Nextflix Reviews - GLOW

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GLOW stands for Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling, this program has had 2 seasons so far on Netflix and I am hooked. I binge watched both seasons pretty much as soon as they hit the network. The premise is based on a real life wrestling promotion that started out in 1986 and had a syndicated TV show for 4 seasons that was known for it's comedic skits. 

In 2012 there was a documentary about the promotion, this was seen by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, who were looking for ideas for a female-centric show at the time. They went on to create this GLOW show. This 2012 documentary is also available on Netflix and is an interesting, funny and poignant watch, well worth checking out to see the history and influence it had on this show. 

Season one of GLOW came out on Netflix in 2017, with season 2 just coming out at the end of June this year. The wrestlers from the series are based on the original characters but with different names.

Alison Brie is a keen but essentially failed actor, she just can't get a decent role despite her passion, professionalism and enthusiasm. Her best friend Debbie Eagan is a fairly successful soap opera star and seems to have it all, making Alison feel overshadowed by her. The pair fall out in spectacular fashion when Brie sleeps with Eagan's husband. 

Alison goes to an audition for GLOW, a wrestling show to be filmed for TV, it's pay rolled by enthusiastic but inexperienced rich boy Sebastian "Bash" Howard and to be directed by irascible, jaded Sam Sylvia. The team is soon put together and starts training, Alison brings her acting chops and enthusiam to the project which rubs Sam up the wrong way but this is the best job she's ever been given and is determined for it to be a success.

Things take a nose dive for Alison when her ex-friend Debbie is picked up to be the star draw of the show as all american good ol' girl Liberty Belle. This threatens her position and stirs up animosity between them, but can they forget their differences and make the show and their relationship succeed?

This disparate team of women need to become like a family to each other, living through the bumps and bruises of life whilst going through the bumps and bruises in the ring. Will the fans like the show? Will the network like the show? Will they be able to pull off the manoeuvres they've practised?

The tone of the show is a great mix of fun and serious, there is drama and proper character development but there is a lot of light hearted stuff mainly in the in-ring personnas of the wrestlers, with such names as Welfare Queen, The She-Wolf, Zoya the Destroyer, Beirut, Fortune Cookie and Brittanica. Most of them are terribly non-pc stereotypes which are so familiar to anyone who watched wrestling back in that era.

Season two is a continuation of the themes of the 1st really with new challenges being presented to them to do their best to try and overcome. I won't say what happens but it seems very likely we'll see a 3rd season sometime in the future, where I hope they'll be able to keep up the level of quality and entertainment of the previous ones.

Oh yeah I just found out today that the character Welfare Queen is played by real life wrestler Kia Stevens. Her TV show wrestling persona is a fun heel who is a sweetie out of the ring, nothing like the powerhouse, Awesome Kong she portrayed for the TNA wrestling promotion.

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Nextflix Reviews - The Limehouse Golem

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I remember seeing adverts for this when it hit the cinemas and it looked pretty good to me so as soon as I saw it pop up on Netflix I watched it with my girlfriend. Set in Victorian London before the days when Jack the Ripper terrified the city there was another serial killer gripping the populace with fear and morbid fascination. They've been dubbed the Golem after the killer left a part of a Rabbi's anatomy on the page of a book in a section about the Jewish folklore creature of that name. 

Bill Nighy plays John Kildare, a vice detective moved to homicide as they are clueless, and need a scapegoat to shaft if the killer is not caught. Rumours about Kildare have damaged his reputation so he is chosen to take over the case and shoulder the blame. Assisted by local police man George Flood (Daniel Mays) they get an emphatic lead that points to the killer being one of 4 men.

This leads to another story altogether, one of the suspects John Cree has been murdered, poisoned, and the blame has been placed upon his wife Lizzie. Kildare is convinced that she killed her husband after discovering that he was the Golem and seeks to prove it so she can possibly avoid being executed once these extenuating circumstances come to light. Kildare and Flood follow through the clues, question the living suspects and through interviews with Lizzie, Kildare gets into her history finding out how she met John Cree.

This takes us into her story, from a harsh early life she manages to find a place and begins to thrive in the theatre. She meets and becomes good friends with Dan Leno a star in the music halls and is taken under his wing. John Cree is a theatre critic and aspiring playwright who becomes besotted with Lizzie. The historical story crosses over with the present day investigation as Kildare struggles to identify the killer as Lizzie's husband before she feels the cut of the hangman's noose.

I found this to be a very enjoyable movie, the actors are all excellent, the settings and plot are engrossing and there is a bit of gruesome murder too, so something for everyone. Erm... well not for kids though... obviously!

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Nextflix Reviews - Tau

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Julia, (Maika Monroe), awakens in a cell along with 2 other prisoners, all of them captured to be tested and experimented on by Alex, (Ed Skrein), a cold, enigmatic science genius who is working on perfecting artificial intelligence. Seemingly without morals or emotion, Alex has implanted devices into his captives necks that collects data from them that needs to be tested and eventually extracted, a process that will prove fatal. 

Julia manages to free herself from the cell but is still trapped in Alex's house which is full of high tech drones and a security robot that stops anyone from escaping. These are controlled by an earlier AI creation, Tau, who Alex commands to make Julia take on a series of mental tests every day when he is out of the house.

The company he works for are on a deadline and time is running out, he has only so many days to test and remove her implant. The countdown is on for her to try and escape before she dies. Her only chance of escape is to convince Tau the AI to help her. Can she find more humanity from a computer than she can from the emotionless Alex?

I don't want to give any spoilers so I'll leave this review like that, it's a good film though with a cool concept, decent script, good acting and it's well paced. There is some gore but it's more a sci-fi thriller with some good tense scenes than a horror. Can Julia convince Tau to go against it's programming and help her? What makes a person a person? 

I was surprised when looking at the cast to find that Gary Oldman voiced Tau, I certainly never recognised him.

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Also starring Maika Monroe

    

Nextflix Reviews - Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

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This looks like a massive budget sci-fi adventure, I vaguely remember hearing the name of it but wasn't tempted to go see it at the cinema. I wonder if the advertising people did a good enough job pushing it. It's based on a series of French science fiction comics called Valerian and Laureline which I have not heard of previously. Apparently producer Luc Besson has been wanting to make this movie for years even considering it way back in 1997 when he was working on The Fifth Element.

As the film starts we see the scope of the civilisations involved in the story during a starting sequence where we see beings from many species greeting and shaking hands with each other as they create a massive, planet sized space base, Alpha Station in the Earth's orbit. Eventually they become a danger to Earth so are set adrift to govern themselves. This is the City of a Thousand Planets, Valerian is a young Major in their security forces. He and his partner Sergeant Laureline start the film on a mission on a planet to capture a stolen converter, a small dragon like creature, the last of it's kind, that appears to poop out multiple replicas of whatever it eats! It is being sold on the black market by some previous residents of the planet Mül which was destroyed 30 years ago. We saw their homeworld get destroyed before the introduction of the title characters, an event that Valerian either dreamed or received a psychic flash about. He recognises them from his dream but when the mission goes pear-shaped he has to get out quickly before he can question them.

Just one of the friendly monsters we see in this movie

After a narrow escape they arrive back on Alpha Base to be faced with two threats, firstly a strange techno cancer has infected the base threatening to destroy it and secondly ruthless forces want the last converter and will go to extreme lengths to get it. The two appear to be connected as a group of Mül show up and kidnap the commander.

There are mysteries and intrigue around what happened to the Mül planet and what they are after that gets the partners into a lot of scrapes during the course of this 2 hour 20 minute movie.

The real star of this movie is the special effects and the imagination at work to create the many creatures and areas of the ship that we see. There are some scenes that almost leave you agog at the amount of detail that went into them. The early mission scene for example is in a kind of virtual reality market place so we see a fight/escape scene that exists in seemingly 2 different dimensions at once. Another seen sees a chase through Alpha Base that passes through a number of regions all vastly different to each other. This movie had a massive budget and it shows, although it apparently ended up a bit of a box office failure so I'm not sure if they'll ever be any sequels.

The action is top-notch and the story is passable, the only negative points is that the characters are perhaps a tad flat and lacking charisma, it's definitely worth a look just for the cool visuals.

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Nextflix Reviews - A series of Unfortunate Events

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I vaguely recall there was a film of this a good few years back now, with Jim Carrey I think, and I know this is based on a set of 13 children's books by the author Daniel Handler using the pen name of Lemony Snicket but I haven't read them at all, so I've no idea how closely the 2 series, so far, of this TV show mirrors them. 

The story is narrated by Lemony Snicket himself he provides exposition and links the 'events' together telling from a historical stand point. Along the way he promises that the outcome and fate of our young stars is one of perpetual doom. It follows the 3 talented Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus and toddler Sunny who are orphaned due to a terrible fire that guts their family home. They are adopted at 1st by their evil distant relative Count Olaf a hammy actor and all round terrible human being who has a gang of strange followers in his theatrical entourage. He is aware of a sizable inheritance soon to come the children's way and plans to seize it for himself. The children manage to get away from him and are passed on to be fostered by a procession of quirky relatives all the while being pursued by Olaf and his cronies.

This is a world where the children are smart and capable and most of the adults are daft as brushes who can't see through the ever improbable disguises of the Count. For two seasons they've travelled around passed between friends of their parents and unlocking some secrets about their parents lives and a secret society they belonged to called The V.F.D., some agents of whom try to assist them whenever they can.

Along the way they also meet the two surviving Quagmire triplets Duncan and Isadora whose lives seem to strangely parallel their own in many aspects, they lost a sibling as well as their parents in a fire. They become allies helping each other out of terrible situations of the Count's making. 

The tone of the show is very dark and comic but very strange, I am probably not at the right age to get it, it kind of seems too dark for me I am surprised kids like it but then Grimm's fairy tales of old were a lot darker than we eventually watered them down to. So it seems kids can deal with darkness, discomfort and even death in their entertainment a lot more than I would've suspected!

The 1st two seasons of the show have aired on Netflix so far and have covered the tales from the 1st 9 books of the series. It's seen them visiting an outlandish set of scenarios and characters such as the world's most prestigious snake expert, a house tottering precariously on the edge of a cliff, a wood mill staffed by hypnotised workers, a frankly horrendous orphanage, the penthouse of a pair of trend obsessed millionaires, a village full of bird loving loons, a hideous hospital and a failing carnival that decides to hold a raffle to decide which one of their freaks to feed to the lions to boost trade!

At every step they are hounded by Olaf with the situation they are in seemingly getting grimmer and grimmer. They certainly are 'unfortunate' that's for sure. Season two ends with an almost literal cliffhanger which may well leave you gasping to see the 3rd and I assume final series as this is set to cover the last 4 books of the set.

For me it's not compulsive viewing really, it's something to have on but the wackiness of the characters and situations doesn't really tickle my funny bone. I suppose it must entertain on some level or I wouldn't have continued watching it. I will certainly watch the last season just to see what happens to the children, Narrator Snicket always suggests that their final fate will not be a happy one, with even the title music suggesting we 'look away' as the story is not a pretty one. I assume they'll be a happy conclusion after all their hardship but who knows what these crazy kids are into nowadays and how it will end!!

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Nextflix Reviews - Cargo

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I think this is the full-length version of a short film that was doing the rounds, being shared on Facebook a while back. It starts out with a couple Andy & Kay and their baby living in a house boat on the river in Australia. They are scavenging for supplies as they go with their only interaction with other people being when they float past a family who pull a gun and eye them warily. 

This is a zombie movie, they've done the escape to somewhere remote part already before the film starts and have it relatively safe now, but maybe they got too comfortable and complacent and disaster strikes. Something bites Kay and she has 48 hours before she turns, Andy desperately tries to get her to a hospital but things go from bad to worse. Andy is now left alone and is himself infected, he desperately has to seek a way to get his daughter Rosie to safety before he turns. 

He meets other people along the way, all eking out an existence in a pretty barren remote rural landscape. There are zombies around but not enough at 1st to seem like a major problem, Andy has to be more wary of the living as some may have a shoot the bitten on sight policy. He is advised by a school teacher to leave Rosie with a mob of aboriginal people who have deserted the towns to go back to the old ways, away from the sickness that has overtaken civilisation.

As so often happens in these movies the living often prove to be as big a threat as the dead, with Andy having to avoid both on occasions whilst also trying to fight off his descent into zombiedom! It's a countdown all the way, can he find a safe haven for his child before he decides to have her for lunch? He does find an ally along the way, Thoomi an aboriginal girl and they have to learn to trust and help each other to get by.

This stars Martin Freeman of Sherlock, Hobbit and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame in the sort of role that I wouldn't expect to see him in, mind you he's in that film Ghost Stories too which is meant to be pretty scary and it's definitely on my one to watch list.

This film is a good story, but it doesn't really feel like that much of a horror, the zombies hardly ever get close enough to be that perilous it seems. The tension doesn't get ramped up as high as I imagined it would be either, I imagined Andy would be struggling hard with not eating Rosie but he never even gets close to it. Overall a cool enough movie but I think it missed a trick or two along the way.

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Other films starring Martin Freeman

   

Nextflix Reviews - Killer Mermaid

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My horror movie howler sense is going off like crazy as I start to play this movie. It's probably going to be a stinker I reckon, all the actors have Eastern European names, so no stars I've heard of and one of the main sponsors/backers (I don't know what they are you know them company names that come up before the movie starts), is Jerry's Catering! They must have pumped some money in as their logo is on a speedboat they use and is focused on as the boat pulls out. Product placement? Kind-of!

Doing a bit of research this 2014 movie seems to be sometimes known as Killer Mermaid singular and sometimes plural and it also seems to be known as Mamula and also Nymph.

It actually starts off reasonably OK, like every horror should with a double death. A guy leaps into the sea seemingly enticed by what I assume is a mermaid's siren call and goes under the waves, his panicked girlfriend beseeches what looks like a fisherman for help and he kills her with an anchor through the neck, so it's not just the mermaid who is killer in this movie.

We're then introduced to 2 women Kelly & Lucy who are meeting with their old school friend Alex and his fiancé Yasmin and we have to put up with some boring catching up, getting to know you sequences. We see Kelly & Alex re-ignite a past spark behind Yasmin's back, they also spot a creepy fisherman, (who may be the killer), and make a good joke/horror reference to the "I know What You Did Last Summer" franchise. We've not seen any mermaids yet but we do see another murder, a drunk guy get's anchor hooked in mid-piss, poor fella. They meet up with Boban and they make plans to go visit an old military fortress on an island called Mamula, an old man Niko overhears their plans and warns them against going, telling of the fortress's past as a Nazi concentration camp and also speaks of the Scylla who he claims once took and ate six of his crew, although it sounds like he is quoting a poem when he says this. Is Niko the fisherman we've seen killing 2 people now? 

Needless to say in traditional horror movie fashion they ignore his warning and go to the island where they find out that the fisherman is already at the island and now they've arrived he won't let them leave, alive! He bursts their dinghy stranding them and proceeds to hunt them down. Is he the only danger on the island though or does something else lurk there?? (It's not much of a spoiler really, after all look at the title of the movie!)

Despite my initial thoughts it's not a bad movie, there is a bit of good gore, some reasonable CGI, creature make-up and the acting is not too bad but it's far from memorable, it won't make anybody's all time favourite list at all. I suppose it's a unique enough idea for a film with the cast running from a mad man with an anchor whilst also trying to resist the siren call of the flesh eating Scylla.

In Greek mythology Scylla is one of two monsters that live either side of a narrow strait, the other being Charybdis, they lived just an arrows range from each other. There is an idiom about being between Scylla & Charybdis meaning to escape or steer clear of one peril you may venture too close to the other. I kept wondering if they'd run into Charybdis in their flight from Scylla, you'll have to watch the film yourself to find out what happens.

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Nextflix Reviews - The Expanse

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This is a show my brother recommended to me a while back, I was a bit slow to watch it so he kept reminding me over and over so it's safe to say he must have enjoyed it. I started with a couple of episodes and wasn't really captivated at 1st but my bro told me to persevere so I did and it does get more enthralling as it goes on. It starts slow but really picks up momentum until it draws you in and gets you rooting for the characters.

OK so obviously it's Science-fiction, it's very story heavy, there are a lot of characters spread over 3 planetary groups and various different factions. It's quite a feat to get your head around all the motivations and intrigues that are going down to be honest and I was a bit confused for a couple of parts. Especially when I started on season 2 it was so long since I saw the 1st season that it took me a couple of episodes to get back up to speed with it.

The main 3 factions/planets we have are the Earth, Mars and then there are the asteroid belt dwelling miners known colloquially as 'belters'. Earth and Mars are at loggerheads with each other and simmering ill will between them means they are almost ready to go to war. The hardy and wild 'belters' dislike both planets for how they have treated them in the past and there is a rebellious terrorist faction amongst them. There is a lot of diplomacy and intrigue going on behind the scenes on Earth where we follow the work of United Nations executive Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), as she tries to prevent war between the planets. Then we have a police detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), looking for a missing woman and we also follow the crew of the Rocinante. 

A conspiracy is uncovered that threatens the fragile peace, a bio-weapon has been created and is tested in catastrophic fashion. Shrouded in mystery accusations begin to fly as paranoia grips the political factions, each suspecting the other of preparing for war. The crew of the Rocinante seek to wipe out the proto-molecule and also discover it's origins but there are more factions who want it for themselves, to use it for their own ends despite the potential dangers.

I have just finished watching the 2nd season of this show and it's pretty good but whilst I do enjoy it there are a few negative points to it at least to my mind anyway. Those negative points are not really caused by the show but by myself really. I am too much of a multitasker and get distracted from what's going on in the show whilst playing on my laptop at the same time. There are so many characters with different motivations that I find it a bit hard to keep up at times. This is a show that requires concentration to pick up all the layers and memory too to remember the names and which characters belong to which faction. This is a show that would benefit from multiple viewing I think so you can catch things you missed the 1st time around.

Season 3 has aired already but isn't up on Netflix yet, and the show was cancelled by Syfy but with an immediate & popular campaign to save it that followed it's been picked up for a 4th and possible even beyond that series by Amazon. So that probably means that future seasons may not be aired on Netflix but Amazon Prime instead! We'll have to wait and see.

The series is based on the Hugo Award winning The Expanse books by James S.A Corey. There are currently seven main novels and 5 shorter works in the series with more already planned so the source material for the TV show to still draw on is seemingly plentiful. The show has received much praise from fans and critics alike so it could well run for quite some time yet.

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Nextflix Reviews - Re:Mind

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This has the look to it of a Jigsaw type of horror, it has a chilling and intriguing premise although I have to say it fell a little flat for me and the potential was not realised. Eleven Japanese school girls wake up with red hoods over their heads fixed by foot manacles around a dinner table. They have no idea how they got there and no clue as to why they have been abducted and shackled. Over the course of 13 episodes they try and piece together what happened and who they offended to wind up in such a scary predicament.

The whole room is decked out with objects that are meant to trigger memories in the girls to prompt them to realise why they have been imprisoned. Every so often, normally after a confession of a memory to do with their missing school friend Miho, the clocks all chime the lights darken and a girl disappears.

As I said the story idea is good but I found the execution to be clunky and confusing and the subtitles didn't really help much with that I think. It has lots of young Japanese ladies shouting at each other and crying It was pretty unmemorable and didn't really have any horrors elements as such just a bit of mystery that I got bored of pretty quickly. It's also pretty unmemorable, I was anxious to get it over with as it was pretty uninspiring and I can't for the life of me even remember what happened in the end!! 

Apparently the main girl characters are members of the Japanese idol girl group Keyakizaka46, I have no idea what that even means... is that a pop band?

Nextflix Reviews - American Horror Story

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This is another cool show that's well worth watching on Netflix. It has six seasons ready and waiting for your viewing pleasure. Each season is an ongoing story arc with a different horror tale to tell. In order the seasons are Murder House, Asylum, Coven, Freak Show, Hotel & Roanoke. It is unique show as far as I am aware as there is a regular ensemble cast over most of the seasons who play different roles from season to season. Only two of the cast have appeared in every season Evan Peters and Sarah Paulson, the latter was a medium in series 1, a gay writer consigned to an asylum in 2, the headmistress of a school for witches in 3, conjoined twins in 4, the ghost of a dead junkie in 5 and an actress starring in a documentary re-enactment show in 6. Series 7: Cult, which I am sure I heard is based on the US elections, has been released although it's not on Netflix yet. If it's anything like the 6 series I have seen so far it should prove to be most interesting and entertaining. Series 8 & 9 have also been confirmed and will be set in the future apparently!! 

Other reoccurring cast members include excellent turns from Angela Bassett, Jessica Lange and Kathie Bates who act their socks off as various larger than life characters. The plots are all twisting and turning and full of memorable and crazy characters. I will give a quick synopsis of each season but so much goes on in each of them that you need to see it for yourself really. 

Murder House is your basic , (although it's far from basic really), haunted house story. A family moves into a house with a bloody past and have to suffer due to it's history both from the living and the spirits of the murderers and the victims that presided there.

Asylum, set in the 60's, is the story of a writer who goes into a run-down insane house for a story and ends up stuck there and sees all the deprivation and depravity that occurs within it's walls. It features subplots of mad doctors, possession and alien abduction of all things!! There is even a random big song and dance number that is truly surreal.

Coven tells of a school of witches that has existed in New Orleans  since escaping there after fleeing from the Salem Witch trials and has a long and chequered history. The current small crop of students are a disparate lot with petty differences all looking to graduate. Their supreme witch returns suddenly to upset the status quo and to facilitate her own personal agenda.

Freak Show is set in the 50's and tells of a struggling travelling group of freaks and their trials and tribulations. There is murder afoot as well with 3 separate outside forces set on targeting people from the show and in the surrounding town. Foremost of these forces is a killer clown named Twisty.

The Hotel of the 5th season is inhabited with vampires and serial killers and their victims and ghosts of serial killers and their victims and a transgender bartender! Lady Gaga won awards playing as The Countess a vampires who lives in the penthouse.

Roanoke is the filming of a re-enactment of a haunting event for a TV programme called My Roanoke Nightmare. The cast filming the re-enactment are plagued by their own horrors similar to those that affected the people they're portraying. With cannibal locals, Celtic witch goddesses and ghostly residents of the historic Roanoke settlement hounding them they'll be lucky if they get out alive.

As horror goes it's not really overly gory or horrific I don't find, it's kind of teen level horror I'd say PG-13 or something but maybe I am numb to it after 40 odd years of watching horror movies. it's been a while since I watched it now but I'm pretty sure there's a fair bit of nudity so probably don't go showing it to your kids.

Most series run for 12/13 episodes and sometimes the stories do have a sense of being a little dragged out with extra elements seemingly thrown in to prolong the story but I don't mind that really as the over the top craziness is great fun as far as I'm concerned. 

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Nextflix Reviews - Z Nation

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Is it possible to get too much zombie stuff? Obviously there is some rubbish stuff out there but this show is not amongst that category by a long shot. This is a very cool show with lots of action and humour with a cast of believable characters. I discovered it when the 1st season popped up and binge watched it straight away and have done the same as each subsequent series has been released. 

The zombie plague has pretty much taken over the entire world with only pockets of human survivors struggling to survive in the hostile environment. The show starts by showing us a medical unit's attempts to create a vaccine using prisoners as test subjects. One of their guinea pigs Murphy is tied to a gurney and injected with the most recent experimental batch of the anti-zombie vaccine but the room is overrun and he is attacked and bitten multiple times by the undead. Instead of dying or being fully consumed he awakes as a strange human/zombie hybrid with telepathic powers over the undead. In season one a team of survivors gather and take up the mission to get Murphy across country to another facility where they can develop a vaccine from his blood. They discover that Murphy's bite turns people into hybrids who are not attacked by zombies but can be influenced by murphy's mind over zombies power.

The team varies as events claim some of their lives or allegiances change but the main players who have survived the longest so far are ex-soldier Roberta Warren, the team leader, a driven and capable woman who is the team's brains; Doc, an aging hippy with a heart of gold and a taste for weed who applies his medic skills and drug knowledge as best he can; 10K a youth with a knack for sniping who takes his name from his proposed Z kill target and Addy a nice girl turned spiked baseball bat swinging Amazon bad-ass by the necessity of life post-Z apocalypse. They are aided from outside the group by Citizen Z who is the lone operative at a government listening/viewing post in the Arctic Circle, he directs them as best as he can using satellite technology but in a world full of chaos he can't always get the message across.

The story of their travels is influenced by the zombies that are always in their way and the living communities that they encounter along the road. Each season seems to culminate with an end to one phase of the mission and the beginning of another as events seem to always conspire against them. 

Although they fight alongside each other for survival there is often conflict within the group too. The dynamic in the team changes fairly often with Murphy himself being the main catalyst for trouble within the group. This friction increases when he is able to father a daughter by a human, who also has zombie controlling powers of her own amongst other abilities. He's a criminal after all and he has his own ideas about the world's future with himself as the ruler of his own zombie/hybrid community. His bite offers survivors safety from zombies which is very tempting for them and Murphy is fed up with being the subject of human experiments and thinks his kind are the future.

The tone of the show is serious in the main but there is a lot of humour in it too, like a slightly less serious and angst ridden The Walking dead. It's got drama in all the right places but is able to induce more than the odd laugh through crazy situations and quirky encounters.

Netflix has 3 seasons available to view right now although 4 have been released so far and a 5th is in the works too. Hopefully we won't have too long to wait as it was left on rather a meaty cliffhanger. 

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Nextflix Reviews - Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

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This one may seem a bit out there for my normal viewing tastes but I really enjoyed this period detective series. I got watching it as my girlfriend loves all her detective dramas and did her normal trick of putting this on at bedtime and promptly falling asleep, leaving me to watch it on my own. I eventually watched all 3 seasons of it, (not all in that 1 night obviously!!) 

The programme is based on the series of books, by prolific author Kerry Greenwood, which began in 1989 with "Cocaine Blues" and runs to 20 in number so far with the latest "Murder and Mendelssohn" released in 2013. Greenwood has also written science fiction, children's books and plays.



Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis) is a spirited thoroughly modern 1920's  woman who has recently arrived  back in Melbourne, Australia. She engages herself as a sleuth solving all manner of crimes and mysteries. Independently wealthy, although she hasn't always been so, she seems to do it more for the love of solving mysteries and to help people out than for any financial need. In the show she has a great cast of interesting characters around her. She is a bit of a thorn in the side of police detective 'Jack' Robinson (Nathan Page) and his constable Hugh Collins (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) as she keeps wheedling her way into his investigations but her skills prove to be very useful and their relationship burgeons over the course of their investigations. Constable Collins falls for Phryne's secretary, the sweet and innocent, good Catholic girl, Dot (Ashleigh Cummings). Recently employed by Phryne, Dot grows from a timid girl to a much more modern and adventurous lady as the show progresses and we see how her relationship with Hugh grows and the ups and downs it goes through challenged by the fact that he is a Protestant and also his ideas of a woman's role differing from her new Phryne influenced ones. Also in Phryne's employ are Mr Butler the butler and Bert and Cec a pair of cabbies who she employs to do all manner of investigative footwork for her. Other recurring characters include Miriam Margolyes as her Aunt Prudence, her friend Dr Mac (Tammy Macintosh) and her ward Jane (Ruby Rees).

As well as solving a wealth of crimes as the series progresses we get to learn more of Phryne's colourful and sometimes tragic history. Some events of her past catch up with her as the series progresses, we learn of her time in the ambulance service during WWI and her time as an artist's model, muse & lover in Paris after the war. Also there's a long story arch much taken up with the escaped criminal Murdoch Foyle (Nicholas Bell) who abducted and killed Phryne's younger sister Janey when she was just a child. He brings some real tension to the story during his time in it, being a thoroughly horrid and capable villain. In later episodes Phryne's father turns up, he's a bit of a cad and they have a strained relationship, he brings his dangerous drama into the mix having unresolved issues from his past that could prove fatal.

I really enjoyed this show, the interplay and progression of relationships between the cast is great, it's a very good ensemble of characters and actors who you end up caring for and wanting to do well. The look at history is interesting too with a lot of social elements picked up and examined during the course of the show.

There is no new series planned it seems but thankfully a full-length movie is in the works having been successfully financed and apparently is planned to begin filming in October. It's called Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears and is slated to be directed by Tony Tilse who is a veteran Australian director who did Murder in the Outback and several episodes of Farscape, Wolf Creek & Ash Vs Evil Dead. Also there is talk of a prequel series based on Miss Fisher which will not be based on any of the books but will be imaginings of the character from a part of her life not previously dealt with.

Check out Phryne's website for more information on her adventures.

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Also starring Essie Davis