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kbilly782
Reviews
Tenebre (1982)
There are better Argento films to spend your time with
Since so many of these films share the same conceit (in the shadows killer whose identity may or may not be possible to guess, flashback sequences that eventually reveal the killer's motivations, etc.) they tend to live or die on atmosphere, and the likeability of the characters.
This movie unfortunately along with Opera is one of my least favorites. The characters are boring which makes the stakes evaporate, and the ending reveal is one of the silliest/most disappointing of any of his films that I've seen.
Do yourself a favor and go watch Deep Red instead.
The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin (2021)
Scattershot
The hair alone is worth the price of admission, but otherwise this was extremely surface level. As other reviewers have pointed out, it jumps all over the place which detracts from the overall cohesiveness of the experience.
Midnight Mass (2021)
Fun but uneven
Fun concept, but it gets bogged down by the endless monologues. Seriously, so many monologues. They absolutely destroy the momentum in many episodes, and aren't particularly thought provoking. The CGI is pretty dodgy as well, although I suppose one can't judge too harshly since it's television.
47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)
Bad effects sink the schlock
Reviewer's bias.
I love Jaws 4 so I am down with bad shark movies.
Review.
This could've been a fun piece of camp. Unfortunately it is not. The shark cgi effects are SO bad that it almost resembles a SyFy television flick. Bad, and not fun bad. Just bad. Bring back animatronics.
The Outsider (2020)
Endless deviations mixed with endless bloat
My review is from the perspective of someone who read, and really enjoyed the book the series is based on. As a result, it will include spoilers.
My overall take on this series is that it should've been a tight 6-episode series. Instead, the show-runners blew through a significant portion of the book in the first 2 episodes. I sat on my sofa scratching my head as to how there could possibly be 8 more episodes when they breezed through so much of the overall story so quickly.
The answer was unfortunately a plethora of added subplots, and character interactions that don't occur in the book. These killed the pace of the show. Many of the latter episodes were completely new stories created for the television show, and boy oh boy did they weigh it down.
Part of my love of the book was how difficult it was to put down. Rarely was there ever a lull in the story. The show has whole episodes that are so laboriously paced, and boring that I found myself just wanting to skip to Episode 10 to see whether they bungled the end. Spoiler alert, they did.
My second point of contention with the series is character changes. Here is where I'll get into spoiler territory. The decision to have Ralph's son be dead instead of away at camp didn't bother me. What did bother me however was how Ralph become bitter, a drunk, and cruelly dismissive of Holly in a way that never occurred in the books.
Speaking of Holly, I hated that they changed her from a sharp, perspective investigator to some supernaturally intelligent, almost clairvoyant character. She was one of my favorite characters in the books, but in the show she seems like the cliched ghost medium character. Her actions during the finale shoot out underscore what I'm talking about. The "damn you to hell" moment made me roll my eyes so hard that they almost fell out. The book is fantastical in its inclusion of the supernatural, but the characters always came across as believable. Don't even get me started on the changes to Jack's actions during this episode.
I could continue bemoaning other character changes. Terry's widow gets shortchanged (she's far more open minded in the book), Claude's mom gets replaced with a cliche "troubled" brother character, and Jack's character/arc is changed to such a degree as to be almost unrecognizable. The minimal use of him in the book is completely steamrolled over in favor of padding out the series length with more suspense scenes.
I think the biggest person who gets shortchanged is the villain himself. In the books, his presence is far more explicit then it is in the show. He's manipulative, and intelligent. In the show he is a literal monster that growls, and roars. Did they think the audience wouldn't understand he isn't human if he didn't roar like a lion?He does little more than sit in the woods, and eat animals. The show removes him from the main story to such a degree that it's shocking. Much of it seems like a tale without a villain, which is why they compensate for this by so heavily leaning on Jack to be the bad guy. The end in the book was satisfying yet subdued. In the show it's all bombast, and once again overly complicates things.
I could go on, and on, but you get the idea. Read the book, skip the show.
The Witcher (2019)
Shockingly awful
Full disclosure. I have played, and love all of the games. I have also read, and love all eight of the books. With such a rich trove of storylines to pull from, I really cannot understand how this turned out to be such a misfire. All the nuance, and depth of the books is gone. The episodes play like cookie cutter cliffnotes. Even worse however are the storylines/details that the show runners themselves made up on their own (Yennefer's agonizingly hokey backstory) or remixed from the books to serve their narrative (the dryads of brokilon).
The biggest two issues with the show however can be found in the lead, and the production values. I'm not sure if it was the showrunners, or Henry Cavill who decided to do an impression of the way Geralt is voice acted in the video game. It was a disastrous decision. He could've chosen to put his own stamp on the character, but no. Cavill's attempt to mimic the video game's monotone gravel is so dull and poorly done that it almost seems like it's joke. This isn't even accounting for the fact that his costume looks like bad cosplay. Every time he came on screen, I wanted to turn the show off. While I do think it's impossible to get past his performance, it might've been made better if the whole thing didn't look like a SYFY channel show. Everything looks cheap, and the effects are shockingly awful.
Incredibly disappointing, but Netflix will keep churning it out.