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Midsomer Murders: Blood on the Saddle (2010)
We all have off-days
If ever you've screwed up at work and wondered if it means you've had a bad career, if ever you've made a mistake and worried it means you are a bad person, if ever you've disappointed your children and fretted that it means you are a terrible parent, this episode is for you, because it proves that even the best of us have our bad days. Midsomer Murders is a good, long-running show with fine actors and engaging characters and it has delighted millions of people around the world. Yet even it once made a jaw-droppingly horrible episode like this one. So go easy on yourself, because we all deserve a little mercy now and then.
Kastanjemanden (2021)
Atmospheric Nordic crime thriller has a huge fatal flaw
Some decent atmospherics and a few good performances cannot compensate for the fact that a killer this omniscient and all-powerful would ever be caught by police who are so extraordinarily stupid.
SPOILERS
The killer is everywhere the script needs him to be, which would take preposterous levels of luck, information, and ability. Two of the many absurdities were (1) filming the sex in the basement of a shopping mall between a future victim (Jessie) and the person he plans to send out later (untraceably encrypted because he is a tech genius) as a decoy for the police (because he's so diabolical he knows this will be useful later). How does he know these two people who we see meeting upstairs are going to spontaneously hook up? How did he know it would be in the basement? How was HE is the basement of a shopping mall, does he live there or did he teleport in at that moment to make a porn movie of them which they somehow didn't notice? (2) When he encounters the couple who have kidnapped the boy Gustav when they have a knife, he overpowers them both while creating no injuries anyone would see and kills them with their own knife in such a fashion that it looks like suicide (!)-- and the man he is killing is a younger, bigger, trained soldier who served in Afghanistan. And the rest of the series he is teleporting place to place to leave chestnut men every that will be creepy and threatening and killing wherever he pleases.
Meanwhile, the police are to put it politely, idiots. For example in episode 3 when the police's entire operation is blown and the third victim and a police detective is killed as result, no one asks how did the killer know what the police's plan was and where they were hiding the potential victim? (DUH!). And why do the two cops charged with protecting a potential victim of a serial killer go out for a pizza and play on his mobile phone, respectively. And throughout the series the detectives seem to have trained extensively in the "When you enter a dark and dangerous area where there could be a killer, keep it a secret from anyone else so there is no backup" school of policing. It is painfully obvious to anyone who is paying attention who the killer is long before this clunks to the end...except of course the crack investigators of Scandi Division.
Tennessee Gothic (2019)
Even better than I expected
I watched this hoping it was going to deliver horror and suspense, which it definitely did. But what I absolutely did not expect was how laugh out loud funny it was, especially the interplay between Paw and his son. It's not easy to get this much humor out of a story of sex-soaked demonic evil but the director and the cast were up to it to challenge. I hope this super entertaining indy movie finds a big audience.