House of Screaming Death
An anthology Film from 2017 that feels for all the world like it's from about 1967, in which a mysterious Hitchockesque man tells four tales in which nothing happens.
House of Screaming Death
Ragmork
incomprehensible, ponderous, thoroughly amateurish mishmash filmed in black and white. Note to amateur film makers: if you're tempted to make an"artsy"film, find something else to do with your time. Only David Lynch has ever pulled that off as an amateur, and you're not him.
Killers [1996]
This must be the worst-edited movie ever. A clear child of the Natural Born Killers/Pulp Fiction Era, except, with such poor editing that it's impossible to make sense of the story. Escaped killers pick a random suburban house to hide out, and it slowly becomes apparent that the clean-cut family living there is anything but normal. Picture the"Gimp"sene from pulp fiction stretched to feature length. The husband even calls the wife"Honeybunny"at one point. Criminals give impassioned speeches about their taste in movies, or pause to recite poetry in the middle of action sequences. The wife is suddenly hanging all over one of the murderers and the husband is tied up; suddenly the husband is free, and is wearing makeup, and when the police arrive to rescue him, he kills them with an axe for no apparent reason. Then he's not wearing makeup anymore and his wife is back with him and the murderer. An unexplained deformed brother of the family pops in and out. Then the gorgeous surviving police sergeant, who came to the house in pursuit of the escaped murderer, is running through the dungeon (did I happen to mention this surburban house has a dungeon?) with the murderer, chased by the completely unexplained people down there. The police sergeant are holding hands, and they kiss. The sergeant is shot, and her last words to the main killer are"Kill them all"for some reason. Then the killers stop to put on skull facepaint and shoot rifles that it's never explained how they got into the darkness, to just say"Hey, we're cool", I guess. Along the way it's mentioned casually in passing that the father and daughter are sleeping together. The whole thing would almost be so bad and over-the-top that it's worth seeing for the sheer spectacle, but the complete lack of sense or explanation for anything makes it unwatchable. It's like a director kept thinking of unrelated scenes,"Wouldn't it be cool if this happened now", and nobody knew how to edit it into a movie.
The Signal (2007) [second viewing]
As described in my last review, compilation of three interwoven short tales, revolving around a broadcast signal driving people insane. I like this one a lot, very well done. (Note: there's another 2014 horror movie called"The Signal"that isn't nearly as good.) I just recently, 10 or 15 years after it had faded to a distant memory of a film Ihad especially enjoyed, popped back up on Tubi (which, among the seemingly thousands of awful horror films it gets, seems to also manage to get these distantly-remembered, hard-to-find favorites.) I remember why I liked it. It's gorier than I remember, and, I don't know, I can't say it's exactly a great movie, but it seriously well done for what it is and the kind of gem I would say non-horror fans shouldn't go out of their way to see, but, every horror fan should see it. As noted elsewhere, the first of the three episodes, directed by the guy who went on to do"The Ritual"and a bunch of better stuff I noted in my review of that film, is the best of the three, very effectively ratcheting up the suspense. The rest is nearly as good though. The second two rely a little bit on camp humor, not my favorite thing, but it's strong enough all the way through to pull off this off-kilter and gory end-of-humanity tale. Also, never realized unti now, the female lead was also one of the leads in"YellowBrickRoad"another favorite deep cut.
The Darkness Of The Road
Swing and a serious miss. Pretty decent lighting and cinematography for what little you can see of this movie (most of it is set on a desolate, deserted road at night) tries to be profound and twisty but succeeds mostly at meaningless"408"-style disjoined"what's another weird scary thing we can have happen?"scenes. Najarra Townsend ("Contaminated", a film I'm fond of) and the nice visuals do little to save this. Reading up on IMDB afterwards, it turns out it does have a cohesive idea behind it and make sense if you know what it's trying to say, but I didn't. Too bad.
Bug (1975)
THIS IS IT! You found it-the one, the only BUG, the single greatest cinematic achievement not just in the admittedly crowded field of mid-20th-century apocalyptic giant insect scifi horror film, nor even just in the scifi or horror film genres, but in human motion picture history writ large, itself. The unrelenting cinematic greatness that this movie doles out in heaping helpings upon your uncomprehending cerebellum-line after line, minute after minute, scene after scene, shrieking burning head explosion after shrieking burning head explosion, without pause, from the opening preacher's sermon to the closing descent into the stygian bowels of the earth itself-simply cannot be adequately conveyed within the constraints of this forum. It must be experienced firsthand.The mere fact that this is one of the very few opportunities in American cinema to see a woman's head get set on fire in the Brady Bunch kitchen would likely be among the chief draws of any more ordinary film it might appear in. But this is no ordinary film, and even something that would obviously be the highlight of most movie-goers' entire seasons is here only the very most trivial, the most trifling beginning to the veritable cavalcade of entertainments bestowed upon the lucky viewer of this inestimable apotheosis of thrilling visual storytelling.To say any more would both unfairly rob the viewer of the opportunity to fully experience the unfolding of this stunning film firsthand, and, necessarily fall short in the effort, because words simply can not suffice.Bug. There is no substitute, no other film experience that can compare. On the rarified mountaintop of cinematic achievement, Bug stands alone.If you disagree with a single word of this review, you should know it was written by my 7-year-old self. And my 7-year-old self knows a BUTTLOAD about movies. You are not likely to convince him he's wrong.As of this writing,"Bug"is, happily, currently streaming on Netflix, and the world feels just that much more right.
The Boo
pretty bad, stiffly-acted, amateurish southern gothic. widow and brother of dead man recovering from the death, when her doppleganger haunts local bars and picks up meen.
ReSet
Ok, so starts, and proceeds through the first half as amusingly terrible take on the Groundhog Day trope. Girl is abducted from a party by an"incel"-stereotype stalker, wakes up in his guest room every time he kills her, after a brief trip to heaven to see her dead grandfather who encourages her along. I'm seriously unsure if this is meant to be a comedy or not. But then, it starts getting into character development, actually spends a little time talking than showing action, finally showing an almost sympathetic side the villain... almost. And the heroine comes off, despite everything she does being justified by everything she's been put through, slightly cruel. All in all, after a really terrible start, I'd almost say this could be chalked up as an"interesting failure"of the kind I might rewatch occasionally. If the first half had been as good as the second half, it would have been.
Sapien
The worst mess of a film I've ever seen. A social media influencer (always a promising start) leaves her fiance, becomes homeless, and goes through two hours of scenes that don't make sense in which apparently she talks to unseen people, apparently kills a family with a machete, talks shit to Jehovah's Witnesses who knock at the front door, becomes homeless, winds up in a hotel, curls up in a tent in a homeless camp with an unexplained mummified corpse and tells it she loves it, gets chased by guys in animal masks, gets kidnapped by human traffickers, is made to fight in a cage death match, and does a dance routine, but it's impossible to know for sure because things just jump around in a disconnected series of images for two hours. I think this is supposed to be an art film, but, nobody involved actually knew how to make a movie? It did actually have one creepy scene, though: she encounters an unseen"wood spirit"that speaks to her around a corner, and the voice keeps changing to different people. That was cool.
The Mount 2
Amateurish, pretentious outing where a bunch of kids and some unexplained adults apparently having a Halloween party in an abandoned house in Gibraltar start stabbing each other for some reason. Also apparently some of them are ghosts, because nobody else reacts to them, and they sometimes turn to the camera and brag"I'm a fucking ghost!". Also there's one part where they got bored making a movie because it turns into a badly over-acted music video or musical or something. Note to future directors: throwing one scene of an unexplained theatrical musical number into the middle of your horror movie doesn't really make it that much scarier. Nor does having a murdered, gloating over the murder scene, address the camera,"You wanted blood? Well here's fucking blood!"Am I supposed to feel bad now?
Quadrant
I think this might be a TV show. Seems like it was filmed on video. A girl does VR experiements where she seduces and kills women, then does it in real life. I turned it off halfway though.
Soft Liquid Center
God save us from"arty"indie horror films. A woman moves to a new house, ,probably in Los Angeles, and after about an hour of talking to her friends and 5 minutes of a lingering shot of her scooping out a watermelon, starts to experience boring, cliched"haunted"occurrences and occasionally disappears and appears in a weird forest setting for a few minutes before the movie abruptly ends with no explanation.
The Whisperer In Darkness
Ok, this one is special, I think we have an honorable mention here. A folklorist investigates tales of strange creatures appearing in Vermont. When I threw this on, I was suprised to discover it was an old horror movie, not a new one, and nearly turned it off, but thankfully I didn't. Within just a few minutes I found myself thinking that I'd forgotten just how visually beautiful some of those old black and white movies are... similar to some of those John Ford westerns. It was quite a ways into it before I realized something was a little too clean—by the end of the movie I realized that certain lighting revealed that there was no film grain. Which makes sense, because the movie was actually made in 2011. But other than that, WOW, the 1930s reproduction is note-perfect, the acting style, the costumes, the special effects, most definitely the lighting... somebody involved with the making of this film had a spectacularly good eye for black-and-white cinematography, it's just beautiful and would probably have stood out as a great example of vintage cinematography if it had actually been vintage. The story is not great but absolutely good, it builds as effectively as some of the great vintage horror, and the plot ticks along, nothing about it sags at any point from start to finish. There's clearly some modern special effects used but for the most part they're effectively disguised to look like 1930s technology, and mostly the whole thing works. The monsters are a little cheezy but by the time you see them I was so into it that I didn't care. This film really caught my attention, there were a few times I had to rewind to see things a second time. Plus, a dark ending, much more Lovecraft than Hollywood, even though only the first two acts are actually from the Lovecraft story this is based on. Very nice work from an indie director. Not quite a great film, but definitely a treat, from where I sit, for sure. Quality entertainment. Incidentally I notice this one gets high marks from a lot of Lovecraft fans in the review section on IMDB.
The Trip (2023)
Four friends plan a mushroom-fueled weekend at a Pennsylvania farmhouse and are killed by an assortment of totally unexplained suicides, accidents, axe-wielding maniacs, and a bunch of other stuff that just plain doesn't make sense.
The Nexus
Basically, Kentucky Fried Movie, but with horror shorts instead of humor shorts.
Stupid Games
A poorly-written, poorly edited, and virtually unpaced 30 minute horror movie with 45 pointless minutes of kids having a dinner party tacked on to the beginning. Kids have a party, eventually the lights go out so they play some sort of supernatural game, the cabinet doors start shaking, they get dragged by something out of the room and into the oven or a closet or something, it was too poorly edited for me to follow any more than that.
The Screaming Silent
The Blair Witch Project, but in Australia, with the now-de-rigeur-for-found-footage-horror 45 minutes of pointless, non-plot-advancing bullshit tacked on to the beginning. But mostly, the Blair Witch Project. Which is great, because nooooobody's ever made that movie before.
The Haunting of Pearson Place
Fairly paint-by-numbers haunted house story in which a young couple buy a country home not realizing it's inhabited by wooden actors that never blink and speak through an electronic pitch shifter.
Network
This is my favorite movie, full stop.
I love this movie so much, am so close to it, I don't know what to say. It's like trying to write a summary of a beloved life-long friend.
This movie about the intersection of power, economics, and media, explored through a tale about the mental breakdown of a news anchor and the paradox of his resulting rise in ratings. It predicted, in 1976, so many things that we didn't see in reality until much later: the forces of economic globalization, the rise of "reality television", the commercial subversion of TV news (still, it may be hard to remember now, valued as a source of objective information at the time) from a reporting concern into a driver of profits and propaganda outlet—and takes them all to a ridiculous extreme, plus, casts a woman in the role of a cutthroat executive, something my…
Resolution
Score one for AI. This small indie film has haunted me for years, as I forgot to review it when I watched it, until tonight I typed one image I vividly remembered as well as a few other details into ChatGPT and asked what film it was from, and after one wildly wrong try, it got it right.
This is a small indie horror flick that stuck with me just for being really weird. A man meets his drug addict friend out at a remote cabin the friend is squatting in, and chains the friend up, forcing him to spend a week going cold turkey. Strange encounters with other drug addicts, local security, and a team of foreign researchers there doing psychedelics begin to occur and they find films and videos that change with each viewing, and what is initially assumed to be haunted land turns out to be…
You’re Next
[reviewed on IMDB] Summary: Pointless, gratuitous scenes of "plot porn" totally ruin 90 good minutes of people being murdered.
This movie is well-produced, well acted, extremely realistic in its gore and violence. Unfortunately, I have to give it only one star because about for almost whole 10 minutes at the beginning, and again near the end of the movie, they stop showing people getting murdered, to waste time bogging it down with some throwaway backstory or reason for the murders, or something, completely from out of left field. I'm not sure... it was people talking, not characters getting stabbed in the eye or having a blender forced down onto the top of their head, so I couldn't sustain any attention to it.
In what universe are moviegoers actually entertained by a murderer SAYING WHY they kill people? Are there really people out there who sit and watch scenes of…
Breaking The Waves
My favorite film by my favorite director.
Wait, ok. A little virtue-signalling never hurt anyone, so I'll point out: From everything I've read and seen, director Lars von Trier seems to me like kind of a disturbed or unbalanced individual, very likely a misogynist, misanthrope, almost definitely a narcissist, and probably personally an all-around malignant asshole. And also, I think, easily the most talented filmmaker of the last few decades. Not since Herzog or Tarkovsky have I seen someone who just struck me as so adept in the language of filmmaking, such a natural talent.
Breaking The Waves is a straight drama. Set on a remote Scottish island, where an American there working on an oil right has fallen in love with a local, who is a member of the island's ultra-religious church. They marry, when he is injured in an explosion on the rig, and their relationship takes…
Let The Right One In (2008 Swedish film)
I consider this film about a young boy who forms a friendship with centuries-old vampire who looks like a 12-year-old girl to be maybe one of the top 10 horror movies ever. This is one of those films like The Exorcist, The Omen, or The Shining where a talented director took on supernatural material, and made, not just a great horror movie, but a great movie, along the way telling a brand new story about familiar monsters without relying on cliche. (It may also be that three of the four movies mentioned were based on acclaimed novels.)
It was originally recommended that I watch this with the original swedish soundtrack and English subtitles, and not use the terrible English audio overdubbing job, and though I don't like subtitled movies in this case it proved to be good advice.
Two years later the novel was remade for American audience and…
The Last Man On Earth (1964 movie)
I can't say this obscure 1964 Vincent Price is a truly great movie but it will always have a very special place in my heart. Unlike some of my most esteemed favorites, I wouldn't say it's can't-miss, but at one point Price himself said this was his favorite of all his movies, and George Romero openly cited it as the direct inspiration for founding father of the zombie genre "Night Of The Living Dead" (bet you didn't know there was a "founding grandfather" movie of that genre. "The Last Man On Earth" made it alllllll possible.)
This was based loosely on the 1954 novel "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. That's the same "I Am Legend" that "The Omega Man" (with Charlton Heston) and Will Smith's much later action movie were based on.
(This is worth a side note here: Richard Matheson's is a name anyone with more than…
Ex Machina
I adore this movie. Well done, old-school humanist, character-driven sci fi. There's like three characters in the whole movie, a lot of talk and very little action, qualities some other quiet "thrillers" I'm particularly fond of (such as The Vast Of Night and The Invitation) share, when they're well-made enough to carry it along on that.
In this, a programmer wins a chance to spend a few days with the reclusive head of his company in his isolated retreat, where it turns out he has built an artificial (and, in some lovely FX work, visually clearly robotic, except for the face) woman. The programmer has been called there to interact with her and determine whether he feels she is genuinely conscious and intelligent. That short synopsis doesn't really do it justice, but to say more would be to rob anyone reading of the experience…
Nathan For You [tv show]
A huge favorite of mine. Nathan Fielder is a "business expert" who comes up with hilarious, incredibly ludicrous, far-fetched ideas to save struggling businesses in this unscripted, quasi-"reality" show.
Just one example off the top of my head: a struggling appliance store is being run out of business by a nearby major chain store. When the chain store advertises that they'll match any advertised price, Fielder advises the appliance store owner to start advertising a certain TV for $1. Then, he'll send people over to buy out that TV from the chain store for $1, and when they're out of stock, his client can raise the price again and resell them in his own store for full price, a 100% profit.
In the kind of complication the show specialized in, somebody noticed that if he advertised the TV for $1, someone might come in and try to buy it for…
Man Seeking Woman [tv show]
I loved this show.
Jay Baruchel, Eric Andre, and the ridiculously likable Britt Lower in a magical-realist take on dating. If you've ever gone to a party and discovered your recent ex is there with her new boyfriend, and, he's literally Adolph Hitler, and, everyone at the party likes him more than you... then you should be able to relate to this.
It had all the monsters and magic of dating made literal, and, played them with a completely straight face. It was three seasons of deadpan humor, mixed with surreal, sci-fi, and fantasy elements. And I enjoyed it immensely.
Touching The Void
What can I say about "Touching The Void"? I'm a sucker for a good survival story, and "Touching The Void" is one of the best of them. It's a true story, the film interspersing dramatizations of real events with interviews with the actual survivors, which is a tactic I ordinarily don't like very much but here is applied to such an incredible true tale that I have no problem with it.
Two mountaineers are climbing in the remote Andes, thirteen miles over rough glacial moraine from their remote base camp, when a storm sets in. Tethered together by a rope, one slips, and dangles over a sheer cliff, suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The other climber, unable to gain secure enough footing to pull him back up, is instead slowly being pulled down towards the edge by the weight. Knowing that if he goes over they will…
Shortbus
OK. Let's forget about sexually explicit content for a moment. You've got 400 other reviews you can read about the sex in.
Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: John Cameron Mitchell is a very good filmmaker. Hedwig And The Angry Inch was very well made, and Shortbus is very well made. This is why I gave this movie 6 stars - it was enjoyable to watch on the level of very well-made cinema. He's clearly done his homework - this film reeks of "best student in his film school class". Despite how that sounds, I mean it in a good way. The actors, including the 'local color' cast to play themselves, also give very good performances all around.
Some of the characters and situations in Shortbus do have a few nice subtle touches, but then, all to often, it is ruined by having them go and behave…
Found (2012)
[posted to IMDB, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2149360/]
I just got floored by this movie. I can only assume the low rating is because so many horror fans have absolutely terrible taste in movies.
This is the kind of low-budget miracle that often lacks a lot—the acting is spotty, the effects aren't great, the pacing is awkward—but somehow manages to make up for it with heart, with an original idea, with a strong, strangely evocative narrative. This film is Decadent, in the aesthetic sense of the word. Like some of Baudelaire's best poems, its imagery and narrative are truly horrible, and in fact it's extremely gory, but somehow it manages to say something new and somehow very darkly beautiful. It helps that the emphasis is not on scares, but rather on telling a story.
In that way, it reminds me very much of "The Hamiltons", another super-low-budget, kind…