Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-14 (Tuesday)

On Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:19:10 -0800, "Ian J. Ball" <ijball@mac.invalid>
wrote:

On 1/15/25 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
>

What did you watch?

>
Did work, and had a meeting yesterday, then ran an errand. So I only saw
stuff in the afternoon and evening:
>

Initiation (Prime) - A 2020 horror movie. What's interesting about this
is that is was co-written and co-produced by the film's lead, Lindsay
LaVanchy (an actress I have never come across before). Considering all
of that, it actually has a passable cast, as they got Yancy Butler and
Lochlyn Munro to show up for this.
   My one issue is that the film takes way too long to get going.
   It starts out being about a sorority and a frat and its members and
pledges. At a party, the lead's (LaVanchy) pledge (Isabella Gomez from
Netflix's "One Day at a Time") is roofied and apparently raped by some
of the frat guys, potentially including the lead's brother.
   Eventually, a masked figure starts offing the frat guys in
particularly brutal ways - is the killer eliminating the "weak links" to
protect the frat?
   Anyway, this gets better the longer it goes, though I would say the
final sequence with the sorority sisters (Shireen Lai plays the third
sorority sister) trapped together in a college building with the killer
probably goes on too long.
   So, I have never seen Lindsay LaVanchy before, and this was
definitely her biggest role to date. Then COVID hit and she basically
did nothing else since this... until just recently - it looks like she,
Gomez and Lai are working together on another new upcoming horror flick.
>
>
What did you watch?

I spent the last few days working through 2023's GOOSEBUMPS: The
Vanishing. In this series we have Ross (from Friends) being a botanist
and a divorced dad of two kids who are staying with him for the
summer. As it turns out there is an old fort that is rumored to be a
former military research facility/ghost location. Kids will stay there
overnight at Camp Nightmare to prove their courage. Only with Ross's
brother (both as young kids) tries to stay overnight at Camp Nightmare
with some friends they all disappear leaving only their clothes
behind.

Fast forward to the future when Ross's kids visit the same place and
have bad experiences. Also Ross gets his brother's clothes back from
the police some 30 years later and finds something on the shirt. That
something looks like nothing else and grows into a carnivorous plant
that ends up eating a young man that breaks into Ross's basement.

The story develops from there fairly well. I've never been a watcher
of the Goosebump's series, but they do a decent job of developing the
story over the course of a season.

What did you watch?