This Week's Comics

Angel: After the Fall #13, Samurai: Legend #2, Final Crisis #4, Final Crisis: Submit #1, Hellblazer #248, Unknown Soldier #1, Runaways #3, Superman: New Krypton #1, Wolverine: Manifest Destiny #1, X-Men: Legacy #217, X-Factor #36, New Exiles #13, Captain America #43, Birds of Prey #123, Trinity #21.

Review: Supernatural, Episode 4.5, "Monster Movie"

After beginning the season with four dark mytharc episodes, Supernatural dials down the intensity with a humorous interlude that's a homage to classic Universal horror films like Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man. As usual when the show needs to lighten up, staff writer Ben Edlund (creator of The Tick, and a former staff writer on Angel and Firefly) is responsible for penning the episode. An Edlund episode never fails to amuse me, and it's just as much fun this time because of the references to some classic genre films that I love.

Director Robert Singer gets into the fun of things with a credits sequence out of a 1930s film, going monochromatic for the entire episode (black-and-white with a slight blue-green tint), and taking a few camera setups right out of the classics the episode's referencing (I caught one from James Whale's Frankenstein).

Good fun. Now back to the dark mytharc.

Review: Eleventh Hour, Episode 1.1, "Resurrection"

Eleventh Hour is an American remake of a British miniseries. The original was created by Stephen Gallagher (writer of two Classic Doctor Who serials), and starred Patrick Stewart as a scientist investigating weird scientific cases while being protected by a Special Branch agent played by Ashley Jensen. In the remake, Stewart and Jensen have been replaced by Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton as a scientist and an FBI agent.

The US remake is from prolific film and television producer Jerry Bruckheimer (the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the CSI television franchise). Mick Davis (The Invisible) is the showrunner, and CSI producer/director Danny Cannon is also involved. Davis wrote this episode based on Gallagher's original script and Cannon directed it.

I haven't seen the British original, so I can't compare the two, but I wasn't at all impressed by the first episode of the US remake. It feels like a plodding cross between CSI and The X-Files, and its basic concept is too similar to Fringe. Even if it had debuted before Fringe, it still would be the lesser of the two. One episode was enough for me to cross Eleventh Hour off of my viewing list.