Smallville, Season 4 (2004)

Having ended season three with no less than three different main characters on the brink of death, this fourth season of the show wastes no time in dropping another major development: the arrival of Lois Lane.  This is not the career-focused hotshot reporter of your parents' Superman, though.  This Lois is a smart alecky city girl with a healthy dose of grifter in her genes.  She's rapidly risen to be my favourite character in the show, and I'm looking forward to seeing her relationship with Clark - which is currently much like that of squabbling siblings - develop over the remaining seasons.

Anyway, after resolving the various major cliffhangers of last season and introducing Ms Lane to the gang, this year's Smallville sets off on its usual pattern of plenty of "villain of the week" episodes through which longer form plotlines are threaded.  These include round 3,000 of Clark and Lana's romance; the main characters' impending transition from high school to college; round 2,000 of Luthor family squabbles; 17th century witches; and alien power stones, oh my!  Basically, everything except lions and tigers and the kitchen sink.  But then there are still six more seasons for them to squeeze those in!

This season of Smallville is certainly not perfect TV: there are the usual less-good episodes from time to time, and I feel like the plotline involved Jensen Ackles's character (another new addition to the cast this year) ends up rather muddled.  Possibly plans had to be altered when he landed the lead role on Supernatural?  But it has a fun overall dynamic and it has finally started to break away from "everyone's powers come from kryptonite" crutch that was repeatedly used to weaken Clark in the first season.

This is not to say that kyptonite doesn't still turn up a lot, because it does.  We even get a third type - black kryptonite - to go with the familiar red and green varieties.  But the show is definitely expanding its horizons in the same way that the characters are.  I approve.

I also approve of the gloriously over the top final episode, which takes the multiple cliffhangers of last year and turns the volume up a couple of notches.  I admire that chutzpah.

And Now For Something Completely Different (1971)

In 1971 Monty Python's Flying Circus had enjoyed two reasonably successful (if sometimes controversial) seasons on UK television, but had failed to win an audience in the US.  The head of Playboy UK thought he had a solution, however: put together a 90 minute film comprising some of the best-received segments of the show, to be screened in cinemas.

And thus And Now For Something Completely Different (the name being taken from a commonly used line in the show) came to be made.  Rather than simply combining existing footage of the skits (probably due to issues with the BBC) they were re-shot on a shoestring budget; so shoestring in fact that they sometimes had to be re-written to remove effects that were included in the original TV broadcasts!

Consisting of roughly 30 short live action sketches and roughly half as many animated sequences, And Now For Something Completely Different is ironically therefore 100% familiar material.  I'm not sure how the sketches were selected - certainly there are some famous segments omitted, such as the Ministry of Silly Walks and The Spanish Inquisition - but you certainly can't complain that they aren't packing in a bunch of material!

As what is essentially an extended episode of a sketch-comedy TV show, there's no real narrative to speak of here (though several of the sketches do blend into each other or have quirky call-backs to earlier content); whether you will enjoy it or not therefore comes down to how funny you find the Python team's sense of the absurd.  Also, to a lesser extent, how willing you are to overlook the cultural assumptions of fifty year old jokes; there is for instance an obvious assumption in some of the sketches that homosexuality is intrinsically funny.

Supergirl, Season 1 (2015)

Everyone knows the story of how Kal-El of Krypton was sent as a baby from his dying homeworld to Earth, where he was adopted by Ma and Pa Kent and went on to become the renowned hero, Superman.

What most people don't know is that his 13-year old cousin Kara Zor-El was also sent to Earth to be Kal-El's protector until he grew up.  This is because her ship was knocked off course, and spend over many years in the timeless expanse known as the "Phantom Zone".  When the still 13-year old finally did arrive on Earth, Kal-El was a grown man and not in need of protection.

A decade later, Kara "Danvers" is the personal assistant to media mogul Cat Grant, trying to find a way to fit into the world as a normal person, without using her powers.  But when her adopted sister's plane experiences engine failure and begins to crash, Kara's powers are the only solution available to her.

Immediately dubbed "Supergirl" by Cat Grant, Kara decides that the time has come to embrace her Kryptonian powers and follow in her cousin's footsteps as a costumed hero with a mild-mannered alter-ego.  And she's made that decision not a moment too soon, because when her ship escaped the Phantom Zone, it drew a prison full of alien criminals with it: criminals who have escaped and now threaten the planet.  (Good job they waited a decade to get up to much!)

I never watched Supergirl season 1 when it came out, because I had thoroughly disliked the trailer, but people kept giving it positive reviews - plus in later seasons it started to crossover with the other Arrowverse shows every year - so I finally decided to give it a try.

Sorry to buck the comics nerd love-in, but I didn't particularly like it.  It does have positive elements: the main cast are solid (though I think Melissa Benoist is a better Kara Danvers than Supergirl), and I can see potential for the show, but many elements of the execution left me cold.  The extended "Kara isn't ready to be a hero" plotline was very tiresome; characters often seemed to flip-flop in attitudes for inorganic "well, the story needs to go in X direction now" reasons; Cat Grant - though well performed by Callista Flockhart - is an awful human being we're apparently supposed to like; and they did horrible things to Lois Lane's dad, for which I will never forgive them.

A friend described this season of the show as clumsy but charming.  I think he was half right!

The Tall Man (2012)

The rural town of Cold Rock has been dying a slow but irreversible decline ever since the local mine closed down some six years ago.  It's a bleak, soul-crushing inch toward oblivion for the town.  And just in case that wasn't enough, things are made even uglier by the frequent disappearance of young children.  One vanishes every few months, without any culprit ever being identified.  The police and federal authorities seem stymied but the local rumour mill has an answer: "The Tall Man", a shadowy figure that some claim to have seen near where the children disappeared.  Who or what this figure might be is a subject of hot debate.  Child molester?  Supernatural menace?  The Devil himself?

One of the few people who seems to be trying to keep the town from freezing up entirely is Julia Denning, the young widow of the town's former doctor.  A nurse herself, Julia has kept her husband's clinic running, though as the locals are fond of telling her: she cannot fill his shoes.

One night, after returning to her isolated home and playing with her son David, Julia is disturbed by loud noises from downstairs.  She investigates, just in time to see a dark figure bundle David into a truck and start to drive off.  With no-one else to help her, Julia chases the truck, determined to recover her boy ...

That's the opening act of this film, and the only part the trailer addresses.  Without spoiling things too much, though, I will say that this is not the straightforward "mother tries to protect her child" film that it appears to be.  There's a pretty big and I think potentially very interesting wrinkle that changes the premise dramatically.

Unfortunately, while the wrinkle itself was intriguing, eventually the film has to explain it, and on that front I feel it fumbles pretty badly.  The truth behind it all was not convincing or compelling to me.  On that basis, despite that I think are good performances and an intriguing shift of expectations, I can't recommend the film.  Particularly if you're looking for a "mom vs monster" film.  (Which if you are, I suggest The Babadook).

True Blood, Season 2 (2009)

Sookie Stackhouse would like nothing more than some quiet time with her lover Bill Compton, free from serial killers and vampire politics and supernatural weirdness in general.  But when you're a telepath with a vampire for a boyfriend, "quite time" is something of a luxury.  Sookie soon finds herself embroiled in an investigation for a missing vampire, while her brother Jason goes looking for meaning for his life in all the wrong places, and their hometown of Bon Temps finds itself the target of a mysterious woman with strange powers and a potentially lethal agenda.

So basically there's going to be lots of sex and blood and flawed people making terrible decisions that lead to more sex and blood, because "smutty, gory, over the top melodrama" is very much the True Blood formula.  And hey, it's a formula that mostly works, thanks in large part I think to the willingness of the cast to lean into all its overblown, histrionic supernatural and sexual shenanigans.

True Blood is not highbrow art, and it has no pretensions to be.  It's fast food TV: slickly packaged and somehow more-ish despite its flaws.  All in all, if you're looking for a guilty pleasure to indulge in, then - at least here in season 2 - it's worth putting on the menu.

We Are The Night (2010)

Three women murder the passengers and crew of a small jet, then merrily leap out of the plane before it crashes.

The next day, after narrowly avoiding arrest by a handsome young detective, pickpocket Lena stumbles across a well-hidden nightclub filled with glamorous people.  Her intent is to locate a mark or two for her light-fingered skills.  What she finds instead is compelling blonde woman who doesn't cast a reflection in the mirror and leaves rather more than a hickey on Lena's neck.

Yep, what we have here is a coterie of three vampires, whose leader believes Lena to be "the one" who can replace the woman who turned her, whom she lost some two hundred years ago.  Lena, for her part, is attracted by the benefits of being a vampire: eternal youth, the ability to enjoy sex, drink and drugs without any risk of complications, being able to walk on walls, all that stuff.  She's rather more conflicted about the trio's casual attitude toward killing people, and not entirely on board with the invitation to sample the wonders of lesbian love, either.  That police detective was very handsome, after all.

Despite the presence of vampires, We Are The Night is not really a horror film.  It never tries to scare the audience at all, instead reveling in the self-indulgence and violence of their undead powers.  It feels rather more in the vein (heh) of say Heathers than Nosferatu, only instead of blowing up high schools the end game is vampire on vampire smackdown.

If you want a vampire-themed "temptations of evil" kind of story and don't mind that there's some rather unfortunate heteronormative subtext underlying it all, We Are The Night might offer some diversion.  But I didn't think it had all that much interesting to say, personally.

The Twilight Zone, Season 2 (1960)

Writing an anthology series is no easy task, especially when you're working with scripts that run no more than 25 minutes.  You have to introduce your characters and the situation they're experiencing, engage the audience in it, create uncertainty over the outcome, and then deliver a pay-off.  That's a lot of targets to try and hit, even before you factor in that you need to try and do it twenty or thirty times a season.

Sad to say, season two of The Twilight Zone misses those targets more often that it hits.  The twenty nine offerings here fall well short of the average entry from the first season.  There are occasional bright spots, of course, but they are few and often still undermined by a flaw or two.

The writing is on the wall early when episode 2 "The Man in the Bottle" is nothing more than a lightly re-skinned version of "The Monkey's Paw".  Other low-lights include"The Eye of the Beholder", which stretches a four minute plot to over five times its natural length, and "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", which is so dedicated to its obvious and uninteresting conclusion that it seemingly never stops to consider how incredibly stupid its whole setup actually is.

As I said, even the better episodes are at least somewhat flawed.  "The Invaders" is probably the best of the bunch, with its one weak point being that it cheats a bit by how it structures Rod Serling's introduction.  "A Most Unusual Camera" probably ranks second for the season, for all that it's more or less another of the multiple 'be wary of miraculous gifts' plots the show has run by now.  It does suffer from a rather forced ending, though.

Overall, the miss to hit ratio is several levels too high for me to give this season even a qualified recommendation.  Here's hoping for a better batting average in season three.

Mysterious Island (1961)

Near the close of the American Civil War, four Union-aligned men escape from the Confederate prison where they are being held, seize an aerial observation balloon, and escape: all amidst the wildest storm of the year.  Their departure is not uncontested, however, and they end up with a Confederate prisoner in the balloon basket with them.

They'll soon be grateful for their enemy's presence, however, as he at least understand how the balloon is operated, and can land them safely ... well, he can as soon as the wild winds die down!

However the storm continues to blow; the five men travel vast distances until they eventually crash on a tiny tropical island.  They must now try to survive here long enough either for rescuers to find them, or until they can manufacture their own means of escape.

Easy, right?  Well, did I mention that all their food and weapons were lost in the crash?  That's a complication right there.  Oh yeah, and there's one other thing: this island already has inhabitants.  They're just not human, and Ray Harryhausen is their father.

Yep, this is a Harryhausen stop motion creature feature and adventure yarn, loosely based on the Jules Verne novel of them same name.  It's not one of the great man's most renowned works, but it is definitely at its best whenever one of his creations is on screen, trying to eat the human cast.  Those sequences fortunately occur relatively frequently, livening up the otherwise sometimes rather stilted plot.

If you've a hankering for an old-fashioned adventure movie, and/or an appreciation for Harryhausen's meticulous stop motion effects, this is worth a couple of hours of your time.

The Librarians, Season 1 (2014)

Colonel Eve Baird of the NATO Anti-Terrorist Unit finds herself disabling an armed nuclear bomb with the help of an eccentric stranger who refers to himself as "The Librarian" and who seems far more concerned with the dusty sarcophagus next to the bomb and what it might do if not disarmed.

A short time later Colonel Baird finds herself drafted to be the Librarian's new Guardian, an appointment the Librarian himself does not appreciate.  He's not going to be able to do much about it, though, because someone is murdering potential Librarians, and he and the Colonel need to save the last three who remain: a brilliant synesthete mathematician, an oil rig worker who is also an expert in art history, and a tech genius super-thief.  Together, this team will have to protect the world from all the supernatural threats that it does not know exist.

Based on some cheesy TV movies from the early 2000s, this is a light and family-friendly show about saving the world from supernatural things and people.  Basically, it's a lot like Warehouse 13, but not as good.  This is not the fault of the cast, who are likeable and do their best with the material: it's just that the scripts are so determinedly light that there is rarely any sense of tension or excitement, even at times when the world is allegedly about to end in some horrible way.  It's all a bit too cozy and twee, in my opinion.