Van Helsing

I have been watching Van Helsing and I must say that I am rather disappointed although I will finish watching the complete season. I am up to episode 7 and I like the show overall but a number of things are annoying me.

1. The vampires cannot go out in to the sun, so what do the humans do when they travel outside? They stick to the shadows hardly ever walking in the sunlight, they use dark tunnels, they flitter from one shadow to another and keep on telling us that the vampires can get them in the shadows. As long as the vampires stay out of direct sunlight they can basically go and do whatever they want.
2. When the humans are being tracked by the vampires what do they do? They wear boots that make so much noise that they can be heard blocks away. They talk loudly when in tunnels, as we all know sound does not travel very far in an echoing tunnel, oh sorry that’s right IT AMPLIFIES THE SOUND and it echoes for long distances.
3. In episodes 5 and 6 when the 2 women are escaping from the vampires they go through tunnels and cannot hear the 2 vampires following them – even though one of the vampires lets out an ear piercing screech but they can hear it when one of the vampires gives out a muffled grunt when he gets taken.
4. John – if I was a member of this group I would have demanded that either he be kicked out or killed. He does nothing but betray them and sow discontent the whole time. Sooner or later he will get what he wants and get them all killed. He complains when they don’t kill someone then he complains even louder when they do. I know the show has to have at least one person that we do not like but it makes no sense that the group keep him, he is nothing but a danger to them. After his first betrayal I would have kicked him outside or put a bullet in his head.
5. The pace is very SSSLLLOOOOWWWW.

I’ll update this again when I have finished watching the whole season (or until something else annoys the hell out me).

 

UPDATE: 21 Dec 2016, 14:15

Finished watching. I have read a few other reviews about this series and most of the comments seemed to be regarding the ending, words like “unusual”, “unexpected” and “surprising” were used. I cannot understand why! I guessed the ending well in advance and was definitely not surprised, I thought it was totally predictable. I knew her daughter would come into it by the end of the season and that she would be a vampire (actually won a bet on that). As for Axel, from the second the door was closed on him I knew he would be back and not changed, only I thought Vanessa would go back and free him – their way was much better.

Prediction for the second season. Vanessa will bow down to the vampires on the threat of her daughter’s life. This will go on for a number of episodes, of course it will not occur to her to just kill the vampire with her daughter and then bite her daughter to make her human again. Also how come the daughter has not inherited Vanessa’s “abilities”?

Another thing I have issue with is that Netflix are claiming this as a “Netflix Original”, as far as I can find out Netflix had nothing to do with the production of this show. It was made and produced by Nomadic Pictures and distributed by SyFy. The season was broadcast in full on SyFy before it was available on Netflix and it is also available on Amazon Video. I do not think that Netflix would allow any “original” content to be available on a rival service.

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The New Detectives: Case Studies in Forensic Science (Dead Wrong)

Just watched the Dead Wrong episode of The New Detectives: Case Studies in Forensic Science. In the first story the initial investigator must have been one of the dumbest cops on the planet.

The Scene: A house was on fire, when the fire department had extinguished the blaze they found 4 bodies and called in the police. The police found a woman's body in the living room, she had been strangled. Upstairs two children in their beds had been shot. In the master bedroom was the final body - a man, shot in the head. Next to the man's body was found a gun with out a barrel.

Police Conclusion:  Murder/suicide, the man had strangled his wife, shot his kids, set fire to the house and then gone to bed and shot himself. The detective then stated that the more he investigated the more sure he was that it was a murder/suicide.

I may not be a detective but I see one small flaw in the cops theory. Apparently after the man had fatally shot himself in the head, he removed the barrel from the gun and disposed of it, it was never found. So far as I know it is not within the capabilities of a dead man to dismantle the firearm and hide the barrel so well that the cops could not find it. Was the man one of the undead ? He had to be to be able to function after blowing his own brains all over the bedroom walls. Wonder how many murderers, rapist, pedophiles and other low life have gotten away with their crimes because of this moron.

Actual Conclusion: The murderer was a pedophile neighbour who wanted the 11 year old girl of the family but got paranoid that the father was setting a trap for him, so he murdered that whole family. It took them 2 years to work this out and the fact the idiot had left a recording of a verbal diary with his sister. The pedophile was sentenced to death, he was executed on 9 April 2003 - YIPEE.

I must state that I have a very high opinion of police, I have had two family members in the force, both are retired for medical reasons.

Raising Hope

I started watching this about a year ago and could not get through the first episode, since then I have made a number of attempts to watch it but for some reason just could not get interested. I finally made it past the first episode (at the time of writing this I am on season 1 episode 8). The acting is brilliant, especially Cloris Leachman. I have always liked her but in this show she is the best. Martha Plimpton, I was never her biggest fan but here she shines, she is a great actor.

This must be one of the funniest shows to come out of the USA in years, it is a shame that it lasted only 4 seasons but I am only on episode 8 and have 80 more to go, wonder if it will get better ? I hope so.

UPDATE: Have now watched up to half way through season 2. Unfortunately I think that the story-lines are getting a bit thin and verging on the ridiculous. I still think the acting is great and getting better but the actors efforts are being let down by the falling writing standards.

More to come.

Presto

Subscribed to Presto for a free 3 month membership.

Cannot see me lasting the 3 months. I was getting jaded with Netflix selection so decided to try Presto, I am NOT impressed. Less than a day and I am already bored. There is very little that Presto has that Netflix doesn’t but there is a LOT that Netflix has that Presto doesn’t. For example, under SciFi & Fantasy  Movies Presto gave me an option of 75 movies the vast majority of which are old, Netflix – 141 options. The same goes for most other genre’s as well. To top it all off though Presto cost more per month than Netflix. This is Presto’s premium package but my Netflix sub is their budget package. This stands to reason really as Presto is part owned by Telstra which has a reputation of NOT giving value for money (ie make as much money as possible for the shareholders and screw the customer, this is of course only my opinion, cannot afford to be sued by them).

Another issue: The resolution on Presto is not great, certainly not true HD.

UPDATE 22 JAN 16: Installed the Presto APP on my phone this morning. Browsed through and was amazed at the number of different suggestions that did not appear on the Web version, unfortunately that was all I was impressed with. I noticed that they had Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012– ) and it was due to expire in a few days so I decided to watch a few episodes. Wish I could – did not matter which episode I selected it played for about 20 seconds and then stopped ??? WTF. This cannot be caused by my phone as I can play YouTube and Netflix without any issues – another mark against Presto.

As a side note – how did they come up with the name “Presto” ? Sounds like they think it’s magic. Got news for you guys – it’s not.

For the Web versions I prefer the Netflix controls over those for Presto, or I should say the lack of controls in Presto. With Netflix you can use the mouse, arrow keys, media control buttons, spacebar etc.. With presto you can use ….. the mouse, media buttons do not work, keys do not work. When using Netflix the left and right arrow keys can be used for rewind and fast forward  but in Presto they have no affect what so ever meaning the mouse has to be used which is no where near as accurate.For example, play back crashed while I was watching a program and when I restarted it it had returned to the beginning, the first time I clicked on the progress bar (a good 10 to 15 mm from the current position) instead of jumping forward it jumped back to the beginning, this happened numerous times. Also while accessing the progress bar on Netflix and YouTube the time of the location is shown, with Presto it is not. How can you fast forward, rewind or jump to a specific place/time in Presto – guess each and ever time ?  The fail marks are piling up for Presto.

Picture resolution: Ran Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries season 1, episode 1 in Netflix and Presto at the same time. The resolution on Netflix was a lot better than Presto’s. With Netflix you can select your default resolution (I set it to 720 as I could not see enough difference with 1080 on my monitor, to justify the bandwidth usage, TV is a different matter – BIG difference). I could not find any corresponding selection for Presto.

Have not tried Presto with Chromecast yet but not getting my hopes up.

UPDATE 23 JAN 16 16:20: Just tried with Chromecast – VERY unimpressed. Could not play anything, all I get is a blank screen (monitor and TV), appears to load but does nothing. That is it, Presto is done. Have cancelled my subscription after less than a week. Biggest load of garbage and biggest rip-off I have ever encountered.

Netflix Recommendations

Was just flicking through Netflix looking for something to fill the time and noticed one odd thing – nearly 50% of the recommendations were from Bollywood. I have never watched nor (intentionally) selected a Bollywood movie, so why am I getting a lot of them recommended ? I have no interest at all in Bollywood programs.

I wish Netflix would give us a way of opting out of categories or at least let us select which categories we do want. My top optouts would be Bollywood, all non-English speaking programs (I can only speak English and have no desire to read subtitles) and Reality (there is nothing “real” in these).

New Page

Check out my new Netflix page.
It lists all the categories (over 3000) that I have found so far, the results of each search will depend on which country you are streaming Netflix from.

I have already found a few movies that did not turn up in my normal searches nor in the categories under Browse.

Enjoy and leave me a message if you find any that I do not have.

Jessica Jones

Sorry but I could not help myself. I had to go back and give this another chance.

My original review on Netflix was removed and when writing a new one their spell checker said “The word ‘netflix’ is not allowed”, REALLY!!. This appears more and more like censorship. Notice also that any bad reviews are at the end of the reading list? That is so that people will only see the good reviews and get suckered into watching crap.

Here is the latest review I wrote on Netflix, wonder how long until it is removed?

========= Review ===========

Do not know why but my original review is no longer here. Censorship by any chance?
I stayed away from this show for some time because of the really bad scripts and stories. I decided to give it one more chance to see if things improved, sad to say but the answer is no.
This time I could only make it through 2 episodes before getting pissed off. The plot is VERY slow and VERY predictable. Acting is mediocre at best. I am very disappointed in David Tennant, I thought he was a far better actor. The lead character makes choices that mean that more people will suffer because she is too damaged and too soft to prevent the suffering but to also end her own. I cannot see this garbage lasting more than one season, if it does then they had better make a marked improvement.
I cannot believe that this is getting so many great reviews. Makes me ask questions like: Why was my original negative review removed? Does Netflix get their staff to write the good reviews? I know a few other people that have watched this show and have the same opinion as me.

++++++++++++++Spoilers+++++++++++

At the end of episode 9, Jessica has Kilgrave in the isolation chamber with his parents when things start going wrong – no shock treatment. Instead of looking for the short in the circuit she does what ? After making a point of telling people NOT TO GO INTO THE ROOM she goes into the room. The result?? Surprise, surprise – he escapes. I worked out that he would escape and who would help him the second he was put into the chamber and it was 100% ensured that his parents would die. This will definitely be the last episode I will watch.

Update – 14 Jan 2016: Just checked and this review is still on Netflix.