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Not-as-bad-as-it-should be little indie horror with a fairly original premise: with no explanation, just a statement that it is so, a shapeshifting serial killer must repeatedly kill people and assuming their forms and memories, leaving their desiccated bodies hidden at a remote farm. He falls in love with a young woman and repeatedly tries to insinuate himself into her life, dealing the whole time with the rate at which the bodies he assumes decay.
Not terrible, for what it is. Not that good, but I'll call it "watchable" because it really should have been so much worse.
It's a Marvel superhero movie.That generally says it all, in my experience.
Somehow these big Marvel superhero movies remind me of Michael Jackson's adult career: get a bunch of big-name luminaries together with a big budget to expertly craft something that screams "blockbuster", and yet still, somehow, manages to be less than the sum of its parts—the writing just isn't exceptional, it's formula dressed up with big names and glitzy production. . And everybody for some reason thinks it's great, except me.
Basically watchable, for a special-effects superhero action blockbuster. But for as much talent was involved in making this movie, that's a crime.
This is not a very good movie, but, I will say, it's about ten times better than I expected it to be. I never like Kevin James nor the track record of Adam Sandler's production company, that made this, but rather than being the truly stupid pile of garbage I expected, it's actually—once it gets going, which takes quite a while—a moderately watchable B-grade action comedy, if you don't go into it expecting more than that.
I'm really surprised. Never imagined I'd think anywhere nearly that highly of it.
Decent drama about the politics behind a morning news show and the network that puts it on. It's not top-flight entertainment like "The Larry Sanders Show", nor is it a classic behind-the-scenes drama series with memorable characters like "Mad Men" or "The Sopranos"—and it sure isn't even anywhere near in the same league as "Network"—but the acting is good, and the writing is fairly gripping, every time a season ended I wanted it to go on.
Truly harrowing story about the buildup to and aftermath of a nuclear strike on Sheffield, England, following the intertwined lives of several people caught in the attack. This unflinchingly grim take on the short, medium, and eventual long-term personal and social toll of a nuclear strike was, incredibly, originally a TV movie. Like "Testament", another movie on a similar theme that I often mention in the same breath, it is absolutely unsparing. It's a very rough watch but an undeniable classic, and order of magnitude better movie than the contrived, soap-operatic pseudo-relevant "The Day After".
I'm writing this quite some time after last having seen it as I've just realized I somehow have never reviewed it. This movie is a pretty big favorite of mine. I'm not sure I can put it up with my very biggest favorites, but it's damn close.
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.
Alright sci-fi action thriller about a spectacularly gorgeous model (Grace Van Dien, great-granddaughter of Robert Mitchum) who ingests an experimental drug, intended to protect humanity from the increasingly toxic atmosphere, that causes her to undergo strange mutations. Soon the scientists are after her. There's guys with guns, lots of running and jumping.
Surprisingly not bad. Visually well-done, high production values without going too far over the top, and adequate acting to pull it off. Deserves better than the 4.7 stars it has on IMDB, at any rate.
A programmer living in isolation invents an artificially intelligent and thoroughly fake-looking but oddly expressive (thanks to some skilled puppetry) head, and charges it to learn to humanize itself. It then spends the movie slowly going insane. Was actually kind of decent for the first half given the conceit, with some decent takes on familiar "What is human, anyway" tropes—the head wakes him up thinking it saw a face in the closet, which he explains is due to its having successfully inherited the human cognitive ability to recognize faces, even when there isn't really one, a neat idea—although by the second half it kind of runs out of steam and feels kind of perfunctory by the conclusion. Ultimately I can't say I liked it it, which is disappointing, because for a while it was definitely heading that way (no pun intended).
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.
I really wanted to like this movie. This was recommended to me by a few people in Indieweb when it was October '25 movie of the month for their Indieweb Movie Club blog carnival, hosted by the estimable Benji.
So, it is with some degree of disappointment that I found, not being a child of the '90s and having no sentimental attachment to the excesses of that era (I have the '70s for that, thank you, although I generally don't steer unwitting friends of other generations towards it with any promise that the cheese I happen to love is going to hold any reward for them) that I found this to be an vapid and unredeemable pile of glossy Hollywood garbage.
This movie appears to have been written by a screenwriter who read an article about "hacking" in Newsweek…
Scientist invents a machine that lets him see extradimensional creatures, and it turns out, let them see him. Another cheezy attempt at Lovecraft, this time with way more '80s fashions than any other I've seen, and the requisite over-the-top latex monster applicances. I always feel affection for these because these low-budget Lovecraft efforts always seem to try harder than anybody else to rise to the material, even if they fail. At least they're aiming high.
As hackneyed and unfunny as a sitcom can be. Chris D'Elia, who, despite whatever else may be said about him, is at least often a funny actor, is absolutely wasted in this. Turned it off during the third episode. I'm not sitting through 9 more episodes of this.
Gritty fantasy show based on a Nail Gaiman about ancient gods fighting it out in modern-day American with the "new gods" of commercialism and technology. A very strong start to this Bryan Fuller adaptation, including a smattering of topnotch actors and some really well-cast cameos, disappointingly doesn't pan out as the season wears on. Never worse than good, the show nonetheless loses the first few episodes' tight plotting and gritty tone, gets talkier and more meandering, as what I hoped would be a tight miniseries turns out to be an ongoing series and kind of loses momentum. Tubi's run frustratingly only includes season 1 for now, ending on a cliffhanger, and worse, I understand Bryan Fuller left after that season and subsequent seasons aren't as positively reviewed. Color me all around kind of disappointed. It started really strong. If this had been a solid 6 or maybe 8 episodes of…
Gritty (for Hollywood) tale of a day in the life of speed freaks. I suppose this movie is alright. Despite being cast full of actors I don't like much (Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Brittany Murphy, Mickey Rourke) it pretty much catches them all at their relative best, doing a pretty good job at bringing full lives to the kind of sketchy characters we've all seen out of the corner of our eyes once in a while, and mostly avoided interacting with. The Hollywood attempt at "gritty" is better than most such. Also, short cameos from the always disturbing Peter Stormare and Debby Harry as a tough-as-nails lesbian liven things up.
I watched this once before, long ago, and recalled liking it, and though it's up and down I came out of it once again thinking I kinda liked it.
Another in a long line of "first contact" films that owe a debt to "2001: A Space Odyssey", but a decent entry in the arena. A lone astronaut on a 10-year-mission to find what's been broadcasting mysterious signals from Neptune. Not bad, it was an alright watch even if conceptually a touch derivative.
Amusingly, "Neptune" appears to have been filmed at Pyramid Lake.
Odd, fun little sci-fi/light comedy about an alien landing in an old man's flower garden in Pennsyvania. Ben Kingsley, Jane Curtin, and Harriet Sansom Harris, still a heavy hitter in sci-fi over 30 years after she freaked us out on the X-Files episode "Eve", play a bunch of old coots who nobody listens to, caring for a space visitor who doesn't talk but manages to express some strange things he needs to get his craft off the ground again. Pretty well done, pleasantly quirky, and a fun watch. I liked it.
A talky, overlong mocumentary about a "haunted object" research team that encounters a strange wooden effigy that seems to possess supernatural powers. I feel bad slagging it off, because it's not terrible, but it's a whole "horror" movie of nothing people talking about a scary thing, rather than showing scary things. At 90 minutes, it feels like about 3 hours long.
A montage of late-night channel surfing slowly reveals a story involving aliens, a horror filmmaker's mysterious unfinished film, a haunted videotape, and a local outbreak of violence. Told entirely as clips of flipping though channels in a fairly convincing recreation of flipping through late night broadcast TV channels, but the execution doesn't really work in an engaging way. Felissa Rose is in this, if that tells you anything.
A phallic/fecal-looking parasite that causes uncontrollable, violent sexual urges spreads throughout an exclusive apartment complex. How's that for an opener?
I just can't be objective about early David Cronenberg. I've always had a lot of affection for Cronenberg as a director, and although the low production values and camp story here play like early John Waters directing a gore film, or like George Romero making a movie about horny urbanites instead of zombies... I'm not going to say anything worse than that about it. And, you know, early John Waters has its points, too.
And, I think, to me, even though this isn't the best of Cronenberg's early films (cf. "The Brood", which unfathomably isn't on Tubi), you can still see occasional signs of talent. There's some disturbing imagery to be seen here, and that's what we come to horror movies for, right?
This unnecessary but not-completely-dreadful sequel keeps a lot of the visual style of "30 Days Of Night"—a movie I'm pretty fond of—so it scores points by me for that. This moves the action first to a gritty, dark Los Angeles, and then onto a gritty, dark vampire-filled ship bound for another hapless small town in Alaska, as the vampires have spread nationwide and a small band of gorgeous, tough-as-nails humans fights a losing battle to kill as many of them as they can.
Whereas the original leaned horror, this is more of an action movie, although with heavy duty supernatural elements. This is basically a "horror movie" in the same way "Predator" is a "science fiction" movie. IE, it's not, it's just dressed up like one, although the costume is pretty good.
But, you know, it's fairly well directed, even if there's not a whole lot to the story…
Surprisingly fun horror about a young girl who takes a spider from space as a pet, which causes problems as it grows. Starts off with a "Goonies"-type "kid movie" vibe but actually turned out to be alright horror, slightly above average. Fun, at least. I liked it.
I thought the first Saw was interesting, not great but good. I lasted maybe 20 minutes of this. It's just violence as entertainment... like, essentially gladiator games, except, it's supposed to be cool because its twisted. Great. Never done it for me.
I'm sure this seemed like a cool idea at the time—the inner dialogue of a delusional scientist tormented by sounds only he can hear, as he slowly goes insane and finally, with 10 minutes left in this 95 minute picture, kills a few people and them himself (seems like there's a lot of that going on in indie horror movies).
It's not that badly made, but 95 minutes of someone's inner dialogue about science trivia and "deep" thoughts, with 10 minutes of actual at the end, is not a good feature film, and definitely not a horror movie. This could have been a 20 minute short.
Reasonably agreeable redemptive comedy about a progressive woman who gets a job turning around a porn magazine. Lots of charismatic actors. I've spent worse 90 minute stretches in front of Tubi.
Fairly watchable Canadian early 2000s Twilight Zone-type anthology. Lots of recognizable faces & reasonably respectable actors involved (David Paymer, Miguel Ferrera, Mare Winningham, a million more. That sort of caliber.) Quality is uneven but some of the stories are pretty watchable and they occasionally pull off a good ending.
Strangely, hosted in the Rod Serling-type narrator role by Henry Rollins. No effort is made to have him seem anything like Henry Rollins, suggesting what the Twilight Zone intros might have been like if Rod Serling seemed less like he was looking forward to a martini and more like he was thinking about beating the shit out of you.
Take a fairly boring tale of a mother of a missing girl, the man who accidentally killed her, and the girl's ghost all being mildly annoying to each other in a snowy rural woodland, and then make it worse by adding "artsy" blurred camera work, smash cuts between disconnected scenes and what appear to be actor improv sessions, and a dissonant synth soundtrack.
Despite my hatred for "found footage" horror films, my interest was piqued by see that this was a "found footage" film from 1989—predating ostensible genre inventor "The Blair Witch Project" by several years. It's sort of like discovering a heavy metal band from 1963.
Interestingly, this film about a family birthday party interrupted by the appearance of aliens shows that the "found footage" genre emerged fully failed from the beginning.
This earliest known example contains everything that sucks about the genre: little plot, a complete disregard for pacing in favor of dwelling for too long on irrelevant conversation between uninteresting characters (do we, as viewers, really need to spend 5 minutes watching the family say their goodbyes to each other after dinner?), difficult-to-watch low-quality camerawork with zero cinematography, muddy sound, and an all-around lack of any qualities that might make it worth spending the time to watch.
I have no idea how they got Katia Winter and Ted Levine (who, by the way, once personally scared the shit out of me in a real life encounter) for this movie that is visually somewhat competent, at best, but feels in every other way like an absolutely amateur mess.
This story manages in the first half hour to mention MK-Ultra, psychedelics, numbers stations, the Black Rock Desert, H.P. Lovecraft, and a character who couldn't have been more closely based on Hunter S Thompson if he'd had his ashes shot out of a cannon after he blows his brains out near the end. And, nothing original at all, other than throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the first 30 minutes of one movie. It's just a hodgepodge of trite conspiracy theory shit tied together with jump scares, as the film finds reason after reason for the lights to go…
Bottom-of-the-barrel zero-budget indie sci-fi about a mad scientist who kidnaps people to clone them for some reason. Notable only for having a twist ending I saw coming about 30 minutes into the movie. (The good guy escapes, and it turns out he was cloned and the clone sets off after him.)
A pretty pleasant surprise—a thoroughly derivative captivity/pursuit movie of the "trapped in an insane psycho's house" variety, about a young woman who is tricked into meeting someone via a dating app who is not who the profile says, but which slowly picks up about a third of the way through and then, surprisingly, just gets better and better.
This is entirely derivative in terms of its themes, indebted deeply to movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but slowly they began to introduce elements that had me thinking, "Well, this is actually alright for what it is, I bet younger horror fans will think it's great... although I'm just not sure it's necessary when we have The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And then, slowly, they just kind added enough novel elements, and truthfully the whole thing is well-made enough all the way through, that I actually wound up enjoying it quite…
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