Monthly Archives: February 2025

Southbound

The most recent [new] podcast movie was Southbound, a mix of anthology and psycho killer… which tracks, yeah. There’s this DJ being creepy on the radio while five stories play out along the same highway, in sequential, minimally overlapping order. I liked this conceit exactly once, as that was the time the interaction was direct, instead of incredibly indirect, nay, practically forced.

So anyway, the stories are as follows:

  1. Two blood- and regret-covered men are forced to face their demons, literal and metaphorical alike.
  2. A lady rock band on tour breaks down, and gets the wrong kind of help.
  3. A dude hits and tries to save a pedestrian, more or less in Silent Hill.
  4. A dude tries to rescue his sister from monstertown.
  5. A family is attacked by strangers.

Aside from the tenuous linear timeline that connects these stories, an even more disappointing facet of the movie is that the latter two stories don’t really involve anyone driving down a highway. If you cannot maintain the theme of your anthology for more than three-fifths of the movie, that is a pretty bad compromise someone made along the way.

…okay, I’m going to stop now, because I have some regrets about what just happened. Anyway, the first and last stories did not make a lick of sense, I think mostly by virtue of not being written as though someone would ever need them to, but the other three ranged from decent to pretty darn good. It’s just the wrapper that is annoying me here.

Shook (2021)

Is it low-hanging fruit to go after a social media influencer type as the victim of a “let’s play a game” horror movie? I mean, nobody likes them[1], it’s easy to play around with the idea that they’re self-involved and deserve whatever they get, and you can either go with a redemption arc or a just desserts arc, with equal facility.

Mia is just such an influencer. And one of her influencer… friends? co-workers? was just murdered by the dog killer that has been stalking town for the last few weeks. So instead of going out to party, she has decided to stay in and watch her sister’s dog while the sister is out of town getting medical tests. Which brings in a whole subplot about how her family has a genetic disease that results in full incapacity followed by death, and it has no treatment, and their mother has already died of this, but the sister was fully in charge of the parental care while Mia went to college to become an influencer[2]. And unless the medical tests go well, Mia will be in charge of sororal care before very much more time goes by. And who knows who might eventually care for Mia?

So there Mia is, watching the dog while her influencer friends nag her about coming to their party, which is just the three of them sitting in a living room broadcasting themselves hanging out. (The friends consist of her bestie, her boyfriend, and her frenemy who is clearly trying to win her boyfriend away.) And then she loses the dog, and a creepy dude friends her on the social media account, and calls her, and apparently lives across the street, and it quickly becomes clear that she is being taunted and stalked, which has her well and truly Shook. And then before you know it her friends and her dog and her sister are all in danger, and she alone can save them. Or at least some of them, since she mostly has to choose one or the other.

And this is the meat of the flick. Can she save any of her friends? Can she save her sister? Can she save herself?

Can she save the dog?

[1] Other than the countless thousands of followers who result in them having influence in the first place, sure. Be all technical, why don’t you?
[2] I have no idea what classes you take for this (other than marketing of course)

Star Trek: Section 31

People have been lining up to deride Section 31, the most recent Star Trek movie that was originally supposed to be a TV series instead, and yeah, it definitely feels like a two episode pilot in a lot of ways. But is it really worse than Star Trek V? It seriously isn’t. Come on.

This is not to say the movie isn’t problematic. As a story, it’s perfectly fine. You take an anti-hero you’re already familiar with from previous stories, and she’s played by Michelle Yeoh in full scenery-chewing mode. And then you enlist her in a Suicide Squad caper with several other misfits-in-search-of-redemption, and they’re off to save… I dunno, probably the quadrant? …from utter destruction, in about 90 minutes. Dark antihero capers full of impossible odds, inevitable betrayals, and sudden death are cool.

But, and this is a big enough but that Mix-A-Lot is contractually obligated to like it:

But, this is Star Trek. Section 31 is the least Roddenberry thing that was ever introduced into Trek, and The Suicide Squad is about as big of a tonal mismatch with Trek as I can imagine, even when I acknowledge the existence of Section 31. (Which, if you don’t know, is the Federation’s black ops division.) So… yeah. As a story, it’s fine, like I already said. As a Star Trek movie… I’m glad they didn’t make it a series instead.