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Ponderously dull sci-fi movie of the sort indie filmmakers sometimes seem inclined to make, the kind where an opening credit lets you know it's "A Film By" and not a "movie". A couple's young daughter gets abducted. A year later, they're still suffering from it, and they get moved out to a remote but high-tech home in the woods where he discovers extraterrestrial shortwave transmissions that also somehow cause her to hallucinate and think she's seeing her daughter. Lots of attempts at artsy cinematography and
Consistently amusing workplace comedy about a man who discovers, separately, that several of his office workers are alien invaders, and a failed short relationship with one of them puts Earth in the middle of an interplanetary battle. Fun enough, plus good players like Samm Levine, Angela Bettis, and several other inoffensively familiar comedy faces make it slightly more entertaining than it otherwise might have been. Not a great comedy but not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. Could easily have been stupid but instead manages to be charming.
A single-note idea where a pair of frustrated hipsters who I bet live in Austin wish they were alone in the world, so they wake up alone, and spend the rest of the movie ruminating on their relationship, "deep" thoughts, and mostly doing what look like acting workshop exercises. The movie tries to redeem itself with "artsy" sequences where something they're talking about is occasionally shown in a cutaway animated, rotoscoped, or black-and-white fantasy sequence... for instance, they're lost in the woods, and he says "I should have been a boyscout", cue the 'clever' cutaway of him in a scout uniform, standing next to a puptent, giving the scout salute for 15 needless seconds, in black and white, of course. Ends without a resolution. The whole thing seems like it came from some sort of workshop. I bet it did well in some festivals. Waste of time.
Awful anthology film. Seems like some people sat around thinking of "scary" vingettes, mostly with no explanation, and filmed them as shorts—for example, a woman gets a mysterious rash, and then gets the idea to attack her boyfriend and it goes away when she drinks his blood, and then you see her walk out and she's fine, and that's it, that's the whole story. Or, a guy misses his dead wife, and has let his apartment fill with trash, and then the trash bags get up and talk to him and it's her ghost, and that's it, that's the whole story. It's loosely framed by a poorly-explained story in which a woman is hopping between universes trying to find one where her dead sister is alive, and apparently her hopping is causing the scary stuff, because movie.
Cartoonishly evil frat guys lure a few women to a remote cabin for a party, only to drug them, rape them, and release them to hunt them down for sport. Things don't do as planned, though, when one of them reaches a road and flags down a car... which happens to have an incredibly realistically nerdy couple—I could swear I sat next to these two in the computer center in college—who turn out to, uh, not be people you want to fuck with.
What follows is tough to categorize. Torture porn? Revenge fantasy? The darkest pitch-black comedy I've ever seen? It's basically all of these.
It helps that it has some good moments that redeem it, so you know it isn't just an exploitation flick. The stereotypically weak characters—the female intended victims, and the geeks—turn out to be overpoweringly strong, but with…
A goofy slasher film in the tradition of (and even name-checks) "Hood of Horror". A gang initiation goes wrong when they break into a serial killer's house, and he's got all sorts of deadly games set up, because, movie. Expect lots of sass. I enjoyed it for what it was.
It's easy to see why this film is considered a thoroughbred classic; at the same time I found it to be solidly made in some ways, but uneven in others. The influence of French New Wave is apparent—and I've never liked the artifice of French New Wave very much, personally. I suppose I'm glad Godard didn't direct it, as they were in talks for, apparently.
Anything else... well, this is one of the most written-about films out there, and my personal opinion doesn't matter much. Google it and you'll find out whatever you need to know.
It's weird to me to label such a classic and beloved film as no more than "watchable"—especially given the stellar cast and its groundbreaking status—but while I appreciate why many people love it, I can't see, despite its very obvious merits, that it's a personal favorite, or even one I'd necessarily go out of…
Never mentioned among the best Coen brothers movies, and for a reason. Which is to say, it's merely a very good movie with a few touches of greatness. Set in the 1950s, and highly styled with everybody talking like Edward G. Robinson (including Jennifer Jason Leigh, which is strange at first), Tom Robbins plays a hapless mail room clerk promoted to the CEO of a major corporation in an effort to tank the stock so the board can buy a controlling share.
It plays into some of the cinematic stereotypes the Coens thankfully learned quickly to avoid, and the story is entertaining but not novel in the way so many of their movies are—until the ending, which is vintage Coen Brothers and really kind of redeems everything. But you wait through a long B+ movie waiting for an A- ending.
Sam Raimi shares a writing credit, which makes sense...…
A man calls a prostitute to a hotel, who overdoses while he's in the shower. Her madam shows up, gets to arguing with him, pulls a knife, and in a minute he's got two bodies in the hotel room. That's the setup.
The rest of the movie? Well, he's got a pimp looking for either the prostitutes or to be paid for them, and two bodies to somehow dispose of.
It's a totally amateurish movie with almost no production values, no cinematography at all, and seemingly no budget, but... no hugely obvious flaws, either. It's a little differenty than most neo-noir pics, as it doesn't really try to have any Hollywood sheen or be "cool", it's just nuts and bolts telling of the story. I liked it for that. It's paced pretty well, too, it never really sags. Probably one of the best c-grade amateur pictures I've ever seen. Not…
What is it about H.P. Lovecraft that inspires so many zero-budget absolutely terrible but obviously spirited 100% amateurish efforts, often starring what appear to be the director's friends or whoever happened to be standing around to ask if they wanted to be in a movie? Somehow I often have affection for these, just because the people so often seem to be having such a good time doing absolute crap emoting and woodenly reciting the script in whatever clothes they happened to be wearing that day, except for the occasional cliché "occultist robe".
A labyrinthine, rococo tale of ghosts and cult activity in the small New England town, with pretty much no acting to speak of, so much as occasional emoting and fake-sounding, put-on voices and accents.
I enjoyed it, for crap. And it is crap, as crap as crap gets. It was kind fun to watch, as a spectacle.
Definitely a strange idea for a movie, as a down-on-his-luck artist rents a studio with some sort of unspecified monster behind a hole in the wall that speaks in a sexy woman's voice and gives him brilliant artistic inspiration in exchange for increasing demands for attention, affection, and finally sex. Yes, with, essentially, a glory hole with teeth. And one that takes credit for the careers of a bunch of great 20th century artists. And as he falls for the gallery owner who falls for him for his new talent, the hole gets jealous, making for a few scenes of minor but visually imaginative gore.
It's a B-movie but the whole thing is so bizarre it's kind of charming. Unfortunately a weak ending keeps it from being recommendable as an oddity... a strong ending would have put it over the line for sure. This is the movie I created…
This entry in the "A group of teens go on vacation in a cabin and..." genre is a sad near-exception to the Canadian horror rule. I say "near" because the antagonist turns out not to be a slasher, zombies, or aliens, and I think they mix it up by ripping off a completely different, unexpected subgenre instead. I say "I think", because, while they show you a lot of weird stuff, they never actually tell you what it is or why it actually happened.
And that's as much good as I can say about this execrable, 100% amateur effort.
Look, it starts with "A group of teens go on vacation in a cabin and...". Apparently even the Canadians can't save that opening.
Here we have something odd. A ghost story but not a horror movie. Not quite a comedy, but far too lighthearted (and innocently goofy) to ever be meant to be taken seriously. Definitely has a certain charm, which it needs to, because that's the only way a story this dumb could ever fly.
A likeable but goofy guy, first seen on a string of comedically terrible dates, gets a job at a hotel which turns out to have a haunted room. The staff has adapted their routine around it and are matter-of-fact about it. Mr Goof has to see it himself, and, after a few scary encounters, bonds emotionally with the ghost and becomes determined to help find the lover who jilted her and caused her to kill herself in the room and bring him back. Eventually things get even sillier and more unbelievable, but... the whole thing is kind…
Absolutely execrable, home-movie-quality effort at a woman who is stalked by demon that looks like a man in a cheap rubber mask, which she once made a deal with and then ran from (maybe she thought he couldn't see out of the mask.) Mostly she lives at home with her daughter and they recite lines at each other. Less than nothing to see here, if that's possible.
I liked this movie, it's a fun sort of solidly-second-rate sci-fi-ish thriller about a group of wannabe startup kids who find a mirror in a hidden room in their house that allows travel to parallel dimensions. Soon enough they bringing back advanced technology from the parallel dimensions, copying the art they find and presenting it as their own, and soon they're making money, and of course things get complicated.
It's unassuming enough, not great by a longshot, but as it goes along it comes up with enough twists and turns to be entertaining, as long as you can tolerate the predominant douchebag startup personalities.
Another fatally-flawed horror gem in the finest Canadian tradition, this odd horror/thriller features an ensemble cast trying to survive trapped in a house with dwindling supplies as zombie-like former humans roam the streets, when one of them begins killing off the others.
The odd attempt to merge a zombie movie and a whodunit doesn't quite pan out, as the whodunit side isn't very engaging.
However, the zombie side, such as it is—the zombies are mostly set dressing, the story is about the people inside the house—has some originality to it, which is nice to see in this overdone subgenre.
The writing and acting are not terribly impressive... in fact, it opens with a cartoonish "kill" scene, probably the very worst, USA-Up-All-Nite-iest scene of the entire movie.
But most especially, what really gets me, it has some moments of gorgeous cinematography, always the path to my heart, and…
A germophobe nursing student begins to be inexplicably attacked by people around her wherever she goes.
Don't watch this movie. I mean it. And especially, don't eat while watching this movie.
I have watched thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of horror movies over the years, some pretty intense.
This movie goes places most horror movies never do, and certainly no mainstream horror movie, or movie of any genre that I've seen.
This one is different, that much can be said confidently. It's memorable. For whatever "different" and "memorable" are worth.
I've seen horror movies with tons of blood. Tons of viscera. "The Exorcist" made vomit a cliche in certain subgenres. The overdone zombie genre has certainly showed people being disemboweled in virtually every graphic, disgusting way possible.
Cards on the table: someone involved with making this movie had to be a coprophile. Full stop.
Cheapo movie that tries to conceal being bad behind being weird, about a weird hotel where weird people check in and they and the weird staff harangue each other and say things that make each other uncomfortable. One character who has a Jewish name and spends the movie berating the staff or shouting into a video call on his laptop liberally sprinkles stereotypical Yiddish words into his tirades, in a forced, unnatural, rehearsed-sounding way, such as emphatically describing things at several points as "verkakte" but mispronouncing it. This movie's title, "Country of Hotels", doesn't mean anything, and neither does the movie.
Canadian-produced TV movie about a pair of outcast girls who find a diary where you can write any wish and it will come true. Being Canadian, it couldn't be as completely bad as it should have been. The cast is mostly TV movie terrible, but the lead actress is oddly really good. It's slightly above average for a TV horror movie. The whole exercise doesn't rise quite to the level of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" but if you're in the mood for that sort of thing it's not too, too, toooooo far off the mark.
What a disappointment. This starts off with an interesting enough idea and fairly creepy execution. A kid saves a wealthy businessman from a mugging, and is rewarded with a job: watch a door in a remote abandoned building from 8pm to 8am to make sure it never opens, for $100k/year. Just watch the door. "What happens if it opens?" "It won't open, because you're going to watch it."
Needless to see, things aren't quite as uneventful as that... put almost. After a decent enough setup to make me want to see what was going to happen, the kid's friends, out partying, show up to bother him, and of course one drunkenly opens the door when the others aren't looking, so they go in to find her... and then, 2/3 of the movie is just "scared teens wandering around darkened corridors". There's lots of people saying, "Did you hear that? I…
I kinda liked this movie. In this modern-day parable of Frankenstein-meets-Hitchcock, a science research student is study reanimating dead mice—requiring hefty doses of chemicals extracted fatally from other living mice—when the woman he loves falls in a lake and drowns. You can imagine what happens next.
Of all the places that could have gone, this handles it pretty well. I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone going out of their way to watch this movie, and it sure takes a while to get going but once it did, I liked it. Some of the violence, while not particularly bloody, is pretty coldly brutal, but I suppose as the scientist gets colder in his pursuit of reanimating the woman he loves, the one or two moments of truly brutal violence sort of fit the character development.
It's a little predictable at points too, and falls back on cliches at odd moments,…
Perhaps the most derivative slasher/psycho film I've ever seen. So derivative of Psycho that the bad guy is named "Norman". And the similarities only begin there.
The one slightly memorable thing about this is villain Toby Wynn-Davies doing a remarkable Burgess Meredith impersonation. So if you've ever wanted to see Norman Bates played by an overacting Burgess Meredith in a much worse version of Psycho, this might be the movie for you. Otherwise, skip it.
Terrible movie. Just terrible. A family goes away to a cabin for the weekend and a mysterious stranger shows up, and an oddly threatening, leering yokel helps them when their car breaks down and never actually turns out to be threatening, just weird. Wannabe tv-movie level acting, which is just sad. Horrible editing and direction, everybody overacts, the editor left in too-long pauses before everybody delivered overacted dialogue, and the script presents the most unrealistic, random depiction of family strife I've ever seen, with everybody's mood and personality apparently changing from minute to minute or even line to line. Finally at the very end, in the last minute, it's revealed to be Christian movie (the dead are back because it's the End Times, but it's not scary, it's "heartwarming" as the family's dead son reappears) and suddenly it all makes sense how it could be so very weirdly bad. They…
I'm leaving this here just so I remember if I run across this again. This movie started slow, and I was having a hard night with other things, so for a while it was just background noise, and by the time it got interesting, I had missed a good part of the story. But it did seem interesting, and definitely had some of the stereotypical flawed-but-kind-of-interesting Canadian horror uniqueness to it. Not even really a horror movie except that zombieish theme, more like a very subdued horror/scifi crossover thriller somehow. Something about a northern Canadian town where people are being sucked into a zombie-like depression and locked away. Will watch it for real if it pops up again.
Middling-to-ok near-future sci-fi flick about an experiment to implant people with AI chips, which take over their lives and force them to kill and sit up straight, you're slouching.
I thought it was kind of ok. Unfortunately the plot doesn't explain much, and it's kind of predictable and takes a while to get to where you know it's going. But it was ok, I thought.
Kind of a disappointment here. This anthology film showing stories of people wandering across a postapocalyptic wasteland, really just some hilly rural area, starts with a couple of incredibly cheap-looking shorts that are so artificial it's almost more like watching animation than live action: very high contrast, saturated colors, and animated beasts, mutants, and robots that literally look like they were rendered on a '90s desktop computer, or were clipped out of an old video game.
But, it's so cheap-looking, and so stylized, it almost works. It reminded me in a strange way of watching som strange French animated feature (it's foreign-language, but with so little dialogue I couldn't place the language) or even a low-rent "Yellow Submarine".
The only problem is, after the weirdly charmingly bad first couple of shorts, it goes on for way too long, and gets less interesting. Some of the shorts aren't as…
As amateurish as it gets, seems like a couple of friends probably got together and made this jokey English tale about a guy who gets stuck in an underground bunker for 8 years before emerging to an outside world that has become a "Mad Max"-type savage wasteland. Obvious dime-store costumes, terrible miscasting, a complete dearth of acting ability, and a horrible Euro-disco soundtrack make this the kind of movie that couldn't even aspire to "USA Up All Nite" quality.
However, this film is somehow charming despite being absolutely terrible. It's like they know they're making a terrible and 100% derivative movie, and don't care, so they just have fun with it. I'm not saying I'd ever watch it again, but, weirdly, I enjoyed it despite it being one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
The best thing about this movie—literally—is the poster. Look at this! It looks like a…
The setup for this movie is dissuasive: Once a year, an ancient secret society "The Locusts" stages "Night Of The Locusts", where innocent people are set up for home invasions and bloody violence which must be finished within three hours, because, movie. Basically, sounds like a ripoff of "The Purge" crossed with the ubiquitously shitty home invasion horror exploitation subgenre, a subgenre I've hated since "Last House On The Left".
However, having watched it... you know, if only one of these movies was ever to have been made—and only one should have been, that sounds about right to me—this one would be it.
Instead of focusing on the violence, the movie spends a lot of time on tensions between the home invaders. There are long, slow sequences where nothing happens: an intended victim hides below the bed while one of the killers is in the room, and... everybody…
A horror-themed variant of those sub-"Airplane!" movies that are intentionally stupid, play to overly broad stereotypes, etc., such as the "joke" of having a child played by a full-grown dwarf, or two nuns who, becoming possessed tear off their habits and begin having sex. Hilarious!
Anyway, plane full of passengers become "possessed" one by one.
Except, weirdly, this cheap-shit movie somehow has cameos from known names—Lance Henriksen (who does not die last, because this is a comedy, not a horror movie), Bai Ling, even Adrienne Barbeau is in there. And, also, weirdly, it's a little bit.... funny? Maybe? Kind of? Maybe I kind of actually found it entertaining? Sort of?
A visually beautiful film made by someone who obviously studied at the feet of Blue Velvet-era David Lynch in terms of cinematography, and succeeds well on that level, but is otherwise absolutely terrible, and, most especially, is truly horribly cast. The actors are uniformly much too young, don't seem confident, for their roles, and mostly can't act. It's an odd and jarring discerpancy in such a slickly visually designed and shot film.
A pair of 1950s rookie detectives, who look like teen models, investigate a murder or something, through a series of pointless, surreal vignettes that are basically random. By the time the male detective is confronting an image of himself in drag, who then goes on to vamp a launge tune, I had long past lost interest.
Disappointingly, Ray Wise has a cameo as one detective's father... the first time Ray Wise has ever led me astray. Oh,…
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