Hemlock Grove – Pilot Episode

I would have to be honest and say that I checked out this series or just the pilot episode based solely on this poster that they have for it. Hemlock Grove is what I am talking about and it’s a  horror/thriller television series for Netflix from executive producer Eli Roth, developed by Brian McGreevy & Lee Shipman, and produced by Gaumont International Television. THe show premeiered on Netflick on April 19th and I downloaded the first episode via torrents and watched it last night. It is based on McGreevy’s novel Hemlock Grove, which was released on March 27, 2012. Currently Netflix has all 13 episodes of season that you can watch online.

I’m not familiar with the novel but we have Famke Janssen, Bill Skarsgård, Landon Liboiron, Penelope Mitchell, Dougray Scott & Freya Tingley as the main cast. Familiar faces Lily Taylor, Aaron Douglas & Kandyse McClure (from BSG). Production wise this show does remind me of Sanctuary and Lost Girl a little bit. The budget for the first season of Hemlock Grove is reportedly about $45 million and filming was done in Port Perry, Ontario a small town about an hour away from Toronto.

The show starts off with one of the lead characters, Roman Godfrey, eating an ice cream cone in a small parlour when a hot girl comes to the glass door and catches his attention. Leaving his cone, he steps outside and follows her to his car where they proceed to have sex and in a bizzarre fetish that he must have, Roman cuts his finger on a blade and rubs a little of his blood on her while she rides him. When done he goes off in his care. Later a teenager, Brooke Bluebell, is murdered in the woods of Hemlock Grove, while she is going to meet her female teacher, with whom I presume she is having a sexual affair. Her car is attacked by an unseen creature and she is chased through the woods and is killed while trying to hide in a playground. Evidence points to an animal attack but suspicions soon fall on Peter, the newly arrived gypsy. Peter is a gypsy and the new kid in town following the death of his uncle and is living in his uuncle’s old trailer park home with his mother. Peter quickly becomes the target of rumors that he is a werewolf.

Roman is a weird kid but that’s because he lives with his weird mother Olivia, who used to have sex with her brother-in-law and Roman’s father’s brother Norman Godfrey. The Godfrey family was well known for it’s steel mill in the little Pennsylvanis town of Hemlock Grove. In the present day, the steel mill has been shut down for years, but the Godfrey family has since moved on to become the owners of White Tower, a cutting edge biotech facility. There’s also Letha, Roman’s daughter, who is exceptionally close to her cousin Roman. Christina is a young novelist and a high school student who is intrigued by Peter. She’s also the first person to meet Peter as he moves in with his mother to the neighbourhood. And we have a mad scientist – a role filled by Dr. Johann Pryce, a visionary who believes that he can create life from death. Pryce is a man who will do anything to pursue his agenda. While the murder is discovered, it’s up to Sheriff Tom Sworn, the man whose job it is to make sense of the mayhem and craziness of “Hemlock Grove” while attempting to keep the town from tearing itself apart.

It’s too soon to say but I hope this one gets better as we go along. I’m looking forward to seeing the next episodes.

Help Find Sunil Tripathi

In the midst of the Boston Marathon bombings, the search for the suspects and the death of one of the suspects, shooting incidents, death of a police officer and the successful hunt for the other, another story loomed it’s head in the news. For a few hours, hundreds of thousands of people received a message about the identity of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers that was painfully false. The story is of a Brown University student Sunil Thripathi, an American youngster of Indian origin who was falsely identified as being one of the bombers. Sunil a 22-year-old Brown University philosophy student who went missing on March 16, became a trending name on Reddit and Twitter worldwide, as a young woman who went to school with thought she recognized him from one of the photos released by the FBI. Redditors also picked up on the supposed likeness, and by the evening Reddit and Twitter (on which “Sunil Tripathi” would soon trend worldwide) had exploded with the theory.

Sunil’s family, who live in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania and describe him as “kind, gentle, and shy,” had launched a social-media campaign to find him; their Facebook page garnered nearly a quarter million views in the first week of his disappearance. As the police search for Sunil expanded, his story began to make national news last month with mentions from Fox News, ABC News, the Boston Globe, and other outlets. By the same evening the Tripathi family began to be flooded with calls, Facebook posts, and harassing emails raising the allegation. The family suspended the Facebook page at around 10 p.m., flagged the messages, and reached out to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. National & local news stations had caught wind of the story spreading on the internet and soon roughly a dozen news vans had parked themselves at the Tripathi residence in Radnor eager to question the family. (All of this, even though Sunil’s Tripathi’s name was never once mentioned on the Boston police scanner prior to the initial suspicions on Twitter.)

After hours of fevered speculation, early on Friday morning NBC’s Pete Williams batted down the rumors, and broke the news that authorities had identified brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the primary suspects. The moderator of the Reddit page that was based on finding & identifying the bombers issued a public apology and asked each & every user who had remove any and all links about him. However Sunil’s sister says that other than some individuals, the family had yet received any apologies from news organizations whose employees helped push the erroneous ID. The Tripathi family’s nightmare continues. Sunil Tripathi remains missing; authorities do not suspect foul play, and an FBI forensic analysis turned up zero clues to his whereabouts. The family has launched another campaign on Facebook encouraging supporters to write messages of love and encouragement on their hands and post the photos online.

Hope he is found alive and well and can return to his family safely.