A young "influencer" couple buys remote land in the south to live off the land. Pretty soon they find bullets buried where they planted their garden, cameras pick up mysterious black-clad figures who prowl around the house and the property, shine floodlights at them, burn photos of them, and chase them into the woods. And that's it. I found myself thinking something I've never thought before: "Why don't they just get a gun?" Trail cameras reveal the figures move with supernatural speed. What are they? Who are they? I guess it doesn't matter, they're just "scary". At any rate, nothing is ever explained, it all just sort of happens and that's it.

The one slight good thing I can say about this film is that it incorporates a followup from another "influencer" trying to find what happened to them, and they intersperse the "stories" (such as they are) of the original couple and the "investigator" in such a way that by the time either starts to get too tedious, they cut to the other, a rare smart move for one of these kinds of movies. Ultimately, through trail cameras, we see the "investigator" chased into a pool in the woods by the figures, who then follow them into the pool, and then, as with the original couple, we never see or are told what happened.

This had to be made originally as a TV pilot. Lance Hendrikson (who does not die in this one, because nobody does) leads a cast of gorgeous actors as they stand around in ultracool sci-fi cyberpunk secret headquarters and do nothing but talk and talk and talk and talk.

There reason this isn't 100% complete garbage, though, is that the actress is so full of charisma and so much fun to watch that she basically carries the movie. The filmmakers are bumbling enough to be amiable, too, but Bree Williamson as the actress really chews the scenery as entertainingly as possible all the way through it.

For that, I'm going to stick this under films that have a certain "je nais se quois"... it's easily the worst movie I ever said that about, but, because of the actress's incredibly likeably performance, it qualifies.

Adam is alone in the Garden Of Eden, so, with unclear theological grounding, he fashions Eve out of sand, they frolic a while to a soundtrack that sounds like The Carpenters, before a snake tempts them to eat the apple that gets them evicted, and from there, the movie spins off into a bizarrely low-fi, shamelessly episodic series of encounters with dinosaurs, cavemen, and various poorly-edited stock footage and stop-motion animated perils. They literally wander on foot, judging by the backgrounds and stock footage used, from southern California to the Grand Canyon to the Amazon to the Arctic, trying to find "the sea", because, "life began in the sea, and we need to start over". (No, Adam, that's evolution. You were fashioned from the dust of the earth, not the sea, remember?)

This is the kind of movie that's so bad you have to wonder who thought it was a good idea to make it. Maybe they had a groovy analog synth soundtrack laying around and needed to make a movie to use it?

And, though I usually don't, in this case, I liked it for that.

Gorgeous couple buys a beautiful house under very sketchy terms at auction. Typical haunted-house hijinx ensue, except with lower-budget effects. Amateur hour. Freevee seems to have a lot of these.

And you know what? It's all a little too poorly thought out to be anything like a good movie, but I kind of liked it, vaguely. It was obviously the product of a consistent, if bad, vision. It was relentlessly over-the-top in its reliance on special effects and overacting, plus, at least the plot is original enough not to be overly familiar. I kind of appreciated it on that level, even though it's ridiculous and just bad.

17-year-old "prepper" survives a plague due to his paranoia, then tries to survive in a cinematically familiar landscape of tough-as-nails men seeking to take the womenfolk and shooting guns at each other. Eh, could've been worse, they could've cast a familiar face as the kid.

An odd tale of a twisted suburban family that seems normal enough to begin with, except for mom's unfortunate habit of punishing family members' misbehavior by putting their goldfish in the blender or hacking their fingers off unexpectedly with a cleaver and feeding them to them. Also, senile old grandma eats flies and crawls into bed while family members are having sex. Before long, every distasteful thing under the sun is drawn into the story—starting with incest and ending with a meal that turns into the most ridiculous bloodbath ever filmed, culminating, I kid you not, in a dwarf getting shot in the dick, replete with pulsing corn-syrup blood spurts from his pants.

I am shocked John Waters was not involved in this. Seriously.

Refreshingly, stars middle-aged actors, not just twenty-somethings, including the protagonist, a veteran of countless exploitation horror flicks, such as, among many others, "The Crazies", "Cat People", and "Knott's Landing". Including in the gratuitous sex scenes. Not often you see a 77-year-old actress in bondage gear doing a sex scene.

Hah! I liked this. Thoroughly amateurish time thriller about a hipster playing a very improbably cryptographer who decodes a message for the NSA and begins to see giant Men In Black. Basically bad, strictly amateur hour, but somehow kind of fun, for being that. They really gave it the old college try.

Dude. It's Alien versus Predator. You know what it's going to be. It's cool, on the higher end of the expected, predictable range of possibilities. Note: Lance Hendriksen is not the last to die in this, proving that it is not a horror movie.

Fun little flick. Sci-fi comedy about a couple of 20-something friends who stumble into some intrigue involving a crashed ufo and a missing alien egg. Reminiscent of quirky indie sci-fi comedies like Buckaroo Bonzai, Repo Man, Bill & Ted, that sort of thing, although it doesn't really rise to anywhere near that level—it's still too much of a teen film for that—but nonetheless, a likable cast and fairly consistently successful comic elements make it a fun view. Definitely doesn't suck. Could maybe be a minor cult favorite, I bet, to people who haven't seen this sort of thing before.

Funny one. Teenager in Salem, MA finds a cursed knife and a demon leaps from friend to friend killing people, for some reason or other having to do with a curse from colonial times. This isn't even a teen scream, more like a pre-teen scream. It's like I imagine the "Goosebumps" movies are like (there are "Goosebumps" movies, right? I think so.) It's absolutely made for adolescents. But: it's actually kind of scary. It's just directed really well. So: definitely a movie for junior high students. But weirdly scary for one. Kind of reminds me of some of those early 70s tv horror movies like "Bad Ronald" or "Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark", which weren't necessarily the best movies, or even the best horror movies, but they managed to ramp up the disturbing imagery to where they were kind of strangely memorable. This isn't quite that good even, but it's in that direction. (Not to be confused with the execrable "Funny Games".)

Can you watch J. K. Simmons for 90 minutes? I can. That's all it took for me to like this piffle of a buddy comedy about Simmons and his daughter's slacker ex-boyfriend searching LA for her when she doesn't answer her phone.

as "survivors trying to escape the Infected roaming the countryside" movies go, this one isn't bad. Brother and sister in the woods in England come across a crusty old farmer who lets them stay at his place when she is injured by one of the traps he set around the woods.

Absolutely horrifying true story, which I probably wouldn't have watched if I had known that, as at this point I don't think the true crime trend should be encouraged any more, it's getting exploitative. In the mid-60s, a single mother in Indiana took in a neighbor's daughters for a few months, then with the help of her kids and their friends imprisoned and tortured the older one to death. Considered one of the worst crimes in Indiana history. Most of the people involved either wound up in jail for a long time or came to a bad end at very young ages, it's a dreadful story all around, and although I suppose technically it's a good movie, done more as a biopic than as exploitation and starring Catherine Keener and E. Page, I can't honestly recommend it as entertainment.

Scream Queen Killer: A "scream queen" actress auditioning for a role by doing about 15 minutes of 30 secone takes on various situations, because, I guess, if you only saw her "act like there's an invisible presence in the room for 30 seconds...act like you're turning into a vampire for 30 seconds" for 12 or 13 minutes, the point wouldn't have been made. Fellas, there's editing now. You should use it.

Plucky small-town mayor sees her town through a shower of meteor strikes while they await The Big One. You know what? I kind of liked it. It was cheesy and sentimental, but disaster movies are gonna do that. The acting was good, it stayed realistic and didn't go all hollywood and over-the-top, and overall, I haven't seen a disaster movie in a long time, and this fit the bill nicely. I should have hated it, but I didn't at all, not even a little.

It doesn't spend a lot of time on the creature, it's more character-focused and revolves less around scares or violence than around drama and the effects of the victims' disappearances on him, his friends, and the small community. It's far from great, but it's definitely much better than I expected, and stands up pretty well as a movie.

A truly strange sub-TV-movie with the most intricate plot I've seen. People's faces appear in a polaroid before they die. Some cops investigate, but they may be involved, I don't know, the whole thing has a lot of characters and a lot going on and a lot of twists and turns and it's all really confusing the director was not in any way capable of pulling it off. And the acting is terrible actors giving it an admirable amount of gung-ho.

Not a bad little sci-fi movie. Not great, but definitely not bad. Very talky and geeky but I kind of like that. A man invents an AI 11 year old girl to lure predators online, and then it follows him and the development of the AI over the course of his life, along the way with a lot of very familiar-seeming exposition inquiring into the nature of consciousness and where the line between simulated life and actual life is. Not the most original story, but pretty well told in that talky way that I like my sci-fi. Kind of like a little younger cousin to my big fave "Ex Machina". Bonus: The inventor is played as an old man by Lance Hendriksen, who is the last character to die in the movie, thus finally proving that, while Lance Hendriksen is always the last to die in horror movies, him being the last to die in a movie does not necessarily make it a horror movie.

An old-school Ray Bradbury fan like myself couldn't miss, just from the title and a one-sentence summary, that this is an adaptation of a classic Bradbury short story. This being Hollywood, almost the first 15 minutes are true to the original story. The rest is a vastly different, make-up-the-rules-as-they-go-along Hollywood-blockbuster-y attempt to capture some of those lucrative Jurassic Park moviegoing dollars, by finding an excuse to put overgrowth and dinosaurs in in Manhattan chasing scientists around. I wonder... maybe this was a good movie, but then someone accidentally went into the distant past and... changed something... and we got this instead. Yet another lesson not to mess with the timestream.

A Bradley Cooper film. Those too young to remember "Love Story" might not be aware of the hallowed tradition of "blockbuster" contrived tearjerker love story crapola, but Cooper seems to specialize in them. This should be put in a double feature with "Silver Linings Playbook", and then both of them tied together and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Lady Gaga sings very well though. I actually am kind of a fan of Gaga, except for her awful music. She seems to have enormous talent and artistic integrity in most everything she does, except as a songwriter. I still would like to know how that powerful voice comes out of a 5'1"person.

A first person shooter that falls into the common 1PS trap of way too much exposition before anything interesting happens, and stretches it out so that takes up 4/5 of the movie, as a film student goes out to interview a reclusive old man at his remote house, with long over-the-shoulder shots of the tediously uninteresting interview scenes in which nothing happens and the student's words are barely audible, and then, spends the last 1/5 just plain not making any sense at all.

a stellar cast (Martin Sheen, Robert Patrick) talking in regrettable fake southern accents nearly sank this off-kilter magical realist southern family drama for me. It was ok, though. Family that fought on camels in the Civil War gets together for grandpa's funeral.

What can I say about Atlanta that hasn't been said? This show started good and only got better. An incredibly well-acted, often poetic, well-written depiction of life of an up-and-coming rapper and his crew. Lots of very realistic, three-dimensional character study, peppered with frequent surrealism and deadpan comedy, unusual takes on race issues not often seen in mainstream media, an absolute refusal to be bound by TV or genre conventions, and occasional usually-successful experimental episodes that depart partially or entirely from the main characters and plot of the series. In my mind, one of the consistently best TV series ever made. When a new season comes out, I actually save this one until I'm ready to sit and take it in.

Antonio Banderas stars as an insurance investigator for a robotics company in a vaguely watchable post-"Blade Runner", post-"I, Robot"movie about domestic robots coming to life, or something. I didn't pay that much attention, but the cinematography was good and the robots were cool.

I consider this one a classic, full stop.

I've had friends say they found it disappointing. And I can understand that, I suppose, considering how some viewers may have grown used to being spoonfed by modern horror. This film has actual plot and character development that you have to sit through. A lot of this film's runtime is just the psychological dynamics of a deteriorating mother/son relationship (and possibly also the deteriorating mental health of one or both) with the scenes of traditional scares only coming as brief emotional punctuation marks.

Consider, on the other hand, that this also has a 98% critics' approval rating on "Rotten Tomatoes". And William Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist", after seeing it, updated his Twitter profile to read, "Psycho, Alien, Diabolique, and now THE BABADOOK" and called it "the scariest movie I've ever seen." A number of critics called it not just the best horror film of its year or decade, but one of the best films of any genre.

So, it's not for everyone. But it's very much for a lot of people. I'm one of them.

The capsule description for this "psycho yokels" movie starts, "A group of friends embark on a camping trip for a ten-year high school reunion." That's all you need to know. Whatever you're imagining comes next is as imaginative as what actually does.

middling supernatural captivity flick. Father and children go to visit a secluded cabin where unexplained, increasingly surreal and scary things happen, almost reminiscent of of a backwoods, thankfully much less over-the-top and insulting-to-the-intelligence version of the ludicrous "408". Actually directed well enough that individual scenes are creepy. I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it, but if you need occasionally distracting horror media wallpaper for an hour and a half, eh, it works. Don't try to follow the story, though.

This was Zach Galifianakis's moment, and nobody knows about it. And I say that pretty much already generally liking everything else he's done.

In this cinematic anti-masterpiece, a corporate headquarters goes on lockdown, and it turns out all the employees have remotely-triggered explosives implanted in their heads, when a voice comes over the loudspeaker and gives them challenges that require them to kill each other or be killed themselves, apparently because, movie. An exceptionally violent, bloody, pointless movie, just violence as entertainment, but, for one of those, actually kind of good cheezy fun. John C. McGinley plays a slightly different character than he usually does, which is fun.

Pamela Adlon out-"Louie"s Louie in this slice-of-life series about three generations of foul-mouthed women trying to get by. A charming, realistic, funny, undiscovered gem. Deserved its five-season run and never got old.

Strange movie. Typical D-grade awful, amateurish horror flick in which a gorgeous actress becomes possessed by the spirit of herself talking with a bad southern accent. But: has moments where the cinematography is really good, which is so completely out of place. There's a couple of isolated moments where there's no dialog or human acting, just other things happening, and I'm like, "Whaaaaa? This movie just got really good for a second." And then, 20 seconds later, back to pure garbage. Funny.

woman gets bitten by a strange bug on vacation, holes up in her apartment and slowly devolves into a monster. Now, picture the movie you're imagining from that description, and then, make it cornier and less believable.

Poor-to-middling horror picture about a guy who picks up a case of never-quite-explained demonic, er, something from a one-night-stand that causes his body to decay and eventually leads hungry demons to him. Saved from complete and utter forgettability by, strangely, a kind of intense performance from Frankie Muniz in the lead, playing well upon the ordinary strangeness that is simply Frankie Muniz as an adult.

sub-mediocre supernatural thriller about a guy whose life is ruined by a curse he picked up by sleeping with a woman he met through a 1-900 chatline, improbably redeemed only by an increasingly unhinged and actually kind of intense performance from Frankie Munoz of all people.

This is not a very good movie. A young girl, whose twin sister drowned while they were playing as a child and she hallucinated Udo Kier beckoning her towards a strange portal while her parents wailed, comes back as a young woman to party with her friends and visit the house. Halfway through, she switches to a fantasy world where she learns her sister may still be trapped, and encounters phantasmagorical visions of people she knows as she wanders a desert and tries to free her.

It's visually well-made, reminiscent of if Guillermo Del Toro tried to retell "Alice In Wonderland" as the sort of disturbingly off-kilter film Udo Kier might star in. It uses a very classic, '40s or '50s style orchestral score, and once it gets going—which takes a long time—there's a lot of really beautiful costumes, masked characters, etc. In fact, on that level, I would say it worked well enough that I actually enjoyed it.

The problem is, it takes half the film before the fantasy sequence begins. And once it does, though it's nice to look at, it kind of retreads familiar ground—it desperately wants to be, say, "Mirrormask", but just isn't quite there in terms of story telling.

Unfortunately it takes more than good costume design and a moderately successful attempt to evoke classic studio-age movie production flourishes to make a great movie. I desperately want to label this an interesting enough failure to watch, but unfortunately, it's not quite. Still, it's now too terrible and it is cinematically beautiful in places, so maybe worth a watch if there's really nothing else but bottom-tier movies on.

I'm rating this a little highly by putting it under "je nais se quois", it's not necessarily anything special, but... it's watchable for sure. It's not crap. If there's a lot of crap to choose from to watch, and there's this, definitely go with this.

What a weird movie. An English woman is trapped in her apartment by a demon from some sort of archaeological dig, menaced by floating knives and an eye peering in her vents. It's a really bad movie, uninteresting story and characters, ludicrous plot and unbelievable "scares", but, it's shot really well, and individual scenes, though ridiculous, are somehow really well done, and some of them are individually creepy.

Young park ranger gets lost in the woods, finds a body, has to sit tight until morning waiting for rescue. For the first 20 minutes of this movie, I assumed it was a 1980s "USA Up All Nite"-type d-grade picture. It wasn't until she pulled out an iPhone and took selfies that I realized it was new.

The acting is crap, directing is crap, everything about it is amateurish and crap. But then, she spends the night out in the woods, and I have to say, it's exactly the kind of movie I like, but could never recommend to anyone else.

Nowhere near as poetic as, say, Open Water, another bomb that I love, but I have to say, it's effectively creepy just for the setup, as she slowly creeps herself out wandering around the woods at night all by herself. Even the handful of predictable scares didn't ruin it for me. It kind of combined my love for crap "USA Up All Nite" pics with my love for solitary survival pics, so, works for me.

I imagine I'll watch it again, although I can't speak for anybody else on that one.

pretty bad, stiffly-acted, amateurish southern gothic. widow and brother of dead man recovering from the death, when her doppleganger haunts local bars and picks up meen.

Wait, ok. A little virtue-signalling never hurt anyone, so I'll point out: From everything I've read and seen, director Lars von Trier seems to me like kind of a disturbed or unbalanced individual, very likely a misogynist, misanthrope, almost definitely a narcissist, and probably personally an all-around malignant asshole. And also, I think, easily the most talented filmmaker of the last few decades. Not since Herzog or Tarkovsky have I seen someone who just struck me as so adept in the language of filmmaking, such a natural talent.

Breaking The Waves is a straight drama. Set on a remote Scottish island, where an American there working on an oil right has fallen in love with a local, who is a member of the island's ultra-religious church. They marry, when he is injured in an explosion on the rig, and their relationship takes some vintage LvT perverse turns on his way back to health.

The movie is as perverse and disturbing in some ways, and in the same ways, as many of LvT's movies have been accurately criticized for. Several leading actresses, including Helena Bonham Carter who was apparently fine playing the lead in "Fight Club", turned down the female lead because they were uncomfortable with the character's sexual behavior. The actress who eventually got the role, Emily Watson, who went on to become a highly respected actress, was expelled from her college when the film came out for participating in what they considered depravity.

I've tried a few times to tell friends about the details this movie, but it's hard to do justice to it, and relating the plot alone, without seeing it unfold yourself under LvT's control, doesn't capture it.

It is a sick, beautiful, touching, beautiful, disturbing, beautiful movie. It has a million tiny moments of directorial brilliance. It has an ending that still gives me chills down my spine when I think of it.

It's worth pointing out that LvT's magnum opus, according to some people (including me), is "Antichrist", a truly horrible movie that completely divorces the idea of great filmmaking from any sort of entertainment value. I can honestly say it's a great film, certainly far and away the best movie I would never, ever suggest anybody watch. And it makes a certain amount of sense he eventually got to that from this.

He also made "The House That Jack Built", which seemed like a deliberate attempt to quickly drive his critics out of the movie theater in disgust, before then rewarding everyone sick, foolish, or optimistic enough to stay. Again: LvT seems like kind of an asshole.

But despite some very strong and occasionally unpleasant moments, there's more than enough beauty here to make "Breaking The Waves" an exceptionally great movie.

For what it's worth, since it may sound like it's difficult to praise unambiguously, it did win the Grand Prize at Cannes, "Best Actress" nominations for Emily Watson from BAFTA and the Oscars, and took Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematographer from the National Society of Film Critics that year, as well as Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematographer from the NY Film Critics Circle. It's a really well-made movie.

Ok, this is TV-movie quality, but it's 1970s TV-movie quality, back when they occasionally made TV movies that could stick with you, and while nothing spectacular, it's also nothing I've quite seen before, outside of those '70s "nature has it in for man" sci-fi/horror flicks (Bug, Food Of The Gods, etc.)

To say more would spoil it. I thought it was fun. It's not a cheezy monster movie, but somehow it might do if you're in a cheesy monster movie mood.

Apparently it scored a 15% on rotten tomatoes, which, ok, I mean, yeah, I get it, it's not by any means scary, and not even really very good by most movie standards. But come on, where's people's sense of fun?

I sincerely hope time loop movies don't become a sub-genre. The idea is interesting enough to support maybe 2 or 3 movies, of which 1 or maybe 2 are actually good. And those 1 or maybe 2 have already been made (they're "Triangle" and maybe "Primer", -not even sure on the latter, because it's so confusing nobody has ever figured out if it's actually a good movie or not.)

This one is a better-told story than "Lake Artifact", for sure, but that's a pretty low bar to clear, and the fact that the more movies on this theme get made the sloppier and less original they seem to be getting makes me worry it's going to be done to death á la "found footage". Extra poor marks in this for making the characters-there's only two characters in this movie-the sort of bickering, instantly unlikeable couple that some filmmakers, who I assume are themselves in long-term relationships that are less than perfect, seem to think are fascinating to watch carp endlessly at each other, when really they're just tedious and annoying. I wouldn't want to be stuck in a time loop with these people, either, I was tired of them after about 5 minutes. And especially low marks for transparently using the time loop and its variations as a heavy-handed metaphor for the facets of a codependent relationship. Great, director, I'm glad you worked out your relationship issues with 90 minutes of my time. Plus some ideas where just taken directly from"Triangle"(Oh, wait, sorry, here it's earbuds. In "Triangle" it was a necklace, that's a *totally* different idea.)

There's a couple of cool scenes and neat ideas here and there, sure, but nothing that wasn't explored much better in, once again, "Triangle", and that film had great plotting, whereas here, a lot of the characters' behavior seems to stem less from any kind of understandable motivation or logic than from the writer saying, "Wouldn't it be cool if they did this?" Like, is there some rule about being in a time loop that says you have to start killing your other selves? Why? Towards the end, a reason does eventually emerge-and to be honest it's a pretty good one, it was the only thing I liked about this movie-but it still doesn't explain at all why they started killing their alternate-timeline selves almost immediately.

Strangely, actually, the end of the movie is actually pretty good... in an unusual turn of events, the end kind of redeems an otherwise totally unenjoyable and derivative movie. It's too bad they waited that long, though. The first 2/3 of it is so tedious and predictable that long before it ever got to the belatedly enjoyable denouement, I had already just become annoyed and impatient for it to be over.

I actually did like the end enough that I thought for a minute I might eventually watch this movie again-they really pulled off a hail mary pass with the third act-but the truth is, two totally unrelatable, unlikable people bickering at each other just isn't interesting to me, even when you use a time-travel metaphor to make the point "relationships are complicated". The admittedly cool payoff just isn't worth sitting through an hour and fifteen minutes of that again.

I checked out the original short, "The Pond". It tells essentially the same story, including pretty much anything and everything that's cool about "Brightwood", but minus the tedious bickering and relationship exploration, in under 17 minutes. That tells you how much of this movie is obsessed with just relationship exploration navel-gazing. And even "The Pond" still, itself, didn't manage to go 16 minutes without ripping off ideas from "Triangle" wholesale.

THIS IS IT! You found it-the one, the only BUG, the single greatest cinematic achievement not just in the admittedly crowded field of mid-20th-century apocalyptic giant insect scifi horror film, nor even just in the scifi or horror film genres, but in human motion picture history writ large, itself. The unrelenting cinematic greatness that this movie doles out in heaping helpings upon your uncomprehending cerebellum-line after line, minute after minute, scene after scene, shrieking burning head explosion after shrieking burning head explosion, without pause, from the opening preacher's sermon to the closing descent into the stygian bowels of the earth itself-simply cannot be adequately conveyed within the constraints of this forum. It must be experienced firsthand.

The mere fact that this is one of the very few opportunities in American cinema to see a woman's head get set on fire in the Brady Bunch kitchen would likely be among the chief draws of any more ordinary film it might appear in. But this is no ordinary film, and even something that would obviously be the highlight of most movie-goers' entire seasons is here only the very most trivial, the most trifling beginning to the veritable cavalcade of entertainments bestowed upon the lucky viewer of this inestimable apotheosis of thrilling visual storytelling.

To say any more would both unfairly rob the viewer of the opportunity to fully experience the unfolding of this stunning film firsthand, and, necessarily fall short in the effort, because words simply can not suffice.

Bug. There is no substitute, no other film experience that can compare. On the rarified mountaintop of cinematic achievement, Bug stands alone.

If you disagree with a single word of this review, you should know it was written by my 7-year-old self. And my 7-year-old self knows a BUTTLOAD about movies. You are not likely to convince him he's wrong.

As of this writing, "Bug" is, happily, currently streaming on Netflix, and the world feels just that much more right.

Seems a little like a TV movie, but kind of a good one. Irresponsible stepdad accidentally leaves daughter and autistic son locked in the house with a savage tiger during a hurricane. Panicky running, hiding, and lots of growling ensue. No, really, I kinda liked it. Don't expect much.

A bunch of women having a bachelorette party in a remote cabin when the fiancee and his friends, who appear to basically be Lynyrd Skynyrd, show up. One of the girls—the slutty one, of course, who bounds to first answer the unexpected knock at the cabin door by saying, "the sexy one never gets killed first"—agrees to take off hunting with them for a few hours in a move so stupid you want to shout at the screen, and once they've got her alone, they turn out not to be such nice guys. And in an admittedly neat twist, it turns on NOT to be a captivity pic with deranged country bumpkins menacing the women, but makes a nice pivot in a different direction. Think "30 Days Of Night", set in the south, and with Lynyrd Skynyrd instead of feral, animalistic vampires.

And I don't mind giving that spoiler, because, you shouldn't watch this movie. It was directed by Rob Zombie's brother, who appears to have also inherited the same gene for creating occasional horror greatness minus an ability to consistently tie it together into a great filem. And in this case, it could have definitely qualified as something a little above the ordinary, maybe almost been a minor classic (in the manner of his brother's "The Devil's Rejects")—but instead, and this is a shame, it falls straight into the "unwatchable trash" category, for 2 reasons.

First, and this is the reason you shouldn't even watch it: the film is virtually unwatchable because, at least on Tubi, the audio is beyond muffled. Lynyrd Skynyrd mumble, drawl, and mutter through it, the heroines growl, whisper and shriek, and you can't understand a damn word of any of it.

It's like watching a movie with a bad case of plugged ears. It sounds like they just didn't know you're supposed to mic the actors. I cranked the TV volume all the way up and couldn't make out a word of it, even as the commercial breaks (this was on Tubi) came through loud and clear. This is the first time I've ever needed to turn on the subtitles for an English-language film, and reading the dialogue just makes it hard for me to enjoy a movie.

And the dialogue was so muddy, even some of the sutitles just said, "[garbled speech]".

Second, it takes almost 40 minutes before the story really starts. It's much too long. It shouldn't take 40 minutes for the first big story beat. The first half was MUCH to slow.

After that it would have been alright, if it had been possible to understand a word of it.

Supposedly a first-person shooter about the spread of a new pandemic that turns people into zombies (I know, where do they come up with such original ideas?) but I think it might actually just be a 90 minute recording of a video game.

You know, weirdly, I liked this strictly B-movie. It was sort of a bad movie that's saved by good direction and kind of a weirdly original approach. Brother and sister get trapped in a farm town taken over by rogue artists who do taxidermy on people. I, you know, kind of enjoyed it, which surprised me. Definitely not one I'd go out of my way to see, but kind of fun for a 2nd rate "teen scream" flick.

What a weird movie. By about halfway through, I just was waiting for it to be over so I could write the review "Insufferable YouTube girl buys a cabin to livestream her life from, and some bullshit happens." But then in the third act, it suddenly flip-flops and gets good, suddenly it has real plotting and twists and turns into a real horror movie. It's like the best save I've ever seen. The awful first two acts are bad enough that it's still unwatchable, but, given that I sat through that, I'm glad it kind of redeemed itself a little bit.

Also, I believe, it has the most monsters in it of any movie: in one of many examples of aforementioned geekery, Screen Rant has listed 81 of them. Not to be outgeeked, the Cabin In The Woods Wiki lists over 90 of them (of which, to be fair, 5 are only seen in outtake footage or referred to in production materials) plus a few dozen more mentioned in the novelization and other official related media.

Not one of my favorite favorite films, but I definitely enjoy it a lot, have rewatched it multiple times without it losing any of its charm, and expect to continue doing so. The very definition of an honorable mention.

Teenage bullies drive a woman to suicide, so her husband forces them to take a strange phone call which is her exacting her revenge from the other side. a c-grade horror movie that somehow got Tobin Bell and Lin Shaye to star in it, making it a strange hodgepodge of occasionally creepy and intense, because, Tobin Bell and Lin Shaye, but, mostly boring c-grade horror movie crap.

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What starts as a dreadfully slow, very British take on a home invasion/captivity flick a la "Funny Games"—something I'm immediately put off by—turns out, very slowly, to be something a little more... but then, exactly what, is never revealed, which is frustrating.

In 1972, a journalist couple who has been poking around a mysterious military operation our on the moors receives a visit from a very oddly-mannered couple, "Mr. and Mrs. Blair", who want to ask them a few questions, and proceed to brutalize and take them captive.

Honestly, pretty bad movie, and the fact that nothing is explained or resolved makes it doubly frustrting.

But at the same time, the acting is, er, strange enough to be a little engaging. The oddball performances of Mr. & Mrs Blair, as they slowly get stranger and stranger, is somehow a little interesting, especially the actress who plays Mrs. Blair, who starts off seeming not quite human, and gets more animalistic from there. Mrs. Blair asks, "Is this a photo of your daughter?" to which the father replies, "Yes, do you like it?" She glares at him for a moment before shouting sternly, "I. DO. NOT. DECIDE!" Good fun.

I don't know. I certainly can't recommend it as a good movie. And the complete lack of an explanation is just annoying. But it was, er, oddly interesting enough that after it ended I went back and re-watched the parts of the beginning I hadn't initially paid a lot of attention to because I was lost by how talky they were. It's not common that I'm interested enough to do that.

So.... hmmmmmm.

No, not a very good movie. But still, hmmmmmmm.

a landmark film in that takes every poor convention of "found footage" films —truly lousy improv "acting", 25 minutes of plotless footage showing nothing but two intensely boring people going about their day, digital effects we've seen a million times before (a guy is "scary" because one eye suddenly rolls up separately from the other, a woman has some sort of bug zipping around under her skin), cameras running in scenes when nobody would ever bother filming, like when they're running from a demon, but somehow not capturing when characters are unconscious or have memory lapses, and of course stilted justifications for"always filming"—and somehow manages to make them worse than ever before: includes dream sequences and apparent flashbacks somehow captured by the camera, senseless nonlinear narrative and jump cuts between scenes with no explanation or reason. It seems like "found footage" has finally just gone from "here's an idea where this filmed evidence gets left over" to nothing more than"We don't want to pay a cameraman for our lousy movie, we'll just have the actors hold the camera."

So, pretty familiar tropes. And this is a zero-budget film, not very well acted or written. But what I liked about this is it was more about the interaction of characters (even if the characters were a little thin), more about the captivity of the people in the house than anything else. There's certainly almost no action. There's a longer scene of people just sitting around waiting for dawn, when it's been announced the last "unchanged" people will be rounded up and killed, than most movies would include.

I liked it for that. Judging by the IMDB reviews, most people absolutely loathed it, I imagine for the same reason. Fair enough.

If this had been an episode of a sci-fi TV show it would have been a cool one. As a movie, eh, the standards are different.

However, it should be said, all else aside the ending is absolutely terrible. The movie just sort of stops at a moment when you expect it to have a denouement. It's an incredibly weak ending. A good ending might have saved this, for me, if it wasn't saveable for anyone else.

It's ambitious, in a hamfisted way. Emma Watson, doing a pretty passable American accent, gets a job at a company that appears to be the Ur-Tech-Company: social media company, hardware company, lifestyle brand, this company appears to be everything, run by Tom Hanks playing the second coming of Steve Jobs and Fielding Mellish, er, Patton Oswalt as his creepily disingenuous second-in-command. The movie traces the development of their rationalizations for gradually stripping away all privacy from all people, with results that don't really surprise very much as the movie goes on.

At least it doesn't end with the huge crowd of people the climactic speech is given in front of all cheering. So there's that.

Low-key but thought-provoking enough to be a fun view. Nobody will ever call this a great movie, but the story is pretty different, and it's kind of a low-key personal favorite of mine, for sure.

Don't watch it. It's really awful.

One of those execrable movies that seems like someone got together all their friends to film a home movie "horror movie". In the first 15 minutes they show a "monster" that's obviously a guy in a yellow hazmat suit wearing a rubber mask. The lead actress is really kinda cute so I left it on in the background and watched youtube videos on my laptop the rest of the time, so I have no idea what else it was about. They show some guys who are supposed to be scientists and stuff at one point.

I shit you not.

It's got some chutzpah, I'll give it that.

Yep, I got sucked into watching all 16 seasons of this. Kind of a misnomer, though, as—I never knew this—"Columbo "wasn't a TV series, but a series of TV movies shown in occasional rotation with a few other ongoing detective movie series, and so never had full" seasons". I totally get why this was a fan favorite in the day. Aside from the very likable lead performance, it broke a lot of conventions—it rarely if ever showed violence, had no chase scenes, there was never wisecracking partner or ongoing romantic interest, no procedural scenes inside the police station, or, in fact, regularly seen coworkers for Columbo of any sort, other than frequent appearances of his basset hound. Generally the character of Columbo didn't even appear until 20 minutes or so into the story, frumpily tying to solve a crime that the viewer had already fully seen committed and knew who the guilty party was. Peter Falk managed to imbue that character with a lot of affectations that might have been annoying in the hands of the wrong actor, and, in fact, is said to have so often improvised, such as suddenly shifting focus and fixating in the middle of dialogue on some inconsequential detail of the set, that the annoyance with him expressed by the suspects he was interrogating was often genuine on the part of the actors. I couldn't binge the whole thing, but I did like it enough to watch it all in about 3 mini-binges with breaks in between for other stuff. ("'Columbo'?", my sister asked me. "I thought that was like 'Murder, She Wrote' or 'Matlock'." No, it's good!)

If this had come out in the 70s, it'd be a minor classic. It even has the old-school analog synth soundtrack. Vacationing couple gets stuck in an island in Mexico where it turns out, the night just before they arrived, all the kids suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and killed all the adults.

It's kind of the opposite of "Mom & Dad", or "The Birds" but with children instead of birds. In fact, I'd be surprised if "The Birds" wasn't a conscious influence. But the nice thing is, that's as close as it gets to cliches, excepting the title. Very far from a Hollywood horror movie, that's for sure.

Light on gore in terms of screentime devoted to it, but extremely gory in the few brief moments it's shown. Not great by a long stretch, but good, in a way that they don't really make horror movies anymore... definitely only for horror fans, though. Gets pretty brutal by the end, seriously doesn't pull its punches, which, when you consider the bad guys are a bunch of children, is even more brutal. Probably deserves to be on my "honorable mention" list, although of my "honorable mention" films, I could see this being one of the least popular ones.

Looks like the kids probably had a mess of fun making it, too.

Amusingly, Wikipedia says this film made a total of about $2500 in theaters. Also, turns out, it's an almost shot-for-shot remake of a 1976 Spanish horror film called "Who Can Kill a Child?" which, really, would be a much better title for what it is. It's funny, because something about it reminded me of Long Weekend, another unjustly underappreciated '70s also-ran horror film which I got turned on to by strongly liking a remake that nobody else cared for.

Low-rated, but I liked it. Postapocalyptic supernatural western with tough-as-nails survivors facing off against strange spectral apparations instead of zombies. Not great but I kind enjoyed it.

I like this movie. Well, "like" is a strong word, it's intense and really disturbing but appreciably well-made. Dreama Walker stars in a "based on a true story" very-slow-burn drama, sticking fairly close to the true facts, about a man who called the office of a fast food joint claiming to be law enforcement, and intimidated the manager and several other people into imprisoning, humiliating, and finally sexually abusing an innocent employee for several hours. The entire first two acts of the movie are set mostly in the one room where it happens. It's pretty disturbing and, I thought, admirably well made, considering how tough the subject matter is. Caution: if you research afterwards, as I'm often inclined to, you'll learn that the full story of the actual events is actually a little more disturbing than what was shown in the movie. The whole thing is really upsetting. But the movie is so well made it's hard not to appreciate the filmmaking.

Fortunate casting (Lili Taylor, Vera Farmiga) and above-average direction, including some good spooky tension-building during scenes of things going bump in the night, elevate what could have been a very tedious haunting/exorcism tale (based on real life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who figured in incidents such as the Amityville haunting and the Enfield poltergeist) to pleasantly above average, and well into decent date movie realm. Hands *will* be clutched. EDIT: Surprise! Found out afterwards it's directed by James Wan, who was involved with Saw and, notably, Insidious, a particular favorite of mine, and another movie that in the wrong hands (IE most commercial horror directors) easily could have been hopelessly mediocre, but fortunately for horror audiences ended up in the right ones. The Conjuring doesn't quite rise to Insidious's level of ingenuity with notably well-done scenes offering genuine scares, but it makes sense that it's from the same director. Guy evidently knows how to direct a ghost story.

strange, high-concept, small-cast sci-fi reminicent of "Circle". A woman is trapped in a soundproof room and forced to do increasingly difficult tasks that bring out a latent telekinetic ability.

Some very occasional neat visual effects and likeable if basically untalented actors can't save this ambitious but poorly-written exercise. Even being charmingly Canadian couldn't save it, which is disappointing.

But, boy is it Canadian. It's just close enough to a stereotypical low-budget but ingenuous and clever Canadian outing to almost be worth a look. Allllllllllmost.

Mishmash of ideas plays like an "Outer Limits" episode. Basically a guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster story. A train hosting a Halloween "murder mystery" party goes off the tracks, leaving the survivors to contend with, basically, the Creature From The Black Lagoon.

I can see the boardroom exec somewhere saying, "We don't have enough 'Hunger Games' content. Find me something." That said, this is a reasonably entertaining take on the postapocalyptic-everygirl-fights-the-government-and-other-factions-of-survivors-on-her-way-to-becoming-their-greatest-hero-and-standing-in-front-of-a-cheering-crowd, probably-adapted-from-a-young-adult-novel genre. All the kids have developed powers and are put into camps where they are labeled by a color indicating how dangerous they are. An 'orange', the most dangerous kind and supposed to be killed on sight, escapes and hooks up with a band of other survivors who try to evade bounty hunters and determine which of the warring factions left of society are really on their side.

Swing and a serious miss. Pretty decent lighting and cinematography for what little you can see of this movie (most of it is set on a desolate, deserted road at night) tries to be profound and twisty but succeeds mostly at meaningless"408"-style disjoined "what's another weird scary thing we can have happen?" scenes. Najarra Townsend ("Contaminated", a film I'm fond of) and the nice visuals do little to save this. Reading up on IMDB afterwards, it turns out it does have a cohesive idea behind it and make sense if you know what it's trying to say, but I didn't. Too bad.

Interesting. A schizophrenic woman who may or may not actually be a mindreader is held in a psychiatric facility and insists her former boyfriend's family abducted her baby to gain the powers that run in her bloodline. Sometimes I find a movie that I particularly enjoy because it shoots only to be what it is—doesn't overreach or try to be something it's not, but does what it's trying to do effectively enough. I'm reminded a little bit, though this is a totally different genre and type of movie, of "Beyond The Black Rainbow", in that this film, like that one, just is what it is... shot and paced just a little differently than most films are. It probably helps that the acting is decent and the lead actress is fairly charismatic.The plot sags a tiny bit at the end into a conventional denouement, unfortunately, but, this one, despite not being a great movie by any stretch of the imagination or even a particularly good one, and not one I'd recommend to anyone else, nonetheless is oddly memorable, and I liked it . I could see watching it again sometime.

I turned this one off halfway through.

The two worst conceits amateur horror directors rely on, anthologies and "found footage" tripe, exacerbated by truly lame stories, stilted acting, and the most amateurish (lack of) production values I've ever seen. Ok, your video editing software has a "video camera messing up" preset. Ok. We've seen it now. Move on.

Seriously. There's just nothing in this movie worth watching at all. Watch anything else.

Starts with a five-minute-long fat joke and goes downhill from there. Seemingly aimed at people out there for whom the Farrelly Brothers' movies humor is too subtle. So broad it seems like it's aimed at kids, except the humor is too raunchy for kids, so, god only knows.

Supernatural thriller with 90 minutes of Genevieve Hannelius as the girl next door who moves into a creepy long-abandoned house with her creepy new adoptive dad, and a really good like last 5 minutes, which all together still isn't really enough to redeem it.

One of the most realistic zombie movies I've ever seen. Almost no dialogue. A little action but not much. Just a soldier, and for a little while a companion he meets, mostly just walking or camping, surviving and outsmarting the roaming zombies as they need to. And, turns you, in a zombie movie, you don't actually need much more than that. No attempts at humor. No attempts to be clever or cool. Just a solid, down-to-earth survival movie, that happens to be set in a zombie acopalypse.

I liked it. I imagine I'll watch this again in the future.

Could have been terrible, but a couple of above-average performances put it just a touch above complete mediocrity. Canadian, not so Canadian (in the usual good way) that I'd have guessed, but it does make sense. Kind of succeeds by not overreaching for more than it can accomplish.

Sometimes you have to admire something just for managing not to be bad, which this does manage. Better writing would have helped even more.

I watched this film 3 days ago and already barely remember it. A bunch of gorgeous kids return to the commune one of them grew up on, and are stalked by the ghost of a drowned man, I think.

Proving that every rule has an exception, this awful sub-"USA Up All nite"stars Felissa Rose, who apparently takes the roles Linnea Quiqley would have once turned down as being beneath her, as a cop investigating some sort of snuff film ring. An attempt to appeal to fans of basic brutality by a director not competent enough even to provide basic brutality.

If I had to forgot every single indie film I've ever seen except one, this might be the one to keep. A little campy, but for this story, it kinda has to be.

I don't know where they found the guy who played the monster, he was perfectly cast, in what should probably be remembered as one of the great monster movie performances, if only because he does a perfect job of what so few movie monsters do, and what I understand the original novel's monster was more like: remaining completely human throughout.

I dunno, this one just sat really, really well with me. I believe I will be watching it again.

(not to be confused with "Depraved", the very good "Frankenstein" update previously reviewed) Captivity/pursuit flick. Urban explorers in the tunnels below Berlin encounter a seemingly helpful denizen of the depths when one of them is seriously injured in a fall, who turns out, once he's lured them back to his lair, to be bonkers. A slightly unusual last few minutes for this sort of fare (in that it foregoes any redemption or sign of hope at the end; ok, that's actually different), decent performances including from the leering bad guy, and half the dialogue being in German are the only distinguishing qualities this movie has.

Disappointing. English horror flick with gritty, almost "Trainspotting" type production values about an electric-chair type contraption found in an abandoned hospital, which either transports the seated person to another dimension, drives them insane, or summons a demon. Actually starts out alright but by halfway through the decent performances and unusually gritty production values can't support the muddled story. Clive Barker could've made this as punchy as it wanted to be, or Danny Boyle could have made it as clever and narratively strong as it wants to be, but neither of them was anywhere near this.

Paranormal Activity, only with satanism.

The problem with most "horror comedy" is it's really just a bad horror movie trying to be passed off as "comedy" because it's just bad. In this case, it's an actual comedy that happens to be about horror topics.

The acting is terrible, the movie is pretty goofy, but it knows what it is and isn't trying to be anything more. What's more, the cast, though pretty terrible, seem like they enjoyed making it. It's fun and, this works in its favor too, just slightly original—definitely not reminiscent of anything I've seen before. I liked it.

Horrible anthology film. Does include the original short of "Piggy", though, which isn't bad.

A couple is in a house and the woman's sister shows up soaked in blood and carrying a hammer, and walks around outside the house looking creepy. There might be more, but 50 minutes into it that's all that had happened so far, and I got bored and turned it off.

A dreadfully BBC-esque supernatural drama. Filmed on videotape for good measure. The blurb said "Peril awaits a group of six friends as they enter an abandoned theater in the woods, where they encounter a devil and a beast." Nor horror, not terror... peril. That's about the size of it. Having watched half of it before turning it off, I can confirm, yes, they're in peril. Quite so.

This is one of those movies I wouldn't recommend to anyone else, but I found it kind of entertaining. Bachelor buys a new house, and digging a hole for a septic tank, he finds a box with two million dollars in cash and a dead body in it. He slowly goes insane, and the body may or may not be climbing out of the box to terrorize him. This is one of those movies that benefits by not aiming that high, and while the story is no great shakes and enough of the acting is wooden that it is never going to be confused for a good movie, it does a couple of things right: casting an anonymous everyman who manages to slowly ratchet up the insanity without there being any one point where it goes too far too fast, and, while most movies break the spell when they show something like an old man in clear corpse makeup, this one actually pulls it off but finding some actor, I don't know who this guy is, but who just manages to put in a creepy enough performance that they can show him in broad daylight and it's just a little bit creepy instead of 100% silly. I wouldn't go out of my way to see this, but it was actually kind of fun.

Reminded me of that movie with Zoe Lister-Jones and Cailee Spaeny about the woman wandering around LA before the world ends, although this was better than that one. Same sort of "clever, but not quite as clever as it thinks it is" high-concept. But, in this case, it was entertaining enough. Eventually it sort of peters out, but if it had kept up the entertainment all the way through, it would have been pretty good.

Scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel here. The most amateurish, dreadful slasher movie I've ever seen, with the stupidest killer name, "Crinoline Head". Kids go explore the home of a famous killer, who of course is still there. They spend like an hour kibbitzing and talking about sex before the killer offs them in the stupidest way possible, such as one woman asks the groundskeeper if she can use her restroom, so the groundskeeper tells her to go squat in the woods and accuses her of not being able to, so the woman storms off bragging about how good at squatting she is, then doesn't notice the killer is hiding on the same side of tree that she approached from and sticks out his arm with his knick pointing up near the ground for her to aggressively squat on to show how great she is at it. One of the stupidest, most contrived, poorly-acted, poorly-written films I've ever seen.

Gang of kids go to rob a blind guy's house, thinking it will be easy.... they're very wrong. Definitely original, with good enough casting, acting, and production to pull it off. Not great by a long shot but for one of these movies to even stand out as not being garbage is impressive. It kind of held my attention, which is incredibly rare for these kinds of exercises.

I would say if you're only going to watch one pursuit/captivity flick in your life, this might be a contender.

It's got 88% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and while I might not go that far on an absolute basis, it makes some sense, and grading on a curve with most of these kinds of movies, I definitely would give it at least that. (Note: closing credits say produced by Sam Raimi. A-ha. And, holy cow, I didn't even recognize Jane Levy with her hair bleached blonde as the lead.)

Giving it an honorable mention, but really only because it is about the best of its genre, even though that's kind of like being remarkable for being pretty tall for a dwarf. It's not great by a longshot—but for a captivity flick, it's outstanding.

Until... an hour and a half into it, it just stops. It ends in the middle of the story.

There are references online to this being both a series and a movie, I don't know if what I saw was a pilot episode or something. If they'd wrapped it up like a real movie, I'd have liked it. I think I'll still give it a "je nais se quois", but, be warned: it stops in the middle.

One of my old ex-girlfriends goes to Ireland and finally becomes the blood-drenched psychopath I for one always knew she had it in her to be. You go, girl! (I thought it might not be her, until the closing credits say, "A film by Normal", which is so totally something she'd be involved with.)

I liked this movie, I bet a lot of people won't though. It's an anthology film, although it doesn't play that way, a few stories around the theme of the sentient black CGI portals appearing around the world. People can enter and leave them but staying too long drives them insane. The portals speak telepathically sometimes. The CGI was actually kind of good for CGI black goo, and the cinematography was really nice, someone is an avid and skilled Kubrick fan.

In this TV-moviest of TV movies, a young woman discovers she looks exactly like the age-progressed adult version of a missing child on a milk carton. Lots of people running after each other ensues.

two students to a video project documenting people's feats and one turns out to be a psycho. Cruelty—not even just torture, but deliberately cruel torture—as entertainment, and nothing more.

Painfully shy man joins a support group, so they drug him and put a gummy worm in his ear that cures his shyness by turning him into a psychotic killer. Forgettable.

Surprisingly decent sci-fi thriller. Tom Cruise is a gorgeous soldier fighting an alien invasion of earth who gets caught in essentially Groundhog Day with a lot more gunfire and tough-as-nails army guys. Some trite writing and a bit of a reliance on suspension of disbelief, not the least of which is Emily Blunt as a gorgeous super-soldier, but gritty production, good pacing, and slightly-above-average cgi aliens keep it entertaining.

well, I'm surprised. Will Smith can actually act. I've never seen him play anyone but Will Smith before. He does an entirely convincing job as real-life runaway slave of Haitian descent, convincing French accent and all, in this not-as-heavy-as-it-wants-to-be civil war biopic. The movie itself is the sort of broad-strokes, morally (and visually too, in this case) black-and-white drama that Apple seems to show a lot of. I liked it ok, although, even though despite being socially progressive myself, I tend not to enjoy movies that are primarily about how bad oppression is. Yes, I know, I'm watching TV to get *away* from all that for a moment. I already know the confederate slavedrivers were probably really horrible people; I don't get much from a hollywood recreation spending 2 hours telling me. Still, though, it was an alright watch.

This slow-to-start but original and ultimately entertaining mindfuck is a slow-burn, low-key gem in the same way as (and bearing some superficial similarities to, in terms of setting and tone, and how gradually and realistically it brings on the total weirdness) Yellowbrickroad, another rare zero-budget favorite of mine.

The Rotten Tomatoes summary probably summarizes it better than I could: "Two brothers receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn't as young men, they're forced to reconsider the cult's beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult."

That is about the best it could be explained without spoilers, except to say there's some hefty surrealism tucked away in the corners, and a metaphysical plateful of temporal spaghetti.

It's also notable for being one of the very few movies I've ever immediately rewound (ok, clicked 'play' again) the minute it ended, and immediately re-watched in its entirety a second time almost from the beginning, just to look for the details I missed. (N.B. the only other time I can recall doing that is the Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink".)

You know, I kind of liked this movie. It sort of plays, not like a great movie, but like, I dunno, a great episode of"The Outer Limits"(or a very long second- or third-tier episode of "The Twilight Zone".) Three strangers wind up coincidentally stuck at a cabin in the remote woods, and things from there go in a completely different direction than you expect. Basically a drama with fantastic elements as they figure out what's going on—far more "Outer Limits" than "Last House On The Left".

Decades ago, in the Russian woods near an abandoned asylum, four bodies were found. Now, a documentary crew goes in to explore. Blue-toned video, night vision, and people screaming during video glitch effects ensue. You know the drill by now.

Somehow I'd never seen this all the way through until now. I see why it left an impression on kids of my generation. For anyone who slept through the 70s and 80s, Kurt Russell is airdropped into Manhattan, which has been converted into a walled prison island, to rescue the President, whose plane has crashed there, and must fight The Warriors to get out.

And, it's not great. But it was actually kinda good. But the acting is a slight cut above movies like this usually are, and even the particularly hammy performances are entertaining. Some of the dialog occasionally rings true at points, which is nice. The movie is a very slow burn and takes it's time, maybe longer than it should, to get where it finally goes, but I didn't mind that much. And the ending finally ratchets up the intensity nicely, after a long very gradual simmer. I think if I was 14 I'd have thought this was flat-out great.

I've been thinking a while about creating a category for "watchable" movies, not quite special, far from great, maybe not even worth recommending going out of your way for, but still, not bad, watchable enough to be worth it if you run across them and have nothing else to do. This was the movie that got me to finally do it.

In this, a programmer wins a chance to spend a few days with the reclusive head of his company in his isolated retreat, where it turns out he has built an artificial (and, in some lovely FX work, visually clearly robotic, except for the face) woman. The programmer has been called there to interact with her and determine whether he feels she is genuinely conscious and intelligent. That short synopsis doesn't really do it justice, but to say more would be to rob anyone reading of the experience of going into this cold and letting the story unfold.

Surprisingly, not too bad. Instead of an adaptation, a sequel to the original movie, and done with some decent cinematic horror chops. It's still a TV show, but, it was alright. Season 2 got a little more saccharine and less gritty. I could have probably watched a season 3.

Terribly acted, zero budget, all around not very well made, but as I said, that's kind of a shame. The story itself mildly entertained me, in better hands and better acted this could have been something. I thought it was definitely better than the two stars it has on IMDB. There's only so high a rating you can get with such terrible acting and production values, but it deserved better than that.

Likeable enough, forgettable comedy, along the lines of past likeable-enough-but-forgettable comedies like "So Fine" or "Used Cars". Jason Bateman owns a flavoring extract company and is thinking of selling. Con artist Mila Kunis rolls through when his employee is injured on the job and stands to make a fortune in the lawsuit. Kristen Wiig is the wife sleeping with the pool boy. JK Simmons forgets people's names. David Koechner is the neighbor who collars him in his driveway every day when he comes home and can't read social cues that he's not liked.

Title checks out.

A gorgeous couple is chased by a menacing black car being driven by Prince down a desert highway, forcing them to take refuge in an odd roadside diner where the locals seem to be hiding a secret. A more entertaining failure than many. Plays something like an episode of one of the less successful horror anthology TV shows, indulges in a lot of familiar plot devices, and telegraphs its punches very badly, but succeeds in being somewhat watchable, on those terms, mostly because of a likable cast. Don't go in expecting more than that and you might find it a passable way to kill 80 minutes.

Halloween.

These people take the "no cameraman" ethic of "found footage" films even further, to "no editor". This appears to be a group of banal college students with no acting experience at all who went to an empty house and improvised a horror movie (albeit one without any horror), then taped all the footage they shot together and called it done. There are interminable, pointless passages of them talking to their professors in class, sitting in the car playing "Never Have I Ever", uneventfully exploring the house and grounds, all shot with a total lack of any kind of cinematic or even sound recording quality that makes the previous recordholder for "worst first-person shooter" I'd ever seen look like Citizen Kane in comparison. No plot, no attempt to build tension, until finally, over an hour into the movie, people's cameras suddenly do the deaddrop one by one for no explained reason and everybody starts running through the house and woods yelling each other's names. Basically, it's like a bunch of students saw "The Blair Witch Project" and said, "Hey, we could do that!", but they couldn't.

I assumed this was a student film but it turns out this filmmaker is middle-aged.

Couldn't even tell you what this movie was about. It was listed under horror, and from reading about it apparently in between the music videos there's some sort of story involving a mutation. I did hear a bad actress mention Satan at one point.

Turned it off halfway through.

They did it to me again! By halfway through, I was waiting for it to end so I could write the review "Four words: creepy rural German grandparents." But then, in act III, it changed completely. Into a wholly forgettable supernatural thriller. Ah, well. The best laid plans, etc.

Tubi very intelligently put this on on autoplay right after The Thing, and I'd somehow never seen it. Another movie that is very dated and of its time, but, I actually, watching it, assumed it must have from the early to mid '60s, not 1956. It's another one of those films that you kind of have to view through the lens of its era, but I can believe that if I had been a teenager in the 1950s and saw this when it came out, without having seen everything later that it shaped, I would have thought it was incredible. I remember not all that long ago, some kids raised on modern, studio-crafted pop saying they couldn't understand what was so great about the Beatles, and I couldn't help but think of that watching this. It certainly originated a lot of common tropes: first sci-fi film to feature faster-than-light travel, first one to use an electronic soundtrack, first one set entirely on an alien world, not to mention the use of vivid color photography years before the black-and-white era ended, and in terms of its production and many of the tropes it uses it's very easy to see the influence on later shows on up until "Star Trek" and beyond. It's hard to believe it preceded Star Trek by at least 10 years, in that sense it still seems ahead of its time.

Tubi followed Foreclosure (2022) with this terrible 2014 movie of the same name. Michael Imperioli, his son, and his racist dad move into a house where a young Black man was once lynched, lose their minds, start seeing actors on old-tymey costumes and pancake makeup around the house while the ghost of the lynched man looks on. Some of the shakiest, most amateur hand-held camerawork I've seen. Imperioli has been in Goodfellas and The Sopranos. How did he let himself get involved with this?

Having seen the execrable sequel, I let morbid curiosity goas me into watching this. A gorgeous couple moves into a house hoping to see a ghost, and nothing happens, unless you consider wooden acting to be something.

The worst-acted movie I've ever seen. A writer moves into a house and becomes obsessed with a ghost, showing up in a cinematic experience with apparently no lighting, the least-competent handheld camerawork I've ever seen, and a single special effect which consists of lighting rooms with a red lightbulb. What was this the sequel to?

I just got floored by this movie. I can only assume the low rating is because so many horror fans have absolutely terrible taste in movies.

This is the kind of low-budget miracle that often lacks a lot—the acting is spotty, the effects aren't great, the pacing is awkward—but somehow manages to make up for it with heart, with an original idea, with a strong, strangely evocative narrative. This film is Decadent, in the aesthetic sense of the word. Like some of Baudelaire's best poems, its imagery and narrative are truly horrible, and in fact it's extremely gory, but somehow it manages to say something new and somehow very darkly beautiful. It helps that the emphasis is not on scares, but rather on telling a story.

In that way, it reminds me very much of "The Hamiltons", another super-low-budget, kind of quiet, unambitious indie film that puts any kind of cheap thrills in the back seat in favor of telling a redemptive story about relationships... unusual relationships not quite like anything seen elsewhere, and rather horrible ones at that, but with just enough familiar about them, portrayed with enough depth, to make you care about these monstrous characters. "Found" shares those qualities.

I really enjoyed it, not as a horror movie, but rather as a movie that happens to require horror to tell its story. As an added bonus, it ends far more satisfyingly than most low- budget films, despite not providing the least bit of resolution. It's a neat trick, and casts a favorable light back on the whole movie, even the earlier parts where it's still trying to find its footing.

Again, if you're looking for shocks, ingenious torture and over-the-top imaginative brutality, this is absolutely not that kind of movie. But those whose tastes lean towards Poe and Baudelaire, and can tolerate the usual shortcomings of less-than-professional filmmaking, will probably enjoy this very much. It works.

[Note, 2023: I must've seen this, and written this review, a long time ago. I don't remember this film at all, even looking it up on IMDB, where I rated it a '9' at some point in the past. Given what a positive review I gave it, I'm marking it as a favorite, but mostly just to remind myself to track it down and watch it again to see if it actually is. Odd that I wouldn't remember something I liked this much. —Mike]

Originally posted on my blog Sloth And Dignity.

A girl buys an evil-looking artifact at a garage sale that a woman smilingly tells her, "It's a friendship game. You put your hands on it and speak your innermost desire. If your friendship doesn't survive the game, neither do you." So of course she buys it and plays it with her friends. Unfortunately the woman didn't tell her the other part of the curse: it puts you in a movie with a totally nonlinear narrative that makes no sense.

Torture porn with a ham-fisted social message. A leering, smug, designed-to-be-hatable billionaire fed up with the"Kardashianization of humanity"(yes, they use that phrase in the movie) imprisons a bunch of reality show stars in a house where they must engage in competitions that inevitably end in them torturing or killing each other, while it's all broadcast live over the internet for the world to vote on who gets the axe next, which somehow helps with the Kardashianization because movie. Yawn.

I saw what I thought was going to be a mid-80s "Mad Max" ripoff, and it turned out to be in a mid-2010s ripoff of a mid-80s "Mad Max" ripoff. James Franco, Milla Jovovich, and Lucy Lui, amusingly also featuring Snoop Dogg playing a post-apocalyptic version of himself who, in the film's only entertaining moment, finally gets the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of his "hoes" in a post-closing-credits sequence.

Perfectly passable"When A Stranger Calls"-style thriller about a phone helpline worker terrorized by a stalker known for attacking pregnant women in their homes. Pleasant for having a much stronger-than-usual heroine.

Picture this: An action scifi/thriller in which an advanced satellite is being used to create extreme weather all over the globe, including a cold front in Rio which is shown literally freezing beachgoers solid in their tracks, and which, near the end, shows the Vice President of the United States shooting a rocket launcher at the President. This is *exactly* the movie you're imagining.

Kind of a new take on some tired old zombie tropes. This starts off reeeeeeally dull for a while but eventually picks up nicely. It's one of those British horror films that tries to actually be a good movie rather than just going for scares, and by and large it works. It's got pretty much the first new ideas of any sort in the genre since "28 Days Later", which it builds on thematically with its infected-humans-standing-in-for-living-dead trope.

If "Night Of The Living Dead" is the Beatles of zombie movies, and "28 Days Later" is the Rolling Stones, this is the Faces at their best. (And, by the way, continuing the metaphor, "Dawn Of The Dead" is Paul McCartney & Wings at their peak, and the obscure 1964 Vincent Price movie "The Last Man on Earth" is Chuck Berry.)

Don't want to say too much because I don't want to ruin it. But, suffice to say: what if the standard post-apocalyptic zombie infection film is just the /beginning/ of something? This film goes there.

I didn't expect to like this one. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as gorgeous astronauts stranded in space when their space station is clobbered by space junk, trying to find a way to get back to earth alive. Really spectacular 3D effects throughout keep it visually engaging, and unique and well-made enough to work. I still don't buy the hollywood casting, but, if you imagine it with more realistic unknowns who were better actors and less just charismatic gorgeous people, you'll realize it's actually a pretty good movie.

I mean, look. I liked "Cannibal Holocaust" too. But there's a difference between somebody making "Cannibal Holocaust", and somebody seeing "Cannibal Holocaust" and saying, "I want to make that too." Except, you know, also including some standard de riguer cliches from newer cliched movies.

Tom Hanks, whose enduring fame I'm at a loss to understand, as the captain of a WWII battleship, engages in a North Atlantic naval battle against Nazi subs in this actually pretty enjoyable bit of fluff. Basically a straight, he-man war movie lacking any nuance, but, you know, I was in the mood for it. Doesn't go very far over the top, which keeps it watchable. Nazis, heard only over the ship's radio, are portrayed as a suitably sneering and murderous enemy that there's no possible moral ambiguity to rooting for their offscreen (totally underwater, actually) deaths. Just in case anyone hadn't got the memo yet that Nazis are bad.

Hunh. Story is, the very worst sort of stereotypically rapey movie frat boys don't take it kindly when a woman fights back. She fights back harder. They get nastier. It seems like these folks set out to make an '80s-style "video nasty", with a feminist slant. Sort reminiscent of of a modern "I Spit On Your Grave" in that way. None of this is my favorite thing by a long shot, but, they did do what they seem to have set out to do. The social commentary is about an inch deep, and most of the characters are paper-thin, but I get the sense any sort of social awareness is just a justification for the violence, anyway, so I didn't really care. No way I'll be watching this again, nor would I ever recommend this as something to watch.

Stoner splatstick, which I guess is at least sort of original. The animated plastic remains of Lara Flynn-Boyle play a witch who lures stoners into her house with weed and eats them. Meh. Entertaining, I guess, sort of, a little, maybe.

This indiest of indie flicks is tediously slow. Billed as a guy being increasingly haunted by his recently-dead ex, what it actually is is about 20 minutes of a guy driving around interspersed among about an hour of two guys talking, and then 5 minutes of "plot twist" and incredibly amateurishly-acted-and-shot "action" at the end. Avoid. Well-meaninged but should have been a 15 minute short, not a feature film, and still wouldn't have been very good.

Another effective Canadian film. How do they do it?

Fairly paint-by-numbers haunted house story in which a young couple buy a country home not realizing it's inhabited by wooden actors that never blink and speak through an electronic pitch shifter.

Ok, with that title, I had some idea what I was getting into. Weirdly slow-moving adult-xxx-film quality starring, apparently, washed-up adult film stars. These aren't even actors, at first I thought the guy just got a bunch of his friends to be in it. Written, directed, and produced by one guy, starring his wife. Plus lots of weird long sequences of people just looking at each other. This is what you get when you cut the sex out of porn and replace it with sci-fi and aliens eating people's brains. I mean it! It's a porn. But with sci-fi instead of sex. Which, you know, I don't like the whole "so bad it's good" thing, but, boy, in this case, they really committed to doing what they were going to do. One of the lowest-rated films I've seen on IMDB, 1.6 out of 10 with over 130 ratings, and that is exactly right. In an abstract way, I admire it. Er, perhaps that's putting it strongly. I find its existence amusing. (EDIT: No doubt about it, these actually are porn actors, the lead actress once won an AVN award.)

Inside of the first few minutes it became apparent this was a little better than that. The acting and dialog seemed good, somehow. Cliche'd ominous background news reports about a viral outbreak are downplayed and handled well for something we've seen so many times before. The couple goes on a 5-day canoe trip and then quickly fall to arguing, and for a little while, this turns into one of those movies that kills time by having a couple negotiate their relationship onscreen for the viewers—my favorite thing—before the canoe capsizes, one's leg is broken, and they must take to land to try and find help. And then the zombie movie starts.

And, it's a pretty good zombie movie, actually, with one major failing: it came after The Walking Dead. We've already seen tough-as-nails bands of scrappy survivors, but will-played and with some occasional real depth and character development, battle each other and the remains of the cops and military. If not for having seen it before, I'd have said this was really good. As it is, it could have stood as one of the better episodes of The Walking Dead. In fact, in some ways it feels like a TV pilot, but in a good way. Would have been a great pilot of a derivative show. If The Walking Dead hadn't existed, this would have been worth recommending. It's better than "Fear The Walking Dead", and, I actually kinda liked that.

The unease of "Eraserhead" combined with the eerie farmhouse atmosphere of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" without being as weird or memorable as either. Arthouse pretensions slightly detract from what is just derivative enough, and just original enough, that they people who made it probably were thinking about how it would have played in 1976, and it might have been a minor classic if it had been made back then, but it's not 1976 anymore, and they should have made something that was going to play well today in front of audiences who've seen a lot of variations at this point on what succeeded in 1976. Annoying couple camping on what turns out to be private land are told to leave, and wouldn't you know it, their battery is dead... but walking up the road, there's a farmhouse... and here, I know what you're thinking. No, picture less violence, more of a slow-burner. The pacing, which a lot of gore fans complained about in IMDB, is actually alright, I like a movie that doesn't show its cards all at once. But this isn't a slow-burner that eventually ignites like dynamite, more like a firecracker. It doesn't leave you with as much as it wants to.

Talk about a swing and a miss. Very strong performances fail to save a sci-fi flick that the director just wasn't up to handling the central relationship complexities and slightly twisty plot that he himself wrote. A couple is offered $50,000 to stay in a house for a month as part of an ostensible relationship study that turns out to be something darker. The palpable chemistry between the lead actors (the woman of whom was actually the writer/director's wife) gets this off to a very strong start, but the obviously contrived and sometimes difficult-to-follow way in which the "drama" develops breaks the spell and as the action gets harder to believe and the plot gets more confusing the film simply never recovers. Disappointing, it started out looking like it was really going to be good. Picture a "Black Mirror" episode directed by someone who just wasn't adept at handling plot twists.

I kinda would have enjoyed the soundtrack without the movie.

Notable for being the oldest movie I've ever seen that opens with a "kill" scene (I always wondered when that idea began) and the fakest-looking.

Well, this is sure to be polarizing. Notably well directed, creepy, builds tension extremely well, very nice gloomy cinematography, the production values were totally on point... all for purposes of showing 90 minutes of the flimsiest of reasons for a nonstop bloodbath, just cruelty and violence as entertainment. Couple gets possessed by... um, something, it's never explained what... but it makes their eyes glow occasionally just so you know they're evil, and makes them want to brutally torture people, and spread the possession to other people, and that's the entirety of the plot. Oh, also, the way you get possessed is the possessed people show you a video of a cave or something and then your mouth lights up like a flashlight. The rest is cruelty and violence. I mean, like, on the few occasions when one of the possessed people gets taken out, you briefly see a glowing mist escape their mouths and their eyes turn normal, just so you know they're back and the people who caught them are now killing their actual, non-possessed loved ones. And that happens more than once. That kind of cruelty. And with no explanation other than "unexplained lights floating around". Then there's the fact that before the carnage starts, somehow nobody notices the "possessed" people acting like stiff zombies for maybe 20 minutes until it suddenly gets bloody and they snap back to life. Happily, mostly incredibly low reviews on IMDB, restoring my faith in humanity... a story this thin, even the terrific production values didn't fool any but the absolute least discriminating viewers.

"Australian for torture/captivity flick".

An anthology Film from 2017 that feels for all the world like it's from about 1967, in which a mysterious Hitchockesque man tells four tales in which nothing happens.

As tediously pretentious, and unqualified to be so, as it gets. A woman inherits a empty schoolhouse from a grandmother she's never met. She wanders around, giving a pretentious voiceover. She plays the "moonlight sonata" for five long minutes, and nothing else happens during that time, while an out-of-focus ghostly figure stands behind her. She wanders around the grounds. She hears a noise upstairs, grabs a knife, and takes, I shit you not, what feels like 5 minutes to ascend the stairs to the next floor. Hands reach out of the darkness and cover her mouth as she screams, then we suddenly cut to a camera pointed upwards towards the front facade of the building that slowly moves closer, then further away, then closer, then further away again, with the scene fading in and out and in again, over and over, because, it's artistic, I suppose, before we then see her again, digging through old trunks, apparently totally fine, no clue what the hands were. Over an hour into the movie, she intones the first line of actual dialogue: she flatly says, "I feel... I am not alone... in the house... and yet... I am.... alone... in the house..." and then stares for several minutes, occasionally taking a sip from a bottle in as close as this movie gets to excitement. Then we're treated to extreme close ups of her squeezing blood blisters and goo-covered skin growths. Eventually, a weird creature makes an appearance and gives her an orgasm, but by then it's much too late. Then, they cut to her staring at the camera with an intense expression on her face and tinkling random notes on the piano, for five minutes. Then another scene of her just staring for several minutes. Somebody should be punished for making this movie.

As might be suggested by that last bit, good direction makes it overall slightly better than it might have been... Actually very decent for what it is, fairly well-done and original for a monster movie, I liked it.

Not an A, definitely a 'B' picture, but kind of a 'B+' one. Pretty grisly, but a movie like this kind of needs to be.

Hilariously bad, phenomenally dated 1980 exploitation monster movie, from right before everything became either a slasher picture or "Hellraiser". Basically Jaws but with many sharks instead of just one, and the Creature From The Black Lagoon instead of sharks, and a whole lot more jiggling boobs. Lots of cool pyrotechnics, too.

You know what? It's a bad movie, sure. But... I liked it. It doesn't take itself too seriously. A likeable, if perpetually worried-seeming, med student gets a part time job and a big hardware store where things gradually seem just a little bit off. The pacing is awful, but the third act is at least ambitious, more so than the first two acts leave you prepared for.

It's a pretty badly flawed movie. Plot points are never wrapped up, and the pacing isn't great, but... it does have a plot. And it's an amusing one, at least. And, by the end, you can tell they at least made a real effort, not like a lot of crap horror films where they don't quite bother all the way.

I has like 4 stars on IMDB, and I think it deserves a little better than that. I can totally understand people not liking it at all, but I also understand a handful of people here and there giving it 6 or 7 stars and saying things like, "Meet it on its own terms and it's not all that bad."

It's undisputably a bad movie. But, if you go into it expecting that... you might find it a little more entertaining by the end than you expected. Only a little, but, yeah, a little.

Very english criminals get caught burgling a country manor home, made to be prey in The Most Dangerous Game. I wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but, eh, for a captivity/pursuit pic, not too terrible.

What a weird movie. Basically seems like a very long soap opera or TV episode with a lot of twists and turns, which is odd, since it's mostly just two guys talking, and sometimes fighting or chasing each other. Something very British, almost, about the way it's all talking and at least tries to get by on strong plotting and dialogue rather than action... not that it succeeds. Two friends go out for a night of ice fishing on a cabin on a Minnesota lake, and one or both of them have ulterior motives. An impressive number of plot twist for two guys stuck in a cabin, and especially since it keeps going when it should end, into a whole other part of the story. However, that's as much good as I'll say about it it: it's dreadfully overwrought, hammily-acted, with actually too many plot twists, and primarily impressive for just going way to far over the top in pretty much every way except entertainment value. Like I said: kind of like a soap opera. Shot on 30fps video instead of film, too, to add to that feeling.

A confusing ending spoils a fairly decent sci-fi thriller in which a team of army people goes to rescue the final survivor of a faraway space outpost where everyone else been infected by intelligent ooze that drives them mad.

"Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark"x "The Leprechaun".

Yes, by conventional film standards, it sucks: almost no story, no narrative arc, almost no dialog for the second half, nothing is ever explained, it's entirely full of insipid depthless characters who are either brutally loathesome (most of the men) or spend a hell of a lot of time doing nothing but wandering through a darkened building whimpering and screaming (most of the females), it spends too much time indulging itself in banal torture porn conventions without going anywhere. I don't even think many of the characters had names. It doesn't even have a trace of the pretentious art-house conventions some films stoop to in order to try to justify the obvious lack of conventional movie-making skill.

And yet, I loved it. I was floored and genuinely scared watching it. I will definitely watch it again.

It's barely a story, it's more just a tapestry of murky, mounting fear, presented for its own sake. In some ways, it's comparable to Fellini in its broad, expositionless, near-abstract presentation of something more wrested from the subconscious than designed to satisfy the intellect.

Its focus on tone rather than narrative is reminiscent of, yes, found-footage origin The Blair Witch Project, but even moreso, of old Giallo horror films, films that reveled in the idea of fear and focused more on creepy mood than the more conventional trappings of movies as "quality" entertainment. No part of the movie is really all that dependent on any other part an any strict way, and it even abandons its "found footage" first-person perspective before it gets to the end. But even so, once it finds makes one of its several shifts and finds its footing about halfway through, abandoning what seems to be a banal brutality-as-spectacle approach and shifting to the stuff of deeper, more phantasmagoric nightmares, it becomes easily the only truly scary film I've seen in a long time. I'm not going to include spoilers, but there are moments in here as iconic and viscerally chilling as Nosferatu's long-fingernailed shadow gliding silently up a stairway wall.

I was genuinely surprised to see "The Inside"'s low 3.3/10 rating on IMDB, but it makes sense. It succeeds in a much less polished, and quieter, but otherwise similarly unconventional way as Lars von Trier's "Antichrist", another film that doesn't even remotely attempt to be enjoyable as a moviegoing experience, which, like this film, deceived a lot of people into thinking it was a bad movie instead of quite the opposite.

I almost gave it 9 stars. I still might. This film knows exactly what it wants to be, and it unapologetically is that and only that, to the very core. If you don't like it, the problem may not be with the film, but with you. Despite the rocky beginning, this film's ultimate odd, offputting achievement deserves to be considered a misfit classic.

(Not to be confused, as I unfortunately later did, with "Inside", an abysmal 2016 captivity porn about a pregnant woman atttacked by a psycho woman inside her home, which apparently was a remake of a 2007 French horror film, which would explain why it's abysmal. I don't understand why France has consistently produced some of the best classical arts — music, poetry, literature, cinema — yet is 100% reliable in making absolutely inspid, shallow, awful horror movies. The 2007 "Inside" is vintage modern French horror—it could barely have held up as a horror short, and yet somehow it's feature-length.)

EDIT: I will say more. This was directed by James Wan, who I later discovered, just plain has a talent for elevating his supernatural tales by seeding them liberally with just great, memorable individual horror scenes. This movie definitely has it's silly aspects, but even his far worse movies have individual scenes that are so well done they make the picture worth watching. The man just knows how to direct a horror movie, not a modern gorefest or jump-out-and-say-boo teen scream, but legitimate horror cinema in the tradition of the classics. And here he's at his best at that.

A young boy, maybe 10 or 12, wants to face his fears and goes camping in the woods where his younger sister disappeared two years earlier. Sitting in his tent, he starts to hear weird things.

And for the first half, that's the whole movie. A kid hiding in a tent with weird noises outside. And, you know what? It was sort of creepy. It built a mood and played effectively off my own fear of the dark. (Have I ever mentioned my phobia? Well, I'm not exactly afraid of the dark, it's a little wierder than that, but close enough.) I have in incredibly hard time being in darkened woods, and I especially don't like being in a tent by myself, when I can't see around me and am in the tactically least defensible position if anything happens, and my senses sharpen and I become aware of every.damn.sound. And as this movie slowly ratcheted up the weirdness, it really evoked that, and despite having basically no plot, I liked it for the mood.

I should say, I liked the Blair Witch Project for similar reasons: because it's a horror movie entirely about sound. You never see anything, only ever heard things. This plays that up well.

Unfortunately, as the movie goes on, it gets a little more just weird and less creepy. Weirdness is interrupted by the boy waking up as if it was just a dream, which is cheap. His sister appears, and he takes it for granted. The sounds and soon lights get weirder, and he ventures out to explore, and apparently finds his childhood home, which appears to be inhabited by... something? None of it is ever explained, it's just weirdness after weirdness. And soon, the videocam he's been using as a flashlight becomes the camera, for some reason he's watching everything through the camera, and it slips in and out of being a first-person-shooter, with all the tedious cliches like him still holding the camera as he runs from half-seen things that appear onscreen in with a brief flash of static and an unexplained metallic screetching noise. And it all drags on a little too long with a little too much sense and it's not creepy anymore.

Which is a damn shame. Because for the first half, this really looked like one of those movies I would like that everybody else hated, and I always like finding those.

If they hadn't blown it by the end, I would have said it's definitely interesting, if not necessarily good. It really was shaping up to be. It's too bad.

You want to see some bad IMDB reviews, by the way, look this thing up. It has a string some of of the worst user reviews I've ever seen. Even though I didn't wind up liking it as much as I'd hoped, I liked it better than *that*.

I had a very hard time following this, but in terms of style, I liked it. Gruff men wander around an apocalyptic urban landscape occasionally towered over by huge arachnoid creatures in the mist, and speak gruffly to each other. Occasionally someone attacks each other or shoots a gun. Not really sure what it was about besides that, but the atmosphere was cool.

By any reasonable measure, this should not have worked at all, but it goes so over the top, and ticks along so well without ever really sagging, that it's actually kind of a fun romp if you don't go into it expecting to take it seriously.

It's another movie that I'd never recommend to anyone, but rewatch occasionally myself just for fun. I wouldn't be surprised if it became a minor cult favorite.

Middling sci-fi drama about a geneticist, discovering her teenage son is a serial killer, cloning and re-cloning his latest victim for him in hopes of keeping him from killing anyone else. Not bad, typical sort of vaguely decent low-budget indie flick, but not worth going out of your way to see, either. Mostly-appealing cast is made up for by the fact that the lead sullen teen serial killer is the least charismatic character to grace my screen in ages. Considering it's an "Into The Dark", sure, ok, better than a lot of those, at least.

Squatters take a job with a catering company so they can scope out millionnaires' homes to squat in while they're away. This time, the millionnaire comes home early and finds them there. Guess which one is the real bad guy? What should have been a thoroughly mediocre exercise, with a distinctly familiar overall captivity/pursuit storyline, is redeemed by a few things: the pacing is well done and very slowly ratchets up the intensity at a consistent pace without it ever being noticeable, and the actors are decent, especially the guy playing the villain, who just plain chews the scenery—he's a real movie baddie, and plays it to the hilt, all leering and supremely overconfident douchebaggery. I, uh, I kinda liked it.

This is one of those movies that seems like it was originally written as a play, which is something that I always tend to like, when it's done competently. Here, it works really well, although if I have any complaint it's that the story builds emotional unease so capably and steadily, that by the time it turns from emotional to physical brutality, it almost breaks the tension. It feels very emotionally authentic as the unease builds. Fucking creepy new agers. (I do have mixed feelings about transplanting the "no cellphone reception out here" trope to the city, although they do pretty much pull it off.)

It's seriously well cast, fairly original, well done all around. Good ending, too. And the closing song rips off "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" very, very effectively.

So, ok, weird. Young woman disappears, then suddenly invites her family to a zoom call of her wedding with her creepy new fiancee. But: First off, this entire movie is a zoom call. The acting is terrible. Major developments are telegraphed and predictable. So, overall all the ingredients of a terrible horror movie. But: the pacing is good. Somehow, despite the terrible acting and the utter lack of motion as the entire movie is a screenshot, tension is built kind of effectively. That, and only that, elevates it very slightly above what it looks like it's going to be. I still wouldn't, say, recommend it, but apparently found-footage horror fans (a phenomenon I don't understand; to me "found footage fan" is an oxymoron) really like this one, and I get it. Plus it's not really found footage. (Note: on subsequent research, this is a Canadian film. Ok, pretty poor showing for indie Canadian fare, it explains why it's a tiny above bottom of the barrel instead of wallowing at the very bottom.

Crusty maine island fishermen, plus a local novelist and a local biologist, confront an unseen monster emerging from the sea. I liked it well enough that I remembered it, can't say much more than that.

Seriously, this is a funny one, because in some ways it's as dumb as a teen scream horror can get—picture Adam Brody, the world's least believable devil-worshipping bad guy, singing "867-5309" as he sacrifices someone to the devil, and you have a pretty good picture of where this goes in places. But, the thing is, it's really well-directed, and the cinematography is at times great... like when Anita (Amanda Seyfried) is having awkward teenage sex with her boyfriend at the same time as Jennifer (Megan Fox) is killing a boy in an abandoned house, Anita senses it through the apparent psychic rapport they share as old friends—which could be a horribly mishandled conceit, but fortunately it's so underplayed that it works—and she looks up to see a vision of Jennifer across the room, crouched like an animal over one of her victims. It only lasts a second but it's absolutely perfect. This movie is full of little touches like that, that redeem it and ultimately do make it an enjoyable repeat view, even despite all the dumb teen scream, one-step-more-serious-than-Buffy-The-Vampire-Slayer stuff. I don't love it, but I like it a lot, for sure, despite the glaring flaws. I've seen it a few times now and will watch again occasionally, it holds up.

As a testament to how just sorta different this movie is: Lance Henriksen has a cameo in it, and not only is he not the last to die, he does not die at all. Not even a little.

Google Glass™️ commercial disguised as a first-person shooter, as two students on vacation in Jerusalem run from the beginning of the apocalypse, which apparently consists entirely of zombies attacking, and living people turning into winged demons. I guess the filmmakers were concerned that people are so addicted to pop-up notifications, they wouldn't sit through a whole movie unless it contained them. Maybe this appeals to the sort of people who think that if you're running from zombies and your Google Glass™️ starts unexpectedly blasting music into your ears, the thing to do is spend the next five minutes yelling "Glass™️, music off! Glass™️, music off!" over and over, instead of just /taking the damn glasses off/.

Is it just me, or are first-person shooters getting even worse? Here, an intolerable"Jackass"-style YouTube film crew (great, another first-person shooter AND anpther horror movie about social media) goes to convince one of their members, who is on his honeymoon at, just because there aren't enough cliches, a cabin in the woods. Pranks appearing to go awry are revealed to be actually pranks themselves, until one decides to actually start murdering the others. Don't worry, I didn't spoil it, it's nowhere near as cool as the idea sounds. Add in the usual lousy improv acting, way too many scenes of boring daily life before the action begins, cameras that magically start and stop with the states of consciousness of the people being films, etc.

Fun enough, and probably an amusing watch for fans of the original (which I am), but not really anything special. The first one broke new ground, and this gets bigger and badder in the best tradition of sophomore sequels but doesn't really bring much new to the table beyond that. The sole exception to that is one notable and long stunt sequence, in which teeny-tiny gamine Chloe Grace Moretz takes out a whole van full of bad guys from on top of, alongside, and finally inside it as it speeds down the highway. That was cool.

This must be the worst-edited movie ever. A clear child of the Natural Born Killers/Pulp Fiction Era, except, with such poor editing that it's impossible to make sense of the story. Escaped killers pick a random suburban house to hide out, and it slowly becomes apparent that the clean-cut family living there is anything but normal. Picture the "Gimp" scene from Pulp Fiction stretched to feature length. The husband even calls the wife "Honeybunny" at one point, in case anyone doesn't miss the Tarantino stylistic ripoff. Criminals give impassioned speeches about their taste in movies, or pause to recite poetry in the middle of action sequences. The wife is suddenly hanging all over one of the murderers and the husband is tied up; suddenly the husband is free, and is wearing makeup, and when the police arrive to rescue him, he kills them with an axe for no apparent reason. Then he's not wearing makeup anymore and his wife is back with him and the murderer. An unexplained deformed brother of the family pops in and out. Then the gorgeous surviving police sergeant, who came to the house in pursuit of the escaped murderer, is running through the dungeon (did I happen to mention this surburban house has a dungeon?) with the murderer, chased by the completely unexplained people down there. The police sergeant are holding hands, and they kiss. The sergeant is shot, and her last words to the main killer are "Kill them all" for some reason. Then the killers stop to put on skull facepaint and shoot rifles—which it's never explained how they even got—into the darkness, to just say "Hey, we're cool", I guess. Along the way it's mentioned casually in passing that the father and daughter are sleeping together. The whole thing would almost be so bad and over-the-top that it's worth seeing for the sheer spectacle, but the complete lack of sense or explanation for anything makes it unwatchable. It's like a director kept thinking of unrelated scenes, "Wouldn't it be cool if this happened now", and nobody knew how to edit it into a movie.

decent cinematography, especially shots making grate use of wintry rural Canadian farmland, is the sole redeeming feature of this unremarkable captivity/pursuit flick in which a young boy is sent by his gorgeous parents to spend the winter on an isolated farm with his grandfather, and things go wrong. Not terrible, it has some typical hallmarks of the many well-made little Canadian indie horror movies that I like so much, but in terms of the plot and whole idea that someone made this movie at all—aim higher, people. I guess there must still be an audience for this stuff, but I myself can't see why people even still make these movies.

Gorgeous and/or tough-as-nails Army people in afghanistan shoot at each other until they accidentally discover stumble on genetically-bred sleestak in an old Russian bunker, then shoot guns at each other and sleestak for the rest of the movie. No, really, that's it.

You ever have that thing where you go to a remote cabin with a bunch of your friends, and wind up caught in a time loop movie? This is like that. You'd think by now filmmakers would have learned that you have to work really hard to do these kinds of stories in a way that keeps the narrative straight—to my knowledge, only "Triangle" has ever pulled it off—or at least be weird, cool, and cerebral enough, as the makers of "Primer" figured out, that nobody cares it's impossible to follow. If you can't go to one of those two paths, you're going to have a mess on your hands, all the more regrettable when for big parts of it it seems like you were almost going to pull it off. "Triangle" was well-told enough that you could follow it. "Primer" was interesting enough that you wanted to figure it out. This came close, but ultimately, was neither. It cuts back and forth between narratives, or between timelines, with no apparent connection or reason why. It shows things that look like they're going to be explained later, but they're never mentioned again. Weird photographs nobody can remember taking appear, which seem like you'll see them taken later on, but they never are. Plus, the story is repeatedly interspersed with interview segments that seem somehow related but it's never made clear how, or if it was, I missed it.

The story is, an Australian family's daughter drowns, and they believe they are beginning to see her ghost around the house. A medium gets involved, it goes through the kind of complex twists and turns any interesting real life documentary involving a true crime might go through, and it once never gets far enough from believable to break the spell. It's extremely sparing about creepy stuff so when it arrives, it's effective. The photo & video "evidence" for the haunting is sufficiently understated to be legitimately spooky... not clear enough to look fake, not blurred enough to look deliberately obscured. And then, when some of it is questioned, the way it could have been produced deceptively is presented realistically, too.

Well done. Hard to call this a great movie, but it's certainly very well done and succeeds entirely at being the horror mockumentary it's trying to be. It really looks real, all the way through. Worth a watch if any of this sounds interesting.

Kind a a cute low-key indie thriller. Strictly amateurish but the cast is kind of fun. Woman moves into a house and the strange woman who owns it has fixations. Like, she always only wears yellow, for starters. But there's more... Also some interesting nu-R&B on the soundtrack in places. it's cute. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone else but I sort of liked it.

Local kids go to explore a haunted house in the woods and get picked off by a masked psychopath, except, way slower and more boring than that sounds.

It's got big rubbery monsters chasing women in their bra and panties, it's got tough-as-nails farmers shooting shotguns at big rubbery monsters, it's got rubbery chest-bursters bursting out of people's torsos, it's got an innocent, wide-eyed tow-headed boy for pathos who (awesomely) gets eaten by a big rubbery monster. What do you want from a monster movie? It's not "Citizen Kane".

I liked it, I was totally entertained.

I was at a deli once, and I looked at a Reuben Sandwich. It was corned beef, sauer kraut, russian dressing, and swiss cheese, on pumpernickel. I was like, "Oh my god, it's everything I hate in one sandwich. I must try this." And I liked it!

This movie is like that. Found footage, perhaps the lowest budget movie I've ever seen—seriously, I'd be surprised if they spent $150 on this. It seems like a guy shot out an email to a bunch of his friends saying, "You want to be in a movie? Here's your lines. You can do it from home, I'll just film us all on a zoom call".

It's a "horror comedy" starring hipsters, no lighting design to speak of, features social media, looks like it was shot on a phone. Everything I hate in one movie!

And you know what? I enjoyed it! It's sincere. It's like if "Paranormal Activity" wasn't so pretentious and had the good sense to just be a little silly and have some fun.

Guy sits around the house, things go bump in the night, and the day. His friends explode during a zoom call. A ghost that looks like his wife in stage makeup makeup tries to lure him into a closet, which he deals with matter-of-factly:"I know you're not my wife, I just talked to her on the phone. And I wouldn't let my real wife lure me into a closet. Wait, yeah, I probably would. But that's besides the point." There's an unexplained monster.

But, along the way, he has one good idea: what if there's a sinister reason why horror movies, "Amityville" in particular, spin off into franchises of endless ridiculous sequels that nobody wants? And: can he put a stop to it?

I enjoyed this the way I'd enjoy a friend's jokey home movie if I was in on the joke. Don't expect any better than that, though.

It's different, I'll give it that. I wouldn't say it's particularly good but neither is it particularly bad. It takes until the third act to really get going but when it does, decent acting and creature design really help it along.

This was based loosely on the 1954 novel "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. That's the same "I Am Legend" that "The Omega Man" and Will Smith's much later action movie were based on. (This is worth a side note here: Matheson's is a name anyone with more than a passing similarity to my taste in movies & TV should be very well acquainted with, and if not, he certainly either wrote or directly inspired many things you're familiar with: he also wrote "The Incredible Shrinking Man", a dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", Steven Speilberg's first feature "Duel", the pilot of "Kolchak The Night Stalker", a slew of '60s Hammer and Roger Corman horror films, novels that were later adapted into "What Dreams May Come" and "Stir of Echoes"... the list is long, and besides being a chief inspiration for George Romero, he's also credited as such by Stephen King, and believed by Roger Ebert to be the spiritual father of later realist horror like "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist". Matheson was extremely influential. End of digression.)

Price plays a scientist holed up in a house trying to survive while the rest of the world has been transformed by a viral plague into a bumbling, bloodthirsty vampiric creatures, sort of a combination of vampires and zombies. Yes, nowadays that setup is hackneyed, but remember: this came out in 1964. Now you know where every other one of those movies got the idea from.

Part of the charm here, besides seeing these very familiar tropes when they were new, is that Price turns in about the best performance of his career here. He certainly hammed it up from time to time over the years, but he could act, and in this one, he plays it straight.

If you're a film buff, especially of horror or sci fi, you need to at least know this one.

Dawn Of The Dead. But in the woods instead of a mall. Because, cheaper, I guess. Also, with worse acting. Plus a weird international mish-mosh of accents including, grotesquely, what seems to be an Englishman trying to affect the accent of a southern redneck soldier in the English woods for some reason. Also the zombie actors appear to have been told to do some sort of jig as they run.

Woman's absorbed-in-utero twin starts to take over. When you've seen as many horror movies as I have, you know the drill.

It was originally recommended that I watch this with the original swedish soundtrack and English subtitles, and not use the terrible English audio overdubbing job, and though I don't like subtitled movies in this case it proved to be good advice.

Two years later the novel was remade for American audience and titled "Let Me In", starring Chloe Grace Moretz, and it might be one of the few times her presence has ever made a movie worse. It just doesn't work to have a famous familiar face for the vampire in this movie. The Swedish version greatly benefits from the cast of extremely talented but unfamiliar actors. Other than that, the American version is still pretty good, as the source material is so good and it sticks close to it. But I think if you're going to watch either movie instead of reading the novel, just go straight to the Swedish original. It's really the one.

Apparently there's an American TV series now too. Ugh.

Basically "The Blob" set in space or "Alien" without HR Giger's influence, but, really, surprisingly for a big-name Hollywood movie (Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds), really not bad for a space monster movie. If "not bad for a space monster movie" sounds appealing to you, and you're able to constrain your expectations to that, worth a watch. I liked it ok, which is more than I expected.

And that's all I know, because that's literally all it takes to get me to turn a movie off nowadays.

Who sent him this game? Who made it? They never say. That's the level this movie operates on.

Anyway, the story is the same in both: a crass suburban couple goes camping on a remote beach in Australia, and things just go wrong. To say more would spoil it. A big favorite of mine and a pretty one-of-a-kind film, in both versions.

I've since gotten the sense that the 1978 original of this isn't revered as a minor classic, but I'm not sure why. We live in a world where everybody has heard of "Last House On The Left" and "I Spit On Your Grave", both of which came out in the same general time as "Long Weekend", and those films are both garbage, nowhere near as good. Not even in the same class.

I went back and forth whether to mark this review as "favorite" or "honorable mention" because, unlike, say, "Network", both versions are far from undisputable, must-see cinematic masterpieces. But both of them, in their own ways, at very least hold up all the way through, and at their best have some extremely memorable and unique moments that I consider standout classic horror. I think my love of them has more to do with my particular tastes than anything else. But, ultimately, yes, in both versions, it's a favorite of mine.

Maya Rudolph as a billionaire who, following her divorce, goes to work for one of her charity foundations. A little unusually nuanced... while she predictably gets redemption by learning valuable lessons from the tireless charity volunteers, they also learn from her that it's ok to pamper yourself sometimes. Well-cast and well-acted, though, which elevates this a little bit over standard fare. I kinda like this show.

Nowhere near as good a film as any of the above-mentioned names would have made, and probably not one I can recommend, nonetheless, I admire the ambition, no matter how far short it falls of its lofty goals.

Talk about disappointing. Started in the sort of quiet, unambitious, but tense way some of my favorite little indie horror films do—reminded me in a strange way of "Yellowbrickroad", a flawed masterpiece in my eyes that takes a lot of chances and ultimately comes down on the right side of them, especially in how it made good use of daylit woods for tension, increasingly rare to find these days as a wooded setting has become such an overused horror movie trope. But then, it descends into the a hackneyed use of just throwing together a bunch of nonsensical hallucinatory scenes of surreal, unexplained "scary" things happening, one after another, with no real explanation why, in lieu of a plot. By the time it was over I couldn't figure out what the story even was, besides "Woman gets a job as a park ranger in the backcountry, hallucinates a lot of weird stuff from her past, then is a park ranger again." Eventually I looked it up on wikipedia, which explained it, and actually the fundamental idea, like the quietly spooky first act, wasn't bad. But the execution was just disjointed.

charming enough animated kids movie about a young woman who finds herself in the world where good luck and bad luck were made. Good-natured without being cloying. It's not brilliant like "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs", but you know when sometimes you just watch a kids movie because nothing else is on and you need to kill 90s minutes? You can do that with this one.

Couple buys a new vacation house, and lots of stilted, boring dialogue and terrible acting happens, "creepy" characters show up and say "dramatic" and "spooky" things, as the man descends into the worst imitation of Jack Nicholson's performance in "The Shining" ever committed to 16mm film. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Stiff, wooden overacting, terrible writing, stilted and unbelievable dialogue, lighting that looks like a high school drama production, jumbled story that flips between time periods without every explaining what's going on... how do these movies get made? Did nobody anywhere in this production stop and say, "Wait a minute, this really sucks, we should fix this or maybe just not do it"?

Ok, couldn't have sounded less promising. "When a TV crew shoots a reality show at an abandoned mental institution, they encounter a horde of demons, leading to a bloody fight for survival". But, then, I see Michael Madsen is in it. He has a glorified cameo as a smalltown sheriff for 15-20 minutes at the beginning. But, then, I notice something: for a movie that is basically what you'd expect from people wandering around a darkened abandoned building being attacked by actors in pancake makeup... it was actually alright. I don't really go for gore flicks, and it was super cheezy, but it was kind of good within those constraints. And then, instead of ending where most movies would, when the final girl escapes the asylum, it keeps going, and lets Michael Madsen come back to chew the scenery for a pretty brutal final act, elevating it to actually an alright Giallo-type flick. It's kind of weird and extreme and absolutely not subtle in any way, very much whatever the opposite of subtle is. I'm not a huge fan of Giallo, I mostly like it ok but don't love it, but if you're a Giallo fan, I might even say if you can put up with how long this takes to rise just a hair above the crowd, it might actually be worth seeking it out. I see it has a 2.5 out of 10 stars on IMDB, which makes sense, but, still. I might even watch it again someday, which is more than I can say for most of the crap horror films on Tubi.

Takes a while to get going, but sort of fun future technodystopia where a company sells "insurance" where if a spouse dies, you get a clone within 48 hours... with the ability to request small custom improvements, of course. What could go wrong? (Hint: everything.) Not quite the movie it wants to be, padded out with unnecessary secondary ideas that are explored then just dropped, and so takes a little while to get going ... would have been a very good Black Mirror episode, with tighter plotting. At twice that length feels a little long for the idea, but still, I'd give it a 'B'. Reasonably well done, not great but definitely not crap.

An impossible-to-understand movie, basically The Shining set in a small cabin, as a writer, his wife, and young son move to a cabin and their relationship falls apart and inexplicable things seem to happen, except, without making any narrative sense. The writer maybe kills a guy. The wife decides to cut the son's tongue out for no clear reason. People approach the writer like they know him. However, the cinematography is consistently gorgeous enough that it kept me engaged.

Jay Baruchel, Eric Andre, and the ridiculously likable Britt Lower in a magical-realist take on dating. If you've ever gone to a party and discovered your recent ex is there with her new boyfriend, and, he's literally Adolph Hitler, and, everyone at the party likes him more than you... then you should be able to relate to this.

It had all the monsters and magic of dating made literal, and, played them with a completely straight face. It was three seasons of deadpan humor, mixed with surreal, sci-fi, and fantasy elements. And I enjoyed it immensely.

I found this one on Tubi, and for the most part, it's actual horror cinema, not the TV "horror"-in-quotes writing exemplified by campy shows like "American Horror Story", which use horror tropes with any edges safely blunted off to avoid upsetting anybody.

As an anthology, the quality is up and down, but season 1 at least for the most part finds these directors in top form and, in the best episodes, not watering their fare down for TV... this is something fans of actual quality horror movies might actually enjoy.

Director Takashi Miike's episode, while not among my favorites, was actually pulled from the original run of the series by Showtime over concerns about the content being too extreme (for cable TV in 2006!) and, true to form, Dario Argento's episode, characteristically both ridiculous and disturbing, had to be edited for violence in the original run, too.

And, happily, it doesn't even lean very often into "horror comedy" or in-jokes, for the most part indulging in that only when it will actually work (I had a chuckle when John Landis's episode has a policeman, speculating that a wild animal attack has improbably occurred in his town, mention that a wolf attack was reported in central London in 1981, an amusing callback to his own "An American Werewolf In London", a childhood favorite of mine.)

The second season isn't as good, it's more dulled-down "tv horror", although it still has its moments, and is, by and large, still often better than most other TV horror series I've seen. I was somewhat unnerved by the idea, if not entirely the execution, of Joe Dante's season 2 episode "The Screwfly Solution", in which something similar to pest control biotech, originally designed to reduce insect populations by chemically interfering with mating urges, finds a much broader use.

Tobe Hooper also is nice to see back in fine form in his season 1 episode "Dance Of The Dead", but I'm not going to say any more than that about that.

Fairly unmemorable one-season anthology series, from the producers of "Masters of Horror", which follows the same format of letting prominent (in this case, less prominent) genre directors and writers an hour of TV time to do their thing. Talky mostly more about dialogue than action, which is actually how I tend to like my sci-fi, and by and large pretty well-done, although a day after bingeing it I find myself struggling to remember any of the plotlines. Notably good acting in the first episode, getting Judy Davis and Sam Waterston locked in a room together to act out a sci-fi drama was a good idea.

A stunningly original story in which a young pregnant couple's car breaks down in the countryside where, in an unexpected twist, there's no cell service, so they go to, get this, a nearby farmhouse, which turns out to be inhabited by, you'll never believe this, a crazy family that takes them prisoner and wants to keep the baby. Finally, get this, in the end, only the woman survives to escape. How in the world do they come up with this stuff? I mean, other than maybe watching the 3000 other movies with the same exact plot?

"Cube", but with less explanation behind it. A woman finds is picked up hitchhiking, then wakes up in a series of tunnels filled with traps and monsters. She escapes. That's it, that's the whole plot.

Well, I have found it—the least believable movie of all time. A bunch of rich people go to a chef's exclusive island for an exclusive meal, which will end in the death of all the guests and staff (as part of the"art"), and some attend even aware of this beforehand. How they got a bunch of well-known actors to participate in this silliness is beyond me. Only slight redeeming point: Ralph Fiennes, already proven great as menacing authority figures, as the chef. But B-list faces abound: Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, Judith Light. What were they thinking??

So consistently terrible, cheap-looking, and over-the-top, yet so obviously committed to by some of Michigan's worst actors, that I bet it could be a cult favorite among "so bad it's good" fans.

I'm not one of those, though.

Big-budget supernatural thriller. Kiefer Sutherland and essentially a glorified cameo from Amy Smart. It's hard to go wrong with a supernatural thriller (I refuse to call this a horror movie; a little too much gunfire) about mirrors. Even the worst ones (Poltergeist 3) have their moments, because, mirrors are creepy. That shot of someone walking away from a mirror but their reflection staying there and gazing at them is always going to work. So, take that, and add Kiefer Sutherland as a gorgeous disgraced-cop-turned-night-security-guard-for-an-abandoned-department-store shooting his gun at a demon in the sewer, and some obligatory scenes of his gorgeous ex-wife and cute kids at home being creepily menaced by every reflective surface in the house, and, meh. Definitely will appeal to, I don't know, the kind of people who thought "Inception" was an intellectual movie. For me, faintly entertaining, since I had a good idea what I was getting into (Kiefer Sutherland is kind of a tipoff.) Y'know, Hollywood. It's not total crap like something you'd see John Cusack in, but not somehow cool, like a movie Lance Hendriksen would appear in, either.

This, I must say, is my kind of movie: just things going *awry*, to the most perverse extreme, yet without stretching credulity so far past the point of believability that you can't empathize. Numerous passing notes provide depth, such as a briefly-seen news interview clip showing a parent who has murdered his child, apparently in full command of his faculties, explaining calmly that "I think what's happening is awful" — except, when asked directly, in the case of his child, which, he says with obvious satisfaction, "it was exactly right."

Great horror draws you in with realism and plays on your own comforts and fears, and this conceit, which could so easily have been botched, fully qualifies. It's got the kind of tone and balance to make it a true visceral horror on an emotional, not physical, level, a kind of emotional gore (and, it bears mentioning as an aside, visually it's much less bloody than a movie like this could have been, and shies away from showing gore that most people would have. For instance, one scene is made more disturbing by intimating the presence of the corpse of a child, someone we have seen earlier in the film, by the sound of flies and not actually ever showing it.) This is perhaps a slight disappointment for the modern horror buff, but for me, it's a throwback to a time when horror pictures tried to be well-made movies, not just 90 minutes of visual shock and gore, and aspired to be lean/spare/economical rather than gratuitous. It's the kind of horror that works in broad daylight.

That proper "emotional horror" tone and balance are something very, very few movies pull off right, and I can think of far more failures than successes...the Nicole Kidman vehicle "The Invasion" leaps to mind as an example of this common failure, in how takes one of the creepiest basic tropes in storytelling history and succeeds in somehow divesting it of any sort of gut-level unease for the viewer.

Or perhaps the best opposing example is this film's failed evil twin, "The Happening", with its vaguely similar themes, equally disturbing in concept and even in some passing momentary scenes, and yet, in its entirety, a complete, laughable, abject failure in its execution.

So, with this very well-done buildup, I'd say the first half of this was shaping up to be one of my favorite movies. I generally multitask while I watch movies, but about 15 minutes into this one, I had to put the laptop away so I could watch it with undivided attention, which is about the highest praise I can give the first 15 minutes of a horror movie. The dread nicely escalates, as news reports and background police activity slowly reveal society going off the hinges, finally culminating earlier in the film than expected in a very well-played scene in the delivery room in which mom's sister bears her first child — with results that were played well enough not to be disappointing even though they were entirely predictable. Cinematically, up to that point, it was well done, in the same way that I like about the 2004 remake of "Dawn Of The Dead" — especially the beginning, which it was reminiscent of, in both the early scenes of a forebodingly sterile suburbia, and in the overall "this is never going to be an 'A' horror movie, so let's make it the most solid B+ horror movie we possibly can" quality of the buildup.

Unfortunately, it then sags in the middle, when it stops showing the widespread effects and background of society deteriorating, and shifts entire focus inwards to focus exclusive the main protagonist family, becoming sort of a murderous reverse "Home Alone" where the parents, rather than burglars, are after the kids, resulting in all sorts of around-the-house ingenuity (duct tape is used in two different gimmicks), and never pulls back out to show what's going on in the rest of society again.

It even completely forgets about the sister and baby the movie made us invest emotionally in halfway through with a harrowing delivery room scene, never bothering to return to them — rendering that entire subplot a mere shock device instead of a plot development.

But, oh, on the plus side, did I mention, the parents are Nicholas Cage and Selma Blair? These choice bits of casting really help things along, especially Blair, who is talented enough to glide smoothly from murderous to tender and back again in a heartbeat, telling the kids she's trying to kill that she and their dad love them "more than anything," and making it sound believable.

The overall fun of the picture compensates for its more predictable plot developments, but unfortunately, as the narrative of mounting social unrest-cum-terror of the first half is completely abandoned in exchange for a much narrower survival tale about one pair of kids who weren't really given quite enough background or character development to make us care about them personally, it ceases to live up to its broader potential as a horror yarn. It's the very definition of a seriously flawed gem.

The reviewer on RogerEbert.com got it right when he said, "[the filmmaker] gets so much right here that I can't help but strongly recommend "Mom and Dad" ... with some qualifications." Ultimately, I don't love it. But I know I will watch it again. That's definite.

And, as if I needed one more thing to like about this near-perfect near-miss, it also once again reaffirms my favorite horror movie trope: the key to survival in any horror-movie scenario is outliving Lance Hendrikson. He's *always* the last to go. I think they cast him for that on purpose.

[Note, 2023: Posting this online several years after writing it, I want to add I was sufficiently disturbed by the good parts of this movie that to this day I've resisted watching it again as it's popped back up online. It's not so much that it's a scary movie as it effectively communicates scary concepts that I'm not sure I want to think about: essentially, it asks, what exactly, deep down, is the difference between the instinctual drives of love and rage?  Off the top of my head I can't think of a lot of movies that had that kind of effect on me.]

Absolutely dreadfully boring first person shooter. Two people spend half the movie driving around doing nothing, then they spend half the movie running through the woods and arguing. And that's really it. They talk and yell and run and nothing else happens. It's not even "found footage horror" any more. They might as well make a found footage movie of paint drying.

Amateurish, pretentious outing where a bunch of kids and some unexplained adults apparently having a Halloween party in an abandoned house in Gibraltar start stabbing each other for some reason. Also apparently some of them are ghosts, because nobody else reacts to them, and they sometimes turn to the camera and brag "I'm a fucking ghost!". Also there's one part where they got bored making a movie because it turns into a badly over-acted music video or musical or something. Note to future directors: throwing one scene of an unexplained theatrical musical number into the middle of your horror movie doesn't really make it that much scarier. Nor does having a murdered, gloating over the murder scene, address the camera, "You wanted blood? Well here's fucking blood!" Am I supposed to feel bad now?

You don't really need to know more about that plot than that, do you? It's another horror movie about social media influencers, which has been categorically proven to be the lamest thing ever to make a horror movie about.

But, to finish.... they go into the woods and play a VR game, that, I dunno, it turns out to be real, or something? The whole thing is for people who were raised thinking watching someone play a video game is entertaining. Not for me.

Starts with the apparently now de rigeur first-person shooter convention of spending like a damn hour showing them goofing around and not advancing the plot in any way.

A true aberration, the rare "so bad it's good" movie I enjoyed. This thoroughly"USA Up All Nite"-level fare about a bunch of frat boys who go to a bordello and are killed one-by-one by the ladies is, well, thoroughly"USA Up All Nite"-level fare, from start to finish. It doesn't really try too hard, and plays like something made in about 1972. These movies, you know, they remind me of my shiftless year or two right after college, working a shit admin assistant job by day and smoking weed and watching "USA Up All Nite" every weekend. Hard not to feel a little affection for a movie that evokes that this well. I'd never recommend anybody watch it, but I may again, if there's nothing else on someday. Suprisingly, this is from 2006. I would have given it no later than 1992 at the absolute latest, and probably earlier.

What a weird movie. A motel with the ruins of a burned-down "Mystery Spot" tourist trap out back draws strange clientele: A man rents a room and spends all afternoon auditioning actors, asking them strange and probing questions. A writer, mourning her husbamd, checks into the next room. A policeman apparently lives in the parking lot, watching the filmmaker to try to figure out what he's doing. Now, make no mistake: this is a bad movie. It's poorly written. It's mostly poorly acted. It's a bad indie film. But, for that: it's pretty good. Most importantly, the leads, the filmmaker and the writer, are really good actors, far better than you usually see in this sort of thing. About halfway through the movie, they get a long scene just talking, getting to know each other—pure character development and, it seems to me the sort of thing two skilled actors might have asked the director to put in the movie and let them ad lib, just to give them some real acting to do. And, it kinda works, it elevates the film just a little bit. Plus, although it's really badly written, it's also not particularly derivative or anything I've seen before... maybe it reminds me a tiny bit of "The Lost Room", but it's not even terribly close to that. So: I kinda liked it! It's bad, for sure. But I liked it. If I had seen this on "Chiller Theater" when I was a kid, I probably would have remembered it fondly for decades.

Sample dialog:

Soldier (who looks nothing like a soldier, but we're told she's a soldier): "Shark attack at 1 o'clock, sir"

General: "One o'clock? That's a long time from now. Are you psychic?"

Soldier: "No, I mean [pointing] thereabouts."

General: "So why didn't you just say 'thereabouts'?"

Soldier: "It didn't seem soldier-y."

Now picture that dialog being delivered people who just have nothing like the comic timing or sensibility that might have allowed Leslie Nielsen to get away with it.

Funny thing is, given how utterly silly it is, the writing isn't terrible. Leslie Nielsen probably could have pulled it off. He's nowhere within a country mile of this, though.

Just one example off the top of my head: a struggling appliance store is being run out of business by a nearby major chain store. When the chain store advertises that they'll match any advertised price, Fielder advises the appliance store owner to start advertising a certain TV for $1. Then, he'll send people over to buy out that TV from the chain store for $1, and when they're out of stock, his client can raise the price again and resell them in his own store for full price, a 100% profit.

In the kind of complication the show specialized in, somebody noticed that if he advertised the TV for $1, someone might come in and try to buy it for $1. But Fielder has a plan. When people show up looking for the advertised special, he throws numerous obstacles in their way, including pointing to a sign that the store put up that they now have a dress code, and formalwear is required to enter.

Then when one person comes back later dressed in a tuxedo and demands to buy the TV, Fielder tells him, sure, it's right in our special room in the back, and leads him to a back wall... with a tiny, one-foot door in it. He tells the man, "that's the premium TV section, they're expensive so we keep them in a special room."

The man gets down and squeezes through the door...

...and then we see inside, as the man stands up: he's in one room, and then there's some kind of glassed-in middle room he has to walk through, and then, on the other side of the middle room, there's the room with the $1 TV.

And, in the middle room, is a live alligator.

So the man gives up and leaves. And as he sees him out of the store, Nathan innocently asks him, "So... you don't want to buy the TV?" And says to him, "I feel bad, too, you know. That's $1 of profit we're not getting."

Meanwhile, as this is all going on, there's a second ridiculous subplot of Fielder trying to hire people to go buy TVs for $1 from the chain store.

All this is pretty par for the course for this show, things regularly got that goofily complicated or occasionally much moreso. It was really funny, and consistent. Not just once, but several times during the show's run, stunts Fielder set up for episodes in production went viral on the internet or even in the news media by themselves, before the episodes aired, with nobody realizing until later on that they were staged for a comedy TV show.

Ok, wait, let me qualify that.

For starters, let me say: my first impression was, most people will hate this movie. Reading up on it afterwards, as is my habit when a movie really interests me, I discovered, yes, sure, enough, everybody hated it. Not just disliked it, I mean REALLY hated it.

I was blown away by it, loved almost every minute of it.

This is a very flawed and totally amateurish movie for sure—but, here's the rub: "Night Of The Living Dead", "Eraserhead", and most of David Cronenberg's classic films were flawed, very amateurish movies. Like them, this to me is the work of an extremely skilled amateur savant, someone with absolutely no understanding of most of the conventions of storytelling, and an absolutely brilliant intuitive feel for the camera and the editing desk.

This is a movie for deep, deep horror aficianados. It is absolutely gory, grand guignol. It has very little plot and so little dialogue it could pass for a silent movie. It's almost an art film. None of the characters even have names. It looks like it was filmed on a $1.50 budget.

The plot is almost nonexistent: A heroin-addicted serial killer roams the city streets while some sort of zombie apocalypse rages. And that's it. Beyond episodic scenes of people trying to survive and the title "necropath" walking around trying to fulfill whichever hunger of his is dominant in the moment, what little plot there is left open-ended. No questions are answered. Is the serial killer a zombie? Are the "zombies" alive or dead (they seem to be able to think and have an odd tendency to speak, as much as anybody in this movie does, which pretty much amounts mostly to one-word utterances.) None of it is ever explained. And if you ask me, it doesn't matter.

The movie is absolutely carried by the performance of the killer, whose gibbering, bug-eyed, feral performance alone eleviates this to the level of a favorite for me. From the very first sight of him, leering eerily out-of-focus outside a car window as he prepares to attack the occupant, I was immediately gripped. The performance, the cinematography, everything... that one shot was enough to tell me something was special here.

This reminded me in a way of "The Inside" (2012), another movie that forgoes pretty much all the conventions of movie making such as, say, plot—ordinarily something I prefer a movie has—very successfully, in my opinion. This, like "The Inside", is not a movie about a story, it's a movie about the conventions of the horror genre, and it tackles hallowed conventions in a fresh way. This one was even better at it than "The Inside", too, and despite the conventional (read: tired) zombie film tropes, this one is far more original in how it tackles it.

I don't know if anyone in the world but me likes this movie, or even doesn't absolutely hate it. But I loved it. Absolutely should be a deep cult favorite. I am sure as years go by horror aficianados here and there will talk about this with reverence. And most (of the very few) people who've seen it will think they're nuts. But they're not. It's repellent and awful and disgusting and horribly lacking in any conventional redeeming qualities, and also, really, really something special for the kind of audience that can appreciate it.

Think of it as a zombie movie "Last Exit To Brooklyn", if that helps put it in perspective.

Elle Fanning as a young model garnering resentment among other models by rising too fast when she gets to LA, so they kill her. Technically very well made, it's sort of like someone saw a Gaspar Noe movie and said, "I can do that!" because they didn't notice there's actually more to Gaspar Noe's movies than slick cinematography.

I love this movie so much, am so close to it, I don't know what to say. It's like trying to write a summary of a beloved life-long friend.

This movie about the intersection of power, economics, and media, explored through a tale about the mental breakdown of a news anchor and the paradox of his resulting rise in ratings. It predicted, in 1976, so many things that we didn't see in reality until much later: the forces of economic globalization, the rise of "reality television", the commercial subversion of TV news (still, it may be hard to remember now, valued as a source of objective information at the time) from a reporting concern into a driver of profits and propaganda outlet—and takes them all to a ridiculous extreme, plus, casts a woman in the role of a cutthroat executive, something my mom reported she first began to see in the workplace in the 1980s.

It says something that, while few remember this movie nowadays, many still remember the tagline from the protagonist's first major act of on-the-job defiance: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" If this movie wasn't when the idealism of the '60s finally breathed its last and yielded the floor to a deep and distressed cynicism, it sure was a touchstone. This movie was to today's hyper-commercial, bottom-line-driven media what "A Clockwork Orange" was to violence: it laid them bare, even exaggerated them to a cartoonish degree—remarkable because in 1976, today's hyper-commercial, bottom-line-driven media corporations didn't really exist yet. But this movie read the tea leaves and saw what was coming.

Along the way it looks, courtesy some of the best-written dialogue in all of cinema by an uncredited Paddy Chayefsky, at the effects on the souls of the people ushering those changes along, represented by the May-December relationship between William Holden and Faye Dunaway's characters, presented respectively as members of the old guard and the ruthless new breed of television executives whose allegiance is to a heartless corporatism more concerned with ratings than with love, then with human life. Pretty strong stuff for 1976, and still strong today.

Also deserving of mention is the stunning cameo by Ned Beatty as the network head who may be manipulating the protagonist's deteriorating mental state, or may actually believe what he's saying, as he closes the curtains to rant in a darkened boardroom with the fervor of religious fundamentalist, calling nations and ideologies obsolete, describing globalized commerce as a fundamental force of nature governing man's existence "since he crawled out of the much", and outright comparing business to God, with—and remember, he's shouting this at a deranged news anchor—television as its prophet. Again: 1976. Incredible.

For a guy like me, with an appreciation for both social commentary and absurdism, a healthy dash of cynical humor, a strong love of a story that moves along on well-written dialogue, and a (in the aesthetic sense) Decadent's fascination with how things fall apart, it would be tough to imagine a movie more tailor-made for my enjoyment.

My brother-in-law, generally a right-on guy but perhaps at 3 or 4 years younger just on the other side of a generational divide I'm at the very tail end of coming before*, told me he just couldn't get into this movie, because the entire style of it seemed very dated to him. I've rarely been so disappointed.

(*My adolescence came at an unusual time culturally—to use that as the most obvious marker for the cultural shift of the early '80s, I think there's a big formative difference between having been in 9th grade when MTV came out, and having been in 5th or 6th grade at that time. But that's a topic for a whole other section of this website.)

Basically, Kentucky Fried Movie, but with horror shorts instead of humor shorts.

Activists try to defeat government-implanted chips that prevent the citizens from seeing that their gorgeous futuristic city is actually a slum. What a funny movie. A 2017 sci-fi B movie that looks for all the world like it's from about 1980 at the latest. Hammy acting, lots of practical and optical effects, sets that look big-budget and actors that look for all the world like Hollywood actors but aren't anybody you've ever heard of. Absolutely crap, derivative, but a little charming in that late-70s-bad-scifi way, and amusing that someone made something like this 10 years into the post-Matrix era.

A middling action picture elevated to high entertainment by the sheer genius of casting Bob Odenkirk and Christopher Lloyd as tough-as-nails action heroes, and, the unlikely fact that they actually pull it off. I liked it.

Ok, I can't say this is a great movie, but it scores pretty high for originality. In a kind of "Home Alone" meets "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers", a girl living in an isolated house single-handedly fights an alien invasion that has taken over her town. More clever than awesome, and arguably just plain silly at times, it's nonetheless supported by very decent cinematography, a script that adds just enough original elements to keep it from becoming either a stale home-invasion movie or a stale fighting-space-aliens movie, and most notably, only 3 words of dialogue in the movie's over-90-minute runtime. Reading up afterwards, apparently it created quite a critical stir, and that makes sense. Even though it's got more style than substance, that style does stand out as something kind of different than I've seen before. Apparently it's the same guy who wrote and directed "The Babysitter", one I wasn't as crazy about, IIRC it leaned a little to heavy on just being silly.

An android aboard a spaceship is upgraded and begins to have feelings. Funny, this is about as amateur and low-budget as it gets, with an odd assortment of clearly amateur actors, but, while I usually hate that sort of thing, the level of commitment on the part of everyone involved makes it kind of entertaining. Like, if this was presented as a fan film, and judged by that standard, it would be pretty good for a fan-made film. Which is, uh, something, I guess. I ultimately kinda liked it, which is a surprise. But be aware of what you're getting into. Prepare mentally to watch a cheapo fan-made home-movie, and you'll do fine.

another dreadful first-person shooter that looks like someone had a spare weekend so they decided to make a movie on their iphone with their friends. Nothing happens for 25 minutes, and then all the lights go out, and it's like an hour and a half of people running around a darkened house shouting at each other. That's it. Monsters are heard outside and never seen. Nonstop nauseatingly shaky cellphone-shot video never sits still long enough to see what's going on. Seems like they made it up as they went along. What Hath The Blair Witch Project Wrought?

Terribly miscast macho he-men who look like extras from a "Dirty Harry" police station scene (the actor playing the captain has almost 300 IMDB credits to his name, including "Donnie Brasco" and "Fast and Furious") run around spouting scenery-chewing Lovecraftian dialogue at each other, like"I have to go. Things are hunting me. Hideous things that dissolve and devour..." or "My pets. You see them? The creatures that fill what men call the pure air and the blue sky", as cheesy, obviously papier-mache bugs and creatures float and skitter around.

Meanwhile, out-of-place humor pops up periodically, like bringing a magician the heart of a demon in a styrofoam takeout container, and when they tell him, "We have brought you a tribute", he says, "What, leftovers?", before opening up a demonic portal in his torso, a giant, hideous gaping maw full of very obviously fake rubber and foam fangs*; or, at another point, a female waitress character for some reason is played, completely straight and with no explanation or anything to suggest it's meant to be humorous, by a hipster-looking male actor with a goatee and mustache.

This seems like a movie made by a very imaginative person who hadn't seen a movie since they were a young child and had only vague memories of what movies are supposed to be like, and a special effects budget limited to whatever they could spend in an hour at the craft store. I generally don't get into "so bad it's good", but this is so over-the-top, and they try so hard, despite having no budget and no talent, I can't help but be entertained by the effort.

I might even give this an "honorable mention"... which, in this case, should not be confused with saying it's in any way good. Rather, it's so pyrotechnically, impressively bad, so ambitious without having anything even remotely resembling talent involved anywhere in the production, that I have definitely never seen quite anything like it. I can say that much for sure.

(*C'mon. How cool is this, just for being so unrepentantly awful:

I am really, seriously not a fan of "so bad it's good" movies, but really just so far beyond the pale the ordinary rules just don't apply.)

family goes to their house in the woods, and some fucking nonsense or other happens.

literally a horror movie written, and I assume mostly improvised in an evening, by an 11 year old girl. I assume this is a home movie that somehow got posted on Tubi. It even sounds like it was recorded on a phone, with a lot of the speech unintelligible. After about 15 minutes of watching them put on makeup and preen I turned it off.

The seemingly ubiquitous-on-Tubi Cynna Rae Shurts plays a space supply ship captain slowly going stir crazy and losing her grip on reality. Mediocre sci-fi thriller with a cast of like 3 people.

A sci-fi alternate history tale about three men stationed in an Arctic outpost during a steampunk version of WWII that gas stretched into the mid-1950s. An enemy mind-control weapon drives them all mad, and has the deadly side effect of turning a really interesting concept into a really dull movie.

As the last of humanity dies out due to a biowarfare contagion gone wrong, three couples in various stages of life hash out their relationships. Which is great, because, you know, nothing is more interesting than spending two hours watching couples hashing out their relationships.

But, you know what? This is a pretty well-made movie. The characters are paper-thin but the acting and casting are above average and that slides the shallowness of it by better than usual. It takes its time getting where it's going, but over the second half, ratchets up the dramatic tension.

Basically the whole thing is played like an extremely, EXTREMELY and somewhat gory dark suspense pic or crime thriller, not a horror movie. There are certainly no scares here, and it's more about the cops circling in on him than torture-as-entertainment, as these films usually are.

Plus, as I said, it's notably well-made for this sort of movie. If captivity flicks weren't an extremely exhausted and cheap genre, and this was the first one I'd ever seen, I'd probably have liked this. I bet some people think this is great.

I definitely cannot recommend it. It's still a captivity flick, more lurid than anything else. It definitely wouldn't exist without Silence Of The Lambs's "I've got a woman in my basement who I'm doing horrible things to" trope and Saw's "let's make this captivity as gratuitously twisted as possible" vibe to pave the way.

But. it's definitely better than most of the movies that a lot of what could be said about it could be said about. Which is kind of like saying a particular poke in the eye is better than most pokes in the eyes. But, sometimes, maybe you admire the skill with which someone poked you in the eye, maybe? Like, you didn't like it, but, you have to admit they're really, really practiced and graceful at poking people in the eye?

I dunno. I would say to anyone, don't watch it. But, if you do want to watch seriously violent, gory, gratuitously twisted crap, this is way better than most of that crap, I guess? I'd probably mark this as having something a little special about it, even, but I wouldn't want to seem like I might be recommending it.

So it's always been funny to me to call this a "horror" movie, which almost requires grit rather than gloss and authenticity to generate scares. But, Tobe Hooper directed, and if nothing else just about anything Tobe Hooper touches is going to have a few brilliantly scary scenes. I will say the visual effects that (mostly) seemed so dazzling at the time look much cheaper and faker today than I remember them being. It's a movie about the supernatural, but it's more a family drama/action movie of sorts (Spielberg, go figure) than a horror movie.

Actually, watching it again after so long, it struck me, it's a pretty unique movie. It owes debts to movies that came before but really resynthesizes things in a manner that was novel for the time, and probably still is today. It was worth the rewatch, but probably not another one soon. Still, it hasn't totally aged out, and deserves its rep.

Goofy, extremely unintentionally campy Australian film about an affable middle-aged amateur exorcist, going around doing exorcisms. Lots of good rubber demon costumes and Buffy-style production values but they play it completely straight. I dunno, somehow the Australian accents let them get away with this.

another very-slightly-better-than-average first person shooter. Widower bent on proving the supernatural doesn't exist invites in a demon to show that it doesn't work. Spoiler: turns out to be a mistake. Pretty intense performance by the lead actor showing his gradual decline into violent lunacy, but would have been better without the conceit. Don't we have enough of these movies already? The trick just isn't that good, especially by the time you realize a demon probably wouldn't have had such sustained interest in continuing to film himself, and from multiple angles, no less.

Ok, very shortly I'm glad I stayed with it. Thi smight be one of those rare "so bad it's good" movies that really is so bad it's good. He spends the rest of the time trapped in his apartment while outside his neighbors turn into creatures, who you can tell are evil because they crabwalk instead of walking upright and talk through an octave divider, and does a very hammy job of trying to act like he's losing his mind. This thing has about half the depth of a video game. I wonder sometimes if lighting design must be easy, because a lot of these crappy movies have noticeably competent lighting, lots of good use of shadow. Also I can't figure out if we're supposed to notice that the paintings on his walls keep turning slanted or even 90 degrees sideways from how they were, or if it was just an accident. At one point he's wearing a sombrero for no clear reason, and attempts to board up his windows with duct tape. Plus, there's awesome violations of the 180 degree rule, as the door to his apartment is always to the left, but the creatures out in the hall banging on it (in between stopping to writhe and crabwalk around for no stated reason) are banging on a door on the left side of the hall. It took me about 7 times to figure out why it was so confusing. Also, I wonder how many apartment building hallways actually have huge, blade-runneresque an slow-turning exhaust fan leading to the outdoors, with a golden shaft of afternoon light shining cinematically through it. Must be a Los Angeles thing. Bonus: the dumbest, most cliche'd ending of any movie ever.

I have never seen a movie pull such a successful turnaround over its runtime as this one. I found it in with FreeVee's horror movies, but noticed the names of a bunch of comedy actors in the credits (including Max Greenberg as the douchebag he's only hinted at in every other role he's ever played.) It starts seeming like a somewhere trite revenge fantasy—woman goes out, acts drunk, gets guys to take her home and try to take advantage of her, and then confronts them and does something to them that's never actually revealed. And, it was well done enough to be enjoyable on that level, even if it seemed a little on-the-nose and unimaginative. I figured , with all the comedy actors, I was in for satire on the level of "Teeth", perhaps. Then it progresses to reveal the crime she is avenging, and she moves from general douchebags to targeting the people from her past who were specifically involved in the crime. Also shows characters with some depth, not everything is black and white... such as the parents of the friend she's avenging (without their knowledge) asking her to move on from the loss, which she's clearly unhealthily holding on t, noticed even by the other people in the film who care about her. The tension ratchets, and by the end, not only are there some profoundly disturbing scenes (which is saying a lot considering how many horror movies I've seen) but I genuinely didn't know what was going to happen next, until it finally built to a very satisfying final act that I didn't see coming.

It's a tough call if I can recommend it as a watch, as a very good chunk of the movie is no better than ok, it takes a long time to build and I'm not sure the denouement is quite worth all that. But I will say it opened by setting expectations very low, and only turned up the heat extremely slowly, but by the end totally had me, I was kinda blown away.

Basically, "Threat Level Midnight", with 10% time-travel content added to the end. Cool silver shirts, though.

I think this might be a TV show. Seems like it was filmed on video. A girl does VR experiements where she seduces and kills women, then does it in real life. I turned it off halfway though.

incomprehensible, ponderous, thoroughly amateurish mishmash filmed in black and white. Note to amateur film makers: if you're tempted to make an "artsy" film, find something else to do with your time. Only David Lynch has ever pulled that off as an amateur, and you're not him.

A bunch of intense people sit around in very dimly-lit rooms and have muffled conversations in front of a wide-angle lens that never stops moving. This movie is dark, as in, the most poorly lit—or poorly un-lit—movie I can recall seeing. One of the actors could have walked into the room while I was watching it, and I wouldn't have recognized them, because you can't see their faces. Amusingly, on IMDB, a bunch of the actors' profile photos are also too dark to see their faces, because, this is the only movie they've ever been in.

Well: turns out, if you can forgive the stupid story, for the millionth cinematic variation of "The Most Dangerous Game"... this is a pretty good movie, for what it is. Definitely a strong cut above what I expected it to be. The cast helps: Samara Weaving (in probably the best performance I've seen her give, by the end she's downright feral), Adam Brody, Andie MacDowall, Melanie Scrofano, plus a bunch of unfamiliar actors, all hamming it up enough to make the eccentric, homicidal rich characters entertaining without going so far over the top that it's too ridiculous to enjoy. It's much better made than the trash movie I expected, and, actually manages to work in some decent black humor, something that a lot of horror movies try at and fail, but this one actually succeeds at pretty well. Turns out a few of the people behind it worked on "Scream", which, meh, but it makes sense, and without Scream's wink-and-a-nod irony it works alright. If you can forgive the stupid story.

Not great, but definitely a cut above the ordinary. It's kinda good. I kinda liked it. Well-made enough that it's probably a good date movie. I can see maybe rewatching this at some point in the future, which is high praise. If you can forgive the stupid story.

Not bad for a soooort of rural-vacation-goes-wrong captivity/pursuit flick. Londoners rent a boat for an evening trip, get lost out in the reeds where some creepy, menacing local kids are partying. Not the best-told story, for sure, kind of a sloppy hand with introducing the more supernatural-ish elements. Was alright stylistically alright, I suppose, for what it is, in that it was a bit restrained.

one of those movies half the world disappears in the Rapture and the survivors deal with monsters and hail the size of footballs. Not terrible for one of those, I guess. Did have vaguely some cool effects, monsters snatching people up off the street and stuff.

Wil Wheaton fiiiinally earns my complete forgiveness for Wesley Crusher, by playing his very creepiest self in what, for at least 2/3 of it, plays like one of the better (although definitely not one of the best) Black Mirror episodes. Set in the 80s (and well done at that, not overplaying it) a lonely bachelor stuck at home caring for his mother brings home a "Rent-A-Pal" VHS virtual friend. Seriously, I didn't have high hopes for this one, and the ending engages in some much-too-predictable strokes, but overall it's mostly well done enough, and creative enough, to be worth a watch. Bonus points for keeping you guessing about whether the video tape is or is not actually responding to what's happening in front of the tv in some amusingly creative creative ways. Again, not great, nobody will be blown away by this, but it's a pretty original and entertaining watch.

Kind of a strange, highly stylized film about a young woman with a degenerative skin condition who uses other people's to replace it. Equal parts Cronenberg and Argento. Slickly produced but I had a bit of a tough time following it, but I might have been distracted. Not overly gory but has sort of grand guignol special effects that could be a tough watch for the squeamish.

Ok, so starts, and proceeds through the first half as amusingly terrible take on the Groundhog Day trope. Girl is abducted from a party by an"incel"-stereotype stalker, wakes up in his guest room every time he kills her, after a brief trip to heaven to see her dead grandfather who encourages her along. I'm seriously unsure if this is meant to be a comedy or not. But then, it starts getting into character development, actually spends a little time talking than showing action, finally showing an almost sympathetic side the villain... almost. And the heroine comes off, despite everything she does being justified by everything she's been put through, slightly cruel. All in all, after a really terrible start, I'd almost say this could be chalked up as an "interesting failure" of the kind I might rewatch occasionally. If the first half had been as good as the second half, it would have been.

This is a small indie horror flick that stuck with me just for being really weird. A man meets his drug addict friend out at a remote cabin the friend is squatting in, and chains the friend up, forcing him to spend a week going cold turkey. Strange encounters with other drug addicts, local security, and a team of foreign researchers there doing psychedelics begin to occur and they find films and videos that change with each viewing, and what is initially assumed to be haunted land turns out to be more a postmodern 4th-wall indie flick type thing in which media and stories figure into the story. All in all a pretty original outing, which scores big with the part of me that enjoys unique little indie horror flicks like "Yellowbrickroad" and "Pontypool".

I dunno. It's been so long since I saw it I honestly can't remember if it's even good enough to recommend. But it had images that stuck with me all this time, and 10 years later I want to watch it again, so, honorable mention.

Dreadfully slow moving movie in which a young couple goes to a cabin in the woods for a romantic getaway, argues a lot, and very mildly strange things happen.

This movie asks us to believe the church—not scientists, the Catholic church—has perfected a never-explained technique for resurrecting the dead. Then the resurrected people, also with little explanation, begin organizing to kill as many people as possible so the "righteous"—determined by hiring hackers to review all people's electronic records, phone calls, texts, etc for sin—can be the only ones brought back to life.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the whole movie is told on the screen on a computer that a guy is sitting in front of. Even when he runs from the police, you only see it through conveniently-placed security cameras that it's never explained why we'd be seeing the video from... the important thing is, everything is always seen through a diegetic camera: a phone, a facetime call, a security camera. Apparently this is supposed to add something to the experience.

Given all of that: this is actually on the better end of what that could possibly be.

Which is kind of like saying a thumbtacks-and-rubber-cement sandwich is on the better end of how a thumbtacks-and-rubber-cement sandwich could possbly taste.

Cillian Murphy stars in the sort of movie Cillian Murphy stars in, this time in which a couple living in a cottage on a remote British island lose radio contact with the outside world, when a solitary soldier shows up claiming to be the only survivor of a deadly worldwide pandemic.

Haunted house movie turns out to be a time travel movie, I think. The actors looked weird and I barely paid attention to it.

Kind of a decent b-grade medical/sci-fi thriller. A pre-"Schitt's Creek "Emily Hampshire (who knew she'd been in movies since she was a kid?) plays a doctor whose husband is one of" the returned", people saved from a deadly zombie virus by a course of medication which is now getting scarce. Played fairly realistically, more for drama than shock, it was slightly better than I expected.

You know, as dumb escapist entertainment goes, this was pretty dumb and escapist and entertaining. A more fun way to kill an hour and a half than I expected.

unexpectedly semi-alright crime/revenge thriller. An up-and-coming young executive is framed for embezzling, so she recruits her old friends from the South Central in an elaborate revenge scheme. Very amateurish, but, somehow, so committed to what it wants to be that it gets entertaining at points. Plus, somehow they pulled together the budget for a decent car chase at the end with helicopters and all. Not as good as it wants to be, but not anywhere near as bad sa it should have been.

the dullest time loop movie ever. One character, a woman in a motel room caught in a time look, supposed to deliver a time looping device to a mafioso who is also caught in the loop with her, talks to people on the phone who sound like voice over artists given lines to read, and tries to figure out how to get out of it. That's the whole movie. Nothing but her talking on the phone to a million different fake-sounding people over and over.

Completely needless miniseries remake of the Polanski's seminal horror film, padded out with slickly-executed but familiar horror movie tropes to fill two two-hour episodes. Someday you will be able to generate this by telling an AI,"Give me Rosemary's Baby, but in the style of The Omen, four hours long, and set in Paris. "Good enough if you still for some reason want to watch it, but I don't see why you would. Maybe if you thought the original was good but needed a few more supernatural deaths or something. Well, at least they didn't try to remake" The Sentinel".

So if watching the violence of the Jonestown massacre is your idea of entertainment, enjoy, this is the Jonestown massacre, presented as entertainment. The only question is why they even changed the name of the compound to "Eden Parish" instead of just calling it "Jonestown". That seems like an odd single detail to add creativity to when you're otherwise just making a rote retelling of tragic events intended as some form of entertainment for somebody or other.

+1 star because they guy who is a precise duplicate of Rev. Jim Jones, even down to the sunglasses, is kind of entertaining in how he literally brings nothing to the role but a documentary reproduction.

Oh, also, it's a "found footage", with conceits like people who remember to keep the cameras running and pointed at subjects of interest even as they're running for their lives through the woods, hiding from nearby gunmen, etc. Which is great, because that idea hasn't been totally overdone.

Don't get me wrong. It's a bad "teen scream" monster movie. But I like it.

The worst mess of a film I've ever seen. A social media influencer (always a promising start) leaves her fiance, becomes homeless, and goes through two hours of scenes that don't make sense in which apparently she talks to unseen people, apparently kills a family with a machete, talks shit to Jehovah's Witnesses who knock at the front door, becomes homeless, winds up in a hotel, curls up in a tent in a homeless camp with an unexplained mummified corpse and tells it she loves it, gets chased by guys in animal masks, gets kidnapped by human traffickers, is made to fight in a cage death match, and does a dance routine, but it's impossible to know for sure because things just jump around in a disconnected series of images for two hours. I think this is supposed to be an art film, but, nobody involved actually knew how to make a movie? It did actually have one creepy scene, though: she encounters an unseen "wood spirit" that speaks to her around a corner, and the voice keeps changing to different people. That was cool.

Huh? Why is this even a movie?

The Blair Witch Project, but in Australia, with the now-de-rigeur-for-found-footage-horror 45 minutes of pointless, non-plot-advancing bullshit tacked on to the beginning. But mostly, the Blair Witch Project. Which is great, because nooooobody's ever made that movie before.

Another execrable movie that seems like someone's hobby project. A woman investigates a village where there have been numerous waves of ergot poisoning, only to discover a cult apparently killing people. As amateurish and poorly-made as it gets.

Terrible pursuit flick that proves that any movie that mentions online video sites or "influencers" is still, in 2024, an instant avoid. A couple takes a challenge to film themselves having sex in different places for online prizes, when some murdered chases and kills them because, movie. Weird because it seems like maybe this was a 40 minute long movie, so they padded it out with scenes of a convincingly sleazy youtube host talking about what they're doing, as if he the one running the contest and getting updates from them, when they never actually mention or refer to him in any way. Which, actually, was kind of funny. But not funny enough to make this movie worth watching.

Spanish film in which an incredibly gorgeous woman gets trapped inside a haunted cabin and slowly goes insane while she experiences literally every "haunted house" horror trope ever, plus the Gorn from Star Trek. Plus lots of scenes in fast motion, which, ok, that's new, I've never seen fast motion supposed to be "scary" before.

In a stunningly original plot, vacationers at their cabin are menaced and killed one-by-one by the locals. Actually, for one of those movies, this was an entertaining one, for the non-stereotypical casting and a couple of actually original spins on it.

Also posted to IMDB, originally posted on my blog Sloth And Dignity.

OK. Let's forget about sexually explicit content for a moment. You've got 400 other reviews you can read about the sex in.

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: John Cameron Mitchell is a very good filmmaker. Hedwig And The Angry Inch was very well made, and Shortbus is very well made. This is why I gave this movie 6 stars - it was enjoyable to watch on the level of very well-made cinema. He's clearly done his homework - this film reeks of "best student in his film school class". Despite how that sounds, I mean it in a good way. The actors, including the 'local color' cast to play themselves, also give very good performances all around.

Some of the characters and situations in Shortbus do have a few nice subtle touches, but then, all to often, it is ruined by having them go and behave in contrived and unrealistic ways that are practically Hollywood clichés. Situations alternate between characters making themselves emotionally vulnerable and revealing deep personal thoughts and secrets in front of total strangers - a few times I was surprised the words "this is a deep movie" didn't just flash across the screen in case anybody missed the point - and people flying off the handle and making unrealistically insensitive statements to each other (which the other person then completely overreacts to, and both begin screaming, all for the apparent purpose of creating "drama".) There is no subtlety or ambiguity anywhere in the mix. Everything is clearly spelled out for the viewer in broad day-glo strokes. It reeks of "Look at us! We're 'complex' characters" instead of ringing true-to-life. It feels like watching a grown-up, tattooed version of "Beverly Hills 90210". With excellent cinematography.

What I want to know is, in a movie where they went so far as to use real sex for veracity, didn't they put any work into having the situations or characters be anything like true-to-life? Are we to believe that a relationship counselor would get so worked up as to physically slap a client over his eagerness to have had a therapeutic "epiphany", and then confide in him that she's never had an orgasm? Even worse, are we expected to believe the scene where a remotely-controlled vibrator concealed in her crotch repeatedly fires at the worst possible moment, forcing her to involuntarily beat the tar out of somebody? Let alone that the husband who claimed to care so much about her orgasm would "misplace" the remote by leaving it in his back pocket during a sex party? Or that someone would then mistake it (a pink remote labeled "trapped hummingbird" and "buzzing bee") for a TV remote, inadvertently triggering the beating? If this all had been meant as comedy and played for laughs, in a slapstick film, it might have worked. As it is, it was all just far-fetched and stupid, saved from being embarrassingly bad only by the actors' considerable skills. Is this what the audiences at Cannes appreciate? The "concealed vibrator" scene was the single worst case, but this sort of contrived situation is present to one degree or another throughout the whole film. People share secrets, people argue. The characters develop, but in many cases no reasons or motivations are presented for them doing so - it just sort of happens, to drive the story along. People have hangups for no reason we can tell, then they overcome them arbitrarily, also for no reason we can tell, other than that the picture needs an ending. I was not surprised at all to learn the actors were allowed to participate in the writing process. Beneath the excellent production and performances, something very amateurish seemed to be lurking at this well-made movie's core.

Essentially, Shortbus is a fairy tale about sex, and should be taken as such. Those who are too old for princes, pots of gold and unicorns may enjoy the sex toys, orgasms and freak-folk performers that fill in for them here, and on that level, it's an enjoyable film, if you're not the sort of person likely to be offended by the very explicit content.

But I do hope that someday someone supplies John Cameron Mitchell with source material that rises to the level of his very considerable skills as a filmmaker.

2023 note: I wrote this review over 15 years ago. To my knowledge, John Cameron Mitchell never made another movie I liked, but he took a star turn in the TV series "Shrill" as a believably narcissistic boss at a small Portland weekly paper, who also unexpectedly does a fabulous performance of a David Bowie song.

Like "Into The Dark", it's basically bad, but in this case, it's over-the-top and just twisted enough, with committed enough performances from the actors playing the psychos, to keep it entertaining and at least watchable, despite how terrible it is as a movie. I wouldn't ever go out of my way to watch it, but if you're looking for some grody horror fare and the pickings are slim, you could probably do a lot worse than this. It succeeds, such as it is, by not being as absolutely execrable as it seems like it's going to be.

As described in my last review, compilation of three interwoven short tales, revolving around a broadcast signal driving people insane. I like this one a lot, very well done. (Note: there's another 2014 horror movie called "The Signal" that isn't nearly as good.) I just recently, 10 or 15 years after it had faded to a distant memory of a film Ihad especially enjoyed, popped back up on Tubi (which, among the seemingly thousands of awful horror films it gets, seems to also manage to get these distantly-remembered, hard-to-find favorites.) I remember why I liked it. It's gorier than I remember, and, I don't know, I can't say it's exactly a great movie, but it seriously well done for what it is and the kind of gem I would say non-horror fans shouldn't go out of their way to see, but, every horror fan should see it. As noted elsewhere, the first of the three episodes, directed by the guy who went on to do "The Ritual" and a bunch of better stuff I noted in my review of that film, is the best of the three, very effectively ratcheting up the suspense. The rest is nearly as good though. The second two rely a little bit on camp humor, not my favorite thing, but it's strong enough all the way through to pull off this off-kilter and gory end-of-humanity tale. Also, never realized unti now, the female lead was also one of the leads in "YellowBrickRoad" another favorite deep cut.

An experimental mess in which four friends camping in a cabin on a remote peninsula outside of Seattle when their world is turned upside-down by extremely low-budget optical effects and incomprehensible editing.

"Cloverfield", but set in LA, and on the action side of the action/scifi line, in that the characters seem to be there primarily as a justification for seeing things blow up. But, I've seen much worse as action/scifi movies go. The action is thrilling, creature design is fun, the visuals are appropriately awesome, and overall, if you're in the mood for a braindead scifi action flick, you could do much, much worse. Plus a fun cast starring Eric Balfour and his chin, plus that charismatic guy who played the police sergeant in "Dexter" and always wore the little panama hats.

one of those movies that's so bad, I don't know how it got made. Obviously intended to be a comedy spoof of horror movies, but avoids tipping its hand by never being funny, just being execrable as if doing that intentionally is enough. A paper-thin caricature of a sorority sister adopts a murderous sloth, which murders the entire sorority, occasionally driving a car or looking up information online to do so.

An obvious love letter to the folks who starred in the sequels to "Friday The 13th", "Halloween", etc., and, like a lot of these movies, fun enough to watch these guys play comedic versions of themselves to be entertaining, even though it's basically terrible.

The sole problem is that for some reason, Schneider, whose filmmaking skills are apparently about on par with his political acumen (at one point in the last few years he was investigated by the Secret Service for making comments on social media advocating for executing the United States President), decided to edit parts of it totally out of order for no particular reason. Nobody's watching this for the narrative, though, so, not a big loss.

A mess that goes nowhere and then ends. A couple goes out the celebrate their engagement at his family's ski chalet. Soon friends turn up, and they warn about another friend who "has bugs in his operating system" having invited himself. Eventually that friend appears, dressed like a pimp and strapping heat, and turns out to be a bit of an ass but otherwise charming and charismatic. A weird groundskeeper one appears and turns out to have been staying there. Soon it turns out her illegitimate son with the the man's father is living there too, prowling around and somehow having gotten hold of the gun. Men from an ancient mining photograph appear on the grounds as handymen. An ancient tragedy in which orphans were left to die in a collapsing mine right under the house is mentioned; it turns out it's the anniversary if the tragedy, and then it's never mentioned again. There's some sort of hooey about psychic children and the illegitimate kid brother turns out to be one. The groundskeeper woman decides the fiancee woman is there to take her son away and goes after her with a pickaxe. For a little while it's as hammy and over-the-top as a Hammer horror film, which I assume is a good thing, but it soon abandons even that as quickly as it picked it up. The whole thing is simultaneously a plotless mess, but also, nothing really happens. It's like it was improvised or written in a game of Exquisite Corpse where every line was written by a different person who knew only the preceding line.

God save us from "arty" indie horror films. A woman moves to a new house, ,probably in Los Angeles, and after about an hour of talking to her friends and 5 minutes of a lingering shot of her scooping out a watermelon, starts to experience boring, cliched "haunted" occurrences and occasionally disappears and appears in a weird forest setting for a few minutes before the movie abruptly ends with no explanation.

Only "Schizopolis" ever got away with substituting mannered weirdness for meaning, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from trying. This muddled mess of characters with no motivation, depth, or even consistent personality traits features a woman trapped in a world that is changing for no reason ever given, with people behaving in bizarre ways, a wall growing over the horizon and slowly expanding to cover a sky that now, again for no reason ever explained (and which most characters change the subject whenever she points it out), has two moons. A war is declared for no reason, everyone under 32 must report for the draft, and there's hamfisted attempts at some sort of social commentay about blaming the poor for their poverty, or about war, or about news media being government propaganda, or some such, but it's hard to understand because it's all briefly touched on without ever being explained, or even being consistent from scene to scene. Add in an unexplained mid-movie change to black and white, along with many seemingly totally perfunctory and unengaging attempts at "artsiness", and you have an incompetently-made mess that desperately wants to be Godard or "Brazil", but isn't even "An Evening With Beverly Luff-Linn".

Sorry, but you can't, say, evoke the horrors of war with a sudden, unexpected firing squad scene if the most character development you've done of the rebels now being executed (who it's never even explained what they're rebelling against, unless it's the black patent-leather platform shoes that many characters seem to focus a lot of attention on needing to wear now, for no reason that's even explained) is to show them frolicking in mountain meadows to a Donovan folk song to signal in mile-high letters "THESE ARE THE GOOD GUYS". By the time people who were the villains in previous scenes show up and stand in front of the rebels to shield them, which somehow all by itself persuades the executions not to shoot, after which everybody just gets on a bus and drives off into the clouds, I couldn't have cared less why any of it was happening.

This big question in my mind is, how did they get Michael Madsen, as well as distantly memorable actors like Judd Nelson and Billy Baldwin, to participate as supporting actors in this garbage? And if they had that budget, why didn't they cast people who can act for the lead roles? (To be fair, it may not have been bad acting, it may have been the editing. Apparently the didn't realize if you're shooting the lines of a scene separately with a single camera, to be cut together into continuous dialog in the editing room, as is very common in filmmaking, you have to cut out the pause where, after delivering each line, the actor freezes and waits for cut to be called.)

One of the least-justifiable 100 minutes of movie-watching in my life.

A sneak attack! What starts off looking like a halfway decent sci-fi about the first human born on Mars traveling to explore Earth, turns into a fairly cliched teen romance-adventure-drama of the sort you might get from Disney or Spielberg's cheesier moments (not a good thing, in my book) when he hooks up with the earth girl he's been video chatting with and they go off to try to find his father, while being pursued by NASA scientists desperate to find him for a heart transplant before his enlarged heart gives out due to Earth's great gravity. Saved by the charming performance of Asa Butterfield as the protagonist, with numerous fun moments such as his convincingly startled expression the first time he sees a horse, and for some reason got a lot of really terrible reviews it didn't really deserve, but at the same time I have a hard time going for the teen romance adventure thing.

I liked this. A definite B-movie, an anthology-type flick about people trying to survive in a town where people''s bodies are being taken over and mutated by a fungal infection. If that premise sounds like anything you could ever enjoy watching, and you can tolerate some occasionally cheesy special effects, then this movie is probably closer to what you hope something like that would be than what something like that usually turns out to be. I thought it was fun, if a little viscerally gory. Fungus... I'm sure you can imagine. It was kinda fun though.

I sort of liked this movie. The last sane people are holed up in a warehouse while the Infected—we don't even need them to be zombies anymore, in fact in this case it's a chemical spill, although that's added as an irrelevant afterthought—wander the countryside randomly attacking anyone they find, and of course trying to get in. And that's really it. Doesn't bother much with plot, there's a little tiny bit of backstory, mostly just people looking intense and trying to survive. (And if it sounds a little familiar, yes, there's one shot that's clearly a tribute to "Dawn Of The Dead".) But, it does the most important thing a movie like this can do: it didn't suck. So, when you've seen every post-zombie-apocalypse movie, and want to find one that doesn't suck, this fits the bill adequately.

Reminiscent of The Sixth Sense, although it was in production simultaneously and based on a Richard Matheson novel from 1958. Kevin Bacon is hypnotized into being able to see ghosts, does his best Jack Torrance as he tears up his house and backyard at the behest of the ghost of a murdered neighborhood child without explaining to his wife why.

A poorly-written, poorly edited, and virtually unpaced 30 minute horror movie with 45 pointless minutes of kids having a dinner party tacked on to the beginning. Kids have a party, eventually the lights go out so they play some sort of supernatural game, the cabinet doors start shaking, they get dragged by something out of the room and into the oven or a closet or something, it was too poorly edited for me to follow any more than that.

Billed on Freevee as a horror, this '90s drama about two troubled adopted kids who murder their parents plays like a TV movie. Neil Patrick Harris and Johnny Galecki, if that's a draw for you.

For the first few scenes I really thought it was going to suck, the acting was just terrible and the characters paper-thin, and ridiculously clean-cut, preppie-looking character Russell supposed to be some sort of scary mad-dog psychopath.

And then something magic happened, and with every scene it got better and better, until by the end I was really impressed and really enjoyed it without reservation. I wouldn't call it a great film, it's definitely got its amateurish flaws, but I'd give it a very, very solid B+, way better than a lot of first time directors' films.

This is an amazing cross between the kind of super-lo-budget indie horror older folks like me tend to think of as "USA Up All Night" flicks—let's face it, the actors uniformly suck, and Russell in particular, is horribly miscast, supposed to be a murderous psycho but seeming more like an overacting college kid, which he probably was—and a really well-executed, smartly written neo-noir/genre flick.

This film wears its influences on its sleeve, although the long shadow of Quentin Tarantino is an interesting thing to see fairly successfuly integrated into what is basically a horror thriller. To spell out all the obvious influences would be to give away too much of the plot, which is nowhere near as straightforward as it initiially appears its going to be, but this film is sort of a cross between the wave of tarantino-influenced neo-noir ("Sexy Beast" also springs to mind for some reason, probably the gritty realism, which this film apes only cartoonishly) and some offbeat & interesting horror movies I could name with plots that revolve around loopiness in time.

Mechanics trapped in a garage fighting for their lives against an alien shapeshifting car. Fortunately, there's plenty of shotguns there. The leading lady's face is square, which is something new. Honestly? I've seen worse.

In a world ravaged by a deadly pandemic, on a remote ranch, actors shoot guns at each other.

Documentary crew filming a woman's decline due to alzheimers discovers supernatural elements and things get worse from there. Soon becomes as tedious to watch as any first-person-shooter, which is a shame, because due to strong acting performances it's a little better than most.

Holy cow. Up there with the best of"Black Mirror"-quality writing, but less like the Twilight Zone and more like finding a trove of lost Ray Bradbury stories... Small-town life above a mysterious underground research facility. Old folks gather in barns and play fiddle beneath strange technological ruins. Kids wander through the autumn woods and find derelict robots and mysterious artifacts. The stories are humanist and character-driven, not technology-driven, and as well-written as any sci-fi I've seen.

A pleasant surprise. This nominal speculative sci-fi indie is set in the near future when the internet has evolved into "the tangle", a global swarm of nanobots keeping everybody's brains connected all the time, as well as infecting their bodies to prevent them from being able to commit violence. But the pleasant surprise comes from a few solid acting performances, cinematography, and direction, and the fact this it's a fake-out: it's a solid updating of '40s-style film noir stle that only uses sci-fi as a plot device, and even has nods to '40s fashions along with the film noir cinematography. I wouldn't say it's great, not sure I'd watch it again, but it was way better most unknown Tubi fare. Definitely an interesting enough way to occupy 90 minutes. Perhaps even worth remembering.

A couple inherits property on the Oregon coast, only to discover that The Creature From The Black Lagoon lives in their well. No, really.

It's one of those films that's not necessarily good, and nothing is ever really explained, which is always a bummer, but it's not tooooo terrible, and, different enough to be a little memorable. I wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but don't regret that I did.

The fact that this, "Threads", and "The Day After" came out around the same time, and all anyone ever talked about or remembers was the soap operatic, TV-ified "The Day After" (although all three were originally produced for TV), is a grim statement about our society's desire to appear to be confronting the potential horrors we've spawned while simultaneously, to the greatest extent possible, avoiding looking at all at the potential horrors we've spawned.

Following the same plot as a short in some recently-watched horror anthology (The Seven Darks, maybe?) a girl's body slowly begins to decay after a night of sex because, movie. Which, if you think about it, is not a lot to happen in an hour and 40 minutes, but that's really all there is, she hangs around her apartment and decays. Also every half hour or so the guy drops in for more sex. Looking every bit like a student film with artistic aspirations, right down to seeming to have been shot on 8mm, frequently out-of-focus, the occasional interludes of a minute or two of nothing but noise and jumpy processed film effects, and the skirling, droning viola soundtrack, it seems at first like, even despite the home movie production values, it might succeed as a Cronenberg-type body horror flick. But then the leaden pacing kills it. Actually, calling it "pacing" at all makes it sound too lively. They take up what must be like 4 minutes of this film with a single shot of a man's face as he gets oral sex, followed by another about 4 minutes of her doing nothing laying on the floor appearing to regret it.This should have been a short film, like... oh, yeah, the short film I first saw this story in. The fx makeup is really good though. She really looks like a well-done steak by the end. The funny thing is, I knd of like that this film exists, even though I didn't enjoy it and wouldn't watch it again. Something about the idea that someone made a movie that is nothing but 100 minute movie of someone turning to jelly is kind of interesting. I bet someone out there somewhere loves this movie.

John Carpenter's The Thing, but with little bugs instead of a big shape-changing monster. No, really, that's it.

What can I say? It's a classic. Modern sci-fi/horror/action movie buffs will probably wonder why people once thought this was so great, and it's probably for me not even on par with"The Blob"(a surprisingly good movie for the era and subject matter) but still, for 1951, I can see the appeal, it was probably pretty unlike anything that had been seen at the time. I enjoyed it for sure.

This is yet another in the apparently long string of oddly charming, super-low-budget H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. This one, despite being an American production of an American author's story, feels very British, in the way a great deal of it, most of it even, is people sitting in ordinary rooms having mannered conversations, played almost like a very talky, British drama. It's also updated to modern times, but played as an odd hybrid of Victorian-seeming dialog and modern tropes, but again, the whole thing is so mannered, it's only a little strange.

It does eventually go more places than that, but it takes a loooooooong time before it does. But, when it does, it's, well, oddly charming. It has occasional video effects of the kind many low-budget films try, thinking they'll look cool, but in this case, they do look cool. Some striking occasionally images and cinematography throughout. The kind of "artsy" odd cuts that so often don't work, but, again, here, somehow they kind of do.

Looking it up after watching, it's very widely panned, which I do understand. Definitely too slow and tough to digest, most people will probably think it's just bad. But to me, it's one of those movies that's kind of its own thing, and consistently so, from start to finish... or at least from the very late point it finally proceeds beyond people just sitting in rooms talking, to the finish. And it low-key worked for me because of it. I kind of liked it, in a strange way. I might watch it again sometime.

I will never figure out how Tubi categorizes movies. It shows me strings of films with odd things in common. In this case, it's several movies in a row where they a movie basically has people talking for 45 minutes before it finally tuns into a horror movie. In this case, it's a couple on a date, as boring and ordinary an indie flick as you could ask for, before she suddenly traps him in her boarded-up house, and it turns into a decent captivity flick as he tries to avoid the monster she's trying to feed him to. Still pretty bad and derivative, but compared to the utterly tedious first 45 minutes of just a couple out on a much too long date, the rest actually seems like quality horror entertainment. The acting is alright, at any rate, and the ending is actually totally decent. But, boy. Pacing, people, pacing. No more 45 minutes of unnecessary talk before the movie starts, ok? The would have been a pretty watchable like 30 minute short.

I can't say it's a great movie. It would have been kind of the sci-fi equivalent of a "teen scream" horror movie, but—despite some serious flaws, such as some flabbiness in the second act involving an unnecessary bad guy whose performance just screams "miscast hipster actor trying hard to play a tough"—it's saved by mostly above-average clever ideas and execution, showing some careful and creative plotting right when it's needed, and which gets better as the movie goes on... it's kind of the reverse of the frequent "started good but ran out of steam" problem.

On the contrary, this starts out alright, and, despite some bumps along the way, picks up steam all the way until it barrels through to a really satisfying conclusion. I spent the first half of a much later second viewing saying to myself, "This is good, but I'm not sure it's really much better than average, I don't know why I liked it so much last time," but by the time it was over, I was like, "Oh, yeah! I did like this so much for a reason!"

Two mountaineers are climbing in the remote Andes, thirteen miles over rough glacial moraine from their remote base camp, when a storm sets in. Tethered together by a rope, one slips, and dangles over a sheer cliff, suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The other climber, unable to gain secure enough footing to pull him back up, is instead slowly being pulled down towards the edge by the weight. Knowing that if he goes over they will both plunge into the chasm, he makes the tough decision and cuts the rope, letting the dangling climber fall to his death. Once the storm abates, he descends the mountain and hikes back to base camp alone.

What he doesn't know is that the climber he cut loose, presumably to fall to his death, upon hitting the ground, broke through what was not ground at all but just a thin crust of ice over a deep crevasse. He awoke on a small ice ledge deep in the crevasse, halfway up the wall, far from both the top and the bottom, with both his legs shattered.

This tells the story of how, on his own, he escaped the crevasse, made the difficult descent and 13 mile hike over glacial morraine from the mountain on two broken legs, to finally make it to back to base camp and then back to civilization, and survive to tell the whole tale in his own words in this movie. Not to mention the details of what happens when the haggard figure of a man who everyone thinks was recently killed appears in a remote mountain camp in the middle of the night, which is a story all by itself.

If that's your cup of tea, this movie is the good stuff. It's an incredible story.

By the way, the man who miraculously made it through the ordeal alive said at the time, and has ever since, that is climbing partner's decision to cut his rope was the right choice in a survival situation. There was never any blame between them. In that moment the only available choice was between letting a man die, or both of them dying. And, as it worked out, by an incredible combination of fate and determination, neither of them did.

A show that bears only the name in common with the movie it's supposedly a "reimagining" of. Bill Paxton as a tough-as-nails, willing-to-break-the-law-to-do-what's-right detective paired with a young do-gooder partner in this cartoonish half-video-game/half-post-Tarantino-crime-thriller cop show. Paxton kinda redeems the proceedings, he's pretty watchable.

slow-starting horror/suspense that is actually sort of decent by the end, if kind of grisly. Two teens setting off fireworks in the woods stumble upon a missing girl trapped in a treehouse by unknown creatures. One leaves for help, the other becomes trapped with her. Movie takes a sharp turn in the middle as they escape, becomes a "pursued by the psycho locals" flick, but as those things go, not too terrible.

I don't know if it's for everyone, but to me, this is an movie that starts ok, and just gets better and better and better over its runtime, finally tying things up in the kind of satisfying and intelligent bow that a lot of movies that aspire to be "mind-bending" strive for but few actually succeed at. It's one of those small handful of movies I go out of my way to re-watch every so often and never regret doing so.

It's hard to discuss the plot in any way without giving away spoilers, and I like this movie a little too much to do that. But I can say, I figured out the solution to the grandfather paradox after seeing this one. So now I'm totally cool with changing the past if I ever need to, which is a major load off. It's fine.

BTW once you've watched the movie at least once—preferably, if you enjoyed it enough to, twice, to catch all the foreshadowing and references you missed the first time—there's a blog called "High On Films" with a thorough review and a lot of observations. I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to tempt anyone to read an explanation before they've seen the movie, but afterwards, you should google it. He even caught some details that I missed after two viewings.

This might seem an odd thing to review but I just binge watched it for the first time in a long time and it holds up. Overall, it was always kind of uneven, but the best episodes—and there are many of them—are well-remembered for a reason. The worse ones are perhaps a bit sentimental, or a bit too predictable, but never that bad. Also interesting is the long-forgotten fourth season, which never appeared in syndication because they expanded the episodes to an hour for that one. To me, the punchiness of the storytelling suffered, TTZ had always made great use of the half-hour format with concise stories that ticked along well. You can sense that the writers wanted to see what they could do given the little extra time, and mostly they make good use of it, but still, I felt a series of this nature kind of benefitted from the strictures of the shorter time slot.

Also interesting was that I had forgotten just how many people who went on to be famous later were in this series. Beyond the obvious, a fair bit of both the regular cast and guest-stars of Star Trek played roles: from George Takei as a Japanese-American dealing with post-WWII racism, to James Doohan in a bit part as a father in a small town, to Leonard Nimoy with a non-speaking role as party of a platoon of WWII soldiers, to familiar bit or single-episode players whose faces I recognized but names I didn't know, like Antoinette Bower (Sylvia in 'Catspaw') or Stanley Adams (Cyrano Jones, 'The Trouble With Tribbles') or Susan Oliver ( from 'The Menagerie', who apparently specialized in playing the psychic sole attractive female inhabitant of the planet where the ship crashes.) Plus there were a host of others, from just about anyone who had a prominent role in a famous sitcom later in the 60s, plus many who I didn't even know were acting that early: such as a very young Robert Redford, and an almost unrecognizable 27-year-old, clean-cut Dennis Hopper as a neo-nazi in one of the S4 hour-long episodes, among many, many other recognizable-at-second-glance faces. Also surprising, despite the series's preoccupations with themes of the time (the space race, the military, the old west, the threat of nuclear obliteration) is how well the stories hold up. In particular, the Dennis Hopper one, in which he spends a lot of time making neo-Nazi speeches, struck me as entirely contemporary (unfortunately) in terms of the story and much of the dialogue. He said things on that episode in 1962 I still hear from certain 'news' outlets and other disreputable sources today.

thoroughly amateurish, stiffly-acted sci fi film that desperately wants to be interesting and quirky but succeeds only in making no sense. I watched the whole thing and have no idea what it was about. Something about a schlubby guy running across people who are getting tested and given some sort of "charge" that other people want to take away from them.

AVOID. Dreadful first-person shooter spends the from 30 minutes showing girls partying. By 35 minutes they've taken a shortcut through a tunnel and one fell in a hole, but 45 minutes is way too late for the plot to start.

Notable for Lance Henriksen, in an odd turn, being the first to die, but then, somehow that's not quite explained, still being there off and on for the rest of the movie, including outliving every other character, but then, not dying at all at the end, perhaps because he's dead already. I dunno. weird. He still does appear in the movie after the last death, so the Kupietz/Henriksen conjecture holds.

Ha. Ha ha. Danny Masterson produced and starred in this, well, not exactly teen-scream flick, but mid-20s-scream flick? A group of gorgeous rich, callow friends get together on a luxury resort island and are introduced to a drug that removes all inhibitions, with the admonition"You can only do it once. In your life. "From these predictable beginnings grows a film that actually has it's moments, in a cheap, Hollywood way... it reminded me of" Disturbing Behavior "in that way of basically being bad and predictable but was elevated by being rather consistent and having a few moments that went above and beyond what they needed to. It rises to some moments of surprising brutality for a flick full of Hollywood b-listers (Ashley Greene as the female lead, too.) The ending strives for some sort of greater significance and falls flat, but overall, again like" Disturbing Behavior", if you're going to watch a shitty movie, they come far shittier and slightly less clever than this. I could see watching it again sometime when I'm bored a few years from now if it comes up.

Truthfully, might not be for everybody, I don't know how many people share my love of seriously well-done pictures but which are mostly just dialogue and little action, and I hesitated for a second to put it on my "Favorite" list only because of that. But, boy did I love it.

"After losing his parents, a priest travels to China, where he inherits a mysterious ability to turn into a dinosaur". Between that, and the obviously rubber dinosaur head shown in the preview, unfortunately I will not be able to review this film, because I refuse to watch it.

Schizophrenic guy (played by a youngish Ryan Reynolds, who I didn't know at the time, and happily was still an actual actor and had not yet gone full-tilt into ironic Manic Pixie Dream Guy persona) hallucinates and goes off the deep end. The twist is, most of the movie is shown from his point of view, to the extent that we see his filth-strewn apartment as clean and tidy, the pink forklifts at his factory job perform ballet, his animals talk to him as a matter of course, and as his victims pile up, their severed heads remain lifelike, cheery, and friendly to him throughout, which adds to the horror when you briefly see the grim reality. (Following a single day of being on medication and unable to deal with the reality, once he's back into hallucination, one of the heads cheerily says to him, "Did you see what those pills did to me? They made me look like a jack-o-lantern!")

Twisted, effective, & truly dark fun... and notable for being one of the only horror movies to end with the whole cast doing an upbeat song & dance number. Bleak comedy in the manner of "Otis". (Update: by Joe Dante. Should have known.) (Update 2: NOT by Joe Dante, I was mistaken. By Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian woman who did “Persepolis”. Apparently, for a long time this script was set to star Ben Stiller, and much as I like Ben Stiller for what he is, that would have cost the cinematic world a true gem.)

some claptrap about a house out in the arizona desert with a haunted hot tub or something. Porn-level acting and production, EXCEPT for the lead actor's momentary Scwarzenegger impression, which is hilarious. Deserves its 2 stars on IMDB..

It's a Canadian film, which makes a lot of sense. Except that...

Unfortunately, by the third act they forget it's a very clever, quirky comedy and it becomes more of a conventional, cliche'd action-comedy. It just didn't hold up. If they had managed to keep it up all the way through, it would have been recommendable. It's really too bad.

A pair of women rent a house for a few days. The owners act fishy. Someone creeps around outside the house at night. Soon it becomes apparent that the owners, who behaved like the worst actors I've ever seen, weren't really the owners, as they wait in a hotel room and try to plot a way to get the women out of the house. In the background, a newscast, read by an anchor who acts like one of the worst actors I've ever seen, reads a story that local asylums are releasing lunatics early to ease overcrowding [cue ominous music]... a police officer who behaves like one of the worst actors I've ever seen investigates a report that the owner of the house is missing.

But, then there's a plot twist. If anything else about this movie had been as remotely good as the plot twist, I would have been able to recommend it as at least bad but maybe watchable. But, nope. Too bad.

It has some strange stylistic touches, such as carnival freaks in the 1930s who are obviously influenced by having seen Marilyn Manson at some point. I'm pretty sure they didn't have goths yet them. Nonetheless, it held my interest and stood above the pack just for being so cinematically beautiful to watch. It had a dreamlike quality, but wasn't pretentious enough to qualify as an arthouse film. It's almost Tarkovsky-level in how intentional the cinematigraphy is, all the way through. I deeply enjoyed it on that level...

...Until the third act. Suddenly it disappears up its own ass and turns into the pretentiously artsy film it so carefully avoided beinig until then. Suddenly it's entirely in black and white, what scant plot there was disappears into basically a series of images and vingettes, and it even commits the cardinal sin of straight-up turning into a music video for a few minutes. Finally it ends on an incomprehensible artsy, pretentious note and I was left wondering what the plot even was.

Too bad. Could have unquestioningly said I liked it if it had just remained a slow-moving, but gorgeous-without-becoming-unbearably-pretentious flawed gem. But it didn't. Still, it has a certain something, but, the last act is so tediouly pretentious it becomes unwatchable. Not recommended, unfortunately.

Ok, this one is special, I think we have an honorable mention here. A folklorist investigates tales of strange creatures appearing in Vermont. When I threw this on, I was suprised to discover it was an old horror movie, not a new one, and nearly turned it off, but thankfully I didn't. Within just a few minutes I found myself thinking that I'd forgotten just how visually beautiful some of those old black and white movies are... similar to some of those John Ford westerns. It was quite a ways into it before I realized something was a little too clean—by the end of the movie I realized that certain lighting revealed that there was no film grain. Which makes sense, because the movie was actually made in 2011. But other than that, WOW, the 1930s reproduction is note-perfect, the acting style, the costumes, the special effects, most definitely the lighting... somebody involved with the making of this film had a spectacularly good eye for black-and-white cinematography, it's just beautiful and would probably have stood out as a great example of vintage cinematography if it had actually been vintage. The story is not great but absolutely good, it builds as effectively as some of the great vintage horror, and the plot ticks along, nothing about it sags at any point from start to finish. There's clearly some modern special effects used but for the most part they're effectively disguised to look like 1930s technology, and mostly the whole thing works. The monsters are a little cheezy but by the time you see them I was so into it that I didn't care. This film really caught my attention, there were a few times I had to rewind to see things a second time. Plus, a dark ending, much more Lovecraft than Hollywood, even though only the first two acts are actually from the Lovecraft story this is based on. Very nice work from an indie director. Not quite a great film, but definitely a treat, from where I sit, for sure. Quality entertainment. Incidentally I notice this one gets high marks from a lot of Lovecraft fans in the review section on IMDB.

Woman gets caught in a haunted house she can't leave, and screams a lot. Some of the least convincing acting I've ever seen.

I'll at least give this clearly allegorical film something for ambition, and being somewhat more original than expected. The most unbearable Brooklyn liberal couple since that Sunita Mani pic about the puffballs from space go for a retreat in a cabin and wind up facing a series of surreal ordeals in the woods. Lots of pontificating about gender roles, masculinity and being a "good man", and some sort of take on religion that I didn't quite get ensured that by the time it was halfway over I'd become too disinterested to follow the plot, though. Actually in an odd way reminded me of "YellowBrickRoad" in terms of surrealist sylvan horror, but with hipster exploration of social roles and obvious (if not quite clear) allegory in place of the prior film's slow-burn raw Lovecraftian horror. This movie desperately wants to have something to say; whether it actually does or not will have to be left up to someone who finds it interesting enough to pay attention to all the way through.

For no reason that is ever explained, a millionaire with a very annoying cackle invites financially desperate people over for a "Game" that might solve their financial problems, only to discover the "game" is he gives them choices of two horrible, sadistic things to do to themselves or each other, and they must either pick one and do it, or his butlers kill them. (Apparently there is some sort of employment agency where you can hire an entire household staff who have no problem with killing for you for no adequately explained reason.)

Also, apparently if you give a good person a gun and tell them they can have money if they kill someone else, they'll just go ahead and shoot them in cold blood, rather than using the gun to kill her captors and free both of them. That's the kind of "logic" this movie operates on from start to finish.•Really? The idea that desperate people will do horrible things for money if you help it along by threatening to kill them if they don't is an observation worth making an movie to make?

Then there is a final needless cruelty at the end when it is revealed that the Final Girl's brother in need of surgery, the entire reason she went to this "game" in the first place, randomly decided to kill himself while she was doing it. No, I'm not ticking the "spoilers" checkbox, because for it to be a spoiler, you have to care about the charactes and what happens to them, and these aren't even characters, they're two-dimensional meatbags used to only be shown suffering as entertainment, devoid of any plot or even any logic beyond that. Nothing about this even makes sense. Nobody in this movie ever does anything for any reason. It's all just a set up for watching sadism for its own sake.

Even "Funny Games", which was deliberately designed to be so vacuous and pointlessly violent that it was actually intended to drive people to walk out in it, had more of a plot and more plausibility than this movie does.

Adding to the complete inability to create any sort of entertainment is the bizarre stunt casting that perpetually reminds you you're watching a movie. "Look! It's Ricky from 'Trailer Park Boys' in a horror movie! It's Crab Man from 'My Name Is Earl', even still with the same funny haircut! It's adult film star Sasha Grey, wisely being given a total of about 3 words to say in the entire movie because she's such a bad actress she can't even be murdered by a butler convincingly!"

I hope whoever was involved in making this garbage is ashamed of themselves. I can't imagine what sort of person thought this up and imagined it would be entertaining, let alone actually went out and made it.

A documentary about the "wow signal", a strong and unexplained radio signal picked up by SETI in 1977. I like this kind of stuff, so, worth watching. Pretty canny, features mostly actual scientists, and does offer natural explanations for the signal, plus goes a little bit into the infrastructure and personalities behind our big radio telescopes.

It's an American Gothic about researchers trying to retrace the steps of a NH community that walked off en masse into the wilderness in the 1940s, and slowly losing their minds in the woods themselves. And that's really about it.

It's a flawed gem, original, and really disturbed me, despite an unsatisfyingly, almost Lynchian-cryptic (in a bad way; think "Mulholland Drive", not "Eraserhead") ending. It has a low rating but extremely polarized reviews on IMDB, a lot of people either really hated or really loved it. I'd watch it again for sure, and years after having seen it, I can still vividly recall a lot of it, because so much of it just plain really got to me. We go to horror movies to be disturbed, and somehow this odd film disturbed me viscerally, in a way that films with a much stronger narrative seldom have.

I could see it as a double-feature with Open Water... they're both kind of very effective mood pieces without much real plot, and both are movies that I could see a lot of people not liking, but which I found oddly stirring.

This is a movie that has lived on in my heart, and vividly the corners of my mind, ever since I first saw it—so much so that I had a little bit of trepidation about watching it again. Would it live up to my recollections? The answer: yes, absolutely. This is one of those movies I'm not sure I'd ever recommend to anyone else, but it plucks my strings just right... made with zero budget and very little by way of plot, in terms of story this entire movie is nothing but a group of hikers losing their grip on reality. And the ending is straight-up terrible, no way around it. But the journey there, just the walk in the woods slowly going incomprehensibly wrong, not even for any reason that's ever given, I find just gripping and disturbing. Worth noting, I usually multitask when I'm watching movies, and even on this second viewing this one sucked me in and distracted me from my laptop. Possibly the most disturbing horror movie set mostly in daytime. It's really a movie about losing control, to me a much scarier thing than any monster. This is one of those movies that, while nobody will ever call it a masterpiece—make no mistake, it's a low-budget indie flick from start to finish—but I find (and a lot of reviewers seem to agree with me) something about it is very affecting; it sticks in your mind. It's a quietly-building grotesquerie. I bet Lars von Trier likes it, or would. And I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's review of von Trier's "Antichrist", which essentially says, "I can't say I liked it; but I can't stop thinking about it." This one is the low-budget indie version of that. (EDIT: Googling around, I found this page of extremely polarized comments on Reddit that sum it up nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/xq7okl/yellowbrickroad/ )

This movie is well-produced, well acted, extremely realistic in its gore and violence. Unfortunately, I have to give it only one star because about for almost whole 10 minutes at the beginning, and again near the end of the movie, they stop showing people getting murdered, to waste time bogging it down with some throwaway backstory or reason for the murders, or something, completely from out of left field. I'm not sure... it was people talking, not characters getting stabbed in the eye or having a blender forced down onto the top of their head, so I couldn't sustain any attention to it.

In what universe are moviegoers actually entertained by a murderer SAYING WHY they kill people? Are there really people out there who sit and watch scenes of people talking, not killing anyone or being murdered at all, and find that entertaining? I highly doubt it.

It's a shame. This film's director, and writer if there was one, clearly could have had a future, and probably a great franchise opportunity with this film—if they hadn't sold out and inserted scenes for the sole purpose of pandering to depraved people who only go to movies for "plot" or "dialogue". I sense the marketing department or some other beancounters urging the filmmakers to go back and add these scenes after the film had already wrapped, just to throw in something to please the lowest-common-denominator idiots who can't even be happy with a 95 minutes collection of murder scenes.

Unfortunately, these pointless, gratuitous non-violent acts completely break the otherwise uninterrupted fever pitch of nonstop brutality, and what would have been a top notch, totally solid 95 minutes of human deaths and is stymied by the crassly commercial attempt to suggest "plot" or "dialogue".

This weird, boring non-violence provides an especially disappointing anti-climax when, unbelievably, it occurs AGAIN time near the end for some reason. Until that point it's been just killing, killing, killing, one murder scene after another for long enough that you can actually start to forget about the cinematically bankrupt initial minutes of non-murder, and begin to enjoy the movie, when, boom, then it happens AGAIN.

One early scene of people not getting murdered might have been forgivable. A second one, right near what should have been the climax of the film, just leaves the viewer wondering what the director was thinking that he allowed such ham-fisted, totally gratuitous irrelevancies into his film—not just once but TWICE.

At least these pointless minutes of "plot porn" are prevented from completely ruining the end of the film, by being suddenly followed in the final minutes with a few more gory, explicit murders (and even the last-minute introduction of a totally new character for the sole purpose of squeezing in just one more axe splitting one more head open before the credits roll!) I have to imagine after being forced to sully their film with stupid scenes of people talking to each other, they probably snuck back in to the studio late at night and added those final few minutes on the sly, without the knowledge of the marketing department or whoever demanded they ruin the movie. Good for them for sneaking that in, that last-ditch attempt at quality filmmaking is the only reason I can honestly give the film its 1 star.

I'm glad the production team came to their senses and at least respected the audience enough to end it so well, sparing us from having the lamentable spectacle of characters SAYING THINGS—not even killing or dying while they say them; just SAYING things!—stuck lingering in our head as they exit the theater.

I don't understand what would even give someone the idea to put something like that in a movie, or what kind of sellout director would allow it. This obvious mercenary ploy to cash in by appealing to the lowest common denominator, even for just a few minutes near the beginning and end, completely ruins what would have been the greatest movie since the history of cinema began, back in 1978 with "Last House On The Left". It's sad, tragic really, how close this film came, and how badly it failed. Ah, to dream, of what could have been, and of murders.

For the first half, a totally fun disaster movie in the spirit of '70s disaster movies, as sinkholes in Los Angeles form and seem to almost willfully chase people until they die as ironically as possible. Then, the second half, scientists run around trying to prevent a 10.0 from happening, and I lost interest.

John Cusack plays a horror writer trapped in an "evil hotel room". Exactly as stupid as that sounds. No, belay that. Stupider.

Paranormal Activity.

That rarest bird, the "so bad it's good" movie I actually like. Mostly because this is exactly what I imagine we would have gotten if John Waters had watched a bunch of David Cronenberg films and decided to make an anthology horror movie instead of a trashy social satire, but was still John Waters. A dumped-on office worker releases nanobots to make his coworkers like him, which turn them into monsters, because, movie. Plus two other similarly ludicrous segments filled with fake gore that I've already otherwise forgotten.

Surprisingly ok Hitchcockian thriller about Juliette Lewis inheriting an apartment and being menaced by a neighbor who leaves threatening notes. William Hurt, Tobin Bell, Shelley Duvall, and Austin Pendleton, who is this nebbishy guy you've seen in a zillion things but never got his name.

A home-movie-quality film about a group of students stuck in their dorm during the pandemic discover that the pandemic was just a ploy to keep people at home while the government tested 5G cell technology, which is a plot to absorb humanity into a "5-Dimensional Internet" by turning them into rubber-faced ghouls with glowing eyes. I'm not kidding. Actually contains the line,"No, you don't understand. I *am* the internet now. "If I was 9 years old, I probably would have thought this was an incredibly cool movie. (Which makes me worried if I ever stumble across" Psychomania"again as an adult. I thought that movie was a little too cool as a kid.) Make of that what you will.