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Offline (2012)
Inconsistent Coincidence is Ridiculous and Convenient
Quite easily one of the stupidest movies I've seen.
Putting aside the obnoxious editing, poor direction, atrociously generic dialogue, the music always building up but never reaching a crescendo, and overall early 2000s look for a movie made in 2012, the story and the villain are maybe the dumbest part.
The whole thing relies on inconsistent coincidence to propel anything that happens:
- 13 years later the cyber guy they hire to find the cyber stalker (SPOILER ALERT) just happen to be the same guy?
- Who is also pretending to be handicap for who exactly? And for how long?
- It's also only due to his ideas and actions that even lead them to finding her in the first place. Well if he could do that and always knew how then what was he waiting 13 years for?
- Also he seems to hack with ease while in his wheelchair, but cut to him in his stalker hoodie and he struggles to input his own password to access the same work screen he was just doing at the police?
- And why was he talking like Dr. Klaw whenever he was alone as the cyberstalker?
CONVENIENT he could suddenly move into an available apartment right across from her... CONVENIENT there was some electrical issue that prompted the landlord to grant him access into her apartment... CONVENIENT she requested him to meet at her apartment and not someplace else... CONVENIENT they never ran into each other with how often they're shown being in and out of their apartments... Also CONVENIENT that she never noticed those huge spy cameras latched about her apartment in plain sight.
However everyone going gaga over still life paintings of ordinary flowers and paying over $10K for them just might be the most ridiculous.
Accidental Switch (2016)
Plotholes, The Movie!
This movie is just too stupid to review so I'ma just bulletpoint a...
List of Ridiculousness:
NO ONE BOTHERS TO COMMUNICATE effectively:
...The bad guy could've just called the airport about his lost bag like she did and he'd have gotten it back without issue (instead of calling her directly pretending to be an aggressive TSA agent).
...Or when the mother is concerned that someone's been in her room and the ex-husband asks her what is she not telling him, she makes no mention what-so-ever about the luggage mix-up along with the aggressive unknown phone call inquiring about the bag in her possession.
...Or once the mother learned that the airport had already recovered the bag, she could have either gone to retrieve it again or inform the bad guy of where it was to go get it himself and leave her daughter alone.
...Or why did the bad guy even bother to kidnap the daughter and kill the dad in the first place? He could've just confronted the mother directly once he learned who she was and where she was staying. Had he done that he would've learned that first night that the bag was just downstairs at the front desk.
THE INCOMPETENT COPS who immediately dismiss the mother's story because they received a phone call from someone claiming to be her ex-husband just HOURS EARLIER...yet somehow, upon learning that her ex-husband was just murdered the NIGHT BEFORE, the cops now suspect her of murder?!
...What about the phone call they received "ONLY HOURS AGO" from the ex-husband (they now know had died the night before)? They're not suspicious of whoever that was posing as her dead ex? Or why? Not suspicious, at all, of the imposter's motives for calling ahead only to inform them not to believe anything his ex-wife will say?
'THE SCAVENGER HUNT' around town he had already prepared for her; what was the point? And when did he set that up? Didn't he just fly into town the night before like she did?
...There's $50 Million in that bag, wouldn't getting that back ASAP be his only concern? Not whether or not she arrives at some random destination at some arbitrary time (lest he kill her daughter thus ensuring he'd never get his $50 Million back). Who knows what all matter of things could happen to the bag while he has her running around town like a nut?
SO VERY CONVENIENT how she could always happen upon the secret phones hidden at these huge locations (like the Museum and an Aquarium) within a city she is a stranger to.
Ultimately... everything that happened happens only so the movie can happen to happen.
The Sweetheart (2018)
It Was The Final Act That Won Me Over...
I don't know if its just that for the past month I've been binging far too many of these "Seducing A, Dating A, Married A, Stalked By A", "Wrong, Deadly, Killer, Good, Fatal", "Family Member, or Occupation" "In The Suburbs" movies, but this one really surprised me. Pleasantly surprised me in fact.
Typically the way this story goes in every other incarnation of this plot is mom's psychotic new beau gaslights everyone into thinking the main protagonist is out to get him, succeeds in sabotaging her credibility with her friends and her schooling, frames her for something, needlessly spree kills half the cast associated with the family in some way without the mom ever even batting an eye, and then somehow the bad guy evil-genius his end scenario, monologues with a gun, and is only finally taken out by some surprise gunshot from a character who has been opposed to the protagonist the whole movie until now.
This movie does none of that (except for the attempted sabotage with her medication). I was very much NOT enjoying the film and annoyed by just about everyone (including the daughter) UNTIL... Until the moment the daughter talks to her dad after she concludes that her mom's new boyfriend just tried to kill her.
Suddenly, I am engaged.
A protag capable of connecting dots?! Resourceful enough to gameplan, execute, and avoid the usual cliched pitfalls of these type of films (i.e. Bad guy suddenly appearing out of nowhere, bad guy conveniently within earshot of key dialogue, bad guy able to supervillain random acts of plot in his favor).
Every time the movie deviated from what typically happens I was even more in:
-- When she locks and barricaded her door -- ensured that any conversation about the bad guy happened while she was far from him -- created the "family movie outing" scenario; told her dad to NOT act impulsively and get himself arrested...
-- When the movie refrained from having the bad guy suddenly and randomly appear outside after her best friend plants a tracker onto his car -- and even the end (aside from the bestie parking her car out in the open on the one road leading to the bad guy's house) with how it utilized the youngest sister.
So despite my praise, my rating is entirely for the final 40 minutes of the movie. Because the plot itself is pretty ludicrous, honestly. Like this con man had a history of targeting single older women who meet untimely ends thus leaving him with their riches... So how does scamming a woman his same age, with kids, and potentially in the midst of an expensive divorce work out for him?
My Daughter's Ransom (2019)
SO frustratingly STUPID!
This lady should've had her spell check turned on for her texting. Or maybe even try texting people earlier at ANY POINT (using that not looking trick her daughter showed her) since the bad guy could only see what she pointed her hat at.
She makes almost zero effort to signal for help at any moment; no hand signs, no mouthing words, no darting her eyes, not even when she draws "H-E-L-P" in the sand does she nudge the guy next to her to look down.
And I don't know if this is a fault of the lead actress or of the direction from the writer/director but why does she not ever display any tears or anguish when being forced to say things she doesn't mean? She was far too compliant with no struggle or resistance to be believable. The director could have at the very least spritzed her face to make it look like she was having trouble with her forced words.
*edit: Having just seen the ending with her "last confession" video it doesn't appear that the actress can actually cry so... I guess that explains that.
Killer Ending (2018)
Literally Gets Worse With Every Scene
With how terrible the outrageously overacting is, combined with the playground-level soap opera dialogue, and the ridiculous casting you'd think this were a self-aware parody. Except it's not. Or it's not meant to be.
THE CAST: You have a cast that all look about the same age playing middle-age parents to middle-age children, a hulking bodybuilder with long shaggy hair we're meant to believe is a college professor (who later turns into a special needs "Doofy" from "Scary Movie"), a captive daughter making the oddest facial expressions to display panic, a villainess who villains with the subtlety of a cartoon, and I guess Emmanuelle Vaugier doing what she can with what's given.
THE RIDICULOUSNESS: -- The pair of detectives who show up to work the missing daughter case are ALSO the detectives working the homicide case of the deaths in the film.
-- The daughter is abducted by an intruder who is already inside of her small dorm room AFTER she answers a knock at her door made by that same intruder.
-- The Doofy professor secretly photographs everyone WHILE standing out in the open.
-- Even the villainess blonde stands out in the open across the street of a diner the author & detective are in, staring as if she can hear their conversation.
-- The author thinks to coerce the kidnapper into moving her daughter to another location of her choosing (with a live feed camera set up identical to before).
I know this is melodrama so it is meant to be exaggerated heightened drama, but wow does this movie make no effort to be watchable.
Terror Train 2 (2022)
The ID of the Killer is Utterly Ridiculous...
Granted the killer in the first one ultimately turned out to be an elderly grandmother, so maybe the killer in the second one is really on par. I'm jumping straight into spoilers and on just this one topic in this review, since I don't really care to say much else about this movie...
SPOILER WARNING:
The ID of the killer... turns out to be...
Tinkerbell... a 5 foot, 92 pound influencer in a fairy costume. When we see her wielding the knife she'd been using the whole movie to kill everyone, the blade is over half the length of her entire arm. She is unequivocally the tiniest and shortest person of any scene she is in.
Yet somehow, when she dresses up as the lizard monk she's suddenly taller than everyone in the cast?! Most flagrant is in the scene in the hallway when walking past Alana and following Merry, both of whom she now towers over. Jean-Paul, the guy she is pretending to be dressed as appears to be much taller, up there with the actors for Xndr and the Prez.
(Speaking of the Prez, man did he just totally disappear from the movie after that magic act scene half way through the film. No death scene, no reappearance at the end, just gone like he had just filmed a cameo.)
Anyhow, the killer turning out to be the size and weight of a blow-up doll with a knife taking down 6-foot dudes is just asking too much of my disbelief to suspend.
Intensive Care (2018)
"My God that's my house" ...seconds later... "Where are you?"
Of the gajillion moments in this film that had me face-palming and throwing my hands up, it's the exchange that occurred at the 67 minute & 50 second mark that finally made me blow my top with the sheer, maddening stupidity of every character in this movie.
The scene starts with the lead woman getting a video call from her psycho stalker in which she recognizes his location and says, "My God that's my house." Then... My God, then she engages him in conversation with befuddlement like she STILL hasn't grasped that this guy has been behind everything the whole movie (the murders, the sabotage, the hacking, the break-ins) despite having already made that conclusion a few times by now in earlier scenes.
She checklists the deadly events of the film as he 'evil-genius' explains how and why he did them. All to her shocked bewilderment (again, despite scenes having already shown her figuring things out just minutes ago).
And then, astoundingly, less than 2-minutes into this exchange she asks him, "Where are you?"
Seriously?!? "Where are you?" She goes from 'That's my house' to 'Where are you' in the matter of 100 seconds?!
She knows that her sick mother is at home, the same home that she recognized the stalker is currently calling her from. The same stalker who had just admitted to murdering her best friend, his previous girlfriends, a guy she met earlier, and got her fiance fired.
Yet she finishes the rest of this scene trying to respectfully plead with the guy to go find psychological help.
That scene is merely just one of many like it in this film and I still have another 17 minutes left to go. Sigh.
*edit: WTF?! Literally another 2 minutes later this entire conversation happens again when she calls her sick mom, shocked to learn that there is a mysterious male nurse there with her now. The woman asks to put him on the phone and... to her shock and horror... discovers that the nurse is actually... her stalker! And he's in her house!!
The very same stalker who had just video called her only minutes ago from that very same house. And once again she kindly pleads for him to seek mental help.
That's it. I'm done. I don't care how it ends. These back-to-back scenes have already killed too many braincells.
Multiversal Rewind (2017)
This is a Kid's Amateur Home Video. No, seriously, it is.
How in the huh did this kid's home video movie make it onto streaming services like Tubi and Amazon?! These are just some of the many strikes against this:
It's not even a feature length at less than an hour -- And it tends to repeat the same scenes over and over verbatim...
The poster shows two grown men when the actual video stars two children who are barely 13 acting as if they are adults (like how kids play pretend) -- There are zero proficient actors in this...
The sound quality is atrocious; difficult to hear absolutely anything -- The VHS-like video quality is literally (not figuratively, but literally) like an early 2000s 360p movie poorly enlarged (not upscaled) to a 1080p...
And there was obviously no money spent on anything so how it can justify that $500k budget is beyond me.
My guess would be this "movie" was ACTUALLY in fact written and filmed by children, starring those same children pretending to be adults, shot around their neighborhood in the early 2000s, using their parent's old camcorder that somehow got released to streamers in 2017 being treated as if it were a real film (because no one had actually watched it).
Festival of the Living Dead (2024)
"Why Are They Running?"
A line spoken by one of the characters in the film and also one I too had to ask. The film is intended as a sequel to the original Romero "Night of the Living Dead" but some of the zombies here can sprint and run on occasion. Just a strange creative choice on part of the filmmakers.
And while I do have some gripes with the film, there really is a lot to like here. It's filmed great, it's lit well, acted and casted well, has great make-up and effects, is never boring, moves at a near constant pace, and even the music (while not my taste) is not distracting or annoying. The Soska Sisters obviously know how to craft a professional-looking film.
However... I do have some gripes:
...Is there like a mandate nowadays to write horror movies around unlikable characters? My God. I have such a hard time believing any of these friend groups in these movies were ever actually friends with how hateful they are when they bicker.
...That added to other tired tropes like: cars crash stupidly or breakdown for no reason, no cell service, one close friend is a selfish douche who gets everyone killed, another friend acts like a crippled invalid that needs to be constantly assisted in all things she could do by herself (standing, running, hiding, shutting up), half the movie consisting of characters calling out someone's name "Kevin!", "Ash!", "Kevin!", "Ash!", "Kevin!", "Ash!", "Carl!".
...And OMG, the stupid melodrama of the main girl -- amid a zombie kill spree -- suddenly struggling to shoot the zombie version of the douchey boyfriend she just broke up with for wanting to let her little brother die. She waits forever too, til he's about close enough that the headshot she administers spatters his zombie infected blood all over her face.
And all this while a zombie infected psycho is holding her little brother hostage until she comes back. Regardless of which she is in no hurry, having zero urgency for this entire segment of the film. The only time really this whole movie where she abandons her pleasantly affirmed, formidable, and no BS-self in place of tears and wandering about.
The last thing I'll say is -- which is not a criticism but an observation (and something I actually enjoyed) -- with the colorful nature of a number of the zombies (given the music festival providing for an assortment of costumed undead) FESTIVAL just seems to be more in line with THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
Chemical Peel (2014)
How Are These Girls Friends?!?
This movie is a chore to get through so I'm just going to list my gripes play-by-play as it goes on...
My GRIPES:
Firstly, they picked a girl with the most overt crazy-eyed resting bwitch face ever to be the "happy" bride centerpiece of this friend group. How or why they are friends with this chic, much less going out of their way to throw her a party, is confounding. At least Regina George in MEAN GIRLS knew how to smile, laugh, and feign interest in her girl friends. Practically every word out of her mouth is either abrasive, offensive, obsessive, or insulting.
A turned-over train accident/gas explosion is the cause for everything that's happening, localized to only the surrounding Valley... so why is the TV suddenly malfunctioning like it's Max Headroom doing the news? Why do the satellites suddenly lose connection? How does that make all communication with cell towers and the internet go down? Aren't internet cables buried underground?
Wait, the landline does work? But because the line to emergency services is overloaded they don't bother to try calling ANYONE else? Anybody living or even existing outside of the small area of town being affected by the fog? It's 2014 when this came out, the majority of people I communicate with don't live within 10 miles of me.
A girl slow walks outside (fully aware of the toxic fog) without any effort to wear protection, a mask, a scarf, goggles, gloves, or even real shoes - only her rubber ducky PJs and foofie animal slippers.
Another girl stupidly tries to perform mouth-to-mouth CPR on a clearly dead infected girl just moments after she vomited out half the blood in her body, getting the infected muck all over her lips.
Yet another girl is being chemical burned alive from the running shower she chose to take and (not only is her response time slow to recognizing the pain) she makes ZERO attempt to step out of the bathtub she is entirely not trapped in to get away from the water.
OK, dumb girl just reached in with her bare hands to turn off the shower they see had just dissolved their friend to death.
Sigh.
Yeah I'm only an hour in and still have another half an hour to go so I'm gonna quit jotting down every gripe I have and just finish the movie and be done with it...
...30 minutes later...
And the literal last 90 seconds are just a needless and stupid way to end this movie.
Embodiment (2016)
Was 5-Stars... Until That Absurd Ending Happened...
It had me.
I was thoroughly engaged.
I was all in on getting behind the wheelchair dependent Sterling as our protagonist.
Even though it's only a short, I was still hopeful to see some comeuppance for the outright hateful female classmate of his... hopeful to see a glimmer of what kind of relationship would be teased at the end with the cute and kind schoolgirl... hopeful for some kind of karmic catharsis regarding the relationship between the garbage uncle, Sterling, and the escort.
But... turns out by the end... Sterling was never the protagonist. His sleazy uncle apparently was (since it is his character and only his character that carries any sort of arc).
This short film lost me with those final few minutes. The guy who is terrible to his sister, his nephew, his escort, and what seems to be to most people in general gets rewarded in the end by driving his car into this kid and inheriting his heart to replace his bad one.
Not only that but the escort he was just manhandling, who swore she was done with him, is now about to hop on the uncle's new heart healthy erection in "honor of Sterling"?!
And the uncle even says it with all sincerity that he is about to do this deed "for Sterling": to selflessly bang the woman he prevented Sterling from enjoying for himself and even killing him which insured that.
The actors all did well and the "all five senses" scene was a real highlight, but wow did that ending really kill my enjoyment and any chance of a recommendation.
One and the Same (2021)
This Was Exhausting...
Convoluted, meandering, and tedious to say the least. If not for the movie description used on here and TUBI I'd have no clue that the underlying plot was about reincarnation as it is NEVER stated nor clarified in the film. It is only ever alluded to, then explained to characters offscreen, before returning to them astonished having fully accepted everything. Seriously, every single character with any awareness of the "Next Life" (reincarnation tracking) program handles it with the same vagueness/offscreen acceptance.
The meandering comes in the poor way the film is paced. The first and third acts follow a 21 year old girl (named Lola) who discovers (I assume) she is the (alluded to) reincarnated spirit/soul/electromagnetic energy/cosmic transference of a murdered black teenage boy (named Robbie) - whose flashback story is told in the hour long second act with its own 3-act structure.
How things happen and why things happen are never explored, only ever alluded to with ominous pronouncements of "they", "other side", "when the time comes", "it's her", "she knows" nonsense. Included within these nebulous allusions is the dots to connect an implied surprise reveal towards the end: that Lola is the daughter of the guy who murdered her past self (as Robbie) who was conceived from raping her mother. We are only to assume that maybe the timing of Robbie's death somehow coincides 9 months after the rape on the day Lola was born.
This kind of storytelling is just tedious when every aspect of everything is unspooled in this very same way.
More GRIPES:
A Black man arrested for killing an armed intruder in his own home after being attacked. Then he is interrogated as if he conspired as some part of it (his own attempted murder).
A teenage girl enters the home of a known murderer, unarmed with no plan, and tells him she is going to kill him.
After having been stabbed by said murderer and knocked unconscious for a spell, she screams upon waking up, which her mother (downstairs at the front door) does not hear for some reason.
The murderer was released after 20 years for good behavior - convicted of killing a kid, despite also being linked to an armed bank robbery where his partner is killed, an armed home invasion where his partner is killed, an attempted murder of the kid's father and even stealing his truck - and that's not to mention his father is also missing (because he killed him too). Yet he mentions that the Next Life program recruited people like him from being on Death Row.
Haunted Hotel (2023)
The Elevator Lame
This really is a poorly produced film on every account. The acting is atrocious, especially from the lead actress whose face seems to be stuck on Botox as her mouth hardly even moves when she talks. I thought half the time she was narrating with how little change her face makes.
The boring direction, the lack of lighting, the nothing special effects, the voice on the phone sounding like she's in the same room, how every single character wears their same one outfit everyday the entire film, the dialogue, the repeated 3 note piano cue for a score, hotel rooms decorated like military barracks... it's just all bad.
It very much has the look of a made for TV movie from 2003, not 2023.
Lifeform (2019)
Only Two Reasons To Watch...
Seriously every time I was about ready to turn this very terrible movie off a new naked boob filled the screen. Just about every single female in the film exposes her mams at some point. Usually followed by their impending death scene. Sometimes they're only partly nude, sometimes they're fully nude, but always close up with the camera lingering in just a matter-of-fact way.
That (or those, or them) are the only positive thing I can say about this movie. The acting is stilted, the writing is unmemorable that you forget it as you watch it, and EVERY SINGLE frame of EVERY SINGLE shot in EVERY SINGLE scene contains copious amounts of fake lens flare overlaying the entire screen.
Now I'm only an hour in and really don't want to finish watching this, but like I said, every time I think to stop it a new pair of--
--okay... now some weird tentacle hentai mess is happening...
The Last Showing (2014)
Aggressively Terrible
The entire plot is just so preposterous. It requires the audience to be as idiotic as the three leads to be riveted by anything happening onscreen. Most especially the idiot boyfriend who could've quelled almost every confrontation if only he knew how to communicate instead of acting like a lunatic and following the villain's every direction like he was trying to win a prize.
The girlfriend aint much better, especially once she decides her boyfriend violated her and killed someone -- both acts recorded by some stranger she immediately trusts -- to which she demands only to view proof of the killing and not of the supposed r@pe that poor helpless creepy stranger also "watched".
My Rating Scale:
1. - poorly produced/amateur crap
2. - utterly terrible
3. - bad
4. - mediocre
5. - average/serviceable and flawed
6. - entertaining with shortcomings
7. - entertaining/good
8. - incredibly good
9. - exceptional/great
10 - personal favorites.
Smart House (2023)
Well the movie poster looked cool...
I was not prepared for just how 'no budget' lo-tech syfy* this was (*not a misspelling). This "Smart House" is essentially like a cramped little townhouse and we're supposed to believe the whole place is operated by a super Alexa (named Cassandra here) that the heroine calls on to do every little thing.
She walks up next to the $30 coffee maker, arms crossed, and asks the Smart House to turn it off. She walks up to the ordinary looking front door and asks the Smart Home to lock it. All met with her satisfied approval.
And I'm no hair expert but why does the main girl look like she's sporting a terrible wig? The part in her hair actually changes from shot to shot (sometimes left, then right, then down the middle) all within the same scene.
Now in full disclosure, I make it a point to never rate a movie I don't see through to the end, but once the ASMR segment started (and kept going) I had to stop, making it through just 10 minutes of this... endurance test. And I felt compelled to leave a review as a warning for others.
Flipped (2015)
The plot is ludicrous (on purpose) just so the ending can happen.
Maybe that is a spoiler, but maybe knowing beforehand that every inane action and ridiculous conversation that fills up the run time can be excused by the ending helps for a better viewing experience. For me it just defied my disbelief too much to enjoy when the plot device is fueled solely by contrivance - so the surprise ending can happen - rather than circumstance, consequence, and tribulations.
Why is she talking with this creeper, why not hang up and call someone else? So her phone isn't able to dial the number 1, well does she not have an entire contacts list of stored numbers she can cycle through?
After surprise ending: Why does her inner-voice sound like an old man? Why are we shown cutaways to the creeper old man inner-voice guy if he doesn't exist?
By Night's End (2020)
Giant OBVIOUS PLOT HOLE tanks the entire movie
It's THEIR house. They live there. Why not search for whatever hidden treasure that may or may not be there (in THEIR OWN house) AFTER dealing with the cops and the self-defense killing of an armed intruder?!
Again, they live there. They could search for this mystery loot hours later, or the next day, or next week, or in a few months if they chose. It is THEIR house.
The cops would've only processed the crime scene within the confines of the bedroom where the body is (or was before they moved it) - not go scouring around their house looking for whatever the intruder may have been looking for - so why was it so pertinent for them to go searching before the police arrived?*
So, so stupid.
*note: I've written this review only 20 minutes in so far so maybe the movie tries to justify this gaping logic hole later, but it still wouldn't excuse the wife so casually going along with her husband's idiotic plan.
Midnight Screening (2021)
A Bore and a Chore
So unmemorable I've unintentionally seen this movie three times on three separate occasions. I'm only finally leaving a review (my first one ever) and rating so I don't unintentionally check it out a 4th regrettable time forgetting I've seen it already.
For a movie that takes place in a movie theatre you'd think that the filmmakers were massive movie fans, but there is so little evidence of any film competency you'd think they've never even seen a film before.
Nothing happens. The pacing is a slog. There is no inciting incident at or near the 10 minute mark; instead it isn't until 50 minutes into this 70 minute movie that anything of note even happens.
The dialogue is never about anything which makes each scene about nothing and only highlights the film's non-attempt to advance a plot of any kind. That might work in a comedy, but a comedy this is not.