Ken and Robin Consume Media: Wednesday, Edgar Allan Poe, and a Murky Found Footage Reveal
October 7th, 2025 | 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
18×2 Beyond Youthful Days (Film, Taiwan/Japan, Michihito Fujii, 2024) Ousted from the company he founded, a Taiwanese video game designer takes a trip to Japan, meandering his way to the home town of the girl he loved half his life ago. If you’re going to spin an essential plot point around Shunji Iwai’s 1995 Pinnacle Love Letter, you’d best deliver a beautiful, evanescent drama, a challenge Fujii more than meets in this exploration of travel and memory.—RDL
Devo (Film, US, Chris Smith, 2025) Arts documentary profiles DEVO, the band who took a Dada sensibility hardened in the Kent State massacre and the industrial dolor of Akron OH and briefly managed to inject it into the pop culture mainstream through such delivery systems as Warner Brothers Records, SNL, MTV, and The Merv Griffin Show. Freedom from choice, it’s what we want.—RDL
La Dolce Vita (Film, Italy, Federico Fellini, 1960) Tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) spends a week in his native environment, the celebrity party scene of Rome, and finds himself dissatisfied. Lush and beautiful, this episodic film allows Mastroianni’s layered acting to convey his character’s emotional journey; a stellar supporting cast fills out this slice of the sweet life as Fellini’s story adds the amaro. Vital if not quite transcendent, this must-watch remained on my list of unseen shame for far too long.—KH
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Portrait (Film, Canada, Adrian Langley, 2025) Antique dealer Whitlock (Michael Swatton) interests old-soul artist Ava (Pragya Shail) almost as much as his oval portrait interests area thief Julian (Paul Thomas). Adaptation of the Poe short-short expands in the direction of crime and melodrama, with a nicely satisfying ghost story underneath both. The score by Andrew Morgan Smith perfectly evokes the mood of this Hammer-Hallmark blend that plays out like the 1960s B-pictures it’s modeled on.—KH
Poison in Jest (Fiction, John Dickson Carr, 1932) Visiting old friends in Pennsylvania, detective sidekick Jeff Marle discovers a house full of deadly pranks, secrets, and (soon) a serial poisoner. Carr lays on the atmosphere thick in this breathing-space novel written the year before he launched his Gideon Fell series. Not as polished as his later masterpieces, but featuring surprisingly strong characterization for Carr.—KH
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Film, US, Jeff Rowe & Kyler Spears, 2023) Adolescent humanoid martial arts chelonians (Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon) who yearn for acceptance in the world of humans battle a monstrous fly (Ice Cube) who plans to destroy it. Kinetic animation and an innovative visual style bring fresh energy to the franchise. I especially loved that the action scene featuring Splinter, voiced by Jackie Chan, follows the rules of a classic Jackie fight.—RDL
Tribe (Film, US, Dan J. Asma, 2025) Retired professor Devon Adams (Asma) heads into the Cujamaca Mountains outside San Diego in search of an explanation for his cult-raised best friend’s suicide. Asma cuts big-budget trailers as his day job, which makes this one of the more effective found-footage films even as the editing is so good that it can break suspension of disbelief. The big reveal is appropriately murky, conspiratorial, and apocalyptic, and Asma picks powerful visuals that overlap with the story suggestively without drowning it.—KH
When the Tenth Month Comes (Film, Vietnam, Đặng Nhật Minh, 1984) Undone with grief on learning that her husband has been killed in action in a border clash with Khmer Rouge Cambodia, a rice farmer enlists a schoolteacher to help conceal his death from family and neighbors. Heartfelt drama with touches of mystical realism examines the dynamics of trauma suppression.—RDL
Wednesday Season 2 (Television, US, Netflix, Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, 2025) Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) trains her knack for investigation on undoing her psychic vision of werewolf roommate Enid’s impending death. Avoids the sophomore slump by devoting more screen time to the perfectly cast other classic Addams characters and with a tightly plotted arc rarely seen in serialized streaming.—RDL
Good
Beyond the Drumlins (Film, US, Dan Bowhers, 2025) Archaeology professor Rust (Michael Kowalski) leads four others into the woods to find an archaeological site for next semester’s dig. Wisely downplaying interpersonal drama, the film depends on the scares to work, which is great until you discover that it’s all the same scare over and over. Some of the segments very effectively spook, and the mysterious structure in the woods is an all-time irruption that absolutely sells it, but as a whole the film never reaches takeoff.—KH
The Bowstring Murders (Fiction, John Dickson Carr, 1933) When the eccentric and awful Lord Rayle is found strangled with a bowstring in his own armor museum, alcoholic criminologist John Gaunt is called in to solve the case. A borderline locked-room mystery solved with Carr’s traditional brio, but the setting is too over-the-top to be believable, and Carr doesn’t put in the work to keep the cast real enough for us to really care who the killer is.—KH
The Harbor Men (Film, US, Casey Malone, 2025) During the outbreak of a hallucinogenic virus at the docks, vaccine denier Steven Dorre (Aidan White) retrieves a mystical musical instrument from a murder scene. For a while, Malone’s inventiveness and creepy visual sensibilities carry you along, but whatever payoff you thought was coming peters out in mysticism instead of horror.—KH
Okay
Maggie Moore(s) (Film, US, John Slattery, 2023) Widowed small town police chief (Jon Hamm) investigating the murders of two women with the same name tentatively romances the next door neighbor (Tina Fey) of the dumbass perpetrator (Micah Stock.) Nick Mohammed stands out in this blend of rom com and Coenesque neo-noir with his atypical delivery in a stock character role, the deputy who acts as Hamm’s confidant / sidekick.—RDL
