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By Mike Kupietz
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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.
Disappointing sci-fi aims for the bleachers and then bunts. Scientists find a way to bring a person back from the afterlife, spend the entire movie arguing about ethics because the process requires euthanizing terminally ill patients and prevents the newly dead from leaving the earthly plane, and then the movie ends in the middle of the story, without a resolution.
A new setting for a clichéd setup: a captivity/pursuit flick set in part in the long barges that travel the canals that criss-cross the English countryside. The villains are a family that seems to be comprised of 50/50 small-town English folk and cannibalistic creature-from-the-black-lagoon-type rubber-mask creatures that live under the water. Anyway, they kill and eat people.
Yawn. It's pretty well-made, actually, but that's about the only good thing I have to say about any of it.
I feel like Ti West somehow had something to do with this.
Unlikeable douchebags gaver at a remote cabin in Vermont—with, get this, no cell service!—and the affable-seeming caretaker turns out to be a psycho and begins picking them off.
Actually, for a movie with that setup, it's slightly better than you'd probably expect. The caretaker is a colorful Dennis Hopper sort and basically makes (what there is of) the movie. And there's a dog, who has been taken on the trip as a farewell before being put down, and basically is the "final girl" of the movie, which is a nice turn. And the way things unfold to murderous is, eh, not as shallow and unbelievable as I've seen, the escalation is somewhat more realistic than just "caretaker is crazy and wants to murder, because, movie" like most films like this do it.
But that's the best I can say for it. It might even almost be watchable if the vacationers…
Slightly overwrought single-parent-and-child-move-into-a-new-house-and-parent-must-confront-their-own-past-demons-to-save-child-from-malevolent-entity movie. You know the drill.
Tough to follow the plot of this one but five people arrive at some sort of institute in the Croatian countryside and are tormented in this highly mannered, extremely Europeans film that somehow feels equal parts Giallo and Hammer Horror.
I don't know whether I wasn't paying enough attention or it's tough to follow. I did like the mood of it but I'm not sure what was going on.
It's a movie about a possessed girl. You know what movies about possessed girls are like.
An impossible=to-understand movie in which Another Culkin plays an asshole—you can tell because everybody calls him "asshole"—goes back to his childhood home following the death of his father and Culkins around the house while his mother, played by Lin Shaye, Lin Shayes around. A twin brother killed as an infant may or may not have existed appears and disappears as a plot element, a predatory gay neighbor tries to predatorily gay him, everybody is an assholes to everybody else, which escalates to violence as mysterious tapes from the past appear, demons or some supernatural claptrap happens, and finally the entire endeavor faces the ultimate misfortune: an overly familiar, cliched plot twist that still somehow manages not to make sense.
Another Culkin sure does Culkin, though. Boy, if you want to make a movie about someone Culkining around the house, you couldn't ask for much better, if that's the right word.…
In one of a million movies named "Prey", a young man on a survival retreat on a deserted island funs afoul of mysterious georgeous women apparently living there nad some sort of supernatural beast. Kristine Froseth, if it matters.
Paint-by-numbers supernatural thriller about a group of friends who rent a secluded cabin and something seems to want them off the land. Weird people appear, voices, you know the drill.
Poor-to-middling "Twilight Zone"-esque take of four travelers trapped in Marfa, Texas. Not badly produced by kind of clumsy... odd editing choices, weird occasionally voiceovers out of nowhere, etc. Meh.
Captivity flick that, if that's not bad enough, goes on about twice as long as it should and tries to turn into an art flick, eventually descending into complete incomprehensibility. A slightly pudgy woman takes out her food issues on her skinny, vapid party-girl roommate. Seems like it wants to be some kind of statement on standards of beauty or the fashion industry but simply alluding to issues isn't a statement about them, no matter how many weird slow-motion shots of people stuffing their faces with cake you put in.
Slightly better-than-average captivity flick, somewhat well made, and with some character development and decent acting, almost like they were trying to make a real movie instead of just brutality as entertainment. But, still a captivity flick. Chef captures and tortures critic who gave him a bad review. Actually much better than that setup sounds, but still, a captivity flick.
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