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Reviews
Sputnik (2020)
This is a good movie and it's a pretty solid 2 hours for sci-fi/horror fans
I've watched it once & I'll probably watch it again. I'd be willing to recommend it to friends, and If I were hosting a movie party I'd put this one up for consideration.
The creature is pretty cool. 100% CGI, but well done. The relevant characters in the movie who are part of the story's movement are pretty well realized and the acting is solid.
It's not the most original concept but there's still enough variation on an old theme that it's almost fresh. It looks really well shot and the film location's are right what was needed. The paranoid Soviet atmosphere that drove the character's decisions was captured well. Sputnik is a good Sci-fi/psychological/creature feature horror movie.that's worth its running time. Go ahead and pull the trigger if you're just considering it.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
Certainly the best werewolf movie made in the last decade
While not a masterpiece this is a movie I'd recommend giving a view. I can't see myself choosing to watch it again with friends who haven't seen it yet. There's better movies. But that said, this movie isn't bad.
The main protagonist was a little over the top but still fun to watch. There were abandonment issues and living with terrible choices themes that gave the story an emotional buy-in that was semi-effective but never really realized. The secondary characters and cast are relatable & have lives of their own. There not just prop pieces. So a really good cast and well shot.
Certain base line assumptions this movie asks you to make, for example the town's attitude towards the police solving a crime immediately after it's occurred then turning on them when that doesn't happen the next day, is a little hard to go along with the way it was presented. This aspect of the movie felt like a real misfire, because the main protagonist was deeply motivated by approval and the town was turning on his department due to their being unable to solve the horrific murders.
It's an imperfect movie that even though flawed is still worth your consideration. So if you're wondering whether to watch Hereditary for the seventh time or watch something new, this is not a bad choice.
Possessor (2020)
Good idea, not great execution
I think this movie is summed up by it's title. That's as good as it actually is. I wouldn't recommend it and I've deleted it from my movie collection because I wouldn't ever feel compelled to ask another person to watch it with me, nor will I have any desire to watch it again.
Cool premise. The antagonist is a woman who belongs to a shadowy org that assassinates powerful people. They have tech that allows their assassins to possess the bodies of people who will be near by to an assassination target. The tech isn't perfect and remnants of the possessed's psych(?) can remain.
It was a cool premise but they didn't really do much with it. None of the characters are relatable so I found it hard to have any empathy, sympathy or outrage towards them. And while a pretty cool premise the story itself is meh.
If you're bored and have run out of things to watch you could do allot worse. It's not S*** but it's also not shinola.
11.22.63 (2016)
Mystery sci-fi thriller..uhh NO
More like mystery romantic drama. The show has so far proved to be 80% romantic subplots 15% character exposition and 5% actual story. In fact the plot about a teacher travelling back in time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK is just a skeleton on which they hang the romantic subplots and has very little to actually do with any of the substance of the show. So if What attracted you to the show is that premise and it is a really interesting one this show will make for very tedious watching because that is just there to touch on here and there but it is not the main focus of the show. The focus of the show is the romance between the teacher and the lady. With each passing episode I find myself giving less and less of a crap.
Video X: The Dwayne and Darla-Jean Story (2007)
Spoilers but fun
They got me! I thought this was a for real documentary although I felt the filmmakers were being rather dick*sh and dishonest to some of the folks who agreed to be interviewed. I should have picked up on it at that point that this wasn't an up and up documentary. But I didn't hence I think this deserves at least 7 stars.
I didn't realize it was bullsh*t until I tried to find the "video x" via torrent. Well EVERYTHING is available through bit-torrent and a few short google searches later I learned I'd been had.
Normally I'd rant and rave about being tricked but they did a good job. Every character in the movie was convincing. Now it seems ridiculous but they managed to suspend my disbelief and that was pretty fun (in retrospect I thought the "crimes" were gruesome and a reflection of the worst of man's inhumanity towards their fellow man), but I kept watching enthralled. Job well done!
Proxy (2013)
It could have!! It should have!! But it didn't...
Everything about this movie is awesome... Except for the movie. It's such a cool idea for a story! The flawed and deeply scarred characters who make up the movie are awesome. It boggles my mind how a director could take such rich material and fumble it as badly as mr. Parker did.
Try as I might I cannot come up with any words that will adequately explain how frustrating this movie turned out. It's such an awesome movie the premise the characters everything about it is like epic or should've been! But the director manages to ruin every thing. Quite the opposite of King Midas I imagine that if you handed Zack Parker a pile of gold which is exactly what this movie was he will turn it into a steaming pile of poop.it's a bummer because this movie SHOULD be amazing
Infini (2015)
I'm giving it a six, 5.5 is a bit low.
This is a very solid sci-fi/horror film. It's a cool plot. I love that the technology they're using is a bit dodgy and carries with its use some risk. The sets are convincing as is the acting. The script and the characters behavior are believable enough not to be insulting to your intellect. If you're a sci-fi fan or a horror fan I would recommend this movie...
BUT
it is way longer than it needs to be. In the novel Moby Dick Melville spends like 58 pages describing the whiteness of the whale. It's a bit gratuitous and unnecessary. This movie does the same thing in parts. No spoiler but in one scene two crewmates begin to crack and you think to yourself they're starting to crack. Yep they're definitely starting to crack. Boy they are cracking up..... They sure have gone off the deep end... Yeah they seem to have gone Looney Tunes... Man are they talking like crazy people... Bats in the belfry... They have definitelyOH FOR F**KS SAKES CAN WE PLEASE START MOVING THE STORY FORWARD NOW!!!!
Other than that it's a good movie and it's worth the watch!
The Gift (2015)
Ultimately it's crap...don't believe the hype
he's an up-and-coming dude just starting to make his wealth, she's a pretty hot lady and sticks by his side. Everything is going really really well until a face from his past reappears. And that face has had it pretty rough. But why? And does he want revenge?
That's it. That's the entire set up for the entire plot of this movie. It never gets any deeper than that. Once you figure out the weirdo wants revenge, and this is not a spoiler because it's super obvious from the beginning, nothing much really interesting happens after that. It's extremely predictable although I'm not going to give away the details why. Trust me when I tell you if you were thinking of downloading a porno while looking at this film then go for the porno. The ending will be just a surprising and shocking provided you've never seen a porno. The ending to any porno is more satisfying than the ending of this film... Or its beginning and middle for that matter. It's crap.
The Visit (2015)
A haters going to hate. The movie was pretty good but it wasn't great.
this is a good film and I wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing it. There were some genuinely creepy scenes and circumstances in the film. I think some of the more super negative reviews on here are from people who are still angry at the director for his previous films. And that is very understandable. The man his released some films that were criminally bad. But this is not one of them.
The movie falls in the genre of found footage even though it's not really so much "found" as it is footage. The daughter of a single mother wants to understand the bitter feelings between her grandparents and her mom. Mom's going on a cruise and the estranged grandparents have offered to look after the kids. Mom agrees because they are after all their grandchildren who should have an opportunity to meet their grandparents. This is not an improbable and crappy scenario from which to build a story. Haters are going to hate.
This is a horror film. A for real horror film! It doesn't rely on stupid jump scares and loud bangs. There isn't even any background music! It's all very disturbing imagery without being gory and alarming behavior by the antagonists. It's a good movie! I never thought I would say that again about something made by M.N.S.
Having said all that it's not perfect. I have watched hundreds possibly thousands of horror films. And the worst part of any great horror film is there ending. It's obviously the hardest thing in the entire world of filmmaking to stick the ending of a horror film. And like 1 million horror films before it The Visit stumbles right at the end. Despite that though it doesn't ruin the entire film and it's at least palatable and non-offending to your intelligence.
M. Night has not earned my trust back and it will take at least two more movies before I ever spend a dollar of my own money to see one of his films in the theater but this was a damn good start!
Last Shift (2014)
It's in unwatchable mess
there is nothing more pathetic than people who obviously must've been part of the cast or crew writing glowing reviews for movies that are horrible. Seriously guys stop you're embarrassing yourself.
A rookie cop on her very first shift is to guard a police station that will be closing down in the morning. And it turns out the police station is haunted by a wanna be Manson family. Sigh...The film uses every tired and overused horror cliché in the book but they're thrown at you in such a bumbeling and clumsy way that any effect they might have had evaporates into a cloud of dumb. This movie sucks so hard that it actually creates a vacuum in which you will pass out from intellectual hypoxia within seconds of being exposed to it.
Don't. Just don't.
Rosewood Lane (2011)
No, It's JUST as awful as these reviews would have you believe
As one reviewer mentioned you can't really write anything about this movie that would be a spoiler. There is NOTHING in this movie that you don't see coming from a mile away. Well except for that by the end it never actually forms a cohesive story or gets any better. SPOILER!
The opening scene was a foreshadowing of the movie's extremely flawed logic and believability. Our protagonist Rose arrives at her fathers house where the police are investigating the circumstances of his death. He's just been found dead at the bottom of the stairs to the basement. The detective not only lets her into the house but also asks the police to give her a moment alone with her father's corpse on the basement floor (you know standard police procedure). It's been laying there for some time and has begun to decompose and she places her hand on his forehead while sobbing uncontrollably. This is MEANT to be an emotional scene, a daughter grieving for the loss of her father, and not WTF creepy. Seriously!
From there is just does a logarithmic downward slide into dumb. The entire movie is a series of stale and tired horror clichés. Anything that could be "thrilling" is broadcast from miles away so NOTHING is surprising when it happens. The nursery rhyme thing is embarrassingly cliché and makes the killer's even dumber and less convincing. While the movie gives you some history about the protagonist explaining why she should exist in the context of the story it never develops the paperman's character. Is he just a psychopath? is he some sort of supernatural evil being? Why hasn't anyone complained to the newspaper that their deliveryman is a monster who scares the hell out of them? He breaks into a women's house, assaults a District Attorney, and the police do nothing, why? Speaking of which what the hell happened to the DA at the end of the movie? His disappearance and a threatening call to the main character's show (a nursery rhyme...ughh) was the setup for the final conflict but then they just completely forget about his character and never explain what happened to him. The movie ends at the paperman's funeral but WHO THE F%#K ARE THESE PEOPLE AT HIS FUNERAL!?!?! Who the hell would have even paid for it?!?! Nothing anyone does in the final scenes of the movie make ANY logical sense. The climax is laughably stupid. It's one of the worst and least satisfying endings I've ever seen.
If you still feel compelled to watch because you want to know what is this disastrous ending we reviewers are talking about then here's what you do: Watch the first 15 minutes then fast forward to about the 1hr 1min mark. Enjoy! All you need to know is that at some point in the movie the DA tells Rose a story about his childhood in which some bullies buried him in a hole with just a snorkel for air (yeah I know that means he couldn't have been buried much more then 1.5 feet and should have easily been able to escape but whatever..) and he wasn't found for a long time. Also that's not her dog (where did it come from? doesn't matter!). There is no point at all to watching anything in between. You're welcome!
Creep (2014)
Very original and really well done
I really enjoyed this movie and I would definitely recommend it. I wouldn't say the movie is "scary" but they dialed up the creep factor to 11! The premise for this movie is very believable and it works excellently for a found footage film.
The premise is a simple one. A struggling videographer answers an ambiguous add to film someone for a day at their cabin for $1000. When he meets his subject the guy seems a kinda weird but harmless. As the day progresses his subject's behavior gets increasingly odd. After a long and very awkward day of filming they head back to the cabin and have a few drinks at the subject's insistence. And it's at this point that his behavior goes from weird to seriously unhinged. That is act 1. Plenty of great stuff follows and it's not just some dude getting getting chased through the woods and shaky footage. This movie is way smarter than that.
There are only 2 people in the movie. Both of the actors are brilliant and totally believable. The character's actions are clear and make sense, albeit one of them is insane. What I really enjoyed about this movie and what sets it apart from 99% of all other found footage films is that it is entirely plausible. I definitely recommend this movie!
Devil's Mile (2014)
Start watching it but don't bother finishing it. I did the hard work for you.
Oh the genre of horror! There is no other genre of film that can lead to such profound disappointment, especially for fans like myself. Every year there are hundreds of so called "horror" films made around the world. Unfortunately of those hundreds of films it seems only 4 or 5 will be worth watching. Really scary! The kind of film that makes you jumpy for a couple of weeks after seeing it. While you take a shower you wonder if when you open your eyes after rinsing off the shampoo you'll see a silhouette on the other side of the shower curtain. Or after you start your car at night you'll see another set of eyes in your rear view mirror. They make you hyper aware of every sound in your apartment or house as you close you eyes to go to sleep.
This is not one of those films.
If you are not at all a horror film watcher & prefer movies like Ice Age or Nut Thief or whatever that recent Pixar film is called then this film might, **just might**, seem scary to you. Maybe. You'd have to scare pretty easily though.
I'm giving this movie at least 2 stars because the premise is a good one. Pretty original really. Some kidnappers take a short cut on a highway that turns out to be the highway to hell! The kidnapping gets botched and innocent people die. They are forced to confront their actions by supernatural forces bent on exacting revenge. Well, sort of. It get's really really, muddled near the end. In fact by the end it doesn't make any since at all.
And when I say "it doesn't make any since at all" I don't mean that in the "it got all weird and artsy" sense so you have to figure it out way, no, I simply mean it seems like the writers gave up and said "F**K it, End it, we're running out of cocaine and Jules said he will be out of contact after 6pm"....but then one of the interns had a couple of bumps so they kept writing for like 30 minutes and came up with the brilliant ending that you really shouldn't waste any of your life waiting for.
I'm not discouraging you from watching this film. I'm just saying if after you've watched it for 41 minutes and find yourself asking "Is this ever going to get any better?" The answer is NO. It only gets worse,
Red Lights (2012)
A COMPLETE mess of a film
This movie started off kind of stupid and just pressed the petal to the metal all the way up to it's spectacularly dumb ending. I'm giving it 3 stars because Sigourney Weaver & Cillian Murphy are decent actors and seemed to have done the best they could with the material. But it's pretty obvious sometime around the 1:15 mark Cillian Murphy realized just how awful this film was going to turn out and just gives up! Seriously, you can spot the exact moment when he realized it was that hopelessly bad.
The long and short of it is Sigourney and Cillian are researchers dedicated to debunking the paranormal. Enter Robert De Nero as a super famous psychic who seems to be the real deal. Cillian's character becomes obsessed with proving he is a fraud, but as he delves deeper and deeper into the mystery man the truth becomes ever more elusive. And Dumb.
I don't think there was a single 5 minute interval where I didn't ask "Wait...Why?" There will always be a certain understandable suspension of disbelief asked of the viewer in almost any movie. This movie makes it a serious chore to figure out how you can justify your suspension of disbelief. There are innumerable scenes in the film that seemed to occur for no reason at all. No explanation as to why 3/4 of anything the characters are doing in the movie is ever offered, and the other 1/4 is just strikingly dumb and far from believable. If the movie were written by a C grade highschool freshman I could give it a mercy filled "atta boy!" But the only 2 words that continuously came to mind were "what?" and "why?"
You should see this film. Not because it doesn't suck, and not because it sucks so bad it's actually entertaining. Neither applies at all. You should see this film for the 1:15 mark where Cillian Murphy realizes how hopelessly dreadful the movie is and straight GIVES UP! I've never seen anything like that in any other film. So it has that going for it!
Purification (2012)
Horror?!?! Thriller?!?! Are you kidding me?
THIS MOVIE SUCKS DON'T BE DECEIVED! Probably not any spoilers because it's SO OBVIOUS. I'm compelled to write this review because 5 of the 6 reviews have obviously been written by cast members or friends of cast members and I fell for it. THIS MOVIE SUCKS DON'T BE DECEIVED!
The crux of the story is not dissimilar to A Christmas Carroll except far less scary or thrilling. A well off self absorbed and greedy man *almost* gets hit by a car at the start of the movie. The car stops just short of running him over and he continues on his way. It's super obvious that he was killed but he doesn't know it.
From that moment on he starts seeing people who have died, starting with a little girl who we find out later is his daughter, and when he touches them he sees a vision of their story. A number of the ghost's deaths can be attributed to his own selfish actions and the consequences they had on these people. Others are completely random. None of them are the least bit believable.
His dead mother's house was left to his brother who has a drug addiction. After receiving a letter stating that the house is to be foreclosed on he goes to confront his brother. He finds his brother shooting up in a closet and has an argument with him and leaves. For the next hour of the movie he sees more dead people.
Because he's seeing all this weird stuff he calls his doctor. His regular doc is not available so he has to talk to a different one. After seeing a series of weird events he returns to his brothers house and his brother tells him that they are both dead and he has 24 hours to change his behavior. He doesn't believe him and leaves. Cut to a church and he's standing outside when the doctor appears and tells him his brother was telling the truth and that his brother is not going to heaven because he overdosed and killed himself but it's not to late for him to change his ways. At this point the movie takes on a decidedly religious tone and unfolds with all the subtlety and cleverness of a Chick tract (except less scary or thrilling and poorer dialogue). Mercifully there's only about 12 minutes left in the film.
In the final moment of the film he is walking down a street where a bunch of people who are dead are doing and saying unusual things when he sees a girl who's wondering around and asking no one in particular "where's my mommy?" She wonders into the street where a car is fast approaching and he shoves her out of the way and is struck by the car. While he's lying on the ground quivering and dying the devil appears and and says that he did a good deed by pushing the girl out of the way. The devil asks him to stay with him, says some other really stupid stuff then disappears. The protagonist stands there looking at his body on the ground when his daughter takes him by the hand and they go off to heaven...or something, I don't know. I just wanted it to be over by that point and thankfully it was.
The dialogue was pretty awful. Most of the conversations sounded very forced and would never occur between real people. The acting was even worse. It's an entirely clean "horror" movie in that there is no violence or gore shown and no makeup effects. That and the combination of seriously horrible acting and terrible dialogue makes this an excruciating experience. Everything that is suppose to be creepy falls entirely flat because it seems to have come from the imagination of what a 10 year old would think is scary, and I have no idea where they get off claiming the "thriller" part of horror/thriller.