The Perfect Babysitter (2025)
TV-movie-of-the-week-quality thriller about a psycho babysitter bent on tormenting a family.
The Perfect Babysitter (2025)
The Other
Subpar, but not awful, horror thriller. Mute adopted girl harbors a horrible secret that possesses her mother. It's her psychotic twin who she ingested in the womb. Don't worry, I didn't really ruin anything for you.
The Unbinding
A talky, overlong mocumentary about a "haunted object" research team that encounters a strange wooden effigy that seems to possess supernatural powers. I feel bad slagging it off, because it's not terrible, but it's a whole "horror" movie of nothing people talking about a scary thing, rather than showing scary things. At 90 minutes, it feels like about 3 hours long.
Transmission (2023)
A montage of late-night channel surfing slowly reveals a story involving aliens, a horror filmmaker's mysterious unfinished film, a haunted videotape, and a local outbreak of violence. Told entirely as clips of flipping though channels in a fairly convincing recreation of flipping through late night broadcast TV channels, but the execution doesn't really work in an engaging way. Felissa Rose is in this, if that tells you anything.
Shivers
A phallic/fecal-looking parasite that causes uncontrollable, violent sexual urges spreads throughout an exclusive apartment complex. How's that for an opener?
I just can't be objective about early David Cronenberg. I've always had a lot of affection for Cronenberg as a director, and although the low production values and camp story here play like early John Waters directing a gore film, or like George Romero making a movie about horny urbanites instead of zombies... I'm not going to say anything worse than that about it. And, you know, early John Waters has its points, too.
And, I think, to me, even though this isn't the best of Cronenberg's early films (cf. "The Brood", which unfathomably isn't on Tubi), you can still see occasional signs of talent. There's some disturbing imagery to be seen here, and that's what we come to horror movies for, right?
30 Days Of Night: Dark Days
This unnecessary but not-completely-dreadful sequel keeps a lot of the visual style of "30 Days Of Night"—a movie I'm pretty fond of—so it scores points by me for that. This moves the action first to a gritty, dark Los Angeles, and then onto a gritty, dark vampire-filled ship bound for another hapless small town in Alaska, as the vampires have spread nationwide and a small band of gorgeous, tough-as-nails humans fights a losing battle to kill as many of them as they can.
Whereas the original leaned horror, this is more of an action movie, although with heavy duty supernatural elements. This is basically a "horror movie" in the same way "Predator" is a "science fiction" movie. IE, it's not, it's just dressed up like one, although the costume is pretty good.
But, you know, it's fairly well directed, even if there's not a whole lot to the story…
Sting (2024)
Surprisingly fun horror about a young girl who takes a spider from space as a pet, which causes problems as it grows. Starts off with a "Goonies"-type "kid movie" vibe but actually turned out to be alright horror, slightly above average. Fun, at least. I liked it.
Time Was
Young woman decorating a house to flip it falls for her designer. LGBT romance movie turns out to be a supernatural Christmas movie.
The Pines Still Whisper
Turgid folk thriller. A paranoid, controlling woman and her daughter live in a remote cabin. Strangers show up with the same tattoo on their necks as the mother. Drama ensues.
Saw II
I thought the first Saw was interesting, not great but good. I lasted maybe 20 minutes of this. It's just violence as entertainment... like, essentially gladiator games, except, it's supposed to be cool because its twisted. Great. Never done it for me.
Masking Threshold
I'm sure this seemed like a cool idea at the time—the inner dialogue of a delusional scientist tormented by sounds only he can hear, as he slowly goes insane and finally, with 10 minutes left in this 95 minute picture, kills a few people and them himself (seems like there's a lot of that going on in indie horror movies).
It's not that badly made, but 95 minutes of someone's inner dialogue about science trivia and "deep" thoughts, with 10 minutes of actual at the end, is not a good feature film, and definitely not a horror movie. This could have been a 20 minute short.
The Twisted Death Of A Lonely Madman
Overwrought indie pic, filmed in black and white for extra artsiness, about an agoraphobic man who sits around his apartment obsessing over an actress. Of course, he eventually kills someone and then himself that way, or so I gathered from the closing narration, because I'd lost interest long before then.
Little Nicky
Adam Sandler—get this—talks in a stupid affected voice! Hilarious, right?
Actually, if not for him, and the fortunately mostly very short cameos of every single painfully unfunny person from about 15 years of SNL from Dana Carvey to Jon Lovitz to Kevin Nealon to Rob Schneider to even a namecheck for Chris Farley, this was cute enough, not as absolutely stupid as most things he's been involved with. And, I mean, it's got Harvey Keitel hamming it up as the devil, which is fun. Probably the best Adam Sandler movie I've seen, although that's an abysmally low bar. If not for the stupid voice, it actually would be almost watchable. (But if he couldn't do a stupid voice, I guess he'd have had to act.)
This came on as autoplay after a Will Ferrell movie, and right after this Tubi tried to autoplay a David Spade movie, and I drew…
Holmes & Watson
The still-inexplicably-famous Will Ferrell does his usual job of unfunnily hamming it up, in this case sucking the talent out of a pretty star-studded cast of extras in this period farce.
Spread (2024)
Reasonably agreeable redemptive comedy about a progressive woman who gets a job turning around a porn magazine. Lots of charismatic actors. I've spent worse 90 minute stretches in front of Tubi.
Oh, God
A very '70s movie that I remember from my childhood as a comedy—c'mon, it has George Burns as God, appearing to John Denver as a man picked to be his modern Moses—and yet, upon review, it has no actual jokes.
It does have Paul Sorvino cast, in a turn that seems unlikely nowadays, as a southern baptist preacher, so if you'd like to see him pay something other than a mafioso, it has that.
Rain Man
Other than Dustin Hoffman's tic-filled, fairly convincing performance as an autistic savant, there's really not as much here as I expected. The constant tics get old fast, and Tom Cruise's performance as his sleazy, materialistic brother gets old almost before it starts, and there isn't much narrative to it. Definitely more of a Tom Cruise movie than a Dustin Hoffman movie.
But I’m A Cheerleader
Cute coming-of-age LGBT comedy about a Christian girl, improbably played by a young Natasha Lyonne, being set to conversion therapy. Some stunt casting, with LGBT icons like Mink Stole and RuPaul cast as conservative parents and teacher.
10/31
Pretty cheezy horror anthology film that looks like it was made in the 80s, complete with tediously familiar eurodisco synth soundtrack. Witches, slashers, an obvious Elvira ripoff, etc. Kind of bottom-of-the-barrel. You're not missing anything.
Fear Itself (series)
Strangely boring horror anthology series. Well-made, and some of it started off seeming like it was going to be interesting, but, while it wasn't terrible, somehow it had a bit too much shrieking, a few too many guns, and some overly familiar storylines.
Night Visions (series)
Fairly watchable Canadian early 2000s Twilight Zone-type anthology. Lots of recognizable faces & reasonably respectable actors involved (David Paymer, Miguel Ferrera, Mare Winningham, a million more. That sort of caliber.) Quality is uneven but some of the stories are pretty watchable and they occasionally pull off a good ending.
Strangely, hosted in the Rod Serling-type narrator role by Henry Rollins. No effort is made to have him seem anything like Henry Rollins, suggesting what the Twilight Zone intros might have been like if Rod Serling seemed less like he was looking forward to a martini and more like he was thinking about beating the shit out of you.
The Deeper You Dig
Take a fairly boring tale of a mother of a missing girl, the man who accidentally killed her, and the girl's ghost all being mildly annoying to each other in a snowy rural woodland, and then make it worse by adding "artsy" blurred camera work, smash cuts between disconnected scenes and what appear to be actor improv sessions, and a dissonant synth soundtrack.
Men (2022)
English folk horror. Very well directed but ultimately gives up narrative in favor of phantasmagoria, for an ultimately unsatisfying watch.
I firmly enjoyed this movie for about 2/3 of its runtime. A woman recovering from her husband's suicide rents an English countryside house, and before long she's stalked by a strange naked man from the woods, and the other villagers—all men except for a lone female police officer and the only sympathetic villager, and all played by the same actor with a great deal of well-done makeup and digital distortion—because less sympathetic and first dismissive, then hostile. In the last third it abandons the mounting drama/thriller effort, which I was enjoying, in favor of folk horror, laden with admittedly very well-done special effects, but more just a spectable and not the narrative denouement I was hoping for. Ultimately what was mostly an atmospheric and tight if low-key thriller just gives…
Panic Button (2011)
High-concept, sub-par execution thriller is basically "Saw" on an airplane with a social media morality play spin. Four people are put on a private jet, ostensibly because they won a contest on social media, but really because they treated others horribly online online, and forced to play a "game" which consists of an unseen voice who seems to know every detail of their lives exposing their darkest secrets, then making them torture and kill each other under threat of their loved ones being killed as they watch by remote feed.
The production values were actually not terrible, but the story is just stupid and 100% unbelievable. I don't know how anybody thought this screenplay would make a good movie. "Saw" was much, much better.
The McPherson Tape (aka “Alien Abduction”)
Despite my hatred for "found footage" horror films, my interest was piqued by see that this was a "found footage" film from 1989—predating ostensible genre inventor "The Blair Witch Project" by several years. It's sort of like discovering a heavy metal band from 1963.
Interestingly, this film about a family birthday party interrupted by the appearance of aliens shows that the "found footage" genre emerged fully failed from the beginning.
This earliest known example contains everything that sucks about the genre: little plot, a complete disregard for pacing in favor of dwelling for too long on irrelevant conversation between uninteresting characters (do we, as viewers, really need to spend 5 minutes watching the family say their goodbyes to each other after dinner?), difficult-to-watch low-quality camerawork with zero cinematography, muddy sound, and an all-around lack of any qualities that might make it worth spending the time to watch.
…
Banshee Chapter
I have no idea how they got Katia Winter and Ted Levine (who, by the way, once personally scared the shit out of me in a real life encounter) for this movie that is visually somewhat competent, at best, but feels in every other way like an absolutely amateur mess.
This story manages in the first half hour to mention MK-Ultra, psychedelics, numbers stations, the Black Rock Desert, H.P. Lovecraft, and a character who couldn't have been more closely based on Hunter S Thompson if he'd had his ashes shot out of a cannon after he blows his brains out near the end. And, nothing original at all, other than throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the first 30 minutes of one movie. It's just a hodgepodge of trite conspiracy theory shit tied together with jump scares, as the film finds reason after reason for the lights to go…
Janus (2024)
Bottom-of-the-barrel zero-budget indie sci-fi about a mad scientist who kidnaps people to clone them for some reason. Notable only for having a twist ending I saw coming about 30 minutes into the movie. (The good guy escapes, and it turns out he was cloned and the clone sets off after him.)
Match (2025)
A pretty pleasant surprise—a thoroughly derivative captivity/pursuit movie of the "trapped in an insane psycho's house" variety, about a young woman who is tricked into meeting someone via a dating app who is not who the profile says, but which slowly picks up about a third of the way through and then, surprisingly, just gets better and better.
This is entirely derivative in terms of its themes, indebted deeply to movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but slowly they began to introduce elements that had me thinking, "Well, this is actually alright for what it is, I bet younger horror fans will think it's great... although I'm just not sure it's necessary when we have The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And then, slowly, they just kind added enough novel elements, and truthfully the whole thing is well-made enough all the way through, that I actually wound up enjoying it quite…
Alien Legacy: Terror on Luxor Ridge
I'm 40 minutes into this completely amateur pile of shit and I have no idea what it's about. It appears to be a bunch of scenes of various English people hamming up the daily lives of English people. And, geez, it's 2:07 long. There's another 90 minutes of this crap! Turned it off.
And here I thought America had a lock on movies this bad.
All The Devil’s Aliens (“Devils in the Darkness”)
Let me say first that virtually any reasonable person will hate this movie. I can't decide if I like it myself. For a good part of it, I sure didn't.
This is sort of like "outsider art" of sci-fi horror. Absolutely terrible by most conventional standards: paced like a slog through a swamp, fairly poorly acting, and a difficult-to-make sense of story.
The story, for what it's worth, is a medical student gets a night job as a caregiver for a cantankerous, agoraphobic old man, who is never seen, but rather only heard perpetually cursing over a baby monitor from his room, as the primary nurse does all the actual attending to him. Strange shadows occasionally dart about and startle him, without explanation. And that's the first half of the movie. And it's, strange, there was actually something about it I kind of liked somehow, but I couldn't…