"Trapped Ashes" -- reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark

Editor's Note: Since NBC's Fear Itself is on hiatus during the Summer Olympics, Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark have taken it upon themselves to review the direct-to-video horror anthology Trapped Ashes, which was released on DVD in July, as a stopgap measure. Their observations follow.

My fellow freedom-lovers:

Let me set the scene for you, citizens. It's Friday night [August 8 -ed.], and I'm sitting on the couch in my apartment watching a movie called Trapped Ashes. Screwy title, huh? Sounds a bit like Slapped Asses, which would also be a pretty screwy title but would not sound quite as gloomy and high-toned as Trapped Ashes. I'd been watching the Opening Ceremonies from Beijing earlier in the evening, but the Parade of Nations soon got to be monotonous, a seemingly endless procession of people dressed up like Century 21 agents, smiling and waving to the crowd in the manner of hometown beauty queens. Snoo-zers! So I succumbed the siren song of Trapped Ashes, which comes billed as a gore-riffic horror anthology, just the thing to substitute for my beloved AWOL Fear Itself. Anyway, the disc starts with previews, and normally I would automatically skip those but I figure, "What the hell? All the better to recreate the true experience of seeing a real movie in a real theater. Let the trailers commence!"

And at first this seems like a good idea, because the first trailer is that hysterical one for Midnight Meat Train, which I hadn't seen for a while. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I'd totally forgotten that Brooke Shields is in this movie. Six beautiful words – Midnight Meat Train with Brooke Shields. That's poetry, that is. But even better is a trailer for something called Bone Eater starring Bruce Boxleitner. This is a real movie that people actually made intentionally. Huh. Go know. We're two previews in, and both are horror movies with titles that make them sound like filthy, filthy pornos. So now I'm happy, citizens. Like, real happy. But the trailers on the disc drag on and on – some aren't even horror – and somewhere around Rambo I get impatient and skip to the main menu for the movie, feeling a little guilty about it for some reason.

I knew (read: remembered) very little about Trapped Ashes going in other than it was a horror anthology film in the Creepshow tradition and that Ken Russell had directed a segment. I knew from reading a capsule review in the Onion AV Club that Russell's segment was about a woman with killer breasts and that it was probably pretty bad. What I did not know and was not prepared for was the fact that the killer breasts are RIGHT THERE IN THE FRICKIN' DVD MENU FOR EVERYBODY TO SEE! "Like they proud a' that shit," to quote Samuel L. And the killer breasts, they look like something from the Jim Henson creature shop, sipping blood through straws from milkshake glasses. I get all embarrassed and quickly opt to "PLAY MOVIE" so I don't have to look at the menu anymore.

Now the movie is playing, and it starts with Laugh-In veteran Henry Gibson driving a trolley around a studio backlot, pretending like he's giving a tour, only there's no one else around. He's alone, giving his scripted spiel to no one. Weird, huh? But soon enough, he's got a few tourists on the trolley with him – three guys, three gals, all Caucasians, varying ages but skewing young. Of these, the only one I recognize is John Saxon, who looks not so bad considering he's John Saxon. The others are not John Saxon. They're just a bunch of low-rent nobody losers who can't read their lines (which are awful anyway) worth a damn.

The studio they're touring is pretty obviously Universal, but they have to call it "Ultra Studios." I myself took the Universal tour about twenty years ago when I was a kid on vacation with my family, and the three big things I remember other than Jaws and King Kong were: (1) the Cleaver house from Leave It To Beaver; (2) the Bates mansion and motel from Psycho; and (3) the whorehouse from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Obviously, (3) sticks in my mind because its inclusion on the tour meant that the perky Universal guide had blithely said the word "whorehouse" to a group which included many families with children. Here, in Trapped Ashes, Henry Gibson takes John Saxon and the low-rent losers to what is clearly supposed to be the Psycho house, only they have to refer to Psycho as Hysteria, and the house itself is not the real Bates place but the aforementioned Texas whorehouse dressed up with haunted house props. Anyway, there follows a sequence straight out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory wherein the lame-o tourists explore the house but soon find that they can't leave the way they came because the doors in this place are all FUBAR and just lead you back where you started. So the tourists are all trapped in this one big room, and Henry Gibson tells them they've each got to tell a scary story if they want out. If there are clumsier, more roundabout ways to set up a horror anthology, I don't want to know about 'em, citizen. First up is a top-heavy bimbo, and it turns out she's the one with the killer mams from the DVD menu. So here we go. Time for bloodthirsty boobs and presumably the story of how they got to be that way.

At this point, I start to get really depressed. The whole production to this point looks shoddy and rushed, and the cast members seem dispirited even at this very early stage of the game. Plus, I can't help but feel like this movie is the cinematic equivalent of those fake wannabe cereals they have at the grocery store next to the real ones. Like your mom can't afford Cheerios so she gets Happy-Oh's instead. That's how this movie is shaping up: Happy-Oh's: The Movie.

It's an odd thing about cheap horror movies but they always seem at least half a decade behind the times in terms of fashion, slang, and pop culture references. I first noticed this phenomenon when I was a twenty-something and in the habit of renting Troma movies. Troma's Nineties movies looked like they were made in the Eighties, and their Eighties movies looked like they were made in the Seventies. That's how Trapped Ashes is, too. The IMDb lists it as a 2006 movie, but it seems to be capturing the zeitgeist of the late 1990s. One of the low-rent nobodies on the tour group, for instance, is a Clinton-era goth girl type, and at the start of the killer ta-tas story, our busty narratrix tells us she's an aspiring actress who's competing for roles against Heather Graham, Alicia Silverstone, Mena Suvari, and presumably other actresses who came to prominence before the Twin Towers fell. She doesn't mention the Towers, incidentally, I did – as a way to show how this movie is still partying like it's 1999. Don't the makers of Trapped Ashes know that 9-11 changed EVERYTHING, including the list of actresses that you'd be up against in auditions forcing you to go to a shady doctor who gives you weird evil breast implants that actually turn your breasts into little vampires that suck people's blood through the nipples even though that turns out to be kind of impractical because for it to work you have to be topless and the person whose blood you're draining pretty much also has to be shirtless because really how else are you going to rub your titties on him except maybe if he licks your nipple you can suck a little blood from his tongue which actually does happen in one scene? I mean, don't they KNOW that?

There's so, so much more to go in this movie. After Titsy McJuggs finishes her awful, badly filmed story, the other people stuck in the house with Henry Gibson get their turns to tell very hackneyed, unconvincing horror stories. One couple went to Japan, and the wife got dry humped by a dead monk. (She got over it, basically.) Then, it turns out John Saxon's character knew Stanley Kubrick back in the day and even schtupped Stanley's girlfriend while the auteur was off making Paths of Glory, though in this movie they'd probably have to wuss out and say it was Stanley Kendrick or something and he was making Trails of Grandness. And finally, the goth girl tells a story about siccing a giant tapeworm on her stepmother. I'm not going to linger on any of this stuff, because frankly it didn't interest me much. Not even goth girl's childhood, which seemed like something out of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, with quaint, old-timey, funny-looking people speaking English in French accents. To put it bluntly, the movie shot its wad with the over-the-top killer breasts thing right at the beginning, and everything after that was kind of mumbly and dreamy and subdued, except for the occasional return visits to the wraparound story, during which the movie turns hammy and dinner-theater-ish.

One odd thing about all these stories – the tits, the Kubrick, the monk, the worm – is that they all sort of peter out. Each supposed tale of terror boils down to: something really creepy and unbelievable happened to me... and then I kinda forgot about it and got on with my life, no big whoop. Now, to be fair, there is a big twist ending in which Henry Gibson reveals WHY all these stories just sort of petered out. But I must cry foul here, not only because the twist is particularly unsatisfying but also because watching the rest of the movie feels like perennially being on the verge of sneezing. You know that feeling, citizens, when you feel like you're just about to sneeze but don't? Well, do you?

In short, this movie delivers the sleaze but not the sneeze.

Dear reader:

I wish I could tell you something, anything about Trapped Ashes, I really do. I received the movie in the mail from Joe on Wednesday or Thursday – along with a letter written in eyebrow pencil on butcher's paper containing his thoughts on the film – and was all set to watch it last night despite Joe's warning by e-mail that "the movie is really, really, really bad, practically from the first frame to the last." I was the one who found it in the new release rack at Wal-Mart and sent it to him to review, though, so I knew I had to suck it up and take one for the team. (After all, Joe already had.) And I was all ready to do just that when I had another one of my mysterious blackouts. Well, it wasn't an actual blackout, per se, but... It's kind of hard to describe. It wasn't like what happened last time, I can tell you that.

Regular readers of this feature may recall the incident that occurred two weeks ago when I was so enraged by the discovery of Fear Itself's preemption in favor of the season finale of Last Comic Standing that I reportedly caused injury to several individuals and damaged some private property. (My case has not come up in criminal court as of yet, so I am still hazy on the details of what happened that night, and my court-appointed attorney has deemed it best to keep me in the dark about them. I believe his plan is to plead temporary insanity, which I don't necessarily agree or disagree with. I'd just like to know what it is I'm supposed to have done, although maybe I don't in light of what's happened since then.) The upshot of all that was my contact with a representative of a group called Lycanthropes Anonymous. I have attended several of their meetings over the past two weeks and was starting to feel that I was making definite progress on that front – that is, until last night.

It was a little after sunset when it started. I know this because I waited until it was dark to put the Trapped Ashes DVD in my player. (I still have a block about watching horror films during daylight hours, even cheaply slapped together ones.) I muted the TV so my ears wouldn't be assaulted by the previews, which always seem to be twice as loud as the movie itself, and got up and started pacing the room, occasionally glancing at the screen to check its progress. (I used to skip past the previews on DVDs, but occasionally I see something that catches my fancy and probably would have escaped my attention otherwise.) During one of my circuits I happened to look out the window and saw that the moon was full and very beautiful. I must have been entranced because my vision grew hazy and I began to feel sleepy. I retired to the bedroom, but left my clothes on, figuring I would only go down for a short nap before getting up and tackling the movie. Instead I immediately fell into a deep sleep and had extremely vivid dreams, most of which revolved around a hideous beast stalking its prey. The curious thing is sometimes I was the beast and sometimes I was the prey. Here's the dream as best as I was able to reconstruct it:

The first thing I remember was standing in the fenced-off deer preserve across the street from the apartment complex where I live. How I got there I don't know, but my sense of smell was most acute for I quickly homed in on one of the creatures and took off through the woods after it. The deer was surprisingly easy to take down – I was a much faster runner in the dream than I am in real life – and I greedily supped on its meat and drank its blood, quickly overcoming my surprise at my own bloodlust. Then, all of a sudden I felt the presence nearby of another bipedal creature (I could tell that it wasn't a deer or anything else on four legs) and instinctually made a break for it. Now I was the one being chased, first through the woods and then, after I leaped over the fence, the streets that bordered the preserve. Whatever was chasing me, I must have lost it because I found myself all alone on an unfamiliar back road.

Padding along as quietly as possible, I listened with my super-sensitive hearing for any sign that I was being pursued. I heard a door open to my right and, ducking behind a tree, watched as an inebriated man carried a garbage bag out to the curb. The beast within me awoke and in seconds I was on top of him, ripping both the man and the bag he carried to shreds with my sharp claws and fangs. I soon regretted tasting his blood, though, because of the alcohol it contained. Maybe if my senses hadn't been dulled by it I would have alerted to my pursuer's presence before it was able to get too close.

The creature let out a howl that chilled me to the quick. I squatted there, hunched over the dead man's still-warm body, for what seemed like forever before I shook off the paralysis and ran as quickly as I could. There was no escaping it this time, though, and at the end of the dream I was finally caught by the beast, which scooped me up in its massive, hairy arms and – after a disorienting trip back through the woods – improbably deposited me back in my bed, leaving me completely unharmed.

I couldn't even begin to tell you what any of it meant, but when I awoke this morning I was again in tattered clothes (but thankfully not languishing in the city jail), and felt more exhausted than I had when I had gone to sleep. Rolling out of bed, I returned to the living room to eject Trapped Ashes from the DVD player – no use letting the menu keep playing on a constant loop – when I discovered that it was missing. The DVD case was also gone, and taped to the TV set was a hastily scribbled note. As I reached for it, I noticed that I had an alarming amount of dried blood on my hands and, when I looked down, my clothing as well. Feeling unsteady on my feet, I staggered to the bathroom to wash it off and discovered to my horror that it was also on my face and matted in my beard.

I have no idea what's happening to me, but I do know one thing: I need to call my sponsor.

Posted by Craig at 7:35 AM Comments (3)

Fear Itself: "Skin & Bones" -- reviewed by Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins

I have a confession to make. This is very difficult for me because I'm a very private person by nature, but my sponsor tells me that the best thing for someone in my position to do is to come clean, so here goes:

My name is Craig, and I am a werewolfoholic.

It has been 28 days since my last werewolf fix. (That would be the Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf, which I found for $2 in a used bookstore and greedily devoured in a matter of hours, much like a werewolf eviscerating its prey.) It's been a bit longer since my last werewolf movie - 1996's laughable Bad Moon - but that came at the tail end of a binge that included The Howling, An American Werewolf in London, The Company of Wolves and Wolfen. I've been (relatively) dry ever since, but that doesn't mean I haven't had urges.

For example, after I finished reading Cycle I considered renting Silver Bullet, the 1985 film based on it, but quickly came to my senses. I also passed on the Sci Fi Original Movie Never Cry Werewolf because a) it's a Sci Fi Original Movie and those are almost never any good, and b) I already saw it 20 years ago when it was about vampires and it was called Fright Night. If there's anything worse than a bad werewolf movie, it's a derivative werewolf movie.

Anyway, as regular readers of the feature are doubtless aware, ever since Fear Itself started airing I've been chomping at the bit for them to roll out the werewolf story that I just know they have to have waiting in the wings. I even watched John Landis's Masters of Horror episode "Deer Woman" during an off week in the hope that it would slake my thirst for shape shifters, but alas, it did not. (At least I can report that it was a marked improvement on his Fear Itself episode, the abysmal "In Sickness and in Health," a.k.a. "The Hour of My Life I Really Wish I Had Spent Doing Something Else.") And I knew going in that this week's offering, "Skin & Bones," wasn't going to fit the bill, either, so that doesn't explain the rampage that I went on after it was over.

There was certainly nothing in the episode itself to set me off. Competently directed by Larry Fessenden (maker of offbeat horror fare like Wendigo and The Last Winter) from a disappointingly pedestrian script by Masters of Horror vets Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan (who penned such deathless lines as "You... taste good" and "He'll... eat... you all"), the story concerns a man who returns to his cattle ranch a shell of his former self after having been lost in the mountains for ten days. He's frostbitten, malnourished and barely capable of moving or speaking. Oh, yes. And he's also become a cannibal since being possessed by a Wendigo (hmm, I wonder why they called in Fessenden to direct this one). Thankfully, the ranch has a resident wise old Indian named Eddie Bear who explains what a Wendigo is and fills the slot reserved for minority characters who are always the monster's first victims in stories like this.

Other characters include the rancher's wife, his screw-up brother, and their two sons (one of whom could grow up to be Lemmon from "The Sacrifice" based on all the references to his limited mental capacity). There's a certain amount of family tension owing to the presence of the brother (who - SPOILER ALERT - turns out to be the actual father of both boys), but it was subsumed by a final act that largely consisted of people running from the possessed rancher, pointing a gun at him and breaking down when they find they can't fire upon their brother/husband/person passing themselves off as their father. Ho hum.

Having made it to the end of the show by sheer dint of will, I eagerly waited through the credits for the preview of next week's Fear Itself in the vain hope that it would be the long-awaited (by me, at least) werewolf episode, but was disappointed when they was none. Nearly beside myself, I went online to check next week's schedule and found that Fear Itself has been preempted by the season finale of Last Comic Standing. It was at that point that I lost my proverbial shit - and my memory of what happened.

I am told I did a great deal of property damage and injured several people, but I don't remember that at all. What I do remember is coming to in a holding cell in tattered clothes and with a splitting headache. Thankfully Thursday nights are slow in my municipality, so I didn't have to share the cell with too many miscreants. I did get a visit from a strange man (who asked me not to identify or describe him for what he deemed "personal reasons") who offered to post my bail as long as I agreed to attend a few meetings of his outreach organization. They call themselves Lycanthropes Anonymous. I think they may be able to help me.

A support group may indeed help you, Mr. Clark, but I certainly cannot. I have problems of my own, you see.

I woke up this morning in my apartment, totally unaware of how I'd gotten there or with any concrete memories of the last two months. All my furniture was gone apart from the television set and a VCR. Stuck to the VCR was a Post-It note reading, "PRESS PLAY."

So I did.

After a few seconds of static, an image appeared on the screen: a dark-haired man, 30ish, sitting in a nondescript room and looking directly into the camera. There were dark circles under his haunted eyes. His hair was wildly unkempt, filthy and matted, and he had a bushy growth of untamed facial hair. His clothing was ragged and torn. Just as I was asking myself who this awful man was, he began to speak.

"Hello, Joe," he solemnly intoned. "You may not recognize me, but I am you."

My heart began to beat wildly. The strange man continued.

"Yes, underneath all this hair, I am indeed Joseph Michael Blevins, born April 12, 1977 in Saginaw, Michigan to Hal and Maureen Blevins. I'm an only child. My mother's maiden name was Emerson. My childhood pet was a calico named Mr. Moonlight. Social Security number 401-82-9706. Blood type, B positive. Favorite Beatle, Ringo."

I was awed. If this man wasn't me, he had certainly done his homework.

"Listen to me," he said. "You have to watch a show called Fear Itself at 9:00 tonight on NBC. That's channel 5. Make sure you write that down. I'll wait a minute before I continue."

I looked around for pen and paper. There was no paper to be found, but there was a pen in my pocket. I decided to write the message on my hand. That's when I noticed that my hands and arms were already covered with writing. Pressing pause on the VCR, I ran to the bathroom to examine myself in the mirror.

Good god! I was covered with writing! Various words and phrases were scribbled all over my forehead, my body, my limbs - all backwards so they could be read in a mirror. These messages were cryptic non-sequiturs like "WIGFALL," "ERIC ROBERTS," "MARRAKESH," "ZUCKER," and "LAST COMIC STANDING." My hair and beard, meanwhile, were indeed like those of the man in the video. With all that hair and writing, I resembled a cross between the Wild Man of Borneo and a men's room stall. What was going on here?

I ran back to the VCR and unpaused the tape. The man on the video - me, I, Joe - continued.

"Listen, I can't go into the specifics now, but make sure you watch this show. It will contain at least six important clues you will need in order to survive. Got that? Six important clues! Whatever you do, WATCH THAT SHOW. Someone will contact you with more information at the proper time."

The message ended, and the tape reverted to static. I glanced at my watch and noticed that it was already 8:58! Frantically, I turned on the TV just in time for the opening scene of Fear Itself. I'd never watched the program before, but it seemed to be some kind of horror anthology like Tales From the Crypt, only without a host. This particular episode, "Skin & Bones" was a cannibal story, fairly well told and satisfyingly gory and depraved. But of course, I couldn't concentrate on the episode as an artistic work since I was so determined to figure out what those six clues were. Here's what I came up with:

(1) The oldest son kind of looks like Justin Timberlake.
(2) Eddie Bear is an Indian.
(3) That skinny guy is way evil. And ugly to boot!
(4) Oh my god! He's going to make his wife eat Rowdy!
(5) That's disgusting!
(6) My local news is next.

I certainly hope those are the six clues about which I warned myself. Also, if anyone sees my furniture, I'd really like it back. Thanks.

Posted by Craig at 5:38 PM Comments (4)

Fear Itself: “Community” -- reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark

“This is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun.” - CLARK GRISWOLD

Doc!

Doc, you gotta help me!

It’s this TV show, Doc, this Fear Itself. Yeah, that’s right, Doc, the NBC horror anthology airing Thursday nights at ten, nine central right after Last Comic Standing. Boy, you sure know your TV shows, Doc. I didn’t think anybody but me was watching... and judging from the ratings they ain’t. So you been watching it too?

Oh, just heard about it somewhere, huh? Still, I’m impressed.

Anyway, Doc, here’s my problem. I’ve been watching this turkey since day one. Day one, Doc, and I ain’t missed an episode yet. Loyal as Greyfriars Bobby, you might say. And what do I get in return, Doc? Zilch, that’s what. Zero. Nada. Nothing. El blank-oh.

What do I want from it? How about a genuine scare every once in a while! The title is Fear Itself but I haven’t experienced any actual fear itself. Boredom itself, yes. Disappointment itself, definitely. Confusion itself, frustration itself, curiosity about what’s on the other channels itself, you name it. Everything but fear itself. I want the fear, Doc. I crave it like the junkie craves his needle. You grok, Doc?

Take last night’s show as a “for instance.” It was called “Community” and it starred that kid from the last Superman movie. Brandon something. Blandly handsome in that “Sears catalog model” kind of way and with acting chops that would almost pass muster in the Podunk High School production of You Can’t Take It With You. In this show, they got him paired with some dame I didn’t recognize. They’re young marrieds eager to buy their first home, and lo and behold, they find a honey of a place in an exclusive gated community. It all seems too good to be true, and Superman, Jr. smells a rat. But Wifey’s just gaga for the dump, so in they move.

Well, you can guess where it goes from there, Doc. Actually, you don’t have to guess. They all but tell you in the first five minutes. It starts with Kal-El making a mad dash on foot for the city limits, the prerequisite angry mob hot on his trail. Most of the rest of the episode is then told in flashbacks, telling you what led up to that chase scene. If your prediction is that the “community” turned out to be a bunch of creeps and whackjobs and that Supes soon regretted ever having moved there, then congratulations are in order, Nostradamus. You are correct, sir.

Fear Itself loves the twist ending, Doc, and I guess the twist here is that the show plays out pretty much like you think it will, except kind of low-key and deflated like somebody’d let all the air out of it. It just seemed kinda half-hearted and perfunctory. Like there’s one scene where the villagers publicly shame a woman by dressing her up in a pig mask and throwing apples at her. Funny, right? But nobody’s really into it. They’re just kind of going through the motions. They looked bored, Doc. Later, the kids in town do the same thing to one of their own, only with snowballs instead of apples. But they show one of the kids throwing a snowball, and she just kind of lobs it underhand. I’m not even sure if it made it to its intended target. The whole show was like that, Doc.

I actually felt sorry for the lummox, Brandon what’s-his-name, Captain Hairdo. I mean, as if the kid didn’t already have problems being unfavorably compared to Christopher Reeve, at one point in the episode they actually show him in a wheelchair! A wheelchair, Doc! I crap thee negatory. Maybe next they came have him star in a remake of Monsignor. You ever see Monsignor, Doc? Not bad at all, despite what you may’ve heard. Plus Genevieve Bujold gets ’em out in one scene. Not too shabby, Doc. Not too shabby.

It feels good to talk about this stuff, Doc. When I came in here, I was all upset because Fear Itself had stolen another hour of my life. But now that I’ve gotten all this off my chest, I feel great. Well, not great exactly but better at least. Ready to go write another blog post slagging Fear Itself. Thanks a million, Doc.

Say, this is some swell office you got here, Doc. I never really noticed it before. You must be awful excited about the Beijing Olympics. All those posters on your wall, I mean. “8-8-08.” I guess that’s when they start televising it, huh? Hey, is that a Heroes coffee mug on your desk? Hmm. I never noticed that lapel pin of yours, Doc. Colorful. Looks like a little bird. A peacock, huh? Cute. You know, Doc, I’ve never told you this before, but in this light, you look uncannily like Jeff Zucker, the President and Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal. The glasses, the bald pate. You guys could be twins.

Say, Doc, why are you looking at me like that? I didn’t say anything to offend you, did I?

Doc...?

DOC, NO!!!!!!!!!

Well, folks, here we are in Week 7 of Fear Itself, the midway point of the series, commonly referred to in television circles as Make or Break It Week. Less commonly known as Hump Week (at least in this age of political correctness), Get Your Act Together Week or Where’s the Damned Werewolf Story Already Week. Let’s face it; they’ve already done vampires, ghosts, serial killers (two of them), voodoo, zombies and (this week) a whole Stepford Wives kind of deal. They’re going to do a werewolf story sooner or later. Why not make it sooner so I have a chance of seeing it before NBC pulls the plug? (And more and more I’m thinking they will one of these weeks, although I shudder to imagine what NBC would pull out of its vaults to replace an underperforming summer replacement show such as this.)

This week’s episode, as Joe has told you, was called “Community.” I like to call it “Count the Allusions, References and Outright Steals.” In addition to Ira Levin’s fictional town of Stepford, which has been depicted in no less than two feature films and three TV movies and was the obvious inspiration for the exclusive gated community The Commons, the episode also featured transitions stolen from Kubrick’s The Shining (“Two Days Later,” “Four Weeks Later” and so forth – I was waiting for one that just said “Wednesday”) and strong allusions to Rosemary’s Baby (another Ira Levin influence), Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Truman Show and even Shock Treatment, the less-than-successful follow-up to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At least Shock Treatment had songs, a satirical point to make about American values a vision of life as a reality TV that series was amazingly prescient. “Community,” on the other hand, just chugged along, refusing to offer up any surprises or chills or, well, anything of interest, really.

The sad thing is it didn’t have to be this way. “Community” was directed by Mary Harron, who previously helmed the features I Shot Andy Warhol (which – SPOILER ALERT – is about some chick who shoots Andy Warhol), American Psycho (which can be found in the $5 DVD bin at your local Wal Mart), and The Notorious Bettie Page (which didn’t stick around in theaters long enough for me to see it) as well as a slew of television shows. Clearly if anybody could bridge the gap between the big and small screens and do so with a certain amount of élan, it was she. Sadly, Ms. Harron was sandbagged with a substandard script (which is, as far as I can tell, the standard modus operandi for this show) and some barely adequate thespians. Still, the one guy who jabbed a pair of scissors into the evil real estate agent’s neck was good. If there’s one thing this episode lacked, it was more scenes of people jabbing scissors into other people’s necks. Would have certainly relieved the tedium.

But getting back to the werewolves, is it really too much to ask for them to give me a decent werewolf story? I make no apologies; I really like the hairy beasts. And after Masters of Horror disappointed me by containing not one werewolf episode, I’m ready for Fear Itself to redress this egregious oversight. If they choose to include a transformation sequence, though, I hope they abstain from using CGI. There’s nothing worse than a crappy CGI transformation sequence. Hell, I’d take lap dissolves between progressively shaggy makeup effects over CGI (which has ruined more werewolf movies in the past decade and change than I frankly care to think about).

Unfortunately, I don’t think next week’s Fear Itself will deliver the werewolf story I’m waiting for. Of course, it’s hard to tell since the teaser was no more than a few seconds and didn’t give any indication of what the episode is about. If the IMDb is anything to go by, though, it will be “Skin & Bones,” directed by Larry Fessenden from a script by Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan, who wrote both of John Carpenter’s Masters of Horror episodes. That’s a reasonably good sign, but the plot description (“When a cattle herder returns home to his family after being lost in the woods for days, he just doesn't seem the same. Soon, a terrible mortal struggle ensues against the terrifying monster possessing him.”) doesn’t scream “werewolf” to me. Werewolves don’t possess you; they are you. Oh, how I wish that were so.

Anyway, we’ll be back next week with another installment. At least I know I will. I can’t say for sure whether Joe made it out of Jeff Zucker’s office alive. Television executives can be notoriously sensitive when it comes to unasked-for criticism.

Posted by Craig at 1:11 PM Comments (4)