Sometimes they come back – in a sense they weren’t expecting me, but I’m back. Two years ago, in the penultimate country, there was a lot of blood in the Russian flow: first we followed the life of Smolensk vampires led by Yuri Stoyanov, and then we switched from the book of Alexei Ivanov to Soviet ghouls. Continuing to speak with Stoyanovsky jokes, let’s say: the circus is gone, but the clowns remain. In other words, the book is over, but the series did not happen. For some reason, the Food Processing Unit got its second season; apparently, only Good Omens’ Neil Gaiman is not allowed to do such a thing.
The sequel was shot not only without a literary basis, but also without the previous team. Instead of Alexander Tsekalo’s “Wednesday” production company, the “Amusement Park” studio is now involved in the production of the show (“Kinopoisk” has already produced the series “King and the Jester”, “Monastery”. “End of the World” and “Fandorin. Azazel”). Sergei Kaluzhanov, who worked on Roman Volobuev’s Detective Syndrome, took on the script. And horror producer Svyatoslav Podgaevsky (“The Queen of Spades: Black Rite”, “The Mermaid. Lake of the Dead”, “Yaga. A Nightmare in the Dark Woods”) was replaced by Eduard Bordukov, who shot the fencing drama “On the Edge” and the street football series “The Box”.
With all the love for the untidy, but at the same time having its own peculiar charm, the work of Podgaevsky, it must be admitted, the first “Pishcheblok” turned around at that time. a complete failure. It is difficult to say exactly what the problem was: either the director could not cope with the long distance (last year’s mini-series “Retirement”, half the size, completely rehabilitated the director), or there was no coincidence in the material, or someone bit him. In this context, it is not entirely clear where the second “Pishcheblok” came from, but the plot here is: good that it came.
In fact, the plot is as follows: It has been three years since the unfortunate Olympic summer in the Burevestnik camp. Valerka Lagunov (Peter Natarov) is now an exemplary pioneer and class president – vampires can’t do otherwise. Comrade Igor Korzukhin, who is in the camp, helps Valerka to keep her monstrous nature in a chain. (Daniil Vershinin). They managed to find a way that would allow Valerka to drink blood every full moon without biting anyone, thereby preserving her humanity. This gives the young vampire the opportunity to meet Anastasia’s newfound love at camp. (Maria Abramova). However, Valerka’s deeply rooted life is threatened by her encounters with other supernatural beings.
The cardinal turn of the people behind the camera clearly benefited the show. It still lags behind Ivanov’s original text, but for the disastrous first round it turned out that he could win at least a little. In previous episodes, Podgaevsky seemed to be trying to find an interconnection between Stranger Things and old camp slasher games like Friday the 13th. It didn’t turn out very well. Now Pishcheblok persistently copies Stranger Things directly: the soundtrack has more characteristic synthesizers, the frenzy of acid light has been combed out, the camera has become more restrained and expressive (the cameraman is also new, of course, but here you can just watch a kind of continuity: Maxim Chirkov, Podgaevsky’ He shot “Tin Head” by Ivan Kapitonov, the eternal comrade in arms of the .
Fortunately, strange senseless eroticism also went under the knife, because the first “Pishcheblok” sometimes got into very strange territory (but it was simply impossible to do without it). On the other hand, anti-Sovietism returned, almost completely removed from Ivanov’s text during the film adaptation, but generally built on it: Podgaevsky’s series sorted out the symptoms in Bordukov in a rather strange way, avoiding naming the diagnosis. They think it’s possible to casually talk about martial law, at least in Poland.
Regardless, the mistakes of the first season free the authors of the second hand: it is difficult to make it worse, then you can reinvent it (i.e. restore anti-Sovietism) or improve it as it is (that is, it is safe to play urban fantasy), or a little bit of everything. These resolutions will probably be the most interesting to follow. In the meantime, let’s make our bets: the first “Pishcheblok” was ultimately about where childhood went, the second, it seems, looks at the death of the victorious eternal law.