While Creepshow season 4 has been reliably supplying the ammusingling inconsistent goods that the show usually supplies, one thing that’s been conspicuous by its absence (aside from the lack of a physical Creep, of course) is the noticable lack of recognizable guest stars.
While previous seasons has seen the likes of cult personalities such as Tobin Bell, Keith David, Adrienne Barbeau, Michael Rooker, Barbara Crampton, Ted Raimi and David Arquette all dive head first into the camp fun, this season has been a little light on celebrities unless you count Michael Flanagan regulars Samantha Sloyn and Ruth Codd. However, season finally rectifies this with not just a good spot of casting, but with a fucking great spot of casting as genre legend and original Creepshow actor Tom Atkins enters the fray to add this to his already impressive stack of genre performances.
Over to you, Tom. Thrill me.
Something Burrowed, Something Blue: Frank, despite his many riches, has been something of a bastard for most of his life, but now, in the winter of his years, wishes to patch things up with his estranged daughter, Allison, however, Allison and her fiance, Ryan, aren’t so easily swayed by Frank’s plea despite the fact that they’re living in abject povery and forced to use an open fridge as air con during a heat wave.
Finally convinced to visit her dad, Allison remains stubborn as ever, but Ryan seems a little more receptive but he soon finds that Frank’s kindness comes with a price. If the ailing patriarch pays for the wedding and holds it on his estate as well as leaving them everything in his will, they’ll have to tend to the eldritch creature named Minhocão, living in a pit in his basement and feed it a living being once every fifteen to stop it wrecking chaos on the surface world above. However, Allison and Ryan have a counter secret that equally spell disaster if not managed…
Doodles: Slightly timid Angela is a single-panel cartoonist (think Gary Larson) who hopes to make it big while interviewing for Timeless, a big, important magazine. But after another applicant steals the job right out from under her by thieving one of her designs, she finds that her absent minded doodling can bring her bitter desires to life after scribbling on a photo of the offending woman sees her later eaten alive by rats.
Granted another shot at the job by old friend, Calvin, she finds that her prospective boss Roger is even a bigger tyrant than she first thought and so, with a little bit more doodling, Roger also comes to a splattery end. With a lucrative job now ahead of her and a date with the truly nice Calvin on the cards, what can go wrong? Quite a bit it seems if you don’t take care using your God-like powers…
There’s a great episode buried somewhere inside Something Burrowed, Something Blue, but it doesn’t seem like director John Esposito was the right man to find it in the first installment of epidode four. Rich relatives, dark secrets, subterranean Lovecraft monsters and a groom caught between his wife and his ridiculously wealthy father in law seems like a classic scenario that practically could write itself, but for such a juicy setup, the story constantly seems unsure exactly how to proceed, thus tripping over it’s own feelers as it goes.
For a show that usually revels in being mercifully free of normal logic (if your common complaint of Creepshow is that its unrealistic, you probably should be watching something else), not a lot of what transpires makes a lot of sense. Despite Frank being a ruthless piece of shit in his younger days, he has been keeping the surrounding area safe from a giant millipeade monster by feeding it once every fifteen years, similarly, he’s worried about who is going to feed it after he’s gone, so he can’t be all bad, yet Allison hates him with a passion – yet we’re never actually filled in on how bad he truly was. Conversely, the twist also doesn’t make a lot of sense when it’s revealed that Ryan and Allison already have a Minhocão of their own to feed and decide to feed it Frank – why wait until now and if its significantly bigger than Frank’s one, why does it still only need one sacrifice? Matters aren’t helped by some rather broad performances, particularly from Kirsty Dawn Dinsnore who just can’t quite nail the campiness and even the final twist is botched somewhat by the Minhocão not being presented as a forrest of tentacles erupting from the ground like as seen on the cover of the comic book, but instead is a shitty, CGI bug which only succeeds at looking cheap. However, in case you’d forgotten, Tom fuckin’ Atkins is in this and even though he doesn’t get to do much more than plead with his daughter to take his money, it’s such a joy to see him – even in a bungled episode such as this – his very appearance earns the installment an extra star.
Faring far better is Doodles, a zippy, to the point, affair that feels like a refugee from HBO’s sublime Tales From The Crypt that takes its premise and confidently lays it all out without any showy bells and whistles. Naive artist discovers she has an ability to change her fate by eliminating all the awful, shitty people around her until she panics and spectacularly fucks upbeat the end. Done deal.
It’s a nifty little idea – who hasn’t idly scribbled some ridiculous drawing on a magazine or a news paper, however, when Anja Savcic’s wide-eyed cartoonist defaces a picture of an enemy out of sheer frustration, satisfying gruesomeness soon follows with a competing artist having her eyes eaten out by some voracious, big city vermin (off screen, but we’re still treated to the aftermath) and a particularly hideous boss practically exploding like a paper bag full of brains after a “mysterious” fall from a balcony.
When I mentioned earlier that Creepshow is a show that operates best without logic, this is what I meant. We’re not burdened with how it’s happening, or why, or even why other things that Angela has drawn hasn’t come to life in the past, but we’re instead led by the nose all the way to the installment’s lurid payoff that shows that if you’re going to doodle someone to death, make sure the ink of your pen doesn’t soak through to the photo of you on the next page lest you suddenly find a wine bottle jutting out of your jugular.
Yet another reliably unreliable batch of tales from Creepshow relentlessly bounces us from great gore and inspired casting to payoffs both fumbled and perfect, but with one last episode to finish us off, let’s see if the usual suspects can end this season by drawing out a high.
Something Burrowed, Something Blue: 🌟🌟🌟
Doodles: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
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