31 Days of Halloween: Hokum

2026, Damian McCarthy (Oddity) -- Amazon

Yes, a proper horror movie including creepy Irish mythos, ghosts and a haunted top floor to an quaint, old hotel. Oh, and a Dick American, but these days they are a horror unto themselves. We rather enjoyed McCarthy's last one, Oddity, creeped out by the actual oddity thing that played the titular role, and followed it not a few days later with his Caveat. He is keen on the creepy and if I can say one thing about this movie, it's that it elicited the first "AHHH!" jump scare in years -- I actually yelled out loud. 

The preamble gives us Ohm Bauman (quite the name; Adam Scott, Little Evil) sitting in his expensive concrete house, late at night, writing on his laptop. The book is about a conquistador seeking a lost treasure in the desert, which comes down to the treasure map stuck inside a bottle, and the only way (questionable) for him to smash the bottle, is on the back of a kid's head. But beyond the shitty whiskey fueled conundrum of his writing, he is also haunted by a ghostly figure he sees in shadows.

Later we find Ohm in Ireland, bringing the ashes of his mother & father to be scattered near the quaint inn where they had their honeymoon. Quaint means odd characters, like the one who killed a goat with a hand-crossbow and a creepy old man in a wheelchair who likes to scare children with tales of Irish witches dragging children through Hell at the end of chains. Ohm is not a shy man, letting everyone know his opinion on killing goats and scaring kids with stories. Oh, and the guy in woods drinking milk laced with magic mushrooms, who shares his uisce beatha ("ishka baha", or "water of life"; moonshine) with Ohm. Rural regions of any country are always colourful.

Ohm doesn't exactly endear himself with the staff of the hotel, quite literally burning the hand of the bellhop (Will O'Connell, Top Boy), who wants to share his manuscript with the famed writer, with a spoon heated from the candle inside a hollowed rutabaga jack-o-lantern (it's Halloween season), but the bartender Fiona (Florence Odesh, Foundation) doesn't draw his ire, nor he hers. Not long after being asked to drink his last at the hotel bar, she and the bellhop find Ohm having hanged himself. I guess the catharsis that brought him to Ireland did not go well.

He awakens in the hospital, weeks later. There is no awkward checking out or police, but its sure awkward when he goes to the hotel to collect his belongings. Now weeks after the Halloween party, and he learns Fiona disappeared that night, not long after finding Ohm. He learns that Jerry (David Wilmot, Bodkin), the mushroom milk guy, is their prime suspect, him being a vagrant with a shady past, and Ohm is compelled to track Jerry down, as her feels somewhat beholden to Fiona. 

Instead of a suspect, he gets a story of Fiona being murdered, Jerry having seen a ghostly visage of her, leading him to believe she is in the hotel's Honeymoon Suite, which has been cut-off since some sort of witch situation years ago -- the suite being accessible only via a chained & locked elevator, so the police (garda) never even bothered looking at the rooms. Jerry has already stolen the key and knows the hotel will be empty after that night, it being the end of the season.

Buuuut Jerry gets caught by the Fergal (Michael Patric, Frontier), the goat hand-crossbow guy, and is carted off, leaving Ohm to inspect the more-than-properly eerie Honeymoon Suite. He is helped by Mal (Peter Coonan, The Alienist), the concierge of the hotel, who finds Ohm after Fergal drives off with Jerry. And sure enough, he finds Fiona's body! She's in a dumb waiter that leads to a basement that has also been sealed off for years. Mal had led Ohm upstairs, hoping to put the whole thing to bed, not expecting Ohm to trigger the dumbwaiter's hatch and discover her body. He's the murderer, and rushes off, locking Ohm inside the room, chaining & locking the elevator behind him. 

This is when things get properly fucking scary. Interestingly enough, McCarthy does not present the movie with Ohm losing his shit. Sure, things have gone from weird to murder-y, and Ohm does start seeing ghostly visions, but he keeps his head, trying to figure a way out, while being haunted by memories and ghosts. You see, Ohm has had ghosts his entire life because, as a child, he acidentally killed his own mother with his father's gun, and his father drank himself to death afterwards. Mom is the effective jumpscare that got me, an apparition following around behind Ohm in her bloodied yellow dress. 

But that's nothing compared to the Barbarian style tunnel in the basement, that ends in a pair of "don't open me" doors. But no way out; just cinderblock walled up stairs. Oh, and the witch ghost that follows him up and OUT of the dumbwaiter. That's alright, Ohm remembers the chalk circle of protection and spends the rest of the night in honeymoon bed and she's gone by morning. Then a bloodied but determined Jerry shows up, having escaped Fergal and come back to find Mal, who already has a story cooked up about dropping the drunken Ohm at the airport. But Ohm has remembered what Jerry told him about Fiona's ghost pulling the long mechanical bell ringer, and alerts Jerry who goes upstairs to free Ohm. Alas, he is killed by Mal but not before Ohm can steal the keys to the still locked elevator (dude, you should have just left it opened until everyone was dead dead) and goes down into the witchy hallway to hide, hoping to fend her off with his chalk. It kind of works? He is captured in chains as well, but more importantly, Mal is carted off into the room at the end of the hall ... that is the doorway to Hell? Ohm, with the insistence of his mother's ghost, cuts himself free of the chains, escapes upstairs, and then back downstairs again via elevator and is rescued from the burning building by Fergal.

Again the hospital, the tale of woe is shared with the bellhop. Bodies were found, including Fiona's, but not Mal's. Mal had gotten Fiona pregnant and was worried by both what his boss and his wife would say. Fucking, men. Ohm has been saved, and relieved of his life long guilt and decides to finish off his conquistador story with a happier ending, as Fiona had asked.

Wow, I won't be doing recaps like that very often. It makes me tired before I can even mention how well-crafted the atmosphere of the movie was, being both eerie and ... capable? We even get some traditional questioning of our ghostly experiences, by the bellhop admitting he spiked Ohm's whiskey with Jerry's magic mushrooms, which probably explains utterly terrifying visions Ohm had (like the bunny costumed kids show host that blames Ohm for his mother's death) but not how Mal is carried off into Hell. Did he see ghosts? Was it all guilt and magic mushrooms? Hell of a lot to go through for family therapy. Yep, lots to chew on in this movie.

More Backrooms

the original backroom image

I eat this stuff right up. My brain, during its formative years, was trained by comic books and Star Wars, the X-Files and Twin Peaks, Unsolved Mysteries and In Search Of... to consume lore and be enthused by the unknown, the weird, and the askew.  Watching Backrooms in theatres, cold, having no experience with the horror sub-subgenre or Kane Parsons work as Kane Pixels on youtube didn't matter in the slightest. Backrooms provides very little in the way of answers, and any answers it does provide are pretty much formed with question marks at the end. Speculation, not answers. 

What was clear about the cinematic Backrooms was that we, as an audience, may not have gotten satisfying answers as to what was going on, nor do any of the characters truly understand what's happening, but it's absolutely clear that Parsons himself knows precisely what is happening. And he's not telling, he's showing, but in pieces.

What I wasn't clear on while sitting in the movie theatre, thoroughly absorbed in Parson's uncomfortable alt-reality, was whether Backrooms was its own thing, a soft reboot of the work he did online, or if it was just a part of it. It the days since, consuming Parsons' Backrooms youtube videos, a few other videos from avid fans who obsess over the details of Parsons' Backrooms, and interview videos and podcasts with Parsons himself, it's clear it's definitely just one part of the whole. You don't need to have seen the web series, but if you want to know more, it will definitely tell you more.

Parsons' youtube series, which he started working on at 16, opens with a group of kids in 1990 making a horror movie with a camcorder, when the kid with the camera falls through a soft spot in reality and finds himself in the backrooms. It is then 9 minutes this "character" exploring digitally created spaces (using Blender, open source 3-D modelling software) through the camcorder lens, digital tracking fuzz laid over top of it all to really give that grainy and retro vibe.  It's effectiveness is at least 50% sound design, just the ominous buzz of fleurescent lighting, a pervasive humm (very Lynchian), the characters' shuffling footsteps, the haunting howls of *something* in the distance.  It's intense and captivating, and then the thing from the distance is right in front of you. It's completely channelling first-person shooter vibes, sans the action. If you turn the corner and something unreal is in front of you, there's no shooting, the only choice is to run away. It's something that will happen again and again in this series.

That might sound repetitive, but it's not the only trick up Parsons' sleeve.

While that first video was just a thing Parsons made adapting the ideations on backrooms on message boards into a video, the second video Parsons release is a sub-3-minute montage of images of all sorts of retro imagery of odd spaces and pre-90's technology and people using such technology (with their eyes or faces blacked out) and out of context bits of text...all once again seeming like it's being played on a grainy video, its haunting soundtrack warbling in and out.  The next video, once again playing like a worn-out video cassette tape features more imagery of blueprints as a creepy-as-hell digitized voice starts to explain about magnetic distortion experiments that revealed the backrooms and the plan was to use such spaces as ...storage. We then see the video from 1988 of the third test showing the opening of a portal.

Currently, there are 22 videos in the series and many of them are just short moody atmospheric pieces, showing imagery that is meant to expand and connect the lore of Parsons' Backrooms together, others are more FPS exploration videos, and still others are communications from Async, the in-world corporation that is trying to figure out how to monetize the backrooms while also studying them.

There is a multi-video narrative arc around the hazmat-suited teams that explore the spaces, and how one of them, Peter Tench, disappeared one day while exploring the backrooms. Given what the Async team already knew about the dangers of the backrooms, they presumed Tench dead, when in reality he had been pushed forward two months ahead in time. Tench found his way into an Async control room and triggered an alarm. But his reappearance led to other, more dramatic problems. And more questions.

The distortion of reality in the backrooms, it's reinforced in both the web series and the movies, has pretty disastrous effects on the mental state of people who find themselves alone in the space for any extended period of time. As we see multiple times through the web series, there are multiple (increasing) soft spots in reality that people (and birds) fall through, some of them with video cameras.

As a physical exploratory space, there isn't much logic to the backrooms, why they twist and wind and connect the way they do, but as you dive into the series you can begin to intuitively grasp what it is even if it's not easy to describe with any surety. The repetition of certain areas, or certain types of areas, intones that there's a reason for them. A sequence in the film finds the camera panning down from a room in reality to that same room layers and layers deep into the backrooms, the distortion of the reality of each room more and more evident the further down you go, almost like echoes, growing fainter the more it reverberates.  This is what makes the backrooms so compelling...that you can almost grasp what's going on, but just not quite.

There are multiple types of creatures in the backrooms, including weird mould/fungal monsters, distorted remnants of half-remembered people, and haunting creatures that are dark Ids made real.  Some of them wail, some of them mimic human speech, some of them do both.  While the backrooms are seemingly endless, it doesn't seem like you can exist within the space long without encountering one of these beings, and they're not docile, even if some of them are ...edible? The very first creature in Parsons' first video is pretty doofy, but each monster after that has been effectively creepy.

Parsons works not just in Blender, but multimedia. There are videos that feature real people in real environments, and real people in digital environments. Real images are manipulated into surreal images, and Parsons' use of electronic music, typically slow, eerie, haunting chords, contributes deeply to the atmosphere (at times the music will drown out the words spoken in the video, implying that mood is more important than what's being said, or, perhaps, toying with the audience by further burying information behind the sounds). Parsons uses voice actors throughout his productions to varying degrees of effectiveness, but he always nails the tone, so even mediocre vocal performances get a pass.

Especially with the first-person-shooter (in this case the "shooter" is the video camera) videos that track through the backrooms, it's often too evident that it's a digital reality. This is no shade on Parsons who is very effectively working with the tools afforded to a teenager, but wow, is it ever a level-up to see these environments cast into reality on the big screen. And the realization of the backrooms from digital into actual sets is phenomenal. 

The film adds the next layer to the Backrooms mythos. While the youtube videos explores the mythology behind it all, the film explores characters and how they are affected by - and affecting - the backrooms. This idea, barely hinted at in the youtube videos, is the sole thrust of the movie. But, again, answers are actually shadows of answers. Satisfaction not guaranteed.

In interviews Parsons has said he would like Backrooms to continue as an anthology TV series, and that seems like the obvious direction for this to go. But given its thunderous success at the box office, it's more likely a second feature will happen before a TV series (let's get real, a streaming series) does. 

I am all-in on this ride. While I worry that maybe Parsons doesn't yet have the life experience or awareness to handle much outside this sphere of creepy, moody, atmospheric pieces, it's clear he's very assured and purposeful in his direction and that he has many talents when it comes to putting vibes and aesthetics together. He's cultivated a pretty substantial audience for a reason, so talent is not lacking. With this property, at least, he seems to know exactly where it's going, if maybe not entirely what it's saying.

31 Days of Halloween: Never Let Go

2024, Alexandre Aja (Horns) -- download

Its a pet peeve of mine, but I am not fond of movies that give you the choice of believing whether its a monster or supernatural being, or believing the person is just suffering mental health challenges. I am fine if you give the characters that choice, as that is a dominant trope in horror movies (given what people experience in horror movies, most people would think them off their rocker) but when the viewer is left feeling unsure, I get annoyed. There was the briefest of moments where I thought, "Yes, its explained, we are sure their is a monster," but then, thinking back on it, I was again left... unsure, and annoyed.

Momma (Hallee Berry, Gothika) lives in a remote Cabin in the Woods with her twin sons Samuel (Anthony B Jenkins, The Deliverance) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV, Paradise). Upon introduction, you can see the boys are malnourished, food-wise and human interaction-wise. They are literally tethered to the house by ropes, long ropes that unfurl from a conduit under the house. In the woods, Momma constantly reminds, is The Evil and if they let go of the rope, it will get inside them and force them to kill each other, as it did their father, and her mother before them. Age ago, Momma reminds, the world fell to evil and her father built the house away from wicked people, and The Evil, and imbued upon it a ritual of magic, wherein the blessings of the wood of the house protect those within its light or tethered to its heart. They live by this hard-and-fast rule.

But its been a hard winter. The green house's abundance has died off, the animals they hunt did not return in the spring, and the family has resorted to eating whatever they find, including bugs, grubs and frogs. And eventually bark, once the pickled and preserves run out. The (un)dead constantly torment Momma, telling her its all her fault, that she did this all on her own, she let The Evil in, she brought it with her. The boys unwavering faith in their mother is beginning to shake, and she herself is beginning to break. When she suggests them killing and eating the family dog, Nolan loses it, cutting her rope before she can put a crossbow bolt into the dog. She is severed from the protection of the house, and instead of letting The Evil in, she cuts her own throat. Kodda the dog runs off.

Without Momma the boys completely unravel. A stranger appears on their doorstep, a hiker who has become lost. At first, he's a bit concerned to see such a ragged pair of boys alone in the woods but then they point the crossbow at him. He tries to escape but.... that is when things become unsure. The man has a cell phone, a working one that makes a call through to 911 before he succumbs to the bolt in his gut. If the world outside has collapsed, then what is this all about? Was Momma lying all along? Was she being metaphorical, and if so, weren't her responses unreasonable, or was she just completely lost, a victim of familial abuse and trauma? The boys cannot know any of this, so only we can speculate. Considering the boys are starving and likely poisoned by what they have been forced to eat, anything that comes after, including a deceptive snake girl, is suspect. I continued to watch as a monster movie, but... the annoyance seeped in.

In the end, the houses is burned down, but not before the boys are ... rescued. The outside world is there, it is not destroyed. But The Evil is now in Sam and Nolan knows it. What are we to believe? Everything is left to speculation, but there was a giant snake skin found on the river side, a moulted sign of something very very large, much larger than can be found in woods like this. So, is there Evil or is there just .... evil? Bah, some questions can be fun, but I am just annoyed.

But I cannot just leave it there, can I? There was much I did enjoy -- the setting, the built up mythology and the dressing up of the environment. Aja had fun constructing this movie, giving us something that felt both magical and mundane, current yet timeless in its depiction of how the family lived. Berry is always more than capable and the boys excelled at playing the twins they were, but with their own personalities, children growing into adolescents, discovering independence and it not weighing well on their shoulders.

Xmas Leftovers: There's Something in the Barn

2023, Magnus Martens (TV Good Behaviour) -- download

I never got from Kent's post that this was an actual Norwegian movie, and with all those opening shots and all that real, GLORIOUS snow, I somehow expected more of the movie. I mean, I have more of a tolerance for terrible horrible movies than Kent does, and if he kind of liked it, I thought it would be decent enough? 

No, not really.

Bill Nordheim (Martin Starr, Spider-Man: Homecoming) is Norwegian-American and is bringing his family from California to Norway, to the house he inherited after his uncle passed. They must be really down on their luck to make such a massive move. At first I assumed they were just coming here for Xmas to close up his uncle's affairs, and show the kids where he comes from, but no, they want to start a B&B.

On the land is a barn, and in that barn is a "barn elf", a "Nisser", basically what IKEA has distilled into a gnome. But like all mythos, all is not soft and cuddly and cute; there are rules to be followed when you have a resident elf, and of course, the movie is all about breaking those rules so that we can have the elf go all "don't feed the gremlin after midnight" on the family.

This is a very sloppy, uneven movie, that despite itself, was ... kind of fun? I mean, its not like Gremlins was considered Oscar material in its time, but that is it with the comparisons, because at its heart, Gremlins had heart; this movie does not really. I don't like the family, and while they are not horrible, they are cardboard "family with issues". Teen Daughter, who I couldn't get past her Norwegian accent constantly slipping through, is typical dismissive and cranky, Dad is an oblivious buffoon, Step Mom is annoyingly optimistic, but by design, as she is a life-coach, and the kid is the kid. Meanwhile, the village Norwegians are basically the country's versions of country bumpkins, present only to fill background and die at the hands of the angry elfs. You would think there would be a rule that the elfs are not allowed to harm humans other than who angered them. I mean, if they go around killing willy nilly everytime they get pissed off, you would think there would be professional elf hunters taking out the pesky buggers.

Its a horror movie, so of course there have to be deaths, but mostly its just chase chase chase, with only a few incidental deaths so the family can be dabbed in blood in later scenes. The deaths are not particularly inventive nor do they really try to, but these elfs are not exactly invulnerable supernatural killing machines. A few self inflicted gunshots takes some down and a broom handle makes a nice skewer. For the most part, they are just scary murderous little folk. And, as Kent also said, better to just rewatch Rare Exports and its exploration of Xmas Horror.

Xmas Leftovers: Red One

2024, Jake Kasdan (Zero Effect) -- Amazon

Santa Claus (JK Simmons, Whiplash) is real. Not only is he real but the world powers are aware of him and collaborate together for Christmas Night, and the weeks leading up to it. That probably means parents become aware he is real. I mean, at some point, someone is going to realize that presents they didn't buy show up under the tree. Anywayz, 21st century Santa has technology and a Security Detail currently run by Calum Drift (The Rock, Skyscraper) who is a bit down on Xmas, given that the Naughty List outweighs the Nice List more and more each year. He's retiring after this run. And then a black ops team breaks into Fortress North Pole and kidnaps Santa right out from under his security team's nose.

Nice detail that the North Pole is under Polar Night when the kidnapping happens... in most movie, you get lovely daytime scenes with snow glistening and all kinds of things that wouldn't be present in December.

Calum has to go to MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority), the secretive organization that not only hides Santa from general knowledge, but also a lot of other mythological creatures. Turns out a hacker named Jack O'Malley (Chris Evans, Ghosted) traced Santa's location back to the North Pole which gave the kidnappers the secret whereabouts of Santa. Calum, together with an anthropomorphic Polar Bear named Garcia (Reinaldo Faberlle, Mayor of Kingstown), waterboards O'Malley (no, not really) until he gives up who hired him. With the information they learn that Grylla an old mythological Winter Witch has the Big Man, and likely for very Naughty List reasons.

This has got to be the worst looking, muddiest, most washed out and indiscernible 4K movie I have ever seen. There were just so many scenes where I couldn't see what was going on at all and to the point, that I wondered if my Internet was crapping out and it was all digital breakup. But no, it wasn't. It just looked like shit. And to be completely honest, it really impacted how much I was enjoying the movie. If you are going to build a 21st century twist on a mythological world, let us fucking SEE IT. 

Beyond that it was a somewhat tiresome plot with The Rock playing all the other Rock characters, Chris Evans playing his pre-MCU characters (snarky, smarmy, lecherous) and everyone else basically phoning it home. And yeeeet, I kind of liked it? As a concept, I am there. I liked the exploration of Santa myth, even if they go the "hi tech" way. Its just.... well, this movie is like many of the thrillers pooped out by the streaming giants of late (Red Notice, Heart of Stone, The Adam Project, etc.) in that it sacrifices what makes a movie good (dialogue, direction, script) for spectacle and some names. Don't get me wrong, I love me some spectacle and it can lead a movie, but they even fucked that up here with the muddy visuals. But there was a enough of it there that I was ... OK with it? I feel a bit of shame in admitting that, as I should hold myself to greater standards, even if you are ignoring the schlock crime movies I tend to watch. I guess it is summed up by my feelings that this movie could have been perfect for me, if they had just put a wee bit more effort into it and not let the Purple Suits drag them along by the nose.

Also, why does Garcia get top poster placement? He's barely in the movie and his voice actor is all but unknown...

Watching: Kaos S1

2024, Netflix

Ended up semi-binging this series about Greek mythology but set in .... modern day Greece? I was hoping it was actually shot in Greece, lending itself to the ideal that countries hurting economically can invite Hollywood over to make shit in their country purely for the money the industry brings in, but alas, it was mostly shot in Spain. Anywayz, at least it wasn't shot in the Hamptons.

My elevator pitch for this series would be, "Think Baz Lurman's 'Romeo + Juliet' but doing for Greek Mythos what he did for Shakespeare."

What 100. Zeus's an ass (Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park). His best friend Prometheus (Stephen Dilane, Game of Thrones) is chained to a stone wall but is regularly teleported in for chats, usually about his existential crises. But something is actually awry in Zeus's reign. There is a prophecy that he will fall. And Prometheus is bringing forth said prophecy via other players: Zeus's hedonistic half-god son Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan, Station Eleven), rock-star Orpheus (Killian Scott, Secret Invasion) and his wife Riddy (Aurora Perrineau, Westworld) who dies by accident, Zeus's brother Hades (David Thewlis, Wonder Woman) who is fucking with the life/death cycle at Zeus's request, Hera (sister/wife; Janet McTeer, Ozark) who is also fucking his brother Poseidon (Cliff Curtis, The Meg), and pretty much all the players we read about. 

1 Great. Yeah, its the gimmick that is the best thing about the show, the idea of turning Greek Myths on their head, set in modern times and applying many aspects of current culture & politics to a world where all-power gods control most of life. The defeated city / culture of Troy is represented by a downtrodden, traumatized Trojan people under the jackboots of President Minos (Stanley Townsend, Blackshore) who is dealing badly with his own prophecy while being manipulated directly by the gods. Amazonian Caeneus (Misia Butler, The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself) born female, in a mandatory all-female culture, realizes he is male in adolescence, and has to deal with the fallout of that realization, and he is played by an IRL trans actor. The ferry to the afterlife looks like one of those ferries used to bring fleeing refugees from Europe to the US during WWII. They have so much fun just depicting the nuances of Greek Myth culture in the modern environment.

2 Good. The performances. I just liked how present everyone was in their weird roles. Sure, Goldblum is doing his usual schtick, hand gestures and pauses and all, but add in some entirely chilling psychotic behaviour and he is the perfect Zeus. I always thought of Dionysus as an uber-sexy, slick like lube kind of character, but playing him as an annoying millennial-type only interested in his own self-gratification and desperate for daddy's affection was actually perfect. And he's a demi-god, so he's only so affected by the activities of the humans he spends all his time around. Rizwan just embodied all this. We all know the story of Orpheus loving his dead wife so much that he went to Hell to get her back, but playing Riddy (Eurydice) as a lonely, disaffected wife of a rock star, just tired of being his muse, all "did I ask you to come to Hell to get me?!?!" was spot on. Yes, I realize I am merging the performances and the roles they were playing but I enjoyed it that much.

3 Bad. I knew they would have to do it but (SPOILER!) they had to have Zeus kill the kitten didn't they. Also bad, its not likely going to get a second season because Netflix sucks. You know, dudes, not everything is going to be The Witcher or Stranger Things, which is weird saying out loud, because a lot of people have utter hate for The Witcher and yet I guess it hits the numbers Netflix Purple Suits need?

T&K's XMas (2023) Advent Calendar: Day 20 - Santa Claus: The Movie

1985, d. Jeannot Szwarc - amazonprime

Santa Claus: The Movie is a big, expensive, often direly boring production that spent so much money on its sets that it feels inclined to shoot laborious sequences within them just to show them off. 

Uncle Clause is a kindly, burly, bearded elder of the northern villages who each year visits the children and delivers unto them a gift for the year's kindnesses.  He travels by sleigh towed by his two hearty reindeer Donner and Blitzen. And 7 minutes into the film, the lot of them, plus Mrs. Claus, all freeze to death.

But wait, something is happening in the stars, and the little people of the north, the Vendegum - "elves" if you prefer - have arrived to save them. Or rather, kidnap them and force them into servitude.  Forced to live forever and deliver all the toys to the children of the world.

There's a whole village, only visible to the elves and special people. This is where the Claus' live now. The brightly garbed Vendegum show them their new home, and the workshop where the elves toil, the elven sleeping quarters, and the toy storehouse which seems infinite.

Dudley Moore plays Patch, who keeps the reindeer, but also invents things in his spare time. And makes elf-based puns (mostly by dropping the "s" in "self" - "elf-control", "elf-conscious).

On Uncle Claus' first outing for "season's greetings' he meets the grand bearded elder of the Vendegum who recites the story of the chosen one, and bestows upon Claus the horrifying "legacy" of "the night of the world... an endless night for you, until your mission is done". 

A montage takes us from the 14th century to the 20th century (with interludes for Santa to create the "naughty or nice" list and to learn about the poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"). Then a side story of two elves (Patch and another) who compete for the job to be Santa's assistant, with Patch trying to introduce assembly line and automated manufacturing to the workshop but while the goods are plentiful, they are not up to standards. But without introducing QC to the workshop, nobody knows they're 

Meanwhile, a rich girl in "New York" takes a shining to a street kid, and gives him some food, but treating him like he's a feral cat, leaving food out the back door ("Psst. Little Boy. Hey, boy"). Santa comes across this kid, Joe, and acts like he's never met a street urchin before.  He takes the kid for a ride because he loves all children, and has infinite time on Christmas eve.

The film comes from Alexander and Ilya Salkind, producers of Superman, and you can see, especially in this joyride sequence, that they were wanting to give that majesty of Superman's flying sequences to Santa. They stop in at the rich girl's place and Joe and Cornelia meet face to face.

Over the next few days, all of Patch's mass-produced toys start breaking. Santa's #1 fans, Joe and Cornelia start getting into fights with kids shit-talking Santa for his crappy presents that break. Back at the North Pole, the returns are piling up. "Returns? We've never had returns."  Santa needs to fire Patch, but Patch quits first. He packs up his bindlestick and leaves the North Pole.

Meanwhile, back in America, Cornelia's step-uncle, the slimy B.Z. of B.Z. Toy Company is facing a congressional hearing on his shoddy, dangerous toys, including a teddy bear stuffed with sawdust and glass, and a doll that is utterly flammable. All his toys must be recalled from the market, the company is in dire straits. B.Z. is approached by Patch who wants a job and has an idea. It's made out to be a grand Toy but it's just a puce lollypop with flying powder. Patch builds a flying delivery car to distribute the lollypops everywhere.

A year later, Santa visits Joe again, who's still living on the streets. Way to make a difference in kids lives Santa. Meanwhile the flying lollypops are a hit. Now B.Z. wants something new but Patch wants to go back to Santa. B.Z. convinces patch to make extra-concentrated stardust candy canes for March 25, and they'll call the day Christmas II.  Santa has a crisis of confidence now that he has competition. But Joe and Cornelia overhear B.Z.'s schemes and learn that the candy canes are explosive if they reach too high a temperature.  Patch and Joe become friends, and steal all the candy canes, while Cornelia and Santa set out to rescue them before they explode. The cops show up to shut B.Z. down but he eats too many candy canes and floats away.

Cornelia and Joe go to live with Santa and Mrs. Claus. Meanwhile B.Z. is floating out into space. Horrifying.

What an ineptly scripted and frequently sloppy film. It's basically a series of vignettes for the first half of the film acting as a Santa origin story but without ever really treating Claus as a POV character. The awe and wonder the film is trying to present is totally in the eye of the beholder and not a character we're seeing it all through. I've never seen a Santa Clause movie but I'm sure those present a greater sense of wonder and exploration of the profession of being Santa. 

In the second half of the film, in which Patch leaves the North Pole for "New York" (by way of London) to become a toy maker in the free market system in order to win Santa's respect, doesn't even try to present capitalism in any real sense (it's almost as if the writers didn't understand how corporations work). John Lithgow plays B.Z. and is the only vibrant spot in this movie...he's a cartoon villain that could be straight out of the Muppets or Inspector Gadget. Lithgow's cigar puffing and over-emoting and are doing all the heavy lifting for a lifeless, humourless script. That he comes close to making magic out of nonsense is a testament to his ample comedic senses and acting agility. Dudley Moore seems bored and disinterested, never trying to sell anything as funny (certainly sensing the "elf" puns are sorely beneath him). Just as The Santa Clause (and many other "becoming Santa" movies likely improve upon the first half, Elf certainly bettered the second half, times 1000.

Abandoning Santa for Patch and the kids and B.Z. means Santa Claus: The Movie is barely about Santa, and by dragging its ass so much it barely feels like a movie. I have no doubt I saw this movie as a kid, but I now understand why I never bothered to go back to it. Moof.

KWIF: Bullet Train (+6)

Kent's Week in Film is this: each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts... just to speed things along. I usually write this on a Sunday.  Today is Wednesday. This entry covers the past two and a half weeks minus some rewatches.

Bullet Train (2022, d. David Leitch - AmazonPrime)
The Visitor (1979, d. Giulio Paradisi - tubi)
Galaxy of Terror (1980, d. Bruce D. Clark - tubi)
Two Little Boys (aka Deano and Nige's Best Last Day Ever) (2012, d. Robert Sarkies - tubi)
Hercules (1983, d. Luigi Cozzi - tubi)
The Dungeonmaster (1984, d. [x6] - tubi)
The Young Master (1980, d. Jackie Chan - Crave) 

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Sitting pretty evenly between the stylish cool of John Wick (and his world largely populated by assassins) and the overwhelmingly frenetic comedic tone of Deadpool 2 (both in which director Leitch had a hand), Bullet Train is both highly entertaining and allcaps A LOT.

A necessary bio-break meant pausing the movie, and with half the players seemingly dead or out of the picture, I thought "surely we're about to hit the endgame". But the time elapsed showing on screen read 1 hour 10 minutes with another 50+ left to go. That seemed like too much movie. And it was!

Though I was never bored in this latter half of the film, it did lose a lot of its mojo when the boss level shows up, mainly because, at this point, it started to incorrectly think we cared about the larger story it'd been attempting to weave. The problem is Brad Pitt's Ladybug is our central POV character and he's utterly circumstantial to the whole affair of this underlying story, so while the film is trying to invest us in its story from an insider's perspective, we're actually tracking it as an outsider. And given Ladybug's sort of laissez-faire attitude, the film shouldn't care as much about the story as it does. I certainly didn't.

The film does a better job at getting us to care about many of its characters, largely a lot of ruthless killers (Ladybug being the "no guns", trying-to-find-zen exception). Lemon and Tangerine are "The Twins", played by Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Henry and Taylor-Johnson are both immensely charismatic in this, which sort of neuters their intimidation factor. They're supposed to be a couple of psychos, the dialogue keeps reminding us of this, but the performances and characterization don't really show it.

As said, a very entertaining movie, but also one that constantly thinks were too dumb to keep up with it (given the shape of the world, there may be a point there). It's continually doing visual cutaways or brief flashbacks to moments or objects or people from earlier in the film, because it thinks we've forgotten or aren't paying attention? It also takes a lot of side trips into the various characters histories, but in a very inconsistent manner (some players get extensive history sequences, others don't get any). This imbalance would be more bothersome if the film had any room to breathe, but it's pretty go-go-go from the get go.

There is a lot to drive an astute film goer nuts within Bullet Train, and I can see how the vast amount of real-world improbabilities and impossibilities, on top of the overbearing cinematic devices used in telling its story would be frustrating, annoying or maddening, if you let it be. There's a better, cleaner film within what's presented, sure, but that's not really what its striving for. Taking it just as surface level entertainment, it delivers pretty highly.

[Toasty's take (we agree)]

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Something I enjoy doing all too much is browsing the ghastly Fox-owned streaming service Tubi. It is absolutely overloaded with content with zero discretion as to quality or subject matter. It is currently the best source for 70's/80's also-ran/B-grade genre schlock, the kind that used to lure you in at the video store with a lurid tape-box/sleeve cover image (often a painting of some kind) that falsely presented intoned a film with scale and quality far beyond its means. 

The Visitor jumped out at me primarily because of cast: a young, already leathery-looking Lance Henriksen, Glenn Ford, John Huston, Shelley Winters....  Names like these in schlock is never a demarcation of quality, but it is a lure, as was its description that promised demonitc, telepathic children and an "intergalactic tug-of-war". My mind, as it so often did with the text on the back of the VHS box (paired with the front-of-box painting), reeled with with potential.

The film opens with that potential revealing itself via a stark, desert-like wasteland with an ever-so-alien sky, shot with all manner of low-budge effects tricks. It's very striking. An impressive soundtrack of tones and whistles and scratching strings accompanies a sudden snowfall as a haggard, cloaked old man faces off against an unknown cloaked silhouette.  It's 4 minutes of ominous, menacing, wordless visuals which falls apart the moment a talking head starts to try and fill in the eye-roling mythos for this tale, as a christ-like figure explains its good-vs-evil concept to a group of bald, white robed children in an indoor arboretum.  The film crashes and burns the moment the overwhelmingly 70's funk horns start blaring as we're transitioned to a 5 minute sequence of a basketball game (culminating in a ball exploding, no questions asked) during which any sense of the fantasy of what came before is completely lost.

The film doesn't know what direction its going it, its not at all confident in its plot. I heard tell (via a later listening to the Video Archives podcast) that this was originally scripted as a proposed sequel to a sort of demon-seed pregnancy movie then re-formed into a sci-fi horror.  The kind of confused conception is evident, and the storytelling never settles into its more fantastical plot.  It could have been the original The Orphan had it not reached too high.  It's too boring to be bonkers, ironic viewing, and it's too bonkers to even approach being good. 

BUT IS IT HORROR?
It's more genre thriller or suspense than horror, at least it's trying to be.

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Galaxy of Terror, from Roger Corman's New World Pictures, does a good job at feeling like a film ahead of its time, and by that I mean you could easily mistake it for a cheesy rip-off of sci-fi horror films from 1987 as opposed to 1980.  What works in the film's favour is its incredible set designs, it's moderately competent special effects, and some costuming that isn't outright embarrassing.  The acting is fine but the script is garbage nonsense that doesn't matter.  It's almost like it was written to employ sets, creatures, models and costumes that Corman already had sitting around, and less like they were constructed solely for the purpose of this picture.  I'm sure it's a mix of the two.

A rag-tag team on a rescue mission arrive on a strange planet and encounter the same dangers the prior crew clearly died from.  It's a film built entirely around set-pieces, gross-out gags and tentacle rape.  Sid Haig, Robert Englund, Erin Moran, Ray Walston and others sleepwalk through the meaningless dialogue and tolerate the humiliating horror gags they're forced to suffer through to collect their paycheck.

It's said that James Cameron was working effects on this, when he requested to do second unit filming of the sets to give them more coverage, which got him noticed for his first directorial gig, Piranha 2.  The trivia on this film is kind of more interesting than the film itself.

BUT IS IT HORROR?
sure, barely. It's surely horrible.

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So many of the Kiwi comedy films I've seen seem to center around naive simpletons or awkward oddballs (or both), and I've generally been quite receptive to that sort of thing. There's a subtle, sly tone and balance these films have to sustain, seeing the humour in the oddities of the characters, but also retaining some sense of empathy and affection for them. We want them to succeed, or at least find some growth in their journey (although it seems a particular NZ trait for these characters to kind of learn nothing or refuse to change). 

Two Little Boys (or it's original name, Nige and Deano's Best Last Day Ever) centers its story around two nitwits who are trying to cover up the accidental killing of a Norwegian backpacker in the opening moments of the film, which makes it particularly tough to invest in these characters. I don't know that we want them to get away with it, or if we're even supposed to (Nige's guilt being what it is).

Nige and Deano are estranged best friends reunited by the accident, but very quickly the toxic nature of their relationship returns, and it's clear why Nige wanted to end the friendship in the first place. 

So, if the film doesn't really want us to want the boys to get away with manslaughter, and if it doesn't want us to hope for reconciliation than what outcome exactly are we supposed to want here?

It's not a poorly done movie. There's some interesting editing choices, some fine needledrops, and even some fun vfx and camera trickery. McKenzie, Blake and Pohatu are all really quite good, inhabiting their roles well, making me quickly forget their more prominent personas in Flight of the Conchords, Lego Masters and Wellington Paranormal where I know them each well, but it's just fundamentally flawed story with a thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion (and an even more unsatisfying coda).

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I've watched a couple of Hercules movies in the past year, and they are, when in the hands of Italian filmmakers, passable escapist entertainment.  This one, though, is a spectacularly ill-conceived peplum that tries to smush together all of Hercules' 12 labors into one 90 minute story in an awkward mish-mash of fantasy, sci-fi and mythology that dares to rip-off Superman, Star Wars and Clash of the Titans at once but with a quarter of their budget.

The effects are pretty daring but done on a frugal budget, so they can be either read as really charming or really bad (or perhaps both?).  The costuming, though, is superb, and super sexy.  This is the best Hercules look, methinks, and the ladies are totally va-va-voom without being lurid about it. I was surprised to find the lip sync was totally on point, like, amazingly so. There are also some fairly amazing sets, which the Italians have been great at for some time, but there's also some that really feel the budget limitations.

This was under the Canon film group logo, so there's a sense that this was trying to capitalize upon the success of Masters of the Universe, by mixing sci-fi with fantasy and superheroes, but they would have to take another crack at it a few years later.

So, that final sequence...Hercules is warned that if he removes the sword from the stone, it will result in the awakening of the pheonix.  He needs the sword to fight the big bad guys, and so he does unsheath it.  The phoenix is awakened and the whole bloody island begins to collapse, killing thousands in the process? This is the big heroic ending??

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The Dungeonmaster basically auto-played on Tubi after Hercules. I didn't select it, and I didn't intend to watch it. It opens with a sequence that plays out like an 80's glam metal music video, of a toe-headed man in glasses following in slow motion a woman in a flowing red dress through some weird local architecture that could is weird enough to be vaguely construed as "fantastical" without any set redressing.  She strips, lays on a bed, and beacons him near, only for demonic creatures to break through the wall and capture her, leaving the man, confused. Title sequence and credits. Man wakes up from dream.  The film starts with a cold open. It's rather inane.

We later see the "real life" scenario of this couple, their existence. He's a too-handsome nerd who has made a primitive 80's computer AI assistant that makes his aerobic instructor girlfriend jealous because of how much time he spends with it. Then they seem to get sucked into another dimension, she's chained up, he's in a weird costume, and a tall, deep-voiced, sallow-looking figure tells him they're going to play a game. 

What follows is a series of vignettes, each from a different director, each in a different genre, including a Mad Max-style chase and fighting a Harryhousen-esque stop-motion animate statue. None of it is particularly well-executed, and our "hero" is armed with his AI in a wrist gauntlet that serves as a total deus ex machina in every scenario.

It is supremely goofy 80's genre trash, and yet it's not unwatchable, thanks mostly to a charming Jeffrey Byron. Like most anthologies, it's not very unified, nor is this all that satisfying in whole or in part. But it also doesn't take itself too seriously, which doesn't exactly save it, but does help elevate it somewhat above some of the other more unwatchable low-low-budg fantasy trash of the era.

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I'm not as well versed in Jackie Chan's filmography as I would like to be.  Having recently watched the Police Story trilogy (I know there are more than three, but I've only seen the first three at this point), I have to say I much prefer the fight-coordination-focused Jackie Chan pictures to the stunt-set-piece-focused Jackie Chan. I mean, yes the stunts are cool but...are they maybe only cool because of the end-credits revelations showing the behind-the-scenes attempts?  As opposed to films like Drunken Master or, here, Young Master, where the film is instead built with a simple story meant to weave through a series of fighting set pieces that showcase the performers' physical prowess, Chan's inventiveness, and humour? It's not like the Police Story films take themselves overly-serious, but they're not really comedies, and the fights definitely take second fiddle to the stunts in those films.

I like Chan's sensibilities, and the sheer cleverness and comedic timing that is built into the very balletic martial arts fights needs not just the movement skills, but comedic acting chops as well to sell it all.  In Young Master, Chan and his various scene partners can run up to 10 minutes through a mesmerizing coordinated routine that is as much dance and pantomime as it is kung-fu. It is ridiculously entertaining, and not a single fight seems redundant or repetitive, somehow Chan and crew constantly keep it fresh.  The opening Dragon dance sequence is a stunner, the coordination difficulty level cranked up to 10, as two two-man teams must react to each other team, themselves within the team, and their surroundings, as they traverse the edges of water barrels and climbing to a 10-foot-high narrow platform.  It's at once joyous and intense. 

Chan's direction with Young Master is so much clearer than his Police Story 1 & 2 work, likely because they are somewhat more involved in their shooting (being shot on city streets and active locations).  He knows exactly what needs to be focused on in any given sequence, and even at this early stage in his career, seems to have a crew of people he trusts to carry out the plan, and follow the action.  Again, I don't have a deep knowledge of his repertoire, but this is a completely clean, crisp effort that doesn't attempt anything flashy behind the camera because it has absolutely no need to. The performances are all the flash needed.  An absolute gem of a movie, that I watched twice in the same week.

3 Short Paragraphs: Antlers

2021, Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) -- download

I started writing about this movie a week ago, and as often happens, any thread of a post trickled off because I remember very little about the movie. Or more precisely, I remember very little of what I want to SAY about the movie. I do remember the earlier buzz around it, with Guillermo del Toro onboard to Produce. I remember it was a Pacific North West / wendigo horror story, that suffered COVID related delays, only to end up with lackluster reviews. And rather than waiting for October, we used it to fill in yet another click click click night.

But what really stands out is how this is a bleak looking movie full of bleak settings and people. It's a dark, filthy, dying town full of tired people - the perfect horror movie setting.  It begins with an addict's kid, sitting in his dad's truck while the meth cooker and his brother (fav Canadian supporting actor 93, Michael Eklund) go deeper into an abandoned mine to cook, but are torn apart by ... something from deeper in the mine. Does the child escape? We don't know, but we soon meet his brother who is badly hiding the fact he is alone from his school teacher (Keri Russel, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), who sticks her nose into his life, something people in this town just don't do. She has her own issues, having returned to the town where her father abused her, after having run away, leaving behind her little brother. But she's back to live in the same house, to face the resentment and guilt, to escape something, to focus her mind on something.... good?

Of course, the wendigo has taken the meth cooker and his son, more of an infection than a possession, constantly hungry, locked in their house by the older brother/son, fed road kill to keep the monster at bay. Until the teacher disturbs things. Creature features are my thing, and the practical mixed with CGI effects of the monster were impressive. The lore of an indigenous American creature is lightly updated, and given some impressive visuals, especially the titular massive set of antlers. The plot is rather forgettable, mundane and should have been cooked longer, but all in all, it settled somewhere between the "that was alright" and the usual "meh" of the October viewings. Usually, all it takes is a small thing standing out, a key feature or character or setting element, for it to be raised higher in my mind, but even the memorably bleak town was not fleshed out enough -- I needed it to have a ... darker past to explain this depression that lingered on it, not just typical dying middle America.

3 Short Paragraphs: WolfWalkers

 2020, Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart (production team behind The Secret of Kells) -- download

This is just a fucking lovely traditional animation movie behind the same animators & production team as The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea. And like these, it draws upon Celtic mythos to build a story, a story as much about fathers and daughters, as it is about magic. I will let Kent enlighten me about the magic that already exists there.

Bill Goodfellow (Sean Bean, Lord of the Rings) and his daughter Robyn (Honor Kneafsy, A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby) have been brought to Ireland, the town of Kilkenny by Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, to hunt the wolves of the area. Robyn doesn't want to be the good daughter, and often sneaks out to learn to hunt wolves like her father. On one such adventure she runs into Mebh, a wild child who lives in the wild forest. They become friends, despite Mebh's wolfy nature, and even more so when Robyn begins to "wolf walk", leaving her body behind to play at being a ghostly wolf cub. Of course, this ends up at odds with the Lord Protector, forcing Bill to choose his daughter over his Lord. And guess what, Sean Bean doesn't die.

Again, this is just a lovely movie to watch. The music, the colours and the animation are all full of whimsy and excitement. Of course, I am drawn to the Irish mythos of the story, and these are no werewolves, cursed and to be feared. They are the spirit of the wood, the wildness being lost as Cromwell's England wants to drive the mystical nature of old Ireland away. In a day when we are having the Canadian Residential School System shoved rightly in our face, I could reflect on the evils of our settler-istic natures, needing to burn away cultures and replace them with our own. So, the creators find balance with the evil being presented, by giving us so much beauty to behold.

3 Short Paragraphs: Mortal

 2020, André Øvredal (Trollhunter) -- download/Amazon

Sometimes I feel I need to rewatch certain movies just so I can put a post in here, to remind myself how much I enjoyed a flick or two.  I recall really enjoying Trollhunter but I don't actually recall anything about the plot, but that it was found footage and there was a giant (and I mean, giiiiiant) troll. Mortal is his most personal feeling movie since that one (i.e. non Hollywood), once again set in Norway and dealing with Norwegian myths.

Eric is  an American backpacker who came to Norway seeking his roots, but all led to tragedy as the family he connected with died in a fire he believes was caused by himself. It was. Eric has weird elemental powers, fire and electricity and water, which he cannot control. It leads him to connect with Christine, a young, beautiful, blonde psychologist who is trying to protect Eric from the authorities, Norwegian and American, seeking to take him. He's killed people; it's understandable, and one vastly powerful confrontation on a bridge frightens everyone including Christine. And then people on the Internet start connecting Eric with Thor, God of Thunder and Lightning.

On the cover, this is just another of the movies since MCU became popular, exploring people with powers and the impact they would have in the "real world". But something has been itching at me since I saw it, the connection to Thor, and the recent rise of ties to "white power". Eric is American, where this racist ideal is very very loud, and he comes to his European roots to take that power as his own, to an almost welcoming (very white) support, as they begin to believe he is a God. The woman standing in his way, the "agent" from the US Embassy is brown, and she controls the shadowy American government forces that want fail to control Eric. While my brain cannot seriously think Øvredal intended this, I can easily see how certain radical groups would embrace the "writing between the lines" they find. And it ended up overshadowing, in my mind, a small story that wanted to connect ancient beings with power to the superhero trope.

Distraction: What I Am Watching (Or At Least Attempting To) Pt C: Abandoned Before I Really Paid Attention

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. Not that you care. But at least I am not telling you about my D&D character. The theme almost always comes in batches.

Pt. A is here. And Pt. B.

Abandoned Before I Really Paid Attention

Holy Fuck !!  Look at that post title !!

There is so much to watch these days. Even if I didn't download stuff, I couldn't watch everything available OTA or via the handful of streaming services I have signed up for. There is just too much that Is Good or too much Less Than Good But Genre. And yeah, I still watch too much that is Less Than Good. I also eat too many french fries and potato chips. I also have a tendency to flick flick flick through the listings until something catches my attention, even when there are Things I Must Watch right in front of me. That leads to one or a few episodes and then Next Shiny Thing.

For example, the new season of Westworld (Kent's post). I know I love the show, you know I love the show. So, why have I watched only one, maybe two episodes so far? I dunno, I don't have any deep insights as to my attention span, even if you remove The Pause (have to move past that label, as we are no longer paused, but changed) from the calculation.

As we have moved on from the Big Pause Button in the Sky, the series has moved on from the bubble lives that was imposed on the self-unaware Hosts (what the show called its robots), as some of them gain more awareness. Focusing on Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood, True Blood) who is taking the war to us, we are briefly shown her plans, while Bernard, Maeve and Fake Charlotte get intertwined in this Grand Scheme. Getting mixed into the intrigue is Caleb, a small-time crook who grabs jobs through an Uber-like gig economy crime app, and the family running the company in direct competition with Delos (the robot makers), with its world influencing big data fed AI.

Soooo much going on in such a short exposure. I ran away. Too heavy right now.

The same goes for Devs (same Kent post) which I only gave one episode. I had actually been waiting for this show to appear, having been enthralled by the trailers. I love Alex Garland's way of exploring topics, so this one yet again again focuses on the idea of an eccentric Big Brain Creator (Nick Offerman, Parks and Recs) running a programming company on the torrents of bleeding edge technology.

In his usual slow, deliberate, beautiful manner (which reminds me of the music of Max Richter) we are introduced to Lily (Sonoyo Mizuno, Maniac [another good show I abandoned for no good reason]), whose BF Sergei is invited by the head of Amaya (Offerman), a company making waves in quantum tech, to participate in their inner circle of coders. He sees something startling, makes the mistake of trying to sneak the info out, and is killed. And Lily is told he mysteriously committed suicide. She doesn't believe it.

So, groundbreaking tech that has such incredible ramifications that they would kill to keep it hidden. Strange, eccentric coder who has the persona of being an almost deific benefactor, but obviously is not. Or is he? Is he hiding something for a very good reason? Or is it and he just Evil? I really should find out.

Reality Z is the Brazilian rip-off of Charlie Brooker's (Black Mirror) Dead Set which itself was simply the idea of doing a zombie apocalypse on the set of Big Brother. I would love to be able to say these reality shows would be long dead more than ten years later, but nope, still going pretty strong.

In this one, set in Rio, the Greek God focused show is full of the usual vacuous stars and wanna-be stars and horrible staff all stabbing each other in the back or fucking each other in the back room, when suddenly zombies start eating their faces. With little real reason, they decide that the set is the best place to all congregate for safety's sake.

I actually watched enough episodes to get bored with it. Zombie Apocalypse seemed utterly perfect for this actual pandemic situation, as it was the jokingly extreme end of what we could have been dealing with. Seriously, did anyone see that video in December, of the Chinese couple who are set upon by state officials, on the street, and loaded into a secured box on the back of a truck? Who knows the actual source, but this is when Wuhan was the centre of this (seriously, when is the last time anyone even SAID the name Wuhan?) and nobody knew where it was going to go. We were dancing between thinking it was "just another flu" and ... well, zombies? Anywayz, this show was light enough to distract me until it actually annoyed me with the usual tropes as well as how much reality TV annoys me, which is why I never finished Brooker's show prior.

Snowpiercer (Kent, I still have your hardcopy on my side table....) is a wonderful idea, a whacked out idea of French scifi about a train that travels constantly, in circles, around the planet which was frozen solid due to a ecological disaster that makes Global Warning look like the mild effect people think it is. This massively long train has rich people in the front, poor people in the rear and a mass amount of privileged middle-classmen. Enter metaphors for classism.

And yes, the TV show is based on the movie.

But, we cannot run a series purely on the story from the movie, which focused on a rebellion led by Captain America, and how to reveals the failures inherent to the classicism built into its system, eventually bring about the downfall. Sure, they could have stretched that out, and I guess they will but they need more story for the filler. So, enter Murder Mystery and the Curtis character's pre-freeze background allowing him the part of investigating cop. The train has a delicate balance that must be maintained, and the idea of a murderer not only killing people but able to frame others, while continuing his acts, upsets the balance. So, Curtis asked to investigate in exchange for ... his soul?

I have only watched a couple of episodes but may favourite immediate Spoiler is that Jennifer Connelly plays a steward, but who is much more, maybe the real mind & skill behind the name Wilford, inventor and apparently false engineer of the train? I will have to watch further, as I was intrigued, just ... distracted.

Briarpatch is a typical weird murder mystery show, something that used to rather rare but is all over the TV map these days. I keep on forgetting why I was caught, albeit briefly, into watching it but then I recall the tenuous connection to Sam Esmail, the creator or Mr. Robot, and the first episode directed by Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night). It stars Rosaria Dawson (Daredevil) as the sister of a murdered cop, forced to return to her small Texan hometown "affectionately" referrred to as St. Disgrace. She is not happy to be there, and folks in town are less than happy to see her return. She left a long time ago, for a reason.

There is a definite mood to the opening episode, all that I watched. Allegra (Dawson) is glad to stand apart from the odd locals, with her haughty attitude and pressed outfits. There is that Small Town Gothic feel to it, as well as oddities (local owns a giraffe) and darkness, and a tiger wandering around. But seeing I didn't get past episode one, we shall see how the show embraces such. I am also curious to jump forward in time to see how they handle the second season, for the show is being billed as an "anthology" series, in that he second season will have little, if any, connection to the first season but for ... something? American Horror Story does this to some degree of success, but not sure, not sure. (note: it was cancelled, so no...)

Someone, somewhere on social media, stated that they see Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and the new Perry Mason as taking place in the same universe. Possibly, and I see what they are getting at, but I saw it more as two people having the same dream, and when they wake up and tell you all about it, you get each person's version, their personally tainted view of the dream. Both are 30s LA, both are about racial tensions, and both are focused around a murder case connected to a religious organization. And both are moody as fuck (AF as the kids say).

But wait, yes I hear your question. Wasn't Perry Mason a lawyer TV show from the 60s? Yes, you are correct but no, not the guy in the wheelchair -- that was Raymond Burr's other show, Ironside. But THIS Perry Mason is set prior to his law career, when he was a down-on-his-luck gumshoe. This Perry is a less than stellar individual, but oh so in tune with the classic schlub film noir P.I. I would have loved to be in the elevator as those two suited studio execs talk about this one, one getting progressively more confused as the pitch is made, "Wait, so he's not a lawyer? And it has nothing to do with him becoming a lawyer? Why again is it even called Perry Mason again?"

And yet, wow.

Matthew Rhys (The Americans) is an everyman, sad-sack in the role, both sympathetic and just head-shakingly a loser. And like the centres of all these stories, he gets hooked on the case he shouldn't, the one that isn't safe for him to investigate, mixing him up in all sorts of things above his pay grade. So, we underdog support him and sort of root for him, as long as he can stop just being a jerk. I definitely need to watch more, as I just excited myself recalling it.

European specfic is a thing right now, or I should more clearly say, European specfic actually appealing to North American audiences is a thing. I can remember the days when I would hunt blogs and entertainment sites from overseas, looking for the next weird & wonderful show to hunt down. These days, there are just so fucking many. I watch some, drop many, I tell you about a few.

Ragnarok is a Norwegian series about a small town at the head of a fjord which has a very personal connection to the Norse Gods. Something environmental is going on in the town when a new family arrives, one with a nerdy, awkward kid who almost immediately starts having ... episodes that lead us to believe he is probably Thor. It is the premise of the show, but with little explanation Magne begins to get stronger, lose his need for glasses and gets all sparky. He is Thor, but what does that mean?

I am not sure, as not a lot drew me in. I usually like the exploration of everyday culture in a part of the world I know little about, but the basic premise that something dire is going to happen and the resurrected Gods are required was a bit thin. And none of the characters were particularly captivating. Might go back, probably won't.

Into the Night is one of the few apocalyptic series released recently, likely ahead of a loooong list that will be released next year, if there is anything to be released next year. This is one of those "something happened" premises where we spend at least a couple of episodes not really knowing what or why, if we ever do learn. Deadly Global Event is the best way to describe, which has the ragtag members of a flight from Brussels to Moscow that is hijacked and forced to fly west, away from the rising sun, away from the sunlight that kills everyone it touches.

I dropped after a few episodes, because it was one of those shows where everyone mistrusts everyone, everyone has their own agenda and its own premise is unable to be sustained. At some point, as they fly west, trying to find airfields to land and refuel, in the circle around the earth, something HAD to go wrong. Oh, I was expecting it to do the season through a liberal amount of hand waving and pseudo science, which I can be OK with, but all the yelling was getting to me.

The Order, classic mid-grade Canadian specific, which we hit upon in one of those, "Well, we are finished watching, what is next?" It seems there was to be magic and monsters, and a secret order of spell casters embedded in a university, and our Hero was somehow mixed up in it, despite his lack of knowledge. Was he a secret wizard? Was he a secret monster? Who knows, but there is Matt Frewer playing the amiable grandfather to the main (grandfather? Fuck I am old) and Adam DiMarco basically playing the same character he played in the main magic-using-uni-students show The Magicians. And there is headmistress Katherine Isabelle, who will always be the werewolf from Gingersnaps, so, of course, I wanted there to be a werewolf in the show.  Guess what?

The show is serviceable enough, but not so much that we got past the first episode. It just didn't really have anything all that exciting going for it. Even look at that ad poster that looks like it was built by an algorithm. This is something I expect to show up on The CW later this year, as they have been plugging in Canadian shows, as they run out of American productions to air. Then again, Netflix has it, so why even bother.

Distraction: What I Am Watching (Or At Least Attempting To) Pt. A

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. Not that you care. But at least I am not telling you about my D&D character. The theme almost always comes in batches.

I am sounding like a broken record (to all the kiddies out there, LP records used to get scratched easily, and would begin skipping, repeating the same bit over and over) but this Pause has me seeking easy distraction and not able to focus on much. We are into month... four (!!!) of this whole strange historical event, and I have to admit, it has become a New Normal. That doesn't mean I am dealing with it well, nor does it mean I am dealing with it particularly badly. But it has changed my psyche somewhat, and not for the better.

If I had a trouble watching content of value before, it has been exacerbated. More and more I need light and fluffy, often dumb and easily digested.

Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts, 2019, Dreamworks/Netflix

I am surprised I am not seeing the Internet talk about this series more, and comparing it to the ultra-nostalgic D&D origins RPG called Gamma World. Ask any GreyBeard D&D player (from the 70s & 80s) and they probably remember and/or have strong nostalgic feelings for Gamma World. Or maybe it was just me.

The game was a Post-Apocalyptic world, once of mutated animals & humans, mixed technologies and mysterious ruins of the ancients to explore. The beasts were often weird hybrids of existing creatures, giant versions of what is around now, or even walking & talking people versions. The world was dangerous, deadly and the game never lent itself to long-term story telling like D&D or its other offshoots. It also never really took itself too seriously.

Kipo takes place after an unknown apocalypse where a young girl from a burrow -- humans living underground unaware of what's up on the surface (Pure Strain Human) -- is thrust upon the surface after a tragedy. Up there she meets Wolf, a primitive & pragmatic girl in a wolf headdress and a multi-eyed, multi-legged pig she calls mandu (Korean dumpling). She almost immediately runs afoul of some talking frogs in suits, who "drive" a car pulled by a giant dragonfly. And she sees her first MegaMute (Wonderbeast?) a gargantuan bunny with many-everything. As she is a cartoon main character, she embraces everything gleefully despite the danger Wolf says is ever present.

Each episode introduces more people and more mutated creatures of the surface, while tossing out the classic "explore the ruins" aspects of all PA fiction. And being a cartoon, we can ignore the logical hiccups that come with Cheetoes not being stale and the pop still having fizz. Also, everyone speaks English.  This show could so easily be retro-fitted into a Gamma World  campaign, that I am surprised there isn't a homebrew setting already created by someone. And no, that doesn't mean I will be doing so. I have enough RPG stuff I am ignoring.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, 2020, Showtime/download

The first Penny Dreadful TV series (2014) was about an American cowboy landing in London, England in 1891 where he initially investigates a murder, but ends up in an intrigue that includes encounters with Victor Frankenstein, Mina Harker & Dracula, Dorian Grey, Jekyll & Hyde and many other figures from Victorian horror fiction. It was a fun series with a dark, enigmatic supernatural focus. I did not write about it.

This series may be a spin-off but it (so far) has very little to do with the parent series. For one, it is set in Los Angeles, 1938 and does not have any cast members from horror fiction. What it is, is a bleak supernatural tale about a battle between two spirits: Santa Muerta, Mexican spirit of death (in the benevolent shepherd to the afterlife aspect), and her "sister", the demon Magda. Magda wishes to prove that mankind is irredeemable, while Santa Muerte believes in an goodness inherent to all. To that effect, Magda appears in many forms to many people (but always as a version of actress Natalie Dormer) influencing them to make the worst decisions. We get racial tensions between the Mexicans of California, and the establishment. We get the growing influence of Nazism in America, before they were even involved in WWII. And we get faith vs religion.

The performances are wonderful, and every episode has been very enthralling. But its so fucking bleak, and one cannot but believe that Magda is entirely correct. Her influence is minimal, but people are such terrible terrible beings. And considering what's going on outside our windows right now, primarily in the US, but truly, all over the world, I am not entirely sure I want my fiction to so terribly reflect this reality. I need a break from it.

Tales from the Loop, 2020, Amazon

And that is why I returned to watching this series. Not sure why I am in a Returned state, as everything about this show strikes me as being entirely written for me. The show began its life as a series of artbooks by Swedish illustrator Simon Stålenhag. His paintings are haunting scenes of the Swedish countryside in the 80s or 90s, with otherworldly, alternate timeline technologies inserted. Robots, fusion reactors, abandoned massive structures, etc. dominate quiet winter countrysides dotted with children.

The art books evolved into a table-top RPG (think playing the kids from Stranger Things but with robots instead of monsters) and then into this series from Amazon. I was not sure how they would translate the imagery into a story, but in the few episodes I have watched, they have captured not only the impossible technology but also the quiet emptiness. If I was to create film or TV, this is what I would create: quiet, lovingly put together character pieces full of nostalgia for something that never happened. I love the look and the style, and the only reason I have not become entirely wrapped up in it, is due what I started this post saying -- lack of ability to focus when focus is required.