Category Archives: TV Show

Horror TV Review: The Walking Dead 11.7 “Promises Broken” (dir by Sharat Raju)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s been such a busy week that it was only about an hour ago that I was finally able to sit down and actually watch last Saturday’s episode of The Walking Dead.  

As I watched Promises Broken, I found myself asking one question over and over again.  Can Maggie and Negan just kiss already?  Seriously, it’s totally obvious that Maggie and Negan are in love.  Even if the writers didn’t necessarily plan for them to be in love, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan definitely have the right chemistry for some Maggie/Negan action.  And I know some people are going to say that it’ll never happen because of what happened in the past but listen …. Glenn’s been dead for a long time.  Because of the time jump, he’s been dead even longer on the series than he has been in reality.  The world of the Walking Dead is a different place and traditional periods of mourning no longer hold much currency.  It’s time to move on.

This week, Negan did convince Maggie to stop plotting to kill him.  That was definitely a step forward.  Then he taught her how to wear a whisperer’s mask.  Awwwwww!  But then he said that he should have killed Rick’s entire party when he had the chance and that …. well, that was awkward.  I know I’ve been critical of the way the show has used Negan in the past but, this season, he’s gotten on my nerves a lot less and Jeffrey Dean Morgan finally seems to have a handle on the character.

As for the Reapers …. eh, who cares.  Pope sent Daryl and Leah on a scouting mission.  They came across a family of survivors.  They didn’t kill the survivors like they were supposed to.  Pope will probably be pissed off but Pope’s always pissed off so who cares?  The Reapers are like totally squaresville.  Real melvin.

Meanwhile, in the Commonwealth …. well, listen, I just love the Commonwealth!  There’s just something so brilliant about this gated, suburban community just sitting there in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.  So far, this season’s best scenes have been set in the Commonwealth and that continued to be true this week.  In the latest episode, Eugene and the Gang had to do community service by killing walkers.  Unfortunately, this led to Eugene and Stephanie interrupting a date between Sebastian Milton and his girlfriend, Kayla.  Sebastian, who is basically the preppy from Hell, got mad about the interruption.  Words were exchanged  Eugene punched Sebastian.  Uh-oh!  Sebastian is the son of Governor Milton!  Eugene ended up getting thrown in jail, where he was informed that he was going to stay imprisoned unless he gave up the location of Alexandria.  Is it is possible that all of this was just a set up to get Eugene to turn snitch?  Bravo, Commonwealth, bravo!

Interestingly enough, Sebastian Milton played a small but key role in the final few issues of The Walking Dead comic book.  After Rick (who was still around in the comic book) took over the Commonwealth and started to form an alliance with the recently deposed Governor Milton, a jealous Sebastian ended up killing him.  On the TV show, of course, Carl is dead and Rick is believed dead.  Unless the show is going to go super dark and kill off either Judith or Rick, Jr., there are no members of the Grimes family for Sebatian to kill.  In theory, who would Sebastian kill?  Ezekiel, with his leadership experience and his messianic tendencies, seem the most likely to take power in the Commonwealth so he might want to watch his back.

Next week is the finale of the first half of season 11.  So far, season 11 has been a bit uneven but it’s started to pick some momentum with the previous few episodes.  Hopefully, that momentum will continue to build and season 11 will give this show the conclusion that it deserves.

Horror On TV: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.13 “The Baron’s Bride” (dir by Bradford May)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of Friday the 13th: The Series, Micki and Ryan go back to Victorian-era London and deal with a vampire.

Who doesn’t like a good vampire story?

This episode originally aired on February 20th, 1988.

Horror On TV: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.12 “Faith Healer” (dir by David Cronenberg)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of Friday the 13th is all about fake faith healers but, even more importantly, it was directd by none other than David Cronenberg!

Be sure to keep an eye out for Robert Silverman, a Cronenberg regular who had important roles in The Brood and Scanners and who has appeared in a host of other Cronenberg films over the years.  He also appeared in Prom Night, playing the creepy janitor who is briefly used as a red herring before the identity of the real murdere is revealed.

This episode originally aired on February 13th, 1988.  (Originally, I got excited when I saw that date but, checking with a calendar, I saw that this show aired on a Saturday the 13th and not an actual Friday the 13th.)  Unfortunately, due to budget cuts after the show’s first season, Cronenberg would be Friday the 13th‘s last celebrity director.

(Cronenberg would, however, go on to appear in Jason X.)

“East Hell”, Review by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

Finally, I get to watch a good short. I will not lead you astray. This short is worth your time. I promise. It goes for comedy and achieves it. A short is successful if you care about the story and characters and get an emotional response in a brief period of time. Really, that is a tremendous achievement. It has a mean girl (well, mean girl demon), two aspiring devil worshippers, and a neglected boy who needs a sitter.

The two girls summon a demon and she appears and it’s awesome!!! The girls are all goth and the Demon is too cool for school-Brooklyn-hipster-badass.

The demon starts savaging them, “You’d be really pretty if it weren’t for your clothes and face and house”. This is fun because demons are usually scary, slick, or sexy, but that’s usually only the purview of male demons. It was fun dark girl power. I felt like I was back in the City and it’s nice to know that these people still exist in my absence.

After the demon is summoned, she’s takes a liking to the real underdog and the story becomes a quasi-revenge story. I really to hope to see Lauren Cipoletti (The Demon) more. She has great comic timing and we need more of her!

When a short is done well, it’s great!

A Blast From The Past: Donald Pleasence Guest Stars On Columbo

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

A few days ago, we observed the birthday of Donald Pleasence, a great actor who became a horror icon with his performance as Dr. Sam Loomis in Halloween. However, 5 years before a generation of filmgoers first met Dr. Loomis, Donald Pleasence played a wine connoisseur-turned murderer on a classic and much acclaimed episode of the classic detective show, Columbo.

Largely due to the battle of wits between Donald Pleasence and Peter Falk — two of the best character actors of their generation — Any Old Port In A Storm has come to be seen as one of the best episodes ever of this still much-beloved detective show. This episode originally aired on October 7th, 1973, just two days after Pleasence’s birthday. Today, on the 48th anniversary of the episode’s airing, the Shattered Lens is proud to share Donald Pleasence and Peter Falk in Any Old Port In A Storm!

As we frequently say around these parts, enjoy!

Horror on TV: Friday the 13th The Series 1.11 “Scarecrow” (dir by William Fruet)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of Friday the 13th The Series finds Micki and Ryan tracking down a cursed scarecrow. The scarecrow guarantees a good crop but only after three people have had their heads chopped off. AGCK!

Listen, folks, scarecrows are scary enough even when they aren’t chopping off people’s heads. I’ve lived around farms. Scarecrows are scary as Hell!

Enjoy!

ORIGIN, Film Review, by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

I have a love/hate relationship with short films because there isn’t a middle ground. Film school is starting to look like a place to go to get in from the rain. When they’re done well, it’s so moving and amazing because in this short period of time, I cared about these characters and was sad to see them fail or overjoyed to see them win. What a lot of filmmakers fail to understand about the short is how challenging they are and really it should inform them that maybe they should try something else. Painting? Sculpting? Insurance? Mail Carrier? Many terrible short-filmmakers will evolve into terrible feature-length story tellers. They have to be stopped!

The short film becomes the proving ground for their bad habits: trading a shocking shot for narrative, trading grittiness for character likeability, trading story structure for a lazy jumbled mess masquerading as realism.

ORIGIN is the worst short that I’ve ever seen. It’s good in that it shows what NOT to do. The story is derivative and boring. The characters are unlikeable, which might trick a teacher into saying great realism, but in reality – banal unlikeable characters lower your stakes and destroy your final act. The dialogue is predictable. The emotion is stilted and unbelievable. Sadly, it was thirteen minutes too long (runtime 13 minutes).

ORIGIN depicts a banal and horrible family dealing with their son being attacked and slowly transforming into a monster. The son doesn’t speak and we learn nothing about him; so, I didn’t care when he died. The father was gross, boring, and annoying; so, I didn’t care when he had to put his monster son down. The mom was a boring/cheating whiner. Her dull and uncaring boyfriend was just sort of there sometimes like a mailbox. The mom and her boyfriend added nothing and slowed an already terrible story down.

What was really insulting was the hamfisted violins at the end that were way too loud to let me know- this is where you should feel……sad. Well, I didn’t and no one should. Don’t tell me how to feel. You have to earn concern. You have to earn stakes. Just having a bunch of unlikeable people running around is boring. We need a show on TLC called filmmaker intervention! This person must be stopped!

Here’s The First Trailer For House of the Dragon!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

HBOMax has a Game of Thrones prequel coming out.  If you weren’t aware of that or had forgotten about it, don’t feel bad. So did I and I’m actually supposed to keep up with this stuff!

It’s definitely a sign of how let down everyone was by the final season of GoT that the production of House of the Dragon has gotten almost not attention.  Personally, I’m kind of intrigued by the show but, at the same time, it’s hard to deny that there’s been a huge backlash against Game of Thrones.  Ever since the final season, it’s become increasingly difficult to find anyone who is willing to admit that they enjoyed the show.

And yet, I know for a fact that people did enjoy the show.  Game of Thrones wouldn’t have gone for as long as it did if not for its very passionate fan base.  There’s a lot of revisionist history going when it comes to Game of Thrones.  Quite frankly, the anger that the finale generated could only have been generated by people who, after devoting several years of their lives to a program, felt that their loyalty and love had been betrayed.

(Of course, that “Who has a better story than Bram the Broken?” line didn’t help.)

So, will House of the Dragon be another success or will it be something like one of the The Walking Dead prequel series, forever destined to live in the shadow of the show that spawned it?  We’ll find out next year!  For now, here’s the official trailer for House of the Dragon:

Horror on TV: Friday the 13th The Series 1.7 “Doctor Jack”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of Friday the 13th: The Series finds Micki, Ryan, and Jack investigating a series of slashings that might be connected to a renowned surgeon named Vincent Howlett (played by Cliff Gorman, who also played an actor based on Dustin Hoffman in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz).  Howlett has a 100% success rate and he owes it all to his antique scalpel.  Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s a deadly and bloody price for Howlett’s success in the operating room….

This episode was written by Marc Scott Zicree, who also wrote the definitive guide to the original Twilight Zone.  The plot — with its theme of a man doing great evil so that he can do great good — certainly feels like it wouldn’t have been out of place as an episode of Rod Serling’s classic anthology series.

This episode originally aired in 1987, on November 9th (hey, that’s my birthday!)

Enjoy!

Horror on TV: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.5 “Hellowe’en” (dir by Timothy Bond)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of Friday the 13th: The Series is a Halloween episode!

For some reason, Ryan and Micki decide that it would be a good idea to throw a Halloween party in a cursed antique store.  Unfortunately, their evil Uncle Lewis is determined to return from Hell and what better time to do that than on the greatest holiday of them all!?

This episode is distinguished by the presence of the great character actor R.G. Armstrong, going totally over-the-top as Lewis and having a lot of fun while doing it!  Something to keep an eye on during the Halloween party are the costumes.  You’ll see a lot of sheets and leotards.  You won’t see many familiar characters, largely because it would have cost money to feature any of them.  That’s not a complaint, though.  Personally, I like it when people make their own Halloween costumes, as opposed to just copying whatever’s popular.

This episode originally aired on October 26th, 1987.