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 ...
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The first suspense (as opposed to supernatural horror) episode of Fear Itself proves to be a disappointment, and I suspect most of the blame this time lies with the direction, rather than with the script. Not that the very guessable "twist" ending scriptwriter Victor Salva (Jeepers Creepers) offers helps matters, but the uneven tone, utter lack of subtlety, and clumsy pacing of the episode, directed by John Landis, killed it much more efficiently than our drama's serial killers could hope to snuff any victim.A bride (Maggie Lawson, most visible of late in Psych) is joking with her maids of honor as they prepare for the ceremony. As one bridesmaid goes to check on the groom, she remembers to pass along an envelope the officiating priest had given her, which he'd received from an unidentified woman. The typewritten note in the sealed envelope says only "The person you are about to marry is a serial killer." This disturbs the bride, but only slightly; she goes to the groom (James Rod...
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Finally a good episode of Fear Itself, one written by Daniel Knauf, he most recently of Carnivale (the HBO dark fantasy historical drama), and one as well shot and acted as the previous two, this one directed by Ronny Yu. Rather a simple story: a doting husband and father of two children is asked by his wife to run an errand, and is so wrapped up in his cell phone conversation with her he doesn't see the pickup truck that charges into the intersection and centerpunches his sedan, apparently killing the pickup's occupants and, it turns out, very nearly killing him. Indeed, he has an out-of-body experience at the hospital where he's being treated, and meets another disembodied spirit; this other spirit tells him that they're both dead. As it turns out, the second spirit is jumping the gun, and both men survive, but when they awaken, they discover that they have swapped bodies. And family man Dennis Mahoney is now occupying the stronger, more pain-resistant body of a prolific serial k...
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So far we don't have too much to fear from Fear Itself, other than having our time wasted, with well-produced offerings of very weak stories and scripts. There are a lot of ways to go wrong with any screenplay, but why take such unpromising work as what has been written, or at least what has been filmed from what was written, for these first two episodes and then lavish on them as much atmosphere and ingenuity as a mid-range television budget can afford? Why not solicit better scripts, or if that's not the problem, quit allowing someone to dumb them down so badly during production and/or post-production?In this episode, we have a world-weary and vicious cop (Eric Roberts, reminding us of Robert Forster), who tortures, essentially to death, a suspect in the kidnapping of a US Senator's son...but before he can die, the obviously guilty kidnapper? accomplice? uncooperative witness? (we guess primary kidnapper, and we do have to guess) makes a dying declaration that he will haunt Harr...
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A well-mounted but unspectacular start for this new anthology series, from the folks who've brought us Masters of Horror on Showtime and Masters of Science Fiction on ABC in the U.S. The pilot's good to look at, but not so great to think about. Thirteen episodes have been promised by NBC, assuming the ratings hold, and while scheduling a horror- and suspense-drama hour after Last Comic Standing might seem an odd sort of "flow" for the night, it does therefore follow both CSI and Supernatural on other nets and might well gather at least a slice of their audiences.Producer/screenwriter Mick Garris adapted a short story by actor and bookseller Del Howison, who's been branching out into writing and anthology-editing; young director Breck Eisner has done some television hours and one theatrical feature, Sahara. The episode's production is top-notch, particularly since it's striving for the grimy, desperate feel that's become rather familiar in lots of recent US/Canadian horror films...t...
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