Review – Do Not Enter (2026)

Because if you spend some money making this kind of movie, this is still what you end up with. A social media production crew breaks into an abandoned hotel, and the additions of a rival gang and a Descent-esque plot twist don’t contribute anything interesting to the story. Some of the production design is surprisingly good, but otherwise this could have been made by a guy with a camcorder. See if desperate

Review – The Great Wall

Because the title would be too long if the movie was called The Great Amount of Money We Can Make If the Cast Appeals to Markets in Both the United States and China. Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal and (briefly) Willem Dafoe supplement an otherwise mostly Asian cast in what would otherwise have been a standard, big budget Chinese fantasy action movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Zombie School

This comes so close to being so bad that it becomes charming. Amazon’s AI dubbing didn’t help matters, though I suspect the dialogue wasn’t exactly Oscar bait even in Korean. For the most part I was able to sit back and let the sheer plotless stupidity wash over me. Unfortunately a handful of scenes involve violence against animals, including some B roll of pigs in which they appear to actually be harmed. Cut that crap out and the rating would have gone up. See if desperate

Review – Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes

This is one of those dramas where you hope against hope that it isn’t going to go the way you know it will. And then of course it does. The inclusion of Max von Sydow as a German Jesuit priest went a bit overboard just to find a way to get a white actor into the cast. On the other hand, I appreciated the inclusion of stories that didn’t have happy endings; anything else would have been blatantly dishonest. The filmmakers do a good job of recreating the disaster as best they were able with the budget they had. Mildly amusing

Review – Hiroshima (2003)

This two-part BBC production follows the final stages of the Manhattan Project up to the dropping of the bomb on the title city. Back in 2003 they were still able to find several people on the American and Japanese sides willing to talk about their experiences, and the dramatic reenactments were a good complement to the interviews. Worth seeing

Review – The Equalizer (2014)

The folks who made this know the revenge movie formula and are good at sticking to it. Denzel Washington is a proven success playing the everyday Joe who falls back on his government assassin past when a friend is threatened. It’s emotionally satisfying to see him keep the upper hand pretty much the whole time, and it doesn’t exactly hurt that the villains are sex-trafficking Russian mobsters. Mildly amusing

Review – Valley of the Dolls

Cliché characters (especially the women) . Hackneyed plot. Dreadful dialogue. Wretched musical numbers. How has this never been turned into a Drag Race Rusical? Though this is nobody’s finest hour, it’s a particularly unfortunate moment for Patty Duke, who tried to use this wretched stinker to move from comedy typecasting to weightier roles. And Sharon Tate’s turn as an actress done in by decadence adds an unintentional creepy spin to the production. Whether this is just plain bad or so bad it’s funny may depend on how seriously you take Hollywood’s 60s-era drug problems. Or maybe just what mood you’re in. See if desperate

Review – Superman (2025)

What an aggravating movie. For better or worse, a big part of Superman’s charm is that he consistently wins fights against the bad guys. But here our hero starts out on the losing end and rarely gains the upper hand until the very end. If the character needed to be reimagined this way, at least they should have used a different villain. In real life we’re all taking a constant beating from vile tech billionaires, so it would have been a lot more fun to watch Lex Bezos Musk Luthor take way more frequent lumps. And the animal peril is genuinely excessive, insufficiently offset by the meticulously happy ending. The cast of newcomers and semi-familiar faces do their best with what they’ve got, but overall this is hard to watch. See if desperate

Review – Insidious: The Red Door

Despite being a big Lin Shaye fan, I was relieved to see this series give up on the Scooby Doo prequels and return to the family from the first one. Unsurprisingly, hypnotically repressing memories of the whole journey-to-the-ghost-dimension thing just leaves father and son even more vulnerable when the same crap crops back up again. Maybe I was just in the mood for a dumb ghost story, but I really enjoyed this more than most of the other movies in the set. Mildly amusing

Review – The Stoning of Soraya M.

Fundamentalist misogyny turns lethal in post-revolution rural Iran. Unjustly accused of adultery by a husband too cheap to pay alimony, the title character suffers the title punishment in a brutally graphic sequence. But in many ways the execution itself isn’t as upsetting as the events leading up to it, particularly after the victim realizes she has neither recourse to justice nor hope of escape. Mozhan Navabi and Shohreh Aghdashloo turn in particularly touching performances as Soraya Manutchehri and her aunt respectively. Worth seeing

Review – Meteor

I don’t know what’s more ludicrous: the science, the special effects, or Sean Connery playing an astrophysicist. And the fact that Connery has any competition for “worst part of the movie” should tell you just how bad the rest of it is. A giant title object speeding toward a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth should have been the ultimate 70s-era disaster plot, complete with a cast of actors who should have had better agents. But both the problem and the solution (blowing it up with nuclear missiles) are so ridiculous that the whole thing’s impossible to take seriously (and kinda not funny enough to accept as laughably bad, though it does have its moments). What would Jordy Verrill say at a time like this? See if desperate

Review – Avalanche

This movie is a master class in how not to tell a story. The premise is paper thin, but even a solid set-up would have swiftly fallen victim to the ridiculous plot twists and thoroughly motiveless characters. The presence of big name stars – including Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow – should at least have been a triumph for the casting director. But instead the sight of competent actors struggling with epically terrible dialogue just calls more attention to how bad the script is. If you’re in the mood for something laughably awful, this should do nicely. Otherwise see if desperate

Review – Antony and Cleopatra

This isn’t anyone’s finest moment, including Shakespeare himself. Though the Bard of Avon takes the blame for the story dragging on for a whole hour after Actium, most of the rest of the dreadful creative decisions rest squarely on the hammy shoulders of lead actor / director / writer Charlton Heston. Somehow the man’s monster ego convinced him that the source material would be greatly improved with a bunch of weird editing and other tricks that waver between experimental and stupid. See if desperate

Review – Predator: Killer of Killers

The quality of both the animation and the storytelling strongly resemble extended cut scenes from a Predator-themed video game. Or maybe even more than one game. The first two subplots combine easily enough. Who wouldn’t want to see a badass viking and a badass ninja team up to battle Predators? But the protagonist of the third story is a World War Two era pilot. Within the episode, the Predator spaceship WW2 dogfight theme works well enough. But when this guy shows up in the arena of death with two hand-to-hand combat experts, it takes some awkward plot twists to effectively work him into the drama. When it comes to low-budget tack ons to famous franchises, I’ve seen worse. Mildly amusing

Review – Predator: Badlands

A wimpy Predator and the upper half of an android – both of whom talk too much – team up to locate and subdue a monster on a death planet. I found it innovative that all of the human-appearing characters are played by only two actors, which must have cut way down on the casting budget. Which is a good thing, as clearly they needed as much money as possible for the effects-intensive action sequences. The result is slick and clever without being particularly interesting. Mildly amusing

Review – Fear Below

The parts with the shark in it were fun. The rest of it was a vaguely unsatisfying 1930s era caper movie about divers trying to recover stolen gold from a van at the bottom of a muddy river. The acting and production values were good enough. Even the script was okay. It’s just that most of the story didn’t do much beyond bridging the gaps between moments when the shark swam in out of the murk and bit someone. Mildly amusing

Review – The Running Man (2025)

I’m not a big fan of movies that set up elaborate game rules and then either ignore or break them. If the plot isn’t going to follow its own established structure, then why bother making up rules to begin with? Even basic character motivation gets tossed to the wind for the sake of keeping the bullets flying and the explosions exploding. I thought the comic book silliness of the Schwarzenegger version was part of its charm, and that’s almost completely lacking here. And after one of Stephen King’s other Bachman books recently turned out to be better than expected, that just made the letdown here a little bit worse. So come for the action, but don’t feel like you have to stay for the story. Mildly amusing

Review – Nuremberg

Despite the high quality of the acting and other production values, I’m not sure this accomplishes much that wasn’t already done by Judgment at Nuremberg 65 years ago. Indeed, I was a little surprised to see the first set of Nazi defendants – particularly big fish Herman Goering (Russell Crowe) – humanized to this extent. I believe I understand the filmmakers’ intent to use the “banality of evil” approach as a warning that people can be monsters even without horns and fangs (a particularly poignant lesson in the current climate). But then the good guys also seem cynical, incompetent, dishonest or otherwise morally ambiguous. Thus the movie was fun to watch but a little unsettling to reflect upon. Mildly amusing

Review – The Conjuring: Last Rites

Though I’ve seen the word “last” used deceptively in horror series titles in the past, this did have the “tired of making these things” feeling that suggests an actual final chapter. If that proves true, then the Conjuring set ends with a whimper, neither as innovative as the first, as petulant as the second or as off-the-rails crazy as the third. I should also note that early in the movie, Ed Warren is giving the standard tour of his basement museum of evil curios, warning against touching because “everything in here is either possessed, haunted or has been used in a ritual.” At which point someone in my viewing group MST3K’d it with “Half this stuff has been in Anton LaVey’s ass.” After that it was impossible to grant the production the sense of gravitas it demanded. Mildly amusing

Review – Grey Matter

One of the items on the Nazis’ long list of vile crimes was the murder of disabled and neurodiverse children. Hundreds of these kids were killed in Austria’s Spiegelgrund “clinic” under the supervision of Heinrich Gross, who added to his crimes by preserving the children’s brains and other body parts in jars. If your workplace gets a betting pool going about the year when the government finally acknowledged what happened and agreed to give the remains proper burial, be sure to put your money on 2002. That’s also the year that filmmaker Joe Berlinger made this movie about the situation and sought an interview with ancient-but-not-yet-dead Gross. Spoiler alert: I was relieved that they couldn’t track him down, as he would doubtless have simply claimed to be unable to remember what he’d done (a lie he’d told in court in the past). His victims deserved to be memorialized without granting their killer any screen time at all, so I’m sorry they even tried to find him. Beyond that this is a powerful documentary about an important subject. Worth seeing