(MINI SERIES) Bodies - A Fascinating Mystery Drama Series with Some Complex Sci-fi Element

As soon as I read the plot of this upcoming series on Netflix last week, I immediately felt intrigued and wanted to watch it at the earliest. I began to do it on Saturday night and managed to finish on the following day. All right, let us just get right to it.

Brief Story Line

In the year 2023 London, DC Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor - Greatest Days etc) found a naked body with a bullet wound in the left eye and a unique mark on his right wrist at Longharvest Lane. As she investigate the case under the supervision of her boss DCI Jack Barber (Michael Jibson - The Lighthouse etc), they found that it was more than met the eye.

(TV SERIES) The Sandman Season 1 - A Visually Stunning Series Based on Best Selling Comics

After months of seeing this title in the Coming Soon section of Netflix, finally the series was released last week. Despite not knowing anything about it, just the fact that there were plenty of articles talking about the series made me feel intrigued. So I started watching this one during the weekend and completed it last night. OK, I'll dive into it now.

Brief Story Line

Story focused on the character Lord Morpheus/Dream of Endless aka the Sandman (Tom Sturridge - Mary Shelley, Sweet Bitter TV series etc) who was ruler of the kingdom in the dream world known as Dreaming. After being captured for very long time by humans, Morpheus managed to escape and return to Dreaming where his librarian Lucienne (Vivienne Acheampong) took care of business while he was away. During his captivity, one of Morpheus' creation, a Nightmare called The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook - We Can be Heroes, Beckett etc) broke away from Dreaming and wreaking havoc in the waking world. 

(TV SERIES) Sweet Tooth Season 1 - A Dark and Sometimes Depressing Fantasy Series that got Better as it Progressed

On Friday, this new series was released on Netflix which I was a bit doubtful to give a try since I was not familiar with the character and it looked weird too. But when I read that it was well received by critics, I decided to give it a try and finished in 1 day. All right, let's dive into it.

Brief Story Line

Story was set during the time when the world was hit by a deadly virus while at the same time new born babies were somehow became a hybrid of half human and animal. A deer-boy named Gus (Christian Convery) had to be raised by his father Pubba (Will Forte - Scoob!, Keanu etc) in the forest to avoid being captured by people who believed hybrids were the cause of the virus. After 9 peaceful years though, Gus met with a traveler named Jepperd (Nonso Anozie - Artemis Fowl, Zoo TV series etc) and decided to leave the forest with him. During their journey, they met with a young woman who was the leader of resistance movement and called herself Bear (Stefania LaVie Owen - Messiah TV series etc). 

(TV SERIES) iZombie Season 1 - Funny Interesting Series Where Zombie Assists Homicide Investigations

I could not remember how I found out about this series, but I am truly glad that I started to see this few days ago. When I watched the pilot episode, I was immediately hooked and could not stop it. I was always looking forward to the time when I finished my work so I could go home and continue watching it. Last night I finally completed the first season. So here are more details of the series.

Brief Story Line

Olivia "Liv" Moore (Rose McIver - A Christmas Prince etc) was a medical resident in Seattle's hospital and was engaged to Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley - Lipstick Jungle, One Tree Hill TV series etc). Liv's life was turned upside down when one night she was turned into a zombie who had to eat people's brains. In order to keep a permanent supply of brains, she decided to work as assistant Medical Examiner in the morgue under her boss Ravi (Rahul Kohli). However, whenever Liv ate a human's brain, there was a side effect where she would sometime got a vision of the person's lives.

Meanwhile Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin - Freelancers, Breakout Kings TV series etc) was a homicide detective with the Seattle Police Department. During the course of his investigations, he would require the help from the ME office about the cause of death or other information of the victims. This would be where Liv's visions would come in handy while assisting Babineaux in the investigations.

But things would not be as easy as it would seem, especially with the appearance of a mysterious man called Blaine (David Anders - Alias, Heroes TV series etc) who would have an enormous impact on her life. So how would Liv deal with her life that was ruined by becoming a zombie? Could she hide her true condition from everyone including her best friend Peyton (Aly Michalka - Easy A, Phil of the Future TV series etc)? And how did she become a zombie in the first place? Find them all in the first season of this wonderful series.

End of Brief Story Line

Well I hope that the above brief story line did not reveal too much information as I would prefer that you enjoy the surprises and fun experience that I had while watching the series. There were few exciting twists and funny moments which usually happened during Liv's interaction with Ravi, or the amusing time whenever Liv's personality was affected by the human brains. Apart from fun moments, there were obviously some touching moments involving Liv as she tried her best to maintain her sanity as well as the relationships with Major and her family & friends. Detective Babineaux's occasional confused/amazed expressions whenever he saw something weird with Liv were also priceless.

I loved this series because it was able to combine the usually scary zombies into a livelier human-like person with a police procedural type of story. Police procedural series is one of my favorite genre of TV series where we would be shown various cases on each episode to be investigated to find the culprit and usually with a larger story arc that run through a whole series or few episodes (Monk, Castle, CSI, Criminal Minds, Lethal Weapon to name a few). Which is why when such genre was combined with a zombie, I had a lot of fun watching it. I think it had some similarities with another more comedic series like Psych which my wife also totally loved.

Through out the first season which ran for 13 episodes, I felt that the first few episodes were very fun and intriguing, but then the middle episodes became a bit too standard and seemed a bit losing momentum. However from episode 10 onwards it started to pick up the pace until the season finale which I absolutely loved. It was a very amazing episode and I felt it was the perfect finale for a first season. I really really am intrigued to see the following season to find out what happened after that ending.

The series did not have a lot of special effects and the cases sometime were not very very complicated. But it was actually the journey towards finding the bad person that was the main attraction. The makeup effects were so so for a series with zombies. So do not expect the type of zombie apocalypse series like The Walking Dead where the zombies were scary and always go around looking for humans to kill & eat. Interestingly, this series was loosely based on comic book of the same title from Vertigo (the part of DC comics which specialized in different type of heroes or anti-heroes, like Lucifer). There were some brief scenes that looked like they were taken from comic books which I personally think gave a nice touch. However, the comic book itself had different persons all together. The only similarities were the way the homicide investigations were solved through the "visions" from the victims' brains.

In short, if you are looking for a police procedural TV series where the main protagonist is a female zombie and had some funny moments with witty conversations, then this is definitely for you. Now if you prefer your zombie to be the main antagonist, then perhaps this would be too weird for you. However, I would still recommend you give this one a try and watch it as I am pretty sure it would provide you something different and fun. The choice is yours.

Happy watching!

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Girl with All The Gifts - A Unique Zombies Movie

I have mentioned in my previous posts that I got some vouchers from Cinemaxx theater for winning a quiz they held and there was another voucher that I still need to utilize before it expired on 24 November. Since there was only 1 movie left that I had not watched in Cinemaxx (the other one was a supernatural horror movie that I did not want to watch if it was not a full house), I decided to watch this one yesterday. It was only playing in Plaza Semanggi and just 1 show per day at 2 PM. After reaching the location at 1 PM, I immediately exchange the voucher for the ticket and wait for a while until the theater was opened at 2PM (show started 15-20 minutes after that). Let's proceed with the movie itself.

Brief Story Line (possible spoiler)

Movie started with the scene of a young girl named Melanie (played by newcomer Senia Nannua) who was living in a cell block. In the morning, two soldiers would be taking her out of the cell block, in a wheelchair where her hands, feet and head were all strapped to the wheelchair, leaving no room for her to move around. She and 19 other similar type children were brought out of their cell blocks to another room where they were given lessons by a teacher named Ms. Justineau (Gemma Arterton - Quantum of Solace, Clash of Titants etc). It was shown that she was very fond of the children, especially to Melanie who seemed to be the smartest of them all.

(TV SERIES) LUCIFER Season 1 - The Devil Taking Vacation on Earth

Yes, you read it correctly. This is a story of Lucifer, the Angel who was cast out of heaven and condemned to rule Hell for eternity but felt bored and decided to take a vacation in Los Angeles. That's the premise of the TV series and definitely what interest me. It's a brand new series in 2016 and only consisted of 13 episodes, so pretty short and did not take me a long time to watch the whole season completely. Anyway, here is the story from the first season.

Brief Story Line

The pilot episode would introduce us to Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis mostly played in British TV shows), the devil who had the power to compel people exposing their deepest desire and charm people to do stuff they would not ordinarily do and also ladies to have sex with him. Lucifer owned a night club called LUX and he had a bartender named Mazikeen usually shortened to Maze (played by Lesley Ann Brandt - Spartacus series) who was actually a demon that left hell together with Lucifer for Los Angeles.

In first episode, a pop star named Delilah who knew Lucifer from days before her fame was shot to death while together with him. Lucifer who was immortal survived the shooting and wanted to find out the person behind Delilah's murder. So when detective Chloe Decker (played by Lauren German - A Walk to Remember, Hostel Part 2 etc) was assigned to this case, Lucifer offered his help to solve the murder which was rejected by Decker.

There was also another detective Dan Espinoza (played by Kevin Alejandro - True Blood series) who was Chloe's separated husband. He suggested Chloe to close the case fast as it was considered just a drug deal gone wrong.

Lucifer who would not take no for an answer easily, tried to do his own investigation and he met Chloe again who finally decided to better let him help her rather than interfering. In this episode we were also introduced to an angel named Amenadiel (played by D.B. Woodside - 24 series, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 etc). He kept on encouraging Lucifer to return to hell since he was stuck with the task of guarding hell while Lucifer was taking this vacation. Lucifer would always reject Amenadiel's requests.

During their investigation, Delilah was found out having a lot of session with a therapist named Dr. Linda Martin (played by Rachael Harris - Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Barely Lethal, etc) who would later become Lucifer's therapist as well.

Lucifer and Chloe were doing quite well together solving the first crime, despite Chloe's uncomfortable feeling with Lucifer's apparent self confidence, narcissism and claiming to be the Devil. She felt that Lucifer was able to provide some good insights and out of the box thinking. Lucifer himself was very curious on Chloe since he was unable to use his charm on Chloe at all. Lucifer also despise children, so he was very annoyed with Chloe and Dan's daughter Trixie, even though Trixie liked Lucifer as she thought he was funny.

In the following episodes, Lucifer who felt good after helping solving case, used his charm to convince the police and let him be the civilian consultant for police and partner with Chloe. There was also a long outstanding case that involved Chloe where another police named Malcolm was shot and in a coma stage (referred to as Palmetto case). Some of the police, especially Malcom's partner felt that it was Chloe's fault and blame her, which is why Chloe having difficulty getting a partner.

The cases that Lucifer helped Chloe would usually be murder from various background and also a case of robbery. Their ultimate case would be in episode 12 which continued to episode 13. In each episode, Lucifer would always try to seduce Chloe and find out why his charm did not work on her, while Amenadiel would always try to find ways to make Lucifer go back to hell using various methods from good to bad for an angel. Meanwhile Maze would also despise the fact that Lucifer was getting more and more attracted to humans and becoming less and less of a devil.

So, could Amenadiel successfully make Lucifer got back to hell? What would Lucifer's relationship with Chloe develop into? Is Dan going to get back to Chloe? Will the Palmetto case be solved in this first season? 

Find them all in this very interesting first season of Lucifer!

End of Brief Story Line

I truly enjoyed this series a lot. The first few episodes got me hooked, but somehow it became a little bit slower, until the 6th episode where the ending gave us quite a surprise and 8th episode which gave a bit of a cool twist. Then the series got a bit more serious as it gave something extra than the usual seduction of Lucifer to Chloe and his crazy acts during investigation. While the final 2 episodes were cool and gave us a nice ending where it would make us getting wildly speculating of how the second season would be.

I also felt that Lucifer was very charming and truly believable as a Devil who can compel people and a real ladies man with his British accent. Chloe's sometimes disgust and disbelief of Lucifer's claim to be the Devil with God as his father was also very funny, especially in a scene in episode 4.

Overall, this series is something different than the usual police procedural series. Lucifer's charm combined with Chloe's insecurity as a police due to her background makes this one a good watchable series. There were of course many hilarious moments involving Lucifer's craziness.

So if you would like to watch the Devil taking vacation on earth, this is definitely a must see one.

Mike's movie moment rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Special Note:

This is an adaptation from comic books created by Mike Carey and published from Vertigo (different line) of DC Comics which is like a brand name where certain comics with more adult content are published. Some of notable comics from Vertigo include Sandman, V for Vendetta, A History of Violence, Constantine and others.