Archives: Movie Reviews

I wish I could like this movie. A zero-budget indie tries hard to be a paranoid UFO invasion/conspiracy thriller, and as the movie goes on and they give her some room to act, the lead actress proves to be better than you often see in these. But it just isn't what it wants to be, and can't escape the obvious influence of some very obvious sci-fi influences. It suffers from a typically amateurish zero-budget heavy-handedness with plodding writing and a lot of overly familiar tropes.

Also, at least the first part of the movie appears to be all studio-overdubbed dialogue, which is jarring.

A not terrible but mostly forgettable updating and downgrading of the original, to include smartphones and LCD TV (which somehow still have horizontal scan lines and white noise static—the TVs and cell phones both) and which is a downgrade primarily due to the idea that the original didn't benefit very strongly from the involvement of both Spielberg (who I find among the least consistent of the greats, but Poltergeist was one of his better moments) and heavy-hitter Tobe Hooper.

I can see what they were trying to do, and in some ways they succeeded—they came up with new and interesting visuals, and a number of new ideas for things to put the family through, and many of the visual effects are pretty good, something the original occasionally lapsed in. It even had some isolated moments and individual shots that were quite good: In this one, when the souls of…

Paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller. Family brings home a haunted artifact, in this case a door they found in the woods, and must call in a psychic to rescue their young son when it abducts him into an unspecified other realm.

Actually fairly well-acted for a zero-budget thriller, but too talky and contrived for what story there is to really work. A young husband and expectant father does drugs and passes out at a neighbors party, and wakes up to have his life fall into convoluted chaos, including lots of talking and talking and talking. Pacing, people. Come on.

Gorgeous young mother suffering from postpartum depression left alone to watch the baby for a few days while husband is on a business trip hallucinates that Every Bad Thing thing happens to the baby, which mostly somehow adds up to a nonevent. By the end you don't care what's real and what's not. Production values are ok and gorgeous lead actress gives it her best, but nothing can save this poorly written non-thriller. Skip it.

Horror/crime thriller. People are addicted to an opiate made from the blood of infected humans, which turns overdose victims into zombies, when a kid winds up deep in debt to his dealer. Despite the absurd premise—and the loads of violence—plays more like a down-to-earth crime thriller than you'd expect, which, while it's still not that good movie, isn't as bad as you might expect, for what it is. Can't really recommend it, per se, because, well, it's about people getting high off each others' blood, but, it's more watchable than you'd expect from that description.

Supernatural flick starts pretty interesting and then totally loses the thread. A man who feels responsible for the car crash that kills his wife discovers a triangular and apparently bottomless pit that the locals have been throwing their trash into for decades. He decides to explore, sending down, over the course of the first half of the movie, just a rope, then a block of ice, a dead fish, and a live pig, with increasingly bizarre results each time.

It's just interesting enough to command some attention. The prominent presence of local religious fanatics, played as typical over-the-top movie religious fanatics, is a bad sign, and none of the things that happen, while cool enough on their own, add up to much of a story, or even make much sense. There's a lot of fridge logic here.

But then, when it really goes wrong is when he goes…

Subpar teen scream. Two little kids disappear when their mom isn't looking, then bunch of teenagers go to get a wheelbarrow from a shed where a body is being kept in liquid nitrogren storage, and all have nightmares or something. I don't get it.

Well-made but difficult-to-follow story about a drifter who rolls through a small southwestern town, gets involved with a local woman and has some sort of intrigue involving people disappearing and lucid dreams becoming real. It felt like a good movie, and yet, I couldn't tell you the story if my life depended on it, even though I just watched it a second ago. The preview blurb said it had something to do with other dimensions, but I didn't notice anything like that.

This movie proves skilled direction and acting can save a movie from ludicrous writing... until they don't.

This movie starts with a family having moved to a rural home to avoid a pandemic. Slowly hints are dropped that it's worse than the pandemic we actually had: "when they turned off the internet" is mentioned in passing.

For the beginning, we just see slice-of-life scenes of family life holed up in this house, and excellent direction and believable acting both keep it engaging and slowly build a not-yet-explained unease—in fact, they keep it engaging and believable enough that when the ludicrous idea of the movie is finally revealed, the production has built up enough credibility to suspend disbelief enough to actually, bettern than might be imagined, pull off the reveal: the "pandemic" is an epidemic of insanity that spreads by using the internet.

Ok, so far, so good. If they had…

Totally amateur, exceptionally long, very-poorly-acted sci-fi story about a man in a hawaiian shirt, not at all believable as a researcher but more likely just whoever they could cast, who does mind control experiments on a group of friends, causing them to act in random ways as they sit around what must be one of the actors' real-life living rooms. Actually probably among the upper echelon of totally amateur, extremely long, very-poorly-acted movies, though, as it gets faintly interesting as they backtrack in the middle and re-tell the story from the experimenter's point of view. So, points for that, it's close to bottom-of-the-barrel but probably sitting on top of the sludge at the bottom of the barrel, not underneath it. But, MAN is the acting bad. Strictly local-theater type.

Odd swing-and-a-miss featuring a miscast Nic Cage as a dorky college professor who begins turning up in millions of people's dreams around the world, bringing him unwanted fame. Starts out plenty entertainingly—of course Nic Cage is always fun to watch even when he's not quite a fit for the role, and certainly a unique idea for a movie.

But about two thirds of the way through, the story just kind of powers down, and the movie turns into simply an excuse to make him a punching bag for no clear reason and with no clear resolution. It's as if the writers had a great idea, but no clue about how to turn it into a story with a rewarding ending. And an odd deus ex machina right near the ending makes it look like some sort of other writing team was called in to try and quickly fix things,…

Seems like a BBC production. "Talky" doesn't cover for this sci-fi "thriller" that is literally entirely talk. Two astronauts wander through a dark fog depicting the surface of a planet they've crashed on, talking to each other, and potential rescues on their radios. And that's it. I suppose there's some sort of plot underneath all the talk, but, boy, is this one dry. Eventually you see some lights through the fog that are supposed to be the aliens, waaaaaaaay towards the end, for a minute.

I bet there's people out there who like this sort of thing. Not me, though.