Reviews

Alphas is a television series that aired in the United States on the Syfy network in 2011 and ran for two seasons. The series centers on a group of individuals, known as Alphas, with super-human abilities due to the progression of human evolution. This group, led by a psychiatrist named Dr. Lee Rosen, uses their abilities to assist the government in solving suspected Alpha-related crimes. Dr. Rosen studies and attempts to understand the Alpha phenomenon, while also working to help his team understand and live with their abilities.

Is this series based on a novel concept? No, but it is entertaining. Is there anything spectacular about Alphas that we should rave about? Nah, but it is still fun to watch.

While it is certainly entertaining, the downside to watching Alphas is that you are guaranteed to be disappointed by the ending.

Coldwater is the story of an adolescent boy who is sent to a backwoods juvenile reform facility. As the film continues, we slowly come to understand the events that lead him there and the horrors that occur.

While I would like to say that this story is completely fictional, it is not. The script and the characters are, of course, a work of fiction. However, the abuse that often occurs in juvenile reform facilities is all too real. There are many documented cases of emotional and physical abuse, in some cases even leading to the death of young teens, at these facilities all over the country.

While this is a fictional story, I appreciate its realism. This realism makes Coldwater shocking and at times difficult to watch. This film is not entertaining in the way that many films are. However, I believe that it is important to watch because the stories behind it are very real.

Kajaki was released in November of 2014 in the United Kingdom before being released in the United States as Kilo Two Bravo one year later. The film is based on the true story of a British Army unit (call sign: Kilo Two Bravo), which was part of the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, positioned near the Kajaki dam in Afghanistan.

On September 6, 2006, the unit was on a routine patrol when they entered a dried out riverbed. When one soldier steps on a landmine, the others rush to his aid and find that they are surrounded by unmarked mines.

Kilo Two Bravo is the directorial debut of Paul Katis, which (not surprisingly), earned him a nomination for a British Academy Film Award. This film is realistic in so many ways – from the landscape, realistic gore and violence, all the way down to the emotions and language of its characters.

Be warned, this film is not for the faint of heart.

The beginning is a little slow, but keep watching! This political thriller is an interesting series that keeps you guessing from start to finish. What will you look forward to by watching this series? Phenomenal acting, beautiful Australian scenery, mystery, drama, and maybe even a few laughs.

Something that we see in The Code that is not often seen in American television is that our main character is a young man who is undoubtedly on the autism spectrum. But he is not only portrayed as a handicapped individual but also a genius, capable of extraordinary things and also capable of being in a romantic relationship and having a sense of his own sexuality.

Thank you, Australia!

A young police detective played by Kristin Kreuk, falls in love with a former United States soldier who is on the run from a secret government agency that turned him into a beast.

I won't deny that the description of this show sounds terribly cheesy. Don't let that turn you away from what is actually a pretty good series!

Beauty and the Beast is an interesting interpretation of the traditional story of Beauty and the Beast. Based on the 1987 CBS series by the same name, Beauty and the Beast combines science fiction, government conspiracy dramas, and mainstream police drama to make a series that is dramatic, romantic, and often funny.

While this series is entertaining, it is often repetitive. Throughout each season, we watch very similar stories, only with different foes to fight.

Disgraced WWII Army Captain, Jack Wosick, is given the opportunity for redemption when he is asked to lead a rag-tag group of misfits, who call themselves the War Pigs, on a top secret mission behind enemy lines to uncover and capture a Nazi super weapon, known as the V3 (a massive artillery canon).

After watching the trailer for War Pigs, it seemed action-packed, dramatic, and often funny. It was, however, none of these things. The action scenes were highly unrealistic and at least one included a terrible CGI explosion. There were also several goofs that the producers missed prior to releasing the film.

Despite the bad things about this film, the story was interesting and the acting was very decent.

Matt Murdock, who was blinded by a chemical spill as a young boy, fights crime as a lawyer by day and as a vigilante by night. Despite his blindness, he uses his superhuman senses to demolish the criminal organizations terrorizing Hell's Kitchen.

As a disabled person, I have a deep appreciate for stories about handicapped superheroes, like Matt Murdock (played by Charlie Cox) in Daredevil. But the fact that they decided to remake this epic story is certainly not the only reason that I must tip my hat to Netflix for their recent original series, Daredevil.

I cannot praise this show enough for its unbelievable fight scene choreography, excellent acting, and striking cinematography. I also appreciate that in comparison to most Marvel series, Netflix's Daredevil adds an element of realism to the story with the addition of grisly deaths, an abundance of blood, and serious injury (to both the criminals and to our hero).

This show is addictive and immensely entertaining. Typically, I like to be a bit more eloquent. However, the most accurate word I can use to describe this series is: badass.

Frankly, I'm not sure that there is a rating low enough to accurately describe Fifty Shades of Grey. Universal Pictures and Focus Features, along with producers Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti took E.L. James' badly written book series and made them into bad movies.

The only reason that Fifty Shades of Grey gained the amount of attention and popularity that it did was because the subject matter is considered by the general public to be taboo. Taken as a whole, the books and films are a colossal insult to and a highly inaccurate of the entire BDSM community.

If Christian Grey were a real person, he would be shunned by the community. The author portrays him a being mentally unstable and controlling in a completely non-consensual manner.

Vampire High ran on YTV in Canada and Sky 1 in the UK from 2001 to 2002. It aired in the USA on The WB in 2002. The series ran for one season (26 half-hour episodes).

As if ordinary teenagers weren't bad enough, the Mansbridge Academy boarding school has both human and vampire teenagers. The series centers on a group of "young" vampires participating in an experiment arranged by the vampire elders, with the intention of civilizing the vampires. In this program, Professor Murdoch is to teach the vampires how to live among and act like humans.

The humans and vampires at Mansbridge Academy face typical (and not so typical) troubles such as friendships, enemies, crushes, intense blood cravings, and vampire-human romance, and trying not to kill your human classmates.

This series is on the most basic level – fun. Don't expect highly developed characters or story lines from Vampire High. There are no profound lessons to be learned from it.

Take it at face value and enjoy the cheesy goodness that is teenage Canadian television.

Demons is an English mini-series about a young man who finds out that he is the last descendant of Professor Abraham Van Helsing (a character originally seen in the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula). It is this young man's destiny to fight inhuman creatures and protect the human race.

It is entertaining, suspenseful, and often funny. It used gorgeous imagery, fantastic computer animation, and a brilliant soundtrack. Demons is a very well-written series. In comparison to similar American shows, I found Demons to be better written, directed, and acted. The writers put together interesting, multi-layered background on every character

Unfortunately, the series ended after only six episodes, leaving many unanswered questions and unresolved problems.

"In every generation, there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer."

Younger people today often dismiss this series as being "another cheesy 90's television show", and that is often true. However, that is something that you grow to love about Buffy the Vampire Slayer soon after you begin watching it.

This series is wonderful in its fun and badass girl-power way. We get to watch Buffy, a naive sixteen-year-old girl grow into a powerful vampire slayer. We also get to watch as her entire Scoobie Gang grow up and fight the forces of darkness together. Plus, who doesn't love to watch the powerful (and very sexy) romances that Buffy experiences?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is well-written and well-acted. It is fun, mysterious, sexy, and all-around awesome. My only true complaint about this series was that after so many seasons and so many hopes for the future, I could not stand the way that the series ended.

I was surprised by how much I actually enjoyed the series Scream. This is mainly because it is one of the only shows that has aired on MTV that was not terrible. While this show could easily be considered more thriller than horror, it certainly has some of the horror aspects of the original Scream film.

Going into this series, I expected very little beyond a similar story line to the original Scream films. In many ways this series is just like the films - the high school setting, the killer's cat and mouse game with their teenage victims, teenagers constantly trying to get laid despite the fact that half of them are already dead.

But, there are also several large differences from the original story. The series Scream in a modern story and is therefore filled with modern technology that plays a large role in the actions of the characters. I also found it to be a bit less gory than the original/

Moonlight is yet another story of a vampire investigator in a love triangle. Mick St. John is a fifty-year old vampire working as a private investigator in Los Angeles. He must choose between his love for a human reporter, Beth Turner, and his vampire ex-wife, Coraline.

While the vampire-human crime solving love triangle has become a surprisingly common storyline, this series is absolutely worth watching. It has a more realistic feel to it than similar series such as Blood Ties from Lifetime and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I also found it to be far less cheesy than many other series. It's less, "I vant to suck your blood!" and "Look at me, I sparkle in the sun!" and a bit more "I'm a lonely, brooding vampire looking for redemption and a way back to humanity".

Thankfully, Alex O'Loughlin's character in Moonlight has not hit the level of brooding of David Boreanaz's character in Angel. A girl can only take so much of that.

Blood Ties is a relatively entertaining series with a storyline that could only have come from the writers at Lifetime. The series begins on a promising note with a gorgeous male vampire and a beautiful private investigator. And since this is Lifetime, there is a love triangle. This investigator must choose between the beautiful and mysterious vampire and her police officer ex-boyfriend and partner. However, the writers at Lifetime decided to throw in a number of random facts about these characters that are completely irrelevant and only serve to make the script more complicated (but not necessarily more interesting). For instance, our beautiful vampire also writes comic books and our private investigator is slowly going blind. This show was interesting and at times fun, but also frustrating. The end of the second and final season was extremely disappointing. The series leaves off on a depressing episode that gives the viewer no resolution to any of the central issues in the storyline. This show's saving grace? Kyle Schmid (Henry Fitzroy) is gorgeous.

This film was mildly entertaining, but also very slow. Most of the film dragged on uneventfully. The majority was simply shots of awkward teenagers having sex in various (and often times dirty, abandoned) settings.

The main issue that I had with this film was that the entire concept was utterly absurd. The story line was based on the idea of a sexually transmitted haunting.

While I have heard some speculate that this film was created as a metaphor for HIV/AIDs, it is my personal opinion that it was just a poorly written movie.

I applaud the writers of Heartless on their interesting ideas about the function of demons in our world and also about the way in which deals with human beings are made. While they do not stick to the ideas of the more typical demon myths, they came up with some very interesting methods.

However, it must also be noted that this film is for the most part, completely nonsensical. In many ways, it was difficult to follow and by the end of the film, little was ever fully explained.

The script to this "artistic" film reads like the incoherent ramblings of a first year film student.