The Strain

The horror is carefully and strategically placed; one mustn't have too much of a good thing, after all.... So settle in. You will be grossed out.

By the end of Episode 4, subtitled “It’s Not For Everyone,” the series is earning its mettle as a truly macabre, chilling and rousing war of attrition in which the winner will either take all or stop hell on earth in its bloody tracks.

The Strain is packed with so much macabre imagery and so many clever ideas that it doesn't feel like the resuscitation of a tired genre, but the launch of something new and fun.

Ominous, creepy and utterly engaging, The Strain is like the perfect drive-in movie.

The series takes some time to put this team together, even in the same area of New York. And while you’re waiting for that plot turn, you’re treated to a series of lurid images, from yucky to jolting.

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.

The Strain is an old-fashioned, marks-hitting horror quest in which a band of unlikely warriors attempts to defeat a thing of unspeakable evil Before It's Too Late.

Campy, creepy, and convincing, The Strain is oddly riveting, with a gleeful, pulpy momentum propelling the plot.

Well told, well acted, The Strain might be just the thing for fans of “The Walking Dead” feeling a little too calm this summer.

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.

The horror-disaster-supernatural mashup thriller premiering Sunday at 10 p.m. is creepily captivating but most assuredly not for the squeamish, or for nervous fliers.

The payoff is a work powered by imaginative energy, intelligence and a skilled cast, all of it adding up to smashing entertainment.

While The Strain is pretty much a cauldron churning with familiar ingredients, the dark brew bubbling inside is served up with a great deal of panache.

The Strain dramatizes the book series of the same name and creates a creepy, ominous mood that does it full justice.

What del Toro, Hogan and Cuse are extremely good at here is suspense and horror.

The Strain is a refreshingly bold deviation from TV's obsession with literal-minded crime shows that self-consciously flaunt their social relevance while wallowing in soap-operatic macho tropes.

The Strain does not dial back the gore for television, and fans of the most graphic sort of horror should eat it up.

Beneath the hamminess and questionable mythology lurks a terrifying tale about a viral outbreak linked to vampirism.

This is cult-classic, midnight-movie horror, designed in meticulous, mythology-respecting detail for comic-book readers and fangirls and -boys.

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.

It may well not be your thing, but if it is, the first four episodes of The Strain have enough stylish gore, enough well-paced mystery and little enough self-seriousness to keep you watching, giggling, through your fingers.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

The Strain has a kind of earnest and respectful fanboyishness, in which every single ridiculous element mandated by the genre is rendered seriously but not exactly unknowingly.

At times the portentous dialogue can sound hokey, but for the most part, the slick pilot and three subsequent episodes set the tone for a series with enough of a hook to get under one’s skin.

At times the somewhat corny diversions distract from the slow-moving main attraction. Still, true-believer horror fans will likely bite into The Strain, even if nonconverts find themselves able to resist.

Outside of Stoll, The Strain struggles to develop its characters in the first few episodes.

The Strain gets off to a busy, icky, unpretentious start, mixing the vigor of a '50s Grade-B horror movie with a convoluted mythology about an ancient virus that turns victims into vampires.

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.

The Strain isn’t great TV but it offers enough unexpected gross-out moments that it’s OK summer popcorn fare.

The premiere is fantastic; a must-see for those willing to handle the gore. Sadly, the wheels start spinning in subsequent episodes as the show lacks the urgency needed to carry its arguably silly subject matter.

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.

The Strain is watchable, but honestly, that isn't good enough when you're talking Guillermo del Toro and FX. In both cases, we expect more.

The show’s recycled vampire mythology fails to justify this level of bloodletting, which even fans of “The Walking Dead” might find gratuitous.