Reviews

This movie got my attention because it's from Mike Flanagan. I've watched most of what he's made, and the only thing I've disliked so far was Absentia. This is probably the second worse now. It's not bad by any means, and it does /almost/ everything exceedingly well. Acting and atmosphere are stand-out aspects, plus points for a creative premise in a stale genre.

What ends up destroying the entire experience is the fact that Maddie is in very little actual danger. She has so many advantages (like an entire house worth of stuff) that she SHOULD be able to take the guy out with no problem. But she doesn't. She can, but just doesn't. Countless opportunities present themselves for her to end the entire thing, and she doesn't. She's in very little danger, and it kills any suspense that would've existed. What's worse, by the end the attacker (if you put any thought into it) is no threat whatsoever to Maddie. She has every. Single. Advantage, but she still does absolutely nothing with it. I don't know how anyone can ignore this, but apparently plenty of people do. So if you can focus on the moment-to-moment and ignore the overall situation, this movie will be awesome.

The novelty of a movie with no dialogue only lasts for about half an hour. Once you're over that, it's just an excruciatingly slow movie. Storytelling without dialogue ends up being tedious, requiring your complete attention while progressing at a snails pace. I only made it half an hour into the film, which (not surprisingly) was the exact time I made it into A Quiet Place. The performances, writing, cinematography, pretty much every aspect of the movie is done well. The premise simply doesn't work. With no dialogue, the movie is doomed to be slow-paced for it's setup, and you simply can't make a slow-paced action movie. I have no problem with slower-paced movies, but that pace needs to be earned. I just don't have the patience for this.

Good lord, where to even begin. This is very obviously written, directed, and acted by people that have never been out in nature, FOR people that have never been out in nature. And I don't mean car-camping (which is just sleeping outside), I just mean being out in nature away from people/roads/help. The level of inaccuracy in this movie borders on the absurd. Bears don't act like that. Cold water doesn't effect you like that. You can't walk around for days in the cold without anything on your head. Everything in the movie is either much harder or much easier than portrayed. Pretty much any movie requires a suspension of disbelief, but the only way you could believe any of this is if you had ABSOLUTELY NO knowledge or experience with it. It's the same thing that was later done in The Grey, except that movie took it so far that the movie was unwatchable.

The movie itself feels like it was thrown together when the writers wrote a first draft that was half an hour long. Characters talk some, try something, bear shows up, attack ends awkwardly, repeat. And every time the bear shows up, it needs to roar at least 3 times, even though there's no reason a bear would do that. I actually caught myself yawning during one of the bear attacks. They're that repetitive and unrealistic.

I feel like they got 15 minutes to talk to someone that actually knew this stuff when they started writing the movie. After that, they forgot what the person said and just filled in the gaps with stuff they'd seen in other movies. If it wasn't for the scenery and acting, this would be unwatchable.

As others have said, this isn't a comedy. There are a couple humorous parts and some of it is kind of goofy, but besides that it's mostly the type of moody drama that already has 100 iterations on Netflix. The premise is sci-fi, but the vast majority of the time is spent on interpersonal BS that isn't worth filming. Or even watching. Wehhhh, my brother died. Not interesting.

It does have Chris O'Dowd though, which is honestly the only reason I checked this out. I'm on episode 7 and he's definitely one of the better aspects of the show. The show does what it does well but it's ultimately still a drama, and dramas can only be so good. The pacing of the show is torturous at times too. The interpersonal stuff isn't interesting to begin with, so you end up with these long, drawn out periods between already-irrelevant conversations. Over an entire episode, there will only be a few points that'll be relevant to the overall plot. The entire rest is personal garbage.

It's really not terrible, but it's also not particularly good. They need to make an abridged version that cuts out most of the personal stuff. Pretty sure they could easily cut this into an hour and a half tv movie.

I honestly have no idea how I even finished this movie. The entire thing amounts to a somewhat creative premise, dragged out over an hour and a half. It's not even a premise, expanded upon. Just a premise with an hour and fifteen minutes of filler. At one point, I caught myself audibly growling/groaning/roaring out of anguish and despair. Dialogue is painful. The nearly non-existent plot makes no sense. The acting is... not great... but somehow one of the better aspects of the movie. Casting seems to have been done with complete disregard to the age of the character. It does the typical (lazy) grown-adult-playing-a-high-schooler thing, but takes it much farther. The high schoolers are pushing 30. The "little kids" are in their early 20's. The dudes mother is younger than he is, but his father is 20 years older. There's a point where they're trying to do an creepy, unsettling scene (the kind of thing you'd recognize from any number of movies like Friday the 13th or Mother!), but the cinematography skill just isn't there to support it, so it falls VERY flat.

This entire movie is just stuff happening, and then the end. I'm marking this as no spoilers, but I have no idea how you'd even spoil this movie. If I was to write a complete synopsis of the movie, it'd just be the short description blurb on IMDb plus one more sentence. The entire movie could have been 15 minutes long. And it probably would have been pretty cool if it had been.

Why did Gary Cole sign onto this?

Not as good as the first Sleepaway Camp, but VASTLY better than the second. The first one was a surprise blast, the second was almost unbearable, this one is right in between. It doesn't have any of the weirdness of the first one, which is a shame. Rather, it leans into the slasher aspect like the second one, except doing so much better this time. In fact, every single aspect is improved over the last one. Acting, dialogue, effects, pacing. There's no ear-gouging, cringy singing scene. It's baffling how two movies, written and directed by the same people, filmed one after the other, could turn out so vastly different.

I have to give special credit to Daryl Wilcher and whoever came up with the concept for Riff. That character was easily my favorite part of this movie. I actually had to pause the movie the first time he... did his thing... because it was so unexpected, and I legitimately laughed out loud every time he spoke or did anything. Outstanding.

The first Sleepaway Camp was a surprise delight for me. I expected it to be terrible, and within 15 minutes was hooked. This sequel is what I expected the first movie to be, but somehow even worse. This movie has no redeeming quality. Every aspect is worse than SC 1. The fun weirdness of the first one is nonexistent. Even with how badly executed this movie is, there's no indication that they were even trying to make it weird like the first. Without that aspect, it's just a generic slasher movie. And it doesn't even do that decently because it cuts away from most of the murder scenes due to budget issues. The script, acting, effects, plot, all are terrible.

The most annoying part is the campers. It's not unusual for movies to use adults to play the role of teenagers (although it's always lazy), but these guys are WELL into their 20's. Some over 30. They're the same real-life age as the counselors, so it's hard to even keep track of who's a camper and who's a counselor (not that it matters). I also have no idea what age the campers are even supposed to be. Most of the time they act like maybe 16, but they'll occasionally do something like an 10-year-old. It's VERY off-putting to see someone that's clearly 30 acting like he's 10. And just to be more frustrating, they have two campers that are actual children. It's maddeningly inconsistent.

This movie is only 1 hour and 20 minutes long, but it took me almost three hours to watch it because there's nothing even remotely interesting in the whole thing. This movie has no reason to exist, and it should never have been made.

The original Solaris was an incredible movie that was held back by a low budget and (seemingly) endless shots of nothing to establish mood. I never held the low budget against it because it's incredible what they accomplished with such a small budget. But the shots of nothing made the entire movie at least half an hour longer than it needed to be, and turned the entire thing into an agonizing crawl. (I'm not against shots like that, there are just far, far too many, and they each go on for far longer than they should. This movie avoids both of the issues of the original film, while creating its own in the form of relationship drama. What they've done is eliminated much of the sci-fi aspect and trippy atmosphere, and replaced it was romance. Where the first movie was a sci-fi film that contained a married couple, this is a romance film with a sci-fi setting. Romance is lazy, boring, and invariably a story that's been told a million times before. So going from sci-fi to romance is always a step in the wrong direction.

Natascha McElhone also simply isn't a good fit for this role. She plays the role fine, it's just an awkward fit. I'm probably a bit biased because Natalya Bondarchuk did so well in the role, but I think it's valid on its own. I think at least part of it is that McElhone only seems to have three expressions, and most of her on-screen time is that weird looking-slightly-up smile she does.

A dead body of a human is worth less than a chunk of meat that you'd buy from the grocery store. It is NOT a person. It's a worthless scrap of garbage that left over from an actual person. So why anyone would care about it in the first place, much less be massively affected by one, is beyond me. I get that Scully personally relates to these crimes, but THEY'RE DEAD. Why would anybody care, in the slightest bit, what happens to the husk of their existence once they're dead. You're dead. Your existence has come to an end. There's no afterlife from which to watch this an be upset by it. And no reason to care what happens to what's left behind by anyone else. Your loved one is dead, that's the end of it. This episode is masterfully acted by everyone in it, but lacks any actual depth. If Scully puts FAR too much value on the chunk of meat we leave after we die, why should anybody care? It only becomes relevant in the slightest AFTER he moves on to living people. By which point, anybody with any sense has already lost interest.

This movie drones on and on and on. The entire thing is a metaphor, which gets driven into the ground during the first half-hour. For the next hour, it's pulverized to dust and then the dust blows into your eyes until you're so sick of the metaphor that you'll despise even thinking about it in the future. And then you'll still have 10 minutes left. If the movie worked as an actual horror movie (without the metaphorical aspect), it'd probably be a great movie. Zoe Kazan does very well, especially given the weak dialogue. Cinematography is very good too, although the entire movie is much darker than it needs to be, which is generally a crutch for horror movies.

My only specific complaint is that they apparently couldn't (or didn't bother to) find a single person that knows anything about cars. How exactly do you hit an animal and break an axle? Even if transmission fluid (not "oil", a tow driver would know better) was leaking, what would he be doing under the vehicle? Or under the hood for that matter. I realize most people don't understand anything around them, but there's a small portion that do. And not coming up with something /slightly/ plausible is impossible to ignore and just lazy.

First off, the acting by the kid is incredible considering how young he is. Brie Larson also does very good, although her character is kind of pathetic and annoying. There were so many ways she could have escaped, but she apparently only made one half-baked attempt in 7 years. 7 years, and she could have just busted through the wall the entire time. There are so many plot holes like that. The movie also lingers on contemplative shots far too often and for too long. It just artificially inflates the movie by pretending like things are more impactful than they actually are. The kids high-pitched voice gets annoying too. The movie is decent, but lacks any kind of substance. It's just a story told in a slow, idling manner. After which, you just think "Alright, well, that wasn't much of anything". By tomorrow, I'll forget I ever even watched this.

The movie starts out alright, but almost immediately descends into typical slasher junk. A lot of the deaths are pretty cool, but the entire movie relies on the slasher crutch of having people just stand there while they and others are brutally murdered. Nobody makes even the slightest effort to escape or defend themselves. Even if someone is holding a gun, they won't even /attempt/ to fire it. It's profoundly lazy and is used in horror FAR too much. Likewise, people are constantly doing stupid, inexplicable things that are ultimately just to set up the next scene. This gets REALLY bad at the end. By then, you'll be wondering "WHY are any of them doing ANY of this?". Wish there was some way to measure eyerolls-per-hour.

All that said, it's still much better than the original Halloween. In that movie, there's the first ten minutes, then NOTHING happens for the entire rest of the movie. It's not even horror, it's a bad cop drama. Because 95% of it is just people talking to each other in different places. So at least this version has that going for it. Something happens. It's dumb, but it's SOMETHING.

Wow. Where to even start. Everyone's covered how incoherent this is, so this is kind of beating a dead horse. There are around ten different topics in this "story", most touched on multiple times in the episode, but each only getting like three minutes total. You'd think the rest of the run-time would string these pieces together, but it doesn't. At times it just seems like random things are happening. Then there are two (maybe more) points where it either jumps in time, they edited (or directed) it poorly, or I just straight-up missed something. I honestly have no idea which it is.

The only (baseless) explanation I can conjure up for ANY of this is: The script was originally 3 hours long and awesome. Steve Buscemi read that and agreed to do this. Afterwards, they needed it to be one hour so they just outright deleted huge chunks of the script, without actually editing anything, and shot what was left. Again, that's just straight conjecture. But it would explain how the end product could be so disjointed. Why was there one (and only one) pig-woman?

Oh, and having to listen to Pink Floyd was awful.

It's well done, but it's still just a comic book movie. They can be entertaining, but they're like the cheese pizza of movies. Hard to dislike, but impossible to really enjoy. This is on the better side of that, rated R for real situations and real dialogue. But it's just not that good. The acting, cinematography, and some of the writing are good, but it still has that dumb, over-the-top garbage that makes up a comic book movie. To make things worse, it's laden with religious nonsense. If you believe this garbage, maybe you'd like it more. But it, like all religion, is still harder to get behind than the outlandish stuff that makes up comic books (and their movies). And to make things even worse, it's not even good at being about nonsense. Catholics don't just disown one of their own and abandon them to "hell" because they killed themselves. Catholicism believes that pretty much everything is a sin, but eh, whatever. It's like the creators wanted to lean into some random insanity but couldn't be bothered to learn something about it first. And of course, they assume that the viewers know just as little about it as they do.

I absolutely love how unhinged this show is. Amy Sedaris is out of her mind and it's incredible. The creativity and randomness of this show is top-notch. Unfortunately, one of her characters is outright unbearable. There's this southern-ish housewife character (Patty Hogg) that is in the show CONSTANTLY that pretty much just yells everything she says. It's like every comedian that yells the entire time they're on stage, thinking that that somehow makes them funnier. It doesn't. You're enjoying this great show, and then someone shows up and just starts yelling for ten minutes. I got through 1 1/2 seasons, and enjoyed most of it. But by the time I stopped watching, I found that I was sitting there the entire time dreading Patty's next appearance. She's such an obnoxious character that she ruins the show even when she's not on the screen.

This episode just drags on and on (even from a previous one) without a single interesting thing happening. I really don't care about Scully's pregnancy, baby, cancer or any of this. I also don't care about Mulder's search for his sister. All of this stuff involving Scully's side plot boils down to sappy drama with a sci-fi background. Same with almost all of the Mulder episodes. It's boring. And irrelevant.

I'm on my fifth (or so) run of X-Files, and the fourth run was the first time I made it through the last two seasons because it diverges almost completely into this stupid drama. I had previously just skipped all the Scully (and most Mulder) episodes, but I wanted to watch them this time. It's excruciating. Not because of Scully herself, but they always wrote her episodes to be this sappy garbage. She never just goes off and does something cool by herself without any stupid sap. Season 5 has some great episodes but between this and the only mildly interesting alien stuff, it's very hit-and-miss.

When you intentionally make a movie without a plot, there's nothing to hold a viewers attention. This movie is delightfully unsettling, but after an hour, it just boils down to "Okay, weird, got it.". It's obvious that it was made to /seem/ as though it has a plot by including individual scenes that /seem/ like they should be connected. Which is kind of genius in it's own way, but the end effect of two hours of this is just boredom. It's kind of amazing reading the other reviews. Some people are frustrated looking for a plot that isn't there, others are feeling good because they found a plot that isn't there. Really, the film definitely has it's merits, and is probably one of the weirder films I've seen. But it's not some kind masterpiece. It's a mostly-worthwhile experimental film. It's a novelty. Just try to enjoy it without turning it into something it's not.

Seems like it's well done, but there are FAR too many plot holes and logical inconsistencies to ignore, and it just gets worse as the show goes on. People make wild leaps in logic and jump to conclusions that no person would ever come to, much less a trained professional, based on little to no actual evidence. These are supposed to be experienced professionals, and despite their huge assumptions and confident guesses, they continuously just-miss the main character? It seems like the entire series is sustained by the CIA leadership making wild assumptions based on almost nothing, that turn out right, and the dude narrowly avoiding them because of the CIA's total incompetence. And the entire thing is based on them believing his guilt, despite the fact that ALL the evidence would show that he didn't do the shooting that the entire series is based on. A twenty-something with no training brought two of the exact same gun (which the ballistics would easily show) into his CIA workplace that had no cameras whatsoever, and managed to kill every with headshot after headshot? It's just too much. You can ignore small disconnects that are created to keep a show going, but this just alternates between the characters being near telepathic, and being utterly incompetent at their job.

Imagine watching a tv show where everyone was afraid that a terrorist was going to blow up the Atlantic ocean with a gallon of gasoline. This is just as absurd.

The show was good enough, but the complete disregard of technical accuracy just kept grinding on me. They kept focusing more and more on the nuclear part, even though it's apparent that NOBODY, at any point in the production of this show, even bothered to even read the Wikipedia article on nuclear reactors. Much less hire someone that actually knows what they're talking about. Virtually everything they say about it is a gross misunderstanding, seemingly based on things the writers saw in prior movies and tv shows. A lot of it is just outright wrong/impossible.

-Nuclear reactors CANNOT, under any circumstances, blow up like a nuclear bomb. (I don't actually know if that's where the show goes, but I'd put good money on it given the 3 episodes I finished)

-Nuclear reactors aren't classified, much less top secret info stored on a secure government server.

-The NRC is just a regulating body. It can function perfectly fine without a head.

-A sensor malfunctioning is a big deal. The response isn't to just send a text message to the head of the NRC.

-Every reactor is surrounded by a containment. Even if a reactor melts down, it stays in the containment. That's the point.

-Why are half the control room operators wearing lab coats?

-This nuclear facility doesn't seem to have an actual reactor, just two cooling towers.

You'd think at some point they would have at least called SOMEONE that had any idea about this stuff. Although the entire plot is reliant on a complete lack of understanding, so they'd have to rewrite half the story to fix it. But then again, it doesn't seem like any of them have even seen an electric fence before, so maybe I'm beating a dead horse. Hint: they don't continuously shoot sparks everywhere.

The actual horror elements of Marianne are very good, although they won't be anything new to someone familiar with the genre. Unfortunately, the entire show has tone and pacing issues that make it feel like it's switching between a horror series and a cheesy young-adult horror series. By halfway through the second episode, it degrades into cliche, mopey scenes that feel like they're pulled straight out of a 90's teenage drama. Which is unfortunate, because five minutes later it's back to some quality horror. Occasional cringe-worthy (and sometimes near-slapstick level) humor, and a VERY unpleasant/unlikable main character also wear on you while watching. It's got some good aspects, it's just really hard to power through all the garbage to get to the next good part. From the other reviews, it sounds like this gets worse as the series progresses too.

I get really bored with movies and tv shows that are 90% people talking. Talking isn't interesting. If you have a story worth telling, you should show it. Otherwise this should just be a book, which I'd enjoy listening to on my drive to work. Birdbox is a great example. Great book, but simply terrible in movie form. This entire concept is pretty cool, but there are just massive periods of time with nothing happening. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski do very well in their roles (especially Blunt, which should be no surprise because she's great), and the writing (as it is), cinematography, and directing are done well, but it's still just a story with very little actually happening. Another story of a great premise reduced to nothing. Maybe if you're really bored and can watch this for "free", give it a shot. Maybe you'll like it. It's not bad, just not actually interesting either.

Awake does a lot of things well, including the acting and cinematography. Unfortunately, it fails in execution. The premise is interesting and fairly creative, but the meat of the the series is cop drama and personal drama, neither of which can result in a great show. Cop dramas are just the same recycled plots and situations, repeated ad nauseam. Personal dramas are sappy tripe that is of no consequence. This show falls right in line with both. The therapist scenes are interesting, but most of the runtime is boring, recycled cop scenes, along with boring sappy emotional scenes. It's like they had a solid premise, and just filled the rest of the show with whatever was easiest to construct and write. Even just watching the show in my down time, I only made it halfway through the third episode. I'd like to know the end, but I'm not spending another 9 hours to do so. And as another reviewer pointed out, it can really only end a certain number of ways. And it takes less than the first episode to have a STRONG leaning which it is. This would have been better as a movie.

Let's not even go into why a cop that's having trouble distinguishing reality would EVER be allowed to do field work. And carry a gun. And work alone. And be allowed to work on cases with such a huge conflict of interest.

I had to shut off this episode and take a break from the series. Hopefully I'll make it back to finish the series, but it's just very hard to watch. Everything after the time jump is so uninteresting. Over the top and cliche, it's essentially a very generic story featuring exaggerated versions of the previous characters. On top of that, it's really hard to listen to the nauseating religious BS, and there's far too much of it. I get that they want to show he's a changed man, but there's just far too much time with podcasters and preachers droning on about religious nonsense. I'll probably finish the series eventually, but I really just wish they had ended the series after the prison.

This is marketed as a light thriller movie, but it's really not. It's really more of a romance movie with just enough thriller aspect to give it an actual plot, and have a story that's actually worth telling. Unlike every romance movie. The movie does a lot of things very well. The acting and cinematography are both top-notch. The writing is good but comes up short at times, including some cliche and/or lazy lines of dialogue. The pacing also lags at times, with extended scenes that elicit an "Okay, we get it.". The only actually bad thing about this movie is the romance aspects. Most of these parts are simply boring, and there are more than a few scenes that are so eyeroll-inducing that they could have been ripped straight out of every pointless, unbearable romance movie ever made. If they had removed all these boring romance scenes, the movie would have been half an hour shorter and much better overall. I understand that some people like that kind of thing, but it's still just pointless drivel.