Netflix changed the entire business of video rental, not just once when it established the DVD through the mail rental service offering a selection that dwarfs any neighborhood rental store (and has put quite a few out of business) not just twice when it began to offer a growing selection of service online to watch instantly through Roku and other similar devices, but with the advent of the Americanized version of the British political drama series House Of Cards Netflix had begun to create its own content. On the heels of its success with House of Cards comes Hemlock Grove.

Grove is based upon the book by Brain McGreevy, and as visualized for television offers up a sort of amalgam of Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets The Addams Family that unless you are a just a huge fan of the genre of the teens save the world entertainment, falls a bit flat on its face as horror. I am sorry to say I cannot evaluate the series as representative of the book as I have not read the book so I will not tell you that if you are a fan of the book that this is worth watching. Despite a stellar cast of familiar names and new faces, or bodies in the case of Amazon Eve as Shelly (background, center) whose face we rarely see even when we do, and despite a disturbing new envisioning of lycanthropic transformation, I found Grove predictable, which unless you are Alfred Hitchcock is the death knell of a Murder Mystery/Horror story.

The series seems to be trying to pry fans away from zombies and make werewolves sexy in the way that Comics/TV series like Walking Dead and books like Pride And Prejudice And Zombies tipped the chip off Vampire’s shoulders in recent years, but it becomes too confused with story lines of  fringe bio-engineering that we never get to see, current economic issues that are magnified by the wealthy local family who used to own the steel mill shifting their investment to said bio-engineering and building a huge glowing sky scraper in rural Pennsylvania, and the mystery of what Shelly might be.

I find myself as unmotivated to check out season two as I found many of the characters to have done the things they do in the course of the story, especially leading up to the climactic stand-off in the final episode.

I hope Netflix will continue to produce content as they are obviously willing to put a lot of effort into production. I  just also hope they find some better fare for future projects.

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