666 PARK AVENUE: First Thoughts on ABC’s New York Horror Story

666 Park Avenue (2012) – Season 1, Episodes 1-6 – Starring Terry O’Quinn, Vanessa Williams, Rachael Taylor, Dave Annable, Robert Buckley, Mercedes Masohn, Erik Palladino, Helena Mattsson, and Samantha Logan.

If you’ve read any of my reactions to WAREHOUSE 13, you know that it’s a show I do not love, yet always watch. I like the characters, I like the welcoming vibe, I like the stories, but none of it moves me. When it pops up in my Hulu queue, I watch it, but when it’s not there I’m not wondering what happened. Eventually, SyFy will stop making it and I’ll go, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and then go have lunch and forget about it. I bring this up as a means of introducing ABC’s new horror show, 666 PARK AVENUE, which I watch and like and will likely not mourn when it goes away.

To be certain, 666 is a better show than 13. It’s better written, better acted, better directed, and has a better visual style. There’s also actual consequences to the things that happen in 666, unlike WAREHOUSE, which hits the Cosmic Reset Button so much that it makes Russell T. Davies uncomfortable. 666 is even, in it’s own way, a more enjoyable show than WAREHOUSE is, which is a fair comparison to make, I think, since both shows deal with unexpectedly weird things happening. WAREHOUSE is full of more likeable characters, but both shows know who their characters are and deliver copious amounts of their signature traits.

666 PARK AVENUE focuses on two couples living at the Drake, a residential hotel in New York City. (Outside of the TV, the Drake is the Ansonia, one of those buildings that’s so cool looking it gets used repeatedly in TV and film.) There’s an older couple and a younger couple, and the show sets up a mentoring relationship between the two couples. The older husband and wife are the owners of the Drake, Gavin and Olivia Doran (Terry O’Quinn and Vanessa Williams). Gavin not only owns the Drake, but he’s the mastermind of much of the creepy stuff that’s going on, and Olivia seems blindly aware of what’s going on, perhaps aware of what Gavin is capable of, but unconcerned with the details.

O’Quinn and Williams are fantastic. They play a wonderful carrot and stick game with the younger couple, Jane Van Veen and Henry Martin (Rachael Taylor and Dave Annable), in which they offer mentoring but never allow them to forget their place. Jane and Henry have been hired to be the Drake’s new building managers, which is the only way they can afford to live in the residence. Gavin and Olivia each want something from the younger couple; Gavin is lining up Henry for “bigger things” and Jane fills the missing role of the Doran’s dead daughter.

The structure of 666 has our four leads doing basically the same thing every episode: Gavin manipulates people for his benefit, Jane experiences something supernatural and spooky inside the Drake, Henry struggles with his desire for political power, and Olivia goes to lunch and shops.

It’s not a complicated format but everyone does their part. The show enhances this format by having various subplots about other tenants in the building. Typically, these plots last an episode or two and then cycle back in some other format, such as when a reporter writes a killer into existence, only to be killed by her creation. The killer is sent to jail, but then Gavin conspires to get him free by using another tenant to assist in the escape.

O’Quinn is always good, and his quiet ruthlessness provides the show’s rock-solid foundation to counter Jane’s spiraling sanity. Rachael Taylor’s Indiana-girl-in-the-Big-City is a curious mix of good and bad; I like that she’s inquisitive but she’s also a bit annoying. As a leading lady in a horror story (and an attractive blonde, at that), you know she’s going to endure the largest psychological damage the hotel can dish out, but I can still appreciate and understand why she goes forward into the creepy room instead of backing away. Her quest for knowledge supersedes her desire for personal safety, and it feels like believable character trait instead of simply a perfunctory plot device.

It’s in the non-detective moments, however, where Jane tends to grate. When she’s hanging out with Olivia and playing the surrogate daughter, or when she’s doing her job and being the Drake’s manager, she’s far less interesting and far more annoying. Luckily, the writers tend to keep her busy with ghosts appearing in her apartment or luring her to the basement or by having birds fly out of the walls.

One of the best aspects of 666 is that it’s clearly learned the lessons of all the failed LOST knock-offs. This show is going someplace and is not taking forever to get there. By the end of episode 6, Gavin has lost his magic box, Henry wants Jane to get help because he thinks she’s crazy, and Jane realizes her grandmother used to live at the Drake, which is why the latest ghost is trying to kill her.

666 PARK AVENUE certainly isn’t the best show on television but it is a rather enjoyable one. It’s effective at delivering some creepy moments and, if nothing else, it provides a good weekly dose of Terry O’Quinn. The show has a darkly slick style and engaging characters, and it’s got the Drake, with all of its dark secrets, to keep me coming back every week.

MAN-THING: Let Him Dig. It’s His Own Grave He’s Digging.

Man-Thing (2005) – Directed by Brett Leonard – Starring Matthew Le Nevez, Rachael Taylor, Jack Thompson, Rawiri Paratene, Alex O’Loughlin, Steve Bastoni, and Conan Stevens.

Yup, this movie exists.

What’s really surprising about MAN-THING, however, isn’t that it exists, but that’s there’s decent talent involved. The director, Brett Leonard, is also the guy who directed Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity, Alex O’Loughlin (credited here as Alex O’Lachlan, his real name), star of Hawaii Five-O and Moonlight has a secondary role as a deputy sheriff, and Rachael Taylor, who had a minor role in a very successful movie (Transformers) and a major role in a very unsuccessful TV show (Charlie’s Angels).

If MAN-THING were made now with O’Loughlin and Taylor, they’d be out front, but since this was made when they were both starting out, it’s Matthew Le Nevez who’s out front, appearing in nearly every scene of the movie. Le Nevez is definitely a better actor than you might expect to find in a low-budget horror movie, but he’s not so much better that he can carry the film. I’m not familiar with Le Nevez but based on his resume he seems to be one of those actors that’s caught between movies and TV shows. Which is fitting, because according to the Never Wrong, the film was originally intended to be a direct-to-video release, then they decided to give it a theatrical release, then they changed their minds domestically, while still giving it an international release. When Americans finally got to see it, it was on the Sci Fi channel back when their name was short for “Science Fiction” and not “Syphilis.”

What I genuinely like about MAN-THING is that it represents an attempt at making a serious movie; this isn’t one of those low-budget monster movies that’s played for laughs or for campiness. What I dislike about it, however, is that it’s serious without being engaging, and the result is a slow-moving, predictable, grind-it-out film that’s perhaps better than it needs to be, and thus not good enough than I want it to be. It’s a shame because I’m always banging the drum for diversity of story in superhero movies and it would have been nice for Marvel to be able to show off that they could take one of their minor characters and build a successful horror movie around him. The result isn’t very scary, though, nor very good.

And really, MAN-THING’s biggest crime isn’t its predictability, but its dullness.

Kyle Williams (Matthew Le Nevez) is the new sheriff in a Louisiana swamp town. There’s been lots of disappearances and murders, including the previous sheriff, and now we’ve got that unwelcome outsider story who will take a fresh look at the strange goings-on in Bywater, Louisiana. (That’s actually the funniest line of the movie. When he’s in a boat with one of the locals, Kyle asks, “Why do they call it Bywater?” to which the single-toothed local says, “Because it’s by the water,” as if it were obvious. Which it really was.) Kyle quickly discovers there’s two problems in town, and we all know they’re related: all the missing persons/murders and the conflict between the oil company who are drilling the swamp and the tribal advocates who claim the land is sacred. There’s a missing tribal leader, who allegedly took off with all the money the oil company paid him for right to drill on the land, and a mysterious Yul Brynner cosplayer walking around in the swamp who’s allegedly the killer.

The movie changes much of the comic book origin (no super soldier serum), but it also names characters after Mike Ploog, Steve Gerber, and Val Mayerik, so there’s something here to both annoy and reward those who watch these movies for how closely they relate to the comics.

MAN-THING employs an environmental vs. corporation struggle, but it really doesn’t play a huge role in the film because the corporation is just a bunch of shifty redneck bad guys who wear a company logo that’s clearly supposed to remind us of the Nazi swastika for some reason, and the local Indian tribe, even though the tribe doesn’t really play a role in the film. Pete Horn (Rawiri Paratene) is the one tribal character in the film and he’s a spiritual leader who knows that there’s bad things in the swamp in the form of an ancient tribal guardian, but the Man-Thing kills him, too, because why the hell not, right?.

Really, MAN-THING is about a killer (Man-Thing) who we rarely see in full, killing everyone who comes into the swamp. The solution to this problem might seem rather easy to you and I – stay out of the swamp – but the Sheriff can’t do this when he’s got murders on his hand, although it’s not like anyone in town seems to care that there’s dead people or missing people. In the opening sequence, we see two kids at a party run off to get naked and screw in the swamp. The boy dies and the girl becomes traumatized, but Kyle only visits the girl once in the hospital and she’s all gone crazy. When the Sheriff shows up at the diner for the requisite “meet the locals” scene, we do, in fact, meet the bulk of the players in our drama, but there’s no sense that, “Hey, alright, here’s the new sheriff to stop all these killings.” Everyone in town seems cool with the fact that they’re happening, or that nothing’s being done about it. Maybe these locals have it right – the only thing you need to do is … say it with me … stay out of the swamp.

From the moment Kyle meets Teri Richards (Rachael Taylor) you know this is going to be the love angle, but then they don’t really do anything with it, and then later on they start making out like … well, like they’re young kids out in the swamp looking for some action. What’s hilarious about this moment isn’t that the lead up to the make out session is way, way, way underdeveloped (that’s just bad storytelling), but that when the oil company head (who is much more of the local tough guy variety instead of J.R. Ewing – we’re not talking about a major corporation here) rolls up on them and catches them in the act, both Kyle and Teri start buttoning up their half-unbuttoned shirts.

They were out in the open, making out for five seconds, yet each of them managed to end up looking like they were a half-second away from stripping down and going at it right outside of Pete Horn’s place.

Impressive.

The Man-Thing costume/CGI bit is weak, but that’s to be expected, and I don’t really hold that against the film – if the story is strong enough, any kind of monster will be fine. Instead of doing the comic book thing and making those who “know fear” burn at his touch, this Man-Thing just indiscriminately kills whomever walks around his swamp. As I mentioned above, this is a dull movie, so there’s nothing unexpected like all of the various human enemies having to team up to defeat it. Things happen, people die, Man-Thing gets blowed up, The End.

Despite the gratuitous boob scene at the start, MAN-THING isn’t a cheeseball SyFy or Asylum film with really bad acting and really cheap CGI and really campy stories. And that’s kinda too bad. I appreciate that MAN-THING is an attempt to mostly tell a solid (if predictable) horror story, but the film would have been well-served with a little something else added to the mix, even if that something else was to not take itself so seriously. If you are going to take yourself seriously, you’ve got to deliver a much better story than MAN-THING offers up. I would love to be able to tell you that MAN-THING was a real surprise and that you should add this horror movie into your superhero collection, but it’s just good enough to be anything more than a movie I need to see more than once.

REVENGE & CHARLIE’S ANGELS: First Thoughts on ABC’s New Violent Ladies of Primetime

Revenge (2011) – “Pilot” – Starring Emily VanCamp, Madeleine Stowe, Henry Czerny, Joshua Bowman, Nick Wechsler, and Gabriel Mann; Charlie’s Angels (2011) – “Angel with a Broken Wing” – Starring Minka Kelly, Annie Ilonzeh, Rachael Taylor, Ramon Rodriguez, and the voice of Victor Garber.

REVENGE and CHARLIE’S ANGELS make an interesting combo set of attractive ladies doing violent things.

In REVENGE, we’ve got the ridiculously cute Emily taking up residence in the Hamptons so she can enact revenge against all of the people responsible for framing her father and ruining their lives – this happens when Emily (Emily VanCamp) is a young child; her father ends up dead and Emily ends up in juvenile detention, and then she gets sprung, told by creepy genius Nolan that she’s loaded and owns 49% of his company, and embarks on her revenge quest. Over in CHARLIE’S ANGELS, we’ve got criminals given a second chance, hired by the heard-but-not-seen Charlie to make the world a better place.

The two shows are coming from different places, the innocent girl seeking to make the world better for her and the guilty women seeking to make the world better for others. Violence plays a role in both shows, but each makes an effort to mitigate the use of force.

In ANGELS, Bosley (Ramon Rodriguez) reminds the women that they’re after justice, not revenge and cautions them to not get trigger happy after the murder of one of their teammates. Eve French (Minka Kelly) joins up as their dead partners ex-partner, who wants revenge against a child trafficker who tried to take them when they were younger. Time and again the point is reinforced – justice, not revenge. Violence when necessary, but only in proper amounts. They might be “angels, not saints,” as Abby (Rachael Taylor) tells Eve, but they’re not killers.

Over in REVENGE, we open with a murder of Emily’s fiance Danny (Joshua Bownman), and the indication is that Emily has something to do with it. (He’s killed on the beach, she’s brushing beach sand off her hand, and we hear from another party-goer that she’s got a secret and isn’t supposed to be here.) As the episode plays out, we see Emily target Danny, and learn that the murdered fiance is the son of Conrad and Victoria Grayson (Henry Czerny and Madeleine Stowe) and reformed Hampton party boy. The indication seems to be that she’s setting him up, but as the episode progresses in a timeline “five months earlier,” we learn that he’s trying to put his past behind him, which softens our view toward him. We also finally see Emily’s version of revenge when she outs the affair Conrad is having with Victoria’s best friend by pretending to be a waitress and drugging his soup in their hotel room, causing him to be rushed to the hospital. Emily makes a point to see Lydia at the hotel and then inserts herself into a conversation between Lydia and Victoria at Victoria’s fundraiser where she “innocently” reminds Lydia that she saw the woman at the Southfork Inn and that, “I hope your husband is okay,” thus outing Lydia and Conrad’s affair to Victoria. Victoria shames Lydia and has her removed from the party and thus, the Hamptons. Emily puts a big red X through Lydia’s face on a photograph of her targets.

Emily, in other words, isn’t a murderer. At least not upon first arriving in the Hamptons.

Does that explanation seem complicated? Like LOST, REVENGE operates on multiple timelines. Just present in the first episode we have:

1. The Present: where Danny is murdered.
2. Five Months Earlier: where the bulk of the show is seemingly going to take place.
3. Emily’s Childhood: where she’s named Amanda and living with her dad until he gets taken away.
4. Emily’s Juvie Hall Days: where she’s named Amanda and in a detention center.
5. All Sorts of In Between Stuff: extensions of the other timelines but not directly connected, such as the news footage interview with Lydia, which marks her as her father’s old secretary.

Unlike LOST, none of this is remotely hard to follow. If LOST was interested in creating a 25,000 piece puzzle of the night sky, REVENGE looks more like a 1,500 piece puzzle with clearly defined sections. REVENGE puts an impressive number of balls into play, already setting up a nice web of character relationships that operate on multiple fronts. For instance, Nolan (Gabriel Mann) is the one person who knows Emily is really Amanda, knows that Jack (Nick Wechsler) still has a crush on Amanda from when he and she were kids together (hell, he names his boat Amanda just so we get this point – REVENGE is trying to thrill you more than trick you), and is a general nuisance around the Hamptons, where his money buys him access and his attitude keeps him excluded (which is fine with him).

REVENGE is putting all of these balls into play and they move and bang into each other like lotto balls in a wind machine.

Unfortunately, it’s an uneven first episode. Parts of it feel really fresh (Emily’s revenge quest) but things like the affair, the focus on the social elite, and Stowe’s “Queen Victoria” all seem a bit too stock and staid. I’ll probably give it a few more episodes, because when the best part of a new show is the protagonist, they’ve already got one big hook in you. Emily VanCamp is wonderful as Emily, her sweet, wholesome looks the perfect cover for her less-than-sweet interior.

By contrast, CHARLIE’S ANGELS already looks like a disaster, its mix of flashy attitude and somber story lines making for a toxic mix of messages. We’ve got these ex-criminal ladies living large on Charlie’s dime, engaging in ridiculous masquerades and pulling off ridiculous stunts in order to capture bad guys. The bad guys they chase are really, really bad – like, trafficking kids bad. There’s a whole organization they’ve been trying to crack, so it seems a bit weird when they make a stop and then want to go party at the hottest Miami clubs, afterwards. Work hard, play hard is fine, but the women seem too disconnected from what they’re trying to stop, sending a mixed message to the audience.

In the opener, Eve joins up in the wake of her friend’s murder and she’s all business. She wants revenge, not justice, but she learns that justice is best achieved not by putting a bullet in someone’s brain, but when one pretends to be a waitress and dresses up as a devil, gets captured and tortured, and then rescued by a vigilante outfit.

The biggest problem with ANGELS is that the writing is awful, the casting is awfuller, and the acting is awfullest. The show’s creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (creators of Smallville) have said they didn’t want anything campy, but with this cast, camp is exactly what they should be doing. When Abby scales a building that’s being watched by the bad guys to sneak into an upstairs apartment, her teammates POINT THEIR FLASHLIGHTS AT HER AS SHE CLIMBS. Right. Because that won’t draw anyone’s attention. If you’re going to have stupid stuff like this, then just push the show away from serious issues like child trafficking. If they want us to take this show seriously, then they should have hired better writers and actors. At the very least, they should have these Angels going after people like, I don’t know, white collar criminals hurting white collar criminals, something where they can do their job and then go be crazy party girls.

Overall, REVENGE feels like a show that knows what it wants to do, has the elements in place, and just has to get better doing it, while CHARLIE’S ANGELS feels like a show that knows what it wants to do, doesn’t have the elements in place, and needs to make changes fast.