Movie Reviews

"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…

strange, poorly acted, poorly made, very cheap-looking, amateurish film using only natural light and almost no special effects, yet manages to maintain a good rhythm and convey consistent enough very creepy atmosphere for me, at least, to enjoy. A bunch of priests gather for an exorcism on an estate, and as they await the annointed hour, visions from the past greet and torture them. A box made from the wood of Noah's ark grants wishes. Everybody talks with NY accents, if you happen to have a thing for or against that.

WOW. Won film festival prizes. Tarkovsky meets Cronenberg. Very slow moving, horror without scares. Focuses on characters, 70's-ish in the same way Beyond The Black Rainbow was. Scientist finally finds 20 year old girl he genetically engineered to have narcotic blood, rescues her from junkie former scientists holding her captive for her blood.