Archives: Movie Reviews

My two favorite things: religious extremism presented as drama, and social media. Great.

This movie asks us to believe the church—not scientists, the Catholic church—has perfected a never-explained technique for resurrecting the dead. Then the resurrected people, also with little explanation, begin organizing to kill as many people as possible so the "righteous"—determined by hiring hackers to review all people's electronic records, phone calls, texts, etc for sin—can be the only ones brought back to life.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the whole movie is told on the screen on a computer that a guy is sitting in front of. Even when he runs from the police, you only see it through conveniently-placed security cameras that it's never explained why we'd be seeing the video from... the important thing is, everything is always seen through a diegetic camera: a phone, a facetime call, a security camera. Apparently…

Despite the presence of the always-welcome Rosa Salazar, this is a painfully less-interesting-than-it-wants-to-be, weird-for-its-own-sake outing in the manner of "Being John Malkovich"—who also happens to play a supporting role in this, in a ridiculous orange-dyed perm—only less inventive. A woman is introduced by two names at a party, and it's explained, "She shares her body with a 56-year-old Englishman", then for the second half of the movie talks in a British accent. Another character floats instead of walking, and when someone asks, "What's his deal?", they're told, "He floats." If these sorts of things, all by themselves, are an adequate substitute for any kind of substance to you, enjoy. Not for me.

Lance Henriksen stars as the devil as a ranch in this fairly solid supernatural drama. Religious themes—some traditional, some made up just for the movie—abound as a workman and his young son, who is prone to "visions" (which I guess plays better in a supernatural drama than "schizophrenia") come to stay for a while and it becomes apparent to them that everything in the entire place is a metaphor for the book of Genesis.

Henriksen is compelling as usual, presuming you like him as an actor. I do. He manages to give his usual understated, low-key burn to the development of a character that many actors probably would have played over-the-top and made unbelievable. I liked it for that. Not really much beyond that to commend it, though.

Captivity/pursuit flick. Hikers in the remote Irish moors get injured and cut across private property trying to get help, only to be imprisoned and tortured by the members of Jethro Tull.

Boring captivity flick. If you enjoy a movie that is nothing but two people being held captive in a basement room and tormented by an unseen captor for 90 minutes, enjoy. (One question, though: why?)

Donald Pleasence is a mad scientist who eperiments on his students and then sells them to a freak show in this unapologetic '70s exploitation ripoff of "Freaks". If you're into the kind of bad movie Donald Pleasence might star in, and like the whole 1970sness of it, you might enjoy. Otherwise, avoid.

Amy Smart and her fiance go to rural China for their honeymoon, which they apparently spend running through the darkness from some ghoul and yelling.

Ok, so, interesting.

This is not a very good movie. A young girl, whose twin sister drowned while they were playing as a child and she hallucinated Udo Kier beckoning her towards a strange portal while her parents wailed, comes back as a young woman to party with her friends and visit the house. Halfway through, she switches to a fantasy world where she learns her sister may still be trapped, and encounters phantasmagorical visions of people she knows as she wanders a desert and tries to free her.

It's visually well-made, reminiscent of if Guillermo Del Toro tried to retell "Alice In Wonderland" as the sort of disturbingly off-kilter film Udo Kier might star in. It uses a very classic, '40s or '50s style orchestral score, and once it gets going—which takes a long time—there's a lot of really beautiful costumes, masked characters, etc. In fact, on that…

I threw this on to have some background noise while working—any horror movie about a ventriloqist dummy is almost certainly going to be a dud, it's too easy a macguffin—but I was quickly surprised to see the magic words in the credits: "Directed by James Wan". Wan has a real talent for horror direction. I'm not actually a big fan of "Saw", the movie that made him, and it wasn't until the one after this one, "Insidious", that he really won me over, but still, like all his movies, this one has its isolated moments, including an appropriately gory and basically totally unexpected denouement. Probably Wan's worst movie, not even really worth a re-watch except for the occasional odd Wan touches, which this movie probably has fewer of than any of his others, but, nonetheless, at this point I'm resigned to likely watch every one of his movies at some…