The Blind King
Slightly overwrought single-parent-and-child-move-into-a-new-house-and-parent-must-confront-their-own-past-demons-to-save-child-from-malevolent-entity movie. You know the drill.
The Blind King
Crawl
Ok nature/animal attack thriller. Kaya Scodelario and her father are trapped in the crawlspace of a house in Florida as particularly ferocious but oddly slow-moving alligators swarm in the rising floodwaters of a Florida hurrican, finding their way into every crevice and attacking everything that moves at the most dramatically opportune moment. Not bad for that.
Some fleeting ok cinematography and occasional well-done action sequences are nice touches. There's a thing with some looters at the convenience store across the street that I liked. Anybody in a movie like this who's first shown stealing an ATM in a flood is obviously going to meet a bad end, but the way they're dispatched is gratifyingly to-the-point.
They Crawl Beneath
Decent enough b-movie monster movie, if you're in the mood for a b-movie monster movie. A mechanic is stuck pinned under a car in a garage while giant poisonous nematodes from below the surface of the earth roam and attack people. Somewhere among the better end of what a movie that could be described by that sentence could be.
The Hyperborean
A self-consciously "weird" movie (never a good thing in my book) movie which suffers primarily from self-consciously "quirky" characters obviously invented by a Wes Anderson fan: a family with a strong, domineering patriarch and a mess of brothers and sisters each of which is a distinct "character", and each with more personality than four real life people would collectively have.
Anyway, this quirky family's patriarch, a distiller, has discovered a cache of 117 year old whiskey from the Shackleford expedition in Antarctica. Oh, because the movie is "weird", one of the casks contains a mummified but somehow not-quite-dead expedition member who somehow got the power to live forever and blast other people with radioactive beams from his face, and is apparently waiting on some sort of extraterrestrial connection, and is pretty soon stumbling around—drunk from being in a whiskey cask for 177 years, isn't that quirky?—shooting rays and flying…
The Call
Very decent, tense thriller. Halle Berry is a 911 operater on a live call with a girl who's been abducted and is in the trunk of a car speeding down the highway. Nothing spectacular but good direction make it watchable, if you're in the mood for a law enforcement action thriller.
Unfortunately the third act sacrifices the moderately successful formula, is less "intense pursuit thriller" and more "Silence Of The Lambs"-derivative stalk-the-killer-around-a-darkened-house, victim-gets-delicious-revenge-in-the-end sort of typical Hollywood stuff. Still, you know, it's alright. I think everything I've ever seen Halle Berry in has been alright, so, it fits.
Cold Souls
Moderately entertaining if almost too quirky sci-fi comedy along the lines of, but happily much more restrained than, something like "Being John Malkovich". Paul Giamatti plays himself, so tormented by a gruelling dramatic role that he has his soul scientifically extracted for two weeks so he get play the role. Unfortunately he doesn't realize there is an international trade in extracted souls and his is, er, "misplaced".
The funny thing is he, and other serious actors, like Emily Mortimer, play this absurd idea so straight that it works. They never do reveal exactly what the difference between having a soul and not having a soul is, as everybody who undergoes the process seems to basically still be themselves, although several times people are heard wanting their souls back, and Giamatti is distressed enough to find he can't reclaim his to go through some intrigue trying to get it back.…
The Summoning (2015)
Fairly mediocre but passably enjoyable B-movie supernatural thriller. A woman, remarried but missing her late husband, receives a cursed medallion that allows her to bring him back from the dead for one night. Turns out, he doesn't want to leave again. Also, he has a supernatural thirst for revenge. Uh-oh.
Voyage To The Planet Of Prehistoric Women
This little oddity has a story that isn't really relevant to it, but it's amusing: Roger Corman bought the rights to a Russian early '60s sci-fi film, had Peter Bogdanovich shoot some scenes of blond woman cavorting on a rocky, storm-tossed Los Angeles beach because the studo demanded "girls" to release the film, they added voice-over narration to make a story out of it, and Bob's yer uncle, they had a movie.
Not only that, but this was the second time Corman did this... with the same Russian film. Same footage and everything.
Anyway, this Russian flick apparently had all the ambition and none of the budget. If you want to see fun early '60s footage of astronauts and mermaids cavorting around rocky landscapes that are supposed through smoke machines running at full blast, I dunno, it's actually kind of fun, for a movie that never, ever shoots…
Dead Air
It's hard to do anything new with a zombie movie nowadays, but this movie kind of does. Bill Moseley takes a star turn in a convincing performance of a mildly unlikeable radio shock jock stuck in the studio while a bioengineered zombie outbreak overtakes his city. It has its share of action, and of course zombies, but a lot of it is handled as a drama or thriller, not as a horror movie, and focuses heavily on the survivors in the studio, not on the zombies, except as they affect the survivors. Plus they manage to have a couple of scenes of things I haven't seen before and a few moments that kept me on the edge of my seat. Directed by Corbin Bernsen, who I've never known as a director, but obviously had a couple of ideas, and handled them well enough to make a pretty good and somewhat…
The Final Wish
Okay-ish supernatural thriller about a guy who inherits a box inhabited by a demon that makes every wish come true in the most horrible way possible. Supposedly from someone who was behind "Final Destination". It was okay-ish.
After Effects
Mediocre horror thriller about students signing up for what they think is a medical study but turns out to be a government bioweapon development program to turn people into either killers or puddles of goo, judging from the effects. Pretty much degenerates into people chasing each other down hallways and attacking each other in the goriest ways possible, and from there into guys with gas masks and guns, and one of the Baldwin brothers on the phone saying, "Mr. Vice President, the test was a success. We're ready for live launch." Meh. It was ok, I guess, if you're in the mood for that sort of thing and seriously, seriously, seriously set your expectations absolutely no higher than I just described.
Walter
Starts out a cute, quirky-but-not-unbearably-so comedy about a geeky small-town movie theater ticket taker who may or may not be the son of God and have the ability to decide whether people will go to heaven or hell after death. Has a couple of unlikely star cameos, like William H. Macy as his therapist, Justin Kirk plays his usual charater as an earthbound ghost who wants to know his permanent fate, and Neve Campbell, improbably, as Kirk's daughter (I guess he had an active sex life at the age of 4) and Milo Ventimiglia in an amusing and out-of-character turn as a womanizing, fast-talking fellow theater employee.
Entertaining enough until it descends from comedy to sentimentality as the subject turns from his obsession with the concession girl and his responsibilities deciding peoples' ultimate fate into him dealing with his complicated feelings about his father's death. I guess the writers forgot…
C.L.E.A.N.
Tough to follow the plot of this one but five people arrive at some sort of institute in the Croatian countryside and are tormented in this highly mannered, extremely Europeans film that somehow feels equal parts Giallo and Hammer Horror.
I don't know whether I wasn't paying enough attention or it's tough to follow. I did like the mood of it but I'm not sure what was going on.
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.
Hostile Dimensions
This films is difficult to know what to do with.
By all rights, it should suck. Zero budget, not very good acting, plotting that seems rather arbitrary, and, worst of all, it's needlessly shot "found footage" style, including the usual contrivance such as people filming while they're running and not being able to turn their head back to look at something pursuing them without swinging the camera around too.
The plot is, a grafitti artist disappears into a freestanding door in an abandoned building, and a couple of filmmakers take the door back to their apartment to study it. It turns out to open to a different parallel dimension every time they open it, which leads to a lot of predictably random dangers and dimension-hopping through door after door as people are lost, found, or abducted between dimensions. A few intriguing encounters with other-dimensional selves are shown and then…
Creep Box
Very dull sci fi movie about a box that uses AI to let people talk to simulations of dead people, and scientists who go around using it. If there was any more plot to it than that, I didn't catch it.
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,…
Quantum Suicide
Hard, very talky sci fi film, something having to do with a quantum mechanics experiement. Tough to follow, very dry, kind of seems to disappear up it's own ass á la "Primer" but without the cool time travel angle.
The Visit
M. Night Shyamalan rarely hits the nail square on the head, and here he doesn't either. His half-hearted venture into annoying "found footage" horror has two kids (and, conveniently, budding documentarians) visiting their estranged grandparents for the first time in rural Pennsylvania—where there's no cell service, natch—and maw-maw and pop-pop gradually start acting kind of odd. They also for some reason have an oven in the kitchen that's so big it requires a 12-year-old girl to crawl all the way into it to clean the back, but can't accommodate a grandmother who appears to be the same height.
Shmamamlon is in some ways a talented filmmaker, visually he's pretty accomplished, but I can't understand why he's been at this nearly 30 years and still seems sort of try-hard, almost experimental, like he's still trying to find his voice. Some of the bit supporting performances in this film are awfully…
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'".
The Quiet Earth
Kind of an enjoyable New Zealand sci-fi flick which, from 1985, may be the latest example I know of of that slightly campy but good, character-driven 1970s-type movie making. A scientist wakes up to find everyone else in the world gone. He spends half the movie doing what I actually realistically think people would do if they can go unwhere and know nobody will see them: keeping himself entertained in fine style, driving big trucks around, stealing art for fun. Eventually he meets some other people and they just kind of survive and worry about the future. It doesn't sound like much of a plot but, I dunno, it's a pretty good, even if not great, movie. It has a rating of 6.7 in IMDB, which is about right, in my opinion.
I also like that when he meets other people, there's some initial apprehension, but mostly they're happy…
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.
The Overnight
Young couple stranded at a hotel where dead people roam and apparently the owners are trying to kill guests to bring back departed loved ones. If you started with the plot of "The Shining", and played a long enough game of "telephone" with it where people repeat it one to another and it gradually changes as people misunderstand each other, eventually you'd end up with the plot of this movie.
Awoken
Starts as a reasonably creepy tale of strange doings in a medical facility researching sleep disorders, but regrettably descends into a paint-by-numbers demonic possession movie for the third act. Candles, latin chanting, guttural voices, yawn.
Excision
Boy, this movie really makes kind of an impression.
Annalynne McCord, last seen looking like a glamor-model-turned-actress in 90210, plays, in what is only the first of this movie's many bits of stunt casting of famous faces in unlikely roles, a painfully awkward, geeky outcast with bad skin, greasy hair and rings under her eyes. She actually kind of pulls it off with a certain impressive intensity I wouldn't have thought a puffball 90210 actress had in her. She plays socially inept and awkward—and maybe something darker peeking out underneath it—to the hilt and it's actually pretty entertaining to watch. I bet she had to study real geeks to nail it this well.
Along the way, ex-porn star Traci Lords plays her extremely uptight and conservative mom, John Waters plays a priest with a completely straight face, and cameos pop up from Malcolm McDowall, Marlee Matlin, Ariel Winter as…
The Harbinger
This was ok. During the pandemic, a woman goes to visit a friend who has been having intense nightmares, and they turn out to be contagious. It gets into some vaguely supernatural and eventually existential ideas as they learn the cause. It ultimately isn't really that rewarding, but, unlike a lot of horror movies, it's underplayed, which works in its favor. Watchable enough if nothing else is on.
Texas Tall Tales
Don't know the plot because I turned it off less than 20 minutes into it. Porn-movie-quality acting tells me all I need to know. Not interested.
What The Waters Left Behind: Scars
In this contender for most awkwardly-titled movie ever, an anglo-American band takes a wrong turn in a small Latin American village and finds themselves lost in an uninspired torture porn movie.
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.
The Final Scream
Torture porn without much torture. A young actress is lured out to a remote house to be cast in a horror movie. It's not a movie. Yawn.