"Men": N*ked men and paranormal peril in a quaint English village. What could go wrong? You'd be surprised.

  

Link to the n*de photos

Browsing for a movie to watch this week, we came across  Men  (2022) on HBO MAX.  Imagining musclemen lounging by the pool, and maybe the old magazine Advocate Men, we eagerly clicked "play." Without any prior research...

The Landlord:  Young, extremely successful business person Harper Marlowe drives 4 1/2 hours from London to a village in Herefordshire, where she will be renting a huge mansion from landlord Geoffrey, who has bad teeth (an important character trait).  He is shocked that Harper can't play the piano, and upset that she reserved the mansion as "Mrs.," but there's no husband with her.

The Screaming Being:  Harper takes a walk through the woods, and finds a huge tunnel going nowhere.  Suddenly a being appears at the other end, and runs toward her, screaming in anger or terror.  She runs.

The N*ked Man: On the way back, she walks through an abandoned village.  There's a n*ked man following her: a mid-40s bear type with a hairy chest, a little belly, and a nice c*ck.

She runs back to her mansion, but the N*ked Man follows.  He peers in the windows, pulls apples from the tree, and shoves his hand through the mail slot, trying to get in.  He appears unable to speak.  He is not threatening, just curious, as if he's never seen a house -- or a human being -- before.

Harper calls the police.  They arrive, handcuff the guy, and lead him off. 

The Green Man:  Harper takes another walk, and stumbles across an old church.  Strangely, the altar contains a stone carving of the Green Man on one side, and on the other a man giving birth. 

The Green Man, a face covered with leaves, is often found carved into the stones of old English churches.  He is thought to be a pagan fertility symbol.

The man giving birth turns out to be Sheela na Gig, a woman with masculine features but an exceptionally large birthing part, a common "grotesque" in English churches. 

The Back Story:  Harper kneels, starts sobbing, and flashes to her back story.

In an elegant apartment near the Tower Bridge in London, Harper tells her husband (Paapa Essideu) that she wants a divorce.  He begs, pleads, yells, and threatens self-harm.  Finally he punches her, and she kicks him out.  A few moments later, he comes plummeting past the window.  Apparently he broke into the apartment upstairs, and either jumped or tried to climb down to her balcony, and slipped.  Either way, he glares at her accusingly as he falls.

The Mentally Disabled Boy:  Outside the church, Harper encounters a person wearing a creepy Marilyn Monroe mask.  The mask comes off -- it's a mentally disabled boy, asking her to play hide and seek. She refuses, so he calls her nasty names.

 More after the break

Mayfair Witches: Two of them, with interlocking stories, a swishy straight guy, and some demon dicks

  

Netflix has just dropped a lot of paranormal tv shows: A Discovery of Witches, Interview with a Vampire, The Preacher...I'll start with Mayfair Witches, which is based on a trilogy of books by Anne Rice, so there's bound to be some gay characters.

Scene 1: A sagging Gothic mansion. A man in a Depression-Era robin's egg blue suit appears on the front porch to give a staring, catatonic woman her Thorazine shot.  He's new, and can't believe that this is the patient: her file is so big, he thought she was elderly.

He reviews her file, and snoops among the weird books and artifacts in her library, including a photo of her as a 1920s flapper.  So she's immortal. Out on the porch, a man is talking to her, but when the doctor comes out, he is gone, and the maid says there was no man.  Eerie!

The rest of the episode juxtaposes stories of two women who look alike, so the only way to tell them apart is by their timelines: the first is contemporary, and the second looks to be in the 1950s. I don't know which is the catatonic one.

The Story of Woman #1: Rowan

Scene 1: Rowan pilots a boat into San Francisco Bay.  Her girlfriend arrives via Uber.  Nope, it's her mother.  

Scene 2:  A surgeon, Rowan is comforting the young boy she'll be operating on. Wait -- a male surgeon, Dr. Keck, took over the case to impress the sexist Board, but he's not operating right. She argues, but to no avail, and the boy almost dies  "Keck is a menace!" she exclaims. 

Scene 3: More tearjerking: Mom's cancer is back!  Plus we've only seen two male characters, neither cute.

Rowan tells the menace Dr. Keck that David Lemle was observing the surgery.  His company does research with stem cells for cancer patients, so could Dr. Keck arrange an introduction, so she can apply for a job as his research associate, so she can get her mother into the trials?  That sounds unethical, and really far-fetched. But Dr. Keck thinks she's arrogant, with a superiority complex.. As he is tearing into her, she hears whispers, something happens inside his brain, and he falls over dead!  

Scene 4: Rowan thinks she caused Dr. Keck's death.  Maybe her powers are genettc, but she's adopted, and there's no way to determine who her birth parents were.  

But the moment she leaves the room, Mom calls a facility and asks who Rowan's case worker is now: Ciprian Grieves, played by Tongayi Chirisa, left. That's a totally made up name.  She leaves a message: "My daughter is hurting people.  I need to know if something has changed."

Scene 5: In a bar, Rowan asks the bartender, Max (Jordan Cox) to have sex with her, but he has a date tonight.  So she goes after a random guy, and he relents.  

After sex, he wants to stick around, cuddle, and discuss their feelings, but she kicks him out: she's only in it for sex, not a relationship.  That's why she never sees the guy a second time.

Scene 6: Caseworker Ciprian Grieves goes to a house in New Orleans and uses his magic powers to look at the spirit world.  A mysterious spirit, played by Jack Huston, is lurking in the back yard.  He calls Rowan's Mom and tells her that He is nowhere near her daughter.  That's a good thing, right?  

Mom notes that she's dying of cancer, so who will protect Rowan when she's gone?  Ciprian volunteers.

More after the break