Okay, so there's actually both a Frankenstein (the scientist) and a Frankenstein monster in Hemlock Grove.
After four episodes filled with Vampire (sorry, Upir) and Werewolf stuff, the idea of a mad scientist creating a monster was a heck of a lot of fun for me.
Actually episode four does a nice job of both moving the murder mystery forward and fleshing out a one of the supporting characters through flashback; specifically Dr. Clementine Chasseur (played by Kandyse McClure, pictured left). Initially in the series, she's introduced as an officer of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, but things begin to move pretty quickly to show she's covering for something.
Part of what I'm enjoying at this point is the fact that the show seems to be working to have traditional monster archetypes (vampire, witch, werewolf, etc.), but then attempts to deconstruct them; the witch has magic, but doesn't use it as it causes more trouble than it's worth, the werewolf hides his nature for fear of scientists, like the mysterious Dr. Chausseur and her interest in Peter.
So far, as an adaption, I'm definitely preferring it to the original book, which moved, chapter by chapter, through different narrative techniques, often feeling more style over substance, but the different transitions seem to work much better in a televised format.
After watching a third of the first season, I think I'm finally starting to get what Hemlock Grove is putting down.
Currently, the show has about five different storylines going on, ranging from the friendship between to Peter and Roman, to the overall murder mystery and the bizarre focus on the Ouroboros imagery throughout.
What finally hit me this episode was how the show is actually laying each storyline out and moving them forward that their own pace - there really is no guarantee that a plot point (like Shelley's (pictured right) strange disfigurement or, even stranger, random glowing) will lead to anything in a specific episode.
The stories move at different paces and although each episode touches on them, the series works a little like a soap opera, in that it always has something going on, but never seems to give a conclusion for anything.
As I'm definitely sticking with the series through the first season, I'm interested to see how it will all end up, and I'm hoping that my understanding of the pacing will play out.
Episode three (sorry gang, but spoilers abound), actually moves into some pretty interesting territory.
In many ways the series comes down to this.
Imagine you've got a pretty terrible secret (in the show's case, Peter is a werewolf), and then imagine that some horrible crime starts happening in your neck of the woods that really starts to point to you as the guilty party. The worst thing is, with your own knowledge and background, you indeed have the capacity and the inclination for this crime, but you know it isn't you.
What do you do?
Although I still kind of feel like I've started watching the second season of a show that should have done a heck of a lot of explaining previously, the third episode moves the mystery along, and for the first time, all of the side plots begin to feel like they are contributing to the main story overall.
Also two caste members from the Battlestar Galactica reboot? How cool is that?
Without going into too much detail of the second episode, this is the one that confirms that yes, Peter is a werewolf, and it does it in one of the more startling transformations sequences I've seen in quite a while.
For me the gold standard will always be Rick Baker's transformation effects in the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London (the makeup for that film was so good that the Academy Awards introduced a new category, Best Makeup, because of it), and although much of what you see in the episode is clearly computer generated, the effects are pretty impressive nonetheless.
The episode itself largely focuses on the murder mystery, but does introduce (through email), Roman's older sister Shelley, a giant girl suffering from some undefined deformities, who wheezes loudly and speaks through a small mechanical device in person, but through her emails, shows herself to be well spoken and quite intelligent.
I actually preferred the second episode to the pilot, and am definitely looking forward to the rest of the season.
So then the book became a television series...
On April 19th, 2013, the entire series became available for download on Netlfix.
As a bit of a slow starter - I of course, found my current copy in DVD form at a used bookstore back in July.
So here's what I've got to say about episode one - Directed by horror filmmaker Eli Roth (famous for Cabin Fever, the Hostel franchise, and a movie called Clown one of my coworkers says I have to check out), the pilot for the series, titled "Jellyfish in the Sky" starts very similarly to the book - the narrator is missing, but the opening death sequence surrounding the first victim is incredibly intense, brutal, and pretty darn horrifying.
As with the book, the pilot is swimming in potential leads, in addition to both Peter and Roman, their mothers, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins all make appearances and also fight for screen time, leaving me unsure of which storyline to follow - in general I prefer a show like Lost or Skins when featuring an ensemble cast, focus on one character per episode and give me some time to get to know everyone.
The series looks pretty great however, the colours are lush, the town, which appears to be both a small town, and a previously thriving factory town, looks like a great setting for a horror story, and I quite enjoyed how the pilot acknowledges some of the similarities to Twilight and points out that this is nothing like that.
In the end the pilot had me interested in watching more - so far no werewolves, but a lot of mystery.
Generally if a film or television show has been adapted from a book, I'm likely to try and read the source material first, possibly because I love reading, or because I want to know where the story originally came from, or maybe I just like to feel like I'm more "in the know" than my friends and loved ones.
So, when I decided to spend the month looking at the Netflix series Hemlock Grove, you'd better believe I picked up the original novel and got reading.
The original novel is ok. I've read a lot of werewolf and other monster fiction over my life, so I can easily compare it to all sorts of things, considering it a slightly twisted version of Twilight, or even a little bit like the film The Lost Boys, in that the story goes to a lot of lengths to show how monstrous the creatures appear to humans, but that the monsters themselves are never really viewed as tragic, just scary.
The novel largely follows two young men, Roman Godfrey and Peter Rumancek, one of whom is a werewolf and the other is likely a vampire (although he doesn't seem to be aware of it). Much of the drama focuses on a string of brutal murders in the city/town of Hemlock Grove, and of the search for the killer.
For me the issue was a massive amount of pretty unnecessary side characters, and a number of side-plots that seemed to go nowhere and not amount to much. The story begins with a fairly clever writing device, in that the actual (and unnamed) killer is also our narrator, but once their identity is discovered, the book seems to drop the concept. Both leads go through a number of harrowing events and some of them are quite effective and disturbing, but in the end, if I were looking for a great werewolf novel* - this wouldn't be it.
Now onto the show!
*My favourite three would be Endore's Werewolf of Paris (1933), Brandner's The Howling (1986) and McCammon's The Wolf's Hour(1989)
Welcome to the first of my October posts on the Netflix series Hemlock Grove, which, after viewing one episode, looks a little familiar...
So you've got this werewolf see, and then a vampire-ish sort of fellow, and they both attend the same high school, and then there's this girl...
But, unlike the way I spent 2010, this series has some pretty diehard (as opposed to twi-hard) fans, and it was based on a book first, and the soundtrack is supposed to be pretty fantastic...
Okay, you know what - Hemlock Grove!
Let's see where this takes us!
