker is the bright spot of the first and worst of the four stories; Samm Levine turns in the most solid acting I think I've ever seen from him; and Tony Todd ("Candyman", I've seen him a million times but never caught his name) turns in a touching performance as the husband of a terminally ill woman. Each story is slightly better than the last; overall I actually liked it.

"The Lost Boys" was better.

WTF is this? It was billed as a horror movie, and 13 minutes into it, we've had he-men with huge biceps and crewcuts running around shooting guns, getting into a barfight, drinking shots of whiskey, and having a sex scene with a woman who looks like a bleached, hyperinflated, airbrushed playboy centerfold, and some of the all-around worst USA-Up-All-Night-quality acting I've ever seen. In the first 13 minutes. I give this flick about 2 more minutes and then I'm done. (Ok, right after typing that some sort of apocalyptic alarms started going off and a monster appeared outside his door and now he's freaking out. Ok, I'll give it a little while.)
Ok, very shortly I'm glad I stayed with it. Thi smight be one of those rare "so bad it's good" movies that really is so bad it's good. He spends the rest of the time trapped in…

Starts out as a documentary about a complicated performer, and turns into a documentary about the complications of making a documentary about a complicated performer. Good, and the events that unfolded in trying to make the documentary are amusing, but lump this in with "Catfish" in the "documentaries that must've sounded really good on paper, but never get somewhere quite as interesting as they promise to" category.

A hitman transporting a body on Halloween is mistaken for a partygoer in a Halloween costume. 20somethings wind up with the body and he wants it back. Truthfully, this movie was background noise while I was working on other things, and every time I looked up, it appeared to be fairly entertaining, until the third act, which appeared to be mostly a gory chase scene with the hitman pursuing the kids across the city to retreive the body.

Boy, what to say about this. Father says he wants a divorce, mom blows her brains out, six months later father brings kids & new fiance up to his remove fishing lodge and leaves them there in the dead of winter. Two acts of sheer, drawn-out boredom as the kids and new fiance first fail to get along, then come to believe they've died and are stuck in the house, lead into one of the most emotionally cold, cruel, brutal third acts I've ever seen. Can't exactly say it's a bad movie, but can't imagine who would ever find this entertaining. Not many movies have made me actually feel bad, but this one did.

Comedy based on real-life armored car heist caper. Zack Galiafinakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Jason Sudeikis, Sharon Jones, Joe Lo Truglio, and many more. With that many big comedy names in one movie, how could it be funny? Answer: it can't. It's mildly amusing, yeah. At moments. But that's the best I can say for it.

Unknowning damned souls board a tourist bus in Holland that strands them by a windmill where the spirit of an ancient miller drags them to hell. 2010's version of the kind of forgettable B movie that Vincent Price could have saved nicely, had he been in it. But he's not. Nice twist on convention at the very end, though, as Final Girl doesn't make it. Don't worry, that's not spoiling anything—you don't need to see this.

Julia Stiles and husband move to South America and encounter some sort of ancient supernatural tradition claptrap surrounding their young daughter. Paced like a political thriller. Political thrillers aren't scary.

Maybe the only shitty, no-budget Troma-studios-level bad indie gore flick I've ever truly enjoyed. An abandoned building full of junkies and lunatic squats comes down with a psycho virus and kills each other in ridiculous ways. But, talk about an A+ for effort. Can't put my finger yet on what made this one so different but I sincerely like it. Managed to stay far enough away from cliches to be entertaining, I guess. Or maybe the director is real good, or something. Didn't go over the top in the usual ways, but found new, entertaining ways to go over the top instead.

as close to being a good movie as captivity/torture porn ever gets. Women menaced by hitchhiker drives car of edge of highway, becomes trapped inside for days as he periodically returns to torture her, mostly psychologically.

Set in a strange alternate reality where remote southern swamps are entirely populated by Brooklyn hipsters with trilby hats and bicep tattoos, this short's-worth-of-plot-stretched-to-feature-length shows a hipster couple living in a big old house in a remote southern swamp, when she suddenly disappears and he begins being visited nightly by an unexplained monster. After she returns, the monster disappears, causing him to be mocked by all their friends until the unexplained monster unexplainedly appears inside the house and attacks him in front of all of them at a dinner party, and he finally kills it, after which he proposes to her, all of which I guess is supposed to mean something, maybe. To stretch this to feature length, we're treated by very lengthy passages of what hipsters find most entertaining: long conversations working through their hipster relationship, and bantering at their hipster dinner party. I do give them credit for…

Another strange, utterly cheap-looking film that looks like it was filmed on an iPhone and is basically utter shite, with virtually no plot, one set, or character depth. A bunch of people are chased around an underground storage facility by an unexplained monster for an hour and a half and either disappear withpout explanation, are killed, or are "possessed" and become evil without explanation. And yet, somehow, it manages to be consistently pretty tense and scary. Good date movie. I counted my blessings, though: after all, this could've been shot as a first-person found footage film. I actually might watch this again.

Sort of typical of how Hulu has a lot of horror movies that are not necessarily that good, but nonetheless interesting. Despite the cliched title, a fairly original spin on the "things go wrong for vacationers on the road out in desolate area" thriller genre, as 4 australians kids in the outback encounter a really bad truck. What looks like it's going to be a slasher film doesn't become one, as there's no slasher. Never-quite-explained supernatural hijinx ensue.

Finally! A movie in which masked psychos pursue and and kill a family out in the sticks (this time in a trailer park) for no given reason, until finally only the daughter, who one might perhaps term the "final girl", escapes! It's about time! No, seriously, this movie is exactly what you'd expect, but, for what it is, it's not actually that tedious. It goes over the top enough to be entertaining and a little surreal, such as a kill in a pool lit only by garish neon palm trees while "Total Eclipse Of THe Heart" plays over the loudspeaker just because rural masked psychos apparently enjoy imparting a sense of cinematography to their kills, plus an over-the-top final villain who keeps coming after having his truck blown up with him sitting in it, chasing the final girl across a conveniently placed rustic bridge in a flaming pickup truck, collapsing…

[submitted to IMDB] I don't know if I've ever given a movie just a single star before. But this is easily the single worst movie I've ever seen. I wish I could give it the 0 it deserves. Somebody must have bought votes because I cannot believe a film with literally no plot beside people torturing each other got 5.7 stars organically.
For no reason that is ever explained, a millionaire with a very annoying cackle invites financially desperate people over for a "Game" that might solve their financial problems, only to discover the "game" is he gives them choices of two horrible, sadistic things to do to themselves or each other, and they must either pick one and do it, or his butlers kill them. (Apparently there is some sort of employment agency where you can hire an entire household staff who have no problem with killing for…

ok supernatural horror thriller about a wealthy city guy imprisoned in a farmhouse by a elderly farm couple dabbling in the occult when his private plane goes down on their property. Notably primarily because I think this is the first time I've seen a horror movie with a 100% all-black cast where race wasn't a central theme of the plot (or mentioned at all, really). Definitely ok acting, and a couple of good moments, such as a visual of a blind man using voodoo to see by placing goat's eyes on his face.

Oddly reminiscent of "The Wicker Man" in superficial ways, but not in the good ways. Gorgeous vacationing couple in Thailand awakes with no memory of the night before and a video on his camera of him killing and burying her. Descends into unexplained weirdness, then explained with a bunch of unsatisfying exotic paganistic bullshit. Wouldn't watch it again but Maggie Q at least made it entertaining for what it was.

One of those movies that look like someone with no experience and no budget said "Let's make a horror movie", and yet, somehow, they got it onto my streaming feed. One of the very worst-acted, worst-written, worst-paced, worst-edited movies I've ever seen. Basically, everybody who wasn't born on Feb 29 goes psycho, because, movie, and the few sane people have to escape from a hospital.

Surprisingly not bad for what it is. Nerdy guys are invited to pledge a frat, the hazing turns into captivity/torture porn. But, on the best end of that. I actually sort of enjoyed it, a real feat for this kind of movie.

Gorgeous journalists investigating the disappearance of an American in a remote polish village find a demonic shrine in a mysterious fog patch in the woods, spend the rest of the film being chased by angry villagers in religious garb and hallucinating monsters. Meh. Likable primarily because the lead actress looks just like this hot waitress who worked at the Mecca Cafe when I was 25.

Some nonsense about a high school actress who looks like Julia Teal, this girl I once met, and who is haunted by a meme, or something. She reads a haunted monologue and then scary shit happens, I guess.

Robin Wright in a 1/3-live action, 2/3-animated film about, um, I'm not really sure. Something about actors being digitized, and then about people taking chemicals made by the movie studios that let them live in a cartoon world. The animation is a stupendous take on vintage Paramount style but this might be the most tendentious film I've ever seen. It desperately wants to mean something, I'm probably supposed to conclude something from the nonstop over-the-top sentimentality about Wright wanting to see her disabled son, but either it misses the mark or I just don't get it. The "From the story by Stanislaw Lem" end credit makes head-smackingly perfect sense.

Madeline Brewer, who always seems to pick at least faintly interesting projects, in what could easily have been a slightly titillating Black Mirror episode, as a cam girl who finds her account, and identity, have been usurped by an impostor. Ultimately a little unsatisfying, as it leaves questions unanswered, but entertaining enough, in that "pretty good Black Mirror episode" way.

A group of teenagers are victimized in an "extreme haunt" amusement. Couldn't sound worse, right? Surprise! This film doesn't aim very high, and thereby it succeeds where few do, by actually being scary. It's pretty much the best case scenario for stupid, trite "teen scream" horror, and one of the best date horror movies I've ever seen. Rob Zombie has tried several times to make this movie and failed more often than he succeeded.

Johnny Galecki and Anna Friel, whom I failed to recognize from "Pushing Daisies", in something that qualifies as a horror movie about as much as "Gremlins" does. Better creature FX than gremlins, nowhere near the plot and amusement. Participants at a wellness retreat have their "cleansed" toxins come to life as monstrous creatures. Entertaining enough until it turns entirely predictable and by-the-numbers. Which is disappointing, because it initially goes so far beyond the pale so fast that it suckers you right into a totally unbelievable premise from very early on.