Ken and Robin Consume Media: Unhinged Hong Kong Action, Canine Horror, and Occult-Adjacent Mysteries
June 2nd, 2026 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
Recommended
Detective vs. Sleuths (Film, Hong Kong, Wai Ka-Fai, 2022) Hallucinating ex-cop (Lau Ching-wan) teams with a pregnant OCTB officer (Charlene Choi) chasing cult-like vigilantes on a murder rampage against unprosecutable offenders. Frenetic, high body count action mystery in which Wai, best known for his collaborations with Johnnie To, gets the budget to realize the fullest heights of his berserk vision. If a cop in her third trimester gets shot and is dangling off the side of a building and you’re only 28 minutes in, you may be watching a Wai Ka-Fai movie. Found on some platforms with wildly misleading cover art under the equally misleading alt title Demon Hunter.—RDL
Furie (Film, Vietnam, Le-van Kiet, 2019) Rural debt collector (Veronica Ngo) relentlessly fights her way through Saigon’s underworld to rescue her young daughter from organ traffickers. Expertly staged and performed action in gritty, street-level mode.—RDL
Good Boy (Film, US, Ben Leonberg, 2025) Loyal dog (Indy) senses a sinister force coming for his ill human in the old family house near the woods. Formally brilliant exercise in subjective horror anchored by an endearingly expressive animal actor.—RDL
Thought Crimes: the Case of the Cannibal Cop (Film, US, Erin Lee Carr, 2015) Documentary searches in vain for satisfying answers in the case of Gilberto Valle, the New York cop busted for seemingly taking steps to realize the heinously sadistic crimes he fantasized about on an Internet forum. Shows a legal case that wasn’t about what anyone wanted it to be about while staring into the void between the depravity of Valle’s forum posts and his self-presentation as a bewildered mooncalf.—RDL
Good
The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (Fiction, C. Daly King, 2003) Collects all twelve of the “episodes” of Trevis Tarrant written between 1935 and 1951. Tarrant is a less-annoying Philo Vance type of idle mystery solver, who specializes in impossibilities. Each episode has a somewhat occult air, even the conventional (and for the most part excellent) locked room problems, and it’s not too big a spoiler to suggest that one or two of them have “genuine” occult phenomena behind them. A mixed bag, as with many such collections, less charming than the Lucius Leffing tales but differently weird.—KH
Not Recommended
Cultures in Motion: Mapping Key Contacts and Their Imprints in World History (Nonfiction, Peter N. Stearns, 2001) Purporting to be an atlas of inter-cultural contact and transmission, this faintly stabs in the direction of “trade routes” and diasporas, with even the best maps (charting the expansion of McDonalds, soccer, and motion pictures in one map of “International Consumer Culture”) being more cartograms than anything else. Intriguing parallels between the spread of, say, Islam and Marxism go under-thought and under-mapped (only 23 maps in the book at all).—KH
Eureka (Film, France/Germany, Lisandro Alonso, 2023) In the old west, a gunfighter (Viggo Mortensen) seeks his daughter; a police officer on a South Dakota reservation faces too many problems at once; an indigenous Brazilian fugitive tries gold prospecting. Triptych of unresolved, enigmatic situations overestimates the impact of long takes and concludes with the thinnest segment.—RDL
