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"Mandrake" (a ridiculous title, about as ridiculous as SyFy, and no more so than IMDb's "Top Billed Cast") is such a superior Sci Fi Channel production as to make me doubt that being the origin. The lead actors, despite the aforementioned "Top Billed Cast" are Max Martini (from "The Unit) as McCall, Jon Mack as Carla Manning, Nick Gomez as Santiago, and Benito Martinez (from lotsa shows, including "The Shield" and "Saving Grace") as Harry Vargas. Basically the plot has Vargas sending Manning and others, including Santiago as guide and McCall as bodyguard, to recover an ancestral artifact from some place in a Central or South American jungle. Mayhem obtains as natives and a "protective" entity object to the recovery. The players, including the females, are attractive, but not gorgeous, get with the action in a reasonable, human -- not superhero -- fashion, get dirty, and in some cases dead. I found the movie superior for the genre, and as I said, excellent, for a Sci Fi Channel production -- if in fact it was.

This show isn't great, perhaps not even good, but certainly not the horror the first reviewer characterized. It is decent light summer fare with talented and attractive actors and actresses. Yes,Bradley Whitford plays a Luddite too primordial to believe in this day and age (for someone younger than, say, 90) and hams it up to the nines, but you shouldn't expect him to be Josh Lyman every time out. After all, if Dule Hill can get away playing Stepin Fetchit as Gus Guster on "Psych", then most anything should be acceptable from the "West Wing" crew. In the first two episodes at least, the plots were a little thin, but the women are lovely. If you are looking for substantive intellectual fare, there's always "Nova."