This is my third attempt to write a review for this week. My first began thusly:
Language, violence, nudity, gore, smoking
My second opened with the title:
In Praise of Hot Women in Tight Pants
Sadly, this one begins with:
In Search of Something Worth Watching
This is my problem with newer content: there’s simply too much of it and so little is any good. In the past few weeks I’ve watched some halfway decent new releases, but they weren’t anything that really blew up my skirt (metaphorically speaking).
For example, I saw a pair of recent offerings from Ryan Reynolds, namely Free Guy and The Adam Project. Neither really classify as horror, but in today’s world of genre mash-ups how much does that really matter? There are elements of horror and terror in nearly everything.
Free Guy is an interesting concept (game avatar comes to life and becomes sentient), fairly well-executed with killer special effects, but the ending is so saccharin I nearly went into sugar shock. The Adam Project (time travel gone horribly wrong) was better, and had an awesome cast, including Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldana, and a breakout performance from new kid, Braxton Bjerken, but again, it didn’t have enough elements of horror to qualify.
I also tried The Lost City (think Romancing the Stone meets The Secret of Nim’s Island while attempting to channel Raiders of the Lost Ark), with Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, and a hilarious cameo from Brad Pitt. It, also, was mindlessly entertaining (and Sandra Bullock showed her skill at physical comedy hasn’t lost anything with age), but again, not really horror, and I couldn’t buy the character played by Channing Tatum, which ultimately killed it for me. So I turned instead to the plethora of TV shows available on the big three streaming services (Netflix, Prime, and HBO Max). This was where the first two opening gambits came from.
I began with Van Helsing, but stopped caring about halfway through the fourth episode, primarily because the two main characters, Vanessa (played by Kelly Overton) and Axel (Jonathan Scarfe), were so eminently unlikeable. It also became clear in fairly short order that this show was little more than The Walking Dead with vampires.
Speaking of TWD, I tried watching Fear the Walking Dead; Dead in the Water, but turned it off maybe fifteen minutes in because of all the WTF moments caused by them portraying things I know wouldn’t happen, such as officers and men on the Navy submarine wearing beards, which the military eliminated decades ago because the face fur didn’t allow for a sufficient seal on gas and oxygen masks. What people on the creative side are doing, essentially, is perpetrating a con job on those viewing or reading what they’ve created. The mark of a good con is all in the details. Get them wrong (especially within the first fifteen minutes) and you might as well be walking around with a sandwich board sign proclaiming yourself to be full of shit. And so my journey in search of something worth watching continued.
I then tried watching Halo. This is brand spanking new. I think only the first three or four episodes were posted when I started. It’s up to nine now, but I only made it through the first two when I decided I simply didn’t give a rat’s ass. This maybe because I’ve never played the game, but there were simply too many sub plots to keep track of while trying to understand this new world, and what I was seeing didn’t seem like it would be worth the effort. And so I moved on.
I finally settled on a show I’ve been seeing for a number of months but hadn’t gotten around to watching yet: Wynona Earp. This was horror and at least amusing, plus it featured a bevy of hot women in tight pants. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m a fan. One might suggest this is yet another example of my misogynistic tendencies, but I don’t care. I likes what I likes, and clearly the filmmakers agree, since they spent so much time focusing on several very nicely-formed female backsides.
It’s also delightfully funny in parts, mainly coming from the title character, played by Melanie Scrofano. And unlike the previously-mentioned piles of crap, the show doesn’t take itself seriously. This is important.
As a writer, I am part of the entertainment business. If what I’m writing isn’t entertaining, then I haven’t done my job. Part of doing that job is to get you to suspend your disbelief – particularly when it comes to horror. I and my fellow writers and creators are, essentially, blowing a bunch of smoke and sunshine up your butts, which your suspension of disbelief allows us to do – provided we’ve done our job. Getting the details wrong or confusing the shit out of the reader/viewer with too many sub plots, or putting a serious face on the ass clown of the Hollywood tendency to take itself too seriously suspends the suspension. Even the best of these books and movies understand this.
Take, for example, The Silence of the Lambs, which is in my Top Five and does take itself seriously, but it also lets the audience in on the joke with bits like Hannibal Lector’s addition of fava beans and a nice Chianti. Or, if you prefer, John Carpenter’s The Thing, which has a character utter the line “You gotta be fucking kidding,” when the guy’s head sprouts spider legs and goes scurrying out the door. It invites you in with a flourish and says, “Enjoy.”
Not that Wynona Earp is in any way comparable to those two examples. But it is entertaining and when you’re wading through the piles of unmitigated crap to try and find something worth your time, nothing else matters.
Until next week . . .
Jeff Thomson
A fourteen-year veteran of the USCG, Jeff Thomson served as a navigator on four different ships and as SAR Controller at two Group Operations Centers. He is currently retired from his life as an over-the-road truck driver, which was not the most conducive writing environment, and yet, he managed to write the majority of his first novel, a bit of his second, and a chunk of his third, using his steering wheel as a desk. He is now writing full time (on an actual desk), and currently working on the sixth novel in his Guardians of the Apocalypse series.
