Noel Murray

A lot about this Chainsaw is under-realized and messy — perhaps because of the project’s convoluted shoot, which saw the original directors axed one week into production in Bulgaria. The final version of the film, directed by Garcia, packs a lot of characters, subplots, and backstory into its 83 minutes, and very few are essential.

While the film is well-acted and appealingly slick, the end result lacks novelty.

A movie that very quickly becomes yet another story about people with guns chasing other people with guns, through featureless forests and abandoned buildings.

While Pearce is typically superb as the hero — a self-doubting U.S. marshal named Jim Dillon — the film itself is otherwise utterly unremarkable. The combination of stiff, overwritten dialogue and flatly functional action sequences wastes a good lead performance.

Schadt’s dialogue lacks punch, and his cast isn’t charismatic enough to compensate. But the bigger problem is that nothing especially tense or exciting happens after the corpse is found.

Given how visually inventive and unusual the film’s first five minutes are, it’s disappointing that, by its last half hour, it essentially turns into one undistinguished chase scene after another. A heroine as strong as Reese deserves a more consistently exciting plot.

The newly released Point Break remake is tedious and overblown — as though the filmmakers were so preoccupied with "updating" the material that they forgot what made it so popular in the first place.

Though the plot contrives to throw Gervais and Leoni together and then pull them apart, the two leads stay consistently in sync through it all, laughing at each other's jokes and generally sharing the kind of normal adult communication that's often missing from movies about people falling in love.

Quale and his crew clearly want this to be a good old-fashioned two-fisted caper, but the pacing is leaden and the plot lacks imagination. Worst of all, nobody really bothered to give the picture an angle. It’s all straight, flat and dull.

It's tough to keep track of everything Jeff Warrick's subliminal-advertising documentary Programming The Nation? does wrong.

The action sequences are strong, with spectacular crashes and explosions, dynamic camera moves and tight cuts that at times give the film an appealing breathlessness. But the cast takes a too-lax approach to this material.

Rites Of Spring does have a real "no idea what's going to happen next" quality, which is rare. Then again, that's because the movie feels haphazard and unfinished: more weed than plant.

In the end, as with too many Gospel-derived dramas, The Young Messiah could’ve used less literalism, and more mystery.

The movie does what it sets out to do: stranding the viewer in a dark place, surrounded by remorseless predators. It’s an old recipe that can still please a crowd.

Guttenberg adapts James Kirkwood Jr.'s humanist black comedy -- and drains all the recognizable humanity out of it, turning it into a morose, unlikable reflection of its sad-sack lead character.

This is a movie displaced in time. And it’s barely a movie. It’s more like a dusty, faded old pamphlet: “So your daughter’s decided to get gay-married…”

God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, directed by Michael Mason, is less strident than the two surprise hits that preceded it, but it still tells a programmatic story, rooted in presumptions.

Alicia Vikander, Eva Green and Charlotte Rampling pump some energy into writer-director Lisa Langseth’s overly static, chatty drama, but are let down by a movie that keeps promising — and failing — to blossom into something more.

A poky thriller that — eventually — delivers some decent scares.

This isn't really a movie made for audiences; it's for casting agents and studio execs, to show off one man's acting chops and his skill at writing dialogue.

Primal ends up being more exhausting than awesome.

The aim here seems to be to replace startled gasps with shocked guffaws. The results are contrary to Scout Law — not Kind, Clean or Reverent.

The movie is one long game of misdirection, playing tricks on viewers from scene to scene, and showing how easy it is to steer a crowd into missing something important. That’s the real De Palma touch, even more than the operatic overtones and excess.

The dreary repetition of the affair sinks Careful What You Wish For. That, and the fact that both leads are lightweights. Lucas and Jonas are okay actors, but neither has the wit, gravity, or sensuality to stand up to the classic film noir duos they’re meant to evoke.

Director Andy Newbery — working from a script credited to four writers — makes the story look classy but can’t find its beating heart.

When it’s a cautionary tale about an unusual family who’ll never know a moment’s peace because of their past choices, Firestarter is worthy of its source material. When in its last half-hour it turns into chapter one of a potential new superhero franchise, it joins the long list of Stephen King movies that are all gimmick, no guts.

It has a good heart and a good cast, mixing Hollywood veterans with some of today’s better young TV stars. But the movie is strenuously, exhaustingly unfunny, in a way that makes its phoniness harder to bear.

Once all the pieces are in place, the film becomes a more conventional and less interesting thriller, with a single violent villain the heroes have to overcome.

The idea of this boat as a last-ditch play to save a marriage is fine as an inciting incident, but it ends up steering the story way too much. Oldman and Mortimer play the drama in “Mary” well. Too bad they don’t get much chance to play the horror.

While The Escape of Prisoner 614 has the right cast for a good old-fashioned romp, this movie barely moves.

Ma Ma’s corny simplicity makes its many flourishes look excessive, and even desperate.

The stars can’t save it.

In nearly every way, Silent Night, Deadly Night is as run-of-the-mill a slasher film as the ’80s produced, enjoyable today primarily for its kitsch value.

The new Jacob’s Ladder is less strange and scary, and more mindlessly action-packed. It doesn’t feel like a dream. It’s more like hearing a stranger describe a dream.

The biggest mystery in the serial-killer thriller Night Hunter isn’t the identity of a super-predator, or the location of his abductees. The real question here is how such a preposterous compendium of crime movie clichés could attract a heavyweight cast.

Poor Demi Moore — playing the self-centered CEO of a failing company — comes off as stiff and shrill, setting the tone for a movie that’s stilted from start to finish.

At times, I’m Not Ashamed is vivid enough to make one pine for a Christian-leaning teen flick that doesn’t have such a blunt, preordained ending.

The Outsider is a slick copy of multiple, much-better films and TV series. It's so well-polished it's practically featureless.

Director Mario Van Peebles brings real tension and excitement to the scenes where these men are surrounded by predators, but the tone of the film is awkwardly split between the grit of modern cinema and the boisterous adventure of old Hollywood.

The teen-targeted fantasy-romance The School for Good and Evil is an exhaustingly long, overstuffed movie that probably would’ve worked better as a TV series.

Dense with plot and mythology, the film is refreshingly unpredictable — if only because guessing what comes next would require understanding what the hell is going on.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of trying to make a Bad News Bears for the '10s, and Rohal has the comic talent in front of the camera to do the job. In addition to Oswalt and Knoxville, he has Maura Tierney as Knoxville's wife.

Mostly the film just feels too skimpy. The first third is largely taken up in establishing the nuclear devastation of Damnation Alley’s world, leaving just an hour for the heroes’ perilous road trip across lands infested with what Peppard calls “killa cockroaches.” By the time the action really gets cranking, the movie is half-over.

It's a lousy movie, but it has spunk.

At its most basic level, the Paranormal Activity formula still has some kick, with its combination of creepy lo-fi video and tasteful suburbia creating some strong, unsettling dissonance.

For the most part, Fear the Night feels like it could have been made by almost anybody. It’s crafty enough, but it’s lacking LaBute’s usual acid wit and fearless provocations.

Palminteri and screenwriter David Hubbard desperately want the crazy misfits in their movie to move the audience, but they're all too cracked to inspire empathy. There's no holiday magic, just famous faces playing people who don't exist.

All the performers are fine--even the miscast Romijn--but they're still too much like actors playing dress-up.

Give Don't Go In The Woods credit for not being a wholly conventional horror movie. Debit it for not caring about horror in the first place.

Despite Tanović’s efforts to depict these crimes and their aftermath as aestheticized abstractions, there’s something depressingly mundane about the way the murders and the investigation play out.

Like its predecessor, “The Boy II” is a fairly corny and stodgy spook-show, with a few good jolts and one genuinely creepy killer toy.

This is a rare case when a cheap B-movie isn’t improved by Cage-style clowning.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Bright is that it squeezes nudity, profanity and blood into the kind of dopey adventure that should be aimed more at adolescents — right down to its simplistic lessons about tolerance.

An oafish bore.

It's all a tad too serious for a movie that's essentially a tawdry pulp thriller. Still, anyone who comes to Acts of Violence looking for colorfully sleazy characters and shootouts — as opposed to nuanced public policy briefs — should find enough reasons to stick around.

This movie’s about as scary as a jackhammer.

Thriller falls back on the old horror formula of bland, often mean-spirited young folks, getting slaughtered one by one … and without near enough flair.

These kind of indie neo-noirs can be little gems when done well. Here though, directors Kevin and Michael Goetz and screenwriter Michael Arkof have delivered something largely devoid of style or narrative tension.

While it has a sharp hook — and is reasonably diverting — it never rises above the routine.

The film isn't erotic or profound. It is occasionally comic, though-like reading the finalists for one of those Bad Sex In Fiction awards.

The apparitions are cool. The schmoes they’re haunting hardly seem worth the effort.

It’s the same dreary hooey, made more tedious and witless through repetition.

The Heart Is Deceitful has a daring that's hard to dismiss, even when it only amounts to Argento shamelessly getting off on human rot.

Although Shattered is a relatively short movie, it takes too long for Prieto and Loughery to put all these pieces into play — at which point the story belatedly does develop some tension.

While McLean and company admirably aim for some relevance by tying the Taylors’ haunting to their personal demons, ultimately The Darkness is just the same old show: things that go bump in the night, and the tasteful decor they defile.

The characters, the plot, and — unfortunately — the star are all interchangeable with the elements of hundreds of other international thrillers.

This “Close Encounters” is overlong and rambling — more concerned with disconnected anecdotes than making a compelling case or telling an interesting story.

As the name suggests, Modern Life Is Rubbish romanticizes analog relationships — and is meant for anyone who does the same.

Robbie is fascinating to watch, as always. But in this case she's providing 100-watt star power to a tacky little table lamp.

Mason does a lot to make the characters’ distanced interactions — mostly via video chat — seem natural and not like a gimmick. But the real-world resonances are actually fairly dull. Though not especially objectionable, Songbird may suffer a worse fate: being forgettable.

Ultimately, there’s just nothing here that’s snappy or relevant. In tech-speak, this film is bricked.

Even with a solid cast at his disposal, Bieber can’t make Don’t Sleep anything more than a disconnected compendium of time-tested shock tactics.

Even with solid supporting performances by Morgan Freeman, Robert Patrick and Peter Stormare, this movie’s just … well, sad. Twenty-five years ago, this exact cast and creative team might have turned this material into something to rival “Harper” or “Body Heat.” Now, they all seem slower and lazier: as committed to making a taut mystery as they are to mastering a Texas drawl.

Hell Fest has exactly one genuinely nail-biting scene.... Otherwise, the movie does little to update, subvert, or comment on the trappings of classic thrillers like “The Funhouse” and “Halloween.”

Amanda Crew and Adam Brody give bracingly realistic performances as a grief-stricken couple in “Isabelle,” a supernatural thriller ultimately too sensationalistic to make proper use of the stars’ excellent work.

It's no "trip through the dark to appreciate the light." It's a nightmare from start to finish.

Raising awareness of social injustice is a good goal, but not enough to hold an audience’s attention.

A movie about self-absorbed douchebags that wallows in their douchebaggery.

A tedious exploitation picture not even sleazy enough to find offensive.

The movie’s overlong and the humor’s too broad, but given that this would-be cult film is aimed at audiences who want something silly and trashy, it’s hard to fault Skiba for just mindlessly mashing those two buttons, over and over.

Extraction’s also not, by any stretch of the imagination, “good.” But at least it doesn’t waste everybody’s time.

The Letters feels dutiful, not artful.

Most of the last hour of Memorial Day feels like a retread at least, and horribly exploitative at worst.

Cold Blood is well-made but hard to warm to — although it might satisfy nostalgic Reno fans, eager to see him playing a silent, hulking assassin yet again.

Me Time is less of a movie than it is a bulletin board filled with half-thought-out premises for dirty jokes.

Nekrotronic is “fun,” but often in an off-putting, aggressive way. The Roache-Turners have prioritized fleeting moments of gross-out humor and special-effects dazzle over a controlled pace, or careful world-building.

If Misconduct were more lurid — or more shamelessly idiotic — it might at least be a guilty pleasure. But instead it’s slow-paced, and the filmmakers’ idea of cheap thrills is to make Emily a masochist, who gets turned on by being spanked and slapped around.

The actor’s fierce commitment turns Between Worlds into another solidly strange entry in the ever-expanding “Nicolas Cage movie” sub-genre.

Despite how good-natured this movie is, it just doesn’t stand on its own. It has the right kind of soul, but a shapeless body.

Their attempts at wit seem forced, and the overall point of each installment is too minor to spend nearly 30 minutes exploring.

Lee structures the film like a mystery, which gives it a sharp hook in the early going but leads to an inevitable letdown in the final stretch when the answers prove less interesting than the questions.

Because of the talent involved, every now and then Holmes & Watson hits on something bizarrely inspired.

Life on the Line traffics in piled-on, predictable melodrama, with only intermittent sparks.

Term Life is cleanly plotted and tautly paced, but it’s never as fun as it should be.

At its best, “Max Steel” shares elements with “Smallville” and “Teen Wolf,” using the supernatural as a metaphor for awkward adolescence. At its worst, it’s more like “Transformers” — an extended toy commercial, noisy and forgettable.

What Goes Up has a one-of-a-kind character in Coogan, a cynic with a savior complex, who lies partly out of convenience, and partly because he knows--as Glatzer and Lawson know--that even a messy story can still inspire.

The movie feels like a thin excuse to show image after image of women being abused. This Martyrs has the bones of its predecessor, but it's been bled dry.

In a way, Oldman’s presence is symptomatic of a larger failing: the decision to cram together a bunch of cool but incomplete ideas rather than spending the time and money to make proper use of just one.

The movie surely isn’t meant to be mean. But there’s an underlying sourness that makes Sextuplets much less fun than the pictures it’s imitating.

The Gracefield Incident sports some impressive special effects in key scenes, but remains yet another found-footage thriller where the dialogue feels phony, the nonscary action is tedious and the images are artless. The angle may be different, but we’ve seen this before.

When the long-promised global barrage of tornadoes, lightning strikes, tidal waves and extreme temperatures hits in the final half-hour, the special effects are stunning. But the razzle-dazzle arrives too late, and is strangely unmoving.

Cage gets exactly one meme-able meltdown scene, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. The rest is a waste of time, even for trash cinema connoisseurs.

Though The Informers is by no means great--nor wholly true to the vision of Ellis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki--moments sprinkled throughout the film capture Ellis' particular mix of flip yuppie satire and lived-in paranoia better than any big-screen version of his work to date.

At every turn in Speed Kills, director Jodi Scurfield and a team of screenwriters sand the edges off a complicated, multi-decade saga, making a featureless knockoff of seemingly every sweeping true-crime movie of the past three decades.

In short, this is a movie about bruised people bruising each other, and if Downloading Nancy had more of an openly pulpy sensibility, then the repugnant premise might’ve had some lasting impact.

It’s probably for the best that The Fanatic is so terrible. If it were made with any actual care, it’d be offensive instead of just dumb.

Director John Pogue brings some grit and energy to the action sequences, but ultimately Blood Brother is just a compendium of pulp clichés, with nothing to say about these characters or the worlds they inhabit.

LaLiberte is the best thing about Girls Against Boys. She has an unforced coolness, even when Chick sticks her with sub-Quentin Tarantino business, like having a conversation about the nutritional value of Captain Crunch, or singing along to not one, but two Donovan songs.

Maximum Impact is a dopey international thriller that’s fully aware of how dumb it is, This doesn’t make it a good movie, but it does make it easier to sit through.

It tests the theory that a creepy clown lurking in the dark is always terrifying. It turns out that with repetition, some nightmares become boring.

As the heroine of the chase thriller The Courier, Olga Kurylenko brings a lot of personal magnetism and awesome athleticism — and she needs to, because her director, Zackary Adler, has stuck her in an action movie that rarely moves.

With Eloise, Legato and company take a prime location, rich in history, and make it look like a soundstage.

[An] uninspired, nonsensical mishmash, which crudely cobbles together second-hand religious imagery, abrasively noisy jump-scares, and — for some reason — techno-phobia.

Aggressively ugly and gross, the movie boasts a certain low-rent authenticity, but the auteur never figures out how to fill his grubby little rooms.

The woodenness of China Salesman, coupled with the general oddness of a two-fisted adventure yarn about hyper-aggressive telecom companies, gives this movie some “weird cinema” appeal. But if you can’t tolerate stinky cheese, leave this one on the shelf.

10 Minutes Gone is clumsy and cliché-ridden, and populated by two accomplished action stars who look like they just want to get through this job as quickly as possible.

Even by the shaggy standards of found footage, The Final Project is amateurish.

Some Kind Of Beautiful has a fine cast, but they’re stuck doing shtick.

It’s clichéd, falling back on the old pulp premise of the culturally diverse “ragtag team” of tough guys and gals, barking out clumsily expositive dialogue in between unimaginative fights.

Frankly, this is the kind of soft-core smut where it’s the character development and dialogue that feel gratuitous.

A run-of-the-mill home invasion thriller, and while Farrands is a solid genre craftsman — as evidenced by his similarly creepy true-crime film from earlier this year, The Amityville Murders — his taste remains suspect.

The movie tries to wrap an important social message in comedy, but it’s unpalatable all the way through.

From start to finish, Black Rose is about as pro forma as a motion picture gets.

It isn't just the fashions that date this documentary, or the subjects' shared experiences of the European turmoil of the mid-20th-century. It's also their work itself, which is like a relic of some ancient civilization.

What makes Baby Peggy: The Elephant In The Room so valuable, though, is that it isn’t just a 58-minute wallow in the misery of one long-forgotten, largely misunderstood American celebrity.

Murnau’s approach to Nosferatu was to treat the material as real, not laughable. Much of the movie was shot on location in Old World villages and towns, and though Murnau can’t avoid the odd theatrical flourish—in keeping with both his personal style and the era’s expressionistic bent—Nosferatu has the ring of truth.

Aside from a few good jump-scares and a couple of original plot twists, Wrecker spends most of its running time cutting between footage of the roadster and footage of the truck, apparently assuming viewers will take those images and use them to imagine something more exciting.

Honestly, The Funhouse Massacre isn't quite enough of either.

While Robertson throws in too many cheap jump-scares, he mostly does well by Green's script, coaxing strong performances from the cast and making sure the viewers feel a sickly dread every time some creature is growling and scratching at the ranch-house door.

Minimalist to a fault, this psychological horror exercise is fairly tedious, distinguished only by the moody lighting and the slow, fluid pans and dollies.

It’s hard to keep track of all the old high school comedies that writer-director-producer Sean Nalaboff nods to in his feature film debut, Hard Sell. Eventually, though, the movie finds its own voice and groove, and avoids being a mere retro exercise.

The biggest problem with Most Likely to Die, though — beyond it being unimaginative, unfunny and frightless — is that it has no sense of place or time.

While a film like Serial Killer 1 may disappoint anyone expecting “Bullitt” or “Lethal Weapon,” its focus on legwork and motivation could well appeal to fans of “Law & Order” — the TV show and the social construct.

This tedious picture botches both the setup and the punchline.

Although this film never really makes sense, Sesma’s years of experience means that it’s at least competently shot, with locations around the world. Plus, it’s admirably gonzo. And when it comes to cheap genre fare, bizarre always beats boring.

A compendium of genre clichés — or, more charitably, “homages” — Queen of Spades offers little that fright fans haven’t seen before.

These are the kind of character- and plot-driven police procedurals designed for binging, a lot like Netflix favorites "Happy Valley" and "The Fall." Although each of the first three films tells a full, discrete story, they work best cumulatively, as the ongoing adventures of one cranky, conscientious cop.

This flavorless home-invasion thriller hasn’t ripened with age.

Excellent production values and a decent premise help hold together “Billionaire Ransom,” an otherwise rickety thriller constructed from used parts.

Admirably imaginative but frustratingly clunky, the sci-fi thriller Let’s Be Evil is a technophobic cautionary tale that ironically demonstrates how fancy new digital filmmaking tools make a low-budget project look spiffy.

The Fight Within is too generic as a sports flick, and too pro forma as a tract. There’s more vitality and humanity in the closing-credits blooper reel than in anything in the actual picture.

The movie sports more personality than most low-budget thrillers, yet sometimes devolves into the kind of ponderousness that a collaborator might have second-guessed.

Nearly every shot of Blood in the Water looks like it could be some band’s album cover. And when it comes to stylish crime pictures, appearance counts.

The jokes aren’t especially clever, and the story’s too cluttered, adding characters that range from an aloof poodle (with a French accent, naturally) to a blustery American monkey (no comment) to a cute alien.

Though the acting is inconsistent and the dialogue often laughable (and not in the good way), the film has an appealing can-do quality and a strong dose of craziness that keeps it from ever becoming boring.

Dull and drab, the film squanders an attractive young cast and a killer title.

The People Garden is so slow and spare that it barely registers. It just floats through the forest, silent and bloodless.

From the overwritten, pop-culture-reference-laden dialogue to the incessant attempts to be shocking, Happy Birthday tries way too hard. For a movie that doesn’t have much to say, it sure never stops jabbering.

What is semi-interesting — in a “huh?” kind of way — is how the Ferraras take various paranoid speculation from the darkest reaches of the Internet and weave it all into a barely coherent super-theory.

Though more sensationalistic than serious, this film has a scale and an energy that rivals any Hollywood blockbuster.

Though it’s mildly enjoyable throughout, the movie is ultimately just a loose collection of nice little scenes, held together by a few palliative clichés.

Mostly The Windmill is about watching some morally shaky people die horribly. But they do it with such dramatic gravitas that their inevitable eviscerations seem almost profound.

Writer-director-actor Miles Doleac’s sprawling Southern-fried mystery The Hollow has the rich characters and milieu of a good literary novel, but never quite works as a movie.

Mr. Donkey is deeply flawed but also fascinating. There’s a good story here, woven between the thudding jokes.

While the cast is talented and the tone is classy, The Charnel House never develops any momentum. The movie puts fright on the back burner to tease out a mystery that proves to be too profoundly idiotic to be worth all the bother.

Overall, The Shelter is a bit too clever for its own good. The hero’s personal hell is too literal, and the movie as a whole is too slight.

It’s hard to recommend Blood Brothers, which is mostly unpleasant and shrill. But it is unusual enough to suggest that Prendes’ next film might be better.

The Axe Murders of Villisca never really comes to much, perhaps because its focus is too diffuse. The scares are low, and the plot under-baked.

Director/co-writer Glenn Douglas Packard tries to bring a little style and color to the film by relying on off-kilter camera angles and cartoonish supporting characters. But he mostly stays within the narrow parameters of the “knocking off generically attractive youngsters one-by-one” movie, never getting campy enough, bizarre enough or satirical enough.

Sometimes it’s impressively funky and stylish, and sometimes tediously derivative.

Writer-director C.A. Cooper’s The Snare is admirably artful and oblique in putting its own twist on the haunted-house story, but it’s derivative of much better psychological suspense films and is obnoxiously unpleasant to boot.

This movie is still, ultimately, a generic shocker. But the amount of care lavished on the character-building and scene-setting is impressive, even if it doesn’t add up to much.

James Cullen Bressack’s Bethany is polished, well-acted and filled with memorably disgusting images, but its portrait of a frazzled adult survivor of child abuse is ultimately formulaic and a little sleazy.

Even when Don’t Kill It veers toward the ordinary, Lundgren is there with his lived-in face and playful eyes, waiting as ever to spring into action. It’s great to see him in a fun movie again.

Forced character arc aside though, this is a tightly constructed and well acted indie with a few standout sequences. It’s further proof that sometimes all a filmmaker needs is a cab and a camera.

The Black Room is unabashedly trashy — with scene after scene of nudity and gore — but doesn’t offer much beyond sensation.

The Eyes is a talky, set-bound drama masquerading as a suspense picture, and nearly the entire movie consists of overwritten, overacted, visually inert confrontations and monologues.

The cast is game and the pace blessedly zippy, but everything about this film feels too fake to generate any real suspense.

Even when the movie shades too far into the oblique or the obvious, its evocative scenes of urban life and Tobin’s powerful performance provide ample compensation. Plot twists or no, this is a vivid depiction of a lost soul.

First-time feature-director Jonathan Baker keeps the pace too slack and the tone too earnest — and sometimes fails to convey basic visual information about what’s happening.

The costars have good chemistry and bring a sense of desperation to their roles that animates a thin plot.

The film as a whole doesn’t make a lot of sense, but from moment to moment it is effectively visceral and raw. It’s compelling almost by accident.

Thanks to three lively lead performances and smart storytelling choices, what could have been a distasteful premise becomes surprisingly entertaining.

There’s not enough story here but every time David pops up on the soundtrack to spout dime-novel clichés like, “Fear the hanged man, because he’s dead already,” this movie takes on the quality of classic storybook, not straight-to-video schlock.

It’s almost as though Combs knows his public image remains fuzzy, caught among such labels as “mogul,” “criminal,” “sellout,” and “under-appreciated genius.” Consider this movie a purposeful step toward cementing a legacy.

As a budget-priced spin on “Sicario” — with elaborate paramilitary action sequences peppered into a story about how lawmen become compromised when they work with crooks — Cartels is passably entertaining.

Weet tries to invest a common horror premise with some original mythology, but unlike films that risk disturbing audiences by tying ghosts to abuse, Darkness Rising treats Madison’s past more as a puzzle to be solved, which drains it of some primal power.

The approach isn’t always satisfying. Some clips could use more setup, or even just a basic explanation.

While writer-director Tudley James has a disarmingly light touch and some stylistic flair, this “Granny” ultimately isn’t clever or funny enough.

While its DIY spirit is admirable, this tedious shocker feels like it was cobbled together from a kit.

Despite a few meta moments in which the characters comment on how their plight is like “a bad horror movie,” Bedeviled ultimately embraces clichés rather the subverting them. The evil technology’s up to date, but the storytelling’s too old-fashioned.

Welcome to Willits has a loopy energy that in short spurts can be pretty amusing. More often than not though, the film is clever to a fault, packing in too many characters and gimmicks.

None of this makes a lick of sense, but it’s fascinatingly asinine. It feels wrong to encourage this kind of misbegotten DIY project, but if you’re a fan of the likes of “The Room” or “Birdemic,” honestly, you can’t miss “Mike Boy.”

London is adequate (if not exactly magnetic) as the lead, and director Patricio Valladares gives the film a rich, shadowy look that almost compensates for the turgid pace and distractingly incessant score.

McGowan is excellent in what she’s claimed will be her last acting role; and Christopher Lloyd is equally memorable as one of the lost souls the heroine encounters in Toronto’s labyrinthine underground.

Axelsson relies too much on picturesque scenery and subtle dramatic performances to engage the audience whenever not much is happening.

A lifeless demonic possession drama.

Doleac’s forging a niche. His name on a picture is now an indication that genre fans will see something different … though it’s not yet a mark of quality.

As a morality tale, Haze is old news. But as an in-the-moment explanation of how hazing happens, it’s so fresh, it’s raw.

The battle scenes here are impressively large-scale, but too sparsely deployed. A good two-thirds of this movie consists of miserable-looking people quietly debating their terrible options, which can be exhausting.

Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill! is just dumb enough to be a potentially fun candidate for someone’s “bad movie night.”

There are limits to how much of an edge a movie gets from incompetence — as writer/director/producer Susannah O’Brien’s The Doll proves definitively.

The lack of any real imagination makes Attack of the Killer Donuts a chore.

Even at its most serious and sophisticated, it retains the pleasingly funky aroma of pulp.

Movies like these — so well-intentioned, so unexciting — give the very notion of “a brainy thriller” a bad rep.

The Midnight Man would feel like a hodgepodge of other fright flicks even without England and Shaye’s familiar faces.

Hopkins and company don’t bring much special or personal to the material. The plot’s predictable and the shocks are routine in Slumber.

Looking for bathroom humor, beer jokes, heavy metal, unapologetic smut and a dude in a furry monster suit? These movies are a one-stop shop for just that kind of good-natured vulgarity.

Ultimately, Wastelander is a movie for fetishists, who likely won't care about the emptiness at its center so long as its surfaces are as smothered with cheese as the straight-to-VHS junk they loved as a kid.

Turning this movie off before it starts is actually a good idea: not because it's dangerous, but because it's lousy.

Even at its most confounding, this is a challenging and entertaining film, delivering suspense and drama even as it's asking if it should.

González maintains a glacial pace and a hushed tone, while withholding so much information that the film is confusing and only comes together in retrospect. It's a grueling experience, with a modest payoff. By the time it finally ends, every word in its title feels apt.

Director Noh Dong-seok — working from a Kôtarô Isaka novel — fills the film with rich detail, helping this "innocent man, wrongly accused" story overcome its dogged conventionality.

hough the first half of the picture is adequately tense and well-made, it's not strikingly cinematic or engagingly mysterious enough to justify the stalling. Or maybe the problem is that 10x10 takes too long to let Evans and Reilly off the leash.

It's a pity such memorable characters are stuck in a story so middling.

While there's only 25 minutes of good material strewn throughout a movie four times that length, Apartment 212 squeaks by thanks to its cast.

Some viewers may find Joe's stressors too negligible; and honestly, Tilt is too shapeless and esoteric to be great. It flags considerably after its first hour, stumbling toward a frustrating ending. Still, there's a frankness to this picture that compensates for the overall slightness. It's the rare thriller that looks to combine "Five Easy Pieces" and "Taxi Driver."

This is a long, miserable wallow, making audiences feel every dark minute of its title.

The overall tone is light and breezy, and while the jokes aren't exactly side-splitting, they do add some welcome eccentricity.

Unfortunately, there's not enough footage of Wallace playing; and in an effort to squeeze in as many voices as possible, "Triumph" suffers from some repetition of anecdotes and ideas. But the details of what Wallace went through are astonishing, and important to revisit.

The scenery's pleasant and the actors are mostly likable. If "Baja" had been made in the '60s, it would have some kitsch appeal. It's easy watching, for anyone who needs a little mind-vacation. Everyone else should consider burying it in a hole for the next 50 years.

"Gehenna" features impressive gore effects, but the plot's an uninspired hodgepodge of dozens of other "haunted structure" pictures, set at a plodding pace, in a gray, dim location. It peaks in its first five minutes. The remaining 100 go nowhere, slowly.

The Assassin's Code features a few plot twists, but none surprising. The situation and the characters are just too stock.

Ignore the nondescript title; writer-director Jeff Houkal's backwoods horror film Edge of Isolation has personality and just enough splatter to satisfy gore-hounds. The plot's a rehash of '70s/'80s drive-in classics like "The Hills Have Eyes," but this movie has its own odd energy and is effectively icky.

Writer-director-star Brian Gianci keeps a snappy pace, and his cast is admirably willing to take chances, but when the humor doesn't land — which is most of the time — the movie's tough to take.

At its best, Another Kind of Wedding understands how hard it can be for families to look past their own burdensome self-mythology, to see each other again as just people.

What the movie does have going for it is Ricci, who in the past few years has become a master at playing offbeat heroines in violent stories. Ricci is convincingly terrified in a film that’s never scary enough to justify her performance.

None of this is as deep as it intends to be, nor will it strike science-fiction devotees as especially novel. But Sackhoff’s Mack is such a vivid, well-rounded character that “2036” still works. It’s like a stage play, crossed with one of the more philosophical old pulp magazine short stories.

Doke's cast of unknowns has trouble bringing a convoluted plot to life. As it unfolds, Goodland stacks up more preposterous B-movie notions than Doke's thin script can support.

Nothing here is revelatory — at least not to anyone who reads the op-ed pages or has watched “The Good Wife.” But the movie is refreshingly smart about how real feelings can get in the way of callous calculation.

The humor is often broad to the point of being shrill — especially once an eccentric genius nicknamed “Hopper” (Lee Kwang-soo) joins the team. For the most part though, The Accidental Detective 2 whooshes by, easily and forgettably.

The movie’s only intermittently successful at blurring the lines between art and life. But it’s a sincerely felt experiment, and it has spirit.

Devotees of Sunset Strip rock decadence may enjoy the general seediness. Horror hounds will likely feel bored, confused and more than a little ripped-off.

Director and co-writer Jason DeVan assembled a good cast, and has solidly constructed scare sequences strewn throughout Along Came the Devil. But even at its best, the movie feels stitched together from incomplete, ill-fitting pieces.

A heavyweight cast and superb location-shooting carries The Padre, an otherwise meandering crime thriller.

What the film mostly lacks is its own flavor.

While “The Last 49 Days” is awkwardly bloated, it does eventually develop some momentum. Once viewers get accustomed to a movie that can move within minutes from courtroom drama to dinosaur attacks, they may enjoy the overwhelming spectacle of it all.

There’s an outstanding short film lurking within Diane, a sketchy, enigmatic thriller that writer-director Michael Mongillo (reworking a Matt Giannini screenplay) can’t quite fill out into a feature. Strong performances and some memorably dramatic moments suggest what might have been, had the movie been more focused.

The cast is talented, the direction is fairly crisp and the dialogue isn’t stiff. When the people who made this movie move on to something better, they’ll have no reason to be embarrassed by where they started.

The film’s appealingly twisty and easy to watch — though it’s ultimately weighed down by a generic plot.

Screenwriter Robert Rhine and co-directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage have made something polished, colorful and energetic but, ultimately, pretty disposable.

The story gradually finds its way to a predictable place, but the company’s interesting along the way, and the scenery can’t be beat.

The movie’s well-meaning, but also tedious and self-indulgent, with only brief flashes of originality — and even those are quickly interrupted by yet another explicit sex scene.

The creature effects in Strange Nature are top-notch, but Ojala has trouble making them scary. His plot’s too scattered to build any momentum.

Writer-director Nathaniel Atcheson has found a clever way to tell a lot of story without many resources — although the end result is still more exhausting than enticing.

An accomplished cast does what it can to bring the material to life, but it’s tough to add fine emotional shading to characters so thick and cartoonish.

Bernstein stages a few good, tense moments in the film’s second half — in particular a skate-chase scene on an iced-over stream — but Look Away mostly fails as a “killer teen” movie. The pace is too slow, and the mood too somber.

The movie’s too slow at the start and somewhat befuddling at the end, but for the most part it’s a haunting, poignant portrait of one woman’s Kafkaesque nightmare.

If nothing else, The Church proves something: Better an amusingly terrible, eye-catching horror movie than a slick, nondescript, boring one.

It’s a reasonably grabby tale despite its familiarity and trying too hard to make its milieu menacing.

The movie’s artier components are imbued with enough heart and poetry to hold the picture together — just barely — through the more tedious stretches.

Hospitality is both an exercise in atmosphere and an actors’ showcase, letting its cast settle deep into the skins of these people who just need something in their lives to break their way … even if they’ve done nothing to deserve it.

Mostly, it’s impressive how Bowler reimagines his own Oscar-nominated 2011 short film. He takes his original idea of using time-travel as a kind of metaphysical Photoshop and seriously thinks through how it would work — and whether it’s possible to have a “happy ending” when revision is always an option.

With scares at a minimum, Astral relies heavily on its young cast, who are all likable and charismatic. Dillane and Idris and the others are undoubtedly destined to appear someday in movies and TV shows far more memorable than this one.

Though Krings co-wrote and co-directed the film (the latter alongside Arnaud Bouron), “Tall Tales” lacks his usual gentle kookiness and vivid designs.

The cast of Texas Cotton is good company, and the location’s a nice place to hang out for an hour and a half. But all these nice folks are worthy of more than such a flat, featureless story.

By the time the Tinker fantasy elements kick in, they seem more like an afterthought than the reason this movie was made in the first place.

The characters and story take a backseat to the movie’s message — which is as subtle as a roundhouse punch.

8 Remains has a cool premise, but director Juliane Block and screenwriter Laura Sommer (with dialogue assistance from Wolf-Peter Arand) treat it more as a metaphor than as a storytelling opportunity.

Default successfully turns a global financial crisis into a movie that’s at once engaging and educational.

Knight does a good job of establishing the political complexities of a more theocratic age. But then The Appearance pivots straight to the usual assortment of things going bump in the night, which — as it turns out — aren’t suddenly less clichéd when everyone’s wearing robes.

Even genre buffs will be disappointed by how minor-league this movie is.

there’s something undeniably inspiring about [Groo's] stick-to-it-iveness, as he hustles around the Utah mountains, completing more movies in a year than better filmmakers ever will.

Like any good hoofer, the South Korean musical Swing Kids is eager to please, relying on both subtly graceful moves and aggressive razzle-dazzle. Though a bit longer than necessary, the movie tells an engaging, enjoyable story, peppered with impressive dance numbers.

The premise is effectively eerie; the presentation depressingly sloppy.

While “Worm Valley” is generally diverting, the plotting is remedial — and devoid of whatever personality Zhang brought to his books. There’s just enough story here to support the next big special effects sequence.

Like a lot of low-budget horror, writer-director Matty Castano’s Alone in the Dead of Night is more a case study in shrewd resource-management than it is a movie.

An obvious abundance of creative passion went into the two-fisted action picture Split Lip — a film that’s generally likable but ultimately too slight and derivative to recommend.

Zuhdi’s story is ambitious; and there’s something poignant about the way these characters’ roundabout schemes keep pushing them further away from what they really want. But the audience rarely gets to see these plans play out.

While this movie is pretty incomprehensible, it’s at least memorable.

The film’s biggest issue is its balance between setup and payoff.

Writer-director Matthew Berkowitz’s crime drama A Violent Man has all the pungent cynicism of a classic film noir but lacks the urgency. A slower-than-necessary pace drags on a movie that’s otherwise well-written and well-acted, and which makes good use of its setting in the world of mixed martial arts.

Winning lead performances and some uniquely quirky touches keep this dramedy watchable from start to finish, but an over-reliance on indie film clichés — from the plucky folk-pop soundtrack to the generic “dredging up the past” plot — add up to squandered potential.

This is just another buy-the-numbers POV fright-fest — like the B-movie version of walking through a professional Halloween haunted house.

The film has the eerie atmosphere and outstanding makeup effects of a good fantasy thriller. But it’s way too choppy to build any tension.

Though it never rises above the level of “interesting experiment,” the dystopian thriller The Bellwether teems with so many ideas that even the bad ones don’t weigh it down too much.

The simplicity of “Parkland” is often quite affecting.

Woodsrider is often needlessly opaque about what it’s showing and why. But the sense of calm about the film is oddly relaxing, even when Sadie’s anxious about the melting snow. This is a contemplative portrait of a different way to live.

While it’s disappointing as a mystery, Who Killed Cock Robin is effective as the study of a compulsively nosy man who follows his hunches whenever they lead, into some dark places.

This is a well-intentioned movie; it's just not a well-made one.

2050 has a meaningful subject, but is so dialogue-heavy and incident-light that almost the entire film feels like a pitch for the movie Holt didn’t make.

Dryly funny and unsparingly acerbic, The Cannibal Club has one simple point to make about the hypocrisy of the aristocracy … and Parente makes it sharply.

Writer-director Roope Olenius (adapting a Neea Viitamäki play) struggles at times to maintain a consistent tone with a film which veers sharply between absurdist comedy and near-horror.

Over-written dialogue and some stiff acting weigh Devil’s Path down, especially in the early going. But the action sequences are quite good, deriving nervous energy from the inherent risk of any illicit sexual encounter: that being in the wrong place with the wrong person could prove fatal.

Anyone who loves Dangerous Liaisons — in any of its iterations — should rush to cue up Lady J, a period romance with a similarly wicked sense of comic melodrama.

While the European locations are picturesque, the cast lacks the chops and charisma to make this collection of killers and thieves imposing. Weight-room-sculpted muscles aside, everyone here comes across like too much of a lightweight — as if they’re just playing pretend.

The major failing of Division 19 that is that it’s just too busy, bouncing between corporate boardrooms, jail cells and insurgent camps, as though Halewood were trying to squeeze an entire season of a SyFy original TV series into 90 minutes.

No Alternative is rambling, but never aimless. It’s the work of an artist meticulously recreating his past, while wishing fervently he could change it.

There’s not much to this movie: just stunning outdoor locations, a soulful Rygh performance, and some raw sword-and-sorcery action. That's more than enough.

Whatever the film has to say about the sketchiness of modern financial wheeling and dealing remains frustratingly non-specific. The characters all feel like they’ve been copied and pasted from hundreds of other movies that end with armed standoffs in some featureless field or warehouse.

What makes “Tough Guy” such a good sports-doc is that it’s unusually honest — both about how much fans loved seeing an old-fashioned bruiser terrorize the NHL, and how that player's demons inevitably devoured him.

Made Me Do It shuffles among different visual styles, as it bounces between its villain’s backstory and one desperate night in the lives of the brother and sister he’s targeted. The movie looks ugly and feels uglier, without much sense of a larger intent to mitigate the meanness. Koppin's right that his movie is different from a typical slasher. It’s far, far worse.

While Feldman — a veteran screenwriter making his directorial debut — brings plenty of storytelling craft to the picture, Know Your Enemy falls short of being as eye-opening as he intends. A strong sense of mystery and two searing lead performances can only counteract so much of the contrivance here.

At its best, Scary Stories explains why these books endure: because they let their young audience know that even in their worst nightmares, they’re not alone.

while the action stalls too often, the look of “Yamasong” is enough to recommend it. The puppetry’s lo-fi but remarkably expressive, with craftsmanship and design that puts most computer animation to shame.

This movie’s a shoddy copy of something that was pretty tawdry to begin with.

Copious blood-spatter aside, I’ll Take Your Dead is about as poignant as any movie with vengeful gangster ghosts can be.

It’s not the easiest movie to watch; but that’s only because Shaye’s admirably unafraid to tap into the parts of herself that weird people out.

This almost unclassifiable Brazilian horror film is one of the most assured, unconventional genre pictures of recent years.

A thin plot and a distractingly jaunty score hold The Bastards’ Fig Tree back. But for the most part, this is a thought-provoking historical fairy tale about the values — and grudges — that survive whomever’s in power.

In the end, the most disturbing thing about The 16th Episode is how good it might’ve been if Cohen-Olivar had figured out how to fill the whole picture with the personality at its center.

A dispiritingly familiar story.

The cast is talented — and occasionally funny — but they run out of fertile material quickly.