The Parades | review by Stephen Theaker

After a huge earthquake hits Japan, a 35-year-old single mother and journalist, Minako (Masami Nagasawa), drowns in the subsequent tsunami. Not that she realises at first. She wakes up on a beach strewn with wreckage and of course her first thought is to find Ryo, her seven-year-old son. Rescue workers ignore her questions. So do survivors, and a colleague from work. The first person to acknowledge her is her colleague’s daughter – because the little girl died too. Later, as Minako searches through the rubble, a young man, Akira (Kentarô Sakaguchi), calls to her from his van. He can see her, and she can touch his arm. She’s in such a state that he offers her a lift to where he is staying, a cosy outdoor bar in a little fairground in the middle of nowhere. He tells her it’s a gathering place for people like them, by which he means those who died with regrets and aren’t ready to move on.

Badland Hunters | review by Stephen Theaker

Although not a direct sequel, this South Korean film is set in the world of Concrete Utopia, which doesn't seem to have had a UK release. Based on a comic called Pleasant Bullying by Kim Soong-nyung, the previous film apparently showed the aftermath of an earthquake striking Seoul so hard that all the skyscrapers collapsed. People tried their best to survive in a devastated urban environment, to build some kind of order among the chaos, but things went awry: a Sight and Sound review described it as "a Ballardian story set in a post-apocalyptic apartment complex".

I doubt many reviewers will use "Ballardian" to describe Netflix's Badland Hunters, which is a self-consciously pulpy and over-the-top affair. A prologue shows us that, when the earthquake hit, mad scientist Yang Gi-Su was trying to resurrect his daughter. Three years later, by which time a drought has added to everyone's problems, he is still mad-sciencing away, and with the help of soldiers has taken over an apartment block that still stands. With his new experiments, Yang Gi-Su aims to create humans who can survive the extended periods of dehydration and malnutrition that are practically inevitable in this dry new world.

The Punisher, Season 1, by Steve Lightfoot et al. (Netflix) | review

Jon Bernthal returns as The Punisher, Frank Castle, after being so good in the second season of Daredevil. That makes this that rarest of things, a non-fantasy spin-off from a fantasy show. (NCIS is another, being a spin-off of JAG which featured, at least in the episodes I saw, a psychic whose powers helped her solve crimes.) There are no resurrected ninjas in this one, no super-powers, just lots of violent people with lots of guns. The events of Daredevil left everyone thinking that Frank Castle was dead, and he’s pretty much finished wiping out the organised crime gangs involved in the gunfight that led to the death of his wife and family. However, a guy going by the name of Microchip (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who is also pretending to be dead, has tracked him down, and wants help clearing his name, so that he can return to his own lost family. What’s more, Dinah Madani of Homeland Security (Amber Revah) has returned from Afghanistan with a mission of her own, to find who killed her partner, and that’s going to lead her into Frank’s sights. This is a very well made action programme. Bernthal, a serious actor, is given lots to chew on, and he conveys both Frank’s heart-rending pain over losing his family and his bottomless rage concerning everyone involved. When he’s upset, you believe it, and when he lashes out, it looks like it hurts. The action, whether it involves guns, knives or fists, is always well-staged, clear and exciting. There is a formula to these Marvel shows, with the airtime divided between the titular heroes, their allies and the villains, and Iron Fist showed how it could hurt the show if any of those are less than compelling. Here, all the story threads are compelling, and viewers are unlikely to feel that there hasn’t been plenty of Frank in the show. It’s really good. Stephen Theaker ****

Death Note, by Charley Parlapanides and chums (Netflix) | review

In this American adaptation of the Japanese saga, dropped by Warner Bros but then produced by Netflix, Light Turner – yes, that’s his name – is plying his trade, homework for cash, while watching the cheerleaders practice, when out of a cloudy sky falls a battered book with the words Death Note on the front cover. He picks it up, then gets himself punched in the face confronting some bullies. He gets punished for the homework service, the bullies go free, and in detention he has his first encounter with what we will learn is the death god Ryuk, in a scene where the shrieksome Nat Wolff as Light Turner makes you wonder if this is going to be a horror comedy. It’s not, or at least I don’t think it is meant to be, but then, once Ryuk has made his first entrance, it’s not very scary either. It’s more a thriller with supernatural elements. The chatty, persuasive, spiny-backed monster (voice by Willem Dafoe, body by Jason Liles) tells Light that if he writes a name in the book, that person will die. If he specifies how they will die (and it has to be physically possible – no sharks in toilets, he is told), that is how they will die. There are lots of other rules, and bit by bit the film tells us those that will be relevant to the plot. Ryuk tempts Light into using the book, and it’s an easy sell: those bullies are harassing a cheerleader, Mia (Margaret Qualley, from The Leftovers). Soon Light and Mia will become close, and start using the book, but you know she’s a bad influence because she’s smoking in her first scene, and as they expand their death noting it’s not long before L, trained since the age of six to be the world’s greatest detective, is on the hunt for them. L, easily the best character in the film, is played by Lakeith Stanfield, also great last year in Atlanta and Get Out. I wouldn’t have minded seeing a film just about him, and apparently there is a spin-off of the previous Japanese films about the equivalent character.

Blazing Transfer Students, Season 1, by Yuuko Kawabe and chums (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Seven students, coincidentally all named Kakeru, start at Tanebi School on the same day, and are thrown into the ring to fight each other. Played by the members of Johnny’s West, a Japanese boy band whose members range from twenty to thirty years of age, they are all distinct types. The trailer describes them as “the excessively zealous fighter”, “the unbelievably smart nerd” (who has very smart glasses), “the young wannabe samurai” (obsessed with old television dramas), “the incredibly average guy” (who seems to be a bit of a creep), “the hoodlum from a bygone era” (who has a magical quiff), “the ultimate crybaby” (who has a Moe haircut) and best of all “the appallingly vain narcissist”, though I’d descibe him more as a lover of beauty in all its forms. After a seven-way special moves brawl, they try to escape, but are recaptured by the other wacky students of this place. Hikari takes them to the principal to learn why they are here: to train as blazing transfer students, who go undercover, two or three at a time, in troubled schools and sort them out. Imagine a cross between 21 Jump Street and Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, with special effects comparable to The Sarah Jane Adventures. Did I mention that the principal, who assigns their missions, is a lifesize mannequin in the form of the lead character from the original manga? It’s posed for different shots, but is never seen moving, and it never ever stops being laugh out loud funny. It also tickled me when, in a later episode, the artist behind the original comic from the eighties turns up to declare he is unhappy with the television adaptation and brings his own replacement team! Other missions include things like a school where all the pupils turn into zombies at night and one whose female pupils have been kidnapping nice boys and keeping them in a cage, to find out what nice boys are like. It’s a shame Hikeru wasn’t directly involved in more of the missions, but it is after all a vehicle for the seven male pop stars. I remember borrowing a friend’s copy of the Doramu Encyclopaedia and being amazed to see how many live action Japanese fantasy programmes there were that I had never heard of. I’m glad Netflix are giving us the chance to check them out. (The Japanese title of this one is Honō no Tenkōsei REBORN.) If you ever wanted to see a programme where one man focuses a jet of wee through the magical quiff of the guy giving him a piggyback, or where two guys in a beauty contest battle it out with magic winks and a visible workman’s aroma, this is it. ***

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, by Gen Urobuchi (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

After half of century of all out attacks, humanity and its alien allies definitively lose the battle against the giant monsters, and the only option remaining is to flee the planet. It takes twenty years in space to reach a potential new home, but an attempt to land on that planet ends in disaster. A return to Earth becomes the least terrible option. One problem is that they have travelled very quickly back and forth, and so time dilation means that thousands of years have passed on Earth in their absence. An even worse problem is that Godzilla – or at least a godzilla, they reason – is still alive, and the planet’s ecology has reshaped itself around him. If humanity wants to recapture Earth, Godzilla will have to go. Captain Haruo Sakaki has a plan to take down the monster, but he’s less than fresh from a spell in the brig and doesn’t yet have the trust of the six hundred lives sent to carry out the mission. Godzilla’s toughness is revealed in this film to be thanks to a personal forcefield, and they have to destroy the organ that generates it if any lasting damage is to be done.

The Good Place, Season 1, by Michael Schur et al. (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Kristin Bell plays Eleanor Shellstrop, a young woman who died in a horribly embarrassing way and now finds herself in the Good Place with Michael (Ted Danson). It’s not exactly heaven as people have imagined it – none of the religions quite got it right, Michael tells her – but it seems rather delightful. There’s a soulmate waiting for her, the bookish Chidi Anagonye (William Harper), and wonderful next-door neighbours to hang out with, socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and monk Jason (Manny Jacinto). And the activities on offer! The lovely little village has umpteen frozen yoghurt vendors, flying lessons, grand balls. The only problem is that – and look away here if you want to remain completely unspoiled, because although this is the premise of the show it does come as a twist in the first episode – Eleanor is not supposed to be there. She was an appalling person when alive, selfish, greedy and mean, and she’s only in the Good Place because of a mix-up. But she likes it, and she wants to stay, and so here is where it develops into a programme as Reithian as the Lord could desire: she has to learn to be good, and Chibi tries to teach her. It becomes a programme that makes the point, every single week, that to be a good person you have to do good things, which feels like an important point to be making at the present time. No surprise that it shares a creator with Parks and Recreation, a programme all about the importance of good governance and being involved with civic life. There are a few saucy jokes, but on the whole it’s ideal for watching with children, who will love the special effects while digesting a series of important moral lessons. It’s a good show, and it’s a good show, that educates, informs, and entertains. And season two’s not bad either. ****

Iron Fist, Season 1, by Scott Buck and chums (Marvel/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Joy (Jessica Stroup) and Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) are the siblings who run the immense multinational Rand Corporation, which was founded by Wendell Rand (who died with his family in a plane crash) and their unpleasant father (David Wenham), who died of cancer. A problem presents itself: a homeless man (Finn Jones) turns up at their building, claiming to be Danny Rand, son of their father’s partner, and an old friend of theirs. If it is Danny Rand, he would own 51% of their company. At first they don’t believe him, to the extent that they throw him out without asking a handful of obvious questions that could have easily confirmed his identity.

iZombie, Season 2, by Rob Thomas and chums (The CW/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Liv Moore is a zombie, after being scratched by one at a really wild boat party a couple of minutes into season one. Luckily she won’t go “full Romero”, as they call it here, as long as she keeps snacking on brains. Since the brains work just as well if the owner is already dead, she got a job in a morgue, where she works with lovable Englishman Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), who soon learnt her secret and began to work on finding a cure. In season two Liv continues to use her brain-visions to solve murders with Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), a grumpy detective. What she doesn’t know is that Vaughn Du Clark (Steven Weber), the owner of Max Rager, the energy drink involved in kicking off the original zombie freakout on the boat, is experimenting on zombies and has ensnared someone close to Liv… At nineteen episodes this series is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be (season one was a tidy thirteen), and having a couple of arch-enemies in the main cast means that (like the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) we check in with them very frequently, even though the meat of the programme isn’t the ongoing arc, it’s the stories of the week, where the humour of Liv dealing with her new brain-given personalities make it come close to being the replacement for Psych that I really, really want. This season includes episodes where she eats the brains of a fraternity brother, a real-world vigilante, a librarian who writes erotic fiction, and a country singer, always with amusing consequences. The funnier it is, the more I like it. ***

The Expanse, Season 1, by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Robin Veith and chums (Syfy/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

James S.A. Corey’s novel Leviathan Wakes was one of the first books I ever requested from NetGalley, back in 2011, but I never got around to reading it. This excellent television version suggests that was a big mistake. As the series begins, humans have not yet left the solar system, so far as we know. There is a good deal of tension between Earth, Mars and those who live further out. Julie Mao, a young woman with connections to the Outer Planets Alliance, has gone missing, and a freighter is attacked while investigating what we know to be the ship she was on. Our protagonists are a group from the freighter who survive, led by James Holden and Naomi Nagata, trying to find out what happened and why, and a cop on Ceres, Joe Miller, played by Thomas Jane, who also has a very groovy haircut, and has been hired to investigate the young woman’s disappearance. It may not be a surprise to discover that there is a lot of shady stuff going on, but that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of surprises. This is a proper science fiction television series with a really good series-length plot that feels perfectly paced and still makes each episode feel like a significant chapter in the story. The effects are at times absolutely excellent, and never less than needed to tell the story clearly. The cast is excellent, and seem to be taking it all very seriously. I’m very much looking forward to season two. ****

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

Spectral, by George Nolfi (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

James Badge Dale (24, The Pacific) here plays Clyne, a character quite similar to the chap he played in the underwatched spy show Rubicon. There he was an extremely intelligent analyst who grew concerned about the patterns he was beginning to see, and he stayed for the most part in his office. Here, on the other hand, he is an extremely intelligent engineer who gets pulled away from his usual work at a DARPA lab to address a problem in the field. There is a civil war in Moldova, at some point in what appears to be the near future, and American peacekeepers on the ground have been seeing things through the special goggles he created: spectral things. And now the things have started to kill, leaving victims flash frozen. Once there, he meets CIA analyst Emily Mortimer and chap in charge Bruce Greenwood, and applies himself to the job. He confirms that whatever they are, they aren’t glitches in his goggles, just in time for a massive surge in their numbers. As the city falls to their attack, Clyne must work with the surviving troops to track the spectrals to their source. This is a really good little film, with an excellent cast, sort of what you might expect the Syfy channel to produce if they weren’t pumping out deliberate rubbish (enjoyable as that can sometimes be). It’s directed very nicely by Nic Mathieu, and could easily have justified itself as a cinema release, although you know that if it had been, bigger stars would probably have been cast, their pay packets requiring the movie to be more of a traditional blockbuster, and it wouldn’t have been the same. It never feels cheap (it feels not unlike a big budget Asian film), the spectrals have a interesting origin, and James Badge Dale makes a very likeable lead. It’s great that the economics of Netflix made a film like this possible, and I hope there’s more of the kind to come. ***

Jessica Jones, Season 1, by Melissa Rosenberg and chums (Marvel/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Jessica Jones is a private eye, and she’s down on her luck, doing jobs for a shady lawyer that don’t always bring out her best side. Traumatised by having fallen under the mental control of a powerful psychic for a long period, and the things he forced her to do during that time, she’s drinking too much and not looking after herself. She has a couple of things going for her: superstrength (though no more invulnerability than is required to punch people very hard without breaking your own arm) and a good friend, former child star Patsy Walker. (Their friendship and its history is one of my favourite things about the programme.) Sadly, we’re not joining Jessica at the point where things start to pick up for her. She does meet a new guy, Luke Cage, who seems able to deal with the worst drunks in Hell’s Kitchen without taking a scratch, but it’s not one of those relationships built on mutual trust, at least at first. And she’s beginning to think that Kilgrave, her psychic tormentor, might be back, and it’s impossible to make anyone believe her when he can just order people to forget that they’ve ever seen him. He is back (and played with a gleefully childish lack of conscience by David Tennant), and he’s going to cause a lot of trouble before the thirteen-episode series is over.

Daredevil, Season 1, by Drew Goddard and chums (Marvel/Netflix) | review

Matt Murdock is a blind lawyer affronted by the injustice he sees in his home of Hell’s Kitchen, a part of New York damaged badly in the battle between the Avengers and Loki’s army of alien invaders. Property developers are moving in, but some of the current inhabitants don’t want to move out, and that’s the kind of case that the newly established firm of Nelson and Murdock can be persuaded to take. What the two lawyers don’t know at first is that behind it all is a shadowy kingpin, who is bringing together Russian, Chinese and Japanese gangsters in one great criminal enterprise. Anyone who dares to utter his name – Wilson Fisk – is killed for their indiscretion, making it impossible to pin anything on him. It would be an impossible situation were it not for Matt’s unusual abilities. The chemicals that took his sight enhanced all his other senses – taste, touch, hearing and balance – and he was trained in combat, at least for a time, by the mysterious Stick. These skills let Matt fight for the city, at first in a black mask, and by the end of the series in the distinctive red suit of Marvel’s Daredevil.

This is an extremely violent series, much more so than Agents of SHIELD or Agent Carter, not suitable at all for children. Matt Murdock tends to get very badly wounded, since he’s often fighting against the odds. A fight in the second episode is the best I’ve ever seen on television, like looking down the classic corridor scene in Oldboy. Wilson Fisk is an utterly brutal villain, his fists the piledrivers they are in the comics, Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance so chilling, so physical and intense, that he’d have had awards nominations if this wasn’t a series about a superhero. (I hope we’ll see him face off against the Avengers or Spider-Man or Daredevil himself on the big screen at some point.) It draws on many periods of the comics, in particular those written by Frank Miller, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Waid, to create a classic version of the character. The mood is dingy and grim, though Foggy brings just the right amount of humour to stop it getting too gruelling – and were those the stilts of Stilt-Man I saw in the background of one scene? Its pace is very much its own; this couldn’t be a network show, with the constant need to cue up adverts that has made programmes like The Big Bang Theory little more than a series of vignettes. The episodes stretch out fully over their running length, building up to moments of sudden, shocking violence. My only grumble is about the frequent discussions about the existence or not of god (Matt Murdock being a Catholic and Wilson Fisk an atheist), which seem bizarre given that the season’s plot follows on from a battle between Loki and Thor. Would people keep believing in other gods, or for that matter remain atheists, when real gods have been seen on television? Perhaps they would, but it makes Matt seem a bit daft. But that’s just a minor issue. I wouldn’t just rate this higher than the other Marvel television series, I’d rate it higher than most of the movies. And season two is going to feature the Punisher and Elektra! Let’s hope a change of showrunner doesn’t put a billy club in the works. Stephen Theaker ****

From Dusk Till Dawn, Season 1 / review by Stephen Theaker

From Dusk Till Dawn is a television series produced and developed by Robert Rodriguez for his own El Rey network, and shown on Netflix in the UK. Unlike Blade: The Series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles or Stargate SG-1, this isn’t a sequel, it’s a remake and an expansion. The outline of the plot is mostly unchanged. The Gecko brothers (nephews of Nice Guy Eddie from Reservoir Dogs) are bank robbers on the run, trying to cross the border into Mexico. They take hostages, a widowed clergyman and his two unhappy children. They end up at a biker bar, a strip club where the star performer is several hundred years older than she looks. The one big difference is that supernatural elements kick in sooner, as Richie’s visions of a mysterious woman inspire him to kill.