Watchmen (2009) / Watchmen (2019)

Watchmen (2009 - Ultimate Cut), d. Zack Snyder - bluray [Rewatch]
Watchmen (2019), cr. Damon Lindelof

The Watchmen comic book/graphic novel is a masterpiece in the medium.  Writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons crafted a story that could only be told via the comic book form.  It 's a self-contained epic that presents a richly detailed world somewhat askew from our own, where costumed adventurers emerged in the 1930's, won the Viet Nam war for America in the 1960's and were outlawed in the 1970's, following which is where the story picks up.  But the superheroics are ancillary to the people under the costume, the politics of the world in which they live (this was written at the height of Reaganism/Thatcherism and the last scary gasp of the cold war), and weight of what the future might bring.  It's not dystopian, but it does cast a pretty bleak eye towards the nature of the "western world".

It's a sprawling tale that was originally told over 12 issues (at that point in the 1980's most single issue comics would use 26-28 pages for story, as opposed to modern comics which only contain 20 pages on average per issue).  Also at that time most comics featured a letters' page, for fans to write in and interact with the creators.  Since Watchmen was a mini-series, a proper letters' page wasn't established and Moore instead used the extra pages for prosaic backmatter, often in the form of in-world magazine articles or book excerpts that would flesh out the history of this self-contained superhero universe.

That dense backmatter is so integral to the Watchmen experience that it makes even the idea of adapting the comic to screen a real challenge.  Not only that, Watchmen didn't just tell an immersive superhero story that doubled as a critique of the times (and human nature) but Moore and Gibbons also were deconstructing the medium in which they presented their story (there is a comic-within-the-comic even, with the Tales of the Black Freighter read by an ancillary character in the story), they deconstructed the superhero down from childhood idols and icons to flawed people under masks, dispensing with melodrama and forming more psychological profiles.  It was revelatory and changed the medium of comics and the way superheroes were styled for decades to come.  There's no way to adapt that to screen and have the same effect.

For almost 25 years in the world of comic book fandom (and certainly before the world became engrossed in comic-book and superhero-based media) Watchmen was an untouchable property.  It lived a very pure form with no ancillary outreach save for a role-playing game handbook produced around the same time as the comic.  It was put on a pedestal, and there are a LOT of people who thing it should have remained there.  It was (and remains) a highly revered work, and DC didn't deign to touch it or alter it in any shape for so long, people forgot that it's just another corporate licensed property.  It's a comic book derived from other sources using analogs of more famous heroes to tell a very specific story.  It would be nice if Alan Moore didn't sign a crappy deal and still held rights to the property and had some say into it and made money from it, but that's not the case.  It's a DC/Warner Brothers/whomever-their-parent-company-is-today product, and since 2009 they've been steadily churning out action figures, video games, new prequels (and sequels), and media containing the characters and its stark iconography

Even in the height of Watchmen idolatry, adaptations had been tried a few times, most notably Terry Gilliam made a concerted effort to get a Watchmen movie made in the 90's, but ultimately determined that it was better served on television as a miniseries to allow the story to breathe.  But Hollywood has a hard time letting go of any idea, and certainly can't let go of any property that's steadily making money and garnering attention elsewhere.  Until recently, the Hollywood movie studio system was the ultimate destination for any story, the ultimate validation, the ultimate point of exposure.  It still sometimes just doesn't understand that some stories aren't meant for its medium.

While reports of previous attempts at Watchmen seemed like shady adaptations with ill-advised alterations, director Zach Snyder -- fresh off a very financially successful adaptation of Frank Miller's 300 comic -- promised to stick true to the source, effectively using the comic as storyboards for the feature with only a few tweaks (longer action sequences, wardrobe adjustments and very minor story changes).  It was still relatively nascent time in supehero cinema.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe was just starting, Christopher Nolan had just released The Dark Knight, and people were gleaning the real potential of big blockbuster superhero cinema that wasn't cartoons for kids, but deeply engaging, huge productions that offered up superheroes and their struggles as something legitimately worth investing into.  If there was a time for Zack Snyder's Watchmen, 2009 was it.

The cinematic experience of Snyder's Watchmen was a bit of a mixed bag.  He certainly captured the visuals of the comic book with striking, brought-to-life, slow-motion, moving panels that inspired familiarity and even a little awe in many fans (but by no means all).  The dialogue had ringing familiarity to those who had read the graphic novel, and the story presented itself, for better or worse, almost exactly as Dave Gibbon's panels broke it down.  It was far from a failure, but something was definitely off.

In the painstaking effort to lovingly recreate the panels of the comic, Snyder forgot to invest real time in the characters.  There's a roteness, a going-through-the-motions to almost every performance in the film.  There's little sense that the performers (most of whom have gone on to become quite familiar faces) had a real understanding of their character, and their emotional connection to each other (the unfortunate result of which was I thought for some time that Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode and others weren't that good at acting).  They're exceptionally attractive people, in amazing costumes, perfectly lit, directed it seems more to recreate a scene that worked on paper rather than create something that works for the screen.

The 163-minute cinematic experience was beautiful but hollow.  It was certainly the story of Watchmen but it didn't do what it should have.  Where was the "wow" that reading the comic delivered.  I recall seeing (or reading) an interview with Snyder where he pointed out that the film was going to deconstruct the superhero movie the same way the graphic novel deconstructed the comic book superhero.  Aside from a few visual winks -- like Adrian Veidt's (Goode) costume, complete with Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin-inspired nipples -- there seemed to be no other thought put into this sense of deconstruction.  There would have been real opportunity to take apart the "origin story" sensibility that guided most superhero films until the MCU era, and likewise Snyder could have really worked through visual aesthetics from various superhero films of the 70's/80's/90's in a pointed way.  It would have taken real vision to do that and (as we've seen from Snyder subsequently) that's not really his style.  Instead, what Snyder added to the Watchmen was just more fight sequences, and they're probably the least likeable aspect of the film, even more distracting than Dr. Manhattan's big blue penis.


There was a direct-to-DVD animated adaptation of Tales of the Black Freighter which seems like such an odd thing to do.  In the comic, the Black Freighter story is told in small, brief sections throughout the 12 issues, so presenting it as a whole seems incongruous to its origins.  A director's cut of the film emerged on DVD, adding an additional 20 minutes, but it's the Ultimate Cut of Watchmen, released around Christmas in 2009, that makes for a more definitive Watchmen experience.  This Ultimate Cut, clocking in at 215 minutes, takes the director's cut and seams in the Black Freighter in pieces throughout (as was originally intended).  The film does feel more whole with the Black Freighter and director's cut footage included, but it also feels like it should be more episodic rather than a barely-unified whole.  Gilliam was right.

In rewatching this ultimate cut, I found the first hour the most engrossing.  This is Snyder (and by proxy Moore and Gibbons) in world-building mode, and if anything the world of Watchmen is fascinating.  It's sense of alt-history, how things differed because of the presence of costumed vigilantes and, moreover, Dr. Manhattan, is riveting.  It was smart of Snyder to revert the production back to its mid 1980's setting if he was going to so literally translate it.  It wouldn't have worked otherwise.  And yet, there's a sense of anachronism between the costumes and the era its set in. 

Snyder's opening title montage -- the slow-motion retrospective through the history of the Minutemen in the 1940s all the way through to the Keene act barring masked vigilates in the 1970s, all set to Bob Dylan's "Times They Are A-Changin'" -- is easily his greatest contribution to the Watchmen legacy.  Snyder's seems to have more of a gift for music video storytelling than actual cinematic storytelling.



But after the first hour, once the world is well established, Snyder has to live with the characters, and the message of Watchmen and he couldn't seem less interested in them.  I have to say that the most vital parts of the film are the Black Freighter sequences.  They snap the viewer out of the lull that Snyder can't otherwise escape.  In Snyder's live-action, the characters say all the right words, the actors move with notable intent, they are framed as if posed, the shots all look right out of the comics, but it doesn't flow like a movie should.  It's only in the Black Freighter animation that the film escapes this need to "panelize" its shots.  What works best is it takes the conceit of a comic-within-a-comic and instead makes it an animated-film-within-a-film, which is the kind of thing an adaptation is supposed to do, adapt to the medium, and use it to its full advantage.

I honestly don't know anyone personally who loves this movie, and I know only a few who like it.  I do like it, but it's only effective as a "Cliff's Notes" version of Watchmen.  It doesn't even come close to replacing the graphic novel, but at the same time it does absolutely nothing to harm it.  Even the overblown sex scene and the unfortunate, overly elaborate, "bone-breaking" fight sequences aren't all that egregious.  I do have to say that Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue genitalia are utterly distracting every time they're on screen.  Whether prosthetic or CGI, it was someone's job to work with those things, either gluing them to Billy Crudup's suit or animating the movement of the phallus and testes as Dr. Manhattan moves around the scene.  It's just a bizarre thought to me.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I think the ending of this Watchmen is even tighter. more realistic to the reality of Watchmen than Moore's original ending.  Framing Dr. Manhattan as the bad guy for the world to rally around seems like a far more elegant solution than dropping a giant space squid on New York. 

The big box set the Ultimate Cut came with also includes a great 40-minute in-story "news programme" that investigates the former heroes of this world.  It covers some of the backmatter material that Moore had in the comics, and one could see how, were this an episodic TV series instead of a film, the post credits of every episode could feature a shorter 5-minute news segment akin to this.

Well, it's 10 years later, and we have a new Watchmen TV series.  I was initially worried when I heard about it because I was afraid of another adaptation of the graphic novel.  I think it was already proven that it can't be easily translated to any sort of screen, nor should it really be.  So it was to my relief to hear that Damon Lindelof, a year or two separated from the excellent The Leftovers (and still-beloved Lost) was spearheading this as a sequel, and a sequel to the graphic novel, not the film.  The Leftovers was such a richly envisioned world that I could only imagine what it is Lindelof wanted to do with the world of Watchmen 30 years later.

Halfway through the first episode of Watchmen I leaned over to my wife and said "I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't this...and I'm so thankful for it".

Let's state it blutly, Watchmen is amazing.  It's uncomfortable, shocking, upsetting, striking, funny, exciting and invigorating.  It's definitely got that "Prestige HBO" vibe,  and it once again reiterates (like Game of Thrones and Westworld before it) that television is now capable of producing cinema-quality stories in a serialized format.  The times they are a-changin' indeed (callback).

The pilot opens brilliantly showing a silent film, fans of the comic will recognize instantly what the film is referencing, but the story pulls out of the film and into the reality of 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the prosperous black community of Greenwood was massacred by white supremacists.  I didn't even know this was a thing, and apparently it's a part of American history that's been forcefully swept under the rug.  I think it's bold that its been given such a high profile awakening, and that it serves as the primary backdrop for this show in many different ways.  It's a brutal historical reality which deserves to be remembered and addressed.  Just one of many mortally deep wounds in America's long history with racism.

This show could be its own thing, just dealing with the legacy of the Tulsa massacre, but those sorts of stories don't quite get the same eyes on it, the same response.  Lindelof, co-writer Nick Cuse, and director Nicole Kassell have taken this buried shame and displayed it boldly in front of their new "prestige superhero drama".  They're doing what Snyder and team didn't do with the film, which was adapt it for the medium, and for the times.  It's perhaps thanks to Snyder's film, though, that the pressure is off for Lindelof and co. to redo Moore and Gibbons' story.  Instead he gets to use Watchmen as a brand, and as a surreality to set his story in.  It's doing the same thing Watchmen did for Reagan/Thatcher-era and holding a reflective surface up to it to stare back upon it.  It may look different and distorted, but things are all too recognizable to the world of today.

The craft of Lindelof's Watchmen is in using its comic book history sparingly, nuggets that readers familiar with the graphic novel will catch and have greater meaning, but serve as curiosities for the inexperienced.  These tidbits, like the note that Viet Nam is an American state, or that the presidents can serve more than 2 terms now, or that whole raining squid thing, or even the "American Hero Story" segments...they all nod back to the comics and mean quite a bit more with the background knowledge, but they don't detract from the main story and they serve as intriguing world building on their own merits even without further elaboration.  This isn't our reality, it's warped and different, but not unrecognizable.

Another brutal massacre, this time a fictional one in the show's history, saw all of Tulsa's police department murdered by a racist terrorist group that sport Rorschach masks as their main iconography.  This has led to the police being masked and unidentified, and by the show's second episode, tensions have escalated into a war between the Seventh Kavalry and the police.

When I saw the commercials for this series, with the police in masks, it struck a note of "this is wrong", as in "what would the police get up to if they were anonymous, not held responsible"?  There's a credible threat in a masked police force for sure, but the show weaves that narrative trickily into understanding the necessity, but it never sits comfortably with that decision.

There will be "purists" (ugh) who don't want any other Watchmen other than what Moore and Gibbons created.  That's fine, nobody is asking them to read, watch, or play anything else, but this is vital TV right now, and Lindelof, Cuse and Kassell negotiate this unexpected superhero playground deftly, investing in all the right aspects, teasing all the right components and creating immensely engaging and thought provoking television in the guise of a comic book adaptation.

This feels like a comic book series properly adapted.  One which uses what came before as a launching pad, not a bible, not a story to tell over and over.  Its greatest success is with Regina King's Angela Abar as the show's focal point.  It teases out her family life, her professional life, her trauma and her competency.  She's a badass, in costume and out.  Louis Gossett Jr. is a 105-year-old wheelchair bound stranger who imposes himself upon Angela's life in the most shocking of ways and the revelations he has to bring to her are personal in so many ways (and likely bigger than what she already imagines).  There are cutaway scenes to Jeremy Irons' Adrian Veidt, living in isolation with only his genetic anomalies to keep him company.  What his deal is 30 years later is still anyone's guess.

I'm already excited for Watchmen week-to-week.  It's the first show in a while I'm making appointment television, not wanting to wait to watch it on demand or from the digital recording.  Netflix and binge watching has trained me to be restless when there's something this good that I have to wait for.  So I sit with anxious anticipation for episode 3.

31 Days of Halloween: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

2019, André Øvredal (Troll Hunter) -- download

This movie will always be about that scene from the trailer, the one where the girl pokes and prods at a massive blemish on her face, a white-headed pimple from which emerges a tiny waving spider leg. 

*shriek*

Body horror to the max, a common urban legend, pure nightmare fuel. Yes, this movie was adapted from the popular children's books of the same name, that often dealt with such tales, the same kinds of tales we saw in those 70s large format comics, short stories that always give the main character a terrible lesson to learn. But how do you jam an anthological concept into a 1.5 hour movie, and keep the characters connected to it? One antagonist, multiple consequences loosely pulled together, is how.

Its the 60s and a bunch of teens are being tormented by bullies, they bump into a drifter named Ramón, and they all end up at the local haunted house. Inside the house they find the book, a book full of (you guess it) scary stories one tells in the dark. BUT, the hook is that NEW stories start appearing, ghostly fountain pen written, tales about the teens and the bullies themselves, stories that come .... TRUE !

With some help from the mind of Guillermo del Toro, the guy who did Troll Hunter does a movie that has some great ideas, but never really takes off. The premise is weak, and the idea waffles between the Bad Kids Being Punished, and... well, just about anyone being punished. Some of the monsters are scary, especially the fat, blobby "pale lady" (really, more a troll/hag creature than a human female) but for the most part, everything is dimmed down to the expectations of it as a kid's movie.

31 Days of Halloween: I Remember You

2017, Óskar Thór Axelsson (Black's Game) -- download

Thus another in the posts I finish writing the previous year's posts, left unattended and quickly forgotten. And yes, still post it as if it was written In the Past (ominous music).

This is an Icelandic mystery wrapped in the shroud OF a ghost story that is as much about the loneliness of isolation as it is about death and ghosts. The movie is broken into two stories, one involving three young people who move to an isolated island to renovate an abandoned house, the other about Freyr, a doctor helping the police investigate a mysterious, disturbing murder with connections to a missing boy.

The structure of the story telling came in the style of a familiar Scandinavian murder mystery, all dark & broody, with a weight of emotion about it. The ghost makes an appearance almost immediately, and through it we learn of tragedy and connection and loss. Freyr (Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Atomic Blonde), who suffered his own loss years prior helps the police investigate a series of suicides & deaths linked to an older crime. As he digs further, he is more & more haunted by what he learns, both figuratively and literally. On the other story, the three renovators suffer their own haunting, as one, Katrin, recently lost a baby. She is haunted by her grief, until more than that manifests.

This kind of story comes with an unravelling, one that wants you to revisit the tropes. It ended with a twist, that while not entirely unforeseen, was a rather nice conclusion to lots of cliches.

31 Days of Halloween: Valley of Shadows

2017, Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen (Everything Will Be OK) -- Amazon

Thus another in the posts I finish writing the previous year's posts, left unattended and quickly forgotten. And yes, still post it as if it was written In the Past (ominous music).

Brooding. The Scandinavians have the market cornered on that, with their fjords, and high fog enshrouded hills and pensive, somewhat intimidating forests of tall conifers. A TIFF entry, considered by many a Gothic fairy tale of sorts, but really both those phrases are over-used these days when referencing horror movies, especially movies that set themselves aside from the jump scares and death, but serving you mood and setting.

Something in the woods is killing the local sheep. Perhaps a big bad wolf ? We are carried through the experience via Aslak, a young boy with his own family trauma. Its a slow go to explanations and reasons, but not really sure if slow did it best. It was OK, is what I remember thinking.

31 Days of Halloween: Lifechanger

2018, Justin McConnell (The Collapsed) -- download

Thus another in the posts I finish writing the previous year's posts, left unattended and quickly forgotten. And yes, still post it as if it was written In the Past (ominous music).

Yeah, what was this about again? Oh yeah, indie-ish movie about a shapeshifter who has to steal new identities once his/her current one begins to decay, literally. Shot and set in Toronto, the movie hands the ball from one body (and one actor) to the next, as "Drew" adopts each life. Until he is stalled by making an actual connection with a woman he meets in the Monarch Tavern.

Rather skillfully done for a micro-budget movie, it makes good use of its multitude of characters, some familiar Toronto faces, as well as the body-horror and gore that smacks of Cronenburg fascination. Going from the interpersonal interactions of monster and man, to a voice over relating to us the challenges of being a monster with no understanding of who and what you are. But in the end, how can we sympathize with a monster mass murderer, no matter how broken up they are about love lost.

31 Days of Halloween: The Love Witch

2016, Anna Biller (Viva) -- download

(i really should finish the 2019 posts before the 2020 posts begin, not ignoring that 2020 was one long horror movie unto itself)

Sometimes the Top Lists lie, and boy, did they on this one.

In pitch, this sounded like a great movie. It's stylized like a 60s/70s schlock witchy-poo movie about a murderous but lovely witch trying to find love. Few men survive her standards. On the outside the movie is rather stylish and well executed, doing an incredible job of being set in the past and the present all at once. But once the shine of the gimmick goes dull, it's just boring as fucking hell.

Elaine, the lovely young witch is heading to San Fran, after the mysterious death of her husband. Mysterious, but pretty obvious she did it. Elaine wants to find Love, and performs rituals (icky wimmin magic) not only to draw needy, clingy, requiring to be murdered men toward her but also a police detective, who starts to catch on, while also falling for Elaine. Oh noes!

As I said already, the movie is stylish, but in some ways that while obviously intentional are grating AF. It almost felt like they were drawing upon the clueless ineptitude of The Room or seeking to intonate a porn movie, but maybe after it was edited for prime time viewing. But despite the fun aspects of the period styling (clothing, attitudes, colours, hairstyles) all the (again, probably intentional) z-grade acting and directing choices ended up being more off-putting than fun.  So, no thanks.

10 for 10: telehell

[10 for 10... that's 10 consumables which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?   ]
 
In this edition:

Mindhunter Season 2 - Netflix
The Boys Season 1 - Amazon Prime
The Wire Season 1 - HBO/Crave
Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus- Netflix
Swamp Thing Season 1 - Showcase
A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 1 - HBO
rewatching Cougar Town - ABC Spark
Arrow Season 7 - Crave
Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 - Crave
Black Lightning Season 2 - Netflix

 aaaand....go go gadget blog

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Mindhunter Season 2 was great.  But also problematic.  And weird.  Though touted as a "season" this really felt like the middle of a season.  If Mindhunter were an old school detective show on network television it would be cranking out 22-26 episodes a year, and this "season 2" would be the middle chunk of it.

And that's just what it feels like...a middle chunk.  It doesn't have a proper start, really, nor does it have anything close to approximating a conclusion.  That's the "weird" part.  It doesn't feel whole.  It's incredibly captivating watching, but I think it will perform much better if watched immediately following season 1 and immediately followed by season 3.

It took me a while to remember some of the dynamics of Season 1, some of the internal hardship at the FBI Holden and Bill faced at the FBI, some of the personality politics at play.  Season 2 finds a new director in play (the awesome Michael Serveris joining the cast), one much more supportive of the psychology division...almost too supportive if that's a thing.

Holden and Bill get involved in the Atlanta Child Murders and it's the center focus of the season.  It's not presented as such but organically becomes it...and it's this simmering on-again/off-again nature that's both scintillation and frustrating about the season.  It's too true to life, that Holden and Bill would keep jumping back and forth to Atlanta without real consistency and often without real support.  It's a gut punch examination of how the system fails its people, and a reminder that not much has gotten better today.

Bill meanwhile is dealing with some family issues, which turns his wife Nancy into that horrible trope of the nagging wife.  I think the show angles for a more sympathetic view of her, but it doesn't quite get there.  The most unfortunate part is with such a keen focus on Atlanta and Bill, Anna Torv's Wendy takes a bit of a side-seat.  She gets some personal drama and a bit of something to do, but she disappears for whole episodes and her storyline is tacked on with an abrupt conclusion in an equally abrupt episode 9.

[11:50]

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I like the recreation of the classic cover image..."classic"? Really?  I guess

I wasn't too fond of the comic The Boys.  Created by writer Garth Ennis and illustrator Darick Robertson, The Boys allowed Ennis to get his cynical frustration with superheroes out onto the page.  It was his critique that superheroes steal the limelight of comics culture, that there's an egocentricity around them, and that they need to be spanked into submission by more hard-edged, down-to-earth characters.  It was edgy and biting for many, but for my liking, tedious and sour.

So I had planned to avoid The Boys adaptation on Amazon.  The distaste of the comics wasn't even close to fresh in my mouth but the bitter sense memory remained.  After a few podcast and a bit of positive reinforcement from Toast, I gave it a shot.

I was astonished at not just how much I liked it, but how feverishly I wanted to consume it.  The characters in Amazon's The Boys are complex in a way that's very intriguing.  The titular Boys led by Karl Urban all have their own baggage, some of it paints them in a bad light, and some shines a better light on them.  But even the supers, like The Deep, Queen Maeve, and A-Train, all have their own baggage too.  These are somewhat despicable people, but then we see that they maybe don't want to be.  The corrupting power of having powers is certainly what's at play. But also there's a searing commentary on capitalism and structures which seek to exploit and taint what's good for greed.  It's this look at how corporate superheroes and the structures put in place to control them (and their image) that's most fascinating. 

At 8 episodes, it's actually perfect length to be satisfying without being overwhelming.  Hopefully Season 2 is as thoughtful and measured.

[21:30]

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more like "pay attention", this show moves quick

Hahaha, how many years have I been telling people that I've never seen The Wire and people saying "What do you mean you haven't seen The Wire yet?  Get on it!"

Well, this summer we finally got on it.

And, well, this is a show that looks every bit like it's from 2003.

Imagine if that's all I had to say about The Wire?

But no, it's great.  The first episode we found to be extremely overwhelming.  That pilot (if it was even a pilot) is so dense, navigating the structures of the police, the political hierarchy of the criminal justice system, and the street level drug operations.  I likened it to the nuts-and-bolts of it all as seen in The Sandbaggers (a classic British espionage series from the late 1970's that is a frame of reference to, like, a half dozen people in the world).

Subsequent episodes get less nuts-and-boltsy.  It's still pretty nitty gritty but it follows the path via the personalities involved.  The characters of the wire are what make it so great.  The way things shake down aren't just standard operating procedure, they shake down the way they do because of the way the people in the procedure operate.  And the show does a great job of distinguishing how they operate.  This isn't Law & Order, there's no formula at play.  The characters dictate how things go down.

This leads to a lot of unexpected situations, and a genuinely exciting series.  It is, however, kind of alarming seeing a very young Michael B. Jordan as a drug runner in the yard.  He's a significant player in this story (filled with almost a Game of Thrones density of cast) and a tremendous actor even as a young pup.  Also, Micheal K. Williams Omar is one of the best characters on TV ever, and Andre Royo's Bubbles is so loveable, the guy you root for the most. Sonja Sonns' Greggs is such a badass, and now I know what the hell a McNulty is.

[31:46]

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you can tell there's a lot of yelling just
from the poster

It's kind of hard to believe that the last time we saw an original episode of Invader Zim was 2006.

I came into Invader Zim as a fan of its creator, Jhonen Vasquez.  He made some very darkly comedic and absurd comics called Johnny, The Homicidal Maniac and Squee, and was certainly excited to see what he would do for, effectively, children's television.  Invader Zim wasn't nearly as dark as Johnny  or Squee but then again, being a show for children (well, let's face it, it was made for college kids), Zim in some ways is so much darker.

But as much as I loved Zim and had friends who equally loved it, and we would shout Gir quotes at each other all the time (I still do!) I didn't watch Zim all that often.  I don't know Zim inside and out like, say, the early years of The Simpsons.  As such, I can pop in almost any episode of Zim and watch it with only a little familiarity (and in some cases, no recollection at all).  So in some ways, Zim always feels fresh to me.

An so, 13 years later, we have a new Zim movie.  The animation is a little more refined, and we're talking one big 70-minute episode (where most Zim stories were 11 minutes), and it all still works, and works damn well.  It's Zim but just EPIC-sized, and it's just as great as it ever was.  Vasquez hasn't missed a beat, and the voice cast is in prime yell-y form.  Those Gir lines are just as great as ever "I shot that pug into space."  Yes Gir, yes you did.

I don't want a full Zim revival, I have too much else to watch (and too much rewatching of original Zim to do].  But more of these movie-length specials, even once a year, would be so, so great.

[40:56]

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the show looks good, but never this good

Cancelled before it even really got a chance to prove itself, deciding to invest in watching Swamp Thing was a definite decision on my part.  I mean, the details that first the show was cut from 13-episodes to 10 in mid-production, and then cancelled outright after the first episode aired on the fledgling DC Universe streaming app, how satisfying could this be.  It seemed like the executives certainly didn't have much faith in the show, so knowing that it could all end in huge disappointment, why should I even bother.

Truth was, I wasn't going to.  I heard that it wasn't really connecting with any other DC TV properties (like Titans or the Arrowverse), and Swamp Thing isn't really a character I connect with in the comics.  But then I heard there was more DC connectivity within the show... Madame Xanadu, the Phantom Stranger... Blue Devil!?!  My nerd brain was severely teased.

The opening episode introduces the world of Marais, a small town deep in the Louisiana bayou.  The local industry magnate, Avery Sutherland, who supports the town is trying some revitalization efforts to his slumping business.  This includes basically sticking steroids in the swamp in hope of finding (or creating) some sort of industrial, military or pharmaceutical byproduct.

Instead it creates a contagion which brings CDC agent Abby Arcane back to her home town and back to some serious drama.  She meets Alec Holland - a scientist brought in to help Sutherland in his discoveries, then fired for getting too close to uncovering Sutherland's dirty deeds - and the two have  a connection, a brief flirtation before Alec is killed for finally discovering the dirty secret.

Of course, Alec becomes Swamp Thing, and you would think that Alec's transformation would be the focal of the show, but no, it's really Abby's navigation of the world of Marais that takes center, and the unraveling of Avery Sutherland's dirty deed which is the over-arching narrative glue.  The whole Swamp Thing of Swamp Thing is kind of a side product.

So it's actually a testament to how finely crafted the show is that it's immensely engaging even when it's only dealing with the supernatural and metaphysical about 15% of the time.  It keeps the budget down, I know, and it is disappointing that Swamp Thing doesn't just morph up out of the ground or keep changing shape.  It's also kind of sad that the grand romance between Swamp Thing and Abby isn't really put in focus either (which was always the main centerpiece of the comics, their relationship).

The show wants to be a suspense-horror first and foremost and does a pretty decent job for what's effectively mainstream TV.  Lots of cool little effects, creepy and disgusting references to John Carpenter's The Thing.

I find all the night boating in the swamp to be excessively tedious, and a little absurd, but hey, maybe real bayou folk do so much night boating, I'm not in the know.

It has some real problems, repetitiveness and spinning wheels, mostly, but it's well made and gets fairly comfortable in its own skin fairly quickly.  Oh, and Madame X, Blue Devil and the Phantom Stranger are all very disappointing representations of their comic book counterparts, and yet, they work for the show (though Ian Ziering's Blue Devil's larger purpose is never truly fulfilled).

[57:50]

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I've said before that reviewing sketch comedy is a difficult task, since the tendency is to want to review every sketch.  That would take forever, certainly longer than 10 minutes.

A Black Lady Sketch Show is named as such because it's never existed before, at least not in North America.  There haven't been many all-female sketch shows, nevermind one whose cast consists entirely of black women.  It's pioneering, and it would be easy for something pioneering to be lazy and pandering.  But this is HBO, it's got to be another level of quality.  And it is.

Robin Thede, Quinta Brunsun, Gabrielle Dennis and Ashley Nicole Black are the show's primary performers, but behind the scenes Issa Rae, Amber Ruffin and more have their hands in the pie.  And they also pull in some great names in black lady celebrity, like Angela Bassett, Jackée, Marla Gibbs, Lena Waithe, Gina Torres, Yvette Nicole Brown, Nicole Byer and one glorious sketch about a break-up featuring Patti LaBelle.

I love the show's opening credits, which feature the quartet as muppets, I watch it every time when I could easily fast forward.  There's a recurring interstitial sketch throughout each of the 6 episodes of the first season which find the quartet dealing with life after the apocalypse as the only survivors.  Mainly it's drinking and talking shit, but little aspects of the outside reality do seep in.   There's a great sketch in the church where people use the open mic for asking for prayers to hawk their wares, perform stand up and try to arrange a date for their lonely daughter.

The great thing about A Black Lady Sketch Show is obviously perspective, seeing things from a point of view that isn't very prominently represented in comedy or on television.  But that perspective is backed up by actually being funny, and with production values that heighten the entertainment.

It's not legendary comedy at this stage, but there are definitely a few classics in the offering.  The production by episode six seems to have gelled and the cast certainly has chemistry to keep this thing going.

[1:15:39]
(that took a long time because I had to look too much stuff up)

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bad poster, good show

I don't know how I came to watch Cougar Town the first time around.  It's hard to remember a time when we weren't so inundated with content, and with new about content that we already had our viewing time planned out.   I'm assuming that when Cougar Town came out back in 2009 that I was looking for things to watch.  For many years I would investigate all the new offerings television had to offer in the fall, and pick out the ones which seemed intriguing.  In 2009, the big highlights were obviously Community and I would have to say Cougar Town as well.

While Community would be an immediate favourite, Cougar Town was something I stuck with.  It was just funny enough to start.  I wasn't a huge Friends fan so Courtney Cox wasn't the biggest draw, and Bill Lawrence's Scrubs was a series I enjoyed quite a bit...for a time... so I did think there was something possible here.

But the coneciet for Cougar Town was Cox, newly divorced, would be prowling around her small-town oceanside Florida community preying upon men 20 years younger than her.  By the half way point of the first season, it was obvious that the writers, performers, and creators weren't really feeling that.  The cast dynamic (Brian Van Holt, Busy Phillips, Christa Miller, Dan Byrd and Ian Gomez) was pretty phenomenal pretty immediately, so the show wisely started twisting more into that friendship.  By the end of the first season the show was starting to regret its title (and in subsequent seasons there would be some joke made over the opening title card at the title's expense).

The phrase "Cul-de-sac Crew" is coined in Season 2 and is basically the center of the show.  It's a group of goofballs who are more family than friends that love to sit around drinking and doing a lot of goofy shit for their own (and our) amusement.  As much as any show, Cougartown grew to be one of those things my wife and I would quote in our daily life.

So it was always disappointing that the show only ever emerged on DVD for Season 1, the weakest season.  But finding out that Showcase  ABC Spark(?) in Canada was airing 2 episodes daily, we set the PVR and have dived right back in, remembering things we had forgotten and discovering the origin of in-jokes that we hadn't remembered. 

We love this show.  It's comfort food.  We started our rewatch at episode 11, which is the halfway point of Season 1.  We weren't too sad to miss the floundering first dozen episodes.  By this entry point, the show is on its way to becoming its silly self.


[1:28:49]

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It starts out very strong in jail, but once he's out, moof

Season 7 was a pretty wild ride for Oliver Queen, but for the most part made for pretty lousy viewing.  Arrow has been a wildly uneven show throughout its run and Season 7 typifies both the good and bad of the show.  It opens with Oliver Queen in jail, which made for some very entertaining stories.  But then he got out of jail, and he retired from being Green Arrow... again.  But then he had to come out of retirement because someone was impersonating him, and not doing the most stand-up job.  Then Team Arrow got deputized.  But that deputization was a tenuous relationship.  And then it turns out the new Green Arrow was Oliver's half sister he didn't know exist and she still has daddy issues and wanted to take it out on Oliver and his city.

There's so much cycling nonsense in Arrow, overpowered characters with silly motivations that are doing big damage to Olver and everything he loves.  Oliver has wrestled with fighting his family and friends so much that at this point it's exhausting to see him go through it again and again and again.  Especially when he's come to a resolution on an issue, like his no killing policy, only to wrestle with whether he should kill again, and again, and again.  So many dramatic moments are revisited that 7 seasons in its tired and lagging.  At least Oliver in prison had stakes, had some of that magic of revisiting his past and dealing his present sensibility.

Consistency of chracterization was never Arrow's strong suit, but it's at its worst in Season 7... just a thoroughly frustrating ride with moments of inspiration.  The "flash forward" this season takes place about 20 years in the future, and follows Oliver and Felicity's adult daughter Mia in a dystopian Star City.  It brings Roy Harper back into the fold and is generally filled with some fun ideas.  Its story is actually far more fulfilling than the rest of the season (even though it mainly takes up about 7 minutes of any given episode...if it appears at all).

The biggest problem with Arrow is its episode lenght.  Sustaining things for 20+ episodes a season is too big an order.  It survives not on story (which, as noted, can vary wildly) nor character (they do wrong by these characters just as often as they do right) but by sheer charisma of the performers.  Stephen Amell primarily went from being the weak link of season 1 to the show's MVP pretty much the rest of the series.  He's a very captivating, charming, likeable performer.

Season 8, with the Crisis on Infinite Earths looming, is only 10 episodes and I thing should be a much tighter, better executed, more entertaining story that is Oliver Queen's swan song ending with someting spectacularly epic.  I'm actually super excited for it, and hopefully will not be too let down (as I always want something more out of these Arrowverse shows and crossovers that I never seem to get, but Crisis seems determined to deliver)

[1:42:14]
(I should be done by now but ...superheroes)
---

this poster is sadly more exciting than the show

I'm not sure what to say about Legends of Tomorrow at this point.  Season 3 took a big turn for the weird and I embraced it for it.  It got very silly at times but it understood how to use that silliness to provide maximum entertainment.  I mean, the giant Beebo fight was one hell of a payoff.

But season 4 continues on a path I wasn't really thrilled about for the show.  What should have been a huge showcase for bringing live-action versions of DC's B- and C-list pantheon to the big screen has instead become about goofball magical creatures and can't-take-it-seriously demonic bullshit.

The draw of having Matt Ryan's John Constantine seems to be the impetus for the show's direction the past two season.  But where as last season had the cast having to adjust and deal with their new magical reality, this season they seem way too comfortable within it.  And it get's corny, very very corny.  Like, 90's syndicated TV corny.  With effects to match.

The show doesn't want to be a superhero show anymore.  Things that would be logical for a superhero with superpowers to do seem to never cross the characters' minds in this show, and it's utterly frustrating.

The cast now consists of over half original Arrowverse or Legends creations, like Ava, Gary, Nora Darhk, Mona, Charlie... who are these people infecting my "DC's Legends of Tomorrow" series?  There's fewer and fewer references to the DC universe and when they do they tend to botch it (this season's take on Neron was duuuulllll).

The time travel element has become a cheap and easy mechanism for the show and it doesn't really have logical purpose anymore.  And it's not that I don't sometimes enjoy the show (the cast is very, very fun) and characters like Gary and Ava are actually my favourites on the show, the whole thing just seems aimless, and not really what I'm looking for.  It does a lot for representation, which I love, but I wish it represented in a less chintzy package.  If not for the looming Crisis, I would be out for Season 5.

[1:54:33]
(...I like talking about superheroes...)
---

Thunder...the best superhero character on TV

Because I pretty much took the year off from reviewing in 2018, I don't have a write-up of Season 1 of Black Lightning.  It's a superhero show on the CW, but it's built outside of -- or at least to the side of -- the Arrowverse proper.  If we're talking multiverse theory, it's an alternate Earth in the Arrowverse and therefore unlikely to interact with or be interfered with by the events of Arrow or Flash or whatever.

That's probably for the best as Black Lightning builds its own reality in the city of Freeland.  If Metropolis is Chicago, and Gotham is New York, Freeland is Atlanta (where they shoot the show).  It's a city divided by race and having a black superhero has some real meaning.

Season One established the city, it established its struggles with violence, it established its politics, its police, its crime.  It established Black Lightning as a retired superhero who must come out of retirement, it established his family dynamic as Jefferson "Black Lightning" Pierce successfully reconnects with his estranged wife and his daughter.  It establishes his daughters discovering they have superpowers, with Anyssa becoming like her dad, a superhero, while Jennifer's powers are beyond her control.  It established Tobias Whale, a ruthless gangster with super strength who never ages who has been running the town for 30 years.  It establishes Jefferson's role in the community, as a leader and principal of a high school.  It established a lot, even more than all that.  But by the end of it, the show has turned so much of what it established on its head, and season 2 has to deal with that.

Season 2 deals with the ASA (some secretive government thing) that was responsible for giving Jefferson his lightning powers, and the discovery that there's more like him, some out on the loose in society, some still contained in pods after 30 years.  Tobias has a keen interest in obtaining these "pod kids" and using their powers for his profit, but as always Black Lightning is a thorn in his side.  Lynn Pierce starts working for the ASA to protect and help the pod kids, which is its own world of trouble.  Anyssa, starts moonlighting as another Robin Hood type hero, Black Bird, stealing from the mob and giving to those in need, while also dealing with the disappearance of her girlfriend, Grace.  Jennifer has an encounter with her childhood crush Kaleel who has since become the mob enforcer Painkiller, only for him to about face and the two go on the run, but not before Jennifer learns to control her powers...somewhat.  Gamby (Jefferson's foster father) fakes his death as he becomes the target of a mysterious organization.  Meanwhile Jefferson has lost his Principal job, and the new principle is...difficult.  Oh, and Markovians, a rogue nation with a lot of black book metahuman projects, is starting a war in freeland.

A lot happens this season, and it's actually pretty great.  The show structures itself in "books" with multiple chapters, so it makes binging a contained effort, with starting and stopping points.  It's generally well constructed and doesn't tread familiar ground too often, which is a real problem for these CW shows.

The acting is hit or miss, with the Pierce family, thankfully all being incredible with a fantastic dynamic that feels like real family, with them supporting and fighting with each other with knowing familiarity.  Some of the other cast though, like James Remar as Gamby or Marvin "Krondon" Jones III as Tobias Whale being a little iffy, if not sometimes really really bad in their roles.  Jones I can understand, as he's not a very experienced actor who has to hold most of the scenes he's in on his own, so it's a lot.  But Remar, man, has been around forever, and with Gamby it's never close to believable that he's a bad-ass superspy, nor someone who is intimately connected with the Pierce family.  The Pierce's sell it on their end at least.

Season 1 was good, but season 2 was exciting.  The show negotiates the drama of superheros and family and relationships exceptionally well.  It deals with the community of Freeland also very well, with the Church playing an important part of guaging the impact of crime and superheroes on the community.  If there is a weak spot in the story, it's in believing that Tobias Whale is a really good mobster.  He's to impetuous and prone to some stupid ideas that should have found him in jail a very long time ago.

By the end of the season the show has gotten deeper into its superhero mythology without taking its boots off the ground. It's introduced a lot of familiar concepts from the Outsiders comic book but in its own way, and it does so with a clear focus on representing the African-American experience in so many of its facets.

It's a very good show, close to being great.  It's still genre television, but it's smart and cool.  Looking forward to season 3, and to Cress Williams showing up in Crisis.

[2:19:37]

(...so much for 10 minutes per...but you got me talking about superhero shows,man...)

31 Days of Halloween: Little Monsters

2019, Abe Forsythe (Ned) -- download

[ed note: November 21, 2019 -- brief hiatus while i struggled (again) with why the fuck do I even do this?]

A zombie comedy feel good movie. I didn't know how much I needed this movie until I watched it. I guess it goes along with my current attraction to the unbearably cheesy formulaic romantic movies that come to us by way of the Hallmark channel but run on network TV during the weekends. My brain just needs something like my belly needs cheesy corn chip products after leaving work. It just fills some void.

Dave (him, not me. shaddup) is a loser, a loser who thinks he can keep his girlfriend no matter how little he tries, no matter how much he tries to delude himself into believing he will be a successful musician. He does lose her, her does end up sleeping on his sister's sofa and he does end up almost getting kicked out of that refuge. But he connects with his little nephew, a little scaredy cat, and joins the kid on a school trip to an outback animal park.

Did I mention the movie is set in Australia? The movie does its best to play it down, especially considering the two leads (besides Dave) are Lupita Nyong'o and Josh Gad. Yep, two Lupita movies in one season --- I am not complaining (*swoon*). Lupita plays the teacher that all the dads are hitting on. No shit Sherlock! She's bubbly, beautiful and in complete control of her classroom of little monsters. Get it, little monsters? Yeah, when the American base next to the animal park happens to lose control of its zombie soldiers, the true monsters are released.

The actual playthrough of her class and Dave surviving the zombie hordes (which are full of bitten kiddies and parents) is pretty formulaic, so the fun comes in Miss Caroline proving she is more than a pretty face and a yellow dress, and Dave proving he can care for someone other than himself. Gad has a blast playing the kid show host who out-assholes Dave. Unlike most zombie movies, they don't lose character after character until only a few survive (as most are kids) but with some satisfaction, we do get to say goodbye to Gad before Miss Caroline's singing saves everyone.

31 Days of Halloween: Les Affamés

2017, Robin Aubert (Tuktuq) -- Netflix

See below's commentary on taking the usual and doing something fresh with it. Nothing can be more the usual than a zombie movie. It's a great challenge to take such an overworked genre and do something that could satisfy both zombie AND general horror movie fans. I am glad to see that most of the audiences enjoyed it, though admittedly it would be considered a slow challenge for some.

The other thing that makes this movie really stand out is that it is from Quebec. I really wish I had more exposure to the Quebec film industry, but unfortunately only rare entries actually leak out. I have always had a feeling that the industry there is so strong, Hollywood skilled strong, that it doesn't need the rest of the world. But I believe the rest of Canada is missing out. The few I have seen are just so distinctly Quebec, very much a product of their environment, not like the generic Toronto or Vancouver movies that are often trying hard to be milquetoast, appealing to anyone from anywhere, washing out the distinct natures of the regions.

In rural Quebec, the zombie apocalypse is in deep throes. Two men laugh it up, telling cheesy jokes as they burn bodies. They are armed and cautious but bleeding off tension with the terrible juvenile humour. On their return they see some zombies they recognize, or are they just lost neighbours? Investigation requires caution and silence, but alas, these are fast zombies, more the infected attackers of sub-genres, and one of the men goes down quickly. The other man moves on. A chilling little bit, in that the man who dies sees a small child in a tree, before he goes down. He does not tell the other man. What becomes of the child is unknown.

The story is thin, a moving "road story" that follows Bonin, the survivor above, as he connects with and loses other survivors. I am not sure they really have a destination, but are just moving away from the ravenous hordes that attracted to sound and movement. Along the way they begin to see something strange, weird towers built by the hordes, towers of random ephemera like electronics or chairs. There is no rhyme or reason, just ... a strangeness. It reminded me of the programmed zombies from Stephen King's Cell.

Viewers have accused the movie of having no story, but I actually really enjoyed that aspect of it. It ends up being more about the characters, the people and just survivors. One of my many many novel sketches involves telling a zombie story as the bite passes from person to person, carrying the story forward as one person changes and we focus on the next person. At the end of this movie little is explained, but I found myself very satisfied.

31 Days of Halloween: The Devil's Doorway

2018, Aislinn Clarke (Childer) -- download

Catholicism. Exorcism. Found Footage. Evil deeds being done behind locked doors. All of these have become solid tropes in the horror movie biz. Tired? Overused? Yes, of course they are. But that is where the idea of trope comes from -- a reusable / familiar idea that can draw the unwary in. If done well, you can feel you are experiencing a new idea, a skilled presentation of something that attracts you.

Clarke obviously went with this idea. She took a horrific moment of Irish history, the Magdalene Laundries where "fallen women" were sent to be hidden in these convents, where they worked primarily in laundries to pay for their own incarceration. Clarke, who gets the place of being Ireland's first woman to direct a horror movie, used this background to explore the evil that people can do on others. And she builds her horror movie around familiar ideas embedded in other horrors.

The problem is that while using this real life circumstance as a backdrop, she actually deflates the historical significance of the events by attaching Satanism and Witchcraft to the evils wrought, instead of it being a true & classic human evil. That takes away much, and it is very strange, for the movie begins with even the almost faithless Father Thomas with a distrust and suspicion of the Sisters behind the convent.

In the end its just a jump scare filled run of the mill horror movie with some good themes that are wasted behind forgettable superstition.

31 Days of Halloween: Rune of the Dead

2019, Rasmus Tirzitis (Vilsen) -- download

Or The Huntress: Rune of the Dead.

And then there is that movie that has, at its core something scary, but turns out to be just an atmospheric period fantasy story. In the game Skyrim one of the primary low level enemies are the Draugr, basically Undead Vikings. Draug is an actual Scandinavian word for the undead, so it's not surprising that a Scandinavian movie would take advantage of them to setup a scary antagonist.

Runa lives with her mother, younger sister and blind grandfather while father has gone off on a viking raid. Mother is depressed and Runa is bitter. She spends her days doing chores and hunting in the woods, showing off the skill with the bow that her father instilled in her. Their blind grandfather provides wisdom and a reminder that they shouldn't give up on his son.

One day Runa comes across a wounded soldier, a man who claims to know their father and assures her he is still alive. She drags the man back to their home and demands that they help him. When he recovers he tells the family of successful raiding, treasure gained but of an unintended curse, and how the survivors of the raid set upon each other to claim the gold for themselves. Soon after, father does arrive home, but beset with a deep worry; is it PTSD or something else?

I find that recaps, while needing to impart where the story is going, are often boring filler to any writing about a movie. They can be soulless and utilitarian. But for this movie, much felt the same way. While there was a definite style, a moody fearful theme, where Runa flows from anger at her mother and father (one for not being there, the other for not being entirely there) to calm repose in the forest, to the occasional prophetic waking dream filled with fear and an unknowable future horror, much of the movie felt more like a viewing of someone's decent LARPing event. It didn't have much life in it.

Finally the movie does swing around to where it was actually going, with the dead men seeking to reclaim the gold come looking for Runa's father and the other warrior. By this point, all scariness that was foreshadowed has been drained out of us. Think the final season of Game of Thrones where we accept the story has to go that way, but it ends up being more rushed and boring than a culmination of the built up story. There are draugr and there is tragedy, but.... yawn.

31 Days of Halloween: Us

2019, Jordan Peele (Get Out) -- download

Wandering through the dross, leaving the ones I know I will enjoy to be scattered amidst the rest, so I cannot just end up feeling apathetic about this whole yearly endeavour. Oh dear, even with that sentence I guess I can say that even a fan who enjoys even just the concept of horror movies can be weighed down by just the boredom of much of the genre.

*shake it off*

Jordan Peele comes almost with his follow-up to the pretty much perfect Get Out. While not in the calibre of his debut, it again shows off his fondness for horror and even the whole Twilight Zone affection, which, I guess, is why he is the new Rod Serling? This movie, is like an episode of said show expanded into a full run, with only a slight hint at having stretched too thin.

Typical Middle Class family (this time he dispenses with black social commentary and just gives us a family) made up of Winston Duke (Black Panther), Lupita Nyong'o and their two kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph & Evan Alex) are heading to the summer house for a deserved vacation. Something tense is going on, mom being nervous and depressed about something. Dad is just trying to make it OK.

Oh, noteworthy preamble about mom, as a kid, getting lost on a beach front boardwalk and running into her mirror doppelganger. Afterwards she is just not right.

Speaking of just not right. Lupita presents us with someone who is more than just depressed or introverted. You can see her trying, trying to interact, trying to connect with other people, but eventually giving up, preferring to just be her alone self instead of faking it. That is something to be said of many introverts, even if we don't have a dark trauma in our past.

And then they show up. The movie goes from tense to tense when a quartet of people dressed in red jumpsuits appear in the driveway and see entry to the house. Instantly we learn they are twisted versions of the family them-self. Agenda? Who knows, but escape is on the table. This is where we see Lupita come out of her malaise, to take control, to protect her family, to violently defend. The middle act of the movie is wonderfully tight and nerve-wracking

And then things get even weirder. This is where we enter the Twilight Zone. There are more than just THOSE doppelgangers. There seems to be an emergence of MANY, at least one for each person in this town, if not all America. And they are killing each and every one of their originals. While I can say that this might have an example of over-explaining a weird plot element, I like that Peele went from chilling to weird & absurd. This was right down my wheelhouse, to mix my metaphors as I am wont to do.

31 Days of Halloween: Slaughterhouse Rulez

2018, Crispian Mills (A Fantastic Fear of Everything) -- Crave

Simon Pegg, Margot Robbie, Nick Frost, Michael Sheen and Asa Butterfield -- a pretty damn good British cast for a comedy monster movie, wouldn't you say? Mills must have some friends in high British film society to gather this crowd for a mid-grade boarding school movie with monsters. And he pulls a decent performance out of everyone involved.

But... Try as I might to spin this in a positive direction, as I am trying to at least do something other than complain (in life, in posts), but this movie.

OK, we can at least be neutral in the re-cap. Middle class kid gets into posh boarding school where immediately he is tossed into the section reserved for outcasts, and assigned to being the roommate of class weirdo Willoughby Blake (Asa Butterfield). Michael Sheen is the oblivious Head Master funding the school via fracking, happening just on the other side of the border wood. Pegg is the oblivious teacher with Robbie playing his GF Skype-ing in her performance via Pegg's laptop. Frost is the oblivious eco-protester / drug dealer camped near the fracking site, with a tragic connection to the school's past. You get the idea of how the adults are cast?

Damn, failed at even that.

The first hour of the movie just blunders through the standard tropes of boarding schools. There are rich kids, "poor" kids, weird kids, rituals and feeble attempts at commentary on class structure. I kept on wondering when they were going to get to the actual monsters of the monster movie, but they spent most of the time setting the setting. Character development? No, not really. Expansive plot? No, not really.

When we finally get to the point of the movie, its pretty familiar fare. Monsters emerge, kids run, bad (aka rich) kids get eaten, adults get picked off one by one, until the rag tag bunch of main characters (including one rich girl the main character has a crush on) find a way to defeat the monsters and escape (barely, always barely) with their lives. Yawn.

Opportunity wasted.

31 Days of Halloween: The Revenant

2009, Kerry Prior (Roadkill) -- download

No, not Leonardo and the Bear, but a zombie buddie movie starring David Anders in a role as a mostly likable walking dead who teams up with his buddy to fight crime. David Anders, who we actually know from another undead series, iZombie, where he played the charismatic and, honestly, likable Bad Guy Blaine DeBeers, seems meant to play charismatic bad guys. He has that rock & roll, sleek aesthetic about him which appeals to me.

Here, a decade ago, he plays Bart, an American soldier killed in Iraq but who, for no reason ever explained, rises from the dead, not long after his funeral. There is a hint at the opening about Bart being one of these guys who just does the right thing, no matter how bad an idea it is. And then that thought is dispensed with for the rest of the movie, so we can just have a violent buddy zombie comedy.

Early in the movie, Bart struggles to understand what he is and WHY he is, but with the unwise help of his ultra-slacker best friend, they just end up becoming vigilantes, killing the Bad Guys of LA, which works out well for the people they save and Bart, who gets to suck the blood of said Bad Guys, rejuvenating him for a while. Is he a zombie? A vampire? A bit of both - a revenant !!

This movie struck me as one that started with one idea, but evolved when the creators just had too much fun doing the buddy comedy vigilante stuff. Eventually they ran out of hijinx to put on the screen and had to lead it somewhere, to some sort of climax. That climax, with Bart discovering almost all the people he killed are now back also as revenants, is ridiculous and out of character for the rest of the movie, especially when the US military gets involved. The movie is entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying.

31 Days of Halloween: In the Tall Grass

2019, Vincenzo Natali (The Cube) -- Netflix

Stephen King and his son Joe Hill (King) get together and write a creepy novella together. It takes a simple idea -- turn a field of tall grasses (bamboo?) into something menacing. As long as you don't over explain, as long as you don't dig too deep in the loamy soil. Once you explain too much, the fearful will fade; the fear lies in the unknown.

So then, why did Natali do just that? I recall his The Cube as being so enigmatic, so utterly bizarre and unreal there could be no real explanation. And I believe that mystery is what made it successful. Our head canon ends up doing all the work for us.

I have commented before on how there is a familiar visual trope of following a lone car down a wooded road, from far above above. You see the wide expanse, unbroken by human influence. The utter vastness of a woodland vista instills a sense of fear in us; something primal. Here there be monsters. The Kings switched that to grasslands, but the trope lives on as we see Cal and Becky driving through the Heartland, grass on all sides of them. Becky is pregnant, and her brother Cal is driving her away from her old life, to begin again, sans the coming baby's father. They pull over, so Becky can get sick, near an age-old church with a bunch of cars in its lot. And then they hear the child's voice from the field, beckoning them to come help him find his way out.

The first act is the core of the Kings' story -- once in the field, you are forever in the field. Voices shift location, the grass is just tall enough to obscure a good vantage point, and your sense of direction is obliterated. What ill intentioned force is doing this to our characters? Who is Tobin the child, and why do we immediately distrust his dirty face. What is the big rock, not quite a rock, at the "centre" of it all? How many people has the field "eaten" ?

If the movie had only kept with the mystery, kept the explanations and expansions at a minimum. Suddenly you can see the tale spinning off its axis, adding in phantasmagorphic visions and imagery of other things in the fields. It is trying to build a mythology around the goings on, but really it just muddies the ponding water.

Natali does not succeed with this movie, if but for the visuals. The swirling, swaying unnatural grass vista is enthralling. Its waves are not wind born. Its motions and sounds are not from insects and nature. If only he had kept to this minimal horror, this focus on the unknown, this reliance on fear, I would have loved this movie.

31 Days of Halloween: Satanic Panic

2019, Chelsea Stardust (Slay Per View) -- download

I dance around the edges of pop culture subcultures. I am not a Trekkie, I am not a cosplayer, hells, I don't even attend the Fan Expo. I am a lurker, not a participant. I have observed the Horror subculture, those goth & metal and counter-culture kids who love everything Horror related. We have been in line with them at Midnight Madness, attended the occasional rep movie viewing with them. I even know a few who could be labelled as such. But no, not me.

This subculture does more than dive into fandom, as many are active participants in perpetuating the genre -- they are part of the making of the movies. Based on her credits, I imagine Chelsea Stardust to be one. She's been on the crew of a lot of the recognizable movies of the genre, and a couple of interviews tell her to be a big fan of the genre. But the problem is, and this is where my preamble leads, is that sometimes these creators are ... too deep into it. While I appreciate making things for the love of it, as we well know I am not good at this blogging, but, damn, a lot of the movies made by this subculture are the worst of the lot. They seem to exist to just play on the tropes, to point out how much they love horror.

Satanic Panic pits a pizza girl against the ultra-wealthy who get their power & prestige from worshipping Hell. She blunders into their ritual seeking to shame them into a tip, and ends up being their token virgin sacrifice. They chase her around the massive mansions of the neighbourhood casting spells and sicking low-budget monsters after her. Eventually she is captured and they complete their ritual. And then there are bunnies.

There is decent acting, some fun characters, capable effects and a fun, quirky sensibility to the movie. But, for the love of Baphomet, do something interesting !!  This movie was just so fucking deep in Meh. And this is coming from me, someone who can at least enjoy the middle of the road of the genre! In the end it almost seemed to be a showcase piece for horror movie makers (see! decent gore practical effects! see! we know our Satanic lingo!) instead of a movie for the viewers.