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Woman takes a job at a rural hotel where the proprietor imprisons and tortures her to make her a wife for her slow son.
Actually, for a captivity flick, this is not terrible, a little more unpretentious and character-driven than more, more like it was done in the '70s than modern. Which makes it relatively good, within a really bad genre. Actually goes over the top enough in the third act that it could have been a minor classic in the genre, if it had come out in 1975, and, hadn't taken two slow acts to get there.
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"…
There should be a genre for "two people in a torture room" thriller. Occasionally you see these movies with the same theme: somewhere betwenen two and a handful of people stuck in a closed room, enduring some sort of experiment or game where they see how they tolerate torture. This is one of those. A woman plays an endurance game that starts with seeing how long she can hold her hand over a candle, proceeds through having to cut the last digits of her own fingers off, and ends with Russian Roulette. In this case, the characters don't even have names. Eh. The woman was good.
Team of ghosthunters accidentally opens a portal to a demonic presence in the basement at a haunte house. Actually has a couple of elements that stand out: a fairly charismatic cast, particularly an ornery driver who listens to Golden Gate Quartet-type Jubilee Jazz, which is kind of a different thing to hear nowadays. But unfortunately kind of dull other than that.
Funny movie. This film certainly crafts its own mythology, while, unfortunately, not being that good.
A group going camping in the woods where a man says they will find one of their missing sisters stumbles into a not-quite-explained series of parallel realms where non-scary actors in ghoul makeup prowl around and cause the friends to hallucinate and want to kill each other.
The film gets a little ambitious in the third act as the man who sent them to the woods turns out to have ulterior motives, but ultimately, it's not enough to save it.
Not total trash, but not good, by any stretch of the imagination.
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…
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…
This is a bad movie. Let's get that out of the way.
First off, this film commits one of my least favorite filmmaking sins: spends half its time on just showing unlikeable people basically just hanging out. It's not even bad pacing; there is no pace.
The acting is, of course, terrible.
In terms of plot, this plays like the mentally challenged cousin of "The Long Weekend". Five high school friends, who don't appear to like each other at all, reunite years later for a camping trip. They get lost in the woods and, one by one, suffer inexplicable deaths by misadventure, often from injuries that would seem to require a bandaid but in this film's world are fatal: a woman stumbles and accidentally pierces her thigh with a branch, which turns out in a under a day to be a mortal wound; a few minutes of another woman sticking…
I think I might be the only person who thinks this is a good movie.
This very Giallo-esque outing is about a severely scarred, burned kid with psychic powers who breaks out of a mental institution and returns to his hometown to torture everybody, where he brainwashes all the towns kids to help him not. Not that he needs the help, though, since he can make things burst into flame just by looking at them.
But the plot doesn't matter all that much. Neither does the often bad, hammy acting (including the odd casting of Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore from The Sopranos as a histrionic psychiatrist.) What matters is that this thing has this sort of outsider-art cinematographic beauty to it, much like the old Giallo films. It's just a cool-looking, atmospheric film.
It's so Giallo-esque that I checked to see if it was made in Italy. It…
Impossible-to-follow movie about a young couple whose marriage is falling apart as the wife becomes obsessed with demonology. Or she's a demon, or, just hallucinating. Or the husband is hallucinating. Or all of the above. Or something. I don't know.
I do know they never leave the house, even once, for the entire movie.
Also, they spend the first half of the movie arguing, and you know, movies that show long scenes of just couples arguing are like my favorite thing.
The army descends on a cul-de-sac in suburban England and warns everybody to stay indoors for what initially seems to be a terrorist attack but turns out to be something far more ghastly. One mother must battle her way to find her daughter, who has fled to a house across the street after arriving for a reluctant Christmas Eve visit to find mum in bed with a one-night stand. Along the way neighbors accidentally get killed, people shoot at each other, and it's basically a huge violent mess.
You know, I liked this. There's not a lot of story here, mostly action. But Scottish actress Neve McIntosh is appealing, the guy who played the nasty rec center manager in "Misfits" does well as her one-night stand who winds up having to stay at her place long after he really probably should have left, and somehow this is the sort…
Slightly above-average "teen scream" flick that I just can't tell if it's supposed to be funny or it's just that over the top. They get into the action quickly as during the cleanup after a party in an abandoned asylum they do the worst possible thing you can ever do in a horror movie: play a children's game, in this case "Stiff As A Board, Light As A Feather", the very worst horror movie childrens' game, and therefore very deservedly spend the rest of the movie with a demonic presence hopping from one of them to the other, trying to kill them off. An attempt to call in a priest for an exorcism ends very, very quickly with the priest wandering into the road and getting hit by their car—this is what I mean by not knowing whether this is supposed to be funny or it's just that over the…
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…
Captivity/pursuit flick in which gay couples visiting a wooded cabin are stalked and imprisoned by homophobes who kill gay people for the entertainment of thousands of rednecks watching on the internet. How many gay couples do they get vacationing all the way out in the woods?
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.
This bears a disclaimer. If I categorize a film as "je nais se quois", that doesn't necessarily constitute a recommendation that it should be watched. In this case, I absolutely don't recommend this film, but I just can't deny... it's a little different.
This is an incredibly psychologically cruel torture porn. I say "psychologically" because in terms of graphic violence or gore, this movie actually extremely mild by the torture-porn-type horror movie conventions. What little graphic violence there is mostly occurs out of frame. I'm hard-pressed to say there's any visible blood in this movie at all.
Interestingly, they make some unusual character choices. There's slight moral ambiguity, one or two characters show various shades to their personalities, and the final girl convention is totally out the window here. The movie definitely goes in its own direction, in a small way.
Irish monster movie about people trapped on a farm with the monstrous results of a genetic experiment to make cows breed grow. Takes a while to get going but actually pretty watchable for what it is, if you're in the mood for this sort of thing.
Julianne Moore in the sort of supernatural/horror thriller that Julianne Moore occasionally stars in, about a "split personality" case that seems to be manifesting the personalities of dead people. If you're going for an actual horror movie, you don't cast Julianne Moore, but at the same time, she's a pretty good actor, and they usually cast other pretty good actors around here. In this case, the guy who plays the lead, who has to shift believably through maybe 10 different characters over the course of the film. Does pretty well. The whole thing would have been terrible with less of a cast but squeaks barely into "watchable" as it is.
Elisabeth Shue in a movie that is to horror movies what Elisabeth Shue is to actresses. So, basically, a step and a half below a Julianne Moore horror movie.
Anyway, Shue plays a woman trapped in a mansion with a new baby that a mysterious nanny who shows up suggests is stealing her soul. Husband complains that her coming unhinged is hurting his career when she's unable to socialize acceptably at his office gala. Ends up running around the house in her underwear, t-shirt and a blousy blouse with a knife, as you might have guessed.
Gorgeous professional couple adopts a gorgeous child who brings a ghost in tow and standard haunted things happen around their gorgeous home, seen only by the gorgeous child and mother, who standardly struggle to convince the gorgeous standard disbelieving father.
Low-key English movie that desperately wants to be a thriller, and feels a lot like a thriller, but just isn't thrilling. Couple adopts kids who turn out to be weird after their mother overdoses. Absent mom works while dad, a house husband, either goes insane, or the kids are somehow doing something to him, or it's just a movie and doesn't quite make sense.
Dreadful indie horror had potential but it's too much of an incoherent mess and worships too much at the altar of bad '80s "Sleepaway Camp"-caliber horror. A man returns to his old home in the remote Catskills to take care of his terminally ill mother, and apparently the mess that follows is him losing his mind or something.
A weird array of cameos for a crap picture: Edward Furlong, the mother is Shelley Duvall in her last role, plus bad-horror-movie avatars Felissa Rose and Dee Wallace, along with lots of the sort of, er, "acting" you see in movies you see the latter two in. Also a couple of weird scenes where the Latino leading man meets some actors very, very, VERY hamfistedly playing two-dimensional racist rednecks out in the woods, who do things like stomp his head while shoulding "RESPECT OUR FLAG!" for hearing him singing to himself in…
A mad doctor's experiments cause an outbreak of of cannibalism at an insane asylum.
It does take a very long while to get going, but once it does, how appealing you find that one-sentence synopsis will pretty much tell you how much you will like the movie.
I will say, within the range of what movies that could be summarized as "a mad doctor's experiments cause an outbreak of of cannibalism at an insane asylum" could possibly be, this is pretty much near the top. The doctor is played by Peter Stormare, if that tells you anything.
I have never seen a movie so closely resemble a good movie and yet just bore the living daylights out of me.
Very slickly produced, I'll give it that. Kind of a snappy neo-noir, I guess. Overpretty young hipsters, including the de rigeur millennial lesbians and Pete Davidson, gather for a small party. They play "bodies bodies bodies", apparently some kind of hide and seek game in the dark, and someone gets killed. Soon they kill someone else thinking they're the killer, and everybody is running around yelling and waving guns at each other and I can't figure out WTF is going on.
This ostensible supernatural thriller has exactly one sentence of the supernatural in it and zero thrills. I wanted to like it because the cast was charismatic but it's just tepid, all the way through. A woman moves home to take care of her mother who is ailing with dementia. The mother seems to be talking to ghosts. The woman goes through the typical emotional merrygoround of exhaustion, concern, and frustration you might expect of a young person taking care of a parent who is making less and less sense. And that's basically it, that's the movie.
An impossible=to-understand movie in which Another Culkin plays an asshole—you can tell because everybody calls him "asshole"—goes back to his childhood home following the death of his father and Culkins around the house while his mother, played by Lin Shaye, Lin Shayes around. A twin brother killed as an infant may or may not have existed appears and disappears as a plot element, a predatory gay neighbor tries to predatorily gay him, everybody is an assholes to everybody else, which escalates to violence as mysterious tapes from the past appear, demons or some supernatural claptrap happens, and finally the entire endeavor faces the ultimate misfortune: an overly familiar, cliched plot twist that still somehow manages not to make sense.
Another Culkin sure does Culkin, though. Boy, if you want to make a movie about someone Culkining around the house, you couldn't ask for much better, if that's the right word.…
Rather disappointing major swing-and-a-miss. Well acted and well made, starts well, has a decent denouement, and just sags terribly throughout otherwise.
I sexually confused adolescent is sent by his parents to an unusually strict boarding school where the small class of 7 manages to be a panoply of "freaks": burn victim, tourettes sufferer, and, memorably, a 12-year-old femme fatale. They're made to read the bible constantly, beaten with a switch, and slowly turn up dead one way or another. Suffice to say, things are not as they seem.
The early scenes, of the kid getting bullied at school and dancing around his apartment in an evening dress, are unusually well done for this kind of movie. Then, towards the very end, as everything falls to shit—again with the kid running around in an evening dress, BTW, andthis time with makeup, too, having been goaded into it by the…
Well-acted but very slow... er... I don't know what it is. Horror? Drama? This film starring a pre-"Ozark" Julia Garner revolves around a family of religious zealots who slowly turn out to be involved in a bunch of local disappearances... and soon mom is diagnosed via autopsy with a disease you can only get from cannibalism.
And somehow, they manage to make that boring.
Then, in the last 5 minutes, they have a whole horror movie's worth of gore, all of a sudden.
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