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By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 3/28/2013
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The formula for the Final Destination films is simple. Someone has a vision that results in a small group of people avoiding a major catastrophe that would otherwise have resulted in their deaths. Then, because it was “Death’s Design” for these people to die, one by one they start dying in freak accidents. The central and highly uplifting message being that you can’t cheat death.
Each of the five (to date) Final Destination films has had pretty much exactly the same plot, and yet people keep coming back for more because when it comes to the Final Destination franchise, plot doesn’t really matter all that much; it’s all about the cool deaths. These become more creative and more improbable with each movie, but never descend to the stomach-churning depths of the Saw films. This week we revisit the five Final Destination movies:
Final Destination (2000)
The first in the series, this is the film that lays down the ground rules. The deaths aren’t as elaborate as in the later films and it deals with the relatively serious themes of dealing with the deaths of your friends and survivor guilt, but the script is the best of the franchise. The characters are written as more than just cannon fodder and it includes a sub-plot in which the police suspect the main character (Devon Sawa) of being a serial killer (which is logical, when you think about it).
Initial Catastrophe: Aeroplane crash.
Survivors: 7
Best Death: Ms Lewton’s death by kitchen accident.
Stars: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Seann William Scott, Kerr Smith, Tony ToddFinal Destination 2 (2003)
This film builds on the “rules” established in the first film by introducing the notion of “second degree survivors” (i.e. people who cheated death because the people in the first film cheated death) and the possibility of breaking “Death’s Design” through new life. However, in the process, the story becomes overly complicated. The initial catastrophe is pretty awesome (the best of the franchise) and it’s less serious than the first film, but the deaths become less interesting as it goes along. My least favourite of the series.
Initial Catastrophe: A multi-car highway accident.
Survivors: 8
Best Death: Evan’s death by kitchen accident (similar to Ms Lewton’s death in the first film but amped up a notch).
Stars: Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Tony Todd.Final Destination 3 (2006)
Co-written and directed by James Wong who also co-wrote and directed the first film, this is the point in the series when the writers stopped worrying about plot and started focussing on making the deaths as elaborate as possible. No new rules are established and the rules of the first film are learnt pretty quickly via internet research (isn’t the internet wonderful?); the additional rules established in the second film are completely ignored. This gives the writers more time for the good stuff, including adding a second catastrophe on top of the initial one. As an optional extra, the DVD release of Final Destination 3 includes a “Choose Your Own Fate” version of the film. Making use of alternate takes, the movie is turned into a ‘choose your own adventure’ story, where it is possible to make (mostly minor) changes to the movie, although a correct decision at the first choice allows you to save Wendy and her friends completely, causing the film to end after 22 minutes.
Initial Catastrophe: A roller-coaster accident.
Survivors: 10
Best Death: Lewis’s death by exercise machine.
Stars: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche.
The Final Destination (2009)
With respect to quality, The Final Destination represents the low point in the Final Destination series. The acting is wooden, the dialogue is clunky and the characters are so completely unlikeable that you want them to just hurry up and die. However, when the characters do oblige and do just that, you’ve got to admit, the deaths are better than they’ve ever been. The goriest (and funniest) film in the series, The Final Destination was shot in 3D, with the deaths designed to make the most of this effect (i.e. lots of deaths by flying object). The film makers also manage to, once again, squeeze in a second catastrophe by including the twist of having the main character have a vision any time any of the survivors is about to die.
Initial Catastrophe: Race-car crash.
Survivors: 10.
Best Death: The death of Carter the racist redneck during an attempt to burn a cross on someone’s lawn.
Stars: Bobby Compo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Haley Webb.
Final Destination 5 (2011)
The final entry (to date) in the Final Destination series is amazingly good for a film so late in a horror franchise. So good, in fact, that it’s a toss-up between this film and the first for the title of best in the series. Final Destination 5 takes the best elements of all of the previous films (awesome deaths, dual catastrophes, survivor guilt, a sense of humour, 3D and Tony Todd), and raises the stakes by adding a few additions of its own. For the first time since the second movie, a new “rule” is introduced, whereby the survivors can avoid Death’s Design by offering Death someone else in their place. This takes the series in a whole new direction. The ending is very cool (I won’t spoil it by giving anything away) and as an added bonus, prior to the credits rolling, there is a montage of deaths from the previous four films. In addition, timed to coincide with the release of this film, actor Miles Fisher released a music video for his song New Romance (linked below), featuring several Final Destination 5 cast members meeting improbable and grisly deaths.
Initial Catastrophe: Suspension bridge collapse.
Survivor: 8.
Best Death: The death of Candice the gymnast.
Stars: Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher and Tony Todd.
Which of the Final Destination movies have you seen? What was your favourite Final Destination moment? Comment below.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 3/21/2013
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This is the third in a series of five posts reviewing the nominees for the 2013 Best Young Adult Novel Edgar Allan Poe Award, the winner of which will be announced on 2nd May 2013.
Set during World War Two, Code Name Verity tells the story of two young women, Maddie, a working-class pilot from Manchester, and Queenie, a Scottish aristocrat turned wireless operator. Thrown together by circumstance, the two girls forge a strong friendship which is tested to its limits when one of them is captured by the Gestapo in France.
How on Earth did Code Name Verity ever get nominated for a mystery award? Over the course of the last couple of months, Code Name Verity has been nominated for numerous awards and made it onto just about every best young adult book list for 2012. I don’t have a problem with that. What I can’t understand is it being nominated for the Best YA Novel Edgar award because, well, to put it simply, IT’S NOT A MYSTERY!!!
According to Elizabeth Wein’s afterward to the book, Code Name Verity started life as a portrait of a female Air Transport Auxiliary pilot in WW2 and built from there. It’s a work of historical fiction and Wein did her best to make it as historically accurate (or at least plausible) as possible. That's the thing I liked most about this book. It takes historical facts and turns them into a story that's a lot more accessible than a boring History textbook. Yet, nowhere have I found any suggestion on the part of Wein that she ever intended Code Name Verity to be a mystery.
By definition, a mystery is a book with a puzzle (usually a crime) at its heart, with the emphasis being on finding a logical solution to that puzzle. Although, as in just about every book ever written, there are things that are not initially revealed by the narrator, discovering those secrets is not the point of this book. It is a story of friendship; it’s about how Maddie and Queenie became what they are and the adventures they have together after they meet; and it’s about the lengths they go to because of their friendship. Given the fact that Code Name Verity had been nominated for a mystery award, I looked very hard for any elements that could even vaguely class is as a mystery, but try as I might, I couldn’t find them because they’re just not there.
Code Name Verity has been incredibly well received by critics and readers alike, and I imagine it will be set for study by high school History and English teachers for many years to come. Nevertheless, just because a book has been critically acclaimed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should automatically be nominated for every award there is. Regardless of how good Code Name Verity is, it seems completely wrong for it to even be considered for a mystery award. There are dozens of awards out there for fiction in general, but only a handful, such as the Edgars, dedicated specifically to mysteries. If a non-mystery can potentially win an Edgar award, then why bother having the Edgars at all?
Verdict: A thoroughly researched historical novel that has touched the hearts of many, but definitely not a mystery by any definition.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 3/14/2013
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Casey Noland (Justin Urich) doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, so he announces to his class that he wants to be a serial killer. This draws the attention of Sasha (Lisa Loeb), a suicidal goth girl who offers to help Casey learn everything he needs to know about killers, provide she can be his first victim; and the local police, who are investigating a string of murders in Casey’s home town. Now Casey must use his new found skills to find the real killer before the police decide to arrest him instead.
Every high schooler knows that the one thing you don’t joke about is killing your classmates. Horror-comedies about high schoolers who want to kill people are also generally frowned upon. Yet somehow, writer-director Trace Slobotkin managed to get Serial Killing 101 a.k.a. Serial Killing 4 Dummys a.k.a. Serial Killer made, and not since Heathers have I seen a teen film that’s quite this warped and twisted.The key to Serial Killing 101 getting away with what it does is that, at heart, Casey Noland is a genuinely nice guy. He might wear a lot of black and listen to Marilyn Manson, but when it comes down to it, he can’t even manage to dissect a foetal pig in Biology without throwing up or stand up to his “gymnasium class coach” (Thomas Haden Church), an ex-military type who sarcastically berates Casey on a daily basis. Had Casey actually been capable of killing, this film would have been a whole lot darker and probably would never have been made (although Season 1 of American Horror Story did manage to get away with that, more or less). As it is, we are instead presented with the hilarious prospect of watching a guy whose natural instinct is to be kind to old people, trying to go against those instincts in order to impress the girl he likes. The result is a lot more fun.Speaking of “the girl”, Sasha is one of my favourite horror film heroines of all time. The problem with a lot of movies about (male) geeks is that the geek usually ends up with some hot cheerleader type whom they have nothing in common with. Yeah, yeah, I get the whole “wish fulfilment” aspect of such a pairing, but I always walk out of those films assuming the guy and girl will break up one week later. In Serial Killing 101, however, Slobotkin presents the audience with a pairing we can truly believe in. Sasha’s not just there to be eye candy; she’s working with Casey to achieve his dubious goal and is every bit as weird as he is.Serial Killing 101 is a low budget film from a first (and only) time writer/director, with Corey Feldman in a (very small) cameo as its biggest star. Virtually no one has heard of it and in Australia it hit the DVD bargain bin immediately upon its release, which is a shame because it’s one of the most original horror-comedies of the last decade.Verdict: Thomas Haden Church steals the show as a comically sadistic gym teacher in this original but twisted horror-comedy.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 3/7/2013
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This is the second in a series of five posts reviewing the nominees for the 2013 Best Young Adult Novel Edgar Allan Poe Award, the winner of which will be announced on 2nd May 2013.
After coming home from work to find his step-father, a writer currently working on a script about an underworld king-pin, bludgeoned to death, high school drop-out Finn Maguire becomes the police’s premium suspect. With the police seemingly reluctant to consider other possibilities, Finn must venture into London’s criminal underworld in order to find some answers and clear his name.
Writer Niall Leonard sure knows how to write a fast-paced, action-packed thriller. Although Crusher is his first novel, he has had years of experience as a screenwriter for British TV series including Hornblower and Wire in the Blood, and Crusher reads just like it was written for television.Crusher contains everything that YA readers brought up on screen-based entertainment could possibly want: a sadistic gangster; a hero capable of defending himself against trained killers; unexpected plot twists; even a femme fatale, in the form of Zoe, Finn’s sort-of-girlfriend. The individual scenes are exciting and cinematic, and keep you turning the pages until the very end. Yet, in spite of this, I never actually cared whether Finn lived or died. This is largely because Crusher’s greatest strength is also its weakness.
With television, it’s often necessary to sacrifice character development and back story in order to fit an episode into the allotted time. This happens all the time with mystery shows and audiences accept it because they understand the situation, but with books, things are different. Within reason, a book can be as long as it needs to be, so there’s no reason to scrimp on set-up and depth of character. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Leonard does in Crusher. Plot twists are unexpected because they come out of nowhere; and Finn’s character is reduced down to the bare-bone facts that he’s a drop-out with dyslexia (which, incidentally, seems to get better or worse, as suits the story). It’s difficult to give a damn about a character who you never really know, and it’s equally difficult to care about a mystery when you aren’t given enough information to stand a chance of solving it for yourself.
Crusher is literary junk food. It was fun while it lasted, but had so little substance that, less than two days after finishing it, I need to flip back through my copy in order to remember the details. I enjoyed it enough so that I wouldn’t rule out reading the sequel, which Leonard is reportedly working on at the moment, but I’ll wait until it comes into my local library.
Verdict: An enjoyable but forgettable debut from the husband of Fifty Shade of Grey author E.L. James.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 2/28/2013
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Ethan dreams of escaping the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina until the day Lena, a Caster girl (a being with supernatural powers) and quite literally the girl of his dreams, arrives. Despite discouragement from just about everyone in town, Ethan befriends Lena and gets much more than he bargained for, including love, time travel and a quest to save Lena from being “claimed” for the dark side on the night of her 16th birthday.
Given the obvious similarities to Twilight, there was always a danger Beautiful Creatures would be written off as “just another paranormal romance”. That was the assumption I made, too, until I noticed the large number of Oscar winners and nominees attached to the movie (Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Viola Davis and writer/director Richard LaGravenese), which convinced me that there might be a bit more to the story than just that. Fortunately, I am one of those people who have to read the book before seeing the movie, because while the book of Beautiful Creatures exceeded my expectations, the movie left a lot to be desired.
The Book (2009 - Authors: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl)
Based on the first in a series of novels, Beautiful Creatures does, admittedly, feature a romance between a mortal boy and a Caster girl, but it is also a mystery; horror story; Civil War drama; and small town story in the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird (which the authors cite as one of the novels that inspired them). The book is told from the point of view of sophomore Ethan Wate, whose father has locked himself away in his study ever since Ethan’s mother’s recent death, and who is now being raised entirely by Amma, his family’s housekeeper and local fortune teller. Ethan understands what it’s like to be different in a town where being the same is a way of life, and the parallels between his own life and Lena’s provide a means for readers to understand what it’s like to be a Caster living in a human world.
Coming in at almost 600 pages, the authors have plenty of time to develop all of their ideas and the book never seems to drag, in spite of its length.
The Movie (2013 - Stars: Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert)
Inevitably, when translating a book as long as
Beautiful Creatures to film, something has to give. Writer LaGravenese takes a
Reader’s Digest condensed book approach to the adaptation, meaning that the majority of the novel’s sub-plots are still present, but in a severely cut-down form. Such an approach is rarely satisfying and
Beautiful Creatures is no exception. Characters drop out of the story, never to reappear; sub-plots that spanned hundreds of pages in the novel are introduced and resolved in a matter of minutes; and Ethan seems to completely forget that he has a father. Nevertheless, I expected as much going in, so was prepared for it. What I didn’t expect was LaGravenese’s decision to change the book’s ending.
Without spoiling anything, in the book, Lena and Ethan are both very much involved in the grand finale. In the movie, however, Ethan is completely removed from the action and Lena is left to fight the dark Casters alone. Given that Ethan is the story’s main character, this gives the film a very weak ending. I don’t have a problem with movies taking liberties with their source material, but if a movie is going to deviate from a book’s ending, it should, at least, try to improve on it.
The Winner
The book, all the way. In fact, don’t even bother with the movie. Save your money and buy the book instead.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 2/21/2013
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This is the first in a series of five posts reviewing the nominees for the 2013 Best Young Adult Novel Edgar Allan Poe Award, the winner of which will be announced on 2nd May 2013.
On the run from her murderous step-father, Becca King, a fourteen year old girl with the ability to read minds, goes into hiding on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Seattle. But when one of her new-found friends meets with an accident that leaves him in a coma, Becca must act carefully in order to avoid drawing the attention of the police and her step-father.
It seems to be the trend now days for adult crime writers to have a go at writing for teenagers. James Patterson, John Grisham, Peter Abrahams, Kathy Reichs and Harlan Coben have all had a crack at it, and The Edge of Nowhere, the first book in a planned series of four, is Elizabeth George’s attempt. Unfortunately, while writing for young adults seems to come naturally to some of the abovementioned writers (Peter Abrahams and Harlan Coben are particular stand-outs), the same cannot be said for Elizabeth George.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 2/17/2013
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Teenage werewolf Scott and his best friend Stiles track down a university professor who may be able to help them find a cure for Scott’s condition.
Last week I wrote about Season 1 of Teen Wolf, which is one of the best teen horror series around. Slotting in somewhere in the middle of Season 1’s chronology is the seven episode web series Teen Wolf: Search for a Cure. It tells of Stiles and Scott’s attempts to find a cure for Scott’s lycanthropy by locating a university professor, Dr Conrad Fenris, who seems to know something about werewolves. The webisodes expand on the werewolf mythology, including how a werewolf can be killed and the different types of werewolves (Alphas, Betas, etc), and give a bit more back story to Derek, but due partly to the short length (around 20 minutes in total) and low budget, lack a lot of the humour and action that viewers of Teen Wolfhave come to expect.
The best web spin-off series I have seen to date was the
Ghostfacers spin-off of
Supernatural. Although the series centred on a group of minor characters who have appeared in only a handful of
Supernaturalepisodes, taken together, the webisodes formed a 40 minute show with a story that was almost up to the standard of a normal episode of
Supernatural (albeit, without Sam and Dean).
Teen Wolf: Search for a Cure, on the other hand,
was sponsored by telecommunications company AT&T, and made available AT&T’s Facebook page (as well as
MTV’s website), and at times feels like a cross between a university lecture and an extended AT&T advertisement. The first two episodes feature Stiles showing Scott videos of Dr Fenris’s lectures on his phone, and although I’m not 100% certain, I’m guessing there was a bit of shameless plugging for one or more of AT&T’s products going on here.
That being said, Teen Wolf: Search for a Cure is not a complete waste of time. Given that most web spin-offs of TV shows focus on minor characters rather than the series leads (like the Supernatural web series mentioned above), it is nice to see a web spin-off series where the main characters of the original show actually appear for a change. Search for a Cure also provides an introduction to Dr Fenris, who later appeared (very briefly) at the start of episode 9 of Season 1 (and incidentally, is played by John Posey, real life father of Tyler Posey, a.k.a. Scott). If you are a die-hard fan of the show, you will want to watch this. For everyone else, though, I wouldn’t bother.
Verdict: An average web spin-off of an exceptional TV show.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 2/14/2013
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When Scott is bitten by a werewolf, he goes from being an ordinary 16 year old to star of the school lacrosse team, but with his new abilities come new problems, including having to deal with the fact that his girlfriend comes from a family of werewolf hunters who want to kill him.
When you mention Teen Wolf, the first thing that comes to the minds of most people is a distant memory of the 1985 movie starring Michael J Fox. “Didn’t they make a sequel starring Jason Bateman?” Yes, they did, but the MTV series of the same name is a far cry from the original movies. 
MTV’s Teen Wolf takes the basic Teen Wolf concept (that of an average teenager who becomes extraordinary after becoming a werewolf) and a few of the original characters and uses these to create the best horror-comedy series that’s hit the small screen since Supernatural. Whereas the original movie was essentially a light-hearted wish fulfilment comedy with the message “be yourself”, the Teen Wolf series is much darker in tone. In the original movie, Scott’s “condition” was hereditary and by the middle of the film, Scott actually preferred being “the wolf” to being his normal self. In the series, Scott’s condition is caused by a bite, and he spends much of his time trying to find the werewolf that bit him (the Alpha) so that he can kill him and be “cured”. If that latter plotline sounds familiar (and not in a Teen Wolf way), you’re right. The Teen Wolf series is far closer in tone and in plot to another 1980’s horror-comedy, The Lost Boys, a fact which writer-creator Jeff Davis confirmed in this interview with The Hollywood Reporter. 
Being a TV series, rather than a 90 minute movie, the Teen Wolf series has ample time to develop its plot. The entire first season is effectively one big story that has been cut into 12 pieces, with episodes often picking up minutes after the ending of the previous episode. It also has some great characters (and actors who portray them). The writers have man an effort to make every character interesting (and I mean every character) and to avoid, subvert or springboard off teen movie stereotypes wherever possible. For example, Lydia, the bitchy, popular girl, is a mathematical genius pretending to be an airhead. Jackson, the lacrosse jock, wants to become a werewolf as the ultimate performance enhancer. You get the idea. If I were to make one criticism of the series, it would be that the male characters tend to be better written, have more depth and be more realistic that the female characters, but Scott’s girlfriend’s marvellously psychotic, werewolf-hunting Aunt Kate more than makes up for that.
Teen Wolfdark, there’s blood and a genuine sense of danger, but it also has a great sense of humour. Don’t let the original movie put you off, Teen Wolf is a show to watch.Verdict: Forget about the original Michael J Fox film, Teen Wolf the series is a dark, funny and well-written take on the werewolf legend.
Bonus – on Monday, I will be posting my review of the spin-off web series, Teen Wolf: Search for a Cure.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 2/7/2013
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What was the best YA mystery novel of 2012? According to the Mystery Writers of America, it’s one of the following:- Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things by Kathryn Burak: A dual mystery that centres on the disappearance of Emily Dickinson’s dress from a museum in Amherst and the disappearance of the main character’s best friend.
- The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George: Apparently the first in a new series of books, The Edge of Nowhere tells of Becca, a girl with the ability to read minds, who is on the run from her criminal step-father.
- Crusher by Niall Leonard: Finn, the prime suspect in his father’s murder, must scour London’s underworld for his killer in order to clear his name.
- Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield: Set in a small New England town, Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone tells the parallel stories of murder victim Amelia in the days before her death and college-bound Becca, who is trying to make sense of the murder.
- Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein: A WW2 historical thriller about Verity, a young British spy captured in Nazi-occupied France.
These are the nominations for this year’s Edgar Allan Poe (Edgar) award for Best Young Adult novel.
This list comes as both a surprise and a slight disappointment to me. At the time of writing, I haven’t read any of these books, and prior to the Edgar announcement, I had only even heard of three of them (The Edge of Nowhere, Crusher, and Code Name Verity), the other two not having been published in Australia yet (the descriptions above are all based on descriptions supplied by the books’ publishers). Three of these books are by first time novelists (Emily’s Dress…, Crusher, and Amelia Anne…), Code Name Verity is by a writer whose first five books are YA fantasy, and The Edge of Nowhere is the first YA novel by an adult crime writer. It seems surprising that none of the books are by writers who’ve had more experience in writing YA mysteries.
My disappointment isn’t so much that these books were selected (as I said, I haven’t read them and for all I know, they could be the five best books ever written), but that some of the other books that were also eligible for selection weren’t. One of my favourite books of the last year was Slide by Jill Hathaway, another first-time novelist. Like The Edge of Nowhere, Slide is a mystery about a girl with an unusual power, the ability to “slide” into someone else’s body and see through their eyes, and contains some wonderful characters whom I really enjoyed “hanging out with” for the few days it took me to finish the book. Two of my favourite authors, Libba Bray and Harlan Coben, also released YA mysteries this year (The Diviners and Seconds Away). I had been hoping that all three of these books would make the list. Nevertheless, if the books that were nominated are even better than the ones I enjoyed, then the nominated books must be pretty incredible.
In the lead up to the Edgar winner announcement on 2nd May 2013, I will be reading and reviewing all of these books and giving by views on which should/is most likely to win the award, but I’m also interested to hear what you think. Which of these books have you read? What did you think of them? What was your favourite book of 2012? Please let me know below.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 1/31/2013
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Rich girl, Kaylee, and her boyfriend, fellow student and groundskeeper’s son, Mason, are missing and Kaylee’s mother has just found a dead body in the back of her car. What has happened to Kaylee and Mason? Have they been murdered? Kidnapped? Or are they two runaways, on the run after committing murder?
By chance, rather than good planning, last week I came across Runaways, Awesomeness TV’s original mystery web series, which is now in its second season and judging by the number of YouTube views, is a runaway hit. Told using an interview format with flashbacks, Runaways is the story of Kaylee and Mason, two prep school students from different sides of the tracks, who have gone missing and are now the subject of a police investigation. “Since when are a couple of runaways a reason to interrogate half the school?” asks one student of the ever present, yet unseen, detective early in the series. A question which the audience is just as eager to know the answer to as the characters.
At the start of the series, both the audience and the characters are in the dark as to what has happened to Kaylee and Mason and Season One is all about putting together the pieces to figure out what has happened to them. Are they dead? Were they kidnapped? Did they run away? And what is that thing in the trunk at the start of episode 1 that looks suspiciously like a dead body? Even when the identity of the corpse is finally revealed at the end of the season, there are still enough unanswered questions to keep the audience wanting to come back for more.
Season Two of Runaways follows the same format as Season One, but goes into a lot more detail. For this reason, I preferred Season Two to Season One. In Season One, Kaylee and Mason are little more than names. Season Two gives them a back story, as it does for many of the other characters, putting forward a range of suspects who might want to kill Season One’s victim. If Season One was all about answering the “what?” of the mystery, Season Two is about answering “why?” At the time of writing, there is still no Season Three, but hopefully, that will answer the final and most important question: “who?” Who is the killer whose actions were the catalyst to the show?
Webisodes are a difficult medium in which to tell a story. Each episode of Runaways is only around 3 – 5 minutes long, which initially gives the story a stopping-and-starting feeling and makes it difficult to get to know the characters (although the latter is assisted by name captions which flash up whenever a new character is interviewed). Most of the web series I have seen prior to Runaways have been spin-offs of regular TV shows, which have the advantage of using characters and set-ups that are already familiar to the audience, so don’t have to waste valuable time in introducing them. Season Two of Runawayworks better than Season One for this same reason. Nevertheless, the writers of Runaways know how to hook their audience. Each episode ends with a twist or development that makes you want to go onto the next episode and which resulted in me watching the second half of Season One and all of Season Two in a single sitting (not as hard as it sounds, since Season One is only around 25 minutes in total, and Season Two, 30).
Runaways is a high quality production, created by Brian Robbins who has previously worked on Smallville and One Tree Hill. The story is packed with characters and situations we’ve seen time and again, but it’s fun and interesting and the acting and writing are nothing to complain about. If Season Three were out, I would watch it right now. Unfortunately, I can’t, but if audience figures are anything to go by, the wait shouldn’t be too long.
Verdict: Although difficult to keep track of the characters at first, Runawayssoon morphs into addictive popcorn entertainment that leaves you eager for Season Three.
By: Genevieve Hayes,
on 1/24/2013
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Six months ago, I heard a radio movie critic talking about the recent wave of Hollywoodremakes. She singled out the Friday the 13th remake as an example of a particularly bad and unnecessary remake. Although I agree with her that most of the recent remakes should never have been made, she was wrong about Friday the 13th. It was one of the better horror remakes. It was true to the spirit of the original films, was suitably bloody and in many ways outdid the originals. Nevertheless, her comments didn’t surprise me:
Mainstream movie critics don’t get the horror genre.
Fast forward a couple of months to a day in December when a friend of mine asked about the copy of Slide by Jill Hathaway (a Young Adult mystery novel) that was lying on my desk at work. I spent the next five minutes explaining to him that there was more to Young Adult (YA) fiction than wizards and sparkle vampires and that many YA mystery novels were as good as, if not better than, their adult counterparts. But again, I wasn’t surprised:
YA mysteries, thrillers and horror novels are vastly underappreciated
Two weeks later, the idea for this blog was born.
This is a blog about mystery, thriller and horror movies, books and TV series. As these genres are so broad, I’m going to focus primarily on teen or YA-centric stories, as they generally receive less attention than adult stories, and because that’s where my interests lie. Even though it’s been a while since I left my teens, I love stories written for and about this age-group. There are a million different reasons why adults read and watch YA books and movies, but here are mine:
Teen stories are faster moving and more exciting than stories for older audiences.
Last week I tried to read Bag of Bones by Stephen King. King is one of my favourite writers and I’m usually on board with anything he writes, but this book was painful. It’s about a writer, presumably loosely based on King himself. At the start of the book, the writer's wife dies, then he gets writers block for four years…AND 100 PAGES! Where was the editor on this book? After 80 pages, I couldn’t bring myself to read another word and gave up. It was the first time I have ever given up on a Stephen King novel. Given that 300 pages is long for a YA novel, there isn’t time for the action to stop for 100 pages in such books.
There seems to be an unwritten rule that if you’re writing in the teen horror, mystery or thriller genres you MUST have a sense of humour. I’m not sure why this is the case, but I’m not complaining. The main reason why I got into horror movies as a teen was because they were funnier than a lot of the comedies that were coming out at that time. I currently believe that Supernatural and Teen Wolf are two of the funniest shows on TV.
Teen stories are more imaginative.
Some of the plots used in teen stories are just brilliant. A teenage girl who hunts vampires in her free time? Sure. A teenage boy who becomes the star of his school lacrosse team after being bitten by a werewolf? Why not! For some reason, plots like these are considered too far-fetched for older audiences, but not for teens, and these are some of the best stories around.
Going forward, my plan is to write at least one blog post a week. Topics you can look forward to include:
- The best movies/books you’ve never heard of.
- Author profiles.
- General discussions relating to the genres.
- Series reviews.
- Comparisons of original movies and their remakes.
If you’re still not sure, the next few posts should give you a better idea.
I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to let me know either by leaving a comment or using the contact form.
