TV

As usual, season 3 of Chucky ended with the killer doll talking directly to us. This time though, it was a plea to elect him for a new mandate. After all, he is the highest-ranking serial killer out there and he has the body count to prove it!

The Chucky TV Show is that it is joyously unapologetic, it feels like it comes from another era, one when nobody really took notice of the weirdest show on cable TV. It seems that the streaming revolution has recreated that conjuncture. It’s hard to find people around you who watch the same show as you, so it’s probably not surprising that Chucky is here, in his world, where the mainstream can’t see how gory it is.

I discovered the original Tremors movie a bit late, just a few years ago. It would have been a favorite a lot earlier if I had known that it was not just a schlocky monster movie, but actually a really great horror comedy with an ace cast and a terrific production team. The 1990’s Tremors film is just pure unadulterated fun.

Since then, I started to watch it regularly and I even upgraded my Blu-ray with a more recent restored version–something I don’t usually do. And I also watch all the other movies! The franchise counts 7 movies in total, and none is as good as the original. Some of them are barely half as good as this first modern classic.

I like the Tremors franchise. It’s mostly dumb fun–and it’s made with the idea that it’s dumb fun. After the first two movies, they went the direct-to-video/made-for-TV road and some are quite lazy and barely watchable (the one in the Canada glaciers was filmed in South Africa, and that didn’t work, at all). But Michael Gross always comes back to play Burt Gummer, survivalist, and expert monster killer.

The monsters are known as the Graboids, giant subterranean worms that would eat you in one go if you made some noise. They are disgusting and deadly, but also smart and possess a strange life cycle that makes them deadlier than you could imagine. There’s always something new and dangerous with the Graboids!

So, I watched all of the movies, as I said. Then, recently, I discovered that there was a one-season TV show simply called Tremors: The Series that was broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel in 2003. I finally put my hand on the episodes and watched them all.

Nowadays, I do not expect a Netflix Show to be remarkable. Too many mediocre shows have just dampened my interest in what the streaming giant put out. That was not the case. At one time, it was the place to see shows that felt original or, at least, tried to be–there are still some like that, but they seem like exceptions.

Launched in 2017, American Vandal didn’t look like much at first, but as the True Crime doc genre found a growing audience always wanting more, satirizing it felt like a natural way of dealing with what started to feel like a formulaic trend in the making. In retrospect, this show created by Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda turned out to be prescient and, re-watching it today, I realized it didn’t lose one bit of its pertinence. In fact, it became even more pertinent.