Archives: Movie Reviews

A woman rents goes on vacation in a woodsy cabin, only to discover that after an initial friendly meeting, the kids camping next door are starting to act a little wierd, either the victims of some sort of monster, drugs in the water, mind control, or a flimsy and never-explained horror movie plot.

By the end whatever happened to them happens to her, but it's never explained what it is, other than that something about drinking bottled water changes people.

It's too bad because the production is good and the atmosphere is creepy. But somebody forgot that stories need an ending. Or at least an explanation.

Low-budget attempted thriller about a disgraced journalist who got somebody killed by revealing a source uncovers a mysterious online puzzle that causes people to disappear. Starts promising a la "The Game" but then ends, disappointingly, without ever pulling the pieces together.

The ultimate contrived, formulaic sitcom. However, it has about the steadiest rhythm of any TV show I've ever seen, the dialogue goes bang-bang-bang, making it perfect background noise.

Having just seen "X" and surprisingly enjoyed it, I checked out this prequel, which finds writer/director Ti West back to his usual unrelatable characters and well-made but uninteresting and stylistically overfamiliar, derivative tricks. In this case, he does the Coen Brothers meets The Wizard Of Oz, showing the elderly lead villain from "X" as a young psychotic farm girl, killing people mostly because, movie.

I'm actually kind of relieved. After "X" I was afraid I might have to start liking his movies. No worries here. Not terrible, well-made enough to almost label it as "watchable", not just painfully uninteresting like "House Of The Devil", but as with so much of his stuff, the cinematic equivalent of a Fluffernutter sandwich: fun, but totally unsatisfying fluff.

A mildly interesting 4-hour-long (!) documentary on 80s horror. Mostly for the kind of people who think "Evil Dead" was a good movie, or that "Toxic Avenger" and "Gremlins" were horror movies... basically, people who think horror should be fun, not scary. But it was alright. At that length, it did manage to cover everything, including some good ones (including obscure favorites like "Night Of The Comet", for instance), and had interviews with basically everybody who was anybody in any '80s horror movie you ever heard of. And it managed to hold my attention for the whole time.

Tediously campy horror/sci-fi movie in which two tough-as-nails thieves are abducted by a tough-as-nails mad doctor and subjected to experiements meant to allow travel across the barrier between life and death, which basically consists of him killing them, them seeing dead loved ones, and him reviving them again, over and over again.

New nurse goes to take care of cantankerous old woman in what looks like a mediocre ghost story but turns out to be a mediocre whodunit. Notable only for having the single longest "detective explains to the crook how he did it" scene that I've ever seen.

A disparate group of people follow a Bigfoot researcher into the wilderness, and eventually find themselves trapped in a tedious captivity/pursuit flick.

Jospeh Gordon-Levitt utterly fails to stop being Joseph Gordon-Levitt and disappear into a role as an uncouth dirtbag type who insinuates himself into the life of a young boy who just lost his mother and his working-class father and grandmother. He ain't Brad Pitt in "Kalifornia", that's for sure. Well-made and gritty, and with a good cast (Rainn Wilson, Natalie Portman) but, a little too sentimental and overlong, and failed to engage me.

A woman returns to her rural home and winds up crossing the dimensional barrier to be with her dead parents, or some nonsense. I believe this is the pilot for a miniseries or something. Not terribly interesting, very TV-sci-fi-like.

Unfunny Canadian sketch comedy show that only lasted a season, thankfully. I guess sometimes even Canada has an off day.