Cody likes one story in the fifth episode of Creepshow, but not the other.
Bruce Davison, the original Willard, never starred in a movie directed by George A. Romero, but he was featured in an episode of the anthology series Tales from the Darkside, which Romero produced. So I like the fact that Davison also turned up in an episode of Shudder's anthology series Creepshow, which continues the franchise Romero and Stephen King started with the '80s films Creepshow and Creepshow 2.
The Creepshow segment Davison stars in is called Night of the Paw, and it was directed by the original Creepshow's composer John Harrison (who also directed the stories The House of the Head and All Hallow's Eve for the series' first season) from a script by John Esposito, writer of the Stephen King adaptation Graveyard Shift.
Like the movies, the Creepshow series is presented as if each episode consists of the horror stories featured in a Creepshow comic book that's being flipped through. The show occasionally uses the comic book concept as a clever way to show the viewer imagery they might not have had the budget to show otherwise. For example, in the Bad Wolf Down segment, werewolf transformations were shown through comic book panels. Night of the Paw starts with a mysterious woman named Angela (Hannah Barefoot) being chased by the police, and getting injured when her car crashes off the road in a rainstorm. The entire chase and crash is shown through comic book panels; by the time the story segues into live action, Angela's car is already flipped over on its roof and she's crawling out of the wreckage. I really appreciate these economical stylistic choices.
Angela collapses at the door of a funeral parlor owned and operated by Davison's character Avery Whitlock, who is called "Whitey", presumably a nickname he earned even before his hair turned white, due to the fact that his last name starts with "whit". Whitey fixes Angela up, and when she regains consciousness we learn that these characters are in the middle of a twist on the W. W. Jacobs story The Monkey's Paw, which was first published in 1902. In this version of the Paw, Whitey and his wife Marjorie (Susannah Devereux) received a monkey's paw that was said to be smuggled out of Mumbai after a Fakir cast a spell on it that gave it the power to grant three wishes. Marjorie wished that they would get a good amount of money - unfortunately, the wish was granted when she died and Whitey received an insurance payout. After his beloved wife died, Whitey used the paw to wish that she would return to life... And, of course, that didn't turn out well, but Harrison did make sure that the scene where Whitey goes to retrieve his wife from her grave looks very cool.
Whitey tells Angela his story during the "night of the paw", saying he expects to be dead in the morning. It's interesting to see how it all plays out, and to see if Whitey is right about his fate or not. There is an instance of less-than-convincing digital effects before it has ended, but overall I found this to be a very solid segment, a great addition to the Creepshow legacy with some awesome visuals.
By the time Night of the Paw has ended, the episode only has 15 of its 44 minutes remaining to tell the second story, Times Is Tough in Musky Holler. This one was also directed by Harrison, but things didn't turn out as well with his fourth contribution to the season. In fact, I would say that Times Is Tough in Musky Holler is easily the worst segment of the twelve that made up this season.
Scripted by John Skipp and Dori Miller, based on the short story they wrote together, Musky Holler tells the story of a town where some bad people took over during a time of crisis - that crisis being a zombie outbreak. Now the citizens have regained control of the town and are ready to punish the former leaders who terrorized them and did even worse to them than the zombies did. It's a story that might have been interesting to watch if the whole thing were told in a linear fashion, but here we're dropped into the story at the end, so we mainly just watch the tyrants complain about the situation they're now in.
Nothing about Musky Holler's few minutes makes me care at all about what's going on, and it feels like David Arquette - who plays the town's brutal former sheriff - was completely wasted in this small role.
While I have applauded the ways comic book panels have been used to help tell other stories, this one is the one that proves the panels can also be used in a way that lessens the effectiveness of a story. The flashbacks that show us why the leaders of Musky Holler are now in this predicament are shown through comic book panels with word balloons, and too much of the story is told in that way. It doesn't work, and almost makes me wonder why they bothered to include this story in the show at all.
Anthologies are a mixed bag, different viewers will enjoy different stories to varying degrees, and when so many stories are being told you're bound to run into one that you don't like nearly as much as the others around it. For me, Musky Holler was a missed opportunity and, when it comes to this season of Creepshow, the bottom of the barrel.
On the bright side, when you don't like a story that's told in the midst of an anthology, there's still hope that you'll like the next story better. And since I already said Musky Holler was the worst of the season in my opinion, that means I liked the two stories in the next episode, the season finale, better than this one.
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