Subfolders
Latest "Movie Reviews" Articles
Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Dead Night

Movies like this exactly are why I created a category "Je nais se quois/Flawed Gems". Definitely not a great movie, but certainly original, after a fashion, and ultimately, I thought, worth a watch, despite the flaws—most particularly for people tired of the clichés of the genre.

This is a solidly B-movie supernatural thriller about—wait for it—a family on vacation in a remote cabin in the Oregon mountains when Bad Things Happen. On top of it, it intentionally starts with some of the most hackneyed cliches out there, and sticks with that for long enough that it could throw you.

As the family settles into their cabin, mysterious hooded figures are seen doing... something... in the woods. People talk on the phone in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Something is Clearly Going On.

In the first hint that things are about to get a little different, a TV is seen…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30721  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

Anonymous 616

Have you ever seen the movie "Funny Games"? It might be my least favorite movie of all time: pointless brutality, and nothing more, presented as entertainment, as home invaders torture and kill a family. I eventually learned that the filmmaker was pointedly trying to make a movie that no reasonable person would sit through the length of.

Well, this does that one better, by dispensing with the highbrow artistic morality play of exposing the viewer as complicit in violence-as-entertainment—and substituting, instead, a brief coda explaining "the got him to do it."

A houseguest at a friend's dinner get-together spots a computer in an empty room and an anonymous person chats with him, knows all his secrets, and in a matter of minutes convinces him to "become like God" by torturing, raping, and killing his friends. So he does. Along with, delightfully, their 12 year old daughter, after hitting…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30716  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Spiral

Well, this movie put one over on me. Starts off with a bunch of guys having a reunion for a bachelor party in a fancy rental house, which logically promised lots of agressive dipshit behavior and characters I wasn't going to like at all. My dirty little secret is I'm often multitasking when I watch movies, and the good ones draw my attention, otherwise I wind up missing a lot, and I tucked in with my laptop expecting to miss most of this one. The loutish behavior in the early scenes (set in a strip club, naturally) did nothing to dussuade me that this would be anything more than 90 minutes of shriek-filled audio wallpaper.

But somewhere in the middle, I noticed the appearance of an antagonist who was incredibly well-cast, just seriously creepy. And very soon the disappearance of one of the guys in the middle of the…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30714  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » WAY too indie

Pesadilla

I guess this is supposed to be some sort of indie neo-noir, because it starts with a robbery, and has people planning other robberies, and has people waving guns around at a few points and some pointless grisly violence that comes out of absolutely nowhere at 1:45 of its 1:50 runtime, but mostly, it's people talking, arguing, or telling endless stories for two hours, capped off by an inexplicably violent ending that features artsy random images and a guy in a dog costume for some reason. I have no idea why this movie was made, or especially why it was labeled a horror movie, except maybe the guy in the dog costume attacking people two minutes from the end. It's boring for 1:45 and then doesn't make sense for 0:08. It's not even bad—it's just not a movie. It's just a bunch of scenes.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30708  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

Cupid’s Guillotine

Absolute garbage. Has the production values of a terrible zero-budget amateur horror combined with soap operatic melodrama. An engaged couple is lured into a haunted house attraction where the woman is abducted and surgically turned into a man by a jealous former, um, it's not quite clear what he his, but he's former, and he's jealous, and he's somehow magically in control of all their electronics, and, he's now also turned himself into a woman and posed as the man's hot, breathy new therapist to seduce him.

It's even worse than it sounds.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30704  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Fisher

Back in college, living out in the sticks, I used to occasionally listen to the local Christian rock station. Though the subject matter left me cold, I liked how the music was so unabashedly amateur—this was long before Christian rock took off even to the extent that it did, much of it sounded like someone had recorded it at home on a 4-track—and that there was something charmingly unselfconscious about it.

This movie is like that.

These people can't act, they just recite lines. This is home movie quality, it seems like someone got their friends (or more likely their church group) together to make a movie. And boy, do they talk about church and heaven a lot in this, even though it doesn't have an overtly religious message to push.

But, I dunno. Despite nearly turning it off about 15 minutes into it, I stuck it out…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30683  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » watchable

June (2015)

A 9-year-old foster kid is shunted from home to home because she's possessed by some sort of nature spirit bent on cleansing humanity from the world, who causes all kinds of hijinx when she surfaces.

It was alright—sorta seems like they were trying to make a horror movie with the requisite acting, story, and production values for an adult audience. It wasn't "The Omen", but, it was pretty tolerable. I don't think I'd watch it again, but I sort of liked it okay. If there were more horror movies like this and less total crapola I wouldn't complain.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30663  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » watchable

The Hollow Child

Decent enough horror movie about a foster child whose little sister disappears into the woods and comes back acting in disturbing ways. The town madwoman claims the child is no longer the same person. Guess who's right?

Not that bad for a horror movie starring teenagers. Probably a decent date movie, there's enough tension. I'd put this on the bottom end of reasonably watchable, if there's absolutely nothing else on.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30661  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Cannibal Mukbang

Well, this movie certainly turned out to be something much different, and much better, than I expected. That's not to say it was a *good* movie... it definitely doesn't aspire to higher than campiness... but by the usual low standards of a campy movie, it's in many ways excellent.

First of all, it introduced me to the idea of "mukbanging", an internet trend originating in South Korea where people watch videos of other people eating. (I'd say "kids today", but I didn't understand the shit kids did when I was a kid, so age as nothing to do with it.)

Ok. Second of all: obviously, it's a horror movie with "Cannibal" as the first word in the title, which places certain genre expectations squarely on it. And, it does live up to those expectations... after a fashion.

There's a lot of unflinching gore here, for sure, but not quite…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30654  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

Evil Under The Skin

Porn-movie-level acting, writing and production values. Mother and daughter go to an Oregon lake for some bonding time and, basically, nothing happens. Mom gets headaches, daughter (played by a real life porn actress) shows her boobs so often that I actually wished she'd put some clothes on, poorly-acted cops and creepy neighbors nose around for no reason other than to create "drama". This is also the worst-paced movie I've ever seen... with overlong scenes of monologues that aren't relevant to the plot, and one seemingly never-ending montage of the mother sitting alone looking concerned for no clear reason.

Shot on often-overexposed home video, and replete with the in-camera slomo and filter effects that some people just don't realize aren't "scary". I'm surprised there wasn't a star wipe.

So low-quality that it's one of the very few movies I've ever turned off in the middle. Definitely the only movie…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30628  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Night Things

Boy, you have to give this home-movie-level, bottom-of-the-barrel amateur production credit for trying. They really tried *hard* to make a good movie. They had absolutely no idea how to, and they couldn't find anyone with any acting chops, but they clearly were trying hard.

Plot: People are trapped in a house in the woods by an energy field circling the area. When they die, they wake up wherever they were first killed when they entered the area. The woods are full of human-like creatures, represented by people in costume-shop cloaks and black and white makeup, who either want to eat them, transform themselves into exact duplicates of them, or steal their gasoline, I'm not sure, sometimes crawl instead of walking for some reason, and drool black goo. The occupants of the house are trying to start up a mysterious machine that they believe will lower the barrier, without getting themselves…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30623  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » watchable

Jug Face

Southern supernatural drama/folk horror about a backwoods rural community that survives by making occasional human sacrifices to an alternately mud- and blood-filled pit that keeps them otherwise healthy in return, as a teenage girl discovers she is the next to be sacrificed.

It was alright, watchable for that sort of thing. Not the greatest, but basically at least it's a real movie with horror themes, and an actual plot, not a cheap-shit amateur effort like so much horror.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30595  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

The Amityville Backrooms

This might be the most amateurish film I've ever seen. An utterly silly home-video-shot idea—I can't even call it a story, it's just an idea—about a realtor who suddenly gets transported without explanation to an empty house (in Amityville, natch) and keeps getting transported back inside it every time he tries to leave.

The remarkable thing about this is they don't seem to have even tried to find someone who could act. The man playing the realtor seems to have been instructed to wander around the house improvising his responses to the situation. He says aloud everything he would have thought, talk to nobody in particular, and emoting, while double-exposures of "creepy" things (tentacles, a man in a hood) occasionally appear in the frame for a second, without explanation, before disappearing again. Occasionally it cuts to people who can't even pretend to be newscasters trying to act like newscasters,…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30547  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Ladyworld

A somewhat artsy take on "Lord Of The Flies" in an isolated house full of eccentric young women, trapped there while attending a birthday party when an earthquake causes it to sink below the surface of the earth. Slowly they become less civil. Adding to the surreal atmosphere are typical "girly" things played for additional strangeness, like their increasingly bizarre makeup, as well as their growing paranoia.

Despite the presence of some of my favorite young actresses, like Maya Hawke and Odessa A'Zion, I didn't exactly like it. Something about young women shreiking at each other quite that much wasn't really to my taste. The artsiness was not as egregious, nor as hamfisted, as a lot of movies, although it did get grating at points, including having an avant-garde Petra Haden/Meredith Monk-type acapella soundtrack, which I might go for as something to listen to but not as the backing track…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30532  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Maggots

Kind of a fun D-grade zero-budget picture about a bunch of punk rockers camping in the woods when they get attacked by giant rubber maggots. Actually was kind of amusing for what it was, has bits of low-key almost Repo-Man-esque cynical dark humor, although the whole schtick wears thin by about halfway through. Still, one of those rare intentionally bad films that I nonetheless enjoyed a little. The characters are kind of funny. A little.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30527  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

The Nothing

I don't know what this movie is about because the first two minutes opened with the most egregious, clichéd first-person-shooter camerawork I've ever seen and I turned it off.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30516  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

Do Not Open

This sequence of horror tropes—I can't really call it a movie—is odd in that it definitely is directed well. Individual scenes, if you saw them in isolation, seem creepy. But next to each other in a mishmash, it's just absurd. This is one of the worst-written movies I've ever seen.

The daughter of a young family of parents and kids who appear to be nearly the same age (named in the IMDB credits as "father", "mother", "daughter", and "son") gets an invite on her phone to a music festival that her same-age parents have forbidden her to go to. This invite carries some sort of inexplicable power to infect all the family's electronics, causing them to see an hear things that require a greater suspension of disbelief that I'm capable of: they see videos of each other on their phones doing things they never did, overhear each other having…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30476  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

Diane (2023)

Absolutely awful pic (indie division). Shot alright, but the plot is incomprehensible... a couple moves into a new building where, after about an hour, it turns out, the building manager is killing people for some reason. Meanwhile, most of that first hour is incomprehensibly spent showing a completely different movie, a cheesy spoof of a '70s blaxploitation flick called "Coffy & Creame" that might as well have been titled "I Dreamed I Gave Tarantino A Hard-On", sometimes showing scenes from that more than once without every fleshing it out into an actual story, before suddenly for the last half hour returning to the unrelated present-day story, which suddenly turns into a jumbled sequence of scenes from an apparent torture flick. Scattered throughout are scenes of a man who was apparently cast for his ability to stare at the camera with a twisted expression on his face, staring at the camera…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30451  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Influenza

This movie has all the warning signs—it's described as a "horror comedy", and the synopsis starts with "A group of social media influencers..."—so I knew what I was getting into.

And, I have to say, it took a while for the setup to get going, a movie about social media influencers trapped in a haunted villa shouldn't take like 30 minutes to get them trapped in the haunted villa, the entire longwinded set up is totally disposable. And, even once everything is somewhat explained, the basic reason for just about any of it is, "because, movie."

But: this is a movie made by reasonably capable filmmakers who seemed to know just how silly the whole premise is, and decided to milk it for what they could. They baldfacedly embrace absolute silliness like, "This is the house where the first-ever influencer killed herself, and now all the ghosts of influencers who…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30448  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Bonehill Road

This is one of those movies that seems like someone who had never made a movie, or even ever known anything about making a movie, had a camera and just asked a bunch of their friends, "Want to be in a movie?"

And, happens to be friends with Linnea Quigley, who it's at least funny to see again like 35 years after what I hesitate to call her "heyday".

But: here's the thing. I really don't get into the "so bad it's good" thing, most of the time it's just an excuse to not really try. This is a rare case where, for me, it actually is so bad it's good, because, it seems like they *really did try*. They just didn't know how to write anything but one horror movie cliché after another, and didn't know how to act, and didn't know how to make a movie. But…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30444  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

13th Child: Legend Of The Jersey Devil

What a weird movie. This movie has the fashions—and solid-state screaming guitar soundtrack—of a more recent picture but looks and feels totally like a 1976 made-for-TV monster movie. Some horseshit about the Jersey Devil, the story didn't make much sense. Bizarrely, stars an aging Robert Gillaume as a convict. It totally deserves the about 2.5 stars average it has on IMDB. It's definitely one of the worst movies out there. But... I liked the 1976ness of it? Kind of? Sort of?

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30440  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Ghosts Of The Void

Hmmmmmm. Tough to know what to do with this one. It might be the most deeply flawed of flawed gems.

A captivity/pursuit flick that doesn't really have any captivity or pursuit until at least 2/3 of the way through its runtime. The director described it as "a home invasion flick without the home" but in truth it barely has the invasion, either. That's a good thing.

A struggling couple, their marriage crumbling and deep anxiety setting in as shown through flashbacks, has been evicted from their home and is spending their night in their car, parked on a darkened street outside a country club in the nice part of town. Slowly, tension builds, and it takes well over half the movie before we see someone is indeed messing with them. Someone leaves a note saying "don't park here" on their windshield... but it may be a nearby homeless…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30309  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » watchable

The Alternate

Okay-ish sci-fi thriller about a videographer who discovers a portal to an alternate universe where his duplicate alternate self is living a much better life, and decides he wants that life for himself. You can probably imagine the entire rest of the story from there.

It wasn't terrible. Just barely qualifies as watchable.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30282  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

Double Vision (2020)

Godawful sub-"USA Up All Nite" garbage that seems to have been shot by amateurs with a home video camera and a knowledge of slasher film clichés (and, amusingly, video editing software with canned effects and cheezy infomercial-style wipes.)

Acting quality, writing, and production values are on par with the worst porno film. One of the few movies I've ever just turned off after a half hour... and, if you've read through enough of these reviews, you know I've sat through the full length of some pretty bad movies.

And, it's two hours long... I can't even imagine another hour and a half of this, and I don't want to.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30279  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » WAY too indie

And Here No Devil Can Hurt You

This seems like a student film... decent at some things about filmmaking (occasionally striking visual images and framing), and totally seemingly oblivious to the need for others (decent writing, any kind of pacing).

A couple having an affair in an empty house spend an interminable amount of time doing nothing—in fact, the first poorly-recorded line of dialogue is mumbled over 22 exceedingly slow minutes into it. He occasionally wears a horse mask, even during sex. Finally they discover they can't leave, and start to see visions of things that probably made sense in the mind of the student filmmaker who thought of this.

Occasionally they have much-too-long scenes of them just sitting and talking about heavy topics like sin, death, and guilt, and my favorite thing to sit through in all of cinema, hashing out their relationship as a couple at length. I kept expecting Sunita…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30274  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Favorite

A Serious Man

In adding my review of Fargo for no other reason than that I couldn't have a "favorite movies" section that didn't mention it, I discovered that I somehow left "A Serious Man", my favorite Coen Brothers film, off.

"A Serious Man" doesn't get mentioned much. Besides being my favorite Coen Brothers film, it's probably also their least accessible. I consider it more a work of art than a movie. The narrative is ambiguous, to say the least, and at times intentionally confusing, as the story unfolds of a professor in the late 1960s who is simply unable to understand why his life is falling apart: his wife leaves him for a man who empathizes with his pain of his losing her and offers him a hug; someone is sabotaging his career with anonymous slanderous letters to his employers; he is threatened by the father of a student who has…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30266  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Favorite

Fargo

I just discovered I have somehow never reviewed this major favorite of mine. A modern redefinition of the film noir and crime dramas, and probably, with "Pulp Fiction", responsible for the modern "neo-noir" tag.

It's hard to do this movie justice in writing.

A desperate, craven, and openly dishonest car salesman hatches a bizarre plot to have his wife kidnapped by unscrupulous characters, so he can force his wealthy but cruel father-in-law to pay a million dollars ransom, goes horribly awry and more and more blood is spilled.

This movie is filled with memorable acting performances. Frances McDormand plays a star turn as the charmingly dowdy cop pursuing the case, William H. Macy brings his full talents to realizing a groveling car salesman who is equally pathetic and despicable, Steve Buscemi does his usual modern-day Peter Lorre bit, and Peter Stormare—who I've noticed has a talent for a…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30264  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Uncontained

A surprisingly ok, watchable post-zombie-apocalypse flick about a tough-as-nails drifter stumbling onto a remote house in Alaska where the precocious young children of a government research wait for their gorgeous, tough-as-nails parents to return while zombies roam the landscape. Other gorgeous and/or tough-as-nails survivors occasionally pass through along the way.

This one was a little different, though, and just slightly better than that intro probably does justice too. It's not really cliched, outside of that, well, it *is* a zombie movie, so certain things are to be expected. It's a little light on character, too, but it's well-made enough, reasonably cinematically polished, and has something of an actual plot rather than just thrills upon thrills, and I can only assume the abysmal reviews on IMDB are mostly from blood-and-guts or fright fans disappointed because it's not really a horror movie. It's sometimes easy to forget, but we do live…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30238  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

The Falling

Straight-up USA Up All Nite fare, and not the best of that, although not the worst of that either, with the understanding that that's not saying much. A 1986 movie about American tourists in Spain when the local villages are taken over by aliens, with all the poor production value, acting and production quality you'd expect. That said, if the '80sness or USA-Up-All-Nite-y-ness of it are enough to ironically entertain you... well, like I said, it's not the absolute worst of that. Close, though.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30234  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Movie Reviews » Trash

Royal Jelly

This is one of those movies so bad I wrote this review before it was even halfway finished. It's kind of a foregone conclusion.

Wooden acting, over-obvious symbolism (the lead actress talks about a bee becoming the hive's new queen as "Cinderella" in the beginning; not five minutes later we see her getting mistreated by her stepmother and scrubbing bedsheets in the house while wearing a Queen t-shirt), and improbable, logic-defying behavior star in this weirdly tough-to-follow story about a bullied high school outcast and beekeeping hobbyist who is picked for an unlikely friendship by an improbable substitute teacher who seems to leap from protecting her from bullies to taking her out for dinner to inviting her along to egg houses to having her move in with her improbable family at her remote farm in the space of about 2 days.

Strangely, the cinematography is competent and looks like…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=30216  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off