Archives: Movie Reviews

You know, I kind of liked this movie. What should have been a standard C-grade teens-getting-picked-off-in-a-remote-location horror movie packs some genuine creepiness in there, as teens in the deserve inadvertently summon a... well, it never explains exactly what the "Hisji" evil entity really is, but it can fuck with electricity and confuse the hell out of its victims before offing them. More about building mood than jump scares or gore, and while it isn't a great film, or even a very good one, it definitely has that going for it, and I liked it for that. Way less crappy that, say, "Candyman". In fact, not really crappy at all, just kind of... only-moderately-unambitious, at worst. The AV club has a pretty good review at https://film.avclub.com/one-of-the-biggest-horror-movie-scares-of-the-year-happ-1835452053, saying all the scares happen in well-lit scenes, and that this is not "don't go in the basement" horror, which is a good way of…

This unbearably self-consciously "quirky" movie about a nondescript mattress salesman seems to lie somewhere on the line between "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Slackers". It desperately wants to be a "cult favorite". "Quirky" characters speak in non-sequiturs, give overwrought philosophical answers to questions like "how does your day look?", and name-drop obscure celebrities in conversations that go absolutely nowhere. And that's just the first 20 minutes, because after that I assumed the title was honest and gave the rest of the movie a miss. I bet it was filmed in Austin.

Family of metalheads buys a remote house in the country, is menaced by the psychopathic former resident who becomes fixated on the 14-year-old metalhead daughter. An all-around appealing, charismatic cast, as well as pretty fair avoidance of obvious cliches and a truly heartfelt portrayal of Mom, Dad, and Daughter Metalhead as a normal, loving family, saves what would otherwise have been a 100% unremarkable terrorized-by-a-psycho picture.

Boy, what to say about this. Father says he wants a divorce, mom blows her brains out, six months later father brings kids & new fiance up to his remove fishing lodge and leaves them there in the dead of winter. Two acts of sheer, drawn-out boredom as the kids and new fiance first fail to get along, then come to believe they've died and are stuck in the house, lead into one of the most emotionally cold, cruel, brutal third acts I've ever seen. Can't exactly say it's a bad movie, but can't imagine who would ever find this entertaining. Not many movies have made me actually feel bad, but this one did.

captivity/torture porn. A couple of kids in london break into an empty building to squat, find themselves trapped and tortured, dismembered, and in what I guess is supposed to be a twist ending, eaten, one by one. That's it. That's the whole plot of this brilliant fucking movie.

The Blair Witch Project, but with Bigfoot, and less. BONUS TROPES! "No cell reception", unfriendly locals trying to run them off for unknown reasons, clueless city slickers lost in the woods, "Who messed with our campsite?", camera conspicuously running when it doens't need to be, "That's the same tree, we went in a circle!", all the cliches. Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, who apparently somehow, amazingly, didn't know better. Oh, also, the protagonists waste too much time talking about their relationship, which is always great cinematic entertainment. No, seriously, this is the worst-paced movie I've ever seen. Ok, they hear something outside in the woods, outside the tent. Does that require seeing them sit there listening in the dark for literally 20 straight minutes?

Bob Odenkirk redeems himself for "Melvin Goes To Dinner". Magical realist series about a young woman who suffers injuries in a car crash, only to discover that either insanity or time travel runs in her family. Rotoscoped animation seemed for the first episode like I was going to quickly get sick of it, but soon proves to be an incredibly smart production choice. Season 1 sags slightly in the middle, and the whole thing might have made a great movie instead of a very good series, but it's a very good series nonetheless, and highly original. Season 1 ends on a serious cliffhanger though. A conclusive ending would have been far more satisfying.

OMG. Ok. I kinda like these teen-oriented "horror" movies that seem like they were made from preteen novels, if they have a couple of fun ideas and creepy enough moments, and am willing to forgive a lot. Case in point would be "Plus 1", which this movie shares a lot in common with, beginning with the setup, which is "teenage protagonists at a party where reality suddenly changes on them in some unexplainable way and they have to find a way to cope". This film really pushes the limits of that forgiveness, though. Unlike "Plus 1", which at least tossed in a passing meteor as an attempt at some kind of macguffin to give some reason for the otherworldly things that occur, this film doesn't bother... kids go to a party, go into a closet to play "Seven Minutes In Heaven" and emerge in a world where everything is the…

Decent drama/thriller starring Bradley Cooper as a down-on-his-luck writer who gets access to a drug that allows him to use 100% of his brain capacity, and his subsequent business and political ascent. Between him and De Niro in a supporting role, pretty watchable.

Ok, no great shakes. Kind of turgid. Strange young man tries to end his own life, keeps bumping into suicidal women and in two cases takes their bodies home for a short while before burying them in his garden and moving on to the next one. Completely unengaging leading man with virtually no personality and not much drama or buildup to the story kind of leadens the whole endeavor. Also not clear why some suicidal women would be so damn chipper and engaging. It does have that woman who played the strange junkyard woman in Walking Dead, who I've always kind of liked for some reason.

Wow, talk about a flawed gem. I really like this neo-noir, which features the two most realistic 10-year-old boys I've ever seen in a movie finding an apparently abandoned cop car and going for a joy ride, attracting the attention of the corrupt sheriff whose car it is and the man he's got in the trunk. Really appealing, set deep in the windswept prairie, kind of a snowless "fargo" at least in terms of setting. The only problem: the too-recognizable-to-suspend-disbelief Kevin Bacon as the sheriff, who is, additionally, repeatedly clever enough to creatively think his way out of jams in a split second, but not clever enough to leave his cop car where two 10 year olds won't find it, or to not leave the keys sitting on the seat in plain view. But overall, despite the flaws, this picture is kind of a fave, I'm glad I caught it.…

Terribly miscast Jason Bateman—who doesn't have the range to be believable as a bully when he's just been acting like relatable Michael Bluth for the first half of the movie—in an otherwise ok thriller carried mostly by the strong performanmce of Rebecca Hall, as appealing as if Jenny Agutter was brought forward in a time machine from 1978, as his wife. Couple moves back to LA, reconnects with disturbingly eccentric childhood acquaintance (and writer/director) Joel Edgerton, who seems to have some sort of unhealthy interest in them. Secrets are revealed. Blah blah blah. Like I said, Rebecca Hall carries it. Does build well to a much more twisted revenge thriller ending than it ever lets on it's going to be.

It's getting tough to do a fresh take on the zombie outbreak picture, but this Korean film does an alright job. The slightly low, non-Netflix-TV-episode-quality production values are really the only thing marring this tale of people trapped in their apartments during a zombie apocalypse. I liked it.

Ripped from today's headlines! A virtual assistant begins acting like a (non-diegetically) weird-looking girl's mother, soon convincing to kill everyone who's done her wrong. Basically, this is like an after-school movie, except with lower production values, and a bloodier ending.

Comic artist, just released from an insane asylum, kills those he feel ruined his life. Entertaining enough comedy-horror. First you need to know it stars Barry Bostwick and Karen Black, which tells you part of the story, and then that it stars Kevin Corrigan, which tips the film into the hoped-for one of the two places it could go given that first fact. Kevin Corrigan, who, yes, you do know who he is, has pretty much only ever been in watchable movies, near as I can tell.

Jumanji, but attempted horror. Dreadful.

Am I the only one who thinks the most recent couple of seasons of thhis are nothing but oppression porn? It's like, "Last episode, women were treated very very badly. In this episode, women are treated very very badly. Be sure to tune in next week, when women will be treated very very badly." The vast real-life importance of gender equality doesn't make that entertainment.

A hitman transporting a body on Halloween is mistaken for a partygoer in a Halloween costume. 20somethings wind up with the body and he wants it back. Truthfully, this movie was background noise while I was working on other things, and every time I looked up, it appeared to be fairly entertaining, until the third act, which appeared to be mostly a gory chase scene with the hitman pursuing the kids across the city to retreive the body.

The definition of "torture porn". Literally no plot except for: a bunch of people are held prisoner and promised to be released if they torture each other, so they do. 90 minutes of people inflicting pain on each other, bookended by Maria Olsen telling them she needs to collect a chemical produced by their brains during pain, and literally nothing else.

Review of first 90%: It's a movie called "Pooka!". What do you expect? (If you are thinking something along the lines of an Outer Limits episode, you've set your expectations right.) The lead actor does a decently frenetic job, though. appropriately cartoonish to the silly premise of an improbably popular and murderous kid's toy taking over his life, and directed far better than it deserves, which actually makes it kind of moment-by-moment gripping despite how silly the entire affair is. Review of last 10%: This movie just doesn't make any sense.

Paint-by-numbers suspense thriller. Mother and son movie to the mountains. There's someone in the house with them! And, that's all there is to this movie. They don't even ever tell you who the killer is. This is like one of those terrible French "thrillers" where people being terrorized is supposed to be enough to be considered a plot.

Well-made but very cliched "The Lady Vanishes" plot-twisty thriller. Gorgeous man takes gorgeous wife and injured daughter to hospital during a road trip, returns to pick them up later and is told he was there alone earlier. Predictable all the way through, and with hefty doses of before-you-even-get-to-the-fridge logic. But, mildly entertaining, on the better end of mediocre.

This starts with a premise that could go either way: a group of teens go to find a teacher who disappeared into a cave, to discover time flows differently inside the cave than out. In this case, it goes the right way, and instead of becoming a predictable thriller, it keeps bringing in new ideas, ending up unexpectedly far afield from where it started, and in an enjoyable & engaging way. Worked for me. Would watch again, eventually.

Daniel Radcliffe is as redeeming as possible in this based-on-a-true-story lost-in-the-jungle survival flick. Friends set off, slowly get separated, winds up being protagonist alone walking back through the wilderness towards civilization, encountering every possible obstacle along the way, including quicksand, a snake, hallucinations, you name it, in the slow-moving third act. Was a pretty good movie until it started to sag... one guy grimacing in pain, hallucinating, and talking to animals doesn't really feel like much of a plot. You gotta admit Radcliffe always gives his all to everything he does, though. And also, that aside, he somehow manages to be strikingly handsome-looking when covered with mud, which strikes me as something of an accomplishment, I guess. I couldn't do it.

Okay-enough dubbed-over flick about a kid getting possessed by her witchy grandma in a coma. Didn't hold my attention so well, but well-made, well acted.