First Impressions: The Strain

When it first arrived as a book back in 2009, I was pretty intrigued, and incredibly lucky.  I actually came across the novel The Strain in my local grocery story while doing my weekly shopping.  Even through I tend to be pretty good about keeping track of the various authors I enjoy reading, sometimes things fall through the cracks and if I hadn't have been interested in the bin of books I probably wouldn't have come across the title for months after the fact.

The original book was pretty great - having read a lot of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, I'm pretty familiar with the tropes, but The Strain almost immediately goes its own way, the story works as a medical thriller, a supernatural thriller, and a monster book all at once, and the entire trilogy (followed by The Fall in 2010 and The Night Eternal in 2011) is well worth the read.

Yesterday, FX premiered the new television series, The Strain, and it was pretty amazing; I watched it with my wife and youngest daughter (aged 17) and the entire story built up a nice level of suspense throughout and then really just went for the jugular.  If you haven't seen it yet, give it a try - the story is intense, but with good casting and a great sense of theatre, I had a a lot of fun watching it.

A quick side note - my daughter, who normally enjoys a lot of horror-themed stories, decided to leave the room ten minutes before the end of the episode as it simply got a little too intense for her (also more than a little graphic), so it may not be fore the faint of heart, or even people who normally enjoy scary movies - I have it admit it definitely got my heart racing.

Looking forward to episode two next week.

First Impressions: Resident Evil 5

Continuing with my habit of playing games on my PS3 that were popular three or more years ago, I've spent the last weekend playing the 2009 video game, Resident Evil 5.

Years ago when I first came into contact with the Resident Evil series, it was through the original Playstation game Resident Evil 2, wherein you played through the same story twice first as a rookie cop named Leon and a college student named Claire, who have overlapping stories and the first example of long-term planning I've come across in gaming - wherein if on your first play through you use up all the resources available in certain locations, there will be nothing left for you to use on your second time through the game as the other character.

After playing my way through Resident Evil 2, I got a lot more interested in the zombie sub-genre of horror, and have enjoyed all of the movies as they've become available on DVD.  I hadn't actually touched any of the other games in the series however, until this one.

The pacing of Resident Evil 5 is quite different than that of 2, for starters the "zombies" are actually infected humans and are therefore much cleverer and faster than the majority of the creatures in the earlier game.  I will happily admit I got stuck for a long time in the first stage of the game as I couldn't quite put together what the game designers wanted me to do and had to look for tips online to figure my way past.

Otherwise the game is pretty fun, the setting is interesting and once I got a handle on the how the controls worked I began moving my way through the story at a pretty good clip. The scares are definitely there, and although the plot seems a little overly complicated for my taste, it's still a fun way to play a great horror story in a well-established series.

First Impressions: Lego Marvel Super Heroes

Last week I managed to get the new PS3 video game Lego Marvel Super Heroes from my local library, and so far it's pretty fun!

Although the game itself is pretty simple - run around, smash things up, make new lego things out of them and run around some more, the game has a pretty great sense of humour, and offers me something I've never seen in any of the great Marvel Cinematic Universe films that have come out over the past few years; the Marvel Universe.

Yup, in this game Spider-Man can totally ignore the fact that he's owned by Columbia pictures and hang out with The Avengers (Disney), and even the X-Men (20th Century Fox) or any number of characters who haven't made it to the big screen yet.

Which is totally amazing; for the first few levels you pretty much play the Avengers (Hulk and Iron Man in level one, Captain America in level two, and Hawkeye and Black Widow in level three), but throughout you get to play as Spider-Man and even Mr. Fantastic for a while.

So far I'd say the game is pretty simple and aimed at young teens - most of the jokes are puns and the Lego theme keeps everything very family friendly, but as a guy in my late '30s, I'm still having a lot of fun playing the game and I get pretty excited every time a new playable character is added, because once you beat a level you can go back and do it again with any playable characters you have collected so far - and in the end the game includes dozens of characters (and yes Mike, that includes both She-Hulk and Squirrel Girl).

The game is pretty fun, and I think a lot of it comes down to exploring the Lego New York setting and just seeing all the neat ways in which these characters interact.

Definitely worth trying out.

First Impressions: Bates Motel

Last week I checked out the new A&E series Bates Motel, with my wife and my youngest daughter Kaia.  A few days earlier I had shown Kaia the 1960 classic Psycho - so we were pretty excited to see how this new show would go.

One episode in, and honestly, I'm liking it.

As the series is effectively a prequel to a story most people are very familiar with, it's interesting to see how they play with the interactions between young Norman Bates and his mother Norma.  The casting is really good, both stars Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga come off as quite genuine, and both more than a little wrong - just the perfect mix of what you would expect for the characters.

The premise has them relocating to Oregon after the untimely death of Norman's father.  Here they purchase a new motel and try to start a new chapter in their lives.  Pretty quickly things start to go south.  The police seem strangely interested in the pair and Norman's quick popularity with the girls at his new school seems to be a pretty big problem for his mother.

With a series like this everything comes down to atmosphere - if things go wrong you move quickly from creepy into farce, but so far, the tone is very nicely set and I'm definitely interested in checking out the next episode.

Dead Space 2: First Impressions

Having finally finished up Grand Theft Auto IV, I moved on to the game Dead Space 2 this weekend, and with two Chapters (levels) under my belt, here are my first impressions

The Opening segment is amazing!  Dealing with the Necromorphs (alien zombies) throughout the first game was pretty darn terrifying.  Spending the first level of the sequel running away from these creatures while drugged and in a straight-jacked was one of the more intense gaming experiences I’ve had.

Like another of my favourite PS3 Franchises, the Uncharted series, the game does an excellent job of giving you tutorials on how to play while moving the story forward.

Unlike the first game where everything is pretty straightforward, the second game starts by informing you that the protagonist is crazy – you literally don’t know if what you’re seeing actual monsters or not throughout the early stages of the game.

Overall the game is a lot of fun – pretty darn scary, and has just the right level of space suit/engineering mixed with survival horror to keep me coming back for more.  Unfortunately it creeps out the majority of the people in my house, so I have to play it quietly, and in the dark.

First Impressions: American Horror Story

Over the last week my wife and I have been catching up with one of the big genre phenomenons of the last few years on television: American Horror Story.

At this point we're six episodes into the first season, so I thought it would be a good point to give the impressions I've had so far.

1) The opening credits kick butt - seriously, although there are a lot of great things I'm gonna say about the series (and some weird things as well), the credits, done by the same folks who've put together the opening credits for The Walking Dead, have given us a really creepy little lead in to each episode.  In addition, more and more of the imagery in the credits makes sense as you work your way through the series.

2) The musical stings are a lot of fun; borrowing from Psycho, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and even Insidious, the music is both a fun reference to older horror films and it heightens the creep-factor of the series.

3) At this point (halfway through the first season), I'm still not exactly sure where they are going with the story - which for a long-time horror fan like myself is a rare treat.

4) Connie Britton's last line in episode two (sorry - no spoilers) guaranteed that I'd be checking out episode three.

5) My wife and I had previously worked our way through Ryan Murphy's previous show,  Nip/Tuck which I quite enjoyed, and I've got to say this one is really impressing me with all the same things I liked so much about that series - well developed characters, intriguing story-lines, and a great atmosphere throughout.

Although like Nip/Tuck, this isn't an environment I'd like to visit, it sure is neat to watch.

First Impressions: The Boys

Like the film Super, I’d been looking at the Garth Ennis comic book series The Boys for a while now. Here was my basic problem – I really enjoyed my first experience with Garth Ennis (Preacher is a really violent, but fun romance with vampires that sits pretty high in my favourite comic book series), my second experience was his run on The Punisher for Marvel comics, which I really liked at first, and then seemed to quickly devolve into a simple horrible-villain-is-horrible-then-the-Punisher-shows-up-and-kills-him cycle that I got pretty tired of pretty quick.

The a few years back The Boys came out, and as I was actually shying away from superhero comics at the time (novels however, like Superfolks by Robert Mayer still made it on to my reading lists and thank goodness, because that book is amazing!) I really didn’t have any interest in checking out some kind of (literal) hero-bashing story filled with morally bankrupt superpowered jerks.

Then in December I had the chance to check out the first few trade paperback collections of the title from my local library, and as I had a bunch of time I thought, Why not?

So, what did I think of the first few collections of The Boys?

Well, they were hyper-violent and full of adult content, but so was Preacher, they did indeed involve many issues where our "heroes" beat the ever-loving crap out of their world's Super Heroes; the stories were filled with concepts and ideas that made me sad or upset with the idea of a world wherein super powered folks weren't really doing anything for the common good, then I started getting angry, and you know what - that is kind of the point.

The main characters are the last line of a defence in a world where super-heroes accidentally kill civilians and then have the victim's families bought off by lawyers. The whole point is that you (the reader) are supposed to be disturbed and angry about what these people in positions of power are doing, and then realize that someone needs to stop them. Like Preacher, the series does have a romance angle at it's centre and yes, you end up caring for the main characters.

Is this a title for everyone? No. Is it interesting? Yes, and as a free read does it work for me? Yup. Although I wouldn't own the series, I am interested in seeing where the creators are going with it and as long as I can keep reading it from my local library, I'll keep following the series.

First Impressions: Falling Skies

Over the weekend I watched the first two episodes of the new SF series Falling Skies and so far I'm really liking it. The series stars Noah Wyle (from er and The Librarian series) as Tom Mason, a former history professor who is caught up in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

Unlike The Event, Falling Skies gives us aliens and an invasion directly from the beginning - instead of building up a mystery, we are given an action-drama set in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

The core of the show comes down to Tom and his three sons, an older teen, a middle teen and a little kid. The second son has been taken away by the aliens and put in a harness - a device the creatures use to control children and use them as manual labour. Tom and his other two children are part of a smaller group of rebels called the Second Massasuchetts, a group of 300 survivors looking to go to survive.

So far the series is pretty cool, and as a huge fan of post-apocalyptic stories, I've got to say it's right up my alley.

First Impressions: The Walking Dead

Last night my wife and I watched the pilot of the new AMC series The Walking Dead, and I've got to say it was pretty awesome. Here are my key impressions of the show:

1) The show works as horror! Having just spent a month reading and viewing a "horror" series involving both vampires and werewolves, I was ready for something that might actually scare me and The Walking Dead delivered. From the opening sequence to the escape from the hospital and the exploration of Atlanta, this show had me pretty freaked out.

2) The acting was great, Andrew Lincoln stars as Rick Grimes, a deputy Sheriff and a man who has woken up into a terrifying new world. I bought the portrayal completely and I am a pretty big fan of both the comic series that inspired the show and the character specifically.

3) The zombie effects were amazing - feature film quality stuff. I was consistently impressed by just how good everything looked, from the abandoned cities to the creatures themselves.

Overall the show was pretty amazing and yes, I will watching the entire series.

First Impressions: The Event

Continuing on with my look at the new genre series of the fall 2010 season, today we'll take a quick look at The Event. As mentioned previously, the show played up the Event as something big that may or may not have even fallen under the category of a genre work.

Here's what I can say about the show, it played with timelines leading up to the event (much like issue one of Y: the last man - which I love), it introduced us to a whole lot of characters; presidents, prisoners, parents, etc., it has a very good leading man (I've been a fan of Jason Ritter since I saw him in The Class - Joan of Arcadia is still on my "To Be Watched" list), who is quickly relatable and comes across as the kind of guy you might want to follow throughout many seasons of a show.

I'm a little annoyed that the pilot doesn't give us any sort of premise to follow (basically, SOMETHING happened), I mean, with Lost - even though the mysteries of the island were clearly only being hinted at in the pilot, you started with a plane crash and people having to survive on a deserted island, it didn't tell you everything, but at least you knew where the first half dozen episodes were going to go. I'm not sure what will happen next on The Event.

Due largely to the acting of Jason Ritter however, I will stick around for a couple more episodes to find out (and may keep watching after that if the show manages to hook me.)

First Impressions: Lost Girl (TV Series)

Last night my wife and I checked out the pilot for the new genre series, Lost Girl. The show focuses on a woman named Bo, who has spent years on her own, travelling from place to place and using her strange abilities to feed on the sexual energies of others.

Discovered by other supernatural beings (called the Fae), Bo is drawn into a world wherein everyone must choose a side (light or dark) and nothing is as it seems. My wife said the idea of Canadian Fae running about is very similar to Canadian fantasy author Charles De LInt's Newcastle series of books, and the series definitely plays up the humour to match its dark premise (it turns out that Bo is a succubus, and that both groups of the Fae may want her dead), in introducing a side-kick character for Bo, a young girl named Kenzie who is both quite brave and a little stupid (a great mix, by the way).

I would consider the series Urban Fantasy, and although the subject matter means it is not for younger audiences, I think that older teens would probably find the show a lot of fun. The cheese factor is pretty high, but finding a good balance between humour and dramatic tension can definitely win a show over for me.

Overall, the pilot was fun, I think we'll be watching the series from now on (unless it goes horribly wrong), and I'm quite interested to see where they are going to go with this intriguing characters throughout the season.