What Have You Watched Recently?

[HeroGM]

Hawkeye, ST: Discovery, Yellowjackets, and Willey's Wonderland.

[death tribble]

A Candle in the Dark

This is a 1970s Spanish horror with two sisters punishing those who do not adhere to their strict moral code. A British girl staying in their hotel is sunbathing topless when stopped by the sisters and they cause her accidental death. The woman's sister, played by Judy Geeson, is told that she left but then can find no trace of her. They had agreed to meet at the hotel. The sisters kill an American girl who seems to think she can as she pleases and come and go as she pleases. They also kill what they assume is an unmarried mother. Judy Geeson's character meanwhile grows suspicious of the sisters and begins investigating the hotel. A man she confides in is killed by the sisters when investigating their wine vat. But the rest of the village is growing suspicious as well after a guest falls in and their seems to be human flesh on the menu.

It's an unusual film but worth a look. 

 

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle

This is a film that knows its limitations. It is a 90s British horror. An evil spirit is bound into a bike after a bike gang attack rivals during a summoning ceremony. The bike wants revenge and sets out to kill the gang. The film is part comedy as well so you have it being repelled by a police inspector who chews garlic. Anthony Daniels (C3PO) plays a priest who tries to exorcise the bike.  

 

Funny Man

This is a 1990s British horror comedy. A record producer wins an ancestral estate from an eccentric man in a game of poker and moves his family there. His brother is following along having picked up hitchhikers. After arriving the family find a game of chance with two win and two two lose squares. After it ends on lose Funny Man is summoned and he proceeds to kill the family. The problem is that you don't get invested in their fate and could not care less. When the young son is killed off screen it seems unnecessary. There are also lots of 4th wall breaks. One of the hitchhikers is doing a Sccoby Doo pastiche but is killed for again no real point. Funny Man looks like a jester from a pack of cards. The intention may have been to mirror Freddy Kruegar from the Nightmare on Elm Street series but it falls flat. One of the hitchhikers seems to have Funny Man's number but is then killed during a duel which makes little or no sense. The brother dies while playing guitar (having never made it) but it is not clear how he is killed. Funny Man meanwhile is dancing while dressed up as Jimmy Saville which would not have been allowed a decade and a half later. The eccentric man is seen in an asylum so he may have just been making the whole thing up in his head. He is played by Sir Christopher Lee and this is the best thing in the film. Honestly avoid this film.

 

Virgin Witch

This 1970s film is about two sisters (played by real life sisters Anne and Vickie Michelle) who go to a country house for a weekend for a modelling job. As you do they are invited to join a witch's coven which is not one devoted to Black Magic. Really it is just an excuse for lots of gratuitous nudity. 

 

Shadows of Fear: Sugar and Spice

Shadows of Fear was a TV series that looked at fear caused by other people rather than the supernatural. Sugar and Spice concerns a family. Mother comes home and finds her son's satchel and her daughter is distinctly odd saying their father picked up said son. This is not what father says when he turns up. And he is a bit of a drunk. Also had been having an affair. So mum and dad fight. You are never quite sure what is going on or why and thus it is unsettling.  

 

Quatermass (1979 series)

this was Nigel Kneale's last Quatermass story and it has deeply unsatisfying elements. Originally written at the end of the 60s and start of the 70s it became dated very quickly. Civilisation is collapsing. Britain is suffering power cuts. The young are being lured into the cult of the Planet People who believe that they will be taken to another planet. The USSR and the USA are teaming up in space and Professor Quatermass condemns both saying that America is corrupt and the USSR is a tyranny and that no good will come of it. This is on what remains of TV broadcasting. Then something happens and the station comes apart. An American who knows Quatermass wonders if he knew something in advance. The Professor goes to a fellow scientist's installation where they picked up that something happened but have no idea what. Then at a nearby stone circle where a lot of Planet People have gathered lightning comes down from the skies and they are all gone except dust.

It has a streak of nihilism permeating the whole script. Cops only work for money. People are much more hostile to each other. Some people have turned to gangs likenthe Baader's named after the Baader Meinhoff gang.  And whatever is happening cannot be reasoned with but can it be stopped ?

Sir John Mills played Quatermass and Toyah Wilcox had a bit part. If you have seen other Quatermass stories this may leave you deeply unsatisfied.

[csyphrett]

Columbo night again and this time our detective contends with Robert Culp as a football team general manager offing his team's owner, and Richard Basehart and Honor Blackman as stage actors who accidentally killed the producer of their play and purposely his butler who tried to blackmail them.

 

CES

[Joe Walsh]

8-Bit Christmas: Watched about 20 minutes of it. Fittingly given the theme, it seems like an 80s-era TV movie-of-the-week ripping off A Christmas Story. We bailed out.

 

Hawkeye S1 E1 and E2: So far, it's good enough to keep watching. Not as good as S1 of most of the supers TV shows of the last 10 years, but I'm keeping my hopes up that it'll get better.

 

Get Back: Pretty interesting look at The Beatles as they struggled to keep the band going. The first episode was the most interesting, because they seemed to be behaving genuinely (if sometimes horribly). E2 and E3 show them behaving much more for the camera, turning on the charm, being goofy, not getting into conflict, etc. It would be interesting to see more of the early footage some day. That said, E2 and E3 were still worth watching.

[Starlord]

On 12/17/2021 at 10:25 PM, Starlord said:

The Witcher Season 1 - I watched this again in preparation for S2...wow, it is so much better when you understand the timeframes in which each segment/episode is happening.

 

Now through ep4 of season 2 - it is excellent so far.

 

Also, watched every episode of Hawkeye except for the upcoming last episode.  This is a solid entry into the MCU.  Not as good as Loki but better than WandaVision.

[Spence]

I really tried to watch Wheel of Time.  There is some good in it so far, but O M G for every interesting minute there is BORING AGONY that seems to take HOURS. 

 

I just can't take anymore.  

 

I hope others have a better experience with it. 

Almost worse than the later books. 

[Pariah]

Sounds a bit like Verdi's opinion on Wagner: "He has good moments, but bad quarter-hours."

[zslane]

I think my biggest issue with this Wheel of Time show is that they are in too much of a rush to get through the story, collapsing entire sections of the first book into "plot soup" that barely resembles the source material. Too much is cut out or drastically changed to call it a satisfying adaptation, in my view.

[Spence]

7 hours ago, zslane said:

I think my biggest issue with this Wheel of Time show is that they are in too much of a rush to get through the story, collapsing entire sections of the first book into "plot soup" that barely resembles the source material. Too much is cut out or drastically changed to call it a satisfying adaptation, in my view.

Emphasis mine.

 

Rush?  OMG.  The episodes I watched were sloooooowwwww borrring slooooogssss.   Nothing fast or rushing about them.  Just a mind numbing painful slog through each episode. 

Except for the sparse sprinkle of action scenes the show was so boring that having to restart the the episodes I was watching because I kept being distracted and missed entire chunks.  I gave up half way through episode 4 and I actually cannot even remember what was happening in episode 4.

 

I am guessing that the fans of the book are not pleased. 

 

 

[zslane]

You have to bear in mind that "the story" I refer to (in the first book) is many hundreds of pages long, with a great many plot branches that the show mashes together--or ignores entirely--into the space of only a few episodes. The show may be very poor at pacing each episode's content such that it feels slow and boring, but compared to the length and breadth of the original material it is based on, the show is positively blazing through the book's events with only a passing resemblance to the original plot.

[Spence]

Just now, zslane said:

You have to bear in mind that "the story" I refer to (in the first book) is many hundreds of pages long, with a great many plot branches that the show mashes together--or ignores entirely--into the space of only a few episodes. The show may be very poor at pacing each episode's content such that it feels slow and boring, but compared to the length and breadth of the original material it is based on, the show is positively blazing through the book's events with only a passing resemblance to the original plot.

 

Got it.  

Well for those of you that are fans of the book, I hope the later episodes will smooth out and get better.  I'm a bit pessimistic, but I hope it happens

[Pariah]

Football, of the American variety. It's bowl season, and I'll happily turn on the TV to watch a third tier-bowl game between two teams I wouldn't otherwise care about.

[Michael Hopcroft]

55 minutes ago, zslane said:

You have to bear in mind that "the story" I refer to (in the first book) is many hundreds of pages long, with a great many plot branches that the show mashes together--or ignores entirely--into the space of only a few episodes. The show may be very poor at pacing each episode's content such that it feels slow and boring, but compared to the length and breadth of the original material it is based on, the show is positively blazing through the book's events with only a passing resemblance to the original plot.

 

51 minutes ago, Spence said:

 

Got it.  

Well for those of you that are fans of the book, I hope the later episodes will smooth out and get better.  I'm a bit pessimistic, but I hope it happens

The Wheel of Time series is so long that I don't even want to dip in my toes.  The only series I can remember being nearly that big was the Mission: Earth SF series "written" by, or at least credited to, L. Ron Hubbard. I never read it, and I'm not sure anyone else who wasn't a Scientologist did either. By the time the first volume came out, Hubbard had already been dead several years -- which led to great skepticism that he could have written any of them, much less all ten volumes.  It would have been a controversy had anyone cared beside critics or members of Scientology.

 

At least the authorship of Wheel of Time is completely above board. Not that it actually makes me like the books any better — a series that long is bound to have petered out at one point, if not more. And my own experience writing a series (shorts, not novels) for Kindle Vella has shown me how difficult it is to sustain a project like that for months, much less years.

[Starlord]

Isn't the book series like 13 to 15 books?  If you even make it to 7 seasons that would be 2 books per season.  Seems like you'd have to cut out giant sections of the books no matter what just to get to the finish.

[Grailknight]

4 hours ago, Starlord said:

Isn't the book series like 13 to 15 books?  If you even make it to 7 seasons that would be 2 books per season.  Seems like you'd have to cut out giant sections of the books no matter what just to get to the finish.

 

It's 14 books to be precise.

 

While it's not overbearing in most places, 15-20% of the books will disappear in a film medium. Jordan was big on descriptions and that's not necessary here, you have visuals.

 

Also the first book is slow with a great deal of world building background. The action starts to take off around 2/3rds through the second book and from there to book 6 is fast paced for a fantasy epic. It does more world building and character development from 7-11 with just enough action to more things along and the last 3 books were written by Brandon Sanderson using Jordan's notes and outlines posthumously so they move at a faster pace.

[Starlord]

The Matrix Resurrections - it was ok.  No new ground covered here.

[Pariah]

Reruns of Family Feud (whilst folding laundry).

 

For those more familiar with the show's history than myself, did the shift in subjects and answers to PG-13/borderline R correspond with Steve Harvey becoming host, or did it happen earlier?

[Christopher R Taylor]

Started watching Faster with Freiberg, hilarious fun with cars

[Starlord]

4 hours ago, Pariah said:

Reruns of Family Feud (whilst folding laundry).

 

For those more familiar with the show's history than myself, did the shift in subjects and answers to PG-13/borderline R correspond with Steve Harvey becoming host, or did it happen earlier?

 

Richard Dawson, nuff said.

[Joe Walsh]

Don't Look Up is hiliarous...and sad, being an accurate depiction of how the most powerful people on Earth react to impending catastrophe: selfishly and stupidly.

[tkdguy]

Tales of the Unexpected: "The Landlady" and "The Flypaper" were two of the episodes I most clearly remember. "Neck" is the third.

[Bazza]

The Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. 

[Ninja-Bear]

I’m almost finished with Season 2 of the Witcher.

[Spence]

Half way through the K-Drama Happiness. 

[slikmar]

Went and saw The King's Man. I should preface this with the fact I really enjoyed the first 2 with Taron Egerton. They were a fun romp with a, honestly, silly story but worked as a parodical send-up of spy movies. This one had some of it, but was really, really dark in comparison. Given they are based on graphic novels by Mark Millar, I shouldn't be surprised, but I really felt anyone going to see if who watched and liked the first 2 were in for a big, and not necessarily pleasant, surprise.