C N – Google

Overrated, pretentious, and poorly disguised attempt to get COVID era survivors to empathize with religious nuts who were not only anti-vaxxers but actively behaved in ways that resulted in the deaths of innocent people from severe cases of the coronavirus. This is the sort of film - like Hereditary - that appeals to what I call the "mediocre booksmart." People who are educated and intelligent enough to appreciate arthouse films, period dramas, and great cinematography but are still too fundamentally stupid to understand when they're being preached at and beaten over the head with a deeply disturbing world view that makes apologetics for political or sociological current events.

Tobe Hooper's worst film hands down. If you were expecting a truly frightening horror movie with the exquisite technical detail of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) this is not it. At all. I would call Eaten Alive an experimental film. Maybe Hooper was tired after making Chainsaw but even The Funhouse (1981) is better than this campy slasher/animal horror. I'm still giving this effort three stars for individual elements of Eaten Alive, which you'll appreciate if you're a big Hooper fan - the setting, the costume choices, a few very specific scenes particularly towards the beginning of the film.

I just watched the first episode of EastEnders from 1985. While I appreciate that this was a groundbreaking soap opera for its time, dealing with serious issues, it lacks anything that I enjoy about historical dramas. The show absolutely radiates the poverty, grueling work, noise, racism, and tackiness of London's East End. Yes, I know that's the point of the show but people just kept screaming at each other and as someone who once lived around working class people who screamed at each other a lot, this is a hard pass. I am AMAZED that this show has endured for nearly 40 years. Why?

This particular story in the series kept me hooked, but I am only giving it three stars for the overly obvious dramatization and hokey overall pattern of the series itself. BUT "A British Crime Story" had me riveted, wondering what happened to beautiful Carole Packman and her long-grieving daughter. Very twisted, indeed. Also, this may sound shallow, but I was completely fascinated with how all the people looked. For example, the daughter Sam had to be about 50, but her facial structure, voice, mannerisms, and hair made her seem like she was only 25-30 years old but had aging make-up on. I couldn't shake it for most of the series, how young she seemed aside from her obvious aging on her skin and by simple math from her birthday. The victim, her mother, was also extremely beautiful when murdered around age 40. I found it staggering that in the last episode the murderer says he "killed for love' some sort of all consuming love - and the other woman was absolutely plain. I mean if I were being rude, I would call her ugly. It's like a Charles and Camilla situation, I don't know.

Very good documentary about the loss of an innocent French woman's life in rural Ireland. I think the show did an excellent job of showing both, in the killer's own words during interviews (the killer actually speaks repeatedly in the documentary) and the reports of others, that the number one suspect is a malignant narcissist who deflects blame for his savagely violent, repeated abuse of his own partner - including hospitalization and near loss of one of her eyes - to things like "she was drunk" and "it takes two." It's not difficult to combine this shameless, clueless lack of insight in self-report of his own character with the corroborating evidence and see a narcissistic man who would kill an isolated foreign woman who rejected his sexual advances in an impulsive rage and rationalize to himself that it was just a thing that got "out of hand." It's a tragedy that the Western legal system is so biased towards protecting white wealthy male criminals, because otherwise this man would totally be in prison for life.