Again, What Is Up With Trick ‘R Treat?
This is a minor update, sure, but we still consider Warner Bros.’ decision to swipe the throwback horror anthology, Trick ‘R Treat, off their release slate to be a quizzical and ‘tarded ball drop. The Internet was going nuts for the film after it scored stellar reviews from a sneak at The Alamo. Its Halloween release date in 2007 was a no-brainer. Buzz remained steady into ‘08 after WB pushed it back and then, nothing.Movie Hole just checked in with director and X2 screenwriter, Michael Dougherty…
“The struggle continues. There’s interest from another distributor so negotiations have begun. Keep your severed fingers crossed!”
With WB’s Creepshow franchise carelessly spanning time in straight-to-DVD purgatory and failing to cash in on the current nostalgia for EC Comics in geek culture, Trick ‘R Treat’s prolonged limbo makes no friggin’ sense. A tidy profit is all but guaranteed. With a cool easy-sell concept, a promising cast (Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker, Brian Cox, Leslie Bibb) and cult buzz/notoriety, comparisons to Mike Judge’s Idiocracy are obvious. Hopefully, a studio gives it more than a funeral pyre theatrical release. Dumb move, WB.
Fear Itself: Family Man
Nope, this isn’t Eureka, and that isn’t the friendly Sheriff Carter up there. But it is Eureka’s Colin Ferguson, and with Clifton Collins Jr. he has created a truly chilling installment in NBC’s increasingly “must see” horror anthology Fear Itself. Well, much of the credit to the success of this episode belongs at the feet of Dan Knauf, who proved himself an absolute master of the macabre with his darkly brilliant HBO series Carnivále. He’s also been a writer for Supernatural, so this stuff is clearly old hat for him.
And I’m pleased to say that the “old pro” really came through with “Family Man.” Easily the best episode of the young season so far and one of the best stand-alone hours of any anthology series I think I’ve ever seen. Ferguson, who we’ve come to know and love for playing the nice guy really shines here. And due to the complexity of the story, both he and Collins get a real chance to flex their acting muscles to brilliant effect. From the chilling scenes at home to the overwhelming drama in the prison, each moment propelled the story forward. The only thing that blows me away is that director Ronny Yu, who does wonderfully here, has Freddy vs. Jason and Bride of Chucky as his horror directing pedigree.
I’ll admit there have been times in my life that I’ve wondered what it must be like to be falsely accused of something you had nothing to do with and wind up in prison or worse. Let’s face it, it really does happen to people. And as a family man myself, the thought of being ripped away from my wife and son and forced to face the unimaginable is a real, if highly unlikely, fear. Knauf takes this notion and mixes it with a healthy dose of Freaky Friday minus the Lohan and Curtis (or Foster and Harris if you’d rather). The result is a tour de force of not supernatural horror, though it was the catalyst, but an internal and psychological terror.
Knauf proved himself a veritable genius when it comes to complex relationships and emotional turmoil with the expanded cast of Carnivale. (Note to HBO: I still haven’t forgiven you for cutting Knauf’s vision short there.) (Note to Knauf: Go back to your idea of finishing the story in comic book format. Tons of other shows are doing it (*cough*Buffy/Angel*cough*) and your story deserves proper closure!). And here he is with one hour, minus commercials, fleshing out these two mix-n-matched guys so completely that you feel the frustration of Dennis Mahoney (Ferguson), and the horror he feels when he realizes that the serial killer whose body he inhabits, Richard Brautigan (Collins) is alive, free and well and living his life with his family in his body.
What I didn’t expect was the struggle that Knauf would build into the character of Richard Brautigan. After he inhabits Dennis Mahoney’s body and starts to try and live his life, he finds it difficult to give up his homicidal compulsions. It would have been so easy to just have him be a psychopath through and through, but it seemed as if he was genuinely thinking that maybe this was a new chance for him to stop being a murderer. To get away scot-free with all his killings and move on to a new chapter in his life. But it just wasn’t as easy as all of that.
His unraveling of concern about his new family, when he unloaded on his “wife” about how easily the kids could be taken from them showed that he really wanted to make this new life work. He was struggling mightily with his internal demons. Ferguson masterfully plays his slow unraveling, and the scenes between him and Collins throughout so beautifully show his slow deterioration. And you can tell in Collins portrayal that he can see the inevitable looming.
I can’t really say enough about the strength of the acting on the part of both actors. They completely sold their various characters and helped creating the escalating terror throughout the hour. And even though, we may have seen the ultimate ending coming, I’ll admit that I hadn’t fully thought through the ultimate result of what could happen to Mahoney even after he does reclaim his own body and life. That was a classic horror ending.
POINTS OF INTEREST (TO ME AT LEAST)
- The show opened with a disclaimer that the following program contains scenes of an intense nature, followed immediately by a shot of a church with the congregation singing “Amazing Grace.” Religion is intense, man!
- I loved seeing Chris Burke (Corky from Life Goes On) but man did he have no real part at all.
- I kept expecting to see Melinda Gordon from Ghost Whisperer during the hospital sequence at the beginning when both Brautigan and Mahoney were wandering around as displaced spirits.
- Are prisoners really as abused as Brautigan was by the guards in prison? I get that he was a murderer of innocent women and children, which doesn’t go over well, but I’m sure such abuses are technically against prisoner policy. It makes sense, for those reasons, why he appeared to be completely isolated from the other inmates.
- Wouldn’t there be a conflict of interest with the officer who’s fiance Brautigan murdered. Surely he wouldn’t really be assigned to guard him. That’d be like hiring a prosecuting attorney who’s daughter he murdered to try his case. Or worse, defend him.
- Do they sing “Amazing Grace” every week at church? There are a lot of songs in most hymnals they could sample from.
- I love the parking lot scene for showing Brautigan that he can’t control everything the way he wants to, and the dinner sequence for showing the climax of his ultimate collapse with such subtlety and tension.
Swingtown has nothing to fear in Fear Itself
Two new summer shows debuted at 10pm last night, one on CBS and one on NBC (ABC had the first game of the Celtics/Lakers battle). And it turns out that more viewers wanted to see people swing than see people scream.
The first episode of the CBS series Swingtown, which depicts various neighbors in the 70s drinking, smoking, exchanging partners, and wearing bad clothes, beat the first episode of the new NBC series Fear Itself, a horror anthology series. Swingtown grabbed 8.6 million viewers while Fear Itself managed to get 5.2 million viewers. For the night, ABC won with the NBA game.
I’m rather embarrassed to say that I completely forgot that either of them was on. My night consisted of watching the Red Sox/Rays game (lots of fights and weirdness) and then reading a book until Letterman came on at 11:35. What did everyone think of either or both of these shows?
Fear Itself — An early look
From The Twilight Zone to Amazing Stories, anthologies have always tried to find a home on television. But where once they were embraced and even lauded, now they struggle to find viewers and usually only eke out a season or so. Last summer brought us Masters of Science Fiction, which itself was a variation on the pay cable Masters of Horror, which proved the more successful of the pair. Horror has always had a special place in our hearts.
And so it is not tremendously surprising that NBC is back in the game, this time with Fear Itself, an hour-long horror anthology. The series premieres Thursday, June 5 at 10pm ET, and I’m going to tell you now to try not to judge it by the first episode. I got a chance to preview the first three episodes, and for me it got better with each installment. Maybe it’s a bias against the fairly typical “monster of the week” storytelling that has weakened episodes of such otherwise good shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville and Supernatural.
I’ve always enjoyed those horror and sci-fi stories that reached a little beyond the shock factor or the hack and slash mentality. “Sacrifice,” which introduces the show to the audience, falls into the latter category in a way that concerns me for the show’s retention rate. Either the second episode, “Spooked” or the excellent third, “Family Man,” would have been a much better way to introduce the potential of the series. Both of those latter two stories featured some twists on the genre and a much more cerebral experience. The horror was as much internal as it was external for our protagonists. Point blank: the stories were just better.
So why start with a fairly surface level “monster of the week” episode? Well, if I recall correctly Masters of Horror on Showtime did something similar with the deer-woman-monster-weirdness of their pilot installment. The only thing that correlates between the two is the promise of sex in the episode and the hotness factor of the female leads. I’d like to think that television executives aren’t so shallow as to think that we need to see Mircea Monroe’s voluptuous cleavage in order to want to keep watching the series, but this is television and America we’re talking about. Ass and boobs are what it’s all about, right? Throw in some guts, gore and at least one ugly vampire and we’re all happy.
The second episode features Eric Roberts and Lost’s Cynthia Watros in a unique angle on a haunted house story. It was nice seeing Watros back at it on the small screen, as I thought both she and Hurley’s character got the big shaft when they booted her off the island via a quick murder (I don’t care what they say it was because of her troubles with the local law). This one read and felt more like a typical horror short story. The effects of the hauntings were very well done and they did an excellent job of establishing the proper mood and tone throughout. Roberts grew into his character by the end.
But as much as I thought “Spooked” was an improvement over “Sacrifice,” I was blown away by just how damned good “Family Man” was. It was a treat seeing Eureka’s Colin Ferguson really put through the emotional wringer in this one. As it was written by Daniel Knauf, who created one of the most under-appreciated shows in the history of television, Carnivale (I still want to know how it ends, dammit!), I had a lot of high-hopes that it would be filled with his trademark mysteries, twists and turns and he really delivered. I don’t even want to say too much about it except to tell you that even in the rough cut that I received, this was far and away one of the strongest installments of any of the recent anthology series; a wonderful idea wonderfully executed.
Anthology series are a tough sell during a typical summer season, but if NBC is willing to truly think about a summer slate of non-reality original programming, I could see Fear Itself as an excellent addition to that family. They can catch all the television actors during hiatuses to film various installments, thus giving fans of those shows an opportunity to see their favorite TV stars during the summer, and it can help those stars, like the aforementioned Hurley (Jorge Garcia) try to avoid becoming hopelessly typecast as their beloved recurring characters; Ferguson certainly stepped well out of his role as Sheriff Carter.
I’d like to think this has a real chance of making it the whole run, but summer audiences can be so fickle and still seem resistant to original scripted programming. Maybe post-strike America is a different viewing beast. Maybe going so long without scripted programming during the regular season has made us more anxious to consider trying something new. And with anthology series you don’t have to worry about the plug being pulled before you get any resolution on any storylines, unless your cat is playing behind the entertainment center and accidentally pulls the plug. What the hell are you doing back there, anyway?