LOOK HERE: Bill Skarsgard (left) and Landon Liboiron in the horror thriller “Hemlock Grove” on Netflix. (Sophie Giraud)
Cousin love, mother-smother love, monsters, a werewolf, small-town werewolf bigotry, extreme nipple shots, an 8-foot high school girl with a plaid skirt and a giant eye in the middle of her cheek, a teenaged immaculate conception, a disemboweled teen, Gypsies, tramps and thieves.
“Hemlock Grove,” the 13-part series available in its entirety tomorrow on Netflix has it all — and more, or less.
This teen/adult horror series is Netflix’s follow-up to the astoundingly popular “House of Cards” as the pay service tries to position itself as the new AMC, HBO or Showtime.
This new series, often very good and just as often very dull, centers around the horrific murder of a town cheerleader whose guts have been eaten out. Was it an animal, a werewolf or the evil doings of the mad scientist?
Hemlock Grove is a fading old steel mill town in Pennsylvania, kept alive by the Godfrey Institute.
It’s a town where the major players either have supernatural powers or are just out of work.
When first we enter, teen heartthrob Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgard), heir to the Godfrey holdings, gets into his vintage Austin Healy 3000 and immediately has sex with a hooker who is so gorgeous she should charge $58,000 a minute. Since I once owned that same car, believe me, what they maneuver in that car isn’t possible in real life, but hey, this is fantasy/fiction after all!
More fantasy: Roman’s mother, who has more hands on Roman than the hooker, is Famke Janssen.
The action then switches from car sex to a beat-up car rolling into town with two people — high-schooler Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron) and his mother, Lynda (Lili Taylor) — who are moving into a banged-up trailer they inherited from a Romany Gypsy uncle. Not a day later, the cheerleader is murdered and disemboweled, and so the kids at the high school naturally suspect the new kid, Peter, who must be a werewolf because his index and middle fingers are the same length.
Thrown into the mix is Roman’s pregnant-by-immaculate-conception first cousin, Letha (Penelope Mitchell) whose father (Dougray Scott) is sleeping with Roman’s mother.
Meantime, Letha’s also dealing with cousin Roman’s lust for her, and his lovable but Frankenstein giantess of a sister, Shelley (as in Mary Shelley — get it?).
It’s not until the last five minutes of the second episode that we get some serious monster action when one of the two boys turns full wolf. Even though we’ve seen these wolf-boy transformations a thousand times, this one’s a particular stand-out — and it’s great.