Weekend Watchlist, 8/8: Survive and thrive

Happy Friday, PV Guide readers! I hope you have a great weekend ahead of you.

Every Friday, I’m recommending a few great things to watch that the algorithm might not be pushing at you right now, with a focus on variety, so every reader can find something they’re interested in. The Weekend Watchlist will always be 100% free. (But I have recently opened up PV Guide’s Premium Tier, for those interested in supporting this work!)

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Three horror movies make their streaming debut this week: Final Destination: Bloodlines on HBO Max, Borderline on Peacock, and The Monkey on Hulu. (I will be watching The Monkey, after watching Bloodlines earlier this week.) New releases Jurassic World Rebirth and Sorry, Baby both arrive on VOD services. But the highlight for me is the Criterion Channel arrival of Jia Zhangke’s newest project, Caught by The Tides. The movie is made from 22 years of archival footage filmed while making other projects, edited together into a new narrative. I’ve heard it’s fantastic, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to finally check it out myself.

In theaters this week, the buzzy horror movie Weapons is out from Barbarian director Zach Cregger – Barbarian seemed like too obvious of a pick for this week’s weekend watchlist, but if you haven’t seen it yet, the release of Weapons is a great excuse to do so (it’s currently on Netflix).

This past week, I watched Pedicab Driver, Final Destination: Bloodlines, 40 Acres (more on those in a second), and rewatched Sudden Death. We’ve also been continuing our rewatch of Slow Horses ahead of the new season, which has been a fantastic decision. It’s the best show on TV.

One other rec that doesn’t quite fit here, because it’s not something to watch: I’ve been loving the daily trivia game Catfishing, where you guess a Wikipedia page based on a collection of its categories. It pulls from a variety of topics every day, and it’s been a fun morning ritual for us these past few weeks to try and solve them together.

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Sammo Hung Kicks Ass

If you like: Dazzling martial arts, physical comedy, athletic big dudes
Watch at: The Criterion Channel
Watch trailer here

Among the Criterion Channel’s new offerings in August is an exciting collection accurately titled Sammo Hung Kicks Ass, featuring six movies starring the great Hong Kong action filmmaker, actor, and choreographer who was a frequent collaborator (and childhood friend) of Jackie Chan.

Here’s what you can expect from a Sammo project: breathtakingly acrobatic martial arts, physical comedy, highly oscillating tones with some dark subject matter, some of the most ambitious set pieces and fight sequences ever filmed, and an innate understanding of the camera’s relationship to bodies and space. He’s one of one, and on a very short list of my favorite directors and action stars of all time.

My favorite of this group is Encounters of the Spooky Kind, a horror comedy that shows off Sammo’s many, many skills. He plays Bold Cheung, a very confident, if kind of dense, man. Dared to spend the night in a haunted house with a hopping vampire, Bold Cheung accepts — he is “Bold,”, after all. What follows is an onslaught of Looney Tunes-style slapstick action with real scares, dazzling fight choreography, and perfectly placed bits of physical comedy, including an extended Duck Soup homage (an easy way to my heart). And if you want another opinion, Sam Raimi basically directly copied one of Spooky Kind’s sequences for Evil Dead II. That’s high praise.

Eastern Condors, a Dirty Dozen-style war movie set in Vietnam, is also a highlight of this collection, but it’s hard to go wrong with a Sammo project.

40 Acres

If you like: Survival thrillers, post-apocalyptic movies about family, movies by music video directors
Watch at: For rent or purchase at VOD vendorsWatch trailer here

This new release flew a bit under the radar, but it’s well worth seeking out. A taut post-apocalyptic survival action-thriller about a family protecting their farmland, 40 Acres has more on its mind under the surface, as the title suggests.

The Freeman family has farmed their land since 1875, when an ancestor fled the US and settled in Canada. Nearly two hundred years later, a mysterious disease has ravaged most worldwide animal life, and farmland has become the most precious commodity left. When violent outsiders attempt to take the farm by force, the family has to stick together and defend their land. But 40 Acres is also about the necessity (and difficulty) of trust in hard times, the power of belief in a better world, and how to build that better world together after the destruction of the previous one. A pretty relevant topic for our times, I’d say.

The feature debut of music video director R.T. Thorne, 40 Acres is fun, tense, and well-constructed, with a sharp script and fantastic performances by Danielle Deadwyler, Kataem O'Connor, and Michael Greyeyes.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

If you like: The Final Destination movies, clever editing, horror with a mean streak
Watch at: HBO Max
Watch trailer here

Watching all the Final Destination movies this summer did rewire my brain chemistry a bit, but it was worth it, because it’s a very fun franchise. The newest edition, Bloodlines, is another winner, playing with the established formula in fun ways while still retaining the strengths of the franchise: clever editing that builds tension (a highlight of this one – a character being worried about the glass floor of a high-rise restaurant breaking is intercut with someone cracking their crème brûlée with a spoon), ambitious set pieces, and hilariously convoluted Rube Goldberg death machines.

Part of the joy of the series is the characters usually catch on to the rules early. Bloodlines takes that up another notch, as a character gets a full book laying out all the rules of the franchise, given to her by her grandmother (who can’t stop trash talking Death after figuring out his rules). It’s another winner in a franchise (nearly) full of them.

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