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What I really took away from this movie is the problems humanity has had to solve to make it to where we are, and the ways in which those problems still present conflict. Shared language and other means of communication have allowed us to cooperate as a species. Our deep fears of abandonment and of the unknown glue us together, albeit sometimes to those that don't have our best interest at heart. This film is a great parable explaining our species in many ways. We've been around 300,000 years and there ought to be many more stories like this. If you want an immersive, suspenseful film a la The Witch, Annihilation, or Mandy, this one's for you. 7/10.

I became aware of John Early from a Seth Meyers interview which got me to dive into the massively underrated show Search Party. His comedic presence is so intelligent and unique, it's really hard to describe to people but I truly believe Early is one of the funniest performers working right now. In Now More Than Ever, I learned he's also a phenomenal musician. I mean it. I would buy tickets just to see him sing - it's incredible. He performs four well-chosen cover songs with a live band whose members are also featured in sketch comedy bits mainly in the first half-hour.

The trouble with this hour-long special is it's edited from a performance that was clearly much longer than one hour and the short sketches use up time and affect the flow of the live portion. I'm always impressed by how stand-ups keep an audience laughing for a full hour or more. This special takes the viewer at home out of that experience. At times it feels like a few YouTube clips strung together. If Early is trying to showcase his many talents he certainly succeeds but if you're making an HBO Special, you've already "made it" as a performer; no one needs a demo reel.

I give this an 8/10. I highly recommend Search Party and John Early's sketch special Would It Kill You To Laugh? With Kate Berlant over on Paramount+.

The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre directed by Texas native Tobe Hooper is a classic of the genre not only for establishing a brand of grunge horror but for the realism with which it treats its victims. They feel like your friends, or since it was from my parents' time, like my own parents and their friends when they were young taking road trips across the Lone Star State. Furthermore, it feels like a horror brewed from the love/hate relationship city-born Texans have with the heat and with the more "country" aspects of life here.

A few minutes into Ti West's X, I was pleased to see a few shots paying homage to Texas Chain Saw, but was quickly dismayed to notice no one involved in this movie had apparently been to Texas. Every line in the first 30 min is a forced attempt to sound regional, and it comes off cartoonish, caricaturish, and inauthentic. Martin Henderson's Wayne is a composite of a few Matthew McConaughey characters and Britney Snow's Bobby-Lynne is a discount Dolly. They can't decide what era or which part of the South they're from or whether they're from the city or the country. I wonder if non-Southern viewers really think that young people in 1979 Houston ever unironically spoke like they were in an old Western film. Certainly they would not dream of filming a porno in a barn outside of cool winter months.

The slow first hour of this movie is a long set-up where nothing plotworthy happens except to explore the characters and setting, but it only served to shatter my immersion. I am not easily offended by Texas stereotypes, but in the case of this film, I was not convinced of them. If they were going to shoot in NZ, why not just make it a Kiwi horror instead of a botched Texas Chain Saw tribute? I have to give props to Mia Goth as Maxine for attempting a three-dimensional character. The cinematography was quite good as well, except for the superfluous porn scenes (was this supposed to be shocking? In 2022?). There was also an attempt to make the death of each character pertinent to their revealed flaws, but by that time, X had spent so much time being cutesy it forgot to make me care. OK horror, 4/10.