movie - Mark writes

Corporate Horror Movies

The scariest monsters in our world are corporations. So I've picked out a series of horror movies about evil corporations, and rebellion or survival against them. No TV shows. No sequels (even if those explain more, like Cube).

All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say,
'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to
get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you
to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head
out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS
ANYMORE!'
—Howard Beale, Network

Metropolis (1927)
Modern Times (1936)
Desk Set (1957)
Seconds (1966)
Soylent Green (1973)
Network (1976)
9 To 5 (1980)
Robocop (1987)
Falling Down (1993)
Clerks (1994)
Cube (1997)
Office Space (1999)
Fight Club (1999)
American Psycho (2000)
Resident Evil (2002)
Idiocracy (2006)
Michael Clayton (2007)
Lego Movie (2014)

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Grab a bowl full of sugary cereal, and sit down to veg your brain out to heroic cartoons of the '60s to early '90s!

What I'm Watching: Godzilla Minus One

Finally out on Netflix (along with most Godzilla films).

G-1 follows the style of GMK and Shin Godzilla by only admitting to the events of Gojira (1954), in this case by being set in 1945-1947.

Failed kamikaze pilot Shikishima watches an island base (a hut and a few engineers) be destroyed by T-Rex-like baby Godzilla. Returning to the ruins of Tokyo, everyone he knew is gone, so he takes in a couple strays. As with most Godzilla movies, the Human story is the least engaging for me, certainly not helped by Noriko being a cipher (stoic Japanese) and Akiko being nonverbal, so we have only pilot's rare nightmares to get inside his head.

He finds work on a minesweeper crew, who have somewhat more personality, and he's productive until they meet the upgraded Godzilla, post Bikini Atoll.

The Godzilla design is fine, perhaps too much spiky, pebbly, obviously CGI-greebled skin. When damaged, it heals back into place, maybe in a different pattern? But you can't tell. I find the texture a little creepy and unsolid; the suits allowed physical changes and movements but remained the same, while the CGI cartoons are all fluid. The head has a reptile/cat look more like the Legendary movies, and the tail/back spines pop up like control rods in a nuclear reactor when he's heating up for a shot. After the nuclear breath, Godzilla's charred, face & chest burned down a significant amount, and takes time to regenerate. That part I like, it's clearly painful to fire it, and takes time, so there's more fighting and mugging for the camera.

The city battles have some real physicality to them, and several callbacks to 1954, but a couple of escapes, close calls, and people who are obviously ready to be stepped on, and then camera pulls back, are not quite as hardcore as Anno Hideaki's Shin Godzilla. Godzilla routinely picks people up in his mouth, and throws them; they're not chewed into pieces or anything. On par with Pacific Rim, and tougher than Legendary's PG-rated adventures.

There's long stretches on ships, and the water does not move well, but it's no worse than the scale-model boats in early movies.

Soundtrack noticeably is pretty weak, and then will have an Ifukube Akira inspired bit which stands out so much.

Japan's postwar government is useless, General MacArthur has Soviet problems, so the citizens of Japan with some decommissioned hardware have to handle Godzilla: A few destroyers with no guns, a prototype fighter, and Doctor Not Serizawa's fairly ridiculous tech weapon. It's a pretty entertaining bad plan, and as long as you don't read some German text you'll have a couple of surprises.

It's a fine Godzilla movie, ★★★★½

I'd rank the best ones now:

Godzilla (1954)
GMK (Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, 2001)
Shin Godzilla (2016)
Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Godzilla Singular Point (2021)

What I'm Watching: The Fall of the House of Usher

A fairly nice homage to Poe's work, 8 episodes which for once seems somewhat justified. None of the episodes are strongly based on a specific story or poem, but they do work most of them in. Occasionally people burst out in poetry like Cop Rock.

Carla Gugino is great as "Verna" the psychopomp, Raven, spectre of death that hangs over the doomed Usher family. The rest of the cast are fine, some of the older/younger alternate actors are better (Bruce Greenwood/Zach Gilford as older/younger Roderick Usher) than others (Mary McDonnell/Willa Fitzgerald incoherently playing older/younger Madeline Usher). Mark Hamill plays Arthur Gordon Pym (of Nantucket!), hero of a round-the-world exploration (I bet!), now lawyer/assassin for the Ushers; I love that Luke Skywalker just grew up to be the best villains.

We know from the start that the pharmaceuticals business empire Roderick Usher has built has a body count, and then all his six children (by a variety of mothers) start dying in thematically appropriate ways. Roderick recounts this to Auguste Dupin, here an insurance investigator/prosecutor, in a decaying ruin of a house. I tended to get bored by the exposition in the house, the set doesn't feel like a terrible storm is raging until it's needed for plot. But the vignettes of each episode are better.

The Masque of the Red Death is just dumb scene kids, but builds to a good level of horror, and a doom for one that should be avoidable… Murder in the Rue Morgue is an ambitious surgeon, some angry chimps, a trick and speech by Verna.

The Black Cat takes an idiot stoner vtuber and some guilt, but I don't think built up his crime enough, I mostly laughed at his suffering all ep. The Tell-Tale Heart gives us the unintended murder and the guilt that was deserved in the last ep. Goldbug is the weak point, mostly exposition and an idiot getting themself killed. The Pit and the Pendulum finally delivers punishment to the most insipid bastard of the Usher kids, the one nobody will ever miss; as Verna says, she doesn't usually intervene, but he's a special case.

The Raven finally wraps it up, the Ushers' exact deal with Verna revealed. I somewhat resent the misuse of Lenore here, she should be a tragic romance following the poem, but instead is just a sacrifice, very weak writing choice. Roderick's scene changes in the end of this don't make a lot of sense. Animal House-ish "where are they now" bit of exposition. Fin.

The music occasionally is heavy-handed and '80s, and I love that. "We Built This City" is being used, I think to troll the Kids Today™, but I love the song and Jefferson/Starship/Airplane, it was the first or second concert I ever went to, so that makes The Black Cat even funnier. "Total Eclipse of the Heart" during an operatic-level screaming argument, just like the vampire opera it's from.

They only rarely got any kind of moody, gothic feeling, even when shooting in dark places, they don't understand building up someone's crimes and then hurting them for it, the series is more shoving it in your face. But reading poetry at all is nice. If you're a big fan of little Edgar Allan Poe, if you find thatsbelievable funny, you ought to watch this.

★★★★☆

What I'm Watching: Rings of Power part 2

(I had this series of toots in my notes, apparently didn't publish. Whoops.)

Previously on Rings of Power

SPOILERS

Galadriel continuing to be a badass, but shitty diplomat, is one of the best blundering D&D PC portrayals. Again has less than fuck-all to do with the book character, and I'm here for it.

Dwarf: "I am a Dwarf an I'm digging a hole." Mostly in his parental relations; I know the feeling. But it's not built up much before this, was much cut from this ep?

"Don't go to middle earth, it is a silly place." I am deeply bored by Numenor's politics, and whiny little Isildur. A swordfight breaks it up but then back to yakking. Elf-king's a bastard; where did I last see him? Oh, right, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter. Humans are 50% evil, 40% neutral, 10% good. Elf & Dwarf are pretty cute, tho. The one relationship in this given any love. New armor is all very shit except Galadriel's plate, which looks OK except dangling chain bits.

One thing is clear from this series: Elfs are assholes. Everything is their fault in the first place, and then you have to give them all your stuff and die for them because OH, wouldn't it be TERRIBLE if they went back to HEAVEN? And they ran that scam in the first age, they're running it again now, and they'll run it again in the third age. Isn't that great? Nobody ever learns to say "fuck off, Elfs". The one blacksmith who does is mocked by the evil vizier.

Arondir Elfpants' fighting withdrawal is a little goofy, very Army of Darkness. But then the peasants try a High Plains Drifter defense and it's obvious shit. Where did these incompetent peasants learn to shoot bows & stab with spears as well as trained Orcs (and untrained evil men)? Then deus ex machina, Numenor knows exactly which shitty peasant village to rescue. Yeah, map magic but it's still bullshit, the entire region must be at war.

Adar: "We have a heart. We deserve a home." Galadriel: "Genocide is good, because you are bad! Waah!" Yeah, that tracks. The thing the main LotR books & series couldn't quite articulate, because Tolkien believed in "lesser races". Queen is nice to peasant Bronwyn for all of 30 seconds until she can put a man of royal descent on the throne. Fuck royalty, kill all kings.

Fun fact: The initial survivors of Pompeii who didn't get off the island all died from pyroclastic heat in the next day. There's no Humans or Orcs surviving Mt Doom. DOOOOOooooom! Also I survived Mt St Helens (hundreds of miles away), and I can guarantee you it just shat grey ash on the ground, it didn't apply an orange filter to everything. Fuck Hollywood cyan/orange. I haven't mentioned the fucking 'obbits, because they do nothing, the wizard did nothing.

Elrond lurking around the Dwarfs, "Man king" lurking around the Elf court, 'obbits and wraiths lurking around the wizard, Queen lurking around the sea captain. None of these are good ideas. Clearly everyone would be better with their own, and the Elfs would all sail West, and there'd be no wars without them picking fights. So many preachy "nobody seen the trouble I seen" speeches.

The Three Rings of Power scene should've played the Airwolf theme, in honor of the greatest "engineers worship their creations" scene of all time.

Endless flute playin' music as 'obbit can't go off the track. I 'ate 'obbits. Uh, and showing NZ square pastures delimited by trees, which seems unlikely for empty woods.

Pacing really sucks, there's as usual 4 eps of content in 8 eps of streaming, would get ★★★★½ if it was edited down, barely ★★★★☆ as is.

Compare it to The Witcher. S1 was excellent, Cavill likes being Geralt, the plots were largely from the books, bit disorganized, should've just followed the Surprise. S2 was meh, went off-books, Cavill sorta saved it. S3 was off-books shit by the incompetent producer, and S4 won't have Cavill. It's down >50% from S1, instead of building audience.

Rings of Power succeeds where it goes off-book. Except the 'obbits. Murderhobo Galadriel was fun.

What I'm Watching: Monarch Legacy of Monsters

Eagerly awaited, because we have a long tradition of great Godzilla TV shows

It alternates between a 1950s origin story, and 2010s post-G-Day. Somewhere in between is Kong Skull Island.

SPOILERS

In 2010s:

"San Francisco was a hoax. I have a podcast." is the most realistic reaction here. Love the Godzilla evacuation plans & defenses, missile turrets on overpasses. Tokyo's taking it seriously.

First ep is setup and family drama. Cate (Anna Sawai from Pachinko) is kind of stiff and useless, except when she's freaking out at her PTSD, flashbacks of Godzilla from the trailer.

Her half-brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) is a jackass, emotionally closed jerk with no useful skills. May (Kiersey Clemons) the expat haxxor is the only modern character who has their shit together.

Monarch starts to show up, with slightly implausible network access. Why are all the secret files blacked-out redacted? Actual secret files are not blacked out, you only get that in publicly-released versions.

In 1950s:

Leland Shaw (Wyatt & later Kurt Russell) really needs to carry heavier weapons, a pistol does not cut it. Wyatt's not one of nature's good actors, but he's adequate and carries "I am my father but softer". The black eye he starts with tries to butch him up some, but he'd never be Snake Plissken.

Dr Miura's (Mari Yamamoto, also from Pachinko) not super plausible, woman doin' it for herself 20 years early, clearly writer ignoring setting. Weird how two people with completely different maps line up exactly right. What are the odds the scale is the same‽

Bill Randa (Anders Holm, later John Goodman!) as proto-Monarch is sus. Creepy guy in the jungle with impossible backstory. Miura should avoid him but as we know does not. The romance here is incredibly weird, fake, and gross, mainly because Anders is one of the most unfuckable humanoids I've ever seen. Shaw looks away like it's skeeving him out, too, but I think it's supposed to be romantic tension.

By ep 2 we finally see a new kaiju!

In 2010s:

Cate really needs to learn the first thing you do when a creepy dude stalks you, is stay in a public area and scream for police, not throw away all your stuff and get kidnapped. But Monarch creep Tim & his French ninja assistant Duvall really suck at investigation, interrogation, and extraction.

The hero party find the wise old mentor and join the main quest. At this point in a JRPG the title screen rolls.

Monarch does not come off well in this, they have resources and yet are utterly incompetent.

I like the two monsters we see, even if they're very bad CGI composed into the scenes like Roger Rabbit. The enclosed space monster attack looks better; less ambitious is better when you're not skilled. Maybe it'll ramp up the monster visibility & quality later? I'm OK with it if they lean into bad FX.

I've definitely seen worse season starts, but I expected more, since Matt Fraction's supposedly writing for it. Well, turns out these first 2 eps are by Chris Black (Desperate Housewives), and Matt's only writing one ep later.

★★★☆☆

What I'm Watching: Renfield

I'm not doing the 31 days of horror thing this year (look at news, I'm no longer in the mood). But a few will be seen, and today's is Robert Kirkman's Renfield (2023).

So Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult, the shitty young Beast from X-Men) is attending 12-step codependency meetings to get out of his century-long contract with Count Dracula (Nic Cage, not phoning it in for once!). Quincy ("Awkwafina", no shit, some youstube performer who can't spell "Aquafina" or her real name) is a young traffic cop who keeps having run-ins with her nemesis, junior gangster, murderer of her father, all around asshole, Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz, Parks & Rec), son of Bella Lobo (Shohreh Aghdashloo, aka Avasarala! Finally some talent!).

And this starts off light, then gets some pretty amazing fight scenes; all digital cartoon nonsense, but really fun. Limbs & blood everywhere. Renfield in this is improbably powered up by eating bugs, like a mass-murdering Popeye with yellow eyes.

Nic Cage plays Dracula right on the edge of camp, but pulls it back to menacing Prince of Wallachia impaling enemies level. No joke, the best Dracula since Klaus Kinski, beats the pants off Gary Oldman or Leslie Nielsen. The "Dracula Powers" are beautifully done. Nobody does the bullshit of "oh it can't be Dracula, he's a fictional character" or worse, "what's a Dracula‽ I've never heard of this!", they live in a world where both the story & history are real.

Every fantasy RPG referee needs to watch this to see how to use Dracula to kick your ass. Watch all the fights again and again to see what a high-Level undead does to low-Level mortals.

Storming of castles, predictable and unpredictable fighting techniques (I laughed out loud at a… disarming… scene), dirty cops & mob straight out of Batman, it's got it all.

It's rare to see a vampire movie walk the line of humor, fights, and horror Dracula. Most only manage one, often none. Like, Lost Boys has comedy (Frog Bros), great fights and vampire dark dream, fantastic soundtrack, but the Master is as lame & unthreatening as a high school principal. Nic walks in a room with a top hat, cane, and fur coat, and you know he's gonna bleed you.

There was no noticeable soundtrack to this, except some incidental music and ska played by victims, and I think part of a My Chemical Romance song.

The film escaped from the "Universal Cinematic Universe" catastrophe, and is the one good thing so far to come out of that.

I slightly dislike the happy ending epilogue, there should be more of a price for heroism or everyone would do it?

★★★★½

What I'm Watching: Who Is Erin Carter?

Over on 'flix, somehow the English were allowed to leave their island and film in sunny Barcelona! Alas, they don't use a lot of local talent. Two of the actors are Spanish-English, one is actually Spanish, the rest are all very British and in many cases so pasty they can't have been there more than a few days, the show's in English for the most part.

The first few episodes are dull but building a bit, Erin (Evin Ahmad) is a substitute schoolteacher who came here with a child, married a nice Spanish nurse Jordi (Sean Teale), wacky divorced cop neighbor Emilio (Pep Ambròs); the latter two are the only ones who can have a convincing conversation en Español. Bitchy rich neighbor Penelope (Charlotte Vega) is the scene-stealer, everything she does is so arch and hilarious. There's a ongoing tragedy of her life that's playing in the background scenes, and she should really be the star of her soap opera. Her final scene (she's fine; minor spoiler but nothing could ever harm or defeat Penelope) is just awesome. Like WTF show are we watching? Who's this Erin chick?

Back to the buildup, there's a holdup Erin foils with excessive skills and what passes for an accidental kill. Then a chick knife fight, which isn't amazing but it's something. Why does Margot know & hate Erin? Pretty soon one murder leads to a favor and Erin's… not a schoolteacher.

There's a strong vibe of A History of Violence, la femme Nikita (or the dozen shitty remake/ripoffs), and by the end a lot of John Woo homage/ripoff/why do mooks always hide behind explosive barrels? Flashbacks give us some context, and the spooky horns person seen in child Harper's dreams & pictures.

Erin's skills and toughness start at "buff soccer mom" and rapidly escalate to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgement Day + The Killer. Most people around her keep trying to fuck her over and take the kid, and do not have plot immunity. There is one incredibly cool, classy kung fu fight in a dress. Keep watching for that. It is the entire point of the film to make this fight happen. The final big warzone is more John Woo. Hug, "take care of OUR daughter", BOOM.

The few parts set in England are dark, grim, dirty, and horrible, warehouses and alleys, treachery and distrust and neglect, like just the worst underground dystopian shithole (film what you know). Barcelona is infinitely prettier. It's a very incidental setting initially, with a honkie-populated suburb and English-speaking school, but they do get better at using it creatively and showing local flavor later. The car chase through tight streets and a lot of empty boxes & water jugs flying around is great fun. Escapes from buildings always involve parkour over pretty rooftops. This is a "come visit Spain!" puff piece, but they should spend time on history of Catalonia if they want to get more Spanish tourism investment funds.

At no point did the writing, dialogue, or cinematography match the intent. This is pretty much exactly the kind of awesome schlock the great Godfrey Ho made, but now they (writer is Jack Lothian?, revolving room of directors) are using impoverished British "talent" in reasonably-priced exotic locales, for overseas streaming sales.

Budget would ruin this. Skill would ruin this. There's at least two plot holes never resolved (both money related). The pacing was slow to start, then ZOOM. No time for bleeding! Can they make more of these? Same girl or anything else of similar design. One hundred schoolteacher ninja movies, I'm there for it.

★★★★½

What I'm Watching: Rings of Power

So… I've been reading a lot of RoleMaster Unified and Shadow World books, which is of course very Tolkieny, "Iron Crown", after all. I finished a Good Omens ep (will review when I'm done, I'm taking my time), and Rings of Power is suggested to me. Well, why not, just one Tolkien fanfic show. As I've previously noted, I dislike the man, and his more overtly racist parts, but I liked The Hobbit book and I'm still up for some Human-Dwarf-Elf cliché fantasy, esp if they go off-book, non-canon, which they've had to.

Spoiler spoiler spoilers, as if it matters. On fediverse I didn't even bother to CW my thoughts.

First ep, 2 minutes in, whiny Elf claims a wood (really paper in this case) boat floats because it has secrets. No, unscientific, pointy-eared moron!, it floats by water displacement. It's this shit that loses you your immortal magic home.

Sauron and the Orcs look much cooler, I like their style. Unfortunately they only show up momentarily until late 3rd ep.

Elfs are too dumb to understand a fork symbol, and the eventual revelation of what it means doesn't make a lot of sense for non-literate savages the Orcs are portrayed as. "Nobody's seen an Orc in years", what? That's ridiculous, they rule half the planet. "Land", I guess since it's flat Earth.

The Elfs carrying 2-handed swords on their backs can't possibly unsheathe for battle. Body armor is preposterously bad. Elf armor is overly carved & decorative. Human armor is leather fake-scale, terminates above the belly button, doesn't cover the arms either. All but useless. Generally the fight choreography is very dance troupe, not much in the way of practical fighting.

Cliché cave troll attack. Galadriel for some reason is a super high level fighter, does no magic. Repeatedly we see the Elfs flying into the air on jump boards or wire fu.

Elfs congratulating themselves on delusional political bullshit. Elrond's a boring, pretentious twat for 2000+ years. Superhero Galadriel is kinda cool, just totally implausible and non-canon (not that I care). Arondir's OK, overarmed knife-ear bastard Human-fucker cop. There's an RPG Elf! There's a lot of racism against the Humans, all Morgoth-worshippers, but that seems typical for Elfs.

Too much time spent with the fucking goddamned 'obbits, or "Harfoots" as they call themselves in this. Filthy barefoot little cannibal shits running around (OK, that's a Dark Sun ref, but I don't doubt that book full of people they consult is a cookbook). They have a stultifying, dead-end culture of nomads who every year mark the 10%+ of their population who died, in some hilarious ways. "Stay on the trails, never walk alone!" That actually kinda works for pre-civilization 'obbits, like in 2000 years they could have settled down but still be cowards.

2nd ep has the 'obbits find a flaming man from the sky: Gandalf‽ I love that guy, even if he's a shitty angel/4th-Level Magic-User. He's just a hairy slob right now tho.

So Galadriel's shipped off West for being inconvenient. Boat to the Undying Lands (North America is heaven) has a real Logan's Run Carousel tone. Stupid Elfs going into the light are just gonna get zapped by lasers. Then Galadriel just swims back across the Atlantic? Sure, why not.

Dwarf kingdom looks really good. Super cool. But the Dwarf costume/appearance are kinda sus, bad stereotypes. Tolkien was racist as fuck, maybe don't perpetuate it in the show? The casting is semi-random racially, which is a nice change, but it's only 50% less. There's been a lot of whining from Internet racist trolls like the owner of "x dot com", and fuck all those people. I must say, I'm disappointed Durin's wife shaves her beard off to conform to Human beauty standards; she should embrace Dwarf hairy-faced tradition.

The naming of things is still kinda shitty, "The Southlands", etc. At least put it in an old language, Torpenow Hill style. If you say it's Mordor or Gondor, that kind of gives things away, but it is those.

First peasant vs Orc fight is fun, mostly. 0th-Level character funnel. The Healer delivering evidence to the town headman is funny, very much what D&D characters do to motivate the militia. Stupid peasants, who we are AGAIN told sided with Morgoth and therefore their line is tainted with evil forever after, really deserve a good hard kicking while they're down. Just coat them with mud, maybe a corpse cart-man singing "bring out your dead!" I do keep seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this.

Galadriel keeps failing upwards, floating in the sea to a raft of hostiles, raft of a friendly dude with suspiciously Viggo Mortensen-looking face and pendant, to ship of Numenor. It's amazing how after days of falling in and out of sea water, starvation & dehydration, she has perfect makeup, slightly mussed & dark roots in her bleach blonde hair. Elfs really are magic.

The Numenoreans say several times, "The sea is always right", I correct STARBOARD! every time. Galadriel, having again failed upwards from prisoner to fairy queen, gets to ride a horse along the beach in romantic slo-mo! And it's clearly the most ecstatic thing she's ever had between her thighs. This scene goes on way too long, it's clearly the director's dirty fetish, someone should've had veto in the editing suite.

I don't understand how the Orcs ever captured all the Elf soldiers off-camera. Arondir fucked up, but most of the centuries-old soldiers must be at their 4th-Level Fighter cap by OD&D rules, so how can a bunch of juvenile 1-1 HD lesser Orcs who literally burn in sunlight fight and shoot on par with them? They do have a Warhammer-spiky-punk-rock hyena/worg special figure, with sub-Roger Rabbit-quality CGI.

1st ep was boring as hell after the cave troll, all premise and exposition. Then it got kind of good, I'm 3 eps in and despite a LOT of problems, it has some good fantasyland style, tone, & fight material worth stealing for your FRPG of choice. It mostly looks magnificent, they really did the "drone flying thru New Zealand and some CGI shots" well, the extras are usually well costumed, armor aside. The scenes in Numenor especially remind me a lot of HBO's Rome. CGI sets are a little iffy, but they don't linger too much on fake buildings.

I'll be finishing this up tomorrow, and then supposedly 'zon has paid for 5 seasons already!

★★★½☆ Definition of mediocre but fun enough to watch.

Part 2

What I'm Watching: Deadloch

Over on 'zon. Bodies start piling up in a little mostly-lesbian resort town in Tasmania, currently having a "Winter Feastival". The local cop, Dulcie (Kate Box) used to be a detective in Sydney, which passes for civilization, so she investigates. Soon a bizarrely drunk, stupid, unwashed, hairy, probably-Human (much like Nobby Nobs from Discworld) detective Eddie (Madeleine Sami) shows up to "help". More bodies pile up, with ritualistic patterns.

The show mostly exists to skewer new-agey bullshit, pretentious people, stupid people, racists, sexist men, women, and really anything. The serial killings and bodies are just an excuse. The, uh, surprise intermission at the 4-hour-long art film is perfect.

Eddie goes from a horrible caricature muppet to someone not too bright (cop, obvs) working far above her abilities, dealing alone with trauma and about to get some more. Dulcie's ridiculously calm and stoic despite a really insane world she's forced to put up with; her wife in particular is a different kind of self-centered chaos muppet no normal person could deal with.

Abby (Nina Oyama) plays the one reasonable person, a long-suffering assistant, fiancée to the shittiest man since Lucy's other boyfriend in Twin Peaks. I love every scene with Abby ("Big Eyes" to Eddie, who is incapable of learning names).

There's a little Scooby-Doo/indigenous people subplot with three teenagers, black, native, and gay, and the rich bitch who owns the local sacred island and won't allow anyone on it, but offers scholarships to get them assimilated. Hm, real estate or something else?

The straight men & women of the town range from feeble-minded working-class thugs to long-suffering with tarts or crazy women, with one or two suspicious exceptions.

I pegged the instigator (who later confesses) in the first episode, but the actual killer baffles me, there's no setup and clues to their involvement except one, which is withheld from Dulcie as well until late. The final showdown and possibly-obscure death escape in the dark, turns into a very trite solution, chance punishes the guilty. I dislike the trivial last 30 minutes or so of an otherwise extremely fun gag.

Other than being doled out an ep a week, and maybe needing a 25-50% editing pass like all streaming shows, this was a nice watch. If your sense of humor's laughing at corpses, this is for you.

★★★★½