As I sit waiting for Office 365 to install on my work machine, I find myself with time[1] to squeeze in the first review of the Fear Street trilogy, which I watched last night. This is good, because I’m out to the theater tonight, and if I don’t review now, I’ll be behind.
So, 1994. Man did they spend a long time establishing it was 1994. Hey, look, B Daltons and Software Etcs still exist! Check out these dozen in a row 30 second clips of songs you will remember from the ’90s and probably won’t look up to see if they had actually been released by 1994 or not! In the midst of all that, we learn that rich people Sunnyvale has a rivalry with poor people who also murder each other a lot Shadyside, across the lake. We also learn that the murders are happening again, in a scene that was so reminiscent of Scream that before the guy dressed all in black robes with a white face mask does some murders with a knife by basically punching the knife in as far as it will go[2], I had already said, “hey, that ringing phone is using the Scream ringtone[, from when Drew Barrymore got offed in the iconic opening scene]!”
Just saying they are going for an aesthetic here, and that aesthetic is: The ’90s!
The rest of the flick, once they stopped establishing and got on with plot and character development, was pretty okay. I actually felt a little bad when nominally disposable characters were in fact disposed, you know? And I care about how the trilogy turns out. As such things go, it’s not nothing.
[1] Or do I??? I mean, unless I finish first, I didn’t have time after all, and I don’t know the outcome yet[3]. Lucky I’m wasting the clock on this instead of, like, the movie review. Woo.
[2] My point is the ineffable quality of the violence was very Scream-like. If you know, you know.
[3] 30, maybe 36 hours later: I did not have enough time.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, I haven’t seen enough Argentinian nunsploitation trilogies lately, and I sure do want to get in on the ground floor of a new one! Well, with the caveat that since it’s ground floor, it’s not provable that the whole trilogy will be nunsploitative, of course.
You know that party game The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow (later by another company just Werewolves), where the players are divided into werewolves and villagers, and the werewolves are eating people and the villagers have to decide who the werewolves are? If you don’t: it’s pretty cool.
I have it on good authority that the best way to make a horror movie sequel is to make the same movie again. cf Evil Dead II, or Halloween II[1], or Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D, to name a few. I mean, this only works with good horror movies, but it’s okay: I liked 
This is the last book in the Powers series!
Look at me, cleaning up my partially-read series backlog. Woo! But also, it’s nice in this case because I still remembered at least a little bit of 
Sixteen years ago, somehow, I played 
I cannot decide whether it’s weirder to be reading non-fiction, or to be reading a book gradually over the course of a year. Both are pretty weird! Like, maybe histories would be less weird? History is just non-fiction with a plot and a throughline. Although I guess a book about what to expect over the course of a year of childhood growth is almost that too? But histories have characters, which this does not, super-disgusting anecdotes about mistaken pumpkin puree notwithstanding.
Warner Bros.’ simultaneous release schedule between theaters and HBOMax is good for seeing new movies and not getting Covid, as everyone knows. But what you may not know is that it’s also good for seeing movies that you would have never quite convinced yourself to make it to the theater to see, and then have forgotten to look for by the time they finally released to a streaming service.