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Movie Reviews » Trash

The Falling

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.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Royal Jelly

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…

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Unhinged Retribution

Perhaps the most derivative slasher/psycho film I've ever seen. So derivative of Psycho that the bad guy is named "Norman". And the similarities only begin there.

The one slightly memorable thing about this is villain Toby Wynn-Davies doing a remarkable Burgess Meredith impersonation. So if you've ever wanted to see Norman Bates played by an overacting Burgess Meredith in a much worse version of Psycho, this might be the movie for you. Otherwise, skip it.

Movie Reviews » Trash

The Undead

Terrible movie. Just terrible. A family goes away to a cabin for the weekend and a mysterious stranger shows up, and an oddly threatening, leering yokel helps them when their car breaks down and never actually turns out to be threatening, just weird. Wannabe tv-movie level acting, which is just sad. Horrible editing and direction, everybody overacts, the editor left in too-long pauses before everybody delivered overacted dialogue, and the script presents the most unrealistic, random depiction of family strife I've ever seen, with everybody's mood and personality apparently changing from minute to minute or even line to line. Finally at the very end, in the last minute, it's revealed to be Christian movie (the dead are back because it's the End Times, but it's not scary, it's "heartwarming" as the family's dead son reappears) and suddenly it all makes sense how it could be so very weirdly bad. They…

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Apocalyptic 2077

As amateurish as it gets, seems like a couple of friends probably got together and made this jokey English tale about a guy who gets stuck in an underground bunker for 8 years before emerging to an outside world that has become a "Mad Max"-type savage wasteland. Obvious dime-store costumes, terrible miscasting, a complete dearth of acting ability, and a horrible Euro-disco soundtrack make this the kind of movie that couldn't even aspire to "USA Up All Nite" quality.

However, this film is somehow charming despite being absolutely terrible. It's like they know they're making a terrible and 100% derivative movie, and don't care, so they just have fun with it. I'm not saying I'd ever watch it again, but, weirdly, I enjoyed it despite it being one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

The best thing about this movie—literally—is the poster. Look at this! It looks like a…

Movie Reviews » Trash

The Blue Rose

A visually beautiful film made by someone who obviously studied at the feet of Blue Velvet-era David Lynch in terms of cinematography, and succeeds well on that level, but is otherwise absolutely terrible, and, most especially, is truly horribly cast. The actors are uniformly much too young, don't seem confident, for their roles, and mostly can't act. It's an odd and jarring discerpancy in such a slickly visually designed and shot film.

A pair of 1950s rookie detectives, who look like teen models, investigate a murder or something, through a series of pointless, surreal vignettes that are basically random. By the time the male detective is confronting an image of himself in drag, who then goes on to vamp a launge tune, I had long past lost interest.

Disappointingly, Ray Wise has a cameo as one detective's father... the first time Ray Wise has ever led me astray. Oh,…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Dr. Ken [tv series]

Ken Jeong stars in this fictionalized version of his life, which apparently consists of a lot of overly broad characterizations, tired sitcom tropes, and middle-aged people talking in awkward, exaggerated attempts at hip-hop cliches in lieu of jokes. Even a huge surfeit of familiar faces can't save this, including a couple of people who were actually funny in "Community", and Dave Foley, who was actually funny in just about everything ever except this, but is thoroughly wasted here as a Phil Hartman wannabe, if you can imagine that that actually exists.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Booger

In between interminable references to "The Pina Colada Song" for some reason, a Brooklyn hipster gets bit by a cat (named "Booger"), and behaves like she is turning onto a cat as she spends the movie looking for Booger, who has escaped out a window. Then Booger returns, and she doesn't turn into a cat. So she sings "The Pina Colada Song" in the shower, and the credits roll, to an indie rock cover of "The Pina Colada Song".

And somebody thought this was a good idea for a movie.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Hallucinations (2021)

Originally posted on IMDB.

Note to aspiring filmmakers: there are two things you are not.

The first is David Lynch.

The second, and this needs to be said far less often because most people are smart enough to make the mistake, is Jean Luc Godard.

But whoever decided to make this pretentious, arch, plotless, "artsy" mess of visual and narrative noise apparently needs to be told.

30 minutes into it I was so flummoxed and annoyed by it that I had to check IMDB to see what others said. And, sure enough, only one review, and they said they didn't last 15 minutes. I believe it.

Don't get me wrong, there's some talented-for-a-student production and cinematography—and this has got to be a student film—but that's not enough. And you really can't just say, "I'm afraid I'm not good enough to make a regular movie people will like,…

Movie Reviews » Trash

A Man Goes On A Killing Spree

Does what it says on the tin.

Or, would, if the title was "A Man Goes On a Killing Spree For No Reason, In Between Much-Too-Long, Scenes Of Wooden Actors Having Interminable, Banal Conversations About Nothing Because The Director Has Apparently Never Heard Of 'Pacing' or 'Editing'".

Movie Reviews » Trash

God Of Pain (aka Algea: God Of Pain)

A truly shitty excursion in which wooden actors are shown committing murders, and then appear before a man in a plaster mask who announces himself as "The God Of Pain" and sentences them to eternal pain.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Incubus: New Beginnings

I notice a lot of truly abysmal, home-movie-level crap comes from this company "ITN". This is more of that. There's an incubus, he looks like the Brawny paper towel man, and a bunch of other shit that I can't even be bothered to summarize, and no acting or filmmaking skill anywhere to be seen.

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Misfit

An obese high school girl who is mercilessly picked on is taken in by a serial killer, shown the ropes, and coached to torture her tormentors.

I throw around the phrase "home movie" quite a bit to describe the lowest of low budget flicks, but it has never fit better than hear.

This really looks like someone had a super-8 camera and an idea... and no talent. You can see the "actors"... I'm guessing friends and family of the director... reading cue cards at points. (No joke, two of the actors have the same last name as the director/writer/producer.)

That said, though... funny thing, this is SO bad it's almost hard to dislike. It's like if your friends made a movie... of course it;s going to be bad... but you're going to like it. This is like that.

Only problem, and the thing that keeps me from…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Octogames

Absolutely execrable zero-budget home movie ripoff of "Squid Games". A YouTuber decides he wants to give away his channel, so, he has a competition where people play childrens games to win it, and the losers are all shot, because, movie. If we're lucky, nobody involved with this so-called "film" will work in movies again.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Aquaslash

I knew going into this it was going to be bad—as if a horror movie about someone putting razor blades in a waterslide at an amusement park could be anything but—but I was fully unprepared for how bad. For the first 50 minutes of this movie, teenagers at a waterpark bicker and argue and pick on each other. Then, an unknown person puts what are apparently the world's sharpest blades in an 'X' halfway down one of the slides with nobody noticing, and we get 20 minutes of so-bad-its-hilarious scenes of people being cut neatly into pie slices as they slide down the slide, and the crowd panicking at the disproportionately immense amount of gore this causes to come rushing out of the bottom. Oh, and, one guy, covered in blood, climbing all the way to the top to tell people to stop going down—because apparently the sound of dozens…

Movie Reviews » Trash

No Solicitors (aka “No Visitors”)

Eric Roberts leads the cast of this Felissa Rose-produced outing, which should be enough to tell you everything. A family of cannibals traps door-to-door salesmen in their basements, harvests their organs for sale, and eats whatever's left over.

Self-consciously bad and relentlessly campy, almost like if John Waters directed a "horror comedy" gore flick. Picture "Serial Mom" with more gore and much worse acting. At least it's trying to be a horror comedy, though, and not just a bad horror movie they're calling a "horror comedy" because they're embarrassed at what a bad horror movie it is. That actually makes it, well, slightly inoffensive, at least to my skewed sensibilities. (Yes: a movie about cannibals imprisoning people to harvest their organs in a basement lab is one thing; but make a bad horror movie and try to pass it off as a comedy out of embarrassment, and I am outraged!)

Movie Reviews » Trash

Get Gone

It's a tale as old as time: a rural family is being ordered off their land by the government and aren't taking kindly to it, and they're all pale mutants due to the water being poisoned or something, and one of them always wears a creepy smiley face mask, and they kill every random group of twentysomething who camps anywhere in the woods nearby.

Practically ripped from the headlines!

Stars Lin Shaye as the mariarch of the murderous, pale, mask-wearing clan, who does really well when this movie makes the mistake so many like it do and in the third act finally gets alright (for what it is, which is to say, something that would have been much better if it was from 1975 than 2019... something about sweet-looking little Lin Shaye cutting off a sheriff's fingers and hissing at him "That's not all I'm going to cut off"…

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Blood River

This southern gothic attempted tale of vampires in a small town is sub-USA-Up-All-Nite level amateur hogwash, the kind of thing you figure someone threw together with a home movie camera and a lot of ambition, and literally nothing else. Right down to the obvious papier-mache corpses and other didn't-even-have-the-budget-to-try totally unspecial effects. And of course nobody in this movie can act at all, all anyone does is stiffly recite lines... where do they find these people?

But, here's the thing, and I always like this: it just doesn't know when to stop. It's ambitious, and obviously the product of someone with a lot of passion. A lot of passion, and absolutely zero talent for filmmaking whatsoever, but a lot of passion. And it just goes on and on and on, long enough to kind of suck you into its weird world of stilted editing and stiffly-recited-from-a-cue-card lines. I ultimately…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Devil’s Domain

This is insultingly bad. It's stupid and broad enough that it seems for all the world like a children's movie, with rubber costume demons, the thinnest possible plot, paper-thin overplayed characters, and basically an overall impression of having been put together by high school students—but it has explicit (if very cheap-looking) gore and heavy sexuality (if all heavy, panting lesbian frottage and not so much as a nipple), and a honest-to-god rape scene.

Girl gets bullied, and the devil, in the form of a woman in an evening gown who occasionally wears a rubber devil mask, decides she likes her, and kills them all in ways that are stupidly broad. Like, one of the popular girls picks on her in school, and a moment later, at her locker, is pushed by a rubber demon hand into a never-explained "Satan-y" place of some sort—which looks like a teenager with a…

Movie Reviews » Canadian

Death Trip (2021)

Among the worst of the worst and apparently the glaring exception that proves the rule about Canadian horror movies.

Four friends go on a trip to a cabin where, for 80 minutes of its 100 minute runtime, they sit around and talk over each other or party with the townies with absolutely nothing of interest happening, or anything that even faintly resembles a plot. I would have thought this was literally just a video someone shot of a bunch of their friends hanging out for a weekend, except that the acting wasn't that good, and that, in the last 20 minutes, one guy starts to try to kill the others with a hammer for no reason that's ever explained, and they spend the end of the movie thwacking each other in the head with hammers and croquet mallets. I'm not exaggerating. Four friends talk for 80 minutes and then…

Movie Reviews » Trash

They Come Knocking

Cabin in the woods. Teenagers. Not particularly scary normal guy in clown makeup trying to talk in a gruff voice. The most perfunctory, paint-by-numbers pursuit/captivity flick ever.