What to watch (and skip) via VOD and Netflix this weekend

Stay home. As COVID-19 spreads, that’s the advice stressed by epidemiologists racing to combat the virus, who have implored Americans to avoid all nonessential travel and limit all person-to-person interactions. “Social distancing,” it seems, is our new normal—at least for now.

Though it can be challenging to look for silver linings in times as tumultuous as these, those sheltering indoors can at least rest assured that there’s now little reason to put off catching up on Netflix. And particularly with movie theaters shuttering across the country in response to the growing pandemic, Americans are looking to VOD and streaming platforms in search of their next binge-watch.

Coins2Day’s (still) here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling down all the entertainment out there to a few distinct recommendations: Put more simply, should you rent it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.

RENT IT: ‘Sea Fever’ (VOD)

Eerily timed quarantine viewing, Sea Fever surely went into production with little sense of how chilling its tale of close encounters on the high seas would become amid the coronavirus crisis.

But it’s a tribute to the sharp, anticipatory abilities of writer-director Neasa Hardiman that this sturdy Irish genre workout—essentially a riff on The Thing and Alien, confined to a commercial fishing boat—quickly bores down into the ethical dilemmas that plague marine biology student Siobhán (Hermione Corfield) and the other occupants of an ill-fated crawler once they become snared in the grip of an oozing, phosphorescent creature from the deep, a squid-like menace that sends worm-like parasites wriggling into their ship’s hull.

Impressively lean and economical, with sparing (though effective) glimpses at the organisms threatening Siobhán and the crew, Sea Fever instead focuses on the human crises that stem from this impossible situation, pitting her scientifically minded perspective against the fear and the paranoia that soon infects the rest of the crew—including a craggy older couple (Dougray Scott and Connie Nielsen) who own the vessel, and whose profiteering led them into these uncharted waters to begin with. Indeed, by the time they start self-quarantining—and especially as they debate the morality of returning to shore, despite the knowledge one of them may be a carrier for this strange, slithering thing—it’s difficult not to wonder if Sea Fever was designed in some laboratory for our frightening, germaphobic times. Alas, it’s nothing more sinister than good writing.

Hardiman gestures in other, intriguing directions, giving Sea Fever the slightly uncanny bearing of an Irish folklore. Siobhán’s red hair is cause for consternation among more superstitious crew members, who believe she’ll bring them misfortune. Even the name of the unlucky skipper, the Niamh Cinn-Óir (translation: the Golden-Haired Niamh), offers the film mythic ballast, which becomes more important as the film enters its creepily melancholic third act. Less successful are Hardiman’s interrogations of how predatory fishing practices, especially bottom trawling that pulls up material from the sea floor and destroys underwater biospheres, play a role in the sci-fi horror freakout that erupts. Worthwhile though that exploration surely is, it gives way too quickly to a more pulpy thriller of queasy, mutating monsters and humans doomed not to figure them out in time.

RENT IT: ‘We Summon the Darkness’ (VOD)

To genre audiences less familiar with her supporting roles in summer blockbusters San Andreas and Baywatch (both opposite The Rock)—or as smoky-eyed paramours across films as diverse as the Percy Jackson franchise and HBO’s True Detective—the actress Alexandra Daddario is perhaps best described as a scream queen in the making. Starring in 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D, she gave the franchise its most all-in leading lady since Marilyn Burns; the next year, a charming zom-com, Burying the Ex, matched her, fruitfully, with the late, great Anton Yelchin. Roles on television, particularly in the fifth season of FX’s American Horror Story, further illustrated the ways Daddario could weaponize her bemused, flickering smile and old Hollywood glamour, while more recent, outside-the-box roles—as a guarded, smiling recluse in Gothic spooker We Have Always Lived in the Castle and a spoiled pop star in mental-illness drama Lost Transmissions—have earned her new fans and kept old ones on their toes.

It’s necessary to first acknowledge Daddario, given that her devilishly playful, dagger-darting turn in We Summon the Darkness is both the best she’s ever been and the biggest reason to see this otherwise-adequate Satantic Panic midnighter. Directed, surprisingly, by Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer), the film gets points for not taking setup too seriously. It’s the ’80s. Two friend groups—a trio of leather-loving heartbreakers, played by Daddario, Maddie Hasson, and Amy Forsyth; and a group of slack-jawed, metalhead boys, played by Keean Johnson, Logan Miller, and Austin Swift— meet up, mosh around, and eventually meet cute at a Midwest concert manned by the subtly named Soldiers of Satan. Heading back to a home owned nearby by one of the girls, they play a fateful round of “Never Have I Ever,” at which point it becomes clear one of the groups has a little more life experience under their collective skull-studded belt—especially when it comes to the whole occult-ritual brouhaha.

See, the script, by Alan Trezza, is a bit of a one-trick pony, hinging on an early twist that any genre-savvy audience member will be able to spot coming from a mile off; it’s still best not to spoil it here. But its dialogue sometimes sings, especially the tart and toothsome one-liners offered up to Daddario, Hasson, and Forsyth, each forced to face off against male counterparts who rarely have as much of a chance to partake in all the wisecracking. Luckily, the leading ladies here are giddily game to banter, bloodlet, and at one point make gruesome use of a weed-whacker. Have I mentioned yet the stunt-casting of Johnny Knoxville, turning up to puff-proselytize as an televangelist preacher? We Summon the Darkness knows full well the kind of silly-scary antics it’s after, even if one wishes it aimed bigger and ripped a bit harder. All the same, there’s a clarity of purpose to Meyers’s direction, a functionality that might be grating were it not for the excitable energy of his performers, that makes We Summon the Darkness diverting enough to distract from our current situation‚ even if no one save Daddario can raise quite enough of their own hell on scree n to warrant the movie’s heavy-metal trappings.

SKIP IT: ‘Love. Wedding. Repeat’ (Netflix)

It’s surprisingly hard to get a read on Love. Wedding. Repeat., a near-terminally bland serving of romantic-comedy casserole that, in flashes, teases that it might become something marginally more appealing before instead reneging on the offer.

Yes, it’s aesthetically a product of the Netflix churn factory and lends a drab-travelogue quality to its should-have-been-striking setting, a splendid Italian villa in Frascati (a few miles from Rome), that’s overrun with marble sculptures and verdant gardens. And, yes, it packs a predictable romantic-comedy cast, led by two decently sized stars in Sam Claflin (of The Hunger Games) and Olivia Munn (from X-Men), and backed by a brigade of pretty, funny faces from television, among them the magnetic Aisling Bea (Living With Yourself), Eleanor Tomlinson (Poldark), Joel Fry (Game of Thrones), and Jack Farthing (also Poldark).

But what’s with that opening voice-over narration from a stately British dame anyone would assume is Judi Dench? (It’s actually Penny Ryder, who’s been Dench’s stand-in on everything from Skyfall to Victoria & Abdul) Credited only as The Oracle, and prone to quoting other anonymous, imaginary soothsayers with one-joke declarations like “chance can be a real bastard” (the one joke is that she cussed, get it?), the voice is heard almost immediately, playing up the cosmic mysteries of chance and periodically reappearing to suggest a genre-straddling crack soon to materialize in the film’s formula, in the vein of About Time. If only.

A remake of the French confection Plan de Table that’s been written and directed with only the most modest of charms by Dean Craig (Death at a Funeral), this destination-wedding rom-com turns out to be little more than the sum of its decorative icing, a tidily 100-minute affair comprised mostly of uncomfy dinner-table conversations in which the characters snipe, scheme, snark, and more often simply sulk about their mess of personal and romantic connections.

For unlucky-in-love Jack (Claflin), nothing’s more important than ensuring his hard-charging sister (Tomlinson) has the perfect wedding day. This becomes a more difficult task than one might expect, with his ex (Freida Pinto) and hers (Farthing) in attendance along with his one-who-got-away (Munn) and a gaggle of troublemaking pals (including Fry). Intermittently, the banter and ballyhoo that results from this is serviceable, especially with the plot moving as a progressive dance in its mixing and matching of character pairs. Fry, whose whose put-upon wingman has a zany energy reminiscent of Coupling‘s Richard Coyle, and Bea, who always brings a mischievous charm to her good-natured characters, come off especially strong, and are clearly the strongest improv performers of the bunch. Claflin and Munn, the film’s de facto leads, fare quite a measure worse, owing to their substantial lack of chemistry and line readings that fall flatter than a drunken uncle at the reception.

But when Love. Wedding. Repeat. Arrives at the “twist” of fate that provides it with its title, not that you should really call it that, it scarcely matters. What could have been an intriguing deviation from rom-com formula instead simply reinforces it, serving to artificially pad out the film to a feature-length runtime while exposing how little is really at stake for this wedding’s generally well-adjusted, blandly written guests. Perhaps that explains the insultingly hasty ending, a ride-off-into-the-sunset flourish employed so quickly it feels, like most everything else in this trifle, more like a flash in the pan.

The best of the rest:

Alan Yang’s Tigertail, on Netflix, explores the immigrant experience through the eyes of one man, Pin-Jui (Hong Chi-Lee as a child, and Tzi Ma as an adult), as he leaves his paramour behind in Taiwan to start a new life in New York, gradually becoming a shell of himself in the process. Touching, gorgeously filmed, and thoughtful about the ways we’re formed by all the things we don’t say as much as the things we do, it’s an impressive first film from the Master of None cocreator, who spoke to Coins2Day about the experience of making it.

One of the biggest movies shifted to a VOD rollout amid the coronavirus crisis, Trolls World Tour is “premiering at home” today, April 10. Arriving four years after the last installment, this colorful and star-studded sequel finds Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake once again voicing colorfully coifed trolls with smiles on their faces and songs (oddly, ones culled from the past half-century in Hot 100 pop) in their hearts. This time around, the leads discover that other tribes of trolls, each obsessed with a different form of music, exist across six different lands—all of which are threatened by the evil, hard-rocking Queen Barb (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s Rachel Bloom) and her dad (Ozzy Osbourne??).

Otherwise, if weird and experimental cinema is your bag, She’s Allergic to Cats (on VOD) fits that descriptor like a leather-spiked glove. From director Michael Reich, it follows a schlubby, self-hating dog groomer (Mike Pinkey) in Hollywood, who becomes a little too obsessed with a mysterious and beautiful woman (Sonja Kinski). Suggesting Under the Silver Lake as a lesser Adult Swim sketch then overhauled into an avant-garde film student’s mixed-results thesis project, it’s certifiably not for everyone—but to a very select few, this will be a satisfyingly stranger pedigree of midnight movie.