Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		2.5

Hemlock Grove: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Twilight Peaks.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 11, 2014

For today’s recipe, you’ll need to have a couple of big box sets ready, please. First, take Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery and Twilight Forever: The Complete Saga, and remove the grand total of 20 Blu-ray discs. Place at least a few of the discs in your Cuisinart and set to puree, adding more discs as you are able until all 20 have been diced to a fine dust. Add a touch of water and fashion the dust into new Blu-ray discs, baking at 375 degrees until crispy. Or, if that doesn’t work—simply pick up Hemlock Grove: The Complete First Season, and you’ll pretty much have the same thing (reduced, as they say in cooking class, to a mere three discs!). In the commentary appending the series’ premiere episode, executive producer and director Eli Roth makes no bones (skeletal or otherwise) about Hemlock Grove’s antecedents, willingly offering up both the David Lynch and Stephenie Meyer outings. If Hemlock Grove never even attempts to approach the surreal giddiness that defined Twin Peaks in its most outré aspects, the series still has several resemblances to that unforgettable show, including a seminal murder of a teenage girl that kicks things off in horrifying fashion, and a small town that is fairly bursting at the seams with—well, unusual inhabitants. Mix in a a few young werewolves and vampires, and if there aren’t the makings for actual teams devoted to Edward or Jacob, there’s certainly enough fodder to make the resemblance to the gloomy ambience of Twilight more than apparent. In its quest to seemingly dominate the world’s entertainment options, Netflix, which is moving more and more into original programming, has already greenlit the series for an additional season beyond the two already in the can, this despite some withering critical assessments of the seasons that have already aired.

There’s an oddly haphazard quality to Hemlock Grove from virtually the first moment, with a gaggle of initially unconnected characters being introduced via a number of quick vignettes. A Roma mother and son, Lynda Rumancek (Lili Taylor) and Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron), arrive in Hemlock Grove, Pennsylvania to take up residence in the rather dilipidated mobile home left to them by Peter’s deceased uncle. Meanwhile, Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgård, real life son of Stellan) is enjoying some carnal relations in a car, but evidently needs a little taste of blood to complete the deed. Roman is part of Hemlock Grove’s ruling elite, the Godfrey family, which also includes his bizarre (and possibly incestuous) mother, Olivia (Famke Janssen, doing one of the most patently bizarre accents ever). The town is soon on pins and needles due to the discovery of the badly mauled corpse of a young teenage girl, and seemingly without much evidence, young would be novelist Christina Wendall (Freya Tingley) decides the murderous culprit is Peter, whom she suspects of being a werewolf.

Soon enough, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks (that would be Peter) and the kid from the extremely right side of the tracks team up to try to track down the killer, while a frankly overstuffed number of subplots spin out involving a number of the other townsfolk, virtually all of whom seem to have various skeletons rattling around their closet. Hemlock Grove never takes the time to adequately explore any of this, however, and simply thrusts it at the viewer, as if simply presenting all this weirdness will be enough to justify the show’s existence.

There are some decent elements in Hemlock Grove, including several well done scares, some good transformation scenes (there is a werewolf after all), and a couple of really interesting characters (two of whom, Roman’s bizarre—and huge—sister, and his cousin Letha, are too often shunted to the sidelines). But much like the “recipe” offered at the start of this review, Hemlock Grove is a pretty mixed up casserole, one with a few tasty ingredients that still can’t help make this show feel like anything other than yesterday’s leftovers.

Hemlock Grove: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hemlock Grove: The Complete First Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Shot digitally with the Arri Alexa, Hemlock Grove boasts the sleek, smooth appearance the Arri excels in delivering, but the show is repeatedly hampered by odd color grading choices, including a kind of sickly pea green or green-yellow hue that is slathered on a lot of the proceedings (as can easily be seen in many of the screenshots accompanying this review). This gives the show a very distinctive look, but it keeps fine detail at bay, a situation exacerbated further by the series' tendency to push contrast quite a bit of the time, leading to blooming whites and general effulgence in many shots. Some close-ups can deliver really superb fine detail (see screenshot 6). There are no issues with image instability and no real problems with noise creeping into the many dark scenes.

Hemlock Grove: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Eli Roth knows how to deliver scares via jump cuts and booming LFE, and those techniques help to bolster Hemlock Grove's lossless DTS- HD Master Audio 5.1 track. There's some good immersion here, courtesy of some well placed ambient environmental effects (a lot of the series takes place out of doors). Dialogue is cleanly presented and well prioritized and some nicely done sound effects also add to the spookiness. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is very wide on this problem free track.

Hemlock Grove: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Director and Executive Producer Eli Roth with Special Guest Lorenza Izzo on the premiere episode.


• Dysfunctional in Every Way (1080p; 11:02) focuses on the show's motley crew of characters and their various foibles.


• Anatomy of a Kill (1080p; 4:32) has Roth overseeing a kill scene.


• Fairytales for Adults (1080p; 7:19) has Roth and others talking about various plot points in between scenes from the show.


• The Rust Beneath the Surface (1080p; 4:54) is about the production design and some of the effects.


• The Monster Within (1080p; 6:25) deals with some of the scarier fairy tale aspects of the show.


• It Hurts So Good (1080p; 4:54) is all about morphing into a werewolf.


• Trailer/TV Spots (1080p; 5:07)

Hemlock Grove: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The featurette entitled Dysfunctional in Every Way included on this Blu-ray set might be an unwitting epigraph for this entire series. Simply throwing a bunch of admittedly extremely odd characters together in a supposed murder mystery with supernatural overtones might seem like a good idea, but as they say the devil is in the details. Too often this series plays like a warmed over marriage of Twin Peaks and Twilight, and my hunch is most fans will simply opt to watch either (or both) of those rather than sit through some of the turgid melodrama on display here. Aside from some questionable color grading choices which detract from detail levels, technical merits here are very strong for those considering a purchase.