craig-snell-151-149427

I've just upped my rating from an 8 to a 9 on the strength of the season 3 episodes shown so far.

Please bear in mind this is the 'other' fantasy show on prime, and the first twenty minutes or so of the first episode of season three were simply putting it 'awesome' as my American friends would say.

It was as good as anything seen on the rings of power and anything on game of thrones or house of the dragon. Please note I am not including 'Battle of the Bar stewards' in this I simply do not think that will ever be beaten for action, suspense, and cinematography.

So if you haven't watched this show because you thought it to be the poor cousins of the other bigger fantasy shows, give it a go. Every season gets better and better, yes a lot of this is because the source material is also all finished and is excellent. (Kudos to @brandonsanderson for finishing it, and major shade thrown to GRRM, for 'having more important things to do' imagine how good GOT would have been if the books had all been done and 'the dans'' hadn't had to resort to making stuff up. Again excluding BOTB, that was immense

Anyway that's my rant over.

I read many reviews of this movie before deciding to go and see this at the cinema, the majority of these were either positive or very positive, and to be perfectly honest I have no idea why.

This is Dracula, but it isn't, it's Count Orlok. If you want to see this done properly watch Bran Stoker's Dracula with Gary Oldman. Yes you have Keanu Reeves rather pitiful English accent, and Nicholas Hoult nails that (it does help him being English) but the film is far superior, it evolves the 'Count' character much better than Nosferatu. You can empathise with him and his reasons for being what he is. Nosferatu does not evolve in any way, there is no origin story, he is just an evil being who likes the taste of blood.

Yes the effects were better in this new film, but that is just a matter of having better technology,

Don't take my word for this, read the book, watch both movies and judge yourself, if I didn't know better, I would have thought someone did a find and replace on the original screenplay, changing Dracula to Orlok and then asked ChatGPT, to take out all aspects of character development from the screenplay.

For what he was given Bill Skarsgard give a good performance as an evil blood sucker, he was believable, but the point of Dracula is that he is twisted from being a good all round bloke by the death of the love of his life, suggesting that evil is made not born. Nosferatu throws this in your face.

So to summarise my muttering, this is Dracula by another name, but they should have left well alone.

Ok, is this show, Game of thrones, or succession? No certainly not, what it is one of the better dramas on Channel 5, the dramas that appear on five are very much hit and miss, so when my suggested that we watch this, I did what I always do, of checking its mark on the good old Internet Movie Database. Having a mark of 5.4 did not fill me with confidence. Adamant was 'she who must be obeyed' that we would be watching, so watch we did.

I thought season 2 was better than season 1, even though Sheridan Smith is a damned fine actress. There are multiple attempts at pulling the wool over your eyes, the uber watchful of you out there may guess the "nasty" pasty early on, but even if you do, it's worth persevering.

If you have nothing to watch as the nights are drawing in, each season can be done in 3 hours if you are good with with the FF button.

In summary, not terrible by any stretch of the imagination, it's not going to win any awards, but you are not going to throw things at the TV When you are watching.