Change Your Image
almightywonton
Reviews
The Pale Blue Eye (2022)
I really wanted to like it
I am, frankly, insulted.
To begin, I utterly despise the depiction of Poe here. This is not at fault of the actor who plays him, but instead of the writers who wrote Poe as an insufferable Literary finatic who spouts poetry to win the heart of a girl he finds pretty.
What's more, the resolution of the story and the following twist were, in a word, insufferable.
Allow me to be frank. Poe was once a living, breathing man. An orphan who desired enough wealth to pursue the life of someone like Byron who they thoughtlessly name in their novels. But Poe was not rich. His work was well known and liked in his time, but he could barely make a living. He was an artist who could not make a living with his art and was thus left with nothing to die a tragic and lonely death.
This story is an insult to a man whose stories always dealt not with devils or cults, but with the great evils of men and society.
To have Poe fall fancifully in love at a time when he had a fiancee waiting for him(who later chose another man) is insulting.
I am also disturbed and infuriated by their feeble attempts to draw from his works. Famed detective Auguste Dupin, who became the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes?
The hinted relationship between the siblings referencing the House of Usher?
The poor excuse of quotation from the Tell-Tale Heart, twisting words of fearsome dread and madness to ..love?
By the end I was infuriated, though I desired to love this Yale held in one of my favorite times in history.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)
Bad, boring, and pretensions
This movie is quite bad. From the start, the internal narration is frightfully overwrought to a hilarious degree. This is like a teenagers first attempt at writing horror.
The most laughable is the line ' closing around you like a claw' yes- a singular claw. Not even the finger attached to the claw- just a bit of keratin closing around you
Oh, the horror
The next larger error that made it quite clear that this was just someone writing something they thought sounded good is the introduction of Polly in the book: I left this world as I entered it, covered in blood
Yet one of the foundational ideas of this story is that Polly, and the dead in general, don't quite remember how they died
So please do explain how Polly remembers she died covered in blood?
The main character is painfully bad- not the actress, but the charecter Lily. She is terrible at her job, sticks everything in her mouth, and plays into the horror trope of SEEKING OUT the weird noises in the house even though she is SPECIFICALLY easily scared to the point that she can't read more than a few pages of a horror book
That is BAD writing, PERIOD.
Compare that to something like the Haunting of Hill house(the book) with a slow pace where the charecters all react to the house in their own unique way. That is well written horror. This is just some poor sods first Creative Writing project poorly made into a sloppy mess of a film whose only transition is fading to black, and who is very really quite proud of being able to REWIND THE FOOTAGE.
Over. And over. And over again
I'm quite glad Lily died in the most hilariously stupid way possible. She would have made a terrible writer.
Lovecraft Country (2020)
Worth a watch
This show is absolutely worth a watch. There is so much creativity and potential, it really just spills out of the screen. The actor who plays Atticus is immensely talented and he steals the show. The episodes are fun and entertaining...about up until the second half of the season.
Now, the second half is where things get...lost. Focus gets put on unimportant details, and many charecters and subplots which were supposed to have value just feel empty and unimportant- especially after you watch the last episode. For a show of this sort you would hope for all the pieces to come together to fit like a perfect puzzle- like a good mystery. But all the subplots just clash and hardly provide importance at all and that was really disappointing for a show that made you believe every moment had value(until it didn't).
Would I recommend this show? Yes. The monster design and some of the concepts really do bring so much fun and inspiration. But this show is far from perfect and suffers from an unfortunate case of the writers biting off more than they can true.
Give it a shot, if only to mix up your normal tv routine.
Fan xiao (2020)
Must watch if you enjoyed the game
I loved this show. It was really slow to get started. Really, really slow. But around the middle of the series things pick up rapidly and the reality of everything really comes crashing in. The last couple episodes are so cathartic if a bit confusing. I loved the game so getting some karmic vengeance on the horrible people who created this situation was wonderful. And I really enjoyed getting a happy ending.
Also all the nods to the game at the end? Loved it!
Bulbbul (2020)
Beautiful, tragic
I had to write this review in response to those who believe that the movie was 'predictable'. A laughable statement projecting that every movie must have a twist. The marketing of Bulbbul portrays it as a horror movie. But the horror does not come from the monster. Bubbul is a story about the nature of power and how anyone can be consumed by it.
The 'twist' in Bulbbul is not the monster.
It is about the human capacity for cruelness against those with no power, and for its credit, Bulbbul creates a horrifyingly familiar scenario, one that portrays a stark contrast of power for its titular charecter.
This is not a ghost story, the true horror in this tale is the acts of men.