Reviewenstein

Yep, it's another one. If you're looking for sci-fi, horror, or both, look elsewhere, because you're probably going to be disappointed by the time you get to the end of this movie. It's something like the 46,754th movie in the last ten years that was made because someone was absolutely sure they'd managed to construct the perfect story to act as a metaphor for Dealing with Trauma and the world needed to see it. You know, for healing. And, to be fair, this one handled it better than most, but it still suffers from the basic failing they all do, which is that, because the writers only really cared about the metaphor, not the story, and because they're not very good writers, they eventually reach a point where they can't conclude the story AND the metaphor, so the story falls apart in order to make the metaphor clear. I think I've seen all 46,754 of them and not once has the story been able to stand on its own. The final act always, always only serves the metaphor and, viewed without it, is complete gibberish. This one is only different in that it managed the job marginally better, but not well enough that it's going to be a satisfying experience for anyone who doesn't think Dealing with Trauma is a super important thing to watch movies about. The day the movie industry finally turns its back on the generation of filmmakers whose worldview came from Facebook will be a great victory for creativity. Until then, we're going to get this facile, shallow, preachy, self-satisfied bait-and-switch again and again.

...It was equally unlikely they would be faithful to the novel as it was they'd be able to resist politicizing it. It follows the same pattern as every adaptation of a literary classic in the last decade, with a load of ideas shoehorned in to suit the filmmakers' personal obsessions and add nothing to the story. What really gets me is that even with such a strange, dreamlike story as this one to work with, the changes they made were the most predictable, pedestrian stuff you could think of. The sheer dearth of imagination boggles the mind. Skip this and watch the original movie or read the book.

I really wanted to like this, especially as Daryl was one of the few Walking Dead characters I cared about who made it through to the end. And I'm prepared to accept a lot from this fictional world, but what I've seen of this show so far is asking too much. TWD's universe has always been very grounded... the only thing separating it from the real world is the zombies. Now we've apparently introduced psychic powers? And video game-style zombie variants with various specialized abilities. I'd enjoy these things in an original story... and I have, many times! But they seem totally at odds with the established tone of this franchise. Combine that with the fact that, at least so far, the series has carried over executive producer Angela Kang's overt social messaging on everything from gender to politics, and there's just not enough to keep me watching to see if it improves.

It's a shame these movies were made when they were. This one more than the last, because it was better a lot of ways. Hopefully, when Hollywood has moved on from its obsession with making all female characters super-competent and nigh-invulnerable and all male characters disposable morons, someone will make another movie with the same kind of elaborate puzzles.

Admittedly, the puzzles are pretty much all it has going for it, and it's not like they're presented in a way the audience can solve them, but it would still be a fun ride if it weren't for the gross and very deliberate dividing of the characters along gender lines.

Here are the spoilers: the movie starts with a team of six people, three men and three women. What do you think happens? You guessed it, all the men die. They don't mix it up, it's just the men, one after another, finally leaving only the women to solve the puzzles. I mean, I was expecting something like that, but even I didn't think it'd be so blatant or so thorough. Eventually it writes itself into a corner, of course, and has to suddenly and awkwardly get rid of two of the women in order to leave the series' heroine to save the day, but up to that point it's just disposing of the superfluous men. I watched the Extended Cut so I can't speak to the theatrical version, but in the one I saw all the villains are also men. There's even a room full of evil folks operating evil computers and there's not a single woman among them. There are a couple of details I didn't spoil here that change that dynamic slightly, but only in the sense that the movie needed twists and to set up a sequel. It is worth noting that the men aren't completely useless or relegated to just doing the heavy lifting, which was nice. They actually do contribute to the solutions, but minimally.

There are some bizarre moments that felt like they were meant to be explored more... one of the characters is immune to pain, which is introduced but goes nowhere. Ben's vocal worship of Zoë seems like it's going to be part of the plot but isn't.

All in all, if you don't care about this kind of thing and can turn your brain off, it's a loud, fun spectacle. If you do, it's more of the same.

I'm not saying don't watch it - actually, I will say that, but for different reasons - just be aware that the trailer was deliberately edited to remove any mention of what the movie's actually about: COVID. I guess the distributor knew it was going to drive many viewers away so they cut the world's most dishonest trailer. COVID explicitly dominates every scene in the movie and somehow doesn't show up in the trailer at all.

The pandemic isn't just a backdrop, which is what I had hoped once the movie started, the entire movie is *about* COVID, both the story and the subtext. That's right, it's a movie with a Message, and that message is "it's not about you, wear a mask to protect other people."

It's a little surprising this thing got made, honestly. The script is the author working out their severe COVID anxiety using horror as a none-too-subtle metaphor. Understandable, but not a great viewing experience. It takes the inevitable swipes at anyone who had concerns about lockdown and mask mandates, and, well, there's not much more to it. It's a risk to have your movie take a political position at the best of times, but bearing in mind the recent revelations about the effectiveness of the protective measures we all took, this movie in particular is already especially difficult to watch.

The only thing about this movie that isn't desperately predictable is the completely random teenage threesome. Then again, it's German, so we should thank our lucky stars it wasn't something worse.

It starts out as a pretty promising supernatural thriller, even throwing in a couple of effective red herrings, but with the start of the third act it spirals into an increasingly stupid Hunger Games-style YA adventure.

This review requires more characters, but the movie doesn't deserve them. As such, I'm going keep typing this explanatory paragraph for forty-six more characters until I run out the limit. Ah, there we go.

Or at least, someone please remind me to stop watching them. The problem is, they look good. They have such great production design... the art direction, lighting, and cinematography all make them look like they'll have stories that are just as good. The trailers always make them seem interesting and full of atmosphere.

They're not, though. Ever. Well, with the possible exception of Conjuring 2, but generally speaking these are the Michael Bay movies of the horror world. They're big and dumb and loud and meaningless, and the sheer clumsiness of them makes it impossible to even turn your brain off and enjoy the ride. Even Michael Bay's better than that.

Yes, it's all formulaic, but I don't think that's a problem. The characters' motivations are nonsensical, events follow each other illogically, the dialogue and acting are stilted and flat. Despite the great visuals, it doesn't even manage to create an eerie atmosphere... endless shots of darkened hallways that should be ominous are somehow rendered boring by the sheer mindlessness of the story. You might as well be staring at a beige wall for an hour and a half.

And here's a fun wrinkle: it's a movie set in a convent, featuring a nun, about Catholicism, and firmly set in a world where God and demons are explicitly real... but it doesn't seem to know anything about Christianity. If you're going to write about anything, do enough basic research that your audience can take it seriously. The climax of these movies always comes down to the power of faith, except it has nuns and priests saying stuff that would make anyone with a basic knowledge of religion do a double take. I mean, I'm neither religious nor a Catholic, and even I thought it was both stupid and disrespectful.

That's about it. Dull, dumb, and seemingly unaware of it. The ultimate Conjuring movie.

I'm honestly baffled this movie exists. I'll get back to that.

First, it's a stretch to call it horror. The trailer is deceptively cut to make it look like a fun, Blumhouse-style romp, but it doesn't represent the movie well. It's more teen drama, to the point that the horror elements seem almost misplaced. They're a tonal mismatch to the rest of the film, but not so much as to be a problem. Just don't go into it expecting Insidious.

The story's a classic Monkey's Paw situation (not exactly, I'm not spoiling anything) with some fun ideas. Mostly, though, it's about a teenage girl and her friends and family, and her insecurities. It's well done.

It's very consciously made to appeal primarily to teenage girls. That's no bad thing inherently, though I wonder when directors will realize that the market for horror aimed at that audience is perishingly small. It has a target demographic that it's aimed squarely at and it doesn't care that much about appealing to anyone else.

And that's why it's an aberration. Because it's still good. All the characters are likable. The circle of teen friends, the dad, the love interest. They're relatable, intelligent, nuanced people. That's rare in *any* movie in 2017, much less horror, much less what they a call "female-led" movie. There's no pandering, no putting down or demonizing of the male characters, no ham-fisted or hypocritical social messaging. Instead, what message there is is genuine and sincere, about universal human issues. It's like watching something made before everyone in the world hated everyone else, except it was made a decade later. A movie like this shouldn't exist in 2017. And while it's arguably a little schmaltzy, which is also not necessarily a bad thing, it's also deceptively clever. I can say no more without spoilers.

My only caveat is this: there's a post-credits scene which undermines the rest of the story a bit. It's easily ignored, though.

Bravo to everyone involved in the production. You did something very, very difficult, and I'm glad I watched it.

This is really a review of season 2. The first season was all the good things you've heard... I don't know what happened in between.

It's like the writer saw the difference between Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 and thought, "That's what I want to do!" So while the first season was serious horror based cleverly in Catholicism, the second season is horror comedy with a completely incompatible cosmology that brings in everything from Scientology to Lovecraft to Bosch. That's a shame on a couple of levels, partly because it undermines the first season, and partly because I would have loved to see these ideas presented seriously.

The characters' personalities have changed, too. Paco is now a bumbling goofball, Elena is relentlessly irritable and contemptuous, and Vergara... well, I can't tell you about him without getting into spoilers, but he's not the same man. The only character who seems consistent is Laguna, who's also the only actor who seems to be taking the story seriously. He almost manages to save it.

The basic lack of seriousness pervades the writing. Stuff happens without any attempt at plausibility... I'm not talking about the supernatural, I mean mundane things. People know things that happened in scenes where they weren't present, plot devices appear at impossible times. At one point a man who was strip-searched and dressed by guards moments ago suddenly has a cell phone in his pocket.

Ultimately, for me, having seen season 1 makes it impossible to really invest in season 2. It's not silly enough to feel like a completely different world, but it's not serious enough to take, er, seriously. I keep expecting the world from the previous season and being disappointed, which compounds the disappointment of seeing a great premise wasted. Maybe watch season 2 first? That might be a way to enjoy both.

There's a lot badness in here, but it'd be pretty overlookable if the movie's moral compass weren't so skewed. It's clearly a completely different creative vision than the first one, and it makes some baffling storytelling choices, but for the most part it works until the final act. After that it degenerates from a classic spookfest into a pointless, inconsistent, sexist, hateful, and generally misanthropic hack job with delusions of significance. This is a franchise killer of a movie, and the fact that anyone still has to pay to see it this long after it was vomited into existence is a crime against cinema.

The worst thing about this movie is how clever it thinks it is, despite having one of the most catastrophically stupid screenplays I've ever seen. This thing - beautifully shot and well acted though it is - has the depth of piece of paper. Blank paper. Blank paper that works in advertising and spends a lot of time on TikTok. You know those ideas you have at 4am that seem amazing but when you wake up in the morning you see all the glaring flaws? This movie makes those ideas feel better about themselves. Oh, and there's subtext, which I honestly hope I've misinterpreted because at least then the movie would just be dumb rather than dumb and misguidedly self-righteous.

It's pretty common wisdom, right? Make sure your first episode of your TV show demonstrates the tone of the series to come, draws people in, and makes them excited for more. If you've slated the first ep to be the weakest, you may want to reconsider the broadcast order. Likewise, when you're making a show about urban legends, it might be a good idea to lead with one people have actually heard of. The best thing about this clumsy, dull, predictable entry is that the rest can only be an improvement. Oh, and the preponderance of violence against men is, I suppose, part of the... appeal?

EDIT: Having now watched further episodes, I was mistaken. It does not improve.

There was a lot to like about this movie. If it weren't for a couple of small things that heavily affected the experience for me, I'd recommend it unreservedly. The presence of Javier Botet, of course, is always a good thing... when you see his name in the credits you know you're in for, if not a great movie, at least a great villain. It was atmospheric and beautifully crafted, and the pacing was fantastic. It wasn't a relentless assault - there were plenty of quiet moments - but it never slowed. We've all seen a million movies with similar premises; we all know the beats. There's always a slow period while the haunting builds, disbelief of some family members by others, a lack of communication between characters, a sequence where they research the history of the house, and so on. Those elements mostly exist in this movie, too, but they're all presented in a way that they defy expectations. Even better, it doesn't come across like the filmmakers are *trying* to defy expectations, it's just a different approach to the material that's constantly compelling.

So why am I only giving it a 7/10? You guessed it, the sociopolitical content. Actually, that's not completely fair to say... Unlike with a lot of contemporary movies, I don't think the messages that bothered me were deliberately inserted to lecture the audience, I think they're just reflective of common attitudes held by the filmmakers. I'm sick to death of them, though, and it brought the movie down for me. If you've seen the it, I know what you're thinking, and no, it's not that. It was the treatment of the father. Bad Dads are a modern horror staple, and I was very happy when, despite his intimidating appearance and serious demeanor, this dad wasn't one. He was set up that way, but revealed to be a kind, caring, man who felt the responsibility of taking care of his family. Then it got a little weird. His wife, very much the usual, loving, horror-movie mom, made a couple of comments blaming the dad for the family's difficult situation, even though it was explicitly not his fault. That should have made her seem like a nuanced character with real human flaws, but it didn't because there was nothing to suggest it was wrong - no repercussions, not even a pained look on her husband's face. Ultimately - and I warn you, I'm about to spoil the ending - the family found itself in a standoff with the angry-ghost-possessed body of a medium. Desperately, the dad tackled the medium, carrying them both out a window to the ground below, saving the day. As always, the moral here is that it's a man's job to sacrifice his life for his family. Yeah, I've seen it ad infinitum, and this was a long way from the most odious (looking at you, Train to Busan and Wreck-It Ralph). In fact, I was impressed because the movie had also been willing to kill the medium, an innocent woman, which gave the situation real stakes. There was genuine tragedy, and there was even gender parity. It felt serious in a way horror movies rarely do. Bravo, I thought. Then the camera panned down to the street to reveal the bodies, and in defiance of physics they had twisted in the air so that the man was lying fully underneath the medium. His head was cracked open and he was very dead, but the medium, of course, was unharmed. It was then revealed that the dad's life insurance policy allowed the mom to buy the family's way out of poverty and live happily ever after, once again hammering home the message that the best thing a man can do for his family is die. And the movie clearly viewed it as a noble sacrifice. That's enough to knock three stars off the score for me and probably ensure I won't watch it again.

Apart from that, though - and I don't expect it would bother most people - this is one of the better horror movies I've seen in recent years. Give it a try if I haven't ruined it for you.

There's a lot to love about this story, but it belongs to a very sad club: movies that are ruined by their endings.

It began with a desperate parent killing his child because he couldn't see any other way out, and the wrongness of that act is the movie's central theme. Edith saves these new children from the harm she inflicted on her own, then the climax brings us full circle as she finds herself driven again to the same desperation, taking them to the clifftop. This time, though, the aunt and uncle are also there, offering the chance to break the cycle. It looked set to be an ending with real meaning and creative integrity. Instead it went completely off the rails and took a turn so out of line with its message it's hard to believe it was written by the same author. At the moment of her redemption, upon being reunited the remains of her child and having a transcendent moment, at the sound of Lilly's voice she thoughtlessly tosses the bones aside and renews her dedication to killing the kids. What? One imagines it was meant to be surprising, and it was... because it was foolish and completely out of character. An hour and a half of excellence, then two minutes of nonsense, and one depressed walk out of the theatre.

I love a good anthology, and it's always nice to see a new entry in the V/H/S series. Shockingly, for such a bad movie, I thought it was a step up from the last one in many ways. It was more cohesive, and the move back to video was wise. The frame story and final segment were amateurish and catastrophically stupid, but the rest was fine.

But my reviews focus on helping readers who are exhausted with social messaging know what to avoid, so is it watchable if you don't want to be preached to? Mostly. The messaging isn't always an active part of the stories, so if you can turn your brain off and just enjoy the gore, it's largely a fun ride.

For most of the movie the messaging is passive and focused on gender. The segments all feature protagonists who are female and antagonists who are male, with a single exception in which the villains are female but are also the only competent characters - and their victims are all male. Men in the movie are exclusively stupid, evil, and/or violent. One segment features a collection of torture victims: all the sympathetic survivors are women and the only male survivor is a psychotic monster. Another segment follows a fanatical, gun-toting militia all of which is male. In short, women = good, smart, and important , while men = bad, dumb, and disposable.

The movie's only active messaging is found in the frame story and the final segment. The latter gets political, with the gun-toting, hyper-Christian, Nazi-adjacent militia being a broad caricature of right-wing prepper types. It's a little too over-the-top to be anything but goofy, but I'm mentioning it because the message is given priority over the story. Most of the segment is made up of scenes of the militia being awful people and none of it is relevant to the plot. Without those scenes the segment would only last a minute or two.

As a horror fan, I also have to take points off the movie for name-checking the "final girl" trope and getting it completely wrong. If you're making horror for horror fans you gotta get the terminology right.

Tune in next time for all your social justice forewarning needs.

I'm shocked by how good this was. It shouldn't have been, right? A big-screen version of a beloved TV series is a recipe for disaster, even when the director is a huge fan. Remember the Tim Burton Dark Shadows movie? Ouch. And I *like* Tim Burton. But somehow Rob Zombie, of all people, pulled it off. I've seen every attempted reboot of The Munsters, and they've never been good enough to stand on their own, with the exception of Mockingbird Lane. Why, you ask? I think it's the lack of Fred Gwynne. His performance was sublime and vital to the show's enjoyability. Mockingbird Lane knew that and didn't try to duplicate it. Yet here we are...

The movie definitely had its problems. The cinematography was weirdly flat (I assume Zombie was going for a sitcom look). I have no idea why the names "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" were changed to "Doomley" and "Wolfgang." Richard Brake wasn't great as Wolfgang, and, of course, Sheri Zombie was terrible as Lily. Sheri in particular was what I imagine nails on a chalkboard would be like if the nails were confused about what their job was and the chalkboard was the tormented souls of a thousand cursed scriptwriters. I wonder how many takes they did before they gave up trying to get her to pronounce "pestilence" correctly. Sylvester McCoy wasn't given enough to work with. Plus a bigger budget would've been useful.

But man, I couldn't stop smiling. It was like a throwback to the world before the 90's - like a feature-length Halloween special. It was fun, good-natured, uncynical, entirely devoid of social commentary, deeply silly, and the jokes were pitch-perfect for what it was. And Herman... I thought Jeff Daniel Phillips did a *fantastic* job. Of all the attempted Fred Gwynne impressions over the years, this was the most effective for me. The common wisdom is that actors taking over existing characters should make the role "their own" without "doing an impression," and this was proof to the contrary. Do the impression well enough, understand the character, and you can pull it off. Heck, his voice is a few octaves higher than Gwynne's and it *still* worked.

I had a great time watching it, I really did. I hope Zombie gets to make more of them.

What *happened* to DC animation projects? Remember when they were the pinnacle of comic book adaptations? Great animation, fantastic design, excellent voice work, and, above all, exceptional writing. They've been relying on that reputation for a long time while churning out bad movie after bad movie, and we keep watching them because we're thinking of Mask of the Phantasm and Justice League Unlimited, but when was the last time you watched one and didn't cringe at the script?

So we come to this one. I would love to write a comprehensive list of every baffling moment in the story, but I just can't. There's too much. I can only say this: it's dumb. And it's a pervasive dumbness, saturating everything from the overall plot to the individual character interactions.

There's some great dialogue, I can say that. Most of it goes to Green Arrow and is delivered extremely well by the actor, but it can only mask the clumsiness of the story for so long. That's a trend I've noticed in these: they begin reasonably well, they start to look sketchy by the halfway point, and by the climax it's clear there was only ever a premise, not a complete story, and the whole thing descends into chaos. I assume DC hopes the audience will be so distracted by the latest slate of randomly-chosen characters and cameos presented in a slightly new way that by the time they're finished pointing at the screen and saying, "Oo, it's Despero and he has a *purple* cape this time!" the movie will be over. These things are gratuitously grim, morally inconsistent at best, shallow, thematically clumsy, and conceptually ugly, but all that would be forgivable if they just had stories that held together.

Okay, I'll give you one example. It's not important to the story, it's just the first moment in the movie that made me shake my head in confusion. Martian Manhunter, Green Arrow, and Vixen, all of whom are intimately familiar with Green Lanterns and how they fight by using a ring to make huge green energy constructs, find themselves up against a guy who fights by making huge green energy constructs which are clearly coming from one finger on his right hand, and it never occurs to any of them he might be a Green Lantern. Not for a moment. Not until one of them notices his shirt, and even then they're not sure.

I also have to point out that this movie contains what may be the single worst line of dialogue ever delivered. I'm not going to tell you what it is because I respect you too much. If you watch the movie, you'll notice.

Arright, that's enough. There are some positives, too. The animation is better than usual, that's something. It's not as fluid as it would have been before the death of the traditional animation industry, but it's not choppy or Flash-based, either. The character design is fantastic. More attention is given to facial expression and nuance of movement than I've seen in a long time. Honestly, that's what got me through the movie; I could just about stand the rest of it as long as I focused on the consistently excellent character visuals.

I don't think any single part of the production team is to blame. It would be unfair to point to the writers as the ultimate cause - if that were the case, the quality would vary from project to project, but it doesn't. I think it must be the environment in which these are produced, with the pressures, restrictions, direction, and requirements handed down from the executives in charge. If you're reading this, writers, don't feel bad. I just hope DC will take a look at its output at some point and remember how they used to do things.

It's been hard to watch this show's quality decline since the new showrunner took over. She inherited a tough situation with the departure of Andrew Lincoln, but his absence hasn't turned out to be the problem. The era's real failings are the lack of focused storytelling and the social messaging. I was determined not to give up before seeing the end of what used to be my favorite series, but after this episode I just can't do it.

There are three plot threads and only one of them significantly advances the story. For the most part, the ep is a dull one. I actually enjoyed the Eugene/Princess detective story, but, as usual, a lot the rest feels like filler.

Here's a quick rundown of this week's social messaging. The first story features a visit to a farming community made up entirely of women who are being exploited by a sleazy male leader. In the second story, a large man is totally unable to subdue another large man but a single, glancing kick from a tiny woman leaves him paralyzed and gasping on the floor. The third story, I kid you not, has someone outraged about the militarization of the police force. That's not my interpretation, it's an actual line from the episode. It's a perfect example of Kang's approach: take a real-world issue and just jam it into the show, no matter how little sense it makes in context. This is a post-apocalyptic society that never had a NON-militarized police force. The message matters, the story doesn't.

Amazingly, the messaging wasn't this episode's biggest failure. That honor goes to the climax, which consists of five solid minutes of the worst-written exposition dump I've ever seen, and I watch a lot of bad movies. Five minutes. Eugene spends *five uninterrupted minutes* explaining the bad guy's villainous behavior *to* the bad guy, even though the audience already knows all about it. It's impossible to describe how bad it is, and poor Josh McDermitt is just stuck there, trying to make this ridiculous monologue sound less stupid while maintaining an impossible level of emotional intensity the entire time. Bless the man for his effort, he did it as well as any actor ever born could have, but it was like listening to someone scream the phone book. Only more pointless.

So... yeah. That's all The Walking Dead I can take. Thanks, Angela, well done. I can take some comfort in knowing that, since she spent the final season on this jumbled mess instead of satisfyingly wrapping up arcs for these beloved characters, I'm not missing anything important.

I figure that line is all you need to know if you're not onboard with movies preaching to you. That's my goal with these reviews from now on... If you're tired of every piece of media heavy-handedly telling you what opinions you should have, click on my reviews and I'll help you avoid them.

This one, it has to be said, didn't have social messaging at its core. The whole movie wasn't one big metaphor for any particular issue, and it didn't place messaging above story. In fact, the message doesn't affect the story in any real way; it's practically an afterthought. Removing it completely wouldn't have had a significant effect, and it doesn't even make an appearance until the climax. That makes me wonder... was it included because the filmmakers believe a movie won't sell unless it contains one the popular messages, or because it's something they believe? Either way, if you can overlook this part of the premise, it's a fairly solid, atmospheric found footage movie. Personally, it yanked me right out of the experience and I couldn't re-invest.

Does it count as a documentary if most of it isn't true? Not deliberate fiction, just factually wrong? I mean, can I film something about the moon being a living being that comes down to Earth at night and rearranges the condiments at Pizza Hut and call it a documentary as long as I seem convincing?

All you need to know about this thing is right there in the blurb. Anyone examining witchcraft throughout history should know that "witch" was never an exclusively female term. That's Hollywood's contribution. Their poor knowledge of the subject about which they're trying to educate people couldn't be any clearer.

It takes real commitment to be aware of all the mistakes usually made by the kind of movie you're about to shoot, to call them out one by one in the script, then make them anyway. That's a whole new level of meta. It's more like performance art than cinema, because they were willing to give up any chance of audience enjoyment in order to deliver the ultimate critique of "requels." This is a movie that looks you in the eye and says, "I'm awful and I know it." Brave. Bold.

Oh, I need to meet the minimum character requirement... er... hey, did anyone notice the oh-so-clever feminist twist as to which characters lived and which died? Boldly brave.

I knew the name but I couldn't place it. I kept thinking I'd look it up later, but it wasn't necessary... the moment I thought, "This is a little pretentious," I remembered who he was.

That said, this is my favorite thing I've seen from him. It was still insufferable, but almost entertaining. The production was fantastic, anyway.

The second biggest flaw, in my opinion, was the performances. With the exception of Boutella, and Weller to a lesser degree, none of the actors quite seemed to embody the characters they were given. Agee and André in particular didn't seem capable of taking the material seriously. André never seemed to inhabit the world at all.

The biggest flaw, of course, was that the moment something happened to pay off the half-hour of portentousness the tone suddenly shifted from serious to silly. Whether that was deliberate I honestly couldn't say.

There was a little of the ol' 2022 identity politics, but not too blatantly.

I suspect there might be more to it than meets the eye if I were to give it some proper thought, but I really don't want to.

Soooo. Guillermo Del Toro, avowed Lovecraft fan, finally had the chance to adapt the author's work however he saw fit. Having been handed this dream opportunity, he summoned up all his creative powers and... gave us the same kind of random pastiche as pretty much everyone else. Why? Was he secretly yearning to make The Unnameable 3?

This episode took the actual story of Pickman's Model and used it as a sort of midpoint in a larger narrative. It pulled a few greatest-hits elements from across Lovecraft's mythos and gave us a pretty good yarn about madness and apocalyptic goings-on, plus it added a few things I guess the screenwriter always thought Lovecraft needed more of, like female characters and family drama. It also tied itself to The Graveyard Rats and Dreams In the Witch House, which I would have appreciated if any of them had been more faithful to the source material.

It was fine, really. I enjoyed it for what it was. I absolutely loved the ending.

Whatever else it was, though, it was not Pickman's Model, the story of which is basically lost in the Lovecraft smoothie. That's a shame, because the real thing is a very strong, punchy, classic horror story, and while it didn't need to be expanded, if it was going to be, it would still have been possible for that portion of the story to be effective. It wasn't, though; in fact the shock ending of the original was meaningless I'm this context, thanks to the episode's lack of focus. I watched it with someone who's never read the story, and, after viewing, she didn't understand the significance of the title. I can't think of a more complete indictment of this as an adaptation.

Usually I can't stand it when an adaptation takes liberties with the source material, and I admit I was frustrated when this one started veering into new territory. The story is a classic and I was hoping to see a fully faithful version, knowing how much Del Toro loves the genre.

That said, it didn't go too far off the rails, and this is one of those rare times when the final product is so good it more than makes up for any disappointment. Honestly, this episode was one of the finest hours of television I've ever seen. I can't say enough positive things about it and I'm not going to try. Have you seen it? Go watch it! Read the reviews later, just go watch it now. Shoo.

It took me a while to come to grips with this one. Partly that's because it seems from the start to be standard 2022 fare - clumsy sociopolitical messaging hammered vaguely into the shape of whatever the genre happens to be. To be fair, that's partially due to to some creative choices early in the episode (that voice on the radio seems to set a pretty clear tone), but it wasn't until some time after the closing credits that I realized there was more to it.

Unfortunately, the episode's length is its downfall. It only needed maybe half the time for the simple morality tale it wanted to tell, and filling the full hour meant including so many irrelevant details that when the end comes it feels sudden and anticlimactic.