Reviews

This UK supernatural genre series, probably trying to capitalize on the success of Being Human, actually does manage to be OK. It's not great, but the 1st season cast does have some chemistry. Where it gets a little shaky is the ghost-of-the-week plots, which somehow feel formulaic just halfway into the first 6 episode run. Unfortunately, if you find yourself getting into the 1st season, you will be utterly disappointed by the 2nd season. Like a lot of struggling shows, the producers of this one apparently decided to replace most of the cast after the 1st season cliffhanger; or maybe they just quit. The 1st season is mentioned a little in the 2nd season, but little is explained, and even the two left-over characters have, let's say, dramatic personality shifts. Season 2 is effectively a different show with the same sets. Even more unfortunately, the creatives seem to have been under the delusion that there was going to be a 3rd season, so the considerably weaker 2nd season doesn't really wrap its own plot, much less the 1st season's. Abandon all hope of closure, ye who enter here.

I saw the trailers for this. But I like Sofia Boutella. After some self-debate, I did start to watch it, and it does have lots of Sofia Boutella in it.

After a while, it dawned on me that I should think of it as a live-action cartoon, and from then I could enjoy watching Sofia Boutella more. Also entertaining, was thinking about all the other movies it reminded me of, since there sure are a lot of them. I'm also pretty sure I saw landscapes from World of Warcraft.

It has a plot, but it's one of those plots where they could have just told you what it is in a couple sentences and you'd be like "oh yeah, that one, I know that one, that's a good plot. Oh, no, no, you don't have to fill in the names and whatall - I got it." This film would be way better with no exposition at all, no voiceover, no flashbacks. When you're doing something this familiar, and fully conscious of its familiarity, it just does not help anything when you sit us down and explain it all. I get "space Nazi" - this is like the 20th film I've seen with these exact same space Nazis; it's just wasting our time to keep going on about how these guys are space Nazis. When exposition is expounded with something like this, it really has to be a tale of extraordinary interest to be worth slowing it all down to fill in the backstory. Do you really think you cleared that bar? Honestly?

The CG artists sure worked hard on it, lots of cool art.

Surprisingly the fight sequences don't work that well. Are those supposed to be like squirt guns? They squirt stuff. Really, it's like they squirt yellow goo that splatters around and glows and only kills people when it's convenient for the scene. It always seems weird to me when movies have sci fi space guns that are less effective than actual guns. Like, did they forget how to make bullets in the future? Maybe it's in the past, which could be why their agricultural technology is somewhere around early Bronze Age level.

Yup, live action cartoon with Sofia Boutella.

For a low-to-mid budget film, this is really a pretty brilliant piece of horror cinema. Maybe there's stuff that could have been done better, but the creep-value of the main conceit, scuba diving an underwater haunted house, powers the story through the odd technical inaccuracy or dubious bit of dialog. If you know anything about diving, it's hard not to see the protagonists as giant idiots, given what they do. But then giant idiots aren't really such a rare thing, and it's not that far out of the range of "dumb ways to die" that involve a selfie stick. It's well thought out and has some comments to make about the trendiness and lure of internet fame, on top of some scares, so I'd definitely recommend a watch.

If you compare this film to big-time professional productions, it's not the greatest, but among its low-budget horror peers, it's a real standout, and even compared to bigger-budget B movies, like your various Conjuring and Insidious sequels, it's got nothing to be ashamed of. I found it pretty engaging overall, aside from a bit of a slow beginning.

Like most genre films, it does rely on more than a few conventions, but it has a fair share of its own originality. The big problems I usually see in indie films are nonsensical writing and editing, often with incoherent direction and editing that make it difficult to impossible to figure out what's supposed to be happening, but the story and the dialog here hang together well. The plot is well thought out. Some of the digital and sound effects show the budgetary limitations a bit too much. I often find myself thinking "If you know you can't afford to make this effect look good, why do it in the first place?" but maybe filmmakers just like to practice for when they start getting Hollywood-scale budgets. I think this production team probably will if they can make a film like this with what they had.

This is one of those random TV episodes that's ripped straight out of master plots to fill time so that they can draw out the arc. On top of that, the whole premise is utterly stupid. You have to believe that "the Founders" had such advanced engineering that they built a steam turbine that can run 140+ years, but... they never thought of adding a steam vent so it could be shut down safely for maintenance. Like an essential feature that's been around since the 1800s? They have a backup system. What does it run on? Surely if they thought of a backup system, they would have thought about what would happen if the main turbine was offline? I won't even get into all the stuff that's crazy if you know anything at all about utility-scale stream turbines, but the silliness of the premise is just common sense. This episode is just one silly contrivance after another on many levels. It's acted out well enough that if you can force yourself to ignore how stupid it all is, it's somewhat enjoyable, but it sure was a struggle. I started the series thinking there might be some smart resolution to it, but slapdash writing like this has convinced me that the big reveals are probably going to be just as ridiculous.

The synopsis says that "the locals are less than welcoming and trying to hide a secret." The locals actually succeed in hiding the secret since the movie just stops before we find out what the secret is. I actually liked it pretty well up to the point where it started to become clear that the writers weren't sure what it was all about. It's not stunningly original or anything, but the setup works pretty well; it just sets up and.... the end. It's kind of a shame since a lot of things really seemed to be clicking, like Elaine Alexander's performance. Some plot elements defy common sense, which I suppose comes back to a weak script. Could have been a surprisingly good movie if they'd left that to bake all the way.

Blood Vessel starts out with an oddly representative group of citizens of various Allied nations adrift in a life boat in the North Atlantic during the final year of the Second World War. A spooky ship looming in the darkness offers salvation, but if you paid any attention to the synopsis, you know it's not going to be that simple. The mysteriously lifeless ship has long been a fruitful horror movie setting, and I think this is one of the better uses of it. I'll take points off for going overboard on the usual bickering among survivors, and I had a hard time buying that Kriegsmarine officers didn't know how to scuttle a ship, but I've seen worse. It follows familiar patterns a lot, but it has enough good ideas to keep it from sinking under too much predictability. That said, it probably won't take you a long time to figure out what's going on before it settles into the usual process of elimination to see who (if anyone) survives.

The movie starts out with a witch trial scene set in Virginia in 1706. The writer apparently has no idea how witch trials worked, where Virginia is, what it would have been like in 1706, or how 18th century English language worked. That was 5 minutes of uninspired annoyance. I mean, if you go through the trouble of making a movie and decide to write dialog with all these "thees" and "thous" (which were already obsolete at the time anyway), wouldn't you take like 5 minutes to read wikipedia and see what they mean? This writer did not. We return to the 18th century later in the film to learn that the writer believes "windeth" was the plural of wind. (Also "you are her way backeth.") Beyond that, it's a vanilla vengeful witch flick that you've seen before, again and again, but with really bad writing. I just don't get the appeal of this witch thing, but I guess horror wouldn't be a genre if they didn't keep repeating the same 4 or 5 stories over and over again. A couple of the actors make a sincere effort. You have to admire that level of professionalism it takes to try to run with this dialog, but nobody could have made this script work. My suggestion: don't stick around until they start blathering nonsense about Einstein and black holes. Those wikipedia articles were not read either.

I didn't expect a lot from this film since it telegraphs "low budget" from the start, but it's a decent thriller. I'm pretty sure I've seen this plot before, but not entirely sure where. However, it's a good story so I can see how it gets reimagined periodically. There's a little bit of an attempt to mix up the "psychological thriller" formula up at the end. I'm not sure it totally works, but an effort was made. The movie sets out from the familiar car accident/coma combo and from there goes down roads that the thriller fan knows well, but I think if you're a genre fan, you'll find it acceptable viewing. If, however, you don't really get into the thriller conventions, it doesn't rise above them, so it's maybe worth skipping this one.

I don't want slag on this film too much since it was clearly made on the cheap and in earnest, but it's full of needless, wobbly German dialog, and it's just such a puzzling decision. Most of actors obviously don't speak German; the writers don't speak German at the level you need to write a film. Why is half the film in German? Yeah, a couple of the actors sound at least fluent, but they're certainly not native, and the constantly shifting fake German accents when they (almost randomly) speak English are just bad. There's even a point in the film where the supernatural baddies explain that they speak all languages, so one is prompted to wonder why they decided 2nd year college German with subtitles was the one to go with.

I could also grumble about this sophomoric understanding of Cernunnos and pagan worship in general. I'm not sure the writers get the basic concept of blood sacrifice (or what the word "demigod" means), but in the tradition of plot motivations for horror films, it's hardly the worst offender. Unfortunately, it kinda misses on the whole horror thing too. And some of the dialog: "The panther and the sheep never hunt together."?

There's some decent acting and some sorta decent production (again, I give them points for at least trying), but for the most part, it seems like a somewhat long student film that by some miracle ended up on Amazon Prime.

In contemporary America, and presumably elsewhere, there are a lot of subcultures that have an expectation that whatever ostensibly weird thing it is they're into is honest, real, and completely harmless, if not virtuous. The corollary is that you should be fine with it, and even if there are some things about it that don't make a lot of sense, you should politely nod, say something like "that's very interesting," and not try to poke holes in it. Which this movie flatly tells you, so there's not much doubt about this being its main message. Because it revolves around this, your enjoyment of it is likely to depend on where you stand on accepting such things, like that there are real-life "vampires" who (from their POV) need to drink blood. (This is a 100% real thing, in the real world; they ain't making it up.) Enthusiasts of unconventional subcultures are likely to enjoy the message and representation, while the more conservative among us will probably be turned off by it.

Coming from what I feel like is a middle ground on this, it's a middling movie. It has a real intention to be a "rom-com," so it follows a familiar formula, while trying to use that familiarity to comment on the message at hand. It's somewhat successful there, and the plot has above-average smarts, relative to the world of rom-comery. It can be somewhat sweet and amusing, but the comedy is very broad, often crossing into corniness, and still, as someone who doesn't completely buy into the message, it isn't funny enough to let me wholly sympathize with plucky vampires trying to get away with tax evasion.

I'm not sure how many times I've seen the Yellow Wallpaper adapted now. It's at least the third one, and wikipedia lists like 5 reasonably direct film adaptations. The story is justly regarded as a horror/feminist/short fiction classic, and I suppose because the author was a woman, it gets a lot of additional interest from the diversity and inclusion motive. I thought the 1977 short film was pretty good, though I haven't seen it in a long time. I think... a long format is maybe not the right way to go for a faithful adaptation. The author Gilman actually wrote nine novels, so I don't think she was incapable of long fiction, or disdainful of it, but yet she chose to write this as a short; and I have to trust that she knew what she was doing. Clearly, it's a literary classic, so... I dunno. Maybe we should trust the artist's judgement about the merits of brevity? I'm not too thrilled about the cinematography, but maybe they were just trying a lot of odd experiments with focus, camera angles, etc. To liven things up a bit. This is a slow, contemplative, meditative, cogitating, simmering, fermenting, rising in a pan in the corner, ripening, perambulating, gently unfolding film.

Like most people, I was immediately drawn in by the first season, which just knocked it out of the park on many levels. I've seen a few reviews where people were bored by the pace, which, yeah, if you don't like atmospheric development, this probably isn't for you, but if you can appreciate patient, atmospheric horror, this is one of the best examples around, and I personally didn't get bored by any of it.

With season 2, which is a whole different animal, with little, if any, connection or similarity to the first, I was a little jarred by the complete disconnect, but it does have some strengths as its own thing if you stick with it. As far as I can tell, their only link is that they're both broadly in the same genre and are period pieces. Season 2 is nowhere near the level of the first season, but I'd give it a solid 6/10.

For the most part, this is a recitation of ghosty-thrillery genre cliches, until the end, where it does chart its own course. I'm not sure the end really works, but at least it's different and it does follow through on the whole Swedenborgian theme. I have not read the novel it was based on, but I have a feeling this worked a lot better as a novel than it did as a movie. As is common with book adaptations, you can see a lot of threads that obviously would have gone somewhere but languished in the abbreviated format of the screenplay . It's competently produced and acted, with solid appearances by several Netflix regulars, so I can't say it's bad, just not really all that engaging.

From the synopsis, I thought this had some potential, and there are some things that work, but it's really a mixed bag. Some of the characters are a bit two dimensional and, without going into spoilers, I don't think the costumes and special effects worked very well. Given the apparent budget constraints, they probably would have been better advised to go in a different direction with some things. It gets points for having an interesting setting, and some of the non-plot-device characters are realized in an interesting way, but there are a lot of plot elements that seem a little contrived and don't make a lot of sense. Like, say, if you were walking down a road, and a car revved its engine and came charging at you, would you (A) run down the road and try to outrun the car or (B) run to the side of the road away from the charging car? I'm just saying - that happened to me once and my first instinct was to jump to the side. I don't regret seeing Don't Say It's Name, but it's not really one I would recommend other than for the cultural representation aspect. There is something to that, but there are better examples of aboriginal cinema.

A lot of random horror flicks on Netflix tend to be rather mediocre, but this one is actually pretty good. I did feel like maybe it was overedited some, like especially toward the end, the denouement felt kind of rushed, but overall it's paced well. It makes effective use of its based-on-a-true-story spooky forest setting. The plot is also a bit richer than the average spooker, and it does manage some real scariness. There might be a few inconsistencies with reality here and there, but they weren't too distracting (I suspect Japanese viewers might find some of it a little silly though.) Overall, it wasn't the greatest I've ever seen, but it was a full meal.

The plot is familiar, and if you've seen more than a handful of horror movies in your life, you'll pretty much know the score here. It is competently produced, shot, and acted for the most part, so it's decent to watch, just not much more than a genre recitation. There are a few, not entirely original, but at least moderately fresh elements, though not many. It actually had some reasonable scares too. If you're not Indonesian, it's at least interesting from the point of view of seeing a slice of Indonesia and an odd little window into how Indonesians look at their colonial past, or at least how this particular filmmaker sees it. It's a lot more pro-Dutch than I would have expected.

This film writhed and wrestled against every expectation I had of it, and it really made me think. It's actually kind of hard to review it without spoilers because everything about it is so twisty, and a lot of its effectiveness comes from thinking that it's going to be something that it's not... or maybe it is. A lot of reviewers seem to be put off by unanswered questions in it, but it seems to me it implies a lot of answers that are pretty creepy if you think about them. This is a film that leaves a lot lurking in the shadows, and it uses that to draw metaphors about racism that are much deeper than they appear on the surface. The insinuation of a subtly self referential lit class into the plot can hardly be accidental.

There was probably an elaborate fantasy thriller novel that this was based on. Parts of it poke through in voiceovers, but really what it is is a bunch of special effects and stunt reels strung together.

I found this while scrolling through Amazon Prime, and I didn't expect too much since it was obviously a very low budget indie (and props to Amazon for picking up obscure indie work like this). A lot of these are kind of unwatchable, but this one actually kept me all the way through. I'm not saying it's great, but it has some charm to it and it is occasionally effective thriller-wise. Dolly Gray does a good job carrying scenes. Like a lot of (presumably) phone-shot pseudo-vlogs, it does suffer a lot from bad micing. I had to play with the volume a lot and rewind to pick up dialog. I assume the "Random as hell" reviewer probably missed a lot of critical plot points that way. It can be pretty confusing if you don't go back and listen carefully. The subtitles help a little but at least on AP, they're not much better than the sound track. It also probably was not necessary to give the Asian receptionist a broken accent. Kinda heavy on stereotypes all around. But it was entertaining.

If you like cautionary melodrama laid on so thick that you aren't sure if it's supposed to be a joke, this movie is for you. It reminds me a little of Crash and (if you go way back) Mazes and Monsters. It seems to want to be an exploration of how the internet collides with teen angst, but it weirdly seems to have been written by someone who was never a teen and only knows what the internet is from 2nd hand descriptions. Aliens maybe? I really don't know who could have come up with this script in earnest. It's full of weird misconceptions about things that I previously assumed were part of commonplace experience. I'm pretty sure the actors were taking it seriously though. Wow, is there a lot of Serious Acting being Acted here.

This is one of those films that makes you say "what?" to the television a lot, partly because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense at times and partly because the sound levels are sometimes inconsistent. You might have to keep fiddling with the volume to follow some of the mumble shots without getting overwhelmed by the background music used to let you know that something suspenseful must have happened. I was often left guessing about that. There's one particular scene in which the trees apparently make rumbling noises of some sort, and the music lets you know that that's very, very scary, whatever it is.

My fiancée fell asleep about 10 minutes into it, which tells you something about the degree to which it merits being included in the "thriller" category. I can sit through almost anything, but I did look it up on IMDb for a bit since there wasn't much going on on the screen. This one would be a hard one to get through in a theater.

It picks up a little bit in the middle, but I can't say there's much reason to stick it out. I suspect that whatever festival buzz it got is because it's sort of about wife abuse, though it's not totally clear what it's trying to say about it, other than that it's bad. Some of the acting is OK.

This film is difficult to review without referring to its Swedish predecessor, Let the Right One In (in English), since most of it is a very direct remake. By comparison to the average cookie-cutter vampire film, it is at least more original and generally more interesting, so if somehow you can't handle the subtitles of the Swedish original or the so-so dubbing in the dubbed version turns you off (I highly recommend the subtitles, as he sound editing in the original is very effective), it might be worth seeing. On the other hand, it doesn't add very much to the Swedish version and loses more than it gains. There is one good scene early on which is entirely novel and well executed, but generally it's the same as the Swedish film only more rushed and less subtle, and oh yeah, with more boobs. I personally also found the atmospheric music in the soundtrack to be extremely grating and intrusive. When the director can't manage to make a scene touching enough, he literally piles on the violins - repeatedly, and drum beats are the code to let you know that there's supposed to be suspense. It seems to be part of a pattern of eliminating anything subtle - this is basically "Let the Right One In for Dummies." Most of the really effective frights in the original are either cut out entirely or so rushed and clumsy that they lose their effectiveness, so don't be expecting a lot on the horror front. I kind of got the impression that the director was so enamored of his one original sequence that he put all his minutes into that, and by the end he was just touching the bases with the rest of the scenes. One sequence near the end is jarringly absurd due to the fact that one character from the book was substituted into the actions of another with some rather inadequate patching. Let's just say that you should be prepared to assume that police detectives are morons and never follow standard police procedure. On the bright side for the producers, it looks like it was cheap enough to make that they won't have much trouble getting their money back.