Hemlock Grove: Season 1

This is the best fantasy/horror I have ever seen. Of course it is true that those two are not my normal priority for viewing (unless you count sci-fi) but I loved Hemlock Grove! It does help that the two main male leads are gorgeous. But all the characters are beautiful and not necessarily physically! I thought the lesbian animal investigator with clandestine links to the Catholic Church an amazing character!I won't even bother trying to explain the plot. So many threads, so many characters and all of them important and special. One thing I really liked was that the story unwinds in each episode but while there is a fair bit of suspense, it does not tease. It goes at its own pace but almost every sentence uttered by the characters adds something.While it is essentially a fantasy/horror story, Hemlock goes deeper. The acting brings reality to the words (excellent writing by the way!) and layers the whole with a thought provoking depth. This is what TV should do to the mind!I have ordered Season 2 - can't wait!

Region free, English version only, no subtitles.Image: 16/9. Very good to excellent. Eyes lashes are visible, along with skin texture details. There are six episodes per Blu-ray-disc which is too much (a fourth disc would have been awesome), but the HD image-depth is there.Sound: HD MA 5.1. Very good to excellent. Again, with even less compression, it would have been even more spectacular. Yet a very immersive experience.Bonuses: 3 hours plus, haven't seen it yet.Most TV-series today are only Supercuts of genre-scenes we have already seen a hundred times, because the network people simply disrespect viewers and probably writers all along. Hemlock Grove is well written, well-acted, visually superb and overall very addictive. Very gory also. But this is real narration and not your everyday fraud, and the production of Hemlock Groves clearly loves the SF / SF / Fantasy domain.Concerning the Blu-ray set, this is True Blood first season level of quality, with much more quality bonuses.

How to describe this show?Well, it's the story of a teenage girl in the centre of a love triangle between a vampire and a werewolf...Which makes it sound rather Twilight-ish. But it's full of gore and violence and sex and nudity, and the vampires don't glitter in the sunlight but are sociopaths with a thirst for human blood while the werewolves aren't noble creatures defending mankind from the undead, but wild beasts barely able to control themselves and just one bad moonlit transformation from becoming man-eating terrors of the night.So unlike Twilight, it's actually good.An alternative description would be that it's a modern take on the classic Universal Studios monsters. You've got vampires who prey on the helpless, wolf-men who live in fear of what they may do on the night of a full moon and even a (superbly acted) Doctor Frankenstein whose work is dedicated to reanimating the dead, moulding flesh into novel forms and creating new life in a petri dish. Season two even introduces a Creature from the Black Lagoon - or at least a lizard-man!The show benefits from a dark, moody atmosphere and a gothic feel, but it suffers from having a creative team that likes to put in strange and disturbing scenes and sequences that add to the atmosphere but don't advance the plot and are often not even connected to it, leading to a concluding episode that is confusing and doesn't feel like it answers the questions or even acknowledges many of them exist. Fortunately, season two manages to weave the threads of season one back together, making the first season much more satisfying in retrospect.All in all, a good show - 3.5 stars - that gets better in its second season.

Oh dear, yet another high-school vampire / werewolf genre series, you might think. On the surface you’d be right but this show’s weirdness takes it way off the well trodden genre trail pioneered by the still unrivalled Buffy.Set in the fictional Pennsylvania (again – a lot seems to happen there at the moment) town of Hemlock Grove though actually filmed in Canada, this season follows the hunt for the beastly perpetrator of a series of grisly murders which start, coincidentally, with the arrival of a gipsy boy and his mother. Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of strange goins-on, centred mostly around Peter, the aforementioned gypsy and Roman, the spoilt rich-kid son of the most peculiar Olivia Godfrey.Much death, mayhem and general oddness ensues while they track down the mythical beast, mostly driving about in Roman’s lovely red car (a 1961 Jaguar XK150 as it turns out). Confounding their efforts along the way is the slightly bonkers Van Helsing-like Dr. Chasseur as she conducts her own werewolf hunt under the auspices of a shady secret religious order not entirely unlike the Iluminati.While the main plot lines progress we learn more of Roman’s Upir (a mythological Russian part witch, part daemon with some very unpleasant habits) heritage, his Lurch’esque utterly likeable sister, Olivia’s beginnings and hints of the dubious moral nature of the work of the Godfrey institute headed by the odd (everybody in Hemlock Grove is odd…) Dr. Johann Pryce.It is a peculiar, improbably successful, blend of almost every element from the genre, standard fantasy themes, some Grimm-like mythology and bits of sci-fi held together by sharp writing and solid performances from the main cast. Apart from one thoroughly surreal episode (although at least I now know what catabasis is) the season piles along at a very acceptable pace with never a dull moment. Season two premiered on US television in July 2014 so hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for the next installment of the splendidly odd, strangely engrossing show.