Movie Reviews

"Saw", but with over-the-top Hollywood excess rather than the British restraint that made it good. Very stylish, I'll give it that, like a music video.

Somewhere in the same fictional Los Angeles as "Psych" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" (and across a fictional continent from the fictional New York of "Ugly Betty") is "Drop Dead Diva" , perhaps the perfect stupid TV program. A gorgeous model dies but refuses to go to heaven and wakes up in the body of an obese lawyer. Every episode features courtroom drama in which gorgeous legal clients pursue only-on-tv type

Spring Fever: Now, this is more like it. This is to horror movies what “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” was to comedies.This is that rare beast, the platonic ideal that every movie that ever tried to be a good bad horror movie was aspiring to be but failed at. Plus, perhaps the most realistic depiction of high school and high school students I’ve ever seen in any movie. Any fan of great cheapo vintage ’70s horror a la Tobe Hooper or David Cronenberg should like this. Also that rare sequel that far outdoes the first film. I loved it. Many people would not appreciate it, I am sure. (NOTE: According to wikipedia, the director requested to have his name removed from the film, and the final film is more a product of the executives and producers. I am floored. Let’s all be glad, for once, that that happened.) (UPDATE: Turns…

A not-bad entry in the psycho-picking-off-teenagers-in-a-remote-location genre. but snow fields instead of woods this time, which is refreshing. Set in the norwegian outback, in an abandoned lodge. Goes on a bit long, but if you're gonna watch something in this genre, this is a decently creepy, non-annoying one.

after a team of gorgeous researchers discovered a cure for death, one of them is killed and resurrected, and gains random psychic powers, randomly turns evil, and kills her gorgeous teammates one by one for no reason.

dear Hollywood, at certain point we figured out that if the bad guy doesn't talk to anybody but the protagonist for the entire movie, they're going to turn out to be either the protagonist's other personality, or someone's already dead. Neither are very surprising twist anymore. This one is the split personality one.

pretentious, nonsensical, overstylized black and white crap. Hipster girl watches haunted house in Brooklyn, bring a guy home, inexplicably kills her then goes insane. Dull. (Much later note: Yes, I realize on re-read that this review doesn’t entirely make sense. Trust me, it doesn’t matter.)

Strangely underappreciated, moody film focusing on the human elements, rather than the violent ones, of the relationship between a child and the serial killer abductor raising him as his own in captivity in a remove farmhouse. Directed by the same woman as Jennifer's Body, another film I thought, while not great, was a cut above the usual fare.

By all rights, I should hate this movie. One of those sort of "heartfelt" "indie" movies starring major stars (and once again Tim Heidekker in a non-comedy role. Why?) Zoey Deutch, who has somehow raised likability to an art form, plays the manic pixie dream girl this time (hands up, everyone who's ever met a real-life pretty girl who gives impulsive blowjobs to homely guys because she feels like it), but manages not to be too overbearing beyond the basic standards of the type. She hunts for adult men to give blow jobs to, which her friends film and then use to extort money from. When her new stepdad's son gets out of rehab and moves in, she they decide to entrap a teacher he made a molestation claim against a few years earlier. From there, though, despite some predictability, the film manages to avoid cliches and sets out on…

Family that films every moment of their lives in POV for no apparent reason, when "scary" things start happening for no apparent reason.

I have no idea how they got renee zellwger, ian mcshane, and that guy bradley who I guess is good-looking to star in this crap horror thriller about a social worker who adopts a little girl who is evil or demonic or something and kills people because, movie. Maybe they all had a contractual obligation to discharge or something.

Like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you'll probably like this film. Don't like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you won't. There's some religious or supernatural claptrap it's wrapped in, but it's not important. I wasn't at all suprised to discover this is a remake of a French horror movie, the surest sign of a terrible horror movie. The french culture seems to have an immaculate grasp of so many art forms, and they compensate for it with a complete, total inability to figure out how to write a good horror movie plot.

Apparently this is a Coen Brothers film. And visually, it looks as good as any. Doesn't appear to have a plot, other than "The Coen Brothers love 1940s Hollywood" and "There are star cameos in this movie". Maybe other film industry folks liked this.

Uh-oh. Another of those kinds of movie that I like but I bet most people didn't: the entire film is a group of people having a conversation. It takes place almost entirely in one room. A college professor, reluctantly attending his own going-away party before moving on to his next job, confesses to a group of colleagues that he is immortal and has lived for 14,000. Cue 90 minutes of cerebral and, to me, well-done and interesting conversation among academic types of varying degrees of skepticism (and one unfortunate cliched religious zealot, my sole gripe with the film, only because, as here, they're all too often a cheap way of perfunctorily adding conflict), exploring all the different angles of this. For a completely unrealistic premise, I think the conversation, and the main character's takes on things, are very realistic and well thought-out along the lines of what an actual, realistic…

Mom tries to cross zombie-infested Los Angeles to find her daughter. The Walking Dead, except with fast zombies instead of slow zombies, and any plot considerations totally replaced by people shooting each other. I can't even figure out how everybody got a gun — everybody has one, but I never heard anybody say, "Here, have a gun" or "Hey, I found some guns!" They're all assault rifles, too. UPDATE: I don't know if I'm watching a remake or an expanded cut or a new season or whatever, but it's much better than this original review. Maybe I missed a couple of episodes on the first view? Worst episodes are still like halfway decent walking dead episodes, but some of them are quieter, almost black mirror-style (in terms of mood) vingettes, more realism than a lot of zombie fare, and everybody definitely doesn't have a gun now. There's a weird "Lord…

Did we really need another movie like this? Uncomfortable dinner in the English countryside between two young couples with an obvious uncomfortable history gets increasingly uncomfortable until, in a stunningly original piece of plotting, masked guys unexpectedly break in and start brutalizing them. Iwan Rheon is better than this. The tables turn repeatedly as the victims and the intruders repeatedly manage to overpower one another, the movie ends as soon as the violence does just in case you though anything besides the violence was the point, and the whole thing is rendered terribly English by pretentious title cards dividing it up needlessly into "chapters" and saving the title card for the end of the movie with a sudden "bam" sound to underscore that it's supposed to have some sort of impact. I suppose if you've never seen a gratiutous bloodbath before it might, but really, what moviegoer hasn't at this…

Early Chris Pratt and some other goofy handsome guy with a bunch of minor celebrity cameos. Two guys get stuck in a magic porn booth that transports them to an alternate universe where real life is like a porn film. They actually stretch the joke for an admirably long time, and really nail some of the "porn film" acting and dialogue, including a stereotypical cop who speaks in nothing but cliches. It could have been way worse.

Daniel Radcliffe is as redeeming as possible in this based-on-a-true-story lost-in-the-jungle survival flick. Friends set off, slowly get separated, winds up being protagonist alone walking back through the wilderness towards civilization, encountering every possible obstacle along the way, including quicksand, a snake, hallucinations, you name it, in the slow-moving third act. Was a pretty good movie until it started to sag... one guy grimacing in pain, hallucinating, and talking to animals doesn't really feel like much of a plot. You gotta admit Radcliffe always gives his all to everything he does, though. And also, that aside, he somehow manages to be strikingly handsome-looking when covered with mud, which strikes me as something of an accomplishment, I guess. I couldn't do it.

Ok, no great shakes. Kind of turgid. Strange young man tries to end his own life, keeps bumping into suicidal women and in two cases takes their bodies home for a short while before burying them in his garden and moving on to the next one. Completely unengaging leading man with virtually no personality and not much drama or buildup to the story kind of leadens the whole endeavor. Also not clear why some suicidal women would be so damn chipper and engaging. It does have that woman who played the strange junkyard woman in Walking Dead, who I've always kind of liked for some reason.

Death as entertainment. Dee Wallace in what looks like an interesting, quirky setup — a family full of characters gathers in a rural house for Christmas when the monstrous son they didn't know the mother tried to abort 20 years ago, and she didn't know survived, shows up — devolves into a fairly by the numbers captivity/everybody-gets-killed-one-by-one-and-hardly-any-plot-besides-that splatterfest. A woman gets cut in half vertically down the center with a single axe swing, another gets an umbrella run clean through her head and then opened, if those give you any idea. Is Dee Wallace this hurting for work?

Surprisingly entertaining spoof retelling of Watergate scandal, based around the supposition that "Deep Throat" was two 15-year-old girls.

okay Aussie haunted house tale. Three researchers in an empty house tape recording things that go bump in the night. Pretty slow to get where it's going, doesn't aim high, but ultimately it's alright.

"Jurassic Park", except with zombies instead of dinosaurs, as things go wrong for a group of gorgeous tourists at a resort where you can go on safari to kill the sole remaining zombies after humanity recovers from an undead pandemic. Likable final girl and decent cinematography and action sequences make it marginally watchable, but still kind of a proof of the rule that the more guns a "horror" movie has the less worth watching it is. By the time there's explosions, you're already well expecting that at some point there are going to be explosions. And, ok, the very ending is good. I'll give them that.

Kind of like "Weeds", except instead of being the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban pot dealer, it's the gorgeous family of an unlikely suburban zombie. Other than that, pretty much the same. Drew Barrymore gets less annoying as she matures, and it's about time that that guy who briefly guested as the only competent sales rep at Dunder Mifflin got a leading role.

Adequate direction saves this overwrought, poorly-thought out, nonsensical attempt at a thriller from being a complete crapfest. Instead it's just mostly a crapfest. Jim Carrey is actually alright at keeping a (mostly) straight face but the movie still seems to somehow have a touch of his usual mania in the way it tries to contort and surprise but instead just ends up confusing.