Archives: Movie Reviews

Gaby Hoffman in a lesbian retelling of Rosemary's baby, except nowhere near as good.

The Final Girl kills the maniac. Set on an Irish Farm. I didn't pay much attention to it.

Another strange, utterly cheap-looking film that looks like it was filmed on an iPhone and is basically utter shite, with virtually no plot, one set, or character depth. A bunch of people are chased around an underground storage facility by an unexplained monster for an hour and a half and either disappear withpout explanation, are killed, or are "possessed" and become evil without explanation. And yet, somehow, it manages to be consistently pretty tense and scary. Good date movie. I counted my blessings, though: after all, this could've been shot as a first-person found footage film. I actually might watch this again.

strange, poorly acted, poorly made, very cheap-looking, amateurish film using only natural light and almost no special effects, yet manages to maintain a good rhythm and convey consistent enough very creepy atmosphere for me, at least, to enjoy. A bunch of priests gather for an exorcism on an estate, and as they await the annointed hour, visions from the past greet and torture them. A box made from the wood of Noah's ark grants wishes. Everybody talks with NY accents, if you happen to have a thing for or against that.

run-of-the-mill captivity and torture by a psycho in an abandoned slaughterhouse, pretty pedestrian, but, I dunno, something about it is kind of engaging. I enjoyed it an iota more than I'd ordinarily enjoy this sort of cliched pic. Maybe it's slightly better made than most. The bad guy is Buffalo Bill rehashed, but done well. Some sudden moments of extraordinary brutality. Apparently it's a prequel, I found out later. (Sheer coincidence... the first one came on as I was writing this. It was totally forgettable.)

Monster found in an iceberg slowly picks off crew of Bering Sea ship. Once again proves that if you find yourself in a horror movie scenario, the key to survival is outliving Lance Hendriksen.

good old-fashioned monster movie! People hiding in a basement from an invasion of giant wasps. Cheezy, but not toooo cheezy. Done right in most ways. Big fun here, I like it. Once again proves the universal horror-movie truism that, if you're stuck in a horror movie situation, outliving Lance Hendriksen is the key to survival.

"Jacobs ladder", except bad.

A Black Crowes album to Texas Chainsaw's "Exile On Main St." Not "Amorica", either, although perhaps their second best one.

dear Hollywood, at certain point we figured out that if the bad guy doesn't talk to anybody but the protagonist for the entire movie, they're going to turn out to be either the protagonist's other personality, or someone's already dead. Neither are very surprising twist anymore. This one is the split personality one.

you know, for a poorly acted, no budget, poorly written, completely amateurish zero budget effort, this winds up being a halfway decent ghost story. The leads are charming and give it their all, as well.

English future dystopian zombie flick. Either the best home movie ever, or the lowest budget BBC production ever. Nothing but intense (seemingly shakespearian??) actors being intense in the woods or narrating intensely. Impressive, in that solid, low key BBC drama sort oF way- more dialogue and character than action.

gorgeous, square jawed mercenaries be macho, occasionally face-off against zombies. More testosterone than any other zombie flick.

A brother and sister go to check up on their increasingly unhinged army vet brother, living up at their lakehouse, to find him having sealed himself inside, acting irrational and claiming he has a killed "pod" trapped in the basement. Increasing creepiness is negated by a sort of insensible final act.

Starts off pretty cool, as a gorgeous bullied kid attacks his gorgeous bully and then the title appears suddenly over a freeze-frame, then degenerates to some sort of silly nonsense about a ghost haunting the rural troubled youth camp where she was bullied to death, which can for some reason cause any injury to her to be reflected onto someone else.

Set in a strange alternate reality where remote southern swamps are entirely populated by Brooklyn hipsters with trilby hats and bicep tattoos, this short's-worth-of-plot-stretched-to-feature-length shows a hipster couple living in a big old house in a remote southern swamp, when she suddenly disappears and he begins being visited nightly by an unexplained monster. After she returns, the monster disappears, causing him to be mocked by all their friends until the unexplained monster unexplainedly appears inside the house and attacks him in front of all of them at a dinner party, and he finally kills it, after which he proposes to her, all of which I guess is supposed to mean something, maybe. To stretch this to feature length, we're treated by very lengthy passages of what hipsters find most entertaining: long conversations working through their hipster relationship, and bantering at their hipster dinner party. I do give them credit for…

pretty original serial killer flick. A gorgeous investigator goes to the deep woods of England in sreach of a cryptid, only to discover she's been led there to film the attempted capture of a serial killer at his remote backwoods dumping ground. A fair handfful of really original elements to this as well as a super intense and dramatic third act. Very british in the way it concerns itself withg telling a story rather than just falling back on convention. I always dig that.

like The Mothman Prophesies, except with the Jersey Devil.

Joe Dante, more comedy than horror... a guy's overly clingy girlfriend, an initially painfully gorgeous Ashley Greene, returns from the dead to mess up his new relationship, while his slovenly friend improbably fucks every gorgeous woman in Los Angeles, two at a time.

this entry in the already crowded “gorgeous lone female cop works the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good" genre features a gorgeous lone female cop working the last desk shift at a haunted police station before it closes for good. Random "scary" stuff happens which eventually turns out to be related to the on-site suicides of a poorly-explained, poorly-acted Manson Family type cult. Essentially, "1408" in a police station.

after a team of gorgeous researchers discovered a cure for death, one of them is killed and resurrected, and gains random psychic powers, randomly turns evil, and kills her gorgeous teammates one by one for no reason.

gorgeous English couple buys Scotland farmhouse, so locals put on pig masks and chase them around it with axes, because, obviously, movie.

Hoooooo. Rough one. Thought it was a "based on a true story" horror movie, but it was closer to a documentary, with the real-life victim of a horrific 23-week captivity in 1985 on a remote farm in the Australian backcountry narrating a fairly intense dramatization of her true story. Mostly psychological torture, but also menial and sexual slavery, impregnation and subsequent termination by a physical beating, constant threats and manipulation, etc. Upsetting shit.