Maneater: Truth Quest Review

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The nonsensical delight of Maneater's shark-RPG premise made for an amusing if somewhat repetitive campaign last year, but the recycled ideas of its new Truth Quest DLC don’t do much to stop that novelty from wearing thin. This expansion mostly offers more of what you’ve already seen, sending you on familiar missions to eat hapless humans, destroy boats, or kill fellow sea dwellers. You’ll still get to hear hilarious narrator Trip Westhaven (once again voiced by Archer’s Chris Parnell) say outlandish stuff while you explore a new area of Port Clovis, and it’s still exciting to kill-or-be-killed by bounty hunters who bear down armies upon you in an effort to taste your delicious shark meat. These activities are just as fun as they were in the base campaign, but unfortunately they’re just as monotonous too.

Having finished his documentary about a bull shark and Scaly Pete, Maneater’s narrator has naturally now gone full conspiracy theorist, sending you on a quest to uncover the truth that the Illuminati satanic lizard people are hiding... or whatever. What you’re actually after isn’t very well explained, but the story ultimately unfolds into a by the numbers hunt for a creature called the Atomic Leviathan. As over-the-top premises go, seeing Westhaven go from eccentric documentarian to babbling conspiratorial psychopath is entertaining and well written, even if a lot of the things you’re doing along the way feel extremely similar to when he was sane.

What We Said About Maneater

"It’s absolutely fun to play as mutant Jaws on steroids! Maneater chews the metaphorical scenery as often as it has you devouring humans and the diverse aquatic inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s some good dumb entertainment – for a while. But if you’re wondering whether its shallow combat and simplistic upgrades can sustain that excitement for the roughly 15 hours it takes to become a hulking megashark and reach the end of its uninspired satirical revenge story… it cannot." -Dan Stapleton, May 22, 2020

Score: 7

Read the full Maneater Review

However, that’s not to say that there is nothing new in Truth Quest. There’s a fantastic new evolution set that turns you into an irradiated demon of the sea with the ability to shoot lasers out of your mouth like Godzilla. This new ability is cool, but it’s also so overpowered that there’s little reason to use anything else, as you’re able to blast apart even the toughest enemies with relative ease. Watching helicopters get knocked out of the sky and people explode as you melt their faces with it never really gets old, but its mere existence also undermines a lot of the other combat choices you could be making.

Alongside the new body mod there are five new organ evolution mods, an added organ slot, and an increased max level of 40 (raised from 30 in the base campaign). None of these are real game changers aside from the organ mod that lets you heal over time, but at the very least they give you some carrots on a stick to grind toward as you work your way through the new region and hunt a mysterious new predator.

The new laser attack is so overpowered there's little reason to use anything else.

One thing that does manage to stand out is how much Truth Quest makes use of Maneater’s Whipshot attack, which lets you grab grenades, torpedoes, or other explosive projectiles thrown at you, and tail-thwack them back at your enemies. While the Whipshot wasn’t required a whole lot to get through the original campaign, it’s absolutely necessary in Truth Quest as some enemies can only be hit from a distance. You can use this to satisfyingly destroy structures or helicopters that would otherwise be out of your reach, or to do serious damage to high level enemies.

The only issue is that you can’t use the Whipshot unless you’ve got AI enemies throwing explosives at you, and sometimes they don’t when you really need them to. Or they do, but they throw them so incompetently that you’ve gotta flail around desperately trying to grab one before they explode, probably taking more damage in the process than you would have if you’d have just gnawed on whatever it is you’re trying to blow up.

Speaking of dimwitted AI, the humans and sea creatures that are usually pushovers up their game slightly in Truth Quest, now coming after you with helicopters, massive warships, and freaky new radiation powers that can seriously mess you up. Seeing the new weapons of war for the first time is a thrill, especially facing off against helicopters – leaping into the air to chew on one of those metal dragonflies is just delightful. Normally all these new enemies would present a pretty lethal challenge… but since you can shoot lasers out of your doggone mouth now, they’re never actually an issue. Oh, the joys of power creep.

Outside of combat, there’s a new kind of side quest called Time Trials, where you literally and figuratively jump through hoops to complete a circuit in time. That helps break up the routine a bit, but Time Trials aren’t particularly exciting overall. Racing around the sea is already something you spend quite a lot of time doing in Maneater, so getting timed while you do it isn’t exactly adding much new to the experience. But at least now Chris Parnell will make fun of you as you struggle to jump through rings of fire. That’s always nice.

The DLC's short-lived campaign only lasts a handful of hours.

There’s also a new “collectible” in the form of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists who hide in hard-to-reach places and spout nonsense before you eat them, which can make for some good, murderous fun. But aside from those thin additions, all the new missions in Truth Quest are nearly identical to stuff we’ve seen before, like eating a certain number of humans or hunting an apex predator that presents a limited challenge. It’s actually surprising how many ideas are re-used, which sometimes feels like it could have been a part of the original game with how little it distinguishes itself.

Truth Quest’s short-lived campaign only lasts a handful of hours, even for a completionist run, but the finale, which has you facing off against the Atomic Leviathan itself, is an absolute highlight. This irradiated monstrosity is unlike any boss encounter in Maneater before it, and feels like a proper kaiju-like monster fight. It doesn’t quite justify a lot of the repetitive questing it takes to track him down, but it at least serves as an enjoyable finale to an otherwise unremarkable expansion.

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Impeachment: American Crime Story Premiere Review: "Exiles"

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Impeachment: American Crime Story premieres Sept. 7, 2021 at 10pm ET/PT on FX.

Impeachment: American Crime Story revisits the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal 23 years after President Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in a 10-hour limited series with a distinct point of view. Regardless of your personal politics, the case itself was an absolute media circus that dominated the news cycle for months and helped launch partisan politics into a new stratosphere of divisiveness. It also made Monica Lewinsky a national mockery and the subject of intense victim-shaming derision that, in hindsight, is beyond appalling and misogynist. But the male point of view dominated coverage at the time, reducing the women involved to cartoon pawns that fit the stereotypes desired by everything from cable news shows to late-night staples.

What Impeachment: American Crime Story, the third in executive producer Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, and Brad Simpson’s sporadic limited series concept for FX, does right from the pilot episode, "Exiles," is make it clear that the story everyone remembers most as a prurient political punchline is actually an intensely personal one for the people at its center. Based on Jeffrey Toobin's book A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President and Lewinsky’s own autobiography, the narrative is led by the perspectives of Lewinsky (Beanie Feldstein), Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson), and Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford).

In the pilot, it’s these three disparate women who provide the primary perspectives. In January 1998, Lewinsky opens the series as the soft-spoken young woman sadly packing mementos in her D.C. apartment for an impending move to New York City. A call from her Pentagon friend/colleague Tripp, suggesting a lunch meeting to “solve” Monica’s problem, sets the stage for the FBI to bring Lewinsky into custody for questioning regarding the ongoing investigation of President Bill Clinton. Livid at Tripp’s participation, Lewinsky calls her friend a “treacherous bitch,” and the series is off and running.

The narrative then jumps back in time to 1993 and sets up Tripp’s life and career as the secretary to Deputy White House Council Vince Foster. In a stunning transformation, Paulson is almost unrecognizable as Tripp, changing her look and physical gait to embody the middle-aged career civil servant. We get a taste of where Tripp is currently: a single parent, partial to the politics of the prior administration and upset about her overall station in life. The show contextualizes her bitterness at losing agency in her own career based on uncontrollable circumstances and partisan whims, and makes her more of a human, flaws and all.

The series even dips into comedy with its portrayal of Paula Jones and her out-of-work actor husband, Steve (Taran Killam). He sees fit to leverage the embarrassment of an article that mentions his wife in a sexual harassment incident with then Governor Clinton as the path to his potential casting in Designing Women. His opportunism is ridiculous and bordering on parody, in terms of the “stupid Southerners” trope, but Ashford manages to makes Jones sympathetic as a woman, not unlike Lewinsky, thrust into a situation she severely underestimated.

Paulson is almost unrecognizable as Tripp.

All three women, in fact, are not cast as just one thing, which history at the time deigned to do. Instead, they are introduced as complex participants in their lives, orchestrators and partial victims to their situations and choices, which already makes the series and its approach an inherently interesting one.

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BenQ EX2780Q Review

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Gaming monitors often lean hard into a stereotype of what gaming hardware should look like. That means brash, angular design with gaudy LED accents.

The BenQ EX2780Q is an alternative. It’s a sleek, refined monitor that could easily be sold as a professional display. The focus is on image rather than refresh rate, providing a wide gamut display and HDR support. All this helps the EX2780Q carve a unique niche in the crowded market for 27-inch gaming monitors.

BenQ EX2780Q – Design

The BenQ EX2780Q’s simple, curved matte black chassis is paired with elegant trim that, in most lighting, takes on a bronze or coffee hue. Thin bezels frame the display on three sides while the bottom is bordered by a small soundbar with a faux fabric texture. This is where you’ll find the HDRi sensor which detects ambient light and adjusts the monitor accordingly. It all adds up to a refined, luxurious look.

Functionally, however, the EX2780Q falls flat. The included stand is sturdy but short and only adjusts for tilt. The monitor will sit low on your desk, so tall gamers may need to prop it up with a box or some books. A VESA mount is included, so a third-party stand can be attached to solve the issue. Still, it’s odd for a monitor this expensive to ship without a height-adjustable stand.

Connectivity options include two HDMI 2.0 ports, DisplayPort 1.4, and a USB-C port with DisplayPort mode. The USB-C port is another unusual feature to find in a gaming monitor, but don’t get too excited. It doesn’t include Power Delivery, so it can’t charge your laptop.

BenQ backs the EX2780Q with a three-year limited warranty. This is uncommon for a gaming monitor at any price point. Samsung and LG tend to offer a one year warranty on all monitors, and while Alienware can do better, its monitors are much more expensive. It’s unlikely you’ll need to use the warranty, but it’s a nice perk.

BenQ EX2780Q – Features & OSD

The BenQ EX2780Q has a remote that can control all the monitor’s features. It includes buttons to quickly change the volume or access a variety of preset modes, such as HDRi or Blue Light modes. I love the remote, though I’ll admit I spend more time hunched over tweaking monitor settings than the average gamer.

BenQ hasn’t sacrificed the monitor’s physical buttons entirely. It includes a set of buttons alongside a joystick that is used to navigate menus. This is the standard arrangement for most modern monitors. One concession is made to the remote: none of the buttons have a label on the front. It’s easy to accidentally turn the monitor off by hitting the wrong button.

The menu includes a decent range of image quality settings. It has five precise gamma settings that span from 1.8 to 2.6 and RGB color adjustment, though only in the User preset. It provides a Black Equalizer setting for competitive gamers who want to boost shadow detail but doesn’t have a built-in crosshair.

There’s a long list of image presets available. These include Low Blue Light mode, a Rec. 709 mode, and an Eye Care mode. While they have their use, I think most gamers will find them overwhelming. For example, it’s possible to access Low Blue Light mode through two different menus, but only one method then provides five alternative Blue Light mode options. Why do the options differ on how they’re accessed? And does a gaming monitor need five different Blue Light modes?

One mode is worth special attention: HDRi. This feature, which is key to the monitor’s marketing, uses a built-in ambient light sensor to automatically detect room lighting and adjust the monitor accordingly. Despite the name, it doesn’t require an HDR signal to work.

I wasn’t happy with HDRi’s handling of color temperature. The feature at times seemed confused, flipping between a cooler and warmer look with distracting frequency. I also didn’t like the look of HDRi when HDR was turned on in Windows. Every mode looked over-sharpened and too cool.

On the plus side, HDRi significantly adjusted brightness, keeping the monitor at a comfortable brightness throughout the day. That’s helpful; it keeps you from ramping up brightness during the day and then searing your eyes by forgetting to turn it down at night.

BenQ EX2780Q – Day-to-day performance

The BenQ EX2780Q is a wonderful monitor for everyday use. Its 1440p resolution looks sharp across the 27-inch screen, with only the finest interface elements and smallest fonts showing any hint of pixelation or aliasing. It’s also a bright display, and while it doesn’t reach the extreme levels of Alienware’s more expensive AW2721D, it beats LG’s popular 27GL83A-B.

Color performance is a highlight. The BenQ EX2780Q is astoundingly accurate right out of the box, going toe-to-toe with mid-range professional monitors like the Asus ProArt PA278QV. The BenQ also serves up an ideal color temperature and spot-on gamma. It’s a wide gamut display, covering the entire sRGB gamut and 90 percent of the AdobeRGB gamut.

Brightness isn’t exceptional, but it’s far more than you’re likely to need for daily use. In fact, I typically used the BenQ monitor at less than half its maximum sustained brightness. This alone would combat glare, which is further reduced by an effective anti-glare coating. The BenQ EX2780Q is a good pick for bright rooms.

Overall, the EX2780Q delivers an experience on par with entry-level professional monitors. It’s a real stunner for photo or video editing. Its on-screen menu lacks the customization some professionals might prefer, but that’s easy to forgive when image quality is this good right out of the box.

BenQ EX2780Q – Gaming performance

You might guess the BenQ EX2780Q’s accurate color and wide gamut leads to excellent visuals in games. You’d be right.

The monitor’s highly accurate, vibrant color looks fantastic in every game you throw at it. Minecraft, which I’ve returned to in recent months, is an excellent example. No one has ever accused Minecraft of being vivid or dazzling, but the EX2780Q does its best to change that. The game looks bright, crisp, and fresh. My time playing Diablo 3 and Final Fantasy XIV lead me to similar conclusions.

This is an IPS monitor and, like all monitors of its type, it can’t reach a deep, inky black. Scenes that should appear entirely dark are instead a hazy gray. However, the EX2780Q I tested had excellent luminance uniformity. It lacks distracting blotches of obvious excess brightness along the corners of the display, which can ruin simulation or horror games and remains a common flaw among gaming monitors.

Indeed, BenQ avoids all the major flaws that often degrade an IPS monitor’s image quality. Contrast is good for an IPS monitor, uniformity is solid, gamma performance is excellent and color, as mentioned, is spot-on.

The monitor falls short in just one area, and that’s HDR. The EX2780Q’s superb color performance offers a vibrant experience that’s more vivid and alive than SDR. However, the monitor’s mediocre brightness and complete lack of local dimming has downsides. It can’t deliver remarkable highlights in brilliant scenes or excellent shadow detail in dark scenes.

Don’t judge the EX2780Q too harshly on this basis, however. No monitor in this price range provides a great, or even passable, HDR experience. The BenQ can defeat monitors well above its price range, like the Alienware AW2721D, in SDR image quality, while sidestepping flaws found in monitors sold for twice as much.

BenQ EX2780Q – Motion performance

The BenQ EX2780Q has a 144Hz IPS panel with a one millisecond gray-to-gray response time. Once impressive, this is now the default for gaming monitors. Gamers can choose competitors with a 1440p panel at up to 165Hz, or a 1080p panel at up to 280Hz.

BenQ makes a clear choice not to compete with ultra-high refresh displays, like Asus’ excellent TUF VG279QM. Highly competitive players who demand the absolute best in pixel response times and refresh rates should look elsewhere. The EX2780Q is built for image quality, not speed.

Still, the monitor’s motion performance is good. Great, even, depending on what you have right now. A 144Hz monitor like the EX2780Q delivers motion clarity and a smooth feel that’s a clear, obvious upgrade over the 60Hz monitors that were common a few years ago.

The monitor also avoids common motion problems. I paid close attention to gameplay in Diablo 3, which combines dark background elements alongside bright, colorful characters and effects. Ghosting and halos weren’t noticeable in my experience.

AMD’s FreeSync Premium is officially supported, but Nvidia’s G-Sync also worked and showed no problems in my time with the monitor.

BenQ EX2780Q – Sound

Most monitors have weak built-in speakers, if they have any at all. The BenQ EX2780Q bucks that trend with a pair of two-watt speakers and a five-watt subwoofer. This system offers loud, deep, rich sound with noticeable bass. The only flaw is sound staging; the speakers are located in a soundbar along the monitor’s chin and fail to provide definition between the left and right channels.

Purchasing Guide

The BenQ EX2780Q is available on Amazon and direct from BenQ for $349.

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BenQ X1300i Review

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Seemingly in a single breath, BenQ has tagged its X1300i projector as “the world’s first 4LED gaming projector,” that’s simultaneously capable of supporting incredibly smooth gameplay and cinematic visuals. In reality, this peculiar cube doesn’t completely live up to all of that hype. The good news, however, is that it gets about as close to meeting those lofty expectations as you could hope for from a $1,300 projector in 2021.

Specs

• Resolution: 1080p (1920x1080)
• Brightness: 3000 ANSI lumens
• Contrast Ratio: 500,000:1
• Input Lag: 8.33ms@120 Hz
• Resolution support: VGA (640 x 480) to 4K UHD (3840 x 2160); HDR10; HLG
• Connections: two HDMI 2.0 inputs; one 3.5mm audio output; one optical audio output.

BenQ X1300i – Design and Features

First, and most notably, the BenQ X1300i makes a deliberate departure from the rectangular shape that most modern projectors have adopted. Instead, the X1300i is a 14-pound cube of a projector, and a stylish one at that thanks to a color scheme that utilizes a black faceplate surrounded by an orange trim. The different shape may make this projector a trickier fit depending on the configuration of your space. But in general, it’s an aesthetically pleasing design that sets this projector apart from the competition.

In addition to a pair of HDMI ports – one of which is an HDMI ARC connection – there’s also a third, hidden HDMI input that can be found by unraveling a few screws on the projector’s back panel and lifting the cube’s lid. That connection is meant solely for the Android TV dongle that BenQ included in the package, which is a usable, slightly flawed tool for streaming if you don’t have another option at your disposal. More on that in a moment.

For all the praise awarded to the X1300i for how it looks, it’s what is inside the box that should be the real cause for excitement. As a 4LED projector, BenQ says the X1300i takes the RGB color system found in standard LED projectors and incorporates an additional blue “pump” into the mix. We’ll expand on this shortly, but the 4LED technology built into the X1300i made for an exceptionally bright picture that portrayed remarkably accurate colors.

Another major bonus from the X1300i’s status as a 4LED projector is its presumptive lifespan. BenQ rates the X1300i as capable of 20,000 hours of use while operating under “normal” projector settings, with a peak of up to 30,000 hours if the projector is in energy-saving mode. Obviously, we didn’t have time to truly test the validity of this claim by BenQ. But if the reputable brand’s assumption is even close, the X1300i will still last far longer than the average, non-LED projector under similar conditions.

Not to go unnoticed, the remote for the BenQ X1300i is a sleek, streamlined way to access important settings and features on the projector. It may not have all of the options that the remote for its relative, the BenQ TK850, comes equipped with, but it isn’t nearly as bulky while offering most of the essential functionality that everyday projector users will find handy, including dedicated buttons for Amazon Prime Video and for switching between the X1300i’s three gaming modes.

BenQ X1300i Projector – Performance

BenQ specced out the X1300i to be a workhorse projector for gamers. Simply put, that is precisely what this product is. There are gaming projectors with better input lag (the Optoma UHD38 comes to mind), and gamers used to the miniscule lag of great gaming monitors may be able to nitpick the X1300i. But 8.3ms for 120Hz playback is solid for a projector in this price range, and we experienced hours of smooth gameplay throughout our testing period.

That impressively low input lag is bolstered both by BenQ’s GameMaestro Technology – which the company says is designed to “optimize visual and audio settings,” for certain gaming styles – and the X1300i’s trio of gaming modes designed for RPG’s, sports, and FPS. The differences in the various modes weren’t necessarily massive, but they were noticeable in certain situations. In FPS mode, for instance, the image seemed slightly more illuminated to help decipher details hidden in darker parts of the picture. We can’t say the same for the projector’s audio, which according to BenQ is supposed to adapt alongside the image depending on what gaming mode is selected, but these three modes had a positive impact on the specific genres of gaming that they are meant for.

The end result of the BenQ X1300i’s intriguing combination of specifications is a gaming experience that should satisfy both casual and more experienced players alike. Make no mistake, the X1300i won’t replicate the performance of a great gaming monitor or comparable 4K TV. But in the gaming projector space, it’s a very capable machine.

Outside of gameplay, the X1300i can be a solid streaming solution, just as long as you’re willing to work with its faults. It’s ridiculously bright, making it compatible with non-light controlled spaces. Plus, BenQ’s auto color calibration feature shines with the X1300i, displaying astonishingly accurate colors with content like the breathtaking visuals showcased in The Grand Tour.

If you do want to play with the picture, the X1300i gives you the tools to do so. In addition to several picture presets (bright, living room, game, sports, cinema, and user), you can adjust standard settings like brightness, contrast and sharpness. Or, you can dive into the projector’s advanced color settings and tinker in areas like color management or HDR brightness for supported content. The average person will likely enjoy the picture that the X1300i presents right out of the box. But it is comforting to know that it’s possible to tune things to your own individual taste.

The X1300i is limited, however, to a 1080p native resolution, effectively putting a low ceiling on how spectacular of an image it can create. And, while the Android TV dongle is certainly better than other built-in streaming platforms we’ve tested in other projectors, it is missing native Netflix support. BenQ tried to include a workaround here by providing the option to cast Netflix to the dongle via a separate mobile device or computer. It works, but the best alternative here is simply to stream through your console or one of the many great, affordable streaming sticks available today.

The built-in stereo speakers of the BenQ X1300i follow a similar pattern to the Android TV dongle. They will work if you need them to, and are in fact better than other projector speakers we’ve dealt with. But there are better, more satisfying solutions readily available, from modest soundbar systems to full home theater setups.

Purchasing Guide

The BenQ X1300i is available through Amazon for $1,299.

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Vacation Friends Review

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Vacation Friends premieres on Hulu on Friday, Aug. 27.

Vacation Friends, starring Lil Rel Howery and John Cena, may not reach the absolute heights of comedy, but it's still an enjoyable hang featuring fun chemistry and another standout performance by Cena (in what's become a summer bubbling over with good ol' John).

When headlining wrestlers transition over to movies, the first instinct is usually to start them out as a straightforward action star. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson traveled this path, with films like The Scorpion King, The Rundown, and Walking Tall, and while he was fine in those films, Johnson was able to separate from the pack because of SNL and Be Cool.

Similarly, Cena began with stunted actioners like The Marine and 12 Rounds, but it was Trainwreck and Blockers that helped him ascend. It took someone being able to see beyond a dude seemingly sculpted out of stone to give him a chance to show off his true charisma. The same can even be said of Dave Bautista and his MCU Drax role. The actual comedy, and improv, talents of top-level wrestlers cannot be understated.

So, naturally, Cena is pure joy here, as he's able to use his wit and charm to their fullest while also borrowing another key ingredient from wrestling: finding the right dance partner. Like Johnson, who was lighting up the screen this summer with Emily Blunt in Jungle Cruise, Cena is able to make magic with fresh and formidable scene partners. Both Howery and Insecure's Yvonne Orji are great here as the "reactors" to Cena and co-star Meredith Hagner's wild antics. Howery and Orji's Marcus and Emily aren't fully free, but also not firmly rigid, so they're able to take a few beats to absorb the craziness while still having a blast partaking in it.

Vacation Friends isn't mean-spirited. At first glance, it may seen like Cena and Hagner's Ron and Kyla are destructively chaotic, like something out of a Hangover movie. It's all a little warmer than that. This is not a "one guy annoys another guy for 90 minutes"-style comedy, though the ads may steer you into thinking that. Marcus and Emily genuinely like Ron and Kyla, and during their week in Mexico, the two couples have a good-natured (and only slightly debaucherous) time. It actually makes the petty and predictable blowup near the end of the movie feel a bit too forced, since this foursome only ever benefits from being friends. That third act conflict aside, the medium levels of shock here help the movie feel less aggravating overall and more enjoyable.

Much of the tension and conflict in Vacation Friends is fairly easy to map out ahead of time. It's basically all misunderstandings which we're way ahead of, and while that stifles the story a teensy bit, it doesn't fully squash the fun. After Marcus and Emily have their raucous romp with Ron and Emily, who are wackily cordial and earnest (especially with drugs and sex), they go back to their old non-vacation lives until their wedding day arrives seven months later. Ron and Kyla unexpectedly show up, never realizing that they'd gotten the brush-off, and the stuffy affair (lorded over by Emily's disapproving father, played by Robert Wisdom) livens up.

Vacation Friends isn't mean-spirited.

The only times Vacation Friends doesn't really work is when it strains to make Marcus and Emily actually angry with Ron and Kyla, because, aside from a few instances, they're actually incredible people who are liked by almost everyone. They just commit the sin (for the sake of comedy) of speaking freely in front of the repressed and uptight. Another bright spot here is Hagner, who you may have seen in Search Party or Palm Springs, as Cena's zany partner in crime. These two obviously need Marcus and Emily to bounce their nuttiness off of, but they also need each other as perfectly synced-up social pterodactyls always willing to live every moment in life to the Nth degree.

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He's All That Review

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He's All That premieres Friday, Aug. 27 on Netflix.

He's All That, a reworked and gender-flipped reboot of 1999's teen rom-com She's All That, is a deftly charming and capable update that takes the original premise, revolving around a glow-up "makeover" bet, and slides it effortlessly into 2021.

Directed by Freaky Friday and Mean Girls' Mark Waters, He's All That isn't laugh-out-loud funny per se, but it does sweetly pull off the magic trick of presenting us with a handful of somewhat insufferable characters at the start and then slowly chipping away at them until they're vulnerable and engaging. As Tanner Buchanan's anti-everything grouch, Cameron Kweller, states at one point, high school is filled with scared people pretending to be something they're not. He's All That cradles this notion and uses it as a storyline strength for its two leads as they both discover what's really underneath all that emotional armor.

TikTok star Addison Rae strikes gold with her first major role, parlaying her social media fame into a character who, similarly, lives her life online in an attempt to craft and cultivate a persona that helps her fit in at a rich and privileged school. Rae is able to give us a character, Padgett, who's shallow, but has also worked very hard to become shallow, in an odd way. She's a paid makeover influencer with an enormous following, but it's all a means to an understandable end. Meanwhile, Buchanan nicely channels some of his angry outsider vibe from Cobra Kai to give us Cameron, who's off-putting to the point where you can understand why he's ostracized.

One of the lingering jokes/tropes from She's All That, which also permeates a lot of other rom-coms, is the idea that an attractive person, like Rachael Leigh Cook's Laney, somehow isn't beautiful until she takes off her glasses and puts on makeup and formal wear. That's ridiculous, obviously. He's All That still has a bit of this as background noise, though it gives us more of a reason why Cameron makes for a perfect "I can make him Prom King" bet. No one thinks Cameron is unattractive; he's just an unbearable malcontent. He's a growling culture snob who would be an absolute pain in the ass to hold a conversation with. In that regard, He's All That's biggest triumph may be making him actually enjoyable by the end rather than redeeming the so-called superficial Instagram girl.

Rae and Buchanan work very well together, as he begins to soften and smile and she -- well, see, she's always been a good person. Mostly. There's an element of Padgett's online personality that requires a bubbly and ever-positive demeanor, but that's also Padgett's factory setting. She's able to connect with Cameron, to his surprise, because she's not the person most people think she is. The romance here comes easily and naturally, and the film smartly leans heavily on the winning charisma of these two. It's a reboot that has a few nudging nods to the original but also stands on its own as just an adorable and appealing story.

Original She's All That stars Cook and Matthew Lillard also appear in supporting roles, but not as their O.G. characters, as this isn't a legacy sequel. After all, Cook plays Padgett's mother, and there's no way a grown-up version of Laney would let Padgett coat herself with the false front she uses for her high school life. Here, simply playing Padgett's hard-working nurse mom, Cook can be a supportive wisdom-dispenser without the baggage of being Laney. Lillard's earnestly befuddled principal, meanwhile, makes for a silly third act scene stealer.

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No More Heroes 3 Review

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While more and more developers try to create seamless, immersive worlds nowadays, No More Heroes 3 feels like a game straight out of 2003, where power-ups are food and big shiny arrows guide you to your next destination. At the same time, however, it’s littered with kitschy modern references to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Netflix, and performance-obsessed gamers, resulting in a 3D action game that’s trapped in both the past and present. This sequel still has some surprising boss fights and admirable ambition, but those are only enough to drag the rest of its aging ideas and mechanics along with it.

No More Heroes 3 is the first mainline addition to the series since 2010’s No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, but it’s actually more directly a sequel to the 2019 spinoff Travis Strikes Again. Unfortunately, unlike the novel and entertaining action of the original games, Travis Strikes Again was not particularly enjoyable, making its returning characters and plot points a less exciting reunion than they could be. But the core premise of the first two No More Heroes games at least returns here, letting you run around the fictional city of Santa Destroy as part-time assassin Travis Touchdown, who is once again killing his way up an assassin hierarchy as part of a bloody competition.

In the original games, Travis joined this twisted contest for a chance to sleep with a beautiful woman named Sylvia Christel. But in No More Heroes 3, his motivations are less self-centered. This time an alien prince named Fu (who is basically the answer to the question “What if E.T. was evil?”) comes to Santa Destroy with his posse of nine alien overlords to try and take over Earth. Fu and his alien cronies conveniently join the assassin’s ranking, giving Travis a path to murder his way toward Fu and save the world.

And that’s pretty much the way No More Heroes 3 goes for its roughly 14-hour runtime: start at the lowest rank, kill the boss, earn money from minigames to eventually buy a ticket to the next boss fight, and repeat until you reach the end. That’ll be a familiar formula for existing fans, but No More Heroes 3 still feels like a step back for the series in this regard. The themed levels full of smaller minions that previously preceded each boss are absent here, and the time spent between bosses is mostly tedious. As a result, the minigames needed to earn money – which range from a pretty fun lawn mowing game to a much less fun mining minigame – make up a bigger proportion of the overall playtime.

No More Heroes 3 zigged whenever I expected it to zag.

To pad out the time between bosses even further, No More Heroes 3 also makes it so you have to complete two or three filler fights against various alien bad guys as an additional requirement to begin the next boss battle. While enemy variety is significantly increased from previous games, these encounters are less interesting than the themed levels they replace, and balancing issues can make them flat out aggravating to take on. These enemies have unique abilities like shooting lasers, throwing up mines, or turning invisible – but because their difficulty seems to be determined by enemy count more than anything, the fights are chaotic and messy as attacks fly every which way with no rhyme or reason.

That’s a shame, because there can be a real flow to No More Heroes 3’s combat when it hits its stride elsewhere. You alternate between light and heavy slashes with your beam katana and whack baddies enough to stun them, at which point you can German Suplex them for additional damage. No More Heroes 3 adds a jump button too (though I rarely used it) as well as four unique abilities on cooldowns. These abilities either slow down time, push enemies away, set up a passive laser beam, or let Travis drop kick the nearest bad guys.

The hacking and slashing can be fun, but I’m more torn on the cooldown abilities. On the one hand, their crowd control capabilities feel designed explicitly for the purpose of handling the aforementioned minion battles, and they could be especially crucial for harder fights. But on the other hand, these attacks don’t feel necessary for the actual boss fights, and don’t mesh particularly well with the rest of the sword-based combat – especially since the beam katana itself still runs on a depleting battery which you need to recharge during a fight by, uh, shaking it.

Getting to each boss can be a slog, but the boss battles themselves remain a series highlight. You’re introduced to Fu and his gang at the start of the story, but these aliens lack the personality needed to stand out in any memorable way – especially compared to past No More Heroes bosses like amputee grenadier Holly Summers, scythe-wielding gothic lolita Margaret Moonlight, or the flame-throwing take on Texas Chainsaw Massacre Matt Helms. But, without spoilers, No More Heroes 3 cleverly zigs whenever I thought it would zag, messing with my own expectations of each boss and providing a few nice surprises for longtime fans. These fights are where combat truly shines, although some bosses are primarily beaten through puzzles instead. But even then, the creativity behind their designs makes them enjoyable for the humor alone, like one fight that’s settled through a deadly game of musical chairs.

No More Heroes 3 feels like a punk band playing on busted amps duct-taped to hell.

Between those flashy encounters, the open world of Santa Destroy is disappointingly barebones, and performance can be noticeably subpar in certain areas. One spot that looks like a bombed-out city (either a reference to Fortnite or Call of Duty) runs so poorly that it actually has an artificial retro CRT TV filter put over it, seemingly to hide its alarmingly bad texture pop-ins. That doesn’t make the issue any less severe, but No More Heroes 3 at least tries to make up for its clear technical shortcomings by presenting itself in new and interesting ways like this. For example, every chapter begins and ends with a hand-drawn anime-style opening or a Takashi Miike podcast hosted by Travis and his cinephile friend, Bishop. It will also randomly throw you into different genres at a moment’s notice, suddenly having you play a No More Heroes version of Fatal Frame or a retro PC-8800-style visual novel. No More Heroes 3 is always ready with a bit of creative flourish after every technical misstep.

These frequent moments of genuine surprise and wonder meant I certainly enjoyed No More Heroes 3 at times, even if by today’s standards it’s a pretty dated and uneven experience between them. Developer Grasshopper Manufacture describes itself as a video game punk band, and No More Heroes 3 definitely feels like a house show where the guitarist is playing on a busted amp, duct-taped to hell but still not sounding quite right.

I can’t help but admire No More Heroes 3 for that. This industry is often unforgiving of games that don’t run at a perfect 60 fps or have the latest high-end graphics, leaving weird, off-kilter projects like this without an audience. But that admiration doesn’t mean I can recommend it in good conscience to anyone who isn’t already invested in director Suda 51’s madcap universe. And even for that audience, it can’t hold a candle to either of its decade-old predecessors.

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Naraka: Bladepoint Review

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Despite battle royale fatigue inching its way into the collective gaming consciousness in recent years, Naraka: Bladepoint is proof that the last-fighter-standing formula still has loads of unexplored potential. This high-flying third-person brawler blends the tight sword clashes of Soul Calibur with the frantic supply gathering and ever-constricting circle of Apex Legends to glorious results. After sinking 35 hours into the full release, its superb melee combat and exhilarating gravity-defying antics are still making me grin, even if irritating network connection issues and lifeless bot matches sometimes hinder the fun. Naraka: Bladepoint isn't afraid to punish you for not respecting its mountainous skill ceiling, but once you find your footing, putting it down is a challenge in and of itself.

In standard battle royale fashion, Naraka: Bladepoint pits 60 combatants against each other on a war-torn isle, each controlling one of seven unique heroes either in teams of three or solo. Instead of scavenging for assault rifles or bullet-proof kevlar, however, you'll search for spears, daggers, katanas, and tons more sharp-as-steel lethal instruments along with breastplates and magical trinkets called Souljades that add passive buffs. The loot-and-scoot way of life will be familiar to anyone that's played Fortnite or Call Of Duty: Warzone before, but the similarities end once the time comes to put up your dukes. Battling other players means engaging in wild, up-close brawls that flow more like a fighting game than any battle royale.

From the instant an opponent parried my first sword swipe, sending me face-down into the dirt, I knew Naraka: Bladepoint took a healthy degree of skill to "get good" at. Charging into battle with no plan in mind against players that know what they're doing will almost certainly yield similarly humbling results, as frantically swinging melee attacks leaves you open to counter attacks and air juggles. Taking time to learn the differences between standard, special, combo, and charged attacks while keeping an eye on your weapon and armor durability (which depletes quickly) is vital to success. It is equally important to monitor the competition's body language, waiting for the perfect opening to cut them down. Once I got into Naraka: Bladepoint's lighting-fast rhythm and strategic duels, though, I started having an absolute ball parrying and dodging with the best of them. Those initial encounters may have been a smidge embarrassing, but it's all part of the learning process, and sticking with it will yield endless hours of breathless yet rewarding brawls.

There are also ranged weapons like bows, muskets, and hilariously gargantuan flamethrowers to find if popping folks from a safe distance is more your thing. This isn’t a shooter though, and killing enemy players solely through those means is tricky. In my experience, crossbows and the like are better for last hitting someone trying to flee after a close-range tussle rather than an entirely different means of fighting. Still, proficiency with them can come in handy, especially during team fights when you might be able to more safely fire shots while your allies take all the heat.

Hero toolkits are diverse and allow for creative combinations.

Practice in all of Naraka: Bladepoint's various disciplines pays off big time once you hop into trios. Initially, I was skeptical that any 3v3 scenario would devolve into a mess of crane kicks and spear stabs. In practice, however, they're more akin to the tactical team fights of League Of Legends than a lawless royal rumble. Coordinating your hero's unique abilities along with those of a teammate can lead to diabolically amusing results. My favorite hero thus far is Matari, a stealthy assassin that can vanish and teleport around the battlefield. In an ideal scenario, I'd get friends to charge right at an opposing team while I skulked around behind them, unleashing vicious combos before they knew what happened. That plan of attack doesn't always work, of course, and in those moments I could (hopefully) dart away with a blink, or hope my buddy could intervene as Tianhai, a tanky hero able to soak up excess damage once he transforms into a giant beast called the Vajra. The hero toolkits are so diverse and meld together so well that I'm sure we'll see creative matchups for months to come.

If you're someone who loves a good backstory to their multiplayer avatar, though, it might be best to look elsewhere. Even after using Matari for hours upon hours, I couldn't tell you a single thing about her personality. Everyone of her mid-match quips is woefully cliche or lacking any enthusiastic delivery, and none of the other heroes fair much better. Sure, there are little snippets of lore sprinkled throughout the menus, but it's always dry exposition with almost no flavor. With how enjoyable and expressive heroes are in battle, I wish there was more to their stories.

Microtransaction Reaction

Naraka: Bladepoint is a buy-to-play game with an astounding amount of cosmetic unlockables. Some of these are available free of charge while others require busting out a credit card, but thankfully none of the items up for grabs can give you a competitive edge. We're talking stuff like skins for weapons and characters in addition to hairstyles, hats, and cute accessories such as daruma dolls. At no point in my time with Naraka: Bladepoint did I feel the need to spend real money, even if it meant missing out on some cool trinkets or skins.

That said, attaining these glamorous goodies is more confusing than it should be. Especially given that everything's split between an in-game storefront, a battle pass with free and paid tiers, and loot boxes galore – which is staggeringly excessive considering Naraka: Bladepoint has an upfront price to play it. There are three currencies you'll use to buy cosmetics: Tae, Spectral Silk, and Gold.

Tae is the most common and easily obtainable as you'll earn it through completing daily challenge quests, leveling up weapons, and winning matches. Spectral Silk is a bit tougher to come by since it's a reward for completing battle pass levels and leveling up heroes. Finally, Gold is a premium currency, which means you'll have to pay for it with real money. Gold comes in several bundles: 240 for $1.85 USD, 1200 for $9.25, 3000 for $23.15, 6000 for $46.25, and 12000 for $92.50. It's by far the most useful of the three currencies since you can purchase the battle pass along with its subsequent levels, loot boxes, and skins directly from the store with it.

Naraka: Bladepoint does a terrible job of explaining the various uses for its free currencies. Tae can snag you the occasional low-quality skin or loot box, but you'll have to grind out challenges like mad to get enough of it. Meanwhile Spectral Silk has a distinct catalog of fabulous cosmetics, but you'll primarily earn it through completing battle pass levels – mostly the paid version of it to boot, which itself requires Gold to unlock. Even if nothing here impacts gameplay, the whole system feels tailor-made to frustrate people into paying Gold rather than figuring all of this out.

Despite how joyous Naraka: Bladepoint's deep melee fights against other players are, however, bots can suck the fun right out of it. For your first few hours of ranked play, you'll almost exclusively face dullard AI-controlled adversaries that barely put up a fight. They'll happily eat a katana to the face and often don't bother putting up a counter-attack of their own. Developer 24 Entertainment insists that bot matches exist to ease new players into Naraka: Bladepoint since the skill ceiling is so high, but you'll likely learn next to nothing from these insipid encounters. I prefer to get blitzed by an actual person, learning from what I did wrong, then mindlessly wail on idiotic bots – and while other games have been known to use a similar tactic to start, you’ll face bots for much longer here with no warning.

If nothing else, at least bot matches allowed me to gracefully swing about the map without a care in the world thanks to how incredibly scalable Naraka: Bladepoint's terrain is. It doesn't matter if you're marching up tiny hills or leaping up towering cliffsides — if it's within sight, you can climb it, especially once grappling hooks come into the equation. Like every other item, they're found throughout the map and are as important as healing herbs or the finest blade. There were several instances where I forgot to fight anyone because hook-shotting from treetop to treetop was so blissful, and as long as your grappling hook reserves are full, you'll never have to touch the ground. It ends up feeling like if Spider-Man threw in some wonderfully overly dramatic Naruto landing poses every once and a while.

But no matter if you're swinging across the heavens or locking horns with an enemy, Naraka: Bladepoint can fall apart at the seams if the servers are acting up. Now, while that's true of almost any online multiplayer romp, it's especially noticeable here when so much of Naraka: Bladepoint relies on pixel-perfect precision. Frustration sets in fast when a parry maneuver goes unnoticed due to lag, but thankfully connection woes have been a pretty infrequent since its admittedly rocky release day. Hopefully that stability will remain from here on out.

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The Other Two Season 2 Premiere Review: "Chase Goes to College" and "Pat Connects With Her Fans"

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The Other Two's second season premieres Thursday, Aug. 26 on HBO Max.

One of the best under-the-radar comedy series is back with a vigorous vengeance as The Other Two -- which aired for one season on Comedy Central in beginning of 2019 -- returns on HBO Max for an extremely welcome second helping. One of the quickest and sharpest shows since 30 Rock, The Other Two remains in top form, with both the writing and performances hitting it out of the freakin' park.

A couple of years go, right before 2020 spun us like a top, Comedy Central purged its live-action comedies. Only Awkwafina's Nora From Queens remains now, and it seemed like The Other Two would go the way of Drunk History and Corporate. But thankfully, it's migrated over to HBO Max, where you can also watch (or revisit) Season 1 and get caught up for this week's double-episode Season 2 premiere. It's laugh-out-loud satire with a glorious balance between biting dark humor and feel-good warmth.

Season 1 ended with young ChaseDreams (Case Walker) "biffing it at the VMAs" (as a reporter puts it at the top of the premiere, "Chase Goes to College"), seemingly tanking the Dubek family's money and fame train. But worry not, matriarch Pat (Molly Shannon) still has her hit daytime talk show and Chase isn't quite done with the limelight yet (despite an initial yearning to go to NYU). Season 2 keeps the roller coaster loop-de-looping with some truly hilarious takes on the realms of celebrity and entertainment as Chase's older siblings -- the titular Other Two -- Cary (Drew Tarver) and Brooke (Heléne Yorke) find themselves at a new place in their lives where they might be on the precipice of thriving.

The characters, and overall comedy, can be a bit vicious, but The Other Two never crumbles because they each will usually, in the end, do right by each other. Cary and Brooke's awkward cynicism and outsider perspective is always pitted against Pat and Chase's befuddled optimism, with each side playing off the other brilliantly. Pat could easily have been painted as shallow stage mom, but she's really just presented as if any ol' mom just sort of stumbled into showbiz. She can be self-centered, but it's always coming from a place of joy and wild openness.

The first episode back, "Chase Goes to College," deals with the direct aftermath of Season 1 as Cary and Brooke try to mold and manifest their Chase-peripheral careers. With Pat now the giddy spotlighted breadwinner in the family, Cary bounces between cheeky internet hosting gigs (red carpet reports for Age Net Worth Feet, silly spots for Bagel Bites TV) while Brooke attempts to wrangle herself a new Chase-type kid star. It's a solid premiere that nicely re-establishes the series' clever, rapid fire pace (it's been a minute since Season 1, after all) and sets up all the characters for new adventures. Meanwhile, Ken Marino is still stealthily killing it as Streeter, Chase's whimsically insecure co-manager (and Pat's boyfriend).

The second episode is even better than the first, however, as "Pat Connects With Her Fans" features Brooke and Cary in two separately hilarious stories connected to Pat's show, allowing for a deepening of character for all involved. Brooke, as Pat's manager, begins to recognize her mom's true talent for connecting with people while Cary and boyfriend Jess (Gideon Glick) attempt to "normalize" their gay relationship in front of a man they think is a conservative midwestern father. Both of these side quests are immensely rewarding, but the latter provides some of the best comedy beats of the past few years.

The second episode is even better than the first.

Considering that The Other Two's return may come as a surprise for some fans, since the renewal news came exactly a year ago during a particularly troubling summer for society, this new run of episodes is purely and simply a gift. Created by former SNL writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, this chaotically clever and ridiculous show is perfect for those who might like their wit a bit acerbic and a touch vulgar. It'll make you cackle and cringe in the best ways.

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American Horror Story: Double Feature Season Premiere Review: "Cape Fear" and "Pale"

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American Horror Story: Double Feature premieres Wednesday, Aug. 25 on FX, and Thursday, Aug. 26 on Hulu.

Warning: Slight spoilers for the first two episodes follow...

Divided into two parts -- the stories "Red Tide" and "Death Valley" -- American Horror Story's tenth official season, Double Feature, kicked things off with the one-two punch opener, "Cape Fear" and "Pale." It's a slow-going, and somewhat soggy and grey, start with "Cape Fear," but the Red Tide tale picked up significantly with "Pale," delivering a fresh Shining-style writer's block spin on vampires.

Though not as dramatic a format shift as FX on Hulu's summer series American Horror Stories, which was a straight episodic anthology, Double Feature also seems like it's out to solve American Horror Story's middling middle-episode problem. Even when the series significantly shortened its seasons, around the time of Roanoke, it still had issues maintaining momentum and narrative focus. Now, still sticking with a 10-episode season, American Horror Story is giving us two five-chapter sagas, one by the sea and the other by the sand, in an attempt to craft tighter, stronger scares.

Red Tide rolls in with a handful of AHS familiars, including mainstays Evan Peters and Sarah Paulson (of course) in supporting roles, along with Finn Wittrock and Lily Rabe as an unsuspecting couple, Harry and Doris Gardner, wintering in the seasonally desolate Provincetown, Mass., to help them both focus on their creative careers. Right out of the gate, it's clear the sleepy streets are plagued with Salem's Lot-looking bloodsuckers, though the local law (Adina Porter) chalks most incidents up to tweakers and speed freaks. "Cape Fear," the first episode, is mostly standard horror set-up stuff, presenting us with an unlikable family about to be in over their heads in an attempt to better themselves. Meta aspects aside, it is interesting how many scary stories involve frustrated artists looking to find fame or recapture old glory.

"Cape Fear" isn't quite good enough to stand on its own, even with the introduction of Peters and Frances Conroy's friendly and fancy fellow writers, Austin and Sarah, who claim to have the key to unlocking any budding wordsmith's full potential. It ends with Harry agreeing to take a mystery "muse" pill and blasting out into full manic genius mode, but it's not as good of a grabby cliffhanger as we find at the end of "Pale," in which Harry and Austin's violinist daughter, Alma (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), takes a pill and joins her dad in the realm of cursed vampirism. That was a very good twist of the knife, and one that made the Gardner family's plight a lot more interesting, since Harry going feral all by himself wasn't all that captivating.

Some vampire lore is sort of sacred, narratively, even though it's all just "make 'em ups." Attempts to stray too far from tried-and-true vampire rules can often go awry, but Red Tide's take is a fairly fun one, delivering a horde of undead weirdos who, apparently, are all, or were all, aspiring creatives. The mystery pill offered up by playwright Austin apparently only gives you boundless gifts if you already had innate talent to begin with. If you're a hack, you become a mindless vampiric animal plaguing the overcast shores. As a functioning vampire, though, one's teeth don't even turn into fangs. You can opt to have them sharpened for convenience (when it comes to killing). There's definitely a different set of rules to introduce here, which is where Harry comes in handy the most, but it's not so much that it lessens the bite of the story.

"Cape Fear" isn't quite good enough to stand on its own.

With these first two episodes, Red Tide builds nicely from a kind of boring bummer into a fiendish family affair, playing with the idea that a particular pop-culture portrayal of vampires is that of an insufferable, immortal noble. So why not create a legion of them out of awful sell-their-soul wannabes? Most aspects of American Horror Story deal with the clash between the clever so-called "coastal elite" and horror tropes, and Red Tide keeps that formula chugging along, but this particular vampire tale holds potential. Though, one has to wonder how these vamps connect to the lore in AHS: Hotel, given that this is all a shared universe.

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Optoma HD39HDR Review

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We won’t bury the lede: The Optoma HD39HDR is one of the brightest projectors that you can buy for under $1000. But that isn’t all this intriguing new product is capable of. While it does have a few puzzling omissions that are hard to overlook, the HD39HDR features remarkably low input lag and incredibly handy installation features for a price that makes it hard to beat. For anyone searching for an HD projector that works well in virtually every environment without breaking the bank, the HD39HDR gets darn close to being a dream come true.

Specifications

• Resolution: 1080p
• Brightness: 4500 ANSI Lumens
• Contrast Ratio: 50,000:1
• Input Lag: 8.4ms@120Hz
• Resolution support: accepts up to 4K (3840 x 2160) input
• Connections: one HDMI 2.0 input, one HDMI 1.4a input, one VGA output, one VGA input, one 3.5mm audio input, one 3.5mm audio output

Optoma HD39HDR – Design and Features

The HD39HDR adheres to what’s considered to be conventional projector dimensions at this point, with the benefit of being fairly lightweight at just under eight pounds. Essentially, if you wanted to move this projector around the house, or maybe into the backyard for a summer movie night, you won’t break a sweat doing so. The remote follows a similarly minimalistic approach, though this compact controller fits most buttons that the average projector user would need into its design. From dedicated buttons for each individual source to manual keystone correction buttons, it’s a handy remote to have by your side as you adjust settings with the HD39HDR.

On the subject of getting set up, Optoma makes it easy to dial in the most proportionate image possible for your specific space. With options like keystone correction, 1.3x zoom and image shifting capabilities, I was able to match the image nicely with my 120-inch screen without having to place the projector in a precise position in the room. Plus, the HD39HDR has a wall color adjustment that lets you select the color that you’re projecting onto, with options including blackboard, light yellow, light green, light blue, pink, and gray. You can also opt to not choose a wall color at all, which seemed to work the best for the screen I was using to test the projector.

As simple as the HD39HDR is to set up and begin using, it does suffer from an apparent lack of features and a somewhat disappointing lineup of available connections. There’s no WiFi or streaming capabilities built into the HD39HDR – something that competitors like BenQ built into their new gaming projector, the X1300i – meaning you will need to connect your own console or streaming device to access your favorite content. To be fair, streaming sticks are ridiculously cheap these days, and the vast majority of them have faster, more competent operating systems than almost any built-in streaming platform on a projector. It is, however, nice to have an alternative should an external source not be available for whatever reason.

The HD39HDR has two HDMI ports, though the fact that one is HDMI 2.0 and the other is HDMI 1.4 is a small letdown since the latter only supports 4K video frame rates up to 30hz. More unsettling is the collection of audio connections, which is glaringly missing a digital optical output. HDMI may be the easier way to go for audio needs these days, but the digital optical port was always a solid backup, especially for setups that feature older home theater systems or soundbars. The supplied 3.5mm input and output will technically get the job done, but they are far less versatile connections overall than the trusty optical port.

Optoma HD39HDR – Performance

Brightness is the name of the game with the HD39HDR, and boy does it bring it. With 4500 lumens of brightness, it is capable of producing a clear, detailed image regardless of what kind of light it may be competing with in your viewing space. From the middle of the day with sunlight infiltrating my office to late at night watching movies in a darkened room, the HD39HDR consistently delivered an impressively clear, visible image. It can get a little carried away at times, with display modes like Presentation and Bright tending to wash out the colors displayed in the image. But for the most part, the brightness of this projector is a huge asset that sets it apart from others in its price range.

The HD39HDR is a 1080p projector, though it can accept a 4K input and is HDR-10 compatible. While we’d love to get a true 4K projector at this price (maybe one day!), the HD39HDR still produces a solid image given the tools it has to work with. The projector has a 6-segment color wheel (RYGCWB), and it has plenty of opportunities to prove its capabilities while watching HDR content like Netflix’s Life In Color, narrated by none other than David Attenborough. It may not have the color accuracy or magnificent contrast that an OLED panel would offer, but scenes like a sprawling shot through the rainforests of New Guinea were surprisingly vibrant.

Though the HD39HDR’s input lag is on par with more expensive options like the BenQ x1300i (8.4ms@120Hz compared to 8.33ms@120Hz), it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t built to primarily operate as a gaming projector. Make no mistake, you’ll still achieve wonderfully smooth gameplay with input lag that low. But compared to something like the X1300i, which had a trio of gaming modes that adjusted the image to meet the needs of certain types of gameplay, the HD39HDR is a bit less accommodating. Aside from its Enhanced Gaming Mode, the HD39HDR feels more like a balanced projector that handles movies and gaming equally well. Depending on how your usage breaks down, that may or may not be an issue.

Despite the comparative lack of gaming-specific modes, the HD39HDR does give you plenty of ways to play with the picture it’s producing. There’s more standard options like brightness, contrast, and sharpness. And there’s more intricate color settings like color temperature, color matching and RGB gain/bias. Personally, I made a few tweaks to the picture here and there, but was mostly satisfied with the default settings that the HD39HDR came out of the box with. If you’re inclined to dig deep into the image settings, though, Optoma supplied nearly all of the tools to do so.

Optoma says it built a 10-watt speaker into the HD39HDR, and to its credit, it can get fairly loud if you need it to. But the sound is unavoidably hollow which, while not unexpected from a tiny speaker crammed into a projector, doesn’t exactly fill the room with the cinematic sound that such a large image begs for. As with almost every projector, I’d suggest investing in an external audio setup and only using the built-in speaker if absolutely necessary. Your movie nights and gaming sessions will be much more enjoyable because of it.

Purchasing Guide

The Optoma HD39HDR is available through Amazon for $799.

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Candyman Review

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Candyman hits theaters on Aug. 27.

Speak his name five times in a mirror and he’ll split you from groin to gullet. It’s the kind of spooky story often passed down in whispers, though in the Candyman series — which began nearly 30 years ago — it takes terrifying physical form. The fourth and latest film, directed by Nia DaCosta, revisits the urban legend and more than earns its place as a decades-later sequel. It’s a modern update (and in many ways, a remix) of a Black horror landmark, and while it certainly pays homage to the existing saga, it also digs deeper into the mythos, unearthing volatile ideas that had always lurked just beneath the series surface. The result is inventive, introspective, and above all, unsettling.

Baby Anthony, who was kidnapped by the hook-handed Candyman in the 1992 original, is all grown up. Played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, he’s now a modern artist who lives with his art gallery director girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), in a gentrified Chicago neighborhood, not far from the Cabrini-Green housing project where the first film was set. He has never heard of the Candyman, or about what happened to him as an infant, but when he first learns of the legend — a story the film dramatizes through gorgeous, folkloric shadow puppetry — he’s undoubtedly intrigued. Anthony has been searching for new material for his canvas, so he decides to visit the largely condemned Cabrini-Green, camera in hand, the way grad student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) did in the first film when she interviewed Anthony’s mother, Anne-Marie (Vanessa Williams), all those years ago.

The movie, co-written by DaCosta, Win Rosenfeld, and Jordan Peele, is about the way the past ripples through time, so it takes many of its story cues from prior entries. However, its echoes aren’t limited to characters and events previously shown on-screen. When Helen first theorized that the Candyman was a collective coping mechanism in poor Black communities, she was eventually proven wrong, but the 2021 film makes the fascinating decision to lean into this idea, while still treating the Candyman himself as a supernatural entity summoned by ritual. It explores the multitude of ways this myth was kept alive by the residents of Cabrini-Green, in ways that both mirror the first film — in which an impersonator briefly adopts the Candyman persona — and in ways that skillfully subvert it.

During his search, Anthony meets a local laundromat owner, Burke (Colman Domingo), one of the neighborhood’s last remaining residents, who acts as a keeper of forgotten myths. He regales Anthony with enrapturing details, not only about the original Candyman — Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd), a Black painter who was lynched for loving a white woman in the 19th century — but about other Black men who either adopted or were saddled with the Candyman mantle over the years, and who met similar fates at the hands of white supremacy. Some characters’ connections to the Candyman are more literal and explicit. Others’ connections are more abstract, told through subtleties in the costume and production design.

In the original three films from the 1990s, Robitaille was a vengeful, honeybee-infested spirit who represented unconfronted sins from a century prior, but the new movie makes the case that those sins never truly ended. It finally approaches the Candyman as something more complex than a vicious (albeit sympathetic) monster, whose narrative purpose is, ironically, to be slain once more. Brianna, for instance, is haunted by her own personal, metaphorical Candyman, a lingering trauma from her childhood, which we see play out in flashbacks. She grew up wealthier than Anthony, but violent, negligent, racist systems have hurt her family too.

The past can only stay hidden for so long, and once the mirror ritual makes its way back out into the world, the resurgence is a treat. Candyman is by no means a mystery to the audience — DaCosta, rightfully, treats the mere presence of honeybees as ominous — but the film’s violence is deliciously mysterious. It can be shocking and stark, and it can also be tongue-in-cheek (depending on who’s at the other end of the meat hook), but what separates it from prior entries is that its kills are rarely shown from the perspective of the people who summon Candyman, to whom he usually appears in person. Initially, the violence is presented from an outsider’s POV, with victims left at the mercy of an unseen force visible only in shadows and reflections, as we watch helplessly from a distance. The Candyman feels even more otherworldly than he did before, and his emergence from pieces of art and architecture speak to the ways in which violence can infest the walls and stories of a community.

The film’s violence is deliciously mysterious.

The film withholds its slasher moments for about as long as the original did. In the meantime, it bides its time with a creeping, slow-burn exploration of spaces, and the way people and their stories are shaped by their environments. DaCosta, cinematographer John Guleserian and editor Catrin Hedström always ensure the audience has an understanding of how each character moves about the frame and how they exist within each setting, before the film cuts to close ups. Composer Robert A. A. Lowe focuses similarly on extracting emotions from physical structures; his music evokes the atmospheric sounds of Philip Glass, who scored the first two entries, but he also injects the many shots of Chicago’s architecture with hard-hitting, propulsive compositions, as if something were waiting to burst forth from the city’s very fabric.

Smart production design choices emphasize the theme of gentrification, a logical next step in the series. The modern finish of Anthony and Brianna's apartment, and their expensive art decor, are a far cry from the graffiti on the dilapidated walls of Cabrini-Green, located just a stone’s throw away. As Anthony begins to rediscover the Candyman tale that he was purposely cut off from, he inadvertently falls into the same cycle as the series’ other protagonists, whose investigations were often from an outsider’s perspective, and were removed from the real violence at the heart of the saga. Abdul-Mateen’s portrayal is no doubt sympathetic — there’s a sense of desperation to Anthony’s search, because it’s as much about discovering a horror story as it is about discovering himself — but he also crafts a character who reeks of a familiar outsider arrogance, since his art is paramount to him, and may even come at the cost of his humanity. At first, the Candyman story and its painful legacy are simply source material for him to exploit.

The film, in key moments, critiques this approach to art and turns the camera on itself, as if to question the purpose of telling stories of Black pain in the first place. DaCosta and Peele are the first Black storytellers to put their stamp on Candyman, and they bring a thoughtfulness to the material which previous entries lacked, both narratively and visually. You only need one hand to count the film’s traditional scares — the jumpy, startling kind, accompanied by jagged sounds — because DaCosta’s approach is far from traditional, turning many of the historic trends of Hollywood horror on their head (some of which date back to The Birth of a Nation from 1915).

DaCosta, rather than only approaching Candyman as an unknown terror waiting to pounce — on vulnerable white women, as in all three prior films — also takes an inside-out approach, and frames the series’ mythos as a distinctly known quantity to many of its Black characters. What they know about the world and its violent power structures scares them far more than what they don’t know. In the new film, horror and bloodshed don’t feel sudden, but rather, they feel inevitable and unstoppable, as has long been the reality in Black communities that are over-policed.

Before long, Anthony’s investigations into the Candyman story begin to consume him — in more ways than one — leading to an unexpected conclusion that feels both satisfying and uniquely bone-chilling. Without erasing what came before it, the film pushes the character and his mythology in a fascinating new direction, which not only has the potential to reestablish him as a fixture of pop culture, but which acts as a vital course correction, reclaiming who gets to tell the story of Blackness in American cinema.

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Mad God Review

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Mad God was reviewed out of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

You may not know the name Phil Tippett, but you definitely know his work. He’s an acclaimed creature designer, who has built the incredible critters found in films like Piranha, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, RoboCop, and Jurassic Park. When Hollywood moved away from practical effects to computer graphics, Tippett adapted, but his heart has always belonged to stop-motion animation. So, for the last 30 years, this Oscar-winning visual effects artist has worked on a passion project, which fans can finally see on the festival circuit. But be warned: Tippett’s Mad God is darker, stranger, and much more of a mindf*ck that you could possibly dream. While impressive in its decadence, all that style might leave you craving more substance.

Written and directed by Tippett, Mad God is a furious rebellion against the Hollywood films that built his reputation. Blending stop-motion animation and sprinklings of live-action performances, he has created an experimental film that has no dialogue, no named characters, and no real plot to speak of. So, his directorial feature debut is not a narrative movie but a tour through the darkest corners of his imagination.

Our guide on this journey is a mysterious figure, whose countenance is hidden behind a gasmask. No facial expression will give away his emotions at any point. However, his wardrobe, a cyberpunk mélange of metal, rubber, and leather that covers him head to toe, warns us that the world around him is toxic. Descending in a rusted diving bell, he plunges deeper and deeper into a hellscape bursting with depravity, violence, monsters, and muck. Incongruent with the unnamed hero’s heavy protective gear is his tightly clutched briefcase, which suggests he is a man on a mission. Frustratingly, this mission goes from unclear to utterly unimportant in the blink of an eye. From there, Mad God shuttles haphazardly through a kingdom of horrors.

A barrage of vignettes presents brief but brutal glances into a world that is narratively devoid, yet lush in details. Scenes of domestic slaughter are played out in shadow puppetry. A merciless food chain is unfurled with creatures, who look like they’ve escaped from totally different genre films, only to become meat. Monsters are bedecked with pulsing boils, pendulous breasts, and spurting buttholes. Altogether, this wretched world seems populated by every bizarre sketch Tippett ever saw rejected by a studio exec or deemed too shocking for mainstream movie audiences.

Mad God provides a feast for the eyes, but a putrid one. Surfaces glisten with slime. Creatures are spiky with hair, wiry and unwashed. Blood and gore hit not in sprays, but in gloppy explosions. This grungy world is so layered with texture that it feels like you could reach out and run your fingers through it. Though with such a dedicatedly grimy and unwelcoming production design (also by Tippett), who would want to?

Though willfully disgusting, the animation within this is an astonishing celebration of stop-motion. Tippett and his team have expertly executed the physicality of these critters. Whether they lumber, scurry, or slither, each has a sense of weight to their motions that makes even the most surreal beast feel real onscreen. So much so, that when live human actors begin to creep into the mix, you might well do a double-take to check if they’re a person or a puppet.

Mad God provides a feast for the eyes, but a putrid one.

Bolstering this revolting visual smorgasbord is an unnerving sound design. No characters speak in the traditional sense. Plenty will wail, gasp, gurgle, or coo. Much of the soundscape is guttural or feral. Yet the recurring babble and squeal of a human baby might be the most haunting sound, considering its hellish context. Meanwhile, the swollen score feels plucked from an ‘80s horror movie, where choral voices sing spookily while a piano and percussion clatter into ominous cacophony. All this culminates into a suitable soundtrack for nightmare fuel.

The repulsiveness of Mad God is intended. In an interview with Variety, Tippett bragged about walkouts at a preview screening, where viewers complained the film had given them “an anxiety attack.” But what is the message of his masterwork? I’m not convinced he has one. Mad God isn’t interested in coherence as much as it is experience. What you take away from this bog of carnage and creation is up to you. Tippett seems content to spill his subconscious onto the screen and call it a day. Though, for what it’s worth, he advised in the same interview that certain substances might be an aid in getting on his wavelength: “I would recommend either taking a gummy, smoking some marijuana, drinking a bottle of wine, or bringing a vomit bag to watch it.”

Full Disclosure: I did not take this advice and kind of wish I had. Though technically remarkable, Mad God left me emotionally cold. Sure, it’s eye-poppingly gross and garish. But without a story to follow or even faces to connect to, I found myself lost in the muck and hankering for a sensation beyond nausea and confusion.

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Archer Season 12 Premiere Review - "Identity Crisis" and "Lowjacked"

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Archer Season 12 premieres Wednesday, Aug. 25 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FXX and is available the next day on FX on Hulu.

In Archer’s Season 12 premiere, “Identity Crisis,” a pair of overly perky marketers inform the main cast of dysfunctional spies that they’re dinosaurs who need to reinvent themselves. That’s a pretty meta jab, considering that the series has lasted so long in no small part by consistently transforming, spending seasons jumping between genres. But like their perpetually contrary characters, the show’s writers are rejecting that message and instead delivering a fantastic start to a season that gets back to the series’ roots.

Archer began as a sort of fusion between James Bond and The Office set at the International Secret Intelligence Service or ISIS. When the rise of the Islamic State made the fictional spy agency’s name have a very different impact, the show began changing things up, transporting its characters into riffs on Miami Vice and Sunset Boulevard before going even further afield for a set of seasons taking place in the comatose mind of the series’ namesake superspy Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin).

While those romps, through pulp and space opera, provided a novel way to let the cast effectively explore other characters while still maintaining key components of their chaotic dynamic, they felt like diversions from the main story. Season 11 finally saw Sterling awaken from the coma and throw a wrench into the lives his family and coworkers had built without him, culminating in a fantastic finale where he proved that, for all his flaws, he’s worth keeping around by saving the world from a tech bro planning on profiting off of flooding the world.

Yet the luster from that moment of glory has already faded by the time “Identity Crisis” begins. The Cloudbeam marketing team Alton (Harvey Guillén of What We Do in the Shadows) and Kaya (Insecure’s Natasha Rothwell) claim they could have gotten Archer the adulation he deserves, but instead the U.S. government covered up the incident and his agency can barely keep the lights on. Cloudbeam blames tough competition from the new spy conglomerate International Intelligence Agency, but as usual Archer’s inept coworkers are at least equally to blame. No one’s called them with a job since psychotic office assistant Cheryl/Carol Tunt (Judy Greer) smashed the phone and didn’t tell anyone.

The crew of Archer is normally entirely unsympathetic, so there’s a lot to gain from painting them as the underdogs. Sterling himself has had to learn some small modicum of humility after emerging from his coma at less-than-full strength. No longer the world’s greatest spy, he’s had to rely more on his coworkers, particularly his hyper-competent ex-girlfriend Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler), who’s perpetually exasperated by Archer’s antics. Of course, given the mercenary nature of the Archer crew, she and fellow spy Ray Gillette (series creator Adam Reed) quickly start talking about how they can join IIA themselves. IIA head Fabian Kingsworth (Kayvan Novak of What We Do in the Shadows) is effectively Sterling in his prime, relentlessly mocking the gentleman spy he once admired and providing a perfect foil for not just Sterling but the entire crew.

“Identity Crisis” sees the team trying to beat IIA to the reward for rescuing a kidnapped scientist while “Lowjacked,” the second part of the two-episode premiere, follows a team-building exercise that goes awry thanks to some ecoterrorists who are just as inept as Archer’s crew. Both establish the bumbling dynamic of Season 12, where some members of the crew try to be responsible and earn the money and prestige needed to keep their business going, while others just slack off. It’s the sort of farce that’s always worked well for the show, which is driven as much by sexual innuendo (or “phrasing” as Archer calls it) and ridiculous subplots involving cloning and country music, as whatever’s happening in the main plot.

Getting back to the basics of modern spycraft has allowed Archer to drop the gimmicks, fun as they may have been, and reconnect with what has always made the show great — its sharp writing and incredibly talented voice cast. Benjamin perpetually shines as he laughs at his relative luck and the misfortune of his most hated coworker, the bureaucratic Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell) who gets beat up while Archer plays with dogs in “Lowjacked.” Cheryl and HR director-turned-field agent Pam Poovey (Amber Nash) are constantly engaged in misadventures, whether it’s taking their own terrible crack at developing a marketing strategy or opting out of helping with a mission so they can enjoy hibachi. When a nervous chef tries to remind them that there’s still a hostage crisis happening downstairs, Cheryl’s main concern, naturally, is if that will affect the grill.

Season 12 also marks Jessica Walter’s final role, as the actress who played Malory Archer, Sterling’s overly sexual alcoholic mother and boss, died in March. It’s a worthy capstone to her exceptional career as she plays the human manifestation of side-eye, perpetually judging her employees between sips of whatever drink she can get her hands on. The show’s limited animation style does an excellent job conveying facial expressions, and, in particular, it masterfully shows the bemused contempt Walter previously brought to the role of Arrested Development’s Lucile Bluth.

It’s a worthy capstone to Jessica Walter's exceptional career.

Malory has always kept her misfit employees together, and Walter’s death throws the entire future of the show into question. But in this one last eight-episode season with the full original cast, Archer’s fundamentals are as strong as ever. If this winds up being the series’ final season, then it’s particularly fitting that it feels so much like a return to where it began.

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