Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Helstrom’ On Hulu, Where Children Of A Serial Killer Use Their Powers To Hunt Evil

Comic adaptations, whether from DC, Marvel, or a smaller publishing house, are always tricky. Why? Because they can be faithful to the source material or go completely away from it. Either way, the biggest challenge is to create a backstory for its characters without taking away from what people enjoyed about the original comic. Helstrom is based on a Marvel comic series, but it definitely strays a bit from its source. Read on for more…

HELSTROM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A stormy night outside a psychiatric hospital in Portland, Oregon.

The Gist: During that stormy night, the hospital’s administrator, Dr. Louise Hastings (June Carryl), finds that two patients have escaped with the help of a nurse and one of the facility’s most dangerous patients.

Meanwhile, a few hours away, a new addition to the hospital, Gabriella Rossetti (Ariana Guerra), sent from the Vatican to observe the goings on at the hospital, is at a house where a boy’s parents think he’s possessed. The hospital’s best investigator of these reports is Daimon Helstrom (Tom Austen), who isn’t a priest but a skeptical ethics professor with experience in possession. He’s so dismissive of the kid’s fake possession that Rosetti is concerned. He shows the kid what real powers look like, as he sets off a ring of fire as they’re talking.

In San Francisco, Daimon’s sister Ana (Sydney Lemmon) uses her job at an auction house to flush out evildoers, including a murdering billionaire, whose heart she stops with her powers. She and her partner in the auction house, Chris Yen (Alain Uy), rely on findings from a man just known as Caretaker (Robert Wisdom), whose findings always have something to do with the occult.

Dr. Hastings calls Daimon in to investigate the escape, mainly due to the telekinetic efforts of his mother Victoria (Elizabeth Marvel), who has been in the hospital for years, due to the demons that posses her. He shuts Gabriella out as he tries to talk to his mother, but he knows he needs assistance from Ana, who ran away to SF years ago. As Gabriella digs deeper, Dr. Hastings gives her the extensive file of the Helstrom family, where she learns that Daimon and Ana are the children of a serial killer.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Helstrom has the feel of Lucifer, only with a lot more serious tone.

Our Take: Helstrom, created by Paul Zbyszewski based on the Marvel comic, is supposed to be bloody and scary and more than a little bit violent. It has some of that, but it’s more creepy than scary and the first episode does nothing to make us want to watch and find more of those scares.

We’re pretty tired of Marvel TV adaptations being drab, dark and slow moving. And Helstrom is all three. The first episode keeps the Helstrom siblings separate until the very end, and having it take place mostly in Oregon seems to give Zbyszewski the excuse to keep it grey and rainy all the time. Sure it’s fun watching everyone have conversations under massive umbrellas, but we know that it’s a myth that the Pacific Northwest is all rain, all the time.

But the first episode had one minor scare, when an eye pops up in a weird cyclops skull that Ana took from a dig site the Caretaker found. Otherwise, the episode just plodded along, leaving us with very little impressions about either Helstrom sibling, why and what has possessed Veronica, and why the siblings have had a falling out.

Some of the action is interesting, like when Veronica toys with Gabriella when the nun sneaks into Veronica’s cell. But somehow, Daimon gets to the cell in time to save her, despite not being anywhere near the hospital in the previous scene. We’re not sure if that’s a storytelling mistake or an editing mistake, where a scene that explains that he was on his way back to the hospital was cut. So that undercut the action in the scene.

We’re also unsure about who the killer is that fathered the Helstrom siblings, if he’s still around, or how any of them got their powers. We’re not asking for it to be spelled out in the first episode, but a little more exposition would have been helpful to give us an idea, like a flashback or something else. For now, we just know that everyone in the Helstrom family have telekinetic powers, and some use them for good. We’re hoping the hows and whys will be explained during the first season.

Sex and Skin: Ana seduces the billionaire after the auction in order to stop his heart, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: After Ana arrives in Portland to help her brother, we see a trucker find a man with half a face in his truck; it’s the same man that invaded the tomb where Ana got the skull, who was consumed by the demon inside the sarcophagus in that tomb.

Sleeper Star: We’ve seen Elizabeth Marvel in a million shows, usually playing someone’s gossipy mother or other sort of person who’s not very nice. Here, she’s pretty convincing as a woman whose human characteristics have pretty much been consumed by the demon inside of her.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m not here to hold hands, or save a cat from a tree, or respond to false alarms,” Daimon assholishly says to Gabriella after he proves that the “possessed” kid is anything but.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Helstrom was slow-moving and dull, and is more interested in brooding dialogue than actual scares.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Helstrom On Hulu