J*A*S*M

A very well executed subterranean horror adventure. The setting is great a horror film, plus it works with the Indiana Jones theme of exploring forgotten spaces left behind by ancient civilizations – on paper it all sounds like they've refined the film just for me. It was also to see that there's plenty of time spent introducing the characters in the opening, so they don't just act as fungible meat for the slaughter. So why only mild genre satisfaction? For one thing, the film is atmospheric, but not at all scary. The monster is designed quite nicely, but it looks strangely stiff, and like it would disintegrate if you lightly poked it. And secondly – and this was a bigger problem for me – the script is a real pain in the second half of the film. We spend long minutes with the professor walking around the cave with his journal and a very forced mythology to let us know what we are dealing with. And that impression of scripted sanity is completely lost when the other characters (not qualified miners!) start digging through the professor's diary (supposedly summarising 27 years of research) and successfully deciphering ancient writing from his notes. I mentally told the filmmakers to just let the characters mindlessly run through the underground passages and not make up such crap.

I considered quitting the series during the first two episodes, I wasn't enjoying, and the two main mystery themes dealt with didn't hook me at all. The countdown to whatever and the mystery video game were getting on my nerves. And it wasn't helped by the characters either, I didn't find any of them to be endearing in any way. It wasn't until the last few minutes with an interesting cliffhanger that always made me turn on the next episode. Well from episode three onwards, in which it becomes fully apparent what is actually going on in the grand scheme of things, I started to enjoy 3 Body Problem. The premise is fascinating, but I feel like they had to cut significantly from the book. There are a number of things that raise questions, but are they unexplained nonsense, or just unexplained details that the book may present better? If Benioff and Weiss have succeeded in anything, it is in making me want to read the book trilogy.

Matthew Vaughn is successfully copying Zack Snyder's creative trajectory. He's not at the finish line yet, but he's getting close. A tiresome, mechanical layering of twists and turns (where no one can be able to tell if the film still makes any sense on any level by halfway through the running time at the latest) wrapped in a sometimes aesthetically repugnant package, complete with humour for first graders in elementary school. Even the acting doesn't work. As a director, Vaughn manages to give drive to at least some of the action scenes here, but far from all of them (e.g. the opening sequence on the train, switching between two actors, struck me as completely disjointed and ultimately annoying).

Infested can most easily be described as a mix of Arachnophobia, REC, and Evil Dead Rise, and it's really no wonder Sébastien Vaniček was put in charge of the next addition to the latter franchise. This debut is an instant ticket to the premier horror league, managing to make a perfectly crafted, very intense film that doesn't have much competition within the spider horror genre. Especially, as long as the creatures are small and nimble, it worked for me 100% and I twitched with very high frequency. I don't even want to imagine how much better this film would have worked if it had more likeable characters that you cared about. The protagonists are, for me at least, the biggest stumbling block, especially the fact that their characters imply some very questionable decisions, which at one point exceeded my tolerance level. There is a thing one of the characters does about 15 minutes before the end that wouldn't have been done by the most anti-system asshole at that point, there's just no justification for it. It's exactly the moment when, as a viewer, I stop "experiencing" what's happening on the screen and start saying WTF instead.

Fine production design, and that’s pretty much it. Everything else is somehow weirdly out of order, the film doesn't work on any of the potentially intended levels (horror/comedy/romance). It could have been more balanced, it could have cut down on the overacting here and add some dialogue there to make the main character's behavior seem at least a little bit meaningful. Plus, it has an annoyingly skewed sense of morality, it didn't strike me as sympathetic at all from a certain point on. And I have Diablo Cody historically pegged as a skilled screenwriter, but damn, it's been 17 years since Juno.

At first it's a bit annoying when the introductory half hour with a bunch of prehistoric people seems like a necessary evil, but once it switches to survival mode it's great. Beautifully shot, atmospheric, suspenseful. And in the end, it turns out that Out of Darkness isn't just the expected prehistoric variation on Predator, but that the story makes sense and is well conceived. I would have ideally imagined the protagonists a level more rugged, it didn't strike me as 100% authentic, but I'm not an expert on the fashion and grooming habits of people 45,000 years ago, so I won't go into more detail. Anyway, the first good genre film this year.

The scale of terror in Calamity of Snakes is completely off the charts when compared to almost all competing animal attack horror films. I really don't think I've ever seen that in my life, anyone with a phobia of snakes will either turn it off or die very soon. On the other hand, by today's standards, it's not a very good film, unfortunately. Ridiculous acting, inappropriate humour, lousy editing, when the victims are attacked, the snakes are obviously thrown from behind the camera ... the killing of real animals during filming is a chapter of its own, I don't want to watch it today and I wouldn't want to watch it in 1982. Morally rubbish, film quality barely a two, horror impression easily a four, so take your pick. I'd take a serious remake any day.

I wonder if the first wave of reviewers, who before the broadcast were shouting in unison (in retrospect) raving lines about the best True Detective season, were just getting drunk on a roll (the impression of exclusivity of being the first to see it) or if they got a proper reward from the studio. Most likely, HBO did a good job of calculating who they could exclusively show it to in order to get the desired response. I guess it wasn't exactly hard – after the final episode, it seems that the biggest focus was on hanging all the progressive themes on the "plot" that "journalists" automatically give points for. So there's a dominant protagonist (and it doesn't matter that she's extremely unlikeable), strongly represented minorities (and it doesn't matter that Kali Reis isn't up to the acting), environmental themes and positively framed terrorist activists, or a supposed Inuit mystique consisting of occasional esoteric bollocks and wandering digital beasts. I'd a hundred times rather watch a progressive thing than a conservative thing myself, but it annoys me to no end that someone thinks it will be enough on its own. Make a damn good crime drama in the first place. For five episodes I tolerated Night Country as an annoyingly drawn-out but – perhaps – average crime drama, but I found the finale a mockery. It was stupid on so many levels! I burst out laughing out loud at the flashback reconstruction of what actually happened at the base.

A nice and atmospheric location, and interesting premise and some decently done nastiness is what The Breach boasts. But it's also clumsily written, amateurishly acted at best, and above all, terribly directed. It doesn't work at all, any hint of atmosphere or tension is immediately killed by something. I went into the film despite not much feedback because of the name of the director, whose first feature I quite liked a few years ago, but I don't know. Either for some reason he delivered a performance several levels worse this time around, or I was so shitfaced when I watched The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh that I didn't notice how shoddy the director was.

I binged the entire series after the WTF twitter responses to the last episode, and the prevailing feeling is probably confusion coupled with crankiness. The series has plenty of flashes of brilliance, but I don't feel completely satisfied as a viewer. It worked best for me in moments of comedic satire on virtue signalling, over-the-top camerawork and the hypocrisy of the rich, but The Curse has many more of those genres and themes, and they don't all seem to come to a satisfying conclusion. The last episode is quite crazy from about the halfway point on, but it's preceded by nine hours of relatively down-to-earth normal drama. It strikes me as a reflection of the conceit of the creators, the same conceit that the show's protagonists suffer from.