Watchlist

 Hey, y'all!  Shockingly, I thought I'd check in and update this little blog with what I've watching for the last 35 days - instead of waiting a whole eleven months.  I have been diligently working through my watchlists, finishing languishing series and plowing through whole new ones.  This is what I've done since Halloween:

• Finished The 100.  I really liked the first three or so seasons but it really started dragging towards the end.  I do try to be a completist, however, and so I finished the last season.
• Finished the last season of Lucifer when the episodes were released.  When I started this show way back when I thought it was dumb, then I gave it a second chance and quite like it.  It was time for it to wrap up, though.
• Watched S1 of Reservation Dogs.  That was great and Mr. Mouse even watched it with me and enjoyed it.  Looking forward to S2.
• Got caught up on The Great British Baking Show when the most recent series was released on Netflix.  This show makes me so happy - everyone is so wholesome (although I am not a huge fan of Matt, sorry) and it's just a balm for the soul to watch.
• Watched S1 of Y: The Last Man.  I'm hearing that this may not be renewed which is too bad.  I didn't love it (could Yorick be more annoying?  I know, I have the comics, he's supposed to be) but there's so much story left to be told.  Strong cast.
• Started and am keeping up with The Wheel of Time.  I loved those books and own volumes 1-12  (Brandon Sanderson was the wrong person to finish it out - don't get me started) so I was intrigued to see how the show would be.  Again, I don't love it but it's getting better as it goes on.
• Got caught up by watching S5 of The Expanse.  This is a terrific sci fi show based on fantastic books.  I think it's getting one more season?
• Started a rewatch of the original Cowboy Bebop and have watched the first couple of episodes of the live action one.  Don't love the live action version but John Cho is certainly giving it his whole heart.  Needs more Ein!
• Watched Squid Game.  Loved it.  Hear they're making a S2 and think that's a bad idea.
• Watched Arcane only because Lindsey Stirling mentioned doing some violin work for it.  I know nothing about the game it's taken from but I really liked it lot.  Looking forward to more episodes.

Next on the list: I was going to start Wentworth (Australian prison drama, highly recommended by a friend) but I think I'm going to do Hellbound first.  I do love Korean horror and this has gotten good reviews.

What are you/have you been watching?

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #14 Gretel & Hansel

 From director Oz Perkins - also director of The Blackcoat's Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House - comes the latest art house horror movie, Gretel & Hansel.  It isn't a strict retelling of the famous and gruesome Grimms fairytale but it is close:  Gretel (teenagerish, played by Sophia Lillis from IT) and her younger brother Hansel (annoying AF) flee their home after their mother descends into madness.  Ostensibly heading for a distant forestry encampment - Hansel dreams of being a woodcutter - they wind up at the house of an old woman (Alice Krige, very difficult to understand).  She takes them in and, in exchange for chores, feeds them from an abundance of delicious foods - despite there not being a garden or livestock anywhere nearby.  

Gretel, who may have second sight and who certainly has nightmares, begins learning herb craft from the witch (of course she's a witch) but becomes suspicious of the witch's intentions.  The old woman only wants to eat Hansel, however, and is trying to bring Gretel into her own witchy, womanly power.

This film is kind of a mess.  At 83ish minutes, it's either too short or too long.  The British-ish accents are all over the place and anachronisms abound (the witch's modern house, modern idioms).  It is gorgeous to look at, however, beautifully and unsettlingly shot, trippy and atmospheric.  It's slow, however, and really nothing much happens.  This is the third of Oz Perkins's horror-adjacent movies I've seen: atmospheric with nothing much happening seems to be his modus operandi.

That's it for this year.  I've been a little frustrated with finding good ( or even "good") horror movies to watch: the standard streaming services just don't offer much and a lot of what they do have is PG-13.  I've still got some DVDs in the queue, though, so maybe I'll come up with a hidden gem or two in the next couple of months.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finish The 100, get caught up on The Great British Baking Show and start watching Squid Game.  Happy horror to you all!

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #13 Till Death

Here was, quite literally, my biggest gripe with the decent thriller, Till Death, starring Megan Fox, the whole time I was watching: shouldn't it be 'Til Death?  I was wrong, apparently, because both 'til and till are correct usage as being short for "until" (and "till" has actually been around longer!).  To me, though, "till" made it seem like this was going to be a farming horror movie. Or maybe about a murderous cash register.  You learn something new every day, I guess.

Emma (a still completely gorgeous and up for it Fox) has been having an affair, feeling trapped by her controlling and menacing husband.  On a surprise anniversary trip to their lake house - they never go there in the winter - said husband lets her know that he knows about the affair in no uncertain terms.  SPOILER although it's pretty much given away in the trailer: she ends up handcuffed to his dead body, dragging him around the property (from which he has taken all phones/sharp objects/etc.) first trying to escape him, then trying to escape the two bad guys who have come for her.

There is absolutely a Gerald's Game + Weekend at Bernie's + Home Alone + Sleeping with the Enemy vibe going on her.  I am a fan of Megan Fox (she's so good in Jennifer's Body and I thought she was fantastic in New Girl) and she is absolutely a final girl to root for here, despite the clunky dialogue and obvious plot.  It isn't at all a horror movie (I continue to be amazed at what the streaming services designate as "horror") but it is a fun and slightly gory little thriller.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 The Wolf of Snow Hollow

On the plus side: as I was watching, I recognized an overhead canyon road shot - "Is that Little Cottonwood Canyon?" - and a ski lift shot - "Is that Solitude?" - and when I checked, The Wolf of Snow Hollow was indeed filmed on location in Utah, mostly in Kamas.  So that's cool!  On the negative side: almost* everything else.

Let me quote from the Netflix DVD sleeve:

A small town cop, struggling with a failed marriage, a rebellious daughter and a lackluster team of officers, is tasked with solving a series of brutal murders that are occuring on the full moon.  As he's consumed by the hunt for the killer, he struggles to remind himself that there's no such thing as werewolves ...

Boy howdy - struggle is right.  This is a tiny indie film ($2,000,000 budget; $186,026 box office (which certainly wasn't helped by a 2020 release)) but sometimes tiny indie films (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, etc.) are fantastic so it wasn't the lack of money.  This was Robert Forster's last film and he was actually pretty good; Riki Lindhome was another bright spot.  But writer/director/lead actor Jim Cummings needs (a) acting lessons, (b) directing lessons and (c) screenwriting lessons.  Other than Forster and Lindhome, the acting was terrible.  The editing was awkward and confusing.  The music choices were sometimes so bizarre that I wondered if this was supposed to be a horror comedy; even after watching it and reading several reviews, I still don't know: parts were laughable but it certainly wasn't funny.  This was one of the longest 82ish minutes of my life.

*  I definitely appreciated the practical werewolf effects - I am such a sucker for dudes in wolf suits!  And the poster is really great.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #11: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

I watched the first and second Friday the 13ths back in 2010, and the third (3D) one in 2013.  Given the gap of eight years, at least I'm watching them in order.  By all accounts, however, this is the last good installment of F13, so maybe I won't seek out later ones.  On the plus side, this fourth - and not at all final - chapter has a baby Corey Feldman and a youthful Crispin Glover, who was pretty cute in 1984 but who soon proves that he has been a total freak right from the beginning.

Here's the plot, which picks up immediately after the events of #3, with police and ambulances collecting all the bodies, including Jason's.  They take his "corpse" to the hospital - wheeling it right in the front door, for hell's sake - and take it to the morgue.  The morgue attendant is too busy trying to make time with the cute nurse to notice Jason's reanimation.  He kills the morgue attendant and then the nurse, and then a chubby hitchhiker the next day on his way back to Crystal Lake.

Meanwhile, at Crystal Lake (I guess, although GOSH I might vacation elsewhere if there had been that many recent murders), Mrs. Jarvis, her 20-something daughter Trish and young son Tommy (Corey Feldman), plus Gordon the golden retriever, have moved in for the summer.  At the rental right next door, six horny teenagers/early 20-somethings show up for some R&R, wasting no time going skinny-dipping.  They meet up with two cute-and-horny twins and soon the party starts.  Also, Trish and Tommy meet Rob out on a country lane: he is ostensibly a hunter but he's really out there because his sister was one of Jason's victims.  All of this, by the way, is pretty decent character-development for a slasher.

And then the killings start.  This F13 has a fairly high body count: thirteen!  There is also a LOT of people crashing through windows (including poor Gordon), either being tossed through them by Jason or diving through trying to escape Jason.  As far as Final Girls go, Trish does a whole bunch of screaming but also does a good job of fighting back.  And while I seriously question that Tommy would take the time mid-massacre to shave his goddamn head, he does rally something fierce and save his big sister with a well-placed machete to Jason's head.  It's apparent that poor Tommy is going to have some serious issues in the years to come.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #10 Candyman 3: Day of the Dead

I watched the first Candyman back in 2014 but I don't think I ever saw II.  I suspect it doesn't matter much.  This third installment is from 1999 and is so bad that I'm only going to transcribe my notes so as not to spend any more time on it.

• And we start right off with a sexy, braless blonde: Donna D'Errico, our heroine - "Caroline"

• TONY TODD.  That is all.

• Donna D'Errico = a terrible actress btw

• Who the fuck takes the subway in Los Angeles?

• The Candyman wants Caroline (his great-great-grandaughter or something) to join?/believe in him so he starts killing off all her friends and framing her for it.  Genius. 

• Was Donna D'Errico on Baywatch? [Checks Wikipedia] YES.  She is 53 now and if you scroll through her Instagram [which I did while I was supposed to be watching the movie], #1 she looks younger now than she did in 1999 and #2 she's had so much work done that she doesn't look like she did then.  She looks amazing but ...

• This movie is trying to say something about white L.A. cops' racism against Hispanics.  But it's just so bad.

• Lol a bunch of pierced L.A. goths capture Caroline - they're worshipping the Candyman - and have tied her up with a ball gag in her mouth.  That's funny.

• This is by far the worst of the ten movies I've watched this month 

• I'm sorry but could someone please give this poor girl a bra?

• Such a bad movie BUT I can appreciate that Caroline wore sneakers (and not high heels) throughout - very sensible

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #9 Suspiria (2018)

 I can't believe it's been since 2018 that the new Suspiria came out.  Which, incidentally, was when I watched the original, 1997 Suspiria.  Is it a problem that I didn't remember much of the original when I watched the new one?  As it turns out, no: in broad strokes, they're much the same.  But anyone who loves the first one is going to realize that the new one is quite different.  Some spoilers ahead.

Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) is a former Amish runaway who has come to 1977 Berlin to join the Markos Dance Company.  Despite not having much formal training, she is accepted and quickly becomes the principal dancer for the company.  The instructors are all witches, you see, and see Susie as the pure vessel they have been seeking for their ritual to resurrect (maybe?) their three goddesses/main witches.  Susie is down with that, especially since the charismatic yet intimidating Madame Blanc (the always amazing Tilda Swinton), the company's main instructor, quickly develops a relationship with the girl.  Meanwhile, other dancer Sara - who was Susie's first friend at the company - begins to think something strange is afoot in the dark rooms and tunnels beneath the dance school; she makes the acquaintance of a German psychologist, a sad man (also played by Tilda Swinton, under very good layers of makeup) who lost his wife to the Nazi camps in WWII (and this subplot needlessly complicates things) and who used to have as a patient a former dancer, paranoid and now gone missing.

This movie must have been percolating in my subconscious because now the plot seems to make much more sense as opposed to when I was watching it when my notes read "Really not sure what's going on but there seems to be a power struggle among three major witches: Markos, Blanc and an unnamed third ... I think Susie may be the third?"  The big finale scene is where all the lurid reds of the original film show up, with exploding heads and gushes of blood.  I was a big fan of the exploding heads, by the way, but my notes: "I don't know what is happening."  

Final thoughts: The new Suspiria is super weird and over-long but it has been my favorite movie of the month so far.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #8 Fear Street Part 1: 1994

I will admit to never having read any R.L. Stine, upon some of whose works the Fear Street Netflix movie series is based.  I was under the impression that he wrote scary stuff but for kids - this Fear Street Part 1: 1994 has a light touch for the most part BUT when it gets gruesome, it goes allllllll in.

In this universe, there are two towns next to each other: Sunnyvale, where everyone is happy and rich and safe and has pet unicorns (not the last one), and Shadyside, where people are poor and struggling and there are murders every week.  Guess in which town this movie is set? 

Our heroine, Deena, has a support system of a younger brother (Josh, who is way into the brand new internet and a big fan of chatrooms) and friends Kate (smart, cheerleader and also prescription drug dealer) and Simon (Kate's sidekick and not much more character development).  After a Shadyside v Sunnyside candlelight vigil/football game, Deena's ex-girlfriend Sam, who moved to Sunnyvale, and a bunch of her new classmates get in a car wreck after harrassing the departing Shadyside school bus.  Deena, Kate and Simon help Sam, but only after she has inadvertently bled all over the buried bones of the persecuted witch, Sarah Fier.  This awakens the witch, who apparently periodically possesses local folk, sending them on murderous rampages over the last three hundred years.  All the previously possessed individuals start coming for Sam and it is up to Deena and her squad to defeat them.

FYI: Grown-ups do not really factor into things here, other than to stand in the way.

I have a couple of small quibbles with the setting: although I totally dug all the 90s music, some of it was rather on the nose (which I suppose you might not realize if you weren't around in the 90s to listen to it over and over again), plus a couple of those songs were not out yet in 1994; and also I'm a little skeptical that high school same sex romances would be quite that out in the early 1990s.

The acting was okay, the premise was okay and, as mentioned above, when the kills got gruesome they really went for it, but I dunno.  Maybe I was tired but this movie just didn't hold my attention.  Eight horror/"horror" movies in and I still haven't been super-stoked about any of them.  I'm always hopeful for the next one!

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #7 Sorority Row

The R-rated slasher, Sorority Row, is pretty standard for a modern (2009) slasher.  I've certainly seen worse and this one had a couple of faces that I recognized: Rumer Willis, Jamie Chung (super-cute) and omg the queen Carrie Fisher as the Theta Pi housemother. 

A prank goes horribly wrong at a house party and a sorority sister (Megan) ends up dead.  Rather than go to the police, four of her sisters (Jessica/ringleader and bitch archetype; Chugs/promiscuous; Claire/second fiddle to Jessica; Ellie/smart and nervous) cover it up, dumping the body down a mine shaft and then blackmailing a fifth sister (Cassidy/heroine and too good to be in a sorority but loyal to her sisters despite their faults) into keeping it secret.  Eight months later, it's graduation and the Theta Pis have one last house party to celebrate.  Mrs. Krenshaw tells them to have fun, be safe and don't damage the house.  SPOILER: they burn it down.

A hooded, masked killer starts picking off everyone who knew about Megan's murder, at first using a tire iron like the one that was used to kill Megan, and then adding knife blades to make it extra.  The bodies pile up, as they do in a slasher: in addition to the sisters getting picked off, several seemingly-random bystanders are killed too, until you realize that they also knew or found out about the murder.  The killer is keeping it secret by killing everyone involved.  Some of the murders are inventive - wine bottle and flare gun, I'm looking at you - others are the standard stabbings expected in this sort of movie.

I jumped a couple of times but generally, this isn't a tension-building scary slasher; it only has a medium amount of blood.  And, in a nice twist, all the male characters looked the same - I literally could not tell them apart.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #6 We Summon the Darkness

It's 1988.  Heavy metal rock music is, to the Christian moral majority, the work of Satan: satanic panic was real, y'all.  In We Summon the Darkness, across the country, eighteen people have been murdered by satanists, which you can tell from all the candles and pentagrams at the crime scenes.  The authorities can't figure it out but they're sure that heavy metal music is to blame.  Meanwhile, in the heartland, three girls - Alexis, Val and Beverly - are on their way to a heavy metal rock show.  They pick up three dudes in a sketchy van and, after the show, continue the party at Alexis's dad's McMansion.

Here's the twist HERE'S THE SPOILER WHICH I'M NOT SORRY ABOUT BECAUSE I THOUGHT THIS MOVIE SUCKED:

The guys are basically good dudes and it's the girls who are out to kill the guys AND they're not doing it because they're satanists - they're doing it because they're holy rollers who are trying to blame satanists and drive the fearful faithful to Alexis's dad's conservative mega-church.  The murders all across the country have all been committed by her dad's congregation.  (Alexis's dad, by the way, is played by Johnny Knoxville who isn't that good an actor.)  Beverly gets cold feet, however, being a recent recruit who isn't entirely onboard with the church, and ends up trying to help the remaining two boys after Alexis stabs the first one.  Bodies start to pile up - including Alexis's coke-head stepmom who just stopped by to pick up her stash, interrupting the attempted murders; and a sheriff - and at one point, Bev is using an outboard motor as a weapon.

I found this flick deeply unsatisfying.  I usually enjoy it when a horror movie goes off the rails in the final third but this one was just confusing.  It seemed like something got cut that would have clarified Bev's motivation.  Why crank Belinda Carlisle's Heaven and then immediately have the power go out?  That motor would have been waaaaaay too heavy for Bev to be toting around.  Why not take the van keys out of dead Ivan's pocket?  Things totally shifted into WTFdom and my last note reads: "Dear A.V. Club: this movie is stupid." 

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 Happy Death Day

I'm going to attempt to post a movie every other day ... we'll see how long I can keep it up.

Groundhog Day is one of Mr. Mouse's and my favorite movies.  Happy Death Day is a horror-comedy riff on that high concept: Birthday girl Tree is a bit of a bitch: snooty sorority sister, mean girl, nasty to her roommate, ignoring calls from her dad, having an affair with a married professor (who is rather a git, imho).  On the night of her birthday, she gets stabbed by a hooded, masked assailant - and then wakes up the next morning, in the dorm room of the same kid she had hooked up with the night before, and relives the day of her birthday again.  When she gets stabbed to death again, and wakes up in Carter's bed again, she remembers what happened to her.  At first she is convinced she is losing her mind; as the day keeps replaying itself, she starts to solve her own murder in an attempt to get out of the loop.

See?  Just like Groundhog Day, down to the part where Tree also tries to become a better person as she's given chance after chance.  There is one difference, however: each time she comes back she is a little weaker, so she may not have infinite days of return.  

In spite of myself, I found this movie charming and fun, especially once she starts to solve her own murder.  I didn't know much about it going in - thought it was going to be more slashery and not PG-13; it really felt like a movie-length Buffy episode (not that there's anything wrong with that).  Jessica Rothe, who plays Tree, is pretty good.  She's Blake Lively-light, pretty, charming, unafraid to be a little goofy or awkward.

Final thought: Tree goes to Bayfield College and the mascot is the Bayfield Baby.  I know it's a joke but omg that's AWFUL.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #4 Cam

Wherein the A.V. Club redeems itself for suggesting Cam as a hidden gem ... but I am beginning to think that streaming services take a VERY broad view of "horror movies."

I guess I never really thought about, or knew anything about, the world of cam girls.  On the one hand, I can appreciate and give moral support to these women who have found a way to more safely make money as sex workers - it's peep shows for the 21st century.  On the other hand, WTF men?  Buncha creepers.

Alice/Lola (a fantastic Madeline Brewer) is an up-and-coming cam girl whose account gets hacked by a lookalike.  More quickly than one might think, her life starts going off the rails - the fake Lola sends a stalkery weirdo to Alice's mom's salon, her little brother's friends fin  d out his sister goes online porn.  Her cam girl friends/coworkers are unsympathetic, the site's IT department is no help and the cops are either scornful/disgusted or far too interested in what she does.  It's up to the OG Lola to figure out who (or what) her doppelganger is.

SPOILER BELOW I'M SPOILING THIS MOVIE WHICH IS NOT A NEW RELEASE BUT YOU'VE BEEN WARNED

The fake Lola isn't real: she's an online deepfake that a bot put together after noticing how much money she was making, cobbling together old footage and coming up with new ways to interact with her patrons.  That's some serious Black Mirror shit right there - and not too far from our own future, from what I've read.  This is a fascinating little movie some big ideas and, for the most part, it pulls them off.  What it isn't, however, is horror.  Scary?  No.  Suspenseful?  Not really.  Gory?  There's some blood but not even a bucketful.  But I liked it and thought it was entertaining and I have certainly spent worse ninety minutes.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #3 Midsommar

 I tend to shy away from really popular stuff at the time it is really popular (for instance, completely resisting the Downton Abbey and Mad Men crazes) which is why it's taken me so long to watch Ari Aster's Midsommar.  I'm not going to talk about it much, other than it was well received and thoroughly discussed when it came out in 2019; if you want to dive deeper, there is plenty out there.

Dani (thoroughly inhabited by Florence Pugh), recovering from a horrific family tragedy, tags along with her self-absorbed boyfriend Christian and his three buddies on a trip to rural Sweden.  One of the buddies, Pelle, has invited his friends to visit the commune where he grew up.  Christian is full of white male privilege; Mark is an asshat; Josh is hoping to study the commune for his anthropology thesis.  Dani is just trying to keep her shit together.  She succeeds better than one might expect.

I'm not entirely convinced that Midsommar is a horror movie.  It is beautifully shot, strikingly set designed and costumed (the flower work is amazing), slowly building claustrophobic tension in the never-ending daytime of northern Sweden - punctuated by startling and gruesome violence.  It is perhaps overlong - there's a lot of time spent with the various escalating rituals - but it held my attention the whole time.  I really liked this one.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #2 Await Further Instructions

This one came from an AV Club "best horror movies to stream on Netflix" list.  I may have to rethink going to the AV Club for streaming horror movie recommendations.  Also: this is a Christmas horror movie.  I've never really thought about it but perhaps I should do a deep dive into the Christmas horror genre: Black Christmas, Krampus, Better Watch Out, Silent Night Deadly Night, etc.  Something to think about when I'm at a loss for something to watch.

Anyway.  Await Further Instructions is a low budget, bottle episode of a weird little movie.  It is not scary but definitely tries to crank up the tension and foreboding.  Nick has brought his girlfriend Annji to his estranged family for Christmas; his mum is thrilled to see him but his dad didn't even know he was coming.  Tension ratchets quickly as Grandpa makes racist comments (Annji is of Southeast Asian descent) and Nick's pregnant and ignorant sister and her bro husband show up.  Nick promises Annji that they'll get up early and leave before anyone else is awake.  When they get up, however, the house has been completely covered by a metallic substance and there is no way out.  There's no telephone, no internet and the television is flashing ominious messages like: AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.  YOUR FOOD AND WATER IS CONTAMINATED.  ISOLATE THE INFECTED PERSON.  INJECT YOURSELVES WITH THE VACCINES - this last, when a packet of previously-used hypodermic needles is dropped down the chimney.

Dad is all in with obeying the messages.  Nick and Angie resist for a while but before too long, Angie (sniffling with a head cold) is locked in a room; Grandpa is dead; sister's husband has lost all the fingers on one hand for trying to poke at the weird metal covering the windows.  It gets worse: everyone starts to lose their shit from the stress, and towards the end, with only a couple people left alive, it gets weird.  Like, low rent Cronenburg weird as the metallic cables become sentient and snake their way through the embattled house, reanimating corpses and the like.

I like weird.  I do.  But I like to know why things are weird and Await Further Instructions is just not forthcoming.  Is it an alien invasion?  (That's my assumption.)  Is it some government science experiment gone horribly wrong?  Is it the rise of the machines?  I'll go along with pretty much anything - but let me know why.

Twelfth Annual Friend Mouse Speaks Scarelicious October Movie Series: #1 IT: Chapter Two

 Like a zombie clawing its way out of its grave, this seemingly abandoned blog has been resurrected, just in time for spooky season*.  These last eighteen months have been difficult (for every person on this planet) and although I've consumed a massive amount of media, I just haven't had the capacity to share it here.  I just couldn't do it.  What's more, I barely remember what I read/watched: a lot of urban fantasy, science fiction and swords-and-sandals fantasy books and a lot of streamed t.v. - but what was it?  The Good Place, Schitt's Creek, Trailer Park Boys, Teen Wolf, Reservation Dogs, The 100 (almost done), Lucifer, The Great British Baking Show, as much Drag Race as I could find, some The Witcher, a total rewatch (again) of Angel ... I wish I'd kept a list because everything else just went right out of my brain as soon as I finished it.

Mmmm.  Brains.  Let's watch some horror flicks - it is October, after all.

For this TWELFTH series, I started with IT: Chapter Two, finishing off what I started back in 2018 with Chapter One.  Maybe I'm feeling nostalgic, but this new remake just didn't measure up to the 1990 miniseries.  Sure, Chapter Two has a good cast (Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader - who stole the show) but the younger actors were more fully realized iterations of the characters and the 1990 actors felt closer to the book too.  This adult Eddie was played way too belligerent for the book's character; the adult Ben just felt off, and was barely a person; the younger Bev was way more badass than Chastain's.  Bill Hader, though - wicked funny.

Other random thoughts (because everyone knows the story and has either read the book, seen the 1990 miniseries or watched this two-parter, so I'm not going to recap): Stuttering Bill has a very excellent vintage Schwinn bicycle that I loved, although I got mad at how he was throwing it around.  And SPOILER SPOILER they defeat Pennywise by calling it a bully to its face? WTF?  I get that biting down on the metaphysical tongue of a cosmic turtle was going to be tough to pull off - but CHASTISING the big bad to make it go away?  You have got to be kidding me.

Final verdict: IT: Chapter Two is not actually scary.  A solid meh, if ever there was one.

*  I hate that term.  Like, really a lot.