iZombie, Season 1 (2015)

Liv Moore is a high-flying medical resident with a practically perfect fiance. She seems to have it all ... right up until she attends the wrong party and gets turned into a zombie.

Now the only way to avoid becoming a shambling undead monster is a regular diet of human brains, so Liv ditches the doctor fast track to join the medical examiner's team, dumps the fiance (so he won't get infected) and resigns herself to a miserable and lonely existence.

But there are two things Liv hasn't taken into account: the insatiable scientific curiosity of her new boss, and the fact that eating the brains of murder victims gives her visions of their deaths (also some of their personality traits, but that is less useful for Fighting Crime).  Because yeah, the apparently 'pyschic' Ms Moore is about to find herself helping Seattle's finest solve crimes ... while all the time worrying about whether there are other zombies out there and what they might be doing (spoiler: nothing good).

iZombie is a fun and quirky police procedural with a twist.  It has a great cast who play the off-the-wall concept straight (while still recognising that it is off the wall).  Good stuff!

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

Paramount made a big deal over the fact that 1984's Final Chapter would really and truly be the end of the Friday franchise.  They may even have been sincere.  But when a movie rakes in ten times its budget, it's hard to leave all that lovely money on the table.  So here we are, back again for more machete slashing action.

I'll give the creative team this much: they recognised that they couldn't just go to the "but wait, Jason's not dead after all!" well for the third time running.  Instead we get a tease of a theme that will return in Part VI before leaping six years into the future to the now adult Tommy Jarvis.

At the age of 12, Tommy helped to finally kill Jason Vorhees.  Now 18, he's being shuttled from one psychiatric hospital to another, where it is hoped they will have better luck treating his tendencies toward being a loner, fits of violent rage, and hallucinating that Jason Vorhees is still around.

Of course, when a violent death at the hospital leads to a series of murderous attacks across the community, the question has to be asked: is Jason Vorhees back?  Or is Tommy even crazier than anyone thinks he is?

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning has lots of violent death (more than any film in the franchise thus far) and several attractive women who remove their clothes or spend a long time in a wet and see-through white shirt, which you might think is all a slasher film needs to be 'good', at least in the eyes of its intended audience of teenage boys.  However, the script is so witless and lacking in tension or engagement that only the most uncritical of slasher fans is likely to be entertained.  I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not the worst Friday film (not even the worst so far - that'd be Part 3), but trust me, avoiding the title of 'worst Friday the 13th'  is nothing to be proud of.

Smallville, Season 3 (2003)

Clark Kent, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor and all the Smallville gang are back for another year of superhero and high school shenanigans, though the "90210 with superpowers" tone of seasons one and two is definitely more muted here.  There's more emphasis on home and work life drama than on high school matters.

There's also a bit more emphasis on - and in fact some obvious assumptions that the audience will be familiar with - the broader Superman franchise.  Using "The name's Perry White" as a sting right before your credits, for instance, only makes sense if you expect your audience to know that he is adult Clark Kent's boss.  Lois Lane also gets her first name drop midway through this series (and will, I believe, actually join the show in season 4).

So how does it measure up?  Well, if you've found seasons one and two tolerably enjoyable then you should like this one, too.  Lex remains a great character, even if I am much less enamoured of his father Lionel than the writers seem to be, and Lana Lang actually gets to be feisty this season, rather than just a damsel in distress, which is nice.  I mean, she still gets lumbered with the damsel in distress thing a bit, but at least she gets to do other stuff, too.  "Phoenix" and "Extinction" from early in the season are both good "Lana gets to do something cool" episodes.

The season's not all winners, of course.  There are good episodes, but also potentially good concepts that aren't well executed ("Obsession" would have worked a lot better if stretched out over multiple episodes, for instance, but likely wasn't because it would have been too similar to another multi-episode sub-plot), and just plain bad ones ("Legacy", frankly, is terrible in almost every way).

If you like comic book-themed TV, and you don't mind that it's got that "sometimes, it's just not that good" thing that comic books themselves go through, Smallville might be for you.

Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)

Musashi Miyamoto and Sasaki Kojiro are the two most famed swordsmen in Japan, and both are being courted for the role of the Shogun's combat trainer.  In those circumstances, it is perhaps inevitable that they will duel.

For Miyamoto, however, finding spiritual peace is a vital part of his journey as a samurai, and he postpones the duel for a year (and also for most of the run time of this 105 minute film) in order to work as a farmer and try to sought out the love triangle that's dogged him for the previous two films of the trilogy.  Only then (and naturally, also after the odd encounter with bandits and other riff raff to show off his martial skills) does Miyamoto head to the island of Ganryu for what, win or lose, will be his last ever duel.

All three Samurai films have been stately affairs from a pacing perspective, with this being perhaps the most glacial of them all.  Having established its end game, it honestly rather does take its time to get there.  I'd be okay with that if I felt like the events leading up to it were strongly connected and created a growing momentum, but I didn't.  The romance sub-plot and the bandits feel like a separate story from the duel, and in many ways a more immediate and engaging one.

Ultimately, this was not for me.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Season 2 (2000)

Professor Challenger and his team are still stuck trying to find a way off the "Lost World", an isolated plateau somewhere in the depths of South America.  They are still menaced by dinosaurs and dinosaur people and host of other menaces.  In this season this includes werewolves, amazons, aliens, half a dozen different magical curses, and most terrifying of all, lost 21st century tourists.  In fact, I think it's fair to say that the "Lost" part of the "Lost World" appellation is highly misleading, since it seems almost anyone can find it; it's getting out again that's the challenge.

So we're back for a second season of schlocky nonsense that retains only the most minor connection to Conan Doyle's 1912 novel.  In fact the connection is mostly just that crappy CGI dinosaurs turn up on a semi-regular basis to chase the protagonists and/or their enemies.  I find myself unreasonably fond of the show's naff CGI in general, I have to admit, achieving a nirvana of nerdy glee when one episode ends with a crappy CGI velociraptor fighting crappy CGI skeletons.

So does The Lost World have anything to recommend it other than the perverse entertainment of its third-rate effects?  Well, at its best it is silly fun, with a decent main cast mugging gamely for the camera in their stereotyped roles.  At its worst, on the other hand, it is ... well, at times it is pretty bad, to be honest.  I guess one fortunate consequence of the "we are trying to escape" premise is that if you find yourself eye-rolling too much, you can always skip the episode, since the show would be over if the characters ever succeeded, and therefore you already know that they won't.

I like this more than it deserves, but if you appreciate schlocky Hercules and Xena-era TV fantasy in general, you might too.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)

When April O'Neil goes shopping for gifts at the local flea market, she happens to pick up a magical sceptre that transports her back to 17th century Japan.  I guess that's the kind of thing you can expect to happen when your best friends are a bunch of teenage mutant ninja turtles and their mutant rat sensei.

Fortunately, when your best friends are a bunch of teenage mutant ninja turtles, you can be pretty sure they will hurl themselves back in time to try and rescue you, even if that means throwing themselves into the middle of a civil war four hundred years in the past.

As a sop to hand-wringing over violence in "a kid's show", the second TMNT film jettisoned the grittier elements of the franchise in favour of slapstick hijinks, and promptly lost over 40% of the box office garnered by the first.  If your first thought is "maybe we should swing the tone back toward more serious and try to shore up the franchise", well you are clearly not a 1990s film executive from Golden Harvest, because their response was "let's just rush out another bit of schlock as cheaply as possible to milk the last dregs out of something that's obviously run its course".

This goes about as well as you can expect, by which I mean "not very".  The turtle costumes and fight choreography are obviously inferior to the prior films, and the plot and dialogue certainly aren't going to make up for any weaknesses on the technical front, because ... well, they're rubbish.  Unfunny slapstick and witless banter is the order of the day.

A waste of your time.

The Shield, Season 5 (2006)

Vic Mackey and his Strike Team have got away with a lot in their chequered careers, up to and including murder, but they are finally well and truly in the sights of Internal Affairs.  Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh is absolutely dedicated to the task of breaking down the team, revealing their corruption, and sending them to jail.  Ironically this is all happening just at the time that Vic & Co have decided to try and stay on the straight and narrow, but that's certainly not going to matter if someone finds all the skeletons that are already in their closets.

Just in case that wasn't enough to worry about, the team (and all the other officers at their precinct) have to deal with budget cuts and a new captain whose only interest is in filling a chair until he can max out his pension.

The Shield is a show that builds on what has happened before, without labouring the point too heavily with exposition.  Characters develop and evolve over time, and what they've done stays with them and impacts their own perspectives and the opinions of those around them.  It's a solid show, and stronger in season five than it was in season one.  Definitely worth a look if you're in the market for some not exactly "white hat" cop show action.