Movie Reviews

Strictly amateur, seems to be full of non-actors, and a nonsensical storyline, as 5 annoying gorgeous woman from LA have apparently been offered thousands of dollars to go to Sedona to do a "spiritual obstacle course" as entirely familiar new-age characters—who seem to be real-life new age characters, they sure aren't actors—get them to confront their anger at their parents and each other, and it's presented as if we're supposed to think it's profound.

Meanwhile, an unexplained teen, who we know is supposed to be a First Nations person because an obvious First Nations person who he calls "Dad" tells him early in the movie "Son, I need you to do the show this week", is commenting on it from afar like a TV show host, and we see hooded figures in space apparently watching it. The movie ends when the "host" inexplicably declares that one is the "winner".…

This has got to be a student film, and by a not very skilled student filmmaker. Less than an hour long, and utterly aimless, with no production values or acting to speak of.

A hipster couple cat sits an apartment that the synopses and an in-movie intro card say is haunted, but I never saw that. Except for them writhing around in what a title card says is "a ritual to rid the house of remaining evil" near the end, it seems like all they do is sit around and talk for the whole thing.

They should ban movie cameras from the borough of Brooklyn. The big studios can sub other locations, and it would make a lot of hipsters find some other way to spend their time.

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…

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.

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,…

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…