“I have an ugliness that’s impossible to love.” –Roman Godfrey

Oh, Hemlock Grove.  What are we gonna do with you?

I frankly don’t know if I can write a coherent, thoughtful, or cogent essay about this show.  It’s soap opera. It’s a gore zone. It’s Twilight. It’s The Howling. It’s True Blood. It’s Skinemax. It’s laughable. It’s visceral. It’s shocking. It makes no sense whatsoever. It creeps me out. It bores me. It rivets me.

I could go on like this for ages. Hemlock Grove has polarized me, almost right down the middle.  After every episode, I debate whether or not I want to continue. Maybe the dialogue will get better? Ooh! Maybe there will be some more amazing bloody werewolf transformations! So I dive back in, expecting the worst, but hoping for the best.

And I get both. Often. In spades.

The good: special effects are top-notch. Seriously. The most amazing werewolf transformations since The Howling and American Werewolf in London. Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron) doesn’t so much transform into a werewolf (SPOILER ALERT: he’s a werewolf), as the werewolf rises up from inside him. His skin splits open, his eyeballs pop out, and he eats his own face. It’s awesome.

There’s plenty of other gory scenes to satisfy throughout the episodes. More transformations, killings, mutilations, beautiful pale corpses. Serious kudos to the makeup maestros (Greg Nicotero, among others) for their top-notch work.

Getting to the heart of the matter.

Madeleine Martin, playing Shelley Godfrey, is wonderful. A quiet, understated gentle giantess with a large deformed bald head and misplaced eyes (one normal, one inky and black and over-sized). She is terrific as the (more or less) moral center of the show, questioning other characters’ actions and desperately wanting to be “normal.” She steals every scene she’s in, even though she’s mute throughout the entire first season.

Shelley Godfrey (Madeleine Martin)

Do you like nudity? Hemlock Grove is all about the nudity, kids.  Male nudity, female nudity, nude corpses, nude bodies splattered in blood, nude bodies covered in fleshy goo. It’s like a smorgasbord of boobies and butts.  Which leads us to…

The bad: the nudity. It’s just so obviously gratuitous and done with very little in the way of character motivation as to be laughable. It’s gotten so I can usually predict it: “Hmmm. I bet she is going to take her top off.” Pause. “Yep. Those are boobs.”  And don’t go making assumptions about yours truly: I dig seeing naked people. A lot. But I dig good stories and great dialogue even more, and if truth be told, I’d rather have the latter than the former.

I mentioned dialogue, and let me tell you: this dialogue is bad. Weird, awkward, stilted, and generally unsatisfying. It’s sappy, unemotional, and delivered with all the gusto of a stoned sleepwalker. The worst offender is Bill Skarsgård as Roman Godfrey, Shelley’s brother. His voice is deadpan and somnambulistic, sucking the energy out of every scene he’s in. *yawn*

Sorry.

The weird: stuff happens in this show that just does. Not. Make. Sense. And then is never mentioned again. Or explained. Characters that you think might be important or interesting just…go away.  People say things that are completely wrong and nobody corrects them.  Here’s just one mild nitpicky example: when Peter rolls into town at the beginning of the series, he constantly runs into people who remark about his hairy body, and in fact they say that’s how they knows he’s a werewolf: because he is extremely hairy.

This guy:

So very hirsute.

And nobody smirks, nobody says, “This guy? The guy with less hair than Justin Bieber? That’s your hairy werewolf?”  They just go along with it: yep, that’s our hairy guy in Hemlock Grove.

The creators certainly have their bloody hearts in the right place. Maybe I expected too much, with the high-profile Eli Roth executive producing. When Hemlock Grove works, it comes exploding out of the fog like a freight train of flesh and blood. When it fails, though, it goes down hard and fast. Insert your own inappropriate joke here.

Hemlock Grove is on Netflix, and has been renewed for a 3rd and final season.

Uncle Mike sez: meh. Watch it if you want. Or don’t.

But I probably still will, hehehe.