These are the eight films I watched for the first time in the first 14 days of January 2025, ranked worst to best:
8. Terrifier, 2016, directed by Damien Leone, streamed on Prime Video, 1.5 stars.
This got my attention because of some buzz around Terrifier 3, which hit theaters in October. I stumbled across it on Prime Video and decided to give it a spin. I enjoyed the first 10 or 15 minutes of Terrifier. The staredown scene in the pizza parlor between Art The Clown and Jenna Kannell's character was mesmerizing. Tara could not look away from the freak taunting her, and you just knew unspeakable terrors were about to rain down on her.
And then the unspeakable terrors started happening, and they were purely gratuitous and disgusting. The problem was that we were given no context, nothing to make us understand the point of any of it. The entirety of the second and third acts of Terrifier existed solely to shock us. Kudos to the great practical effects, but they meant nothing.
Everything I hear leads me to think that the second and third films in this franchise are significantly better than this one. But I'm not compelled to go any further.
7. Wolfs, 2024, directed by Jon Watts, streamed on Apple TV+, 2 stars.
Apple TV+ had a free preview weekend, so I took a browse and found this. And I was excited. Brad Pitt and George Clooney together in a new film? Hell, yeah, I'm down.
THUD! Started out interestingly enough. Clooney's a PR fixer, here to clean up a terrible mess for a high-profile client. And then Pitt shows up, he's also a fixer, sent here by the hotel manager who saw the mess happen on a security camera feed. And then Clooney and Pitt start bickering like an old married couple over how to do this job. And then they find a couple bricks of heroin in a backpack. And then they bicker and bicker and bicker about how to fix this bigger mess. And then ...
It's lame. It becomes evident pretty quickly that Apple TV+ had a brilliant idea to pay Pitt and Clooney a lot of money to get some eyeballs to Apple TV+. The problem is that it apparently didn't occur to anyone to bankroll a decent script.
A waste of time.
6. White Lightning, 1973, directed by Joseph Sargent, streamed on Prime Video, 2 stars.
I can understand that this was a crowd-pleaser in its day. It's very possible that I saw this in a theater with a buddy or two back then, but I remembered nothing about it -- until the last scene, which I instantly recognized. But I may remember that from a trailer or something. In any event, I marked this as a first-watch.
White Lightning is everything I expected it to be. Burt Reynolds being early-1970s superstud Burt Reynolds bucking authority and charming the ladies and hanging with best buddy Bo Hopkins and driving a souped-up Ford muscle car and getting revenge on the small-town sheriff who done his Southern family wrong.
Standard stuff, not particularly noteworthy outside the beautiful rural-Arkansas locations. I've never been much of a Burt Reynolds fan, so this one didn't grind my gears. I gave it a shot. Didn't find much to like or hate about it.
5. In The Forest, 2022, directed by Hector Barron, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars.
I stumbled across this one while browsing Prime Video building a watchlist. I knew nothing going in other than what I read on the Prime synopsis, which was enough to interest me.
I would describe In The Forest as more a schizophrenic thriller than a horror movie, as Prime classifies it. A grandfather, his daughter and his granddaughter take a camping trip and park their RV on an isolated river bank in the woods, only to be visited by a shotgun-toting stranger who tells them they are on private property and must leave. But the vehicle's back wheel gets stuck in a rut, they can't get out, Mom hikes a couple miles to a house to seek help, and encounters some odd people who really don't want Mom and her family hanging around.
The story gets a bit muddled with some lame twists and turns and unanswered questions. But enough murder and mayhem happens to keep it interesting. And in the end, In The Forest was good enough to keep me entertained for about 80 minutes.
4. Frozen, 2010, directed by Adam Green, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars.
This was a weird one for me. I was totally wrapped up in the story, a simple one in which three friends are stranded near the apex of a ski lift with no hope for rescue for several freezing, snowy days. I was feeling the panic, and the anxiety. And the boredom. How the hell are they gonna get down from there? How long can they survive in that brutal weather without food or drink? How are they going to pass the time?
Seriously, at one point I realized there was about an hour left in the movie's runtime, and I couldn't imagine how the filmmakers could fill it with just that one static setting. And that put me into a panic, and I spent the rest of the film totally enthralled yet racing internally to get to the end. And I was so relieved when it was over. And thrilled that it really was a good movie.
3. V/H/S, 2012, multiple directors, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars.
I hated this movie for the first 10 minutes or so, through the disgusting introduction of four disgusting characters in "Tape 56," the terrible wraparound story in this found-footage anthology. I was still disgusted into the first couple of minutes of "Amateur Night," the first short film. I damn near shut the thing off. But then Hanna Fierman's character, Lily, appeared onscreen, looked straight into the camera with those dead saucer eyes and muttered "I like you." It was weird, and I was hooked. And Lily got crazy.
The last of the standalone shorts -- "The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger" -- also was pretty good. The two in the middle were good enough to hold my attention. The wraparound never did redeem itself, but we don't spend too much time with it for the rest of the movie.
On balance, I liked this movie quite a bit and couldn't wait to get to V/H/S/2 the following night. Turns out, the second one, as I wrote in my previous post, killed my enthusiasm for this franchise.
2. Alone, 2020, directed by John Hyams, streamed on Prime Video, 4 stars.
Grieving young widow packs all her belongings in a U-Haul trailer and takes off for a new life in the hinterlands of Oregon, only to find herself unable to shake an apparent stalker popping up everywhere on the isolated highway she's traveling.
This was a good one. Jules Willcox as the mouse and Marc Menchaca as the cat carry this 98-minute thrill ride extremely well. The story is crisp, the tension is palpable and the cinematography is gorgeous.
1. Abigail, 2024, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, streamed on Prime Video, 4.5 stars.
This one is the reason that most all of my viewing activity this month is happening on Prime Video. I bought an ad-free subscription early in the month because I decided I had to see Abigail after hearing all the buzz about it in the YouTubers' year-end wrapups.
I knew the basics of the plot and about the controversy over the spoiler-y nature of Universal Pictures' marketing. I went into it with high expectations while at the same time expecting to be let down because I did know the key reveal.
But you know what? All that didn't matter. This thing grabbed me by the throat from the opening scene and did not let go. This movie was bonkers. It was batshit crazy.
The best way I can think to describe this movie: Have you seen From Dusk Till Dawn, or at least have a good idea of what that movie was? Abigail is comparable in many ways to that one if scaled back a couple of degrees. We spend the first 20 minutes or so meeting the cast of characters, an entertaining and funny opening act in its own right. Once we get the big reveal as we move into the second act, all hell starts breaking loose -- and the hell keeps breaking looser and looser all the way to the final scene. It doesn't let up.
Abigail is one hell of a ride, even if you know going in what the ride is going to be. I can imagine this most likely will be at or near the top of my list when I do my 2025 wrapup.
If I find a better movie than this sometime in the next 11 months, this will be a hell of a year.
--------------------
Amazon purchase links (I am an Amazon affiliate, and your clicks help support this blog):
Comments
Post a Comment
Spammers will not be tolerated. All comments containing links to external sites will be removed.