Anyone who saw the new Starz series "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" knows it should be renamed simply "Spartacus: Blood". The producers of this so called "entertainment" took an effect used hardly sparingly by Frank Miller in "300" namely the slow motion arterial spray of blood, and put it in almost every hit, stab, punch or kick in every fight scene portrayed. And sometimes the blood, for want of a better term, "redded out" the screen background - why? For a scene change? Now that was not really a cheesy effect, but it was a cheap looking one - like someone had no ideas except "throw up more blood!". Of course the other aspect of this series that pushes and pushes and pushes itself to the fore is the rumpy pumpy.
In the opening episode there were three scenes, two involving the soon to be named Spartacus played by Andy Whitfield and "his woman" Sura played by Erin Cummings ( I kid you not! ). The other one involved the evil Roman Glaber ( Craig Parker ) and his very conniving wife Ilithyia ( Viva Bianca ) "You know women are not allowed at the front" he tells her. Pfnarr! Pfnarr! And while the first scene between Sparty and Sura was somewhat perfunctory with many fade cuts, the second one between them could hardly be described as such.
What it can be described as is lazy. It was lazy because it used the movie making cliche of having the characters do it directly after a scene of intense danger - which of course is what happened. Hey we killed a lot of bad guys together! Let's do it, right here right now, we are already sweaty and breathing hard, so its really no biggee.
So maybe we should think of a second name change for this "epic" - let's go with "Spartacus: Blood and Sheets".
Now though this is very bad TV and I mean really really bad, I will be watching the next episode to be sure, for the contextual analysis of course.
