Tag: cch pounder

The Terror: The Devil In Silver: Season 1, Episode 3 – “New York In June”

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Season one of The Terror is one of my favorite seasons of television over the last decade. It is a beautiful piece of historical fiction about a group of 19th-century British sailors trying to find a Northwest Passage and discovering something sinister in the frozen wasteland. I don’t think it was originally intended as an anthology series, but it became one. I have not seen the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, but they say it is very good.

And now, some seven years later, we are getting Season 3. I didn’t actually know this was part of The Terror until I started watching it. On their main screens, AMC+ just shows it as The Devil in Silver. But the opening credits do say The Terror. I don’t know why. Had I known, I would have watched Season 2 first.

The Devil in Silver follows Pepper (Dan Stevens), a guy who had the great misfortune of getting into a fight with his girlfriend’s ex, with the police nearby who were at the end of their shift. Rather than arrest him and deal with the paperwork, they take him to a mental hospital where he’s put on a 72-hour hold. If he behaves, they say, he’ll be released. As is the way with these things, he gets stuck there indefinitely.

New Hyde Hospital is a rundown, shabby place, and the series hits the state of our mental healthcare with a hammer. Hospitals are underfunded, understaffed, and tend to treat the symptoms with drugs rather than get to the heart of the actual disease. Also, there may be a monster. It might also be a scary patient they keep locked behind a silver door. But probably it is a monster since this series is all about the supernatural.

Our first two episodes introduced the situation and our characters: patients and doctors. It is a great cast, with Aasif Mandvi as the head administrator, CCH Pounder as one of the doctors, Stephen Root as the book club leader, and Judith freaking Light as one of the patients (I haven’t seen her in anything since Who’s the Boss, but one look at her IMDB page shows she’s kept busy – good for her.)

Pepper is angry and belligerent. He’s the McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in this scenario. Episode Three begins with the aftermath of Episode Two, where he was attacked by the monster. He awakes to find that the doctors are telling the story that he became belligerent and violent, and they had to get rough with him – hence his injuries.

He tries asking the patients who this patient is behind the silver door, but they give conflicting answers when they give answers at all. When he’s told that the patients are going to be taken to a pizza parlor for a treat in a few days, he decides that’s where he’ll make his escape. To keep the patients calm (and zoinked out of their minds), the staff gives everybody some heavy downers. Pepper doesn’t swallow it and tells his roommate his plan. The roommate tells someone else, and before you know it, all the patients are not taking their meds. The pizza party is a disaster with everyone acting, well, crazy, and Pepper ultimately decides he needs to stay to try to help them get real help.

He is once again confronted by the monster, who basically tells him if he doesn’t comply, he’ll kill everybody.

Ok, I’m once again rambling for too long. I really don’t want to do full recaps. I just don’t have the patience for it, but I’m struggling talking about single episodes without giving out quite a bit of information.

I’m struggling with this show. It has a great cast, and the story has potential. Though it does lean a little too heavily into the well-worn tropes of mental institutions. It’s lacking something. Maybe a specificity to the characters. The actors, especially Judith Light, give it their all, but I don’t find myself interested in them. And they’ve brought out the monster too soon. It’s not really that scary but keeps lurking about and doing stuff. I’d prefer a bigger mystery about what it is and what it wants.

The cast is good enough that I’m going to keep watching, but I truly hope it gets better.

Now Watching: The Naked Gun (2025)

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The Naked Gun (2025)
Directed by Akiva Shaffer
Starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder

Only one man has the particular set of skills… to lead Police Squad and save the world: Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. Following in his father’s footsteps, he must solve a murder case to prevent Police Squad from closure.

Rating: 7/10

I was twelve when the original The Naked Gun came out. I can’t remember if I watched it in the theaters, but I watched it many times on home video and loved it. It was one of those movies that seemed to be always playing on cable TV. Or my friends and family members would rent it regularly. I remember seeing it often. I remember it would come on, and me and whoever was with me would sit and watch it.

It was a film that everyone seemed to love. Me, my friends, my parents, sibling, and other relatives. It felt like the funniest movie ever. I watched both sequels in the theater. I remember liking the second one quite a bit but finding the third to be rather terrible. I think most people did, as the franchise kind of died afterward.

And then we all collectively forgot about the films. I hadn’t thought about them in years. I think last year, or maybe the year before, I caught the first one on some streaming service. It was funny, but not hilarious. My sense of humor has changed since I was twelve, and I don’t tend to like movies that are just one joke after the other without much story.

Which brings me to this new one. When it came out, a lot of the critics I follow were excited about it. Some were declaring it the future of cinema. I guess a lot of straight-up comedies don’t make it to the cinemas much anymore, so the fact that this one had big stars and got a real theatrical release got them excited.

I skipped it in the theater because, again, my comedy instincts are weird, and this looked like non-stop gags. But I finally caught up with it this weekend, and guess what? It’s funny.

Liam Neeson is terrific in this. He’s basically sending the type of character he’s played in a thousand movies. He plays it completely straight, which makes all the insanity going on around him that much funnier.

As I figured, there are a lot of gags. I won’t say too many of them because that is how this type of comedy works, but it was a lot. Quite a lot of them worked for me. Not all of them, probably not even half of them, but that’s the thing with throwing tons of jokes at the audince – if only a small percentage of them work, we are still laughing quite a lot.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Demon Knight (1995)

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When I was in college, I went to the movies pretty much every weekend. Sometimes two or three times. I saw absolutely everything that I had even the slightest amount of interest in. I probably did have interest in Demon Knight when it came out, as I liked horror comedies. But I honestly don’t remember. What I do remember is watching it in the theater and absolutely loving it. 

Demon Knight is branded as a Tales From the Crypt story. Tales From the Crypt originated as an anthology horror comic in the 1950s and was hosted by the Crypt-Keeper, a wise-cracking corpse. It has been revised in various formats over the years, including an HBO series that lasted from 1989 to 1996. I’d never read any of those comics, and I don’t think I’d watched any of the HBO episodes, but the Crypt-Keeper would pop up in commercials and things, so I was definitely familiar with the brand.

Demon Knight was successful enough that they commissioned a sequel, Bordello of Blood, which came out a year later. I hated that film. So much so that it completely turned me off the whole Tales From the Crypt thing, and I never watched anything from them again. I never even came back to Demon Knight. So I haven’t seen it in 30 years.

It is one of those films I’d periodically think about, and I’d think I should revisit it, but for whatever reason I never did. It seems to be a movie that’s more or less been forgotten by the culture. I never see anyone talking about it. There are lots of other movies like this – some I did watch when they came out, some I didn’t – that get brought up periodically in online discussions. Those I usually seek out and watch again. But the lack of discussion about this one meant that anytime it would pop into my mind, it usually popped right back out again.

I cut the cord years and years ago. I own a lot of DVDs, but I do subscribe to various streaming services. I’m one of those people who subscribes to one service for a month or two, and then I’ll cancel it so I can subscribe to something else. I figure there is only so much stuff you can watch in any given month, so why spend all your money subscribing to every service?

A couple of months ago, Starz had one of those super deals where you could subscribe to an entire year for like $20. I’ve subscribed to Starz before and remembered it being okay, so I signed up. Tonight is the first time I’ve actually watched anything on their service since I subscribed. Most of the stuff they have is of no interest to me, and the stuff I am interested in I’ve already seen and own on DVD.

But while looking for a horror movie to watch, I found this and decided to finally give it another go. Actually, what I really did was watch The Mothman Prophesies on Starz, the Richard Gere flick from 2002, but it was so god-awful I decided I didn’t want to write about it for my Friday Night Horror Movie, and I dug around Starz some more and found this.

For the first ten minutes or so I wished I hadn’t. This was not what I was wanting; my fears that it would not live up to my memories were coming true. But then I was able to click my brain off. I was able to enjoy the film for what it was actually doing, not what I wanted it to do.

What it does is create an incredibly goofy, violent, goopy, and funny little horror story with lots of comedic elements and some pretty good practical effects.  Billy Zane is having the time of his life, too.

Zane plays a demon called The Collector, who is after a guy named Frank Brayker (William Sadler). Brayker has a powerful artifact known as the key, which the demons need to take over the world, but which also contains some of Christ’s blood, which can kill the demons. 

Brayker holes up in an old mission turned hotel, and the film becomes a base-under-siege story. Also in the hotel are an assortment of people, including the sassy owner (CCH Pounder), an old man (Dick Miller), an ex-con (Jada Pinkett Smith), an asshole (Thomas Haden Church), and others.

The film doesn’t do anything particularly new with the concept. There is lots of infighting, attempts to sneak away, and a traitor, but it does it with gusto and a real sense of fun. I remember when I first watched it, one of the joys was watching Thomas Haden Church play a character completely different from the good natured goof he played on the TV show Wings. Here he cusses, drinks, and has a prostitute attach battery clamps to his nipples!

The demon designs are good, and it is a real treat to see how many practical effects they used. CGI was just getting started at this point, and there is some use of it here, but mostly the demons are made of real stuff, and the gore is visceral (and the blood was made out of glow stick juice!). 

This is a film that understands it isn’t going to win awards. The Oscars will not be calling. But it does what it does well and has a blast doing it. I had a lot of fun watching it, too.