Archives: Movie Reviews

Darkness descends on the world in the form of an unexplained momentary global black out, during and after which everybody standing in a dark enough area spontaneously disappears from their clothes, rapture style, for unexplained reasons. Random voices are heard in the darkness, fresh batteries randomly start dying in minutes, and the sun stops rising, also for unexplained reason, until a couple of children survive for unexplained reasons until the sun starts coming up again for unexplained reasons. Occasional vaguely creepy SFX as people turn into shadows, darkness assumes vague, half-seen human forms, and random voices, possibly of dead people, echo in the darkness — which are all diminished by the rest of the time, when the creeping darkness and "shadow people" just look totally like fake animation effects. Starts Not Mark Wahlberg (Hayden Christensen) as Mark Wahlberg's character, and Not Halle Berry (the uncharacteristically disappointing, over-histrionic Thandie Newton) as…

Middling thriller about a young couple who rents a house from a landlord who has cameras all over it and a soundproof cell in the basement.

Ghost of a little girl holds the gorgeous members of a film production company captive in their office and kills them one by one in cartoonishly horrible ways. sub-mediocre, formulaic with occasional bits of humor. A charismatically bloviating Billy Zane as the director. Probably not quite "USA Up All Night" quality.

Torture porn. Kid gets stuck standing on a landline in a foreign country, local tortures his girl in front of him. Just when you think it’s over, it kicks into overdrive as the kid gets his revenge in even more brutal fashion. Actually pretty well made for what it is, the acting is solid, but especially brutal, keeps outdoing itself. That's not a good thing. I don't know why some people enjoy brutality enough that people make these kinds of movies.

as close to being a good movie as captivity/torture porn ever gets. Women menaced by hitchhiker drives car of edge of highway, becomes trapped inside for days as he periodically returns to torture her, mostly psychologically.

Decent supernatural thriller with Mr. No-Nonsense, Art La Fleur. Two families are lured to look at a house out in the woods, arrive to nearly hit a young girl in the road with her tongue cut out, and soon discover they can’t leave the property. Every attempt to drive or walk back to the road just puts them back at the house. 7 cans of beef stew keep reappearing in the pantry every day. Months pass. Everybody goes a little insane, dead relatives appear, etc.

One of those small but special films I really like. Horror meets wilderness survival flick. Well done, solid, understated, original, starkly beautiful horror/suspense film set at oil drilling office in the remote arctic. Ron Perelman. Things slowly go wrong, climate change is implicated but no more is said than absolutely needs to be. Gorgeous, stark cinematography benefits the film in the same manner as "Open Water".

Alright. Petulant Kiwi teen under house arrest, ankle monitor and all, with her crazy family in big old house. Things go bump in the walls, as what looks like a setup for supernatural horror turns into a pretty decent non-supernatural thriller.

Inventive anthology. Lots of creepy unexplained shit, and Maria Olsen playing it straight for once. Fun, pretty original, I liked it.

A not-bad entry in the psycho-picking-off-teenagers-in-a-remote-location genre. but snow fields instead of woods this time, which is refreshing. Set in the norwegian outback, in an abandoned lodge. Goes on a bit long, but if you're gonna watch something in this genre, this is a decently creepy, non-annoying one.

zombie road picture plays like a missing episode of Walking Dead, from one of the good seasons.

Execrable. Seems like a probable attempt to invent a "mythology" that could be spun off into 14 sequels, but nobody is that stupid.

She's a ghost. She wanders around a house. Doesn't sound like much but actually kind of a pretty cool movie. Kind of leans towards being an arthouse flick, but in a good way, without overbearing pretense. Poetic, slightly dreamy, original and self-assured. A spirit goes through the motions of her life before being contacted with by a medium trying to help release her spirit.

Ok, now I get why Eli Roth's name is known. His first film, a surprisingly good entry in the vacation-gone-wrong/gorgeous-teenagers-menaced-on-a-trip-to-the-woods gore flick, because the primary villain is not a monster but a flesh-eating disease. There's some unfortunate stereotypical murderous rednecks, and while they threaten to overpower it, they never do. Some predictability keeps this from being a great picture but it's definitely a cut or two above the ilk I expected it to be just like. Much better than Hostel, which I thought was more the work of a hack than most other people seemed to. I see why Eli Roth might have been considered a promising horror director at the time.

Fairly enjoyable little picture, actually. In a small midwestern town, a young teenage sociopath with his killer urges under control struggles to be normal until he discovers an older man (Christopher Lloyd in a deadly serious turn) is a serial killer and tries to stop him. Light on violence or horror and with only a totally unexpected phantasmagoric turn at the very end, plays for the most part like a drama. I kinda liked it.

Maybe the only shitty, no-budget Troma-studios-level bad indie gore flick I've ever truly enjoyed. An abandoned building full of junkies and lunatic squats comes down with a psycho virus and kills each other in ridiculous ways. But, talk about an A+ for effort. Can't put my finger yet on what made this one so different but I sincerely like it. Managed to stay far enough away from cliches to be entertaining, I guess. Or maybe the director is real good, or something. Didn't go over the top in the usual ways, but found new, entertaining ways to go over the top instead.

Promising but ultimately disappointing future dystopian black comedy with a slight Clockwork Orange artifice and sterility to the production. Single people are sent to a hotel to either hook up or be transformed into animals and set loose in the woods. One man escapes and joins the "loners", who forbid romance, in the woods — at which point the movie completely runs out of steam, and spends the remaining half its length going absolutely nowhere.

boring as hell drama about an unlikeable gorgeous couple doing nothing interesting in Iceland after everyone else in the world inexplicably disappears.

Missi Pyle tricks a bunch of really unlikeable good-looking people into coming hiking with her in what seems like an attempt at a "Big Chill" for millenials but doesn't even come close. They spend the time arguing before a big huggy ending, without ever succeeding at making you care about what they're arguing about. (Not a horror movie, BTW, even though it sounds like it.)

two families share a cabin in a post-apocalyptic-plague woodland. More a bleak drama than a horror movie. Well-made enough, I'm sure some people will like it, but wasn't my cup of tea. Doesn't really go much of anywhere.

Adequate direction saves this overwrought, poorly-thought out, nonsensical attempt at a thriller from being a complete crapfest. Instead it's just mostly a crapfest. Jim Carrey is actually alright at keeping a (mostly) straight face but the movie still seems to somehow have a touch of his usual mania in the way it tries to contort and surprise but instead just ends up confusing.

Haunted winery turns out to be something more as gorgeous ghost hunters get picked off. Why did previous owners kill themselves by stabbing themselves in the stomach? Starts out as a standard ghost story and expands to something a little more freaky and maybe even sci-fi.