Posted by Dustin on 02.08.2012 at 4:13 pm

Last night was the 2 hour premier of ABC’s “The River.” This has been getting a lot of promo time. It’s from Spielberg and the guy behind the “Paranormal Activity” films. I am a big horror fan, but I’m not a big fan of those movies. I went into this expecting to have a lot of the same techniques from those films in the show, and indeed that’s what it was. A lot of standing around, a lot of talking, a lot of jiggly cameras with some creeps thrown in here and there.

The show is about an explorer, Dr. Emmett Cole, who basically had his own “Discovery Channel” like show for 20 years. He disappears in the Amazon, and his family goes in search of him. A television crew follows to make a show about them searching for him. It turns out after 20 years, he seems to have found something, real magic!

As with a lot of new shows this season, I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it. It was just okay. This only seems to be an 8 part miniseries, and since I basically just watched the first 2 parts, I want to at least see how it ends. I am also interested the religious/magic themes going on in it too.

I never found myself scared out of my wits, but neither was I with the “Paranomal” movies. There were times with the movies I jumped, but I never felt the dread others did. The same with this show. I never felt dread, and found I only jump once. I did feel creeped out in the second hour with the doll tree. But at the same time I kept wondering “how did people in the Amazon get all these damn plastic made dolls?” That annoyed me more than anything!

One of the men on the team with them was caught by the producer making a phone call, saying if Emmett found the source, he’ll take him out! All I could think of was either there is something in the jungle some corporation wants to make money off of, or this is going to play into some grand Illuminati storyline where people are put in charge of protecting some major world secret. It almost seems from the previews it’s the later, as we saw a clip of Emmett saying something along the lines of “This is the source of it all!”

If you watched, what are your thoughts? All I know is the ratings and reception seem to be less than stellar. So if I stick with this, only to have a giant cliff hanger and the show canned … I’ll be pissed!