"Eater"
A fine, deft episode, based on Peter Crowther's short story of the same name, and adapted by
Richard Chizmar and
Jonathan Schaech (who also recently wrote the screenplay for the feature-length adapation of Ed Gorman's novel
The Poker Club). Cult favorite
Stuart Gordon, probably still best known for
Re-Animator, directed a fine, small cast headlined by
Elisabeth Moss, most visible of late, inside greater or lesser degrees of padding, in
Mad Men.
A rather simple storyline: A particularly vile and prolific mass muderer, known for quickly killing his male victims and slowly cutting parts from his female victims and essentially eating them alive over the course of days or weeks, is delivered to a rundown Louisiana police precinct to be held overnight in their lockup. The sergeant in charge details two veteran patrolmen and a "boot," a rookie still in her probationary period, as the graveyard shift to stay with the "Eater." One of the veteran cops is openly contemptuous of young Officer Bannerman, though more because she's a woman than because of her "Goth" interests, tattoos, or that she reads
Death Dance magazine (an intentionally poorly-disguised reference to Chizmar's
Cemetery Dance horror-fiction magazine). For her part, Bannerman is somewhat intrigued by the presence of the monster in the lockup upstairs, her colleagues less entusiastic; the veterans turn out to be right, as the Eater begins some sort of magical chant shortly after settling into his cell, which causes some odd noises and shimmering in the precinct house. The veteran officers begin acting very aggressively toward Bannerman, as she begins to note that both of her shiftmates never seem to be in the same room with her at the same time, and to sit and move in exactly the same way. It's soon revealed that the Eater had apparently ripped the heart from the sergeant, and eaten it while it was still beating, so as to give the monster the magical ability to take on the sergeant's form, and then went on to do the same with the two elder cops in the station with Bannerman, who finds the front doors chained shut...and eventually starts finding the corpses of her colleagues. The Eater stops playing games with her, and reveals himself in his true form; as he attacks her, she fights back as viciously as she can, and finds the only effective weapon to use against the monster. The station house is infested with rats, and so there's a good supply of rat poison on hand...Bannerman rubs some into the neck wound the Eater has given her, and eats a large handful more of it herself. Then, in essentially her last act, she handcuffs the Eater to her, to hobble him when he realizes the amount of poison he's ingested by drinking her blood and generally chewing on her. He seems to be dying in painful spasms, cursing her now-dead body, as the show ends.
Stuart Gordon's love of cocked camera angles (surely a fan of the ABC
Batman tv series of the '60s) and some clever scene transitions are only the flashiest elements of his work here, which brings an energy lacking in essentially all the previous episodes, and reinforces the solid if not, as presented, flawless script (most obvious nit to me: why would a rookie as resourceful as Bannerman, faced with a chained safety-glass door, not break it with her gun butt or, failing that, shoot it out, so as to get out and get some backup?). Better use of the soundtrack was made in this episode than in previous ones, as well...the setting allowed for some zydeco to be introduced, along with some appropriate world-music rhythms in the score, and there's at least one reasonably good jump-scare sound effect, the squawk of a police radio.
All told, this is about what I was expecting and hoping for from this series, which to say the least it hasn't been consistently providing. A few more like this one could make us all forgive the weaker entries, I suspect. If you missed it, this one will be visible on
Hulu.com sometime in the next day or so, and I'd say it's worth the time.
An interview with Elisabeth Moss is
here.
For more on Fear Itself, please see our
Online Video Guide.
