stuff by paige

I tend to forget that you can watch things on Amazon Prime, but with the release of PANIC and it's multiple advertisements I was pleasantly reminded. Based on the the 2014 young adult novel PANIC by Lauren Oliver, this series covers a small town in Texas' yearly tradition, in which graduating seniors compete in a dangerous game and face their fears in order to win money to improve their lives.  From looking at other reviews, PANIC has gained a mixed receival, however I genuinely really enjoyed it and found it extremely binge able and tense at points. The series is an amalgamation of different genres and themes, including romance, crime, loyalty, poverty, privilege, and gave me similar vibes to The Society (2019) and Escape Room (2019) - but with lower stakes. A lot of the challenges felt a little lacklustre and seemed liked recreational behaviours that some individuals would do without money even being up for grabs.  I never read the book, however I'm thinking that the ch...

Through all of the lockdowns and tiers, one of my most missed activities has for sure been attending the cinema - expected as a film graduate, I guess. Therefore it should come as no surprise my excitement when theatres reopened, especially when I realised that the highly anticipated Demon Slayer Movie was going to be having a limited UK release, and booked tickets for the first showing near me. Things didn't start off great, as it had slipped my mind that all of the rabid anime stans have also been locked inside for the past year or so with one of their only weeaboo outlets being TikTok, and thus putting a group of them in a dark room together was probably not the best idea. The amount of "SHEEESH"es and "Eren Yeagers" and noise that came out of the other cinema goers as the film began was enough to make me cringe into my seat as it was.  But then we realised that the subtitles were cut off. After many sounds of complaint and a few minutes of the projector bei...

American Horror Story has been running for a long time now, and with time, each season has progressively been disappointing. However, after finally getting to watching Season 9, I reignited a little bit of my love for the series. I feel this series really nailed the camp themes of an 80's slasher with an overload of jazzercize, synth pop, 80's fashion and over the top stabbing, whilst maintaining some stereotypical AHS horror tropes - asylums, serial killers on the loose, supernatural happenings. And, of course, cast with many familiar AHS faces, including Lily Rabe, Emma Roberts, Dylan McDermott and Finn Wittrock to name a few, along with a few fresher faces and new cast members from more recent seasons. There were some really fun parts of this series, alongside scenes which genuinely made me wince or cringe, and I did find myself stuck to the screen with the amount of plot twists and crazy character revelations which took place. Now, don't get me wrong; AHS: 1984 is fa...

 It took me a while to get around to watching this film - I just hadn't found myself in the mood to watch a teen dramedy. However, after reading a Twitter post about the writer and director, Alice Wu, I decided to finally give it a go, and I am very glad that I did. The Half of It follows introvert Ellie as she helps Paul, a jock from her school, by ghost writing love letters for him to the most popular girl in school, Aster. The twist is, however, that Ellie herself is also romantically interested in Aster, which sets up for a rollercoaster of a coming of age movie.  Alongside the laugh out loud development of Ellie and Pauls friendship, the romantic scenes, and the heart breaking reality of lying to a friend, this film explores some really complex themes surrounding small town mentality, sexuality and religious pressure, academic pressure and planning for the future, and the hardships, stereotyping, and racism faced when immigrating into a small town. I really really loved ...

I sadly never got around to seeing Pet Sematary when it was first released in cinema, so I was more than pleased when it popped up on my Netflix home page. Adapted from Stephen King's 1983 novel by the same title, Pet Sematary is a horror film which follows a doctor and his family as they move away from their busy lifestyle and towards what they hope to be a calmer one in a rural woodland area.  The film takes a sinister turn quite near the start, including the family's cat is being found dead and the father having to bury it in the "Pet Sematary" in the woodlands, only for the cat to turn up alive and seemingly well the next day. Things take on a domino effect from here as the reality of what the Pet Sematary is and the forces which brought the cat back, leading for the film to get progressively more spooky and distressing, intertwining the family's past demons with their present and leading to a horrific ending. This film did not fail to give me shivers and hav...

After how much I enjoyed WandaVision , I really hoped that I would enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier just as much. And although I did enjoy it, there was just something not quite doing it for me from the beginning. The show follows the aftermath of The Blip (when Thanos snapped his fingers and made half of life in the universe disappear), specifically focusing on Sam and Bucky as they face many challenges adjusting to life after coming back from The Blip. Alongside their own many personal struggles, Sam and Bucky quickly find themselves involved in trying to stop a "terrorist group" called the Flag Smashers, who quite literally want to "smash flags" and abolish borders in order to help those in need after being uprooted from their homes and jobs after people returned from The Blip.  The show is quite heavily focused on humanitarian issues, including mental health, poverty, racism, and the abuse of power. These elements were all extremely gripping and I felt t...

Love and Monsters really took me by surprise, and I ended up enjoying it so much more than I would have ever thought. The film follows Joel (Dylan O'Brien) as he sets out on a journey in the midst of a mutated monster apocalypse to rekindle his relationship with his pre-apocalypse girlfriend. Along the way, Joel makes friends, overcomes his fears, finds his strengths and realises there's more to life than just purely surviving. Love and Monsters features some really interesting ideas, mixing sci-fi, dystopia, romance, comedy, and monsters, bringing a really fresh movie experience, especially to say that this was a feature which was based purely on a script and not derived from a book or TV show like many films nowadays. I also found that I really appreciated the casting; Dylan O'Brien is great (although I feel he is being typecast for running roles), Michael Rooker is brilliant, and I was also extremely excited  to see Arianna Greenblatt who played Young Gamora in Avenger...