Penny Dreadful (Season 1)

Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) is a famous explorer.  However, his trekking into deepest darkest Africa has been put on hold while he seeks his daughter, Mina Harker.  Mina has been abducted by something foul and supernatural.  As such, Murray has assembled a team of specialists to face the threat.  Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) has a way of knowing things, a sensitivity to the spiritual.  Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnet) is an American marksman who happened to be on tour in England when Miss Ives recruited him.  He has a dark and mysterious past, but proves to be a stalwart ally.  Sembene (Danny Sapani) looks to be an African tribesman with deadly knife skills who serves as Murray's butler.  There must be a story here, but it is not revealed.  Finally, requiring a doctor to examine the corpse of a vampire (?!), Murray recruits Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway).  Can this band of heroes find and rescue Murray's daughter?

Of course, there are other figures in London.  Frankenstein's creature (Rory Kinnear) demands a mate that will be like him.  Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) has taken an interest in Miss Ives, Ethan, and even Ethan's lover, Brona (Billie Piper).  There are many subplots to allow development of every character.

Here is what The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could have been.  Penny Dreadful creates an excellent blend of dark horror with calls to Dracula, Frankenstein, and Doran Gray.  Entertaining and engaging.  Highly recommended.

Hawks (1988)

The movie opens with Deckermensky (Anthony Edwards) taking a test drive in a SAAB in England.  His aggressive driving is soon a cause for concern to the salesman (Geoffrey Palmer), especially when Decker detours into a quarry.  Decker orders the salesman out of the car and then races toward a cliff edge.  He hits the brakes and skids to a stop only feet from his doom.

Bancroft (Timothy Dalton) is a cancer patient in a UK hospital.  He sees that his new roommate, Decker, is asleep.  Bancroft is both charming and obnoxious, leaning more toward the obnoxious.  When Decker is awake, Bancroft is a source of both the worst of the news and also a voice to fight against the inevitable.  He is particularly harsh when Decker talks suicide.  Bancroft tells a tale of his youth when he and a band of friends called themselves the Hawks.  They were merry pranksters who sought to find humor in everything.  He recruits Decker and the pair are soon inseparable.  Bancroft decides it is time to pursue a dream that Decker mention: go to a high-end brothel in Amsterdam!  To do so, they steal an ambulance.

Elsewhere, Hazel (Janet McTeer) is having a breakdown.  She is pregnant thanks to an affair with a Dutch tourist.  Her friend, Maureen (Camille Coduri), convinces her to let the father know.  The pair set out for the Netherlands.  Sadly, Maureen's car breaks down, but an ambulance stops to assist.

The movie swings from humor to tragedy.  Cancer patients are a strange choice for the main characters of a comedy.  The strangest part was that Decker is an American Football player who happened to be in Europe for a tour.  Why has he remained in England for treatment rather than return to the US?  His parents visit but he declines to return with them.  Why?  Then there is the oddity that Bancroft is obsessed with the wife who left him in his hour of need.

Made between Dalton's two appearances as James Bond, this is a huge departure from that role.  That he dons a clown nose and has rainbow hair adds to the craziness.  It has its moments, but the downs outweigh the ups.  Just okay.

Doom Patrol

The latest DC comics TV series is Doom Patrol.  The Doom Patrol consists of a bunch of misfits with superpowers, more or less.  There is Robotman, Elasti-Girl, Negative Man, Crazy Jane, and the Chief.  Cyborg shows up early though he appears to be on -loan rather than a full member.  The series opens with introductions of each character and their origin story.  Cliff was a race car driver who, in 1988, 'died' in a car crash.  Now he is a brain in a can.  Rita Farr was a successful Hollywood actress who, in 1955, was exposed to a toxin that made her melt when stressed.  She has achieved some control so as to maintain her shape but she's still iffy.  Larry Trainor was a test pilot with dreams of joining Project Mercury in 1961 until he flew through a radioactive entity that left him horribly disfigured and inhabited by an alien symbiote.  Crazy Jane has multiple-personality disorder with the twist that most of the personalities have a superpower.  Chief is a rich, secretive genius who appears to be immortal.

Early on, the Chief (Timothy Dalton) is abducted by archvillain Mr. Nobody (Alan Tudyk).  The entire season has the general goal of finding Chief.  Instead, it mostly delves deeply into the ruined hyper-sensitive psyches of the misfits.  Robotman is obsessed with the daughter who grew up without him.  Rita misses the limelight but starts melting at the slightest provocation.  Larry is gay.  Though the show takes place in the current year, he is still stuck in 1961 and obsessed with a lover he hasn't seen in almost 60 years.  Flashbacks and imagined encounters have gratuitous face sucking.  Of course, the comic version of Larry was straight (he was written in the 60s after all).  Crazy Jane is just a basket case who emotes venom at everyone and at all times.  She shifts from one unappealing personality to another.  Cyborg is guilt-ridden about his mother's death and can't seem to master his cybernetics.

The biggest problem of the show was the timeline.  It keeps flashing back to each character's origin which becomes infuriating.  Rita and Larry are in their 90s.  Cliff and Jane are pushing 70.  The Chief was an active explorer in 1912 and doesn't look any older as of 2019.  Clearly, the comic was published in the 60s and the character bios would work just fine if the setting was somewhere in the 1960s.  Robotman looks like he was assembled with 1950s technology rather than 1990s tech.  Why?  Every time you start to buy into the characters in the modern era, we flashback to the 1950s or 60s and you wonder why these characters aren't dead already.

Beyond the timeline issues, the characters suck.  Robotman and Crazy Jane spend their time being angry and dropping a variety of four letter words.  They scream and yell and curse to prove that they care and want to be proactive.  Or, in Jane's case, just wants to scream and yell and curse because life isn't fair.  Negative Man is generally apathetic.  When he isn't having his imagined trysts with his 1960s boyfriend, he mopes and bemoans his fate.  Wow, 60 years on and he still hasn't adjusted or even figured out how to communicate with his symbiote.  Rita is similar though she is more of the keep up appearance type person.  When forced to participate, she complains and whines.  Cyborg is tolerable.  In fact, he's a fairly likeable character who isn't either in a constant rage or soul-crushing depression.  Chief is rational and stable but has a very small part and is absent for much of the series.  Of course, the 'team' he has assembled reflects poorly on him.

Skip this turkey.  I wish I had.