Dropping on April’s Fools Day, the first two episodes of a reimagined The Twilight Zone are now available on CBS’s streaming service, CBS All Access. Putting such a popular science fiction property on their paid service, having done so already with their prequel Star Trek: Discovery. By offering well sought after shows on their paid service that might have otherwise failed, CBS has made sure that they are a name to remember alongside the giants Netflix and Hulu. This version of the show features new master of horror Jordan Peele in the Rod Sterling presenter role, delivering the iconic intro and outros that The Twilight Zone are known for, and is just as good as any of the episodes from the original run.

Beware, there are some spoilers in what follows.

The first season drops with the first pair of episodes, one completely new, and the other a take on a classic episode. “The Comedian”, the first of the pair, stars Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick, Silicon Valley), Amara Karan (The Night of), Diarra Kilpatrick (The Last O.G), and Tracy Morgan. It follows Nanjiani, playing the titular Samir Wassan, whose political observations don’t go over well at the club. Morgan, as the famous comedian J.C. Wheeler, who offers Wassan advice. Be more personal in his performance and the crowd will eat it up, but beware, what you give up will be gone forever. Following that advice, he realizes that it’s true, but at a terrible cost, and he must decide what he’s willing to do to be successful.

As a start for the new series, “The Comedian” is a solid double. Not quite a home run, as the twist is obvious from the set up, and by the end, both Nanjiani’s and Morgan’s acting becomes a touch too hammy for my personal tastes, but while I saw it coming, how it was executed was excellent, and seeing such a diverse cast, nearly all named character in the episode was a person of color, including Kilpatrick’s Didi, a black lesbian. It made for a delightful watch, and a great way to begin the series.

“Nightmare at 30,000 Feet”, a modern retelling of the classic episode starring William Shatner from 1963, is the second episode. This version of the tale follows anxiety-ridden investigative journalist Justin Sanderson, played by Adam Scott (Pretty Little Liars, Parks and Recreation), who gets on a plane to Tel Aviv, finding an MP3 player with a podcast loaded onto it, voiced by the host of the amazing podcast Hardcore History, Dan Carlin, which describes in the past tense, the disappearance of the very plane they’re on. Again, the episode is a solid double, as how Scott plays off of the podcast portelling his doom was a little too smooth, he too read to believe a podcast on an antiqued device he just happened to find was accurate, and the episode bounces from possible cause to cause of the crash without sitting with any of them long enough for them to be believable. At the same time, however, “Nightmare” is filled with callbacks to the episode it’s based on, and while everyone knows how the plane crash comes about, based on the actions of the person trying to stop it, the final twist at the end I didn’t see coming, and was interesting.

Each week, beginning on the 11th, new episodes will drop on CBS All Access on Thursdays. Personally, I do not enjoy the once weekly release these streaming services use for some of their shows. When I watch a show on a format like streaming, I want to be able to watch it at my leisure. The once weekly formatting, especially for an anthology format where each episode is standalone, waiting seems like an echo of a largely bygone era.

All in all, these first two episodes were fun to watch, and I can’t wait to see the others and report back once the season is through. With Jordan Peele attached to the series, I faith that the stories will be more than up to snuff.

The Twilight Zone is now streaming on CBS All Access, and on CBS.com

David Castro is a Puerto Rican writer from New York City. He has worked on the upcoming Undead supplement for Chill Third Edition and is working on launching a Patreon. You can find him on Twitter (@theinkedknight), on Tumblr (thedevilsyouknew), on Facebook (facebook.com/inkstainedstudios), and at davidrcastro.com.

Following his spectacular solo debut with 2017’s hit Get Out, Jordan Peele returns with another horror film that he wrote, produced, and directed himself with Us. Staring Black Panther alums Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, the movie follows a family, hunted by dark mirrors of themselves. While this movie is amazing, just as great as Get Out was, what it has to say is less blunt and obvious, and thus, might not be as clear to moviegoers, but please be rest assured, Us has as much to say as his previous film.

There are spoilers to follow, beware.

More than anything else, Us showcases how amazing of an actress Nyong’o is. In a film where all the characters must play double duty as themselves and a monstrous version of themselves, Nyong’o’s twin performances really show you how skilled she is, and with hopes, leads to her getting more leading roles in the future. On the other hand, while Duke gives a perfectly fine performance and is passing as a sort-of lame dad, the tenor is voice takes to do an American accent make him seem as though Duke is doing an admittedly not terrible Jordan Peele impression throughout. While it was amusing and his character provided the much-needed levity that horror so often requires but fewer filmmakers forget, how much he sounded like a Key & Peele character was distracting.

What makes Us amazing is the same thing that, to me, made Get Out great, Peele’s dedication to world building. Both, on top of the obvious horror/thriller motifs, have a strong science fiction vibe to them. Both films have a world and backstory bigger than the events of the film itself, and both have many unanswered questions, but unlike Get Out, where Peele went in depth about the history of the group, the director has come out saying that he won’t be doing the same for Us. We, the fans of this amazing movie, will have to take what we will from the evidence he put down and figure out what all these things mean on our own.

The world Peele presents in Us is one in which some organization has cloned every American in the hopes to be able to control their actions by a connection through the clone, but the experiment fails. The clones are identical, but without souls, and are connected, but the connection only goes one way, the things the originals do and experience are mirrored in their bestial clones. Abandoned in the hundreds of miles of abandoned tunnels that, according to text shown at the start of the film, exist under all of America, these clones, or Tethers, form vicious relationships with the clones of those of us who pair in the overworld, until the start of ‘The Untethering’, when they come above ground to cause mayhem and murder.

Nyong’o’s character, Adelaide, saw another version of herself, what we find out is her Tether, as a child, and has been afraid of her for her entire life, these fears coming true when her Tether and the Tether versions of her husband and children, invade their home and assault them. This dark mirror explains how everything that has happened to Adelaide in her life happened to her, but worse, meeting her husband that she doesn’t love but has to be with because it’s who her original loves, having children with him, and having to perform a c-section on herself because that’s what happened when their son was born. Escaping them, Adelaide and her family flee to their friend’s home, only to find that they were already murdered by their Tethers, and that this is not an isolated incident, but happening all over Santa Cruz, the corpses piling high.

Eventually, we learn the ultimate twist of the film. Throughout the film, we get scenes of her childhood, going through therapy to help with the trauma of getting lost and seeing her other self as a child, which caused her to be mute for a time. We learn that, in fact, when she saw her Tether that day, the clone incapacitated her and trapped her in the realm of the Tether, replacing her in the normal world, and that the version of Adelaide we’ve rooted for the whole film, was the clone all along.

The twist is, in and of itself, been done in body double media before, but how it was done, how the movie reveals it, is what makes it amazing, as well as Nyong’o’s performance as both characters, makes me wonder if the film wants me to pity the Tethers, as it is not their fault that they are what they are, regardless of what they did, while Adelaide being one who escaped and was not violent until forced to give me the sense of a nature versus nurture element to this all. Should I, as a viewer, root for the victims who are privileged in comparison to the violent attackers who are a literal underclass and are starting what could be thought of as a revolution against those who oppressed them? You can take from the film what you want, but I choose to believe that these things are muddy, purposefully so, as regardless of how hostile and animalistic these others, the Tethers are, as ‘Red’ the crimson-suited villainous Nyong’o character says in the film, Americans.

Us is in theaters wide everywhere.

David Castro is a Puerto Rican writer from New York City. He has worked on the upcoming Undead supplement for Chill Third Edition and is working on launching a Patreon. You can find him on Twitter (@theinkedknight), on Tumblr (thedevilsyouknew), on Facebook (facebook.com/inkstainedstudios), and at davidrcastro.com.

Image: Marvel Studios

Captain Marvel, the first of Marvel Studios’ to be lead by a woman, shattered the box office. Making $153 million dollars domestically and a collected $455 million worldwide, making it the second highest Marvel opening weekend behind Avengers: Infinity War, and as well as the highest grossing female-led movie in history, the sixth highest opening weekend, and the fifth best international opening weekend of a movie ever. So the film is a financial success, this can not be denied, but is it good? Simply put, yes. It is amazing, as a piece of superhero media, as a film, and as a feminist cultural icon. I wholeheartedly believe that this movie should be seen by everyone who can get out to see it.

Brie Larson, who in my opinion has yet to give a disappointing performance, is amazing in the titular role. Her ability to never seem as though any of the hardships she is put through in the film, paired with her physicality that makes you believe that she can do the amazing stunts, makes her exactly perfect for the role of Carol Danvers. Despite the movie being set in the era of grunge, it and Larson’s performance is not grungy or gritty, it lacks the dark realism that plagues comic book movies of late, instead, she is always confident and, sometimes literally, glowing throughout.

Samuel L. Jackson, continuing to look amazing and working harder than most actors in the United States even at age 70, is also amazing in this. It isn’t a Nick Fury backstory, per se, just the amount of time we get of him on screen allows us to learn more about him in this single movie than we had in the more than a dozen read more…