US TV

Review: Van Helsing 1×1 (US: Syfy)


In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, Syfy

Syfy’s new mantra may be ‘fewer, bigger, better’, a tactic that’s already given us the likes of The Magicians and Childhood’s End, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to stop being the home to z-grade, made-in-Canada schlock such as Killjoys, Hunters and Dark Matter. 

In particular, taking a leaf out of frequent contributor the Asylum’s playbook, Syfy does love to develop non-copyright infinging shows that are still rather similar to other successful shows, but which are generally rather cheap and terrible, the most successful of these being Z Nation.

Without a huge amount of thought, Syfy now gives us Van Helsing – not to be confused with the rather similarly plotted Wynonna Earp or the identically named movie Van Helsing – in which the daughter of noted vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing wakes up in 2019 and discovers that the western half of the US has been over-run with vampires thanks to a volcanic eruption this year. Hmm, sounds a bit like the quite popular The Strain, doesn’t it? What a coincidence.

Notably, Miss Van Helsing now appears to have super powers and do martial arts and stuff. Could she be the saviour prophesied, who’ll save humanity from the Feeders? You’ll be asking if she’s the Chosen One next.

The keenest and most astute of you will probably guess that Van Helsing bares no resemblance whatsoever to Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the nice little Dutch scientist Van Helsing who appears in it. Unlike Stoker’s vampires, the vampires of this piece can’t roam in daylight without burning up and have a lot more in common with Walking Dead zombies than any vampires you might have come across in your media travels. 

Instead, the show is an ultra-low budget, “seven fighty, diverse people in rooms” kind of show in which people shout the plot at each other in between moaning about the collapse of civilisation and their dead loved ones before shooting one another. Fight scenes are simultaneously reasonable yet dreadful, with everything looking just fine and well choreographed until something terribly embarrassing takes place that makes you think they just didn’t know what to do next – either that or they couldn’t afford more than one piece of paper per fight to map out the moves on.

Everything about Van Helsing is derivative. Literally the only good thing about it is the surprisingly good soundtrack. Watching it is painful and, worst of all, hugely boring. It even makes me yearn for the comparatively high quality, absolutely low quality Wynonna Earp

Avoid.

What have you been watching? Including MacGyver, Lucifer, Doctor Doctor and Mr Robot

It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.

The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. 

I think I did pretty well last week at keeping up with all the new TV releases. It wasn’t until Thursday/Friday when a big bunch of them dropped in my lap that I fell behind. All the same, there have been a few new ones over the weekend, too, which makes my job a little harder. I’ll try to catch up with them over the coming week, but my workload’s a bit fierce so I might end up doing ‘mini-reviews’.

Elsewhere, I’ve already reviewed The Good Place (US: NBC), Kevin Can Wait (US: CBS), Bull (US: CBS), This Is Us (US: NBC; UK: Channel 4), Designated Survivor (US: ABC; UK: Netflix), Lethal Weapon (US: CBS; UK: ITV) and The Exorcist (US: Fox; UK: Syfy). This week, I’m aiming to review the first episodes of Van Helsing (US: Syfy), Berlin Station (US: Epix), Insecure (US: HBO), Pitch (US: Fox) and Notorious (US: ABC), as well as pass third-episode verdicts on Quarry (US: Cinemax; UK: Sky Atlantic) and The Good Place. If I have time, I might even preview Falling Water (US: USA). I wouldn’t put any money on that happening, though.

After the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of Doctor Doctor, High Maintenance, Halt and Catch Fire and You’re The Worst, as well as the season finale of Mr Robot and the return of Lucifer. But before that, there was one other new show I took a look at…

MacGyver (US: CBS)
A quick glance over TMINE, including the original’s appearance in Nostalgia Corner and an attempt to crowdsource ideas for a female MacGyver, should show you how keen various people have been over the years to reboot the 80s action show about an engineering genius turned spy who uses his technical prowess to get himself out of scrapes, often with the help of a Swiss Army Knife.

Finally, though, someone’s finally gone and done it – twice, in fact, since the first pilot was scrapped, most of the cast fired, and this exceedingly awful new episode filmed in June with a new cast to replace it. A reboot, rather than a sequel, MacGyver sees former army bomb disposal expert turned super secret spy Lucas Till (X-Men: First Class) as the new MacGyver, former CSI George Eads as the ex-Delta Jack Dalton, who together ‘bro’ their way around the world in an effort to stop Vinnie Jones from killing everyone with a bioweapon. 

Whereas the original series was at great pains to ensure the science of the piece was at least semi-feasible and novel, this new MacGyver thinks science is for sissies, but can’t dispense with it altogether because what is MacGyver without some macgyvering? So the other head-nod to the original beside the names and the voiceover (somewhat wooden in this case) is also the worst part of the show, with Till either using a paper clip (you can tell it’s a paper clip because every time he uses it, the words ‘Paper Clip’ appear on the screen) or something inaccurate you’ve seen in a movie some time (eg passing a biometric scan using a fingerprint obtained by dusting a previous fingerprint), rather than anything halfway competent.

It’s also got a few women problems and every so often thinks to itself, “Maybe I could do that bit in the pilot of Scorpion. Or Hawaii Five-O‘s,” since sticking to one remake is too hard. If only it had been as interesting as either of those, though, since 10 minutes before the end, I was clubbing myself in the hope that it would be ending soon. That’s when they nicked a bit from Intelligence and I gave up.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including MacGyver, Lucifer, Doctor Doctor and Mr Robot”

US TV

Review: The Exorcist 1×1 (US: Fox; UK: Syfy)


In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, Fox
In the UK: Wednesdays, 9pm, Syfy. Starts October 19

Over the past couple of years, it’s become very apparent there’s a big difference between two groups: people who movies and TV shows, and the people who make the trailers for them. Last year, of course, we had the horror that was the Supergirl trailer, which made us think we were getting that spoof Black Widow solo movie from Saturday Night Live. Except the pilot turned out to be a lot of jolly fun instead. 

Then, this summer, we had Suicide Squad. Now, by all accounts, that was never going to be a great movie, but such was Warner Bros’s concern that it was going to tank at the box office, when a trailer for the movie got people all excited for it, the company actually got the trailer makers to edit the final movie. The result? A nonsensical disaster. 

Don’t trust trailers, seems to be the lesson.

Now, one of the big US TV trends of late has been the remaking of old horror movies, with A&E’s terrible sequel to The OmenDamien, already having crashed and burned this year. So I guess it’s no surprise that Fox would eventually get round to a remake of perhaps the most famous of them all – the one Mark Kermode himself reckons is also the best movie of all time – The Exorcist.

“Of course, it’s Fox,” we all thought. “It’s bound to be rubbish.” And then we saw the trailer, which basically just confirmed our worst fears: the remakers didn’t understand the source and were just going to do a generic horror show.

Well, guess what – the trailer lied. Again. The Exorcist not only understands what made the original work, it’s genuinely good and even scary… so far. Here’s the misleading trailer – more after the jump.

Continue reading “Review: The Exorcist 1×1 (US: Fox; UK: Syfy)”

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