In April of 2011, ComicsOnline.com gave site reviewer Erin Hatch a mission: Watch screening dvds for several upcoming shows. Tormented by the assignment, the man turned to drinking and disappeared from the face of the earth. One week later, a tattered journal appeared on the doorstep of Senior Media Editor, Matt Sernaker. Among various chronicles of his spiritual journey, the document contained the three TV reviews. ComicsOnline is proud to present the Drunken Geek Review of Hellcats:
Let’s talk about cheerleaders. I have known a couple of cheerleaders in my day, but being a geek I couldn’t really refer to them as cheerleaders without sneering a little bit. That is what I get for being antisocial, I guess: the popular girl archetype was burned into my brain as a negative status. Something to revile, to scorn. Despite acknowledging the origins of my prejudice against cheerleaders, I somehow was still surprised that some people found them not only tolerable, but likable. Likable enough to make a TV show about them. A TV show called Hellcats.
“Woke Up Dead” starts with two teenagers running from a zombie horde that heralds their impending doom. Unfortunately, this scene is just a student film within the show, and in the first few minutes the story returns to the real world and the zombies are relegated to a small section of my subconscious that really wants those cheerleaders torn limb from limb by the undead. Instead the show follows two and a half plots: one following what seems to be a protagonist-like girl who goes searching for her dead-but-not-really father only to find out that he is not really dead. The second is about a young filmmaker with an extraordinarily high budget and seemingly unlimited time on his hands who is trying to get into a crappy pretentious film school, and not even a good pretentious film school like they have here in California or over in New York. The third plot revolves around a young woman who takes part in an journalistic expose at cheating among sports stars at her university, only this entire plot is pretty much ignored for the second half of the episode, and doesn’t resolve anything, so I am only counting it as half a plot.
Like the other CW teen dramas I have reviewed over the past five years [Editor Note: These reviews were written over a maximum period of one week, not five years. We do not know what exactly happened to Hatch during that week, though as per the instructions of the assignment, some alcohol was involved.] Hellcats is not a show that you can just jump into unprepared. While the episode was infinitely more comprehensible than the 90210 episode I reviewed due to the mostly self-contained and self-explanatory plots, the relationships of everybody are all kind of muddled, and you kind of wonder how everything fits together and why exactly you should care about any of those cheerleaders. Otherwise, the episode was pretty good, though I must say that the film student subplot was pretty ridiculous.
ComicsOnline gives Hellcats – “Woke Up Dead” 3 out of 5 Highschool Cheerleaders who were too good to go for awesome geeky guys. You know who you are.
Stay tuned to ComicsOnline.com for everything geek pop culture and keep an eye out for future Drunken Geek Reviews coming soon!
After the Hellcats review, Hatch went on to write five more reviews, all of which were for TV Shows, Movies, or Videogames which do not exist. Yet. He has not been seen since.
