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PICK OF THE WEEK
Deadly Class (NEON)
Somebody somewhere has watched
Riverdale and thought: this is all right, but we can do better. Let’s keep the spooky teen heartthrobs bit, that’s quite good, but can we make it about a hundred times more violent? But let’s also try and make it a bit more like Harry Potter.
One more thing. Can we please set it in the 80s? I know someone who can get us a good deal on Echo and the Bunnymen licensing — yeah, I’m aware
The Killing Moon was featured prominently in the movie Donnie Darko, but that came out ages ago, no one will even remember. Yes, this is exactly what’s happened, and now we all get to enjoy the results in Deadly Class.
The KJ Apa / Archie of this particular comic book adaptation is the extremely brooding Benjamin Wadsworth, who plays disillusioned teen Marcus Lopez Arguello. ‘Disillusioned’ here may be a bit of an understatement: he has just burned down his orphanage, killing everyone inside, and is now homeless and seemingly obsessed with murdering Ronald Reagan .
His salvation arrives when he is recruited (by Lana Condor from To All
The Boys I’ve Loved Before!) into King’s Dominion, a Hogwartsian private academy where the children of the world’s most notorious crime families are sent to learn the dark arts.
It’s a wild mix of intentionally funny and laughably over serious, probably best personified by Henry Rollins’ cameo as the school’s poisons teacher. But while it’s impossible to take entirely seriously, it could still be a lot of fun. Just depends how much gratuitous comic book violence you can withstand.
C.B. Strike (Prime, 8:35pm Tuesday)
You’d think J.K. Rowling would be kept too busy making weird revisions to the Harry Potter series to write a whole series of crime novels under a pseudonym. You can kind of see why she initially published them under the name Robert Galbraith, can’t you — with her name attached it inevitably just feels like some peripheral part of the Potterverse. Like right now grown-up Harry is coming home after a long day at the office and watching an episode of C.B. Strike, his favourite detective show. He set it to record on his wizard’s DVR by twitching his wand and chanting “recordiarmus!”