The Dead Guy
Weirdly charming zero-budget amateur "horror" in which an FBI agent with the power to talk to the dead spends the whole movie talking to the dead and literally doing nothing else. Seems like a likeable guy, though.
Latest "Trash" files
The Dead Guy
Perceptarium
100% amateur crap. Some sort of attempt at Lynchian surrealism executed with apparently no knowledge of cinematography, lighting, sound, or acting.
After The Outbreak
Cheapo horror flick about a bunch of people holed up in a house during a zombie outbreak. Mostly you don't even see the zombies. So, basically, "Night Of The Living Dead", except, totally uninteresting.
Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me
What a weird movie. Bottom-of-the-barrel crapola, with the (lack of) acting and production values of a cheap porn film, and yet... something about it... if this had been a big budget it would have been kinda good. It's about a zombie outbreak in Philadelphia, and a group of survivors trapped in a basement. But it's a lot more about dialogue than zombies eating people. And it has a couple of fanciful animated sequences that totally work as comic relief and look better than anything else in the movie. It's kind of like... this would have been a good movie if they'd spent the kind of budget on actors and production staff that they did on the animation. The writing is, strangely, not really that bad, if you can imagine a skilled director directing skilled actors at it. But the movie looks and feels like a porno but with zombies instead…
A Clockwork Shining: Kubrick’s Odyssey 3
Let me save you the trouble: The Shining was Kubrick trying to send a coded message full of symbols to tell us that the MK Ultra project was being used to mind control American citizens by creating the Laurel Canyon 1960's rock scene after Jim Morrison was hired to play a rock star because his dad sprayed aerosolized LSD that had something to do with Charles Manson, and Hitler, and Sirhan Sirhan, and the Freemasons, which John Lennon secretly said in an interview that he didn't want to be in anymore shortly before being killed by a guy who liked the book Catcher In The Rye, which is a mind control device by a military intelligence officer, and, uh, I literally cannot make up bullshit that is as ludicrous as this conspiracy theory "documentary". Does contain the memorable line, "I do believe Bob Marley may have been what he appeared…
3 Tunnels 2 Hell (aka “Serenity Farm”)
Cheapo flick about a man who acts like a bad actor who inherits a farm on an island in Washington populated by other people who act like bad actors (except one, see below), only to discover tunnels on the property with zombified creatures dwelling in them. An entirely amateur effort that manages to distinguish itself by being just a scintalla more clever than the usual bottom-of-the-barrel amateur horror movie fare, plus some oddly somewhat-adequate cinematography and orchestral score, both also just a scintilla better than these kind of awful movies usual are, plus one mid-movie soliloquy from a crusty old guy who, strikingly, can actually act, recounting the genesis of the monsters with all the gravity of Brando in Apocalypse Now.
It was funny, in the first seconds of the movie, the strings kick in on the score, and I was like, "That's kind of good background music for a…
Debbie Does Demons
I think this is a softcore porno that somehow wound up on Tubi. Some sort of horror-themed nonsense about a ouija board summoning a 300-year-old witch is a pretext for showing a lot of unnaturally large tits and trashy people talking about screwing, in the lowest-possible home-movie production quality.
I mean, yeah, if you resurrected a busty 300-year-old witch with a ouija board, I'm sure the first thing she would do is stand in the shower caressing her own body, right? That's the level this thing operates on.
I lasted about 45 minutes before turning it off, but truthfully that was only because I was distracted for a lot of that time by looking up naked photos of one of the actresses on the internet.
Lillith
This is one of the best awful movies I've ever seen. A jilted college student summons a succubus to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend, and then can't stop her from rampaging. An absolutely amateur, zero budget, probably student-run production. But—I liked it! The actors really commit, and it had odd moments of cheeky humor that worked in much the same way as your friend saying something cheeky might work.
And it stayed in its lane: tt didn't get overambitious, it seemed to know it wasn't working with much and did what it could with what little it had. The sum total was that it was kind of charming how bad it was.
Undateable (series)
As hackneyed and unfunny as a sitcom can be. Chris D'Elia, who, despite whatever else may be said about him, is at least often a funny actor, is absolutely wasted in this. Turned it off during the third episode. I'm not sitting through 9 more episodes of this.
Banshee Chapter
I have no idea how they got Katia Winter and Ted Levine (who, by the way, once personally scared the shit out of me in a real life encounter) for this movie that is visually somewhat competent, at best, but feels in every other way like an absolutely amateur mess.
This story manages in the first half hour to mention MK-Ultra, psychedelics, numbers stations, the Black Rock Desert, H.P. Lovecraft, and a character who couldn't have been more closely based on Hunter S Thompson if he'd had his ashes shot out of a cannon after he blows his brains out near the end. And, nothing original at all, other than throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the first 30 minutes of one movie. It's just a hodgepodge of trite conspiracy theory shit tied together with jump scares, as the film finds reason after reason for the lights to go…
Alien Legacy: Terror on Luxor Ridge
I'm 40 minutes into this completely amateur pile of shit and I have no idea what it's about. It appears to be a bunch of scenes of various English people hamming up the daily lives of English people. And, geez, it's 2:07 long. There's another 90 minutes of this crap! Turned it off.
And here I thought America had a lock on movies this bad.
Theta States
Sleepless man falls under the influence of a demon posing as a doctor who runs a sleep clinic. I have never seen a movie try harder to be a supernatural epic, and fall so far short because they had no budget and no talent. But, wow, they really wanted this amateurish piece of garbage to be an epic. I kind of admire trying to punch so incredibly far above your weight.
Bottle Monster
Alcohol single mother and young son movie into a new house and there are... things there.
What a weird movie. Definitely an execrable, bottom-rung, amateur, poorly (really, not at all) acted, zero-budget movie. But, I dunno. The lead actress really commits, even though she can't act. And the special effects are so corny, but used so sparingly, that they're kind of charming. Plus, weirdly, there's a last-minute cameo from Bob Clendenin, who you will definitely recognize as one of those slightly funny-looking, "Hey, it's that guy" second-string character actors who's been in a million commercials and shows and things but whose names you never get.
Rated 2.5 stars on IMDB and that's about right. But, still, somehow, once it finally got going—which took a while—I liked it, for a terrible movie.
Obsidian (2020)
Patients at a medical clinic trial an experimental drug that cures their permanent injuries... at first.
Sub-USA-Up-All-Nite bottom-of-the-barrel zero-budget amateur-made flick turns out to be, weirdly, not a 100% terrible creature feature. There's like, one or two good actors in it, or something. They tried pretty hard, that's for sure. I mean, it's absolute garbage, for sure, and yet—I kind of liked it. I've seen way less watchable absolute garbage. Weird.
Indiscretions
This "thriller" is in every way like a porn flick without any sex. These people are obviously not actors, and are as stiff as if they're reading lines off cue cards. It's shot on VHS, not even always in focus. I lasted about 20 minutes. Seriously: why would anybody watch something like this if there's no sex?
From Dust
Strange. This is a bottom-of-the-barrel, amateur, zero-budget, home-movie level attempt at sci-fi, as a couple of non-actors playing "scientists" examine ancient artifacts found Antarctica, which turn out to release something sinister.
But, you know what? I don't know why, but this is like the best bottom-of-the-barrel, amateur, zero-budget, home-movie level attempt at sci-fi I've ever seen. There's something kind of good about it. Maybe it had a really good editor, or something? Bizarre. It's like a bunch of non-filmmakers and non-actors got together to make a bad movie, but somehow accidentally included someone in the mix who knew what they were doing. I actually kind of liked it, which is totally weird, because, I mean, it's terrible.
Reflect
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".…
Fawn
They've got to stop making zero-budget first-person-shooter "found footage" crap about groups of 20-year-olds investigating some bullshit.
Dark House
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.
The Quantum Terror
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.
Anonymous 616
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…
Cupid’s Guillotine
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.
Fisher
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…
Evil Under The Skin
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…
Night Things
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…
The Amityville Backrooms
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,…
Do Not Open
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…
Diane (2023)
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…
Bonehill Road
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…
Double Vision (2020)
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.