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whaz_up_doctor
Reviews
America's 60 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries and Crimes (2010)
Started interesting ended Paranoid
This show was rather interesting at first. It presented show snippets on some of America's greatest oddities. Then it got to the top 15 or so and they were less unsolved mysteries and more conspiracy theories. That kind of ruined it for me.
Encanto (2021)
A charming movie brought down by the Music.
My family watched Encanto together on Christmas Eve. As typical of a Disney movie the animation was bright and colorful. The story was interesting if rather predictable and the characters were fun. However, my favorite part of Disney movies is the music, and that is were this movie falls apart. The majority of the music has lyrics that are spoken very quickly or they are in Spanish, both of which makes it hard to understand what they are saying. For a movie where part of the story is told through these songs, that presents a problem.
The songs also didn't seem to fit into the movie very well. I realize that Disney movies generally have people bursting into song at random moments but they seemed particularly jarring in Encanto. Maybe they would have made more sense if I could have understood them better.
Overall, not a movie I would pay to go to a theater to see, but if you already have Disney+ or can get it from a library give it a go.
Horror at the Cecil Hotel (2017)
Starts okay then goes downhill
Note: I think a lot of reviews on this page are for another documentary: Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. If the review mentions 'web sleuths' they are probably talking about the Netflix doc. This one doesn't have any 'web sleuths'.
As for this documentary: The first episode was good but it went a little off the rails after that. We start in the.80s-90s with the episode about Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger. This one was kind of interesting.
Then the second episode jumps to 2013 with the Elisa Lam case. This episode can't decide if it want's to be straight true crime or spooky supernatural. It kind of hints at the later (see below) but then again not really. They should have either gone there nor not, not half way in between.
The third episode was the weakest, jumping back to the 60s. The timeline was confusing. Especially if you notice that the dialogue of couple fighting was the same dialogue of a couple fighting that Elisa Lam heard in her room right before someone knocked on her door and she opened it to find nobody there. (Were they trying to hint that she was hearing ghosts or just being cheap and reusing the sound bite?) There didn't seem to be enough of a story for the third episode so they randomly branched off into the Black Dahlia case. It took me about 5 minutes of internet searching to discover that the ties between the Black Dahlia and the Cecil Hotel are tenuous to non-existent so its inclusion makes no sense.
Hyperdrive (2019)
Good Show - Rigged Competition
As a TV show this was very entertaining. I liked how they had drivers from all over the world with all kinds of cars. I also liked how they switched up the course to keep it interesting. I do wish that they had made the episodes longer or more of them so they didn't have to put in to many chopped up 'fast replays' instead of just letting us watch the drivers do their course.
As a competition however, this was completely rigged. You had more chances to get to the Knockoff rounds depending on where you started in the Qualifiers, If the driver started in Qualifier 1 s/he had up to four chances to make it through, in Q2, s/he had up to 3, in Qualifier 3 - 2 and in Qualifier 4 only one. Surprise, not surprised, of the 12 drivers to make it to the Knock out rounds 7 started in Qualifier 1, 3 in Qualifier 2, 2 in Qualifier 3 and none from Qualifier 4 made it through. This might have been acceptable if they had done time trials or something to earn their spots in earlier qualifiers but the show didn't say anything about that so it seems like some drivers had an unfair advantage. I'm sure that some of the drivers from later Qualifiers could have gone through if they had had as many chances as the others.
Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018)
Disappointing
Other than the half lap in the very beginning, there was really only one race in this entire movie. They obviously didn't have the budget for effects and so relied on nudity for cheap thrills instead. I wanted racing, explosions and mayhem, not softcore. BOO! The last half an hour is the only part worth watching.