DVD Review: Witches of East End: The Complete First Season

Witches of East EndWitches of East End, which is based on a book series by Melissa de la Cruz, focuses on a family of witches. The mother of the family, Joanna Beauchamp (Julia Ormond), has been keeping her two daughters, Freya (Jenna Dewan-Tatum) and Ingrid (Rachel Boston) in the dark about being witches in order to allow them to live normal lives. Doing so, however, may cause disastrous repercussions for them all. Joanna's estranged sister, Wendy (Mädchen Amick) shows up to see her with warnings that something evil is coming her way, and she must get her daughters involved.

Over the course of the series, the daughters start to learn how to use their magic, much to their mother's chagrin.

Witches of East EndThe series has action but also romance as there is a love triangle between Freya and her fiancé (Eric Winter) and his brother Killian (Daniel DiTomasso), who she has an unexplained intense connection with. Ingrid meanwhile starts to fall for Jason (Adam Noble), a detective that's had a crush on her for a while.

I really enjoyed the first season of the series. I wasn't sure what to expect from a science fiction program on Lifetime, but I was pleasantly surprised. While it's not as dark as a lot of other science fiction on television today, it has a interesting story and well written characters.

The cast was all chosen well in the series. The standout for me was Amick as the fun and quirky sister.

The effects were about average. Some of them worked, but others, like glowing eyes, were just a bad contact job with a facial morph that did not work for me at all. However, it wasn't enough of a bother to detract from the story.

Special Features:

Falling Under Their Spell
This feature is about six and one half minutes long. It's made up of some of the main cast members discussing their characters. It's a good introduction to the series and the basics of the characters and story lines.

Deleted Scenes
There is one deleted scene from the first episode, one from the third, and two from the fourth.

Gag Reel
There's about a minute worth of bloopers. There wasn't anything spectacular about them.

Cat Blooper
I wouldn't exactly call this feature necessarily a blooper. With voiceover it's explained how they used both a stuffed cat and a live cat in the scenes, specifically in one that only was on air for six seconds. In high-speed it shows how many times the trainer had to work to try to get the cat to lay still before it was to stand up and walk away.

Trailers that played automatically include 3 Days to Kill and The Americans.

I wouldn't recommend buying this DVD set based on special features only, as they are few and not that great all in all. Otherwise, however, this is a great series that is worth a watch.

Quality:

I usually don't mention the quality in my reviews, but I noticed at times the DVD looked slightly blurry/out of focus or more often oversharpened. It wasn't that noticeable over time, but at the beginning it was irking me. It's possible it's the disc.

Packaging:

The set contains three discs in a normal clamshell case with a double-sided flip piece. The first disc contains three episodes, the second has four, and the third has three and also contains the special features. You can only read what is on the discs by the inside of the cover insert, but you do not have to remove discs to read it, as it is on the left side. There is also an insert advertisement for the Melissa de la Cruz book series on which the television show is based.

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