Evildad Reviews

Bodies (2023)

Excellent series

[9/10 · 10 March 2024]

This is a great series that drew me in with each episode. It certainly was NOT what I expected. Instead of a police mystery over multiple decades, we get a time travel story with four different police officers trying to unravel a conspiracy over 150 years. Each of the characters is engaging (although DS Whiteman was straight out of a film noir), and I really cared about each of their fates. It's a series that, if you don't binge it, you at least have to avoid letting too much time pass between episodes, and you really have to pay attention to the details, because they're important.

Most time travel stories seem to have a forced ending of one kind or another, but the final episode of this series was extremely satisfying. The best television i've seen in awhile.

Restoration Road: Montana Grist Mill (2021) Season 1, Episode 2

No restoration here!

[1/10 · 19 September 2023]

Nothing about this episode involved restoration. They take a potentially historic barn from upstate New York, disassemble it, and haul it to Montana to build a fake gristmill on some Montana rancher's land. They simply use the heavy timbers of the barn to make the frame of the mill, which is an obvious tourist attraction on the ranch. The water supply to the wheel isn't even directly flowing to the wheel, it has to be pumped up to a tank to drive the wheel, which pushes a very small set of stones to grind a little wheat for the tourists. As someone who has been involved in historic restoration, this show's title is an embarrassment.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

17 years later, still sucks

[3/10 · 22 January 2018]

I just watched this on Starz, so it was uncut, and before I got very far into it, I had to come here and see what others thought of it. I'm surprised at all the apologists for John Carpenter. "It will be a classic in another decade." Um, no.

First, the plot (something out of Mars' past has been released and is affecting the human colonists) is actually a very good idea. Heck, the general story itself wasn't bad. But the implementation, from the exposition (having the LT describe what happened) to the dialog to the silly battle scenes (the individual fight scenes in close quarters were actually quite good) was just mediocre. It doesn't help that Ice Cube can NOT act. When he runs into the fight randomly firing machine pistols out to each side with no attempt to aim or conserve ammo, I groaned audibly.

The idea that the LT's drugs could help fight off the "ghosts" was pretty good, and should have been explored. As a Jason Statham fan, I was disappointed at how wasted he was in his role in "Ghosts."

This could have been another "The Thing" if Carpenter hadn't wanted to have a fighting free-for-all. No, Carpenter has never had a hit movie, but he has made a few films that are very worthy of re-watches. This isn't one of them.

Salvation (2017– )

Better than the others think

[6/10 · 7 August 2017]

I was surprised to learn that this is a CBS show, because I've been watching it on Amazon Prime. If I had to sit through commercials, I'd probably bail out, but uninterrupted, the show is actually quite watchable. Someone complained about the sex lives of the characters, but that's pretty much resolved by episode 2, so that the story moves forward without that crap. The characters are likable and hatable (zat a word?), as appropriate, and one of the things that drives the show is the mystery about Darius' true intentions. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? We're still not sure, although given the government representatives, he's probably still the best alternative.

That's the other thing about the show. Unlike all those other comet/asteroid disaster movies, the government's stooges not the good guys here. Their ideas are desperate and stupid, and yet the red tape that prevents them from working fully with Darius is all too real. The idea that they're worried about giving Darius a billion dollars for his idea when, if it all fails, IT WON'T MATTER, is exactly the way government would think.

Probably a few too many twists and turns in this show to be believable, but I suspect they are trying to stretch the series past just the asteroid collision event. We'll see.

Grey's Anatomy: Song Beneath the Song (2011) Season 7, Episode 18

Wow, really bad!

[1/10 · 23 June 2017]

We've been binge-watching Grey's on Netflix, and this came out of nowhere. You have this amazingly dramatic episode, Callie's life hanging in the balance, ruined by this idea that all the actors should get a chance to sing. At first I thought this was going to be another version of Meredith's near-death experience, with some outright hallucinations thrown in as Callie sees people singing while working on her. But after the first ten minutes, it stops being funny, and the rest of the episode drags as we wait through song after song to find out if Callie and/or the baby survives. Just a major malfunction.

Outbreak (1995)

Good first half, then loses its way

[5/10 · 4 April 2015]

This film has a gripping premise: the idea of a deadly virus, with 100% mortality, getting loose in the United States. During the first half, the film is involved with first discovering the outbreak, at two different locations, then trying to track down how it's transmitted and trying to find the vector or host that brought it into the country. All the medical drama is engrossing, and the actors are excellent.

Then it becomes a military cover-up story. We get some ridiculous helicopter combat flying, a bomb that's going to be dropped on innocent civilians to vaporize the town and eradicate the evidence, and Dustin Hoffman pleading to the flight crew over the radio to do the right thing and not drop the bomb. Even the military cover-up would have been OK if the storyline had been more plausible and not tried to make the ending an action adventure. It just felt like someone decided the movie needed an exciting ending and threw a bunch of nonsense in at the end.

Fillmore (1972)

Must see for the obscure bands

[8/10 · 7 March 2010]

Never saw the original theatrical release, but this DVD is only 55 minutes or so. There's no Bill Graham interview stuff, he just hops on stage and introduces a few of the bands. The opening credits seem to run forever, sucking up a lot of that minuscule hour of video. Possible the most egregious (to me) error is that during Jefferson Airplane's clip, they show a ton of footage of outdoor scenes (crowds, rallies, concerts) and occasionally closeups of Grace, Paul and Marty. I suspect this was in the original film this way, and probably because the stage footage sucked but they wanted to include the Airplane.

All that's the bad news. The good news is that this DVD has two complete songs by Quicksilver (featuring plenty of guitar work by John Cipollina), most of a song by It's a Beautiful Day, two pieces by Hot Tuna, a rave-up tune by Cold Blood: all this is worth the price of the DVD. The video is extreme wide-screen, mostly split in two parts, sometimes three and sometimes overlapping montage. If you're looking for footage of old heroes, you could do worse than this.