Mr. Burke Reviews

Review #12: Haven Several months back, I discovered reruns of Haven were airing on one of the retro television stations. I'd already seen every episode, but I set a timer anyway, and found that they were in the middle of season four, which was fine by me. After a few episodes that I thought might've been edited a little too much, I checked Netflix , and it was there. I continued from where I was instead of restarting. I might still do that at some point. Haven was a series on the Syfy channel, loosely based on the Stephen King novella, The Colorado Kid . You don't need to read the story first. In fact, I didn't read it until, probably, around the third season. It bears little resemblance to the show. The story has three characters in it, two of whom run the local newspaper, Vincent Teagues and Dave Bowie (not the singer). In the show, they are brothers, and Dave's last name is also Teagues. The newspaper's name is different. The town name is different. The...

Review #11: Blood Drive I sat in on a panel at a recent sci-fi convention ( Heliosphere , in Rye, NY ) on the topics of movies that they love to hate. Not movies so bad that they're good, but movies so bad that you want to warn all your friends away from them. In the latter part of the discussion, the panel started polling the audience for their suggestions. I couldn't think of one off the top of my head, but I did mention Syfy channel's Blood Drive , which ran last summer, and which I binged in the fall. No one had heard of it. Ah, to be that lucky. The less said about Blood Drive , the better, but this is a review page, so I have to say something. Okay, first, the commercials sold it to me as an apocalyptic future with some kind of Death Race that involves "Vampire cars". Now, stories with vampire cars tend to be more campy than horrific. Blood Drive might be campy, but it doubles down on horrific. Gory, graphic, buckets of blood, with plenty death and d...

Review #10: Inhumnas Possible spoilers for parts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) , particularly Agents of SHIELD . Hard to believe that the current series of blockbusters coming out of Marvel Studios started with, of all things, Iron Man . It's equally amazing to some newer, younger fans that Iron Man was basically a B-list hero before Robert Downey, Jr. got a hold of him. One reason for this is because Marvel had signed away the rights to some of its franchises, particularly Spider-Man , The Fantastic Four and The X-Men -- which included use of the word mutant . (Side note: this is why DC Comics uses "meta-humans", which are essentially the same thing, even if the mechanics are slightly different.) That brings us here. To the average non-comic-reading viewer, there would probably be little difference between a mutant and an Inhuman , even if, story-wise, they have totally different origins. At one point, The Inhumans was scheduled for later this decade ...

New Columns Coming Work and other writing projects, and just decisions on things to review, have kept me from my hoped-for weekly schedule. Not that anyone is following this blog yet. Few have even stumbled upon it. When I left off, I remember that I wanted to do a Inhumans vs. The Gifted column. But then I didn't because I found out that the Inhumans was only a miniseries, and maybe I'd wait until it was over. And then I thought that I'd just do two separate columns. And then ... excuse, excuse, delay, delay. Likewise, I thought I could do a Orville vs. Star Trek: Discovery column, but the obvious setback is that I don't have access to the new Star Trek. Granted, now that the season is over, I could use the free introductory month to binge the season, should I find a month when I have that much time. Naturally, if this were some sort of paying gig, or if I actually had followers at this point, I would make the investment. But let's face it, if you're r...