Weekend Watch: July 14, 2023
Cheesy horror flick's got Gen-X reliving our fear of quicksand + this one time in theater camp + our fave vamps from the Isle of Staten are back...
Happy Friday, TueNighters! We’re cruising into the weekend with another awesome list of movie releases, series drops, and tv shows, as seen on this week’s TueDo List — LET’S GO!
What We Do In The Shadows | Season 4 (FX Networks): Based on the feature film by Gen-Xers Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, the series documents the nightly exploits of vampire roommates Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) as they navigate the modern world of Staten Island with the help of their human familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), and their vampire bureaucrat acquaintance, The Guide (Kristen Schaal).
We’re hoping for more celebrity cameos, too: previous seasons have seen the likes of Mark Hamill, Tilda Swinton, Nick Kroll, and Benedict Wong, while Sofia Coppola, Thomas Mars, and Jim Jarmusch made their vampy debuts in season four.
The Afterparty | Season 2 (Apple TV+): Tiffany Haddish returns as Detective Danner in this hilarious murder mystery that explores a different character’s account of one fateful evening, all told through the lens of popular film genres and unique visuals to match the storyteller’s perspective.
In season two, a wedding is ruined when the groom is murdered and every guest is a suspect: introducing new film genres and an expanded cast of characters played by Elizabeth Perkins, Zach Woods, Paul Walter Hauser, Poppy Liu, Anna Konkle, Jack Whitehall, Vivian Wu, John Cho, and Ken Jeong.
Theater Camp (Theaters): an original comedy that could become a cult classic for theater kids. Tony Award winner Ben Platt and Molly Gordon star as Amos and Rebecca-Diane — lifelong best friends and drama instructors at a rundown camp in upstate New York. When their beloved founder falls into a coma, clueless tech bro Troy (Jimmy Tatro) arrives to run the property (into the ground). Amos, Rebecca-Diane, and production manager Glenn (Noah Galvin) band together with the staff and students, staging a masterpiece to keep their beloved summer camp afloat.
Any theater kids in the house? We’d love to know — drop a comment below!
You Won’t Be Alone (Peacock): In 19th-century Macedonia, a young girl is kidnapped and then transformed into a witch by an ancient spirit. Curious about life as a human, the witch accidentally kills a peasant in the nearby village and then takes her victim's shape to live life in her skin. Her curiosity ignited, she continues to wield this horrific power to understand what it means to be human.
What critics are saying: An ethereal folk horror that’s less scary than it is deeply moving.
They Cloned Tyrone (Netflix): a pulpy, sci-fi mystery caper starring John Boyega (Fontaine), Teyonah Parris (Yo-Yo), and Jamie Foxx (Slick Charles) as an unlikely trio investigating a series of eerie events, alerting them to a nefarious conspiracy lurking directly beneath their hood.
A neighborhood drug dealer (Boyega), is shot dead by a rival and then is very shocked to wake up in his bed the next morning unharmed. He and Slick Charles (Foxx) and Yo-Yo (Parris) begin looking into the incident, and their search eventually leads them to a vast underground complex where a government–backed lab is performing experiments on the local Black population. Realizing that he is an artificial clone controlled by Nixon, Fontaine initially feels despair but decides he needs to stand up to these white institutional overlords for the sake of his neighborhood.
Published in our TueDo List as releasing, this week: the film will begin a limited theatrical release on July 14th and available globally for streaming on Netflix on July 21st.
Quicksand (Shudder): follows an American couple on the brink of divorce who travels to Colombia for a work conference. While on a hike through the rainforest, a storm causes them to become trapped in a pit of quicksand. Unable to move, it becomes a struggle for survival as they battle the elements of the jungle and a venomous snake in order to escape.
Cheesy horror movie alert: but worth a mention because in nearly every tv show and movie we watched Gen-X grew up thinking that we would all one day encounter quicksand.
Theater kid forever! I can’t wait to see Theater Camp!
I only just learned about Theater Camp this week, and I am so excited to see it! Plus, I think it’s good to support smaller films in theaters. Now more than ever.