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Home Movie (2008)
Animal killers
The kids keep killing animals and the parents do nothing about it. 0 stars.
This whole film is like a stress test of these thoroughly alien children behaving like malevolent demons and these idiotic parents not only ignoring it but doing absolutely nothing about it, even after they keep killing animals.
It reaches a point within just 30 minutes where you have to clock out. It's just too much stupid and too much ignoring of violence and clear-cut 100% by the book serial killer behavior that all the film is going to do at this point is stress you out, because it's not scary and it's not thrilling and it's not even unsettling.
It's basically softcore torture porn, and extremely weak at that.
WNUF Halloween Special (2013)
Way too many commercials
I wasn't around watching TV in the 80s but I was in the 90s and 2000s, and I can say that there were nowhere near as many commercials on TV back then as there are in this film.
This is a great concept to play with, and the apparent use of actual 80s-era cameras and tape to make it look like a VHS is spectacular, infinitely more realistic than anything in the "V/H/S" series.
Unfortunately the concept isn't played with long enough. Whether this was the right choice or not I can't really say because the actual story itself is very weak and boring.
Clearly the "Actual 1987 VHS recording" gimmick is meant to do all the heavy lifting here, and a tremendous amount of work was put into recreating the aura of a local news Halloween special in the 1980s, complete with fictitious commercials.
That's pretty much the only part of the creative process where a tremendous amount of work was done. The story sucks and is padded with a ton of these fake commercials, to the point where I just flat-out could not focus on the program at all, I was tuning out the fake commercials the way I would tune out real commercials.
This was a movie experience that could more easily and entertaingly be replicated by just watching the BBC program "Ghostwatch" and about an hour's worth of 80s commercials compilations on Youtube.
Predestination (2014)
Works better as a book
I know that it's based on a short story already. I haven't read it beforehand, which probably didn't help because by design, these sorts of time travel shenanigan stories inevitably end up going toward surprise twists often relating to time travel paradoxes and playing around with them.
As a story to be read, it's easy to see how this sort of story could work and be genuinely surprising. But as a film, where we're unfortunately able to see and hear the characters involved, decisions have to be made regarding the cinematography in order to preserve a lot of the secrets and twists that we aren't supposed to know.
Right away, Sarah Snook playing a character who, as we first see them, appears to be a man but then reveals they were born a woman, means that we're going to figure certain things out too easily since we recognize it is Sarah Snook playing a role, then playing another.
Unfortunately, and without spoiling, this leads to situations where the film's attempts to not give away a twist early on ends up accidentally drawing attention to the fact that there will be a twist later on. The most blatant and frustrating example is when Snook's character is telling their story about meeting and falling in love with a man. The way their first meeting is shot just screams "surprise twist down the line" that kind of served to break down all the rest of the secrets the film had to keep hidden.
Apart from some minor inaccuracies on my part and a wild guess about the Fizzle Bomber that turned out to be mostly accurate, due to the aforementioned scene meeting the man and subsequent plot development, I had completely figured out the surprise twist of this film fully 40 minutes before the end of it.
It didn't ruin the movie for me but it was very disappointing that I was able to figure it out so quickly and easily without actively trying to.
Abandoned (2022)
The horror of a baby crying nonstop
Honestly, the baby crying nonstop completely drags down this movie. I literally could not pay attention to what was supposed to be happening because so many instances where expositional scenes get interrupted by the baby crying. More than once, a jump scare was completely ruined because the mother yelping set the baby off crying.
A whole lot of the horror aspects end up becoming frustrating tedium as the weird paranormal stuff immediately has to give way to the "uh oh, got to calm the baby down" type stuff.
Sometimes it seems like the baby crying is supposed to be a part of some deeper theme to the story, perhaps a supernatural take on post-partum depression, but then the baby crying interrupts yet another scene and we're back to more spooky haunted house shenanigans that were done better by other movies that didn't have a shrieking baby crying nonstop.
V/H/S/Beyond (2024)
Too much filler
It's getting really hard for me to keep coming back to V/H/S as a series because aside from the first one and V/H/S99 and 94, they've all been really terrible.
This one almost manages to pull itself out of the slop pile, with a particularly strong first segment "Stork". But aside from this and "Stowaway", the other segments are pretty much garbage. Random and pointless gore that goes so over the top it stops being disturbing and starts being annoying.
Worst of all is that much like V/H/S Viral, it just drops the VHS gimmick and has pretty much all but one (and a half) segments be fully digital or GoPro body cam footage.
If I want to see a nonstop procession of pointless gore, I can scroll through Twitter looking for footage from Palestione. "Stork" and "Stowaway" alone can only carry this so far.
It's What's Inside (2024)
Fun film
This was a neat, fun film that is unfortunately cursed to be completely forgotten due to being a Netflix film, which means that Netflix has done 0 promoting or advertising for this film, dumped it onto their platform and leave it to be forgotten within a month or two.
Something has to be done about this because it's not sustainable and Netflix knows it but apparently doesn't care, only choosing to price gouge their subscription costs and eat the losses instead of actually promoting the stuff they put out.
The film was fun, though without any promotion, the image it had on Netflix made it seem like a horror. It is not and has the same sort of impressionistic style as "Natural Born Killers" or Euphoria the HBO show.
Some measures are taken to provide context as to who is actually who at certain points, but some characters still don't have enough time to distinguish themselves so that even when we know names, it's confusing as to who they actually are because they didn't really get enough time on screen.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Fred Durst minor role
Didn't have a revelatory effect on me so I guess I'm not trans, but that's okay it was still a great experience. Plus I could deeply relate to the sensation of not being real and time passing rapidly.
Anyway, much like Skinamarink, this is the type of film where most of the negative criticism of it is probably true and accurate but there's really nothing to be done about that. The film either hits you the way it was intended to or it doesn't, and this film doesn't have the same sort of physical things going on like Skinamarink that make it a physical struggle to actually watch.
Occasionally I got "Twin Peaks" vibes from this, which is probably good. Otherwise, this is one of a very minute few films that reading a review or a detailed synopsis just isn't going to work. Whether you love it or hate it or think it's okay, this is a film you can't really predict how you'll feel about it without seeing it.
The Watchers (2024)
Falls apart when it starts explaining everything
The film was at its best early in the middle, introducing the concept of the Watchers and the one-way glass room the protagonists have to stay in at night. The seemingly random plot elements strung together work because of how seemingly random yet intentional they seem.
The concept starts to fall apart once they get deeper and deeper into explaining the meaning behind all these seemingly random plot elements, tying it all together in a way which makes it all come across as rather bland, and likely to prompt a whole lot of questions instead of appreciation for the story and its mystery.
Without spoiling, I can just say that when there doubt, whether with regards to character motivations, the purpose of the Watchers, or how certain supernatural things work, the film was genuinely interesting and fun to watch. Once it started to explain everything, the character motivations, the purpose of the Watchers, and the whole backstory involved, it fell flat.
As an aside, the inclusion of the conure and it learning to talk felt very heavy-handed, like the most obvious of obvious metaphors short of outright explaining the idea upfront.
Monolith (2022)
The Vast of Night with a scifi horror twist
This is absolutely one of those films where you either love it, or you hate it, or you think it's okay, and it's carried entirely upon the strength of actors telling a story.
That was what carried The Vast of Night and it's put at work here, as the movie takes place entirely in one location with only one actor ever present on screen, basically making phone calls to various people about their stories about having vivid, violent dreams or hallucinations all based around receiving a mysterious black brick.
Much like The Vast of Night, everything about this film hinges on the story, so if you are not into the story there's essentially nothing else in this film for you.
Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)
Too small
First saw this years ago, then saw it again today after rewatching the first film last week.
The first half hour of the film has loads of potential, teasing us with a look at an alternate 2016 where alien tech scrapped from the War of 96 has given the world a huge boost in rebuilding and adapting their technology to our own use.
Then the aliens come back, with severely limited patience, in a colossal ship the side of a small planet and ram it up against Earth within an hour of their arriving.
This is big stuff, far huger than what the first film did. Unfortunately, the first film was 2 hours and 30 minutes, taut and tight, while this film is only 2 hours, and it is scrambling the whole time.
There's just no time to really delve into much of anything in this film. We get some genuinely phenomenal scenes, then just move on to the next setpiece without any appropriate aftershock or absorption of what just transpired.
The story is what it is. The inclusion of the 3rd alien circle robot that just so happens to have a huge store of technology that far advances the invading aliens is a very weak Deus Ex Machina but at least it isn't used in the film itself. But the story of the first film was very broad and simple and it was still amazingly done.
This film just doesn't have enough time, and so it plays out like a regular ordinary scifi action flick you'd probably watch on netflix once then forget it exists, rather than sequel to one of the most well known and prolific scifi action films of all time.
Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
Cringeworthy
There's two entries in the IMDB trivia page which really sum up the biggest issues with this film.
"The original screenplay penned by Max Landis was heavily rewritten during pre-production by director Roseanne Liang due to sexual harassment allegations made against Landis at the time."
and
"While Roseanne Liang was reworking the script, she noticed that it was written in an incorrect font size. After she corrected it, the script was 60 pages long, which equal 60 minutes of running time. While she didn't want to change anything about the plot structure, she decided to added extra dialogues and longer action sequences to give the film a more adequate length."
This really sums up perfectly the most basic issues with this film; it starts off like a world war 2-era "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (twilight zone episode) and very quickly gives up in exchange for a barely coherent action/thriller mess with a plot that with each little revelation becomes almost comical in how seemingly random it is.
On top of that, the Max Landis aspect comes across very clearly with the male airmen making increasingly lewd and aggressively sexual comments about the protagonist over the radio. It's probably realistic guy talk on a WW2 gunship which is probably thanks to Roseanne Liang's rewrite; the original was probably a whole lot lewder.
Meanwhile, the amount of times this woman, Maude Garrett, proves herself to have ridiculous abilities and talents like you'd expect from James Bond or some other cliche action hero. The theme that seems to be coming across is a clumsy sort of "girl power!" message that would've been cringeworthy in the 90s.
Probably the worst part of it as well is that the whole vaguely supernatural aspect, the thing behind the title "Shadow in the Cloud" could have been completely removed from the story altogether and not changed it very much, if at all. It's just something there, like firemen being harassed by ghosts while they try to put out a fire in a haunted house.
A Plague So Pleasant (2013)
Saw it under the title "The Dead At The Door"
Was wondering why I could find almost no evidence of this film's existence; it was listed on AmazonPrime with the name "The Dead At The Door" and I watched it in February 17th, 2019.
The synopsis given for this film was too much to pass up on. I almost regretted it, as the film starts with a very blurry, monochrome picture, featuring some psychopath reciting an inexplicable monologue about being a morning person to someone just off-screen behind us. It was almost enough to make me turn off the film, but I was stuck to it just for the synopsis.
This film seems to have everything going against it, as apparently being so low budget as to have to turn to a camera made just after 2001 but not too far after.
Once the main character (thankfully not the psychopath) steps out of the house, he's greeted by three zombies in some truly terrible makeup... and he casually walks past him and goes to his car. Through a voice-over from him, painfully acted in a droning monotone, we learn there was a Zombie Apocalypse years ago, and it was somehow discovered that, after you stop shooting them for a while, they go into a docile-like state and actually don't attack anyone.
It's further explained that, like in The Walking Dead, normal people who die of natural causes will turn into zombies now. This has the added effect of new-style cemeteries in which the dead are herded into fenced enclosures and family members can come by and visit them. For some reason, they will eat oats. The US government has them federally protected and it is a felony to attack a zombie.
The middle of the film is vital to the film plot overall but feels like somewhat of a distraction. The protagonist's sister is obsessed with her ex-boyfriend who died and keeps visiting his zombie in one of the zombie cemeteries. This leads to the very bad decision from the protagonist to decide to kill the zombie ex-boyfriend to try to let her get over it.
The rest of the film covers exactly why the US government made attacking zombies a felony, and suddenly this extremely low budget film starts churning out some truly fantastic makeup work (one zombie without eyes is truly horrifying) and becomes fun.
Voyagers (2021)
Stupid people do stupid things
I see a lot in the reviews and even the trivia section on IMDB that there was a clear bit of influence and toying with "Lord of the Flies" in this film, whether intentional or not. This is not a fair comparison due to what should be the most obvious thing: This is not a wild uncontrolled jungle these kids are stranded in.
"Lord of the Flies" was about a group of kids who get stranded on a deserted island and attempt to build a structured society. The inevitably breakdown and failure is supposedly indicative of the chaotic nature of humanity, particularly when everyone involved is underdeveloped and not yet mature enough to fully master the necessities of socialization and communication to properly hold a tribe of people together.
"Voyagers" is about a spaceship full of children and one adult meant to take an 86 year journey to a new life-habitable planet. The children are meant to grow up, have their own children, and those children have their own children who will be the ones to arrive and set up a colony on the new planet.
Once the one adult in the story is taken out of the situation, it unfolds like Lord of the Flies.
Except that this is not a deserted island, this is not the wilderness. This is supposedly humanity's last chance for survival, a desperate mission sent to seed a distant planet while everyone back on Earth dies off.
So why is the ship packed with children who do not have parents, are kept constantly drugged so they experience no strong emotions or hormonal instincts, and not properly socialized or taught anything by their one adult except how to maintain the ship and feed themselves?
This is a catastrophe that anyone should've been able to see and take measures to prevent long before these kids were even test tube grown. The story and the acting and the writing is not strong or interesting enough to get past the incredible stupidity of the situation as a whole.
Grown-ass adults supposedly put this mission together and sent the kids into space on a mission that if it fails, means the end of the human race and they didn't think to send anyone else on the mission to raise the kids properly, watch over them, and prepare them for the next stage of the mission. The one adult who tags along literally had to beg to go along at the last moment because apparently he was the only one not so incredibly stupid as to realize that sending a spaceship full of unsocialized kids in the midst of puberty with an automated system to teach them to feed and drug themselves was a disaster waiting to happen.
I can't with this movie, I can't focus on anything else except how incredibly stupid this whole thing was. This is like if in "Interstellar" instead of sending Cooper the engineer and the elite astronauts, they sent his daughter and some other kids alone instead.
Malignant (2021)
A little too dumb
Went into this film without knowing anything about it. Apparently Madison, born Emily, had an abusive husband and now she lives on her own. She had a history of being in a psych ward where a voice called Gabriel spoke through a radio to her and now she's having scary dreams/visions of gruesome murders.
For too long this film drags, taking too long to actually get to the main point here. It follows the typical horror thriller tropes, almost as a dull routine to build up to the horror properly which it so desperately wants to get to.
The problem is the amount of time wasted in the buildup, with background exposition, means that by the time the big James Wan-style twist, I've already figured it out.
Too much time was spent giving clues that could only really lead to a few places, so it was inevitable that the big twist would've been figured out long ahead of time.
From there, the film goes extra weird, and a little too dumb for its own good. There's plenty of grotesque over the top gore, though it also comes with.... wacky over the top martial arts-style fight scenes, a normal human body that is inexplicably bulletproof, and the main antagonist somehow having magic electronics-disrupting powers.
Some of the stuff I strongly disliked, but I don't hold it against the film if it's done well or has a purpose to the story. I also tend to prefer things not be explained too much in a film, so the aforementioned mysterious electronics-disrupting powers not being explained didn't bother me.
What bothered me most about this film is that it had a dumb little idea they wanted to do, and so constructed a very bland and boring story around it just to build up to the wacky climax.
If you don't like how the story turns out, that's fine, but if you did like it, then this could've been done so much better, like a fine cut of perfectly seasoned and cooked steak served with soggy french fries and mushy salad.
Good Burger 2 (2023)
It's fine
I was an avid Nickelodeon watcher as a child, and very well acquainted with Good Burger, the film and the sketches, as well as Kenan and Kel with their own spinoff show.
Then I grew up and grew out of Nickelodeon. But now almost 30 years later comes a sequel. Standard reflex for such news and things is to automatically assume it will suck and is a cheap nostalgia cash-grab.
It's not. It's fine. Some actual effort into many aspects of this; for one, Dexter's attitude towards Ed has clearly changed since the first film, as he's a lot more tolerant of his wacky antics, but in a realistic way, not in a "ignoring the crazy guy now" way.
A lot of the humor is broad and slapstick, obvious for a movie essentially meant for children (although at one point someone says "ass").
What surprised me was that there were actual genuinely funny jokes and gags that worked even on adults. A lot more than I expected.
I'm not one who is taken in by nostalgia alone, and it has its share of flaws, so the highest praise can give this movie is if I had to watch it again, I would not mind it.
Project Almanac (2015)
Millennial "Primer"
This film strongly reminded me of "Primer", but in terms of the scifi involved it is much softer than Primer. Primer was extremely dense and focused a lot on the engineering aspect as well as sticking to the "rules" of time travel as much as possible.
Here, the kids involved do go into some engineering but it is largely glossed over and once dumb things like "emotions" and "hormones" get involved, the rules start getting broken.
I wasn't expecting something on the level of "Primer" and that's okay. It was fun and the characters were fun, narrowly avoiding becoming annoying on several occasions.
The consistency in terms of the time travel logic was not clearly evident on first viewing, which is a bit weird since almost every time travel movie basically has a different "type" of time travel that it follows all throughout (such as, changing past = changing future, or cannot change past because what you try to change was already done in the first place, or changing time = creating alternate universe).
Maybe it would require another viewing to get it, but for the most part this film is too light and breezy for that. It doesn't really matter how the time travel works in this film. It might have made for some more interesting elements if it did but ultimately I cannot fault this film for the decisions made and stuck with.
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023)
Very very boring
Oh man. Good god. That was my reaction several times throughout this film, and not in a good way.
Within the first minute I was already dreading it, as the opening narration mentioned some generic ruling star empire where "a thousand kings ruled uninterrupted", which is a lot like a chain-smoking fat man with a drinking problem saying he's going to live to be 150. Or maybe it's just being cheeky and there were actually hundreds of kings ruling over the course of a couple of years, being constantly deposed or assassinated every few days.
This bothered me because this felt like a lazy foundation from which to start a whole new science fiction universe, and my feeling was correct.
This movie spends its first hour just on worldbuilding, except that the world it's building is bland and boring. This could easily be transplanted into Star Wars or Warhammer or any other major franchise and almost nothing would have to be changed. And this isn't in a good "timeless classic" way like the story of Seven Samurai (an obvious inspiration) is.
Instead it's because the story's setting is so empty it's like a blank scifi RPG template was picked and Zack Snyder never actually bothered to fill out any of the details.
There's tons of comparisons made by reviewers to Star Wars, and the knowledge that apparently this was originally meant to be a Star Wars film that Disney passed on (a rare Disney W). Any resemblance to Star Wars is purely superficial; there's almost nothing here.
The original "Star Wars" had a similar initial setup of a big evil empire and a plucky band of rebels building up a resistance against them. As well, it had many different things and people happening around it, references made to things, people, and events that clearly were important to the world we were seeing, like Obi-Wan, the Clone Wars, the Jedi being defenders of the Republic, the Force, Jabba, the Imperial Senate, all these things were brought up in the very first film and treated with a sense of having some very clear importance to the story as a whole.
There's nothing like that here beyond the absolute bare minimum of words to fill it in. The "Imperium" rules from its "Motherworld". They were ruled by kings, then their last king was assassinated and an evil psychopath named Balisarius took over or something. Now they are cartoonishly evil and they literally rape and murder and destroy entire planets for no clear reason. They raped murdered and destroyed Kora's planet and kidnapped her as a kid to raise her as a soldier for the Imperium until she deserted.
That's it. That's pretty much the entirety of Rebel Moon's world that it took 45 minutes to set up.
Without anything else to it, you'd imagine there would be some interesting characters or wild action scenes to entertain with, but there aren't. Everyone has the same sort of bland flattened affect of an RPG NPC waiting for you to level up enough to unlock their backstory sidequest. Some of them don't even seem to have names until many scenes later when another character mentions their name out loud.
None of the action scenes are in any way memorable or exciting, as at best they could be described as shot "functionally", except apparently Zack Snyder's gimmick is random slow motion, there's constant instances where the action will suddenly go into slow motion for no reason.
The slow motion didn't bother me as much as it apparently does other people. What did bother me was how the camera kept randomly unfocusing during scenes, blurring for no reason, or suddenly going into a sort of fisheye lens appearance, or one shot of Kora and The Farmer Whose Name I Forgot, where suddenly the Farmer's face started to blur while Kora's remained sharp and in focus.
All of this would be laughable if the entire film itself weren't so BORING. Pretty much everyone looks and sounds miserable, even in scenes they're supposed to be feeling triumphant in, and the only actor who seems to be putting any real effort into their work is Ed Skrein, which is somewhat amusing because ten years ago he played Daario Naharis in season 3 of Game of Thrones and then was replaced by Michiel Huisman (also in this film) because supposedly they didn't think his acting skills would've been up to par for what they had planned with Daario later on (which turned out to be mostly nothing).
If you told me this was a film that was written, directed, photographed, and edited all by first timers, I would believe you. It has almost no redeeming features unless you are the kind of person who likes looking at flashing lights and sweaty people, in which case there are plenty of other movies that have that that aren't as BORING as this.
May December (2023)
Almost ruined by that goofy piano cue
Honestly this movie is not bad at all. It wasn't what I was expecting but I never hold that against a film. The only thing that probably drags the script down is that it struggles a bit in the first half hour or so, moving so slow as to almost be boring.
It isn't until more than an hour in that the film is done playing with the superficially odd element of "Hollywood actress is hanging out with our normal family to learn more about us" and finally starts delving into the real core of the film; the aftermath of what began as a romantic relationship between a teacher in her 30s and a 13 year old student now that they are married with children.
What remaining time is given to this, and to the gradual realization from Joe that his late childhood was basically stolen from him, is what really makes this film fascinating, along with the perpetual presence of Nathalie Portman's character Elizabeth, who is involving herself further and further into the family dynamic to the point where she would seem to be getting too close to them.
But what really drags this film down as a whole is the goofy little piano cue that plays after almost every scene or dramatic moment. It is like something you'd hear in a parody of a soap opera, or in "The Room". It does not fit the tone of the movie at all and is cringeworthy in how goofy it is played.
I thought after some time that this was possibly intentionally goofy in a satirical way, but as the film progresses you start to realize it isn't, they went with this goofy faux-soap opera piano cue. It is so bad I almost stopped watching completely.
Chucky (2021)
Falls off hard in season 2 and never gets back up
This was a surprise when the first season came out in 2021. It was actually good, and got a lot of freedom in terms of gore and saying the F word freely on cable television. It also went the route that "It" (2017) did by having the main cast of kids be the strongest point of the show and make them actually likeable and interesting.
The times it focused on "Chucky" lore sometimes threatened to derail it, while Fiona Dourif is an absolute powerhouse reprising the role of Nica from Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky, as well as even playing 80s era Chucky (with her father Brad Dourif overdubbing her) in flashbacks, and a Nica infested by Chucky.
By the time of season 2, it falls off hard. The storyline starts to become overly wacky and repetitive, and it starts to become cynical and even a bit over the top disgusting with the kills.
Something that made (most of) the Chucky movies great is that they were fun, even with all the violence and gore if you weren't into that. The 2019 reboot "Child's Play" was nothing like that. It was ugly, nasty, unfun, and cruel. It felt less like a fun horror movie and more like someone with serious anger problems taking out their problems on fictional characters.
Seasons 2 and 3 of this show feel somewhat like that. Chucky is still acting snarky and wacky, but the story is collapsing around him. The gore and violence is becoming gross, nasty, and needlessly cruel, and the effect it's having on the main characters starts making you empathize more and more with them while they become more and more miserable, frustrated, angry, and obsessed, all the while Chucky hasn't changed.
In short, Chucky isn't fun anymore. The level of violence is going way up and the level of fun is going way down. If these were the sorts of stories being made by a friend, by the first few episodes of season 3, you would be asking them serious questions about their emotional state.
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Extremely loud and annoying
The very first thing I noticed about this film, watching about 10-15 minutes worth, above all else, was "Wow this is unreasonably loud". Not just in terms of volume or the constant screams, but just the overall tone of the film. If this is intended to be a horror movie, it is doing absolutely everything wrong thematically; there's tons of music constantly playing, tons of sound effects making tons of noise, acting that sometimes borders on over the top and wacky, and people talking loudly all the time.
The way it comes across as a result is almost like a stereotypical "hollywood popcorn flick" more suited for an action movie or a comedy. There's even a sequence about 1 hour and 10 minutes in that is shot and scored like something from "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" or "Van Hellsing". There's even a goofy little one-person dancing sequence during these events.
Except this movie isn't an action film. It doesn't try to be. It's not funny either, and it doesn't try to be a comedy. It's supposed to be a horror film, but it doesn't seem to be trying. Nothing in it is scary, there's an overabundance of (extremely noisy) jumpscares, the CG is atrocious, and overall it's extremely boring.
What was the plan here? This film has nothing to offer for fans of pretty much any genre other than extreme closeups of Alison Lohman's face and her constantly screaming. If I wanted that I don't need to be subjected to this wall of noise, both visually and audially.
V/H/S/85 (2023)
Might be the worst of the series
That's really saying something, I think. I consider V/H/S Viral to be the worst of the series, but at the very least "Viral" had some mildly amusing bits like the nonchalant zombie fight with the skateboarders.
I greatly enjoyed the first V/H/S, thought the sequel was overproduced and boring, Viral a disaster. Then the series revived on Shudder. V/H/S 94 I found to be a big letdown, while V/H/S 99 was surprisingly fun.
One of my biggest complaints about V/H/S 94 was that a whole lot of the segments seemed largely pointless or meandering and didn't really offer anything except cheap and excessive gore for gore's sake, which bores me.
But at least they were clearly having fun with it.
V/H/S 85 seems to backslide to the pointless and meandering, with stories that are largely boring and just setups to have gore for gore's sake. None of them have any goofy or tongue-in-cheek elements like 94 or 99 or any hint of humor to them.
Originally I had no interest in the V/H/S series because I was under the impression it was going to be a cheap, trashy gorefest of fake snuff films, less a film anthology than a makeup/practical effects artist's thesis project. I was pleasantly surprised (most of the time) when the segments turned out to be mostly fun, exciting, or at least imaginative in some ways.
This is the film in the series (so far) that is a cheap, trashy gorefest of fake snuff films with the slighest of slight supernatural bends to each segment just to make it fit in with the series. Boring.
Deliver Us from Evil (2014)
Extremely boring
Extremely boring and extremely plain, bland, formulaic. This is a movie that could have been made at any point in time by any writer and any director. There's no style to it, no substance, nothing in it beyond the ordinary. Everything about it screams "Paycheck movie", done by a handful of well known actors for a paycheck and/or a contractual obligation. Hours after viewing I could not even tell you anything significant about the film other than "some cop and a hipster priest deal with demon possessed criminals".
Nothing else stood out about it. Writing, acting, cinematography, music, all very plain and very functional.
V/H/S/99 (2022)
Fun and one of the best of the series
I was genuinely shocked when the first V/H/S exceeded my low expectations, then slightly less shocked when the next two in the series proceeded to be terrible. V/H/S 94 despite all the grand fanfare and sort of being a handoff to a new group of filmmakers, was a meandering mess more focused on gore for gore's sake than anything else.
This one is far superior, possibly as good as the original. For one, while the attempt to make the video look like VHS quality (begun in V/H/S 94) isn't fully convincing, the overall style and ambience of the segments, even when they go over the top into parody, are much more convincing as something from the 90s than most any of the previous entries in the series.
Some moments seem to venture a bit too close to being overly cheesy or ridiculous, but these moments never last long enough to drag from the film overall. Also, the use of gore works far better than in V/H/S 94, without it becoming over the top or boringly excessive like a simulated snuff film.
V/H/S/94 (2021)
not so good
At the very least it was better than V/H/S Viral and V/H/S 2. On the positive side for this, an effort was made to make the video actually look like it was filmed by hand camera and being viewed on VHS. The effect was still too smooth in some places and the frame rate was off, but it still looked significantly better than the last few.
The segments themselves just weren't very good overall. There was also a lot more effort and attention placed into the gore effects than on actual story or horror.
The experience reminded me of how I had avoided watching the original V/H/S for so many years because I was worried it wasn't actually a horror anthology so much as simulated snuff films. Finally watching V/H/S I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't. Watching V/H/S 94 it feels more like most of this was put together just to be simulated snuff films.
Mister Creep (2022)
too cliche
I'm a sucker for found footage stuff and typically I do not hold certain low budget elements against a film such as bad acting or mediocre effects or props. This film doesn't have that issue. It's biggest issue is that it's painfully cliche.
From the pointless interrogation tape of Mr. Creep to the clearly deranged old lady with the serial killer obsession you can't help but cringe or go "Oh come on" constantly at every dumb little sequence that has either been done so many times before in better movies or relies too much on the characters being incredibly stupid, it's as if they live in an alternate universe where they've never seen any movies, read any books, or learned anything at all about things like "stranger danger".