The Review Show

Episode179. We're covering a Halloween classic this week with Tim Burton's 1988 movie Beetlejuice. The Maitlands are a young couple living a quiet life in their small New England town, until they die. Then they have to learn the confusing bureaucracy of the afterlife and how to scare off the new owners of the house they still "live" in. They've seen ads for a man named Beetlejuice who promises to exorcise the living out of the homes of the dead, but everyone warns them to stay away from this chaotic force of nature.

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Episode 178. We watched the new Netflix show Brand New Cherry Flavor, a magical revenge thriller set in early 90s Hollywood. Young filmmaker Lisa Nova is trying to get her short film made into a feature-length movie, but when a producing partner takes advantage of her and signs a movie deal without her as the director, she swears to burn his life to the ground. She contacts a mysterious witch to grant her the powers to destroy her enemy, but with serious consequences to Lisa herself.

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Episode 177. To kick off the spooky month of October, we watched the 2008 Australian film Lake Mungo. This mockumentary follows the Palmer family coping with the sudden death of teenage daughter Alice, and their investigation when they find photos and videos that seem to show Alice after her death. While they confront the possibility of the supernatural, the family also confronts the secrets Alice kept from them in life.

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Episode176. We're starting another ongoing series covering one show to its conclusion, starting this month with season one of the 2014 HBO drama The Leftovers. Three years ago, there was a sudden unexplained event called "the departure" where 2% of the human population disappeared into thin air. Now, the rest of humanity struggles to find answers, closure, and purpose. We follow sheriff Kevin Garvey as he deals with the dissolution of his family and the rise of a cryptic cult in his small town.

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Episode 175. To conclude our Shametember series, time travel nerd Kyle needed to watch Rian Johnson's 2012 film Looper. Joe works as a "looper," a hitman who only kills bodies sent back to him from criminals thirty years in the future. When his own future self arrives, Old Joe explains that the future has been taken over by a tyrannical genius and he's there to kill the child who will grow up to be this terror. Young Joe has to predict his older self's movements and protect a child who is innocent -- but still dangerous.

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Episode 174. Shametember is back! This is the chance for each of us to clear a movie off the "list of shame" of things we should've seen by now. Melissa named famous sequels she hadn't watched yet after seeing the first movies in those franchises, and this week we watched Aliens! This 1986 follow up to Alien sees Ripley awakening from her Nostromo escape pod a staggering 57 years in the future. She learns that Earth has already started a colony on a planet she knows is dangerous, and the xenomorphs have started attacking its citizens. She accompanies a squad of space marines to destroy the aliens and attempt to save the colony's last survivor.

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Episode 173. Alan and Ignacio are on the show this week to talk about The Digimon Movie. We watched the dubbed American release from the year 2000, and the three original Japanese mini-movies that were edited together to make this American version. We see the digidestined kids throughout their young lives as they encounter their first Digimon egg, try to stop a Digimon virus from destroying the internet and setting off nuclear bombs, and help an American boy whose own Digimon has turned to the dark side.

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Episode 172. Join us for a Review Show first, as we read the prose novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Photojournalist Will Navidson and his family move into a new house, and soon discover a seemingly unending dark hallway that opens up where there was no door before. Will films every step of his exploration into the house, which is eventually edited into the documentary The Navidson Record. House of Leaves is a book with an interesting structure: academic articles were written about the movie, a man named Zampano wrote a book about the movie and the articles, and a listless young man named Johnny Truant finds Zampano's notes after his death and edits the disorganized manuscript together, interjecting with his own footnotes along the way.

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Episode 171. We watched the 2021 Netflix sci-fi drama movie Stowaway. Three astronauts are on a two-year mission to Mars. They've just left Earth hours ago when a stowaway falls out of a compartment in the ship -- a launch engineer who hit his head, fell unconscious, and was accidentally sealed into the ship before takeoff. They can't turn back. A resupply ship can't reach them. It's a race against time for this team to figure out how their limited resources could possibly sustain an extra life.

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Episode 170. We listened to both seasons of the audio drama Passenger List, written and directed by John Scott Dryden and Lauren Shippen, and starring Kelly Marie Tran. It's been six months since Atlantic Flight 702 disappeared when traveling from London to New York City. The airlines declared that the missing plane was brought down by a bird strike, but college student Kaitlin Le refuses to accept this explanation. She knows her twin brother Conor is still alive and suspects that the airline and maybe even the US government is hiding something. To the detriment of everything else in her life, she's dedicated to pursuing every possible answer to find the truth.

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