Urban Gothic disc 3 continued and disc 4
Dec. 17th, 2006 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabeth16 Necromance
"Turns out he only wanted me for my body"
somewhat lacks twists if you read the imdb description, but as a 'teen suicide don't do it' it twists nicely.
17 Eater
Oh, this is a *good* one.
Very, very nasty.
The imdb description gives away almost the whole thing, but it still manages to deliver.
The whole trapped in a dark place with a scary thing thing is classic, of course, and we're not who we are, which rather depends on splitting up.
Lovely use of regional accents, manages to get scary out of them.
And of course the main characters are police, so who are they going to call?
Yes, logically, more police, but for once they're acting with plausible degrees of caution and stupid. I mean, not vast stupid, just the tiny kind of we aren't quite thinking movie enough seriously.
I like this one.
Cannibalism is a major theme in this series. In the city, seeing other people as just meat?
18 Serotonin Wild
And we're back to young-teen wish fulfilment fantasies.
Lots of running around with guns, shoot teachers, napalm police.
:eyeroll:
Bit of mysticism dropped in, girl called Kali, meet Buddha / kill Buddha
but on the whole, really rather boring.
19 The End
Couldn't really watch this one. Too much pissing about with form, couldn't see the content. It was all webcams and handheld cameras while the guy holding it whispers and fake cut aways to technical fault on 5 or 5 news breaks. I can see they were having fun with it, but I couldn't understand a word of the webcam or the handheld bits and I'm not interested in fake-news. Even on actual TV it wouldn't have been much of a trick.
So I just fast forwarded.
Says something about the habits of this series that when you see a guy crawling into shot you can know for absolutely certain that he's only going to have stumps where his legs should be.
Employment opportunities for disabled actors.
Only 3 eps on disc 4. Nicely divided up there.
20. Ritual Slaughter
another "what if the crazy person is right" one
but rather nicely done.
Again, working the budget - two actors, one room, almost the entire episode. Never leaves the building. Thrifty.
And totally depends on the two actors getting it. But I think they did.
It's basically a long conversation between a woman who does rituals so her bad thoughts don't break things, and her new pshrink. He starts out very confident, all the right phrases, very sensible scientific. Only then the conversation-power gets all muddled up, and he starts getting scared too. It was nicely done.
Managed some creepy, if you were willing to play.
See these kinds of stories aren't what I usually try to tell... but sometimes that's because I string a lot of them together before I call it an episode. So it's interesting watching these, seeing how much can be done with very little. It's like... watching US TV with the budget and the FX and all that, seems like getting there from here is a huge great gap, would need millions. Watching UK TV, there's some good stories being told with a lot less, in roughly the genre I want to play in. It's a bit like studying Lit and starting with novels and then looking at drama and connecting it up to TV and film - there's lots added in, but it isn't necessarily a huge great leap.
Which, you know, obvious now I've thought of it.
21&22 Dollhouse Burns
Two more episodes left, and imdb says Winter and Jude are back. Winter is the lesbian police detective and Jude is the cute guy who became the storyteller of the city.
... except now Jude is considerable less cute, and an entirely different actor. Hate it when they do that.
And it's another one where they try and tie everything together. This time with The Institute, which is a common feature of all the episodes I liked least this year. Not promising.
We find C-TAC is the government agency that deals with weird.
We find Winter got recruited after her first appearance. Which I like. It would be much less fun if she already knew weird. As it was she figured it out.
We find a whole lot of things I'm getting really bored with already. Less fun.
I mean, okay, logically, if there was weirdness with the density we've been seeing, bumping into officialdom as often as it has, then there would be official dealing with weirdness. But that makes it a whole different scale than the series has been playing at. I mean, it has thus far been about the individual or small group (usually about 4) bumping into forces larger and scarier than they are, the great unknown come calling. Making it about an entire organisation against an Institute against the Heart of the City changes the scale, the stakes, the emotions, all that. Which, imho, makes it actually a different series.
At least XIII kept the scale the same. One bloke finding darkness.
Now there's him being randomly moody in a cemetery and having strangely slashy conversation with the demon headmaster while telling him bad guys lose nine times out of ten. Which, frankly, no man who'd been through the experiences of anyone in this series would ever utter unless they were bugfuck insane. Good guys always lose in horror movies.
So I'm cranky on many levels.
Winter remains pretty.
... oh look, turns out C-TAC and The Institute are the same. Big surprise.
And it's set up as corrupt minds fighting corrupt hearts. Meh.
part 2
Aaaand now he's being slashy with Milton the carrion eating zombie.
okay.
I... might actually like this if it were the pretty version of Jude and the zombie wasn't all drippy with dead dog.
"You're about to do something stupid or dangerous"
"both"
"we've discussed this before. If you're going to do both I have to knock you out with a plank"
:-)
"I'm the city's storyteller. It's my duty to make sure that the big book of reality does not end on my watch."
Which meshes how with last episode where he said he could only watch?
Oh fuck... and they were doing so well! She survived two and a half episodes!
(Dead lesbian)
so, random naked people, including random naked guy this time. Surprise!
Twists that aren't twisty. Meh.
"We all have a heart, and each of them is dark"
would be the point of the series.
eeeew, kissing. Bloke kissing someone who doesn't want him to.
ah, to steal his blood and make a big mess of the universe.
well that's just gross.
And the storyteller is the crucible. Meh.
You know, I'm sure there was at some point potential for those last two eps to be something other than the most godawful mess, and yet...
On the whole, after I've watched them all, Urban Gothic was... more often a waste of time than not. But it did some interesting things.
I'm going to ignore the last two episodes, because teh suck.
Winter is fun.
Jude as the storyteller is fun.
Milton the zombie is in fact rather fun, though I like him best as part of the gang.
Episodes that work include Vampirology, Deptford Voodoo, Old Nick, Eater, Sandman, Ritual Slaughter. All for different reasons.
Dead Meat, Lacuna, Turn On, Necromance, all had good elements. The Boys Club was deeply creepy.
Quite a lot of the others clunked.
And some radically sucked. Be Movie was bad, Pineapple Chunks was beyond bad.
The good eps mostly cluster at the start of season 1. Bit of a problem there.
I like Thirteen more the more I think about it.
Journalist / Storyteller who gets too close to the darkness and falls in. That's kind of like the Torchwood black hole knowledge theory. Horror classic.
But trying to turn something like this into something that all ties together and makes sense? When it weren't intended to from the start? Does not work.
If I were setting random (horror) stories in London, Milton and Jude v1 and Winter join some Neverwhere folk as people one might randomly bump into.
I don't know as I'm glad I bought the set, but I'm not tempted to sell it on. There's at least two hours of TV that I might rewatch sometime.
"Turns out he only wanted me for my body"
somewhat lacks twists if you read the imdb description, but as a 'teen suicide don't do it' it twists nicely.
17 Eater
Oh, this is a *good* one.
Very, very nasty.
The imdb description gives away almost the whole thing, but it still manages to deliver.
The whole trapped in a dark place with a scary thing thing is classic, of course, and we're not who we are, which rather depends on splitting up.
Lovely use of regional accents, manages to get scary out of them.
And of course the main characters are police, so who are they going to call?
Yes, logically, more police, but for once they're acting with plausible degrees of caution and stupid. I mean, not vast stupid, just the tiny kind of we aren't quite thinking movie enough seriously.
I like this one.
Cannibalism is a major theme in this series. In the city, seeing other people as just meat?
18 Serotonin Wild
And we're back to young-teen wish fulfilment fantasies.
Lots of running around with guns, shoot teachers, napalm police.
:eyeroll:
Bit of mysticism dropped in, girl called Kali, meet Buddha / kill Buddha
but on the whole, really rather boring.
19 The End
Couldn't really watch this one. Too much pissing about with form, couldn't see the content. It was all webcams and handheld cameras while the guy holding it whispers and fake cut aways to technical fault on 5 or 5 news breaks. I can see they were having fun with it, but I couldn't understand a word of the webcam or the handheld bits and I'm not interested in fake-news. Even on actual TV it wouldn't have been much of a trick.
So I just fast forwarded.
Says something about the habits of this series that when you see a guy crawling into shot you can know for absolutely certain that he's only going to have stumps where his legs should be.
Employment opportunities for disabled actors.
Only 3 eps on disc 4. Nicely divided up there.
20. Ritual Slaughter
another "what if the crazy person is right" one
but rather nicely done.
Again, working the budget - two actors, one room, almost the entire episode. Never leaves the building. Thrifty.
And totally depends on the two actors getting it. But I think they did.
It's basically a long conversation between a woman who does rituals so her bad thoughts don't break things, and her new pshrink. He starts out very confident, all the right phrases, very sensible scientific. Only then the conversation-power gets all muddled up, and he starts getting scared too. It was nicely done.
Managed some creepy, if you were willing to play.
See these kinds of stories aren't what I usually try to tell... but sometimes that's because I string a lot of them together before I call it an episode. So it's interesting watching these, seeing how much can be done with very little. It's like... watching US TV with the budget and the FX and all that, seems like getting there from here is a huge great gap, would need millions. Watching UK TV, there's some good stories being told with a lot less, in roughly the genre I want to play in. It's a bit like studying Lit and starting with novels and then looking at drama and connecting it up to TV and film - there's lots added in, but it isn't necessarily a huge great leap.
Which, you know, obvious now I've thought of it.
21&22 Dollhouse Burns
Two more episodes left, and imdb says Winter and Jude are back. Winter is the lesbian police detective and Jude is the cute guy who became the storyteller of the city.
... except now Jude is considerable less cute, and an entirely different actor. Hate it when they do that.
And it's another one where they try and tie everything together. This time with The Institute, which is a common feature of all the episodes I liked least this year. Not promising.
We find C-TAC is the government agency that deals with weird.
We find Winter got recruited after her first appearance. Which I like. It would be much less fun if she already knew weird. As it was she figured it out.
We find a whole lot of things I'm getting really bored with already. Less fun.
I mean, okay, logically, if there was weirdness with the density we've been seeing, bumping into officialdom as often as it has, then there would be official dealing with weirdness. But that makes it a whole different scale than the series has been playing at. I mean, it has thus far been about the individual or small group (usually about 4) bumping into forces larger and scarier than they are, the great unknown come calling. Making it about an entire organisation against an Institute against the Heart of the City changes the scale, the stakes, the emotions, all that. Which, imho, makes it actually a different series.
At least XIII kept the scale the same. One bloke finding darkness.
Now there's him being randomly moody in a cemetery and having strangely slashy conversation with the demon headmaster while telling him bad guys lose nine times out of ten. Which, frankly, no man who'd been through the experiences of anyone in this series would ever utter unless they were bugfuck insane. Good guys always lose in horror movies.
So I'm cranky on many levels.
Winter remains pretty.
... oh look, turns out C-TAC and The Institute are the same. Big surprise.
And it's set up as corrupt minds fighting corrupt hearts. Meh.
part 2
Aaaand now he's being slashy with Milton the carrion eating zombie.
okay.
I... might actually like this if it were the pretty version of Jude and the zombie wasn't all drippy with dead dog.
"You're about to do something stupid or dangerous"
"both"
"we've discussed this before. If you're going to do both I have to knock you out with a plank"
:-)
"I'm the city's storyteller. It's my duty to make sure that the big book of reality does not end on my watch."
Which meshes how with last episode where he said he could only watch?
Oh fuck... and they were doing so well! She survived two and a half episodes!
(Dead lesbian)
so, random naked people, including random naked guy this time. Surprise!
Twists that aren't twisty. Meh.
"We all have a heart, and each of them is dark"
would be the point of the series.
eeeew, kissing. Bloke kissing someone who doesn't want him to.
ah, to steal his blood and make a big mess of the universe.
well that's just gross.
And the storyteller is the crucible. Meh.
You know, I'm sure there was at some point potential for those last two eps to be something other than the most godawful mess, and yet...
On the whole, after I've watched them all, Urban Gothic was... more often a waste of time than not. But it did some interesting things.
I'm going to ignore the last two episodes, because teh suck.
Winter is fun.
Jude as the storyteller is fun.
Milton the zombie is in fact rather fun, though I like him best as part of the gang.
Episodes that work include Vampirology, Deptford Voodoo, Old Nick, Eater, Sandman, Ritual Slaughter. All for different reasons.
Dead Meat, Lacuna, Turn On, Necromance, all had good elements. The Boys Club was deeply creepy.
Quite a lot of the others clunked.
And some radically sucked. Be Movie was bad, Pineapple Chunks was beyond bad.
The good eps mostly cluster at the start of season 1. Bit of a problem there.
I like Thirteen more the more I think about it.
Journalist / Storyteller who gets too close to the darkness and falls in. That's kind of like the Torchwood black hole knowledge theory. Horror classic.
But trying to turn something like this into something that all ties together and makes sense? When it weren't intended to from the start? Does not work.
If I were setting random (horror) stories in London, Milton and Jude v1 and Winter join some Neverwhere folk as people one might randomly bump into.
I don't know as I'm glad I bought the set, but I'm not tempted to sell it on. There's at least two hours of TV that I might rewatch sometime.