Just finished the first episode. It was pretty... well.
It wasn't really *scary*. There were some really creepy parts in the second one (I was out of the room for the title, but I think it's Crouch End), but let's go in order.
The first one, Battleground, is very much not not not based on Small Soldiers. In fact, when we read the story in English back in the day, we watched Small Soldiers as comparison because there was no movie about it.
It was interesting. Some good parts, the pacing was OK, some parts stretched credibility. I liked the vague fleshing out of the story. In the original, he's, like, wandering around this dead business man's place and finds the package, IIRC.
Anyone notice that he never said a word in the whole story? As far as I recall, not a single discernible word is spoken at all.
It didn't feel scary. It felt like a Twilight Zone episode. And so did the second one.
A somewhat creepy TZ episode.
The second one was kinda folksy feeling, very archetypal newlyweds-take-a-wrong-turn-and-end-up-in-a-bad-place. I did, however, like the seemingly arbitrary and misspelled-for-copyright-purposes Mythos name-dropping.
It's a lot scarier to hear that pronunciation of "Nyarlahotep" than my "Nyarlathotep", which is strange because it's just a slightly different infliction with a single different syllable.
The Vincent Price-esque voice may have contributed.
The creepy kids were OK. It woulda been better had they no eyes or something. That woulda made the "Gone down to the Goat with a Thousand Young" part even better.
And, on that note, the tentacle monster was poorly done. Admittedly, it's hard to do scary+broad daylight digitally, but it just looked fake. The face coming out and bleeding black was a nice touch, though.
-In conclusion, I say... not scary. Interesting, a little creepy at the end, but not scary.
It wasn't really *scary*. There were some really creepy parts in the second one (I was out of the room for the title, but I think it's Crouch End), but let's go in order.
The first one, Battleground, is very much not not not based on Small Soldiers. In fact, when we read the story in English back in the day, we watched Small Soldiers as comparison because there was no movie about it.
It was interesting. Some good parts, the pacing was OK, some parts stretched credibility. I liked the vague fleshing out of the story. In the original, he's, like, wandering around this dead business man's place and finds the package, IIRC.
Anyone notice that he never said a word in the whole story? As far as I recall, not a single discernible word is spoken at all.
It didn't feel scary. It felt like a Twilight Zone episode. And so did the second one.
A somewhat creepy TZ episode.
The second one was kinda folksy feeling, very archetypal newlyweds-take-a-wrong-turn-and-end-up-in-a-bad-place. I did, however, like the seemingly arbitrary and misspelled-for-copyright-purposes Mythos name-dropping.
It's a lot scarier to hear that pronunciation of "Nyarlahotep" than my "Nyarlathotep", which is strange because it's just a slightly different infliction with a single different syllable.
The Vincent Price-esque voice may have contributed.
The creepy kids were OK. It woulda been better had they no eyes or something. That woulda made the "Gone down to the Goat with a Thousand Young" part even better.
And, on that note, the tentacle monster was poorly done. Admittedly, it's hard to do scary+broad daylight digitally, but it just looked fake. The face coming out and bleeding black was a nice touch, though.
-In conclusion, I say... not scary. Interesting, a little creepy at the end, but not scary.
