THE LASSER CAST

THE LASSER CAST is Pete and Danny, two friends with a shared appetite for horror, trading opinions on films and streaming series. Pete handles the introductions in recent episodes, and he rarely lets Danny ease in. He might ask for an excitement rating from one to ten, check whether Danny has kept up with the latest Monarch installments, or open a Twin Peaks: The Return review by asking whether the whole thing felt like wasted time. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters threads through the recent run, reviewed one or two installments at a time. They come to it as fans of giant monsters, and the series sits in a Monsterverse that includes King Kong, Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan, with Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt Russell playing the same man. Affection does not buy patience. They pick at a plot driven by family affairs revealed early in the first season, at time jumps and flashbacks that let a franchise revive characters it has written out, and at the habit of cutting back to Godzilla or King Kong whenever a creature has been missing for too long. Their phrase for that last move is 'break glass in case of emergency.' Credit still gets paid, and the effects and sets draw real praise. Pete owns up to a rough couple of weeks with the series, and describes Danny's enthusiasm draining the moment it comes up. Older films are the change of pace. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon arrives as a deliberate break from Monarch after news of a sequel to the 2006 film, and the conversation fixes on how meticulously its slasher stages each move, from disabling the weapons in the tool shed to wearing a bulletproof vest. One line gets singled out as both funny and sensible for a human killer up against a house of eight teenagers: 'statistically, I'm at a huge disadvantage here.' John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, which Pete admits he had never seen, pulls the talk from a favorite alley shot and the film's lighting toward cults of personality. From there it wanders to the old thrill of a new Stephen King hardcover and the scramble around a new Taylor Swift album. Twin Peaks: The Return reverses the arrangement. Danny is the first-timer, Pete the self-described gigantic David Lynch fan, and a late scene in which Lynch, on screen, lays out the Blue Rose lore to Albert gets particular attention. Tangents are part of the texture, whether a broken phone stand, a sleepless night or a Matt Fraction comic recommendation. Sign-offs ask viewers to like, subscribe and comment, and tend to end on a crude joke. The language is strong and plot details come freely.