Ingenious, unsettling, and oftentimes riotously funny, director Mark Mylod's The Menu has been prepared exactly the way I most enjoy my satire: blackened to a crisp. While its thematic and presentational inspirations are unhidden and encompass everything from Hell's Kitchen to Midsommar to Fantasy Island, what this savage comedy chiefly reminded me of was Don't Look Up, last year's end-of-days spoof that ended on the bleakest of all possible notes.

For fans of family-friendly improv comedy, our long local nightmare is about to be over. Because as of November 11 and 12, after a three-year hiatus, ComedySportz Quad Cities finally returns to the area with opening-weekend shows at the organization's new home base: the newly refurbished Spotlight Studio located on the lower level of Moline venue the Spotlight Theatre.

Running at Davenport venue the Mockingbird on Main November 11 through 20, Spooky Pete is the latest blast of ingenuity, hilarity, puppetry, and sure-to-be-glorious WTF-ery by the Haus of Ruckus team of T. Green and Calvin Vo. It's the pair's first Mockingbird show not to feature, at their center, Vo's and Green's comedic alter egos Johnny and Fungus. It's also a haunted-house story, and is consequently landing, as stated on the production company's Facebook page, “Just in time to be late for Halloween.”

No matter its other pluses and minuses, and they're mostly minuses, director Jaume Collet-Sera's Black Adam is certainly one of the oddest comic-book blockbusters I've yet seen, in that it somehow feels like both a superhero/villain origin story, which it is, and the final installment in a three-part series, which it isn't. Then again, maybe I was just hoping it was a trilogy-ender, because after only two hours in the film's company, I think I've already had enough.