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

On 6/2/2024 9:28 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

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!

Hulu has it in 4K?!?  The movie was released on disc only on blu-ray.  :-/

    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,

Well...if you watched it on disc you could have watched the unrated version.  :-)
Here is a comparison of theatrical vs unrated cut:
https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=246728
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
 

I don't think I've heard of this one.  Is Neeson in the Bruce Willis phase of his career where he's cranking out low budget direct to video movies faster than people have time to watch?
I watched:
Doctor Who (Disney+) - "Dot and Bubble" - The Doctor and Ruby land on a planet with a small colony of spoiled rich kids who are so self-absorbed they can't be bothered to leave their social bubble, both literally and figuratively.  Their refusal to see the world as it really is will lead to their deaths unless they listen to the Doctor.  Unfortunately for them the Doctor isn't in their social bubble.
Confess, Fletch (Showtime) 2022 movie (which has been sitting on my DVR since 2022) starring John Hamm as "Fletch," who gets caught up in a convoluted plot involving a stolen painting and a murder.  Beyond that I really didn't follow the plot of this movie at all.  I've been working my way through this for the past few days and finally finished it.  The movie was just sort of on as I watched Fletch make wise cracks and annoy the police.  Maybe fans of the character will like it more, but I was just waiting for it to be over.
I also watched some  M. Night Shyamalan movies. There *will* be spoilers!  Stop reading now if you don't want to know the twists...
SPOILER SPACE
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Unbreakable (4K disc) 2000 movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.  Bruce Willis stars as a security guard who survives a train crash that killed every other passenger on board without a scratch on him.  He soon after meets a comic books obsessed Samuel L. Jackson who suggests he may be a superhero and begins to groom him to become one. Jackson has a condition which causes his bones to be brittle and easily break.  Jackson explains that he thinks comics are a glimpse of a true higher reality and if there is someone as brittle as himself in the world there must be an unbreakable opposite also out there.  They soon discover that one of Willis' powers is when he touches an evil person he can see their evil plans.  And at movie's end Jackson shakes Willis' hand revealing Jackson was behind the train crash and many other disasters resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people as Jackson searched for his opposite.  The movie has grown on me over the years and I think I like it a bit better now than I did when it first came out.
Split (4K disc) 2016 movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. James McAvoy stars a a man with split personalities several of which decided to kidnap three teenage girls including Anya Taylor-Joy.  Anya has to outwit McAvoy's personalities to escape but one of the personalities seems to have super human abilities.  The movie ends with Anya rescued but McAvoy still free.  The final scene takes place in a diner with people talking about the events and commenting about how there hasn't been anything like this since the psycho who intentionally derailed a train was caught.  Then Bruce Willis stands revealing himself to be the same character from "Unbreakable" who has now embraced being a hero and his latest target is James McAvoy.
Glass (4K disc) 2019 movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. This serves as a sequel to both "Unbreakable" and "Split" with the cast of both movies returning for this one.  The movie opens with Willis's vigilante superhero with help from his son (the actor from the first movie reprising the role) tracking down James McAvoy.  Willis is now known as "The Overseer" and McAvoy goes by "The Horde."  The two are both super-powered and fight to a standstill when they are both surprised by the police and taken into custody.  The two of them are sent to a mental hospital which happens to be the same hospital where Sam Jackson is being held.  Jackson now goes by the supervillain name, "Mr. Glass."  All three of them being at the same hospital is by design.   They were sent there by a doctor (Sarah Paulson) who is determined to cure them of their shared delusion that they are super human.  But Mr. Glass has other plans and with The Horde's help he plans their escape and a final showdown.  This was my first time watching this since seeing it in the theater.  I liked it a lot more on this viewing.  All of these movies work much better when watched back to back as one continuous story.  I think my main issue with "Unbreakable" when it first came out is how the movie has an abrupt ending without a proper resolution.  But when watched all together the story now has a much better beginning, middle, and end.
Knock at the Cabin (4K disc) 2023 movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan based on a 2018 novel.  The plot follows a family vacationing at an isolated cabin who are visited by four people who show up predicting the end of the world if the family doesn't do what they say, and what they say will have deadly consequences.  This was my first time watching it since seeing it in the theater.  The movie holds up very well.