Movie Reviews

I've never been more torn as to whether I liked or hated a film.

This plays like the evil twin of "Being There"—a cheaply-made film in which a deranged man-child, kept imprisoned in squalor and sexually abused by his mother for his entire life, escapes into urban Adelaide, and in a highly episodic series of events is taken, "Chance the gardener"-like, into various people's company, eventually fronting a rock band, and getting laid way more often than a babbling, homeless-looking person who can only repeat things he's heard said to him really ought to be, before ultimately stumbling into true love, all without being able to string together a single coherent sentence.

First off, this film has a lot of taboos—incest and animal cruelty, for starters, as he has sex with his mother and senselessly asphyxiates first his cat and then his parents with plastic wrap.

Then, the…

A slow-to-get-going, very quiet but beautifully shot rural folk horror that I'm sure most people will hate but I found very satisfying, once it got going, to the extent that it ever does. A researcher out at a rural pond for not-clearly-specified reasons encounters mounting hallucinations and increasingly hostile locals, with a heavy dose of pagan mythology. Picture a much quieter, almost arthouse "The Wicker Man" or "Midsommar" vibe, but fortunately restrained enough not to be distractingly pretentious.

This was very badly panned by a lot of people on IMDB, but a few seemed to appreciate it as I did, and film buffs might find it to stand out from the pack. Despite being bored for the first part, I did, and by the end I found it very good.

The cinematography stood out, and even a lot of reviewers who hated the film acknowledged that—very reminiscent of Lars…

Now, this is a uniquely weird movie. A bizarre and gory tale of unseen forces manipulating humans to commit acts of extreme violence is told entirely with human-sized puppets, which are detailed enough to go straight down the uncanny valley: they blink, they appear to have nearly-real-looking human skin with stray hairs and razor stubble, although the facial expressions are largely unchanging. It helps that it's filmed in real locations.

At first it seems like someone knew they had a fair-to-middling-at-best horror sci-fi on their hands so they decided to make the best of it and elevate it into something truly strange, making suspension of disbelief much easier with the puppet-only production. But, boy, the trick kinda worked.

One critic said, "too damn strange to completely ignore", and I agree with that.

To give an idea of what's going on here, turns out some of the characters are…

Kind of an offbeat British/American comedy about an eclectic assortment of characters who become involved with each other in the days before humanity is due to be wiped out by a comet. Jenne Fischer, Rob Lowe, Diana Rigg. I enjoyed it, it was more clever and entertaining than it should have been, and I was disappointed when the first season ended on a cliffhanger and it wasn't picked up for a second.

Weirdly OK sci fi flick. In pandemic times, a scientist wakes up imprisoned in a life support unit, and spends the movie wandering a medical-facility-cum-military-installation, uncovering the truth about what's happening to her. Little dialogue and almost no plot, but, visually well done enough to be sort of interesting, I guess, and with touches of fairly disturbing body horror. I didn't hate it, and might actually watch it again at some point to pay a little closer attention.