A very talky, uneventful 1971 Giallo flick from Spain. A woman is left home while her husband is away, and seems to go about her life and talk to her neighbors for the first hour, then starts having occasional grotesque dreams, and by the end there's some hint of violence or something but by then I'd lost interest.
Does feature, I have to say, an unusual number of extremely attractive actresses. Must be a Spanish thing. Is everybody there beautiful?
Slightly-above-average-for-a-TV-movie TV movie starring Liana Liberato as the distraught dumpee of an unlikable jackass who follows him to his new home upstate and does the TV movie equivalent of invading his life, which in this case amounts to a couple of coffee dates with his new wife and two argumentative encounters with him when she's not around, which of course ends with her accidentally getting stabbed.
Oddly enough, the one actual thing this movie has to commend it is a rare serious role from rubbery comic actor Richard Kind—trust me, you've seen him, google it—who has a bit part as a corporate boss the husband is trying to impress and does a surprisingly good job in his bit part as the dismissive, irascible executive.
A surprisingly forgettable teen scream which inexplicably stars some familiar and reasonably talented faces: a pre-"Supernatural" Jensen Ackles, Dominique Swain, Shannyn Sossamon. A teen gets lured into a world of satanism and demons by an evil computer game or something, and one by one everyone around him commits grisly murders and then kills themselves. Not terrible, just, forgettable.
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…
The Shining, except with a teacher with a history of domestic violence getting some writing done while working in an empty school over the summer with his students instead of a writer with a history of domestic violence getting some writing done while working in an empty hotel over the winter with his family, and without Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, or Scatman Crothers.
Think about that for a minute. Think about the odds that that would be worth watching.
Blech. Egotistical director recruits a team of young actors to spend the night filming in a hounted house with strapped-on cameras and, basically, nothing happens. They wander around for an hour jumping at shadows, and then there's some sort of yelling and killing, but it's way too late at that point.
+1 star for not being a found footage film.
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…
Pretty much a date movie, but not so much a "I hope the person I'm watching with ends up clinging to me, let's try a horror movie" date movie as a "I already know we're going to spend most of the movie making out, so I need a horror movie we can easily ignore" date movie.
Paranormal investigators in the 1980s get sucked into strange occurrences at a house haunted by a vengeful spirit or something, if that matters.
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.
Sunita Mani got me again.
As with the sci-fi "Save Yourselves", this is a supposed genre flick, horror this time, that's really mostly about people going off into the woods to explore their relationships.
I don't get it. Sunita Mani is ever-appealing, but just from the lead roles she picks, I have a feeling in person she's a really high-maintenance person. She sure seems to have a thing for having relationships, and exploring relationships, and talking about relationships. At any rate, apparently she thinks movies should have people arguing about their relationships, that much I know.
Not my thing as entertainment.
Oh, yeah, there's some murder and people creeping around in this one. Also features a "twist ending" you can see coming about halfway through the picture.
Man goes camping in the woods alone to scatter his friend's ashes when and the friend or something, haunts him. Not bad, I guess, a lot of movies are way worse. I didn't mind it. Had some well-directed scenes, a tense scare or two. But I watched it 2 hours ago and already can't remember how it ended.
Edit: This movie is, again, not bad, but so forgettable that I watched it again a month later and didn't even remember I had watched it until 2/3 of the way through there was finally a scene I realized I'd seen before. Same overall impressions as first time.
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.
Not that I'd recommend it. I wouldn't…
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?
A bunch of punk rockers go to... wait for it... a cabin in the woods, where a deranged park ranger starts picking them off while quoting park regulations at them, because, movie.
The lead actress, Chloe Levin, is pretty good, more tough-as-nails than a lot of final girls.
The always oddly likeable Liana Liberato in a creature feature, of sorts, that starts out alright but unfortunately kind of runs out of steam. A vacation at the beach house turns awkward when unknown microbes blow in on the tide and infect everybody. Interesting enough until unfortunately character and narrative get sacrificed about halfway through and it essentially becomes a captivity/pursuit flick, except with fog (and the occasional visually gnarly but otherwise not-well-explained "infected" person) as the villain.
"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…
Substantially recycling most of its major points from "Brightwood" this movie improves on it in some ways and falls short of it in others. Promisingly, the couple in this film don't bicker quite as constantly or annoyingly. Other than that, there are such strong similarities, that many of the unexplained plot points, which this movie is particularly full of, I understood easily because they were explained in "Brightwood".
It's the huge number of not-even-subtle-enough-to-be-fridge-logic leaps, as well as the 100% familiar "twists" and conceits, that make this movie a failure as entertainment. It's certainly better-made than "Brightwood" in many ways. But, when you've already seen something that's so similar that you know what's coming before it does, it's hard to enjoy. Really cool ideas, for sure, but poorly executed and totally already done before.
Supernatural "thriller" apparently aimed at like 10 year olds or something. A group of gorgeous girls receive strange voicemail messages apparently from a graveyard, and it turns out one of their boyfriends robbed some graves and gave out the jewelry, resulting in some of the cheapest-looking special effects in cinematic history. Yawn.
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 writer has a monster in the upstairs of his house who he feeds people to and it gives him ideas for bestselling books. It was, eh, ok. Not good, not terrible.
"What About Bob" with Brett Gelman instead of Bill Murray and a slacker instead of Richard Dreyfus's character. It was ok.
A young couple go on vacation in the woods and get driven crazy by an annoying noise. That's it, that's the whole movie. And there's an annoying noise playing through the whole thing, so you share their suffering.
Why don't they just leave?
Stars Annabella Rich, who appears to be the anti-Madeline Brewer. Everything she stars in is some kind of tedious.
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.
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