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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
irreverent, deeply irreligious low-budget spoof about a bumbling Satan, yes, *that* Satan, trying to scheme his way back into heaven. Kind of charming and funny. Guaranteed to offend the devout. Avoid if you are offended by scenes of your preferred deity having gay sex.
One of my favorite horror movies. Just very well-directed. Actually scared me at points. I will say no more.
EDIT: I will say more. This was directed by James Wan, who I later discovered, just plain has a talent for elevating his supernatural tales by seeding them liberally with just great, memorable individual horror scenes. This movie definitely has it's silly aspects, but even his far worse movies have individual scenes that are so well done they make the picture worth watching. The man just knows how to direct a horror movie, not a modern gorefest or jump-out-and-say-boo teen scream, but legitimate horror cinema in the tradition of the classics. And here he's at his best at that.
Middling thriller about a young couple who rents a house from a landlord who has cameras all over it and a soundproof cell in the basement.
If you're reading this list and haven't seen "The Descent", just go see it. A classic in my book. A bunch of women on a caving expedition when things get scary. Not a classic horror story, but a classic horror film and, I think, a rewarding movie-viewing experience. Very well-made by a director who understood that horror movies should be movies first and horror second. It does eventually lean a little more towards action/adventure/survival than towards plot/storytelling, which is often not my preference, but this is well-done enough to rise above my usual complaints about the category. (UPDATE: I have heard from some friends that they don't like this movie. I don't understand that.)
Woman survives intrigue and lust in the woods in post-zombie-apocalyptic drama with almost no zombies. Drama, not a horror film. Pretty good actually.
Here we have a rare beast: for Long Weekend, both the 1978 original and the 2008 remake starring Jim Cavaziel (distributed in America with the title "Nature's Grave") are both worth seeing. They're good in different ways. I might prefer the original but thanks to capable horror direction the remake has some memorably chilling moments.
Anyway, the story is the same in both: a crass suburban couple goes camping on a remote beach in Australia, and things just go wrong. To say more would spoil it. A big favorite of mine and a pretty one-of-a-kind film, in both versions.
I've since gotten the sense that the 1978 original of this isn't revered as a minor classic, but I'm not sure why. We live in a world where everybody has heard of "Last House On The Left" and "I Spit On Your Grave", both of which came out in the…
Assassin takes over other people's bodies to kill her targets. Another small-but-satisfying Canadian sci fi thriller, well-cast with a bunch of no-name actors. David Cronenberg's son, and I called this one as Cronenberg-related without knowing I was right, although I wasn't sure, because this was a little better than Cronenberg Jr's last film. Still self-consciously strange, strangely retro, and with some brief unexpectedly gory scenes this time, but definitely showing some maturity and self-assurance that was missing last time. I liked it, and had one of those rare endings that I actually liked better after I thought about it for a minute... it wasn't a good enough film that a bad ending wouldn't have ruined the whole thing, but it was a good enough film that a good ending redeemed the whole thing. If Cronenberg Jr's next film is as much better than this as this was than his…
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…
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.
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.
Megan Fox in what starts off looking like a disturbingly brutal captivity pic, as her husband decides to punish her for infidelity by driving her out to their remote lakehouse under pretext of a romantic evening but then handcuffs her to himself and kills himself, turns into actually kind of decent neo noir as he apparently also called hitmen/jewel thieves to come rob the place and kill her.
Ok, not a great movie by any stretch, but deserves an honorable mention for being fairly original, clever, and darkly entertaining.
Wil Wheaton fiiiinally earns my complete forgiveness for Wesley Crusher, by playing his very creepiest self in what, for at least 2/3 of it, plays like one of the better (although definitely not one of the best) Black Mirror episodes. Set in the 80s (and well done at that, not overplaying it) a lonely bachelor stuck at home caring for his mother brings home a "Rent-A-Pal" VHS virtual friend. Seriously, I didn't have high hopes for this one, and the ending engages in some much-too-predictable strokes, but overall it's mostly well done enough, and creative enough, to be worth a watch. Bonus points for keeping you guessing about whether the video tape is or is not actually responding to what's happening in front of the tv in some amusingly…
Here's a twist... A pretty crappy thriller that actually sucks until a pretty good twist ending. Young girl moves into an apartment complex in LA, where the neighbors turn out to be just a little bit possessive & controlling.
Once again Rob Zombie shows that if he could write as well as he can direct, he'd be the horror equivalent of Quentin Tarantino. This movie is visually gorgeous in many places. Just bring a walkman. Basically an excuse to string together a bunch of episodic vignettes of grotesque violence.
Man with a boat goes crazy in a fairly boring way.
Eli Roth, once again showing his ability to waste his more than adequate filmmaking skills on torture porn the sake of nothing but torture porn, technically well-done but with nothing to actually redeem it beyond the extent to which you enjoy obscenely unflinching brutality, and no originality, only novelty in persuit of the same, just a masterful abilty at repeating the exact sort of think he's seen before, tweaked just enough to be a different movie. Even the name is ripped off from a device used in the genuine gore classic "Cannibal Holocaust". Plus, despite showing the most graphic violence imaginable, he studiosly avoids showing so much as a nipple during this films more than an hour of showing "amazonian natives" running wild. I have to imagine there's an x-rated cut of this floating around somewhere, and honestly, I'd respect that more than this. You want to be genuinely transgressive,…
Talk about a disappointment. For about 85% of its running length, this jump-out-and-say-boo ghost story about a young widow mourning her husband's recent suicide in the lake house he built manages to stay better than average by mostly avoiding familiar tropes and plot twists and slowly ratcheting up the weirdness with a minimum of special effects or exposition, or even ever tipping its hand as to whether the haunting is actually happening. Then, in the very final scenes, whatever forces often conspire to take middling horror pictures and ruin them by jettisoning sense and writing in favor of overly familiar tropes, sentimentality, and special effects packs as much of all that into the last few scenes as they normally do into a whole movie, and completely undo everything that was good about it up to that point before concluding with an ending that neither satisfies nor even makes much sense.…
TV-movie-quality throwaway flick about a woman whose daughter gets bit by a rattlesnake out in the desert, and is helped by a strange old woman in a nearby trailer which vanishes afterwards. Later, mysterious strangers tell her she must take a soul for the one that has been saved, otherwise the kid's fatal injury will revert, and she must do it before sunset, because, movie, obviously. Eventually she kills someone and her kid is safe. Who was that old woman? What strange power is behind this ordeal? It doesn't matter, and it'd better not, because we never find out.
You know, this one wasn't bad. Like, you have some time to kill, you wanna watch a horror movie, there's nothing good on, this one is alright. Young "boy in a bubble"'s parents take him to a doctor's creepy old clinic in the woods for a gene therapy cure. Haunted house story with lots of familiar tropes, until you discover they found a fairly original way to put a million familiar pieces together. Don't think I'd watch it a second time, but don't mind having watched it a first. (Oh, I gotta add: It has one special effect that is like my favorite horror special effect I've ever seen. It's very quick, but it's something I genuinely have never seen before. So, no spoilers, but there's one quick thing in there I had to stop the video, roll it back, and watch again.)
It's getting tough to do a fresh take on the zombie outbreak picture, but this Korean film does an alright job. The slightly low, non-Netflix-TV-episode-quality production values are really the only thing marring this tale of people trapped in their apartments during a zombie apocalypse. I liked it.
Movie-of-the-week level thriller about a woman whose protective new boyfriend turns out to be her deranged cousin trying to have her for himself. Oops, gave away the ending. Now you don't have to watch it.
Lance Hendriksen takes his family icefishing, unaware that a "creature from the black lagoon"-type obvious-and-clearly-shown-man-in-a-costume monster lurks below the surface, waiting to kill everyone up to and including Lance Hendriksen, once again proving that outliving LK is the key to survival.
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