A bunch of people wandering in the woods have hallucinatory episodes surrounding a strange untalented actress they encounter out there. Seems like someone shot this on home video with a bunch of stiff, untalented local dinner theater actors or something and props they got at a Halloween store. You can tell someone involved really wanted to make a good movie but the production is unredeemably amateur. For the last time, people: obvious video effects are never scary.
A pretty atrocious horror movie that feels like an 80s TV movie except for the cell phones and the way-over-the-top-gore of the death scenes. A photographer inherits his grandfather's large-formate camera, once used to obsessively take "death portraits", posed post-mortem portraits of corpses. Some of the deaths are a little imaginative, I'll give it that.
Particularly atrocious is the use of video effects to try to make action more "intense"... processing the video when actions happen. So "TV movie".
How Ray Wise allowed himself to be involved with this, I can't imagine. I think this might be the first bad movie I've ever seen him in, usually he's a pretty good tipoff that something is at least a little entertaining. Maybe it's that his top-billed role, as the grandfather in a few flashbacks, has almost no speaking lines, or that his sole bit of dialog with another character…
This piece of video—I have a hard time calling it a movie—lowers the low-effort first person shooter "found footage" conceit to a lower depth than I've seen before, by not only discarding the "found" aspect that explains why we're even seeing the film, but discarding the "filmed" found-footage idea entirely.
This series of events—I have a hard time calling it a story—center around a man who has bought a "daruma", a Japanese good luck doll, and the entire movie is filmed, through an annoying fish-eye lens the entire time, from the doll's perspective. Diegetically, the doll doesn't contain a camera, nor is it possessed, nor alive in any way, but for some reason the entire movie is filmed from the doll's perspective. This results in a few annoying conceits, such as the doll always needing to be turned to face anything the filmmaker wants us to see, as well as…
Odd little movie about a woman (played for no reason that's ever explained by a man in drag) who is just unlikeable. And that's really it, she just goes around being unlikeable.
I kind of enjoyed it, oddly, some of the characters have some charisma. I didn't mind watching it but wouldn't go out of my way to either.
Pretty charming action comedy buddy picture starring Nic Cage as a not-entirely-flattering version of himself, sucked into working for the CIA while staying as the houseguest of a rich guy in Spain who may be the head of a crime syndicate, but definitely turns out to be an over-the-top huge Nic Cage fan. Lands somewhere near the high end of the range of what that could possibly be, I enjoyed it.
Worst of the worst. This appears to be a porn movie, except, despite all the talk about boobs, and women walking around with hyperinflated boobs, and women squishing their boobs, and women taking off their shirts to show their boobs, and weird mentions of Playboy and Ron Jeremy inserted into conversations, and incredibly greasy and amateurish male actors, there's no sex.
Instead, it's an unbelievably cliched, zero-effort attempt at a slasher flick.
There's no acting or editing, either.
A pretty amusing entry in the "Purge" movies. A Black family moves to Beverly Hills on purge night, unaware that the father who seems to have struck it rich has left a trail of unpaid bills and pissed off people, every one of whom has decided to settle the score on the "Purge", a night when all laws are suspended for 12 hours. Heavily steeped in Black American culture—funny cameos from Snoop Dogg, Paul Mooney, and Mike Tyson as the vengeful owner of a bouncy castle party rental who's been stiffed on his bill—and almost nonstop rapid-fire riffing make what could have been a pedestrian enterprise amusing enough to sit through.
Like Charles Bukoswki made a horror movie. A bunch of punk rockers break into a warehouse or something to throw an underground rave. And have all kinds of sleazy sex with each other. And, weirdly, occasionally breakdance. And an unexplained guy in a welder's mask tortures and kills them all in ridiculously over-the-top ways, because, movie.
This movie is fuckin' TERRIBLE. But it doesn't try to be anything more than it is. It's not trying to be good. It's totally committed to being nothing but what it is: a terrible movie of nothing a bunch of sleazy people dancing, fucking, and being gruesomely killed for no apparent reason. Which, I kind of oddly admire... in concept.
"Hostel", but set in a sleazy sex club in China. And with more guns and gangsters. And a shitty rave soundtrack.
And somebody thought this was a good idea.
Tensions escalate (to say the least) among group of women gathered at a remote cabin for a bachelorette party when a nearby train accident releases a cloud of caustic chemicals into the air.
Oh, my, does this want to be a great movie. It tries SO hard. And, it's not the very worst movie I've ever seen. Some (only some) of the actors and production values aren't bottom-of-the-barrel. But, it's extremely deeply flawed, at very best. They just didn't think some things through, or something. Lots of fridge logic and unbelievable behavior that I'm sure seemed cool when they thought of it but didn't quite work in practice. And the characters are pretty much 100% unlikeable.
But... it's kinda weirdly fun for the trying. If the characters had only been 75% unlikeable, or quite so many of the characters hadn't quite so unrealistically lost it, it might not…
Nothing happens for literally the first hour of this hour-and-twenty-minutes monster movie. Two sisters have a car break down on a deserted road (how do they think of these ideas?) and slowly get more creeped out. Then after interminable sitting around talking and getting creeped out, one wakes up from falling asleep and the other is gone, leading to 25 minutes of wandering through the woods with a cell phone calling her sister's name. Finally, after an hour, she finds a man in a rubber monster suit who has kidnapped her sister and two other people whose car has broken down nearby. More running through the woods ensues.
Lousy. Gorgeous couples move out to the country, decide to go ghost hunting at what's supposed to be a burned out prison but looks nothing like a prison, locals are in some sort of cult and chase them through it attack them, there's a ghostly demonic preacher who looks like Rob Zombie fading in and out, kids have crescent moon birthmarks that are never explained, the whole thing is just kind of a mess.
Mildly interesting flick about a team of filmmakers and a crusty, tough-as-nails australian dude being menaced by a giant humanoid bat in the outback. Australian enough to be somwhat entertaining, and they make you wait for the whole movie for the creature FX but they're really cool when they finally show up.
Well-made but rather disappointing quasi-"thriller" (because it's not thrilling) coasts along like it's going to be interesting, and never gets there. Survivors of an unspecified apocalyptic event cower in the basement of a hospital while unspecified creatures roam above. And, that's pretty much it. Slight nods to drama happen—one person gets shot early, another walks outside of their own will, a third disappears behind a closed door and appears to be meet an unspecified painful fate by unspecified monsters—but that's it. Nothing really happens.
Plus, it has a soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten. Which, I mean, what could do a better job of saying, "this should be interesting"?
Eventually, and I only know this because it was pointed out in a single IMDB review, there's a single image near the end that briefly explains what it's all supposed to be about, and kind of redeems it all a little bit. But…
Tediously unoriginal and predictable captivity/pursuit flick: kids on a road trip, flat tire, remote farmhouse, psycho local family, you know the drill. Why would anybody bother to make this movie again? The production values and direction are decent, but who cares?
Boy, if I was only going to watch one slasher flick in my life—and one is probably about my lifetime appetite for slasher flicks—this one might be it.
Kids on their way to a music festival run out of gas and have to stay in a small town that's famous for a possibly apocryphal killer living in the woods. Surprise: he's not apocryphal.
But, somehow, I liked this movie. It's stupid in the exact ways that these movies need to be stupid, but also had the slightest hair more plot than most, and some very slightly different twists and turns than they usually take. It also had, I think, more blood than any movie I've ever seen before. Boy, is there a LOT of blood in this movie.
It's tough to put my finger on. But I actually sort of enjoyed it. It didn't exactly suck. Weird.
Psycho hillbilly farm family pursues, tortures, and kills their city-slicker guests in extremely graphically gory ways. George Romero's son obviously learned a few things from his father, and this movie is alright for what it is—although editing is not among them, the editing is notably terrible in places.
But Texas Chainsaw Massacre pretty much obviated the need for anyone to make this movie, 50 years ago. This doesn't succeed in any way that that movie didn't, and doesn't in some ways that it did.
Native American horror flick about a house party in a house built on top of a burial ground, which ends up stalked by vengeful Native American spirits or somesuch because of a magic ring or something. Bit of a mess, skips around a lot stylistically... lots of woo-woo, suddenly people giving the standard lecture about the curse of a humbled "once-proud people", then weird scenes of torture porn of someone in a mask torturing captive topless women for reasons I'm not clear on, then shifts to a neo-noir crime thriller vibe with the heroine going after the guy who gave the "once-proud people" speech earlier with a gun. Michael Madsen as the speech-giving villain, which nowadays tells you something, plus he plays a Native American in this, which is just kinda weird. Cool vintage-type analog synth score at points, though.
A bad actor from Los Angeles inherits an island in Washington, with the restriction that he must operate a horse riding camp on it. There he and the other bad actors who work there dodge an irrelevant subplot about developers conniving to sell the land, and discover a subterranean bunker infested with some sort of unseen zombie virus bullshit that causes any ostensible movie it's in to turn into a badly-lit version of the video game "Doom".
Promising but ultimately disappointing thriller on the "pursuit" end of the captivity/pursuit flick spectrum. Annoying mountaineer drags a woman he just met onto a grueling hike up Mr Whitney, where they are menaced by southern-accented mountain men who seem to be able to hike faster than them and appear wherever they are despite having no visible camp, climbing equipment, food, water, or snow gear. Reasonably scary villains and a likeable heroine sustain it for a while even through the leading man's endless lecturing about how to hike and that what is essentially mountaineering, not hiking, isn't too bad, but it just declines, turns into a cliche'd captivity/pursuit flick and runs out of any ideas at all maybe 2/3 of the way through before finally descending into total cliche.
Why didn't she just stay off the trail and go down the mountain?
Surprisingly decent zero-budget indie drama that starts like it's going to be a crap thriller but slowly and smoothly transitions to something quieter and more thoughtful. Three friends' relationships with each other and their respective loved ones fall apart after someone dumps a body in their car's trunk while camped in the backcountry and they decide they can't call the police because the car's owner is an ex-con.
It's a small, relatively quiet movie, and it does have a glaring logical flaw and admittedly tough suspensions of disbelieve (how long can you keep a body around in Los Angeles without anybody noticing a smell?), but, it's a hair different, not really something I've seen before, and though some of the acting is bad it's a serious effort that doesn't reach for more than it can accomplish and only seems to get stronger as it goes on, which is a…
Five kids run out of gas in a snorwstorm and take shelter in an empty building, and things fall apart after one turns up dead. Thriller plays like a horror movie before veering off into a procedural; an unfortunate move, because it was a mediocre horror movie, and then a passable thriller, but the break in momentum in what had been a horror movie with much too long of forward-flashing from the action in the school to police interviews with the survivors kills it. Eventually it gets interesting as what actually happens is revealed, but halfway through the third act is way too late for a movie to start to get interesting.
If I tell you five college students shelter from a hurricane in an abandoned junkyard and are hunted down by the most thinly-drawn villain in all of horror movie history in an incredibly slow-moving captivity flick, it would be true, but unfortunately, it makes this terribly-written mess of a movie sound much more interesting than it is.
Aside from spending an entire hour going absolutely nowhere, this schizophrenic film can't decide what it wants to be... it starts as a first-person shooter, becomes an ordinary horror movie, interspersed with a procedural as later media interviews about the crime are randomly cut in, then tries to morph into a neo-noir crime thriller of some sort, as late in the movie some sort of plot twist involving some sort of dark web media show or some fucking thing is suddenly introduced in a tedious expository scene of two new characters people…
An alright thriller. A gorgeous couple leaves the city to await the destruction of the earth by an asteroid in a remote Tennessee backwoods campsite. Things get complicated as other gorgeous refugees start to show up.
Gorgeous couple wanders through an apocalyptic landscape full of viral outbreak zombies, encountering other gorgeous survivors of questionable intentions in, essentially, a "Walking Dead" episode. Lead actress Jamie Bernadette, who pops up in these kinds of things, put in a pretty strong performance though, lots of range. Vaguely watchable, although I can't say much more than that about it. Watch for cameos from Dominique Swain and weird scream queen Maria Olsen.
In one of a million movies named "Prey", a young man on a survival retreat on a deserted island funs afoul of mysterious georgeous women apparently living there nad some sort of supernatural beast. Kristine Froseth, if it matters.
Kids get lost in the Alaskan woods looking for a pot patch and run afoul of... a Native American psychopath? A Native American spirit? Unsure, but it's Native American, and in a way that's mildly racist, or at least orientalist... there's really nothing to the Native American element except in-scare-quotes-"exoticism".
Plus, plot holes galore. Things come and go, like a mute character that joins the movie for a few minutes, that are just never explained, people are apparently gravely injured multiple times yet keep on keeping on, and even the fate of some of the main characters isn't clear. The antagonist appears to be some sort of spirit originally, appearing to fade in and out, but later stops doing that and is apparently just a crazy guy (with a *lot* of bodies laying around his campsite.)
That's the bad. And all in all, make no mistake: I don't…
Caught this on Tubi about 40 years after having last seen it in the theaters and not remembering a thing about it (In fact, I'm not even sure I saw it in the theaters... I believe I did.) I expected it to be a much-too-1980s corndog, and it was; however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that as the film went on, they put some effort into some odd aspects of it here and there, and in the middle of all the cheese there are a couple of passing images or short scenes that are surprisingly effective.
It reminds me, in a way, of how Tobe Hooper would occasionally take on cheesy projects (Think "Mars Attacks") but, then, because he's Tobe Hooper, would occasionally inject genuinely scary moments in them when you didn't expect them. This was a bit like that.
The plot is that a very 80s kid…
This movie starts with a man slumped at the front gate of a cabin. An older man stands in front of him, watching him impassively, as he pleads, "I didn't mean to break the rules." The older man calmly grabs his head, and, with one hand, pulls it off his shoulders.
So that's where we're at.
Sometimes you see a movie that is so low-budget, so obviously just someone had a camera and decided to try to throw a movie together, that somehow, improbably, it has enough heart to actually watch.
This movie is sub-bottom-of-the-barrel. According to the credits, it was written, directed, edited, and everything else by one guy. It stars like 4 people, has virtually no special effects, the acting is "local theater" quality at best, if these people are even actually actors.
The plot is, father and son go on a hunting retreat to a…
The lame, derivative captivity flick id Rob Zombie's debut feature, and the only things worse than a piece of garbage: a piece of garbage that tries to make up for being a piece of garbage by being highly stylized garbage. Needles video effects, split screens like it's a music video, etc. Plus "artsy" effects like weird interstitials of characters, some of whom otherwise aren't even in the movie, overacting and doing "scary" improv, preaching about the end of the world or talking about killing people for sport, all sorts of hammy horseshit designed to compensate for really not knowing how to make a movie. It's all style, no substance, and the style really isn't very good. Like, when the heroine finds the operating theater and discovers her boyfriend being lobotomized by a corpselike surgeon in an exoskeleton, a good director wouldn't really need to shift to solarized video to underscore…
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