Rathko

I'm a fan of horror/suspense and really want the Netflix original programming experiment to succeed. I loved 'House of Cards' and am one of the handful of people in the world who actually likes Eli Roth. Which is to say; I had high hopes of "Hemlock Grove". I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed.

1) The three credited writers have little to no actual screen writing experience and it shows: incoherent plotting, poor pacing, and embarrassing dialogue.

2) The casting is terrible. Not a single actor remotely suits the character they're playing. One of many, many examples is Bill Skarsgard. He's supposed to be playing bad-boy-dangerous. He even chain smokes to prove it. Only problem is he looks like a pasty and waifish Prada model with all the menace of a girl scout. Every character is similarly miscast.

3) All the actors are terrible. They're experienced. They're not new to the whole acting thing. Yet every one of them is awkward and stilted and visibly uncomfortable. They all have that embarrassingly amateurish community theater vibe and I can't understand why. Famke Janssen's accent sounds like a Canadian Leonard Nimoy doing a Katharine Hepburn impersonation. It's just one example of the inexplicably poor choices made by every actor involved.

4) For a show about werewolves, gypsies, angels and mysterious backwoods shenanigans, there's no attempt to introduce an ounce of suspense. You know that feeling when you're watching a show and the credits role and you're giddy with excitement over how it's going to turn out and you're mashing at the keyboard to pull up the next episode? Yeah - there's none of that.

5) The whole point of Netflix producing original content is that they're not confined to the standards of TV. Nothing about this show couldn't be shown on primetime network stations: no sex, no violence, nothing that even tries to push the envelope.

6) Even at a technical level, everything seems amateurish: awkward framing of shots, shots held too long, inconsistent editing, dull and murky photography, poor music choices, generic and uninspired production design and costuming.

"Hemlock Grove" is one of those once-in-a-decade epic failures that defies all reason. I hope to God it's an aberration and not an indicator of what to expect from Netflix in the future.

The opening features such bad titles and crappy camera work I almost turned 'Gravedancers' off before it even started, but it turned out not to be so bad after all. As direct-to-DVD horror goes, this occupies the high end and for all its plagiarism and clichés, it's entertaining enough. The budget limitations lend the whole thing a vaguely old-fashioned quality, not least when the ghosts are finally revealed, reminding us that static latex can actually be far more creepy than CGI. There's nothing particularly original or inspired here, and the actors, save for Tchéky Karyo and Megahn Perry, deliver nothing more than functional performances, but for all its faults I was inexplicably entertained.

Even by the standards of no-budget direct-to-DVD fare, this is pretty bad. I can live with the amateurish lighting and questionable acting, such are the pitfalls of limited finances, but creativity and originality don't cost a penny and 'The Maze' is sorely lacking in both. The entire blame for this fiasco can be laid at the feet of the two writers who don't so much craft a screenplay as string together a series of loosely connected genre clichés. We're used to our horror characters behaving stupidly, but few are as stupid as those depicted here. Grown adults playing tag in a corn field in the middle of the night? Really? Grown adults who don't seem to realize that corn rows do not constitute an impenetrable barrier? And shouldn't the psycho killer be just a little bit scary? Or at least intimidating? Not a skinny kid who could, in reality, be immobilized by a girl scout with her hands tied? And why so squeamish about blood and violence? Sheesh.

Not even bad-in-a-good-way. Just plain bad.