I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
There is a famous paradox. Although Knight Riderclaimed it was Zeno’s Paradox, it’s not. But it is at least a paradox. Here it is:
What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object?
What’s the answer? Into the Badlands. How so? Because it’s an actual, real-world test of that paradox. It takes the unstoppable force that is the Hong Kong martial arts movie and confronts it with the immobable object of an AMC TV series.
Despite the likes of Indonesia’s The Raid coming along to challenge them, Hong Kong martial arts movies are, of course, the fastest genre in the world. If you have any interest in martial movies, you watch Hong Kong martial arts to see the best – and fastest – martial artists the silver screen has to offer. I’m most partial to classic Jet Li myself, but Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan et al have all formed part of my viewing habits since Jonathan Ross’s Son of The Incredibly Strange Film Show revealed their delights to me back in the 80s.
And the slowest genre in the world? AMC TV series. The network practically fetishises slowness:
There must be a guy at AMC that stops you after one sentence of your pitch and says, “whoa whoa, save some of this for season two!”
And Into The Badlands is a deliberate attempt to bring these two genres together. Rather bizarrely the brainchild of Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, it stars Daniel Wu, an American actor but the star of dozens of Hong Kong martial arts movies.
The show is set in a post-apocalyptic America. This isn’t that surprising: martial arts date from before guns and are made largely redundant by the presence of guns, so a martial arts movie usually needs to have a reason for there to not be any guns – something somewhat problematic in modern-day and even historic America, but not so hard in a post-apocalyptic, post-technological society. Unles you turn the guns into a virtue, of course.
As with most other post-apocalyptic societies, everything’s become weirdly patriarchal and feudal in Into The Badlands, with seven ‘barons’ now running America, following a series of wars. Each has made their territory safe and stopped the wars by getting rid of guns. In return, everyone either learns how to be a ‘Clipper’ – martial arts soldier cops – assuming they’re male or goes to work in the fields picking poppies or getting married to the Baron.
Wu plays one such Clipper, who patrols the territories, enforcing the justice of his increasingly unstable, increasingly bewived Baron (Marton Csokas from Falcón, Rogue, The Equalizer, The BourneSupremacy). One day, he comes acrossa peaceful boy sought after by another Baron, ‘The Widow’, only to discover that he gets superhero killing powers at odd moments.
What will he do? WIll he take the boy into the lawless ‘Badlands’ between Barons’ terrorities, looking for the boy’s mother and answers to his own past? And will he do it before the Sun expands into a Red Giant and dies (aka the next AMC Upfronts)?
In the US: Saturdays, 9pm EST, Starz In the UK: Not yet acquired
Whatever else can be said about Starz’s Ash Vs Evil Dead, there’ll always be the fact that every week, it gives us Bruce Campbell, doing what he does best – fighting the Evil Dead. But the show has more than that. It has comedy. It has horror.
The precise ratio of comedy to horror varies with every episode. Most of the time, Ash Vs Evil Dead is quite funny but filled with a lot of gore, typically involving Bruce Campbell using his chainsaw-for-a-hand to chop off a head, disembowel something, etc. Watching Campbell do this, as his idiotic Ash character does something even more idiotic each week, is a joy to behold.
What it wasn’t until this week, though, was scary. Gory, yes. Scary no. But all credit to the show, as episode three gave us a demon rather than a zombie/Deadite, and was actually very creepy. It was less funny, but as I said, the ratio tends to vary.
What the show hasn’t yet worked out is how to make us give a toss about Campbell’s young helpers. Or the FBI agent chasing after them. And while it does have the obvious asset of Lucy Lawless in the cast, she only gets to show up for about a minute each episode – something that results from the fact each episode is only half an hour long, so there’s not much room for development or anything that properly services the main plot.
So Ash Vs Evil Dead‘s biggest asset is also its biggest problem: Bruce Campbell. It’s his show and there’s not much else that’s interesting about it. It’s fine as comedy-horror goes, and far more enjoyable compared to any other horror show on TV right now, but that comedy-horror only really works when Bruce is around.
I’ll certainly carry on watching it, because Bruce is Gold. But I can’t help but feel the show is coasting a little, getting by on Bruce when it could be doing a lot more. Maybe we’ll get that in time, once Lucy Lawless shows up in earnest to show the kids how it’s done. Then it might be dead good. See what I did there?
Barrometer rating: 2 TMINE’s prediction: Not as great as it could and should have been, but still top comedy-horror, and Starz has already renewed it for a second season.
