The kind of movie that a church group makes when they decide to make a "horror movie".
Well, you gotta admire their commitment.
I wonder how these things get on Tubi.
Best moment: The psychiatrist hands the protagonist a bible and tells him he needs God, not medication. Protagonist: "You're a doctor, not a priest." Psychiatrist: "I'm a human being. One who knows a lot more about these kinds of things than you do."
Nebbishy teen has a monster in his house that won't let him leave at night, forces him to be in bed by sundown, and eats anyone who comes calling.
Basically, it's a horror movie for kids, but kind of on the slightly intense side for kids. I thought it might be a "Goosebumps" movie or something. Has a weak "and then it all turned out to be a dream" type ending. I guess I should have expected that. Still, it's bad but not irritatingly so, and for what it is, kind of mildly entertaining, I guess.
Ten minutes of a totally uninteresting YouTuber yammering at his phone was all I could take of this "movie".
All the worst first-person shooter "found footage" horror cliches, wrapped around a nonsensical story about a man who whose face digitally distorts and he starts killing people when he sleepwalks, because, movie. Shot entirely in one house. Essentially, "Paranormal Activity" with even worse actors.
I wish people who made these first-person shooters understood that just because you don't have a cameraman doesn't mean you can also dispense with pacing, acting, and having a story.
Disappointing to see such a bad movie so full of Canadian accents. I guess it's the exception that proves the rule. Maybe Canada will kick this filmmaker out.
A young man who has just declared bankruptcy receives a mysterious charge card and buys a car, and becomes subject to usurious terms he can't afford. Mysterious threating individuals begin stalking him. An extremely contrived, self-consciously quirky, eccentric, clearly David Lynch-inspired exercise, but unlike most movies that could be said about, it actually kind of works on that level. It has some effective cinematography, including later very obviously film noir-influenced scenes that are visually well done, and actually manages to often say just on the entertaining side of being tediously "indie" and "quirky", which is rare, and I give it credit for that much.
Unfortunately, where it falls down is the much-too-slow plotting. It's twice as long as it needs to be, and for the full first half nothing really happens except for contrived self-conscious "weirdness". And the story isn't very good, and requires a little too much suspension…
British near-future dystopian sci-fi romance. A couple in a society where relationships are tightly regulated by electronic bracelets that control whether they can touch each other or not is informed that their relationship has expired and they must move on, and they're not happy about it. Could have been worse, sometimes the British have a way of making movies not be absolute crap. On the less interesting end of watchable, but, basically watchable, for an indie flick.
This was a good one, could be a spooky low-key modern gothic horror classic. Effectively creepy and atmospheric all the way through in the best manner of well-done horror. A man is hired to spend a few days as caretaker for a mentally ill woman sequestered in a remote island home. Upon arriving, he is chained in a harness ostensibly to prevent him from being able to wander into certain parts of the house. The young woman is alternately completely catatonic, and up wandering the house menacingly with a crossbow. There may be something in the walls.
More about mood than scares or gore, although make no mistake, this is genuinely a horror movie, and if you ask me, it's the way horror should be done... creepy and tense enough to be a date movie, but well-made enough to stand as an actual film, not a cheapo genre exercise.…
An AirBnB in San Diego is accidentally double-booked by an Irish couple and a couple from New York who are actually criminals on the run. Billed as a supernatural thriller, by an hour into this 90-minute zero-budget amateur movie it had consisted entirely of the couples hanging out around the house (apparently they booked an AirBnB all the way around the world and across the country, respectively, to sit around the house), bickering amongst themselves, plus two fleeting shots of figures in costume-shop satanic robes lurking outside the house. And that's it. I turned it off.
Painfully indie, poorly acted movie that I bet was filmed in Brooklyn. A girl... I don't know. She bleeds from the ears, she goes on blind dates with the worst men ever, she goes to the doctor, she deals with customers at the department store she works at who demand her help in choosing between perfumes that they say smell like spoiled bananas and rancid meat.
Weirdly, the visual production values are pretty professional and well-done, while the attempted acting—really, just people clearly reciting lines and trying ineptly to seem ingenuous about it—is just absolutely awful, incredibly bad. Like, porn-movie-bad. The contradiction between that and decent productions values is jarring.
And the weird pastiche of video production effects, jumpy visual montages to jazz drumming, and special-effects interludes in "artsy" styles don't help at all.
I turned it off halfway though.
What starts out as a really excellent pitch-black comedy about a production of "Julius Caesar" gone murderously wrong loses the thread about halfway through.
For the first half it was incredibly well made and cruising to be a particular favorite, but about halfway through the tight plotting suddenly gets very, very flabby, and instead of exploring the consequences of a murder they fall back on the "comedy" of the bodies piling up as many more happen.
It's a true shame. The production is excellent, whole thing is surprisingly strong, and even the acting holds up all the way through, with the exception of the appearance halfway through as Malcolm McDowell, playing his usual role of Malcolm-McDowell-in-costume-as-someone-else. The actors seemed incredibly true-to-life, based solely my meager experience with theater actors. I'm guessing this really is aimed as a satire at people who've been involved in the theater, but it was…
Amateurish, zero-budget attempt at a thriller. I can't even really follow the plot, this guy gets broken out of jail, now he owes someone some money, this little girl is being read to on the playground by someone nobody else can see. Two freaking hours and 35 minutes long. No thanks.
Everybody ... stares ... looking ... concerned. And ... talks ... very ... slowly. What ... are ... they ... saying? I ... don't ... know ... because ... this ... movie ... has ... the ... most ... muffled ... and ... indistinct ... sound ... recording ... I've ... ever ... heard. Turned it off halfway through, which was long after it got annoying.
This feels like a pilot episode of an anthology sci-fi show that wasn't picked up, and at 1 hr 1 minute long, it probably is. A lonely shoemaker builds a robot wife, his girlfriend finds out and is creeped out. It's kinda cute, in that there's-nothing-on-and-I-bored-so-I'll-watch-one-of-these-episodes-of-the-new-run-of-The-Outer-Limits kind of way.
Actually not bad supernatural thriller about woman who experiences night terrors, and possibly a visit from a demon, after accidentally killing her infant son in a car accident.
Not great by any stretch, and the very end is a little clichéd, but certainly above average for this kind of movie, with no egregious failings.
One of the most boring "thrillers" I've ever seen.
An injured climber in Scotland wakes up in a mountain shelter. He tends to his injuries, and in a few minutes another climber shows up, and they talk.
And talk.
And talk.
And that's literally all they do.
About 80 minutes into this 110 minute movie, they finally start talking about some horror or drama element—supposedly some beast is roving outside and wants the climber. Why did it take 80 minutes to get to this? Finally, in the last 20 minutes, they get into some supernatural elements.
I get the sense this was a 15-minute short that the director/writer/star narcissistically thought deserved to be a 2 hour movie. It didn't. Might have been a cool 12-15 minute short, if they'd gotten to the ending.
But, I mean, literally 80 minutes of two guys in a room talking before the…
This is sure to be a polarizing film. More a montage than a story, with plenty of very long, unhurried (and beautifully shot) nature shots, this film depicts a version of humanity that hibernates through the winter, and is just slightly more a part of the natural world. People are still people, they don't act like animals, they have dinners around dinner tables and go to concerts. But there's no line between "civilization" and "nature"... goats and raccoons wander through the houses, roosters leap on the dining room table to pick what's left of a massive pre-hibernation feast, and people describe whatever group of people they happen to cohabit with as families, as parents and siblings. "Once when we woke up I had a new older sister", someone relates. "We had no idea where she came from." Cows appear to be the dominant species, and are often seen wandering by.…
Sometimes I stumble onto a treat.
A company invents VR technology to allow rich people to experience life from the viewpoint of someone more disadvantages. To say more about the plot would require spoilers.
This indie sci-fi is filmed in black and white, which seemed pretentious at first, but made sense as the movie rolled on, because, it's sci-fi, yes—but mostly it's actually film noir, and while nobody would accuse it of being one of the greats, it's a pretty well-done one for a little indie flick. As the story gets more involved the choice to film in black and white as an homage to vintage film noir makes sense.
It started out seeming pretentious and not very effective, not to mention not particularly well-acted, but only got better as it went along, building, happily, to a very effective ending noir ending. Though it takes a while…
Not absolutely terrible haunted house movie. Couple recovering from the death of their son is haunted by... it's not clear, but something. Also, seems to be set in basically a trailer, instead of a house. So, a haunted trailer movie. Not so terrible for a B movie, though, so, basically watchable if you're in the mood for this sort of thing, although don't expect much more than that.
They hire a medium/exorcist who is down-to-earth and underplayed, for once... think about Zelda Rubenstein in "Poltergeist", then imagine her polar opposite.
Patients at a medical clinic trial an experimental drug that cures their permanent injuries... at first.
Sub-USA-Up-All-Nite bottom-of-the-barrel zero-budget amateur-made flick turns out to be, weirdly, not a 100% terrible creature feature. There's like, one or two good actors in it, or something. They tried pretty hard, that's for sure. I mean, it's absolute garbage, for sure, and yet—I kind of liked it. I've seen way less watchable absolute garbage. Weird.
Scientist pandemic something something. 8 minutes of the most egregious "found footage" cliches were enough to get me to turn it off.
This is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen... to a point.
This movie about a suicidal man driving around in a car looking for an opportunity to kill himself when the ghost of a young girl appears in his passenger seat starts as an execrably "indie", pretentious, artsy, low-budget enterprise of the sort I usually hate. And for maybe the first very long half hour, that's what you get. I looked at the clock at the 30 minute mark and questioned whether I could do another 90 minutes of it. Lots of film effects, not much else happening.
But, first off, I noticed something strange: this low-budget pretentious crap movie about a guy driving around in a car had a full-on orchestral score more appropriate for "Raiders Of The Lost Ark". So I began to pay attention. And after the dreadfully long first act... it actually got…
This "thriller" is in every way like a porn flick without any sex. These people are obviously not actors, and are as stiff as if they're reading lines off cue cards. It's shot on VHS, not even always in focus. I lasted about 20 minutes. Seriously: why would anybody watch something like this if there's no sex?
Truly strange—this is a very talky, amateurish, artsy and extremely pretentious zero-budget indie flick with little plot, dislikeable characters and not much acting to speak of... and yet, somehow, it works. It's like the exception that proves the rule.
A young couple goes on vacation at a cottage she grew up vacationing at, only to be visited by a pretentious masked figure who is either some sort of forest spirit or her childhood imaginary friend. She spends the rest of the movie walking through the woods talking with him, to her boyfriend's growing annoyance.
It's hard to explain why it works. It's very much like a fable, there almost nothing to it, and somehow manages to weave the pretentious elements into something of an engaging tapestry. I don't know. It's weird. It should be an awful, awful movie. Virtually every identifiable element of it, looked at on its own, is…
"Alien" in a boat. Vaguely watchable sci-fi/horror action adventure, if derivative.
Stars Lance Henriksen as the Captain. He is the last character to die, meaning this may be a horror movie.
A hopelessly pretentious amateur production apparently about an actress wanting to stage a cursed one-act play—I got that by looking it up online, because I sure couldn't tell from watching the movie. One of those movies that tries to make up for lack of filmmaking talent by pretention and being 'experimental'.
First you learn the rules, THEN you can break them. Not before.
Annabella Rich is starting to seem like a harbinger of bad, pretentious amateur movies. Second one I've seen her in this week.
Turned it off after 30 minutes.
Strange. This is a bottom-of-the-barrel, amateur, zero-budget, home-movie level attempt at sci-fi, as a couple of non-actors playing "scientists" examine ancient artifacts found Antarctica, which turn out to release something sinister.
But, you know what? I don't know why, but this is like the best bottom-of-the-barrel, amateur, zero-budget, home-movie level attempt at sci-fi I've ever seen. There's something kind of good about it. Maybe it had a really good editor, or something? Bizarre. It's like a bunch of non-filmmakers and non-actors got together to make a bad movie, but somehow accidentally included someone in the mix who knew what they were doing. I actually kind of liked it, which is totally weird, because, I mean, it's terrible.
Funny enough, tonight I filled in a bunch of reviews long-time favorites I'd never posted, and as soon as I was done, what does Tubi serve up, but the best gangster movie I've ever seen, "Goodfellas".
Honestly? I love this movie, but not like I love many of my other favorites. There is no denying it's one of the best films from one of our best directors, and contains an unimaginable heap of talent in its huge ensemble cast of dozens. It's a superb movie that deserves every bit of the wide praise it's received, and is the thrilling watch from beginning to end. I love this movie. But not like I love many of my other favorites.
But, it's ultimately just a story. It's not profound. It's about the rise and fall of a gangster. Even a crime film like "Dog Day Afternoon", another old favorite crime movie, somehow…
This movie about a young man's coming of age in a mafia-controlled Bronx neighborhood in the 60s, set against the backdrop of the growing civil rights movement, has always been a particular favorite of mine. De Niro's directorial debut, it's kind of a less-flashy little brother to GoodFellas, and for my money, a similarly good movie, although the story is smaller and more personal. It likewise stars De Niro, albeit here as a good-guy working-class dad, and has a cameo from Joe Pesci once again in scary mobster mode. Original author Chazz Palmintieri plays a star turn as a coolly intimidating local boss who De Niro wishes his son would stay away from.
I originally reluctantly had this under "Honorable Mentions" instead of "Favorites", because, ok, it's not "Network" or "Deliverance". It's not even "GoodFellas". But, damn, it's undeniably a big favorite of mine.
Understated, character-based horror like they used to make in the 1970s, although with a fair share of visceral gore along the way, for sure.
A mother carries a miscarried baby to term, only to have it mysteriously revive... with a taste for blood. Now, better movies have been made with worse premises, and this does remarkably well with it, for a (reasonably, 2009) modern horror movie. It's a quieter, less ambitious, yet to me much more engaging movie than similarly-themed efforts such as the still-not-bad, reasonably watchable Michelle Monaghan supernatural drama/thriller "Blood".
I found the cast to be good, and the writing spends a little time developing the characters into real people, making some of their decisions after the gore starts a little more believable.
A lot of people I assume were born long after the advent of slasher horror and splatstick gore films really…
Les Blank's truly memorable documentary about the making of Werner Herzog's excellent "Fitzcarraldo", a historical adventure drama about an early-20th-century entrepreneur seeking access to rubber trees in the Andes who organizes having a 300 ton steamboat carried over a mountain. As part of making the movie, they actually did carry the steamboat over the mountain, with documentarians along the way collecting footage of the unbelievably nihilist, dour Herzog, the erratic rages of leading man Klaus Kinski, and more. One of those rare times, along with "Hearts of Darkness", that a "making of" documentary stands as a great movie in it's own right.
Contains the famous monologue from Herzog that is often quoted as being particularly illustrative of his character. Standing in the Andean forest, he says to Blank: "Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony…
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