Archives: Movie Reviews

Actually, not a bad teen screamer, in some ways, although I do wish the trend of naming horror movies by coming up with a "horror" adjective that has nothing to do with the plot would stop. Visiting his dad in a resort town on a lake for the summer, a teen suspects his neighbor is possessed by a witch that makes people forget their small children, and then eats them. One of those movies that seems like it might have been made from a Young Adult novel, but, among the definitely best and most well-made of them. Some effective horror direction & cinematography and decent effects & creature design do the trick. Netflix reposted it and I got tricked into watching it again because it had been a while, and I didn't regret it, and wound up watching the whole thing.

Gorgeous journalists investigating the disappearance of an American in a remote polish village find a demonic shrine in a mysterious fog patch in the woods, spend the rest of the film being chased by angry villagers in religious garb and hallucinating monsters. Meh. Likable primarily because the lead actress looks just like this hot waitress who worked at the Mecca Cafe when I was 25.

couple sailing across the pacific wind up adrift for a month and a half. Considering how much I usually like these kinds of survival stories, meh. Somehow this one didn't speak to me.

I spent the first half of this movie convinced that Lars von Trier had finally descended into sheer pointless brutality. And, granted, even after it drastically changes character into a completely different film by the end, and has spent a lot of time on digressions about the meaning of art, I'm still not sure "Human Centipede 2" would have been any different, if it had had the scantest of art-house pretensions and a couple of philosophical digressions. But, damn, LvT is still an incredibly talented director, and by the end, Matt Dillon's repulsive, unsympathetic performance starts to look like the role of his career. Leave it to LvT to once again, as he did with the totally unenjoyable masterpiece Antichrist, show that cinematic greatness and entertainment are not necessarily related even in passing. I just hope he'll stop trying to prove that morality isn't necessarily related either—I feel like the…

beautifully-shot move about women living in the wilderness as "wives" and "daughters" of a cult leader. Slow-moving. Didn't really follow it. Gorgeous cinematography, though, and spectacular natural locations. Can't imagine where this was shot. Alaska? (Turns out, Ireland.)

'Glee' with zombies. For real. Very nearly embarrassing enough to actually be entertaining.

Anyone who has ever worked a dreadfully dull, bottom-rung office Admin Assistant job for uncaring, disrespectful employers will already be familiar with this movie, and ask themselves why they relived it, and nothing more than that, by watching this. How they got that great actress who played Ruth on Ozark to sign on to this plotless tedium is beyond me.

Madeline Brewer (OITNB, Handmaid's Tale, Cam) seems to only pick somehow above-average, if not great, projects. This movie about a hiker stumbling on a couple of rednecks living in the wilds off the Appalachian trail was much more decent than I expected. Rather than being a run-of-the-mill thriller, it actually had a story to tell. Not a great story, but a good one, and more of one than a lot of movies nowadays.

Like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you'll probably like this film. Don't like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you won't. There's some religious or supernatural claptrap it's wrapped in, but it's not important. I wasn't at all suprised to discover this is a remake of a French horror movie, the surest sign of a terrible horror movie. The french culture seems to have an immaculate grasp of so many art forms, and they compensate for it with a complete, total inability to figure out how to write a good horror movie plot.

Teenagers getting picked off in the woods by zombie-type people infected with a disease... but, that said, surprisingly good, fairly original. Felt like an early-80s classic, and an ok one, not a rip-off by someone raised on those movies who loves them a little too much and thinks that's enough, as these sorts of movies often are. A pleasant surprise.

Empty, banal torture/capitivity porn. Male victim this time, english moors this time. Yawn.

I didn't know what drew Katie Asleton or Lake Bell to this very standard captivity/stalking-through-the-woods fare (directed by Aselton) but it's only that casting that makes it slightly watchable.

Here's a twist... A pretty crappy thriller that actually sucks until a pretty good twist ending. Young girl moves into an apartment complex in LA, where the neighbors turn out to be just a little bit possessive & controlling.

Overdubbed polish film with only its slightly odd, foreign tone and charming cast to set it apart from the usual psycho-picks-off-campers-in-the-woods flick.

Strange, seems like a BBC production. Someone described it as "The Goonies meets Silent Hill", which seems about right. Campy and melodramatic, kind of feels like the '70s Dr Who to me, in the ways that it strangely just somehow didn't grab me.

Surprisingly not bad for what it is. Nerdy guys are invited to pledge a frat, the hazing turns into captivity/torture porn. But, on the best end of that. I actually sort of enjoyed it, a real feat for this kind of movie.

What starts off like a cheezy tv movie slowly turns into a very decent hitchcockian thriller. An illegal immigrant maid hired by a family in the Hamptons suspects the son has drunkenly hit-and-run a pedestrian, and it all goes to shit.

I was in the mood for some light fare so I tried this Keanu Reeves thriller. Had I known it was an Eli Roth film I wouldn't have bothered, there's "light" and there's "tissue-paper thin". Typically shallow and pointless Eli Roth torture porn fare, this time without even gore, and even more fridge logic than usual. Basically, the Small Faces to "Funny Games"'s Rolling Stones. Two teen girls take Keanu Reeves hostage in his home, seduce then torture him, for no reason other than it's an Eli Roth movie and someone out there thinks that's entertaining enough that they got name actors to participate. I wish Eli Roth would find another line of work.

Ok, bonus points for inventing a new genre. Instead of the Rom-Com, this is a Rom-Hor (Rom-Zom?). Requiring tremendous suspension of disbelief and chock full of fridge logic and tropes made up for the sole purpose of driving the plot along, this horror-romance has a zombie regaining consciousness for no stated reason, and falling in love with a live human after absorbing memories of her by eating her boyfriend's brain. You know, it's utterly ridiculous, and I kinda enjoyed it, because it commits so hard to being what it is. Somehow they got John Malkovich for this, too, as the hard-nosed general who refuses to believe, until, in the climax, he comes to understand that a zombie can learn to love.

You can virtually hear someone watching "The Hunger Games" and thinking, "There's got to be a way I can come up with a franchise that is this same thing, except I get paid for it."

Couple falls asleep in a car and gets buried when a blizzard snows them in. Another example of the kind of stuck-in-a-hopelessly-remote-location survival film I like so well, although, probably my least favorite of those. Still one of them, though.

Irish film. Crew on a fishing boat battles an infection of seamonster-borne parasites. Not bad, these sorts of things can be done alright, especially if they're done far away from Hollywood.

English film. Girl hired to be caretaker for invalid at dark, scary haunted house runs around dark, scary house being scared of ghosts. Not bad for that.

[Posted on IMDB] In this terrifying true life story, two inventive filmmakers make a cursed horror movie which, although pretty decent itself, casts a foul spell that forces every lazy, terrible wannabe horror director who see it in the next 25 years to say "Hey, I could do that too" and copy it with their own inferior, deathly dull, derivative "found footage" horror attempt. Millions of bored viewer hours are wasted not being scared, Netflix is overrun with dreadfully dull "horror" films, and, in the end, the entire horror genre is nearly destroyed. Will the horror genre survive this dreadful curse? Nobody knows the end of the story. Stay tuned.

(not to be confused with the excellent 2007 horror anthology film of the same name) Boring-as-wallpaper hipsters track a hacker through the desert or something and wind up getting held prisoner and questioned interminably in Area 51. If the this film had been as interesting all the way through as it started to get in its third act, instead of two acts of turgid indie tedium first, and then kept going, I probably would have thought it was pretty good.

Amateurish film somehow turns into kinda decent low key thriller. Over-energetic hipster girl moves in with eccentric sound-recordist and possible pervert, and get involved in the case of a neighborhood girl gone missing. It was alright, in its way.