2021: the year we add Streaming

I started this blog to help me get through all the films and TV shows I owned on DVD (and later, those I had digitally purchased).

We've now reached an inversion point where I find myself buying things so I can review them - and will thus watch them - while my list of "things on streaming I would like to check out" grows ever longer.

So, from 1/1/21 I'll be reviewing stuff I watch on streaming, as well as things I "own".  Media that was reviewed from a streaming service will have a Streaming tag.

Warehouse 13, Season 4 (2012)

Season 3 of Warehouse 13 ended with a major "all is woe" cliffhanger, so as you might expect, this season kicks off with the warehouse team employing desperate measures to correct the situation.  They succeed in this, of course - there wouldn't be much of a show if they did not! - but such drastic actions carry their own adverse side-effects that will soon force them all to confront a whole new series of threats.  And will confronting those threats lead to new dangers?  Well of course it will!  The Warehouse - it's like a perpetual motion machine for trouble!

This is the longest single series of Warehouse 13, with two major plot arcs running through it; one leading into the mid-season "the world is doomed" cliffhanger and one leading into the end of season "the world is doomed" cliffhanger.

... you may be noticing something of a theme with how this show likes to punctuate its major plots.

You may also notice something of a "guest stars from other genre shows" thing going with the show, too.  There's been a fair bit of that already, mind you, with the Eureka crossovers and guest spots from at least three different Star Trek actors, but this season hits a whole new gear on this front.

Despite the repetition of certain story beats, season four of Warehouse 13 is I think a stronger offering than the previous series (just as season 2 was a step up from season 1, come to think of it).  Hopefully this down-up-down-up pattern won't continue with another down for the fifth and final series.

If light adventure genre TV is in your wheelhouse, you will probably find yourself entertained here.

Black Christmas (2006)

The sisters of Clemson University's Delta Alpha Kappa sorority are looking forward to the holidays, and spending time with their families.

Unfortunately for them, their sorority house was once the home of one Billy Lenz. At Xmas fifteen years ago, Billy murdered his parents and mutilated his sister (who is also his daughter: don't ask). He's spent the time since then in an institute for the criminally insane. This year, he intends to finally escape and find a new family to spent the holidays with.

Targeted by a serial killer for Christmas? So far, so bad! But though they don't yet know it, it's even worse than that: sorority sisters start getting murdered even before Billy makes his escape. Why are two killers targeting these young women?

Well, for those of us in the audience, the identify of the second killer isn't all that hard to guess. For the unfortunate victims, of course, it will be half the film before they even know they are in danger.

This film - often styled Black X-Mas, as above - is a remake of a 1974 proto-slasher film (featuring none other than Superman's Margot Kidder).  It features a cast of then-TV-famous young women including Buffy's Michelle Trachtenberg and Party of Five's Lacey Chabert, as well as a pre-Arrow Katie Cassidy.  That's probably some pretty good geek-bait, honestly.

Is it any good, though?  Wellllll ... it's okay, I guess?  It gets off to a fast start and it has plenty of the murderin' action that people generally watch slasher films to get.  Also, the cast is solid.  On the other hand, I think it loses a fair bit of momentum because it keeps stopping to fill in the backstory of the murderer.  That's a big sin in this genre, to my mind.

At the end of the day, I didn't enjoy this enough that I would recommend it, but I did like it enough that I would like to check out the original.

Lost Girl, Season 4 (2013)

 

Kenzi Malikov lives a dangerous life.  She's a 'mere' human who works as a private investigator in the Fae community, disguising her 'inferior' heritage with regular doses of a black market lotion that lets her mimic the powers of a sprite.  The only people she can rely on are her friends Hale and Dyson, who help her solve cases and keep her secret.

If you remember my reviews of the previous three series of Lost Girl, you might be thinking "wait, isn't the main character a Succubus named Bo?".  And yes, yes it is, but at the outset of this season Bo is missing and none of the main cast even remember she exists.  That changes pretty fast, of course - Bo and her bodacious bosom are rather too important to the show to vanish for long.  But they are absent long enough for me to say that I would watch the heck out of "Kenzi Malikov, Undercover Human".

Anyway, once Bo is back we're set for more traditional Lost Girl hijinks, with plenty of sexy Succubus times, wacky Fae crimes, and scheming of all kinds.  As well, of course, there's the gang's struggles to find out who abducted Bo, where she went, and what was the motive behind the whole affair.

If you've enjoyed Lost Girl to this point, I see no reason why you won't like this season, too.  It's solid stuff overall, with a likeable cast and a good blend of comedy and adventure.

The Beguiled (2017)

Mississippi, 1864.  The American Civil War rages across the country, including in the region near the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies.  While out picking mushrooms, one of the younger students finds an injured Union soldier.  Despite the man being an enemy, she leads him back to the school for medical treatment.

Local Confederacy regulations call for the school's owner, Miss Farnsworth, to alert the authorities to the man's presence.  However, she fears that sending him to the prison camp in his current state would be a swift death sentence, and resolves to wait to tell them until he is well enough to survive.

At least, that's what she tells herself, her students, and the school's limited staff.  The fact that he's a handsome and quite charming young man might also have affected her decision.  It has certainly affected several of the other women at the estate.

Of course, the women's interests and motivations are not necessarily mutually attainable, and there's always the question of what their new guest's intentions might be: the situation is apt to become complicated!

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because there was a 1971 film based on the same novel, which I reviewed about eighteen months ago.  Some people have a fundamental aversion to remakes.  I am not one of them, and am often interested to see how new writers, directors and actors will approach such a project.  (For the record, I'm particularly interested in seeing how new writers and directors would approach The Hobbit.  Less so the actors, since I think the cast of those films did a good job).

Ahem.  In any case, what this means is that when it comes to remakes, or (as this more accurately is) new adaptations of the same source material, I'm pretty interested in how the films differ.  On that front, this offering falls a little short, I think.  It is somewhat different in that it tends to tell the story more through the viewpoints of its female cast, rather than its one prominent male character.  I like this aspect of it.  The problem - though only for someone who has already seen the earlier film - is that it does very little else that feels new or novel.

If you haven't seen the 1971 film, this is I think the better overall offering.  If you have seen the earlier one, it may not offer a sufficiently distinctive experience to be the optimal use of your 95 minutes.

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 1 (2016)

Arrow and The Flash have both generated a number of recurring super-powered characters who play an occasional role in events.  Now, blasting through the timestream comes Rip Hunter, who collects eight of these secondary supers, including - perhaps a little surprisingly - recurring Flash villains Captain Cold and Heatwave.

Hunter is a renegade agent of the Time Masters, an organisation which protects the timestream from time criminals.  He wants his eight recruits to help him prevent the conquest of Earth by Vandal Savage, which (if nothing is done) will occur in 2066.  The Time Masters have refused to take action against this event, saying that it is the correct course of history.  Hunter's wife and child will be killed by Savage in his conquest, however, and Hunter is desperate to prevent this.

Of course, defeating a man who is capable of conquering the entire planet will be no easy task, and there's also the rather inconvenient fact that Vandal Savage is immortal.  Born in Ancient Egypt and somehow imbued with eternal life by a meteor, he can only be slain by the two other people who were present when he received his powers.  These two have been reincarnated scores of times over the centuries, and each time they are, Savage hunts them down and murders them.  Their latest incarnations are, of course, among Hunter's eight recruits and are feeling pretty keen to pursue Savage rather than the other way around.

Legends of Tomorrow's first season is a bit of a bumpy one.  The team are not exactly stellar at working together, shall we say, and a lot of their efforts seem to make things worse for the world, rather than better.  Particularly early in the season, the plot of several episodes is "clean up the mess we made last time".  There are some decent in-fiction reasons for this, but it does get a bit wearing at times.  Still, the cast is pretty fun and ultimately I think it pays off pretty well.  I definitely enjoyed it enough to give season two a try.

His Girl Friday (1940)

 

Hildy Johnson, former star reporter of The Morning Post, drops into the paper to see Walter Burns, the paper's editor, and also her ex-husband.  It's no idle visit: Hildy is there to let Walter know that she's recently become engaged, and intends to quit the newspaper business to become a stay-at-home wife and mother.

Walter expresses pleasure at the news, insisting on meeting Hildy's fiance (a rather bland insurance salesman) and taking them both out to lunch.  This, of course, is nothing more than step on in a barrage of schemes to torpedo the impending nuptials.  Walter, you see, wants Hildy for himself - though rather more for her journalistic skills than for romantic reasons, I feel - and is pretty confident that if he can delay their departure long enough, he can find a story his ex-wife's reporterly instincts won't let her leave alone.  He may be right, at that: it just so happens there's a man on death row for fairly flimsy reasons.

The rest of the film depicts the battle of wills between Walter and Hildy and the pair's equally fierce struggle to write a story that the city's corrupt mayor and sheriff have no intent of letting see the light of day.

His Girl Friday is a seminal 'screwball comedy', with the razor-sharp banter and rather cynical view of love that generally characterised such works.  It's mostly good fun to watch, though at the end of the day it's hard to say that it's got a "happy ending". On the one hand, both Hildy and Walter seem to have got what they think they want ... on the other, I'm not sure what they want is all that sensible!

If you want to watch some skilled 1940s thespians deliver snappy dialog at a thousand words a minute, this film definitely has you covered.  Just don't expect anyone to be a better person at the end of the film than they are at the beginning!

Arrow, Season 4 (2015)

Oliver Queen has fallen in love and left not just Star City, but his identify as The Arrow behind, in order to build a new life with Felicity Smoak.  But Star City is not as ready to let go of Oliver Queen as he is of it.  While Oliver's friends continue to try to keep the streets safe, they and the police both find themselves overmatched by a mysterious organisation known as the Ghosts.  Both Oliver and Felicity are soon drawn back to the city to help defeat this new menace.

Of course, defeating the Ghosts will be no easy task, as they possess weapons unlike anything Oliver's friends have ever seen ... though fortunately Oliver himself has, as we learn through (yet) more flashbacks to the five years when the world believed him dead.  In a nice change of the formula, however, Oliver is not the only one whose past will play a significant role in this season's developments.

Arrow remains a solid action-focused superhero show.  It profits hugely from good casting in the cast around Oliver.  This is not to say that Stephen Amell is bad in the lead role - he's not - but the program is definitely much helped by the presence of strong and charismatic players making up the rest of the main (and for that matter, supporting) cast.

One weakness of this season that I will call out is that the resolution in the final showdown feels a bit reminiscent of that of season 2 (though not to anywhere near the extent that season 2 of The Flash felt like another variation of season 1).

The Flash, Season 2 (2015)

 

Barry Allen and his friends managed to thwart the machinations of Eobard Thawne, but in doing so they inadvertently opened a series of rifts that lead to a parallel Earth.  The team quickly dubs this other reality "Earth-2" (not a nomenclature the people of that world particularly appreciate, as you might imagine).  This parallel world is similar but not quite the same as their own: the same people often exist, but they have different jobs and personalities, and there's a whole new batch of metahumans there.

In and of itself, contact with another world is not necessarily a bad thing.  Unfortunately, Earth-2 is home to a psychotic super-speedster named Zoom, who has terrorised his world for years and fully intends to do the same to "Earth-1" ... right after he's done murdering The Flash, of course.

Faced with an enemy whose speed far out-strips his own, and who commands a menagerie of supervillain minions, can Barry and his friends even survive, let alone triumph?

I'm a sucker for alternate reality stories, so I am pretty much the target audience for an Earth-2 type storyline, but this season of The Flash didn't quite work for me.  I certainly don't think it is up to the standard of the first.  It's a bit too po-faced grim for much of the time, and several of the elements of the season-long arc are too reminiscent of what we saw in the previous series.  It's still a decently entertaining superhero show, mind you, and I intend to keep watching, but it's definitely a qualified recommendation.

True Blood, Season 3 (2010)

Sookie Stackhouse and company are back for another series of sexy supernatural shenanigans involving multiple conflicting vampire factions, Viking revenge schemes, and werewolf turf wars.  

The previous season of True Blood ended with all kinds of melodramatic events: deaths and disappearances, oh my!  This season hits the ground running on the follow-up to those developments, and keeps the action and the plot twists (and of course the gore and nudity) flowing at a fairly rapid rate for its entire twelve episode run.

True Blood is a show with a very specific formula: it's very over the top, sudsy stuff, with unashamedly histrionic writing that profits from the commitment of its charismatic and talented cast.  It certainly won't appeal to all people, and I think there's a very real risk that at some point the soapy silliness is going to overwhelm the actors' efforts to keep it engaging, but for now it is still managing the balancing act of treating all these shenanigans with utter in-character seriousness.

If sexy vampires are your thing - and clearly it hits a chord with a lot of people - True Blood definitely delivers the product you're after in season three.

The Four-Faced Liar (2010)

Shortly after moving in together, Molly and Greg go out for a drink at a local bar, The Four-Faced Liar.  There, they bump into a college classmate of Molly's named Trip.  He introduces them to his girlfriend Chloe, and to his flatmate Bridget, an out and proud lesbian.

Greg and Trip quickly bond, and - initially because she doesn't have anyone else to talk to, and later because they begin to discover shared interests and values - Molly starts spending more and more time with Bridget.  You can probably see where this is heading, even before I mention that Greg and Molly's relationship begins to founder as living together exposes differences and issues that they never previously noticed.

The above probably makes The Four-Faced Liar sound like a very standard coming out relationship story.  And honestly, if you just look at the bare bones of the plot, that's exactly what it is.  But a film doesn't have to break new narrative ground to be well-executed and effective.  This is well-cast, well-acted, and consistently entertaining.  If you're looking for a quiet night in with a queer-friendly romance, you could definitely do a lot worse.

M*A*S*H, Season 5 (1976)

A big challenge of reviewing seasons of a long-running TV show is that the basic premise and structure of the program doesn't usually change much over the years.  This can make it hard to find things to say about it that you haven't said already.  Season four of M*A*S*H made my job easier by having a couple of significant cast changes.

This season is not so obliging: it's pretty much just twenty-five episodes of the usual 4077th shenanigans.  This isn't a negative thing from the perspective of entertainment value, mind you.  M*A*S*H's cast and writers have by now refined their formula to a pretty precise art, and if you've been enjoying the program up to now, you will almost certainly continue to do so.  But it does make it rather hard to find new things to say about it!

One thing I can mention though is that there has been a slight shift in the overall tone of the show over the five years so far.  The characters in general are softer and more rounded, less acerbic if no less witty.  Personally I appreciate the change as I found the first season a bit mean-spirited (and definitely showing its age in its attitudes toward gender).

For my tastes, highlight episodes for this season include "Lt. Radar O'Reilly", "Dear Sigmund" and "Movie Tonight".

Lost Girl, Season 3 (2013)

Having defeated the Garuda, which wanted to feed on all Fae, succubus-and-private-investigator Bo might be forgiven for thinking things would quiet down for her and she can focus on her budding new romantic relationship.

She is, of course, not going to be that lucky.  As always, there's machinations from the leader of the Dark Fae to worry about.  And then there's a series of murdered Fae, at least one of whom looks uncomfortably like a succubus kill.  Oh, and above and beyond all that, there are some seriously weird things going on for Bo herself ...

Lost Girl season three continues the entertaining adventures of Bo and her friends.  It builds well on what has come before, with the relationships between the characters continuing to evolve based on past events, including shifting alliances and allegiances, as well as the introduction of a fun new character in the shape of Tamsin the Valkyrie.

It's not flawless, of course.  There are a couple of moments where new Fae lore is revealed in a "clearly the writers just came up with this for this season" kind of way, but they do at least make some effort to explain away why the subject has never come up before.  And the season opener with the Amazon jail and the sadistic warden is (a) a bit on the nose in general with some squicky sexual abuse themes and (b) somewhat transphobic.  The latter issue was hopefully not intended by the writers, given the show's general LGB-friendliness, but it's there nonetheless.

iZombie, Season 3 (2017)

Ever since she became a zombie, forced to eat human brains to stay sapient, Liv Moore has done her best to keep the secret not just of her own nature, but indeed the very existence of the undead.  So far, she seems to have managed it.  But as a functional cure continues to elude her and her friends, and the numbers of zombies in the world continue to inch upward, it becomes ever harder to keep a lid on the truth.

Forestalling the inevitable public exposure of zombies, and preparing for the day when those efforts fail, is a major theme of season three of iZombie.  I rather like how this whole effort plays out, personally.  The players aren't always who they claim to be, of course, but they also aren't necessarily who you might expect them to be, given typical story beats.  It can be hard to pull off subversions of common plot beats - those beats are common for a reason - but I feel like the show does a good job of it here.

Overall, if you have enjoyed seasons one and two of iZombie, I don't see any reason not to continue to follow the adventures of Liv & Co.  The cast remains engaging and likeable, the plot takes some unexpected but not illogical turns, and there's plenty of nerdy humour for those of us in the geekosphere.  This latter element can occasionally be somewhat problematic in that it sometimes drifts into punching down, but on the whole it is entertaining stuff.

Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

Back in the ever-less-accurately-named Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a twelve year old Tommy Jarvis finally slew the mass-murderer Jason Vorhees "for good".  But despite the seeming finality of that event, Tommy has never been able to shake the conviction that Jason would be back.  Which is why, now aged roughly twenty, he decides to break into the cemetery where Jason is buried, exhume the body, and sent it up in flames.

Given his pyrotechnic plans, Tommy probably should have chosen a less storm-wracked night, particularly because with one errant bolt of lightning into a maggot-inspected corpse, Jason Vorhees is not just back, he's back and undead.  His nigh-supernatural resistance to injury now escalated to actual supernatural levels, Jason narrowly misses out on killing Tommy in this first encounter, but is soon merrily hacking his way through anyone else he happens across.  Meanwhile Tommy desperately tries to persuade the authorities that they've got a zombie killer on their hands, which goes about as well as you might expect, though the local sheriff's attractive daughter seems rather more willing to believe him than does her dad ...

Fans of the Friday franchise were apparently less-than-enthused by the fifth film's attempts to set up a new killer in place of Jason Vorhees (and to be fair, the film wasn't very good).  So with this one the studio apparently decided to give them what they wanted.  Jason's resurrection kicks off this movie and is by far the best scene in it, particularly for slasher fans, since it is one of the very few moments where the movie actually gets gory.

Because for some reason - probably the mid-1980s moralist pushback on gory, sexualised films - this movie seeks to give answer the question "what would a Friday the 13th film with no boobs or blood be like?".  Which I can assure you is not a question any fan of the series was asking.

The answer, at least as it turned out in this case, is "not very good".  The film-makers attempt to recompense the lack of prurient content with ham-handed attempts at comedy.  Oh, the guy slammed his face into the tree and it make a bloody smiley face!  Oh, the kids at summer camp are making droll comments about their chances of survival!  The laughs, they barely start.  An effort to actually inject some tension and menace would have been a much more effective tactic; but also probably much harder to pull off, and "making an effort" has never really been the franchise's strong-point.

For Vorhees-completists only.

Warehouse 13, Season 3 (2011)

At the end of last season, the Warehouse 13 team saved the world again, but the emotional and personal cost has been high, leaving them down an agent and strained for resources.  The 'regents' who run the warehouse are working to find a new operative to relieve theses issues, while the team prefers to hope for the return of their former colleague.

These matters and their outcomes will soon need to take a backseat, however, as - much like in season one - it emerges that there is a new threat to the very existence of the warehouse itself.  Someone has formed a conspiracy to not just steal the artefacts the warehouse was formed to preserve and control (a reminder: artefacts are items and objects that have developed uncanny powers from their association with famous/notorious people), but is kidnapping, interrogating and killing regents to do it.

This third season of Warehouse 13 is a bit of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it does a pretty good job at introducing a new member to the team/cast - not always easy - and most of the individual episode plots are decent, with some fun artefact shenanigans.  On the other hand, there's the "shadowy conspiracy" season arc, which is rather a misfire.  The bad guy's motives are not unreasonable, which is good, but he's simply not very compelling and the specifics of the plot arc rely an awful lot on the warehouse bosses juggling a heck of a lot of idiot balls.  Bad guys should not (nearly) win because the good guys were dumb.

Overall, if you're into Warehouse 13, this season probably delivers enough entertainment that you won't be turned off; but if you aren't a fan, it's definitely not going to change your mind.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

It is the 1960s.

Napoleon Solo is a former thief and current (not especially willing) CIA agent.  He's charming, clever and good at improvisation, but kind of a jerk.

Ilya Kuryakin is a KGB agent.  He's taciturn and thorough, and very strong.  He's also a bit bullish and hard-headed.

Solo and Kuryakin first meet when the latter attempts to thwart Solo's mission to help Gaby Teller, the daughter of an alleged Nazi scientist, escape from East Berlin to the west.  Solo wins that round - barely.

Neither man is very impressed when their respective bosses inform them that they will now be working together.  Gaby's father, you see, has disappeared and is believed to be working with a secret organisation of former Nazis to develop a nuclear weapon.  Only by combining forces can the US and USSR prevent this threat from coming to pass.

And thus the scene is set for 'odd couple' spy antics.

The Man from UNCLE has a great cast, stylish direction, cool 60s fashion, capable villains and neat action sequences.  Unfortunately, it is somehow less than the sum of these parts.  I think this is due to two factors: tone and structure.  In the first case, the film comes across as a bit smug, and rather too impressed with its own cleverness (when it is not, in fact, all that clever - the plot-related surprises, frankly, aren't surprising).  In the second case, the final act of the film loses momentum and direction.  We're set up to expect an exciting special forces assault, a la You Only Live Twice, but said assault turns out to be straightforward and instead we get a long chase scene (in a movie not exactly short of them), and then a very talky final resolution to the plot.

The final film is still fairly fun and enjoyable, especially if this kind of thing is in your wheelhouse, but I do feel a little disappointed that what we got fell short of what it could have been, given the components on hand.

The Last Ship, Season 2 (2015)

The crew of the USS Nathan James would be forgiven for thinking that once they found a cure for the lethal pandemic known as the "Red Flu", the hard part of their job would be over. But of course they would be wrong. It soon emerges that major threats to their success still remain, whether it be those who want to ensure that only the 'right sort of people' get the cure, or those who are immune to the disease and would really rather let everyone else die so they can inherit the Earth.

Naturally, thwarting all these evil-doers becomes the responsibility of our intrepid crew (though they do get some help from a few new faces that join up this season).

I was not terribly impressed by the first season of this show. It was very bog-standard TV action stuff, with cartoonishly evil bad guys and blandly heroic good guys duking it out in not especially interesting or innovative ways, compounded by some unfortunate casting choices.

All of those issues are honestly still present here in this second season.  It even adds a new flaw by blithely hiking up the rate of immunity to the Red Flu to levels that make the whole premise of the first season seem rather far-fetched. 

Despite all that, however, it is a bit more engaging overall, and even has a little more ambiguity to it.  It probably also didn't hurt my enjoyment that they wrapped up the wince-inducingly ill-advised season 1 cliffhanger in only 2 or 3 episodes and never mentioned it again.  Honestly, had the first season been of this standard, I'd probably have given both a (very) qualified recommendation.  As it is though, the improvement here is not enough to make me say "sticking with it through the rough start is worth it".

The Brood (1979)

 

Psychotherapist Hal Raglan has developed a method he calls "psychoplasmics", in which he encourages patients with mental disturbances to let go of their suppressed emotions through psychosomatically inducing physiological changes to their bodies.  Raglan performs public demonstrations with one such patient, who is able to induce welts and burns to appear on his own body when confronted with memories of the abuse he suffered from his father.

Another of Raglan's patients is Nola Carveth, a severely disturbed woman who is in a legal battle with her husband Frank for custody of their young daughter Candice. Following a visit with Nola, Frank discovers bruises and scratches on Candice.  Though his daughter doesn't say how they happened, Frank not unnaturally believes that his estranged wife was responsible.  Confronting Raglan about the issue doesn't get the outcome he expects, though: the psychotherapist insists that Candice's weekly visits continue, and threatens to work to deny Frank custody if they do not!

Understandably angry, Frank refuses to back down and sets out to find some leverage against Raglan so he can protect his daughter.  That search is soon complicated, however, by the vicious murders of several people close to his wife and to him ...

Director David Cronenberg has acknowledged that The Brood was inspired in large part by the disintegration of his own first marriage.  I'm not sure that making a horror film about your ex is any more endorsed by mental health professionals than Dr Raglan's on-screen woo-woo would be, but the actual film itself proves to be a pretty good one.  It's not flawless, by any means - the murder scenes are a tad unconvincing in their choreography and some of the blood effects, for instance - but it's genuinely creepy at times and definitely shows the potential that Cronenberg would go on to realise throughout the early and mid 80s.

Eden Log (2007)

 

A man wakes up in a cave.  He has a corpse beside him, and no memory of who he is or how he came to be in this place.  Setting out to explore, he quickly stumbles across automated video messages, and an apparently insane man who appears to be physically integrated with a strange plant.  He also finds himself menaced by both armoured figures and animalistic mutants.

What's going on?  Why is here?  These are of course the questions that our nameless protagonist wants to answer, provided he can stay alive long enough to do so.

Eden Log is a French science fiction horror film.  It does not appear to have had a substantial financial backing, and utilises a lot of darkness and a deliberately muted palette (at times, it feels like it is black and white) as what I imagine was both a cost saving measure - it limits the sets and make-up you will need, and how sophisticated they need to be - and a stylistic choice.  The overall look conveys the grimy squalor of this dystopic future and makes the occasional (muted) splash of colour the more notable for its rarity.

Unfortunately, for my taste this visual style is the main thing the film has going for it, as neither the performances nor the script left me all that impressed.  The delivery of dialogue, at least in the English language version I saw, is rather wooden.  I expect the actors were probably more comfortable in their native French.  The story, meanwhile, feels rather stretched even for a (these days) relatively trim run time of 100 minutes.  It would probably have worked better as an episode of a science fiction anthology series like the Outer Limits, where it would have been only half that length.  Also, it includes a sexual assault scene that could (and should) have been omitted.

Splice (2009)

Clive and Elsa are genetic engineers working at Nucleic Exchange Research & Development (yes, the acronym is NERD - thankfully the film never makes a big deal of this 'funny' thing).  As part of their work, they've created a mated pair of slug-like creatures that they believe will allow them to produce a new chemical with potent medical benefits - though not as potent as if they were allowed to splice human DNA into their work.

However, the powers that be at NERD are not on board with the human hybrid idea, despite the dollar signs Clive and Elsa dangle in front of them.  This is not, of course, due to any particular moral qualms: they're just aware that such research would be a legal and PR disaster.  It's kind of refreshing to see a cinematic corporation that's not cartoonishly evil, and merely amoral in a banal, butt-covering kind of way, I think.

Anyway, Elsa isn't about to give up on her dream project, and persuades Clive to go along with her in creating a human/slug-thing hybrid embryo.  Just as a proof of concept.  They won't let it come to term, of course.

Yeah, anyone believe that plan is going to work out?

Splice is kind of like a slightly smarter, less gonzo action movie version of Species.  It's got a solid cast, decent creature effects, and a mostly solid and well-paced script.  There is however some sexual violence in the last act.  I could have done without that.  I can see that it was the probably the simplest way to get to the endgame they wanted, but I'm not convinced said endgame was worth it.

That issue aside, this is a solid little horror film.

Videodrome (1983)

 

Max Renn is the president of CIVIC-TV, a channel that specializes in provocative content, full of sexuality or violence.  He's always on the look-out for the next prurient sensation, and is not above some pretty shady business practices to get it.

Basically, in other words, Max is the cinematic embodiment of the "video nasty" boogeyman that conservative alarmists were in a fuss about in the early 80s - when they weren't in a fuss about Dungeons and Dragons or rock music, that is.

Anyway, things are pretty good for ol' Max.  He's just started a new sexual liaison with an attractive and kinky radio psychologist, and he's got a lead on that new sensation he has been looking for.  Videodrome is an ultra-low-budget pirate broadcast.  It's plotless, single-set sexual violence is just the edge that Max thinks CIVIC-TV needs in order to grow, so he immediately sets out to find the people behind it.

That search, however, turns out to be far stranger and more dangerous than Max could ever have imagined.

As I alluded to in my second paragraph, Videodrome definitely feels tapped into the early 80s zeitgeist, exploring many of the anxieties that plagued society's self-appointed moral guardians at the time.  You know the ones I mean: the type who believed that A Nightmare on Elm Street was surely a sign of the end times.  It's a somewhat risky idea, really.  I could easily see tackling such themes ending up in some kind of cringingly awful self-apologia.  Fortunately, this is a David Cronenberg film from what is probably his best period (from 79 to 86 he brought us The Brood, Scanners, The Dead Zone, this film and The Fly - quite the resume!).  It's a deftly made mix of sex, body horror and hallucinatory weirdness, and well worth a look if you're at all a horror fan.  Personally, I think it would work a treat in a double feature with either The Fly or John Carpenter's The Thing.

Rabies (2010)

A young woman is trapped in a sealed pit, deep in the woods.  Her brother Ofer, unable to get her out, promises to find help.

A park ranger and his wife are conducting rounds of a nature reserve in a forest.

Four teenagers driving to a tennis tournament take a wrong turn and accidentally run over a man who staggers out of the woods in front of their car.

These three groups, as well as two others I haven't yet mentioned, will spend the rest of the film intersecting and interacting in various, rarely-productive, ways.

So .. this film.  Thirty minutes in, I was really enjoying it.  Decent interactions between the characters and a nice surprise in that the teenagers respond relatively sensibly to hitting the young man (who is Ofer, in case you hadn't realised).  Two of them stay with the car and call the cops - who wonder of wonders in a horror film, actually show up! - while the other two try to help Ofer find his sister.  I was excited.

And then the rapiness kicked in.  Oh boy.  Both the teens who stayed with the car are attractive young women, and one of the two cops is all about sexually assaulting them via a "search".  It's clearly not the first time, and it's also apparent that his partner - who we're disturbingly asked to find sympathetic - is aware of this and has covered for him in the past.  From then on in, I was frankly not in a positive mood toward the movie.  I could possibly have overlooked it if the second cop had been positioned as just as bad, given he is obviously complicit in the behaviour, but as noted, he's positioned as sympathetic.  Screw that.

Rabies (or Kalavet, in the original Hebrew) has a good cast (albeit working in a language I don't speak), and several good moments, but for my tastes they aren't enough to compensate for the awfulness of the gender politics.

Deathgasm (2015)

 

After his mother gets locked up for a drug-addicted rampage, heavy metal enthusiast Brodie is packed off to a rural New Zealand town to live with his evangelistic uncle and obnoxious cousin.  It's a seriously uncool situation with only two redeeming features.

The first of these is Brodie's beautiful high school classmate Medina, who actually seems to like him.  The second is Zakk, a fellow metalhead with whom Brodie forms a garage band.  If truth be told, Zakk's a bit of a jerk at times, but Brodie's not exactly spoiled for choices when it comes to friends.

Things take a turn for the weird when Zakk and Brodie stumble across some ancient sheets of music that used to belong to a renowned heavy metal musician.  This is actually the Black Hymn, which will grant demonic power to those who play it.  And after a particularly fierce beating from his toxic cousin, Brodie's in the mood to not feel powerless any more.

Of course, invoking demonic power is by definition a bad idea, and soon the sleepy town's streets are awash in both gore and demon-possessed locals.  Now it's up to Brodie and his friends to try and prevent the literal apocalypse, armed only with sex toys, chainsaws, and a blistering guitar solo or three.

Deathgasm is clearly following in the in the comedy-horror splatterpunk style of early Peter Jackson, before he started churning out turgid, 94 hour long CGI-fests.  It features a great deal of over the top gore, gross out comedy, and juvenile wackiness (e.g. the use of sex toys as weapons).  If you are in the target audience for such fare, you will likely enjoy it: I did, though I do feel it loses steam a bit in its final half hour.  The film's only answer to how to keep building seems to be to throw more absurd gore on screen, and there comes a point where that gets a bit played out.

Ridge War Z (2013)

 

A journalist accompanies three veterans to the site of the climactic battle of the war between the living and the undead. There, he asks the men to share their stories of the encounter, while the film asks the viewer to believe that the fate of humanity rested on the outcome of a skirmish involving a whole six soldiers.

No, it's not any more convincing than it sounds.

Ridge War Z (AKA Gory Ridge) feels like it wants to be the quasi-documentary zombie war narrative that the World War Z novel also offered, but that the film based on the book chose not to be.

Perhaps, in more skilled (and wealthier) hands, this approach could have worked.  Here, with the script's clumsy, plodding repetition of the "war is hell" refrain, and the embarrassingly meagre zombie-fighting action it offers, the outcome is pure tedium.  I can't really blame the cast for this: they do a decent job, but they simply aren't able to get much out of the trite dialogue and weak action scenes.

Ridge War Z seems to earnestly want to be a thoughtful film about war that just happens to have zombies in it, but it lacks the ability to match this ambition.  I can't see that it will please any audience.  People who want a drama about war are likely to be turned off by the zombies, and those who are keen on undead carnage will be thoroughly unimpressed by the anemic zombie action on offer.

Re-Animator (1985)

Dan Cain has it pretty good.  He's a handsome medical student with a smart, attractive girlfriend.  And a new transfer student just rented the spare room at his house, so he's not going to have any trouble covering his rent, now.  Basically, as long as Dan avoids getting involved in bizarre experiments aimed at raising the dead, I am sure his life will be all sunshine, rainbows and puppies.

Good thing there's no chance his new room-mate, Herbert West, is experimenting in Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, right?  And even if he was to do something like that, there's little chance it would lead to evil headless professors or rampaging undead hordes, I'm sure!

Re-Animator is a gleefully over-the-top bit of cinematic schlock.  I imagine the screenwriting team taking the motto "Subtlety is for cowards!" as they hurl viscera and nudity at the camera from almost the first shot of the film.  Our opening scene features exploding eyeballs and things are not going to get any more restrained from there.  The cast seem fully on board with the melodramatic excess, with Jeffrey Combs (as Herbert West) and David Gale (as the malevolent Dr Carl Hill) being particularly noteworthy in their enthusiastic hamming.

It's hard to argue that this is a good film, but it sure is a fun one!

Let the Right One In (2008)

12-year old Oskar lives with his divorced mother in a block of flats.  Oskar's shy and meek demeanour conceals a core of bitter rage.  He is bullied every day at school, and spends his evenings imagining bloody revenge: he keeps a knife under his bed and collects newspaper articles about violent crimes.

Oskar's about to have plenty of new reading material, as a series of murders sweeps the neighbourhood.  He's somewhat distracted from his usual clipping-collecting routine, though, by meeting Eli, who is a new arrival in the apartment block.  Eli is Oskar's own age, and she rapidly becomes his only real friend.  He confides in her about the bullying, and she encourages him to fight back.

Of course, Eli and the murders are connected, something that we know even if Oskar doesn't.  The story of who is committing the murders, and why, and what will happen when Oskar finds out, is essentially what the film is all about.  

Let the Right One In is intelligently and elegantly put together, and does a fine job of juxtaposing the misery that Oskar experiences at school with his growing relationship with Eli.  While there are supernatural elements at play here, the film arguably finds horror more effectively on a more mundane level: it is pretty easy to see a parallel between Oskar's story and the real world radicalisation of alienated young men.

Note that Let the Right One In is the original Swedish version of this film; there is also an English-language remake titled Let Me In, which is apparently very similar.

Ginger Snaps (2000)

Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald hate their home town, their schoolmates, their parents ... basically everyone and everything, in fact, except each other.  Still sharing a bedroom despite being sixteen and fifteen respectively, their principal form of entertainment is staging elaborate photographic tableaux of their own deaths.

Said deaths start feeling rather too real, however, when they are attacked by a violent, wolf-like creature one night.  Ginger is savagely mauled by the beast before they can get free of it, and even then they only manage to escape when the creature pursues so single-mindedly that it runs right into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

But at least the crisis is over, right?  Well, maybe not.  Ginger's wounds heal suspiciously quickly, and her behaviour changes in ways that probably aren't solely related to the fact that she's (finally and belatedly) experiencing her first period.  Just what kind of creature was it that attacked the two young women, and is Ginger fated to become one of them?

This Canadian horror film puts a lot of trust in its two leads: Ginger or Brigitte or both are in almost every scene in the movie, and are required to go through a wild ride of emotions and experiences in the process.  The actors also have to make us care about these two characters, who really aren't very pleasant at first.  So kudos to them for pulling it off, as I was definitely invested in the fate of the Fitzgerald sisters by the time we reached the film's climax.

Some of the monster effects show up the film's relatively low budget, but that minor quibble aside, this is a good little horror film.

Debug (2014)

Six convict hackers on work release, along with their guard, are sent to debug the systems on a drifting starship. Left running unsupervised for years at a time, these sophisticated programs can get corrupted, even come to think they are 'real people'. Clearing them out is routine work and none of the seven humans expect this time to be anything out of the ordinary.

Of course if they were right there wouldn't be much of a movie.  So it's probably no surprise if I tell you that the security AI on this particular vessel is determined to do unto the humans before they can do unto it ...

Written and directed by David Hewlett, who is probably best known for his role as Rodney McKay on the Stargate TV shows, Debug is a smartly produced bit of low budget SF/horror.  The script isn't anything particularly deep or innovative - the debt to HAL's homicidal impulses in 2001 is openly acknowledged by Hewlett - but it moves along briskly and doesn't ask its characters to be too obviously stupid.  The sets and costumes are effective and the special effects work, while obviously modest and limited, do not look too terrible.  I tend to credit Hewlett's extensive experience of TV science fiction (and the contacts he made there) for how well-judged these elements are.

Hewlett's TV experience probably also helped with casting.  Everyone here is solid, and obviously a post-Game of Thrones Jason Momoa was a pretty good 'get' even back in 2014.  No doubt the years of Stargate: Atlantis that they did together didn't hurt.

If you're the target audience for a "haunted house in space" movie, you could certainly do a lot worse than Debug.

Vampire Circus (1972)

The Count of Stetl is a vampire, who has been preying on village children for his blood.  Finally his depredations grow to much for the townsfolk to bear.  They assault his castle and after a fierce struggle, one of them stakes the Count in the heart.  He sinks into a death-like trance, though not before prophesying that the children of the village will be the food for his resurrection.

Fifteen years later, the village is wracked by a strange plague.  The national authorities have placed a cordon of soldiers to prevent anyone from leaving.  Not a fun situation, so the villagers are pleasantly surprised when a travelling circus somehow slips past the cordon and into their town.  At least, some new people and new diversions!

The villagers can be forgiven for having no suspicions of this strange event, but for us it has only been five minutes, and not fifteen years.  And we know that the Count's human lover escaped his demise.  And of course, we also know that this is a movie called Vampire Circus, so I don't think it is exactly a spoiler if I tell you that at least some of the the carnival folk (including a pre-Doctor Who Lalla Ward) are here to make sure the Count's prophecy comes true.

This is a late stage Hammer Film.  Hammer burst onto the cinematic horror scene in late 1950s with a series of successful films starring Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing, but by the end of the following decade they were struggling.  The stagy, mannered tone of their films and tendency toward period settings made them seem old-fashioned and they steadily lost ground to the more naturalistic (and more graphic) US competition. 

Hammer attempted to adapt to changing audience expectations.  Vampire Circus is one of several of their films to include a significant dose of nudity and rather more graphic violence/gore than their early offerings.  Unfortunately, they mainly proved through this that it is possible to be salacious and still come across as a bit fuddy-duddy.

Despite having what I consider a terrible title, Vampire Circus is one of the better efforts of Hammer's later years.  It's a fun romp if not exactly a very scary one: it certainly has plenty of ideas, even if they aren't all executed that well!  If you've an interest in the progression of cinematic vampires through the ages, it is worth checking out.

Oculus (2013)

11 years ago, Alan Russell murdered his wife Marie, and was then killed in self defence by his ten year old son Tim when he tried to kill his children.

Or at least, that's the finding of the police investigation.  Tim's sister Kaylie, who was 12 at the time of the killings, thinks otherwise.  She is sure that an antique mirror her father purchased somehow drove both Alan and Marie insane.  She has tracked dozens of cases of the mirror's owners meeting macabre fates, and has become an antiques dealer herself with the avowed intention of finding the mirror and getting irrefutable proof of its malign, supernatural powers.

And now, as Tim reaches his 21st birthday and is released from the mental institution where he has been treated for the past decade, Kaylie has located the mirror and is ready for the showdown.

Oculus is a well-crafted horror film, driven more by suspense and creepiness than gore or violence (though there is some of the latter).  It has a solid cast and a pretty tight script that does a good job of justifying the characters' actions, or failure to act.  "Why doesn't Kaylie just smash the mirror?" has a couple of different answers offered, for instance, and they hold water pretty well.

Well-crafted stuff, check it out if you want to be creeped out.

October 2020 Review Schedule

This October, reviews will be posted on Tuesdays, Thursdays (except today) and Saturdays.

Smallville, Season 4 (2004)

Having ended season three with no less than three different main characters on the brink of death, this fourth season of the show wastes no time in dropping another major development: the arrival of Lois Lane.  This is not the career-focused hotshot reporter of your parents' Superman, though.  This Lois is a smart alecky city girl with a healthy dose of grifter in her genes.  She's rapidly risen to be my favourite character in the show, and I'm looking forward to seeing her relationship with Clark - which is currently much like that of squabbling siblings - develop over the remaining seasons.

Anyway, after resolving the various major cliffhangers of last season and introducing Ms Lane to the gang, this year's Smallville sets off on its usual pattern of plenty of "villain of the week" episodes through which longer form plotlines are threaded.  These include round 3,000 of Clark and Lana's romance; the main characters' impending transition from high school to college; round 2,000 of Luthor family squabbles; 17th century witches; and alien power stones, oh my!  Basically, everything except lions and tigers and the kitchen sink.  But then there are still six more seasons for them to squeeze those in!

This season of Smallville is certainly not perfect TV: there are the usual less-good episodes from time to time, and I feel like the plotline involved Jensen Ackles's character (another new addition to the cast this year) ends up rather muddled.  Possibly plans had to be altered when he landed the lead role on Supernatural?  But it has a fun overall dynamic and it has finally started to break away from "everyone's powers come from kryptonite" crutch that was repeatedly used to weaken Clark in the first season.

This is not to say that kyptonite doesn't still turn up a lot, because it does.  We even get a third type - black kryptonite - to go with the familiar red and green varieties.  But the show is definitely expanding its horizons in the same way that the characters are.  I approve.

I also approve of the gloriously over the top final episode, which takes the multiple cliffhangers of last year and turns the volume up a couple of notches.  I admire that chutzpah.

And Now For Something Completely Different (1971)

In 1971 Monty Python's Flying Circus had enjoyed two reasonably successful (if sometimes controversial) seasons on UK television, but had failed to win an audience in the US.  The head of Playboy UK thought he had a solution, however: put together a 90 minute film comprising some of the best-received segments of the show, to be screened in cinemas.

And thus And Now For Something Completely Different (the name being taken from a commonly used line in the show) came to be made.  Rather than simply combining existing footage of the skits (probably due to issues with the BBC) they were re-shot on a shoestring budget; so shoestring in fact that they sometimes had to be re-written to remove effects that were included in the original TV broadcasts!

Consisting of roughly 30 short live action sketches and roughly half as many animated sequences, And Now For Something Completely Different is ironically therefore 100% familiar material.  I'm not sure how the sketches were selected - certainly there are some famous segments omitted, such as the Ministry of Silly Walks and The Spanish Inquisition - but you certainly can't complain that they aren't packing in a bunch of material!

As what is essentially an extended episode of a sketch-comedy TV show, there's no real narrative to speak of here (though several of the sketches do blend into each other or have quirky call-backs to earlier content); whether you will enjoy it or not therefore comes down to how funny you find the Python team's sense of the absurd.  Also, to a lesser extent, how willing you are to overlook the cultural assumptions of fifty year old jokes; there is for instance an obvious assumption in some of the sketches that homosexuality is intrinsically funny.

Supergirl, Season 1 (2015)

Everyone knows the story of how Kal-El of Krypton was sent as a baby from his dying homeworld to Earth, where he was adopted by Ma and Pa Kent and went on to become the renowned hero, Superman.

What most people don't know is that his 13-year old cousin Kara Zor-El was also sent to Earth to be Kal-El's protector until he grew up.  This is because her ship was knocked off course, and spend over many years in the timeless expanse known as the "Phantom Zone".  When the still 13-year old finally did arrive on Earth, Kal-El was a grown man and not in need of protection.

A decade later, Kara "Danvers" is the personal assistant to media mogul Cat Grant, trying to find a way to fit into the world as a normal person, without using her powers.  But when her adopted sister's plane experiences engine failure and begins to crash, Kara's powers are the only solution available to her.

Immediately dubbed "Supergirl" by Cat Grant, Kara decides that the time has come to embrace her Kryptonian powers and follow in her cousin's footsteps as a costumed hero with a mild-mannered alter-ego.  And she's made that decision not a moment too soon, because when her ship escaped the Phantom Zone, it drew a prison full of alien criminals with it: criminals who have escaped and now threaten the planet.  (Good job they waited a decade to get up to much!)

I never watched Supergirl season 1 when it came out, because I had thoroughly disliked the trailer, but people kept giving it positive reviews - plus in later seasons it started to crossover with the other Arrowverse shows every year - so I finally decided to give it a try.

Sorry to buck the comics nerd love-in, but I didn't particularly like it.  It does have positive elements: the main cast are solid (though I think Melissa Benoist is a better Kara Danvers than Supergirl), and I can see potential for the show, but many elements of the execution left me cold.  The extended "Kara isn't ready to be a hero" plotline was very tiresome; characters often seemed to flip-flop in attitudes for inorganic "well, the story needs to go in X direction now" reasons; Cat Grant - though well performed by Callista Flockhart - is an awful human being we're apparently supposed to like; and they did horrible things to Lois Lane's dad, for which I will never forgive them.

A friend described this season of the show as clumsy but charming.  I think he was half right!

The Tall Man (2012)

The rural town of Cold Rock has been dying a slow but irreversible decline ever since the local mine closed down some six years ago.  It's a bleak, soul-crushing inch toward oblivion for the town.  And just in case that wasn't enough, things are made even uglier by the frequent disappearance of young children.  One vanishes every few months, without any culprit ever being identified.  The police and federal authorities seem stymied but the local rumour mill has an answer: "The Tall Man", a shadowy figure that some claim to have seen near where the children disappeared.  Who or what this figure might be is a subject of hot debate.  Child molester?  Supernatural menace?  The Devil himself?

One of the few people who seems to be trying to keep the town from freezing up entirely is Julia Denning, the young widow of the town's former doctor.  A nurse herself, Julia has kept her husband's clinic running, though as the locals are fond of telling her: she cannot fill his shoes.

One night, after returning to her isolated home and playing with her son David, Julia is disturbed by loud noises from downstairs.  She investigates, just in time to see a dark figure bundle David into a truck and start to drive off.  With no-one else to help her, Julia chases the truck, determined to recover her boy ...

That's the opening act of this film, and the only part the trailer addresses.  Without spoiling things too much, though, I will say that this is not the straightforward "mother tries to protect her child" film that it appears to be.  There's a pretty big and I think potentially very interesting wrinkle that changes the premise dramatically.

Unfortunately, while the wrinkle itself was intriguing, eventually the film has to explain it, and on that front I feel it fumbles pretty badly.  The truth behind it all was not convincing or compelling to me.  On that basis, despite that I think are good performances and an intriguing shift of expectations, I can't recommend the film.  Particularly if you're looking for a "mom vs monster" film.  (Which if you are, I suggest The Babadook).

True Blood, Season 2 (2009)

Sookie Stackhouse would like nothing more than some quiet time with her lover Bill Compton, free from serial killers and vampire politics and supernatural weirdness in general.  But when you're a telepath with a vampire for a boyfriend, "quite time" is something of a luxury.  Sookie soon finds herself embroiled in an investigation for a missing vampire, while her brother Jason goes looking for meaning for his life in all the wrong places, and their hometown of Bon Temps finds itself the target of a mysterious woman with strange powers and a potentially lethal agenda.

So basically there's going to be lots of sex and blood and flawed people making terrible decisions that lead to more sex and blood, because "smutty, gory, over the top melodrama" is very much the True Blood formula.  And hey, it's a formula that mostly works, thanks in large part I think to the willingness of the cast to lean into all its overblown, histrionic supernatural and sexual shenanigans.

True Blood is not highbrow art, and it has no pretensions to be.  It's fast food TV: slickly packaged and somehow more-ish despite its flaws.  All in all, if you're looking for a guilty pleasure to indulge in, then - at least here in season 2 - it's worth putting on the menu.

We Are The Night (2010)

Three women murder the passengers and crew of a small jet, then merrily leap out of the plane before it crashes.

The next day, after narrowly avoiding arrest by a handsome young detective, pickpocket Lena stumbles across a well-hidden nightclub filled with glamorous people.  Her intent is to locate a mark or two for her light-fingered skills.  What she finds instead is compelling blonde woman who doesn't cast a reflection in the mirror and leaves rather more than a hickey on Lena's neck.

Yep, what we have here is a coterie of three vampires, whose leader believes Lena to be "the one" who can replace the woman who turned her, whom she lost some two hundred years ago.  Lena, for her part, is attracted by the benefits of being a vampire: eternal youth, the ability to enjoy sex, drink and drugs without any risk of complications, being able to walk on walls, all that stuff.  She's rather more conflicted about the trio's casual attitude toward killing people, and not entirely on board with the invitation to sample the wonders of lesbian love, either.  That police detective was very handsome, after all.

Despite the presence of vampires, We Are The Night is not really a horror film.  It never tries to scare the audience at all, instead reveling in the self-indulgence and violence of their undead powers.  It feels rather more in the vein (heh) of say Heathers than Nosferatu, only instead of blowing up high schools the end game is vampire on vampire smackdown.

If you want a vampire-themed "temptations of evil" kind of story and don't mind that there's some rather unfortunate heteronormative subtext underlying it all, We Are The Night might offer some diversion.  But I didn't think it had all that much interesting to say, personally.

The Twilight Zone, Season 2 (1960)

Writing an anthology series is no easy task, especially when you're working with scripts that run no more than 25 minutes.  You have to introduce your characters and the situation they're experiencing, engage the audience in it, create uncertainty over the outcome, and then deliver a pay-off.  That's a lot of targets to try and hit, even before you factor in that you need to try and do it twenty or thirty times a season.

Sad to say, season two of The Twilight Zone misses those targets more often that it hits.  The twenty nine offerings here fall well short of the average entry from the first season.  There are occasional bright spots, of course, but they are few and often still undermined by a flaw or two.

The writing is on the wall early when episode 2 "The Man in the Bottle" is nothing more than a lightly re-skinned version of "The Monkey's Paw".  Other low-lights include"The Eye of the Beholder", which stretches a four minute plot to over five times its natural length, and "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", which is so dedicated to its obvious and uninteresting conclusion that it seemingly never stops to consider how incredibly stupid its whole setup actually is.

As I said, even the better episodes are at least somewhat flawed.  "The Invaders" is probably the best of the bunch, with its one weak point being that it cheats a bit by how it structures Rod Serling's introduction.  "A Most Unusual Camera" probably ranks second for the season, for all that it's more or less another of the multiple 'be wary of miraculous gifts' plots the show has run by now.  It does suffer from a rather forced ending, though.

Overall, the miss to hit ratio is several levels too high for me to give this season even a qualified recommendation.  Here's hoping for a better batting average in season three.

Mysterious Island (1961)

Near the close of the American Civil War, four Union-aligned men escape from the Confederate prison where they are being held, seize an aerial observation balloon, and escape: all amidst the wildest storm of the year.  Their departure is not uncontested, however, and they end up with a Confederate prisoner in the balloon basket with them.

They'll soon be grateful for their enemy's presence, however, as he at least understand how the balloon is operated, and can land them safely ... well, he can as soon as the wild winds die down!

However the storm continues to blow; the five men travel vast distances until they eventually crash on a tiny tropical island.  They must now try to survive here long enough either for rescuers to find them, or until they can manufacture their own means of escape.

Easy, right?  Well, did I mention that all their food and weapons were lost in the crash?  That's a complication right there.  Oh yeah, and there's one other thing: this island already has inhabitants.  They're just not human, and Ray Harryhausen is their father.

Yep, this is a Harryhausen stop motion creature feature and adventure yarn, loosely based on the Jules Verne novel of them same name.  It's not one of the great man's most renowned works, but it is definitely at its best whenever one of his creations is on screen, trying to eat the human cast.  Those sequences fortunately occur relatively frequently, livening up the otherwise sometimes rather stilted plot.

If you've a hankering for an old-fashioned adventure movie, and/or an appreciation for Harryhausen's meticulous stop motion effects, this is worth a couple of hours of your time.