Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

STRANGER THINGS Season 3

by Leave a Comment

Season 3 of STRANGER THINGS (Netflix) flirts with jumping the ’80s nostalgia shark but doesn’t, focusing on great characters, great storytelling, and fresh themes to produce another winning season.

In Season 3, the kids are older and leaving childhood (and their dark past) behind, while the small town of Hawkins is undergoing its own change as the new Starcourt Mall ravages local businesses. Unfortunately, strange things are once again afoot, this time by the Soviets, who are trying to build their own dimensional gate. The rift has already allowed enough of the Mindflayer to get into our world to begin infecting local townspeople toward an apocalyptic end. Now it’s up to Hopper, Joyce, and the kids to band together to save the world once again.

This season was a real delight, as the show is evolving to revisit old themes while providing fresh material and character development. Everything about the show has great integrity to it, even the heavy ’80s references and nods to films like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and THE TERMINATOR. The kids are cute but this isn’t overplayed either, thank God. (It’s weird how well the Duffer brothers write kids, as in interviews with them and the child actors, they are super awkward around actual children.) The three main story lines are each enjoyable on their own and come together perfectly at the end in a show that is an example of textbook storytelling.

Then there’s Robin, played by the beautiful and hilarious Maya Hawke (Ethan Hawke’s daughter), who along with Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) steal the show as kids working an ice cream shop who crack an intercepted Russian code and discover the Soviet base. Their scenes were the best part for me.

Overall, two thumbs up for this season of STRANGER THINGS, and I’m looking forward to the big finale next year.

THE DARK Season 2

by Leave a Comment

I enjoyed season 1 of THE DARK and looked forward to the second season of this German science fiction thriller series watchable on Netflix. Where the first season sets up all sorts of spooky plot questions based around a time travel portal in the woods near a small town, the second season answers much of the mystery while going for broke on the premise. The result is engaging and fun, though it comes close to flirting with the ridiculous extremes of LOST and feeling at times like a sci-fi soap opera.

The second season picks up where the first left off, with various characters trying to understand the connection between disappearances in the town now and 33 years earlier, or becoming time travelers themselves and players in a contest between two warring sides. One side wants to end the cycle of time loops that culminate in the apocalypse, the other wants the apocalypse to occur but save a certain portion of humanity. I think that’s the case, it’s actually not clear, nor is it entirely clear who the good and bad guys are.

The show is a real workout for the brain. Because the time travel occurs in 33-year jumps, the story plays out in 1920-21, 1953-54, 1986-87, 2019-20, and 2052-53, after the end of the world. As a result, you see characters at different times in their life–as children, adults, and seniors. There are numerous characters and family relationships to track. Then you have the mystery of the time travel itself, how it works and its influence on events.

A great deal of the fun of the show is in the bootstrap paradox. This is where time travel reverses cause and effect such that events seem to create themselves with no discernible origin. For example, suppose you’re about to die, but future-you comes back and saves you in the nick of time. The paradox is that in linear time, you should have died, so future-you would not exist to save you. ARRIVAL plays with the same idea. The concept is milked to full effect in THE DARK, which I found as frustrating as fun if not more so, as it eliminates cause and effect, and the show starts to rely on constant emotionally heavy, paradox-based reveals until every character is heavily involved in the time travel and the plot starts to become meaningless while producing yet another paradox. Time travel changes everything, but everything must happen as it always has in the loop.

In the end, THE DARK is a fun ride. The characters are likeable, the science fiction aspect and its mystery are compelling, and the writers tease out a good combination of mystery and reveal.

THE TERROR (2018)

by Leave a Comment

Based on the novel by Dan Simmons, THE TERROR, which originally aired on AMC and I caught on Amazon Prime, offers a horror take on Captain Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1845–1848. Driven by strong characters and a powerful cast, the show brilliantly combines a supernatural monster element with actual historical events rendered with rich accuracy and realism.

The show begins with two British warships, which have been converted into the most technologically advanced exploring vessels of the age. Their mission is to explore the Arctic in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, which would offer a dramatically shorter trade route between the United Kingdom and China. Leading the expedition are Captain Crozier of the TERROR (Jared Harris, rapidly becoming one of my favorite actors), Captain Franklin (the great Ciaran Hinds) of the EREBUS, and Franklin’s second, Commander Fitzjames (the solid Tobias Menzies). We also get to know many other crew members, all of them distinct and likeable or detestable.

Franklin is out for glory and rashly commits the ships to a route that freezes up and leaves the ships icebound, against the advice of Crozier, who is the more practical of the two but also haunted by his failings to the point of struggling with a drinking problem. Things are bad enough as the crew is forced to winter in the Arctic, but after a local native is killed, a strange creature appears and begins hunting them one by one.

The real horror element isn’t the creature, however, but the cold, the refusal of the ice to thaw, the deteriorating rations, and the resulting madness and starvation that slowly tears the crew apart and turns them from honor- and duty-bound Englishmen into savages. Fear in all its guises is on full display in this show, as the men continually face an impossible and steadily worsening situation and struggle to maintain duty and compassion. The result is powerful, heartbreaking drama.

In short, the show is brilliant. While it decisively concluded as a miniseries, based on its popularity, its makers are turning it into an anthology show, with the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during WW2. I highly recommend it.

IN THE FLESH Season 2

by Leave a Comment

IN THE FLESH is an amazing British series about life after the zombie apocalypse. Told from the point of view of a zombie who has been cured and is now reintegrating into society, the series works as both an excellent drama and also for its themes of prejudice and recovering from trauma. It succeeds where its imitators like THE CURED failed. I recently finished the second season, which was as good as the first.

In the first season, Kiernan leaves a government center where zombies have been cured. The only problem is they remember everything they did while they were infected. He struggles with his guilt and shame while trying to be hopeful about being with family again, including his kind but clueless parents and his sister, who was a fighter in the Human Volunteer Force (HVF), a homegrown militia that held back the tide of the undead. The season works so wonderfully because it tells both sides really well: The HVF veterans who don’t trust the cured, have to similarly assimilate to civilian life (going from heroes to in some cases the small-town losers they were before), and in some cases are suffering from PTSD. And of course the cured themselves, who have to face family and neighbors they brutalized while infected.

Season 2 picks up where the first left off, but the tension and prejudice between the cured and the uninfected has reached a new level where it’s being institutionalized. Among the cured, an underground organization is forming to resist societal control, while the government is instituting harsher and harsher measures for controlling the cured, such as forcing them to work menial jobs to prove they’re not the bad sort and give back for what they’ve taken the country. It all comes to a head with a prophecy that if the first risen is killed at the anniversary of the rising, the dead will rise again…

This is a great series that shows how horror tropes can be used to engage people about big familiar themes in a fresh and interesting way, and how these tropes can work very well if taken seriously with solid human drama. IN THE FLESH is not so much a zombie apocalypse show as one that deals with how society would come together again after one was stopped in its tracks with a cure. Unfortunately, while there’s no third season, in the first two a complete story is told, and it’s different and compelling than what you’d usually find in the genre.

PATIENT ZERO (2018)

by Leave a Comment

PATIENT ZERO (2018) is a zombie movie that aims for the stars but only makes it as far as the roof. There’s something strangely compelling about it, the way those old Ginzu knife infomercials used to be compelling (“if you buy now you also get…”), but like those old infomercials, in the end, you don’t buy it.

The movie starts with the remnants of humanity surviving in underground bunkers like nuclear silos. The disease is a rabies-like illness that produces violent infected called Mad Dogs (those who know my zombie fiction are probably laughing by now). In one bunker, Dr. Gina Rose (Natalie Dormer) works with Morgan (Matt Smith), the only human known to have been bitten but survived, hope to combine his blood with that of the first infected, patient zero, in the hope of making a vaccine or a cure (the movie confuses the two). With a DAY OF THE DEAD feel, they work with the military to capture infected and interrogate them in the hopes of identifying patient zero. (Morgan can somehow communicate with the infected in their language, which consists of roars and grunts.) The officer in charge of the operation (a stock villain) thinks it’s a waste of time, resulting in conflict between the scientists and military. Compounding all this is a melodramatic love triangle between Morgan and his infected wife, held in a cage in the facility, and Dr. Rose. When an infected (Stanley Tucci) infiltrates the facility showing self-control and rational thought, indicating the infected are evolving and organizing, everybody is put in danger.

This is an odd movie, stitching together interesting elements, intriguing premise, competent direction, very good acting, and strangely engaging melodrama into a hot mess with weak villains, zombies that aren’t scary, some crazy dialogue, and a flat ending. The movie tries to be and do too much, but I don’t know whether that sinks it or saves it. Overall, I have to give it a C+.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

by Leave a Comment

Inspired by the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel, Netflix’s 10-episode miniseries THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE tells the story of a family struggling to survive a haunted house, both while they lived there in the past and in their separate lives in the present. It’s top-notch horror and the best ghost story I’ve seen on screen in years.

The first few episodes show us the lives of the Crain family, each story focused on one of five children who lived in Hill House and flashing between past and present. As children, they suffered bizarre experiences in the house until a horrifying night in which they were forced to flee their home. As adults, they are all connected but isolated, haunted in a different way now, by their memories, and by the need to protect themselves from the memory and lasting effects of what they’d experienced.

It’s a popular watch on Netflix, and I have to admit going into it I wasn’t sure what the fuss was about. I enjoyed what I was seeing, but I thought the show relied too heavily on jump scares that at times felt cheap. Then it all started to come together, most powerfully starting with episode 6, one of the tensest hours I’ve seen on television and where Timothy Hutton, playing present-day dad, really shined. From then on out, for me, it went from an enjoyable show to something completely riveting. It all builds to a very strong finale.

The series is only roughly based on the Shirley Jackson novel but pays homage to it in a very distinctive way–an emphasis on psychological horror. The house is insane, and its weapon is to drive its occupants insane as well until they die and stay forever.

As adults, the Crain kids are all pretty messed up by their childhood, with addiction, denial, controlling behavior, and self-isolation being rife among them. The house is calling to them, but we’re rarely sure if what the character is seeing is an actual apparition or the manifestation of a damaged psyche. Normally, I don’t go for that sort of thing in TV as the technique is often misused and cheapened, but it really works here. Similarly, the characters sometimes share what they see with each other but usually don’t, because what’s the point? It can’t be real, so nobody will acknowledge it as such.

In the end, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is a very strong horror story about a haunting and being haunted, perfectly blending a ghost story with psychological horror the way the novel did.