Reviews

Someone just sent me EIGHT episodes of this series on videotape, one per tape, with bars/slates/tone in place of where commercials would have gone. EIGHT episodes, all apparently duped from master broadcast reels. Six of them never broadcast. Four of them not even known to exist. Where the hell did someone GET stuff like this?!?! Did these come from someone who worked on the show, or what? These are pristine copies! I'm too scared of copyright strikes to upload, but what a great show! The network should have given it a better shot -

The premise isn't really science fiction, although there are elements similar to Back to the Future, Somewhere in Time, and other classic sci-fi projects. The production values are quite high, even cinematic. It baffles me that people only ever got to see two episodes. Seems like one of the great lost TV shows --

For films by Del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth and Devil's Backbone, plus Cronos and The Orphanage, are his four most nearly perfect works, for me anyway. I love the way his films usually pair very old people with the very young, with a lot of strange machinery and startling - even alarming - mythological images along the way.

It's nice that he got such recognition for Shape Of Water, his most famous film, since that seems to have given him the freedom to pursue his own visions. However, I only watched Shape once, and found it to be kind of "Del Toro For Dummies." Just the most simplistic, almost silly reduction of a story to a few base elements. I would have liked it better if he'd gone all the way and really made a 21st century Creature From The Black Lagoon. Instead, it was just Beauty and the Beast, in drag and underwater ----

Here's one of my patented One Sentence Movie Reviews that some will take as discouragement and others as endorsement - Electric Apricot: Quest For Festeroo offers exactly what one would expect from a film helmed by Les Claypool of Primus: Terrible music that gets stuck in your head, jokes that are rarely funny, men who are even uglier beneath all that hair, and a devotional audience seemingly unaware of any of this.....

Wow, to say that one "starts off slow" is to really undersell how gradually it makes that left turn into genuine wonkyness. Not boring tho, I was on board for the whole thing - the Klaus Schultz soundtrack kicks in more and more as the whole movie becomes just as not-quite-right as its cars with people driving on the wrong side. It isn't until very near the end that things go off the road entirely, with such engaging style that I was very glad I took the long, mostly leisurely drive. I absolutely ended up somewhere unexpected, and even said "Wow!" out loud a couple of times at the end.

And just when I thought they were gonna cheap out on the budget, they surprised me one more time, almost literally in the movie's rear view mirror. Add to that how the soundtrack completely sells it for me, and I found it a very good (if glacially paced) show ---

Maybe the best documentary I've seen in years. "Tread" is the story of a handy guy named Marvin Heemeyer who got screwed over by a small town good old boy network that made it impossible to keep his muffler shop business, so he locked himself in a garage for a few months while he rebuilt a bulldozer into something like that TV movie Killdozer, a rolling tank that he used to take down the town hall and the buildings of several adversaries, without ever actually injuring anyone. He just rolled out one day and destroyed the property of everyone who destroyed his dream.

The film uses footage of the rampage, recreation footage, and the actual tapes Marvin made as he worked on the Killdozer, talking about why and how he felt it was up to him to dish out justice. I remember the news stories when it happened, so it was just fascinating to meet all the people Marvin talked about and see the inside story of what really happened --- easily the best thing I've seen on Netflix since the new seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000!

Marvin clearly suffered from serious mental illness. One thing I liked about the documentary is that it gave equal time to everyone in town, which made it even more clear that things weren't as Marvin imagined. The neighboring business Marvin fought so hard against turned out to be good for the town. That's what's so fascinating, the inside look at how one guy got the picture so twisted in his head, and was just brilliant enough - and crazy enough - to try and go out with some kind of apocalyptic even-scale reckoning.

Like one interviewee says, a good friend of Marvin's - he probably just spent too much time alone in his hot tub. One guy with a twisted reality can impose that false reality on a big chunk of the real world, at least when he has the power to do so -- certainly seems applicable to the times we live in now!