By: Henry J. Fromage –
A return home results in your typical work-type fare. Yes, documentaries a dozen and an unchallenging action film or two.
395. M3GAN 2.0
Much ado has been made about the box office failure of this cult film follow-up and I’m not going to pretend I have the answers, either. All I can say is that I enjoyed this as much or more as the original. It’s bigger, dumber, and easily as tongue-in-cheek as our favorite killer android doll flips to the good side when a military upgrade of her general situation goes on the lam, threatening everyone but especially little Cady, who she’s programmed to protect. Genuinely a blast. Three Beers.
396. Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster
This Netflix documentary about the hunt for the missing OceanGate Titan submersible that captivated the world is a fairly straight up the middle the play, but doesn’t skimp on examining the hubris of company founder and pilot Stockton Rush. A product of old money, he was known to follow his gut and skirt rules wherever he felt necessary- a maverick in an industry that he’d learn the hard way operated on zero forgiveness or margin for error. Three Beers.
397. Grenfell: Uncovered
This devastating Netflix documentary delves into the circumstances of the devastating Grenfell Tower apartment complex fire in London, resulting in the deaths of 70 residents in the deadliest residential fire since The Blitz. It’s a story of cut corners and corporate malfeasance on a sickening scale, although from interrelated corporations that each blame the other for being the deadly ingredient that made things so bad. Two Beers.
398. Vanished in New Canaan
This Hulu documentary examines the story of the search for Connecticut mother Jennifer Dulos, who seemingly disappeared without a trace from her suburban home one morning after dropping off her child at school. The ex-husband soon becomes an object of scrutiny, but his damning actions that day before and after only yield circumstantial evidence- at first. Three Beers.
399. Vanished in Paradise: The Untold Story
Paul Walker Hauser gets a starring role as Michael Larson, who in real life did memorize the board of the popular game show Press Your Luck (which the longer-lasting exclamation “No Whammies’ came from, it turns out) and proceeded to go on a record-breaking winning streak that had CBS’s knickers in a twist and actively searching out how to stop it. I liked the mix of behind the scenes scheming and Larson’s on-screen domination, and the sad familial dynamics that are gradually revealed just add another layer. Three Beers.
400. Brightburn
This gory and disturbing horror postulates “what if Superman didn’t come to Earth pre-loaded with an impeccable moral center?”. What such power, particularly coupled with adolescent instability, could do is indeed the stuff of nightmares, at least after you give this a watch. I wish our evil Superboy’s core performance had been a bit stronger, but it certainly gets the job done. Three Beers.
401. The Lair
It might be time to stick a fork in Neil Marshall- he’s done. The visionary director that gave us The Descent among other nightmares is now reduced to SyFy Channel-level special effects and acting in the service of co-writer and star (and wife) Charlotte Kirk’s horror stylings. The idea isn’t bad- a pilot shot down in Afghanistan comes across an old Soviet secret lab that was aiming for super-soldiers and landed on monsters. Besides the lackluster production values, what really sinks the film is how variably fearsome these things are. You can’t have them both capable of ripping a grown man apart and susceptible to a well-thrown punch. Pick a lane. Five Beers.
