The 2014 film Unfriended (released in 2015) was a pretty banal ghost story in which a bunch of generic teenagers are taken to task for their past sins in the matter of a bullied girl who committed suicide. It would be almost insufferably generic and forgettable, except for one very important thing: the entire film […]
From among the Video Nasties It is honestly incomprehensible to me that Dead & Buried isn’t better-known among horror fans. Its original release in 1981 was accompanied by a poster claiming “The creators of Alien… bring a new terror to Earth”, and that feels like it should be enough all by itself, even if the […]
From among the Video Nasties In 1963, indie producer-director and godfather of gore and direct marketing Herschell Gordon Lewis made Blood Feast, a movie typically identified as the very first gore picture (that is, a movie with no intrinsic merits and no hook to its marketing campaign other than “there is blood, lots of it). […]
The Strangers! Now that was a real corker of a horror-thriller, a film that I would have happily predicted at the time – the time was 2008 – was going to establish itself as a small classic of the genre. This does not seem to have happened, and yet ten years later, the film did […]
A review requested by Kelleson Dale, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! Here’s the one thing that is unambiguously true about Repo! The Genetic Opera: it sure is a […]
From among the Video Nasties I’m not sure whether what is most impressive about Night of the Bloody Apes is a positive (there’s so much wacky bullshit going on here that it saves the film from that meanest of fates, being boring) or a negative (it’s so boring that I lost interest halfway through even […]
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is pretty well dumb across the board, but there is one respect in which it’s kind of so unexpectedly smart that I absolutely have to assume it’s on purpose. And that precise combination of “almost entirely dumb, but smart in just enough ways that you can see the filmmakers peering through […]
First, the bad news: Hereditary isn’t by any means as all-time “scary” as the hype would have it (with the proviso, as usual, that one person’s “scary” is another person’s “silly” is another person’s “boring” and so on). What it is, and it’s almost as good, is distressing – a film that so persistently depicts […]
Movies can be frustrating in any number of ways, but maybe the most frustrating is when an almost-great movie misses that target for just one dumb reason. Witness A Quiet Place, which is microscopically close to being my favorite American thriller in at least several months, maybe even a year or two, and instead has […]
It had to happen eventually: Steven Soderbergh has at last made a film that I just don’t like at all. Unsane, the director’s second film in his un-retirement, following the lanky heist film Logan Lucky, is the latest in the proud tradition of Full Frontal, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience: a film made to be as […]
A review requested by Yourself, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! How to go about discussing the 1964 Kwaidan? It’s historically important as the first Japanese horror movie to […]
Annihilation feels like it might be the most Alex Garland thing that Alex Garland has written. The writer’s sixth screenplay – the second that he has directed – is the embodiment of all his most characteristic traits: it is far more interested in ideas than characters, it’s infatuated with the scientific processes at the heart […]
