Popular reviews

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  Review by Bunny🐰🪓 ★★★½

  Stuck, loosely based on a true story pretty nice explores how ordinary people react when stuck in a situation they don't want to be in and would act like monsters to get out of it.

  The movie nicely balances the brutal and serious side of the plot providing it with the depth that it deserves that you start feeling for the victim and at the same time works pretty good as a dark comedy whenever the culprit tries to bable around with nonsensical reasons to prove her innocence, stuck has all the things that a dark comedy needs but the only thing that I want more here was Brandi and toms interactions, Suvari's character Brandi was the best part here…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 2

  a vicious, farcical horror movie where at every opportunity for someone to make a choice that doesn't hurt someone else class-based precarity stops them from doing so. it is insane that this is based on a real murder. RIP stuart gordon

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★

  Action!: Lovecrafting with Stuart Gordon & The Talking Heads

  A promising nurse on the verge of reaching the top of the ladder has her dreams shattered when, after getting drunk and high, she ends up running over a homeless man, whose situation is straight out of a Ken Loach film, gets stuck in the windshield and she fearfully drives him home, hoping he will just die.

  The film borrows directly (or indirectly) from various sources, resulting in a blend of Crime and Punishment and the Coen brothers' trademark dark humor. Gordon does an excellent job of marrying these distinct elements to create a film that becomes more entertaining as it goes along, especially the ending. There is a lot of tension…

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  Review by nathaxnne <3 [hiatus] ★★★★★ 3

  Amicus Productions reopened its doors in the latter 00's to offer the world Stuart Gordon's Stuck, which is essentially a True Crime/News Of The Weird Anti-Cell-Phone-Use-Whilst-DUI PSA as a section of Amicus Classics Tales From The Crypt or Vault OF Horror expanded to phantasmagorical feature-length, with all of the black humour and whipsaw narrative reversals that implies. Stuck starts off as a relatively accurate dramatic recount of a 2002 case in which a health care worker was driving home and hit a man, ramming him through her windshield, and she panicked and just went home, not alerting the authorities or getting any help. She apparently checked in on him once in a while to say that she was sorry. After…

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  Review by shookone ★★★★½ 4

  Stuart Gordon gets right to the core, puts social bleakness into close-ups and formulates the whole cynicism in genre garments. a nasty crime and punishment tale, one focussing on the central part of repression. the garage as black hole, a blind spot of our soul. one that doesn't clean itself, oh well.

  how smart the construct is shows that it decidedly includes bureaucratic institutions aswell - police, job center or hospital, you'll find racism, blind eyes, fake correctness and dog-eat-dog-mentality everywhere. "it's all about the advancement, baby!" besides that we're always close to our protagonist and become her accomplices. the psychologization of Mena Suvaris character is never forged, always conclusive.

  Stuck takes a good look on systemically enhanced egocentrism and social injustice, wraps it into a decent entertainment package that is never light-footed. even if the purifying carthasis is a frisky derision, the tragedy is always shining through. more than the spectator might acknowledge.

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  Review by laird ★★★★½ 1

  You can really tell Gordon is great with actors. Even the throwaway parts like the old lady getting her toenails cut are performed pitch perfect with the blackly comedic tone of the movie. Doesn't hold back in the ick factor either, making it one of the better exploitation movies I've seen in the past 20 years too!

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  Review by WraithApe ★★★★

  Just a quickie as I've got company later and off to FrightFest for the day tomorrow but caught this last night and it was an unexpected blast! I say unexpected cos I couldn't remember how it got on my watchlist and the title wasn't exactly promising... Stuck. No expense spared on SEO with that title. Expectations raised considerably as I saw during the opening credits that I was watching a Stuart Gordon joint and man, let me tell you, it didn't disappoint!

  A vicious, jet black comedy thriller featuring Stephen Rea as as a down on his luck bum, having lost his job and then been kicked out of his apartment, his night is about to get a whole lot…

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★½ 2

  You have to see this to believe it and even then you still won't believe it! Based on a real life incident that took place in Texas! Never ever underestimate the stupidity or inhumanity that human beings are fully capable of committing!

  Stephen Rea gets huge props for being the most grotesque hood ornament ever!

  Personally didn't care for the cliché stereotypes but if you can get past that it is a real trip!

  It took everything I had to hold back the tears of joy when Princess (The Pomeranian) found her bone ;-)

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  Review by Dan Abel ★★★

  "HELP!!!"

  One night while driving home from a nightclub a nurse's assistant hits a homeless person with her car and proceeds to drive home with him stuck in her windshield. Refusing to get him help, her life is now intertwined with his as she tries to figure out a way to make this situation go away while he struggles for his life stuck in the windshield.

  Yeah, I know my blurb should be enough to give this a one sentence review and move on, but that's just not my style. We open with clips of Mena Suvari with cornrows serving Jell-O and pills and cleaning shit off of an old man's ass in a nursing home while gangster rap is…

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  Review by Dylan van Frankfoort ★★★½

  Think "The Tell-Tale Heart," only instead of a dead old man under the floorboards, it's a living Stephen Rea mangled in a car windshield.

  Mena Suvari is great, looking like Norton in Stone and initially coming across like Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell, i.e. a sympathetic character with relatable motivations, but that analogy would only stand if Lohman smashed the old woman with a hammer after denying her an extension on her mortgage. Fuck, this is a mean, disgusting little thriller, with Rea, for his part, playing beat-to-shit extremely convincingly.

  Of course his performance is aided by deeply disturbing gore courtesy of the maestro, Stuart Gordon, who ostensibly understood that we're all so desensitized to stuff like decapitations…

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  Review by Brian Formo ★★★★

  Stuart Gordon was ahead of the curve with Re-Animator but so was he with Stuck. Stuck is an underseen social thriller that would’ve sold for double-digit millions at this year’s Sundance for how it bends the genre; it's a combination of body horror and class horror, how capitalism can turn ordinary people into uncaring monsters when confronted with not just a hardship but also themselves (Mena Suvari says over and over that it wasn't her fault that she hit Stephen Rea with her car, her fear of the consequences overriding any accountability). There's also an aside to how immigration laws make it so groups of people cannot be good samaritans out of fear of deportation. But it's also an exploitation film and the whole cast is great but Russell Hornsby is phenomenal as Suvari's drug dealing "boyfriend."

  R.I.P. Stuart.

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  Review by Burrows ★★★½ 2

  So Stuart Gordon passed away last week. A great genre guy. I loved FORTRESS and PIT & THE PENDULUM back in the day. I remember enjoying RE-ANIMATOR too, but I don't remember much of the film.

  STUCK was one of his latter entries. Ever so loosely based on a real incident where a poor schmuck gets hit by a car and lodged into the windshield at the ass-end of the worst day of his life.

  STUCK was shot in Saint John, NB. Not too far from me, but in terms of film-location-land, it might as well be right next door (my home province being PEI). So it's certainly fun when regional hero and national trailer-park cult hero John Dunsworth shows up…