Movie Moxie loves TV presents Monster Man on SyFy!

Cleve Hall, his family and friends and co-workers, manage SOTA FX, a special effects company in Hollywood, making monsters for everything from

Dreamworks to Devo! 

It is a TV reality show, of a sorts. So unfortunately for us, at least half the show is spent dwelling on the interrelationship drama between, mostly Cleve and everyone else. The intro explains that a good number of the shop folk happen to be Cleve’s family, this includes his ex-wife and daughters, so interpersonal drama is kind of a given. I would just much rather concentrate on the monsters they’re building and who the monsters are for this week, but that’s me.

Cleve Hall is the main character (boy is he a character), this is true, but he’s also a grown man. Running around in goth ringmaster most of the time, rolling his eyes and ignoring his shop foreman (and everyone else) when they chide him for his timing. His daughter Constance is more often

involved in shop builds than her other sister, she does makeup jobs and faces/heads mostly, unless assigned otherwise by her dad. The other daughter Elora is dutifully in the shop, but she seems to be the main one who runs around in “normal” clothes and makeup, if you can believe that. Sonia Maddox-Hall is Cleve’s ex-wife, and while they do crack jokes about being formerly married and what a mess that was, it strikes me as interesting that the show presents that situation as Cleve being mature enough to be his ex-wife’s boss inside a Hollywood build shop. Roy Knyrim is Cleve’s business partner and co-owner, the show always has him running around complaining about Cleve’s timing and being the responsible one, while Cleve has fun. Cindy Miller is the other co-Boss, she’s not often featured in the show as a builder, but rather yet another person running yelling after Cleve. Johnnie Saiko and Hill Vinot are the other unrelated shop creators, and that’s the whole family of SOTA FX.

As far as the monsters and the jobs the work on, they’re not bad. On the one hand, you get to see how all these movie effects monsters are made, what it takes to make them, and even parts of how the monster is used in the video or whatever towards the end of the show. On the other hand, it

really takes away the mystery (if there was any for you) of the whole monster prop in the video deal. I mean, after seeing huge pieces of foam rubber turn into a werewolf man, it’s a little disenchanting. However, the shots of the monster being used in a film at the end of the show do make it worthwhile. Cleve and his crew have made alien 50’s bobble-heads for Jackass boys, a music video and entire concept for the famous band Devo, spider monsters that try and eat your head, and all sorts of other fun things! The show itself and the jobs they do seem to be a bit more low rent for Hollywood, but please bear in mind, the SyFy channel is somewhere in the medium range of popularity, as are most of their syndicated shows. I personally enjoyed FACE / OFF more, but Monster Man is worth a watch and a giggle or two. 

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Alicia Glass

Movie Moxie loves TV presents Being Human on SyFy!

What they refer to as a re-imagining of the smash hit series on BBC, Being Human tells the story of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost who all live together trying to cope with their double lives!

I can’t for the life of me figure out why SyFy thought they could do any better than BBC, who bought us such forever gems like Doctor Who, to
“re-imagine” the series that’s already a huge hit on BBC would’ve been fine, except well, they didn’t. That is to say, it wasn’t until Season 2 that they actually deviated except in seriously minor ways, from the original storyline presented by BBC. Sally (not Annie) is the ghost, she was killed by her boyfriend in the very house she now haunts, it’s exactly the same. Aidan is our vampire and he’s struggling to get out from under Bishop, his bloodthirsty boss’, heel. Again the same, but for the names. Josh is our werewolf, and one of the first things he does after getting a girlfriend, poor thing, is Turn her. Aidan and Josh even work at the same hospital together; come on folks. If you can turn out something amazingly original like Lost Girl, the Americanized treatment of Being Human can get better than this. However, that is just the first season, and I’m here to talk about the 2nd season.

Warning! Spoilers Ahead!

Here in the 2nd Season, Sally (Meaghan Rath) has already figured out who murdered her and confronted him, the bastard. Great. Now, she’s apparently got what she ends up calling a Reaper following her around and encouraging her to shred other ghosts. The Reaper turns out to be all in her head, which is to say it was Sally herself running around doing these horrible things to other ghosts and possessing humans to boot. It’s not bad for her own personal storyline, an original one at that, though I would’ve rathered that the Reaper was a real outside influence and not just in
Sally’s head, like Aidan and his Elder vampire problem. Which leads us on to the resident vampire.

So, let’s see. Aidan’s gotten rid of Bishop (we hope) and now has to worry about Mother and her cadre of aides, plus the daughter Suren who was buried as punishment for a good 80 years and has been dug up just now to redeem herself and lead the vampires of the city. Aidan is of course set to guard and reeducate Suren, we all know just how well that turned out. And Henry, who is Aidan’s Childer and was his Second for a long time, has to show back up to join the fold and try and aid Aidan too. I found, that for all the terror and bloodlust these style of vampires present, I’m simply not impressed. I adore the guy who plays Aidan, Sam Witwer of stuff like Smallville, and the way he plays the alcoholism equivalent of trying to go off the blood. But other than that, the storyline they have for dear Aidan this season is weak. Not a single vampire ally that he’s turned to for help has actually helped him. I know, they’re vampires. There has to be a good one out there somewhere, how about introducing a Blade-style halfbreed aide-de-camp for Aidan?

On to my favorite character! It’s odd – I’m a vampire person (real vampires, Dracula et al, not this Twilight crap) and yet for both the BBC show and the SyFy show, my favorite character is the werewolf. He, Josh (Sam Huntington), seems to have the most problems out of the entire Being
Human crowd, and I think that might be because he’s the one still closest to actually being human. The other roommates are, after all, dead in one form or another. Anyways. Season 2 has Josh trying to reconcile with what he’s done to Nora (there’s another almost-name damn it), dealing with a couple of Purebreeds, that is born werewolves, Aidan and his vampire issues, and oh yeah, the fiancé that he left when he was first cursed as a werewolf, Julia. I liked Julia, her courage and perseverance was admirable. And the scene where she died, during the sudden eclipse and Josh partially transformed, freaked out and left, poor Julia’s hit by a car right? Then we’re treated to an entire awesome scene when Josh comes back, he sits and they talk, only to discover…he’s talking to a ghost. And there’s her door. Oh man, that one scene, if you’ve had the perseverance to stick with the show this far, made all the other idiocies of Season 2 worthwhile.

Sadly for us, that wasn’t the last episode of the season. The last episode was supposed to be the culmination of all of their storylines, sort of, we hope. Aidan’s trying to defy Mother up to the last second as the coffin closes. Josh thinks he’s going to save Nora and lift the whole curse by going off to kill the man who Turned him. And Sally, dear thing, she just can’t get rid of that Reaper no matter what she does. Tying all the cliffhangers together is natural for any popular series like this, but it could’ve been done better. New episodes of Being Human on SyFy are supposed to return in 2013, let’s hope they return with some guest writers as well!

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Alicia Glass