Latest "Trash" files
Movie Reviews » Trash

Nanoshark

Picture this: you get together your funniest friends to make a movie with "Airplane"-style goofy humor. Now picture your funniest friends aren't available, so you get just a bunch of your not-quite-as-funny friends, plus that one weird neighbor from down the street, and they gamely try to save this intentionally ridiculous tale about shrinking a shark down to enter a kid's body to eat a disease, and mostly fail.

Sample dialog:
Soldier (who looks nothing like a soldier, but we're told she's a soldier): "Shark attack at 1 o'clock, sir"
General: "One o'clock? That's a long time from now. Are you psychic?"
Soldier: "No, I mean [pointing] thereabouts."
General: "So why didn't you just say 'thereabouts'?"
Soldier: "It didn't seem soldier-y."

Now picture that dialog being delivered people who just have nothing like the comic timing or sensibility that might have allowed Leslie Nielsen to…

Movie Reviews » Bad but I liked it

Killing at Outpost Zeta

Clearly post-Battlestar-Galactica 1980 low-budget sci fi outing in which space travelers travel to a faraway planet, charming for its post-Battlestar-Galactica 1980ness. If that sounds appealing to you, sure, give it a shot. Be aware it has nothing else going for it, though.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Made Me Do It

Another flippin' home movie made it onto Tubi. Kids in a house being stalked by a slasher... how did an incompetent filmmaker come up with such an original idea? Every stock "I don't know how to make a movie" trope: weird, random "artsy" jump cuts and needless video effects between scenes, abysmal acting, no lighting or sound design to speak of, and possibly no script. 100% garbage. One of the very rare times I've turned a movie off.

Movie Reviews » Trash

The Occupant

Another zero-budget apparent home movie someone made with their friends. Estranged children come home to inherit their deceased mother's house, some lady says the mother wanted to give the house to her, everybody emotes, meanwhile somehow it's interspersed with scenes of a cheesy dramatization of the same thing. I honestly wasn't interested enough to figure out what was going on.

Movie Reviews » Je nais se quois

Messenger Of Wrath

A strangely ambitious story for a movie that appears to be a zero-budget amateur movie starring the director's never-acted-before friends. What starts home invasion captivity flick gets longer and more complex than I can follow, as the masked home invader bad guys apparently are then picked off by a mysterious further, way-more-badass masked bad guy, who starts off seeming like some sort of supernatural force but is apparently watching out for the daughter of one of the home invaders who turns out to be sympathetic even though she's a home invader? I don't know, couldn't follow it, but at 2 hours and 5 minutes, man did it go on. It did have strangely well-done background music, almost like they spent more money on that than on the rest of the movie combined. They certainly didn't spend anything on sound, lights, or special effects. Or actors. Absolute garbage, but I almost…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Horror Hospital

An unmistakably glam 1975 exploitation outing, like "Rocky Horror" trying to play it straight as a horror film, with none of the fun, ideas, or budget. A glam rocker, apparently played by Eric Burdon trying to play "Alex" from Clockwork Orange, goes on vacation to a mansion where they're performing experiments on humans. 100% exploitation garbage, if you're into that sort of thing.

Notable for being the oldest movie I've ever seen that opens with a "kill" scene (I always wondered when that idea began) and the fakest-looking.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Mind Leech

Two men ice fishing on a lake in the midwest pull up a huge fake rubber leech that attaches itself to bad actors' foreheads and causes them to stagger around like zombies and kill people.

So consistently terrible, cheap-looking, and over-the-top, yet so obviously committed to by some of Michigan's worst actors, that I bet it could be a cult favorite among "so bad it's good" fans.

I'm not one of those, though.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Devil’s Void

Realtors or psychics or somebody lure people to a house so they can be harangued with bad special effects from people with rubbery "demon" appliances stuck to their faces. Bottom-rung garbage.

Movie Reviews » Trash

Amityville Turkey Day

In this absolute bottom-of-the-barrel waste of time, a puppet turkey that for some reason talks with a fake Brooklyn accent kills what I assume must be the director's friends and family, because they clearly aren't actors.

Movie Reviews » Trash

South Of Hope Street

The kind of movie that you have wonder how it even got made.

Only "Schizopolis" ever got away with substituting mannered weirdness for meaning, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from trying. This muddled mess of characters with no motivation, depth, or even consistent personality traits features a woman trapped in a world that is changing for no reason ever given, with people behaving in bizarre ways, a wall growing over the horizon and slowly expanding to cover a sky that now, again for no reason ever explained (and which most characters change the subject whenever she points it out), has two moons. A war is declared for no reason, everyone under 32 must report for the draft, and there's hamfisted attempts at some sort of social commentay about blaming the poor for their poverty, or about war, or about news media being government propaganda, or some…

Movie Reviews » Trash

Bury The Bride

Talk about a serious swing and a miss.

A bunch of women having a bachelorette party in a remote cabin when the fiancee and his friends, who appear to basically be Lynyrd Skynyrd, show up. One of the girls—the slutty one, of course, who bounds to first answer the unexpected knock at the cabin door by saying, "the sexy one never gets killed first"—agrees to take off hunting with them for a few hours in a move so stupid you want to shout at the screen, and once they've got her alone, they turn out not to be such nice guys. And in an admittedly neat twist, it turns on NOT to be a captivity pic with deranged country bumpkins menacing the women, but makes a nice pivot in a different direction. Think "30 Days Of Night", set in the south, and with Lynyrd Skynyrd instead of feral, animalistic…

Movie Reviews » Trash

The Devil’s Work

A couple is in a house and the woman's sister shows up soaked in blood and carrying a hammer, and walks around outside the house looking creepy. There might be more, but 50 minutes into it that's all that had happened so far, and I got bored and turned it off.
Movie Reviews » Trash

Ouija Clown

literally a horror movie written, and I assume mostly improvised in an evening, by an 11 year old girl. I assume this is a home movie that somehow got posted on Tubi. It even sounds like it was recorded on a phone, with a lot of the speech unintelligible. After about 15 minutes of watching them put on makeup and preen I turned it off.
Movie Reviews » Trash

Anna: Scream Queen Killer

Scream Queen Killer: A"scream queen"actress auditioning for a role by doing about 15 minutes of 30 secone takes on various situations, because, I guess, if you only saw her"act like there's an invisible presence in the room for 30 seconds...act like you're turning into a vampire for 30 seconds"for 12 or 13 minutes, the point wouldn't have been made. Fellas, there's editing now. You should use it.
Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

Nyctophobia

another dreadful first-person shooter that looks like someone had a spare weekend so they decided to make a movie on their iphone with their friends. Nothing happens for 25 minutes, and then all the lights go out, and it's like an hour and a half of people running around a darkened house shouting at each other. That's it. Monsters are heard outside and never seen. Nonstop nauseatingly shaky cellphone-shot video never sits still long enough to see what's going on. Seems like they made it up as they went along. What Hath The Blair Witch Project Wrought?
Movie Reviews

The Sacrament

I once went to the deli with my grandparents and on the menu was the reuben sandwich. This is corned beef, on rye bread, with swiss cheese, sauer kraut and russian dressing. "My god," I thought, "It's everything I hate on one sandwich." So I had to try it. So it was when I saw this movie was produced by Eli Roth, uber-trendy untalented maker of "Hostel" and similar derivative, terrible gore films, and then, saw it was directed by Ti West, director of "House Of The Devil", a stylized, paper-thin genre-exercise echo of actual good horror movies. I had to find out.

For those who found the merely derivative "House Of The Devil" to be too original, or whose complaint about the Jonestown tragedy is that they weren't there to be entertained by seeing it, this creativity-free paint-by-numbers retelling of the Jonestown story should satisfy.

My guess…

Movie Reviews

Eaters Of The Dead

Zero-budget camcorder-shot amateur garbage. Why is this kind of stuff on Amazon Prime? Apparently somebody's home movie about society-wide cannibalism after a nuclear apocalypse, if that matters. Even worse, it tries to be artsy occasionally... urg.

Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

Hungerford

First person shooter. Zero budget, almost a home movie, except for the last 10 minutes, which they apparently spent the whole budget on. Kids running for their lives from people possessed by alien bugs for no particular reason.

Movie Reviews » "Found Footage" crap

The Levenger Tapes

Listen, horror movie directors: people wandering around the woods at night getting freaked out by sounds (or, worse, by thinking they hear sounds, which you don't even hear) is A.) not a plot, and, B.) it's been done. Blair Witch did it, they did it better than you, it can't be repeated. Stop it.

Another dreadful, zero budget first-person shooter where so little happens that it seems like they retroactively decided to film some non-first-person footage of police reviewing the "found footage" to see what happened to instersperse the non-action with, which still doesn't save the complete absence of plot.

Kids camp out at a remote cabin, see someone camping nearby who they hit & run earlier, and decided to go to his campsite in the middle of the night to apologize. Except, even more boring than that sounds.

Mostly just kids walking through the woods at…

Movie Reviews

Dude Where’s My Car

I thought this might be faintly entertaining but it was just embarrassing. This recycled pile of whatever Bill & Ted, Repo Man, and Harold & Kumar flush away when they go to the bathroom seems primarily aimed at the set who will someday mature into Farrelly Brothers or Adam Sandler fans. By the time Andy Dick shows up in a cameo, I wasn't even surprised.

Movie Reviews » Trash

The Dark Tapes

As a horror movie fan, you have to learn to stomach bad movies and look for the good in them, because there are a lot of bad horror movies out there. You wind up sitting through anthology films (gack) or identically-tedious found-footage films (retch). Even so, rarely do I just turn a movie off halfway through because I just can't believe sitting through any more of it would be less boring than virtually anything else I could think of to do with my time.

I turned this one off halfway through.

The two worst conceits amateur horror directors rely on, anthologies and "found footage" tripe, exacerbated by truly lame stories, stilted acting, and the most amateurish (lack of) production values I've ever seen. Ok, your video editing software has a "video camera messing up" preset. Ok. We've seen it now. Move on.
Seriously. There's just nothing in this movie…