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Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

Project MKHEXE

This slightly-better-than-it-should-be Lovecraftian horror mockumentary is about a filmmaker investigating his brother's suicide after months of raving about a secret government mind control project, "MKHEXE". The runtime is almost two hours and somehow it manages to hold up, and the ordinarily annoying first-person-shooter horror trope is dialed down far enough that I didn't even really notice it until about 2/3 of the way through. That, the long run time, and an egregious number of video effects (why do so many supernatural phenomena resemble VHS glitching?) are all the hallmarks of movies I dislike, and yet, it kind of held my interest all the way through.

Interesting, it's one of those movies that goes on longer than it should, blowing past several points where most movies would have, maybe unfulfillingly, ended. In this case it's a good choice. It sees the story through.

Not that I'd recommend it. I wouldn't…

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Movie Reviews » Trash

Delicate Arch

Four hipsters take a camping trip in the desert to try to make "YellowBrickRoad" and aren't good enough filmmakers to pull it off. They make up for lack of an explanation for anything with lots of fourth-wall cleverness, "artsy" video effect interstitials, choppy editing, and some of the cheapest-looking "horror" costumes & makeup I think I've ever seen.

"What if we're in a horror movie? What if I didn't even exist before you pulled up to my house to pick me up?" By the time they're literally pushing and pulling at the edges of the film frame, it all starts to look very familiar, only lower-budget.

I hate to rag on it because I want to like these kids. Obviously someone went to film school, so, what were they supposed to do?

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Movie Reviews » Canadian

Anything For Jackson

"The Omen" cast a long shadow, and this well-made but somewhat derivative tale sits squarely enough within it that some of the scares are unfortunately predictable. Holly Palance cheerily throwing herself off the roof in 1976 was genuinely chilling; when the overly gregarious neighbore for some reason is oddly assertive about wanting to clear the house's walk in this movie and the camera lingers a little too long on the blower's spinning blades, you already know what he's going to do with a big smile on his face.

The plot is actually somewhat different than the sources a lot of the tropes come from—an elderly grieving Satanist couple kidnaps a pregnant woman to sacrifice her in order to bring their grandson back from the dead.

On the upside, it's pretty well-made and acted—it's Canadian, after all—and has Julian Richings, the creepy skinny actor who played the devil IIRC…

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Movie Reviews » Trash

Reap

Amateur hour, starring people who just can't even act. A bunch of vapid LA kids have a party and a weird girl shows up and tells them she's going to have to take their souls to "the other side" unless they find people to take their places, because, movie.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

I Am Going to Kill Someone This Friday

Fanms of Bad Lieutenant and Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer will probably like the psychotic executive protagonist of this film. This is a lower-key variety of psychopath than Christian Bale might once played, not cartoonish so much as perpetually-irritated guy plays the character with a smoldering intensity and nonstop animosity towards everyone and everything he meets.

Unfortunately, this is about all the movie has to offer. Ultimately there's not much plot, there's just waiting for an angry guy to pop off.

It was alright, mostly because of his performance.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

How Not to Work & Claim Benefits… (and Other Useful Information for Wasters)

Sort of a peculiar, charmingly British movie about two affably irresponsible lads who are mysteriously given $10,000 by a stranger, and after some affable goofing around find themselves being questioned by the police. Started off a bit slow for me as I wasn't in the mood for British charm qua British charm, but, strangely, as it goes on, it gradually mutates from a low-rent comedy about a couple of drifters to sort of a twisted psychodrama. I kinda liked it for where it got to, even though it took a while to get there.

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Movie Reviews » WAY too indie

Spell

An insufferable hipster artist flees to Iceland after the death of his fiancee, where a one night stand with a woman who makes him get a sigil tattooed on his chest and then steals from him leads to him getting embroiled in the slowest-moving, talkiest not-very-well-explained supernatural circumstances ever, leading to him going on a vision quest until he encounters his fiancee returned temporarily from the dead for a climactic 30 minutes of talking about their relationship, my absolute favorite thing to sit through in a movie.

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Banshee!!!

This was really bad, but I liked it. It's a low-budget monster movie that appears to have spent its entire budget on the monster... and it's a good one.

The plot, if it matters, is that a shapeshifting monster prowls the woods, kills people, and makes people's heads explode with its banshee wail. Local cops and loadies get together to try to kill it and mostly get picked off.

But, I don't know. Something about this one is fun. The acting is corny but maybe a touch better than it usually is in movies this cheap, and everyone seems really committed, and the action kind of doesn't let up and isn't all bad, despite the incredibly silly scenes of people's heads exploding or being ripped off like a piece of paper being torn.

The monster, not the cheesy video clichéd video distortion effects that indicate when someone…

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Movie Reviews » Honorable Mention

Publish Or Perish

Nothing tooo terribly special, but this is a fun little black comedy about a professor, stressed about trying to qualify for tenure, whose whole life spirals into bad intrigue when he's falsely accused of an affair with a student and then accidentally runs over her boyfriend. Overall, better done than most things like this, despite some moments that strain credulity. It unfolds almost like a Coen Brothers castoff script, but I mean that in a good way. It punches above its weight and largely succeeds at that. I watched "The Hudsucker Proxy" the other day, and while that's obviously a much more polished movie, I enjoyed this one's story and dark comedy more. The cast of unknown actors is well up to snuff, too.

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Movie Reviews » WAY too indie

Shortwave

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

...oh, sorry, I think I dozed off there.

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Movie Reviews » watchable

Drones

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.

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Movie Reviews » WAY too indie

A Room Full Of Nothing

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.

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Movie Reviews » Trash

Tenants

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.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Bystanders

Talk about a guilty pleasure.

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…

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Bitch Ass

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.

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Movie Reviews » watchable

Bonne & Clyde (1967)

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…

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Movie Reviews » watchable

The Hudsucker Proxy

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...…

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

The Dead Bodies In Room 223

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…

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Beyond The Dunwich Horror

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.

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Movie Reviews » Different, At Least

Deep Dark

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…

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Movie Reviews » Canadian

The Corrupted

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.

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Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

The Waiting

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…

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Movie Reviews » Trash

Sins Of The Mother (2022)

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.

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Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Parallel (2018)

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.

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Shifted

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…

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

GoodBi (2022)

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.

This…

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Movie Reviews » Trash

Country of Hotels

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.

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Devil’s Diary

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.

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Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

The Door (2014)

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…

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