Love And Low-Maintenance Composite Decking

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SURREALESTATE – Season 1 Episode 1 – SPOILERS

Sarah Levy

Susan Ireland: “I want to make a difference in the world, one house at a time”

Quotations abound in this episode and they are used effectively to set the mood for the story and characters. The first one is from Aleister Crowley (via August Ripley): “The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics.” Luke Roman himself gets epigrammatic and suggests that “only love and low-maintenance composite decking last forever.” And later he offers (in an aside) a quote from Rochefoucauld: “It is with true love as it is with ghosts. Everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.” Much credit for the extraordinary visual impact of the episode must be given to Director Paul Fox, and Director of Photography Jackson Parrell because, as @NVGhost005 put it on twitter: “The cinematography for #SurrealEstate is the best I’ve ever seen on @SyFy.” Continue reading →

Van Helsing – How The Show Changed Toward The End

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SPOILERS

Paul Johanssen, Gia Crovatin, and Duncan Ollerenshaw

Vampire boss Dimitri (Paul Johanssen) having dinner with his sister Antonasia (Gia Crovatin) in the final episode of the first season. Dr. Sholomenko (Duncan Ollerenshaw) is in the background. In “Carpe Noctis” (Episode 5.6) we learn that Dimitri’s influence extended as far east as Chicago, though he was headquartered in Seattle, possibly because of the weather.

For the first three seasons of VAN HELSING, the life expectancy of the average character was not long. Of the 13 credited characters in the first episode, eight were deceased by the end of the thirty-ninth episode. Some characters were even brought back seemingly for the sole purpose of having them killed. Christopher Heyerdahl‘s character Sam is as much a source of carnage as the vampires, and eventually becomes a vamp himself. (He seemed naturally suited to the vampire lifestyle.) The travels of Vanessa (Kelly Overton) and her tribe were largely restricted to the U.S. Pacific Northwest. They met other tribes of human survivors occasionally, and in the third season managed to get all the way to Denver (where most everybody dies). Vampires developed the ability to move about in daylight (thanks to the researchers at Blak-Tek) and were briefly led by someone called Scar Face, but his brood of vamps was quickly absorbed by The Sisterhood, an ancient society led by ruthless vampires Ivory (Jennifer Cheon Garcia) and Scab (Rowland Pidlubny). The Sisterhood breaches the defenses at Denver killing most of the humans there, then Hansen (Neal McDonough) drops poison gas on the rest of them to keep them from being turned. Vanessa flirts with the dark side and, at the end of Season Three, kills her sister Scarlett (Missy Peregrym). Continue reading →

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us

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WANDER – directed by April Mullen – written by Tim Doiron – SPOILERS

Katheryn Winnick and Raymond Cruz

CIA agent Elsa Viceroy (Katheryn Winnick) and Wander Sheriff Luis Santiago (Raymond Cruz) at the scene of Zoe’s death

Arthur Bretnik (Aaron Eckhart) investigates conspiracies. He co-anchors a “deep web” podcast called The Thought Junction dedicated to all things conspiracy (Atlas Major is his on-air name) with his sidekick Jimmy Cleats (Tommy Lee Jones). The podcast discusses “…the unsettling number of Illuminati black operations that plague our country” (meaning the US. The film is set in the New Mexico desert).

Years previously, a car crash left Bretnik’s wife in a vegetative state and killed his daughter. Bretnik thinks he is the one who was targeted for death because of his investigative activities. Continue reading →