flicksthatmakemesick has been reviewing movies for thirteen years! Launched in 2011, we’ve had one whole decade of googling synonyms for vomit and using nausea as a verb. This site has had more comebacks than the Mexican food I had for lunch yesterday, as whole years went by with no one remembering it existed.

Happily, the bad habit of using hand-held cameras has waned; the peak seemed to be in 2013, the year that brought us Captain Phillips and Gravity, both Four Barf Baggers (our highest rating!). But what is a balm to our tummies is death to a website that depends on queasiness for its existence. We must face the truth that the Shaky Cam Era is over, and gratefully put down our Pepto Bismol.

But WAIT! This is the internet, and like the Meta-verse we all hate but still inhabit, we can be reborn with a different label even though we are the exact same thing! Since we no longer need to use our empty popcorn buckets as potential puke receptacles, we will now put different categories in them. See The Patented flicks Ranking System page for a complete guide to how these non-shaky movies rate.

How It Began:

I love movies. To me, a perfect afternoon would be spent wandering from theatre to theatre in one of those gigantic multiplex places that show about 20 different films, and catching up on the ones that I want to see but somehow never got motivated enough to leave the house. (And by wandering, of course I mean going back to the box office each time and purchasing a crisp new ticket for each film at eleven dollars a pop. I may have missed this step occasionally.)

But that changed about 13 years ago when I had an experience that at the time I thought was isolated. The film was Three Kings, a 1999 edgy action/comedy that starred the dream duo of George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. It was shot in an overexposed way that mimicked the heat of the desert and made you squint as if you’d been staring into the sun. The editing was choppy and fast and the oversaturation of color gave the whole film a vaguely polarized feel. I thought it was terrific and I was quite absorbed in the story, when I suddenly realized that my stomach was very upset and I was seconds away from puking up my popcorn. I made it to the bathroom in time and then sat in the lobby with my eyes closed, thinking I must be getting the flu. I never had any other symptoms, though, so I just forgot about it. A few weeks later, I decided to go back and try to catch the last half of the movie since I had no idea if George and Marky Mark had ever found the gold. I still don’t know, because I got sick again, and from that day forward going to a movie involved a lot more that just looking up the time it started.

I thought I was a freak in this matter, but turns out that a lot of people are using their popcorn buckets for more than just holding corn. The proliferation of hand-held cameras and the fast-cutting style favored by action films seem to be the main problem, but in the past few years there have many films that caused this effect that were completely unpredictable. (Thank God Once had music to listen to, because I spent almost the entire film with my hands over my eyes.)

This website is meant for those of us who love movies but mourn the loss of tripods and those huge cameras that were too heavy to hold. Peruse the site to see if there films you should avoid, and add your own comments as a warning to the weak of stomach.

We hurl so that you don’t have to.