Mayhem: Rage Virus outbreak in an office building full of shitheads. It's very satisfying, in the way that The Purge maybe could have been, but emphatically was not.
The Seven Percent Solution (1976): Wow, for a Holmes movie, this is a lot! Part Trainspotting, part Orient Express: Tokyo Drift and part Abbot and Costello Meet Sigmund Freud. It just keeps going.
Archive (2020): Guy tries to resurrect his wife from backup into a robot body. It was pretty good, and I liked that it addressed the issue of "what do you do when your beta releases are actually conscious?"
I Am Lisa: Solid small-town-werewolf movie that correctly notes that ACAB. The genre "small-town werewolf" is the best werewolf sub-genre.
Next (2020): So far this is pretty good. There's a hard-takeoff AI and an FBI agent and a mad scientist try to avoid being murdered by it. So basically it's Person of Interest if it started at season 4 and wasn't 75% plotblocking perp-of-the-week police procedural. The tech hasn't made me cringe too much yet.
The Haunting of Bly Manor: This is the poster child for "just because you can do 9 hours does not mean you should." The whole thing could have been wrapped up in a 2 hour movie with nothing of note lost. The first 4 episodes spent their time with Precocious Children being Cute or Spooky, and unless you've never seen a haunted house movie, you've seen these irritating tropes straight from Central Casting over and over again. The first 4 episodes did not advance the plot at all, and could probably have been condensed into 15 or 20 minutes. The story actually gets kind of interesting around episode 5 or 6, so I want to say "just start there", but that might be confusing. Maybe watching the first half of episode 1 then skipping to episode 5 would work? Or, here's another alternative, just skip this series entirely because it's not worth the time.
Helstrom: Eh, it was ok. A pretty by-the-numbers "itinerant exorcist" story, done in muted gray. I never read the comic, but it doesn't feel much like a superhero show, or even a Marvel show. Ana's character is a lot of fun, Victoria is pleasantly scary and does an amazing demon voice, but everyone else, and the plot, are kind of a snore.
The Craft Legacy: It's not necessarily worse than the original, which, as I recall, was bad. All of the twists were telegraphed and obvious. And it definitely has the feel of "this is how 40-year-olds imagine that teens talk".
Bad Hair: Black women battle possessed vampire weaves. It's pretty funny.
The Mortuary Collection: A good horror anthology movie, and unlike most, the framing story (with Clancy Brown!) is actually pretty good.
Mortal: A guy visiting Norway suddenly starts to develop out-of-control superpowers and goes on the run. It's pretty good, but by the end it feels like it was just the first episode of a TV series rather than a stand-alone movie. It didn't really resolve anything. "We're running, we're running, government goons, ok we're done. Pencils down."
La Révolution: "What if the French aristocracy were actually zombies/vampires" is a very They Live take on the French Revolution, so you'd think I'd be all in on this, but this series also doesn't really go anywhere. I dozed through more than half of it and I don't think I missed anything.
Blood Vessel: Shipwrecked Allies board a Nazi ghost ship in WWII. Why are the lifeboats scuttled and the crew dead? You guessed it -- vampires! The goddamn Nazis went and Lost Ark'd some goddamn vampires. It's pretty good.
The Witches (2020): I barely remember the original, but I remember it being not good, and this is also not good, but, the monster design on the witches is pretty great, and Anne Hathaway does a fantastic, scenery-chewing job -- it's like she's doing Nicholson's Joker here, but more crazed. So it's almost worth watching just to see her unhinge her jaw, both literally and figuratively.
New Mutants: It was fine. More of a haunted house movie than an X Men movie. It's no Logan, but it's one of the better entrants in that series.
>Death of Me: A couple on vacation have drug-induced hallucinations of murdering each other. Wicker Man or Jacob's Ladder? It's not bad.
You are being much kinder to Craft: Legacy than I'd be, maybe because for some odd reason the original came to us from DVD.com just as we decided to watch Legacy, so we were able to do a quick A/B.
Compared to its parent, the lack of characterization and conflict in Legacy is really glaring. Watch the original and it's obvious how much more stuff happened in it!
Possibly. I remember very little about the original except, you know, it being not very good.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who liked New Mutants, and I'm bummed it'll never get a sequel.
I was fine with the awkward dialogue, baffling villians and low budget weirdness of I Am Lisa, right up until the climax, which had her wearing obvious plastic halloween vampire teeth and required a bad overdub to fix her diction. Thermoplastic-set stage vampire teeth have been around for decades and were affordable on a broke college student LARPer's budget back in the 90s...
Weird thing to fixate on, I know, but I couldn't un-see it.
Whoever made "Next" gets bonus points, or maybe gets them taken away, for using the X logo in the title:
It's a pretty good show, which explains why Fox canceled it last month.
It was cancelled? Guess I better finally watch all the three episodes (so far) via OnDemand, eh?