Reviews

A family is driving along a deserted road when the father at the wheel starts to doze off. He collects himself just in time to avoid hitting another car. Spooky things begin to occur immediately after.

Not even having had to watch the first five minutes of Dead End, you already know what's going on from that three sentence description unless you're an alien who has just arrived on Earth. How much more blatant does it get, though?

There's a ghostly woman in white who appears and disappears mysteriously, carrying around a mutilated baby. The road the family travels on is endless with nowhere to turn off. All timepieces have stopped at precisely the same moment. There's a hearse driving around that snatches the characters one by one.

Get it now? If not, I bid you greetings, my interstellar friend. Welcome to Earth, the characters were dead all along.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge's twist was novel at the time it was written by Ambrose Bierce, but that was in 1890. Some variant of "a hallucination as the character was dying," "nothing is real, the events are some kind of purgatory/afterlife shenanigans," and "it was all a dream," were all done to death (so to speak) long before Dead End came out, plus done much better in Carnival of Souls and Jacob's Ladder.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that the characters are awful to each other and unpleasant to endure as they bicker. The worst aspect is a younger brother, the most obnoxious sibling in a horror film since Franklin in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

For aliens only.

At a mere seventy minutes, it's hard to believe that a movie could overstay its welcome. My three favorite films are all significantly longer (Seven Samurai at over three hours, Citizen Kane at two, and The Thing at almost two), but the wonderful thing about those movies is that something is happening in them. When there's a shot that lingers or there's a contemplative pause in those films, something is being communicated to the audience. Contrarily, in the numerous navel-gazing stretches that make up most of Luz's run time, nothing is communicated. This quickly reached the point that I started regularly yawning in boredom, then began to talk to the screen and demand that the movie get on with things. Over. And over. And over.

Luz is a film with a lot of lingering shots. Endless, boring lingering shots. If they served a purpose, that would be fine; unfortunately, they all seem to be in the film to kill time, or if I was in the mood to be charitable I'd say that they were to allow the viewer to stew in the atmosphere. As any cook will tell you, it's still possible to overcook a slow-simmering stew, which happens right at the beginning with an interminably long bar scene where a woman babbles endlessly about things that don't really matter and which we're shown in flashback later anyway. All pointless. It's just one scene out of an entire film made of such expanses of nothing, where characters repeat the same phrases a dozen times, pauses stretch out to no purpose, and every action taken by any character is focused on in minute detail without any relevance.

People seem to be crediting this movie with being too "smart" for the audience, though the story is very simple. A girl summoned a demon years ago and an encounter with an old schoolmate has brought it back, wanting to possess her for unexplained reasons. This is done through a Rube Goldberg device on the demon's part involving possessing a corpse, transferring to a psychiatrist, having the psychiatrist go through a lengthy hypnosis with the girl where he pretends to be other people (while running around naked and/or crossdressing, which were entirely unnecessary touches), and eventually succeeding in possessing her. Okay. And? What were the stakes? The titular cab driver Luz is now possessed by a demon. I never had any reason to care about Luz, nor was any consequence of her being possessed given, so what does any of it matter? Is a demon cab driver even worse than a regular cab driver? Seems like a wash to me.

This film is also being described as "artistic" and "surreal," but aside from some bleed over between memory and reality it's clear what's going on, just not why anyone should care. The people are all acting off-kilter, but that's probably more of a function of them being German than any deliberate intent on the part of the director. Even if it was intentional, why have your actors come off like weirdos both when they're possessed by a demon and also when they're not?

I also have to knock the score, which almost never stops playing and is often wholly unrelated to what's going on in a scene.

It's hard to separate this movie from the process I went through while watching it. I went in knowing nothing about the film aside from it being classified as horror (the rule is all spooky movies, all October) and the late Louise Fletcher having starred in it. In the opening minutes there seemed to be a weird vibe between the father and daughter, so I went to make sure that it wasn't some sort of creepy parent-child incest movie. That took me down one hell of a rabbit hole where I learned about the book series and its rampant degeneracy, though strangely that particular father and daughter are one of the few relationships WITHOUT incest. Go figure. If the movie had been true to the novels in the other grotesque relationships it would've been my cue to shut it off unfinished, but there were enough complaints online about the movie not being horrifically perverse enough to please fans of the books that I kept watching.

What I found was a generally unpleasant movie consisting almost entirely of child neglect, abuse, and murder. That might be somebody's idea of a good time (teenage girls, apparently?), but not mine. Unsurprisingly, the one bright spot of the film was Louise Fletcher's performance as a stern grandmother who hates what the children represent (they're the product of incest, because their creator VC Andrews was some kind of creepy fetishist), not a pleasant character yet one delivered in such a convincing way that it elevates the more lackluster cast around her.

A mean-spirited and somewhat pointless film, but it was decently made and thankfully teenage siblings weren't bonking each other.

The Oracle is about a shrieking, hysterical woman who starts fooling around with a magic automatic writing hand that's possessed by the ghost of a murdered man; unfortunately, she can't convince anyone that what's happening is real, because she comes across like an irrational basket case in everything she says and does.

This is not, by any means, an effective horror film; however, it does manage to be unintentionally funny, as the characters around the protagonist - her husband, her best friend, a psychiatrist, the police, et al - dismiss her concerns every time she opens her mouth. The audience is supposed to be on her side, since we know that she's not crazy (at least in regard to the ghost, her constant screeching doesn't say anything good about her general emotional stability), but it's just so obvious why nobody takes her seriously that their completely warranted skepticism becomes comedic.

Oddly, the plot resolves itself, with the ghost killing his killers, so it's not clear why there even needed to be a titular oracle in the first place.

Outside of the accidentally amusing elements it's a rather dry film overall, with only a couple of moments that are intentionally interesting. More recommended for B-movie fans than strict horror buffs.

Some people are killed. The brother of one of the victims wants to find the killer. That's the first five minutes of this movie. The next hour is a series of obnoxious weirdos - each with a stupid quirk that somebody may have mistakenly thought were funny (man who raps every sentence, man who speaks in golf analogies, man who only wants to talk about eggs, etcetera) - hanging out together and blathering idiotically until some guy dressed all in black shows up to kill them. Everyone dies. The killers' identities and motives are never revealed. The end.

While the lack of quality of many low budget films comes from incompetence, at least they seem as though somebody in the process was trying to make something entertaining. This film is the product of not even one single person involved in making it caring in the slightest.

A movie about people trapped aboard a derelict Nazi ship, possessed by some unspeakable evil force. How could such a thing possibly go wrong?

It goes wrong by being boring beyond belief. Despite the "R" rating, Death Ship manages to be more toothless than kid-friendly horror films like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, or Poltergeist. Blood pours out of a shower nozzle, a man gets hit with a swinging crane, a person falls into water and presumably drowns, generic screaming is heard, a man walks through a freezer filled with well-preserved and fully clothed bodies hanging from the ceiling, a film reel of Hitler giving a speech plays, a woman eats candy and it gives her extremely bad make-up effects on her face that are supposed to indicate illness or something, the voice of a German ghost(?) speaks and only one person can hear it, a movie projector starts playing on its own and chooses a 1930s musical, lifeboats drop themselves into the water, gauges read zero, an elderly man with poor eyesight shoots a gun, young children wander around looking for a place to piss, machinery on a boat moves exactly as it is supposed to in close-up, a man is unable to turn a wheel that another man is able to move easily when he tries, a man bloodlessly gets his arm damaged in some gears under a heavy coat so you don't actually have to look at the injury. Unless I fell asleep at some point, that's every supposedly "frightening" thing that happens in Death Ship and you'll note that there isn't a single scare in there. I was desperately hoping that the trip through the frozen corpse locker would lead to the bodies coming to life and attacking - or at the very least grabbing somebody by the arm like the suspiciously-placed scarecrow at your local haunted corn maze - yet what happened instead was absolutely nothing.

That's the biggest takeaway from this film: Absolutely nothing of interest ever happens on the NAZI GHOST SHIP.

As I was exercising in the park today, a fellow who had just gotten done smoking some crack in the bushes came up and engaged me in conversation. Among the various topics he brought up were the hollow Earth, the Mark of the Beast, and this "documentary" about a fellow from the future. Despite my skepticism of the subject matter I promised him that I would watch it, though as it turns out this is not actually a documentary. Confessions of a Time Traveler is a short sci-fi film shot in interview style, consisting of a poorly-delivered series of monologues from a masked man pretending to be from the future droning on and on and on. John Titor - who claimed to be a time-traveler from 2036 and was a frequent topic on paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM - at least made his claims about very near-future history engaging. With precisely one-thousand extra years of time to work with (a number that seems too coincidental to be anything other than a deliberate homage to Titor on the part of the filmmakers), the writers of this film couldn't even manage one interesting development. The people of 3036 allegedly live in pods, have flying cars, ban cell phones, get a chip implanted in them thanks to COVID-19, and keep dogs in zoos because they're so rare. There's nothing there that you couldn't set ten years in the future, much less a full thousand. Give the viewer some entertainment value by claiming there's interstellar travel or a robot apocalypse, for chrissakes. The last few minutes give a twist ending where the time traveler is revealed to have been murdered to conceal the fact that the planet Nibiru is going to destroy the Earth in 3036... or something... which makes you wonder why the "documentary" would be allowed on Tubi without time-traveling assassins doing something about it.

There is literally no reason to watch this, unless you're the type of person who spends time smoking crack in the bushes, in which case you might enjoy it.

(You should probably just stop smoking crack in the bushes, though.)

No snakes were eaten in the course of this movie, which is naturally a humongous disappointment. The set-up of a city cop using traps that he picked up in his military career to target urban criminals is a good one, but that is abandoned in the first fifteen minutes to move the action to a bayou where he dicks around with rednecks who are holding his sister hostage for more than an hour.

This is one of those movies that probably hits differnet people in entirely different ways.

Women seem to find the forbidden attraction aspect of a woman cheating on her fiance with a horrible douchebag somehow erotic, but as a man I sympathize entirely with the scorned David Duchovny character who simply can't understand why his fiance cheated on him when their relationship was seemingly going so well. This wouldn't be a problem in a film that was centered around Duchovny's character, except the bulk of the movie follows the cheating woman around as she lusts for a dickbag with no redeeming traits. I simply couldn't empathize with Brigette Bako at all and kept hoping that the object of her infidelity would get hit by a bus or something so that some measure of righteousness would be restored to the world. The closest the movie offers is - bizarrely - a shirtless game of basketball, after which it's Duchovny that gets knocked out and the scumbag that was knowingly cheating with his fiancee just walks off into the proverbial sunset.

Chrissakes.

The worst part? The woman in question that these two men are obsessed with isn't even special in any way. She's not inordinately attractive, her personality sucks, she has nothing going for her. Everybody is better off with her dead and everybody would've been better off with her illicit lover dead, too.

God damn, I hate this movie.

When you go into a tunnel, a shadow person grabs you and you become a spooky ghost.

Why a shadow person wants to turn you into a spooky ghost is not explained, nor their motivation for snatching children, nor why they pester the parents of children they have snatched, nor why the townsfolk are covering up for them. Elaboration on those points would've been nice.

But we didn't get that elaboration, so the entire plot of the movie is that when you go into a tunnel, a shadow person grabs you and you become a spooky ghost. WoooOOOooo. Scary.