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Reviews
The Night Agent (2023)
Binge worthy!
It's been a while since I've seen a show that had me watching several episodes one after the other. This is an entertaining adventure that features an FBI agent who ends up working together with someone who has been targeted by unknown bad guys. Each episode they work together to investigate the mystery surrounding the events of the first episode.
It might seem like there are some coincidences or character introductions that don't have anything to do with the main plot at various parts, but it all comes together in the end. It has a diverse cast but it's not woke trash like so many of the other shows that are on Netflix. It's just entertainment without an agenda.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities: The Autopsy (2022)
The only good episode
The basic plot is that a Forensic Pathologist has been called in to help investigate some deaths from a suspicious explosion in a mine.
This was the only good episode. I haven't seen all the them because most of the ones I did watch were crap and I didn't want to waste any more of my time. Other than this one, they range from barely passable to atrociously bad.
When you watch shows like this, you expect a twist, or you expect unlikable characters to get what they deserved. You want the protagonist to be likeable and clever. This is the only episode to deliver on those expectations. An interesting mystery and a satisfying (though not necessarily happy) ending.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities: The Viewing (2022)
Awful and pointless
I've been very disappointed with this series. I haven't seen all the episodes, but of the ones I have seen, only The Autopsy was good. Go watch that one and skip the rest, they aren't good. But this one here, The Viewing, deserves special mention for how awful it is, a complete waste of time.
The story takes place in the early 80s or something (but that has no bearing on the plot whatsoever) and it starts with a few characters being invited to some rich guy's place. They meet in an underground parking lot and get picked up in a van by the rich guy's lackey. Once they get there, they spend the next 30-40 minutes just talking, drinking, and doing drugs and we get some background the invitees; an astrophysicist , a famous musician, a famous author, and a psychic. After slogging through the very boring conversation that just went on and on, the pompous rich guy (played by Robocop) finally reveals why they were invited; to look at some meteor rock thing from space.
See, he's already tried to figure out what it is with the vast resources available to him, but all the usual scientific methods have failed. Why he even cares, who knows, but he's obsessed with it. The astrophysicist makes a couple suggestions, but they've already been tried. At this point, the viewer has to wonder, why on earth does the rich guy invite the musician and author for this? It would be like bringing in Taylor Swift and Stephen King when all the great scientific minds failed. It's completely asinine. In fact the author character, with his non-existent wisdom and experience with meteors, says something like "it's just a rock". Actually, even that comment was pretty dumb, because from the look of it, it was way too symmetrical and patterned to be just a rock.
You almost have to wonder if the show writers just started writing the plot without even knowing where they were going with it, and once they finally finished writing the stupid conversation and got to the next part, they never went back and thought, does the beginning still make sense? The writers were probably high, they sure seem to love showcasing the pointless drug use in the overly long conversation scene.
Anyways, back to the "plot", the musician makes a discovery completely by accident when he smokes a joint right next to it and the smoke he exhales causes a reaction. The thing starts probing them. Two of the guests' heads explode, two escape, and the rich guy turns into some monster and wanders off. And that's it. That's the story.
Possibly for the first time ever after having watched something, I thought to myself that the creators set out to specifically troll the audience with the most pointless garbage ever put on screen.
The Stranger (2014)
Frustrating
Drifter comes to town looking for someone from his past. The drifter is basically a low key vampire, though that isn't apparent until later. He's a gloomy, depressed, and solemn individual who makes idiotic choices for himself and others.
At one point he doesn't kill someone when he has the chance (someone who very much deserves it for what he's done and what he would do if allowed to live) and you almost want to stop watching at that point. I guess the writers couldn't come up with a better or more plausible way to to keep the movie going and instead just rely on the character making nonsense decisions.
The ending was not surprising or satisfying either.
Interceptor (2022)
The Wokest
Every scene and every character in this movie is there to be as woke as possible. Bad acting, cheesy stunts, plot holes, and ridiculous character motivations. I watched this in a group of people that covers both ends of the political spectrum and everyone thought it was terrible.
The Terminal List (2022)
Good Show!
Very entertaining. Not woke. Better than Amazon Prime's Jack Reacher show.
Don't bother looking at the low scores from the so called critics, they are so out of touch it's laughable. If something doesn't have wokeness and push their far left political views, they hate it. Probably more "toxic masculinity" than they could handle.
6:45 (2021)
Has been done before and much better
Closest comparison I can think of is Happy Death Day 2U, and if you haven't seen that, just think Groundhog Day with a murder/horror theme. At its best it was merely OK but got sort of boring starting around the middle and for me there wasn't really a payoff with the ending to make up for it.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Don't believe the hype
Saw this available on a streaming site and decided to see what all the hype was about. What a disappointment. Can't understand why it became so popular, it's a terrible movie. Reminded me a lot of The Evil Dead that was also for some reason very popular despite being an awful movie.
We don't get to know anything about most of the characters and when they start dying, you just watch it passively without caring. Once the first character dies, they rest of them follow into death so quickly that there's something like 45 minutes left when it's down to the "final girl". And that's about 45 annoying minutes of her running and screaming or tied up captive and screaming. There are scenes that just so repetitive and drag on and on and on.
There isn't really anything really violent or shocking either. Because the movie is very old and very low budget, the chainsaw violence is mostly off screen. I don't see anything compelling for horror movie fans here.
Hypnotic (2021)
Woke-notic
This movie is about a lady who goes to a hypnotherapist to cure her depression but he's a bad guy who just wants to control her. The only mystery is why he's doing it.
The main character is a white female, her boyfriend is a black male, her best friend is a white female, her friend's husband is a black male, the helpful police detective is a black male, the police's own hypnotherapist is a white woman, and of course, the evil hypnotherapist villain is a white male. This film obviously trying to do some brainwashing of its own.
The hypnosis in this movie is portrayed as some kind of mind control superpower. If real hypnosis could work like this, they would outlaw the profession like they try to outlaw mutants powers in the X-Men movies. After spending some time going under with the hypnotherapist, he can basically command his patients to do anything like programmed robots. Command them to see things, command them to completely stop moving, command them to kill. I expect movies to take liberties with stuff like this, but this one stretched its credibility way beyond the breaking point.
Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021)
Terrible origin story
For an "origin" story, it's awful. If you only care about how the Snake Eyes character becomes involved with the GJ Joe organization, maybe this will do. If you want to know how he becomes capbable of being a deadly fighter and ninja, you will get nothing of the sort here. In the first scene we first see him as a young boy, then the movie fast forwards to him as an adult fighting in a cage. He's already a tough guy and knows how to fight and wins the match. Next action scene he's fighting ten guys at once. When he's given a sword, he already knows how to to use it like an expert. There is some physical training he gets later on, but it's all very brief with no sense of progression or accomplishment. He knows already how to do everything.
For an action movie, it's mediocre at best. It barely held my interest after the halfway point and the tie in with the GJ Joe and Cobra characters was clunky and in some scenes (with Scarlet or the Baroness) almost cringey.
The Weekend Away (2022)
The woke weekend
There's a theme to this movie: all white men are jerks and the police are corrupt and incompetent.
White man 1: Husband who cheats on wife and murders her friend.
White man 2: Abusive cop with anger management issues.
White man 3: Weak, weird, and socially awkward hotel manager who spies on everyone with secret cameras.
White men 3 and 4: Male escorts who drug and rob women.
Non-white man 1: Victim's ex, no faults that we see and is more like victim of his ex wife stealing his credit card and using it on a spending spree.
Non-white man 2: Taxi driver, Syrian refugee, total saint if there ever was one. Goes way out of way to help female protagonist. Police think he's a crook based on pretty much nothing at all.
Then there's the movie itself. Woman's friend goes missing and later turns up dead. Our protagonist can't remember anything because she was drugged, and eventually gets blamed by the police (with no real evidence). In a scene where she's trying get away from the police, there's a scuffle and the male detective (see white man 2 above) slips on a loose rock and takes a ridiculous tumble over a ledge and plunges to his death. The woman police detective later finds some grainy CTV camera footage of some guy (his back turned) pushing the victim on to some rocks. From that, they conclude it must have been the male cop who is the murderer. That's some fine police work there! Case closed!
But is it!? The woman has finally returnd home and is now separated from her husband. In the final scene, she goes to see him just to drop off their baby as it's his turn. She finds a bead from her dead friend's necklace (which she gave to her friend earlier in the movie) in his coat pocket while she's looking for keys, proving that he's the real murderer, as it must have fallen in there in the struggle. Wow, that is some incredible luck there with that bead. Turns out the guy flew down there, murdered the friend (accidentally), then flew back, all while babysitting their baby. The movie really stretches its credibility. I was also bored by the half way point. Do not recommend.
Breach (2020)
Terrible
Everything about this movie feels cheap. Can't believe Bruce Willis stared in it. It's gotten to the point where if you see he's in a movie, you know it's probably one to be avoided.
Mythica: The Darkspore (2015)
Terrible sequel
Low budget fantasy setting films are probably the hardest to get good, so the first Mythica was a half decent by that standard. This sequel however was pretty terrible. It gets off to a really bad start in the first five minutes when it completely undid the two major accomplishments of our band of heroes from the first film, making the first one feel like a waste of time.
Later on, one scene in particular really irked me. Our group is in the desert, hanging around a magical portal trying to figure out how to open it. When they finally figure out how to open the portal, at that exact moment, the villains just happen to reach them. They're seen from some distance away, so naturally, you'd expect our group to run into the portal to escape. But no! Instead they just stand there while the villains slowly approach and then take them prisoner. What!?
After this sequel, I had no further interest in watching any more from this series.
Stay (2005)
Boring!
Don't bother with this one. It starts off mildly interesting but becomes less so as it goes on. In fact, after a while it becomes clear it's not going to get any better but by then you'll stick around just to see it to its conclusion. Better off not even starting it. The twist at the end is not much of a payoff. In fact, a lot of this film, including the twist, is copied straight up from a way better movie called Dead End (2003), so it's not even original.
Nightmare Cinema (2018)
Half decent
Not great by any means but I've seen worse. None of the stories were very good but some were mildly interesting. The best were the slasher and the plastic surgery ones, though you may see the twists coming. The worst one by far was the priest one, there's no point to it. If you're watching this movie and find you're anxious to get to the end, that's the story to skip to save some time.
Starfish (2018)
Awful
I rarely quit a movie half way through but I did on this one. If a movie starts off not very entertaining, you might keep watching hoping that it will get better. By the time you realize you've made a mistake in selecting it, you're half way through and typically think to yourself you might as well finish it since you've gone this far.
This movie however, I gave up and stopped watching long before the end. From the trailer I knew it wouldn't have much action and instead would be more of a slow cerebral movie with a theme of isolation, but it also showed some mystery, suspense and horror. But those latter elements are barely there and no doubt just there to make the trailer look good.
The main character returns to her home town after the death of a friend and after the funeral breaks into her friend's restaurant/home and a lot of time is spent there with nothing of note happening. The next day the rest of the town is dead or in hiding and some creatures are roaming about killing people.
There's a brief sub-plot about the disaster and creatures being linked to something hidden in some audio messages and maybe she could save humanity or whatever if she put the clues together and figured it out. You'd think that would be a big part of the story but she barely looks into it and then decides she couldn't be bothered with that and it was the end of that "plot" point.
Everything the character does, whether real or just in her head, is uneventful, boring, pointless, and drawn out to seem intellectual but just comes across as pretentious. Don't waste your time with this drivel.