Stuff I Watched in Spooky Season

It's "Spooky Season" but I haven't felt like watching a lot of horror movies.  There weren't any new ones that really sounded interesting to me, so this list only has one "horror" movie that wasn't really scary and is from 1970--not a Rifftrax one, so don't worry.  There isn't a lot of other stuff either, so don't worry that it'll be really long, Phantom Readers.

Shazam Fury of the Gods:

  In large part this movie failed because of the change of leadership at DC/WB--but also it's not a good movie.  While the first one was a fun origin story of a kid who gets Superman-level powers and in the end shares them with his five adopted brothers and sisters, this pretty quick gets off-brand by murdering a lot of people, including having the principal of the high school (or whatever) jump to his death, though they wisely don't show that.  But then there's a lot more murders reminiscent of the Hellboy remake the same year the first movie came out.  That movie was rated R and flopped so maybe don't copy that?  The city of Philadelphia is trapped in a dome like The Simpsons Movie or Under the Dome, but not a lot is made of that either; it doesn't really seem to inconvenience people much.  

While it was cool when Billy Batson shared his power with his family in the previous movie, the problem in a sequel is trying to do something with six superheroes.  So...just strip most of them of their powers and you don't have to focus much on them.  Basically the whole thing winds up being a long, dull slog instead of the fun of the first movie.  Helen Mirren gamely tries to be a villain while Lucy Liu takes the lion's share of the metaphoric mustache twirling as a fellow "Daughter of Atlas."  Since Shazam (aka original Captain Marvel) has existed since the 40s (with some gaps) you'd think they could have found a better story to use than this.  I remember reading one of Geoff Johns's comics about them exploring some of the other doors in the Rock of Eternity, which would have been a much better and more fun movie than this.  Far too late it brings back some of the fun of the first movie when Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman shows up for an almost literal deus ex machina.  Anyway, it's good the WB/Discovery merger killed this.  (2/5) (Fun Facts:  A mid-credits scene brings in characters from Peacemaker and makes fun of the Justice League/Justice Society names.  The end credits scene brings back Sivana and Dr. Mind or whoever the little bug is to inch that plot forward though it'll never come to anything.)

Only Murders in the Building Season 3:  I watched the first two seasons pretty much all at once.  I liked the first season but the second season got a little bloated with guest stars and subplots that didn't mean much.  Guess what?  This season is like that second one.  It adds a couple of big names in Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd.  We already saw Rudd "die" at the end of last season on the stage of Martin Short's new play but that was just a fake out.  Like "Who Shot Mr. Burns" they pronounced him dead at one hospital only to pronounce him alive at a better hospital.  Or something.  Then he dies a second time so he's actually murdered in the apartment building to maintain the accuracy of the title.

Meryl Streep is a struggling actress in Martin Short's play, and right from the start they really, REALLY want you to think she did it.  At one point in the penultimate episode she even "confesses" but you know it's not her.  I mean it's too obvious.  It's that Family Guy Law & Order joke about the biggest guest star being the killer.  There's a whole subplot about her being the secret mother of Rudd's brother, who's also his manager. So you're supposed to think she did it for him but that's not it.  That does help foreshadow who actually did it.  The second season I thought the solution only really worked if you worked backwards, but this one was more solid, though maybe more boring.

Besides Streep and Rudd, a chubby Matthew Broderick appears as a potential replacement for Rudd, except he's really annoying.  There are a trio of romantic subplots, one for each of the sleuths.  Again the cameos and red herrings and such can be more annoying than fun.  I didn't hate the show, but it's really more a parody of itself at this point.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  the end features the death of Steve Martin's stunt double, played by Jane Lynch, who will in theory be the 4th season's victim.)

Archer Final Season:  This review of DC's Blue Beetle used the term "aggressively okay" and that would really describe this final season of FXX's Archer.  It's not bad but for a final season it's pretty bland.  No attempt whatsoever is made to answer any longstanding questions like the identity of Archer's father, bring in any big guest stars, or even show Archer and Lana's daughter AJ.  The only thing they did this season was add a new agent to replace Lana and then they didn't really do anything with the new agent once she was part of the fold--she's barely even involved in the last couple of missions.  While this wasn't as bad as the three coma fantasy seasons or the infamous "Vice" season that really began the show's downward spiral, there was nothing epic about what should have been the epic conclusion of the 14-year run.  There will be 3 special episodes starting on December 17th to maybe salvage the end of the series. It would have been nice if they'd announced this before the "final" episode aired as I and many others posted basically, "This is it?  That was lame."  I'm not sure why they chose to basically prank their audience like that. (2.5/5)

Strays:  This movie came out in August or so but quickly fell to Barbenheimer and is now on Peacock.  Basically like the Seth Rogen movie Sausage Party it's an R-rated version of a kid's movie.  Instead of a Pixar movie, this is like The Incredible Journey or Homeward Bound in that it's about 4 stray dogs on an incredible journey.  Only it's so an abandoned dog named Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell) who wants to return to his abusive stoner owner (Will Forte) so he can bite his dick off.  He gets the help of a stray Boston terrier (voiced by Jamie Foxx) and two dogs with owners:  an Australian Shetland (voiced by Isla Fisher) and a Great Dane (voiced by Randall Park).  There are a lot of predictable jokes about poop, pee, and humping.  And some drug humor when they eat mushrooms.  Underneath all that is a story about toxic relationships and moving on from them.  So it's not just a bunch of raunchy jokes; there's some heart to it too. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  the movie is produced by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller who did The Lego Movie which also starred Will Ferrell.)

Buffaloed:  Peg (Zoey Deutch) grew up poor in Buffalo and goes to jail for scamming people with fake Bills tickets.  She gets out and goes to work for a sleazy debt collector (Jai Courtney) and then starts her own rival business.  Mayhem ensues!  Having experience in this area, the movie's "insights" into debt collection are not that accurate.  I mean there are laws and a lot of stuff they do is illegal.  Debts don't exist on just one slip of paper that you can set on fire to make your debt vanish.  Maybe if this had been set in the 80s, but these days everything is scanned into computers.  Still, it's an entertaining movie to watch Peg hustle like a sleazier version of Reese Witherspoon in Election.  (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Peg's mother is played by Judy Greer who was in Archer and Ant-Man.  Peg's brother is played by Noah Reid who was David's boyfriend/fiancé in the last few seasons of Schitt's Creek.  It's a little surprising an indie movie like this actually got permission to use the Buffalo Bills name and logo, though no players appear, I don't think.)

The House That Dripped Blood (1970):  I read a review of this on The Other Side blog and thought it sounded interesting and it's streaming free just about everywhere:  Roku Channel, Freevee, Plex, Pluto TV, Tubi, etc.  Like later movies like Creepshow or Twilight Zone The Movie it's actually an anthology of different stories.  The framing device is that a Scotland Yard inspector goes to a country town to investigate a disappearance from a house and the local cop tells him about some strange incidents in the house prior to that.

The first story has a real Stephen King vibe as it's about a horror writer who rents this creepy old house in the country to work on his novel about a strangler named Dominick.  Then he starts to see Dominick and people get strangled.  Is it real or is he imagining it?  It was pretty decent with a couple of nice twists.  It could have been strung out longer if they hadn't needed to accommodate the other stories.

The second story stars Peter Cushing as a retired guy who rents the house thinking he'll get to chill out and take things easy.  But then he goes to the local wax museum (because what small country town doesn't have one of those?) and sees a statue that looks like some girl he used to love.  His friend (Joss Ackland, the bad guy from Lethal Weapon 2 and 1994's Miracle on 34th Street and the head wizard in the Discworld miniseries Hogfather) goes with him to the museum and is also obsessed with the statue.  The problem when you think about it is this story really has little to do with the house.  The evil in this case is really in the wax museum so it doesn't really fit with the theme.  And it's not even really an original idea; the Rifftrax movie Terror in the Wax Museum came out a couple years earlier than this.  It's not quite as bad as if they had just spliced this in from something else like the MST3K/Rifftrax movie Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders where they literally spliced in a segment from 1983 into the rest of the movie made in the mid-90s but still it doesn't really fit with the rest of the movie's segments.

(I was thinking about it and here's what I'd do with that second story:  instead of the wax museum, have a mannequin in the house that looks like the woman he used to love.  He at first tries to hide it but it keeps showing up and then he starts going all Lars & the Real Girl with it.  Locals see him with this mannequin and get concerned, so they call his friend Joss Ackland.  He shows up and also becomes obsessed with the mannequin and they fight over it and maybe the friend damages it so Peter Cushing kills him.  And then he dies or gets arrested and maybe we see the mannequin grin or laugh or something to indicate it's alive like an evil version of Mannequin.  Like the original it's not all that original but it at least fits the theme better.)

The third story stars Christopher Lee as a guy with a young daughter who moves into the house.  He hires a governess to take of the girl and teach her.  It seems like Lee is a jerk but then we find out just why that is.  Like the first story it's a neat segment that could have been strung out longer if they had, for instance, dropped the Cushing segment that didn't actually fit the theme.

The final story stars Jon Pertwee (the third Doctor Who) as a film star who rents the house while he's making a vampire movie.  A costume shop gives him a cloak that actually seems to make him a vampire.  While the evil originates from outside the house, most of the mayhem happens inside the house, so it's better than the second part.

Then there's a final bit to wrap up the framing segment that ties into the fourth story.  A real estate agent turns narrator, breaking the fourth wall to sum things up for us.

Overall it's not a bad watch, though not scary unless maybe you're under the age of 10.  (3/5)  A couple of Fun Facts:  at one point Pertwee is given a cloak that says "Shepperton Studios" in it and that's the studio where they made the movie.  This movie may perhaps feature the most godawful collection of neckerchiefs ever recorded on film.  I guess that was really a fashionable thing in England in 1970.  Ugh.

Quickdraw Season 1:  This 2013 series from Hulu was recommended to me for a while and so I finally decided to watch it.  Like Blazing Saddles, Maverick (the James Garner TV show or Mel Gibson movie, not the Tom Cruise movie), or The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr it's a Western comedy.  John Henry Hoyle (co-creator John Lehr) is the new sheriff of Great Bend, Kansas in 1875 and is determined to use his Harvard education to clean up the town.  He's aided by his bumbling deputy Eli and a mortician-turned-medical examiner.  And there's of course the mandatory prostitute/bar owner he falls in love with.  While Hoyle is a dumbass about a lot of things, we find out in a duel with the outlaw Cole Younger that Hoyle is a really good shot--hence the title of the show.  The first episode is a little weird as at the end Hoyle is shot twice and they tell him he's going to die, but the next episode he's fine and dandy.  So was that the end at the beginning or is it going to be a think like Kenny in South Park where he dies in every episode?  But then in another episode they mention that he has two bullets in him so I guess he recovered...somehow.  

This is the kind of show that really takes a few episodes to start coming together.  It never really rises to the greatness of Blazing Saddles but it's not bad.  With the sexual humor it's more on par with A Million Ways to Die in the West. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  An Amazon commercial mentions a warehouse in Great Bend, Kansas, which is the setting for this show so like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman or some of those old Westerns of the 50s and 60s I guess the setting is a real place, though unlikely anything like the TV show.)  (Content Warning for Right Wingers:  the season finale features Hoyle and his posse dressing in drag to get the drop on Cole Younger and his gang.  If you're in Florida you better keep your kids away from that or the secret police will probably put you in the gulag.)

Quickdraw Season 2:  There was a second season with 10 episodes instead of 8.  It's pretty much the same thing as the first season but a little better.  A recurring story throughout the season is Hoyle trying to get the prostitute/bar owner to marry him while Eli marries a prostitute named Pearl who is also Hoyle's stepdaughter.  There's a plague of grasshoppers that winds up with Eli becoming a farmer and a visit to the freed slave town of Nicodemus for a rodeo that leads to murder.  The last couple of episodes bring back Hoyle's supposedly dead wife and Hoyle and Cole Younger have to join forces against a bigger bad.  Overall I think this season was tighter and everything was coming together better.  It's just too bad it didn't get a third season to see if it could keep improving. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Halfway through the first season they started to use a theme song over the end credits but then in the second season they just continue the final scene while the credits run.) (Content Warning for Right Wingers: The 8th episode features Cole Younger dressing in drag when he attempts to escape from Hoyle, so kind of an inversion of the previous season.)