“Kill Them, Mommy”

“Friday”

Wild couple of episodes of Crystal Lake.

First of all, Pam goes crazy and she was just butchering hippies left and right. Just because she is stabbing all of these hippies, it does not mean that she can’t take some time to manipulate Grace. One hippie did get away, but it was not the one that wound up with a machete in his head (Thanks Jason!).

Pam’s mysterious connection to the Bellflower organization came into view more in episode six as Briana discovered info about Pam’s past. She took it to her brother the Sheriff Lee Brooks. They confronted Pam at the end of the sixth episode and it sure sounded as if Pam was coming clean.

At lest, with part of it.

Episode seven was a full on flashback episode where we see Pam and everything that led to the birth of Jason and the origin of the entire situation. I can understand why Pam left her husband and took off with Jason. It makes sense as well why Jason turned out to be like he is.

How did Bellflower end up creating a couple of mass murderers in the Voorhees family? Lots of experimentation and injections seems to be the correct answer.

The seventh episode was all in flashback so I assume that this is what Pam was telling to Lee and Briana and that when episode eight kicks off, they will see how rough her background was. Will they be taken in and start to believe that Pam is not the person racking up a body count in this New Jersey town?

This has been a great series so far and I am curious to see what we get in the finale.

“A New Beginning”

The fourth episode of Crystal Lake is surely setting up Pam’s next victims with a crew of hippies that have gotten Grace pulled in. However, it is the one hippie that apparently can speak to spirits that is going to get them all killed off. She spoke with Grace’s mom and she attacked Pam because, as we know, Pam killed her. This really spooked Grace.

Earlier in the episode, Pam had sex with Chief Lee. I’m not sure if this was done to set up an alibi for the burning of the diner or if she really wanted it… or it could be both.

Things are looking bad for Crazy Ralph as he is the leading suspect for the death of the two men that was once believed to be a bear attack. When Dorf went to find evidence at Ralph place, he found a hippie strung upside down and skinned. She arrived at the episode’s beginning and we see her get trapped in one of the bear traps.

Pam tossed her machete into Crystal Lake when it was discovered that one of the bodies had a wound resembling a sword. Is this going to be Jason’s eventual weapon of choice?

We get some intriguing background on Chief Lee from a former co-worker. We learn that Lee took the fall for a group of cops who were crooked in some case. This was a surprise to me as he has always seemed to be above board.

We are halfway through the season on Peacock so far. It has been an interesting show that I will definitely finish.

“Part III”

Bear hunting is all the rage on Crystal Lake ep 3.

Some of the locals believe that the pelvis found in the woods had been killed by a bear.

Of course, that was never going to go well for them.

It was just a matter of time before they shot one of their own group. However, the shot man was not just shot, but he saw a vision of the mysterious man who attacked Claudette and Barry in the car.

Then…

Pam Voorhees strikes again.

This time she brutally murders Grace’s mother and sets her diner on fire to cover the scene (better than feeding her to the bears). She sees her being angry with Grace and she believed that she was being abusive to the girl. It looked though that Grace was doing it to herself (with self-inflicted cigarette burns).

Grace seems to be fairly off-kilter as well. She assaulted Claudette in the bathroom. Admittedly, Claudette started everything trying to get Grace back for throwing the shoes into Barry’s car (even though we know it wasn’t her). So with Claudette, it felt as if she deserved what Grace does to her. This is what leads to her mother being mad with her.

Pam takes advantage of that and she absolutely shows off how crazy she is.

Crystal Lake is picking up some steam for me as I enjoyed this episode fully. It felt much like the It: Welcome to Derry show in ways, particularly with the past time frame.

Crystal Lake is streaming on Peacock.

“Some of Us are Meant to Wear Masks”

The second episode of the series has some interesting moments, especially with Linda Cardellini.

Pam Voorhees went to The Experience, a self-help group led by Wilhelm (Nathan Darrow). I really thought that Wilhelm, the guru who ran the program, was going to be the next victim on the list of Pam, after she murdered those agents last week (although it was in self-defense). Wilhelm was a really a-hole and I kind of wanted to see him killed. However, someone else caught up to Wilhelm before Pam could and left him a bloody (albeit alive) mess.

Something scary is going down at Camp Crystal Lake as the counselors were having a party, only to be disrupted by rain. Before the rain, Grace had shown up to the party, trying to look older. She was dismissed by Claudette. Grace told Claudette that she saw her having sex with Barry at the time of Jason’s drowning, but Claudette tossed that threat aside. Grace threw away her cloggers and they wound up being chucked at Barry’s car at the end of the episode when they see some giant monster in the woods.

Not sure how I felt about this episode. I have not been a huge fan of Friday the 13th but the first episode was interesting enough to make me want to continue. I hope the next episodes will pick up the pace or I might have to forget about watching more of Crystal Lake.

“Camp Crystal”

Peacock’s latest show, Crystal Lake, is a prequel to the Friday the 13th series, that seemed to focus on Jason Voorhees’s mother, Pam. Pam is played by Linda Cardellini, and there appeared to have something more than just a mother grieving her son who drowned.

There is a piece of this story that is mysterious. The arrival of the “agents” took this series and made it a turn that I was not expecting. It was bloody and brutal and a lot of fun.

There is something that Pam is hiding from us, and I wonder how this is going to proceed.

The series dropped all eight episodes at once, but I am not planning on binging this. I would like to keep working on watching the show as it was an intriguing first episode. I only knew it was out because of the Reel Rejects on YouTube, which was doing a watch along on the first four episodes (which told me it was dropped at once). Peacock has had some fun shows during its time, but this was probably their biggest IPs of all of them. Plus, I do really love Linda Cardellini, so there are some pluses for this show.

Spoilers

“Night of the Iguana”

The penultimate episode of season two is the first part of a two part episode bringing a hitman to a wedding to murder the groom.

The episode brought several characters back to the canvas including Beatrix Hasp, the former crime lord who is in protective custody. She is played by Rhea Perlman. Another return character was Luca Clark of the FBI, who is a recurring character on the show played by Simon Helberg.

The Iguana is the hitman. He is shown murdering a man and taking his place at the wedding, literally with his mask he made out of the dead man. It was creepy. The Iguana is a ghost. Nobody knows who he is or what he looked like. I liked the Iguana. He was a scary individual.

Haley Joel Osment was our victim this week. He also turned out to be the son of Beatrix Hasp.

Now, here was the twist that made things not work for me. It turned out that everything the Iguana was doing was trying to find his way to Beatrix. He set up Charlie so she would go see Beatrix. The whole thing at the end kind of wasted what the concept was.

Next week, the episode continues. Maybe they will do something to make it make more sense.

Spoilers

“The Big Pump”

Episode 10 of the second season of Poker Face was probably my least favorite of the season so far.

It featured the story of a man Rodney (Jason Ritter) who wanted to get “pumped up” for a class reunion and tried to get the owner of a local gym, Brick (Method Man) to get him some of the “good stuff” that he was selling to the other gym members who were making more progress than he was.

When the man, who worked as a health inspector, discovered that the “good stuff” was mother’s breast milk, he was angry and ready to report him. Rodney and Brick fought and Brick accidentally hit him in the throat with a weight. He set it up to look like Rodney had been lifting weights without a spotter and had a terrible gym accident.

Here comes Charlie.

Charlie and her new friend Alex (Patti Harrison) began to have doubts about the story being told by Brick and, even though Charlie wanted to turn over a new leaf and start to mind her own business, she couldn’t help herself.

I just did not find this episode very engaging. I did laugh as Charlie had been locked in the sauna by Brick because she was trying to get a message to Alex via smartwatch by doing a sequence of exercises that included heel raises, arm circles, lunges and push-ups. This was meant to spell HALP.

I found this to be a bit of a step back for Poker Face, although a crime solving partner was new for Charlie. There are two more episodes of season 2.

Spoilers

“A New Lease on Death”

Awkwafina gets killed this week in Poker Face and Charlie has got to figure out what happened.

With Charlie’s truth detector, she is quite the handful for the criminals or con people of the world. In this case, we have Alia Shawkat, playing con woman Kate, who is trying to get married to Awkwafina’s grandma to get her hands on a rent controlled apartment in New York. Kate was definitely sinister, but even her slimy tactics were no match for Charlie.

Charlie setting up a trap for Kate to capture her on film being the heartless monster that she was. I love when Charlie out smarts the villain. This was a perfect example of her being ahead of everybody.

Charlie is also very kind and is a people person. She makes friends very easily, even if it does seem that death will follow her around.

Spoilers

“One Last Job”

I felt bad for Charlie here. She met a man who was the manager of a  SuperSave big-box store (played by Corey Hawkins), but he ends up being the dead body.

This episode took a bunch of film genres and crammed them together. It was a rom-com, a heist movie, an action/adventure and maybe some thriller.

There were also a bunch of allusions from movies in this episode. They referred to the “Die Hard is a Christmas movie” argument, a couple different things from Mission: Impossible, Weekend at Bernie’s, and even It’s a Wonderful Life.

This episode felt a tad rushed, as Charlie gets our bad guy (though not a real bad guy… more of a guy who got in over his head) quickly. Everything was just so fun, and helped us understand that, no matter how much we would like it to be, real life is not like the movies.

Even though it felt rushed, I enjoyed this episode very much. It once again played with the format. Last week and this week’s both were directed by Alan Arkin and he seems to have a cool idea for this show.

Spoilers

“Sloppy Joseph”

It was last week that I wondered about the format of this show, worried that if it just stays the same that it could become too repetitive and dull. I commented that the show switched things up last year near the end of the season, all for the better.

Damned if they didn’t do it again.

Charlie got a job as a lunch lady at a private school and got involved with the drama of a nine-year old. The structure of the episode flipped around too. No murder… unless you count the gerbil, Joseph, the victim of a talent show magic trick gone awry.

This was a wonderfully twisted episode where Charlie comes in conflict with the gold-star earning, sociopathic child named Stephanie. Stephanie is willing to do whatever it takes to remain at the top of the class, leading in the gold star competition, but Elijah was catching up to her, and defeated her in a spelling bee (sort of rigged by the teacher, admittedly).

With 20 gold stars on the line, everything would come down to the talent show and Elijah had a banger of a magic act. Stephanie messed with the magic box Joseph was going to be in during the magic trick and led directly to the splattering of gerbil blood across the front row of the kids at the talent show, a scene that would have made Sam Raimi proud.

There were so many things in this episode that were fun, from Charlie amending her typical “bullshit” response to “bullshoot” to Stephanie’s outright blackmail of the principal, Dr. Hamm, played by the always marvelous Margo Martindale, to Charlie’s quoting of Jaws. The whole situation was surreal, but, as a teacher myself, I bought every second of the episode.

Spoilers

“Hometown Hero”

Take me out to the ballgame… where Charlie will solve a murder case with the greatest of ease.

The latest Poker Face episode was set in a small time minor league park with a washed up pitcher named “Rocket” and a team on the verge of setting an all time record for losing.

A group of the players got together to bet on the team losing and it was going to be a huge pay off, especially as they were throwing the games.

However, a new, hotshot pitcher threatened to upend their plan, so they spiked the kid’s gum with drugs. Unfortunately, the drugs only served to make him unhittable.

After some shenanigans, the team still was able to lose and set the record. However, the young kid discovered the truth and was going to blackmail Rocket with the evidence. Rocket threw a ball at the kid’s head, killing him accidentally.

Thankfully, the newly hired ball-girl Charlie was able to uncover the, admittedly, stupid ballplayers’ scam for throwing games and she was able to put together the truth from Rocket.

This was a pretty dumb episode, but it was still fairly entertaining. A big charm of this series is Natasha Lyonne and her performance as the living lie detector. I do hope there are some switch ups coming because I am afraid that the repetitive format might get dull. Last time I mentioned that in reference to this series, the show did change up and gave some creative episodes so I hope the same thing will happen in the second part of this season.

Spoilers

“The Taste of Human Blood”

Killer alligator!!!

I am not a fan. So this week’s Poker Face hit me in a different manner.

The best line of the episode was “This is Florida.” 100% accurate.

Charlie finds herself at a cop convention where a jealous officer, Fran (Gaby Hoffmann), who was tired of losing the cop of the year award to Gator Joe (Kumail Nanjiani), wanted to embarrass him at the awards. Unfortunately, her attempt led to his death.

So to cover up the inadvertent murder, Fran gave Daisy, Gator Joe’s pet alligator, meth and had her eat her owner up.

Like I said… killer alligator.

Of course, Charlie was able to help the, technically, innocent gator from the trigger happy cops at the convention who kept claiming that Daisy had to die because she had the taste of human blood.

Weird episode. Fit right in with Florida.