​Evil kids are such a good genre fodder. The juxtaposition of presumed innocence and the dark side is perfect playing field. Many directors, authors, creators of all things scary go there. With different results. Sometimes, really succeeding.
Orphan, the original, came out all the way back in 2009. And it was pretty freaking awesome. With solid cast of real actors and one creepy-ass kid and a killer twist.
Now, well over a decade later, because we live in a culture that can’t leave anything well enough alone, there’s a sequel which is technically a prequel using…get this…the same actress.
Now Tinseltown has long been playing fast and loose with casting kids. In fact, if you only went by what kids look like TV, you’d be shocked encountering one and learning their age in real life. Every time.
For ages now, there’s bene people in their 20s playing teenagers, but with younger kids, the casting is usually closer (maybe a few years instead of a decadeplus apart), i.e. Stranger Things. Which is to say in the original Orphan, Isabelle Fuhrman was likely somewhat older than the nine-year-old Esther. But in the second movie she is well into her 20s. So it looks…what’s the polite word? Incongruous?
I mean, yes, she’s somewhat young looking, and yes, the director uses all sorts of practical effects from makeup to a kid stunt and trick shooting messing with viewer’s perspective, but you CAN TELL. You really can tell.
Which is to say not only do we go into this movie already knowing one of the most awesome plot twist in the last two decades of scary movies, but we are also being sold on a cheap trick that really doesn’t quite work.
To the movie’s credit, it gives you a new twist. And a really fun one at that, once again turning the audience’s perception of the perfect nuclear family on its tail.
And overall, it is fun, a fun quick entertaining movie. That would work so well if it was its own thing. But as a sequel/prequel it leaves a lot to be desired from a logistics perspective. Granted, movie watching presupposes a certain suspension of disbelief, but you can only push it so far.
The real Esther might be an adult woman trapped in a child’s body, but the actress playing her isn’t. No movie trickery can convince you of that.
Which brings us to the next question? Why didn’t they just cast a lookalike? Why did they have to try to be so cute and clever with a bizarre and impractical concept of using the original?
Yes, she’s a good actress (who has apparently worked steady since…who knew) but one can only do so much against the restrictions of age even in the place (the silver screen) that has long defies such limitations.  Unless you’re the real Esther…imaginary as she is.
Because audiences tend to be less than discriminating and often go with entertainment value over all other considerations, the movie actually did nicely enough at the box office to warrant a sequel. Watch…they’ll do it too. Who knows how old Fuhrman will be by then, but apparently that doesn’t matter, so…
The crazy thing is that this movie is cowritten by the creator of the original, who also apparently thought it was a good idea. Well, it’s probably easier than coming up with an all original one.
There you go, now you know. Turn off your brain and come along for the ride.

​I almost didn’t watch this adaptation. I certainly put it off long enough.
When I first found out Sandman was getting adapted for screen there was a mix of excitement and trepidation. Excitement, because it’s my all-time favorite comic by one of my all-time favorite authors. Trepidation, because it seems just about impossible to adapt and because the TV series American Gods was such a disappointment. And because Netflix with its penchant for pandering and YA-leaning, Netflix which has long ago forsaken quality for quantity,
But then, of course, of course, I simply couldn’t stay away. And lo and behold, Sandman was actually good. In fact, it’s about as perfect of an adaptation as the infinitely complex comic universe might have hoped for.
Yes, it has been put through the Netflix machine and did come out striving to be the world’s most inclusive, epically queer, gender and racially diverse show, with color- and gender-blind casting all over the production. And I mean, ALL OVER IT. Forget the characters you knew, most of them have been reimagined. Some cleverly, some otherwise, most unnecessarily, but there you have it. Distracting but oh so well meaning.
Remember how in comics Death was a pale goth teen? Lucifer was male? Lucien the librarian a mop-haired ginger man? Etc. Etc. well, no more, all of that has been reimagined. To varied degrees of success.
The new Lucienne is a surprising delight, Death has become an adult, Lucifer doesn’t quite work no matter how much I like Gwendoline Christie; her face is simply too kindly for the role and don’t even get me started on that coiffure.
Sandman at least they kept as close to the books as possible; he is played to a near perfection by Tom Sturridge, an actor who I mostly associated with a stupid old romcom where he played a perpetually pajamaed mime. But no, Sturridge can actually act and well, he embodies the Lord of Dreaming with poise and panache, deepening his voice, perfecting the all-too-serious demeanor.
I’d long suspected Sandman to be a stand-in for Gaiman himself. Tall, moppy-haired, always dressed in black. The man weaves dreams and nightmares…what better analogy for a writer is there?
Well, I imagine Gaiman is flattered by Sturridge’s depiction of his signature character. Sturridge nails Sandman, the pouty, moody, broody Morpheus. And serves as a perfect glue to serve what might have been otherwise a choppy disjointed production together.
Because by nature, Sandman is a very elaborate discursive universe, there is something of an anthology-like quality to the production. There are simply so many stories to tell. And it works, It all works. These lovely strange, poignant tales with their lovely, strange, poignant morals are such a pleasure to revisit in a new format.
There are so many stories left untold still; not even all of the Endless have been introduced.
And then there are the visuals. The comics have always been stunning, and I’m pleased to say, the show does them justice. It’s spectacular to look at, from iconic images to reimagined. The TV show’s Dreaming is positively dreamy. This is a feast for the eyes. It looks like art in motion.
All in all, a terrific adaptation. Good enough to delight fans of the original work. Exciting enough to create new fans. That’s good television. Recommended.

Guillermo Del Toro seems to have arrived at a self-indulgent phase of his career. One where he believes he can do no wrong. Like he’s too huge to go wrong now. And no, that isn’t a pun on his gargantuan size, although…seriously…the man looks dangerously overweight.
But anyway, I’m actually a major fan of Del Toro. Love most of his work. His latest output, though…there was a disappointing noir adventure Nightmare Alley. Then, a welcome return to horror with Cabinet of Curiosities anthology but his involvement there was fairly limited, mostly as a sometimes author and creature co-creator. And now this…Del Toro for children. Or is it?
Granted Del Toro’s Pinocchio is much closer to the original source than Disney and therefore is considerably darker. Granted the stop-motion animation is rather striking. But beyond that, you have a beloved tale turned into something like a lesson on mortality for children. Because you know how much kids love lessons and how much they contemplate mortality…
Mind you, I’m all for darkness in stories, but there’s a way to handle it, to balance it, and this movie doesn’t quite do that right.
There are songs here, too. And I was thinking what garbage lyrics set to pretty melody. Only the final song was any good. And sure enough, in credits Del Toro wrote the lyrics for the majority of the songs but not the final one. The music is done by Del Toro’s frequent collaborator, Desplat and is faultless. So there’s one thing Del Toro can’t or maybe just shouldn’t do…produce ingenious rhymes like “My son, my son, you are my shining sun” for instance.
Then there’s the peculiar casting. The sidelines are all Del Toro’s regulars, the man loves to recycle, but the main cast has one huge talent and a David Bradley (randomly) and some unknown kid with a piecing voice.. Why? No idea.
And this major talent, mind you, isn’t even given a chance to shine until the credits song. The rest are singing freely. And speaking. In weird mismatched voices.
Which is to say there is no explanation whatsoever as to why Geppetto’s son Carlo (named after Carlo Collodi the author of the book) and Pinocchio himself are speaking with a shrill British accent. They are in Italy. The background characters are speaking with Italian accents. It sounds flat-out weird, distractingly so. The rest of the cast is all over the place but fairly uniform, and nowhere near as British as the wooden boy.
And also, whose bright idea was it to cast the great Cate Blanchett as a demented looking monkey with virtually no lines but grunts? Seriously?
But anyway...even if you put all of this aside, even if you ignore the weird tone of the movie which meditates on war and death and all those cheerful kid-friendly themes, the fact remains is that it just doesn’t charm you. It must. It has to. The original story does.
But Del Toro (and okay, yes, he does share a directing chair on this one and no, I’m not going to make a joke of someone having to share a chair with a man Del Toro’s size) has made one huge unforgivable mistake with this adaptation–he made Pinocchio unlikable. Somehow he managed to do that. Pinocchio is meant to be charming, wily, misbehaved but adorable, and Del Toro’s (and that other guy’s) version is annoying, shrill, and irritating. Bewildering but true. And sad, so sad.
The movie managed to score critical acclaim and even award nominations, but this viewer/reviewer was profoundly disappointed. You can always drop 117 minutes and decide for yourself.
 

​Ah, a fresh BBC crime drama featuring the too ubiquitous to care about David Tennant (who must be the busiest UK actor around, all those babies to feed) and the always awesome Tucci. Spawn from the mind of a man behind the almost perfect Sherlock series. Yes, please.
And then…no.
But four episodes later.
The thing with Inside Man is that it thinks it’s cleverer than it is. In fact, it is blatantly obsequiously enamored with its own supposed cleverness. It’s a show that positively fawns over itself. Or maybe a show creator that does.
Either way, inside Inside Man is nothing but a bag of cheap tricks, none of which hold up to intellectual scrutiny, logistical or even just critical examination.
So, if you use the process of elimination, it just goes to show you who the real brains behind the Sherlock was, out of the Gatiss/Moffat team.
This isn’t to say Moffat can’t write. He can. He’s rather clever with zingers and one liners, he can make a dialogue sparkle. But that’s all surface appeal. When you look deeper, it falls apart. His twists are all TA-DA and pizazz, but only so long as you don’t think about them too much.
His messages are all askew. He might not actually have a message, he just likes the flash cards with catch words.
Take the first episode of this show. It starts with a tense scene on a metro train, seemingly ripped out of #MeToo playbook. In fact, it watches like a #MeToo ad. Women get abused and picked on by a lout who then gets taught a lesson by a brave and plucky Janice Fife.
This is all while the Lydia the journalist, a millennial seemingly perfect for raising objections and standing her ground, sits by quietly.
However, Lydia is impressed with Janice and follows her out and the two go on to become very tentative friends.
So ok, with a first scene that rousing, it seems that Moffat is jumping on the popular band wagon, taking down abusive men, etc., right?
Wrong, Very wrong.
How do we know this? Well, because afterwards and for the entire duration of the show, women get a pretty rough deal, with Janice getting the roughest deal of all.
Moreover, where in Sherlock you had two (differently) charismatic but uniformly charming, awesome, likable protagonists, here most people are quite sh*te. Worst of all, the detective duo with Tucci Sherlocking it in as a criminology professor on death row for savagely murdering his wife and Atkins Estimond’s Dillon Watsoning it as his circumstantial bestie/sounding board/personal recorder due to his photographic memory. Oh and Dillon is also on the death row for savagely murdering 14 or 15 depending on how you count women.
And these murders of women are constantly and consistently the butt of a joke between two chummy self-satisfied murderers who are practically cute about it.
And then there’s Janice who due to a terrible misunderstanding gets locked up, beaten, tortured and worse in a vicar’s basement.
You’d think one would be safe at a vicarage, right? Wrong. Not where there’s child pornography idly lying around on a USB stick. Not when people don’t listen to or trust each other.
And then, Tennant – the sexy vicar – a happily married man, a devoted father, goes off the rails completely and drags his family along with him.
So, two separate storylines, with Lydia the reporter connecting the two. Because Tucci takes cases to solve inside his prison and his warden indulges him.
Mind you, Tucci is a sadistic bastard who likes to drag things out for dramatic effect and his entire game is…pause and wait, so they can see how clever he’s being.
But hey, he can’t help it, he’s just written that way. He is nothing but a showcase of Moffat’s limitations. The very first puzzle Tucci’s character (laughably named Grieff) solves is basically a stupid juvenile pun that makes no sense if you think about it for longer than two minutes.
Continuing puzzles are much the same. This golden egg is merely gilted.
And just wait until you see the convolutions Tucci puts everyone through to find Janice. Something that could have been easily taken care of in so many other simpler ways.
Oddly enough, even Janice the victim is made unlikable. She’s meant to be the companion character in a way to Tucci, the Mycroft to his Holmes; someone just as clever if not more but not particularly fond of people. And yet, she is a. too self-righteous to listen, too rigidly inflexible in her morals and b. kind of annoying.
She’s also clever, but like Moffat, like this show, gloatingly so. Which makes her genuinely annoying and nowhere near as likable as she should have been.
And I’m not one of those people who needs a sociopolitical message in their entertainment. I didn’t need or expect Inside Man to dissect the gender politics for me. So this really isn’t about the representation or depiction of that. This was only ever meant to entertain cleverly.
The show’s failure to do so is frustrating, because it comes so close, but consistently backs away, poses, preens, and says “look at me, aren’t I clever?”
And no, frustrating resoundingly NO, not as clever as you think, by far.
Well written dialogue – yes, genuinely funny at times – yes, well acted – YES, especially a star turn by Moffat’s own son as the vicar son.
But for a mystery, a twisting puzzling mystery, it is just not that clever. Sherlock would rip this to shreds.
And yet it has the gall to tease the sequel at the end.
No, just don’t. Even Tucci considerable charisma can’t carry that.
Just get back to doing Sherlock already before Cumberbatch is an old man. Seriously.

Ah, there he is, Guillermo Del Toro proudly returning to his horror origins after the stunning but disappointing Nightmare Alley with this charming assembly of nightmares.
The goal here is obviously to create a classy production. That much is obvious from Del Toro presenting each story in a three-piece suit next to the actual beautifully crafted cabinet of curiosities to the gorgeous title sequence…and to the stories themselves which are deeply steeped in Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions.
Classy isn’t something you’ll find a lot of on Netflix, which seems to pride itself on quantity over quality, so it is appreciated when found. But moreover, there simply aren’t a lot of (barely any, really) good anthology series out there.
Creepshow is fun, but what else? Remember Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror? Or Fear Itself? It’s been ages.
Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities I certainly a worthy addition the lineup. Albeit, uneven.
Eight episodes adopt stories ranging as wide as Del Toro himself to the master of cosmic nightmares (two of them) to some unknown/lesser known/old-timey authors. With the exception of episode 7 – by far the tripiest and most Italian stylistically of all – that seems to have had no short story basis.
Del Toro bookends the anthology with his work, two very different stories. First one, of a creepy storage lot with some heavy race commentary, and last one, with a pair of grieving bird lovers stuck in a creepy haunted house. Watch the later if only to see Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes clean-cut and clean-shaven, go all actorly.
Frankly, watch them all, except maybe for episode seven which I really didn’t care for and found overstylized, pretentious, and slow…at least, until the creature shows up.
It stands to mention that all creatures were co-designed by Del Toro himself and are therefore awesome.
Overall, Del Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities is a visually stunning box of tricks with some genuinely creepy moments. A must see for any horror fan. Not perfect, perhaps not even great, but very, very good. Recommended.

​Barbarian is one of those awesome movies that’s got thrills and scares and suspense, but…it doesn’t make any sense.
Which is to say the creators of it are likely making a bet that you’ll be too distracted by the flash and bang and guts and gore appeal of it to notice that the plot doesn’t hold up to any sort of scrutiny. The logistics just aren’t there.
It starts off with Tess– Georgina Campbell aka BabyBerry (the way certain younger generation of actors resemble an older one, she’s a split imagine of the Ms. Berry) getting to her Airbnb rental only to find that the place has already been let out and now she has to share.
It could be worse, though – Tess gets to share the place with Keith, who seems lovely and woke and respectful and all that. Keith is played by Bill Skarsgård, an actor who doesn’t look like anybody, including his famous father and brother.
In fact, Bill Skarsgård is awesome because there’s a certain changeable quality to his handsomeness where it can go either way: he can be a legitimately nice guy or a creep. Pennywise, anyone?
Anyway, in the light of day, the adorable rental turns out to be the only place standing in a nightmarish burned down neighborhood. That’s just one of the creepy elements, leading up to a spectacularly creepy basement showdown.
And I do not use the words spectacularly creepy lightly. This movie has one of the most awesomely terrifying basements in horror movie history. A real beauty…that nightmares are made of.
Pivot.
A seemingly random scene set at least four decades back with a creepy tall dude stalking a woman.
Pivot.
AJ played by Justin Long (back from the land of random romcoms, just coms, etc. to his Jeeper Creeper stomping grounds) is driving down a scenic coastal highway when he finds out that he’s been accused of rape. AJ, is an actor and the more we learn about him the more we see how accurate that accusation might be. AJ is unrepentantly scummy, a sh*tshow of a person.
And now he’s about to lose all his money is lawsuits, so he goes to Detroit to liquidate some property and guess which property he owns? That’s right, somehow, for some reason, he owns a creepy Airbnb ​ house.
And its horrible basement.
Cue in further nightmares.
Ultimately, it’s monster madness slash survival thing and it’s all very compelling and super fun, but….it doesn’t make any freaking sense.
 
Ok, so now that you know all those things about the movie, you should go watch it. Then come back and read the rest of this review.
Again. CAUTION. The following paragraphs will give away some of the plot’s twists and turns. OK? Ok, let’s do this.
 
Why does AJ own a house in a horrible neighborhood of Detroit? How does the place survive as Airbnb ? Does no one ever check the area? Does no one ever check the basement?  More importantly, does no one EVER notice that the tenants are going missing? Sure, the cops in the movies are depicted as useless at best and negligible at worst, but the people who come to stay are from other areas. They presumably have families. And no one looks for them?
Or are we to believe that the basement mommymonster has never killed before the events of the movie?
Why hasn’t anyone checked the basement? Like when the house got sold or any time before or since?
How can someone survive in a basement, however vast the basement may be, unnoticed and without seemingly any income or means of getting necessities, for decades?
What about two somebodies?
And the breeding experiment which seemingly gave birth to the basement’s mommymonster doesn’t work within a timeline. If the mommymonster has been living there for 40 years and she is a result of a series of inbreeding, when would her father had to have started? We’re not talking some missing toes or developmental and/or mental glitches, we’re talking a living nightmare.
If the father started in his late teens or early twenties, then why does the flashback feature him 40 years ago (presumably the age of the mommymonster)?
If not, then yikes, and the creators of the movie do not understand how DNA works.
Where does the mommymonster get milk? Where do they get anything in that basement? Not like she can raid the neighborhood no one is living in, except for one homeless dude.
Why hasn’t she ever attacked the cleaners that presumably take care of the Airbnb in-between renters? Or she did, and no one notices either?
Why hasn’t anyone come looking for Tess or Keith in the two weeks they’ve been missing? Tracing their stay location would have been easily enough done.
There’s probably more I’m not thinking about right now, but those are the main things. If anyone has any good answers, I’m all ears.
 
And yet, despite being a very logical person, I had oodles of fun with this very illogical movie. And you might too. The barbarians are at the gates. Let them in.

​I love horror movies about as much as I hate modern country music. Passionately.
So this intersectionality intrigued me. Sequin-blazed, eardrum-piercing twang Nashville twisted tale of the dangers of fame and ambition utilizing a considerably terrifying presence of Katey Sagal to the max. Ok, sure, bring it.
But then again, outside of doing its best to exploit the “woman unhinged” scenario, this movie (yet another one is a long series of Blumhouse for Prime disappointments) just doesn’t offer that much.
First off, it stands to mention, there’s nothing supernatural at work here. All the thrills and scares are man…well, womanmade.
That woman is a has-been country star, once upon a time a part of a popular country sister act, and since then unseen, unheard of, shut-in. You know, all the more to add to her cult-like status with the fans.
Among these fans are Leigh and Jordan. A country duo trying to get places. One’s pretty, one’s pretty talented. An uneven dynamic that they’ve been able to make work so far, but they are stuck at the small potatoes level. They need something special to go further. And what’s more special than a duet with their favorite star? One no one has heard from in years. What a story that would make.
So, the girls bake a pie and set off to say Hi. And then the nightmare unspools. Psychological manipulation, drunken mayhem, fighting, and yes, singing (the cast can sing and twang) ensues.
It sounds campy, right? It is. Or it might have been but the movie’s writer/director inexplicably chose not to lean into that instead opting for a high-strung hysterical dramatics that don’t quite land anywhere all the way. An extreme version of a Lifetime movie, maybe?
This movie is a Katey Sagal show all the way and Sagal (the real star of the production) is perfect here. There’s something naturally terrifying about her imposing frame, her crudely sculpted features, the somewhat unnatural way in which she’s aging wherein her tapping fingers (utilized heavily in the movie) belong to mitts far older and wrinklier than some of her face. When you combine that with her character (a woman who has soaked in bitterness, resentment, regret, anger, and solitude for decades), you get a strikingly disturbed individual with more issues than NatGeo and an appetite for chaos.
She’s eager to offer guidance that may seem instructional but is in fact a twisted revenge scenario. It’s personal. And it isn’t. It’s Dutch sister against the world. And oh yeah, it’s the South. People have guns and are not afraid to use them.
But Sagal’s efforts aside, the movie falls flat no matter how feminist it wants to be. I mean, it is all ladies, both the stars and creative team. The couple of men cast members are largely irrelevant foil. The movie seems like it wants to say something but then it just lets out a wail and stops. Ending up with all the poignancy, originality, and complexity of a modern country song. Which is to say none.

Umma is one of those highly conscientious, very well meaning and sincere movies that ramps up dramatics so much, it tends to forget it’s meant to be scary. It’s a slow-simmering pot set on so low that it doesn’t seem to ever come to a boil.
Which is to say that while conceptually interesting and well-acted, the movie never really wows or excites or even scares.
What went wrong with this tale of motherly love at its creepiest?
Well, let’s see…
The idea goes like this. A Korean-American woman (very decent Sandra Oh) lives remotely and very, very off-the-grid with her teenage daughter (adorable, peculiarly named Fivel Stewart of Atypical fame). A woman used to once be an accountant, but then developed a paralyzing fear of electricity and turned to bees. Now they got a booming apiary that hunky local shop owner played by Dermot Mulroney is helping her sell.
Decent enough of a life all around, albeit much too limiting and limited for the daughter. But then again, daughters pay for the peculiarities of their mothers. That seems to be the theme here.
Then a Korean uncle shows up telling Oh’s character than her mother died and leaving her with a creepy suitcase. And that just seems to open up a really nasty can of doodoo.
Turns out Umma (Korean for mother) was a bitter mean witch (used allegorically and for rhyming purposes) who never learned to feel at home in her adopted country after immigrating from Korea and took her unhappiness out on her daughter. And apparently afterlife isn’t much homier, so she’s determined to haunt her daughter from the grave.
Then the movie remembers it’s supposed to be scary…Enter some ghostly and possession elements.
The moral (rather obvious and heavy handed) is that all women eventually turn into their mothers if they are not careful and drag their own ugly business out generationally. It may be accurate, but it isn’t enough and certainly not enough to sustain this movie, which manages to feel slow at just 83 minutes.
Objectively, it would have probably been fine as a short, 20 or 25 minutes. It would have probably been fine as just a drama. But the first-time writer/director Shim obviously overreached here, trying for a sort of serious cinema with cheap jump scares, and it just didn’t quite work. Even with a producer as genre legendary as Raimi. Not very exciting and slow, but it'll work wonders if you can't fall asleep.

​A perfect example of a sort of drivel Netflix tends to specialize in, Day Shift is neither clever nor original nor especially good. It’s just loud, flashy, and in your face stupid in a way that says, “I cater to the lowest hanging fruit and I’m loving it.”
How unoriginal: well, it’s a typical buddy action thriller comedy, where those buddies are also the odd couple.
You got you hip and smooth Bud played by Jamie Foxx who, now in his 50s, has apparently forgot to age. Bud is a vampire hunter – this is established in an crazy opening scene which is just one prolonged fighting sequence. However, he isn’t very good at following rules – of course, he isn’t rebel, rebel – so he doesn’t get good shift and doesn’t make good money. And he needs money, desperately, his insanely hot estranged wife is giving him grief over it. And he’s got a young daughter to think about.
Enter Seth, your classic millennial nerd played by the classic millennial bro Dave Franco. Now that he more talented brother got cancelled, Dave is all we got, people. Dave aka Seth is a hip dresser and a sh*t fighter. Seth is a desk jockey at the vampire hunting company Bud works for and he gets, wouldn’t you know it, paired up with Bud to make one comically mismatched superteam.
The thing is, it isn’t that comical. It’s almost not funny at all and that includes the always amusing presence of Snoop as a killer cowboy. The movie ramps up on action to cover up for the fact that it’s fundamentally neither funny nor clever nor good. Clichés are riding clichés to the grand bombastic finale and a happy ending for all. Well, except vampires, obvs.
Dumb, crass, loud – this movie is essentially the way other nationals describe American tourists. It’s a movie that, despite its obviously sizable budget, manages to come across both corny and cheap. So, if it’s cheap thrills you’re after, go for it. Otherwise, pass.