Why is The Strain's apocalypse so underwhelming when it should be the best thing on television?

I like pretty much anything science fiction. This weekend I watched Lavalantula and Two Headed Shark Attack. I thought Three Headed Shark Attack was threatening to overdose me on The Asylum's particular brand of terrible movies, so I'll spare you a review. And let's face it, it was all just filler for the normal Sunday night shows that I indulge this time of year: True Detective, Falling Skies (on its last season), and The Strain.

Aside from arguing with my friend Adam over who is the "True Detective" of season two, our other conversations tend to circle around "The Strain." This season, the vampire apocalypse has full on struck New York City. Vampires wander the alleys and streets in packs doing "The Master's" bidding while our would-be group of heroes from season one are cooking up a "strain" of their own that will infect vampires and essentially kill them.

Guillermo del Toro's handiwork is evident in the exploration of vampire biology which ends up being intriguing enough to stick with the show week after week. We are also fed nuggets of information about the vampires. We've learned there is more than one master, and they are not fond of one of their number going rogue. We've learned that Abraham is 94 years old and sustains his youth by turning the vampire worms into a boiled down cocktail that he injects into his eyes to give him the strength of someone thirty to forty years younger. And we've also learned that no one in New York City really seems to care that people are dying everywhere.

This is one of the things that I thought I Am Legend captured so wonderfully in those snippets of all hell breaking lose that we saw through Will Smith's flashbacks. Maybe Fear the Walking Dead (which is supposed to premiere in August) will show how an apocalypse exploding in real time should happen, i.e., widespread panic and people screaming while buildings burn to the ground. Everyone in The Strain just seems so damned calm, and it's weirding me out a bit. "Oh there's a vampire apocalypse? Let's just break into this spa, kill some vamps, and then have sex in the pool." "Oh there's vampires eating people by ejecting six foot snakes from their mouths? No worries, I still need to see your I.D. to get into this place and there's going to be a ribbon cutting ceremony at the new food bank down the street." As far as I can tell, it's business as usual in New York with people going to their jobs and kids attending school. All I can say is...really? Have you not seen the vampires eating your neighbor? Why is traffic on the streets not gridlocked with people trying to get the hell out of New York City?

Anyway, my criticism aside it's not going to make me stop watching. I just am a little flummoxed at this particular representation of an apocalypse.

Everybody on the Strain is obsessed with making bad choices

Oh boy. Sunday night's episode of The Strain called "Occultation" featured the long awaited "Eclipse" moment that has been advertised for a year now. The build up to the solar eclipse made me think that the proverbial shit was really going to hit the fan. In my mind I was thinking swarms of vampires emerging from the sewers with blood dripping from their maws and attacking New Yorkers enmasse. What actually happened is kind of "meh." A few people got infected, but New York remains pretty much New York, only with people growing increasingly more terrified of "strange events" because there are reports and eyewitnesses of supposed crazy people attacking others "non crazy" people.

But just like most horror tropes, the Strain's strongest plot moments come at the expense of intelligence. First off, there's Dr. Ephraim Goodweather who approaches his wife Kelly by going to their home. Ephraim is "on the lam" because the FBI has footage of him dragging the dead pilot from the airplane we saw in episode one down the hallway, so yeah, he's wanted for murder. Still, Ephraim manages to duck the pursuers enough to get to his wife's home and warn her. And it's pretty stern. "Get out of New York. Take the kid. Run." She replies, "You're scaring me." And his response is, "I'm scared. There's a pestilence. You have to run." Can you be any clearer than that?

But of course, she doesn't. I mean, why would you question the word of a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control that's had a profound career as an M.D.? I tell you what. If a doctor from the CDC told me that I needed to drop everything and get out of town, I'd grab the keys and be gone within the hour.

But the disbelief doesn't stop there. We have Gus getting ramrodded into helping the Nazi vampire, Mr. Eichorst, who meets him in what appears to be a sewer of all places. First, I wouldn't go into a sewer or an abandoned subway tunnel to meet anyone. Second, when Gus meets Mr. Eichorst again, this Nazi vampire in makeup clearly demonstrates supernatural speed and power. Eichorst threatens Gus' mother and then tosses him some cash to do yet another illegal job, and it never occurs to Gus to just go home, stuff his mother in the car, take the cash and get a full tank of gas, and just leave town. I mean like drive to Mexico leave town.

And then we have poor Jim Kent (played by veteran actor Sean Astin). Jim knows what he's doing is probably endangering the world, yet he still works for Dr. Eichorst all because his wife (whose dying of cancer) is getting signed up for an experimental treatment. But to damn the whole world for love? That's a serious lack of judgement. Jim gets the IQ80 award for the first season of The Strain (and I say that because it's been renewed for a second season).

And finally we have the rat guy, Vasily Fet, who is now killing vampires. He knows that there are monsters under the streets, and no one will believe him. Vasily is like the male version of "Cassandra" from the Trojan War (brush up on your Greek mythology, and you'll know exactly to what I'm referring). He goes to his dad's house and tells his father to take mom and go on a long vacation. Of course, dad just "blah blah blah. You never visit. Now a stranger wants to tell me what to do. Blah blah blah blah." And Vasily shakes his head and mutters, "I tried..."

So yeah, things are getting very ominous on The Strain, and it frustrates me because it doesn't need to be this way. If people would just listen to "the experts" then this wouldn't be an apocalyptic story. But I guess that's the point, right? How can you have an apocalypse if everyone is listening?

The Strain is really good and if you like vampires you should watch it

"...a virus exists only to find a carrier and reproduce, that's all it does and it does it quickly. It has no political views, no religious beliefs, no cultural hang-ups; it has no respect for a badge, it has no concept of time or geography. It might as well be the Middle Ages except for the convenience of hitching a ride on a metal tube flying from meal to meal to meal. That's how a plague begins. So you still wanna be the first one through the door?" --Ephraim Goodweather (CDC doctor).

Spoiler Alert, you have been warned. The pilot episode of "The Strain" pretty much had me on the edge of the couch seat the entire night. The setup for the story is masterful. It starts with a plane that's in the middle of landing when a flight attendant in first class gets a call from another flight attendant at the rear. When she goes back there to investigate, her frightened co-worker says there is a lot of noise coming from the cargo hold. Is it a wild animal? Whatever it is (because it's not completely revealed in this episode) it has enough strength to break through into the passenger area of the plane and in the two minutes it takes to land a plane, manages to kill everyone on board (I'd never heard of the phrase "we got ourselves a dead airplane" but I kinda really love it for the ominous way it rolls off the tongue).

And that's just how the show starts. The mystery quickly builds from there as we are introduced to a brilliant CDC doctor in a custody fight with his wife, a Pawn Shop dealer who has what looks like a human heart in a jar of brine that's infected with hundreds of worms that feed on human blood, and a pale faced gaunt guy with strange eyelids (and who doesn't actually breathe). The pale-faced gaunt guy seems to be the one orchestrating the events in the pilot episode. He's aware that the "cargo" has arrived at the airport and then with what looks to be a wealthy philanthropist, makes further plans to transport a 9-foot-tall coffin filled with 500-pounds of dirt across the Hudson River.

There's plenty of gore in this first episode. A guy gets drained of so much blood he pretty much mummifies on the spot. But the vampire that's draining him smashes his head like a huge melon. It was pretty gross. And the scene where the autopsy guy gets made into lunch for a bunch of newly risen corpses is pretty frightening.

All in all, I'll be watching this series all summer. It's great if you love horror. Even greater if you love vampires. The tension is high, and the ticking clock showing just how little time has passed since event zero just seems to add to that (as what's really going on here is the world is in the first hours of an apocalypse that will destroy all civilization).

Bravo Mr. del Toro. Bravo.

The Strain starts on Sunday and I'm ready to be infected

This Sunday, Guillermo del Toro's "The Strain" unleashes itself upon America. I'm super excited because uber blogging website io9 recently did an expose on how similar the scenes from the pilot are to the comic panels from Dark Horse. When you hug your source material this close to your chest, it has to be good...at least if you're a true fan. For the casual person who just happens to land on FX Sunday night by accident, all the hard work that went into the series will probably have no effect. So here are some of the panels taken from the io9 website:

So what do you think? Intriguing enough to watch? I think so.

Also, today is the day for the Woven cover reveal. Co-authors David Powers King and Michael Jensen worked together on this book, and it's being published by Scholastic. If you have the time, please click on one of the links below and go and check it out.

Michael's FB

Woven FB

David's FB

David's Blog

David's Twitter

Rejoice horror fans because vampires are about to be terrifying again

The FX Network has really surpassed my expectations with American Horror Story: Coven, and now, I have finally watched the first official trailer for Guillermo del Toro's The Strain. I've talked about this show before HERE. Even though there's really not much to see in this video, I am excited. Vampires are about to be vampires again, and that means "TERRIFYING!"

Are these what the vampires in The Strain for FX will look like?

In 2009, film maker Guillermo del Toro gave us the horror novel The Strain. He followed it in 2010 with The Fall, and in 2011 with The Night Eternal. Together with writer Chuck Hogan, del Toro explored the world of vampires that he had begun with the movie Blade 2. Do you remember the Russian vamps that could split their lower jaw in two halves revealing a larger mouth filled with all kinds of terrible things? Yeah, those vampires were a precursor for what del Toro planned to do with vampires. Let's just say (for the sake of convention) that these vamps are a far cry from Edward in Twilight. Rumor is they even defecate on themselves while feeding on humans. Gross but probably something I'll be drawn to watch. I'm a fan of well-done horror that crosses science-fiction boundaries and if del Toro is behind it, the production values should be incredible.

From what I gather, del Toro is exploring vampire biology in The Strain (the sciency twist). He views them as parasites. They introduce a capillary worm into a host's system in the most invasive of ways (del Toro has a thing about vaginas and vagina-like orifices in all of his films) and of course it introduces a virus that changes the host into, well, a blood-sucking vampire. Anyway, I've been looking at comic covers for The Strain to get an idea of how the vampires are going to look when the series makes its debut on FX, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be a fairly accurate reproduction of these panels:

I seriously would not want to be this hapless fellow.

This isn't a herd of zombies. It's a herd of vampires. Zombie Vampire apocalypse
is where the action is at. Wouldn't you agree?

I love the atmosphere in this piece...down to the exposed bloody ribs
of the human victim on the ground. The fact this act took place in what
appears to be a garden shed hints at the horror that engulfs the world.
Even suburbia isn't safe.

DEAD BODIES EVERYWHERE!!!!

Anatomical sketches of the vampire head.

I kind of wonder if The Strain series will follow the path blazed by The Walking Dead. In other words, will they start with a band of survivors just trying to find a safe place to hole up in the ashes of a vampire apocalypse? Like The Walking Dead, The Strain has potential to just keep going season after season with new and different tidbits revealed about the vampires and by rotating the cast (killing off characters with abandon) in fall/season finales.

Have any of you read The Strain comic book or picked up the three novels? If so, what did you think of them?