As now customary, this will be one part of two; the second will be posted likely the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Hopefully everyone has a nice, long holiday weekend-I should. I did go to Epcot last week to once again experience their annual Food & Wine Festival before it concluded.
Another customary thing I did: revisit various places. This includes the Lotte Plaza Market Asian grocery store to purchase more food & drink. Most aren’t really worth mentioning, to be honest. Thus, what I will mention are two new beverages. The first was Taco Bell’s exclusive flavor, Mountain Dew Baja Blast Midnight. I like regular Baja Blast; not surprisingly, a grape version is one I was happy to have tried. Second: Coca-Cola Holiday Creamy Vanilla. It’s not too terribly different from regular Coca-Cola Vanilla. That said, I do enjoy both.
Since last time, I’ve seen a pair of movies theatrically. The first was a horror film called Shelby Oaks. It was the feature film of a famous YouTube movie reviewer, Chris Stuckmann. He’s not one I’ve ever watched regularly, whether it was during his previous era of “dude who yells and curses constantly” or his current era of “he doesn’t criticize any movie now that he’s in the industry.” The movie got a mixed reception; me, I actually did enjoy the tale of a woman attempting to look for her missing sister. Appealing to me was that it was NOT the usually insufferable “elevated horror” and instead felt like something from the past. The movie did have faults, for sure-however, the claims that the movie “didn’t have a third act” are completely erroneous and there were nice atmospheric moments not often seen in horror anymore.
The second film was Predator: Badlands. Of course, the original is an all-timer I’ll always love. Predator 2 is pretty sweet (don’t listen to the naysayers) and I guess Prey was fine. Otherwise, a great creature has been in some lousy movies. Yes, Badlands was “safe” for modern audiences by having an underdog “runt” Predator-a Yautja, to use the proper name of the alien species-attempt to kill an unstoppable monster & he has a wacky synthetic human sidekick. Even I can admit there was a bit too much humor and it’s quite different in every facet from the original Predator movie. Those points duly noted, I still enjoyed Predator: Badlands. I was fine w/ them attempting something new, people wanted to see a Predator movie that at least partially took place on their home planet, and creativity shone both in the score and the various creatures on what they called a Death Planet. I was happy it wasn’t a movie I was disappointed in.
To reiterate, I should return sometime the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
