Hello, fans of movies and TV series! I've long been a fan of British actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, known from Edgar Wright'sThree Flavours Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of The Dead, Hott Fuzz and The World's End) and have certainly been looking forward to new movies and series starring them.
Especially since these talented filmmakers have launched their own film company, Stolen Pictures, and have announced a bunch of movies and TV series that again mix comedy with horror and sci-fi.
One of the company's first big projects was Truth Seekers for Amazon Prime and it seems to be one of the best British series of 2020.
The main character of the show is a charming fat guy Gus (Nick Frost), who works as an engineer at an Internet company, installs equipment, and spends all his free time on the youtube channel "Truth Seekers", dedicated to all kinds of paranormal stuff and conspiracy theories.
At the same time his suspiciously polite boss Dave (Simon Pegg) constantly sends his favorite employee in places that are somehow associated with his hobby - converted into a hotel hospital for the mentally ill, haunted mansions, or just houses with a bad reputation.
Once the boss paired Gus with a young guy named Elton John (!!!) and with his appearance, or rather due to his talent to attract various strange things, the number of all sorts of devilry going on around 'this couple begins to grow exponentially.
The series, which is very easily the British version of the iconic X-Files, is damn good and above all the way Pegg and Frost work with the structure of the original show and string a through plot on the "monsters of the week." Not forgetting to pay maximum attention to detail and pop culture references.
There are more than enough of the latter here, and besides the obvious ones, like Elton's sister masterminding a Dalek costume from Doctor Who for a local comicon, there are some that only true movie geeks recognize.
For example, Gus's grumpy father-in-law, played by Malcolm McDowell, gets a very unpleasant eye procedure, as in Clockwork Orange, and young Elton wears a Choose Life T-shirt. Plus hundreds other trivia from The Evil Dead, Twin Peaks, The Blair Witch, The Incredible Adventures of JoJo and a good dozen '80s horror movies.
And most importantly - it's all for a reason, and each of these little things, literally brick by brick, build the whole universe of the series and lead to an absolutely crazy finale, the level of schizophrenia in which reaches the biblical scale of Neil Gaiman's Good Omens.
And, of course, it's not without its trademark humor. Pegg and Frost pull out all the stops and each episode has more than a dozen sarcastic jokes or black humor, which perfectly compensate for the lack of the usual pubs, pints of beer and other components of a "real British show" and at the same time balance the horror aesthetic and the carefully crafted atmosphere of an old-school, and in some places too sentimental show.
As usual, it was not without a fly in the ointment. In terms of production quality, "Truth Seekers" is inferior to the duo's previous films - the absence of their regular co-writer - director Edgar Wright, but it still looks very worthy, which makes the recent news that the show will not get a second season sound very sad.
8 out of 10
Image fotr this post found on collider.com/tag/truth-seekers/
Sorry for possible errors - English is not my native language and writing movie reviews - is my method of learning.