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Positive:
39
Mixed:
13
Negative:
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Critic Reviews
Jul 14, 2017ColliderJul 14, 2017
Season 4 Review:
For the first time since the series’ strong start in 2014, The Strain delivers propulsive drama and world building. In the final season, the talented cast, the gorgeous effects, and the singular cinematographic aesthetic are matched bold narrative moves and satisfying character beats.
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Aug 27, 2016
Jul 9, 2015
Jul 14, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The cast is uniformly good, especially Corey Stoll as Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, the head of a Center for Disease Control team called in to investigate that dead plane.... The greatest strength of The Strain is its ability to revamp vampires while paying homage to the myths about them that have accrued over decades.
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TV Guide MagazineJul 11, 2014
Season 1 Review:
So generous in its jolts that you barely have time to dwell on the plot holes, The Strain may not be the most original thrill ride, but it's among the summer's most enjoyable, elevating its genre clichés with a pulp urgency that, like the monster's icky wormy offspring, gets under your skin and stays there.
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Jul 14, 2015
Season 2 Review:
The Strain reifies its connections between political and melodramatic themes with the gory action for which the series is best known--the monsters’ neck-piercing six-foot tongues, the silver bullets’ exploding effects--in kitschy evidence during the battle against that takes up the bulk of the storage facility scene.
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Jul 10, 2015
Season 2 Review:
Some of the situations--the tension between Eph and his son, Zach (Max Charles, replacing Ben Hyland); a new romance between Vasiliy and Dutch--are dull plot stretchers, setting up future crises and filling time until the story lines mesh. Or so we can hope. Meanwhile, the show still gets the tone mostly right and offers consistent pleasure in its details.
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Aug 7, 2014
Season 1 Review:
he series doesn’t have the best pacing, or the best dialogue (“Well, if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, we’re going to the morgue”), and in some areas it doesn’t even try: never has a show set in New York but filmed in Toronto felt more like a show set in New York but filmed in Toronto. (When Astoria appeared, full of burning garbage cans, all of Queens raised its eyebrows.) And yet the show overflows with greasy satisfactions, simply because it commits so fully to its own goofiness.
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Jul 11, 2014
Season 1 Review:
Quality-wise, it's closer to Child's Play 2 or The Kiss than it is to Re-Animator--which truly is awesome, as anyone who's seen it will testify--but I love the fact that The Strain seems to be trying to evoke these sorts of better-than-government-work horror midnight time-wasters.
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Jul 11, 2014
Season 1 Review:
[The first episode is] a little dawdling and predictable and unsure of its tone, with cardboard characters and flat dialogue. Things pick up after that, though--once everyone’s been brought onstage and the story set in motion, the episodes have more snap, and the horror scenes go from pedestrian to actually creepy.
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Jul 11, 2014
Season 1 Review:
While I seesawed between unimpressed and grossed out for much of the pilot, by the third episode, the best of the series so far, some of the characters had been fleshed out (and yeah, there's probably a better way of putting that). By the fourth, I was finally getting a feel for what The Strain might be capable of as it slowly revealed some real-world horrors that may have been there all along.
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Jul 10, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The better parts of The Strain will unsettle viewers with this new species of monster.... The first couple of episodes seem as if they’ve been assembled from a kit that’s missing a few nuts and bolts; by the third and fourth episodes, however, a viewer gets a much better sense of The Strain’s style and bite.
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Aug 15, 2016
Season 3 Review:
Out of the corner of your eye, The Strain almost looks like a real show. [19/26 Aug 2016 p.106]
Jul 20, 2015
Season 2 Review:
The Strain knows how to to gross. It needs to get better at the engrossing part. [24 Jul 2015, p.50]
TV Guide MagazineAug 18, 2016
Season 3 Review:
The show is now basically a giddily graphic war-zone melodrama, with a quarantined Manhattan a new Ground Zero as embattled humans face an ancient evil. [22 Aug - 4 Sep 2016, p.16]
Jul 11, 2014
Season 1 Review:
For fans craving the next dark, disturbing weekly watch in the spirit of The Walking Dead, The Strain will prove too cheeky and eye-roll inducing. Those that appreciate late '90s B-horror flicks such as The Faculty might enjoy The Strain for the kind of creepy, often goofy ride it is, even though it never gets too deep.
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Jul 11, 2014
Season 1 Review:
There are ominous signs of an oncoming crisis, and it’s possible that, once that crisis finally arrives, the show might shed its more tedious elements and become something worth watching. As of now, it proves roughly the same as its literary equivalent: a few cool ideas, and a whole lot of dross.
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ColliderAug 27, 2016
Season 3 Review:
Ultimately, instead of finding our characters at the start of a new chapter, we find them somehow regressed back to what is essentially same old, same old and the first three episodes are spent catching up instead of moving forward. The rest of the gang is diverted by cumbersome subplots.
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Jul 9, 2014
Season 1 Review:
Despite a great deal of visible effort, the first four episodes of The Strain never succeeded in making Corey Stoll's epidemiologist character even remotely compelling. Unfortunately most of the other characters are even more superficial and predictable, which made it nearly impossible to stay engaged when they began doing dumb things. The only real bright spot in The Strain is David Bradley.
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