I consider this one a classic, full stop.

I've had friends say they found it disappointing. And I can understand that, I suppose, considering how some viewers may have grown used to being spoonfed by modern horror. This film has actual plot and character development that you have to sit through. A lot of this film's runtime is just the psychological dynamics of a deteriorating mother/son relationship (and possibly also the deteriorating mental health of one or both) with the scenes of traditional scares only coming as brief emotional punctuation marks.

Consider, on the other hand, that this also has a 98% critics' approval rating on "Rotten Tomatoes". And William Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist", after seeing it, updated his Twitter profile to read, "Psycho, Alien, Diabolique, and now THE BABADOOK" and called it "the scariest movie I've ever seen." A number of critics called it not just the best horror film of its year or decade, but one of the best films of any genre.

So, it's not for everyone. But it's very much for a lot of people. I'm one of them.

Wait, ok. A little virtue-signalling never hurt anyone, so I'll point out: From everything I've read and seen, director Lars von Trier seems to me like kind of a disturbed or unbalanced individual, very likely a misogynist, misanthrope, almost definitely a narcissist, and probably personally an all-around malignant asshole. And also, I think, easily the most talented filmmaker of the last few decades. Not since Herzog or Tarkovsky have I seen someone who just struck me as so adept in the language of filmmaking, such a natural talent.

Breaking The Waves is a straight drama. Set on a remote Scottish island, where an American there working on an oil right has fallen in love with a local, who is a member of the island's ultra-religious church. They marry, when he is injured in an explosion on the rig, and their relationship takes some vintage LvT perverse turns on his way back to health.

The movie is as perverse and disturbing in some ways, and in the same ways, as many of LvT's movies have been accurately criticized for. Several leading actresses, including Helena Bonham Carter who was apparently fine playing the lead in "Fight Club", turned down the female lead because they were uncomfortable with the character's sexual behavior. The actress who eventually got the role, Emily Watson, who went on to become a highly respected actress, was expelled from her college when the film came out for participating in what they considered depravity.

I've tried a few times to tell friends about the details this movie, but it's hard to do justice to it, and relating the plot alone, without seeing it unfold yourself under LvT's control, doesn't capture it.

It is a sick, beautiful, touching, beautiful, disturbing, beautiful movie. It has a million tiny moments of directorial brilliance. It has an ending that still gives me chills down my spine when I think of it.

It's worth pointing out that LvT's magnum opus, according to some people (including me), is "Antichrist", a truly horrible movie that completely divorces the idea of great filmmaking from any sort of entertainment value. I can honestly say it's a great film, certainly far and away the best movie I would never, ever suggest anybody watch. And it makes a certain amount of sense he eventually got to that from this.

He also made "The House That Jack Built", which seemed like a deliberate attempt to quickly drive his critics out of the movie theater in disgust, before then rewarding everyone sick, foolish, or optimistic enough to stay. Again: LvT seems like kind of an asshole.

But despite some very strong and occasionally unpleasant moments, there's more than enough beauty here to make "Breaking The Waves" an exceptionally great movie.

For what it's worth, since it may sound like it's difficult to praise unambiguously, it did win the Grand Prize at Cannes, "Best Actress" nominations for Emily Watson from BAFTA and the Oscars, and took Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematographer from the National Society of Film Critics that year, as well as Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematographer from the NY Film Critics Circle. It's a really well-made movie.

Also, I believe, it has the most monsters in it of any movie: in one of many examples of aforementioned geekery, Screen Rant has listed 81 of them. Not to be outgeeked, the Cabin In The Woods Wiki lists over 90 of them (of which, to be fair, 5 are only seen in outtake footage or referred to in production materials) plus a few dozen more mentioned in the novelization and other official related media.

Not one of my favorite favorite films, but I definitely enjoy it a lot, have rewatched it multiple times without it losing any of its charm, and expect to continue doing so. The very definition of an honorable mention.

---

I turned this one off halfway through.

The two worst conceits amateur horror directors rely on, anthologies and "found footage" tripe, exacerbated by truly lame stories, stilted acting, and the most amateurish (lack of) production values I've ever seen. Ok, your video editing software has a "video camera messing up" preset. Ok. We've seen it now. Move on.

Seriously. There's just nothing in this movie worth watching at all. Watch anything else.

This slow-to-start but original and ultimately entertaining mindfuck is a slow-burn, low-key gem in the same way as (and bearing some superficial similarities to, in terms of setting and tone, and how gradually and realistically it brings on the total weirdness) Yellowbrickroad, another rare zero-budget favorite of mine.

The Rotten Tomatoes summary probably summarizes it better than I could: "Two brothers receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn't as young men, they're forced to reconsider the cult's beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult."

That is about the best it could be explained without spoilers, except to say there's some hefty surrealism tucked away in the corners, and a metaphysical plateful of temporal spaghetti.

It's also notable for being one of the very few movies I've ever immediately rewound (ok, clicked 'play' again) the minute it ended, and immediately re-watched in its entirety a second time almost from the beginning, just to look for the details I missed. (N.B. the only other time I can recall doing that is the Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink".)

In this, a programmer wins a chance to spend a few days with the reclusive head of his company in his isolated retreat, where it turns out he has built an artificial (and, in some lovely FX work, visually clearly robotic, except for the face) woman. The programmer has been called there to interact with her and determine whether he feels she is genuinely conscious and intelligent. That short synopsis doesn't really do it justice, but to say more would be to rob anyone reading of the experience of going into this cold and letting the story unfold.

I just got floored by this movie. I can only assume the low rating is because so many horror fans have absolutely terrible taste in movies.

This is the kind of low-budget miracle that often lacks a lot—the acting is spotty, the effects aren't great, the pacing is awkward—but somehow manages to make up for it with heart, with an original idea, with a strong, strangely evocative narrative. This film is Decadent, in the aesthetic sense of the word. Like some of Baudelaire's best poems, its imagery and narrative are truly horrible, and in fact it's extremely gory, but somehow it manages to say something new and somehow very darkly beautiful. It helps that the emphasis is not on scares, but rather on telling a story.

In that way, it reminds me very much of "The Hamiltons", another super-low-budget, kind of quiet, unambitious indie film that puts any kind of cheap thrills in the back seat in favor of telling a redemptive story about relationships... unusual relationships not quite like anything seen elsewhere, and rather horrible ones at that, but with just enough familiar about them, portrayed with enough depth, to make you care about these monstrous characters. "Found" shares those qualities.

I really enjoyed it, not as a horror movie, but rather as a movie that happens to require horror to tell its story. As an added bonus, it ends far more satisfyingly than most low- budget films, despite not providing the least bit of resolution. It's a neat trick, and casts a favorable light back on the whole movie, even the earlier parts where it's still trying to find its footing.

Again, if you're looking for shocks, ingenious torture and over-the-top imaginative brutality, this is absolutely not that kind of movie. But those whose tastes lean towards Poe and Baudelaire, and can tolerate the usual shortcomings of less-than-professional filmmaking, will probably enjoy this very much. It works.

[Note, 2023: I must've seen this, and written this review, a long time ago. I don't remember this film at all, even looking it up on IMDB, where I rated it a '9' at some point in the past. Given what a positive review I gave it, I'm marking it as a favorite, but mostly just to remind myself to track it down and watch it again to see if it actually is. Odd that I wouldn't remember something I liked this much. —Mike]

Originally posted on my blog Sloth And Dignity.

Kind of a new take on some tired old zombie tropes. It starts off reeeeeeally dull for a while but eventually picks up nicely. It's one of those British horror films that tries to actually be a good movie rather than just going for scares, and by and large it works. It's got pretty much the first new ideas of any sort in the genre since "28 Days Later", which it builds on thematically in the zombies-as-infected-humans genre. If "Night Of The Living Dead" is the Beatles of zombie movies, and "28 Days Later" is the Rolling Stones, this is the Faces at their best. (And, by the way, continuing the metaphor, "Dawn Of The Dead" is Paul McCartney & Wings, and the obscure 1964 Vincent Price movie "The Last Man on Earth" is Chuck Berry.) Don't want to say too much because I don't want to ruin it. But, suffice to say: what if the standard post-apocalyptic film zombie infection is just the /beginning/ of something? This film goes there.

I mean, look. I liked "Cannibal Holocaust" too. But there's a difference between somebody making "Cannibal Holocaust", and somebody seeing "Cannibal Holocaust" and saying, "I want to make that too." Except, you know, also including some standard de riguer cliches from newer cliched movies.

Another effective Canadian film. How do they do it?

Yes, by conventional film standards, it sucks: almost no story, no narrative arc, almost no dialog for the second half, nothing is ever explained, it's entirely full of insipid depthless characters who are either brutally loathesome (most of the men) or spend a hell of a lot of time doing nothing but wandering through a darkened building whimpering and screaming (most of the females), it spends too much time indulging itself in banal torture porn conventions without going anywhere. I don't even think many of the characters had names. It doesn't even have a trace of the pretentious art-house conventions some films stoop to in order to try to justify the obvious lack of conventional movie-making skill.

And yet, I loved it. I was floored and genuinely scared watching it. I will definitely watch it again.

It's barely a story, it's more just a tapestry of murky, mounting fear, presented for its own sake. In some ways, it's comparable to Fellini in its broad, expositionless, near-abstract presentation of something more wrested from the subconscious than designed to satisfy the intellect.

Its focus on tone rather than narrative is reminiscent of, yes, found-footage origin The Blair Witch Project, but even moreso, of old Giallo horror films, films that reveled in the idea of fear and focused more on creepy mood than the more conventional trappings of movies as "quality" entertainment. No part of the movie is really all that dependent on any other part an any strict way, and it even abandons its "found footage" first-person perspective before it gets to the end. But even so, once it finds makes one of its several shifts and finds its footing about halfway through, abandoning what seems to be a banal brutality-as-spectacle approach and shifting to the stuff of deeper, more phantasmagoric nightmares, it becomes easily the only truly scary film I've seen in a long time. I'm not going to include spoilers, but there are moments in here as iconic and viscerally chilling as Nosferatu's long-fingernailed shadow gliding silently up a stairway wall.

I was genuinely surprised to see "The Inside"'s low 3.3/10 rating on IMDB, but it makes sense. It succeeds in a much less polished, and quieter, but otherwise similarly unconventional way as Lars von Trier's "Antichrist", another film that doesn't even remotely attempt to be enjoyable as a moviegoing experience, which, like this film, deceived a lot of people into thinking it was a bad movie instead of quite the opposite.

I almost gave it 9 stars. I still might. This film knows exactly what it wants to be, and it unapologetically is that and only that, to the very core. If you don't like it, the problem may not be with the film, but with you. Despite the rocky beginning, this film's ultimate odd, offputting achievement deserves to be considered a misfit classic.

(Not to be confused, as I unfortunately later did, with "Inside", an abysmal 2016 captivity porn about a pregnant woman atttacked by a psycho woman inside her home, which apparently was a remake of a 2007 French horror film, which would explain why it's abysmal. I don't understand why France has consistently produced some of the best classical arts — music, poetry, literature, cinema — yet is 100% reliable in making absolutely inspid, shallow, awful horror movies. The 2007 "Inside" is vintage modern French horror—it could barely have held up as a horror short, and yet somehow it's feature-length.)

This is one of those movies that seems like it was originally written as a play, which is something that I always tend to like, when it's done competently. Here, it works really well, although if I have any complaint it's that the story builds emotional unease so capably and steadily, that by the time it turns from emotional to physical brutality, it almost breaks the tension. It feels very emotionally authentic as the unease builds. Fucking creepy new agers. (I do have mixed feelings about transplanting the "no cellphone reception out here" trope to the city, although they do pretty much pull it off.)

It's seriously well cast, fairly original, well done all around. Good ending, too. And the closing song rips off "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" very, very effectively.

Based loosely on the 1954 novel "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson. That's the same "I Am Legend" that "The Omega Man" and Will Smith's much later action movie were based on. Matheson's is a name anyone with more than a passing similarity to my taste in movies & TV should be very well acquainted with (and if not, he certainly  either wrote or directly inspired many things you're familiar with.)

Price plays a scientist holed up in a house trying to survive while the rest of the world has been transformed by a viral plague into a bumbling, bloodthirsty vampiric creatures, sort of a combination of vampires and zombies. Yes, nowadays that setup is hackneyed, but remember: this came out in 1964. Now you know where every other one of those movies got the idea from.

Part of the charm here, besides seeing these very familiar tropes when they were new, is that Price turns in about the best performance of his career here. He certainly hammed it up from time to time over the years, but he could act, and in this one, he plays it straight.

If you're a film buff, especially of horror or sci fi, you need to at least know this one.

It was originally recommended that I watch this with the original swedish soundtrack and English subtitles, and not use the terrible English audio overdubbing job, and though I don't like subtitled movies in this case it proved to be good advice.

Two years later the novel was remade for American audience and titled "Let Me In", starring Chloe Grace Moretz, and it might be one of the few times her presence has ever made a movie worse. It just doesn't work to have a famous familiar face for the vampire in this movie. The Swedish version greatly benefits from the cast of extremely talented but unfamiliar actors. Other than that, the American version is still pretty good, as the source material is so good and it sticks close to it. But I think if you're going to watch either movie instead of reading the novel, just go straight to the Swedish original. It's really the one.

Apparently there's an American TV series now too. Ugh.

Anyway, the story is the same in both: a crass suburban couple goes camping on a remote beach in Australia, and things just go wrong. To say more would spoil it. A big favorite of mine and a pretty one-of-a-kind film, in both versions.

I've since gotten the sense that the 1978 original of this isn't revered as a minor classic, but I'm not sure why. We live in a world where everybody has heard of "Last House On The Left" and "I Spit On Your Grave", both of which came out in the same general time as "Long Weekend", and those films are garbage, nowhere near as good. Not even in the same class.

Jay Baruchel, Eric Andre, and the ridiculously likable Britt Lower in a magical-realist take on dating. If you've ever gone to a party and discovered your recent ex is there with her new boyfriend, and, he's literally Adolph Hitler, and, everyone at the party likes him more than you... then you should be able to relate to this.

It had all the monsters and magic of dating made literal, and, played them with a completely straight face. It was three seasons of deadpan humor, mixed with surreal, sci-fi, and fantasy elements. And I enjoyed it immensely.

This, I must say, is my kind of movie: just things going *awry*, to the most perverse extreme, yet without stretching credulity so far past the point of believability that you can't empathize. Numerous passing notes provide depth, such as a briefly-seen news interview clip showing a parent who has murdered his child, apparently in full command of his faculties, explaining calmly that "I think what's happening is awful" — except, when asked directly, in the case of his child, which, he says with obvious satisfaction, "it was exactly right."

Great horror draws you in with realism and plays on your own comforts and fears, and this conceit, which could so easily have been botched, fully qualifies. It's got the kind of tone and balance to make it a true visceral horror on an emotional, not physical, level, a kind of emotional gore (and, it bears mentioning as an aside, visually it's much less bloody than a movie like this could have been, and shies away from showing gore that most people would have.

For instance, one scene is made more disturbing by intimating the presence of the corpse of a child, someone we have seen earlier in the film, by the sound of flies and not actually ever showing it. This is perhaps a slight disappointment for the modern horror buff, but for me, it's a throwback to a time when horror pictures tried to be well-made movies, not just 90 minutes of visual shock and gore, and aspired to be lean/spare/economical rather than gratuitous.) It's the kind of horror that works in broad daylight.

That proper "emotional horror" tone and balance are something very, very few movies pull off right, and I can think of far more failures than successes...the Nicole Kidman vehicle "The Invasion" leaps to mind as an example of this common failure, in how takes one of the creepiest basic tropes in storytelling history and succeeds in somehow divesting it of any sort of gut-level unease for the viewer.

Or perhaps the best opposing example is this film's failed evil twin, "The Happening", with its vaguely similar themes, equally disturbing in concept and even in some passing momentary scenes, and yet, in its entirety, a complete, laughable, abject failure in its execution.

So, with this very well-done buildup, I'd say the first half of this was shaping up to be one of my favorite movies. I generally multitask while I watch movies, but about 15 minutes into this one, I had to put the laptop away so I could watch it with undivided attention, which is about the highest praise I can give the first 15 minutes of a horror movie. The dread nicely escalates, as news reports and background police activity slowly reveal society going off the hinges, finally culminating earlier in the film than expected in a very well-played scene in the delivery room in which mom's sister bears her first child — with results that were played well enough not to be disappointing even though they were entirely predictable. Cinematically, up to that point, it was well done in the same way that I like about the 2004 remake of "Dawn Of The Dead", especially the beginning, which it was reminiscent of in both the early scenes of a forebodingly sterile suburbia, and the overall "this is never going to be an 'A' horror movie, so let's make it the most solid B+ horror movie we possibly can" quality of the building.

Unfortunately, it then sags in the middle, when it stops showing the widespread effects and background of society deteriorating, and shifts entire focus inwards to focus exclusive the main protagonist family, becoming sort of a murderous reverse "Home Alone" where the parents, rather than burglars, are after the kids, resulting in all sorts of around-the-house ingenuity (duct tape is used in two different gimmicks), and never pulls back out to show what's going on in the rest of society again.

It even completely forgets about the sister and baby the movie made us invest emotionally in halfway through with a harrowing delivery room scene, never bothering to return to them — rendering that entire subplot a mere shock device instead of a plot development.

But, oh, on the plus side, did I mention, the parents are Nicholas Cage and Selma Blair? These choice bits of casting really help things along, especially Blair, who is talented enough to glide smoothly from murderous to tender and back again in a heartbeat, telling the kids she's trying to kill that she and their dad love them "more than anything," and making it sound believable.

The overall fun of the picture compensates for its more predictable plot developments, but unfortunately, as the narrative of mounting social unrest-cum-terror of the first half is completely abandoned in exchange for a much narrower survival tale about one pair of kids who weren't really given quite enough background or character development to make us care about them personally, it ceases to live up to its broader potential as a horror yarn. It's the very definition of a seriously flawed gem.

The reviewer on RogerEbert.com got it right when he said, "[the filmmaker] gets so much right here that I can't help but strongly recommend "Mom and Dad" ... with some qualifications." Ultimately, I don't love it. But I know I will watch it again. That's definite.

And, as if I needed one more thing to like about this near-perfect near-miss, it also once again reaffirms my favorite horror movie trope: the key to survival in any horror-movie scenario is outliving Lance Hendrikson. He's *always* the last to go. I think they cast him for that on purpose.

[Note, 2023: Posting this online several years after writing it, I want to add I was sufficiently disturbed by the good parts of this movie that to this day I've resisted watching it again as it's popped back up online. It's not so much that it's a scary movie as it effectively communicates scary concepts that I'm not sure I want to think about: essentially, it asks, what exactly, deep down, is the difference between the instinctual drives of love and rage?  Off the top of my head I can't think of a lot of movies that had that kind of effect on me.]

Just one example off the top of my head: a struggling appliance store is being run out of business by a nearby major chain store. When the chain store advertises that they'll match any advertised price, Fielder advises the appliance store owner to start advertising a certain TV for $1. Then, he'll send people over to buy out that TV from the chain store for $1, and when they're out of stock, his client can raise the price again and resell them in his own store for full price, a 100% profit.

In the kind of complication the show specialized in, somebody noticed that if he advertised the TV for $1, someone might come in and try to buy it for $1. But Fielder has a plan. When people show up looking for the advertised special, he throws numerous obstacles in their way, including pointing to a sign that the store put up that they now have a dress code, and formalwear is required to enter.

Then when one person comes back later dressed in a tuxedo and demands to buy the TV, Fielder tells him, sure, it's right in our special room in the back, and leads him to a back wall... with a tiny, one-foot door in it. He tells the man, "that's the premium TV section, they're expensive so we keep them in a special room."

The man gets down and squeezes through the door...

...and then we see inside, as the man stands up: he's in one room, and then there's some kind of glassed-in middle room he has to walk through, and then, on the other side of the middle room, there's the room with the $1 TV.

And, in the middle room, is a live alligator.

So the man gives up and leaves. And as he sees him out of the store, Nathan innocently asks him, "So... you don't want to buy the TV?" And says to him, "I feel bad, too, you know. That's $1 of profit we're not getting."

Meanwhile, as this is all going on, there's a second ridiculous subplot of Fielder trying to hire people to go buy TVs for $1 from the chain store.

All this is pretty par for the course for this show, things regularly got that goofily complicated or occasionally much moreso. It was really funny, and consistent. Not just once, but several times during the show's run, stunts Fielder set up for episodes in production went viral on the internet or even in the news media by themselves, before the episodes aired, with nobody realizing until later on that they were staged for a comedy TV show.

So it's always been funny to me to call this a "horror" movie, which almost requires grit rather than gloss and authenticity to generate scares. But, Tobe Hooper directed, and if nothing else just about anything Tobe Hooper touches is going to have a few brilliantly scary scenes. I will say the visual effects that (mostly) seemed so dazzling at the time look much cheaper and faker today than I remember them being. It's a movie about the supernatural, but it's more a family drama/action movie of sorts (Spielberg, go figure) than a horror movie.

Actually, watching it again after so long, it struck me, it's a pretty unique movie. It owes debts to movies that came before but really resynthesizes things in a manner that was novel for the time, and probably still is today. It was worth the rewatch, but probably not another one soon. Still, it hasn't totally aged out, and deserves its rep.

Ok, very shortly I'm glad I stayed with it. Thi smight be one of those rare "so bad it's good" movies that really is so bad it's good. He spends the rest of the time trapped in his apartment while outside his neighbors turn into creatures, who you can tell are evil because they crabwalk instead of walking upright and talk through an octave divider, and does a very hammy job of trying to act like he's losing his mind. This thing has about half the depth of a video game. I wonder sometimes if lighting design must be easy, because a lot of these crappy movies have noticeably competent lighting, lots of good use of shadow. Also I can't figure out if we're supposed to notice that the paintings on his walls keep turning slanted or even 90 degrees sideways from how they were, or if it was just an accident. At one point he's wearing a sombrero for no clear reason, and attempts to board up his windows with duct tape. Plus, there's awesome violations of the 180 degree rule, as the door to his apartment is always to the left, but the creatures out in the hall banging on it (in between stopping to writhe and crabwalk around for no stated reason) are banging on a door on the left side of the hall. It took me about 7 times to figure out why it was so confusing. Also, I wonder how many apartment building hallways actually have huge, blade-runneresque an slow-turning exhaust fan leading to the outdoors, with a golden shaft of afternoon light shining cinematically through it. Must be a Los Angeles thing. Bonus: the dumbest, most cliche'd ending of any movie ever.

Wil Wheaton fiiiinally earns my complete forgiveness for Wesley Crusher, by playing his very creepiest self in what, for at least 2/3 of it, plays like one of the better (although definitely not one of the best) Black Mirror episodes. Set in the 80s (and well done at that, not overplaying it) a lonely bachelor stuck at home caring for his mother brings home a "Rent-A-Pal" VHS virtual friend. Seriously, I didn't have high hopes for this one, and the ending engages in some much-too-predictable strokes, but overall it's mostly well done enough, and creative enough, to be worth a watch. Bonus points for keeping you guessing about whether the video tape is or is not actually responding to what's happening in front of the tv in some amusingly creative creative ways. Again, not great, nobody will be blown away by this, but it's a pretty original and entertaining watch.

This is a small indie horror flick that stuck with me just for being really weird. A man meets his drug addict friend out at a remote cabin the friend is squatting in, and chains the friend up, forcing him to spend a week going cold turkey. Strange encounters with other drug addicts, local security, and a team of foreign researchers there doing psychedelics begin to occur and they find films and videos that change with each viewing, and what is initially assumed to be haunted land turns out to be more a postmodern 4th-wall indie flick type thing in which media and stories figure into the story. All in all a pretty original outing, which scores big with the part of me that enjoys unique little indie horror flicks like "Yellowbrickroad" and "Pontypool".

I dunno. It's been so long since I saw it I honestly can't remember if it's even good enough to recommend. But it had images that stuck with me all this time, and 10 years later I want to watch it again, so, honorable mention.

So if watching the violence of the Jonestown massacre is your idea of entertainment, enjoy, this is the Jonestown massacre, presented as entertainment. The only question is why they even changed the name of the compound to "Eden Parish" instead of just calling it "Jonestown". That seems like an odd single detail to add creativity to when you're otherwise just making a rote retelling of tragic events intended as some form of entertainment for somebody or other.

+1 star because they guy who is a precise duplicate of Rev. Jim Jones, even down to the sunglasses, is kind of entertaining in how he literally brings nothing to the role but a documentary reproduction.

Oh, also, it's a "found footage", with conceits like people who remember to keep the cameras running and pointed at subjects of interest even as they're running for their lives through the woods, hiding from nearby gunmen, etc. Which is great, because that idea hasn't been totally overdone.

Huh? Why is this even a movie?

Also posted to IMDB, originally posted on my blog Sloth And Dignity.

OK. Let's forget about sexually explicit content for a moment. You've got 400 other reviews you can read about the sex in.

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: John Cameron Mitchell is a very good filmmaker. Hedwig And The Angry Inch was very well made, and Shortbus is very well made. This is why I gave this movie 6 stars - it was enjoyable to watch on the level of very well-made cinema. He's clearly done his homework - this film reeks of "best student in his film school class". Despite how that sounds, I mean it in a good way. The actors, including the 'local color' cast to play themselves, also give very good performances all around.

Some of the characters and situations in Shortbus do have a few nice subtle touches, but then, all to often, it is ruined by having them go and behave in contrived and unrealistic ways that are practically Hollywood clichés. Situations alternate between characters making themselves emotionally vulnerable and revealing deep personal thoughts and secrets in front of total strangers - a few times I was surprised the words "this is a deep movie" didn't just flash across the screen in case anybody missed the point - and people flying off the handle and making unrealistically insensitive statements to each other (which the other person then completely overreacts to, and both begin screaming, all for the apparent purpose of creating "drama".) There is no subtlety or ambiguity anywhere in the mix. Everything is clearly spelled out for the viewer in broad day-glo strokes. It reeks of "Look at us! We're 'complex' characters" instead of ringing true-to-life. It feels like watching a grown-up, tattooed version of "Beverly Hills 90210". With excellent cinematography.

What I want to know is, in a movie where they went so far as to use real sex for veracity, didn't they put any work into having the situations or characters be anything like true-to-life? Are we to believe that a relationship counselor would get so worked up as to physically slap a client over his eagerness to have had a therapeutic "epiphany", and then confide in him that she's never had an orgasm? Even worse, are we expected to believe the scene where a remotely-controlled vibrator concealed in her crotch repeatedly fires at the worst possible moment, forcing her to involuntarily beat the tar out of somebody? Let alone that the husband who claimed to care so much about her orgasm would "misplace" the remote by leaving it in his back pocket during a sex party? Or that someone would then mistake it (a pink remote labeled "trapped hummingbird" and "buzzing bee") for a TV remote, inadvertently triggering the beating? If this all had been meant as comedy and played for laughs, in a slapstick film, it might have worked. As it is, it was all just far-fetched and stupid, saved from being embarrassingly bad only by the actors' considerable skills. Is this what the audiences at Cannes appreciate? The "concealed vibrator" scene was the single worst case, but this sort of contrived situation is present to one degree or another throughout the whole film. People share secrets, people argue. The characters develop, but in many cases no reasons or motivations are presented for them doing so - it just sort of happens, to drive the story along. People have hangups for no reason we can tell, then they overcome them arbitrarily, also for no reason we can tell, other than that the picture needs an ending. I was not surprised at all to learn the actors were allowed to participate in the writing process. Beneath the excellent production and performances, something very amateurish seemed to be lurking at this well-made movie's core.

Essentially, Shortbus is a fairy tale about sex, and should be taken as such. Those who are too old for princes, pots of gold and unicorns may enjoy the sex toys, orgasms and freak-folk performers that fill in for them here, and on that level, it's an enjoyable film, if you're not the sort of person likely to be offended by the very explicit content.

But I do hope that someday someone supplies John Cameron Mitchell with source material that rises to the level of his very considerable skills as a filmmaker.

2023 note: I wrote this review over 15 years ago. To my knowledge, John Cameron Mitchell never made another movie I liked, but he took a star turn in the TV series "Shrill" as a believably narcissistic boss at a small Portland weekly paper, who also unexpectedly does a fabulous performance of a David Bowie song.

For the first few scenes I really thought it was going to suck, the acting was just terrible and the characters paper-thin, and ridiculously clean-cut, preppie-looking character Russell supposed to be some sort of scary mad-dog psychopath.

And then something magic happened, and with every scene it got better and better, until by the end I was really impressed and really enjoyed it without reservation. I wouldn't call it a great film, it's definitely got its amateurish flaws, but I'd give it a very, very solid B+, way better than a lot of first time directors' films.

This is an amazing cross between the kind of super-lo-budget indie horror older folks like me tend to think of as "USA Up All Night" flicks—let's face it, the actors uniformly suck, and Russell in particular, is horribly miscast, supposed to be a murderous psycho but seeming more like an overacting college kid, which he probably was—and a really well-executed, smartly written neo-noir/genre flick.

This film wears its influences on its sleeve, although the long shadow of Quentin Tarantino is an interesting thing to see fairly successfuly integrated into what is basically a horror thriller. To spell out all the obvious influences would be to give away too much of the plot, which is nowhere near as straightforward as it initiially appears its going to be, but this film is sort of a cross between the wave of tarantino-influenced neo-noir ("Sexy Beast" also springs to mind for some reason, probably the gritty realism, which this film apes only cartoonishly) and some offbeat & interesting horror movies I could name with plots that revolve around loopiness in time.

The fact that this, "Threads", and "The Day After" came out around the same time, and all anyone ever talked about or remembers was the soap operatic, TV-ified "The Day After" (although all three were originally produced for TV), is a grim statement about our society's desire to appear to be confronting the potential horrors we've spawned while simultaneously, to the greatest extent possible, avoiding looking at all at the potential horrors we've spawned.

Two mountaineers are climbing in the remote Andes, thirteen miles over rough glacial moraine from their remote base camp, when a storm sets in. Tethered together by a rope, one slips, and dangles over a sheer cliff, suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The other climber, unable to gain secure enough footing to pull him back up, is instead slowly being pulled down towards the edge by the weight. Knowing that if he goes over they will both plunge into the chasm, he makes the tough decision and cuts the rope, letting the dangling climber fall to his death. Once the storm abates, he descends the mountain and hikes back to base camp alone.

What he doesn't know is that the climber he cut loose, presumably to fall to his death, upon hitting the ground, broke through what was not ground at all but just a thin crust of ice over a deep crevasse. He awoke on a small ice ledge deep in the crevasse, halfway up the wall, far from both the top and the bottom, with both his legs shattered.

This tells the story of how, on his own, he escaped the crevasse, made the difficult descent and 13 mile hike over glacial morraine from the mountain on two broken legs, to finally make it to back to base camp and then back to civilization, and survive to tell the whole tale in his own words in this movie. Not to mention the details of what happens when the haggard figure of a man who everyone thinks was recently killed appears in a remote mountain camp in the middle of the night, which is a story all by itself.

If that's your cup of tea, this movie is the good stuff. It's an incredible story.

By the way, the man who miraculously made it through the ordeal alive said at the time, and has ever since, that is climbing partner's decision to cut his rope was the right choice in a survival situation. There was never any blame between them. In that moment the only available choice was between letting a man die, or both of them dying. And, as it worked out, by an incredible combination of fate and determination, neither of them did.

I don't know if it's for everyone, but to me, this is an movie that starts ok, and just gets better and better and better over its runtime, finally tying things up in the kind of satisfying and intelligent bow that a lot of movies that aspire to be "mind-bending" strive for but few actually succeed at. It's one of those small handful of movies I go out of my way to re-watch every so often and never regret doing so.

It's hard to discuss the plot in any way without giving away spoilers, and I like this movie a little too much to do that. But I can say, I figured out the solution to the grandfather paradox after seeing this one. So now I'm totally cool with changing the past if I ever need to, which is a major load off. It's fine.

BTW once you've watched the movie at least once—preferably, if you enjoyed it enough to, twice, to catch all the foreshadowing and references you missed the first time—there's a blog called "High On Films" with a thorough review and a lot of observations. I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to tempt anyone to read an explanation before they've seen the movie, but afterwards, you should google it. He even caught some details that I missed after two viewings.

Truthfully, might not be for everybody, I don't know how many people share my love of serioulsy well-done pictures but which are mostly talk and little action, and I hesitated for a second to put it on my "Favorite" list only because of that. But, boy did I love it.

Schizophrenic guy (played by a youngish Ryan Reynolds, who I didn't know at the time, and happily was still an actual actor and had not yet gone full-tilt into ironic Manic Pixie Dream Guy persona) hallucinates and goes off the deep end. The twist is, most of the movie is shown from his point of view, to the extent that we see his filth-strewn apartment as clean and tidy, the pink forklifts at his factory job perform ballet, his animals talk to him as a matter of course, and as his victims pile up, their severed heads remain lifelike, cheery, and friendly to him throughout, which adds to the horror when you briefly see the grim reality. (Following a single day of being on medication and unable to deal with the reality, once he's back into hallucination, one of the heads cheerily says to him, "Did you see what those pills did to me? They made me look like a jack-o-lantern!")

Twisted, effective, & truly dark fun... and notable for being one of the only horror movies to end with the whole cast doing an upbeat song & dance number. Bleak comedy in the manner of "Otis". (Update: by Joe Dante. Should have known.) (Update 2: NOT by Joe Dante, I was mistaken. By Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian woman who did “Persepolis”. Apparently, for a long time this script was set to star Ben Stiller, and much as I like Ben Stiller for what he is, that would have cost the cinematic world a true gem.)

For no reason that is ever explained, a millionaire with a very annoying cackle invites financially desperate people over for a "Game" that might solve their financial problems, only to discover the "game" is he gives them choices of two horrible, sadistic things to do to themselves or each other, and they must either pick one and do it, or his butlers kill them. (Apparently there is some sort of employment agency where you can hire an entire household staff who have no problem with killing for you for no adequately explained reason.)

Also, apparently if you give a good person a gun and tell them they can have money if they kill someone else, they'll just go ahead and shoot them in cold blood, rather than using the gun to kill her captors and free both of them. That's the kind of "logic" this movie operates on from start to finish.•Really? The idea that desperate people will do horrible things for money if you help it along by threatening to kill them if they don't is an observation worth making an movie to make?

Then there is a final needless cruelty at the end when it is revealed that the Final Girl's brother in need of surgery, the entire reason she went to this "game" in the first place, randomly decided to kill himself while she was doing it. No, I'm not ticking the "spoilers" checkbox, because for it to be a spoiler, you have to care about the charactes and what happens to them, and these aren't even characters, they're two-dimensional meatbags used to only be shown suffering as entertainment, devoid of any plot or even any logic beyond that. Nothing about this even makes sense. Nobody in this movie ever does anything for any reason. It's all just a set up for watching sadism for its own sake.

Even "Funny Games", which was deliberately designed to be so vacuous and pointlessly violent that it was actually intended to drive people to walk out in it, had more of a plot and more plausibility than this movie does.

Adding to the complete inability to create any sort of entertainment is the bizarre stunt casting that perpetually reminds you you're watching a movie. "Look! It's Ricky from 'Trailer Park Boys' in a horror movie! It's Crab Man from 'My Name Is Earl', even still with the same funny haircut! It's adult film star Sasha Grey, wisely being given a total of about 3 words to say in the entire movie because she's such a bad actress she can't even be murdered by a butler convincingly!"

I hope whoever was involved in making this garbage is ashamed of themselves. I can't imagine what sort of person thought this up and imagined it would be entertaining, let alone actually went out and made it.

It's an American Gothic about researchers trying to retrace the steps of a NH community that walked off en masse into the wilderness in the 1940s, and slowly losing their minds in the woods themselves. And that's really about it.

It's a flawed gem, original, and really disturbed me, despite an unsatisfyingly, almost Lynchian-cryptic (in a bad way; think "Mulholland Drive", not "Eraserhead") ending. It has a low rating but extremely polarized reviews on IMDB, a lot of people either really hated or really loved it. I'd watch it again for sure, and years after having seen it, I can still vividly recall a lot of it, because so much of it just plain really got to me. We go to horror movies to be disturbed, and somehow this odd film disturbed me viscerally, in a way that films with a much stronger narrative seldom have.

I could see it as a double-feature with Open Water... they're both kind of very effective mood pieces without much real plot, and both are movies that I could see a lot of people not liking, but which I found oddly stirring.

This movie is well-produced, well acted, extremely realistic in its gore and violence. Unfortunately, I have to give it only one star because about for almost whole 10 minutes at the beginning, and again near the end of the movie, they stop showing people getting murdered, to waste time bogging it down with some throwaway backstory or reason for the murders, or something, completely from out of left field. I'm not sure... it was people talking, not characters getting stabbed in the eye or having a blender forced down onto the top of their head, so I couldn't sustain any attention to it.

In what universe are moviegoers actually entertained by a murderer SAYING WHY they kill people? Are there really people out there who sit and watch scenes of people talking, not killing anyone or being murdered at all, and find that entertaining? I highly doubt it.

It's a shame. This film's director, and writer if there was one, clearly could have had a future, and probably a great franchise opportunity with this film—if they hadn't sold out and inserted scenes for the sole purpose of pandering to depraved people who only go to movies for "plot" or "dialogue". I sense the marketing department or some other beancounters urging the filmmakers to go back and add these scenes after the film had already wrapped, just to throw in something to please the lowest-common-denominator idiots who can't even be happy with a 95 minutes collection of murder scenes.

Unfortunately, these pointless, gratuitous non-violent acts completely break the otherwise uninterrupted fever pitch of nonstop brutality, and what would have been a top notch, totally solid 95 minutes of human deaths and is stymied by the crassly commercial attempt to suggest "plot" or "dialogue".

This weird, boring non-violence provides an especially disappointing anti-climax when, unbelievably, it occurs AGAIN time near the end for some reason. Until that point it's been just killing, killing, killing, one murder scene after another for long enough that you can actually start to forget about the cinematically bankrupt initial minutes of non-murder, and begin to enjoy the movie, when, boom, then it happens AGAIN.

One early scene of people not getting murdered might have been forgivable. A second one, right near what should have been the climax of the film, just leaves the viewer wondering what the director was thinking that he allowed such ham-fisted, totally gratuitous irrelevancies into his film—not just once but TWICE.

At least these pointless minutes of "plot porn" are prevented from completely ruining the end of the film, by being suddenly followed in the final minutes with a few more gory, explicit murders (and even the last-minute introduction of a totally new character for the sole purpose of squeezing in just one more axe splitting one more head open before the credits roll!) I have to imagine after being forced to sully their film with stupid scenes of people talking to each other, they probably snuck back in to the studio late at night and added those final few minutes on the sly, without the knowledge of the marketing department or whoever demanded they ruin the movie. Good for them for sneaking that in, that last-ditch attempt at quality filmmaking is the only reason I can honestly give the film its 1 star.

I'm glad the production team came to their senses and at least respected the audience enough to end it so well, sparing us from having the lamentable spectacle of characters SAYING THINGS—not even killing or dying while they say them; just SAYING things!—stuck lingering in our head as they exit the theater.

I don't understand what would even give someone the idea to put something like that in a movie, or what kind of sellout director would allow it. This obvious mercenary ploy to cash in by appealing to the lowest common denominator, even for just a few minutes near the beginning and end, completely ruins what would have been the greatest movie since the history of cinema began, back in 1978 with "Last House On The Left". It's sad, tragic really, how close this film came, and how badly it failed. Ah, to dream, of what could have been, and of murders.