So, after a mixed procession of rat monsters, brain sucking hats and nagging ghosts, Creepshow season four finally ends its run with a customary homage episode that is usually so fun to watch. While previous seasons have seen the show drop Justin Long directly into Horror Express or Night Of The Living Dead, stage a surprisingly faithful Evil Dead spin off and gave us a story set in a ludicrously easter egg stuffed horror museum, Greg Nicotero stages possibly his most audacious tribute to date by attempting to bring a beloved titan of terror back from the dead in a way doesn’t necessarily have to be tasteful, but does need to be tremendously endearing.
However, despite being faced with the living dead and enormous spectacles, possibly the biggest surprise lurking within the episode is that the season closes out with an episode directed by John Harrison, the man responsible for the greatest number of duff installments the show has ever experienced. Can he end the season on the gruesome high it richly deserves?
George Romero In 3-D! : Sarah’s very old-school, Pittsburgh based bookstore seems to be about to breathe its last as, thanks to no online presence whatsoever and the fact that print, apparently, is dead, unscrupulous landlord Mr Cooper wants to up the rent and have the place closed down. However, hope is at hand in the form of an old batch of possibly valuable comics that were produced and written by Pittsburg’s favourite son and the lord of the dead himself, George A. Romero that’s found by Sarah’s son, Martin and employee, Dawn. However, after putting on a pair of supplied 3-D glasses, Martin soon finds out that the comics are cursed and that the zombie adoring one of the covers of the comics has escaped into the real world and can only be seen while wearing the red and green lens. The figuring that only way to stop the dead is to enlist the man who created them, Martin decides to invoke the man himself from the pages of his own comic – that’s right people: George Romero lives!
Baby Teeth: Permanently anxious helicopter mother, Miranda is at her wit’s end with her willful and brattish daughter Shelby who simply won’t do a single thing she’s asked. On a trip home from the dentist, Miranda is stoked that she’s gotten to keep the extracted teeth of her awful daughter in order to add them to her collection of Shelby’s baby teeth, but her worry is stirred up even more when she finds out her child no longer wears an iron charm around her neck any more.
This – added with a truck load of supernatural karma hurtling in her direction – obviously spells disaster for the ungrateful Shelby and her equally abrasive friend, Kaitlyn, but no one could foresee Shelby’s teeth mutating to form a misshapen, screeching, deminutive, tooth fairy-tale creature that gets its kicks from ripping off jaws and eating lips. There’s nothing in a parenting book to help you with that shit, let me tell you…
I always eagerly await the token Creepshow episode where it thoroughly embraces its roots and while the show has shown off its geek credentials on more than one occasion with episodes devoted to the works of Romero, King, Raimi, Coscerelli and many others, George Romero In 3-D! may be the most unabashed, love letter of them all. Obviously, this is a Greg Nicotero episode (no duh) and the fact that hea actually worked with the majority of the filmmakers he homages means there’s an extra layer of love that’s adorably palpable throughout. However, even for a Nicotero homage episode, George Romero In 3-D is surprisingly broad by having the great man himself temporarily resurrected in a grey, penicil-drawn, Take On Me/A-ha form to fumble about the place and correct people that his zombies were actually “ghouls”. To a layman, the episode is no doubt vehemently strange and more than a little silly, but to the dyed in the wool horror fan, the goofy nature of the episode is more than balanced by the obvious love leaking out of every pore – even the characters have Romero centric names such as Martin (George’s post modern vampire film), Dawn (Dawn Of The Dead) and cruel money man, Mr. Cooper, looking exactly like his namesake from Night Of The Living Dead. The zombies – no, wait, ghouls (sorry George) – are just as good as you’d expect from the man responsible for The Walking Dead, the wrinkle that they’re invisible until 3-D glasses are used are neat and Sebastian Kroon’s performance as Romero himself is appropriately adorable and as a whole, this is a wonder night of the loving dead.
However, as relentlessly sweet as George Romero In 3-D! is, the real surprises lurk within John Harrison’s Baby Teeth that not only ends the season with some fucking style, but stands as one of the more starkly brutal segments Creepshow has ever seen. While I’ve been consistently hard on Harrison ever since Creepshow started – even putting the boot into his earlier installment, Smile, which co-opened the season – the director manages to pull a rare blinder, knocking out an episode that merges the notion of the Tooth Fairy with Celtic farie myth to create something truly monstrous.
The set up is simple: Rochelle Greenwood’s over compensating mother is terrified that something awful is going to happen to her shit-eating kid (sneeringly played by Alison Thorton), but we soon realise that the over-parenting is actually because she fears supernatural shenanigans coming for her spawn, even though the kid deserves everything she gets and the true star of the show is the truly freakish creation that appears at the end of the episode.
Aside from an influx of memorable guest stars and a noticable no-show from a live action or animated creep, one other thing that this season has seemed to be missing is some truly stand out monsters, but in a single segment, Baby Teeth rectifies the last one with style to spare with a truly ghastly creation that’s as unnerving as it is awesome. With its wrinkled skin, jagged maw and a baby dress, this take on the Tooth Fairy looks like Annabelle is cosplaying as that leering apparition from the end of that movie, Smile and with the added proclivity of jaw ripping, it’s genuinely one of the most scariest creations the shows ever produced and gives the entire episode the extra oomph it needs to cross the finish line with flair.
Once again Nicotero and company has given us yet another mixed bag that, no matter how good or bad the episode may be, always is fun and interesting. Whether we’re graced with a fifth season is down to the anthology gods (no to mention the bigwigs at Shudder and AMC), but there’s still life in the old Creep yet – it just would be nice to see him again in the rotting flesh.
George Romero In 3-D!: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Baby Teeth: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
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