What I've Caught Up With, June 2024 Part 2

On the television front, I finished some shows in June. I made it to the end of The Boys, but I haven’t started the fourth season yet—I’m waiting until it’s all posted, so it’s likely I’ll watch the whole thing in July. I got through Gen V as well, mostly to stay current with The Boys. I also finished Red Dwarf, as mentioned yesterday. I watched Fallout, which was fun and finished the Peter Capaldi seasons of Doctor Who. I’m still watching Farscape, but now more or less when I want; White Collar is my new workout show.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2024 Part 1

If there's a theme to the bonus movies I watched in June, it's that most of them have a longer-than-average name for some reason. I don't know why it worked out this way (and it's not all of them, as will be evident tomorrow), but once I started, it just became sort of the thing that was happening. Some good stuff this month. While there were a few that I didn't love, there were plenty that I enjoyed a great deal. More coming tomorrow.

Sub-Mission

Film: Below
Format: DVD from Lena Community District Library throught interlibrary loan on basement television.

Submarine movies are their own particular little subcategory of war films. Most submarine movies have an element of horror to them in the sense that they are almost inherently claustrophobic. So, while “horror” might be a stretch in a lot of cases, at the very least, there’s an element of fear involved in them. That makes a film like Below an interesting proposition, as it is both a war/submarine movie and overtly a horror film. It essentially billed itself as “Poltergiest on a submarine,” and honestly, there’s no way it could live up to that hype, and it frankly doesn’t. There’s a story here, but in large part, this functions like a long episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

In 1943, in the dead middle of World War II, the submarine USS Tiger Shark is patrolling the Atlantic and, due to its position, is ordered to pick up survivors spotted by a British plane. There are three survivors of a British hospital ship recently sunk, and because we need some tension right away, one of the survivors is a woman. The survivors, who have been in the water for a couple of days, are brought on board just as a German destroyer shows up, so we’re going to get a little cat-and-mouse and the sub will take some depth charge damage before escaping. During that attack, the sub gets targeted specifically because a record player starts up out of nowhere. After the encounter, the sub’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood) discovers that one of the rescued people is a German, and he shoots him.