The action thriller Live Wire is serviceable, but considering its premise, it should have been a lot better.

It seems the producers of The Phantom Kid were trying to make another Bugsy Malone. But instead, they made something akin to The Terror Of Tiny Town.

While the Canadian horror anthology movie Twists Of Terror had three chances to deliver a good story, it somehow managed to screw up each and every time.

The science fiction movie Carriers is a more realistic than usual take on the killer plague movie genre, which in part explains why it’s very effective.

With all that talent in front of and behind the camera, The Challenge should have been much better than it actually is.

While Linda Lovelace For President is not a hard core sex film, it is without doubt a hard going film.

Even when you consider the quality of many slashers from the 1980s, The Forest is way below average for the genre.

Sorry– inside joke.  I bet Teleport Keith gets it, though.  So anyway, this is how I’ve been torturing myself since frigging November:

Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978), in which no one ever said the Antichrist had to be human…

Sherlock Holmes (1916), which has recently wriggled its way off of the Lost List to give us a taste of the original Definitive Holmes Player…

Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), which is so much worse even than you remember…

Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), in which George Lucas belatedly remembers that these movies are supposed to lead into the ones he already made…

Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005), in which he double-belatedly remembers that they’re specifically supposed to be showing us the origin of Darth Vader…

Virgin Witch (1972), which astonishingly is probably the best thing I reviewed this go-round…

and…

Wild Country (2005), which would have been the best if only writer/director Craig Strachan had realized that we’d know it was werewolves all along.

Stalker (1979)

Three people go off into the wild in search of a possibly-supernatural phenomenon. On their way, they bicker with each other, getting on each other’s nerves (and sometimes the nerves of the audience, too). We never actually see any of the terrifying things that confront them… but toward the end, a woman makes a tearful confession directly into the camera, and…

And…

Ummm, even though all this is technically accurate, I see I’m inadvertently giving a description of the wrong film. Let me try again:

Our protagonist goes from a mundane, monochrome world into a mysterious land of color, where nothing is quite the same; and (with some curious, ill-matched companions and a dog) follows a winding path on a quest for a magical place where they’ve heard their wishes will be granted… Theyyyyy’re off to see the…

Oh, boy. Now I’m really describing the wrong movie. Forget it. Just read the damned review, OK?

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I had two different lists of possible second films for this Roundtable: one of bad-place-but-not-a-haunted-house films, one of potential Resurrected Reviews that fit the profile…

…only then, having waded through the entire cinematic Amityville oeuvre* – and I think waded is the right word – I got curious about how The Murder House trope might operate away from the Amityville framework.

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SINISTER (2012)

…in which a struggling true-crime writer, in an attempt to reboot his career, moves himself and his family into the site of a notorious, unsolved mass murder and child abduction…

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(*Yes, yes: I’m aware that there’s one more to go and at least one more on the way. Sigh.)

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