Last night I watched the first episode of Shudder's new Creepshow series. Overall it was pretty underwhelming. Yeah, it had the stereotypical Creepshow stuff (a comic book style presentation, and The Creep), but beyond shoehorning that stuff into the presentation the show - at least based on the first episode - is a dud and completely misses the mark.
The episode was about 45 minutes long and made up of two separate stories. The first story was fucking horrible and proved that the creators of this series don't really know what made the original Creepshow...well, Creepshow. It was slow paced, over-long, meandering, completely devoid of camp, and never bothered explaining WHY the things that were happening onscreen we're actually happening. Basically, the story ended up being a weird rip off of The Thing and/or The Blob, in a way. There was minimal gore, and while the practical effects work was pretty good, whenever they used CG it looked like shit. Actors such as the guy who played Jigsaw and Adrienne Barbeau were completely wasted, and the end of the episode was just stupid (what the fuck was Adrienne Barbeau's character basing her rapid calculations on? It made no sense). A really bad choice to include in the first episode of the season, which Shudder is releasing on a weekly basis as opposed to all at once.
The second story in the episode was much better. Again, the overall feel of the story was kinda ill-fitting for the campy Creepshow format, but it was otherwise really well done and engaging, although it completely failed to stick the landing with a fairly lame, all-of-a-sudden ending. I feel like the first story should have been cut down a lot and the second one expanded, as the whole "little girl with her creepy haunted dollhouse" concept was fairly unique and well-executed. I also appreciated the fact that they resisted using the "kid tells their parents what's going on only to not have them believe her" cliche. Keeping what was going on to herself seemed very much like a "kid" thing to do.
Also, their use of The Creep in this series is pretty pointless. They're treating him like this iconic character but he was really the least memorable aspect of the original Creepshow movie by far. Here, he just comes across as a mute Cryptkeeper more than anything else. Again, pointless.
Whike the second story was an improvement (except for the ending, that is), overall this was a pretty weak first entry. I'll probably check out next week's episode, but considering they were only six in this season, they better step up their game pretty quickly.
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