Orangutan Island - Season 1 (2008) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I love monkeys and apes, I'll be the first to admit. But bias aside, this is, I think, one of the BEST shows that was on TV. And the whole family can enjoy it!
Orangutans, one of our closest living relatives, are critically endangered. Deforestation and poaching are bringing their numbers dangerously close to a point of no return. When a parent dies, usually the young orangutan would follow shortly after. However, the classmates of Nyaru Mentang have been rescued and are raised by humans in hopes of releasing them into the wild. This is a long process, as the dependency period of a baby orang on it's mother is the longest in the mammalian family, aside from humans.
The show is always good for a laugh, and I find it always makes me smile, no matter my mood going into it. Most of it is pretty happy, though there are sad parts of the episodes, and some of the stories about the orangutans are heartbreaking. Take Bonita for instance - poachers shot her mother out of a tree, and she clung to her mother's hair on the way down. After mother and child hit the ground, the poachers came and literally ripped her away from her dead mother, most likely to be sold into a life of solitary confinement in a cramped cage.
Within a couple episodes you'll get to know the orangutans, and learn to appreciate and understand their complex social structure, and their quirks. Each is very distinctive and has a readily discernible personality.
Watching them, one can't help but feel like you are looking at people. They think, they plan, they ponder, they trick, they scheme, they cry, they laugh, they love (two romances start up during season 1!!). These intelligent and gentle creatures will easily capture your heart, and you'll find that each episode ends much too quickly.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Orangutan Island - Season 1 (2008)

A desperate struggle for survival is raging deep in the heart of Borneo's forests. Illegal logging is rapidly destroying the Bornean orangutans' last stronghold in the wild -- leaving hundreds of orangutan babies orphaned and homeless. Their future seems bleak but a ground-breaking project provides real hope for ensuring the survival of the species. Meet the 35 classmates of Forest School 103 at the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rescue and Rehabilitation Center. These precocious red-haired "children of the forest" will get the opportunity, through this innovative project led by Lone Droscher-Nielsen and her team, to live wild on a protected island. Orangutan Island is the foundation for the largest primate rescue project in the world. Go with them on their journey to adulthood as they struggle to form their own society and learn how to live free on Orangutan Island.

Click here for more information about Orangutan Island - Season 1 (2008)

Harper's Island: The DVD Edition (2009) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)We are so hooked on this show it isn't funny, which must be a tribute to the writing and the direction. The producers certainly know how to get you going, though it takes a few episodes before they can start reeling you in and playing you the way they want to.
At the very beginning there are too many characters--if you have ever seen Robert Altman's film A Wedding some of this will look familiar, but add into it a maritime setting, a fantastic yacht, and a culture of working class people trained to anticipate the needs of the wealthy, and you have a recipe for tension right there, and that's before you get the murders going. The families of Trish Wellington (Katie Cassidy) and Henry Dunn (Christopher Gorham, often looking oddly like lean, lanky, nutty Anthony Perkins) invite you to a destination wedding, one held at Harper's Island somewhere in the Puget Sound, where you will be staying at the incredibly glamorous Candlewick Inn, but there will be plenty of time for slumming and seeing how the other half live.
Chief among the main characters is our heroine, played by Elaine Cassidy, the Irish actress who made a splash in Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey ten years back. As Abby, the daughter of the local sheriff (Jim Beaver), Cassidy plays the tragic survivor of a mass murder that rocked the island seven years ago. Could the killer, John Wakefield, thought to have been shot down by Abby's dad, still be alive? Has he gone back to his ways of hanging his victims from the trees? For many episodes Fate and the unseen killer arrange it so that one by one, victims die but nobody really realizes it, thinking they have just gone back to Seattle and will return for the wedding ceremony. That got a little hard to swallow, but during this period we began to sort out who was who, who's sleeping with who, who resents the power of who, who seems irretrievably scarred by the earlier murders, and something of the sociology. Now we know the characters and it hurts when one of them dies.
The show's gory in spots, soapy in others. So violent is it that the individual episodes are named after comic book signifiers ("Ka-Boom," "Thwack," etc) and after a few weeks you learn to wait for the act of violence each one stands for. The "Sizzle" is particularly gruesome, though nothing yet matches the shocking death that takes place in the island's lovely old church. I still get headaches when I think about that one! Every cliché of this kind of slasher film is rehearsed here, but expertly and often with a twist. Even the one where a medium reads the heroine's Tarot cards and suddenly sees something in them too horrible to put into words and she runs out of the room mumbling, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." -Like the beginning of Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7!


Click Here to see more reviews about: Harper's Island: The DVD Edition (2009)

A horror-inspired drama, this CBS series is about a group of friends and family who meet to celebrate a wedding on an island just outside Seattle, an island that is famous for a streak of unsolved murders seven years ago. Suspense ensues when they end up dead one by one; has the killer returned or is someone else to blame?

Get 31% OFF

Click here for more information about Harper's Island: The DVD Edition (2009)