The Strain

After the first season: Terribly B-movie like, repetitive and with few ambitions. The one-dimensional characters don’t generate any drama, the main villain looks ridiculous and the fights with the generic vampires are always the same. It’s nicely brutal towards the secondary characters, though – it kills grannies and toddlers – but that’s the only thing I actually liked about The Strain. When taken as a whole, not much happens during the first season, and I probably won’t watch the second. (06.10.2014)

A pleasant genre piece that, after three parts, has no problem keeping the tone set by a somewhat overcomplicated pilot. Interestingly developing characters and the two biggest badasses of the current series - rat killer Vasilij and maestro Satrakian ensure a sufficient supply of platelets. Viggo Nekromortensen Thomas Eichhorst on the other side of the river only completes the beautiful panopticon. The fear that the wheels will fall off and everything will start going in circles disappears in part five. As soon as the fight for life and death begins, The Strain gets going in exactly the way that pulp demands. Te Nosferatu commando and the formation of vampirological-deratization-virological revolts are explicitly top moments. (28.07.2014)

Season 1: suspenseful at first, with a mysterious atmosphere and an interesting idea, then it’s more about the survival of the apocalypse, and a bit above average, it was a pleasure, but it didn't blow my mind. On the plus side, it features Finch the janitor and Samwise from Lord of the Rings, and I liked them a lot here. There’s also an interesting German bad guy, but the main "zombie" is pretty laughable. Unfortunately, the characters overall are very simple, with no depth to them, and as a result you don’t really care about them, but I'll see what comes in future seasons. (12.03.2019)

Forget Penny Dreadful! The Strain is a very engaging, dark quirky sci-fi with very good dialogue and an interesting story, and the involvement of the janitor from Harry Potter is more than gratifying. After the pilot, my enthusiasm and excitement are high, as such high potential hasn't been seen here before. Second episode: the pace dropped considerably, I'm afraid it will end up being another drama rather than horror. From episode seven till the end, the series maintains a decent pace, introducing new characters, but the finale was a slight disappointment for me, mainly because it didn't differ much from the other episodes. It's great, but it's not quite at the top.. (20.07.2014)