PENNY DREADFUL SEASON 2

Harry Treadaway, Patti LuPone, Reeve Carney

PENNY DREADFUL. Season 2. 2015. Showtime.

During the first season of Penny Dreadful, the group of weird individuals banded together to fight a horde of vampires. In this season, their antagonists are a coven of really nasty witches. Alternately fascinating and a little bit silly (without being campy), the show still manages to be quite entertaining and watchable. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway of The Disappeared) has been importuned, to put it mildly, by his creation, "John Clare" (Rory Kinnear), to create a mate for him, and he chooses to revive the dead woman (now called Lily) whom once was the lover of Ethan Chandler/Lawrence Talbot (Josh Hartnett). Alas, Lily (Billie Piper), has little interest in John, but she does have a hankering for Victor, although even he is dismissed when her evil side becomes ascendant and she hooks up with Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), whose transsexual lover, Angelique (Jonny Beauchamp of Stonewall), comes to a sad end, no thanks to Dorian. Meanwhile Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) nearly pays for his sins thanks to the manipulations of head witch, Mrs. Poole (Helen McCrory of the BBC's Frankenstein). Vanessa Ives (Eve Green), who has become like a daughter to Malcolm, deals with her own inner demons and relates how she became a witch herself at the tutoring of a "cut-wife" played superbly by a highly-deglamorized Patti Lupone [Parker]. .

This was a fine season for the show, but there were some disappointments. Ethan never runs into Broma/Lily, which certainly would have been an interesting interlude as she's supposed to be dead, and he also never encounters Dorian Gray, with whom he had a sexual encounter in season one, either. While the character of Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale) is admittedly likable and Beale's performance is excellent, one wishes they didn't make him such a relentlessly stereotypical homosexual; he even pronounces his "r"s like "w"s as if he were a little girl! Lyle and Ethan have a lot of semi-amusing banter, but one wonders what the self-described "old queen" would think if he knew about Ethan and Dorian! The LGBT aspects of the show seem added more for spice than veracity or open-mindedness. Penny Dreadful is influenced by everything from Mary Shelley to Dark Shadows.

Verdict: Imperfect, but very well-acted by a great cast, and highly entertaining. ***.

PENNY DREADFUL SEASON 1

PENNY DREADFUL Season One. 2014.

"No one in this room is kind -- that's why you're here." -- Sir Malcolm Murray.

This Showtime series takes place in 19th century London and throws together some classic characters from horror fiction -- Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway of The Disappeared), Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), Professor Van Helsing (David Warner), etc. -- and combines them into a new storyline. The protagonist -- if you can call him that -- is an American cowboy-entertainer named Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett of The Black Dahlia). He is hired by Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) and family friend Vanessa Ives (Eva Green of Casino Royale) to retrieve Murray's daughter, Mina (Oliva Llewellyn), who has been kidnapped by vampires. Frankenstein's monster (Rory Kinnear), the first of two "unliving" beings that Victor has cobbled together, hates his creator and, as in Mary Shelly's great novel, wants Victor  to make him a mate. A series of gruesome mutilation murders are occurring all over London but the killer doesn't seem to be Jack the Ripper. All we need is Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and we're ready to go ...  Penny Dreadful for the most part is a literate, handsomely produced, well-written, and very well-acted Gothic soap opera that mercifully eschews camp (American Horror Story for instance), but the series goes completely awry when it suddenly turns into The Exorcist with its very contemporary-type scenes of demonic possession -- complete with spitting, cursing, useless priests, and so on -- that smack more of the 1970's than the 19th century. The show also throws in a fairly unexpected homoerotic sequence in the episode Demimonde, that is hot but hardly ever mentioned again, and has more to do with "shock" value and snaring some gay fans than with good story-telling -- although the scene certainly plays. [Internet trolls railed that the series turned into gay porn, which is hilarious as the two men are never actually seen in bed together, and the frequent male-female couplings in the show are much, much more explicit.] There's a final twist at the end of the first season that I should have seen coming but didn't, for shame. Let's just say that it summons up images of the tormented Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man. The show has just begun its third season but I have mixed emotions about watching season two -- will it retain the classy aura it exhibited in the earlier episodes or just descend into silliness? Eva Green is especially superb in this and Billie Piper also scores as Ethan's tubercular girlfriend, Brona, but everyone in this, down to the smallest role (including Alex Price as Proteus), is wonderful. Abel Korzeniowski composed the rather lush score and excellent theme music.

Verdict: Interesting, with many fascinating and clever facets, but ... **1/2.

THE BLACK DAHLIA

THE BLACK DAHLIA (2006). Directed by Brian De Palma.

“I think you'd rather f--k me than kill me,” says Hilary Swank to detective Josh Hartnett in this adaptation of James Ellroy's novel, which pretty much sums up the tone of this rather silly movie. Brian De Palma once made some very well-crafted and entertaining pictures, but despite some elaborate scenic design and the duplication of the forties era, this is not one of his more memorable projects. The picture begins with a long, unnecessary prologue showing us how the detective team of Harnett and Aaron Eckhardt were originally boxers and how they square off against each other in the ring. Before long the two are not only partners but best buddies, forming a loose menage a trois with Eckhardt's girlfriend Scarlet Johansson. [Miss Johansson is either a mediocre actress or to be charitable is simply struggling with an impossible part.] Hilary Swank is much more on the mark as the stereotypical sexy, amoral rich gal, Madelaine, who dallies with Hartnett when he investigates her family in connection with the murder of [the real life] Elizabeth Short. One gets the impression that neither De Palma or anyone else connected to the movie cares that much about Short, The Black Dahlia, or anything else. The script by Josh Friedman is terribly confused and disjointed and the movie takes forever to sustain some interest. There is a hilarious scene in an alleged lesbian nightclub that could only be in a Hollywood movie, with stages and stairs out of Busby Berkeley and k.d. lang making a guest-appearance on the landing as a vocalist surrounded by chorus cuties. The movie has its compelling moments and entertaining scenes but by and large it just doesn't convince. Hartnett and Eckhardt are fine, however, and the picture is nearly stolen by Swank's mother (Fioria Shaw), who gets drunk and bitchy at dinner, to say the least. De Palma doesn't seem to care anymore about camera movements and angles and stylishness, and Black Dahlia can certainly not be seen as a memorial to the dead fifteen-year-old child, Elizabeth Short. The filmmaker doesn't seem to get that she was a minor being exploited by adults, a cycle which, frankly, this movie seems to be continuing.

Verdict: Overbaked and clumsy. **.