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Last Update 7/22/26
Dark Winds Season 4 (2025)
This season is based on The Ghostway, one of Hillerman’s best novels. There’s quite a bit of embellishment as Leaphorn plans to retire and has chosen Manuelito to be his successor, with is not likely to sit well with Chee, who would seem to be better qualified. Leaphorn thinks Manuelito would be better able to work with the Navajo and get their cooperation because she understands them better than Chee, who has not been living on the reservation until recently. The plot involves a runaway student who is traveling with a gangster, who gets killed after a fight with a woman who is clearly an assassin. This season is at time tedious, nothing much happening despite long scenes. 7/22/26
Lee Cronin’s the Mummy (2025)
I should not have liked this. It incorporates things I abhor in horror. There are no clear rules about the evil so it is almost arbitrary whether or not it wins. I also dislike child in jeopardy plots because they are cheap and over common. A special note for the actress who plays the possessed girl because even without lines she was superb. I found The Exorcist boring. This is similarly religion based. A young girl is abducted and recovered years later, but in a peculiar state that ends in violence. This is simplistic. I was not completely happy with the resolution, but my attention never strayed from the screen. 7/21/26
It: Welcome to Derry (2025)
This eight episode series was recently renewed, to my delight. Season 1 is gripping, scary, well acted, and full of surprises. Derry is clearly being affected by some mysterious force that causes really grotesque hallucinations and horrible deaths. There are two parallel stories. One involves children at the local school who are disappearing under frightening circumstances. The survivors are plagued by visits from the entity responsible. The other is about a military base nearby which has a secret. They are attempting to excavate what they believe is a kind of alien technology that they know is affecting people in the area. By episode 2 I was completely caught up and episode 3 drew me even tighter. The writing became erratic at midseason. The military cannot arrest people, particularly when they are off the base and not doing anything wrong. And when they do in this case, they make no secret of it – but no one objects? And a significant military operation in a New England town would have attracted major attention. Those objections aside, this was a very engaging series with a good many high spots and only a couple of lows. 7/20/26
Ballerina (2025)
This is set in the John Wick universe and Keanu Reeves has a small part. A young woman who saw her father murdered by cultists is adopted by a society of assassins and trained as a professional killer, as well as a ballerina. She violates the rules of her order by tracking down the cult, which has a non-aggression pact with the assassins. This eventually puts her at odds with both sides, particularly as she eliminates a great many of the cultists. Wick is sent to neutralize her and prevent an all-out war. He is sympathetic, however, and ends up taking her side, assisting as she lays waste to the cult and its headquarters. There is a bit more story in this than in the main Wick sequence. 7/13/26
South Park Season 26 (2024)
There were only six episodes this season. Four of them are okay and two are quite good. The first of the good ones involves Randy's purchase of an expensive Japanese toilet and his public advocacy of using them and eliminating toilet paper, which leads to the toilet paper Mafia attempting to assassinate him. The second involves AI, when students begin using them to write papers for school and even respond to text messages, with predictable results. The others focus on Prince Harry - the weakest of the six, just one joke over and over again, Cartman's attempt to open a restaurant, jealousy in a friendship, and Garrison's reversion to being a Trump clone. 7/11/26
John Wick Chapter 4 (2023)
Although this appeared to be the last movie in the series, there is apparently another one in the works. This time Wick wants to free himself of all obligations to the assassins’ guild and try to lead a normal life. He is opposed by an arrogant official representing The Table, the group that runs the guild, who makes several attempts to kill Wick before he is challenged to a duel, a quirk in the rules by which Wick can achieve his goals. But the rules also allow the accused to pick a champion, and he chooses a blind martial artist who is pretty much the equal of Wick. There is a fairly clever maneuver at the end to make sure the right person gets killed, but I pretty much saw it coming. As with the other movies, the back story is much more interesting than the main story line, but there is also some really neat camera work during a couple of the fight sequences. 7/10/26
John Wick Parabellum (2019)
This crosses the line into fantasy. The assumption is that a large portion of the world’s population are actually assassins – Wick cannot walk down a city street without being recognized and attacked. Complex choreographed battle scenes follow. Then there is the secret master of the assassin’s guilt who lives in the Moroccan desert. And the elaborate code of conduct that prevails is at times fascinating although not always believable. Halle Berry is briefly his partner. Wick is not really a hero – he’s sort of a malevolent pawn. He was forced to kill one of his friends in the previous installment, and now he is ordered to kill another to get his life back. On several occasions there are public murders and bystanders do not even seem to notice. Lots of villain. No real heroes. Nice motorcycle chase. Cliffhanger ending. 7/8/26
John Wick Chapter 2 (2017)
Wick avenged the death of his dog and the theft of his car in the first book by virtually eliminating an entire section of the mob, but now he is forced to assassinate a prominent woman because of an old pledge. This leads him to eventually break the rules of the assassins’ society, which results in an open contract to murder him that leaves him fearful of everyone he meets, any of whom could be paid assassin. The fight sequences are the main attraction and they are pretty well done, although in many ways this was just a reprise of the first movie. Some of the sketched in back story was more interesting than the main plot. 7/5/26
John Wick (2014)
The first of the John Wick movies - I had not seen any of them when I started this - features Keanu Reeves as a retired hitman who has to become active again when the son of the local mob boss steals his car and kills his dog, shortly after his wife dies. The mob boss knows that Wick is formidable and mobilizes his men while suspecting they will not be able to stop him. He kills a dozen men who break into his house in a remarkably short period of time. He kills more than that in a longer nightclub sequence. Very violent, obviously, and with only an occasional surprise. Very few of the characters live till the end. The ending is inevitable but satisfying. 6/30/26
Scream 7 (2026)
Although this is pretty well done, it is just more of the usual. Various people get stabbed, impaled, or bludgeoned to death and this time there are three villains masquerading as ghost face, which kind of eliminates the mystery element. I’ve never understood how the costumed killers can take so much abuse without being at least too injured to continue their attack. And the physical size of the person when revealed is sometimes clearly impossible as the killer. And no one ever manages to shoot him when they are armed, even at close range. And people do really stupid things in order to keep the action going. The ending is pretty disappointing. And where were the police all this time? More interesting for nostalgia than for the story. 6/29/26
Castle Rock Season 1 (2018)
This series, which only lasted two seasons, is based loosely on Stephen King’s fiction, although the link is often obscure. The warden of a prison commits suicide, after which a strangely uncommunicative man is found in a secret cell. There is no way to identify him, but he asks for a specific lawyer, who as a child disappeared for several days in the Maine wilderness. The mystery man may be a manifestation of the devil, since he has not aged after twenty years imprisonment and when he eavesdrops on a family gathering, it turns into a near riot. This moves rather slowly at times presumably because they had to fill a certain number of episodes. Sissy Spacek shines. At times, this felt a bit like Twin Peaks – some subplots seem to be filler rather than parts of the main story line. A couple of weak spots. I can’t believe any police department would allow a dementia sufferer who had just shot her best friend to death to stay in her home, unsupervised, in the aftermath. I found the explanation in the final two episodes unnecessarily confusing and the climax was disappointing. 6/27/26
The Terror Within II (1991)
The original did not deserve a sequel. It’s pretty much the same story. An underground laboratory holds some of the few survivors of a plague that turned everyone else into silly looking monsters who can take multiple bullets to the head without flinching. Andrew Stevens stars, with his mother Stella Stevens in a supporting role. Most of it is various people running around in what appears to be a rocky desert. No explanation of why the lab would be there, with no roads or surface buildings. Or why the monsters would be there. Or why the actors didn’t die of shame for appearing in this mess. 6/1/26
Planet Terror (2007)
An over the top zombie movie with a great cast - Michael Biehn, Rose McGowan, Bruce Willis, Josh Brolin - designed to be both an homage and a spoof of drive in movie features. A mysterious gas is released into the air and people begin to suffer odd bites that do not bleed. McGowan loses a leg early on and gets a wooden stake in place of a normal prosthetic. Brolin is a doctor who plans to murder his adulterous wife. Biehn is the local sheriff, who has some unofficial priorities. Willis just has a cameo. Not bad, not good. 5/17/26
The Terror Within (1989)
This is without question the worst movie I have seen in years. Rarely did sixty full seconds pass without my BSdetector going off. It’s after a plague has wiped out almost all humans, replacing them with very toothy creatures that are immune to lasers, electrocution, and so on. Six scientists in a secret lab beneath a dilapidated shack in the desert are trying to survive, but they let a pregnant woman in who gives birth to one of the creatures – which grows from infant to adult in minutes despite not having any access to food. The hero carries a crossbow rather than an actual weapon with any chance of killing it. One of the scientists discovers that it is susceptible to a particular sound – apparently by magic since she has no evidence of this but of course she is right. Except when she isn’t. The misogyny is annoying. The scientific illiteracy is annoying. The stupid dialogue is annoying. The unbelievably bad acting is annoying. The corny special effects are annoying. And there is a sequel! 5/4/26
Third and final season with Honor Blackman, still black and white. A bit more polish than the previous season, but not much. They deal with an elaborate swindle, a gambling syndicate, stolen military secrets, a stolen elephant, a religious racket, an assassin targeting British agents, possible witchcraft, a dead agent who turns out to be alive, a defecting Russian, a rebellion by Scottish separatists, drug smugglers, and others. Good series, but it was about to get much better with Diana Rigg joining the cast. 5/2/26
Cold Storage (2025)
Not a new concept, but a returned space capsule carried a mutated organism which infects and takes over anyone who comes into contact with it. This reminded me a lot of one of the Return of the Living Dead Movies. It’s mostly about various random characters becoming zombies. The cast is quite good and there are some really gross shots, but for the most part it was a retread. Not awful, not great, and something I will have forgotten by next week despite the very good cast. No surprises, no particularly memorable characters, no twists, and virtually no imagination. Hollywood seems to have turned in upon itself. 4/30/26
The Bone Temple (2025)
Latest in the 28 Years Later sequence. Most of humanity succumbed to the plague that turned millions into zombies. Ralph Fiennes is a possibly insane doctor who has created a temple constructed of human bones. He has been attempting to communicate with the most powerful local zombie, whom he calls Samson, and whom he has caused to become addicted to drugs. He is successful, after a fashion, although Samson does not speak. There is a small group of survivors nearby who have lately been beset by other survivors who have formed a small but virulent cult. It's a very bleak future and sometimes painful to watch. Fiennes is running out of the drug that keeps Samson docile. Very skillfully done but a bit too depressing for my tastes. 4/28/26
Doctor Who Season 1 (2023)
The first season with the new Doctor. The opening episode on the dvd is apparently the Xmas special – and it is a lot less frantic than the show has been in recent years – introduces Ruby, the new Doctor’s companion, who was a foundling baby and is presently beset with mischievous goblins. It turns into a musical comedy that is completely out of character for the series and character. Pretty close to awful. The first regular episode, about a future birthing center run by babies, is pathetically bad. The cuteness element is so overdone this it becomes worse than saccharine, and the plot is completely implausible. Episode 3 is actively insulting to fans of the series, and frankly, anyone actually bright. The writers were apparently trying to create an entirely new show. The next episode is not quite as awful. The one after that, involving a war which only has one side, is absurd and filled with inane platitudes. The episode about the virtual reality world is a lot better although it falls apart with inconsistencies at the end. The shapechanger vs bounty hunter episode is intermittently okay, but the costumes are comical. The two part finale is sometimes impressive, but the plot makes so little sense that it was hard to stay interested. 4/24/26
Anaconda (2025)
I initially decided to pass on this one because it looked like a spoof. But it got a lot of good reviews. A bunch of amateurs stumble upon the rights to the Anaconda movies and decide to make a new, independent film. The first half is largely comedic, although the theme of a group of people trying to achieve a young ambition is actually impressive. The snake they hire for the film is accidentally killed. Although the story never gets entirely serious, it does a good job of mixing the two streams into a consistent hold. Not a great movie, but very watchable. The special effects are, however, less than impressive. 4/12/26
What Lies Beneath (2000)
A stylish ghost story starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. They are a married couple who are suspicious of the relationship between the new couple who moved in next door. Pfeiffer begins to hear odd sounds and catches sight of a younger woman, whom she eventually discovers had been having an affair with Ford a few years earlier. She was later found drowned, apparently an accident, but it is her ghost who is appearing to Pfeiffer. Eventually Pfeiffer discovers that her husband murdered his mistress, and when he realizes that she knows the truth, he tries to kill her as well. With the assistance of the ghost, she manages to avoid being killed and Ford himself drowns. Low key but very well done.4/6/26
All Fun and Games (2022)
A young boy finds a cursed knife and brings it home. The knife is a conduit for a demon that struck first in the days of t he pilgrims, and now it turns one brother into a killer. The lighting is so bad that this is visually difficult to watch, and the menace is only intermittently scary. It’s basically a slasher movie with a mildly different explanation. The cast isn’t bad, but the story is so lacking in energy that I lost interest very early. Nor did I care particularly about any of the characters, who are only superficially portrayed for the most part. The jump scares are pretty badly done as well. Very disappointing. 4/5/26
Honey West (1965-66)
I was a big fan of Ann Francis, but too many of the episodes of her tv show relied on her male partner to save her. It wasn’t always the case but enough to be annoying. Some of the later episodes include humor that verges on farce. I was amused by how often crooks who are digging through walls and otherwise doing heavy work, still wear suits, ties, and hats. The tear gas ear rings in the first episode are a bit over the top. I find her assistant to be endlessly irritating, and the premise of a lot of their interactions is clearly misogynistic. The stories are also very simplistic compared to modern tv scripts. Faked theft to collect insurance. Drugs smuggled inside snow globes. A diamond smuggler. Missing bank money. A witness in hiding. A kidnapped musician. Another kidnapping, this time a child. There are stolen designer gowns, a series of warehouse fires, insurance scams, loan sharks who kill those who don’t pay, a missing private detective, counterfeit money, a suave jewel thief, an abandoned mine filled with killers, a mysterious and very wealthy recluse, a reverse burglary, a device that ages objects instantly, a really cornball fake medium, Honey encounters her double, and others. Pretty standard detective fair for the 1960s by Francis elevates it. 4/4/26
Skeleton Crew Season 1 (2024)
This is a Star Wars related show for kids, with relatively high production values. Four children inadvertently launch themselves into space when they find an abandoned but still operational spaceship. They run into a fake jedi in the midst of a pirate base. Predictably they visit various planets in their quest to find their way home, while their parents try to get around the secrecy that conceals their location and communicate with the lost spaceship. The pirates return and there are captures and escapes. This was a bit too much of a kids’ show to really hold my attention, although some of the special effects were interesting. The show was in limbo for a while but is apparently going to have a second season. 4/1/26
We Bury the Dead (2025)
The US accidentally sets off a bioweapon that appears to have killed everyone on a densely populated Australian island, Tasmania,. Teams are sent in to recover what will be more than a half million bodies, but it appears that some of the dead are actually returning to life, or something that looks like life. This is a zombie movie, of course, but an unusual one and very low key. At first, the wakened ones are virtually comatose and the authorities euthanize them. As time passes, they become increasingly animated, and dangerous. The protagonist convinces a co-worker to help her sneak into a prohibited area so that she can look for her husband's body, but along the way they run into a soldier who has gone mad because of what he has seen. More atmosphere than action but well done. 3/31/26
Andor Season 1 (2022)
This Star Wars spinoff features an obviously conflicted man who is attempting to discover the truth about his past and the location of his missing sister. In the first episode, he is forced to kill two police officers working for one of the super corporations, and is being hunted by an obsessed officer with no sense of humor. He has to go on the run, joins a group of rebels involved in a daring attack on an Empire base, has some minor adventures, and gets arrested and sent to a prison planet. The plot gets increasingly complex as the season progresses, but the production qualities stay very high. This was the best of the Star Wars tv spinoffs, at least so far. Season two was broadcast last year. 3/27/26
Loki Season 2 (2022)
Loki spends the first episode time slipping, which leads to some clever dialogue. The transition to episode 2 is, well, nonexistent. Loki tracks down his female alternate self as the time agency is on the verge of destruction. In episode 3, they track down a variant of t he man who created the TVA. In episode 4, the time loom appears to self destruct and there is a civil war within the TVA. The final two episodes result in Loki sacrificing himself to become somehow the center holding the time stream together. Not quite as good as season 1 but still very enjoyable. 3/24/26
Tales from the Crypt Season 6 (1994)
The opening episode about a lawyer trapped in a kind of court of Hell is so bad that I went no further for a long time. There is an odd episode about a woman at a masquerade party seems to wearing a hideous mask, but it is actually her face. Other episodes involve time loops, imaginary friends, incompetent CIA assassins, a cursed house, etc. The grizzly hunting episode is awful. The final episode is narrated by “Humphrey Bogart” whose image is shown only in reflections because we see everything through his eyes. He gets killed by his wife and her lover but is still conscious and able to see them. 3/18/26
Return to Silent Hill (2026)
I actually read the novelization first. It’s hard to translate some of the visual effects to text, but it allows deeper descriptions of the characters. The opening is even more rushed than it seemed in the book. A very flawed man returns to a remote town after receiving a mysterious message from a former lover. I find this franchise to be full of potential that has never come close to being realized. It does not help that most of the special effects are so badly done that they are comical. This is one of those low budget films so terrible that I actually get angry watching it. Why would anyone think this was worth producing, let alone watching? 3/16/26
The Rockford Files Season 2 (1975)
Overall, with a couple of exceptions, season 2 was better than season 1. A two part story about the hijacking of several trucks is particularly clever. Rockford’s father gets targeted by organized crime. A swindler gets a taste of his own medicine in another. The episode involving the murder of a colonel is dreadful. The writers new nothing about military procedures and were also way wrong about military authority in civilian affairs. The female lead is a terrible actress and the dialogue was often comically bad. I am starting to get tired of ridiculously corrupt local police officers and chiefs and I prefer the episodes with actual mysteries rather than just run-ins with organized crime figures. The episode in which Rockford is accused of dealing drugs is offensively dumb and out of touch with reality. The one about the rigged card game makes no sense. The DA who hired Rockford to investigate a crooked poker game is actually part of the gang running it. So why did he hire Rockford? Rob Reiner guest stars in one episode. The plots are almost all very similar so I couldn’t watch more than a couple at a time. The episode about the cormorant statues is very good. 3/15/26
Dark Winds Season 3 (2024)
This season incorporates elements from two novels, Dance Hall of the Dead and The Sinister Pig. This covers Maneulito’s brief time working for the border patrol and the season expanded from six to eight episodes. I might be getting slow, but there were a few jumps this season – plot developments that did not follow logically and left me wondering if I had missed something. Two young boys go missing. One is found brutally murdered. Leaphorn fears that a monster is prowling the reservation. Manuelito suspects that there is sexual trafficking going on at an oil company. There are some gruesome murders. An FBI agent suspects Leaphorn, rightfully, of having killed a man during the previous season. Nearly all of one episode is a dream sequence. I hate dream sequences, most of the time, including this one. The subplot about the FBI agent who believes Leaphorn is a murderer is not in the books and I found it a bit distracting at time. 3/11/26
Predator Badlands (2025)
This was much better than I expected and took the series in an entirely new direction. A young predator travels to the most dangerous known planet to prove something to his clan, and himself. There he meets a human woman, actually a robot, who was damaged by a fabulous beast an expedition is attempting to capture. She is missing the lower half of her body for most of the movie. Together they battle the violently aggressive flora and fauna of the planet, then the creature, then the rest of the expedition, which is revealed to be evil. The special effects are mostly CGI, but more convincing than usual, and a lot more inventive. Some of the creatures are fascinating. There are moments of genuine humor sprinkled through as well. I said some minor quibbles but very much enjoyed this one. 3/10/26
Willy’s Wonderland (2021)
This is Nicholas Cage doing Five Nights at Freddy’s, battling animatronic creatures demonically possessed in a closed amusement facility. One gimmick is that Cage never speaks in the movies. He agrees to clean it one night in return for repairs to his car. $1000 for a single night’s work is clearly nonsensical, but this isn’t a serious movie. A lot of it makes no sense at all. The special effects are primitive. And the whole plot is rather silly. Among other things, they are acknowledged as mechanical, but Cage gets drenched in blood every time he kills one of them. 3/7/26
Evil Dead Rise (2023)
The Evil Dead series moves to an urban apartment building in this gory, over the top horror film. An earthquake reveals a buried vault from which a teenager extracts the Book of the Dead, and subsequently summons an evil spirit that takes over his mother. She is invulnerable and implacable, and capable of changing her victims into variants of her own evil. The story is very claustrophobic – for most of the movie they are all inside a single apartment – and there are a couple of convenient plot devices. There just happens to be an industrial grade wood chipper in the basement parking lot, and for some reason they can turn it on just by pushing a lever. Captures much of the tone of the originals, and puts it in a very different setting. 3/5/26
Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)
Sequels are notorious apt to be bad, but this was proving the point rather badly, despite a few good actors cast in stupid roles. The first five minutes are so incomprehensibly bad that I almost stopped there. I confess that I only made it to 16 minutes because it was so awful that I felt insulted. Bad acting, plot that made no sense, awful special effects, characters acting in completely unbelievable ways. It took six years from the first movie to come up with this absurd piece of nonsense? If I had gone to see this in a theater I would have asked for a refund. It’s not professional level film making. 3/3/26
Dark Winds Season 2 (2023)
Based on Tony Hillerman’s People of the Darkness. A professional hitman is connected to a mine explosion, a car bombing, an attempt to kill a child, and other murders. There is also a stolen box of apparently innocuous items that suggest a mineral survey was faked so that someone else could buy the land and reap the profits. They’ve added a subplot to the original book – one of the victims at the mine explosion was the son of Joe Leaphorn, the main character and the officer in charge of tracking down the killer. There are a couple of small bits that didn’t work well for me, but overall this was a good adaptation and the confrontations with the hitman are very well staged. Each season is more or less one book spanning six episodes. Looking forward to season 3. 3/2/26
Silent Hill (2006)
The first of four movies based on the video game, which I have never played. The game is Japanese so I was expecting that the weird stuff would rarely be explained, because Japanese horror fiction rarely does so. But the early part of the movie is sometimes hard to follow, and the writers obviously did not understand police procedure. You cannot arrest someone without probable cause that they have committed a crime, so when the woman searching for her daughter is arrested, my immersion in the movie – already tenuous – was completely severed. Things like this are so easy to avoid that I find it insulting when the writer doesn’t bother. The plot, such as it is, involves a woman and her adopted daughter, the latter of whom runs away in a town that is sequestered because of a supposed underground fire, is filled with ash, and has various creatures including armless humanoids who spit acid. This is a really bad movie. Despite good actors, it is incoherent and visually disappointing. It makes no sense. 2/26/26
Dark Winds Season 1 (2022)
George R.R. Martin was co-producer of this series based on the Tony Hillerman mystery novels set mostly on the Navajo reservation. Joe Leaphorn is aided by Jim Chee, who works for the FBI, and Bernadette Manuelito, his deputy. An armed robbery, a missing helicopter, a bogus priest, a young woman scared to death, more murder, a pair of political activists, a pregnant team, and other elements mix in this season, which is based roughly on Listening Woman. Beautifully filmed, well cast with mostly Native American actors, but considerably altered from the original material. The photography is excellent. They added a very mild supernatural element but it wasn't a big part of the plot. Liked it well enough that I ordered two more seasons. 2/23/26
The Black Phone 2 (2025)
This sequel is a mix of good and bad, and even having recently seen its predecessor, I still had some trouble following what was going on, particularly in the first half. A young woman gets telephone calls – usually in dreams – from various dead people including a younger version of her late mother. She slowly begins to figure out how all of this is connected to the events in the first movie, in which her brother survives a serial killer. The grainy visuals meant to show dreams is overdone and annoying. It is also quite a bit too long, and there were times when my attention wandered. The actor playing the camp owner does an excellent job. 2/21/26
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (2025)
The followup movie does not make much sense. Why would the power be on in a building that has been abandoned for twenty years? And why isn’t it locked up? Why is there a set of walkie talkies in perfect condition in the office, along with a modern computer – the place has been closed for more than 20 years. And why are the posters fresh, clean, and intact, even those outside. Anyway, this is about a young girl who is obsessed with the animatronic figures that were once used in a pizzeria until the death of another child caused it to be closed down. The cast isn’t bad but they don’t have much to work with. The writers also changed it from rationalized – robots – to supernatural. The back story is so confusing I could not follow much of it, and I didn’t care either. The motivation of the little girl is never explained. The special effects are particularly bad and the murders are all, if not off screen, at the edges of it. Far inferior to the first movie. Some of the scenes are embarrassing badly done. The ending is terrible. They set the scene for a third, but hopefully will never make it. 2/19/26
Fallout Season 2 (2026)
The second season of this show, derived from the post apocalyptic game, is of very high quality. I am very impressed by Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell, who both perform very difficult roles with skill. The special effects continue to be first rate – the deathclaws are particularly well done – and several new elements appear from the games – the New California Republic, supermutants, radroaches – and the show elevates the Enclave into major villain status. It also looks like we are going to have a war between the NCR and the Legion next season, plus more turmoil from the Brotherhood of Steel. It’s not clear if the mind control project. This is my favorite show in quite a few years. It manages a large number of parallel plot lines so that they are all easy to follow, even when they aren’t merging or diverging. 2/4/26
The Black Phone (2021)
Inspired by a Joe Hill story, this is seriously flawed by the complete stupidity about police procedure. They cannot question a minor in the absence of a parent. How hard is it to understand that? Anyway, the protagonist is a young boy and latest victim of a serial child abductor and killer who wears a variety of masks. There is a non-working telephone in the room where he is kept, but it begins to ring and he hears the voices of the dead previous victims, who want to save him from the same fate. Ethan Hawke manages to be pretty creepy and the plot is basically all right, although it takes a while to regain its momentum after the abduction. 1/20/26
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2018)
I mostly liked this, although some of the police procedure is irritatingly bogus. The protagonist is a night guard with a bad temper whose brother was kidnapped as a child and never found. He takes a job at a closed pizzeria whose owner was interested in animatronics, and his robot characters are sentient and kill intruders. I deduct points toward the end where the friendly police officer makes completely inexplicable demands without explanation and in contradiction to everything that went before. And the protagonist then acts completely against his character without explanation as well. The acting, I’m afraid, is competent but not brilliant. Interesting premise, uneven execution. 1/17/26
Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Starts badly with some really stupid high school conflict whose characters are far too old for their parts, and whose writing is far too stupid for adults. It appears that this was an attempt to blend an actual slasher movie with a spoof of a slasher movie, but despite competent acting, it succeeds as neither. New girl in town where the closing of the main employer causes tensions and a clown starts killing people. Plot is not important in this kind of movie, but suspense is, and there is little of that as well. I suspect this is a case of ambition overruling judgment. 1/14/26
Nightwish (1989)
This was not as good as my memory of it – thirty years ago. A small group of college students travel to a remote cabin for an experiment in which they are manipulated into dreaming about their own deaths, but there are evil forces in the cabin that are all too willing to make their dreams come true. I always liked Clayton Rohner, but the rest of the cast did not impress me. The script is so awful that I barely made it through. The scientist in charge is a joke, and his operating conditions do not even make sense within the context of the movie, let alone reality. He believes there is an evil entity from another dimension so when he summons the entity, he first chains everyone up so that they cannot interfere. There is an attempt to rationalize it all – it was mostly a dream – but they even botched that. 1/10/26
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2025)
This is one of the few movies I have ever aborted in the middle. It is incoherent, sometimes appalling, nonsensical, visually boring at best, and wastes the talents of a good many excellent actors like Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton. It is meant to be a sequel but halfway through I still didn’t understand what was going on, the visuals were awful, the acting was indifferent, and there was no coherent story. This was a complete failure for me even though there were hints of good ideas lost in the confusing struggle between plot lines. Beetlejuice wasn’t much more than a cameo. 1/8/26
The Toxic Avenger (2025)
Over the top remake of the over the top original. Janitor Peter Dinklage is thrown into a lot of toxic chemicals and becomes super strong, super ugly, and impervious to bullets. He is opposed by the corporation that generates the toxics, plus a gangster whose son he has mutilated, and a rock band that doubles as hit men. There is also a woman trying to expose the corporation. Limbs are torn off, heads explode, and so on. The avenger has a stepson who is taken hostage by one group of bad guys who want to study his mutation, while another group of villains just wants to kill him. Just as silly as the original but with a better cast. 1/7/26
