Reviews

This show is not for everyone, and I can totally understand the people who hate it, but if you like really dark humor and can handle a serious cringe factor, this might be a show for you.

You've read the setup: Emma Stone and Nathan Felder play a yuppy couple trying to pitch a reality show called "Flipanthropy", in which they build carbon neutral homes in Española, New Mexico, and generally pretend to care about the locals while doing so. Everyone realizes pretty early on that she's a lot more likely to appeal to an audience than he is, and that basically drives the dynamics of the show. There's a lot of fairly heavy handed commentary on gentrification, White guilt, liberal hypocrisy, etc, but the main goal of the show seems to be putting the characters (and the audience) into a series of very uncomfortable situations, and they are extremely good at doing this.

It's a challenge to make a movie or show in which none of the main characters are particularly likable. Seinfeld, Curb your Enthusiasm, and Burn After Reading are examples that made it work. In all those cases, however, the characters are flawed but entertaining. In this show, the main characters are unlikable and truly grating. Emma Stone's character is shallow and annoying, but Nathan Felder's character is thoroughly loathsome in pretty much every way. It's hard to believe he wrote that character for *himself*.

The eponymous "curse" is really sort of orthogonal to the rest of the plot, and is really just used to enhance the already creepy tone.

I'm enjoying it, but I really hope it's one and done, because I can't see sticking with this level of discomfort for another season.

[Update: no spoilers, but the finale was godawful!]

All time travel stories require varying degrees of suspension of disbelief. The only fully self consistent plots involve "closed loop" stories, like Predestination, but those require us to give up on the concept of free will. Some are just incredibly stupid (Looper comes to mind). On the scale of things, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure isn't all that bad.

The good thing about this movie, is that it puts the really implausible stuff right at the beginning, and once it establishes the rules, it mostly sticks to them.

Two randos build a (sort of) time machine out of what looks like a Commodore 64 and a pile of literal junk (seriously, this movie gets a solid F for prop design). Rather than send people back in time, it has one and only one capability: it allows the users to kill a specific person in the past, as long as they can locate that person at a specific time, and of course this tees up a classic morality dilemma.

This changes the present and everyone in it, but because "yada yada yada quantum mechanics", anyone in the room with the machine will remember the original timeline - and NOT have any of the memories they should have in the new timeline. This is actually an issue for a lot of time travel movies, they generally just sweep under the rug rather than confronting it outright.

They start with a pretty clear case where killing a bad person in the past will save the life of a innocent person, but it won't be a spoiler to tell you that this has unintended consequences and that their attempts to set things right will just make things worse, or at least put them further and further from their original world.

So in the end, it's a mix of the butterfly effect, the multiverse, and the Trolley Problem. In spite of some of the other reviews, I found the acting and emotions pretty good. I think it would have made a good Twilight Zone or Black Mirror Episode, but stretching it to a full length movie got a little thin.

I didn't hate the ending, but a lot of people did.

You'd think that back when there were only 3 networks and no streaming services, the bar to get something on TV would have been extremely high, but you would be very, very wrong about that, and nothing exemplifies that better than TV "variety shows", with the ultimate being the one-off "variety show specials", like this one.

Young people will have a hard time grasping the magnificent awfulness of these things, but the documentary starts by pointing out - with examples - that by the standards of the time, this was no worse than a lot of others. What made it uniquely terrible was the attempt to make it both a variety show AND semi-serious Star Wars canon.

I honestly don't know if I watched it back in 1978. If I did, I wiped it from my memory. I did watch it a few years ago, after the bootleg showed up on YouTube, and it's is truly horrible. Even if you hate watch it, you need to fast forward to the "good" parts to keep from being bored and/or getting a cringe headache.

The documentary does a good job of breaking down the exact chain of events that led to the Special, and the revelation is that Lucas was far more involved than he admits to now, at least in the beginning. There's lots of entertaining commentary, both by the people involved and by modern celebrities.

I dinged it a little bit for two shortcomings: (1) I would have liked a few more clips from the Special, with direct commentary about them. They did this a few times, but a few more would save you the trouble of ever watching it.

(2) They pulled a punch by making no mention at all of the extreme amount of cocaine that was *definitely* involved in the creation of this. I'm sure they left out some good stories in that department.

Still, fun for Star Wars fans who are also fans of bad television.

I know you usually have to suspend some disbelief in horror and sci fi movies, but there are limits, and this movie strains credibility to the limit right out of the gate.

The main character's loser brother is involved in a robbery that goes wrong, and his partner is shot and killed. He realizes there's evidence on the guy's phone that will incriminate him (these are not the brightest bulbs). His sister, who is a medical student, comes up with a "brilliant" idea: she will take propofol to fake her own death, she'll get taken to the morgue, and steal the phone.

Of course, propofol won't do that. There's a good chance it will really kill you, like it did to Michael Jackson, but otherwise you'll be quite obviously alive. Even if they thought she was dead, she was somehow confident that she would be put somewhere where she could easily find the other guy and his phone, rather than, you know, in a drawer that she couldn't get out of. Like they say in the commercial, "When you're in a horror movie, you make bad choices. It's what you do."

Without giving away any spoilers, the "twist" is pretty obvious - and completely unbelievable.

On the other hand, the acting is pretty good, and if you check your brain at the door, it's reasonably entertaining to watch.

When I saw the previews, I assumed this was a time travel movie, but no. It's about a race of aliens who look exactly like humans, speak English, and have coasts that look like Southern California except for some weird wave-shaped rocks.

Adam Driver plays an astronaut who agrees to take a two year mission to transport some cryogenically frozen colonists so he can earn enough to treat his daughter for some life threatening alien illness.

Somewhere mid-flight, the spaceship is hit by an asteroid and is forced to crash land on Earth, killing all but one of the frozen passengers: a 9-year old girl named "Koa". Unlike Adam Driver, Koa doesn't speak English, and apparently this incredibly advanced civilization hasn't invented Google Translate, so a lot of the movie is taken up by them trying to communicate.

Anyway, as you can guess from the title, their arrival on Earth is 65 million years ago, at *precisely* the time (and place!) the asteroid is about to come and wipe out the dinosaurs. But don't worry; the Earth is still choc-a-bloc full of dinosaurs when they land, and they have to dodge them to get to the escape pod, which crashed some distance away.

That's pretty much it for the plot. It's all set up very quickly and then they just go from narrow escape to narrow escape, which after a while all kind of look the same.

Basically, this is like someone found a script for a low budget SyFy original and dumped a bunch of money into it without improving it in any way.

The only good thing I can say about this movie is that it's only 90 minutes.

As my title suggests, this is a very entertaining movie by any standards, rather than just "for a low budget indie movie". I've seen plenty of $100M+ movies by major studios with major stars that aren't nearly as good.

I literally googled "best new sci-fi movies streaming now" and this is one of the first ones that came up. I heartily agree.

You know from the description that it deals with parallel universes, and I won't spoil it by saying much more, but it's original, funny, and mind-bending.

I can't find a budget anywhere, but it's hard to imagine it could be more than a few thousand dollars. It only has two actors and all takes place in one apartment. The minor special effects could be done these days with free video editing tools. I'm guessing they just ordered pizzas instead of springing for craft services.

In spite of that, it doesn't look cheap at all. It looks very polished and professional in the acting, the blocking, and the framing of the scenes. This is somewhat surprising given that this is the ONLY IMDB credit not only for the two actors, but for the writer/director/editor as well.

The choice to render it in black and white could have (should have?) come across as pretentious, but it doesn't.

It's bit on the short side, but I'm OK with that. Too many movies pad things out because they feel they just MUST get to 90 minutes - or these days, sometimes 2 to 3 hours. This got the job done and exited without wearing out its welcome.

I really hope we'll be seeing more of these folks in the future.

If I could go back in time and watch this movie when it came out, I might have enjoyed it more, but in 2023 so many people are obsessed with gematria-based conspiracy theories that they've lost all entertainment value. When Jim Carey's character starts to get really creative about ways to make things add up to 23, it almost seems like it's making fun of that sort of thing, but there's no wink; it takes itself really seriously.

I'm in the minority that never cared for Jim Carey as a comedian and I enjoy him much more in serious roles, and I can't help but think there's a good movie here trying to get out.

Carey's acting is good, but the problems start with the initial setup. They tee him up as a classic "bitter loser", working as a dog catcher who hates dogs, but then we learn he actually has a really nice life, with a devoted wife and an apperently good relationship with his son. It just goes on like that. None of the characters or their motivations are particularly fleshed out or believable.

Even good neo-noir movies don't usually stand up to much scrutiny, but this one's got plot holes you could drive an RV through, and it ends up with a lot of head scratching at the end.

BJ Novak plays Ben, a writer and aspiring podcaster. The story begins with him and a friend at a bar being consummate douche bags, comparing notes on their banal philosophy and the many women in their lives, with each responding to whatever the other one says with "100%". Later, Ben gets a call from Texas the brother of "girlfriend", which turns out to be a girl he hooked up with and doesn't really even remember. The brother tells him they're calling her death an OD, but he thinks she was murdered. He decides to go and make the whole story the subject of a podcast.

You see in broad strokes where this is going, because the "shallow city person finds meaning in rural America" is a VERY well worn trope (I mean, darn near *every* movie on Hallmark is some variation on the female version); nevertheless, this manages to be a mostly fresh take. He of course finds the family and the people of her town much more deep and interesting than he originally thought, and believe it or not Ashton Kutcher kind of steals the show as the surprisingly insightful owner of a local recording studio.

It's a bit ham handed at times, but manages to stay engaging and entertaining throughout, and while the ending isn't exactly believable, I definitely didn't see it coming.

Overall, very enjoyable. I hope we'll be seeing more of Mr. Novak in the future.

This is the story of a female conductor who has made it in a mostly male dominated world. She's absolutely passionate about her work, but her life is very problematic outside of that. She's in a marriage or long term relationship with her first chair violinist, but the movie establishes - both directly and indirectly - that she also has a pattern of leveraging her fame and reputation to groom young women around her, and this begins to get her into trouble.

There have been plenty of very good movies about artistic narcissists, usually men, so why didn't this one work for me? I think because most those movies spend more time focusing on the artist's passion, and they usually also have a certain charisma even in the more problematic parts of their lives.

In this movie, the scenes where Blanchett is conducting or otherwise interacting with the orchestra are absolutely fantastic and mesmerizing, but they're few and far between, and outside of those moments, the movie is bleak and joyless.

It's clear I'm in the minority, but except for a few high points, I found this movie bland and depressing.

Interesting movie. It's done in the style of classic mockumentaries (This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show, etc), about a disgraced pastor of a prosperity gospel church, who is clearly based mostly on Creflo Dollar (although Dollar has been pretty good at avoiding scandal so far).

Both leads do a fantastic job. The pastor is played by Stirling K. Brown, who does a great job of capturing the charisma and the narcissism of religious grifters, but the movie really focuses on his wife, Trinity, played by Regina Hall, as she wrestles with weather to stay with him in spite of his major flaws. This is portrayed as a combination of genuine religious belief and her own narcissistic desire to hold on to her position as "First Lady" of the megachurch - and of course the money.

The plot follows the two as they prepare to make a grand comeback from the scandal that brought down their church. They've hired a documentary crew to make a movie about this, and we see some, but not all, of the action through their eyes.

One review referred to this as "side splitting", but I think they need to get their sides checked. There are very few laugh out loud moments, and quite a few serious ones. I find that a lot of movies that skewer religion get cold feet and pull punches, and I was worried this would do the same, but the satire stays razor sharp throughout, with no apologies.

The movie is at its best when it takes aim at the hypocrisy and saccharine affection among the "faithful" in churches like this.

Without giving any spoilers, I found the ending was a bit subtle for a movie like this, but all in all I enjoyed it.

It's clear from the reviews that this movie isn't for everyone.

Do you want action or jump scares? If so, this movie isn't what you're looking for.

On the other hand, if you want a slow burn that cultivates a genuinely creepy atmosphere and keeps you guessing right up to the end, give this a watch.

It starts with two women in the desert who are escaping a cult, which I'm sure the makers' lawyers will assure us is in no way inspired by Scientology. We learn their story in bits and pieces, but it's also clear that their memories are not entirely reliable.

This is definitely a "less is more" movie, and they do a lot with a very low budget, few actors, and almost no sets. Maybe a little slow in the middle, but definitely pays off at the end.

I would really love to see more like this.

Let's face it, most horror movies are extremely predictable. Even the ones with "twists" tend to telegraph them from a mile away.

Without giving away any spoilers, I'll say that this movie does a very good job of making you think you know exactly where it's headed and then switching gears entirely - so much so that I actually wondered if I'd accidentally changed channels at one point.

It's a slow burn that maintains a genuinely creepy atmosphere from beginning to end, and it does throw in a few good scares. It's gory at times, but not overly gory like so many modern horror movies.

I dinged it a couple of points because at times characters do things that are extremely dumb even by horror movie standards, but all in all I found it very enjoyable.

This movie started out very promising. Emma Roberts and John Gallagher Jr play a young couple who buy a house out in the country. We learn that "a tragedy" happened in the house 40 years before, and we're meant to understand that it's been empty ever since - even though it's in perfect condition. They have a new baby and Roberts' character is suffering from severe postpartum depression, which is exacerbated by the fact that her husband's job as a country vet keeps him busy for roughly 18 hours a day, every day, even though he only seems to have like two clients. She begins to have hallucinations about the previous tenants, and her behavior becomes more and more erratic.

The setup is good, and Michael Shannon turns in a classic Michael Shannon role as their creepy Michael Shannon-like neighbor, but it never really delivers. The only reveal happens pretty early, and they telegraph it from a mile away.

Don't get me wrong, I love slow burn horror movies, but there's slow and there's SLOW, and I do expect something to eventually happen. No danger of spoilers because there's really nothing to spoil. It just sort of plods along and ends.

It seemed like they were teasing something more interesting in the backstory, but then it was like they checked their watches, decided the movie was long enough, and called it a wrap.

The good: there's some great acting in this movie. Ana de Armas does a fantastic job in the lead and. Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody are great as Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller, and Jullianne Nicholson is downright terrifying as Monroe's mentally ill mother.

The bad: pretty much everything else.

First and foremost, this is NOT a biopic. This is work of fiction, based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. There are some facts, a lot of supposition, and a whole lot of major plot elements that are completely fabricated, including one crucial plot point that literally *could not* have occurred (more about that in a bit).

Then there's the pace. This movie is almost three hours long, but it seems longer, and much of it is padding. For example, there's one scene where a delivery man delivers a package, and Marilyn goes looking for a tip. She takes a while to search for her purse, and by the time she finds it, the man is gone. It's played as if this scene is displaying something profound, but it really doesn't convey anything we don't already know. It just takes up time.

I know that Marilyn Monroe had a lot of sadness in her life, but I don't believe that it was entirely miserable, and except for a handful of scenes with Arthur Miller, pretty much all happiness is expunged from the movie. At least half of it is devoted to Marilyn having emotional meltdowns for one reason or another. Yes, we get it, she had a lot of demons, but after a while, it just gets repetitive.

Then there's the film style. The word that's been applied is "bold", which I take to mean "doing lots of weird stuff with the camera". The movie switches between color and black and white. Usually, when movies do that, it's for a reason. For example, in Memento, the color scenes run backwards in time and the B&W scenes run forwards. In Better Call Saul, the present is in B&W and the past is in color, etc. In this movie it's just random. In addition, they randomly change the aspect ratio, as well as filming style, sometimes adding filters to make it look like a home movie, or using handhelds, weird tracking shots, etc. There are a couple of scenes that are basically horror movie style. One in which they use night vision and another where a crowd morphs in hideous ways (Oh, did I forget to mention a handful of scenes are surreal?)

All in all, it reminded me of when kids first learn about PowerPoint in middle school, and then are compelled to use every available animation effect on their first presentation.

Finally, without giving away any spoilers, they cook up a trigger for her suicide that a quick trip to Wikipedia will tell you could not possibly have happened.

To summarize, it was an OK way to spend a long evening watching Netflix, but I would have been upset if I had paid money to see this.

From the title, you'd think this was an intentionally bad movie, like Sharknado or Velocipastor, but it's not. I really think they set out to make a good movie - which it's also definitely not.

They kinda sorta seem to take the religious aspect seriously, but they throw in enough stuff that I can't imagine religious people enjoying this movie.

Made on a budget that would embarrass a community theater, it is sort of entertaining in a "so bad it's good" kind of way.

It also raises the interesting (if you're high) question of whether there were sharks or other sea creatures on Noah's Ark, and if so, why? It seems like a waste of already limited space.

I often start my reviews with "I really wanted to like this movie.", but this was kind of the opposite. I went in really not wanting to like it, because let's face it: it's really, REALLY dumb, even for Emmerich, and that's saying something.

Absolutely nothing that happens in it is within a 6 hour plane flight of believable. Not the science, not the behavior of the characters, not the premise, nothing.

I always imagine Rolland Emmerich as someone who has devoted his life to torturing the science teachers who gave him failing grades in school, and this movie did nothing to disabuse me of that belief, but I actually found myself enjoying it in spite of myself - and not just in the "so bad it's good" sense, although it certainly is that.

I think it's main advantage over some of his other movies - particularly Day After Tomorrow - is that it has no delusions of relevance. There's no "message" or any politics. It's just kind of fun roller coaster.

It's not a spoiler to talk about the Ray Bradbury short story, because this movie has almost nothing to do with it.

In the short story, people go back in time to hunt a dinosaur, whose death has been carefully studied and shown to cause no effect on the time line. They when they come back, they find numerous *subtle* changes to the world they left, and eventually realize that a small mistake they made in the past caused them.

In this movie, they go back in time to kill a dinosaur, and... that's pretty much where the similarity ends. Time travel stories are usually problematic, but this one throws all logic and reason out the window, not to mention the fact that there are plot holes you can drive a bus through.

Even with a bunch of extra stuff thrown in, they still have to pad the movie with superfluous and annoying action sequences to stretch it to the requisite run time.

And let's talk about the quality. When I started watching this, I assumed it was a low budget made for SyFy movie, but this came out in *theaters*. I guess the budget was slashed and they couldn't afford the post production processing they had planned to do. The result is that the dinosaur looks like a theme park animatronic, and large parts of the movie are really obviously shot on green screen. It's hard to believe this came out 12 years *after* Jurassic Park.

The only bright spot is Ben Kingsley, who can even bring some class to this train wreck. Besides that, it's not fun enough even to hate watch.

The original short story was made into an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater. You can find it on YouTube. Do yourself a favor and watch that instead.

Another in the "obviously evil corporation surprisingly turns out to be evil" genre, updated with Covid and homelessness. That's not a spoiler; they telegraph that something is shady right after the opening credits, so you can't even pretend it will be a reveal.

Zoë Kravitz plays an agoraphobic woman working for the company that is about to go public with "Kimi", which is like Alexa or Siri, but has humans helping to improve the language translation (I assume the other services have that, too). Obviously, you know she's going to hear something she's not supposed to hear, and the plot is off and running.

Even for a movie like this, there's a lot of suspension of disbelief and "What are the odds?" moments. It's also a pretty common trope to have the slick bad guys turn into bumbling morons to stretch out the story, but it this case they take it so far that it almost channels Home Alone.

Still, Zoë Kravitz is a pretty good actress, and Jaime Camil (the father in Jane the Virgin) is always fun to watch, so it's a reasonable way to pass 90 minutes.

Really interesting series. The best I've seen in a while. It's about a global pandemic, which - ironically - got delayed by a global pandemic. OK, the one in the series is a bit worse. It's obviously heavily influenced by Stephen King's The Stand, but without the goofy supernatural stuff.

It jumps around in time and place, ranging from a few years before the pandemic to 20 years after. It follows several character threads, but the central one is about Kirsten, a child actor when the pandemic hits, who ends up with a touring Shakespeare company afterwards. The theater angle gives the whole thing a very interesting vibe that might attract people who ordinarily wouldn't watch a movie like this. It's mostly serious, but not overly heavy, and there are enough quirky comic beats to break the tension. David Cross was an inspired addition to the cast.

I get the feeling the negative reviewers wanted a more traditional shoot 'em up zombie or Mad Max style post-apocalyptic adventure, and if that's what you're looking for, this is not the movie for you. This is all about character interaction and development, and it takes its time in telling the story, filling it in little by little as it jumps around in the time line. Questions are raised in the first episode that don't resolve until the last, but patience pays off, so don't pay a lot of attention to the reviews that gave up after a couple of episodes.

It's so rare to see complex characters these days. Most movies and series nicely sort themselves into good guys and bad guys, with no gray areas. In this series, all the characters are complex and 3 dimensional. There's bad in the good ones and good in the bad ones, and you really have no idea where things are going to go next.

One (positive) review said "Don't expect sci fi.", but I strongly disagree. This is extremely good sci fi.

Highly recommended.

Not a particularly great movie, but certainly entertaining, primarily because of Alexandra Daddario's outstanding performance.

Riding the recent wave of 80s nostalgia, they bring back the heady days of the great Satanic Panic, which is kind of amusing now - unless, you know, you're one of those people who lost their job or went to jail because of it.

It follows three girls on their way to a heavy metal concert, where they hook up with three guys whom they invite back to one of their family homes. Obviously, this is not going to end well.

No spoilers, but if you don't see the "twist" coming, you've probably never seen a movie before. Nevertheless, it keeps a pretty good pace and stays true to its campy 80s direct-to-video vibe, so overall I found it pretty enjoyable.

For a while, this movie seemed to be teeing up a contrived but entertaining neo-noir thriller. Nicholas Cage's character and his wife do a good job of building a menacing and tense atmosphere, and in spite of a not very convincing accent, Kelsey Grammar does a good turn as a good ol' boy Southern law man.

Then it seemed like the writer quit and was replaced by a AI bot trained for "generic horror movie". Suddenly nothing anyone does is believable and nothing makes sense, culminating in one of the dumbest endings I've ever seen. Even then, you have no idea what's going on until it's explained in a newscast voice over during the end credits.

The 0% on Rotten Tomatoes is well deserved.

Wow, this is a hot mess! Entertaining only for how horrible it is.

The setup is your typical paranoid Christian persecution fantasy: Covid has been used as excuse to institute world government with "communism everywhere" and to outlaw Christianity - you know, all of Dr. Fauci's recommendations.

It takes place just four years in the future, but somehow everyone has forgotten "the way things used to be" until the protagonist explains it. No details of the New World Order are ever given, and everything takes place on a very small scale. Really, it just seems like one overzealous local police chief.

The "heroes" are a group of people who have decided to spread the word of Christianity again. They start with the bold act of spray painting fishes on things, once on piles of leaves. Eventually, they are aided by a woman who works in the police department, who is "what you would call a hacker" and she helps them identify "secret Christians" and invite them to rallies.

The story takes place in Germany, and most of the actors are German, reading horrible dialog in English with very strong accents. Some of the actors are American, reading horrible dialog in English with American accents. In one scene, two women start in English, and then inexplicably switch to German with subtitles, presumably because one of them didn't speak English well enough to get through it.

It's not clear how much of the dialog is written and how much is improvised, and the only director's note seems to be, "Speak more slowly and stretch it out. We've got to pad 90 minutes!".

The sets and props would embarrass the most humble community theater. The police station appears to be a middle school auditorium, with some furniture in the corner. The main characters all live together in an an apartment, which for some reason has black plastic draped on the wall, a tiny Christmas tree, and a random string of twinkle bulbs. Late in the movie, someone apparently donated a fog machine, so they fill the police station with fog, just because they can.

The movie remains weirdly agnostic about the virus, masks, social distancing, etc. Is it a hoax or is it real? I would assume the people making it are anti-mask, but the good guys always wear masks outdoors and socially distance, even when holding their super secret illegal meetings. On the other hand, they never wear masks indoors, when they're huddled together around the little Christmas tree. The bad guys randomly wear masks or don't, presumably based on the individual choices of the actors.

This really doesn't even rise to the "so bad it's good" level, mostly because it's just not that interesting and all the actors are so low energy. Without the goofy exploding birds of Birdemic or ... everything about Tommy Wiseau, it just sort of falls flat.

So only watch it if you're truly committed to seeing every bad movie.

I'm a fan of weird movies, but I'd never heard of this until it popup in a Firesign Theatre fan group.

As far as I know, this the only example of a hippiesploitation surreal Western musical - well, sort of musical. The characters don't sing, but they throw in real groups from the time, including Country Joe and the Fish and the James Gang. Of course, they're simply thrown into the Old West playing their electric instruments without comment.

The two main characters are the eponymous Zachariah, played by John Rubinstein (you might not recognize the name, but you've seen him in a million things), and Matthew, played by a very young Don Johnson in his only second movie role.

They are close friends (and as close to being gay as you could get away with at that time) who set off to become gunslingers. They both get very good, but then follow separate paths, with Zachariah going on a Siddhartha-like quest to find himself.

I suspect the copious weed smoking in the movie was real, as several characters appear to be VERY high much of the time, but I have to admit I genuinely enjoyed this movie, both the story and the music.

I mean, how often do you get a drum solo in a Western?

Part of me doesn't want to like this show because it's got plot holes you can drive a truck through and the actions of the main characters are often inexplicable and unbelievable.

For a simple example, when Leanne first arrives, the husband would certainly have reached out to her privately beforehand to clue her in on things, but instead he just keeps his fingers crossed that she'll play along, and she does (what are the odds?) The whole series is full of things like that.

On the other hand, it's very well crafted and acted and the creepy atmosphere really draws you in, so I'm totally hooked.

This popped up in my Prime recommendations. Seeing the talent, I decided to give it a watch.

Not terrible, but I literally had to laugh at how dated the "erotic thriller" genre has become. There's just an absurd amount of gratuitous nudity and soft core sex (you know, the kind where the...um..."parts" don't quite line up right). When they're not having soft core sex, Kari Wuhrer is dreaming about soft core sex - like, a lot.

This genre drove cable subscriptions ("Cinemax: we have more breasts than HBO"), and always got a lot of real estate video rental stores, but in the modern internet age, it just comes across as kind of tame and silly.

If you strip out the gratuitous titillation, it's basically a 70s-esque plot about a (hot) college student who has paranormal abilities and gets recruited but a (hot) college professor surreptitiously uses her to try to solve the murder of his former girlfriend (did people really say "lover" in 1994?) - or is it to cover up his own involvement?

Anyway, the acting is decent, and they throw in enough red herrings that I really didn't see the end coming.