Recent viewings

[Rev. Powell]

COLOSSAL (2016): An alcoholic woman (Anne Hathaway) discovers that she controls a giant monster who is attacking Seoul. COLOSSAL might describe the movie's tone problems---there are too many innocent deaths for it to work as comedy, and the premise is too ridiculous for it to work as drama or horror---but the film's absolute commitment to its allegory keeps you curious to see how it will turn out. 3/5.

[javakoala]

SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN (1983)

This movie is madness, which means I enjoyed it. Shot on a tiny, tiny budget, shot on video, and shot using the talents of the kids in an acting class.

Basic outline: Strange little girl shows up at a children's home. She cannot speak, but soon she is controlling the other kids and causing the death of those who would stop her. To help stop the spread of Evil, Jesus Christ Himself makes a guest appearance to zap a few of the possessed children.

Ample blood to hide the lack of common sense, plus a major turning point of the story is NEVER SHOWN but talked about endlessly for five minutes or so. "Yes, we get there was a mishap at the public pool. Shut up about it, and get the movie going again, please."

So utterly weird and bad that you can't help but smile as it defies logic to reach its frighteningly bizarre religious ending.

3.5/5 on the entertainment scale
2/5 on a realistic scale. Maybe 1.5/5

[Rev. Powell]

RIFFTRAX: THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON: Radiation + sunlight = evolutionary reversion to an alcoholic lizard-man state. Stupid premise, fairly dull execution, but Mike, Kevin and Bill are at the top of their game, making ample fun of the hero's hard drinking and fondness for slutty nightclub molls. Also downloaded an equally funny short, "Drugs Are Like That," to make a night of it. If your a Rifftrax fan you might go 4/5 for the SUN DEMON riff. "Dear Santa, sorry about all the drinking and turning into a sun demon. I'll try to do better this year."

[FatFreddysCat]

"Rumpelstiltskin" (1995)

The infamous fairy-tale gnome has been imprisoned in a figurine since medieval times, but now he's on the loose in 1990s L.A., where he has nefarious plans for a young widow and her baby son.

Silly direct-to-video horror cheez from the writer/director of the original "Leprechaun," which should tell you pretty much everything you need to know.

[lester1/2jr]

Tai chi zero - typical mediocre modern kung fu flick. borrows the mechanical monster from that wil smith movie 2/5

Killing Words (2003)  - the guy kidnapped his wife and is gonna kill her . OR IS HE?  or is the whole thing some kind of twisted game???? you don't know

5/5

Heartless (2009) pretty cool movie about a guy who gets involved with some evil spirits in east London. They set his Mom on fire which isn't very nice, but also help him get rid of a birth mark on his face OR DO THEY? you don't know. The evil kingpin guy looked like more homeless than scary

4/5

[claws]

Viral (2016)

Two sisters must face and survive a deadly outbreak after their desert community is put under quarantaine. The infected are controlled by parasitic worms inside their bodies.

The Weinsteins teamed with Blumhouse for this zombi-ish teen horror, which plays out like a cross between the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later. Not a perfect film but still good enough to watch. 2.5/5 (flawed but worthy)

[Rev. Powell]

LIMITE (1931): Three people languish on a lifeboat; flashbacks show how they got there. Great experimental camerawork, but slow-paced yet confusing, with almost no dialogue, so that you may not figure out how the pieces were intended to fit together. The director was a teenager when he made this, his only film; he had clear talent, but this needed better pacing and editing and feels like a first draft of a good movie rather than a masterpiece. 2/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"The Demolitionist" (1995)

In the near future, a policewoman shot down in the line of duty (Nicole Eggert of "Charles In Charge" and "Baywatch" -- of all creatures!) is transformed into a cyborg crime fighter and turned loose on the murderous syndicate that controls the city's underworld. Bullets fly, stuff blows up, the end.

Sharp eyed genre nerds will notice Heather "Nightmare On Elm Street" Langenkamp and FX maestro Tom Savini playing minor roles in thi cheap, cheesy, gender swapped "RoboCop" knock-off. Silly but watchable.

[claws]

54 (1998)

1979: Dude from Jersey becomes a bartender in the world famous night club Studio 54. He soon gives in to sex and drugs while enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, but all that glitter ain't gold when the IRS shows up and shuts the disco down.

A poor man's Boogie Nights with a cult following. I do enjoy the soundtrack but they don't make good use of it. Certain scenes underlined with a fitting song would have made this much better. Anyway, All star cast, great disco soundtrack. Mike Myers is pretty good in his first and only serious role as the owner of 54.   botched plot, shallow characters, modernized (as in 1998 house music type modern) version of a disco song performed in a scene taking place in 1981, alternative version (why? couldn't get the rights?) of Amii Stewarts Knock on Wood hit. 2.5/5 (flawed but worthy)

[Rev. Powell]

THE SNOW QUEEN (1957): After being insulted by a good little boy, the evil Snow Queen freezes his heart and kidnaps him, and his playmate goes on an adventure to save him. A Soviet Cold War attempt to create a Disney-style cartoon with Russian folkloric themes (even though the original story is by Hans Cristian Andersen), and quite successful at it. The Art Linkletter Christmas kiddie introduction appended to Universal's version to pad the length is terrible. 3.5/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"What's Up Nurse" (1977)
Cringe-worthy late '70s British "adult comedy" about a klutzy young doctor whose first assignment at a small town hospital is full of wacky hi-jinks involving large breasted nurses.
...apparently British anti-pornography laws were so strict in the '70s that sex comedies like these were the closest things to "dirty" movies in the U.K. This flick was pretty much just a bunch of 30 second "naughty" comedy skits stitched together to make a feature length film. This sort of thing might have raised eyebrows in the '70s, but it's tame as milk now.

[Rev. Powell]

TAG (2015): A Japanese schoolgirl finds herself shunted through many different realities, all of which want to kill her. TAG is already sort of notorious for its memorable opening scene, in which a busload of schoolgirls get sheared in half; the rest of it just as silly, gory and surreal, with no real substance but a decent quota of outrageous bloody fun. 3/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Death Spa" (1989)
A high tech Hollywood health spa is the site of several mysterious and horrific deaths, which may have been caused by a supernatural force.
This surprisingly gory, so-'80s-it-hurts flick is cheap n' cheesy in all the right ways and is actually much better than you'd expect, given its totally ludicrous premise.

"Old 37" (2015)
A pair of backwoods brothers (Kane "Jason" Hodder and Bill Mosely) cruise the remote roads of a small town in an old ambulance, posing as paramedics so they can take accident victims back to their junkyard lair to do unspeakable things to them.
Sounds like a simple enough premise but this disappointing slasher flick fumbles the ball all over the place, spending way too much time on set up involving the idiot teenybopper cannon fodder we don't care about, till eventually the whole thing devolves into a boring muddle. Skip it.

"Be Afraid" (2017)
A small town doctor and his family encounter "shadow people" who come out of an abandoned tunnel in the woods in the middle of the night to steal children away from their parents. It's fairly predictable, familiar stuff but it sports fine performances and a decent amount of creeping dread.

[dean]

Free Fire: A bunch of gun dealers in the 70s meet and things go wrong. They then proceed to shoot at each other for the majority of the movie.

I'm a fan of Wheatley but was left a little underwhelmed by High Rise and this one fits into a similar category. Just feels like it needed some polish and either more silly surreal nonsense from the key concept or more banter from the characters to flesh them out more. It suffers from a lack of anyone likable but Copley and Hammer both do a pretty good job of injecting a bit of humour into the film. 3/5.

I'll compare it to Lesson of the Evil by Takashi Miike. Very different films but LOTE basically does 'insanity' with its main conciet; shoot the hell out of school students for one hour in ridiculous fashion which I enjoyed thoroughly. This one just drops in energy as people hiding behind broken concrete shoot each other in the legs and such for a good 50 minutes which is fun and silly for the most part but needs a bit of shaping as it loses energy pretty quickly.

[Rev. Powell]

THE TENANT (1976): A young man moves into a new apartment where the previous tenant committed suicide; under pressure from his unpleasant older neighbors, who backstab each other and obsess over the slightest noise in the apartment, he becomes unglued and starts to suspect the same fate awaits him as the previous tenant. The most underrated of Roman Polanski's "apartment trilogy," this is also the most unhinged and mysterious of the three, with its deep existential dread marred perhaps only by Polanski's sheepish performance. 4.5/5.