Television Review | The Cutprice Guignol

July 19, 2016

Stranger Things: An Effusive Horror Fan’s Review

Last week, I wrote yet another bitter review about the new horror show Outcast, and how it never really sold the “horror” side of itself. And that’s not to mention the scores of other horror shows that have dissapointed me with their non-existent “horror” in the last few years- the latest season of Sleepy Hollow, The Walking Dead, Scream Queens. Bah, humbug. A few notable exceptions aside, horror just wasn’t living up to my lofty standards, which is no-one’s problem but mine, but still. Huff. Meh. Blergh. And then, swinging out of left field, comes Netflix’ s newest addition to the horror canon, Stranger Things, to stab me through the neck and yell “SHUT UP LOU NO-ONE CARES WHAT YOU THINK!” into my gurgling visage. And I couldn’t be happier!

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As a hundred reviewers have already noted by now, Stranger Things is a salute to all things seventies/eighties and horror related- posters for Evil Dead and Jaws dangle on the walls on the main characters, while The Thing crops up on TV screens. The soundtrack might as well be someone sitting with their knee in your chest yelling “HAVE YOU HEARD OF THIS BAND CALLED THE GOBLINS?”. The direction evokes John Carpenter, Dario Argento, and Wes Craven by turns- and all that is excellent, turning the show into a must-watch for fans of that era of horror. The Duffer Brothers, who created Stranger Things, also worked on Wayward Pines, which, now that their magnum opus has been released, looks like a practice run for this (much better) show.

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And, of course, the technical aspects are all outstanding- Winona Ryder headlines, and her performance as the brittle but compassionate Joyce is fantastic. Fellow adult David Harbour steals the show right out from under her nose with a devastatingly brilliant and understated performance as the cop who’s got more investment in this case than he perhaps should have. But this is inherently, a show about kids- and the four child actors the show revolves around are phenomenal. Finding one decent child actor is one thing, but four, plus a handful of teenagers I don’t want to throw into an industrial wood burner? Miraculous. The writing has, if you’ll excuse the oxymoron, a fuckton of nuance, and the direction is consistently solid. Even the title sequence is bloody excellent. But that’s been well covered already, and I want to talk about something else.

Winona Ryder, at one point, has a cluster of fairy lights as a screen partner and still KILLS IT

Stranger Things is, for my money, simply the best horror TV show I’ve seen in years. And it didn’t strike me how much the horror shows I do watch hadn’t been living up to the standard of pure horror like this. Most horror shows (like Supernatural and The Walking Dead) now run for years instead of telling one story, and that requires them to pull in new themes, arcs, characters, new “The monster was humanity ALL ALONG” cop-out endings. I don’t blame them for this- those shows have long seasons and giant arcs to contend with, and that’s their bag and they do it with a modicum of success. But God, did I miss having a show that just set out to tell a straight horror story, a little self-contained tale that doesn’t sprawl out over years and years and seasons and seasons.

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I don’t want to give too much away about Stranger Things, because the glory of the show is watching this (perfectly paced, might I add) story unfold over the course of eight near-perfect episodes. It does touch on some themes, like loss and parenthood, but it is, at it’s heart, driven by the horror. It’s fucking scary in places, forcing you to squint into shadows and examine the background of every shot to see what’s waiting for you in the shadows. Mixing human horror with the supernatural, and filtering this through the eyes of the four leading children, it’s a fucking chilling piece of TV, one that isn’t trying to do anything more than tell a damn good scary story. They have left it vaguely open for a sequel series, but what I want to see is Stranger Things turning into an anthology banner series- because I want to see what other brilliantly unsettling stuff The Duffer Brothers have under their hats.

And for me, right now, that’s more than enough. I honestly cannot recommend Stranger Things enough, especially if you’re a fan of horror- and if you’re not used to scary TV, I suggest putting away a few extra quid for the energy bill this month because you’ll be sleeping with the (hopefully not flickering) lights on for a week.

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January 3, 2016

Sherlock: The Abominable Bride Review

I’ve never really written about Sherlock on this blog before, which is kind of odd when you consider the fact that it’s a) a proper pop-cultural pantheon that has earned it’s place amongst the most critically revered and passionately fandomed shows of the decade and b) co-created by the man behind one of my favourite shows of all time, Steven Moffat. Truth be told, Sherlock has never really interested me on the same rabid level that other shows have-I appreciate it as a bit of clever fun (and the Hound of the Baskervilles adaptation is something extremely special) but it generally leaves me a little bit cold for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the ostentatious style, maybe it’s the general air of smugness that wafts off it in waves, maybe it’s the fact that it has made Benedict Cumberbatch an inescapable presence even to those who are pretty ambivalent towards him (guilty as charged). But I get it; it’s slick, clever, and mind-bending, with a few great performances sprinkled in there to boot. If you love it, more power to you, even if I can’t quite get on board with that bandwagon myself.

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Nonetheless, I finally caught up on the 2013 series a few weeks ago, and it made sense to tune in to the period-piece festive special The Abominable Bride because-well, because it seemed like a rollicking bunch of historical festive fun, which is something I can never in good conscience turn down. And hey, Steven Moffat pulled off one decent Christmas special– why not another?

And hey, the show did entertain me- quite a bit, in fact- for the first hour or so. Dumping us back in Victorian England as a period-appropriate Sherlock and Watson try to figure out how a woman who apparently shot herself in the head has returned to commit a series of bloody murders, the show had a lot of fun recalibrating it’s modern-day cast to the 19^th-century setting. The story had a good ghostly edge that fit well with the Christmas broadcast (look, ghost stories and Christmas just make sense to me, alright?), and it even manage to cart out Blackadder stalwart Tim McInnery for a guest spot. This was good! I liked this! Thumbs up and a round on me for everyone involved.

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But then the story took a…turn. We jumped back to the present day, and the show quickly revealed that everything in the preceding hour had been happening inside Sherlock’s head as he tried to figure out how Moriarty had returned. And, in the final half-hour of the show, Sherlock disappeared firmly up it’s own mind palace.

Look, I get that a lot of the appeal of this show is that it’s fiendishly clever, dancing between reality and the inside of Sherlock’s head even in the straightest of episodes. But here, every scene seemed to run into the next one like so much wet paint; we were in the modern day, where Sherlock was certain that if he could solve the case of the ghostly killer he could figure out what happened to Moriarty, but no! That was him tripping on drugs! And now we’re acting out the last scene of the Reichenbach Falls- not the show’s adaptation of it, you see, but the original Conan Doyle story! And now we’re back in Victorian London solving the original mystery! Andrew Scott’s in a dress! Back to modern day! DO YOU SEE HOW CLEVER THEY’RE BEING? DO YOU SEE IT? DO YOU?! The episode seemed so desperate to please hardcore fans that I swore at some points I could hear it trying to claw it’s way out from behind the screen to fellate the audience.

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And, before I carry on, let’s take a small moment to consider the resolution to the Victorian plot. I’ve touched on women and feminism in Sherlock before, but the events of the Abominable Bride really take the cake. The episode peppered in a few references to the women’s suffrage movement- which wasn’t exactly around then under those terms, but alright- one of which included a character announcing “VOTES FOR WOMEN” with literally no further context or apparent relevancy to the plot. And it was with this level of sledgehammer subtlety that they dealt with the rest of that story. Sherlock tracks the perpetrators of the murders down to a church, where they are revealed to be feminists fighting for women to be treated with more grace by their male counterparts. And how are they doing this, you might ask? Maybe through the letter-writing campaigns and the peaceful marches that the Suffragists employed (much later in the timeline, but hey, historical accuracy clearly isn’t an issue here)? Or through the ink-bombing of letterboxes and hunger strikes of the Suffragettes? Of COURSE not- they’ve created a murder cult that slaughters men who mistreat their partners. Also, they kick around churches wearing purple KKK hoods.

No, really.

And then Sherlock does a speech about how one half of the population is at war with the other (even though many men supported women’s suffrage and fought alongside their female counterparts) and that this is a war that men must lose (which both puts the onus for gender equality on men instead of the women who are apparently fighting it, and frames women’s suffrage as something that removes power from men as opposed to giving it to women). Forgive me if I’m a little annoyed, but as someone who’s studied gender history for a long time now, framing the early Suffrage movement as a bunch of spurned women who commit murder every time a man displeases them fucking infuriates me. Depicting the vital early stages of Britain’s feminist movement as a man-murdering cult, while not even bothering to name-check any of the brilliant historical figures who helped define it (Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Astell, et al) is some bullshit. I’ll admit that this did colour my attitude towards the episode in a big way, but even without it, the third act of The Abominable Bride was a fanservicey, confused mess.

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Basically, for me, a casual fan with no deep emotional investment in the series, this episode pretty much severed ties to the last vestiges of goodwill I had towards it. From an overly clever-clever third act that seemed to rely much more of fanservice that actually moving the plot along or telling us things we didn’t know, to a resolution to a plot that popped early feminists in KKK hoods, the whole thing felt like it was striving for something bigger and better than anything it could really achieve. Tuning back in to the series, I was hoping for either a jump forward in the Morairty plot of the previous season or simply an entertaining romp through Victorian London. What I got was an ugly mish-mash of both, an episode that seemed to give a half-hearted hand-wave to both plots without properly throwing itself into either. What resulted was a flabby, self-indulgent mess whose plot could have been summed up in a webisode,

Ah, well, at least I get another year off before I have to deal with it again.

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December 1, 2015

A Wanker’s Literary Reaction: How to Get Away with Murder

So, I’ve been interested in How to Get Away with Murder ever since Viola Davis scooped an Emmy for her performance in it earlier this year. I’m not particularly into police/crime procedural shows, so I wasn’t exactly coming to the show from a place of wild enthusiasm or any beyond “huh, this is on Netflix and I need something to watch while I clean the house”. So, you know, it didn’t have a high level of expectation to live up to. Especially with that knowing, on-the-nose title; how would they, um, get away with that? And then I watched it, and it’s pretty much the best thing I’ve seen all year.

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Seriously, trying to write a coherent review of HTGAWM has been nigh-on impossible because I just want to word-vomit every single thing I adore about this show. There’s the fiendishly compelling season-long arcs, the brilliant characterisation, the insane performances, the big issues it tackles, the smart way it takes them on. So, bear with me here while I try and put into words exactly why you should be Clockwork-Oranging yourself down in front of this show right now.

So, How to Get Away with Murder revolves around criminal defence attorney and law professor Annalise Keating (Davis), who chooses five students from her course every year to work on her cases. These five students- Wes, an ambitious nice guy with a secretive past, Connor, a callous, sharp-tongued narcissistic, Asher, a privileged upper-class douchebro, Laurel, an insecure idealist, and Michaela, who aspires to be like Annalise- end up embroiled in a murder case whose impact on their lives in further-reaching than any of them could have imagined. Yeah, I know it sounds like you’ve seen it all before, but trust me, you haven’t.

CHARLIE WEBER, LIZA WEIL, KARLA SOUZA, MATT MCGORRY, ALFRED ENOCH, JACK FALAHEE, AJA NAOMI KING

ATTENTION GILMORE GIRLS FANS: The woman second from left is Paris, and now she’s all grown up and insanely excellent!

First off, I’d say that the main strength of this show lies in it’s characterisation. All the characters in this show have fully-formed arcs of their own, developing them beyond the tropey nature of their origin, and considering that the main cast numbers eight in total (all of the above, plus two employees at Annalise’s law office, plus a recurring character in the form of Annalise’s boyfriend whose body is very possibly literally hewn from oak), that’s pretty impressive. Half of what makes the show so damn compelling is the way they break these characters down into something fresh and different, exploiting their pasts and the occasionally ruthless nature of their work in order to create fully-formed people to populate the show.

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And of course, I can’t ignore the performances. There’s not one dud in this show, and everyone steps up to the plate when they’re given something chunky to get their teeth into. This, in part, has to be down to the fact that you have to bring your a-game when you’re acting opposite Viola Davis, who, within forty seconds of walking on-screen in the first episode, turns into the most compelling woman on TV at the moment (save for maybe Jessica Jones, but that’s another review for another time). The question isn’t how she got the Emmy after only one season, but rather how anyone else can expect to win it as long as she’s inhabiting this character. The show throws a lot of potentially tricky or controversial subjects at Davis-such as race, gender, class and abuse- and she knocks them all out of the park without seeming like she’s even trying. She’s a flawed, sometimes outrightly cruel, character, and I would watch a thousand seasons of her swaggering about a court shouting at people before I got bored of it (and even then, I’d still be admiring her wardrobe).

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While the show doesn’t necessarily push the boat out in terms of plotting-a season-long arc, with flashforwards to a murder committed at the half-way point of the season, dotted with case-of-the-week dramas- I can’t fault the writing, either. It’s sharp, witty, and on the ball, taking on a bunch of hotly-debated topics (like rape culture, terrorism, and sexual abuse) and asking sometimes uncomfortable questions about how they fit into the world of the show. The whole thing has a kind of trashy feel to it, while making sure that the plot is never anything less than compelling, smart and decadently entertaining.

Basically, what I’m saying is watch it. Even if, like me, this show doesn’t look like it’s your thing, give it a go, because it’s fucking excellent. Smart, boundary-pushing television doesn’t exactly come around all that often, and if you love TV as much as I do, it’s almost intoxicatingly exciting when it does. I’ll hear no excuses: the first season is on Netflix, and we’re currently half-way through the (nigh-on perfect) second, so you’ve got plenty of time to catch up before it comes back in February. Which is, ironically, a murderous amount of time to make us wait.

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November 4, 2015

A Wanker’s Literary Reaction: Ash vs Evil Dead

So, I have a somewhat scandalous admission to make: I’m not that huge a fan of the Evil Dead series. I know, I know, I can hear you yelling at me now- “I thought you said you were a fan of horror!”. And I am. It’s just that, for whatever reason, Sam Raimi’s seminal video nasties never quite smashed their way to the same level of obsession that, say Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street or, um, Final Destination (look, I’m SORRY) did in my head. Which is not to say that I don’t get it- I do. They’re great, and Raimi revolutionised indie horror with his innovative gore and balls-to-the-wall sense of fun. But I was coming to the reboot of this series without too much preciousness about the original movies on my mind, is what I’m saying.

That all said, I was pretty pumped for the premiere of Ash vs Evil Dead this Halloween (which I spent dressed as a genderswapped Beetlejuice or Wednesday Addams, depending what day you found me, so everyone else needs to up their constume game). After the catastrophic TV “re-imagining” of classic horrors like Rosemary’s Baby, this one seemed to have something that set it apart from the pack-namely, the involvement of the original directors and and the always-welcome presence of Bruce Campbell.

And I mean always welcome in the most literal sense possible. If he was to walk through my front door right now, I’d be like “hey, Bruce, let me pour you a glass of brandy and we can talk about setting the wedding date”. Did I mention that I love Bruce Campbell? Because I LOVE Bruce Campbell. He’s the greatest bad actor there ever was, and he’s probably the most iconic part of the original Evil Dead franchise, mainly because he looks like he’s having more fun than perhaps anyone else has ever had in front of camera (except me in my sex tape, but that’s another matter).

I’ll be honest, I’d probably let him finger me even with the chainsaw hand. Is that awful? That’s awful, I’m sorry.

And that’s the one thing that stands out above all else in the season premiere of Ash vs Evil Dead- just how much FUN everyone seems to be having. Utilising as many of the same visual tricks as the original movies (as well as keeping the Deadites looking the same as they always did, thankfully), there’s no part of this episode that didn’t make me grin. From the superbly executed horror sequences (the one in the haunted house that was lit by a spinning torch was legitimately inspired, and really worked) to the dumb humour to the batshit crazy action scenes, this show knows how to balance it’s horror and comedy perfectly. I wrote about Scream Queens a few weeks back, a show which pretty much failed to strike a comfortable balance between the two, and I was struggling to think of a TV show that actually did- until this came along.

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I guess what I like most about it is that it isn’t attempting to come up with gritty new takes on old-school horror. It’s just having fun bringing the goofy, funny, scary, super-violent feel of the original movies to the small screen, with a bit more space to develop characters and plot. While we’ve certainly seen some great horror over the last few years- from Cabin in the Woods to The Babadook to The Visit– it’s been a long time since something with such an obvious B-movie quality has broken through to the mainstream. I’ve missed seeing someone having genuine outright fun with the genre, and in that respect alone, Ash vs Evil Dead has me on board as a viewer, just to see where they can take this next.

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October 10, 2015

American Horror Story, Hotel: Indefensible

Well, that’s it: they’ve fucked it. They’ve gone too far. There’s only one way to describe the premier of American Horror Story’s fifth season, Hotel, and that’s indefensible.

The show had always threatened jumping the shark, but here they’ve less jumped it than nonconsensually sodomized it in a seedy motel room. Series one and two balanced so carefully outrageous camp (Jessica Lange feeding the corpse of her husband to her dogs, a possesed Lily Rabe delightedly choosing a cane with which to beat her asylum-bound charges) and genuine emotional stakes (ugh, the “Never trust a drunk” scene between Jessica Lange and Francis Conroy in season two, basically), but series three and four seemed to throw any kind of semblance of over-arching plot to the wind in favour of…witches? The sentient head of Kathy Bates? Denis O’Hare getting Freaks-ed?

Suddenly, they weren’t dedicated to creating interesting, thematically coherent stories with plenty of dark horror elements; they wanted to make hyper-camp, unbelievably bad taste exploitation flicks that yeah, did occasionally hit some televisual sweet spot and remain kind of entertaining. Every season, there seemed less and less that was compelling about the show. Sure, there were a few great performances, some good scenes, some great lines, but none of it hung together as anything other than a series of halfway connected vignettes. With a big overhaul in place for their fifth year, I was hoping that they might reclaim some of the decent stuff that had made the first two seasons so compelling. But with the first episode of season five, Checking In, out this week, I think I may have lost the last vestiges of goodwill I had towards American Horror Story.

I recall when Denis O’Hare got actual acting to do!

Right, let’s get this out of the way. Here are the things I liked about that episode: Kathy Bates’ acting, Sarah Paulson having a legitimately sassy role, the tantalising promise of Evan Peters. There. That’s it. I’m done. Wes Bentley’s performance as the tragic cop who winds up living at the hotel is good, but everything about his crime-scene investigations comes off as cut-price Hannibal (mainly because he reminds me of Chilton a little bit) with elaborate and violent mutliations that serve no actual plot purpose beyond having a guy’s penis glued inside a dead girl’s vagina. And hey, that starts us off on my first major gripe with this episode: the outrageous amounts of sexualised violence.

Look, I have a pretty strong stomach for almost any kind of violence. I watched The Human Centipede 3, for Christ’s sakes. I can appreciate violence when it’s either done well or adds something to the plot; outside of that, I’m not really going to enjoy it, and it’s going to take a lot of convincing for me to believe that it’s necessary. And this episode…yeesh. There were hot blonde teenagers being force-fed in their skivvies, there was a shockingly unsexy soft-porn sequence where a vampiric Lady Gaga (more on her later) and her partner hump then murder an unsuspecting young couple, and there was, of course, the scene where a dope fiend got violently sodomized with a spike.

Honestly, my rule for these kinds of things is that if Se7en wouldn’t do it, there was probably a good fucking reason for that. And that reason is that showing, in pretty graphic detail, a man getting raped with a giant spike only enlightens the viewers as to what a man getting sodomized with a fucking spike looks like. The scene genuinely upset me, and also made me really angry, because Ryan Murphy and his team have been throwing around sexualised violence a lot in their shows recently, often to no real conclusion. This was just an extension of that in the worst possibe way: we learnt nothing, we were told nothing, and it all seemed like an excuse to show us something “shocking” and “edgy”, trivialising the pretty grotesque act. Do you remember the rape scene in series two, where the camera slowly pans in on Sarah Paulson’s traumatised face, and how impactful that was? Compare it to this scene: vile, exploitative, and simply there to feed the dumb gross-out violence of a certain subset of horror fans (note: this is the second time someone has been bummed to death in this show. Just so we’re keeping count). I hated it. I HATED it.

But let’s focus on some other elements of the show. Firstly, Lady Gaga: if there’s one thing I could say for certain that Lady Gaga has, it’s presence, but for some reason it just didn’t translate on screen. Her line readings veered between terrible and just bearable, but she was a nothing of a character beyond the outrageous outfits and dirty, kinky sex, neither of which she really carries off. Her partner, Matt Bomer, is playing a nineties boyband star- not literally, but take a look at these photos and tell me I’m wrong:

-and he was fine, but in a completely forgettable way. The two of them had a kind of Spike-and-Drusilla vibe, if Joss Whedon had had the bad sense to show the audience the two of them constantly boning. It’s their relationship that makes it interesting, not the constant soft-porny shots of Matt Bomer’s ass. AHS has a long and proud history of showing copious amounts of man-ass, but this was too much, even for me (have you seeeeeen the pictures of Finn Wittrock this season though? Can’t handle that hotness, because at least 30% of my attraction towards this show is the unbelievably gorgeous men).

UGH BRB DYING

More than anything, the show felt like a series of disconnected vignettes. If you’ve had the misfortune of watching Kanye West’s godawful Runaway, then that’s the best point of reference I can find for Checking In. It was dumb, all over the place, with apparently no real urge to go anywhere or do anything or explain any of the reasoning behind it’s often tasteless choices. American Horror Story has always been trashy TV, but this went beyond that and into the realm of exploitation for the sake of exploitation. The whole thing reads like Gaga’s own Bad Romance video: occasionally cool, wierdly headwormy, but ultimately signifying nothing.

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September 28, 2015

Scream Queens, or Ryan Murphy Fools Me Again

So, as you may know, I have something of a…troubled relationship with Ryan Murphy. The writer/director/showrunner, along with his oft-partner in crime Brad Falchuk, has produced some of my favourite and some of my least favourite television of the last decade or so. On the one hand, the turgid back end of Nip/Tuck’s run. But the other, the spritely first season of Glee. But then, everything after the first season of Glee. However, American Horror Story. And on and on into oblivion. His TV produce, as far as I’m concerned, is almost astonishingly patchy, but yet I still find myself drawn to whatever new pile of bubblegum poison he’s pumping on to my screen. No matter how ridiculous the concept, how outrageous the casting, how badly I know in my soul it’s going to go wrong, he fools me every time and I come back for more. And that’s how I found myself watching his new show Scream Queens.

Look, there’s a lot I like about Scream Queens. For one, it’s a hearty, unambiguous salute to a specific genre of horror- the teen slasher, which is one of my personal favourites (Friday the 13th REPRESENT). It’s packed full of in-jokes, gloriously violent and horrible deaths, convoluted backstories, and plenty other genre tropes that make me clap my hands together. Plus, there’s the cast, made up of my favourite actors from other Murpchuck shows: Lea Michele from Glee, Emma Roberts from American Horror Story, etc. Plus, there’s Jamie Lee Curtis (basically playing Jane Lynch’s character from Glee, gloriously)!

The plot revolves around a sorority house, led by a sociopathic president (Emma Roberts) who’s intent on keeping her house for the pretty and popular- using deadly means. Initially, the show has it’s charms- the bubblegum world studded with hideous, violent death (spray tan replaced with hydrochloric acid, head-in-the-fryer prank gone wrong, etc) is pretty great, and I actually kind of enjoyed Nick Jonas’ guest turn as the simpering suck-up to the most popular guy in school. The show seems to be having a lot of fun dismantling those cliches, even if it is done with the usual level of sledgehammer subtlety from the team behind this sequence. Skyler Samuels, as pledge Grace Gardner, really reminds me of Jane Levy in Suburgatory, with her laid-back charm that doesn’t slide into gratingly pointed territory, and the almost all-female cast look like they’re having a ball- of course, as anyone who’s even glanced at her work before, Roberts is glorious as the poisonous valley girl, while supporting cast like Abigail Breslin (as one of Roberts’ cohorts) and Lea Michele (as a socially awkward new pledge) fill out the world.

But I’ll tell you the one thing that doesn’t really work about it: the horror. Look, I get that this is a comedy series before a horror series and that’s cool: in fact, I’m hoping the heavily tongue-in-cheek take on horror might get a few more people to seek out the films they’re lampooning and then I’ll have someone to talk to this shit about. But there’s an uneasy balance at work here. The show’s main villain, the Red Devil, has a pretty cool design that suggests someone somewhere was half-taking this seriously-

Ugh, let’s be real, I would probably wear those trousers in real life.

-and it seems at times as if we’re meant to find them scary. The direct horror sequences lurch wierdly between satrical and serious, and it’s not that good. Look at something like Scream, the ultimate meta-horror. Remember that first time you saw the opening sequence and how shit-scary it was? Yeah that’s what Scream Queens needs. It needs someone who isn’t afraid to really twist the knife (if you’ll excuse the pun) and go hard on the horror, partly because it helps make everything else look so starkly, ludicrously great in comparison. Maybe I’m a horror snob (in fact, no damn maybe about it) but, for all it’s good points, Scream Queens just isn’t doing justice to it’s horror icons.

Dammit, I know I’ll probably be watching the rest of the series. He’s done it again. He always does.

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July 23, 2015

Sense8 is Bloody Excellent

Look, let’s get one thing straight: I think Sense8 is a great show. But I’d be doing you a disservice, as a noted cultural critic, by not mentioning Freema Aygeman in it.

Ugh. You might remember Aygeman as Martha Jones from series three of Doctor Who, where she displayed a similairly staggering lack of acting talent. I know some things are down to taste, and some people prefer different acting styles and what have you, but I defy anyone to look me in the eye and tell me this woman can act. She’s an infuriating black hole of talent, a gaping maw of awfulness that threatens to engulf the entire show in it’s wake. She’s stilted, her accent is hilarious, her character impossible to buy into, her chemistry with the cast almost non-existent. It’s genuinely difficult to look at the screen when she’s on it, because she’s that astoundingly, unwatchably terrible. And I can’t pretend that she’s not part of the show. So, fair warning: don’t think I’m giving her a free pass just because she lucked on to Netflix’s most interesting show to date.

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June 22, 2015

Underrated Sitcoms to Waste Your Summer With

The sitcom is a very specific breed of TV show; there’s a balance between the witty and mawkish, as groups of friends and/or family go through continually contrived ups and downs. But it’s the televisual equivalent of someone handing you a steaming mug of tea and telling you not worry because they’ve already got dinner in the oven. They’re easy, they’re familiar, and occasionally they offer a gateway to a very specific kind of TV-watching comfort. So today I’m taking a break from Fifty Shades of Grey, and taking a look at the most underrated sitcoms of the last ten years. Prepare to have your summer wasted.

1. Happy Endings

This was a show I caught ten minutes of once, then avoided like the plague until a distant crush on Zachary Knighton pulled me back in. And I realized why I didn’t like it the first time round; Happy Endings has a spiky, difficult, sour edge. It doesn’t welcome you in; it subverts all the sitcom tropes you expected it to abide by, and has it’s own rhythm and chemistry the likes of which I haven’t seen before or since. Centred around six friends living in Chicago, it sounds like you’ve seen it all before, but relentlessly sharp humour, manic, try-anything energy, and a fantastic leading cast (Adam Pally as Max is the queen of my heart) make this a cancellation to weep over.

2. Suburgatory

I rolled my eyes so hard when I heard the premise for this my eyes almost vanished into my skull. Teenage girl gets moved to the suburbs by uptight single dad? Kill me. But this is probably my favourites on this list. The chemistry between leads Jeremy Sisto and Jane Levy is comfortable and warm, thrown completely at odds against the sharp-edged, synthetic world of Chatswin. It’s packed with fabulous supporting characters- where to start? Perhaps with Ana Gatseyer and Chris Parnell as the day-glo sinister Shays? Maybe Alan Tudyk’s repressed, unstable dentist? Cheryl Hines warm-hearted walking hair extension? Or, as we should all agree, Charly Chaikin’s terrifying Dalia, a automaton Barbie doll who’s some mix of human and horrifying? Amongst all the batshit crazy stuff, there’s a powerful emotional core at play here, with a perfectly plotted arc revolving around parenthood that packs some genuinely surprising emotional punch. Fuck it, here’s Ana Gatseyer singing Barracuda:

3. Viscious

Did you really, truly think you were getting through this without a British sitcom? You poor fool. Anyway, Viscious is my guilty pleasure- Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen as an elderly bickering gay couple, with the voice of my dreams Frances de la Tour as their long-time friend and neighbour, Violet. Throw in my new TV chrush Iwan Rheon- have you seen his weird handsome face? Have you?- and you’ve got the recipe for an unchallenging but occasionally hilarious show. Yeah, it’s old-fashioned, but in that nice warm, fuzzy way British sitcoms from the seventies are- with canned laughter, racy jokes, and real effort put in to developing the leading pair. Best served with wine.

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February 3, 2015

A Wanker’s Literary Reaction: The Flash

“MY NAME IS BARRY ALLEN, AND I’M THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE!” bellows Grant Gustin cheerily over the opening credits of The Flash, a hectic series of primary-coloured blobs with happy/frowny faces whose entire first season arc was scribbled on the back on a napkin and the lost down the back of a cab seat.

The first time I saw Grant Gustin, he was playing Sebastian, a sexy, charming, devious gay guy trying to hook up with Chis Colfer’s boyfriend in Glee, of all places. For some reason, his most memorable moments on the show came during this amazing performance of Uptown Girl-

(for reference, Grant Gustin in the one standing next to a pillar with a vase thing on it at 8 seconds in, and also the only one from this show whose career hasn’t been permanently derailed by it)

– So whenever I see him wander, often apparently lost, on to screen as Barry Allen/The Flash my mind immediately shouts a line from that song at me. But that’s not to say Gustin (UPTOOOWN GIIIRL) isn’t kind of brilliant- he’s the epitome of bumbling charm, being a nice guy without being a Nice Guy (the kind who mope and frown because they’ve been “friendzoned”). The Flash- a super-fast superhero alter-ego of Barry’s who fights crime created after an accident- is essentially just an endearingly serious and shouty version of Barry, who’s just yer normal everyday forensic investigator with a face as cute as a puppy made of ice cream. He’s the centre of what is probably my favourite superhero show on television right now, which is saying kind of a lot because superhero movies and TV shows are beyond played out for me right now. Sure, I gave Arrow (The Flash’ mother series) and Agents of S.H.I.T.E a go, and sure, a picture of Stephen Amell holding a baby made my womanhood explode like a nuclear weapon. But Gustin (SHE’S BEEN LIVIN’ IN HER WHITE BREAD WORLD)- and his show, by extension- have an old-school, Gerry Anderson charm in the simplicity of both character and plot that sets them apart from the overly slick antics of The Avengers or-God forbid- Gotham.

The supporting cast- including That Guy Who Played JD’s Brother in Scrubs, Gruff Detective Father Figure, Gruff Detective Father Figure’s Intelligent and Beautiful Daughter, and the one nerdy guy on TV who’s somehow not an unbelievably annoying exaggeration of the worst parts of myself- are superb, and the simple backstory (big explosion, boom, megapowers) allows loads of time to fill in the universe around Gustin (AS LONG AS ANYONE WITH HOT BLOOD CA-AN). The villains are my favourite part of the show, by far. Plucked seemingly verbatim from the comics, they wear giant goggles, have guns that shoot ice, deliver terrible quips as they wreak havoc, and generally stalk around the place looking like they’re actually enjoying ruining countless lives because no-one has bothered to stop them yet. Give me bad guys who look like they’re having more fun than I did the whole of last weekend, and you’ve got me hooked.

I like that kind of brazen simplicity- I don’t need things to make sense when they’re fun. Sure, if you want to go hardcore on serious backstory, be my guest, but superhero shows that don’t work a healthy dollop of self-awareness into the mix are just throwing all their potential to the winds as far as I’m concerned. Go kick around the back entrance of the Game of Throne’s writers room if you want some serious work, I’m pretty sure they have a terrifying sweatshop of writers just attempting to keep up with how many characters are in the damn show.

I don’t demand high levels of camp from every series I watch, but that’s not to say I don’t miss it from time to time. If there’s one good thing that Gustin (AND NOW SHE’S LOOKIN’ FOR A DOWN-TOOOOWN MAN) has brought over from his time at Glee, it’s a bit of silliness. Everyone on screen during every episode of The Flash looks like they’re having a whale of a time, and it shines through every frame to turn Barry Allen’s antics into something really quite charming. Hard to fault? Probably not. Hard to dislike? Completely.

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December 17, 2014

Hemlock Grove: A Wanker’s Literary Reaction

Yup, I’m combining blog series. Deal with it. Look, in theory I LOVE Eli Roth. To be honest, I find him as a person tremendously interesting- he’s spent decades immersed passionately in the horror genre, getting dirt under his nails and blood on his shoes in the name of making better horror movies. Which would be brilliant if the horror movies he made were actually any good. I feel horrible saying this because he’s clearly deeply knowledgeable and passionate about a genre that I consider the greatest one out there, but his films straddle an awkward boundary of wanting to pay homage to the classics while still making an original story with Roth’s stamp all over it. It seems to be a case of having a director so totally surrounded by a certain type of film that he, subconsciously or consciously, peppers his films with far too many genre clichés to truly separate his own work from that of his predecessors. Add to that the images of sexualised dead bodies in Hostel- which I find utterly, unforgivably grim no matter the gender or situation-and you’ve got a man who I love almost entirely outside of his films. But not, perhaps, outside of his TV shows. I’m taking a look at his Netflix series Hemlock Grove for the first time, and this blog post will serve to document my honest reaction accordingly. I’m also drinking every time I see nipples, a murder, or nipples AND a murder in the same scene.

Seriously though, nipples AND blood in the opening scene.

Look, I’ll be honest: this isn’t a GOOD show. Not by a stretch, But that doesn’t mean that it’s not buggeringly good fun. Imagine if Twilight had actually had a sense of humour and a bit of self-awareness; this is what you’d be looking at. With Peter Rumaneck, troubled Romany He’s-DEFINITELY-Not-A-Werewolf who moves to the town of Hemlock Grove with his mother, swaggering about with the kind of easy, sexy charm that the aforementioned young adult series could have done with in spades. Though he’s placed up against an interminably awful love interest-who, within moments on appearing on screen, announces “I’M A NOVELIST”, a move which simultaneously makes me want to punch myself in the face and reminds me that I have that planning for my book to do- he manages to sparkle on-screen in an entirely non-Edward like way. Imagine if Twilight was told from Edward’s point of view- some weird girl turns up and starts obsessing over him, and he’s just trying to get on with his life- and you’ve got the gist and thrust of this character. The script also has great fun with his settling into the discomforting elements of the town, such as when he’s apparently the only one to notice a shuffling, groaning woman with light pouring out of her face wandering down the school corridor as lights flicker ominously above.

What I like most about the series, though, is the Godfreys. An old-money family with some dark secrets and a seriously nice house, we meet the fabulous Famke Jamsen early on as the matriarch of the tribe, a brilliantly awful cow who brings just the right level of pissed-off repression to the role. Then you’ve got Roman, the seventeen-year-old tearaway, a man so beautiful that I don’t think I’m bisexual any more. Seriously, the first time he came on-screen-

– my jaw actually fell off. A bit of research reveals that he’s Bill Skarsgard, marking the third series that’s secretly dominated by an incandescent performance from that family (Alexander Skarsgard in True Blood, Gustaf Skarsgard in Vikings, Bill Skasgard in This Show Which I Will Only Remember Because He’s Super Fucking Hot). It helps, too, that they’ve given him plenty of fun to have with the role, hissing “Do the fields need tiiiiilled?” when he’s woken up too early for his liking. He’s one of those people for whom serious material would be too easy, so they’ve handed him a cornucopia of weirdness and fun to the already tongue-in-cheek show.

The direction- courtesy of Eli Roth, at least in the first episode- is occasionally inspired (such as the found footage-y sequence of a young girl fleeing from an unknown monster) but sensibly takes a back seat to scene-setting and exploring the fabulous possibilities the series’ hometown has to offer. The centrepiece direction sequence for the first episode is undoubtedly a flashback to Roman’s childhood, which is filmed like a B-movie-right down to Famke Jansen’s hand languidly dangling a glass of wine over the edge of a seat-and proves that Eli Roth’s admirable horror knowledge can work beautifully if it’s deployed in the right way.

Based on this first episode, I will be watching the rest of the series. It’s not the best thing on TV in a technical sense, but it’s certainly got it’s charm. The writing is solid and brought to life by some enthusiastic performances from the cast, and everyone seems to be going at the campier elements hell for leather. If American Horror Story ever needed a campier, more teen-friendly spin-off then this is it. That said, I am now pretty drunk so don’t take my word for anything.

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Category: Television Review