will-05196

They did pretty well considering the silliness of the premise. This one has some problems. Some of these it circumvents by not taking itself too seriously. The network exec guy was one of the highlights. (I'll never eat prawns again.)

Female nudity was a treat on the big screen. Even Demi Moore at her age was quite a sight. (The younger lady? Hubba hubba).

(Spoilers follow).

But, I'm expected to believe a person could erupt from another's spine, and the original's body survives intact. Not even a broken bone.

No mention of how much clients pay for this drug. No exploring of the complete life-at-stake dependency on the mystery company, who, once you're on the hook for the drug and need it to live, could up their price to any amount at all, and you're up the creek if you don't pay. The protagonist wasn't aware of this at all? Didn't mention it, fret about it at all?

It's a fairly fun movie if you can keep your suspension of disbelief, which is pretty hard work. Also has some not too subtle but fairly well executed themes about aging, how our younger selves disregard what we might put our older selves through by living recklessly, how the world treats young beautiful women with ridiculous red carpet treatment simply for looking good, and how difficult it is when that rug is pulled, etc. Not a classic, but worth the price of admission, I guess, which puts it head and shoulders above everything else I've seen of late.

Extremely mediocre. Save your money and time. It's not like you go into a slasher expecting it to be good, but if you get 'effective' that's about as good as it gets. This isn't even close. If there was a plot or story here I didn't perceive it, although I did walk out 50 minutes in (wanted to leave sooner but I was trying to avoid someone at home). The opening sequence told me all I needed to know - this wasn't going to be good. Relies entirely on graphic CGI wounds and juvenile attempts to shock the audience. Attempts to build character in the victims are cliche and ham-handed, or far too saccarine sweet to be relatable as real people, thus make you care about them.

Worst of all the villains give nothing. There's no mystery, just a guy in bad makeup doing stupid faces when he does stuff. No good one liners, no mystery or personality to them. They're just these overacted not in the least frightening, doing extreme things 'just because they're doing them' people in bad makeup... 'doing stuff'. That's really it. If I hadn't seen Trap recently this would be the worst movie of the year quite comfortably. Averaging 7 stars on this site means AI are writing the reviews. IMDB is becoming completely ineffective as a guage of what's good, bad, or even remotely watchable. Save your money, this is terrible.

Was this a joke? Was the director trolling us?

Words fail me. If you took the best film makers in the world and told them 'make the worst, stupidest possible movie', and they devoted years and enormous budgets to the task, they could not have made something half as awful.

The plot made no sense. The premise was absurd. The dialogue was written as if by ill-informed AI. The acting was abysmal. There were simply no redeeming features to this.

It was a fascinating study of our decline as a species - I could not help speculating on what kinds of people would actually be on the edge of their seat wondering how it would play out.

Lowering expectations is a great way to have them exceeded. Went in low and found myself pleased to see an 'okay' movie. It could never be great - there is not enough mystery behind the exomorph, we know what the facehuggers will do, what the full grown organism will do, that the synthetics may or may not be shady, or wind up shady, etc.

So you know what you're going to get, and you get a 'humans being hunted through dark spaces by bugs' thing, with (this time again) synthetics being treacherous.

Aesthetically, this was impressive. Until the facehuggers all run loose you don't notice use of CGI. It looks very grimy and organic, the settings, spacecraft, life in the future, all that.

The characters are a problem. The Asian girl for example has no personality, isn't allowed to have one, she's just first casualty in line, utters a little expository dialogue is all. The insufferable British accent guy "hates synthetics", behaves obnoxiously and talks annoyingly, that's all I remember of him. The pregnant one "was pregnant", that's all she has going on before she's turned to food. Remember Aliens / Alien, when there was time for some character before they became food? That made it more powerful when they became food.

Not sure why (other than the obvious cash grab) this movie needed to be made. This series has nowhere to go. I can think of half a dozen great sci fi novels the world has forgotten about which would make fantastic movies. It would still be recycling ideas, which is all we do nowadays, seemingly, but it would also be new. (Buy me lunch and I'll tell you which books I'm talking about.)

Anyway, if you like jump scares, loud noises, and people you don't know or care about having bad things happen to them, this film will work for you. It did indeed look/sound impressive on the big screen with surround sound. If it had a good story to go with the aesthetics it'd be one to remember. Pretty sure in a week I'll forgot I even saw it.

Why Poe's name is attached to this is a mystery - nothing to do with the original story, they snip occasional iconic Poe imagery in here and there, quote some of his poetry, but this is basically a soap opera and slasher combined. Quite overcooked much of the time, overwritten, overacted, comes with your obligatory serves of wokeness brainwashing of course (diversity, yaaaay!). Stretches plausibility in more ways than just supernatural - a billionaire magnate marries a former heroin addict? Um, sure thing.

Had some positives, was entertaining enough to watch the entire season, but the show seems to have acquired pretensions it does not really earn. Direction (and casting) lacks a certain deftness. I applauded when the character with the insufferable British accent was finally bumped off, guvnor. None of the characters were especially believable in their roles, maybe with exception of the family matriarch. Looks slick enough to trick the majority of the audience into thinking they've seen high quality, and that worked well, given the quite drastic overrated average here on IMDB. Another win for style over substance, and it's pretty shallow style at that.

This seems quite underrated - perhaps people are so moved by the horror of the crime they don't appreciate the filmmakers who presented a thorough and detailed account of what happened, and why.

Fascinating insights into the incident itself and backgrounds of the monsters responsible, including conversations with their families. All too clearly is it brought to life what went on in that house, the ramifications for the wider community and ultimately all of us. A shocking story, one you're not likely to forget. Detailed as it is, never does it treat the subject without its due gravity; this is a portrait of evil in all its ugliness, also sensitive examination of the ripple effects when those from our more familiar middle class world are plunged unexpectedly into its depths.

Horror's really making a comeback just lately. Still plenty of bad movies being made, but more and more good ones are standing out, and this is about as powerful / unnerving as it gets. This is the only time I almost couldn't finish a movie because it was too well done - I've switched many bad horrors off well before the finish line, but this was so unnerving that by the end I almost couldn't handle it.

Not because it's a gore-fest (although you won't be let down if that's what you came for); but because this movie does the little things right, chiefly the attention to character. All supporting actors gave performances of a much higher standard than you'd expect in your average horror movie. Both leads are sublime - relatable, imperfect people, people you feel you know after just a few minutes of screen time. That's what gives the shocking moments such power.

I won't get into the supernatural elements as it's hard to discuss them without spoilers, but that dynamic is handled with intelligence, subtlety, and a deft hand. Setting and sound are likewise deftly handled to build mood and atmosphere that doesn't relent, just builds throughout, and somehow even the moments of explosive terror do not relieve the ongoing tension... it just keeps building.

I'm a veteran of the genre, and not easily disturbed. This movie did the job - haven't been this unnerved during a film since I was a kid sneaking down to the living room after bed-time to watch Nightmare on Elm Street.

Not much to write home about here. Does nothing that genre fans haven't seen a thousand times, and this movie doesn't do them well. The "cat and mouse slasher" sub-genre is increasingly one of my least favorite, as they bypass character development, backstory, plot, and take short cuts to suspense / atmosphere. After a brief character introduction, a rushed premise setup, we're into - in effect - one long car chase, not a story.

Nothing is well enough explained as to why this family does what it does. The premise was flimsy enough to be a spoof on the genre, except they did this with a straight face. The supporting actors were poor. The leads didn't have a lot to work with, though they did as well as could be expected of them, and the lead lady is very easy on the eye. The sole reason I was able to endure 30 minutes of this pointlessness was in hope that she would be somehow disrobed, but even I have my limits.

Waste of time. Averaging 6.9 on IMDB smacks of shennanigans, and of people being paid to boost the rating up artificially. There's no way this should average above a 3.

Dull, padded out, filled with filler. Turned it off after half an hour when I saw they were deliberately wasting time to fill the minutes. She calls a pharmacy to find out what the pills are... but she hangs up!!!! She calls again to find out... but she hangs up again!!!!! She calls a third time... and it's a long drawn out pointless conversation... but she eventually finds out the pills aren't what she originally thought!!!!! They're a different color!!!!!! Oh my GOD!!!!!!

But we don't learn what they ARE yet, oh no, with a plot this thin and uneventful you have to milk every minute out of each bit of it. It's the writing equivalent of going into pointless detail just to fill the pages up with irrelevant word and hoping your audience is vapid enough not to care. (Robert Jordan syndrome).

Should be averaging about 4.5 on IMDB, but I guess Netflix is busy writing reviews and giving ratings to these underwhelmers.

Can't sit idly by while the torture porn addicts who can only handle "Saw" and jump-scares slag off this almost perfectly executed slowburn.

As effective a mystery as it is a genuinely frightening film. The mystery deepens and deepens as each disturbing answer comes with more disturbing questions. Far more skillful filmmaking is needed to make you question reality along with the protagonist, than to simply disgust you with a splatterfest.

Atmospheric and full of tension. Had me guessing till the end. Superbly acted and written. Great example of how, when horror is done properly, the result is unfortgettable. Don't miss this one, unless you're one of the fidget-spinner crowd who can't sit still for long enough to know what a horror movie is really supposed to do.

In a parallel dimension I shut it off after 30 mins because it was so frightening. In this one, because it was too poorly done and ridiculous. I'm not actor, but I imagine if I tried it for the very first time, my performance would be on par with these folks - pretty darn bad.

As others have pointed out, the progression of "tension" is really silly and artificial. The power goes out and suddenly everyone is already maximum spooked. There's a knock at the door and they're literally reaching for baseball bats. Um.... why? There has been no indication of any menacing presence yet whatsoever. It was like trying to trick the audience into being scared or something, very strange, just hamfisted handling of dynamics.

They lost me when one of the bimbos is asking about, "do you happen to have any books in the house about when weird things happen after comets pass over?" Oh gee well there's a book in the car which we haven't mailed yet, maybe THAT has something about this subject? He goes and gets the book. Gee whiz! It does! Gravity, and schroedinger's cat, and blah blah blah! How so very convenient! That was when the movie had to be put out of its misery.

And yeah, my big takeaways: hand held camera with the nonstop shaking thing? No thanks, if I wanted to be seasick I'd go get on a boat. For this absolute clunker to get an average over 7 is the true horror here.

Oh boy did the horror genre need a movie like this. Be warned you Saw crowd people, you won't like this. It's too intelligent, too well done for you. This is for people who want a movie with real characterization, real feeling, whereas the dumbed down Saw crowd just want to see 2 hours of someone getting tortured and chopped up. This movie may not be for you.

I want to give absolutely nothing away. There's not much more to say than bravo to everyone involved, and what an outstanding job by the cast. I have never felt such powerful empathy for characters onscreen in any genre of film, so much that this becomes genuinely difficult to watch at times for your shared pain with these characters.

The tension is ratcheted up without mercy, slowly, relentlessly. Many subtle deft touches, little things that may escape the eye first viewing but resonate at a deeper level, as the nightmare coalesces, made all the realer for the bond you've formed with these brilliantly portrayed characters.

Bravo. Restores your faith in the genre, relies on none of the cheap tawdry tricks of so many lesser horror films of late. Simply outstanding, and genuinely frightening like few other films you'll see. Deserves to be remembered as a classic long from now.

Absolute waste of time - do not bother. You won't even get to see the female lead naked, which is about all they could have done to avert the boredom for a scant few seconds. Everything about this stinks - the writing, the premise, the acting. Sorry guys but this is what happens when you put something terrible out there to get in the way of more worthy films, you get called out.

The average 6-star rating smacks of shenanigans. Go ahead and waste 2 hours if you want to, but don't say I didn't warn you.

A premise like this is never going to make for a great film. A great horror film has rarely ever been made - you usually have the laughably bad ones, and the effective ones. This was an effective one.

The rating average is a bit low here, because the jump-scare crowd disapprove of the lack of jump-scares and the limited gore. (There was one jump-scare that I counted, and there's sufficient gore, but yes, much of the horror is implied and off screen, which of course to those lacking imagination and a sense of gravity will be unsatisfying - the Saw crowd, in other words).

The acting was far above what you'd expect in a film of this sort; all the actors should be applauded for adding subtlety to their roles, little glances on the part of the girls which says "I have a secret" loud and clear, little expressions of doubt on the faces of the cop and the coroner which say "something's not right here".

The slow-burn is effective. Movies like Babadook fail on the slow burn, thinking long passages of meaningless filler is the same thing. Not here - it's a good horrific slow burn, never quite clear where it's headed.

Where it's headed is probably the only kind of payoff / conclusion this sort of film could go to: somewhat predictable, cheesey, unrealistic, and really it's the only part I'd fault, although how they'd have ended it otherwise I couldn't say. Overall, you go into this expecting the usual horror movie crapola and it's a pleasantly unpleasant surprise.

This is a masterpiece. Deserves to be commercial hit and cult classic all at once. Of course I am going to bet the majority of people won't know the gift staring them in the face. Finally a movie that is not made just for the idiot market. Just watch it if you have ever loved David Lynch or Donnie Darko or anything that messes with your perception and makes you question reality itself.

I don't even want to review it as such - no point spoiling the fun for those who will get it. It needs a warning label for the less sophisticated viewer: this is not spoon fed entertainment. You stupid people get most movies made for you already - let us have this rarest of gems. Game of Thrones and Peter Jackon's Lord of the Rings is thataway. This is REAL fantasy, and the most hardcore comedy imaginable.

The film pays a good deal of attention to its sadistic thrills such as the glass on staircase scene. Suffers a bad case of "information dump". Clunkily jerks through revelations with no artistry or progression, showing a confused handling of timeline. Fails the difficult task of balancing narrative tension with revealing the background mystery. Many viewers will not be discerning enough to care, I'm cursed not to be in that large happy club of the easily pleased.

The mother's character was cookie cutter, probably through no fault of the actress - she was certainly poorly written / directed. She lurches from rejection / acceptance (and back again) of the prospect of a possessed son with clumsy puppet string jerks of hamfisted directing. Basically, her main job in this film is to pull concerned faces of varying severity while serving as a prop for the evil child. Wife / husband dynamics likewise are handled in a rushed off-hand fashion, with insufficient time and care given to character development. They were cutouts for their role as props to the evil child. The shrink guy (or whatever he was exactly) was shoe-horned in, in a rush, to dump large undigestable chunks of plot information and backstory in a few unconvincing passages of dialogue.

Evil child suffers a common horror movie flaw of being omnipresent "Always One Step Ahead!" To me this is the lamest and most fatal commonly found trap horror flicks fall into and is frankly laziness and lack of real story-telling skill, as is a reliance on jump-scares, which this film also suffers from.

What could have been a pretty well done, although by no means original, creeper is a bland, tired, uninteresting and uninspiring phoned in effort despite the star of the show, the evil kid, doing a pretty good job in his role. Almost everything else in this thing is remarkably forgettable. A good example of a movie attempting to bypass the standards other genres demand of it because it has the horror tag, and a reminder of when horror movies bother to do the "small" stuff well, they are the most memorable of films. You don't get a pass from the discerning viewer who won't be distracted from the standards of story-telling by jump-scares alone, try harder.

It's a sad time when you have to go back to 1981 for a good flick, back to an era where they had to actually make a good film, as opposed to the modern day where it is more common to cheese it and trick you into thinking you have seen a good film.

This is what I want in a movie. Things aren't spoon fed. You're not treated like an idiot, you're left to glean from context the subtleties of character interactions. Some moral complexity, protagonists who do the wrong thing, a villain(ess) who is so convincing even you the viewer, knowing she's the bad guy, are half convinced by her lies. And a little skin doesn't hurt either.

This is a Gone Girl from a better time, when filmmakers had a bit more respect for their audience.

Well this is another movie whose high user rating I cannot fathom. It probably didn't help I had just watched Mystic River, full of masterful acting and deft touch direction from Eastwood. This by contrast attempts to look and feel like a classic espionage blockbuster by carelessly throwing all ingredients of such films together in a lumped mishmash. It was miscast from the outset - Swarzenegger would have been better for the lead than De Niro, who is frankly too good and subtle an actor to be in something this vapid. The female lead was likewise the most unconvincing since I saw Demi Moore hamfisting her way through Mr Brooks.

Nothing in this mess felt true to life. If you enjoyed it, I envy you, because there are more bad movies than good ones and it would be nice to be so easily amused. This is a 4/10 flick at best and yet look at you all, lapping it up. I don't understand this planet.

Solid enough horror flick, if you can forgive a rather implausible premise.

Yes yes, men are bad, men imprison women in domestic hell they call "marriage" and burden them with children.

We are very sorry.

To compensate for generations of such treatment, men have invented (among everything else we invented, ie, everything) an elegant solution called "MGTOW", which is basically bachelorhood with a philosophy behind it. Look it up, it's a thing now.

So one fine day, women will stop complaining about being burdened with motherhood and so forth, and begin complaining about men not approaching them for marriage anymore. Oh look, "where have all the good men gone," an op-ed in today's paper. It has begun.

Reverse the genders in this film and you've got the truer picture: women enslave men, not the other way around.

Anyway, yeah, it was a fun enough flick and pretty stylishly done, if you can ignore the agenda.

I thought about the wisdom of the title of this review, because I know it will encourage some of you to see this. Go ahead, I guess, if rolling around in the filth is your idea of a good time.

It's not shocking, though, it is merely disgusting. Any hack can imagine garbage as putrid as this, it merely takes shamelessness (not courage) to act it out and bring it to screen. And of course the filmmaker has the hubris and delusion to claim it is some sort of statement, artistic and political.

It is one of the only times I have ever sided with people calling for a film to be banned on grounds of taste, and I've seen nearly every bad taste video nasty out there.

It isn't even worthy of the notoriety, this one just deserves to be ignored, scraped off the collective shoe and forgotten, along with all those involved in making it. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Pretty hard to review this without spoilers, but let's just say it does a pretty good job of leading you down the garden path, then abruptly switching on the lights and you find yourself somewhere you didn't expect to be.

The mystery here is intriguing enough to keep you watching as it unfolds, but there were some stretches of seemingly unnecessary padding, especially the interactions between the two protagonists. Some "get on with it already" moments. But I had to know where this was headed, so the film did enough good things to keep me wondering. You will need to forgive a few moments of implausibility to enjoy this one... the film might have benefited by showing how they set up their fake haunting pranks.

The prosecuting attorney, by the way, looked exactly like an actor portraying a prosecuting attorney on TV, rather than an actual prosecuting attorney, if you know what I mean. Back to acting school, lady.

Worth watching if you can look past a few flaws.

I am guessing there are a lot of shills being paid to write reviews by the studio or something, it's the only explanation of why absolute and total garbage like this has a rating higher than 3.

I'm a fan of horror and no prude - go ahead, shock me, exploiterize some hot wanna-be actress for my titillation, pile on the splatter, let's get down in the gutter & roll around in the filth for a couple of hours.

But this... man. It did not work on any level whatsoever. I mean, come on... where's my kicks here? This is just... no. Too many problems to bother going into. Frankly this steaming mound doesn't deserve any more time spent on it. Trust me: it's a stinker.

And, uh, ladies... me and the lads, when we're fishing, we don't generally sit around plotting gang rapes, but maybe we are really rare atypical men. Maybe most other guys like gang rape as much as they like fishing (but, like fishing, can't always find the time to do it, I guess). So ladies, rest easy, most of us have better things to do than hatch rape plots against you, although I assure you, you do indeed look lovely today.

Sleep tight... there are MEN out there... everywhere...

Evil... evil men. One day they're inventing civilization, inventing tampons, changing the tyre, changing the oil, defending you from sabretooth tigers, arresting the bad guy, killing the spider, opening the stubborn jar lid... the next day, they're carrying on like these brutes.

Apologies for everything.

Unlikable characters with forced unconvincing (unfunny) banter.

Unrealistic premise and verisimilitude absent.

Snuff film - "we could sell 10,000 copies". Are you sure that's how underground movies work? You want 10,000 copies floating around implicating you in murder? I don't think so, how about there is a market for this but it's a select clientele who pay big bucks for the real thing, like $10 grand per tape? I can think of this stuff for free, how much did they pay you guys to write this?

Really despised all of the protagonists in this film, I would have stuck around to watch them all murdered but the film was already so unconvincing the payoff wouldn't be worth it. Bailed on this one halfway through, waste of time.

The first Vacancy was pretty good due to strong characterization and although realism wasn't entirely that movie's strong point, they put some effort into it at least. Don't waste your time on this, it's not scary, entertaining, shocking, and it's not even a "so bad it's good" flick, it's just lame through and through.

Not a perfect movie, but if you go into this with the expectations you should have of a slasher, you might be pleasantly surprised. Was a pretty effective thrill ride for the most part, an interesting premise, and they took the time to develop the characters, humanize them.... they are not the typical generic cardboard cutout stand-ins of your usual slasher.

Nor are they just - how to put it - gore meat, there for the slaughter. They make a contest of it, and you are really not sure till the end if they are going to make it. Unlike a lot of the more cheesey and lame flicks (like Wolf Creek) the bad guys are not immune to error, and will not necessarily magically appear wherever they need to... you feel watching it like the prey has a fighting chance to make it out.

The build-up is really well done. It's not too slow, not too fast, and the vids the guy finds in his hotel room are really pretty realistic and horrific.

------------------------------------Spoilers------------------------------------

Little details bothered me on occasion:

-end scene when Amy calls 911, doesn't stress the need for an ambulance (husband still alive after all)

-considering one cop has already been through, the hotel guy & his two killers leave the body of David sitting out in the open overnight?

-why did one of the bad guys jump on top of the car to get her out of it (the car hadn't started or moved at the point he decides to jump on the car - wouldn't you go to the door to yank her out of the car rather than jump on the roof with intention to go through the windshield?

-The escallation of events was a bit ham-fisted in a few places when subtlety would have been better - eg, when the "fake 911 call" happens, and a car barrels through the phone box, at the time I thought it was a bit of a tension killer... imagine if instead he realises they are still messing with him, is creeped out by something more subtle, and rushes back to the room to save his wife.

In all, this is not a film for the ages, but you don't expect that going into a slasher, you expect a thrill ride, and this one delivers. Stands out head and shoulders above its peers in the genre, worth watching... turn off the lights, grab the popcorn & lock the doors.

Boy oh boy, what a mess.

Visually, it's gorgeous, although by now of course the CGI that so impressed everyone has not aged well and Gollum looks really unconvincing.

Story-wise, they have raped and confused Tolkien's masterpiece and taken liberties Tolkien himself would never have allowed for all the money they'd throw at him. The hubris of the lady who altered this script is unbelievable - Farimir's a bad guy, huh? Whatever you say, lady. Probably a movie was never going to truly capture the nuance of the books, but they didn't even come close here... the cartoon in the 70s did a better job for God's sake.

This has been watered down appallingly for the cattle. As long as it looks and sounds like a good movie, the cattle are impressed, as usual. Good costumes and music, that's all the cattle need. And of course Bad Guys all being clearly and obviously 10000% bad, the good guys are clearly and obviously 10000% good... angel music when they are on screen to make it even plainer, and sinister music for the bad guys, it's a good substitute for character.

Every line of dialogue must lack subtlety to keep the sheep impressed, so of course even Wormtongue holding a parchment and saying: "Theoden signed it this morning," yeah even this has to be The Most Dramatic Line Ever Said In a Movie!!!!! Cue the music which reminds the audience they're supposed to Feel Emotions at this moment.

Oh my God how embarrassing to see those actors trying to keep a straight face while talking "elvish". Gimli's character is nothing but lame comic relief - he's short, get it? Ha, ha.

This whole movie was an enormous, overly long cringe. And the cattle cued for miles to dump hundreds of millions in the pockets of those who did this. For shame.