Review: HBO’s ‘True Blood’ Season 4, Episode 9 – “Run” (aka “Let’s Get Out of Here”)

I was not even looking forward to watching this week’s episode of True Blood, and not just because I was in the middle of Wedding Crashers on TBS.  Am I alone in thinking this season is seriously lacking in substance?  I read other reviews after the fact and they are getting good reviews for the most part.  Am I crazy, or is it everyone else?  However, this week proved to be a little less lousy, and I’m finally getting some of the meaty vampire content that I enjoy.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Well, last week was quite an episode.  Antonia and the vampires finally had their confrontation, of course in the cemetery.  Where else would supernatural creatures meet to discuss their centuries of hatred and animosity toward one another?  Sookie was shot during the scuffle and since Bill was stabbed in the face with a silver cross and Eric was being cursed again by Antonia via Marnie, Suitor #3, Alcide, comes to save the day.

This week’s episode opens right after the shooting, and as Alcide carries Sookie through the woods to her house, he is overtaken by Bill who grabs her and attempts to heal her by feeding her his blood.  Sookie is almost dead and not responding.  Alcide gives Bill attitude, and Bill responds with the best quote of the season:

  “Werewolf, I’m going to need you to shut the f–k up!”

As Sookie recovers, she has a dream about Bill and Eric, and confesses that she loves them both.  She proposes that they share her, which I’m sure would go over really well.

 Antonia is going crazy, Debbie is still mad at Alcide, and Jessica is venting her problems to Nan, which is all sorts of hilarious.  Bill and Nan have some choice words for each other about how things should be run, and tempers run high underground as the two of them and Jessica are covered in silver.

Lafayette, with Andy’s gun, kicks Hoyt out of his house to take care of Arlene and Terry’s baby.  Andy and Jason try to break in to retrieve the baby, but Lafayette, still being possessed by the crazy Cajun lady from the past, will have none of it.

Jesus comes over to help and is able to communicate with Mavis, the woman inhabiting Lafayette’s body.  She retells the scene of her baby being killed, and that she was killed shortly after, by the married man who impregnated her, and that he buried them under the tree in the yard.  So they do the only logical thing to do – dig in the yard and pull out a baby’s skeleton so Mavis can hold her baby one last time.  I am disgusted beyond words.

Alcide agrees to help Marcus, the pack leader, “intimidate” Sam for spending time with Luna, his estranged wife.  However, the meeting turns into a scuffle and Sam gets the crap kicked out of him.  Too bad it’s not really Sam, but Tommy playing dress up again.

Sookie and Debbie meanwhile have become great friends.  Debbie distracts Antonia/Marnie by offering the services of her werewolf pack while Sookie breaks into the Moon Goddess to look for Eric.  What Sookie finds is the coven being held hostage; and also that Eric is under Antonia’s spell and is going to be forced to turn into Uma Thurman and ‘Kill Bill’ at the Tolerance convention.  Sookie goes to warn Bill, but is she too late?  Tune in next week to find out!

 Let me hear it for vampire politics!  I have been craving it since Russell Edgerton disemboweled that TV news anchor last year.  The constant struggle to be accepted in the mainstream, to go against their very natures as undead killing creatures, and to see Nan get her panties in a bunch, is really what drives my personal interest in the show.  I have always been fascinated with vampires, the seductive killer, and its nice to see the show go back to focusing more on their story.

I’m so far over this witch nonsense.  Antonia has one move – she holds up two fingers, speaks in a different language, and the vampire before her kneels on the ground.  I hope the cast were given knee pads.  I feel like Antonia is like a villain of the week on repeat, like Scooby Doo’s going to pull off her mask to reveal someone unlikely.  And then she would say, “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those silly vampires.”

Go LONGHORNS!

And, as always, I am almost completely unaffected by the other storylines.  They are like sprigs of parsley garnishing the True Blood plate; waiting to be thrown aside so I can enjoy the real food.

I give this episode 3/5 bears.

Oh, and this happened…

Review: HBO’s ‘True Blood’ Season 4, Episode 8 – “Spellbound”

Could season four be writing itself out of a nose dive?  I sure hope so.  While I sill can’t say for sure whether this season is definitively getting better, this week’s episode at least made an improvement from the last one for a change.  Let’s delve right in.

SPOILERS AHEAD…

We last left the folks at Bon Temps undergoing quite a bit of scary spellwork.  Antonia, inhabiting Marnie’s body, has gathered quite a coven of followers to recreate her spell which will cause all vampires in the area to daywalk and burn alive in the sun.  Bill has ordered that each vampire in the area bind him or herself in silver until the day passes.  Bill, however, goes a little easy on Jessica and she manages to escape her binds and is attempting to make her way outside.  Jason runs in like a badass and tackles her to the ground.  They then start making out.

Review: HBO’s ‘True Blood’ Season 4, Episode 6 – “I Wish I Was the Moon”

Another Sunday, another True Blood.  I was hoping to have a glowing review to write, and I know you were hoping to read one.  Let this be your warning: You may not find it here.

Oh, and also, there are spoilers ahead.

The episode opens in Sookie’s house.  As predicted, Bill storms over to lay the smack down on Eric, who is busy kanoodling Sookie in the living room.

Sookie stops Eric from killing Bill in a really anti-climactic fight, by explaining that Bill is his King.  So what does Bill do?  Captures Eric of course, turning a deaf ear to Sookie’s protests.  Eric may be a danger to everyone, according to His Highness, because he may be under the control of necromancers.  The great, green monster of jealousy has finally reared its ugly head.  Sookie was missing for over a year and comes back only to shack up with his arch enemy.  Ouch.  No wonder he kicked her off his property.  I don’t know which of them I feel sorrier for.

Eric is thrown in a cell with Pam, who’s looking more and more like Two Face.  She pleads with him to remember, to be the Eric she’s been with for over a hundred years.  Eric vehemently declares that he wants no part in the things that he’s done, he doesn’t want to remember them.  And good thing.  He used to be a giant toolbox.

The Knights of Badassdom Trailer: It’s time to Level Up!

We’ve talked about The Knight of Badassdom before, but didn’t have much info. Now, thanks to Comic Con, we’ve got a Knights of Badassdom trailer. And we’re gonna show you the trailer, but let me first talk a little bit about what could be my favorite film cast ever. Ever.

Tyrion Lannister, Jason Stackhouse, and Steve Zahn are roommates, (Awesome already right?) and Stackhouse has just been through a rough breakup. So to cheer him up, his buddies do what all movie-land friends do – they kidnap him and take him somewhere to raise his spirits.

Only in this case, that somewhere is a LARP game. Once there, they encounter Liam McPoyle, Abed Nadir, and Summer Glau. Sounds good to me.

Now what that means is that in one paragraph, I’ve already tied this movie to Game of Thrones, True Blood, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Community. And I didn’t even mention W. Earl Brown (Deadwood, Justified), Joshua Malina (Sports Night), and Larry Zerner (Friday the 13th Part III) whose character ‘Shelly’ is famous for supplying Jason Voorhees with his hockey mask. And now, his name in KoB will also be ‘Shelly’…

Anyhow, here’s the Knights of Badassdom trailer:

BAD. ASS.

In addition, we also have some interviews from Comic Con…

The first one with Entertainment Weekly, which feature both Margarita Levieva (The Lincoln Lawyer) and Michael Gladis (Mad Men) whom I for some reason had not already mentioned, along with may of the aforementioned actors and Director Joe Lynch.

And the 2nd, longer interview, for G4TV is just Lynch and Summer Glau…

http://www.g4tv.com/lv3/54344

There is no release date set thus far, but it’s coming out sometime this spring…

 

Review: HBO’s ‘True Blood’ Season 4, Episode 5 – “I Hate You, I Love You” or “Me and the Devil”

This season of True Blood is definitely proving to be more and more entertaining.  I didn’t have high expectations, previously with the show having had those expectations hit me with disappointment like being run over by bulldozer.  But with the current plot lines, and especially this new uninhibited Eric, it’s becoming funnier than it ever has been.  Which I appreciate, because vampires have a tendency to be major downers.

This episode, ironically, starts out with Mr. and Mrs. Boring and their son Weirdo.  However, it’s nice to see Tommy actually fight back for once and he ends up killing Joe Lee and his mother in a vicious rage.  Then he brings them to Sam’s house for show and tell; so they do the only logical thing – wrap the bodies in tarp and throw them in the swamp.  The Dateline special is pending.

Terry and Arlene meanwhile try to figure out the best way to make their baby stop being the creepiest child in the universe.  Terry suggests finding a reverend to cleanse the home of evil.  They end up calling Tara’s mom and her minister lover-turned-husband who come over for a sing along with a tambourine and light giant joints to stink up their house.

Eric has a dream about a sleeping Sookie when who shows up – Godric, his maker who ended up killing himself last season.  Dream Godric tries to convince Eric that he needs to stop fighting his nature and drink Sookie’s blood so he can day-walk.  He goes in her room for real and when she wakes up, he says he had a bad dream.  After he cries for a while, Sookie agrees to let him stay in her room to sleep.

Oh and P.S., why hasn’t anyone besides Andy not noticed that Jason has been missing for days on end?  Hoyt thanks Jessica for saving his “best friend” but he didn’t even know his “best friend” has been MIA for, what, a week?  Predictably, as soon as Jason drank Jessica’s blood, we knew the sex dreams were only moments away.  These dreams, however, include Hoyt.

Bill has his hands full with his great great great great great great granddaughter, Portia; who still wants to get in his pants even though she admits that it’s incest.  Sick.  I’m glad he glamored her into being afraid of him, she’s full on psycho.

Jesus and Lafayette are going to Mexico to visit Jesus’ grandfather, who he hates because he made him kill a goat when he was 9.  Jesus hopes that his grandfather will help them un-piss off the vamps and reverse Eric’s memory curse and Pam’s rotten face.

Sookie goes to see Marnie under the ruse of wanting a psychic reading.  Marnie is able to channel Gran; and when Sookie reads Marnie’s thoughts, her Gran’s voice tells her to run away from Marnie because she’s bad news. Marnie gets captured later by Bill’s goons and has another vision of the Spanish witch, Antonia, who was apparently murdered by vampires.  That still doesn’t explain why she hates vampires, though, hmm….

Eric discovered everything he did before he lost his memory and feels so remorseful that he plans to leave Sookie’s house, until she calls him back to make out with him.  He should have left, though, because Pam let it slip that Eric was staying there and Bill has his angry pants on.  Look out, Northman, you’re about to get a vampire-king bitch slap.

Oh, and Alcide is being visited by his local pack master about not registering with the pack.  Blah, blah.  Alcide was wearing a wife beater, so I was distracted.

So this Antonia person that is possessing Marnie, we have found out, is responsible for a multitude of vampire deaths.  Apparently she used Necromancy (control of the dead) to cause a bunch of vamps to wake up and walk through the daylight, causing them to be burned up.  Has she not found a suitable conduit before now?  No one willing to let her possess them?  It doesn’t make sense for her to make herself known after hundreds of years.

While I’m quite sick of half of Bon Temps (Sam, Tommy, Jason, Hoyt, Jessica, Tara, etc.), I will say that most of the story arcs are intriguing.  And call me a silly girl, but it’s about time we got back to some development with Sookie’s love life.  First it was Bill, then Alcide, then Eric, and lately it’s been no one.  It’s about time they explored the Sookie/Eric combination.  Next week we should see quite the blow out between Eric and Bill.

Oh, and I hope Eric never gets his memory back!

A solid 3.5/5 Bears.

Hero Express – ‘The Avengers’ Teaser Trailer, Kick-Ass 2, and Another Actor Wants ‘Luke Cage’

Welcome to Hero Express, your one-stop shop through the news filled world of superhero’s in Film, TV, Video Games and whatever else floats your boat.

This is the Hero Express for July 18, 2011:

Review: HBO’s ‘True Blood’ Season 4, Episode 2 – ‘You Smell Like Dinner’

Episode 2 of this season was released on HBO Go this evening alongside the world premiere.  So, along with tonight’s double feature, comes a double review!

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!