Moose And The Movies

Took a few days off from the movies to check out the 10-episode Dexter: Original Sin, which just wrapped on Paramount+.  In case you don't know, it's a prequel, taking place 15 years before the first season of the classic Dexter series with flashbacks to another 15 years or so before that. It all serves to flesh out Dexter's backstory -- how he ended up in that blood-soaked storage container as an infant and how he honed his craft as a vigilante serial killer. I was pleasantly surprised by it. It was much better than I thought it was going to be. Original Sin, with Michael C. Hall's voiceover narration, does a fantastic job of bringing back the feeling and atmosphere of those first three or four great seasons of classic Dexter -- before the original series lost its way. Irish actor Patrick Gibson is the new, young onscreen Dexter. He looks enough like Hall physically and is able to easily pull us in without too much distraction, with a big assist from Hall's familia...

Blink Twice, 2024, directed by Zoe Kravitz, streamed on Prime Video, 2 stars. It's difficult for me to express how much I despised this movie for the first 75 minutes or so of its 102-minute runtime. I found no joy whatsoever in watching a debauched gazillionaire tech bro and his hangers-on stranding a group of women on a private island for a substance-filled, brutal raping good time. I don't care how dazzling the movie looked. I don't care that people like Christian Slater and Kyle MacLachlan and Geena Davis whom I generally love watching are along for the fun. I only cared that the longer this movie went on and the slower the pacing got, I was in active hate mode for this piece of crap. My extreme displeasure eased up a bit during the predictable but somewhat satisfyingly revengeful third act. The final scene that was supposed to be a clever twist was really bad, but the resolution of this horrible story was enough to keep me from thinking of Blink Twice as a total disast...