sgcim Reviews

The Wrong Tenant (2022)

Good thriller with two stories at once...

[8/10 · 24 February 2024]

The person that wrote the plot of this movie wrote a huge spoiler that wasn't revealed till the very end of the film, so I would suggest that you change the plot description before you spoil it for more people.

Luckily, I didn't read the plot description before I watched it, so the movie wasn't ruined for me.

The acting was good by all the characters in the film, especially the tenant, who would scare the hell out of me if he were renting a room in my house!

The idea of shooting two plats at once was a good one, and had me puzzled for a while until it became apparent how it tied in to the main plot of the film.

I can't think of any negatives about the film, so give it a watch!

Bar Girls (1994)

One Great Scene

[9/10 · 10 January 2024]

An okay film about the denizens of a lesbian bar in some city (definitely not New York) where the beautiful Loretta, a progressive, intellectual comic book writer falls for a newcomer to the bar, the equally beautiful Rachel. Who seems to be a little younger than Loretta. Everything seems to be going alright for the two lovers, until a more masculine lesbian starts to get the hots for. Rachel, and enters into a struggle with Loretta to take Rachel away from her. She tries everything she can think of to try and win Rachel over, but nothing seems to work until Loretta surprisingly invites her over her house to plead with her to leave her and Rachel alone. They start drinking a little and Carmilla Griggs, who plays the more masculine woman, tells Loretta that she loves Rachel and she won;t give up till she becomes her girlfriend and leaves Loretta. Ms. Griggs shoots a few baskets, and Loretta seems to be watching her admiringly, and takes the basketball into the house followed by Ms, Griggs.

Loretta finds out that Ms. Griggs is a cop, and starts putting her down for upholding the white, male, patriarchy over people like her. Ms. Griggs senses something strange about what she's saying and tells Loretta that She is no white male. Loretta responds that she sure fought with her like a white male at the bar over Rachel, and Ms. Griggs realizes that she's found Loretta's character flaw and senses that Loretta is turned on by her, and begins to seduce Loretta!

At first Loretta tries to deny the aggressive woman's advances, but Ms. Griggs refuses to give in, and Loretta can't resist her anymore and lets the aggressive woman make love to her while she pleads that she hates her!

In the next scene Loretta admits to her friends that Ms. Griggs has taken Rachel away from her by letting herself be seduced by her rival.

This is the highlight of the film, and the only other film that has a scene like this was "X. Y and Zee", where Liz Taylor uses the same strategy to take Michael Caine away from Susannah York. That film wisely ends on that (off camera) scene. But Bar Girls ruins the drama by returning to its lackluster plot, and kind of peters out.

Take Your Pills: Xanax (2022)

An Important Subject, Given a Superficial Treatment

[1/10 · 2 December 2022]

A simple minded presentation of a very serious, complex problem that completely ignores the decades of research.into the biological basis of anxiety disorders of former head of the Psychiatry Department of Columbia University, the late Donald F. Klein, generally considered the 'father of biological psychiatry'.

The director of the documentary has no scientific credentials, and is known for making documentaries on Frank Sinatra, James Brown, and various political topics.

This is not to deny that Xanax addiction is not a serious problem, and that the drug should only be prescribed as a last resort in the treatment of anxiety disorders, but there is a huge difference in clinical anxiety disorders, and many of the cases presented in this documentary.

Towards the end of the doc, the clueless psychiatrists present antidotes such as 'communing with nature, meditation, mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy (which has a large failure rate in the treatment of clinical anxiety disorders, though is effective in milder cases, and educating patients in simple facts about their illness), and other ways of dealing with their problems, which is perfectly fine with dealing with stress. But the only reason Xanax should be prescribed is for the treatment of Panic Disorder, which is something completely different than stress.

The fact that doctors are prescribing Xanax for stress, is part of the problem. Of course it's extremely effective in alleviating stress, but that is not what it is approved for by the medical field.

Using Xanax for stress is like prescribing a powerful opioid for simple back pain. Sure, it works, but it's overkill, because of the addictive nature of opioids and benzodiazepines.

The statement one of the doctors makes, that Xanax is the same thing as alcohol is erroneous,, because while alcohol works on some of the same receptors as Xanax (GABA), it also acts on other receptors, and Xanax is much more selective, and only acts on GABA. Therefore , alcohol is what's known as a 'sloppy' drug, with dangerous side effects, while the benzodiazepines.are 'cleaner' drugs without the side effects of alcohol The other problem with benzodiazepines is overdose, but that only occurs in using them with any other CNS depressant like alcohol, opiates,etc. In adults, and in huge doses with young people, who probably shouldn't be prescribed drugs like Xanax to begin with. Unfortunately, many young people use Xanax as a recreational drug, and combine it with alcohol and other CNS depressants and wind up overdosing also..

The Weekend Away (2022)

A murder mystery that doesn't care about its plot?

[1/10 · 6 March 2022]

I've never seen a murder mystery that shows the cops who the murderer is, and then decide it's one of their own who was guilty!

And again, all the white men ar guilty of something, date rape, robbery, and then two of them are accused and convicted of murder when they show only one man committed the murder!

Fast Color (2018)

Non- Movie

[1/10 · 12 December 2021]

Could've been written by a six year-old. How did this get made? They could have made a decent, quiet sci-fi out of this like "Quiet Earth", but they chose to make a vapid, non-movie that shows what the super hero genre has done to film making.

It's gotten to the point where you can make a super hero movie where two terrible actresses talk about their lives, and because it's not like the terrible Marvel and DC crap, people think it's a good film. Simply by making a bad film that avoids being like other bad films results in a good film. Bizarro world.

Equinox (2020)

The ending makes sense.

[10/10 · 3 January 2021]

Read about the folklore discussed by the librarian in the library scene, and you'll understand what the ending was about.

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

Walter Tevis was a great author.

[10/10 · 27 October 2020]

When I found out that this was taken from a Walter Tevis novel, I had to see it. He's the same guy that wrote the novel that they based "The Hustler" on, and there are many similarities between the two books/movies. They both take place in roughly the same time period 1950s-60s, and feature someone who is the best at what discipline they are involved in. However, both have character flaws that get in the way of them advancing to the top of their craft, which they ultimately overcome through force of will. There is one seemingly unbeatable master of that craft that they have to work their way up to finally facing, and they both fail at first, but eventually triumph in the end. Both films had fine directing, acting, music (the great jazz composer Kenyon Hopkins for the Hustler) and cinematography, but IMHO the B&W grittiness, along with the jazz score of The Hustler are superior to the slick look and source music of The Queen's Gambit.

Der gläserne Blick (2003)

Murky Mystery

[7/10 · 28 April 2019]

This one hasn't been reviewed by any IMDB members, and there aren't even any outside reviews of it, so you're gonna nave to listen to me, whether you like it or not! The filmmaker seemed to be trying to make it hard to understand what was going on plot-wise, and three different languages were used, with sub-titles for only German and Portuguese, so you're going to have to turn the volume up really loud to understand Sylvie Testud's lousy English, and the same goes for the Portuguese actor playing the detective. The basic plot involved a detective trying to solve the case of a man who was murdered on the beach, after his six year-old daughter casually points out that they just found a dead man's body right on the beach where they were having lunch together. He casually tells her to have some more ice cream, while he tries to find out what is going on. That's pretty much the tone throughout the film; everybody is very casual about everything.



*****Spoilers It turns out that Sylvie Testud was getting revenge for a GF of her's that was filmed having sex with the dead guy on the beach, and a famous soccer player, who later murdered her, although the body was never found. Most of the story is told through two camcorder tapes, because Sylvie Testud is not very cooperative with the detective. In one scene, she almost throws him off a cliff on the beach, because she's so sick of his prying questions! In another scene, the detective's ex wife beats the crap out of him, after he sneaked into her house, where she was busy having sex with the maid... It's never proven that Testud actually committed either murder; the detective just makes inferences that Testud refuses to agree to. It's never established what relationship Testud's friend was to her, although there's a brief scene on the tape of the two of them playing violin together in some type of school string ensemble. It's not even proven that the guy on the beach and the soccer player murdered Testud's friend, because her body was never found. It's also not clear what the motive was behind the 'game' the two men were playing with Sohie's GF, and then Sophie. Sophie started screaming to the detective that the dead German guy on the beach liked to whip her GF, and even his dead dog, but there was no evidence that he did that. Like the title of the review says, 'Murky Mystery'.

Gerald's Game (2017)

A Waste of Time

[1/10 · 29 September 2017]

I couldn't believe they made a movie like this. Same old tired theme of parental abuse that somehow tries to get linked to a story about a woman who is chained to a bed for kinky sex with her husband, who has a heart attack and dies.Then that's linked to some necrophiliac murderer... The rest of the movie concerns her trying to get free from the handcuffs, and thinking about an episode of paternal abuse she had when she was twelve. No, I'm not making this up. That's what this piece of crud is about. Netflix really can't seem to come up with anything decent on its own. They copied House of Cards from the UK and almost had a good series, but then they veered off the original story, and ruined it. I couldn't believe it when I saw that it was based on a novel by Stephen King. Then again, he hasn't written anything very good for some time now...

Message from the King (2016)

Terrible dialogue, plot, acting, direction camera work and lighting.

[1/10 · 17 September 2017]

I don't know how anyone could consider this a good movie. The plot made no sense. The dialogue was terrible. The lighting was too dark, even if it was going for a pseudo-noir effect. The camera had trouble following the action in the fight scenes, and the director must have been asleep to let all of this take place. It started out okay, but why did he have to lie about being a cab driver, and not tell customs he was a detective? He didn't know that his sister was dead yet. Why did he only bring $600? Why couldn't he involve the LAPD if he was a detective? The second half was so convoluted, it made no sense whatsoever. Terrible movie!

Death Note (I) (2017)

I never saw the original, and still thought this sucked

[1/10 · 28 August 2017]

I never saw the original, and still thought this movie was terrible. The actors didn't even seem to be acting; just reading their lines as fast and as quietly as they could. There was no sense of tension building up in the film; the chase scene just seemed thrown in to try to add some excitement. I know that most US versions of Japanese fiction are bad (with the exception of Ring), but this film just seemed like a rushed, beginner's attempt at making a film. Wingard has made some good films in the past, but this is not one of them.I don't even feel like watching the Japanese TV series on Netflix after seeing this pitifully directed and acted mess. The music was horrible, also.

Get Me Roger Stone (2017)

All you ever needed to know about Roger Stone, and politics for the last 50 years...

[9/10 · 13 May 2017]

Netflix really scored big time by releasing and airing this doc on Stone. It's going to be talked about a lot, and probably for a long time, which will make RS very happy, and increase his fees.

It seems the central point might be that hate, and beyond that, fear, might be the most powerful force in the US today, if not the world... RS has gleefully exploited that observation, and built a career around it.

The doc makes it clear that RS had a lot to do with getting our current prez elected, and hints that he might have been involved with the story that is in the news at this moment.

This was five years in the making, and was started when RS was on the outs with the Republican Party, and was relegated to working for foreign dictators.

Even the filmmakers didn't know that Stone was going to be back in the limelight again by the time the film was being finished.

You might as well see the film now, because it's going to all anyone will be talking about for the next few weeks...

Let's Be Evil (2016)

Don't Waste Your Time

[1/10 · 16 December 2016]

Somehow the makers of this film managed to get seventy six point three per cent of the voters to give this piece of crap a rating of ten. The Internet Movie Data Base's rating system must be deeply flawed for a movie like this to get anything higher than a two. It started off like it might be a decent flick, but after fifteen minutes you realized it had terrible acting, plot, dialogue, music, direction and writing, and you thank God that you had something better to do with your time than follow a camera flying down corridors, air shafts and whatever else, than watch this poorly made and conceived movie. Until I got Netflix, I didn't realize that the UK could make even worse movies than they make in the US.

Paranoid (2016)

OMG! this was worthy of Ed Wood Jr.!

[1/10 · 6 December 2016]

If you watch this series and think of it as a comedy, you'll have a great time! It had the worst acting, direction, WRITING, and camera work that I've seen since something like Planet Nine From Outer Space. Every single character in it is ridiculous, all the actors are ridiculous, the writing by series creator Bill Gallagher is absolutely ridiculous. I guess you'd have to blame the directors also, but it's as if there were no directors at all. It's as if the actors were not told how to act, and were left to act any way they felt like acting. We were howling with laughter at the ridiculous dialogue, and it never stopped until the eighth episode, which Bill Gallagher didn't write, so he has to assume most of the blame for this mess. The directors must share the blame also, because they were responsible for what we saw. It was worthy of a movie like "Airplane", written by the Zucker brothers. So don't take this series seriously as a mystery, and appreciate the unintended humor of it, and you'll have a great time!

Snoopy Green's Vampire Movie (2012)

Hopefully, this will presage a new movement in horror films...

[8/10 · 30 October 2016]

I happened to see some stills of this film on a website, and had no clue as to what it was about, but one thing I knew for certain; it was indeed a vampire movie. I looked it up on you tube, and found it through my Roku you tube channel, so I was able to watch it through my TV. The film's dialogue is quite memorable, perhaps due to the fact that the actors repeat their lines so often. It also contains a subtle political sub-text running throughout the film; cleverly concealed by having the director himself telling us it directly. However, the stunning performance by Tara Hunt in the lead role of an aspiring, multiple addicted actress is the highlight of the whole film. Her scenes with the other lead female actress, surpass even the late, great master of horror, Jess Franco, in their special interactive qualities. As if all of this wasn't enough, the film generously provides us with multiple alternate endings, pretty much covering any direction you would have wanted the film to go in.

Cleverman (2016–2017)

Very well done series

[9/10 · 29 October 2016]

I binge-watched all six episodes of this first season, and found it very enjoyable. The writing was fine; all the loose ends are taken care of by the sixth episode, and the dialogue had a nice flow to it. The acting was uniformly good, and the directing was handled very well. It's shot very well, and the only thing mediocre about the series so far was the CGI on the monster in the sixth episode. I can see by the board and reviews that this has stirred up a lot of emotion regarding the plot and theme of the show, but not being from Australia, my review doesn't concern itself with that matter. Many of the reviews (both positive and negative) were done by accounts that were created four months ago, and this show was the only show or film that those people reviewed, so I think you can guess what that means...

Dark (I) (2015)

Drama- not a thriller

[4/10 · 25 October 2016]

I saw this on NF, and it was labeled as a thriller, but if you expect a thriller, you're going to be very disappointed. It turned out to be a very low-budget drama about a washed up 33 year-old model with some serious mental problems being left alone during the 2003 blackout in NYC. The building and the neighborhood are made to look very sleazy, so even though it was shot in Manhattan, it's probably supposed to be Bushwick, Brooklyn, like it said on her driver's license. It has a very uh, interesting first scene, but after that, it settles into a character study of the lead character. The only good scene after that is the scene where the lead walks home drunk from a bar, and is made fun of by some kids in the neighborhood. She starts yelling curses at them, and they start cracking up in laughter at her. Other than that, it's basically a one woman show till the seemingly tacked on ending. As usual with low budget films, there are the typical phony, ten star reviews by people involved with the film, so that sunk it down another star for my rating.

Appropriate Adult (2011)

Interesting, but basically talk and digging...

[7/10 · 23 September 2016]

I was never aware these two sick animals' crimes, so I went in to this without knowing what this movie was about. A social work student is asked to act as an 'Appropriate Adult' for a guy in a police station who is dressed in a normal fashion, no chains or even handcuffs. The fellow speaks in a matter of fact manner about having problems with his daughter, who threatened to give LSD to her younger siblings, and the father says he loses control and chokes her. The fellow then is left alone with the 'AA' and makes some chilling remarks to her. The police are shown digging up the guy's backyard with him again, not in handcuffs, speaking knowledgeably about using some tools.

Basically, that's the pattern of the whole movie, and while it's kind of creepy, it gets kind of monotonous after a while, and I found myself wishing that the film would just end. Certainly, the two leads give good performances, but the director doesn't help them much in his choice of presenting the story in the manner of a play, rather than as a work of cinema.

The Visit (I) (2015)

More found Footage garbage

[1/10 · 30 August 2016]

I would have given this a decent rating, but the found footage genre was over after Blair Witch Project. This David Blum just keeps raking in the bucks, because the budgets are always below five million dollars, and the kids will keep forking out their sixteen bucks for garbage, because they see the name M. Night on it, or Paranormal Experience Seventy Five, and as long as they can make forty million on it, they've made a thirty five million dollar profit on it, which is what it's all about anyway. Why hire great actors, great composers, etc.., when you can hire anyone who the kids can relate to, because after all, it's found footage. M. Night talks about creating great 'art' on the extra features 'making of' short, and what does he give us? Found footage. What a joke!

Road Games (2015)

Fun to Watch Twice

[8/10 · 12 August 2016]

I don't generally trust reviews of films by IMDb users, and always go to the outside critics first before reading some of the reviews here. That really held true with this film, because the reviews seem to be fake(only one review listed for a person's account, and that review is of this film). I could be wrong about that, because maybe the user wants their other reviews to remain private, but this film seems to have a great deal of fake reviews that either give it a great rating, or a poor rating. I thought the film kept you in suspense throughout, with good acting and direction, although some of the writing seemed to have lines that made no sense,i.e. "You say tomato, I say open heart surgery"(?), and the mother telling her own daughter that she's a night owl, leading us to believe she's a complete stranger to her daughter. I saw it on NF, which had subtitles for most lines in the script (except ones that the director didn't want us to know), and this is essential for this film, because it constantly changes from French to English- sometimes in mid-line. Once you know the plot twist, it is fun to watch the film again, up to the the reveal scene, because you can appreciate the parents' reactions to their daughter coming home again. The expressions on the father's face throughout are particularly subtle, without giving anything away. You can also appreciate what an idiot the boy is as he ignores the truth about his new girlfriend over and over.

Deep (2015–2016)

A black and White Comic Book

[3/10 · 7 August 2016]

I expected a lot more from this after watching the wonderful French TV crime series "Spiral", but Deep played like an overly melodramatic satire on the film noir genre of the 1950s. The pacing was so rushed that we couldn't stop laughing at event after event piling up on one another. It almost seemed like a silent film that was sped up because of the filming process, but unfortunately there was too much sound; an overwrought score that telegraphed every event in the movie before they would happen, and ridiculous dialogue that seemed like it was trying to outdo Roger Ebert's "Beyond The Valley of the Dolls", or the hilarious filming of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead". It wouldn't be fair to blame the actors, because the writing, direction, cinematography, music and the ridiculous pacing of the film, all made it impossible to give anything resembling a good performance, so it made them seem like a bunch of yammering idiots. If you like watching train wrecks like the above mentioned movies, you'll enjoy watching Deep; at best you won't find it boring.

The Spoils Before Dying (2015)

Pretty funny noir spoof

[9/10 · 30 July 2016]

While this mini-series wasn't as funny as some of the best SCTV spoofs, it still had enough laughs in it to make it more watchable than most of what passes for comedy these days. To fully appreciate it, you should be somewhat knowledgeable about film-noir and jazz from the 1950s. There are references to 1950s jazz musicians like Wardell Gray, a tenor sax player who was mysteriously murdered in the desert outside of Las Vegas. They never found Gray's killer, so the writers borrowed that case for the plot of this TV show. There are a lot of other jazz in-jokes in the dialogue, so I can see where many people would find this mini-series baffling or boring. All of the performances in the show are fine, though some of the writing leaves the actors with some pretty lame lines in regard to humor. There are a few things that didn't make sense, such as showing the two detectives knock on Rock's door twice, J. Edgar Hoover's arms flailing around towards the end, and Will Ferrell's character just staring into the camera at the end, but they didn't have much of a negative effect on the show.

My Friend Rockefeller (2015)

Not as thorough as I would have liked...

[7/10 · 3 July 2016]

I saw this on streaming NF last night, and didn't find any reviews of this doc anywhere, so I didn't know what to expect.

It turned out to be about a story I vaguely remembered hearing about on the news; a guy who was impersonation a scion of the Rockefeller family.

However, that was just the surface of the story, as this German citizen had been impersonating and lying his way through life in the US since high school to become a part of of the wealthiest circles in places like San Marino CA, Greenwich Conn., Wall St. NYC, Boston's 'Cafe Society', and some wealthy enclave in New Hampshire.

If that was all he did, it would be just a benign story of a social climbing parasite, who used lived off of two high earning women to fund his escapades. But the fact that he murdered at least two innocent people, and hacked up their bodies so completely, that one of them was only discovered because the house owners decided to dig up their backyard to build a swimming pool, revealed that this man was a murderous sociopath, who would stop at nothing to achieve his ridiculous goals in life.

I felt like there could have been more included in the doc, considering two books had been written about this guy, and Lifetime even made a docudrama about this man, from the POV of one of his wives.

The second body, the first victim's wife, was never found.

Loony in the Woods (2006)

Quirky slasher satire

[9/10 · 6 April 2016]

I had just finished watching a terrible Troma satire on the same type of genre flick, "Decampitated", when I saw this one right after it on a Roku channel. I was surprised to see a very clever, imaginative, and most of all hilarious satire of the 'slasher in the woods' genre. Instead of using the painfully obvious humor of the Troma film and the sequels to the Scary Movie franchise, this film came up with a very original approach to satirizing this exhausted genre of film. The pathetic characters in the film are almost cartoonish in their appearance and line deliveries, but they never degenerate into the unimaginative stereotypes seen in most if not all US satires. The two brothers; one an unbelievably obnoxious ex-child star, dance/exercise instructor, and the other a Dudley Moore type of character who has lost his voice from an accident caused by his jerky older brother, and who must speak through a miserable electronic larynx, invented by his idiotic older brother, are hilarious. This film creates its own insane little world, and remains darkly hilarious up to the end. It turned out that it was made by the son of the great British film maker, Mike Leigh, and even had Alison Steadman in a cameo role.

Eternal Damn Nation (2013)

Good One Man Effort

[8/10 · 3 April 2016]

The director also wrote, produced and starred in this film, so you've got to give him credit for pulling off a good supernatural flick on a low budget. The acting, direction, camera work, dialogue and score were all good, so it was a cut above the trash you usually see in these types of movies. There were some good rock tunes in it, but it also had some good orchestral/choral music for the historical parts with Lucifer, heaven, the angels, etc... The story line was similar to the Prophecy movies, but I liked the twist at the end, which added some more complexity to the typical good vs. evil plot. I also liked the fact that it struck a good balance between the darker and lighter tone of the film, which kept it from getting too monotonous.