The Strain

I will probably have good cause to regret these words in a few weeks, but, at the outset, Guillermo del Toros' The Strain (FX, Sunday nights at 9:00 pm CST) looks like it will be simple-minded, gory fun.  On the evidence of the first episode, the show seems to be a reboot of Nosferatu, the old German horror film that was both strangely beautiful and completely over-the-top even by the histrionic standards of the silent cinema.  You can't take Nosferatu seriously -- it's a melodramatic confection mingling lofty Wagnerian pretensions with the lowest types of Victorian sentimentality -- but the damn thing, like the killer rice-noodle worms in The Strain, wriggles its way into your brain and you can't shake some of its grisly and ridiculous images.  I am hoping that The Strain will achieve some of this same effect, although, of course, I am skeptical.  I tuned in to the ninety minute pilot episode on FX after watching an excellent British mystery on PBS ("Endeavor") and, of course, the shock of that transition was sudden and demoralizing.  After watching morose but kindhearted Cambridge detectives, all speaking in grave Shakespearian accents, courteously interviewing elegant suspects in the green and pleasant rural environs of their medieval city, I was confronted with two American TV actors, a man and a woman, both blessed with figures like those displayed on shows like Baywatch; the two characters were shot in flat, expository video-friendly light and they were disrobing for us to have an opportunity to admire their splendid physiques -- and, while stripping, the characters, CDC contagion experts about to don respirators and quarantine garments, exchanged sub-literate banter of the most obvious kind, some chatter about their past affair and the male hero's child-custody conflict -- all of this baldly expository, unrealistically candid and direct, and utterly uninteresting.  The scene's principle frisson was the contrast between the beautiful semi-nude bodies on display and the HazMat suits that the characters were donning.  (Network TV remains a bulwark for stereotypical sex-roles:  the handsome big lunk isn't good with donning the complicated HazMat outfit -- he also can't manage to knot his ties -- and has to rely upon the maternal assistance of the comely female contagion expert.)  The scene was inexpertly directed, banal, and dull, but it did end with a strangely compelling remark by the heroine:  "You don't understand women at all," a comment not delivered in the plummy rounded tones of a PBS show and hardly Shakespearian in eloquence, but, in fact, fairly penetrating in context, a kick in the face. You see, it's a matter of adjusting your expectations:  PBS is PBS and Network TV Network TV and ne'er the twain shall meet, except, of course, when they do:  for instance, shows like Secrets of the Dead and The History Detectives which channel the disreputable energies of ghost-hunting programs on Scyfy and other Cable TV.  The Strain is utterly unrealistic and crammed with clichés -- there is a vampire-hunting Van Helsing figure straight out of Bram Stoker, an elderly concentration camp survivor who ambles around with a silver-headed sword, who runs a pawnshop where he collects silver (!), and who wears a floppy fedora with cape when he goes to JFK airport to investigate the strange events at that place.  (The TSA promptly decides he's a lunatic and throws him jail). The references to the original Nosferatu (and Werner Herzog's remake) are amusing:  instead of a ghost ship, we have a plane packed with corpses stalled on the tarmac and, of course, there is a huge and sinister coffin filled with dirt in its cargo-hold.  The villains exhale ammonia and have a strange shutter-effect in their eyes and they seem to be Nazi-vampires from Berlin.  Their ostensible leader (the real boss is the monster from the cargo hold) uses dialysis to address his blood issues and he seems intent on importing the vampires onto the island of Manhattan.  (It's not clear why it's not sufficient for them to simply take over the Queens and Jamaica.) The director is Mexican and so he's allowed to use semi-offensive, if amusing Hispanic stereotypes -- the vampire's chauffeur is a tough ueber-Macho gang-banger who is also a mama's boy -- and there are some craven Spanish-speaking bandits in an early scene.  The sheer stupid exuberance of this show won me over.  There are pleasingly nauseating special effects:  in one scene, a doomed factotum walks through a series of corridors in JFK.  One of my complaints about series TV is that the film makers seem to have forgotten the art of editing -- everything is shown in real time since the shows usually are too long for their rather limited subject matter and so the producers have to pad everything:  if someone walks across a street, we are shown the character's entire pointless transit of the boulevard in real time.   In the show, the doomed guy walks and walks and I began to suspect that the director was just padding the episode, killing time before the commercial -- but this stroll had a purpose.  The corridors get progressively darker, dingier, more expressionistic with more lurid and ghastly colors -- it's like the figure is perambulating the chambers in Poe's "Masque of Red Death".  Then, the doomed extra encounters a great mass of corruption, a heap of something turd-colored and rotting on the concrete floor and, as he stares at this pile of dung and rot, it suddenly looms up, turning into a vast 12 foot high creature that sucks out all his blood -- we get X-ray style anatomical images similar to the inserts in a CSI-style show -- disarticulates the poor fellow's spine and, then, hurling him to the floor, gratuitously punches his head into pulp.  The creature flies away on gargantuan wings, moving at superhuman speed, leaving the shattered headless corpse on the floor.  (Warning! this show contains crude language, violence, and nudity -- mature audiences only, the network teases at each commercial break.)  FX wants you to watch this show and so it repeated the pilot three times.  By the time, the show came around to my access point from PBS -- the scene with the CDC characters donning their HazMat suits -- their dialogue seemed less idiotic to me and more nuanced; either the show was better than I first thought or I had descended to its level.  There is bad bad stuff -- for instance, The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes -- and there is good bad stuff:  so far The Strain fits the latter category.