Just a couple years ago, Blumhouse was cranking out stuff like House of Spoils ( now streaming on Amazon Prime Video ) on a regular basis, and really ramping up the output for spooky season (RIP the Welcome to the Blumhouse series – which produced an extraordinary Sidney Sweeney creeper, Nocturne – and Into the Dark ). Spoils might be a rung higher on the ladder though, considering it stars a bona-fide Oscar winner in Ariana DeBose ( West Side Story ), and is from relatively new-to-the-scene, relatively promising writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy ( Blow the Man Down ). It also taps into the movies-and-shows-about-chefs trend and marries it to creepy feminist-witch tales, prompting us to wonder if a little eye of newt might make building a menu a little more inspired, both literally and metaphorically speaking.
HOUSE OF SPOILS : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? The Gist: Glimpses in the firelight: crone-ish looking women do ritualistic things around cauldrons, e.g., massaging bloody entrails like they’re kneading biscuit dough.
Neat! CUT TO: a whole pile of high-end-kitchen cliches, complete with a highly demanding ego-chef, Marcello (Marton Csokas), yelling at his underlings to chop-chop with the sprigs of exotic greens delicately tweezered atop quarter-ounces of foam, and shit like that. The key cog in his machine is a character heretofore and forever known only as Chef (DeBose). She tells Marcello that she’s quitting to partner with a restaurateur on her .
