This single-season mystery/thriller series starred Jessica Biel, who sounds like she's been practicing her diction to good effect, as a Public Radio journalist doing a series investigating the disappearance of 300 people from a small town. Conspiracy-theory type stuff. Well-done creepy atmosphere, good performances, and grounded, believable production made this a good, if not great, watch. I liked it.
Well, this was a little different, and for the most part kind of entertaining little indie flick. A trio of women from Atlanta take a vacation in the woods during the pandemic, and spend about half the movie kibitzing around, smoking weed and keeping themselves entertained, when they start to feel like there's someone there watching them.
And from there, just when the movie seems like it's just going to be these women kibbitzing around, it gradually gets far weirder than you would ever expect. It's not all entirely well-explained, but it something along the lines of an alien invasion, and things get stranger and stranger, and what had been a down-to-earth flick about three down-to-earth women in a cabin becomes a fairly convoluted low-budget special effects sci-fi spectacle.
I pretty much enjoyed it, for a very low-budget and possible amateur production B-movie it turns pretty ambitious. And the…
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".…
Good swing and a complete miss. Starts out for at least half of it seeming like that rare decent indie flick, as a couple on a technology-and-sex-fast in the woods have a brutish, shirtless, drunken stranger stumble into the cabin... but then, after that setup, abandons telling a story in favor of a scenes that don't seem related to each other, the stranger telling them "You're already dead", few minutes of "deep" conversation, finally unexplained men in hazmat suits appearing and spraying smoke machines around, and then abruptly ending just when it seems like the second act was about to begin. Plus some sort of "time loop" allusion where everything unexplainedly starts again. But no hint of any explanation at all, for any of it, no plot, nothing. It's like they had a jumble of ideas and didn't think they needed to tie them into any kind of a narrative.…
This movie required the most suspension of disbelief of any movie I've ever seen. I don't know where to begin.
It's a "workplace horror" about a badly picked-on and bullied young woman, fresh out of college, apparently losing her mind and believing she's being pursued by some sort of tree-person that I couldn't be sure was supposed to be real or imaginary. The thing is, it's as over-the-top as any absurd comedy, but it's not a comedy, it's horror. Picture a workplace that's as much of an exaggerated caricature as "Office Space", but not a comedy. It's that weird and unbelievable. I don't know, maybe it was supposed to be a comedy-horror but they forgot to put the jokes in?
First she just seems badly bullied, so realistically it made the movie hard to watch, and even date raped by her asshole boss whom she's for some reason…
A weirdly sort of entertaining zero-budget flick about a bunch of low-rent people in northern California who, bear with me, play a cassette tape and accidentally free a witch who was trapped in it. Comments supernatural shit, exorcism, etc.
It was so low budget it seemed pretty useless at first, but the variety of people of the sorts you'd find hanging around a junkyard or dive bar were kind of realistic and entertaining, and they really committed to the whole thing. Kinda good for such a piece of crap.
They've got to stop making zero-budget first-person-shooter "found footage" crap about groups of 20-year-olds investigating some bullshit.
This is a low-budget indie movie that should have been way worse than it was. In a dystopian urban future that visually resembles our dystopian urban present, a scientist invents an android duplicate of himself, then gets into a love triangle when the android and he both fall for the same quiet, timid store clerk. The entire movie is narrated by the android from its own point of view.
The acting is abysmal in some places, the story is quiet and slow and honestly nothing special, and I'd go so far to say most people probably wouldn't like it—I suspect my usual post-review check online will reveal a lot of haters—but it definitely had some appeal to me.
But it maintains a certain low-budget dystopian esthetic well, and had a certain low-key cerebral quality to it that I liked. The android, imprinted with its creator's memories, is overarchingly…
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.
Bottom-of-the-barrel amateur-home-movie-level crap, but at least it tries to have a sci-fi angle. Or something. Basically these kids explore the sewer looking for a missing girl and encounter a bunch of really low-budget home-movie special effects.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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,…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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