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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?
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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?
"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…
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.
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.
A guy has dreams that he kills and eats people, and I don't know anything more than that because it was so terrible I just turned it off after 20 minutes.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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