I recently mentioned Dunkirk which is supposed to be a great movie, but I am reminded that there is a lot of crap out there as well. With streaming services a lot of movies I'd never have rented are available to watch for free so I've been going through my watchlists checking them off. Everybody has their likes and dislikes in movie genres – westerns, war films, mysteries, horror, whatever, so there may be great movies out there that some folks just don't like. That's not what this thread is about. I kind of like indie movies, you often run into little gems the mainstream studios neglect. But like looking for roadhouse dives that serve great food, lots of them serve crap as well. Same with movies.
Going with the idea that a good movie is just a good story well told, these movies are bad stories poorly told no matter what the genre. These mini-reviews contain spoilers but that’s because I recommend that nobody waste their time on them like I did.
Please feel free to add your own.
The Midnight After – bunch of passengers in a bus in Hong Kong come out of a tunnel to find they are the only people in existence. Lots of threads that never go anywhere, no explanation for anything that happens, unrelated crap happens for no reason and nothing is ever explained or resolved at the end. Total crap.
Tank 423 – some unknown mercenaries with British and Scottish accents get trapped in a tank (actually an APC) by some unknown enemy that looks like alien monsters for some unknown reason in an unknown location with a couple of crazy women thrown in for good measure and they all go crazy and die in the end. It’s revealed that it’s all an experiment by some unknown group of people. Nothing is explained, nothing is resolved. It’s one of those movies where the writer has no idea where he’s going or what to do when he gets there so he leaves everything in an ambiguous state and the director tries to make up for that with really pretentious cinematography. Total crap.
Wiener Dog – this got very good reviews for some reason and has some name actors, Danny DeVito and Ellen Burstyn, and is ostensibly how a dachshund, the wiener dog of the title, enters into and affects people's lives. The dog is just a prop and not crucial to anything and is often neglected, and the whole movie is just a series of vignettes about dysfunctional people leading dysfunctional lives. The dog gets run over by a truck at the end and is just a red splat in the road as more vehicles run over the splat. Crap movie - don’t waste your time.
