Tag Archives: review

TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead 7.6 “Reclamation” (dir by Billie Woodruff)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I just watched the latest episode of Fear The Walking Dead and I have to say that this is probably the first time this season where I really felt lost.   I think that if I had watched the previous seasons, I would have had a better reaction to this particular episode.  But, I have to admit that I had to use Wikipedia to discover who Al was and why Morgan and Grace were looking for her.

I will say that Maggie Grace did give a good performance as Al and it was hard not to get caught up in her joy as she experimented with that cannon.  And I do like the idea of someone trying to travel the country and record people’s experiences for future generations.  Whenever I watch any of the Walking Dead shows, I always wonder what it’s going to be like for the people who were born after the zombie apocalypse and who have no memory of what the world was like before the dead starting walking.  Everything that we take for granted today would be viewed the way that we currently view the Roman Empire, a remote and almost mythological time that sometimes seems to be beyond understanding.

Unfortunately, there were many moments when the latest episode reminded me of one of those old Walking Dead episodes where almost the entire show would just be Rick driving from one location to another, having endless conversations about everything other than what the viewer wanted to hear about.  The episode was bit too slowly paced for me, which has always been a frequent issue when it comes to The Walking Dead and its spin-offs.

That said, it appears that things have worked out well for Al and Isabelle so yay!  And tomorrow night’s episode will apparently feature Strand so an even bigger yay! for that.  Strand is a far more compelling villain that the paramilitary thugs that wandered through this episode (not to mention Walking Dead: World Beyond).

TV Review: Dexter: New Blood 1.3 “Smoke Signals” (dir by Sanford Bookstaver)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s been a busy week, with my sister’s birthday and Thanksgiving, so it was only this morning that I finally got a chance to watch the latest episode of Dexter: New Blood.  

A lot happened in Smoke Signals.  In fact, it was probably the busiest episode of the series so far.  That’s not a complaint, of course.  If anything, this episode felt like a classic episode of the first Dexter series.  In Miami, there was always a lot going on around Dexter while Dexter tried to figure out a way to dispose of his latest victim.  The latest episode would seem to suggest that, chilly weather aside, upstate New York is not that much different from Dexter’s former home.

Here’s a quick rundown of what did happen:

First off, Lily the hitchhiker was killed by the serial killer who we all know is going to turn out to be Olsen.

Harrison is now a student at the local high school.  He stood up to group of bullies, which was cool.  But, by grabbing the bully by throat and basically strangling him while demanding that the bully leave his friends alone, Harrison confirmed my suspicion that he’s got his own Dark Passenger.

Audrey, who is kind of annoying, told Olsen to stop “fucking up the planet.”  Olsen pointed out that Audrey drives an “old gas guzzler.”  It seems kind of obvious to me that, along with being a Count Zaroff-style serial killer, Olsen is also Audrey father.

Angela continued to investigate Matt’s death and Dexter again found himself in the weird position of being the closest confidant to the people investigating a murder that he committed.

Dexter spent most of the episode trying to figure out how to get rid of Matt’s body.  It turned out to be not as easy as he thought it would be.  Eventually, after watching the Seneca people burn the body of the deer that Matt shot, it occurred to Dexter to do the same thing with Matt.

No sooner had Dexter finished stuffing Matt in the incinerator than he ran into Matt’s father, Kurt.  Kurt was totally drunk and swore that he had just had a conversation with Matt and that Matt was still alive!  I’m interested to see what the show does with the character of Kurt.  At first, I thought he’d just be another person who would eventually come too close to revealing the truth about Dexter, like Doakes from the first two seasons.  But the end of the latest episode, with Dexter driving the drunk Kurt home, suggested that their relationship could become a bit more complex.

For myself, the highlight of this episode was Ghost Deb, who spent the entire show popping up at the least opportune times and profanely taunting Dexter over his inability to get rid of Matt’s body.  Ghost Deb had a point.  Dexter is out of practice and his idea that he could somehow turn his urges on-and-off was a foolish one.  Dexter should know better.  Ghost Deb and the wood chipper was a great Dexter moment.

All in all, it was a good episode.  I do wish that Olsen was a bit less obvious in his villainy but Dexter was never exactly known for its nuanced villains.  The Trinity Killer was more the exception than the rule. That said, I’m interested to see where all of this stuff with Harrison leads.  Is Harrison a killer-in-training and, if so, how is Dexter going to deal with that?

Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow!

Lifetime Film Review: Abduction Runs In The Family (dir by Jeff Hare)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

If abduction runs in you family, it might be time to get a new family.

Or it might just be time to make sure that you’re really, really good at it because, if abduction is the family business, you don’t want to be embarrassed at the next family reunion.

Abduction Runs In The Family in not only an ominous way to describe your relations but it’s also the title of a Lifetime movie.  It stars Jessica Morris as Alyssa.  When she was a child, Alyssa was abducted by a man named Miles (James Hyde).  Miles did not abuse or deliberately harm Alyssa.  Instead, he wanted a replacement for his daughter, Sophie and, when he abducted her, he treated her as if she was his own daughter.  Alyssa was eventually rescued and Miles was sent to prison.  Now, years later, Alyssa has become famous as a result of talking and writing about how she was not only kidnapped but how she also eventually forgave Miles for what he did.  As the movie begins, Miles is about to get out of prison and Alyssa has a book coming out about her experience.  Finally, life is providing a chance for both of them to get on with their lives.  Miles, of course, has been given a restraining order as a condition of his parole.  He’s not to go anywhere near Alyssa or her daughter, Emma.

But then …. Emma disappears!

Emma’s been abducted and Miles is Alyssa’s number one suspect.  However, Miles has an alibi for the entire afternoon and he insists that he did not kidnap Emma.  If Miles didn’t do it, who did?  Can Alyssa rescue Emma with the help of the man who abducted Alyssa so many years ago?

Abduction Runs In The Family is an interesting Lifetime film, largely because it takes an unexpected approach to the relationship between Alyssa and Miles.  Alyssa insists that, after kidnapping her, Miles only treated her with kindness and fatherly love and the film keeps you guessing as to whether Alyssa’s memories are correct or if she’s still suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.  Miles is creepy, largely due to his past, and yet he still seems to be sincere in his desire to move on from his previous actions.  It leads to an interesting dynamic between the two characters, who are both well-played by Morris and Hyde.

Unfortunately, the solution to the mystery itself isn’t particularly satisfying.  This is one of those Lifetime mysteries where the film overall would have benefitted from a few more suspects because once you eliminate one them, there’s pretty much only one other person left.  And, unfortunately, a good deal of the film’s conclusion rests on the guilty party leaving a very obvious clue out in the open for everyone to see.

All that said, this is still a compelling Lifetime film, one that takes its story in some unexpected directions.  The final scene between Morris and Hyde is nicely acted and written.  This is definitely a Lifetime film to keep an eye out for.

Music Video of the Day: Do You? by Rebecca Black (2019, dir by Bia Jurema)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s a music video out there for a song called “This is Thanksgiving.”  I was originally going to share it because it’s one of those videos that’s regularly cited as being one of the worst ever made.  However, I changed my mind because a lot of the comments that I saw underneath the video were extremely mean-spirited and seemed to be personally attacking the girl who sang the song, as if it was her fault that some creepy old man wrote a bad song and directed a crappy video.

Anyway, that got me thinking about Rebecca Black, who was the subject of a lot of unfair ridicule over Friday.  The good thing about Rebecca’s story, however, is that she didn’t give up and she’s continued to perform and most of her post-Friday stuff isn’t bad at all.

In fact, here’s the video for Do You?, performed by Rebecca Black.

Enjoy!

Lifetime Film Review: V.C. Andrews’ Pearl in the Mist (dir by David Bercovici-Artieda)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since I kind of enjoyed watching Ruby earlier today, I decided to watch the second film in Lifetime’s Landry family saga, V.C. Andrews’ Pearl In the Mist.

Pearl in the Mist picks up where the first film ended.  The year is 1962 and aspiring artist Ruby (Raechelle Banno) is living in New Orleans and still thinking about the life that she left behind in the Bayou.  Her father (Gil Bellows) is still married to her bitchy stepmother (Lauralee Bell).  Ruby’s twin sister, Giselle (Karina Banno), is still using a wheelchair as a result of a car accident and she’s still angry that Ruby stole away Giselle’s boyfriend, Beau (Ty Wood).  Ruby’s half-brother, Paul (Sam Duke), is still living in the Bayou and is still in love with Ruby, despite the fact that any physical relationship between them would be incestuous.

However, it’s time for Ruby and Giselle to get out of New Orleans.  They’ve been enrolled in a prestigious boarding school.  Giselle is not happy about having to leave home.  Ruby is excited because, goddammit, Ruby’s excited about everything.  At the boarding school, Ruby deals with all sorts of drama.  She befriends a girl who is passing as white.  She inspires a blind pianist.  She flirts with a hunky groundskeeper.  She continues to paint under the tutelage of Miss Stevens (Meaghan Hewitt McDonald).  She does all of this despite the fact that the school’s headmistress (Marilu Henner) hates her because Ruby is from the Bayou and no one trusts “swamp people.”  As the same time, Ruby has to deal with her wicked stepmother and her bitter sister.

I have to admit that, at first, I didn’t think I was going to like Pearl in the Mist, if just because Ruby herself was so perfect that she was kind of annoying.  She never had a bad thought.  She never said a bad word.  She was also so extremely naïve and so endlessly enthusiastic that I could understand why Giselle was so sick of having to deal with her.  Ruby’s innocence made sense in the first film, because Ruby was still adjusting to life in the city.  But, by the time Pearl in the Mist rolls around, there’s really no excuse for Ruby to be so clueless about …. well, everything.

Fortunately, about halfway through, the film started to get interesting.  Bizarre incidents started to pile up.  Characters started to snap at each other in dialogue that was so overwritten and pulpy that it was kind of impossible not to love the sound of it.  The film embraced the melodrama, as I like to say.  It all eventually led to a plot twist involving Giselle that was so insane and so out there that it redeemed the entire film.  Karina Banno appeared to be having a lot of fun being bad as Giselle and it was fun to watch her.  If you’re going to be in a film like this, you always want to play the bad girl.  They always get the best lines.

In the end, Pearl in the Mist was so over-the-top and cheerfully silly that I couldn’t help but enjoy it.  All trips to the Bayou should be as fun.

Lifetime Film Review: V.C. Andrews’ Ruby (dir by Gail Harvey)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This time is the 1950s and the place is Louisiana.  Ruby Landry (Raechelle Banno) is a teenage girl who lives in a shack out on the Bayou.  She’s never known her mother.  She’s never known her father.  She does know her Grandmere, Catherine (Naomi Judd), who is a Bayou witch.  

Ruby might not know much but she knows how to paint.  One day, the owner of a New Orleans art gallery just happened to be driving by when he spots Catherine selling Ruby’s paintings on the side of the road.  He’s impressed, even though the paintings aren’t really that impressive.  He buys the paintings and then hangs them in his gallery.  Ruby can’t wait until she graduates high school so that she can move to New Orleans with her boyfriend, Paul Tate (Sam Duke).  Except … uh-oh!  Grandmere explains to Ruby that Paul is actually her half-brother so no, they can’t run off together.  That’s incest and that might be okay for the Ozarks but folks in the Bayous got standards.

As long as secrets are being shared, Grandmere also explains that Ruby’s father is a wealthy man named Pierre Dumas (Gil Bellow) and that Ruby actually has a twin sister, who we later learn is named Gisselle (and who is played by Karina Banno, the twin sister of Raechelle Banno).  Having dropped a lot of information on Ruby, Grandmere promptly dies.

Ruby inherits Grandmere’s shack and she still has the money that she made off of her paintings, which means that Ruby is now one of the richest people in the Bayou.  However, her alcoholic grandfather still wants to sell her to a local businessman so Ruby flees the Bayous, heads to New Orleans, and decides to live with Pierre!

Pierre is ecstatic to discover that he has another daughter.  Pierre’s wife (Lauralee Bell) is a bit less excited about it.  And Gisselle claims that she could hardly care less about her Bayou sister.  In fact, it seems like Ruby’s only ally is the housekeeper who, it turns out, knows all of the best voodoo priestesses in New Orleans….

Now, believe it or not, all of that happens within the first 30 minutes of Ruby.  Ruby is not a boring film.  In fact, one could claim that there’s almost too much going on.  No sooner has Ruby moved into the house than she’s hearing mysterious weeping coming from one of the bedrooms.  No sooner has Ruby started high school in New Orleans than she’s being set up for humiliation by her twin sister.  As soon as Ruby draws one of her classmates naked, you know that she’s going to end up in an asylum where a doctor will demand to know if she’s familiar with the term nymphomania.  Ruby is a big and messy film, one that embraces the melodrama with so much enthusiasm that it’s easy to overlook that the film really doesn’t make much sense and that a lot of the plot is dependent upon people not being particularly smart.

Ruby is one of the many recent Lifetime films to be adapted from a V.C. Andrews novel.  Now, of course, V.C. Andrews didn’t have anything to do with writing Ruby.  She died long before the book was written.  Instead, Ruby was written by ghost writer, pretending to be Andrews.  The plot ticks off all of the usual V.C. Andrews tropes with such precision that it’s hard not to be both impressed and amused.  White trash?  Yep.  Incest?  Yep.  Rich relatives?  Yep.  More incest?  Yep.  Big house?  Yep.  Twins?  Yep.  If you made use of a random V.C. Andrews plot generation, it would probably give you something similar to Ruby.

Ruby is silly fun.  It doesn’t reach the heights of Flowers in the Attic films but it’s still better than the films that Lifetime made about the Casteel family.  It was also the first of four films about Ruby and her family.  I’ve got the other three on the DVR and I’ll be watching and hopefully reviewing them before the month ends.

Lifetime Film Review: A Professor’s Vengeance (dir by Danny J. Boyle)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

When aspiring writer Nicole Atkins (Lindsey Dresbach) returns to graduate school, she assumes that she’ll take a few creative writing courses and that will be it.  Unfortunately, her creative writing professor has come down with a case of mono and his replacement is Daniel Hudson (Ross Jirgl), an arrogant academic with whom Nicole previously had a torrid affair.  At time, of course, Nicole didn’t know that Daniel was married to a veterinarian named Valerie (Crystal Day).

It’s an awkward situation but Nicole hopes that her previous relationship with Daniel won’t be a factor in the grades that he gives her.  Daniel, meanwhile, seems to be perturbed by the fact that Nicole is getting close to another student, Brandon (Byran Bachman).  When one of Nicole’s papers gets an F, Daniel explains that he actually gave her an A.  Maybe, Daniel suggests, Brandon hacked into the system and changed her grade, all in an effort to make Daniel look bad.

Meanwhile, students are dying.  The police think that the deaths are due to accidental drug overdoses but the viewer knows that there’s a murderer stalking the campus and anyone who has ever had any sort of relationship with Daniel is a potential target!

If this was one of Lifetime’s “Wrong” films, A Professor’s Vengeance would have concluded with Vivica A. Fox showing up at the end and saying, “Looks like you slept with the Wrong Professor” or “You picked the Wrong Major.”  However, it’s not a part of the Wrong series, even if it does have a plot that feels like it would have been perfect for the particular franchise.  Also, like the majority of the Wrong films, A Professor’s Vengeance is a thoroughly fun and enjoyable Lifetime melodrama, full of lies, sex, death, and a smug man who you just can’t wait to see get his comeuppance.  It also has a twist ending and a nicely done dream sequence!  Seriously, what more could you ask for from a film like this?

Ross Jirgl is wonderfully hissable as the smug professor but the film is truly stolen by Crystal Day, playing the professor’s wife.  Day perfectly captures the fury of a woman who is smart enough to know better than to trust her husband and her building anger as it becomes obvious that he’s cheated on her is one of the best parts of the film.  Lindsey Dresbach is a likable heroine and, just as importantly, she’s also believable as someone who could write a short story that someone would actually want to publish.  Meanwhile, Bryan Bachman is very sweet and sympathetic as her well-meaning classmate.  Of course, it’s not a Lifetime film without a skeptical police detective and, in this film, that role is well-played by Kate Dailey.  If I ever committed a crime, I would not want to be questioned by Kate Dailey’s detective.  I would probably start naming names as soon as she shot me that first glare.

I very much enjoyed A Professor’s Vengeance.  It’s exactly the type of film that made me fall in love with Lifetime in the first place.