Hulu’s October: Horror Thrills and Family Fun

Here’s hoping the possible gems found in this month’s Hulu listings balances out the tardiness of this preview’s arrival.  There’s big news about the new season of Quinta Brunson’s acclaimed school workplace comedy.  A new documentary uses the catfishing of a rock act to illustrate the dark side of celebrity worship.  The male leads of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” reunite for a boxing drama.  There’s even a 30th anniversary revival of a classic of Chicano cinema.

October of course wouldn’t be October without a few horror offerings, and Hulu definitely delivers those.  A simple housefly plays a key role in one of David Cronenberg’s great body horror films.  A demon-possessed teen brings something other than ratings gold to a semi-seedy late night talk show.  For real-life horror, there’s a documentary about a supposed reform school that hid how many of the boys entrusted to it wound up dead.

From an English countryside bonkbuster to aliens who question the need for Halloween, this month’s goodies provide both tricks and treats.

Now Available

Abracadaver–In this Mexican heist comedy, three circus magician brothers meet again after years of separation.  What brings these estranged siblings together is a plan to steal from an impenetrable fortress a twin mummy whose value is in the millions.  But it’s for a good cause, honest.  The theft will save their father’s life.

Barbarian–Tess Marshall has reason to regret taking a short-term rental in Detroit for a job interview.  The place is already occupied by a man named Keith.  The house itself is located in a really bombed-out section of the city.  Unfortunately for her, those aren’t the reasons she should have cleared out of that house yesterday.  Those real reasons for regret just begin with the accidental discovery of a secret basement room containing a filthy mattress, a video camera, and a smeared bloody handprint on one wall. 

Blood In, Blood Out–Taylor Hackford directed this cult Chicano cinema classic which follows the intertwining lives and fortunes of a trio of Chicano cousins from 1972 to 1984.  In 1972, teenager Miklo Velka traveled to East Los Angeles and moved in with cousins Paco and Cruz.  The trio soon become involved in gang violence because Paco and Cruz are members of the Vatos Locos gang.  A series of violent inter-gang attacks and counter-attacks lead to the cousins being separated.  Miklo’s stuck in San Quentin prison on a murder charge, Paco joins the U.S. Marines, and Cruz continues pursuing his art.  But as time passes, the cousins’ lives will diverge further.

The Fly (1986)–David Cronenberg’s remake of the 1958 science fiction horror film of the same name stars Jeff Goldblum as brilliant but eccentric scientist Seth Brundle.  The scientist has been working to perfect a teleportation device known as a telepod.  After Brundle teleports himself during one experiment, he thinks his body’s increased strength and physical stamina comes from the teleportation process somehow purifying his body.  But in reality, it’s the complete opposite.  A housefly slipped into the pod when Brundle teleported himself, and now the scientist is slowly becoming a fly-human hybrid.  The result: body horror in the mighty Cronenberg manner. 

Hold Your Breath–Sarah Paulson makes a return to the horror genre with this period tale set in 1930s Oklahoma.  Margaret Bellum (Paulson) is a mother who lives in the midst of the windstorm-swept Dust Bowl with her two daughters.  She’s already on edge.  Rumors popping up around town of a male drifter who preys on husband-free households push her further off the sanity wagon.  But is the greater danger facing the Bellum family the Grey Man, a boogeyman made out of dust?  Or is it Margaret’s own crumbling sanity?

La Maquina–Andy (Diego Luna) is a Mexican boxing promoter in crisis.  His best friend and client Esteban (Gael Garcia Bernal) aka La Maquina faces an ignominious end to his boxing career thanks to a first round defeat resulting from his not drinking his lucky fizzy drink.  Worse, the boxer is starting to hallucinate, possibly the result of receiving one too many hits to the head.  Andy’s determined to rebuild his friend’s confidence through getting Esteban back into shape in three months and having a rematch.  However, the promoter’s plans don’t account for the big secrets that will strain the friends’ relationship. 

Ready Or Not–Grace (Samara Weaving), who comes from a poor background, has put up with the toxic behavior of the wealthy LeDomas family because she’s deeply in love with her new husband Alex LeDomas.  But there’s one more barrier to the happily ever after she seeks: she has to play Hide And Seek with her future in-laws.  The trouble is, she learns too late that if one of the LeDomases find her, they’ll literally kill her.

 The Return Of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlisle–As a child, country singer Brandi Carlisle idolized Tanya Tucker aka the wild child of country music.  Tucker had toughness, a husky voice, and astounding musicianship skills.  Yet because Tucker was a woman, she never got credited like Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard for her outlaw behavior.  Tucker’s volatile romantic life and drug abuse led to her career flaming out.  Carlisle hopes to revive the veteran musician’s career by helping the older singer record an album of all-new material for Tucker’s first record in seventeen years.  Tucker’s own doubts about her abilities, though, might undermine the singer’s efforts to relaunch herself.  Your Sleeper Film of the month.

Scamanda–In 2012, Amanda Riley started a blog chronicling her struggles with the blood cancer known as Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  This Christian wife talked about the effects of her cancer treatments, miraculous remissions, and terminal scares.  For years, blog readers connected emotionally with Riley and many readers donated to help fund her cancer treatments.  But Riley’s tale turned out to be an elaborately cruel deception which involved fake medical documents and her deliberately shaving her head.  Based on the titular podcast.

Silkwood–Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep, in one of her great performances) works at Oklahoma’s Kerr-McGee nuclear power plant.  When the plant starts falling behind on completing an important contract, pressure to catch up results in lots of overtime work and ignoring the fudging of safety and workmanship test results.  Silkwood notices and is vocal about the Kerr-McGee workers’ health and safety being endangered by these practices.  Her determination to investigate further what’s happening at the nuclear plant and to alert the world results in her personal life being ruined and her health being endangered.  Was Silkwood’s auto accident death the product of bad luck or something worse?   

Solar Opposites Halloween Special–In the new holiday special, Korvo and family are trying to become members of a swanky country club.  While they’re waiting, the alien family puts Halloween to the yea or nay test.  However, when Korvo mouths off a little too much about not wanting to be involved with a holiday where he gives candy to kids in costumes, his life will stay taken over by the Spirit of Halloween until the alien says otherwise.

Witches: Truth Behind The Trials–This National Geographic docuseries looks at six of history’s most notorious witch trials to examine what happened and why.  The suspected witches were usually poor women unable to defend themselves. The series will recreate witch trials over the centuries from Germany, Scotland, England, Sweden, Ireland, and of course America.  

October 10

Abbott Elementary Season 4–A new season brings several changes for this situation comedy about the lives of dedicated teachers at a badly funded Philadelphia public school.  Season 4 will run 22 episodes.  There will be a Halloween episode and a Christmas episode.  This season will showcase principal Ava, which means more looks at her family and her life as related to the school.  There will even be a crossover with “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.”  Finally, Janine and Gregory’s kiss in last season’s finale has butterfly effect results on the rest of the school.

Deadly Secrets: The Lost Children Of Dozier–Marianna, Florida’s Dozier School For Boys had for over a century been the place which received (without parental consent) boys from poor families.  These youths had committed minor legal infractions.  At the school, its juvenile charges were regularly subjected to brutal mental, physical, and sexual abuse from the school’s guards…who were otherwise respectable community members.  Officially, 31 boys died on Dozier’s grounds during the school’s existence.  But forensic anthropologist Dr. Erin Kimmerle discovers in Dozier’s unmarked graves 55 more boys’ corpses.  This is the story of the efforts to identify these unknown boys’ bodies and return the remains to their relatives.

The Grab–This documentary from Gabriela Cowperthwaite (“Blackfish”) uses the $4.7 billion sale of Smithfield Foods to a Chinese company as the starting point for chronicling a seven-year investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting into various interests’ race against the clock to control food and water resources for potential power and profit in a dystopic future.  These players include the Chinese government, the founder of the Blackwater mercenary group, and even a Saudi company.

October 11

Dragon Ball DAIMA–”Dragon Ball” creator Akira Toriyama designed this project intended to mark the 40th anniversary of the series’ first serialization.  Thanks to a conspiracy, Goku and his friends have been literally shrunk down in size.  To find a way to regain their normal size, they’ll need to explore the mysterious Demon Realm accompanied by Supreme Kai, Glorio, and Panzy.

Fright Night (2011)–In this remake of the cult vampire movie of the same name, teenage horror movie fan Charlie Brewster discovers his reclusive neighbor Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) is actually a vampire.  But when none of Brewster’s friends believe him, he’s forced to ask dissolute TV host Peter Vincent (David Tennant) for help in ending the vampire’s reign of terror.

October 16

Nemesis–Public Prosecutor Sylvia von Maele is highly displeased when a key trial witness gets murdered in von Maele’s home.  Her solution is to work with an underground team of detectives to nail a group of international criminals who’ve remained above the law.  But what happens when the trail leads to the highest levels of the Dutch business community?  Based on the novel by Simon de Waal.

October 18

The Devil’s Climb–Deep in the wilderness of southeastern Alaska lies the mountain known as The Devil’s Thumb.  This tower of ice-plastered granite has a reputation as one of North America’s most dangerous mountains.  Two famed rock climbers are determined to summit the mountain.  One is Alex Honnold, who’s driven to achieve the seemingly impossible.  The other is Honnold’s best friend Tommy Caldwell.  After suffering a career-threatening Achilles injury, Caldwell treats this climb as his chance for a comeback.  Can the two friends climb all five peaks of The Devil’s Thumb in a single day?

Fanatical: The Catfishing Of Tegan And Sara–This documentary brings together a celebrated indie pop duo and a true crime documentary filmmaker.  In the late 2000s, Tegan and Sara Quin started establishing themselves as creators of touching songs about sapphic yearning.  At the same time, social media such as message boards, Tumblr, and Facebook made it easier for the Quins to interact with their fans.  The extroverted Tegan particularly liked that feature of social media.  That is, until it was discovered that an imposter(s) informally called Fegan (aka “Fake Tegan”) had been posing as Tegan on social media for over 16 years.  In that time, the catfisher(s) made victims of the con believe they had a cool new friend or even a secret lover.  The scam was made plausible by the catfisher(s) using Tegan’s private photos and personal family news.  What this film says about fans’ sense of ownership over a celebrity and the personal toll on Tegan in particular, the viewer must see for themself.

Rivals Season 1–David Tennant (“Good Omens”) stars in this series based on Dame Jilly Cooper’s second Rutshire Chronicles novel.  It’s1986 in Thatcher-era Britain, and Lord Tony Baddingham (Tennant) is controller of Corinium Television.  His rival and neighbor is Rupert Campbell-Black, an ex-Olympian, a member of Parliament, and a notorious womanizer.  Campbell-Black and Baddingham’s rivalry spirals out from the former constantly reminding the latter that he’s a product of generational wealth.  When Lord Baddingham makes a play for BBC viewers with a talk show hosted by the ambitious Declan O’Hara, it means that O’Hara’s family must move to the countryside with him.  However, when O’Hara’s family learns they’ll be neighbors to Campbell-Black, they soon get sucked into a world of callous philandering, unrequited lust, and maybe even the rivalry between the two peers.  Viewers will soon see why Cooper’s source novel was called a bonkbuster.

October 19

Late Night With The Devil–In 1977, Jack Delroy constantly struggles and fails to knock Johnny Carson’s talk show off the top of the Nielsen ratings with his own talk show.  This year, sweeps week comes during Halloween, and Delroy and his producer Leo see a way to use their Halloween show to pump up their ratings.  Their ace in the hole is an interview by best-selling parapsychologist Dr. June Ross-Mitchell with 13-year-old Lilly D’Abo.  Not only is the teenager the sole survivor of a mass suicide by members of a Satanic church, but she is supposedly possessed by a demonic spirit Lilly calls Mr. Wriggles.  When Delroy suggests conjuring up Mr. Wriggles, events soon go the “Hell in a handbasket” route.

October 24

The Speedway Murders–On November 17, 1978, four young Burger Chef employees working the graveyard shift at the restaurant were mysteriously abducted from their workplace.  Thanks to police incompetence, the crime scene was cleaned and allowed to re-open for business the next day.  The corpses of the missing young workers were found in rural Johnson County the following day.  Unsurprisingly, the case still remains unsolved.  This documentary examines theories about what happened to the teen victims.

October 25

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band–It’s a new concert documentary starring the Lying Orange Felon’s newest least favorite rock star (because Springsteen has endorsed Harris for President).  In his first live concerts since the outbreak of the pandemic, Springsteen re-assembles the members of the E Street Band for a 2023-2024 tour that will take them throughout the U.S. and on to Europe.  Springsteen at 74 may no longer dance around the stage during his performances.   But he and the band are still organized enough to get their playing up to speed and to have a song list that could be the story of a life passing from youth to old age.