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Any horror movie starring Katie Holmes is only going to be so good. This one has very decent creature effects, though. Guy Pearce (who appears to be completely featureless other than his tiny little nose, sorta like a male Milla Jovovich) and his tiny little nose are utterly wasted in this. Also notable for (spoiler) basically being a horror movie about the Tooth Fairy. If you're the kind of person who's amused by catching goof details like the scullery maid in the beginning trying to see what's in the dark basement by holding the candle right in front of her eyes, this movie is full of that stuff.
Ok... college kids in bikinis, weekend waterskiing vacation at the lake, mean redneck locals, sharks. That's all you need to know, except that it distinguishes itself by incorporating the nuttiest revenge plan ever, and also, by netting Donal Logue to play the sheriff. He must've liked the script. The digital sharks are pretty well-done, too, that sort of thing is getting better.
Well-made but very cliched "The Lady Vanishes" plot-twisty thriller. Gorgeous man takes gorgeous wife and injured daughter to hospital during a road trip, returns to pick them up later and is told he was there alone earlier. Predictable all the way through, and with hefty doses of before-you-even-get-to-the-fridge logic. But, mildly entertaining, on the better end of mediocre.
OMG. Ok. I kinda like these teen-oriented "horror" movies that seem like they were made from preteen novels, if they have a couple of fun ideas and creepy enough moments, and am willing to forgive a lot. Case in point would be "Plus 1", which this movie shares a lot in common with, beginning with the setup, which is "teenage protagonists at a party where reality suddenly changes on them in some unexplainable way and they have to find a way to cope". This film really pushes the limits of that forgiveness, though. Unlike "Plus 1", which at least tossed in a passing meteor as an attempt at some kind of macguffin to give some reason for the otherworldly things that occur, this film doesn't bother... kids go to a party, go into a closet to play "Seven Minutes In Heaven" and emerge in a world where everything is the…
Despite a little predictability, this Irish tale of a young mother who moves out to the woods and begins to suspect that her son has been replaced by an impostor is a decent enough view. The acting is decent, the score is creepy, it's well-made enough, if not exactly exciting. I don't regret the time spent watching it.
An interesting setup, as two gorgeous high school girls obsessed with social media fame trap a serial killer in hopes of learning to commit murders so they can cover them online. Contains good laughs, especially how they become frustrated as repeated initial murders keep getting believed to be accidents, and an amusing gym battle scene with Craig Robinson, but soon sputters and stumbles, descending entirely into predictable, hackneyed writing, deus ex machina plot devices, and wrapping up tidily with some serious fridge logic. Still, it's mostly entertaining, but it fails hard enough at living up to the promise of its first half that I can't really recommend it.
teen scream ghost story. Misunderstood orphan girl goes to live with aunt and uncle, finds dead girl's ring in the woods. You know the drill. Erick Avari.
A promising tagline: "female intruder accidentally dies in an introvert's house, so he keeps the body around as a friend. Then she starts to decay..." Starts off ok but ends pretty boring, just not much "there" there. However, has that nebbishy little lady from "A Dirty Shame", who I always like.
Surprisingly engaging zero-budget haunted house flick in which a middle-aged couple, recovering from the loss of their college-age son, moves into a house with a sordid past and believes they are being contacted by him. Stars middle-aged adults, not kids, for a change, which seems hokey at first but works out to its benefit. The performances are up and down but ultimately work well. Apparently they saved their entire budget for the tiny handful of really well-done special effects, and it was a great choice. Starts off seeming kind of iffy, could easily have gone into "Paranormal Activity"-caliber crap, but by the time it kicks into high gear ends up really effective, with some genuine creepiness along the way.
two families share a cabin in a post-apocalyptic-plague woodland. More a bleak drama than a horror movie. Well-made enough, I'm sure some people will like it, but wasn't my cup of tea. Doesn't really go much of anywhere.
Oh, my beloved "The Babadook". It could so not work, but it really does. So well-directed. A genuinely scary movie. Mother and young son deal with the pain of losing dad, and a monster which may or may not be the manifestation of that loss.
I consider this one a classic, full stop.
I've had friends say they found it disappointing. And I can understand that, I suppose, considering how some viewers may have grown used to being spoonfed by modern horror. This film has actual plot and character development that you have to sit through. A lot of this film's runtime is just the psychological dynamics of a deteriorating mother/son relationship (and possibly also the deteriorating mental health of one or both) with the scenes of traditional scares only coming as brief emotional punctuation marks.
Consider, on the other hand, that this also has a 98%…
Joe Dante, more comedy than horror... a guy's overly clingy girlfriend, an initially painfully gorgeous Ashley Greene, returns from the dead to mess up his new relationship, while his slovenly friend improbably fucks every gorgeous woman in Los Angeles, two at a time.
Simply put, the worst movie ever made, and not in that spectacular way that might be worth seeing just for the awfulness. Psycho girl played by an actress who appears never to have acted before or during filming is terrorized by a ramekin (a kind of pastry cup). Seemed like somebody's high school project. Maybe middle school.
Of course the lone hick has tunnels and a torture dungeon under his backcountry cabin. Set in the desert this time. With the likeable girl from "An American Haunting", I think, who looks like a young version of my aunt Muriel. ---
Wow, sometimes you stumble across an unexpected gem. The setup is a remote pair of forest rangers checking trail cams stumble across a pair of survivalists, initially promising to be a standard backwoods captivity/pursuit flick with no more to commend it than the notably gorgeous digital cinematography (which happily holds up from start to finish). Fortunately it turns out to be something else: a quiet and pretty original creature feature/body horror outing that I bet admirers of both Svenkmayer and Cronenberg would find things to enjoy in, not to mention being consistently well-directed and visually beautiful enough to evoke Lars von Trier's earlier years. One of those horror films that probably pleased a lot of high-minded critics. I have little doubt Roger Ebert would have greatly enjoyed it, and I'm sorry not to be able to read his review of it. I'll remember this one, and watch it again. Also…
A pleasant surprise. One of those rare movies that starts really lame and completely redeems itself by the end, provided you can take some amusement from the totally unexpected over-the-topness of it. First-person shooter in which the "never stop filming!" film crew is crass Americans that goes to a remote rural Eastern European village, pisses off superstitious locals by accidentally filming a funeral, and engages in some incredibly heavy handed foreshadowing before getting themselves stuck out in the woods to get picked off — and yet, somehow, rather than collapsing under the weight of almost more clichés than you could possibly fit into one uninspired seeming movie, the whole thing takes off into unexpected the territory with such a beautifully over-the-top SFX blowout that I think I said "wow" more than once out loud. Special-effects so good that you'll want to see it on video see you can pause it…
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…
Another thoughtful Canadian thriller that starts off looking like it's going to be torture porn but in fact turns out to be low-key and, after some initial grisliness, largely nonviolent, more talk than action, and that's in a good way. A lunatic abducts a judge and subjects him to a trial for a bad verdict, in front of a jury of the entire internet. Plays like one of the better (if not necessarily one of the best) episodes of Black Mirror, with its examination of the role of technology and the media in justice and morality. Plus, Donald Sutherland as the staid judge, and an intense performance from an unrecognizable Vincent Kartheiser to boot, just to elevate things that much more. Those Canadians, I don't know how they do it. (Looked online afterwards and this movie seems to have been pretty broadly panned. I'm not sure why.)
Picture, in your mind, a movie about Ashley Greene and her husband moving into a haunted house, which at one point contains the lines "It wants US. It feeds on life. We opened a window into our world, and now it wants to come through." This is exactly the movie you're thinking of... except, this movie's ending makes less sense than the movie you're imagining.
another "thriller" about a psycho stalking/imprisoning, and re-stalking a woman through the woods. This one started off seemng like it was going to be good, with well-done scenes of a woman being stalked on the road by an increasingly threatening other motorist, before he captures he and it becomes much more run-of-the-mill fare. Still probably among the better of these types of movies, with some actually inventive twists and a genuinely creepy and realistic psycho, but, did the world really need another movie about nothing more than a lone woman being captured and/or pursued and victimized by a lone man and then overcoming it? Is that really a story that needed telling yet again?
Kids camping on an island snort coke with a virus that temporarily turns them into zombies. Meanwhile, in an underground facility, the drug is tested by a mysterious sciencey guy. Ha, you know, this is a bad, derivative horror movie, and an utterly acceptable watch, in that USA Up All Night bad movie kinda way. Just over the top and original enough, and not so derivative as to be painful. One of the worst movies I've ever not minded.
Couple falls asleep in a car and gets buried when a blizzard snows them in. Another example of the kind of stuck-in-a-hopelessly-remote-location survival film I like so well, although, probably my least favorite of those. Still one of them, though.
Hardly worth dignifying with a review, except I don't want to someday accidentally think I didn't watch it and start it again. Family invites "Pilgrim Reenactors" to throw their thanksgiving dinner, who wind up inviting "friends" and eventually turn out to be murderous, because, movie. This would be a torture porn gore flick if it was gross instead of silly, or a horror comedy if it was funny. Man, these Hulu "Into The Dark" things could not be more scattershot in terms of quality.
Two things I can't stand: 1.) unbearably twee, self-consciously "quirky" comedies; and 2.) Tom Arnold being cast as anything other than the one white guy on the Soul Plane. I lasted like 20 minutes on this movie.
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