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caseycosner
Reviews
The Midnight Club (2022)
What Happened to You, Mike Flanagan?
I am enthralled with Hill House. I thought Bly Manor was okay, but nowhere near the level of its predecessor. Still it was palatable. So I had some sort of hope for Midnight Club.
Boy was I wrong, and utterly disappointed.
There is nothing scary, AT ALL, about this show. Well, except for how dull the story is. Netflix markets this as horror. That's way off base. Not even close. Lots of reviews liken this to teenage drama, and they are 100% correct. It's mundane, pointless, and boring garbage. On top of that, the characters suck. I don't care at all about them or their plight. They have no personality. And Anya is so moody you just just want someone to push her down the stairs and make her character go away. But Ilonka is worse. By far. She's an absolute narcissist with no respect for boundaries. The acting overall is awful and I found myself playing on my phone during the "story telling". Just awful.
Mike Flanagan, what happened to you? You used to create utterly amazing content. Did Netflix drain you of your creative juices like some sort of leach? I hope so because this series SUCKS and I hope you still have something to give.
So why 3 stars? It was visually nnice. Cool setting, nice scenery. Without that, this would be a 1 in my book.
Reacher (2022)
Tom Cruise, Pay Attention
I have never read the books upon which this series was based, just an FYI. I randomly chose to watch this on a lazy weekend and was immediately engrossed. I am the most cynical, pessimistic person when it comes to movies and will find any reason to take a deuce on a show or movie. But Reacher had a plot that not only kept me interested, but the characters were also incredible. Obviously, Reacher himself is a freaking Titan who looks like he just stepped down from Mount Olympus to provide inspiration to us mere mortals. But everyone else? Findlay is one of my favorite characters ever, someone who had legitimate personal growth and made me go from disliking a character to wishing I could buy him a beer just to talk with him. And Neagley is hard-core and awesome. Even Roscoe, who was not believable as a badass cop at first completely grew on me.
From the action sequences to the plot to the locations, Reacher was amazing. I had to binge this show in the span of 36 hours, and I haven't deemed a show binge worthy in nigh on 6 years (that's right, I said nigh on). If you want to be genuinely entertained with good action, a great story, characters you want to hug and tell everything will be okay, all without some thinly veiled political message, check out Reacher. Take it from a cynical movie viewer who lost faith in Hollywood over a decade ago. But Reacher may have punched and eye gouged my cynicism into oblivion.
1923 (2022)
What Is This?
Apparently if you watched all the other Yellowstone stuff, this show may be right up your alley. But for those of us who didn't see them, this is really boring. Heated arguments about grazing rights? Yee-haw! Remember Star Wars episode 1 and how that was all about trade disputes? That movie sucked and so does 1923.
In addition, that Africa storyline... who the hell runs off with a crazy-eyed woman when they have literally said 50 words to each other? And they get "engaged" like 2 days later? Both are broken and bananas. It's not romantic, it's insane. Nobody in their right mind would do this. Granted, I know that neither one is "in their right mind", but it's still so over the top to be laughable. And she claims to find his death wish lifestyle "romantic", yet even after he explains what he does the first time she encounters wildlife she goes on a diatribe of how it's not romantic, and how dare he expose her to such danger, and she never wants to feel that again, etc. What the heck did you expect? It's freaking Africa you crazy eyed loon! Please let her get eaten by a shark while she's swimming in the ocean or something.
And for the love of all that's holy please liven up that nonsense about cattle and sheep. Or, on second thought, I will just skip the rest of the series.
At least the locations they chose for filming were pretty.
The Resort (2021)
Not the Worst, But Pretty Close...
Lots of folks say this a horrible film. Yep, they are correct. This movie, as a whole, is pretty awful. The acting is bad, the dialogue is wretched (kudos to the reviewer who pointed out the multiple uses of the word "literally" by the cast, but I suppose this is typical for dips**t millenials), the coloring of the movie is odd, and it's absolutely true that nothing of importance happens for about an hour. That waterfall scene exists solely to show our quartet of dead millenials swimming in bikinis and shorts. Great bodies, but that's it. Nothing but air up there.
So why 3 stars? The last 15 minutes were entertaining. The ghost and death scenes were not bad at all. If you look past the absolute lack of common sense, it's a cool ending. Not great or original or or ground breaking, but entertaining. If you have 15 minutes to kill and want to watch some moronic hotties with bodies encounter the same fate as those 15 minutes, then fast forward to the end of The Resort.
Dreamcatcher (2021)
It Sucked
So first off, one of my quirks is that I absolutely love bad movies. They are a guilty pleasure. I can watch "Baseketball" over and over because it makes me laugh even though it's an awful movie. But this movie... holy crap this dumpster fire of a movie needs to be buried. No, that's not good enough, since someone in the future could discover it like a time capsule and think this is how our civilization made movies. It should never been made.
The acting is so bad it's not even laughable. The writing is also bad, with quips about Mitch McConnell and shopping at Target... gah, just writing about it makes my frontal lobe throb. I'm sure the actors tried their hardest, or maybe not, it's impossible to tell. Any rando could have been inserted as an actor and it would have accomplished the same thing, honestly. The characters are so terrible that you are happy they are killed off (in really stupid ways), because that means the movie is that much closer to being done. Mercifully.
Someone wrote a review saying they would cancel Hulu for recommending this atrocity. I just might do that. This should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention. I would rather pass a kidney stone than watch this movie again.