As Creepshow’s fourth season continues to be an endearing showcase for campy, old-school horror tales with a slightly modern twist, I feel there’s an issue I have to raise, if only to get it of my chest.
Where the hell has the Creep gone?
I’ve had these pangs before when Creepshow’s moldering, skeletal host was a no-show for a good chunk of season 3, but we’ve hit the halfway point of season 4 and we haven’t once seen him in the rotting flesh! Whether budget or time restrictions have hampered filming any wrap arounds for the show’s grinning posterboy (or maybe it’s because he’s a little too close to Tales From The Crypt’s Cryptkeeper), it’s a real shame he’s been put on the backburner.
Still, onward and upward we go and with this third episode, we find a couple of tales that put a typically tongue in cheek spin on some classic horror tropes.
Parent Death Trap: Lyle Van Johnson is something of a put upon kid who, not only has no friends at school, put is constantly nagged by his painfully white bread, “old money” parents who see him as painful disapointment. However, after a bungled prom date with Violet, the most popular girl at school, the parental disapproval hits critical mass and Lyle finally snaps as he beheads his father and disemboweled his mother and hides their bodies in the local lake. However, Lyle doesn’t find the peace he’s hoping for when his folks return from the grave to continue verbally lacerating him as a couple of glowing ghosts.
Four years pass and Lyle and disapproving apparitions have fallen into a maddening routine where the follow him around all day berating everything from his lack of success carrying on the Van Johnson name to even his choice of serial. But after a chance meeting with Violet goes strangely well, it seems that Lyle has finally moved out of his folk’s supernatural influence, but what is Violet actually after: Lyle or his family’s wealth?
To Grandmother’s House We Go: Marcia is an unrepentant gold digger who has left a long list of finacially drained, heartbroken men in her wake but all she has to show for it is that she is stepmother to the trusting, young Ruby who looks up to her shallow matriarch.
After Marcia’s last grift was scuppered by a vengeful mother-in-law who kept a tight grip on her late son’s inheritance, her greed-fueled frown turns upside down when she later finds out the old woman is dying of cancer and wishes to spend time with the innocent Ruby before she passes.
Marcia, overjoyed that the final obstacle to her being rich beyond her wildest dreams, but while driving Ruby to grandmother’s house, they are beset by a werewolf who holds them under siege in their car. Can this insanely shallow woman finally dredge up some semblance of parental care in order to protect Ruby from the slathering monstrosity?
If I had to find a way to quickly describe Parent Death Trap, I guess it would be Meet The Parents meets The Frighteners as director P.J. Pesce (From Dusk Till Dawn 3) gives us a typically lopsided view of life after death. Far more overtly comic than your average tale, there are times when you wonder if the story wouldn’t have benefited from maybe being a feature as the episode sort of crams in a lot, but ultimately proves to be very entertaining. Essentially a farce, but with dead people, the installment doesn’t really get cooking until Lyle (Dylan Slone with an appropriately harrowing look on his face for the duration) finally snaps under the crushing pressure his histrionic parents put on him and slaughters them like pigs. Even then, pipe sucking patriarch, Archibald, berates his child for not killing him correctly even when his crazed son is hacking at his neck with a sword and soon after he uses the weapon to gut his mother. Up to this point the wild, over-acting of all involved threatened to capsize the story into something a bit too cartoonish and abrasive, but after the Van Johnson’s return as transparent, spectral, apparitions, the show’s visuals finally manage to catch up with its tone and things start to get all the more unpredictable from there.
While Parent Death Trap is never fully, laugh out loud funny, it benefits greatly from the fact that most other anthologies probably would have ended the episode after the monstrous parents rose from the dead. However, here, it keeps going to provide Creepshow with possibly one of the more complete stories it has ever offered, with a four-year time jump and even some complicated sub-plots involving snooping detectives and issues involving Violet and her parent issues. Not perfect, by any stretch, but a good, hard worker of an episode.
Elsewhere, we find the far simpler To Grandmother’s House We Go, a tale that delves into the tried and true trope of the ruthless gold digger, here utterly embraced by a squawking Keegan Connor Tracy who constantly seems on the verge of genuinely losing her voice. Basically, whatever have here is yet another little red riding hood analogy whose twist is that the dismissive stepmother is also along for the ride as they are beset by a hulking lycanthope on the way to the home of a dying old lady.
Justin G. Dyck – director of an alarmingly large amount of Christmas-themed TV movies – keeps things simple and humorous as the lion’s share (or should that be wolf’s share?) of the show is dedicated to Connor Tracy’s pink-suited, central performance. As money hungry gold diggers that appear in short horror tales loaded with karma go, Marcia isn’t that bad and while she despises Ruby ever calling her mommy (she prefers “older sister”) and constantly rolls her eyes at the child’s needs for a parent, she doesn’t mistreat the child physically or anything. However, once the lengthy set up is out of the way and the episode has gotten all the obvious red riding hood nods out of its system, it switches to becoming a more limber beast once the mismatched pair are stranded in their car on lonely road with a Howling-style werewolf snapping at their window. For a show like Creepshow, which often sacrifices subtle character arcs for big, campy, comic book swings, Marcia’s transition from opportunistic piece of trash to werewolf fighting protector actually hits the desired notes and emotions to feel properly earned which makes both this and Parent Death Trap quite the fun an frothy double act with a solid, connecting theme devoted entirely to incredibly shitty parents.
Hell, the episode even manages to end with a jump scare that, while admittedly cheap and more than a little logical, still managed to startle me despite me experiencing it on a mere tablet – which is fairly impressive in my book.
But seriously, are we really done with the Creep?
Parent Death Trap: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
To Grandmother’s House We Go: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 