144 - Star Warriors

    A documentary about the 501st, a group of Star Wars enthusiasts who dress up in Stormtrooper costumes for events.  This movie focuses on the role that the 501st played in the Rose Bowl Parade.
    This is an extra on the Blu-ray release of the Star Wars movies.  I started watching it, but found myself surprised that it was effectively a self-contained documentary.  It's structured as one, with a clear focus, and there's no padding with material from the Star Wars movies.  Plus, it's feature-length.  So I think it counts.
    It's not a great documentary, but it's interesting enough, and it does stir up some more respect for the people who participate in their organization.  I've always been impressed with their costume work, and I've been aware of their work in charity circles.  What really stands out is how grueling this project is, and how much work they put in.  Their actions aren't raising money, and they don't get any real fame out of it.  The organization gets a bit more recognition, and that's about it.
    After being selected for the Rose Bowl appearance, the recruits arrive in Pasadena and go through a marching boot camp.  They spend several days getting the hang of marching, as well as getting used to marching wearing a helmet.  Some of the helmets have terrible visibility.  The armor can be difficult to move in.
    At the end of their march, one guy passes out, and we see another guy with bloody toes.  But they pulled the project off.  They get to have pictures taken with George Lucas.
    It's not as heartfelt as some other SW documentaries, but at least it's less reliant on outside footage.

143 - The Lords of Salem

    A DJ receives a mysterious record, which leads to a strange modern coven, and the legacy of witches in Salem.
    A peculiar movie.
    I've had some mixed feelings about Rob Zombie's work as a director.  His enthusiasm for 70s horror is something I share with him, but it's his modern elements that I have a harder time getting behind.  I liked House of 1000 Corpses, but I had a really hard time with the darkness of The Devil's Rejects.  I never saw Halloween or Halloween II.
    The Lords of Salem is a little more toned down than what I've seen.  It's better paced, and it's not quite as bleak as Rejects was.  I don't mind downer endings, but he seems to revel in them a little more than I'd like.
    His direction is good, and he has a nice eye for framing memorable shots.  I'm not a fan of how the picture was colored.  The shadows are actually distracting, which takes away from setting the story in the real world.  Over the credits, there's a montage of shots of streets and buildings, and those are lit very well.  In fact, I think all the exterior shots were exactly the way I would like them.
    The story is a mix of good and bad.  I think I like the moderate pace of development, but it all seems a little too predictable.  That isn't a serious problem, since the direction is generally interesting, and there are still a few sequences that I didn't see coming.  The biggest problem is the quantity of material that seems to be weird for weird's sake.  I'm more likely to tune out when I see things like the reference to A Trip to the Moon, which doesn't seem to have any particular meaning.
    Even so, there are some remarkable visuals.  I'm glad to see that IMDB claims that there are no digital effects.  It's good to see that.
    I'm not sure what I'll think of this as time goes on.  If anything, it's made me more interested in rewatching The House of the Devil, which covers similar ground, but I have stronger feelings for Ti West than I do Rob Zombie.
    Regardless of my reservations, I like that Rob Zombie is out there making horror movies that are throwbacks to other time periods.  It's pleasing, and kind of comforting to see works that look this way.

142 - Hell

    In the near future, solar flares have resulted in the temperature going up ten degrees Celsius.  Society has broken down.  A pair of sisters attempt to travel North with a pair of men.
    I'm a little conflicted.  Sometimes, I liked the job that was done with establishing the scenario.  There were some nice locations used, and some of the touches were pretty good.  Then, there would be other points at which I felt like this was just repeating the same atmosphere I've seen in plenty of other movies.  To be honest, I'm guilty of them myself!  Now and then, I think about writing a script, and I work a little on outlining it.  I realize that I'm doing scenes I've seen plenty of times before, but it doesn't really bother me.  So why should I be bothered when I see someone else doing the same thing?
    The story is pretty minimal, and fairly predictable.  One of the girls is kidnapped.  The other girl goes through a plan to rescue her.  They beat the evil family.
    I think there's one main weakness to the story, and it's that the overall situation - the raised temperature - has less and less significance as the story goes on.  By the time we reach the last act, there's no reason why it couldn't just be something as trivial as being in the middle of nowhere.
    Otherwise, the direction is unremarkable.

141 - Branded

    An advertising executive is the victim of a large conspiracy, then finds that brands - or the desire for products in general, exist as strange monsters that feed off mankind.
    I'm having an impossible time giving any clue about the plot without spoiling any of it, so that will figure into this review.  This was a mixed bag, with some really fantastic ideas, but also a certain amount of material and handling that brought the overall project down.
    I'll start with what went wrong.  The role that the viewer plays seems to change around.  Sometimes we're just an observer, but occasionally, there's a narrator, and this seems kind of jarring.  It may have just been that the time between each voiceover was a little too long.  There are occasionally sequences, shown in a smaller aspect ratio, as if we are being screened short films.  This is fine, but it's a strange approach, since it usually lightens the mood, especially against material that would otherwise be pretty dark.
    I didn't care for the romantic plot line.  It was useful, mostly for creating a son for him to be concerned about, but for the most part, I didn't like her, and she didn't seem to offer as much to the story as expected.

    There's an interesting satirical edge to this story, which is much more compelling, and the movie would have been better served by focusing more closely on that.  The main focus of the story is on advertising, and the ability it has to shape the behaviors of a large segment of the population.  Massive spoiler here, but the main part of the story starts with a variety of fast food executives wanting to deal with their dropping revenues.  The advertising guru offers a solution that is well beyond the means of a conventional advertising campaign - to change the standard of beauty to make it acceptable to be fat.
    This works, and the main character takes the fall as part of the plan.  As he figures things out, and becomes able to see the strange monsters that run our desires, he decides that the best thing he can do is get rid of advertising.

    A peculiar movie, and uneven, but it's still worth a watch.

140 - Tabloid

    A strange documentary about Joyce McKinney, who starred in a strange tabloid saga during the end of the 70s.
    I don't think I ever got wildly enthusiastic about this movie as I was watching it, but it's certainly the strangest documentary I've watched this year.  The story starts off with a mildly strange story, of this girl arranging to try to spring her Mormon fiancé from his missionary work in England.  After causing a stir with this story, the tabloids dig up more information on her past, which implies some S&M escorting work.  Then the last part of her story involves that she had a favorite dog of hers cloned.
    While she's the common thread to the movie, it feels like it's going everywhere.  And the more I hear any of these people talk, the less I believe any of them.  Joyce appears to exaggerate, the tabloid representatives are probably omitting pieces of information, and probably exaggerating others.  By the end, it's easy to feel like you've heard too much to piece together the truth.  But it also raises the question - in this case, does the truth matter?
    I don't think it does.  In a weird way, it's a lot like watching JFK was.  Nothing is quite solidly believable, but there's something going on, and the end result is still the same, no matter what you believe.

139 - After Porn Ends

    A documentary focusing on performers who have left the porn industry.
    This was actually more interesting than The Girl Next Door, but the quality varied a bit more.  The most interesting people were some of the much older ones - Randy West, and this guy, Richard Pacheco.  Most of the stories are nothing unusual, mostly they get tired of the job, and want to carve out a normal life.  Many of them have some difficulty accomplishing that, because of the barriers that society puts up.  We see the people who blame the industry for their life, and other people who have accepted the work they did, and have overcome it.
    Randy West is actually very impressive.  He's kept himself in shape, he golfs a whole lot, does charity tournaments, and only seems a little like he regrets the inability to have a normal relationship.  He doesn't complain about this, just seems a little wistful.  He does complain that he can't give to charity like other people do, that he has to do this kind of participation, because organizations will refuse his money.
    There are two people who come across badly, and one of them is Shelley Lubben.  She describes being led into a terrible existence of prostitution, drugs, all kinds of bad stuff.  The problem is that she doesn't seem to recognize that maybe her family life, prior to that, was the problem.  She describes her father kicking her out of the house, and this immediately leading to her problems.  It's hard to say how much of this is an issue of how her story was edited, but something feels like it's missing in her story.
    The other one who really seems out of place is Crissy Moran, whom I had never heard of.  It seems like she's just taken on the role of being a Christian activist, but I get the impression that she still hasn't found herself.  Eventually, she's going to find something else, and cast off her identity, and claim that she was never really herself.  I don't mind this, but it's a little frustrating to see people deny who they are.
    Richard Pacheco is charming, and left the industry in 1984.  He has a healthy attitude about his past work, he's been able to work doing things he likes, and he has a very bright daughter.
    I suppose I should also talk about Asia, since I have an incidental connection to her.  She took piano lessons from my mother, so she knew me when I was a baby.  She also knew both of my brothers.  I'm aware of her presence on Facebook whenever one of them comments on a status of hers.  She comes across well, and I admire her approach.  She doesn't enthusiastically embrace her career, she doesn't reject it, and she seems to have been smart enough to know what she should expect, and the pitfalls associated with it.
    Strangely, the one that I feel sorriest for is Houston, but not because of anything terrible in her career or her post-career life.  It's that she has these injected lips, and they stand out.  Without those, she wouldn't have half as many problems with being recognized.

138 - Best Worst Movie

    A documentary about the movie Troll 2, and the cult status it has attained.
    I'm in an unusual position watching this movie, since I've only seen a few moments from Troll 2 online, but I've never sat through the whole thing.  But I'm also very familiar, and generally pretty loving toward bad movies.  I have a certain understanding of what makes them work so that they aren't just seriously bad, incompetent movies.  A level of competence needs to be reached, especially on a technical level.  There has to be a string of bad decisions made, and there has to be a sense of serious determination by someone in charge.
    It looks like Troll 2 reaches those criteria.
    The documentary explores most of the people involved in making the movie.  Most of the cast is interviewed, the director plays a role, and we even see the composer, although he doesn't say anything.  The fans are shown, events are shown.  The main focus is on the man who played the father in Troll 2, George Hardy.  He's a dentist now, and he's a wonderfully enthusiastic, positive guy.  He's a remarkably charming presence, and he seems entirely genuine.
    What's remarkable is that the entire cast knows that the movie is terrible, and has gradually come to terms with it.  They know that they were terrible actors, but they also have the weight of the overall project being terrible weighing against their film credit.  I suppose there's a difference between being in a low-budget, poorly made movie that isn't recognized as the worst movie ever, and being in the one that shows up at the bottom of the heap on IMDB.
    Even though these cast members seem to have accepted their role in this, we see that the director seems conflicted.  He loves the attention he's getting, he loves going to events, but he doesn't seem to accept that the movie is bad.  It's a little uncomfortable to see it, because he's clearly aware of the way that most people view the movie, but he feels compelled to defend it in ways that don't feel right.  He argues with the actors in front of the convention audience, he expresses contempt for his cast.
    The one bit that especially stood out was when the cast is talking about how they were trying to get a line changed in the script.  The line, as it appears in the movie, is "He'd cut off your little nuts and eat them!"  The girl who delivers the line was uncomfortable with it.  Not just the content, but that it's not the way people speak.  Other cast members and her come up with an alternative, and propose it to the director.  He refuses, saying "I know how Americans speak."  Of course, this is an Italian director, with a limited grasp of English.

137 - Life 2.0

    A documentary about Second Life, with a focus on three stories.  A designer who makes a living selling wares in Second Life, a couple who meet, and ultimately divorce their spouses as a result of their romance, and web developer who runs a Second Life account as an 11-year-old girl.
    I wasn't sure what to expect when I started this.  I've tried Second Life, and I'm just not social enough to really enjoy it.  Since most of the fun happens as a result of interactions, I didn't have much to do.  With no goals, it wasn't engaging for me.  NPR loved doing stories about it.  Their fascination with the relationship of in-game currencies to real-world currencies seems kind of silly.
    But this movie remained really fascinating, and it actually got steadily more interesting as the story wore on.  The approach is almost eerily evenhanded.  When you see the housewife and her Second Life beau meet at the airport, you feel a little dirty, like you're party to her infidelity.  They don't mention that the other guy is married as well, at least they don't mention it for a long time.  When they do, it's implied that they've been separated for some time.
    For as much wild, crazy sexuality as I've heard about on Second Life, there's very little addressed in this movie.  There is one sex scene, but it's treated kind of gently.
    The couple is easily the most engaging, because it's easy to agree with them, but something about the situation makes the viewer wary.  And it isn't just the idea that they met in Second Life.  It's hard to make a villain of someone who remains entirely anonymous in the movie - her husband.  We hear a tiny bit of his voice at one point, distorted, but he doesn't seem mean or anything.  In fact, she seems to have felt a little ashamed by his entrance.
    The designer is fascinating, because it's some of the more solid, less emotional parts of the documentary.  She sells products in Second Life, and converts that currency into US dollars.  And she was doing pretty well, at least at her peak.  It isn't clear if her business has turned around.  She was involved in a lawsuit over a person exploiting a game weakness and duplicating her products, and reselling them.  By flooding the market with duplicates, her original sales were hurt.
    The last story is really strange.  The guy playing as the little girl.  It's implied that he doesn't do anything even vaguely sexual.  His avatar is dressed in a fairly Lolita-like outfit occasionally.  But he plays the role as a young girl, and hangs out with friends.  He dances.  Most of the story is about a sense of self discovery.
    The couple, and the guy playing as the girl both have endings that really are wonderful cappers for the movie.

    Despite how passionate I am about games, and how much I enjoyed Star Wars Galaxies back when it was decent, I don't feel like this gave me any particular feelings about Second Life.

136 - Heckler

    Jamie Kennedy hosts this documentary, running from the relationship between stand-up comics and their hecklers, to artists (particularly filmmakers) and their critics, to the broad criticism on the internet.
    I didn't quite recognize Jamie Kennedy.  After looking up his credits, it makes sense.  I've seen a handful of things that he's been in, but most of them are his older credits (Bowfinger?  I'll keep an eye out next time I watch it).
    At first, the focus of the documentary is fairly entertaining.  No one really liked hecklers, and the variety of ways that comics deal with them is fascinating.  For the infinite possibilities that a heckler has to taunt with, even though most of them are some variation on "you suck," it's amazing that so many people are able to pull off coming back with a relevant retort right on time.
    The second act focuses more heavily on complaining about film critics.  This was actually the point at which Kennedy lost me.  Not entirely, since I actually found most of the comments to be interesting.  The more we reward critics for being as outrageously negative as possible, and the more popular those types of reviews get, the less likely that anyone who should see a review does.
    Sorry, that was an awkward sentence.  I know that next to no one sees my posts.  That doesn't bother me.  But I treat these write-ups as much more of a personal matter to me.  The few instances that I've really said how much I didn't like a movie -  Sheltered, Against the Dark, The Terror Experiment, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Pool Party - none of these were absolutely unwatchable.  And I'm pretty sure that I made no personal attacks with any of them.  On the off chance that Timothy M. Snell, director of Pool Party, reads this review and feels hurt, I'm sorry man.  I just don't think I'm the right audience for your picture.
    There were two sequences in this movie that stood out.  One of them is the footage of Uwe Boll fighting critics.  I had heard of this, and it seemed like a childish response to criticism.  To be fair, some viewers are overcome by Boll's sensibilities.  I don't think fighting them is going to make them think his movies are any better.  There was something creepy about seeing Boll punching these people.  Some of them really pretty young.
    The other scene was early in the movie, when two guys outside a stand-up are called back in to discuss their criticism of Kennedy's performance.  We don't have any sense of if they've actually done some heckling, or they just complained about the show afterward.  This seems to be a scene where Kennedy asks them what they didn't like about his performance, and then complains that they aren't comedians, so they shouldn't complain.  This seems especially strange, because as far as I can tell, the gag running up to it is Kennedy onstage doing the old joke about how country music is all about people losing things.  A gag I've been familiar with since sometime in the 80s.  I would also feel embarrassed for any comic trying to do a segment on that.
    I fully understand.  I don't bounce back from most criticism I get.

135 - Face/Off

    An FBI agent captures his terrorist nemesis, and finds that he has to impersonate him in order to get information about a bomb.  Once Castor Troy comes to, he no longer has his face, and he takes the agent's face, and impersonates him.
    I'm counting this as a first viewing, because I think I may have seen part of it on a bus trip during high school.  I only remembered the premise, but nothing else.  Didn't remember the bomb, or any of the set pieces.
    This is directed by John Woo, and it's got all his staples.  Unfortunately, most of these characteristics are only novel the first time you see them.  With a modern eye, these tricks are kind of silly.  Slow-motion gun fights, jumping around with explosions, and lots of birds.  At least Woo restrained the usage of birds to the last big sequence.  The slow-motion stuff got incredibly annoying.  A well-shot sequence doesn't need slow-motion to get the beauty of a composition.
    The story is pretty high-concept stuff.  It's a great story, and Travolta and Cage are an excellent pairing.  They both get to flex some acting muscles, and even the sequence of the story is pleasing.  But the direction just stands in the way of what could have been an action classic, turning it into a mildly annoying failure.
    Woo also really likes to drench music over some of these action sequences.  I don't think I mind that, but somehow, the volume on it was much higher than it should be.
    I might return to this again, but I don't think it will be any time soon.

134 - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

    Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a small band from Heartland, USA, which is recruited by a large record label.  Greed gets involved, and there's a villain, Mr. Mustard, and robots…
    One of those movies that usually is cited as being incredibly terrible.  It's easy to understand why.  It's campy, it's silly, the plot is not engaging, it uses Beatles music in a way that doesn't seem entirely respectful…
    Yes, even though this has nearly everything wrong with it, I somehow found it modestly enjoyable.  It's way too long, at about 2 hours, but it's pretty engaging, at least for the first half of it or so.
    The music is mostly pretty faithful to the original arrangements, but sometimes the songs get extended to work better with the film, and some of the songs gravitate toward a disco-like arrangement.
    The strange silliness in force is really puzzling.  For some reason, some of the songs are sung by robots, or at least partially by robots.  She's Leaving Home is a strange choice to do that with.
    As the movie wore on, I kept thinking of Across the Universe.  Some people seriously hate that movie, but I think that one is far less offensive than this weirdly sanitized, bizarre version of a Beatles universe.  If anything, this movie seemed more like a cross between Across the Universe mixed with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

133 - Saturday Night Fever

    A 19-year-old spends his days working at a hardware store, and his nights running with his friends, and occasionally going out to a disco.  He decides to participate in a dance competition.
    It's hard to say that there's much plot to this movie, since it's more like a character study of these young people, and a certain sense of inevitability they feel.  It's a very bleak movie.
    The role that disco plays in the story is a strange message that somehow, being a good dancer is enough to give a sense of hope.  What makes that message strange is how the disco itself comes off.  Like most things in the movie, it's shot realistically, even though they let some of backing lights bleed, in an effort to look a bit more glamorous.  As I saw these shots of the disco, it looked kind of scummy.  Not especially clean, a little gaudy.  And these are supposed to be the sequences that give us a sense of the hope that Travolta feels.
    Hope is really hard to hold out.  No one in this movie acts reasonably.  In fact, the only person I can think of that behaves well is probably the owner of the hardware store.  Travolta's character is brash, aggressive, mean, violent, kind of abusive.
    The hopelessness that permeates the movie is palpable.  Travolta has a sense of doom that he will be working at the hardware store for his life.  He knows that he hasn't made his parents happy, since he isn't as successful as his priest brother.  A friend of his has gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and she is very religious, so he can't persuade her to have an abortion.  (Spoiler) He chooses suicide rather than deal with the situation.  Girls seem to base their self-worth on how much attention guys will pay to them.
    While this was more interesting than I expected, it's hard to picture this movie being a hit.  In fact, I could see the same subject matter being treated as a documentary much more compelling.
    One thing that really came out was the use of Stayin' Alive.  It's written to the film, and part of it describes Travolta's popularity while dancing, but the song ends with repeating "Life goin' nowhere/Somebody help me."

    Also, the wiki article is interesting.  There's a PG, and a PG-13 version of this movie.  The original was R.  There's a massive amount of cursing, plus a bit of nudity, a gang rape, some assorted other sex, some gang violence…. I can't imagine what kind of movie would result when that material is taken out.

132 - From Within

    In a small, religious town, an epidemic of suicides starts.  Some people believe that they are caused by an outcast family that does not believe.  A girl investigates.
    I was looking for a fun, dark horror movie.  I've been a little disappointed with how slow most of them tend to be, and I wanted something lively.  I've actually been thinking about re-watching Dawn of the Dead, but I've resisted, in favor of watching something new.
    So, this still disappoints in the sense that it doesn't move along as fast as I wanted.  But it's still reasonably paced.  The lighting is a bit subdued.  Otherwise, there's a very Twilight Zone feel to a lot of the movie.  The strangeness of how much religion runs the town is interesting.  It's not over-the-top, like a Children of the Corn scenario.  It's not as overdone as the lady in The Mist.  There's a casual community acceptance of over religious behavior, as well as a community acceptance of using religion as a blunt instrument.
    Things remain fairly slow as the pieces come together.  While much of the middle of the movie is spent setting things up, it still ends pretty well.  And the ending actually does have a Twilight Zone-like angle to it.  Very pleasing.
    There's one element that actually makes this movie stand out, and it's montage that we see over the credits.  We get a bleak ending, and it doesn't just leave us with the knowledge that things are going to get worse.  We get to see things get worse.  It's very satisfying.

    What's odd is that, even with all these religious messages, it doesn't come across as a movie with a particular agenda.  Maybe the message is that any belief system can be dangerous if it's misused.  Not too bad.

131 - The Conversation

    A surveillance expert records a conversation between two people.  Since he still feels guilty about a prior job where someone killed his targets, he feels increasingly nervous about the results of this job.
    Another Coppola movie - that makes three so far this year.  I had never heard of this, but it seemed to be worth it.  A notable cast, including Harrison Ford, Gene Hackman, Teri Garr… it's an impressive lineup.
    It's not as ambitious in scale as Coppola's other movies.  There are some big shots and sequences, but much of the movie is taken up with smaller locations, smaller sets, and more intimate shots of his subjects.
    Despite this description, I think I prefer this to The Godfather or Apocalypse Now.  There's a nice development of character, and despite Harry Caul's oddities, it's easy for the audience to start identifying with him as his story moves along.  In fact, it would be easy to play the story with a stronger horror angle, but the direction doesn't feel manipulative.  It keeps things very firmly ambiguous, and we're left with an uneasy feeling, which is what I think we're supposed to get.
    This movie throws the viewer into a world of surveillance, which doesn't come across the way it does nowadays.  I've been pretty confident since 9/11 that effectively all computer, phone, and banking activities have been monitored.  I've found it a little puzzling that there's been surprise at the scope of these programs.  The difference is that most of us offer little that would be of interest to the government, local authorities, or anyone outside of our immediate circles.  And that's where this movie targets.  We don't know what the relationship is between the client and the targets, only that they have some kind of relationship.  The idea that a direct conversation, in a crowded place, with lots of ambient noise, could be recorded and cleaned up so effectively is a little chilling.  The world of these experts is strange, but it's mostly because there's no particular moral code among them.  It's all just a job.  There's an obvious parallel drawn here, between doing this work, and prostitution, which seems a little heavy-handed.  Regardless, it's an effective idea.
    I like it.  I don't know how likely it is that I'll revisit it, but it's one of these movies that will probably stick with me.

130 - Sleepover

    A group of less-popular 8th-grade graduates have a sleepover, during which they are challenged to a scavenger hunt by a more popular group of 8th graders.  The stakes are the prime location to eat lunch once they reach high school.
    I don't know why I put this on my Netflix queue.  I think I wanted a teen comedy, and I tend to have a soft spot for coming-of-age stories.  As I started watching this, I was much more aware of how terrible it was.
    And yet, I found myself feeling better about the movie as it went on.  I felt more forgiving of all of the corny jokes aimed at the younger crowd, and somehow, a sense of nostalgia set in.
    It made me think of the Mighty Ducks movies.

    When I was young, and there wasn't much to do during the summer, I would watch whatever movies we had around late at night.  This included the first two Mighty Ducks movies.  These movies worked for me.  The sense of humor, the camaraderie, and the implied romantic elements.  If I were a young girl, probably around 6th-7th grade, I would love this movie.  I would think it was hilarious, and I would think that it encapsulated what I wanted my relationships to be like.
    As an adult, it's not especially funny, and it seems like it tries a little too hard to be wacky.  There are still some overly sappy moments that feel too nakedly manipulative, but after being exposed to a bunch of them in a short time, it becomes easier to forgive it.
    I want to point out that they have a decent cast for this, including Steve Carell.  And I think that the lead, Alexa Vega (who is best known for playing Carmen in the Spy Kids movies) is cute.  But I think she looks far better with dark hair than she does with what seems to be her natural blonde.

129 - Kill List

    An unemployed ex-soldier does some work as a hit man with a friend of his.  Things get a little strange.
    This showed up on a few lists as one of the highlights of the horror movies available on Netflix.  It is an interesting find, and for a fairly unknown movie, it's pretty good.
    The pacing is fairly slow, but it's timed very well.  Odd little developments happen at just the right rate to keep you interested.  The strange elements ramp up gradually, until some really strange stuff happens about 3/4 of the way through the picture.
    And that's where things really shift.  The first half of the movie is solidly a personal exploration of this man's marriage and his relationship to his kid, and to his friend.  At a certain point, it moves into a cult-based sense of horror, a la The Wicker Man.
    What's unusual about this, and a bit frustrating, is how little we learn about what's going on.  We have to piece together what we can, but it doesn't seem to be quite enough.  There are no clear explanations.  Regardless, it still works pretty well because of the strange, compelling characterizations from earlier in the movie.
    Around halfway through, I realized that this reminded me of The Ninth Gate.  Things were a little more explicit in that, and the ending seemed very well managed as it came about, but there's a similar theme in this one, of a fairly normal, moderately evil man being seduced into being a more supremely evil person.