Thursday, October 3, 2019

Belated Stranger Things reviews (MM #150)


Yep, giving up on doing forced death-march Halloween compilations made me skip talking about the last couple seasons, but now that I can do this stuff year round casually at my own pace, I figure I wanna fill this in.


Stranger Things 
Season 1 (2016)
Season 2 (2017)
Season 3 (2019)



Season 1 from here...

All right, I've put it off long enough.
No one can talk about 80's horror this year without mentioning "Stranger Things".
Everyone loves it, the internet has lost its goddamned mind over it, memes are everywhere, everyone's doing a "Stranger Things", font logo on their site and/or Facebook wall, Bullmoose has it on business cards, and...it lives up to the hype.
It's really good.
I fucking loved it.
But, it's one of those ones, there's nothing left I can say about it, because everyone's said it.
"'Goonies', meets 'IT', meets 'E.T.'", check.
"Speilberg meets King", check.
"Dark Scooby-Doo", check.
"Nailed the 80's look and feel like nothing else ever has", check.
"It's what 'Super 8', tried and failed to be", check.
I've been beaten to all of it.
See it if you haven't.
It's fucking wonderful.
Its been renewed for season 2, hope they don't jump the shark, perfection is hard to maintain.

Yep, last couple years, was waiting for that big 80's horror franchise revival...thing, and this looks like it.
It came.
Hallow-Christmas finally came.

Season 2-

Even better than season 1, IMHO.
You've got the Ghostbusters Halloween theme.
You've got Sean Astin as an original Goonie.
You've got the introduction of Eight, Max, and Billie.
You've got the expansion of Eleven's origin story.
You've got justice for Barb.
Mind-flayer pays off in season 3.
And, I don't care what anyone says, I liked Eleven's side adventure.
It was needed character development, IMHO.

Season 3-

Not quite as perfect as season 2, but still pretty damned good.
You've got the darker gory "John Carpenter's The Thing", version of the Mind-Flayer.
The characters multiply like crazy, every side character from 1-2 gets more than one moment to shine, and becomes part of the core gang.
We get some shenanigans from the Russkies, as is proper for an 80's based series.
We get the theme to "The Neverending Story", as a love ballad!
They're doing the Harry Potter thing of, as the kids get older, the more innocence the series loses.
Season 2 still followed the formula of 1 a little bit, but 3 starts flipping stuff upside down like "Empire Strikes back", and "The Last Jedi".
We have no idea how the characters are going to re-unite for season 4.
Or even if they'll all be back!
Or even if one of them is still alive!
It's going to be interesting.

Yeah, I guess that's it.

In a few weeks, when all the episodes are out, I'll do "AHS: 1984", as ST's retro-80's companion piece.
Gotta say, three episodes in, and I'm loving it.


Previously with MM-

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