Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

DOORS (2021)

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DOORS (2021) is a lo-fi sci-fi anthology movie with a killer premise and compelling moments marred by an overall somewhat flawed execution. Despite its problems, I quite liked it for its sense of weird mystery. I watched it on Amazon Prime.

One day, alien “doors” suddenly appear all over the world. In the ensuing panic, many people seem to connect with the doors, apparently mesmerized, and pass through them. Millions lost in a single day. In response, the government sends in “knockers,” teams of scientists trying to figure out what’s on the other side. Every effort appears frustrated until a hermit manages the seemingly impossible, only even this may not ultimately matter in what comes next.

I just love that premise. The movie does a great job creating a sense of existential dread and cosmic horror as humanity is confronted by something monstrous, incomprehensible, and apparently carrying out an agenda. It’s the kind of thing that made THE LEFTOVERS so interesting to watch.

The trouble with the movie comes from its pacing and the fact it’s an anthology. The film feels a bit inert at times, and while it’s fairly cohesive, there’s little sense of a real story. Instead, the four episodes tend to feel somewhat incomplete.

Nonetheless, I love how much the filmmakers accomplished with the interesting premise and what appeared to be a very small budget. A lot happens off screen, wonderfully left to our imagination, and where there are special effects, they’re strategic and well handled. The movie shines in its mystery and falters a bit when it tries to explain things, so you have to simply love the mystery.

Overall, I wasn’t sure about this one at first but I gradually got sucked into it and found it a fun and weird watch.

FOUNDATION, Season 2

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Based on the classic sci-fi series by Isaac Asimov, Apple TV’s FOUNDATION is a lush series about the fall of a galactic empire and a small group of scientists who preserve knowledge in the hopes of shortening the resulting dark ages. Season 2 picks up where the first season left off, and while I enjoyed it more than I did the first season, I’m still not sure if it knows what it is.

FOUNDATION was always difficult to adapt to the screen because it’s primarily a story about ideas, and the story itself leaps ahead in time, which would require an almost entirely new cast every season or even every few episodes. Apple TV’s effort was pretty game, injecting plenty of interesting ideas and a beautifully imagined galactic empire. Where it went off for me was it seemed to contradict its source material.

In Asimov’s series, a psycho-historian named Harry Seldon models vast populations and predicts the empire will fall and resulting 10,000 years of barbarism and misery. He puts together a group of scientists to store all knowledge needed to restart the empire and places them on a remote planet at the edge of the imperium. When the empire does start to fall, the tiny defenseless colony will face a series of crises, and as they solve each, the now deceased Seldon returns via hologram to say the crisis was predicted and they likely solved it as predicted. Individual action does not matter–psycho-history is about large populations where individual action is almost meaningless to the outcome. The only time Seldon is wrong is when an outlier appears, a single individual capable of changing history: the Mule.

The problem with the show is that it seems to be filled with outliers, characters who have some type of psychic powers and who definitively seem to change history. Meanwhile, Seldon himself is now several versions of AI, and in contradiction of their own trust in psycho-history, at least one starts meddling with the others. Okay, so what, I guess, but it makes me wonder what the show is really about, and also wonder whether they should have tied it to Asimov’s stories at all. The overall narrative appears to be similarly muddled, a story of subplots and less of a main plot.

Overall, though, I found it worth watching as refreshing sci-fi. It’s great to look at it, there are some interesting ideas, and it’s fun, especially this second season with its faster pace and tighter focus. I’ll be curious to see where things go if there’s a third season.

THE HOUSE OF USHER

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In Mike Flanagan’s latest, THE HOUSE OF USHER (Netflix), Edgar Allan Poe’s stories get a modern twist in this Gothic horror miniseries about the fall of a family and the dark side of capitalism.

Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) ruthlessly runs Fortunato, a pharmaceuticals company, with his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell). He has led a charmed life of wealth and power, but tragedy has taken aim at him as his children begin dying one by one in horrific freak accidents. As his family legacy dies, he must face the deal he made decades ago, one that produced a dire curse.

This was a ton of fun, offering everything you may love about Flanagan’s brand of character-focused horror, from its recurring performers to the great dialogue to its big themes. In this case, the theme is capitalism, and man, he holds nothing back. The mismanagement of wealth while vast problems that wealth could solve go unchecked, corruption, never having enough wealth even after one has more than one can spend, confusion of wealth with being superior, the destruction of people and the environment, and how vast wealth corrupts one’s morals and spirit. This was one of my favorite aspects of the show.

Besides that, the Poe Easter eggs are fun, but what I really enjoyed was the modern retelling of classic tales like “The Masque of the Red Death,” expertly woven into the overarching story with plenty of solid twists. The Usher kids are all utterly corrupt, and their deaths have a fun comeuppance and sense of justice to them while also being sad, as they realize what they could have been if it hadn’t been for the money. The deaths are often grisly and make Gothic scary again.

Overall, I loved this one and highly recommend it. It’s effective, thoughtful, and a ton of fun.

NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU (2023)

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NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU (2023) tells the story of a young man struggling to stay alive during an alien invasion. Novel for its almost non-existent dialogue and reliance on physical performance, the movie is creepy good fun, though the feels it aimed missed in my case.

Mourning her mother’s passing, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) otherwise lives a seemingly idyllic life in a house near a small town, taking pleasure in the living things, though it’s clear she’s grieving something far more than her recent loss, something deep in her past. We find out the town shuns her for some horrible past incident, but soon this will be the least of her problems as aliens invade. What starts as a home invasion escalates to become much more, resulting in deepening isolation and an ever-increasing struggle for survival.

The film is pretty remarkable in that there is pretty much only a single discernible line of dialogue. Otherwise, Dever carries the performance by trying to outsmart the aliens, run, or fight back any way she can. As for the aliens, they stole the show for me. As they’re fun to discover, I’ll say little about them except that there are several types, which really amped up the weirdness and threat, and as familiar as some looked from UFO lore, they definitely come across as alien and quirky.

With no dialogue and with Brynn constantly fighting to survive without any real safe place being available as a goal, the movie does sag a bit in the middle even if it doesn’t actually lag. The last act reveals why Brynn was so isolated and what she’s carried with her ever since, but while it’s well done, by then, the emotions this was supposed to generate didn’t really happen for me. Both the alien invasion and Brynn’s story tie together in an ending that felt for me kind of forced into what the director wanted more than what the story seemed to want.

These gentle criticisms aside, I liked NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU for its overall approach, creepy set-pieces, weird aliens, and overall feel. Overall, I thought it was pretty well done and worth the watch.

PREY (2022)

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I haven’t seen any of the PREDATOR movies since the original, but when I found out they were setting a new movie among Comanches in the 1790s, I had to give it a try. I’m glad I did. From the beautiful scenery to the native culture and action, PREY delivers.

The setting is the Northern Great Plains. The year is 1719. In a Comanche village, Naru, a young woman, wants to be a hunter. She is a good tracker, but she hasn’t yet been tested in a hunt, and her tribe would rather she focus on the gathering part of hunting and gathering. During her roaming, she spies a strange fire in the sky. This, we know, is the arrival of the Predator, an alien hunter visiting to test itself in its own great hunt. A good tracker with excellent powers of observation, Naru figures out a strange creature threatens them, while the Predator works its way up the food chain to finally discover a cunning and worthy adversary. Soon, it will be hunter versus hunter, and only one will walk away alive.

The movie has heart. Naru is likeable, believable, and we see her fight to prove herself being far less about her masculine-dominated tribe and more about exceeding her limitations and realizing her potential. The glimpses of Comanche life are interesting and supposed to be pretty authentic, though one could argue about when they started riding horses, whether the French would have been that far south hunting buffalo instead of trading, and whether or not women rode into battle alongside men (some say they commonly did). The Comanche would one day become a powerful empire thanks to their alliance with the horse (brought to them primarily by the Spanish), but this is early in all that, being 1719, so I took the movie’s portrayal of Comanche culture and history at its word.

The settings are also impressive–the film was shot in my adopted home of Alberta–providing a terrific backdrop for all the hunting and action. The CGI is pretty well done, and the action sequences were exciting and really well handled.

Overall, PREY is at its core a pretty simplistic sci-fi action movie, but the presentation is terrific, and I found myself quite liking this one, enough to make me utter the rare statement: “I liked that new PREDATOR movie!”

THE BEAR, Season 2

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THE BEAR (FX Original exclusively on Hulu in the US, on Disney Plus in Canada) was a surprise watch for me. I honestly fell in love with it. Season 2 was just as good, though different, with a particular hour-long episode that was one of the funniest and most heartbreaking TV episodes I’ve ever watched. This. Is. Good.

In the first season, we meet Carmine, a famous chef who takes over his deceased brother’s small Chicago restaurant and all its problems. From the gritty visuals to the deep, lovable characters to the realistic dialogue to the exciting and tense focus on what happens in the kitchen when things are humming and when things crash into disaster, it fired on every cylinder for me.

At the end of that season, Carmine comes into a surprise amount of cash from his deceased brother, which promises an end to all the restaurant’s problems. Instead, Carmine invites a whole new set of problems by interpreting the gift as a sign to create the restaurant he’d always wanted to build with his brother.

At first, I was wondering at the second season’s heavy turn toward comedy and the characters’ cuteness, a common sign of a show becoming a surprise hit and possibly struggling to find its footing with a second season. The first season comes at you like it has nothing to lose, while the second starts off with an awareness it now does. Happily, it doesn’t take long for THE BEAR to shake it off and find its groove and then raise the volume past the previous season’s high of 11.

There’s a lot of focus on the secondary characters this season, which is handled beautifully. While the renovations occur–at a frantic pace to meet their financial obligations and need to reopen quickly–many of the Beef’s staff members go off to learn new skills and level up to be able to contribute to the new Bear, which will offer fine dining. These episodes are goddamn heartwarming. Everybody gets a chance to find their best selves via a sense of owning what they do, often aided with powerful guest appearances by the likes of Will Poulter and Olivia Colman. They all contribute to the season’s overall theme that self-actualization is a journey with big gains but also a significant cost.

Then there’s the family Christmas episode, and oh wow. The less said, the better. I’ve never laughed so hard watching a human train wreck in my life. The guest stars, the dialogue, the pacing, all of it is landmark TV. And it perfectly encapsulates why all the major characters in the show are the way they are and why they have the motivations they have.

Overall, THE BEAR is fantastic. Big, big recommend. It’s a show that hits big themes, feels real without ever being boring, bakes your heart in the heartwarming moments, and fries your nerves when things go wrong. Can’t wait for Season 3.