Archives: Movie Reviews

The most clichéd, unimaginative slasher pic I've ever seen. This is like if AI wrote a slasher pic. Six friends but a remote fixer-upper in the English countryside where there is, of course, no cell reception. Soon the local inspector comes around to tell them the history of the house: the last owner came home one day and "for reasons unknown" killed his family with a hunting knife—and he, of course, just escaped from a mental institution. The killer sneaks into the house wearing, of course, a distinctive homemade mask to which he has gone to the trouble of adding a mechanical mouth that opens and closes to produce a chattering visual effect, because, movie, and, of course, stalks them around the house and stabs them one by one, because, movie.

Continuing the tradition of teen scream horror movies about "influencers" being terrible, this terrible teen scream horror movie is about an influencer who takes a tubing trip with a bunch of friends and stereotypical teen scream horror movie things happen to them. It's all here: the scary local creep who is either trying to hurt or help them, the mysterious deaths, the constantly seeing things through the view of a phone screen, the things not quite being explained, the yawns.

A highly mediocre movie that descends into a disjoined mess as the filmmakers apparently changed their minds three or four times about what they wanted it to be.

A team of douchebags stays at an inn in France for high-altitude cycling training when a huge wave of serial killings hits. But wait, it's not serial killings, it's a pandemic. But wait, it's not a pandemic, it's a strange mist that assumes human form and kills people by touching them and turning them funny colors. But wait, it's aliens. One by one everybody dies, disappears, or kills each other until one couple is left. Hooking up in an out-of-place and overly long romance montage, they decide to go for a final swim outside and allow themselves to be taken by the aliens, who finally put in an appearance but decide not to kill them for reasons that are a mystery. A…

English 1988 kid's fantasy film about an girl who connects with a local disabled boy through her fantasies of visiting a creepy, surreal rural house. It was alright, I suppose, but the leading girl is just kind of sullen and charmless, and I wasn't really in the mood for it when I watched.

A disappointing outing from Joe Dante. As a horror movie, it's on the level of his "Gremlins" but without any of the originality and charm. Two teen boys and the de rigeur pretty girl next door find a bottomless pit in the basement of their new home, and clichéd, predictable "scary" things happen: chased by a scary clown doll, transported to a phantasmagoric caricature of their childhood home to fight a monstrous version of their absent father, etc. etc. etc. I dunno, man. Sam Raimi started his career with the execrable sub-bottom-of-the-barrel "The Evil Dead", and even he's made a better horror movie than this.

Kind of a fun teen sci-fi thriller about a geeky young JPL scientist who posts a video of an encounter with an extraterrestrial and winds up on the run across North America from a shadowy government agency that has androids that ride motorcycles. Fun enough. Until....

...at the end of the last act, it turns out to all be religious propaganda. Aliens searching for the "origin of the universe" are studying humans for their unique link to all creation, which turns out to be: worship of a particular religious figure.

It would have been "watchable" if not for that, but I can't recommend that kind of smug bullshit.

Millenials trapped in a bunker after the apocalypse predictably go nuts and argue. A lot.

A strange one. This movie about a team of campers beseiged by giant mutant ticks stars a bunch of unlikely comedy and sitcom actors: Seth Green, Alphonse Ribiero, Peter Scolari from "Bosom Buddies", the latter two playing tough against type.

This is about as much of a monster movie as "Gremlins" is, except, in the final act, it gets weirdly intense and violent, although the acting doesn't get any better.

An indie horror film I want very badly to like but just... meh... not quite? Alexandra Essoe stars as a young actress whose chance at a new role starts to eat away at her life and body. Maria Olsen is there, being creepy as a movie casting executive who clearly wants something. Unfortunately it's a little too slow-moving and too little is explained. It's hard, any time I don't like a movie with either Alexandra Essoe or Maria Olsen, I feel like I'm letting them down. But, this one just isn't a best effort from the filmmakers.

Mediocre low-budget indie thriller about a woman whose daughter disappears from her bedroom although they can still hear her calling for help from right nearby, leading to a difficult-to-follow tale about higher dimensions and demon abductions and a physicist who explains that demons inhabit string theory's higher dimensions due to the fall of Lucifer and advising prayer as the safest way to deal with higher-dimensional issues, provoking tremendous, life-threatening yawns from the audience.

What a disappointment. This movie starts off like it's going to be a cut above, with a really unique idea that, for about the first half of it, hold up well: following a car breakdown en route to a remote airport trying to flee the country after a zomview apocalypse, a Las Vegas stripper with nothing but a handbag and a vial of cocaine is trying to cross the desert on foot in platform shoes, relentlessly pursued by a single zombie.

The conceit is wonderful, and not something I've seen before: one person being followed great distances by one zombie, like a post-"The Walking Dead" take on "Duel". There's some predictable sequences but by and large I found it pretty charming. For half the movie.

Unfortunately, the movie loses the thread so completely that I assumed it was an anthology film, or had segments directed by totally different directors. The…