New year, new roundup. Fall of the House of Usher, Suitable Flesh, Godzilla Minus One, Godzilla x Kong, Monarch, Destroy All Neighbors, Late Night With The Devil, Immaculate, Vivarium, The Menu, Alan Wake, Control, Alan Wake 2. SIX MONTHS OF THINGS REVIEWED.

After a long hiatus the boys are back, and have on their their their their their boogie shoes for the 2023 loosely-based-on-a-Stephen-King-story ‘The Boogeyman’. Is Mike Flanagan’s ‘Absentia’ too extreme for you? Here’s the training wheels version of that to show your impressionable, Stranger Things loving teens. At least they changed the monster from the story to no longer moonlight as a therapist, because really, how is this thing going to be able to pull off a degree plus the hours of supervised post-master's work in the mental health counseling field? WE’RE CALLING YOU OUT STEPHEN KING.

The gang bids the island life behind as they finish up ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ and reflect back on their long strange journey. Is it even possible to live a normal life after living with beast folk so long? Maybe, if you’re not a milquetoast Prendick that is. That’s the moral of the book BTW.

Was Dean Koontz inspired to write 1989’s ‘Midnight’ based on ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’? Does getting a goat testicle transplant increase vitality? Does Doctor Moreau deliver as good a dialogue on pleasure and pain as Pinhead? Does an Ox wave its tail when happy? Does Derek know any Green Day songs? All these questions, and more, in our coverage of the middle part of The Island of Doctor Moreau. No answers though.

Moreauvember continues with the gang’s review of the first third of H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’. Everyone focuses on the plight of the Beast Folk, but nobody dives into the sad life of Montgomery, who just wants to tell the sad story about how he got roped into this whole animal transformation business and nobody wants to hear it. Don’t worry though, we do.

Fun fact: In the space of four years H.G. Wells wrote ‘The Time Machine’, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’, and ‘The War of the Worlds’. Is there a greater four year grand slam than that? Tune in, Moreauvember begins now. Don’t forget your beast folk.

Have we ever covered an animated film before? I honestly can’t even remember after all these episodes. Anyhow, the gang watches 1997’s ‘Perfect Blue’, a.k.a., the movie you’ve probably seen shots copied from in most Darren Aronofsky films, the most comprehensive version of a Giallo, or, the anime you could use as a measure of the quality of the art to show your grandmother if her only conservative view was that she did not like anime and absolutely nothing else about sex or violence.

While certainly not an Armageddon/Deep Impact situation, 1998’s ‘The Last Broadcast’ is often lumped in, unfairly, as the mirror to The Blair Witch Project. This is much to its loss as it is certainly no Blair Witch, but also because it has a completely different flavor of “found footage” in its inclusion of cable access shows, MIRC logs, and true crime talking heads. That’s right folks, MIRC logs, we’re heading back to the mid-90’s!

On the one hand we have JR missing the twist of 2019’s ‘Body at Brighton Rock’ so hard that it would be like not realizing Bruce Willis was dead after watching The 6th Sense, and on the other we have Derek confusing the production story of Predator (the script for which was originally titled ‘Hunter’) with the 2003 film ‘The Hunted’. We both lose. Not to be outdone, you also lose. We don’t even warn you about the Natural Park Zone of Death, major failure.