Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

From among the Video Nasties Thus far into the great Summer of Blood ’10 Video Nasties Extravaganza, you could be forgiven for assuming that the Video Nasties list was pretty much a bunch of hot air, trumped-up charges of obscene violence levied against movies that were mostly innocuous and badly-made, guilty perhaps of extreme bad […]

The completion of what is threateningly being referred to as the “second trilogy” of Saw films, Saw VI is a triumph (a very relative triumph) for two reasons: first, it is not so bullshit confusing as Saw IV, and second, it is not so sleepy and wholly pointless as Saw V, and hehehe, I just […]

A review by request for reader Laurence C. from Canada. Admittedly, I’m stretching the definition of “classic” in this case beyond the beyond; even beyond the definition of “classic trash” that I’m indulging myself in for a few weeks. We’re talking about a film that came out in the summer of 2007, when this blog […]

How much easier life would be if one could argue in good faith that the Saw movies were being produced according to some sort of template; that except for the names these were all the same damn thing over and over again, like the Friday the 13th films. Ah, but excepting for the fact that […]

The final shots of the Michael Bay-produced remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre set up a sequel in the baldest way possible, and also one of the stupidest: relying as it does on a character who very prominently lost his arms suddenly being able to jump out of the dark with a chainsaw. Yet somehow, […]

Although it absolutely does suffer from having as its protagonists a pair of idiots idiotic even by the standard of an Idiot Plot, The Strangers absolutely deserves this much praise: it is a ridiculously well-crafted scary movie. Maybe not good enough to rise to the pantheon (the last film to reach that height, I’d wager, […]

The short version is: no, Michael Haneke’s new version of Funny Games does not need to exist. Regardless of its inherent quality or lack thereof, it serves essentially no useful purpose. As to the useless purposes it serves, well, that’s the long version. In 1997, the German director made his first major international splash with […]

I am certain that I saw Untraceable. I have the ticket stub right here, so I know I paid for it, and I can recall a couple of scenes that weren’t in the trailer. But the film itself just shot right through my brain without leaving more than a ghost in my memory. And that […]

I suppose that it’s fair to say that if you have so far been a fan of the Saw series, you will most likely enjoy Saw IV, at least in part. You are also a sick and deviant monkey-fucker. Why did I pick monkeys? I cannot say. But I expect that people who would deliberately […]

First, I want to mention how very much it amuses me to read review after review proclaiming that Captivity is such a filthy pit of swill that not even the most stalwart masochist could possibly suffer through it, and that it so wholly lacks even a trace of invention that it surely must mark the […]

Joking is all well and good, but the surprisingly virulent controversy around Hostel, Part II perhaps deserves some consideration. So check this bit of nastiness out: If we follow the official narrative, you had one of two reactions to that poster: you thought it was depraved, immoral, sickening trash; or you thought it was compelling […]

I was already worried about having Psycho flashbacks just from the premise of Vacancy, in which two people are terrorized by the weird proprietor of a tiny hotel miles off the main highway in what appears to be California, so when the main titles started up, looking very reminiscent of the work of the late […]

Categories: horror, torture porn