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From: "Ian J. Ball" <ijball@mac.invalid>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-06-01 (Saturday)
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2024 09:28:35 -0700
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On 6/2/24 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:

> I watched:
> 
> RIFFTRAX:
> "Vengeance of the Dead". A man is haunted in his dreams by
> the ghost of a beautiful young woman; after the woman reveals
> she and her mother were murdered by a hooded gang, he begins
> to hunt down the members of the gang while sleepwalking.
> Apparently they're playing new movies. This one was bad.

*Always* a warning sign: When you look a movie up on IMDb, and *none* of 
the cast have portrait pictures on IMDb.

This flick is basically an example of this.

> What did you watch?

I took it really easy yesterday. I only managed to get through a soap, 
some golf, and two movies:

soaps: GH - Fri's ep. Sonny continues to lose it, and sends some thugs 
to go after Jason, after Jason refuses to sell out of the coffee 
business - hopefully, this finally sends Sonny to jail. Not much else 
happened except that NuNuNuMolly continues to be a stress case, and asks 
Carly about the wedding attack. Agent Jagger Cates and Jack Brennan have 
an amusing "confrontation"/interrogation in Brennan's hospital room.

golf - Day 3 of the Canadian Open in Hamilton, Ont. saw Scotland's 
Robert MacIntyre in the lead by four(!), followed by Canuck Mackenzie 
Hughes, Kiki Ryan Fox and American Benjamin Griffin all four strokes 
back. American Sam Burns and Brit Tommy Fleetwood are also in the hunt. 
But it seems unlikely that MacIntyre will be caught.

Blumhouse's Fantasy Island (Hulu) - In glorious 4k!
    I think I liked this 2020 flick quite a bit more than Anim did. 
Yeah, the ending was a little too all over the place, and "too cute". 
And this was unfortunately "PG-13 horror" when I was expecting(/hoping 
for) "hard R horror" out of this, which was disappointing, and which 
also made for a much *less dark* film that I was anticipating.
    But, such as it was, this was an OK "twisty" take on "Fantasy Island".
    And, hey - at least they got it right that Lucifer Hale is *pure 
EVOL*!!1!11!!  ;)
    It's a little annoying that Portia Doubleday's character also didn't 
suffer a horrific fate.

Fun fact: Before I went to bed last night, LMN was playing 2009's 
"Sorority Wars" starring... Lucifer Hale! 15 years ago, when Hale was 
about... what? 19? (so this was pre-PLL (bitches!!)), she was adorable. 
By 2020?... Not so much!  :p

Blacklight (Hulu) - Also in glorious 4k!
    Honestly, it kind of blows me away that even relatively "low-budget" 
flicks like this one (though, I guess USD$43 mil isn't exactly 
"low-budget"...) are now getting 4k presentations on the streamers.
    Anyway, this was just OK - it's kind of like "The Parallax View" but 
without Warren Beatty, the pervasive 1970s pessimism, or the hopeless 
ending.
    Liam Neeson plays Travis Block - a man with a "particular set of 
skills" - which in this flick involves getting deep-undercover FBI 
agents out before they get into "too deep"!! The flick makes clear that 
Block is not an actual FBI agent, but an independent contractor. He 
works for the "head" of the FBI (Aidan Quinn - which means you just 
*know* he's EVOL!!1!).
    First problem, though, is that this was filmed in Australia (Neeson 
and Quinn may be the only non-Aus actors in the cast), with Canberra and 
Melbourne very, very unconvincingly standing in for Washington DC. (I've 
only been through DC once, and even I could easily tell this was not 
filmed in DC!).
    Neeson has a perennially disappointed and slightly hostile adult 
daughter (Aussie actress Claire van der Boom), and an adorable 6(?)-year 
old granddaugther (one-time child actress Gabriella Sengos) whom Block 
teaches all of his paranoia too!
    Anyway, when one of the people Block pulls in from undercover 
(Taylor John Smith) starts spouting conspiracy nonsense about the FBI 
eliminating domestic political "agitators", you know the guy is actually 
on to something. Eventually, a plucky guttersnipe reporter (Emmy 
Raver-Lampman) is dragged into this.
    This is nothing we haven't seen before, either more generally, or 
specifically from Neeson, and a number of the other Neeson films in the 
same vein are probably better than this one.
    But "Blacklight" sure does look pretty in 4k!!  ;p