Once again rising from the grave just in time for Halloween, the gutsy little horror anthology we know as Creepshow has returned to blitz us with a plethora of spooky stories and traumatic tales and I for one am extremely glad it’s back.
There really isn’t really show quite like it out at the moment that tackles horror and humour with such amusing levels of self aware camp and as weird as it sounds, part of the fun for me now is waiting to see if the wildly inconsistent quality control of the episodes is still in effect. No other show can deliver an absolute banger of an installment and then immediately follow it up with a slice of undercooked trash and still have you coming away with a smile on your face and the first episode if season 4 dutifully delivers with one story that’s incredibly strong and a second that looks like it was knocked up in a single afternoon…
It’s Creepshow, baby!
Twenty Minutes With Cassandra: Games reviewer Lorna Snell is enjoying a quiet night in alone when she’s disturbed by the panicked banging on her front door by a young, fear stricken goth girl named Cassandra who desperately warns that there’s a monster outside and that there’s no escape. Of course at first, Lorna is highly sceptical, especially when “Cassie” calms down and starts explaining a few disconcerting rules that comes with this particular creature – but upon dismissing the news that no matter what she does, the monster will rip her to pieces in twenty minutes, she discovers that everything is horribly real at the expense of a hapless delivery man.
Cassie suggests that instead of trying to escape, Lorna should make her remaining minutes meaningful, however, after getting a clandestine note from an extraordinarily unexpected source, she realises that Cassie’s predicament isn’t everything the girl made it out to be.
Smile: James Harris is a photographer who has just won a humanitarian award for his work snapping pics of a tragedy in South America, however, as he and his wife Sarah celebrate on a glitzy red carpet, a million miles away from the drowning father and son James snapped to win that award, a mysterious photographer snaps a Polaroid of them that doesn’t quite add up. You see, despite taking the snap of them close up, when James and Sarah are handed the picture, it looks like it was taken from across the street.
However, as the night draws on, the picture on the photo changes from different shot of them taken throughout the evening, suggest that a supernatural force is silently judging them. However, when the photo suddenly shows that the Harris’ son, Max, is now in danger, James has a confession to make about his award winning photograph…
Launching the season off of the starting grid with the energy of a genetic freak with a ten-a-day energy drink habit is Twenty Minutes With Cassandra; an actual genuine contender for being one of the top five best Creepshow segments the TV show has ever produced. Essentially starting off as a monster-themed home invasion story and then morphing into something bizarrely moving, we find Samantha Sloyan’s everywoman and Ruth Codd’s tortured youth starting the story seemingly trying to fend of the brutal claws of a hulking rat monster, but after the usual spurts of gore and survival tips (Lorna tapes a bunch of kitchen knives to a baseball bat to defend herself), the tale shifts into something far deeper with the revelation that the rat monster is the physical manifestation of Cassie’s guilt.
Taking the notion of a wounded, entitled millennial taking her pain out in the world to a fascinating degree, Cassie turns up at a targets house under the pretence of getting chased in order to get people to spend time with her and feel bad when she leaves their lives after having her weaponized guilt monster assault the house. However, the script by Jaime Flanagan continues to throw more curve balls than a baseball pitcher as the story takes amusing and unexpectedly poignant turns; the notion of a guilt monster apparently isn’t a new thing as Lorna has a cat-themed one living in a chest in her living room (some photos on her phone reveals that she actually hangs out with it sometimes) and she closes out the episode by having a civilised chat with Cassie’s monster after she storms out. Series ace in the hole, Greg Nicotero, keeps things nice and Creepshowish, utilising those coloured gels and dialing up the strangeness and the bloodletting, but he also knows when to slow things down to emphasize the quieter moments like a strangely sweet chat Lorna has with a pizza delivery guy who is simply too nice to head her warnings. The performances are strong with both actresses having coincidentally showed up recently in Michael Flanagan’s Neflix’s House Of Usher and the themes dealing with the different ways people handle their emotion leads to possibly Creepshow’s most genuinely touching moment. The climactic chat between Lorna and Cassie’s rodent beast is both surreal (they both debate the definition of the word Kaiju in a jocular fashion) and incredibly sad (the jagged toothed creature admits that he is so tired and asks if they can talk a little more instead of ripping her to pieces.
In the face of this gold standard Creepshow, we go from arguably the shows strongest director to the weakest with John Harrison’s Smile that can’t possibly hope to follow up the unpredictable strangeness of the first installment. In fact, even without Nicotero’s fantasic entry, Harrison’s would still feel basic and unsatisfactory as he tells his story in a flat and rather bland way that is neither scary or tense. In fact, the tale of a couple being haunted by a Polaroid, whose surface changes to ever more threatening images, is presented with so little flair that any impact the plot may have vanishes like an exposed negative. Even for a campy show like this that regularly treats logic and realism like taffy, the antics and reactions of the beleaguered couple are not only unrealistic, but horribly staged which drains the interest even further. Even the most reliable fallback the show has – eg. some cool monster or supernatural shenanigans) is woefully half boiled as we’re never really told what, or who the shadowy photographer is who is making like a inhuman (or should that be more inhuman) member of the paparazzi.
While the show ends its twist rather tidily with a simple spot of tragic irony, it’s still missing the heart, character and originality of the previous story which basically means that Nicotero has hit another home run while Harrison has struck out once again.
Now, what could be more Creepshow than that? See? I told you it was back.
Twenty Minutes With Cassandra: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Smile: 🌟🌟
We Have Issues 
Cassandra was crap. It was one of the worst Creepshow episodes I’ve ever seen. It took 6 ”writers” to come up with it. Stephen King would never have written this low grade, bargain basement junk. It’s no better than Creepshow 3!
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