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epergne
Reviews
Home Before Dark (2020)
Enjoyable and Positive, but...
This was a pretty fun and entertaining series. I recommended this to a friend with a young daughter to watch together because it has a really positive message for girls. As a role-model, Hilde is a great character. But...for an adult, this series isn't quite good enough. I feel like they ran out of time at the end and just hurried up to get to the ending. The last episode is particularly poor. But the writing in general is pretty bad. Also--and I hate to say it-- young Brooklynn Prince's acting is unfortunately pretty noticeably bad. She was wonderful in "The Florida Project" but much less so here. It's not a matter of her personality; she's great. It's her face, eyes, and physical acting that are the problem. As an adult male without children, I am not the target audience for this. The writing and acting can be overlooked as a very positive series for family viewing.
The Devil's Candy (2015)
Lame
I'm on the side on the nay-sayers here.
Generic heavy metal music, a lot happening in darkness, and a whole lot of cliche. It's not a TERRIBLE movie, but it's also certainly nothing above the ordinary. I can enjoy heavy music just fine, the music itself is not my beef here, but the whole "heavy metal = satan" is crap. It's just lazy. There's no real suspense, we can't see anything, and cool tattooed dad paints butterflies with kids' faces and many-eyed goats and all that = scary satan stuff, is just tedious. Andy Williams songs would have been more jarringly disconcerting. (OK, maybe not a great choice.) Nah, sorry. From 2015, give me Bone Tomahawk, The Witch, We are Still Here, Green Room, The Lure, and even The Visit, before ever even thinking about this one. I know, I know, to each his own etc. Of course.
The Bye Bye Man (2017)
Not So Bad
I was drawn to write this review by the weird, skewed reviews of others here. Of course, tastes are highly subjective, but the scathing, "worst movie ever" type comments here are just ridiculous.
Is Bye Bye Man a brilliant, must-see horror? No, not at all. Is the acting Oscar-worthy? No, but I've seen plenty worse. Actually, it didn't bother me. Someone here mentioned things not making sense. What? I'm not sure. It was all pretty straightforward, supernatural premise aside.
I found the first quarter to be genuinely creepy and well-paced. Once we know what's going on, it goes a bit silly. But that's almost the recipe for these kinds of movies.
I gave it a solid 6 because it entertained me (on the particular night, and in the particular mood, I watched it.) I've watched countless horror movies and I can be a snob when I want to. I usually have no time for the CGI-laden, cliché-ridden fare that passes for horror these days. Bye Bye Man, while certainly approaching that, had just barely enough of something interesting to make it better than many. It's no masterpiece, but it also isn't the 1-star material that others here will have you believe. I wonder how many Andy Milligan films they've seen?