Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-06-01 (Saturday)

On 6/2/24 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:

I watched:
 RIFFTRAX:
"Vengeance of the Dead". A man is haunted in his dreams by
the ghost of a beautiful young woman; after the woman reveals
she and her mother were murdered by a hooded gang, he begins
to hunt down the members of the gang while sleepwalking.
Apparently they're playing new movies. This one was bad.

*Always* a warning sign: When you look a movie up on IMDb, and *none* of the cast have portrait pictures on IMDb.
This flick is basically an example of this.

What did you watch?

I took it really easy yesterday. I only managed to get through a soap, some golf, and two movies:
soaps: GH - Fri's ep. Sonny continues to lose it, and sends some thugs to go after Jason, after Jason refuses to sell out of the coffee business - hopefully, this finally sends Sonny to jail. Not much else happened except that NuNuNuMolly continues to be a stress case, and asks Carly about the wedding attack. Agent Jagger Cates and Jack Brennan have an amusing "confrontation"/interrogation in Brennan's hospital room.
golf - Day 3 of the Canadian Open in Hamilton, Ont. saw Scotland's Robert MacIntyre in the lead by four(!), followed by Canuck Mackenzie Hughes, Kiki Ryan Fox and American Benjamin Griffin all four strokes back. American Sam Burns and Brit Tommy Fleetwood are also in the hunt. But it seems unlikely that MacIntyre will be caught.
Blumhouse's Fantasy Island (Hulu) - In glorious 4k!
    I think I liked this 2020 flick quite a bit more than Anim did. Yeah, the ending was a little too all over the place, and "too cute". And this was unfortunately "PG-13 horror" when I was expecting(/hoping for) "hard R horror" out of this, which was disappointing, and which also made for a much *less dark* film that I was anticipating.
    But, such as it was, this was an OK "twisty" take on "Fantasy Island".
    And, hey - at least they got it right that Lucifer Hale is *pure EVOL*!!1!11!!  ;)
    It's a little annoying that Portia Doubleday's character also didn't suffer a horrific fate.
Fun fact: Before I went to bed last night, LMN was playing 2009's "Sorority Wars" starring... Lucifer Hale! 15 years ago, when Hale was about... what? 19? (so this was pre-PLL (bitches!!)), she was adorable. By 2020?... Not so much!  :p
Blacklight (Hulu) - Also in glorious 4k!
    Honestly, it kind of blows me away that even relatively "low-budget" flicks like this one (though, I guess USD$43 mil isn't exactly "low-budget"...) are now getting 4k presentations on the streamers.
    Anyway, this was just OK - it's kind of like "The Parallax View" but without Warren Beatty, the pervasive 1970s pessimism, or the hopeless ending.
    Liam Neeson plays Travis Block - a man with a "particular set of skills" - which in this flick involves getting deep-undercover FBI agents out before they get into "too deep"!! The flick makes clear that Block is not an actual FBI agent, but an independent contractor. He works for the "head" of the FBI (Aidan Quinn - which means you just *know* he's EVOL!!1!).
    First problem, though, is that this was filmed in Australia (Neeson and Quinn may be the only non-Aus actors in the cast), with Canberra and Melbourne very, very unconvincingly standing in for Washington DC. (I've only been through DC once, and even I could easily tell this was not filmed in DC!).
    Neeson has a perennially disappointed and slightly hostile adult daughter (Aussie actress Claire van der Boom), and an adorable 6(?)-year old granddaugther (one-time child actress Gabriella Sengos) whom Block teaches all of his paranoia too!
    Anyway, when one of the people Block pulls in from undercover (Taylor John Smith) starts spouting conspiracy nonsense about the FBI eliminating domestic political "agitators", you know the guy is actually on to something. Eventually, a plucky guttersnipe reporter (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is dragged into this.
    This is nothing we haven't seen before, either more generally, or specifically from Neeson, and a number of the other Neeson films in the same vein are probably better than this one.
    But "Blacklight" sure does look pretty in 4k!!  ;p