Cody digs into the fourth episode of the Creepshow TV series.
From Dark Night of the Scarecrow to Scarecrow County, Scarecrows, and many other films and stories, there have been a lot of killer scarecrows in the horror genre. It's a popular concept, and I'm happy that a killer scarecrow got added into the world of Creepshow with the fourth episode of the Shudder television series.
Each episode of Creepshow is divided into two stories. The killer scarecrow segment of this one is called The Companion, and it was directed by David Bruckner (who also directed The Man in the Suitcase in the previous episode) from a script by Matt Venne, based on a story crafted by Bubba Ho-Tep author Joe R. Lansdale and his children Kasey and Keith Lansdale. It starts off with a young kid named Harry (Logan Allen) hiding out under a bridge after a rough fight with his older brother Billy (Voltaire Council), something that seems to be a very common occurrence. Viewers may notice that the bridge has graffiti on it that claims "Jimmy is a dead f*ck"... and fans will recognize this as a reference to Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Creepshow's creative supervisor Greg Nicotero likes to drop Easter eggs like that into his projects, but here I have to wonder if the Easter egg was Bruckner's idea, since he was attached to direct a Friday the 13th movie for a few years. That F13 never ended up getting made, but I did write a review of the script Bruckner would have been working from.
After Harry has some fun banter with his pal Smitty (Dylan Gage, who does a great job during his brief appearance), Billy shows up at the bridge and chases his brother off into the countryside. Eventually they reach a farmhouse, which happens to be inhabited by a strange scarecrow that a lonely farmer assembled after the death of his wife. Somehow the scarecrow came to life. And it's homicidal.
The Companion has a nice visual style - I love the blue lighting and thick fog at the farm when Harry and Billy arrive there - and an interesting enough story. Sporting an animal's jawbone, the scarecrow itself is cool and unique looking, and fits right in with the other creatures we've seen in Creepshow segments.
One thing I love about this series is the fact that Nicotero never allowed it to drift too far away from the original films, 1982's Creepshow and 1987's Creepshow 2. Although the show has branched away from Stephen King source material (every segment of the films was based on a story by King), it remains connected to those films through the presence of people who worked on them. Since The Companion wasn't written or directed by anyone who was involved with the movies, the episode's second segment is. Creepshow composer John Harrison wrote the segment titled Lydia Layne's Better Half and shares story credit with Nicotero, who worked in the FX department on Creepshow 2. The director of Lydia Layne's Better Half was new to the Creepshow franchise: Roxanne Benjamin, who had been a producer on the anthology V/H/S, which Bruckner directed a segment of.
This episode's second story stars Tricia Helfer as successful businesswoman Lydia Layne, and it's basically a new take on the Hitchhiker segment from Creepshow 2, but more contained and not as entertaining. In both The Hitchhiker and Lydia Layne's Better Half, a woman accidentally causes someone's death, doesn't do the right thing and report the death, and then spends the rest of the story being tormented by them. In this case, the person Lydia Layne accidentally kills is her girlfriend Celia (Danielle Lyn), who gets very upset when Lydia chooses to give someone other than her a prestigious position at her company. The women get in a fight, Lydia knocks Celia down, Celia hits her head and dies. Then Lydia decides to try to dump the body... and ends up trapped in an elevator with the corpse during a power outage caused by an earthquake. Either Lydia has lost her mind, or it seems that Celia's corpse is starting to move...
The set-up of the segment is fine, but for me there wasn't enough substance to it to maintain its twenty-plus minute running time. I just wasn't very interested in watching Lydia sit in the elevator with Celia's dead body. To be honest, I found it tough to stay awake through Lydia Layne's Better Half the first time I watched it. I may have been running on too little sleep, but still, I didn't find the segment to be much of an attention grabber.
I expected the segments that were from Creepshow veterans to be the ones I'd prefer in the episodes, but this makes two episodes in a row where I enjoyed segments directed by Bruckner and written by franchise newcomers more than the ones that came from people with previous Creepshow experience. I still love that the show's connection to the past is so strong every episode, but Bruckner just happened to handle stories that were more interesting to me.
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